by Tim Lott
Jean was a good, well-behaved if slightly spoilt girl who rarely gave trouble. She adored her older brothers, particularly Norman, who was already showing some of the waywardness that would fully flower after the war on the disreputable edges of the Soho underworld. Norman was tough and had a reputation as a scrapper. It made Jean feel safe and a little proud.
For Jean the 1930s were spent much as for Jack, the beat, beat, beat of automatic life: school; a week’s holidays at the seaside once a year – Southend instead of Margate; playing in the street; listening to the wireless; going to the cinema; reading. Jean might have read Girls’ Own Paper rather than Champion or Hornet, might have seen Gone With the Wind instead of gun movies with Tom Mix or Edward G., might have spent a hot evening dressing up in front of the mirror rather than kicking a football over the rec. But the messages were the same: always behave; work hard; know your place; keep your nose clean. Things might be tough, but they would turn out all right in the end.
I stare once more at the three photographs of Jean, hard, as if I can penetrate them somehow by force of will. There is no trace of any aberration, any twist or wrinkle in Jean’s childhood that might have curdled her inside, that might have tended her towards buried rage or desperate self-hatred, to be carried through life like a loaded gun in the bottom drawer. No one can remember that she had anything other than a happy childhood with a loving, rather conventional family. Memory is treacherous, a myth-maker and liar, but it is all there is left of Jean, the only light with which to probe. There was no clue in her behaviour – no truancy, uncontrollable rages, over-compliancy, physical eruptions – to what was still out of sight in an identical house, in an identical street, 250 yards and half a century away, an ambulance trembling outside.
But there was one vital component in her make-up, in the ways open to her to make sense of the world – not individual so much as general, at least generally female – that did vary essentially from my father’s. For a girl from Jean’s class in the 1930s there was only one destiny: she would be a housewife and mother.
To be a woman was to be married, to be married was to have children. Then you would give them your all, and their happiness would be the emblem of your success. Sacrifice and devotion were not just possibilities chosen from some vague, unprinted menu. It was the role cast by every source of knowing that there was. Each romantic film the cinema threw out made for proof of a woman’s proper destiny. The selfish, the clever, the ambitious, those that deviated, were left alone, or died remorseful, or gave up their careers and got married gratefully. This same pattern appeared in comics, in books, in radio serials, in advertising and Good Housekeeping magazine, in every kind of popular storyline. The crippled, orphaned, martyred ballet dancer of Bunty or Mandy was finally, joyfully redeemed. The heroine of every Mills and Boon romantic novel suffered terribly for love, to be rewarded finally with a kiss and an offer of marriage and motherhood.
Just as the male was there to go out and vanquish, to slay dragons, the female was required to cast herself into the flames if necessary, to save the only thing, absolutely the only thing, that really mattered: the family – the man and the children. Imagination, public imagination, was curtailed, whalebone-corseted.
Jean could distinguish fantasy from reality, inasmuch as anyone can. She was no fool, but smart and knowing, in her way. She did not swallow the movies and comics like a computer uncomplainingly swallows its software. However, perhaps it was not what was put into the films and books but what was left out that counted. It was that absence that set horizons to the imagination. If you were going to dream of a different future for yourself, you would have to be a person with remarkable self-confidence and determination.
Jean possessed determination, but she lacked, like many women of her generation, a strong sense of self. That was the way life was arranged, always had been, to keep things the same. And this is something to bear in mind, maybe the first indisputable, unavoidable clue – since it is clues I suppose I am looking for – the first thread in the hanging rope.
Like Jack’s, Jean’s childhood ended, practically speaking, in September 1939, when war broke out. It had been an undistinguished time, as unremarkable as Jack’s. In fact, it was even more unremarkable, because, as I have said, real drama touched Jack’s early life on two occasions.
If the Crystal Palace could cast shadows, it would have settled, on a late summer afternoon, over the Wells and Lott greengrocer’s shop in Gipsy Hill. All through Jack’s childhood, it was a presence as firm and indestructible as all the other, still more transparent structures that bounded the space within him.
The palace was a building of awesome proportions. Made entirely of glass and iron, it was capable of enveloping more than six St Paul’s Cathedrals, although the walls were only eight inches thick. Although lopsided now, due to a fire in 1866 which destroyed the north transept, it was the incredible conceit of an age that considered itself immutable, without end and blessed by God.
It was first erected in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the behest of the Prince Consort, Albert, who gave the commission to the Duke of Devonshire’s gardener, Joseph Paxton. The great hall was to show examples of British design and manufacture, together with exhibits from all over the world, and would be a symbol, according to Prince Albert, of peace and love between individuals and nations.
Paxton conceived of an amazing structure that would dazzle a world up until now enclosed in opaque, heavy brick and plaster, stucco, tiling and cement. His building would enclose tremendous volume with negligible mass. As a design, it was derided – ‘a cucumber frame between two chimneys’, according to John Ruskin – but from the moment of its erection, the palace dazzled everyone who saw it. It was described as the eighth wonder of the world. When Queen Victoria arrived to open it, so proud was the singing of the national anthem that many in the 1,800-strong choir and orchestra were seen openly to cry.
The cliffs of glass that enclosed whole elm trees and fields where sparrows still flew wildly in the roofs, seemed an apparition. Four hundred tons of glass and cross-braced iron framing enclosed 100,000 exhibits. The glass had a magical, hallucinatory quality and seemed to change colour with the weather. Inside there was a fountain made of crystal twenty-seven feet high, together with boating lakes and mazes, all enclosed within the great naves, towers, arches and transepts. Eden itself, said one diarist. A place of wonder and mystery, said another. A fairyland, said Queen Victoria.
After the exhibition closed, the palace, which had attracted vast crowds – 6 million in all, the total population of England at the time – was moved to Upper Norwood, with views that spread across the metropolis in one direction and towards Brighton in the other. In its reincarnation, it was even more massive, impossible to take in at a glance, rising to six storeys in places and with the addition of two new barrel-vaulted transepts. It opened with a performance of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’, accompanied by the immense Handel organ, around which the whole structure spread, 4,568 pipes stretching towards the smiling heavens. One of the greatest and most glorious days of our lives, said the Queen. New rail lines were laid in order to reach it and two huge water towers, each 100 feet taller than Nelson’s Column, were built at each end of the nave to feed the largest fountain in the world, 250 feet high, and the great cascades below it.
The new palace was divided up into courts – Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Moorish, Medieval and so on. There were great sphinxes, a zoo, exotic plants, huge models of thirty-three dinosaurs. Magnificent firework displays took place every week, culminating in great flaming portraits and tableaux ninety feet high and 200 feet wide: the launching of Stephenson’s Rocket, the Battle of Manila Bay, portraits of English heroes like the Duke of Wellington and Baden-Powell or ‘exotics’ – Cetewayo, King of the Zulus, and the Shah of Persia. Concerts took place regularly, and balloons flew over the palace with acrobats hanging from trapezes by their teeth. There were restaurants and cafés, and landscaped gardens. Visitors were sucked
into its trapped emptiness from all over the world. It was intoxicating, impossible.
By the time Jack was born, the great palace was showing signs of wear. The Handel concerts had been replaced by brass bands, the fountains had mostly dried up. There was dog racing and football now, and boxing, dances, dog shows, dirt-track racing. The great firework displays continued, watched every week by the infant Jack from his bedroom window, but the company that ran the palace had gone bankrupt and the vast edifice was wreathed in a cloud of shabbiness evinced by peeling paint and dirty corners. Yet it remained an incredible thing, perhaps the greatest surviving symbol of English self-confidence.
On 30 November 1936 Jack had spent an ordinary, dull day at Rockmount School, shouting, kicking a ball about, hurling water bombs. Already overweight, he fended off bullies as best he could. He looked forward that night to going to the talkies with Rita Cole, his now ostracized cousin. They were both outsiders in their way, both smarter than they should have been. Jack went home to the house in Essex Grove and had some tea – sausage toad and leftover batter with jam for pudding. Still in long socks and shorts – the change into long trousers would come next year – he set off with Rita to the Albany Cinema in Anerley Hill. It was cold and windy, so he wore a rough wool sleeveless V-neck pullover under his coat. There was a double bill playing: Public Hero Number One (a B-grade rejoinder to Edward G.’s more famous film) and something else, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, or prisoners and warders.
It was about half-way through the first feature that the rumour began to spread around the cinema. There were noisy whispers that some of the audience tried to quell with a chorus of shushing. Jack listened closely, his attention wandering from the flickering gun battle. The whispers were inaudible but persistent, gathering strength, interfering with the story unfolding in celluloid frames.
After a while, the manager walked on to the stage, his shadow big against the screen. Behind him gangsters walked away from the carnage. He held up his hand and there was a hush as the announcement was made. The cinema had to be evacuated. There was, the manager said, molten glass falling from the sky. The hush took on the character of disbelief. Glass didn’t burn, everyone knew that. Anyway it was the palace, the screaming Alice; nothing could happen to something so vast and solid. Orderly, subdued, Jack and Rita rose with the audience and pressed towards the exit doors.
Outside, the sky had flared into orange. Standing on the high ground of Sydenham Hill, the palace could clearly be seen glowing through liquefying windows. There were great clouds of smoke and burning fragments in the air. In the gutters, cascades of molten glass and iron. Jack watched people pick bits up and roll them into tiny balls for souvenirs. How did they not get burnt?
Jack knew he should get home, for Art and Cissy would be worried, but the spectacle was irresistible. He stood and stared. Whole panes of glass were flying through the air and crashing into the street. There were frightening sounds too, a terrible groaning and whining like some tremendous mythological Fury. Air was being forced through the bellows of the giant Handel organ in a final, impromptu fugue, pushing out sad, misshapen chords.
Birds were screeching, trying to escape from the aviaries within the palace. The doors were opened and the birds took flight, but the fumes from the smoke overcame them and they crashed insensible, dying, to the ground. Flames, sodium yellow rather than red now that the glass was on fire, were shooting 150 feet into the air, sending clouds of sparks over Gipsy Hill and Sydenham. Higher overhead, there came swarms of planes, rented by sightseers determined to see the greatest firework display ever. The glow from the palace was colossal, and was seen as far away as Dover and Brighton. In the middle of the Channel the pilot of an Imperial Airways plane flying eighty miles away could see the light.
The immense iron girders buckled and twisted grotesquely in the heat. Hundreds of thousands watched as the Crystal Palace turned to liquid and carbon, a great pyre. Jack and Rita reluctantly worked their way home through the crowded streets. Anerley Hill was packed with cars carrying tourists staring at the sky, climbing trees to get a better view. A few hundred yards way, Churchill, on his way from the Commons to Chartwell, watched in tears. This is the end, he said. There was a phenomenal crash as the central transept collapsed. Around him, like Churchill, many of the crowd were in tears. But Jack was just excited, thrilled by the largeness of the drama. He and Rita dawdled home, half turning back to listen to the crack of one and a half million square feet of glass disintegrating, and feeling, like the whole of England felt, something end.
The next day Jack got up early to look at the site. The palace had simply gone. Only the water towers still stood, teetering and filthy. At the north end, a few bronze statues gazed down on an ornamental fountain in which there were still goldfish, their scales turned completely black. Nobody died in the fire. Nobody tried to build it again. The Crystal Palace is finished, said Henry Buckland, the stricken manager. There will never be another.
A year or so after the fire, Jack began to notice a change in his mother, Cissy. She was spending less time in the shop now and seemed constantly tired. Her hair was falling out.
Art didn’t like to tell Jack that Cissy was dying. It wasn’t something he wanted to think about. Nobody seemed to know what was wrong with her. A ‘wasting disease’, said the doctors. Tuberculosis perhaps. One thought she might have damaged her insides while working in the shop, hefting sacks of potatoes while she carried Jack inside her.
Her deterioration was plain for anyone to see. The hair, now grown back from the bob that Art hated, framed a face that was increasingly pale and skeletal. Her breathing was fading, becoming strained. Nobody talked about it. Early in 1939, she was admitted to Elmers End Hospital. Jack went to visit her, but could hardly hear her voice sometimes. She told him that she loved him. Jack understood what was happening, although nobody told him.
In May 1939, Cissy died in Elmers End Hospital. Jack had known death before, when Cissy’s father, known only as Red Rufus because of his enormous auburn beard, had lain at Granny Starr’s house in Berridge Road in the upstairs room, pennies on his eyes. Jack was told to kiss the corpse but he refused, frightened.
This time, Cissy was laid out in the top room of the house in Essex Grove, on the snooker table, and family and friends came to pay respects. Cissy’s remains, in the style of the time, were public, to be viewed, kissed or touched. Her favourite niece, Dusty, would stand by the casket, flip out Cissy’s long hair and brush it until it shone. The brush had a pearled back, tinted green. Green was allowed now; while Cissy had been alive the colour, in any shade, was not permitted in the house, since she deemed it unlucky. Now her relationship with luck of any kind had played itself out.
Jack avoided the room with its bizarre new furniture. The idea of seeing his mother dead made him queasy. Art was beyond consolation and would not get out of bed. Jack, still only thirteen, understood he had to be strong, that there was no time for grieving. He had to be strong for his father, in his imagination so tough, who had snapped like something rigid but brittle gives way when a force is concentrated in just one place. Art still stayed in bed, although the business was beginning to suffer. Jack began sharing the bed with him at night, worried that his big, powerful father might be lonely. They held each other. His father wept.
On 1 June 1939, Florence Cecilia was buried in Elmers End cemetery. One word appeared on her gravestone: Peace. Aunty Rose moved into Essex Grove to try to help, but things were collapsing; that which moored them had been sheared. Art would just not get out of bed, day or night. Charlie Wells pleaded: the shop would not survive if Art did not come back. Already they had lost Cissy as a worker, and the pressure on Charlie and his wife was becoming impossible. But still Art stayed in bed, and the weeks became months. No doctors came, but the grief had deflated him, taken him beyond grief itself. He was, it was said, suffering from a nervous complaint. In those days, the word ‘depression’ was not much used. Charlie knew there was no way bac
k and he sold the shop. Art just lay there, beyond help, as everything softly collapsed.
Chapter Six
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
Macbeth
I am staring at more pictures. This time they are anonymous, grotesque, rather than familiar and faintly reassuring. The pictures are from a book about madness. Here is a tall, semicircular brick construction that has latterly been converted to a linen cupboard. It was used at the Mapperley Hospital in Nottingham during the nineteenth century. Patients were confined within it, then drenched in freezing water in the hope of shocking them out of their melancholy. Here is an ingenious contraption which features a latticed pagoda in the centre of a gently curving bridge over a lake. It has been fixed with levers to collapse in the middle when stepped on and send the centre of the pagoda plunging into the lake below, taking the patient by surprise, again in the hope of scaring him out of his dolour. The date is 1826. Here is an innocent-looking machine which John Wesley used to electrically shock patients in the head in the eighteenth century. And here is an eighteenth-century psychiatric outpatient ward with grotesques pulling on giant magnets, invented by Mesmer in the hope that the magnetic force would rearrange the ‘magnetic fluids’ in the brain. And here, most horrifically, is a man, apparently terrified, being held by the head while another man – presumably a doctor – thrusts the point of a scalpel into his forehead. It is a seventeenth-century Dutch print of a quack treating mental illness. It is horrible, and I feel glad that these treatments for depression are confined to distant history.
