‘They might enjoy it.’
‘So would I, but I’d lose me job.’
Sometimes I’d go to the Trades Fair on my own, sometimes with a mate, and sometimes with Mum and Dad, though progress with them tended to be rather slow, and they’d stop and look at things that bored me rigid, like bedroom furniture and three-piece suites in uncut moquette, whatever that was, from Darbysons of Burley.
I don’t recall Mum and Dad ever buying anything from the Trades Fair, except the records, but it gave them ideas. Mum would scrutinise the new washing machines, and Dad would talk knowledgeably to the proprietor, and the following day she’d be in the library looking up Which? to see what they recommended.
Her curiosity satisfied and her sense of values placated, we’d go home again and wait until Mrs Woodrup dropped off her fat mail-order catalogue. If the item was small – a record player or a wireless – we’d get it from her with monthly payments, though even these small ventures into HP frightened my mum. She’d far rather pay for everything when she had it, rather than get it on the never-never. To her the phrase ‘Frees you from pre-set spending limits’ was another way of saying ‘Allows you to live beyond your means’.
Every Friday, when Dad came home with his wages, he’d hand them over to Mum, who would sit down and do her accounts with a series of little cash boxes from Woolworths. The insurance man, the milkman, the electricity and the gas were all accounted for, then there would be the lump for housekeeping and, finally, Dad’s pocket money for his nights out at the Station Hotel playing dominoes with ‘the lads’.
My own pocket money amounted to one shilling. It never changed for years, it seemed. It didn’t buy much, but most of it went in Woolworths on seeds, or ‘construction kits’, though at the Trades Fair there was another temptation – Mr Oliver’s nursery stand.
The small nursery along Springs Lane, opposite the Coronation Hospital, was not somewhere I went regularly. It was up the other end of town from us. But at the Trades Fair, Mr Oliver really went to town. His stand would be full of house plants – weeping figs and rubber plants, ferns and gardenias – things of such exotic origins that I’d never think of owning them.
The urge I had to own a rubber plant was all-consuming. I’d swotted up on its Latin name – an easy one to remember – Ficus elastica. But rubber plants were five shillings – more than a month’s pocket money. Even a record was cheaper, and it gave me more prestige among the other kids in the street.
I inspected the dozen or more rubber plants on Mr Oliver’s stand with a covetous eye.
‘D’ya want one, then?’ he asked. He was a wiry man with iron-grey hair and olive-coloured skin.
‘Yes. But I can’t afford one.’
‘Why d’ya like ’em?’
‘I like the leaves. I like the way they’re all waxy. And that red thing coming out of the top.’
‘That’s the new leaf – all rolled up and waiting to uncurl.’
‘Mmm.’
I knew it was no good. I could look at those rubber plants until the cows came home, but I couldn’t afford one. Mr Oliver saw my predicament.
‘I’ll tell you what …’ he said. ‘Have some of these.’ He reached up to a beam, from which hung different kinds of leaves, tied into bundles for flower arrangers. He pulled down a cluster of deep-purple, glossy ones.
I took them from him and turned them over in my hand. They were amazing – shiny as steel but soft as supple leather. ‘What are they?’
‘Magnolia leaves; they’ve been treated with wax. They’ll last for ages.’
I thanked him, probably less effusively than I should have done on account of being lost in wonder and also overwhelmed by his generosity. The magnolia leaves were probably only worth a few pence, but they were things of such incomparable natural beauty and simplicity that they took my breath away.
I took them home and kept them in a drawer in my bedroom – to be taken out and stroked from time to time, held up to the light and admired. Mr Oliver was not wrong. They lasted for several years before they finally fell apart, but the thrill of owning them is with me still, and they fuelled a passion that seemed to increase almost daily. A passion for things that grow.
I think I’d have swapped anything up to the age of fifteen for a bit of height. I was, as befitted the first part of my surname, small. Four feet ten in the fourth form, rising to five feet one by the time I left school at fifteen. I’ve claimed five feet nine since I was eighteen, but according to the tape measure, I’ve been lying. I’m five feet eight and a half inches. Maybe I’ve started shrinking.
Moving On Up
The fact that I failed my eleven-plus came as no surprise to anybody, least of all me. There was, for a moment or two, a faint glimmer of hope, I suppose. A brief flash of optimism when I mused on the fact that I might know the answers to some of the questions on the sheets of paper in front of me and be capable of expressing myself. But they didn’t last long. They went out of the window the moment I saw John Brown was still writing long after I had finished, and that he was on about his third page. Still, I hadn’t made too many blots on the one I had completed.
I don’t remember the moment when I heard I was one of those who would be going to the secondary rather than the grammar, but it can’t have come as a shock. There would have been that momentary stab of regret at another failure, but then, when I had taken the trouble to consider the sort of mental struggle that grammar school would have posed for the next six years – among all those ‘brainy’ girls and boys – I knew that I had been put in the right place. Funny how ridiculous that sounds now – brainy. But that’s what we called them then, the bright kids. The ones who grasped concepts readily, instead of sitting there with a furrowed brow trying to make sense of the teacher’s complicated ramblings. I can recall that feeling now – the feeling of trying to knit fog. I caught up in the years that followed, but at the age of eleven it is no consolation to know that you are a late developer. Who’s to say whether you’ll develop at all? And into what?
‘Anyway, the uniform is nicer,’ my mother offered by way of consolation. There was no disappointment on her part, just resignation. She knew all along that her little boy was not really cut out for an academic life. ‘Bright but not brainy,’ she’d say. It was probably a bit of a relief. The mention of the uniform would be her way of moving things on. The secondary-school uniform was a navy-blue blazer with a navy- and royal-blue tie and grey shorts. Until you got to the fourth form – then you could wear long trousers. The grammar-school pupils wore striped blazers of bottle green, silver and black – like something from Henley Royal Regatta – and they got told off if they didn’t wear their caps. Our caps were optional, or at least they seemed to be. Most of us wore them simply to keep warm. The winters were bitter back then. Come the spring, though, they’d be consigned to the bottom of the wardrobe, along with the garters that were used to hold up our socks, and the stiffeners from our shirt collars. Socks round the ankles, capless heads and curly collars were the signs of a second-former, but first-formers were started off as their mothers hoped they meant to go on – smartly attired in full uniform. There was method in this: it meant that the rest of your clothes got less wear and tear.
So off we poled, down to the Co-op, interrupting Mr Hay’s lunch yet again, as he came through the mirrored swing door finishing off his sandwich.
He eyed me up and occasionally measured things with the tape that hung round his neck, then laid everything out on the wooden counter – the vests and the underpants, the socks and the shirts, the tie and the blazer and the cap. Everything except the shorts. He hadn’t any small enough, so Mum had to make those on her sewing machine.
‘That’s a bit of a dint in my housekeeping, Mr Hay,’ she muttered.
Mr Hay smiled weakly, but offered no discount. ‘At least you’ll get your divi,’ he consoled.
‘Go on, then, wrap them up.’
‘What number?’
‘One seven two nine se
ven three,’ Mum intoned. It was a number we used every week at the Co-op butcher’s where the massive Mr Hogg, whose hands were like bunches of sausages, weighed our meat on his hefty white Avery scales. Never was a man more aptly named.
We never used the Co-op grocer’s in between Mr Hay’s drapery and Mr Hogg’s butchery. The stuff there was ‘a bit cheap’, said Mum, by which she meant inferior rather than economical. For groceries we went to Mr Elwood down Leeds Road, who would deliver the order in a cardboard box once a week – with a packet of Spangles each as a treat for me and Kath, and the packet of washing-up powder wrapped in newspaper so that it didn’t taint the food.
But Mr Hay and Mr Hogg had passed muster, and the Co-op divi came in handy at Christmas when it could be traded in for seasonal treats – a lump of boiled ham or a bit of sirloin. Mum would get a fair bit bearing in mind the clothes we had just bought.
‘What about a satchel?’ Mr Hay enquired.
‘Oh, I hadn’t thought about that.’ My mother looked worried.
He brought one out for her to look at. It was too expensive.
‘Real leather, mind,’ Mr Hay reassured her.
‘Yes, I’m sure. But have you anything more reasonable?’ It was never ‘cheaper’, always ‘more reasonable’.
We looked at a briefcase, but it was decided that it was too grown-up and still a bit pricey. We settled in the end on a small fibreboard suitcase that was painted brown to look like leather.
‘Yes, that’ll do,’ said Mum, having had me walk up and down the shop holding it in my hand to see if it looked right.
With me hanging on to my newly acquired luggage, and Mum cradling the brown paper parcel of clothes, we walked up the street back home for a consoling plate of Mr Hogg’s sausages and a dollop of mashed potato.
I spent the first term of my secondary-school life in a large house at the top of a street just off the Grove. ‘One Oak’ was an old Victorian villa that had been pressed into service for the first-formers until the brand-new school on Valley Drive was ready just after Christmas. The rooms of One Oak were lofty and echoing, and there wasn’t much in the way of a playground except the small tarmac drive at the front of the house below the tree that gave it its name.
Here, I had my first taste of homework, of the art of Picasso and van Gogh, and of the cane – three swipes across the bum for sheltering in the porch when it was raining; the teacher said it wasn’t – spitting did not constitute light drizzle.
At least they didn’t call me ‘Titty’ at secondary school. That name had already been foisted on my cousin David. I got ‘Titchy’ from the girls and ‘Fred’ from the boys – the first a cute sympathy vote, and the second a mickey-take of my then unfashionable middle name.
After Christmas we moved to the brand-new school on Valley Drive, with a hall and a stage, a proper art room, a library and a laboratory complete with gas taps and sinks.
I tried to excel, and I did enjoy English, even if Miss Weatherall could be discouraging on occasion: ‘This is not the way to spell “experience”; how many times do I have to tell you?’ written in red ink at the bottom of my essay. I thought ‘expierience’ was a much better spelling.
But for all her discouragement, something in Miss Weatherall’s teaching must have ignited a flame. It was probably no more than the merest flicker back then – a dim glow or a tiny spark, barely visible in the darkness of my general ignorance. But she did, somehow, manage to foster an interest in words and convey to me their inherent power. She probably deserves more credit than I have ever given her (but I bet she never thought I’d write for a living).
I managed a B plus at art, thanks to the kindly Miss Gill, who opened my eyes to the work of Augustus John and a woman’s cleavage, but not necessarily in that order, and later Mr Wildman, who encouraged me in drama. My French accent, said Madame Hawksworth, was, if anything, a little too strong. What a shame that my written work did not demonstrate the same enthusiasm. ‘When it comes to writing about the weather “It is pleuting” might be amusing, but “Il pleut” would be more correct.’
I should have been better at science, bearing in mind my future, but Miss Sutcliffe – known as ‘the Improper Fraction’ (top-heavy) – was a loud woman who frightened the life out of me. When she bawled at you, ‘Acids must be respected!’ you felt obliged to scatter the vinegar on to your fish and chips with particular care.
I was good with my hands so it seemed perverse that I could not attend rural studies and woodwork classes, but these were reserved for the B, C and D classes, not the A stream in which I found myself. So there must have been some glimmer of intelligence visible to my teachers even then. Perhaps they thought that patience might pay off.
I just wished I could grow a bit. I was cannon fodder for any ambitious school bully. The bitter irony of not being allowed to do woodwork was brought home to me one day when one of the B stream worked his way round the playground with a lump of knotted seagrass – the stuff from which they make the seats for Shaker chairs and stools. He’d walk up behind any suitable victim wearing shorts and flick it at the backs of their legs. It stung like hell.
I am a placid sort, not given to violence or loss of temper on a regular basis, but when it snaps, it snaps. My knees shake and I find myself in possession of far more bravery than is probably wise in a person of modest physical attributes.
He came up behind me, and the first I knew of it was the stinging sensation at the back of my knees. I leaped forward. So did he, and started to whip me around the playground like a pony being broken in. I stood it for about three strokes of the lash, then I turned round and stared him in the face. Well, I stared up at where his face would be – he was taller than I was, and broader, too. The fact that I had stopped must have deprived him, momentarily, of his impetus. In that split second, I snatched the seagrass from his hand and proceeded to dispense the same treatment to the back of his legs. He jumped back once, then twice. Before he had a chance to jump a third time, or, more likely, to regain his composure and grab the seagrass back, I threw it in his face and marched away, convinced that he would follow and do me untold damage. He didn’t. Instead, he slunk off in the direction of his girlfriend, who had been watching the whole thing from the sidelines.
I had always fancied her. She was the most beautiful girl in our class, with long, blonde hair and a clear complexion. I managed to get a snog with her behind a curtain at one of the class Christmas parties that Dorothy Robinson organised in the Congregational hall, but she did not seem keen to prolong the relationship and soon moved on to another windowsill. Then she took up with the bully and I kept my distance.
I watched him walk over to her. She glanced in my direction. I like to think that I gave a good account of myself in her eyes. But whatever she really thought, she never came my way again. But then, neither did he.
I did not make any staunch friends at school. I suppose I should feel embarrassed to admit as much, but I can’t. There was never anybody I felt completely at ease with or whom I completely trusted, and I envy those folk who are still close to their school friends later in life. I’ve never really analysed why it happened this way. I don’t think it was a personal deficiency or any particular reflection on my classmates. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to commit back then. My closest friends are those I made in my early twenties, and thirty-odd years on we remain as comfortable in each other’s company and even more at ease with our respective foibles than we did back then. It was worth the wait.
The Lame Duck
I’d not really taken much notice of Keith. He’d been in 2B and that meant he might just as well have been in another country. It’s not that those of us in 2A regarded ourselves as being academically superior (well, not that much); it’s just that you couldn’t really get to know someone well over the space of two playtimes and a school dinner. Not in the same way that you could if you spent every waking moment from nine till four sitting with them and their wind problems in the airless confines of a classroom
.
I’d notice him across the playground sometimes. Standing on his own, or trying with an assumed bravado to involve himself in some game that the others were playing. It never worked, and he’d scuttle off again, with expletives ringing in his ears, trying to look as though it didn’t really matter, and bouncing his body against the chain-link fencing in the repetitive fashion of the terminally bored.
Keith was one of those lads who’d been dealt a duff hand by nature. He had a withered arm and one leg slightly shorter than the other, which gave him a lopsided walk. His head was an odd shape. It wasn’t exactly deformed, but it wasn’t regular either, and his teeth were too big for his mouth. His hair had been cut by someone who was clearly a stranger to scissors.
He wore glasses, and while none of the bespectacled lads in my class had what today we’d call ‘designer frames’, Keith’s were more old-fashioned than anybody else’s. The thick horn-rimmed type that dads and uncles wore.
I never expected to know him at all. True enough, I was a bit of a loner myself, being small and not regarded as ‘one of the gang’ at school, but I still had my pride, and Keith was obviously way below me.
Then one day he fell across my path. Or was knocked into it. I was walking to school along Valley Drive, having forgotten my bus fare for the umpteenth time, when a lumpen body bounced on to the pavement in front of me. It was Keith.
It all happened so fast. I remember him writhing around on the floor, and shouting, ‘Ooh, sir! Sir!’
It was an odd sort of thing to shout. And then I saw what, or rather who, he was shouting at. It was the driver of a Bedford van, who was leaping down from his cab, his face twisted with worry. He’d clipped Keith as he’d been crossing the road.
Nobbut a Lad Page 20
