by Anne Peile
‘I don’t bloody know, do I, after all these years.’
My mother had kept none of Jack’s possessions except for two books. One of these, an early sketchbook from the Slade, was subsequently thrown away. She had let us use the spare pages for painting when we were small and later she disposed of the damp, stuck block we had made of it. The second of the books was Dream Days, a collection of stories by Kenneth Grahame. The cover was blue, stamped with a twining art nouveau design of briar and blossom, in the centre there was the suggestion of the arch of a doorway framing the initials of the publishers – TNS, Thomas Nelson & Sons. The design was repeated on the end papers within. My father had written his name – John (Jack) ap Rhys Owen – on the page facing the frontisplate. In the picture plate beautiful, ephemeral children in sailor suits gazed through a grove of trees towards a sacred hilltop castle, rising up out of a mist. Their hair and hat ribbons were lifted by a breeze, you knew that this breeze would be soft and fragrant and without menace.
When I first found Dream Days and its inscription I asked my mother whose it was.
‘Whose d’you think? It was your father’s. I don’t know why I don’t chuck it out. Tatty old thing.’
In the first year at Clapham County there was a lesson they called Language; it was taken prior to learning Latin. We were taught about the origins of the English language, about place names and how the names of trades had given people their surnames. After one lesson I went to ask the teacher at her desk and she explained to me that ap Rhys was son of Rhys, that in modern days it was less usual and was often foreshortened into Pryce.
‘Why do you ask? Your name isn’t Welsh,’ she piled her papers together and snapped her handbag closed as the end of lesson bell drilled.
‘I just wondered.’
It was over the counter of the post office that my mother met her permanent man friend. His name was Ron; he was a driving instructor for the British School of Motoring. He used the post office branch to pay in his takings, ten shilling and pound notes and silver coin in a canvas bag. At home my mother announced that she was signing up for driving lessons. Ron had a wife and children in Tooting and so their first meetings were illicit and at odd hours.
Watching Ron, sitting on the sofa in our flat, I thought that he slightly resembled a frog, because of the way his eyes bulged and the position in which he sat with his short legs bent in their narrow trousers. He had brown curly hair which had begun to recede; he was some years younger than my mother. She had taken to wearing lipstick again, a crimson shade named on the base ‘Gay Geranium’. I wished, for her own sake, that she would shave her legs above the knees. Ron dressed in casual shirts and because his stomach was large he belted his trousers low down. One of his two characteristic habits was to make an extended grinding noise with his teeth to emphasise statements or to express surprise. His teeth were notably fine and white despite his heavy smoking. The other habit was the repetition of rhymes and phrases which served him as recurring punch lines in conversation; there was ‘Owing to the wind and rain, Christmas will be late again’ and ‘All coppers are bar stewards’.
During the first weeks of Ron’s visits to our flat I felt some sympathy towards him, I saw him as a pathetic and vaguely embarrassing little man. When the extent of my mother’s partiality for him became obvious I saw that there was no longer any need to feel sorry for Ron.
When we heard the door bell late at night I said to Lin, ‘Is that him, again?’
She snapped back at me, ‘Why shouldn’t she have someone? It’s none of your business.’
Lin was animated in Ron’s company; they exchanged ripostes and repeated jokes of marked unkindness from a television show named The Comedians which they both enjoyed. Once when Lin and I were standing beside each other Ron called to my mother, ‘Look at these two standing side by side, it’s like Laurel and bleeding Hardy.’
When Lin was at home she was sometimes allowed to join my mother and Ron to drink the bottles of Young’s beer which he brought clinking in on his late-night visits. They threw cigarettes to each other across the room, rather than getting up to offer the packet. My mother chain smoked on these occasions. Ron would say ‘Blimey, Mo, what d’you do with them, eat them?’
As the evening wore on and the rapport between Lin and Ron increased my mother’s mood would become edgy and irritable; she would make an exaggerated show of emptying ashtrays and clearing away their glasses. Then Lin, calculating that she had pushed my mother far enough, would give a small pleased smile and leave them alone together on the brown sofa.
Sometimes on Saturday afternoons when I was doing homework at the table Ron would walk through to the kitchen, eyeing me warily, although I consciously tried never to look disapproving or embarrassed. ‘Thought your mum deserved a cup of tea,’ he would say and return with a tin tray of cups and a packet of Embassy cigarettes.
In certain subjects at school I was an outstanding pupil. At first the teachers had treated me with wary reserve because Lin had been unruly, rude and a troublemaker. She left during the year that I began; she went to Pitman’s College for a shorthand and typing course and then on to a rapid succession of jobs where, invariably, she became involved with at least one man. Most recently she had joined an academic support department at the London School of Economics. For a few weeks a young fair man used to call for her; he was a student activist named Ted. Ted and I ate McVities ginger cake together.
‘When is Ted coming again?’ I asked her one day.
‘He’s not, I’ve packed him up. I got sick of it; he was always going on about the bleeding Greek colonels.’
I worked very hard at all my subjects at school because it brought me praise and because there was nothing else in my life that I liked very much. I also applied myself with extra dedication when I began to suffer from recurrent bouts of tonsillitis which frightened me and filled me with dread. Every time I used to think that I was going to die. When the pain in my throat was at its most intense I used to wonder how much pain human bodies could tolerate and whether and when they just gave up and died. I had heard that animals crawled away to die. I would listen for my heartbeat in my head against the pillow, fearing that at some point it would not repeat. I used to imagine essays that I had handed in being marked, but me being already dead. I did not discuss these fears with anyone. I had tried, with Lin, but she was derisive. ‘You’re round the twist,’ she said. I knew that my mother would be impatient and dismissive; worse, that by attempting to impress upon her how real my anxieties were, I would only make myself feel those anxieties the more, while she herself remained unmoved. I was, in any case, a secretive child by nature. It was silence and the crafts of concealment that won me Jack.
So, by immersing myself in the school subjects I would pretend, for as long as possible, that an illness was not going to happen again. I always knew, with a dreadful inevitability, when the infection was coming on. I would try to resist it with extra study and with diversions and home-made cures of chocolate bars or bits of ice picked from the freezer compartment; I took long walks across Wandsworth Common or chose new books from the third-form paperback library which was operated from a large brown cupboard. Some hot nights I would read through, finishing a book at dawn; but the course of the illness always had its way, as I had known it must.
My mother viewed the illnesses as personal inconvenience. ‘You can’t expect me to take time off work,’ she would say. ‘Get yourself to the doctor’s again.’
The elderly doctor’s surgery was the ground floor of his house on the West Side of Clapham Common. He depressed my tongue with instruments kept in a beaker of diluted Dettol disinfectant. The taste to me was not unpleasant, my mouth and throat being so hot and full of infection.
‘I’ll give you another scrip for penicillin. Make sure you take it all, and try to drink or gargle, there’s a lot of debris there.’ He accented the word in the French way; on his desk there was a perpetual calendar of brass which extended to a new millenn
ium. The doctor was stern, he reminded me of some minor character from a wartime film. I did not dare to ask him about dying but I was comforted to sense that he was kind towards me.
When the tonsils are severely inflamed, it is impossible to swallow anything, even saliva is too painful. Because, so often, I could not eat, I began to grow thinner. I missed almost a whole school year. When, after a long bout of illness I returned to repeat the fourth form, the games mistress said she hoped she could expect to see me run much faster in the netball court from now on.
We were streamed into sets for different lessons. My Latin teacher said that she had never had a student like me, in English one of my essays was taken away for a competition. I made friends with a bony blonde girl named Alison. Alison was never still, she was constantly restless and animated by a nervy energy. She was so thin that her legs were merely the shape of her bones and yet she took six spoons of sugar in her tea and brought brown paper bags of doorstep sandwiches to eat on her two bus journeys to school.
One morning break when we were sitting on the lost property box reading an Avon catalogue the Latin teacher sought me out, ‘Literae Humaniores,’ she said.
Alison and I regarded her blankly. ‘We have just had confirmation, we put your name forward for the scholarship exam and sent in some of your work. Oxford have agreed to let you sit the paper, even though it will be two years early.’
I was not sure what she was talking about but because her habitual earnestness was lit by pleasure I said thank you.
‘We’ll write home,’ she said. ‘I’ll organise it straight away, with the school secretary.’
‘That must be good then,’ said Alison.
I said that I supposed so and we resumed our perusal of the catalogue pages.
Alison lived on a council estate behind the Battersea Dogs’ Home at Nine Elms. She was savvy and quick-witted; when she was ten her mother had unexpectedly produced two other children in rapid succession and Alison became self reliant, playing out on the balconies and walkways and concrete aprons of the estate and in the surrounding streets where there was already demolition for the coming of the New Covent Garden. I had never played in the street before, we had great fun together. Looking back, it was an odd mixture of the childish and the prepubescent. With enthusiasm we joined in the nuisance games like knocking down Ginger that the estate children played. We sat swinging our legs on low walls by chalked pavements, eating the sweets from Jamboree bags and brightly coloured penny chews. At the same time we were often deep in contemplation of the states of love and sexual attraction that we heard enunciated in soul music, or scathing in our disparagement of the lives and tasks of the women in the flats that surrounded us. It seemed that women, once they were settled in a marriage, existed in a world where things spilled out and spilled over. Their hard-skinned soles overlapped the edge of their mule sandals, hair escaped from under scarves, slack stomachs and breasts overflowed garments, groceries spilled from carrier bags, children fought to wriggle free from a pram harness or a hand’s grasp, always there were messes spilled and dirt trodden that must be mopped and wiped. Women leant on their balconies and watched other people moving, without aspiration. They were slack, perhaps because their lives had lost the tight excitement and expectant promise it once and briefly had.
For all her daylight freedom, Alison’s parents were particularly strict about her fulfilling the household chores that she was set and about her coming home time in the evening; at eight o’clock she must enter the lift for the seventh floor of the tower block and the darkening balcony from which you could glimpse the river and the illumined sign of Dolphin Square. Her father would stand waiting on the seventh landing for the lift to ascend. My mother imposed no such restrictions on me; if it was not a night when Ron was expected she would go to bed early with a red rubber hot water bottle and a book of crossword puzzles. When Alison invited me to stay on Friday nights my mother made no demur; not so long afterwards I was able to exploit her disinterested attitude in full measure.
On Saturday mornings Alison was tasked with taking the family’s laundry to the Nine Elms wash baths, transporting the capacious plastic launderette bags in her brother’s pram. Sometimes the lifts were out of order and between us we would bump the pram down the many flights of new brutalism concrete. On the landings the corners smelled of urine and were strewn with the charred match boxes from children making flaming missiles.
The architecture of the Nine Elms wash baths burgeoned with the improving impetus of Victorian civic philanthropy. The terracotta brickwork was embellished with garlands and urns and classical masks. Inside there were majolica wall tiles and mosaic floors, polished brass fittings and teak benches. Alison said that in one section you bought a bathe with a towel and soap hired, but only old men and funny men went there now, she thought. ‘My mum always says to keep well out of it.’
The laundry section of the wash baths was the preserve of female company. The superintendent was a small bird-eyed woman; her hair was dyed ink-black and worn in a 1940s style snood at the base of her neck.
‘Morning, girls, come to do Mum’s wash, have we?’
Two other women sat on the wooden benches. In the disposition of their wearied limbs and the large ungainly bulk of their mainly fawn clothing and their dull eyes they resembled old soldiers, resting after a campaign. One of them had leg bandages which could have been puttees.
‘That’s right.’ Alison was intent upon inspecting the change her mother had given her, calculating whether by doubling up the load at the driers stage she could save enough money to buy herself a packet of ten cigarettes on the way home. Alison favoured the menthol kind but if she could not afford a whole packet we visited the newsagent who sold threepenny singles and assured us, each time, that it was better to be born lucky than born rich.
I helped her to load the wash into one of the big blue machines that had been screwed to the mosaic floor.
‘How’s your boy then, Doreen?’ one of the old soldier women asked the superintendent.
‘My son? Don’t ask. I was in the Cricketers last night and she came in, with her husband. No shame.’
She looked to Alison: ‘You know my boy Danny, don’t you?’
‘Not me, no.’ Alison turned away, drumming her bony fingers on the metal lid of the machine. I knew that she did know Danny, we both did; we talked to him sometimes while he was out mending his motor scooter.
‘He’s with the Electric Board, doing his City and Guilds, you must have seen him around. Now he’s got himself hitched up with an older woman.’ The superintendent turned towards me and I felt surprise that she deemed me old or informed enough to be included in the conversation. ‘Dreadful it is, shocking.’
After each sentence she patted the crimson mouth corners of her lipstick with a fingertip; the nylon fabric of her overall whispered as she moved her arms.
‘And married too, is she, Doreen?’ The other bench woman put in, the glint in her eyes showing that she was keen to stir up the indignation further.
‘Too right she is, I just told you, he was there last night, the husband. She can’t get enough, the bitch. She’s a ruddy nympho. Pardon me, girls.’
‘I don’t suppose you’re telling these anything they don’t already know, not nowadays.’
Alison was watching for the powder light on the machine to come on. Under her breath she said, ‘Let’s hope to God we never turn into one of them when we’re old. You’d shoot yourself first, wouldn’t you?’
‘That’s true, they know it all these days, don’t you, girls. Have your cake and eat it. And you don’t ever have to get caught either, not now, when you can take a pill to stop it.’
‘That’s right. Buy me and stop one,’ said Alison.
‘Hark at you. Come here and take the end of this sheet for me.’
Alison and the superintendent stood pulling and folding sheets, walking towards each other with the ends when the requisite size was reached. I had tried it one week but
had lost hold when Doreen had stretched and twitched the cloth and so I was not asked again. Alison was expert, knowing instinctively the choreography of the task and holding fast to the corners when they were tugged.
‘So, girls, you got boyfriends?’
I shook my head. Alison said, ‘Might have.’
‘I thought you would. It’s because you’re a blonde, men can never resist a blonde. What’s he like?’
‘All right, I suppose.’
‘I hope you don’t let him.’
One of the bench women raised her head as if from reverie, ‘They’ll never respect you if you do.’
The superintendent turned to me, ‘Ah, look at her there, all wide-eyed. You’re too quiet and shy for all this, aren’t you, love?’
‘She’s all right,’ Alison said.
‘Here it comes,’ the bench women were nodding at a younger woman who was entering, pulling her wash behind her in a basket on wheels. Her heels tapped on the mosaic and her newly dressed hair was swept back and lacquered into curls. She eyed the seated women critically for a moment and then said to one, ‘Blimey, close your legs, girl, your meat’s smelling.’
The other woman guffawed and the superintendent clicked her tongue in disapproval.
Alison said, ‘They’re such dirty old bags in here, they make me sick. Come on, let’s go and tap the phone instead while the wash is doing.’
By these words Alison did not mean to suggest that we listened in to the conversations of others – although we always welcomed a crossed line – rather, it was a method she had acquired of literally tapping up and down the cradle of old black composition telephones in a sequence corresponding to number, in most cases it would effect a connection. Alison would scan the directories in the hope of finding a famous name. She had also perfected a method to reach the GPO recruitment line with its own recorded song which began ‘Hey, hey, hey telephone girl’. She would sing back to the jingle, gyrating and dancing in the small space of the telephone box.
