by Tim Lott
When the snap in his head came, Jack began laughing too, though it was an awkward laughter, risen from a well of relief, and laughter at himself and his too-primed imagination. He moved forward with a different step now, unworried. He picked up an arm and waved the hand: cheerio. It was so light, the sticking-plaster pink of the mannequin quite unlike human skin. The sign above the shop was punctured by the blast but still readable: Bur – here there was a gap – ns, the Tai – another gap – ors. The clothes inside – three-piece suits, shit brown and slate grey – were still burning. Jack kicked at a few more dummies and, eventually bored, turned on his heel back towards Hetty’s house.
Hetty’s once shy, wind-soft face was stiffening again, gaining angles and small, crushed lines around the mouth. Jack could almost see them emerging, a watermark on old paper. Even her legs, mottled like those of all middle-aged women of the time, impressed by the heat of open fires, seemed newly sad. The smell of loss was more acrid now, since the telegram had arrived – George was missing, shot down over Germany. She still had hopes of course – sunny side up! – but they were thinning, becoming transparent. The caged birds wittered like morons, ignoring the pointless swivelling mirrors.
Arthur was working with Jack at Strand Electrics, but was on unpaid leave now because he had developed rheumatic fever. For three months, Jack brought him dinner – pig’s liver and onions, pies with ersatz meat filling, potato, mash and gravy, oxtail soup the colour of wet khaki, anything off the ration that wasn’t whalemeat, barracuda or horse – from Bert’s Caff in St James’s Avenue. Rheumatic fever affected the heart; it would store itself up in the mulch of Arthur’s history and kill him four decades later, in conspiracy with Arthur’s careful, over-conscientious personality. But for the time being, it was simply an inconvenience for Jack, having attended to the recovery of his father, now to be nursing his older brother.
Arthur was finally restored to good health well enough, or so it seemed. Jack and he were friends now, beyond the bullying that had hectored the younger boy’s childhood, when Arthur had teased his fatness and thrown darts at him as a joke. Arthur’s illness, while weakening him, putting an invisible bracket around the far end of his life, made Jack still stronger, accelerating the slide into manhood and responsibility.
Jack’s transition to adulthood had a culminating rite, serving in the armed forces, which he embarked upon in 1943, applying for admission to the navy for no other reason than that he liked the uniform and felt it would make him more attractive to girls. Jack was excited, and of course patriotic, but not without shrewdness. He knew call-up was coming to him and he understood that to volunteer now was to provide him with a choice that otherwise would be unforthcoming.
At dawn, on the day of his departure, he put his clothes together in bundles, in a kitbag, and made his way downstairs. The American breakfast – wheatflakes and milk instead of fried bacon and egg – was consumed. Art, awkward with emotion, saw him to the door when he’d finished up and drunk his heavy tea. Good luck, said Art. Behave yourself. He slipped him half a crown, shook his hand and went back inside. They did not hug, now that Jack was a man.
Nervous, Jack caught the bus to the training camp in Skegness – It’s So Bracing, declared the Jolly Fisherman on the seaside poster. He wept that night, his first time away from home. There were to be twelve weeks’ basic training, as an aircraft technician, an electrician for the Fleet Air Arm. What a cock-up, thought Jack, who could barely change a plug. He was transferred to Harlow, innocent of its post-war new-town future, just a rural hamlet in Essex. From there he was posted to Cornwall, then Wales, to wait out the war, never seeing active service. Of course, he tried, volunteering for some of the excitement abroad. They were asking for members of the Fleet Air Arm to build bases on the Japanese islands before the Allied landing. It would be like a holiday, with secrets. The newspapers did not show cadavers, so death was hard to imagine. The war was a cartoon, against Musso the Wop and Hitler, who had only one ball. It was music hall with bullets and distant, always heroic death. Jack, to his disappointment, was rejected.
The outfit he had volunteered for were wiped out to a man by the Japanese. George was confirmed dead, Hetty’s face settling into engraved stone. Ken was in Burma, starving and shitting water in the jungles and bogs, in the so-called ‘Forgotten War’. In the letters he wrote home to his cousin Rita, suffering was excised, out-of-bounds by habit and custom.
After the war, Ken would hate the Japanese until he died, but not so much as the Americans, who stole the war for themselves in Objective Burma with Errol Flynn. That film would blind him with rage: Fucking Yanks. Other than that, he would not talk of his suffering; talking like that was for poofs and women. There were rumours of German horror camps, where millions were slaughtered. Armour was sought, and found in myth. People were basically decent. Everything would come out in the wash. Everything was just common sense, in the end.
Jack was happy in the navy, happier than he’d ever been in his life. A deeply conformist man, a uniform particle of his class and generation, he loved the camaraderie, operating as part of a larger unit; he loved having everything organized for him. No need to decide, that most irksome of mental chores. To tell true, it was more like a themed holiday camp than a war station, a kind of elaborate play-acting. Although they were land bases, they were imagined as ships – HMS Vulture in Cornwall, HMS Goldcrest in Wales. To leave base, an array of Nissen huts, was to go ashore. All ashore that’s going ashore, murmured the Tannoy, as if through a veil of catarrh, ashore being an array of sand dunes outside the perimeter fence. VIPS were piped aboard the Nissen huts. A large shot of rum was served up at noon. Six bells was called instead of six o’clock. There were endless sports – rugby, hockey, football, cricket – and girls in the seaside resorts, at a time when men, like everything else, appeared to be on ration, while women were in glut. Maybe there would be a kiss, or heavy petting, a feel. Nothing more, they weren’t slags.
A clutch of snapshots from the 1940s show Jack smart and cocksure in the uniform of a matelot, arms forward in a slightly simian pose, cigarette lolloping from the side of the lip, crooked smile, the fat melting under navy training, leaving the residue of a sleepy, handsome face framed by auburn quiff. The faint, knowing arrogance was more pronounced than ever. The navy did have the best uniforms, better than the coarse mud serge and shapeless tailoring of the army. The rangy bell-bottoms were folded seven times to indicate the seven seas; there were nonchalant, cocked caps, triple-striped scarves, all in blue serge, bleached pale by the ensigns to suggest experience, war hardness. Mocked as a sea-going WREN by the lumpen stokers and grease monkeys in the bellies of the battleships, Jack was nonetheless proud in his uniform. He learned to dance, finding unexpected nimbleness and grace. His gauche, awkward boyhood was slipping away. By the time the war finished in 1945, he was touched by military poise and fresh, boy-next-door good looks.
The family began to collect, droplets into a pool, once more as the centrifuge of peace operated. Ken, intent on ditching Rene now – how had he known about the jumbled sheets? – was still in Burma, toughened by betrayal and the war, and nostalgic for England. He wrote to Rita on VE Day, 8 May 1945, from 2342092 Corporal Lott RA, South-East Asia Campaign:
Very many thanks for the letter received a few days ago. I am glad to hear that you and all at home are in very good health and plesed to say that this few lines have me feeling very fit and well. It is now 7.45 pm, which is 1.15pm in England and the PM has just given his ‘V’ Day speech, the boys are nearly going mad with joy. They all feel sure that now with all the troops that can be sent out hear it will not take long to finish off the Japs and us boys with over three years service out here can come home soon, thank god it will soon be over.
Jack was demobbed in 1946. He chose from four demob suits: a sports jacket and flannels, a single-breasted worsted, a grey pinstripe single-breasted and a double-breasted pinstripe. He took the double-breasted pinstripe plus a Raglan herringbone
overcoat. There was also a hat on offer, a trilby or a flat cap, but Jack passed it up; no one wore hats any more. Self-expression, the atomic force of its latency quite unguessed at, could be demonstrated through the style of the hair, the placing of the parting, the swell of the quiff. In the new homeland, the class slurry would be swept away.
The civilian England that Jack returned to was a place hopelessly confirmed in its sense of itself. Any doubt that it was the greatest power, the hero of the world, had been burned away. Plucky, tough little England, the fount and saviour of civilization, the ancients rooting for us down the centuries. If only they had listened to Plato, Jesus, Socrates, said David Niven, the pilot-hero in A Matter of Life and Death, as he crashed in flames.
Newsreels appeared in the cinemas, showing the horror of Nazi concentration camps, bodies being bulldozed by the ton into lime pits. The atom bomb reduced Japanese babies to a salt cellar of ash, their shadows burned on the ground. Jack briefly shuddered, then explained it, shuffling the images until he could tell himself a bearable story about them. This story had to be true or else…
The Germans had been tricked by a mad genius and then – reluctantly – forced to follow his orders on pain of death. The A-bomb had been necessarily launched against the brave but wasplike Japanese to save more lives in the long run. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, they were acts of mercy. Now atoms – what were they exactly? – would be used for the good. Electricity would be free. Already the novelties were being planned – atomic vacuum cleaners, atomic cars, atomic pudding!
England would go on and on, stretching into the future, as it stretched into the past. Of course, the class fissures had to be closed now, the remittance to be paid for the agony and loss. The eggheads and the nobs, they had their place, looking after us, making sense for us – J. B. Priestley, George Orwell, C. E. M. Joad, William Beveridge, icons for rich and poor alike – but the common man would come into his inheritance. They would run the pits, the railways, the hospitals, the power. It was only fair.
There would be stability, safety, unity, the same sense of unity that thrilled them at Dunkirk, that saw them whistling through the flames. Britain can take it! There would be freedom, not to do spectacular things or conjure pots of gold – there had been enough excitement, the stretching of limits. No, there would be freedom from, not to. Beyond this, the Englishman didn’t want that much. As Ernie Bevin complained, The trouble with the English is that they suffer a poverty of desire. And now there would be also freedom from doubt, for everything had snapped into place, as the stories predicted, as faith always promised. The gears of history had meshed and proved that good triumphed over evil after all. Everything comes out in the wash. It’s a lovely day tomorrow. England, the lionheart, the – in a not-much-fuss-about-it way – decent, the safe, the straightforward.
But, if that was so, why did it feel so hard now, when they had won, beaten down the Devil after all? Facts were facts, the right thing was being done for the workers, for the ordinary bloke. It went without saying. Yet it was still so drab, and tough and poor and frigid. No one had realized how poor and frigid, until the Americans came over with their dollars and their white teeth and their rubber johnnies. Rationing was still on, digging deeper than ever. The cities were a rubbled mess. There was no colour, no fashion, only sludge green and puddle brown, grey, black. Only twenty-two types of government-approved, dreary furniture designs. There were fuel shortages, as the bitter winters descended on God’s country. Were they sent by God? Women queued for hours every day. The food was ersatz, gristled or stale.
Jack read his Reveille. The headlines were bright enough – Face Panties! How I Grew Tall Drinking Blood! Luscious Lovelies! – but the story they did not tell was that of a country still under siege, in the grip of puritan frenzy. A West End milliner’s in court for the crime of embroidering roses and butterflies on camiknickers. A gang of men prosecuted for making illicit jellies in Barnsley. It was funny, he supposed, but sort of funny-sad. Jack Priestley, whom he would listen to on the wireless, got it bang-on, didn’t he? We are trying to do a wonderful thing in this country, but not in a wonderful way.
The books, the wireless, the songs, the movies – everything that floated down from on high – told a different story, of a world where all things turned out for the best, where there was promise and perfectibility.
Now working at Berkal, the scale-makers in Park Royal, Jack ruminated as he calibrated the machines. Everyone had a job who wanted one, and if you got fed up with the one you had, people were queuing to give you another. The National Health was a good thing, had to be, even though it got a bit silly. Reveille had particularly singled out the National Health wigs for ridicule.
There was no crime to speak of, despite the gang panics in the Daily Mirror, the lurid headlines telling of the Cosh Boys, the Elephant Boys and the Knife Boys of the inner city with their knuckledusters, bicycle chains and flick knives. It was all exaggerated; in Ealing nothing was stolen, no one was hurt. Anyway, there was nothing to steal. Also, wages were climbing, 80 per cent higher than in 1936, it said in the Herald. Art and Arthur were both making OK money, especially if you counted the fiddles. And there was still fun to be had, they couldn’t put that on the ration. Sometimes Jack went to the variety shows at the Chiswick Empire to see Max Wall, Wilson, Keppel and Betty, Jimmy James, Katrina, Jimmy Wheeler, Leslie Walsh the Memory Man, the Bernard Brothers and their Miracles of Mime. There were jugglers, trick acts, stand-ups hinting at the great secret of sex. The high point – of course – was Phyllis Dixie and her Nude Tableaux, a dozen naked lovelies, all of them still as stone. The slightest movement – an eyebrow, a foot – could mean prosecution. They had pasties and stars to cover the nipples.
But mostly Jack went to the dance halls, which were sucking in hundreds of thousands every night, from the prefabs and back-to-backs. The Hammy Pally, the Montague Ballroom in Ealing Broadway, the Odeon in Park Royal. Jack had learned to dance in the navy and he was good now, on the floor before anyone, while there was space, doing the fishtail and the half-chassis, those tricksy variations on the quickstep, plus also the foxtrot, the tango, the paso doble, the samba, the rumba, the new jive and jitterbug, the girls slitting their skirts and losing their tightened, careful selves for minutes at a time. Some dance halls banned jitterbug, a coon dance, filthy. There still remained some English scraps, novelty dances mostly – the hokey-cokey, the Lambeth Walk, the Muffin Man, the conga – but the Americans had freshened England, individualized it, sexualized it. The old dances, the St Bernard’s Waltz, the Lancers, the polka, the sequence dances, severe, the flow broken to circumscribe intimacy, the dancers at arms’ length, these were dead now, dead as Musso the Wop, hanging by his heels with that whore by his side, and Adolf, that dastard, a bullet in his brain and good job too.
His mantle of fat completely gone now, Jack began dating regularly, but didn’t go steady until he met Thelma Taylor. She lived over the bike shop in Southall High Road. Well off, the Taylors even had a television. Thelma was willowy, tall, great pins, a brilliant mover. They danced to Oscar Robin, Kathy Stobart, Lou Praeger at the Palais, the Montague, the Odeon. She played around, Jack suspected, sitting at home wringing his hands. He fancied her like mad, not that she would let him do anything in the way of, you know… Maybe a kiss. There was nowhere to go to do anything else, no privacy.
They danced three, four, five times a week, Jack now in two-piece, single-breasted barathea suits, plain brown, or pinstripe, or Prince of Wales check, cream shirt with arrow-point collar, Prince of Wales tie and knot, all bought on the coupon. Turn-ups were permitted on the trousers now. Monk shoes with a buckle, also brogues and suedes. Thelma wore the New Look, dominant collars, plunging neckline, the nipped-in waist, the sloping shoulders, the fancy bows. Her pleated skirt flew up under the rotating mirror ball, throwing out spangles of coloured light.
She dumped him in the end. Jack was hurt, but he was a practical man and a stoic, not much given to highs or lows. He had never
proposed to Thelma – she was a no-good, not to be trusted. Love didn’t come out of the sky and hit you, that was rubbish. Love was something you learned.
On his twenty-first birthday, Art gave Jack a gold watch and some money that had been put aside for him over the years. He celebrated by buying a motorcycle, a Vincent Comet HRD, 500cc, black and chrome, 100mph, single-cylinder, top of the range, almost; there was the Vincent Black Shadow, a beast, too rich for Jack’s blood. Jack drove it right out of the shop, first time on a bike, then parked it out the back of Hetty’s, and brought it into the room full of oil paintings when it rained.
When he wasn’t at the cinema or the dance hall, Jack played snooker at the end of St James’s Avenue with Ronnie Van Den Bergh, a wolf and a bit of a villain, and Derek Beard and Freddie Wade. He learned all the trick shots: spin-backs, leap-overs, double screws. They played for hour upon hour, Jack with his Players cigarette staining the fingers that made a bridge for the maple cue to rest upon, Ronnie with his Capstan Full Strength glowing with undreamed-of death. They talked, about nothing in particular, complained a bit, but not too much. Derek had read that two-thirds – imagine! – of young people wanted to leave the country for the Commonwealth. This was a higher figure than for any other country in Europe. A queue of half a million to get out. Why don’t we give it a go? Jack agreed there and then. Ten-quid assisted packages to Australia. In what seemed no time at all, they had made the reservations, done the medicals, got the visas, said their goodbyes. It all fell through of course, Derek Beard backing out at the last moment, not wanting to leave his mum. Jack couldn’t face going out there with just Ronnie, he was too much of a pain in the backside.
So Jack remained in England, in Ealing, working Saturdays now at Terry O’Dwyer’s greengrocer’s shop in Notting Hill Gate, just for the extra cash. He’d met Terry at Berkal and they got on as mates. One day in 1948, Terry said, Jack, give up the job and come and work with me, full-time. I’ll see you all right. Okey-dokey, thought Jack, why not? And that was it, that was his future, his entire working life machine-pressed out, a groove, cut deep and immutable. Jack would spend his life working in the greengrocer’s. It was OK, he supposed. Don’t expect much and you won’t be disappointed, he told himself, as he would also tell me further down the years.
