There were hundreds of pubs in Dudley. My grandad told me about them all. The Albion and the Gypsies’ Tent and the Smiling Man. Further afield: the Hangsman’s Tree, the Swan with Two Necks, the Pig on the Wall. You could tell a whole history of a place from its pub names. The first thing I did when I took our pub on was go back to the original name: the Crow Cawing. It’s an old place. Roundheads drank in a tavern here, there was badger baiting in the hollow out the back that is now the chemist’s uneven car park; they used to read the Chartist newspaper out loud to crowds of men in the front bar. In the rebellion, in 1842, the people made tiswases in the nail yard that was next door, three nails hammered together to throw under the army horses’ hooves. When they got taken to Worcester Assizes the nailers would be asked for their plea and they’d say, I plead starvation, before being led off to the cart that would take them to the boat for Australia.
That Saturday morning we stopped on the corner at the bottom of the High Street. There’d once been a pub here called The Welch Go By, meaning the Welsh. They must have driven their sheep this way to the markets, maybe my great-granny had come with them. Round the corner, where the bus station was, was where both my nan and grandad grew up. They got married at the end of the war. This was after all the houses had been knocked down and everyone moved out to the estates. We stopped outside the television shop. People would stand there to check the cricket scores or wait for the football results on Saturday teatimes. That day, all the screens in the window had Margaret Thatcher’s face on them.
All the screens have Margaret Thatcher’s face on them. There are hundreds of them. She’s giving a speech. Hundreds of screens, faces; she looks down at us. It’s like she’s telling us all off, but we can’t hear her.
Oh, bloody hell, my grandad says, like he’s forgotten all about something and remembered it suddenly. He unravels the bandage from his hand and then wraps it back up again.
From then on she was always there, a picture on the television hundreds of times over; sometimes only her voice, nagging away across the allotments and gardens and factories; the meanness of it, her voice, working away at you like rust.
‘Now, with increasing frequency, neighbour strikes against neighbour, and common humanity is being displaced by action against the most vulnerable of our people in the battle for pay and power.’
All the standing up after my injury makes my legs strong. I can feel them grow, feel the muscles harden. For a few days I drop my trousers at the start of playtime to show everyone the bruise. The first time I do it, it’s for Ronnie, who’s already seen it on his back step, and Paul and Jermaine, but the next couple of days the whole class crowds round, girls too, which makes me feel a bit funny, especially when Michelle Campbell shouts, I can see his willy, when she can’t because I’ve got my hands over it. She’s got a big mouth. I try to be angry with Michelle, but the feeling I get is different from being angry with her. I stand behind her in the classroom and look at the bobbles in her hair and her shiny ear-rings, even though it’s against the rules to wear them. I wait for her to turn around and laugh.
Everyone gets bored of my arse as the bruising fades. I have to stop dropping my trousers anyway because Miss Wright gets suspicious of what’s happening in the cloakroom and starts to stand at the door at break-times.
Her wants to see yer willy, Michelle whispers.
Someone has been to the boys’ toilets two days running and gone all over the floor. Miss Wright gives us a long speech about how it’s dirty and how whoever did it might need some help so we have to come straight out and own up or tell her who it was if we knew.
Nobody’s telling tales. Nobody knows who it is, anyway.
Jermaine turns to me and says, Is it yow?
I try to do a face like my grandad when he thinks my uncle Johnny has said something stupid. I am worried, though. I think Michelle might go and tell Miss Wright it’s me for a laugh. My mum has written a note to allow me to stand up in lessons after my accident. Miss Wright might think the two things are connected.
The toilet stayed a mystery for a long time. We’d go in there at break and there’d be a long brown turd on the tiled floor waiting for us. Miss Wright went frantic. We had an assembly about it. The teachers kept saying that the person doing it might need help, but I remember realizing that what they really meant was whoever was doing it was in big trouble. Then one morning, the word SHIT was smeared on the toilet wall. The S and H were thick and big and the I and T were smeared greasily across the tiles, falling away, like the writer had run out of shit and energy at the same time, as if the weight of it had pulled them earthwards. There was a handprint on one of the white china sinks. Michelle told us we were going to get our fingerprints taken so they could find who it was.
They used their poo as a pen, Jermaine kept saying and couldn’t stop laughing. That was it, then; the teachers locked the toilets. If we wanted to go a teacher had to go in there with us.
It was Jermaine, and no one gave him any help. Not long afterwards he got shunted to his real dad’s family in Birmingham and we never saw him at school again. Miss Wright made sure we all knew it was Jermaine. He got into trouble, spells in secure units and, later, Winson Green. He came in the pub not long after I first took it on. He’d have been twenty-eight, twenty-nine then, visiting his mum who had gone back to live with her own mum and dad on the Rosland estate somewhere. He wasn’t in a good way, probably shouldn’t have been drinking with his medication. His face was scratched with tattoos, like a Maori warrior. I asked him if he still did any drawing or anything like that and he just looked at me. It was a stupid question, I know; his left hand shaking and the other holding his pint. He showed me photos of his kids. He didn’t see them much; three of them, different mothers, different areas, round and about. He hanged himself on Christmas Day a few years ago in a flat above a row of shops in Darlaston. I’d have gone to the funeral if I’d found out in time.
When that lad said piss artist when I told him about his dad’s drawing I swear it took me all my strength not to get the bat from under the bar and give him the hiding he was asking for.
The shit on the toilet floor at school makes me think of that spring of the hunger strikers, although they came a couple of years later, when things started to get really bad. I remember some terrible arguments between Johnny and my grandad.
It’s stopping up, Johnny said, from the landing.
An I’ve tode yer iss comin down.
It ay.
This is my house an I’ll decide what gos up on the walls. Iss comin down.
Johnny had a poster of Bobby Sands up on his wall. I knew that Bobby Sands was in prison and on hunger strike. The idea of having nothing to eat or drink on purpose was so extraordinary to me that I’d watch every news bulletin and try to snatch glimpses of the hunger strikers in my grandad’s paper. When Johnny told me about the dirty protests, of the prisoners going on the blanket, naked, shitting and pissing in their cells, it created a kind of ghoulish glamour that appealed to an eleven-year-old boy, and made some foreboding echo of Jermaine’s behaviour in my head.
My mum told me that I couldn’t watch the news, that she wasn’t watching it either because it was too horrible, but I’d catch her with my nan, their hands to their mouths, watching updates about the state of the prisoners’ health and Margaret Thatcher’s voice saying she would let them die before she gave in.
What’s the point, though? I asked Johnny.
Well, the point is, they’m taking a stand, they’m shaming Margaret Thatcher.
Her’s got no shame, that’s what Grandad says.
Well, I agree with him, for once, but the point is her will be shamed because either they’ll die, and her’ll have let them die, or her’ll have to back down.
And what is it they want to happen?
They want to be not treated like criminals. They’m political prisoners. That means they’re in prison because of what they think not because of what they’ve d
one.
Did Margaret Thatcher put them in prison?
Well, yeah, she wants them in prison, yeah.
For what they think?
Yeah.
What about you?
What?
Will you get in prison for what you think?
I expected him to say, No, doh be so saft, like my grandad would, or, No, that kind of thing doesn’t happen here. Instead, he said, Well, if I was, I’d be proud.
Johnny was my hero for a long time. We’d all lived together when I was a baby and then again during the long, hot summer of my sixth birthday when Johnny was seventeen, while our house got finished, after we’d moved out of the flats. He’d done a year’s work after leaving school, sweeping up in a factory, and had finally persuaded my grandad he should go to college, so he packed in his job and had August at home watching England and the West Indies play cricket on the telly and filling a paddling pool for me and Ronnie and his sisters to jump in and out of in the back garden. He’d sit and supervise us in my grandad’s deckchair, reading the Daily Mirror with his shirt off, wearing a floppy hat like Clive Lloyd, the West Indies captain; tensing the muscles he’d grown from sweeping bits of metal across a factory floor; sketching, and drinking the odd bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. Afternoons, we emptied the pool and he’d wander across the allotments to water the dying plants. There was a hosepipe ban and the men would give him silver coins for the water. Sometimes he’d get Natalie Robertson to walk down one of the paths with him. I saw them kissing once, leaned against some fence panelling that faced towards West Brom. She went off with someone else when the weather broke. There was a pile of drawings he’d done of her naked in his sock drawer. At night he’d play David Bowie LPs over and over on the record player in his room until my mum or dad would bang on the wall to get him to turn the volume down.
What do they think, Bobby Sands and that?
Well, they want Ireland, all of Ireland, to be a separate country. They don’t want the English soldiers to be there or for Ireland to be divided into two, like it is now with a British bit and an Irish bit. It’s called a war of liberation. Liberation means freedom. They’m trying to free theerselves.
Why doh they fight the soldiers to make em leave?
They do, but the soldiers am very powerful, they’ve got the whole British army, and the rebels ay got much, so they have to work out different ways to fight them. It’s what always happens when powerful countries invade less powerful ones.
Like bullying.
Exactly, it’s exactly like bullying. It’s a way of fighting against the bullies even if you cor beat em in a fight.
I remember thinking even then that the easiest way to fight a bully was to bully them right back, to fight fire with fire, like Johnny had with the skinheads. He told me that when they broke his easel he went for them, even though there was twenty, thirty of them. He kung-fued one of them into the canal. He told me he thought he might have killed one of them. I said I hoped he had. Now, I realize that could not be true, not in the way he told it, anyway, but I still wish he had. There must have been some yearning in the way he told me about it, with his black eye and his cracked ribs, some dream of fighting back, fighting fire with fire, that took hold of me.
I knew Margaret Thatcher would let Bobby Sands die, it was obvious. He wasn’t hurting her.
The poster didn’t come down. It stayed up in Johnny’s room. He’s probably still got it somewhere; he keeps everything. He moved it from the door as some sort of compromise. He put him up next to Peter Shilton. Johnny played in goal for a while at Cinderheath. After Shilton made that mistake to let the Wolves win the cup he liked him even more.
My grandad stayed angry. On the night of the argument he got up halfway through his chips and walked outside. While we finished eating I could see that he’d gone over the road and was standing next to one of Harry Robertson’s old bangers, pretending to have a cigarette in the spring air, checking you couldn’t see the Bobby Sands poster from the street.
Thass all we need, I heard him saying to my nan later, a bloody brick though the winder.
‘On this the government will not compromise. It is not prepared, through the granting of political status, to legitimize criminal acts undertaken in pursuit of political ends.’
At break-times me, Ronnie, Jermaine and Paul stand on the edge of the big boys’ football game behind the goal. If the ball comes onto our playground we chase it and fetch it for the bigger boys and try to pass it back to them, with the inside of our foot to show what good players we are and that they should ask us to come and play.
Loads of kids are already on holiday. The car works and some of the factories connected to them all shut down for two weeks so some of the school go off on holiday before the six weeks’ break. It’s good because we can’t really do proper lessons, we do project work and find things out for ourselves. It’s the cricket season. A set of stumps is painted on the wall and we borrow a milk crate for the other end, but football has carried on right into July and the older boys are always a few short.
Rodney James calls us on from behind the goal to play for his team against Michael Campbell’s. Rodney’s a good footballer but Michael’s the cock of the school, so his team usually wins. Michael is Michelle’s older brother. If I say anything to Michelle or pull at the bobbles in her hair she says she’s fetching Michael.
It’s great. The four of us don’t touch the ball much but we chase around after the older boys. The score is 5–5 and it’s nearly the end of break. I’m dying to get a proper touch so instead of racing around like the others I stand still for a minute. Michael Campbell is running with the ball with all the other kids bouncing off him, but I see that he knocks it too far in front of him so I run in to tackle him. Usually, if you try to tackle Michael Campbell, he bangs you over but my legs are strong from standing up all the time and my dad and uncle Johnny have shown me how to tackle when we play at home. I get my foot to the ball and step through it, all my weight moving forward. I feel Michael’s foot behind the ball on the other side but then it gives way. He crashes into my shoulder and then down onto the playground. All the other kids come racing towards the ball so I turn my body so they can’t get to it, like I’ve seen players do on the telly, and wait, wait, wait, because I know Jermaine will run for the ball somewhere. Then there he is, in the corner of my eye, and I pass the ball with the inside of my foot, instead of booting it, and even though it’s a bit flat, it rolls, rolls, evenly down the slope in the direction of Top Church and the brewery, and into Jermaine’s path. Jermaine knocks it towards Rodney near the goal but I’ve taken off again and am chasing to get level with him. Rodney tries to flick it in, he’s already scored five goals, but their keeper, Mani Singh, stretches out a leg and pokes the ball out to where I’m running. I keep going and hit it full pelt through the posts and into the fir trees that stop the ball going into the road. Mani trips me up after I shoot and I tumble over and tear the knees of my trousers and everyone shouts Goal! Goal! Goal! All my team huddle in front of the goal. The bell goes for the end of break. Michael Campbell is still lying in the middle of the playground like he’s dead. He gets up slowly as the classes get into lines and starts to walk towards me.
He’s gonna kill yer, Paul and Jermaine say.
We can have him, Ronnie says and takes off his glasses.
Michael doesn’t want to fight, though. He stretches out his hand to shake mine and says, Played.
I can see Michelle watching from the girls’ line.
Yow lot play again at dinner, Rodney shouts over to us. We do a little dance to celebrate and get told off by Miss Wright.
I remember standing in the class line and looking down at my ragged trousers and closing my eyes and thinking about that feeling when the ball came to me and I banged it in the goal. I still think of it sometimes. When I opened my eyes Michelle was looking over and smiling.
‘We don’t mind hard work – and we expect to be reward
ed accordingly. We strive to put a bit by – and see it grow. Our aim is to stand on our own feet, to do the best we can for our families, and if possible to ensure that our children have wider opportunities and better prospects than we had ourselves.’
Well, this is just more work in less time, ay it? My grandad studies a piece of paper with my dad at the kitchen table while my nan makes them a cup of tea.
My dad shrugs.
Greater efficiency? Some of the words they use, I ask yer. More work in less time. Next thing ull be more work in less time, for less money, with fewer blokes.
My grandad is laughing but I can tell he doesn’t think anything is very funny.
They must think we was all born yesterday.
There ay much yer can do about it, my dad says and shrugs again.
My grandad looks at him over the paper, looks into him. He doesn’t say anything. There is something in my grandad’s voice, like he knows about who my dad voted for, that makes me worry.
Continental working practices, my grandad reads from the piece of paper.
At least it means there’s work, my dad says.
Oh, there’s work, there’s work.
My grandad leans forward across the kitchen table, over the letter, with his reading glasses in his hand, like he is weighing something up, reckoning.
Well, we cor stop mekkin steel, cor stop mekkin things altogether. We’ll be in a mess then. They said anything else at yower place?
Short-time, some on em.
Not yow?
All hours, me. My dad grins. They wanna keep the machines running.
Yow wanna get em payin yer by the hour, our kid, I tell yer.
They are back to normal now. I know what they’re talking about. My grandad gets paid every week, with his money in an envelope, with a piece of paper that tells him how much work he’s done and how much he’s been paid for it. My dad gets paid every month. He gets paid the same no matter how often the machines break down. That’s why my nan and grandad pay rent and we pay a mortgage. We used to pay rent, when my dad got paid every week in an envelope. This is how it works. If you get paid monthly you have to start paying money to buy a house. That’s why we live in Elm Drive.
How I Killed Margaret Thatcher Page 3
