by Dai Smith
He was all about treating us. We had been punished, he implied. Now we deserved better, he insisted. Suddenly we were elevated to a difference from those around us. With him we alone went on trips, even on weekdays, to the seaside in one or other of his gleaming black cars. The Humber usually or, if he felt like it, the rather swish Alvis, chromed enough to be American. All the cars had vertically ridged and hand-sewn black leather seats with walnut trimmed dashboards and ebony driving wheels, large and imposing enough to steer a bus. My mother would sit in the single seat for two in the front, throwing anxious looks and pleading smiles back at me as I slid across the lonely expanse of the deep back seat. Before we set out I would have been loaded up with “sweets for the journey”, no matter how short or how long it might be. If we ever bought such things for ourselves, in or out of the family, it was done sparingly and with the appropriate coupons carefully clipped and counted out from the ration book.
For him, nothing ever seemed restricted by ration. He would turn up with slabs of the pallid yellow “American” cheese imported from Canada, with as many as eight rashers of thick-cut gammon, not watery bacon slices, its meat raspberry pink against the grey transparency of greaseproof wrapping paper, and other cuts we rarely saw, and could not afford: rump steaks, double pork chops, legs of lamb and silverside beef. Against their bounce and juice our scrawny pieces of neck and shin were flaccid, their sour odour coming to the surface of simmering water like the beige scum flecking Barry Island beach. The after taste of thrice weekly cawls was banished for us along with the otherwise healthy diet of pre-Coronation years, shouldered aside by the sugar fest to which he invited us on mountain picnics, car rides and nights by the fire banked up with the coal he had delivered.
My world of make and mend, of wait and see, of if you’re good, and maybe tomorrow, ended. It all came today. A pushbike with drop handles that was not second-hand. A panelled leather football. Comic books. A blue mottled Conway Stewart fountain pen. Oh, I was a lucky, lucky, boy. There were, set before us in sophisticated boxes, roundels of Clarnico’s dark chocolate mint creams and the cocoa milk-sweetened selections of Dairy Box or Cadbury’s Milk Tray. Black Magic from Rowntree’s was too crisply bitter for my rotting teeth but the parcels of strawberry and orange essence would squirt and stick like paste to my sugar saturated gums. My mother, who had never smoked, would now suck and blow on Passing Clouds or Sobranies, the commonplace of Woodbines and Players left for others to drop in the gutter. At home there was, too, alcohol in the house, brought by him for when he dropped in, more and more frequently, more and more without warning. She didn’t appear to mind, though I noticed she kept herself ready, or smart as he would say, for his visits. It was then that I came to recognise the off-key note of citrus and herbs that was their Gordon’s Gin and Tonic in tumblers.
They had met for the first time on the day my father had died in a motorbike accident. He would usually set out, on his black and green underpowered BSA bike, at six just after first light. He would ride down the Valley to its mouth and then up the adjacent Valley branching to the left for twelve miles. He had left off working underground, no matter what it paid, as quickly as he could and found new work on the new industrial estate as an assembly-line car-parts fitter. It was one of those mechanical and mechanistic post-war jobs sent to compensate us for thirty years of misery and war. All behind us, we were told. We sucked the welfare tit with as much astonished gratitude as I would later slurp up the sugar of sweets and treats.
That morning, when he went, I would normally still have been asleep in the back upstairs bedroom. But this day he was late. I had heard him talking with my mother, laughter from both amongst their whispered words, and then his bare feet slapping out of bed onto the stone cold linoleum floor and the splashy sound his piss made into the china chamberpot they kept underneath their bed. I left the swaddled comfort of my eiderdown quilt nest and ran across the landing, bang into him. My father grabbed me and dangled me upside down over the stairs. In a terror that was feigned and a delight that was not, I screamed and wriggled for deliverance. My mother came out of the bedroom and held him around his waist, pushing his vest up over his chest and kissing his neck and tickling him under his arms. He was naked other than for that. He held me with one arm so that I screamed louder. He half-turned and cupped my mother around her neck and bent over to kiss it. I twisted to see them, two shapes, dark and fair, a moment only allowed them for this. Then he let her free, yanked me up and stood me straight. He told me to go back to bed with my mother. He kissed me on the forehead and then on the lips. I could smell my mother on his breath. “Got to go,” he yelled, and ran down to the kitchen where his work clothes would have been warming on the chair in front of the kitchen range he had installed himself for her convenience and constant hot water. An indoor bathroom was to be next. Dreams. We heard him shout: “Half past seven! I’m off”. And he went.
We lay under the still warm blankets and heard the bike choke in the cold and cough harshly before it stammered into life as he rode it out from the back garden, through the gate and into the unpaved lane that ran behind our street. The engine puttered before it finally purred smoothly. We lay listening, my mother and I, as its familiar noise drifted away from us.
Because he was late, my father decided that day to take a short cut over the mountain between the two valleys. That road wound steeply upwards in a whorl of bends to the plateau before it corkscrewed down to the next valley bottom. We called it the New Road because it had been built, to no real purpose of regular travel, by unemployed men on council contracts in the years before the war. It seems that as my father pushed his BSA over the top and then accelerated into the first hairpin bend of his descent, a late winter sun rose up before him like an incandescent silver disc from over the mountain’s shoulder. It blinded him so abruptly that he stuttered at speed and skewed the bike to the right and into a postman’s red van, which had been hidden from him by the light that had flooded the road and filled the air. The van had bulled into the bike side on, and it hurtled my father into the air for the instant of life he had left. He died in the next moment, when his head hit the road. There were no helmets worn then so his skull cracked open from the top and spilled the blood and nerves of his brains onto that rough and narrow road.
Coming up behind the red postman’s van was a low slung, high fronted black Humber. The driver pulled over to the side of the road and half-straddled it on a tussocky grass and bullrush verge. He switched off the engine and got out. The van driver was already out and staring down at my father’s corpse. He was dead. They told us it would have been instant on impact as if that might comfort us. As for the details my “Uncle” Jack would, meticulously and with infinite subtlety in order to play on a child’s sensations, lay these out before me later. He told how he walked past the postman and bent over my father. To make sure, though he was, he said, absolutely sure – anyone would have been. Behind him he heard a hollowed-out voice in a flat monotone: “I didn’t see him. Oh, Christ Jesus. I just didn’t see him. I couldn’t do nothing. He was just there, on my side. On my side. I couldn’t do nothing.” So nothing could be done, and there, as they all said over and over, it was.
When I came home from school that afternoon, the house was full of neighbours and friends. We had no relatives left alive. I was picked up and ushered into the front room with the piano. My mother was in bed. The doctor had called. And would come again. I was to be a brave boy. My father would have wanted me to be a brave boy. He would have wanted it. So he was dead. My father was dead. A stranger patted me on the head and offered me a mint to suck. It was the kindly man I would soon know as “Uncle” Jack. A brick, an absolute brick, they all said. What happened ricocheted around me and from room to room as I was hugged and pitied.
“Uncle” Jack had been driving to a job in our valley but, after the accident, and the police and ambulance calls and the waiting and witness statements, he had volunteered to go with a police sergeant to tell the relativ
es of the deceased what had occurred and what he’d seen. He was, as everyone quickly said of him, just that kind of chap. One in a million. Jack had even stayed after the police had left, and before the neighbours came. He made tea. He opened the door. He explained. He comforted. He made sure the doctor called. It was he who insisted my mother go to bed and it was he, when we three were left alone in the house, who took me by the hand and led me upstairs to sit with my mother on the bed I had shared with her, and my father before me, that morning. Her tears soaked my woollen school jumper to a stiff lumpiness of clots, and wet my face all over. “Uncle” Jack smiled and said, “There, there,” and left us to it.
After that, and the funeral for which he made his car available, he called more and more, though never as any kind of intrusion. He made it all seem a natural progression of meeting followed by friendship. He would park one or other of his glamorously alien vehicles in the street, and wave to gawping neighbours. Soon they would talk. And why not, was what, no doubt, they were saying. My mother was not yet thirty, her wan complexion and the shadows of grief beneath her eyes giving her a faded prettiness. Like a pressed flower in a book, a flower whose live colours had not dried out. The life she had eked out with my father cannot have been easy, though I still felt the warmth of it holding us close. With him gone she would hug me closer, often without warning, and then her sighs would well up and their bubble-cries burst and spill their tears onto my hair. She worried over what next. She had worked as a pay clerk for one of the Colliery companies before the war. There were no such jobs now. Shopwork, perhaps? Friends posed unhelpful rhetorical questions but offered no solutions. And then there was “Uncle” Jack.
He owned a garage where repairs were carried out. It was one of very few in both the neighbouring valleys. He had also assembled a fleet of cars for hire. That is, if you can call three maintained and polished saloon cars a fleet. “Uncle” Jack advertised it as such and he, or one of his mechanics, doubled up as drivers. For funerals and weddings and special treats not catered for by council buses or private charabancs. Few of the men amongst us, and none of the women, could drive at all then, and there were, in any case, few cars to drive and none to afford. “Uncle” Jack was the future it seemed, a crossover into a future we could only glimpse and he already embodied. When he was behind the wheel he always wore his black leather gloves, and he never took the left one off his hand. People assumed it was a war-time injury. He chose not to disabuse them. Nor did he pretend. “Uncle” Jack had not gone to the war because of the injury to his hand. What was his left hand now was a clumpy prosthetic thing which he kept covered up. He told my mother, who told me, that he had lost the hand of flesh and bone when one of the new mechanical coal cutters that had been installed went haywire and finished his career as a collier. He congratulated himself on the escape from the dust and accompanying pneumoconiosis that would, for sure, have otherwise been his lot. With his compensation money, paltry enough, he bought the garage, essentially a lock-up with a pit in the floor, and he taught himself to drive the car he’d always wanted. When the Yanks were billeted in all the surrounding valleys his wartime services were in demand. His enterprise grew. He invested in an extension to his garage, and more cars. After the war there was to be a snub-nosed charabanc, blue with a streamlined white trim and glinting chrome wheels, for hire to drinking club and chapel outings and for as far away as Blackpool, whose illuminations were, for us, the eighth wonder of the world. Most of us only saw them on Movietone newsreels in black and white, but we craved their light as much as we did sweetness. “Uncle” Jack was one of those who hastened to meet the need.
We never went over the mountain to his house and whether or not he was married, or had been, was a question neither raised nor answered. Not so far as I knew anyway. Perhaps my mother knew, and was content. Later, it was never mentioned between us. It was “Uncle” Jack’s sister who kept house for him. I met her, a woman almost her younger brother’s size, when she came, now and then, to tea with my mother and him in our house. Sometimes the teatime was extended. Then my mother, “Uncle” Jack and his sister, Gillian, would expand the fun of what he called their “little get-together” with an open cupboard and the bottle of gin he left there. I would be given extra rations of sweets by “Uncle” Jack and sent out to play, and be popular with my bounty on the mountain above and behind us.
To make these visits with his sister even sweeter, “Uncle” Jack brought a wind-up gramophone player, a box of needles and a stack of brittle records. The hiss of the emerging music was removed now from both the rat-a-tat attack of brass and the moony drift of melancholy which had come with the war. “Uncle” Jack’s up-to-date stuff was all soupy balladeering and the glutinous tones of crooners set to the emasculating slither of a thousand violins. The hold-and-release jerk of rock ’n’ roll hadn’t yet come along to break the hold-tight pitter-patter of foxtrots and the glide-together of a waltz. This was a shimmy for security’s sake in that niche between the war they’d survived, and the way we were all going to be. Only not quite yet.
When they ran out of records, Gillian sat at the piano and played, her back to the bay window alcove in which the piano, otherwise silent now my father was not there, sat and waited for her touch. The piano was in the room where my father had lain in a coffin that had been closed because of his injuries, and from where he was carried away. I could not put the thought or the sight out of my mind as her fingers, nails painted as brightly red as her crimson lipsticked mouth, danced up and down the ivory keys. Gillian dressed as she entertained: loudly and colourfully in dresses of pleated jersey silk with a flower pattern. Her perfume, a cloying afternote of gardenias, mingled with the smoke of her cigarette, and stank in that room. My mother said her blonde hair owed more to a bottle than the sun or nature. I knew all this, too, though not everything, because I would ask my mother to tell me what and why everything was. But I could see for myself that her resistance to any of it was feeble, for her sighs were lost into laughter when “Uncle” Jack danced to bend her backwards in a swooping fashion, or when he whirled her into the arms of Gillian and he flopped onto the piano stool so that the music he could thump out with his still-whole right hand might continue for them.
During these months after my father’s death as spring became an early summer the idea of my mother having to work at all receded. She had a pension of sorts from my father’s war service, along with whatever she could claim for me, but mostly we were fed and treated by “Uncle” Jack. More than that, my mother would find a green pound note folded into four in her snap-purse and, more than once, the delicate flag of a white five pound note which we would hold to the light to marvel at the watermark coming through the curled barbed wire of its black calligraphy. Half-crown pieces or florins would materialise in my coat or trouser pockets. She would protest, seriousness conceding to a grateful half-heartedness, as he would tut-tut and put an arm around her shoulders. Soon, “Uncle” Jack spotted that she wore the same dress over and over and took to bringing new ones he’d sized and chosen himself. She would kiss him pressingly on his forehead as he sat in my father’s armchair in the kitchen whilst she came and went and came again from upstairs to down in successive changes of clothing.
Through all this I felt only happy that my mother was my mother again and not some wrenched-off branch of a past life. I had no resentment of him at all and his presence in our life never extended into the night or the mornings. His takeover was far more subtle than any mere replacement. He was bigger than that, and larger than all around him through the unmistakeable power which he yielded and which made him distinct. It was, and I can say that I knew it even then, the car which underlined his power. With it he proclaimed something relative to us, yet which, at that time, was beyond us. Not wealth of a kind, but something more, a hint of a world without the boundary of limits. The car declared the change that was taking place, elsewhere in other worlds, by just being there, but it was the fact of its being there, in the here and now a
nd not some unfolding future, which gave those such as “Uncle” Jack their temporary kingdoms over us. Leather seats and waxed paintwork and the headiness of petrol fumes made a Jack into a King as readily as if he had been a warrior set on a horse and free to survey a land without horizon.
Others my age clearly envied me as I, shy conspirator with them, waved at them left behind in the street as the car pulled off, down the Valley and beyond it. To be touched by power such as this was, in their eyes, to be blessed, and in mine too, though my father had had to die to let it come about. Did we all wish for this to be, our fathers dead? No one spoke of it. Because, of course, it was not really so. Only it left me feeling, if not cursed by the blessing, then singular. I had no wish to be so singled out, and removed. With a stubborn resentment that was not thought through and certainly not articulated, I took, piece by piece and more and more, to sensing when a visit from “Uncle” Jack was imminent so that I could avoid him. When my mother set about tidying the house and herself I would refuse to remain to say “Hello”, and stay out for as long as I dared. If he turned up unexpectedly I would spot him and vanish into the garden and out over the stone-built back wall into that territory of unpaved back lanes and quarries and mountainside dens which was our domain, separate and secret from the organised world that cared for us.
One day that summer the chance came to spend a whole day apart. Courtesy of the British Legion a convoy of double-decker municipal juggernauts of pre-war vintage were to trundle out of the Valley to the seaside. Mothers, fathers, children and, by invitation to the unfortunate, the fatherless such as me whose father had been once a member of the club. No charabancs. No motor cars. The anonymity of a gathering in which, again, I could be a part, and an onlooker, not the looked-at. It would be a Saturday, leaving early and not back until well after dark. Please, please let me go. Why not? said “Uncle” Jack to my mother, and he gave me a dusty red ten bob note.
