Nobbut a Lad

by Alan Titchmarsh

  ‘Spread out the flower into a pleasing shape, then fold over the newspaper like this …’ She folded the paper so that the buttercup was sandwiched between the two layers. ‘Now then, you can place more flowers folded between newspaper on top of this one, and then put them all underneath a rug in your house.’

  It was fortunate that these were the days before fitted carpet or, as Peter Earle might have put it, we’d have been buggered.

  ‘It really is as simple as that. And then, when your flowers are dry – after about a week – you can take them out of the paper and stick them into an album like this …’ From her other desk drawer, she pulled what looked like a stamp album, but when she opened it, we could see that different wild flowers had been stuck to every page. There was an audible gasp from the room. Even Peter Earle was impressed.

  ‘How do we stick them in?’ asked John Brown quietly.

  ‘I’m glad you asked that, John.’

  He could not resist a smug smile as he wriggled in his seat and looked at the floor.

  ‘With stamp hinges. Instead of folding them as you normally do to stick your stamps into your album, just lick them and use them to fasten the stems to the pages. You’ll find that a sheet of tissue paper will prevent the pages from sticking together.’

  She said ‘tissue’ properly – with two ‘s’s – unlike her pupils, who would call it ‘tishoo’.

  At that moment, the sonorous clanging of the handbell signalled that the school day was over, and we all traipsed outside, picking up a peg on the way with Mrs Rishworth’s instructions ringing in our ears. ‘The pressed flowers and the peg dolls will need to be handed in at the end of the summer holidays. On the first day of the new term.’

  I took care to explain things properly when I got home. If I only told Mum ‘half a tale’, I’d be in trouble, or she’d go down to the school and ask for clarification. With images of rugs and newspaper and stamp hinges whirring around in my head, I spilled out the instructions.

  ‘An album of pressed flowers? By the end of the summer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it’ll keep you out of mischief.’

  And it did. That summer we invested in a wild-flower book to help with identification. We went through the woods, along the riverbank and on the moors collecting flowers and bringing them home to press. On Sunday walks we stopped by promising-looking hedgerows and unpromising-looking waste ground.

  I would go off in one direction, while Mum dragged Kath in the other. She was nothing if not committed.

  Week after week I laid my wild flowers in newspaper, and the rag rug between the kitchen and the front room became as high as a doorstep – you had to climb up on to it to get from one room to another.

  Night after night I would sit up, writing their names in the album in my childish, spidery script with a Platignum fountain pen, having stuck their fuse-wire-thin stems first to my fingers and finally to the rough grey pages of the album with the thin and flyaway stamp hinges. If anyone coughed while I was sticking them in, I’d have to frantically scrabble underneath the table for lost hinges. We found them, years afterwards, underneath the lino and down the sides of the settee.

  Mum made most of our bread, but when she needed an extra loaf at the weekend, she would buy one from Hardingham’s bakery in Brook Street and I would carefully remove the tissue paper and lay it flat between the pages of my album. As a result, all my flowers – the vetches and the hawkbits, the fox and cubs and the evergreen alkanet, the cow parsley and the water blobs – all smelled of fresh bread.

  By the end of the summer I had a collection to be proud of. One or two of them were short of names – nondescript plants with green oval leaves and tiny white flowers – the plant equivalent of ‘little brown jobs’ in the bird world, but the majority were readily identifiable and clearly named.

  On the weekend before we were due to go back to school, I suddenly remembered.

  ‘Mum! We’ve forgotten the peg doll.’

  ‘What peg doll?’

  ‘The peg doll that has to be done with the pressed flowers.’

  Mum frowned. ‘You didn’t say anything about a peg doll.’

  ‘I did, I did! I’m sure I did.’ The panic began to rise. ‘Well, I think I did.’

  I saw the look in Mum’s eye and ran upstairs to my bedroom. Hanging behind the door on a hook was my pump bag – the homemade one with Mum’s handwritten name tag on it. It had been there since the end of term – I had no need of pumps during the summer holidays as sandals with the toes cut out were my regulation footwear in August.

  I took down the bag and tipped the contents on to the floor – one pair of black elasticated pumps, one tattered school timetable and a small wooden peg.

  I scooped it up and walked slowly down the stairs. Mum didn’t say anything as I lifted the peg on to the kitchen worktop and gently laid it down. I went to get a drink of water from the sink – to avoid her eye as much as anything.

  Then she said brightly, ‘Do you have any ideas, then? About this peg doll?’

  I could have hugged her. It meant that Mum had gone into rescue mode. She was going to help, and it was not going to be a crisis. She would make sure of that.

  ‘Let me see what I’ve got by the machine.’

  Mum’s sewing machine was her most prized possession. In the early days it was a hand-wound Singer, but now she had a treadle version she worked with her feet, which meant that she could have both hands free while the needle went to work – it made it easier to feed the cloth through. It stood under the front window, and beside it was a cloth bag full of remnants – bits of cloth too small to make a garment but too big to throw away.

  She rummaged for a while and then straightened up. ‘No. Nothing there that inspires.’

  My heart sank.

  ‘Just a minute. I think I’ve got some crêpe paper in the cupboard. Left over from Christmas.’

  The tall grey cupboard built into one side of the fireplace was an Aladdin’s cave. My sister and I were too small to see into it, which, from my parents’ point of view, was probably quite useful. Mum pulled open the door and began her search. She came out with bits of red and green crêpe paper, a tube of Uhu, some pieces of cardboard and a box of crayons – probably intended as a Christmas present for some nephew or niece but never handed out.

  Then she went to the sewing-machine drawer and took out a pair of scissors. ‘These aren’t my dressmaking scissors, mind! I don’t want you ever using those.’

  I shook my head. ‘What are you going to do?’

  Mum looked at the clock. ‘Good gracious, is that the time? Go on, you get off to bed. I’ll start it tonight and then you can help me finish it off tomorrow.’

  I kissed her goodnight and left her, as on so many evenings when my dad was out, hunched over her sewing machine, but this time with cardboard and crêpe paper, glue and crayons, rather than floral prints and cotton.

  There was no doubt about it, this was a class peg doll. It was propped up on the mantelpiece when I came down in the morning. It was a golliwog wearing a boater and playing a banjo.

  ‘The Black and White Minstrels was on last night. It gave me an idea.’

  I looked at the beaming doll – its bright-red lips, white eyes and black face sticking out above a green crêpe-paper jacket and red trousers, both beautifully tailored. A pipe cleaner had been wrapped round it for arms, and the banjo was made out of cardboard and stuck on with glue. It was, quite simply, a work of art.

  ‘But you’ve finished it,’ I exclaimed, turning the doll round in my hand.

  ‘Well, I thought I might as well, Sparrow. You’ve spent so much time on your pressed flowers I don’t think they’ll mind.’

  The following morning I took in the two albums that comprised my pressed-flower collection, taking care that the bread paper did not blow out on the way, and I slipped the peg doll carefully into my pocket.

  There was the usual buzz on the first day back at school –
swapped stories of holidays in Filey and Brid and Blackpool from those of us on the eastern side of town, and of trips to Scotland and Cornwall for those from the west.

  When Mrs Rishworth came into our new classroom (we had all gone up a year) to look at the fruits of our summer labours, she wandered down the long row of albums and murmured, ‘Well, some of you have been busy.’

  Like the albums, the peg dolls had been placed above small paper labels that bore our names, and Mrs Rishworth went along the row scrutinising them, along with Mrs Lambert, who was about to take charge of us. There were shepherds made from bits of striped pyjama fabric; there were forerunners of the Barbie doll in six inches of tulle; there were soldiers and sailors and chefs and policemen in varying stages of dress; but there was only one black-and-white minstrel. He did rather stand out. Not just because of his colour, but also because of the standard of handiwork.

  I think it was plain for all to see that this was the work of a mother. There was a tense silence while the two summer projects were judged, and then, after some conspiratorial nodding and a whispered conversation, the two adjudicators came to the front of the classroom.

  The winner of the peg-doll competition is …’ Mrs Rishworth paused for effect ‘… John Brown for his policeman.’ Polite applause followed and John beamed and looked at the floor.

  ‘And the winner of the pressed-flower competition is …’ another pause ‘… a truly wonderful collection in two albums from Alan Titchmarsh.’

  I think it was the very first time I had heard my name spoken out loud in public when it was not used as a reprimand. My name had been called out because I had won something. It had never happened before. And it had happened for something that I really had done myself.

  Had mum’s black-and-white-minstrel peg doll been given a prize, I would have been racked with guilt. As it was, I could hold my head up high. My plant collection had the seal of approval and I was given The Observer’s Book of Wild Animals to prove it.

  I still have it. And I still have the pressed flowers in their albums. The stamp hinges are still stuck down. And the leaves of tissue paper from the loaves of bread are still carefully in place. But there are still one or two flowers I cannot identify. That’s probably because now, fifty years on, they really are ‘little brown jobs’.

  What is it that makes some children more confident than others? Are they born that way? Is it nature or nurture? I’ve never been sure. But lack of confidence is a curse – a curse that still plagues me after fifty-odd years. I think people get irritated when you admit as much, especially if you’ve ‘got on’ and done quite well. But there is, genuinely, that feeling that sooner or later you will be found out for what you really are – an impostor; the only child in a room of adults. It’s not an affectation, a display of false modesty. It is deep-seated and impossible to shift. Born, I suppose, of a lack of security. But why should it happen to someone whose childhood was loving and, for the most part, happy? And why should it still manifest itself later in life in someone whom, as far as other folk are concerned, has life sorted? I will never understand the true nature of insecurity. Perhaps those who appear confident and self-assured are just better at putting on a front than the rest of us. I wish I had the knack. Or, at least, a thicker skin.

  The Dawning of Reality

  I wish I could say that I had ever felt a real part of school, but I never did. Maybe it was the same for all kids, but some of them just seemed to fit in quite naturally – they were good at maths from day one, or, at the very least, seemed to have been born understanding the ground rules. I suppose the biggest mistake I made was in imagining that school would be a bit like our family. Only bigger.

  It was a naïve assumption. A childish one. But then I was a child. I innocently assumed that if I was nice to everyone else, everyone else would be nice to me. It wasn’t that I was a goody-goody, just that I had other things to do than look for trouble. And problems.

  The fact that I had got it all wrong dawned very gradually. There was a moment, for instance, when teachers stopped calling you by your Christian name. I wondered why. Up until the age of about eight they had been happy to shout out ‘Alan’. Suddenly it was ‘Titchmarsh’. Sort of impersonal. And unlike ‘Smith’ or ‘Jones’, ‘Titchmarsh’ was such an identifiable name. There was no hiding with a name like that. No blending into the background with the Robertsons and the Taylors. Mr Rhodes had always called us by our Christian names, so why did Mr Chadwick not? Almost overnight it changed.

  And Mr Chadwick never seemed to give you the benefit of the doubt. Mr Rhodes was no pushover, but he was the sort of teacher who when you said you didn’t think you could do something, would encourage you to believe that you could. When you told Mr Chadwick you could do something, he assured you you couldn’t.

  I always thought I had a good sense of humour. Mum and Dad talked about the importance of being able to ‘take a joke against yourself’. I think I understood what they meant. After all, I’d never been overly serious – always trying to make people laugh, and quite happy when I succeeded. It was a kind of defence mechanism, I suppose. I didn’t mind being thought silly when that was my intention. It kind of distracted folk from the fact that I hadn’t really mastered long division. But one day Mr Chadwick turned all that on its head.

  There was a Christmas party planned at the school. Nothing especially grand – just an afternoon off at the end of term when we would have sandwiches and buns, and play a few games. We were told that we could make a party hat out of cardboard. We were given a sheet each.

  I decided that I would be a wizard and so I cut off a triangle of cardboard and bent it round to form a cone. What I could not do – with just two small hands – was stick it together. I asked for help. Mr Chadwick came over with the Sellotape-dispenser and stuck the two edges together while I held them in place. Then he asked me to get up. I did so. He put the now pointed hat on to my head. (I had not yet stuck on the brim, which would transform it into my wizard’s hat, to be painted with stars and moons.) Then, in full view of the class, he walked me over to the corner of the room and stood me there while, in red chalk, he drew a letter ‘D’ in the middle of the hat.

  Everyone laughed. But I could not see what he was doing. I looked around me at the sniggering faces of my classmates, trying vainly to understand why it was all so funny. Only when I was told I could go and sit down again and took the hat off, did I realise what he had done.

  I knew I should have laughed with the rest of them. That I should have been able to ‘take a joke against myself’, and yet, that afternoon, I felt betrayed. Far from being a part of the joke, I was the butt of it because I could not see what he was doing.

  It was a simple, silly thing. The sort of thing that a teacher would do without a moment’s thought, and yet it has lived with me all these years and I have never forgotten that moment of what to me – in the middle of what should have been a jolly, carefree afternoon – was one of the most shaming and upsetting moments of my life. Had I regarded myself as in any way bright, it would not have mattered. It would have been an obvious joke. But the grain of truth that it contained – that I was, indeed, a dunce – wounded me to the heart.

  You could argue that I should have been more thick-skinned, less sensitive. But the fact remains that on that day I felt more isolated, more alone, more marginalised than I had ever felt before. And all because of a silly hat.

  Dad’s limited record collection wasn’t the most comprehensive introduction to music. The red leatherette-covered Fidelity gramophone, bought from Mrs Woodrup’s catalogue, could at least play an LP with the lid closed, which pleased my mother’s tidy nature, but the collection of discs was slow in building up. There was an Ace of Clubs LP of Mendelssohn’s ‘Fingal’s Cave’, the Band of the Royal Marines playing military marches, an EP of Maria Callas singing the ‘Easter Hymn’ from Cavalleria Rusticana and, my own contribution, – Russ Conway playing ‘China Tea’.

  Nevertheless, Dad had loved
music and singing from an early age, and when he came home one evening with another EP of Mario Lanza giving vent to the ‘Drinking Song’ from The Student Prince, his collection was almost complete. Had he been able to find a recording of Richard Tauber singing ‘You Are My Heart’s Delight’, his cup would have overflowed. To make up for this deficiency, he would sing it to my mother instead.

  It didn’t put me off.

  The Voice

  The inference was that it wasn’t very good. ‘It’s a bit reedy,’ said bandy-legged Mr Atkinson, the choir master, when he heard me speak. Then he sat down at the piano in the vestry and played a few arpeggios. ‘Right. Sing these notes.’ He launched into his first scale. There was no ‘How nice to see you’. ‘How good of you to come’ or ‘So you want to be a choirboy?’ Just ‘Sing these notes’.

  He seemed surprised when I could, and when I managed to reach ‘E’ above top ‘C’. He looked over the top of his thick horn-rimmed glasses, and I saw that his eyebrows were black and bushy like hairy caterpillars. From the waistcoat of his grey suit hung a delicate gold watch chain. He took out the timepiece and looked at it. ‘Right. You can start on Monday.’ Why he needed the watch to work out what day I was to start I couldn’t understand, but I do remember being relieved.

  My acceptance into the ranks of All Saints Parish Church Choir must also have been a relief to my dad, who had been a member since he, too, had been a lad. The high spot had been when he sang at the Albert Hall. Not on his own, he was at pains to point out, but as part of the choir at some big festival. I, in my usual way, accepted that my future Sundays were mapped out. But then I did enjoy singing. It gave me a kind of freedom, in my head, if not in terms of where I could go on Sundays.

  I discovered I could sing at junior school. Mrs Rishworth, chatelaine of the second form, was the musical one, forever putting together some small percussion orchestra or choir. With tiny drums, cymbals, triangles, tambourines and ‘clappers’ (she thought ‘castanets’ too exotic a word for our juvenile northern vocabularies), we would bang away in time to either her conducting or the flailing arm of another pupil she thought had promise. It was usually a girl called Dale Bryce, who had about as much style as a metronome. Her face would remain totally expressionless, and she would repeatedly draw in the air a perfect triangle, as one might with a sparkler on Bonfire Night; but there was no passion, no liberties with the rhythm. There she stood with her neat brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, her stout frame encased in a grey woollen jumper and pleated skirt, evincing not a grain of emotion and staring straight ahead as her arm quartered the air.