Swan River

by David Reynolds

  In the summer of that year, 1898, Gladys outgrew the cot and Young George gave up his room across the landing from Sis’s so that it could be shared by the children; until his wedding to Marie Potts in 1900 – they had become engaged in 1894 – he slept on a narrow bed in a corner of the living room.

  From then on Cliffie and Gladys, like many siblings, shared a bed – and Gladys would only sleep wrapped in her brother’s arms. She called Cliffie ‘Boy’, and they played together on the stairs and landings and on the large, rectangular lid of the WC which served them as a table. There Cliffie taught her to play chess, and by the time she was three – and he was eight – she could beat him, sometimes. If someone wanted to use the WC, they would move the chessboard and play on the floor in the hall outside.

  Looking back, Cliffie saw that he had lived for five years as an only child among many grown-ups; Gladys was both a welcome companion, who adored and looked up to him, and a source of some freedom because she drew the attention of the adults. The house continued to be a focus for Old George’s many brothers, sisters and sisters-in-law, and also for two of Tom’s brothers – Bill, who had been at the dinner where Tom and Sis first met, and Bertie, who came to play chess. All of these visitors – even the most dour, the deaf retired policeman, Uncle Johnson – were charmed by Gladys. They would sit her on their knees, cuddle her, play with her and bring her presents. And she always responded sweetly and politely.

  Drunken Aunt Suey called every Saturday – to receive five shillings, a weekly contribution to her maintenance from Old George – and made a point of seeking out Cliffie and Gladys. She would fumble in her voluminous, dingy skirt and present each of them with a paper bag full of bull’s-eyes; they were then required to kiss her. Cliffie could manage this only by holding his breath – Aunt Suey gave off a sickly stench that Sis said was caused by gin – but Gladys happily complied and sometimes even hugged the smelly woman.

  Apart from her parents, Gladys’s favourite adult was Rose; unlike Cliffie, she seemed to realise when she was a small baby that there was something unusual about a woman who walked about on her hands and somersaulted backwards through doorways, and she soon tried to imitate her – something Cliffie had never done. Rose taught her to dance and cartwheel and do headstands and handstands, but it was a private matter; Gladys didn’t like to have an audience. She danced with Rose in the drawing room with the door shut, to tunes produced by a device like a musical box, and, though Sis was admitted to play Gladys’s favourite tune, ‘Daisy’, on the piano, no one else could join in or watch. She would turn cartwheels for her own pleasure in the garden, and sometimes Cliffie found her standing on her head beside their bed – and then she would say, ‘You do it, Boy,’ but, though he would do most things she asked, he wouldn’t, because he didn’t like being upside down.

  On Mondays Cliffie and Gladys would stand at the breakfast-room window waiting for bubbles to rise from the drain in the corner of the basement area at the front of the house; bubbles appeared on Mondays because it was washing day and the drain was clogged with leaves. While the Alices boiled water in the copper in the scullery, and washed and rinsed clothes and linen in galvanised baths with scrubbing boards and Rickett’s Blue, Gladys and Cliffie watched and waited, without telling anyone, as the bubbles came, closely followed by soapy water which slowly flooded the basement area and slithered towards the door. Only when it came under the door and crept along the passage would they sound the alarm – and watch with delight as one of the Alices waded across the area and unblocked the drain with a stick.

  When Old George was away, he would send his washing home in a parcel and always put in small presents for Cliffie and Gladys. The postman always knocked twice when he had a parcel to deliver and the children would rush to the door yelling, ‘The dirty!’ Cliffie would get there first and begin tearing off the paper and string on the breakfast-room floor while Gladys danced around, excited and trying to help. On one occasion Sis appeared and told Cliffie that they must take turns and that Gladys should be allowed to open this one.

  Sixty years later, Cliffie remembered what Gladys said then, and gave it as an example of his sister’s sweet and gentle nature: ‘No. Let Boy open it. He likes doing it, don’t you, Boy?’

  Cliffie recalled that his attachment to Gladys persisted and grew stronger. Writing in 1960 – with the benefit, of course, of sixty years in which to coalesce his memories – he described their young life together as an idyll in which ‘she loved me as I loved her’. She was ‘adorable, pretty and somehow possessed an unearthly quality of grace’.

  21

  Gladys

  The summer of 1898 should have been a good time for Tom. The Welsbach company promoted him to the prestigious and highly-paid position of Chief Accountant and, for the first time for six years, he and his wife were able to sleep in a bedroom free of children. However, the new job brought new time-consuming pressures, and Sis seemed to find being alone with him at night more of a nuisance than a blessing.

  Old George told Sis of a conversation he had with Tom, in which Tom said repeatedly that he was ‘exasperated’ by Sis’s attitude towards him. Old George had been unsure of what he meant, but told Sis that an exasperated man who drank was a potentially dangerous man. He assumed that, with his yet higher income, Tom was again wanting to find a home; surely Sis must now look for one with him. But Sis seized on her father’s use of the word ‘dangerous’. In her opinion Tom was dangerous; did her father know that that summer he had tried to slap her face, raised his fist to her and, more than once, come home with blood on him after brawling who knew where? Her first responsibility was to her children; it would be wrong for her to take them from a home where they were happy, and where there were adults who cared for them, to live alone with her and a drunk.

  By the autumn of 1898 Tom was again drinking heavily and regularly.

  On November the fifth, Cliffie, who would be seven the next month, was very excited; his family always had a party on Guy Fawkes night, with a large bonfire and a guy. He had bought his own fireworks with pocket money saved over many weeks and had been gloating over them for days; he would be allowed to let them off before the main display provided by the grown-ups. It was a Saturday, and when his father came home from work he helped him make the guy out of old sacks, straw and string; it was a proper one with legs, arms, a body and a head, and he was struck by the care his father took to get the proportions right by adding and taking away handfuls of straw, and by how skilful he was with the string. Cliffie dressed it in an old shirt, jacket, trousers and peaked cap that his father had saved specially.

  Later, his father went to the Norfolk Arms and he helped his grandfather and Uncle George build the bonfire while Gladys, who was not yet two, struggled to carry pieces of kindling chopped by Uncle Ernest. That evening would be Gladys’s first sight of fireworks – she had been asleep in her cot the previous year – and she was excited but apprehensive; she didn’t like loud bangs.

  As it grew dark, the garden filled with relations, friends and neighbours. The children from next door hung over the wall, and Toppy lurked in the shadows under the trees at the end.

  Gladys watched with Sis from the kitchen window and flinched when Cliffie ran up with a golden rain and waved the sparks at her from beyond the glass, but she was soon laughing and clapping as he set off starlights and Prince of Wales feathers. Afflicted by some demon, Cliffie lit a squib on the kitchen window sill; Gladys pointed with delight at the brief shower of silver sparks but the sudden bang as they went out made her scream and cry and bury her head in Sis’s shoulder. Furious, Sis ran out of the house and chased Cliffie up the garden until she was diverted by Ernest tossing a firecracker at her feet.

  While Young George minded the bonfire, Tom took charge of the fireworks and soon began to have a row with the father of the children next door; the man was annoying him by telling his children to watch their eyes whenever Tom let off a rocket. Cliffie recalled his father saying, ‘I’ll soo
n show you’ – and briefly wondering what he would show him.

  The man had the same thought. ‘What will you show me?’

  ‘This.’ Tom held up his fist in the firelight – to Cliffie’s eyes it was much larger than usual – and started to climb over the wall. Young George and Ernest rushed up and, after a struggle, managed to hold him back.

  When the fireworks were over, Sis rebuked Tom and accused him of being drunk. There were moments of angry shouting before Tom strode out of the house slamming the front gate so hard that it fell off its hinges.

  For weeks the gate lay on the ground in the basement area. It embarrassed Cliffie; he knew now that being drunk was something to be ashamed of and the broken gate was a public declaration of his father’s weakness.

  Cliffie often witnessed, or overheard, his mother accusing his father of being drunk. His father would protest, either angrily or in a hurt way, and reply with one of two favourite expressions: ‘Unmitigated rot’ or ‘I’m right as ninepence.’ In time, Cliffie came to regard both these ripostes as confirmation that he was, indeed, drunk.

  On 6 January, Twelfth Night, 1899, Little Alice took down the many holly branches that had festooned the house over Christmas and left them, bundled with string, at the bottom of the stairs to the basement. Late that night, after everyone was asleep, Tom came in, cursing noisily and knocking over the furniture. When Young George asked him to be quiet, he swung a punch at him, and was subdued only when Old George pushed him down the stairs – where he stayed until morning asleep on the holly.

  The event stayed in Cliffie’s memory – he found it hard to understand how his father could sleep on a pile of holly. But he was more dismayed when his father wet the breakfast-room sofa. He found him in the scullery shamefacedly washing the loose covers and learned the truth by eavesdropping. After that, he knew what had happened when his father’s trousers and long johns were hanging on the line beside the sofa covers.

  In Sis’s diary, references to Tom were brief. His degradation was recorded in short, clipped notes buried among descriptions of Sis’s own activities and those of Gladys and Cliffie: ‘Tom fell on basement steps. Father and George had to go down and carry him’; ‘Tom drunk. Punched Ernest and swore at Rose, 1 a.m. Apologised after lunch’; ‘Vile night. Tom threw up in his sleep. Alice helped me wash. Father away so slept, tried to, in his bed.’

  Tom was always penitent, and said that he would reform and that whatever had happened wouldn’t happen again, but Sis didn’t believe him. Even when she was aware that he was trying hard to conquer his craving, and for a few days or weeks he drank less or stopped drinking altogether, she had very little faith. She was tired of broken promises; the only thing that he could say that touched her – and he said it often – was that he loved her and Cliffie and Gladys; she believed that he did, but now such declarations – as she confided to Kate and to her diary – only made her sad.

  For a while Tom claimed to have turned to God, to have signed the pledge and to be praying for release from what he described as an affliction. Sis scoffed privately, but took Cliffie to St Mark’s Church where he joined the Band of Hope, signed the same pledge and attended gatherings where he and a large group of children recited: ‘I have promised, with God’s help, to abstain from all intoxicating drinks and beverages.’ At Sis’s insistence, Tom had to explain to Cliffie what ‘abstain’, ‘intoxicating’ and ‘beverages’ meant.

  In March 1899 the Welsbach company demoted Tom from chief accountant to assistant accountant, with a reduced salary, on the grounds that he was no longer competent to fulfil his former role and that he had lost the respect of his subordinates. Sis recorded that he seemed almost grateful and that he stopped drinking – although she viewed even this latest effort cynically.

  In June the board in Germany told their manager in London – the white-haired man who had given Cliffie a shilling – to sack Tom. Tom wrote to him, stating that he had ‘taken himself in hand’ with the help of a priest, who himself wrote a letter promising to hold Tom to his undertaking. Sis saw the manager’s reply and described its contents as shameful, despite its main import: that the manager had reversed the board’s decision and given Tom a last chance. To his employer, Tom had resolved to renounce his ‘miserable and unworthy past by rigid sobriety and honesty in the future’; the implication that his drinking had led him to be dishonest at work disturbed her, but she had a small hope that this close confrontation with the prospect of unemployment – something men feared more than anything – might be Tom’s salvation.

  * * * * *

  Cliffie was seven then. He was aware of the crisis and of the importance of his father’s job and had prayed earnestly on his knees for its preservation, but this didn’t stop him having fun with his sister and his friends. In February 1899 Sis was concerned that he was spending too much time with Toppy and, in particular, that he had gone with him to a football match in Tottenham without asking her permission.

  I reread my father’s account of his escapades with Toppy and felt envious of his friendship with someone so loyal and daring. My explorations of the little town I had grown up in by the Thames seemed tame compared with the adventures he and Toppy had had all over London and the risks they had taken. And I realised that it was Toppy, rather than my grandfather Tom or great-uncle George, who had triggered my father’s enthusiasm for the Spurs.

  To get to the Tottenham Hotspur football ground at Northumberland Park would have cost Toppy and Cliffie a penny ha’penny each return by horse-drawn tram, but they could rarely afford that; instead, they travelled free by hanging on to the ladders at the backs of brewers’ drays or by jumping on to the axles of the four-wheeled cabs known as growlers. They had to be quick and alert; there was an ever-present danger of being seen by the driver and lashed by his whip, and there were malicious urchins in the street who would yell, ‘Whip behind, guvnor.’

  Toppy earned regular money by lighting fires in the homes of orthodox Jews on Saturdays and paid the sixpence it cost to get him and Cliffie into the Spurs ground, and a penny for five Woodbines or Ogden’s Tabs to be shared during the game – my father’s penny-a-week pocket money would have already gone on sweets. And Toppy funded much longer excursions; he knew that, as long as you didn’t leave a station, you could travel every branch of the North London Railway and come home again on a child’s half-price ticket bought for a penny at Dalston Junction. In this way Toppy and my father saw large swathes of London from the windows of railway carriages, from the ships in the docks at Poplar to the pagoda at Kew and the Thames at Richmond.

  Cliffie and Toppy had an enemy, the local bully, Bert Rapley – and that summer of 1899 Rapley had something to taunt Cliffie about, a fact that Cliffie could not dispute: that his family was pro-Boer. Since the death of Gladstone the previous year, Old George and the rest of them, including Tom, had given credence to the views of Keir Hardie, Robert Burns and Robert Blatchford, the editor of the radical Clarion. By listening to discussions around Old George’s bed, Cliffie learned that his family’s long-standing bugbear, Joe Chamberlain, had conspired by means of a secret telegram with someone called Cecil Rhodes to deprive the Boers of gold that they had found on their own land in a place called the Transvaal; the Boers had invaded some British territory called Natal only because Chamberlain and Rhodes had sent soldiers into their country.

  When he expressed this view at school, Cliffie encountered bewilderment and even jeering, so he decided to keep quiet about it. However, Rapley remembered what Cliffie had said. On a Thursday band night on Hackney Downs in August, after an argument about a cricket bat, he chased Cliffie into the crowd around the bandstand. There, just as Rapley caught up with him, Cliffie found his father – with his mother, his uncle Ernest and his sister in her pram. Deprived of his prey, Rapley danced about a few feet away, jeering and pointing at the whole family. ‘Pro-Boers! Pro-Boers! Bloody pro-Boers! That’s what they are!’ It was a serious stigma and the crowd stared, some of them angrily. Uncle E
rnest wanted to give Rapley a thick ear, but Tom told him to calm down and said that he would deal with him. But first he ushered Sis, Gladys, Cliffie and Ernest into the penny seats – which were green deckchairs, close to the bandstand and separated from the crowd by a rope.

  Rapley stood by the rope shouting, ‘See them! Bloody pro-Boers, they are.’ Tom went up to him and spoke in a friendly voice: ‘If you keep shouting like that, I’ll call a policeman. You’re a naughty boy. I know where you live and I know your father and I’ll call round and tell him. Do you like jumbles?’ Jumbles were cakes, three for a penny at a shed nearby. Tom put a penny in Rapley’s hand. The bully, who was only nine years old, looked at him, dazed, then turned and walked away.

  * * * * *

  Tom had not had a drink for two months, and Sis dared to hope that, with the constant threat of the sack, his resolution might last. She didn’t speak to him on the subject because he had asked her not to mention it. He stayed sober for another month and then something happened – Sis never knew what, but presumed it was something at work. On an evening in October she smelled whisky on his breath. He wasn’t drunk then, but he was ten days later, and the following week the pattern of staggering down the basement steps late at night and sleeping on the breakfast-room sofa began once again.