My mother did the pools as well. She had her own coupon, even her own user guide, a book-sized, soft cover manual describing all the systems she might use. She could never be bothered with form, preferring the mystery of numbers as her guide. She used birthdays, anniversaries, saint’s days and family ages as the places for her crosses, always neatly placed between the bold-printed boundaries of the first column to the right of the teams.
She always favoured birthdays, however. Perhaps for her it followed logically out of the concept of motherhood that she lived and never once questioned. It was a role her life demanded and raised birth to complete prominence. Her numerical restriction, however, meant that she never placed a cross anywhere in Scotland, whose fixtures were always set out below the obviously superior programme south of the border. And, apart from FA cup weekends, most of the Fourth Division was also foreign territory, out of bounds, beyond consideration, since the highest birthday you could generate was thirty-one. My father never questioned the practice, however, because his forensic analysis of form needed match reports, analysis, journalistic comment and opinion. Fourth Division games rarely figured and our northern edition papers did not cover Scotland, so his rationally considered choices were always and inevitably drawn from the same sub-set of fixtures as my mother’s divination.
Thus, twice a week, she did perms, once at the hairdresser who operated out of an asbestos-panel prefab that stood on short brick stilts on a levelled plot at the end of a derelict row, and one as a pattern of crosses for the pools. The perms came out of a catalogue supplied by our agent, the man with the leather satchel full of jangling coins who collected the coupons. There was an eight from twelve, or an eight from sixteen and multifarious versions of both plus others. Hours of thought went into whether this scheme provided better chances than that one, whether the elusive twenty-four points might materialise here or there. And, of course, whenever it did, it was a week when half the country celebrated with its five shilling winnings.
Just occasionally, very occasionally, a poor family would win a fortune, as much as a hundred thousand pounds, a sum so large that no-one could comprehend how it might ever be spent. But, as my mother would comment when she heard the news, it would certainly ruin its recipients. The winners would immediately move away from their village - never very far, mind you - usually into the nearest middle-class suburb where they would never be accepted as peers, but from where they could still be sure that their broadcast change of status would be noticed. They would buy a fast car, curry attention, and then die in a crash or suicide a couple of years later. In our household, and perhaps many others, it was the promise of the win that attracted: the reality, should it ever have happened, might even have been rejected. Luckily, we never won, so my mother was never required to address such a dilemma.
What we could have won - though never did - was the fag money that went into the pockets of the local shopkeepers. I spent half of my childhood, it seemed, running - I never walked - to and from the local corner shop or more distant off-licence in the evenings clutching a coin so tight its imprint would still be on my palm when I returned to hand over the packets to mam or dad. His was the serious stuff, Senior Service at worst, or Capstan Full Strength or Player’s Weights. Hers were a little bit more up-market, Park Drive or Bachelors, sometimes even a menthol Consulate, its green and white flip-top pack always so immediately and strangely different from the others. Both of them considered themselves above Woodbines. The Captain Webb matches that rattled in my pocket as I sprinted home were always a treasure, giving me each time an excuse to run round to my granddad’s house so he could tell me again the story of the brave army man who swam the channel, a fame realised in a mustachioed man wearing cotton coms on the front of the box.
My dad was a covert smoker, the cigarettes always pulled hard once or twice so that they burned down quickly. Then he would hold them in his cupped left hand, the burning tip held inwards towards the palm while the thumb and three fingers maintained permanent delicate contact with the drawing end. The protrusion was just enough to allow a drag without further adjustment, an act that looked like he was sucking smoke down strands of straw fingers that bunched to the left of his nose. The smoke would loop and coil between his bent knuckles, his entire hand thus dyed a deep nicotine yellow.
My mother used a holder, one of those short white plastic contraptions with a gauze filter inside that had to be dampened before use. They cost more than the cigarettes, it seemed. My dad used to complain that she was paying for something to take the taste out, a taste that she had paid for, but she didn’t listen. She hardly inhaled, or exhaled when she smoked, hardly even drew the fire. She held the stick elegantly, just like women in the films we seemed to watch every night, the thumb and fingers of her left hand all extended to a stretch, the palm open, the white stick trapped near the tips of the first two fingers.
“Never smoke, young Donald,” my dad used to say after opening each new packet I brought. “You’ll never have any money if you get into the habit.” And then he would cough long and hard, his cheeks drawing in to accentuate the dark of his six o’clock shadow into a pair of hollow pits that rendered his head a skull.
“He’ll never smoke, our Donald,” said my mother religiously each time, offering me a hug into the vastness of her floral apron-front as assurance of her assertion on my behalf. By the 1960s I was already telling them off, saying that their habit would kill them, and it probably did, but they didn’t listen to me. I was also already a covert smoker.
I was probably what might be called a late child. I don’t ever remember mam or dad being young. Now that I am pushing sixty-five, I realise that when I was young, my parents were then only in their mid-thirties. They had married, the war had intervened, my dad had been wounded and took time to recover. Pre-war photographs show them both looking ordinary, my dad with side-slicked brilliantined hair, always with its centre furrow atop a slight frame in a suit of non-descript colour. My mother still had hand-coloured photos of herself. She was posed, seated, wearing a plain two-piece and a frilly-front blouse. She was thick-set, rather plump, with knees that seemed to fill the width of the skirt as it stretched towards the floor. The shoes were simple, with a single strap. They had been married seven years before I came along.
By the time I knew her, she had become mam-sized and mam-shaped. She was a series of boxes, all enclosed in a floral apron. While he remained the Jack Sprat, the wiry, loose-limbed, bony miniature, she grew to the wife that ate no lean. I never thought of her as big, but she certainly was no waster. And I stayed an only child. She had left school at fourteen, would sew and cook, would clean and cope, but, until the day she died, she could neither write a sentence nor divide.
They both liked their tele, however. He sometimes had a pale ale, she a Mackeson or a Jubilee Stout, but both were rare. Usually it was tea that flowed. The pot was always warm, the tin caddy with the Indian patterns always being opened and closed, the clean and sonorous snap of its lid still clear in the memory. We bought our tea loose from the Rington’s man that came round once a week, the powdery leaves scooped into the brass pan of a pair of scales in the back of his gaudy, black and gold van. A quarter of tea, a half of tea is what you bought, and it went straight into the caddy you had carried out from the kitchen into the road, straight from Indian chest to Yorkshire tin with no need of packaged intermediary.
Our tea was usually served in china cups from a silver tray that could be carried into the front room, where it would sit atop a small table under the front window, a table that only moved once a year - except for the daily cleaning, of course, when neither I nor my dad was at home - when a Christmas tree took its place. The clink of china, of cup in saucer, of teaspoon stirring in the heaps of sugar we used were the usual and only complement to the sound of the radio and later the box. Conversation was an odd word, a passing comment about a celebrity’s new frock or snatched words from a well-known song,
repeated tunelessly in the manner demanded by a popular culture whose clear but unstated goal was to condition.
In the years before Coronation Street, we were a family of game-show addicts. Michael Miles in Take Your Pick, Hughie Green on Double Your Money, Beat The Clock on Sunday Night At The London Palladium, they were all unmissable. Sometimes people won a car, a Hillman or a Morris, an event that would have both mam and dad literally on the edge of their seats. It was something that could provoke a reliving comment or recollection for a week. We would even sometimes play the Yes-No interlude from Take Your Pick in the evenings before tea. I would be the gong, with an enamel plate and a wooden spoon, waiting for those to be avoided affirmatives or negatives that Bob Danvers-Walker used to seek out like an inquisitor. In the nineteen-fifties, you needed a public school name just to hit a gong on a game show: so little has changed.
There was once an old man who answered questions on opera. Hughie Green put him into the box on Double Your Money and asked him questions about Puccini and Verdi, the host’s Canadian accent struggling with the open-mouthed vowels in the Italian names. It was the serious part of the show in the second half, when there was real money on offer, when the entertainment was no longer light. At the time, of course, none of us knew a thing about anything. We were working class, after all. Knowledge was not our station. But the old man won a thousand pounds, an event that would send my mam into a monologue about what she would buy with such money. A new washer was usually top of the list, one of those new-fangled twin tubs that had a spinner, but replacing the outside toilet with an indoor bathroom was never far behind. Dad, obviously, wanted a car and, lo and behold, he soon got one, his tailoring chain having promoted him to the dizzy heights of a store visitor, a man who travelled around the company’s shops to ensure that policy was being properly followed in this, the dawning of the management age. It was an old car at first, a Ford Eight, pre-war, reconditioned. But then there was a Standard Eight, same number, different make, that had a boot large enough for young Donald to treat as a playground. You could crawl in and out when the car was running because the backs of the seats folded flat. And it was green. And, apart from the nobs in the big houses, of course, it was one of only half a dozen cars in Kiddington. And the only new one.
And thus the philosophy. Yes, life was governed by luck, and the pools had to be done. But there was reward in knowledge, since only right answers passed the test of the box in Double Your Money, where even opera was worth something. Prizes were either the products of consumerism to which we unquestioningly aspired, or they were the cash to purchase them. Winning the holiday that was occasionally on offer was generally scoffed at, because it left you with nothing when it was finished, granted no status beyond the potential bragging of memory. Something material, after all, spoke for itself. Such structure even prompted Hughie Green to claim that his show was ‘educational’ and thus worthy beyond mere entertainment. Not only were the rewards desirable, they were also available and, in a country that had seen six years of war and subsequent years of austerity, it and its genre received applause.
The spectre that we feared, of course, was new conflict. I was not very old when, one night after work, my dad was suddenly, uncharacteristically, almost uncontrollably angry. There was a report on the news, a story about a far away place with a map I had never seen in my school atlas, one of those strange places that were so far from the British Empire that they were invariably squashed down the crease of a centre-fold, or slipped carelessly off an edge. I had never heard of it and there were names on the screen my mother couldn’t even begin to pronounce. I can still remember her trying to bend her lips around the sound of the capital city when, like a banger going off on bonfire night, my dad looked up from his paper and said, “They’re never starting another war... No! No! ...the stupid gnathics...” I had never before heard him swear. From my mother’s reaction, perhaps neither had she. His anger was incandescent, his voice cracked with emotion as he stood, apparently to attention in anticipation of call-up. “To think of all the people who have died... And now there’s something else the toffs don’t like, so they are going to send more hard-working, ordinary people to their deaths to get what they want for themselves!” It was the closest I ever heard him get to politics. It passed, of course, a false alarm. The war was real enough and its deaths were no less final, but there was to be no general call-up. No requirement to die.
But it was also an era when television was bringing home the reality of the death camps. They came right into our living room. Children now would have to be protected from such images. There was a trench in a black and white winter, a trench being filled with the skin and bone of systematically starved people, their lifeless strings of limbs tangling like the threads of gristle we pulled off the joint on Sundays.
“What have they done?” I can remember asking, my child’s logic demanding a reason to justify such treatment.
“They were Jews,” said my dad through a cloud of blue Capstan smoke.
Though I was barely beyond infancy, even I knew this could never be a reason, a justification for doing this to fellow human beings. “That lad in the striped suit, young Donald,” said my father once, “is about as old as you. He never got any older.” It was a horror that endured.
But it was a film called Alexander that shook me to the core. It was on late at night, perhaps later than parents nowadays would allow, but I doubt it. The film was in black and white, but then so was everything on a black and white television. We had watched the start, when people in medieval costume walked the streets of a town saying things in unintelligible subtitles. I remember my mother saying, “Just look at that. It must be years old. I don’t know where they dig ‘em up from.” She betrayed no concept of period drama.
It was the knights, the Teutons, whoever they were, who played out that memorable scene. It’s the battle on the ice, I can hear you say. No, you are wrong - right film, wrong scene! I can remember looking on the map to find a country called Teut, where they might come from, but, to this day, it’s never appeared. Well, as you know, they were conquering, as knights do. They took one town, chased people and killed a few. Then they built a fire, collected the town’s babies and dropped them one by one into the flames. Now killing other people in battle was quite normal. It was something I saw daily, if not hourly on our screen. But babies...
“What have they done?” I asked, wondering if they had all cried too long, been sick or messed their pants. There was no answer this time.
But the picture was clear. In both cases there was an ideology at war, attacking, oppressing, annihilating what offended its own partial needs. And this mirrored the coldness of war which threatened even to freeze the consumer programme we all worshipped. There was another ideology that threatened, had even caused another, though limited war. There were no reasons for anything, no causes other than people’s thoughts, assumptions, prejudice.
And what better to maintain the ideological balance than the Western? Clean-living white people, pure at heart, generous of spirit travelled in mutually supportive communities in rattling white wagons they constructed and maintained for themselves. They were pioneers, personally through their population of a new world, economically via their desire for a better life and ideologically through their promise to develop virgin land in the name of private ownership and profit. Opposing them was a horde, anonymous, foreign, uncommunicative, driven by a social order we could not comprehend. Vastly outnumbered, vastly outgunned, our pioneer heroes prevailed through stern effort, collegiality and, crucially, superior technology. And win they did, thus repelling the fears that amassed on the edge of the sphere that they successfully and justifiably sought to expand in the name of right. It was political correctness, 1950s style.
Twenty Two
The windmills were the last straw... - Suzie describes Don’s opposition to most forms of renewable energy, the events that led to his acquiring a police r
ecord and thus anticipates his activity in the sierras. Suzie sets up a bonfire to destroy Don’s course notes and invites the neighbours, who won’t eat the food.
The windmills were the last straw. It had nothing to do with us. They weren’t even in our metropolitan area, let alone our own backyard. They were way over towards the coast, miles beyond Ribthwaite, between Chisteacre and Jest. At least that’s where they were planned to go. They were never built, largely because Donkey and his gang took their direct action.
He’d done every course under the sun. He’d done arts, sciences, sociography, median studies, politics - we all know about politics, don’t we? - economeretricious, theology and Lord knows what. The house was full of course units, TMAs, files of research notes, tutorial sheets, background reading, mimeographed reprints and learned paupers. You couldn’t move in our bedroom, not that Donkey has moved in the bedroom for years... But the paper, it was everywhere. There were piles of journals next to the loo, some of them with permanently unfolded centre-folds, reference lists flapping on the pin-board in the hall whenever we opened the front door and a veritable volume of tomes stuffed into the landing cupboards.
Now brain might be better than brawn, and there might be method in madness, but there’s no disputing that the titles were from Mars. ‘An Estimation Of The Cruciality Or Otherwise Of Gratuitous Blood-letting In The Mid-Century Vampire Movie’, ‘A Linguistic Analysis Of Expletive Infixation In Multisyllabic English Verbs’ and ‘A Catalogue Of Official Manipulation Techniques In Late Twentieth Century Professional Football’ are just a few that spring to mind. ‘Beekeeping On Thursdays’ wouldn’t have surprised me.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 22
