That holiday at the caravans, we went on a day trip on the train from Porthmadog and had the whole carriage to ourselves, could see for miles across the lakes and mountains. I remember the Sunday afternoon we left, looking out the back window of the car as we drove across the causeway away from Porthmadog, with the Ffestiniog train puffing steam alongside us and the shadows of clouds making patterns on the hills across the water. I looked back; back at the sun dropping down behind the mountains until we drove into the dark of a plantation of fir trees.
A few weeks later the factory where my dad worked closed down.
It’s the night before the royal wedding. Everyone has been given the day off to watch the wedding but at my dad’s work they said not to come back at all. They’ve run out of money and orders for things made of steel so that’s that, everyone has to go home and go on the dole. I’m not meant to be listening. I sit upstairs and hear my mum and dad talking. There’s nothing much else to do, anyway.
It cor goo on like this. I’ll pick summat up. Things ull pick up in the autumn.
My dad is trying to sound cheerful, I can tell. My mum sighs.
Yer say that but where’s the pick-up gonna be? Where’s it gonna pick up? There ay no sign at all. The onny sign is of things gerrin worse. Me dad says he reckons there’s a couple of hundred more going at Cinderheath. They’ll shut the whole thing, yer know. Patent Shaft. Round Oak next. Iss gonna get worse. I’m onny repeating what yow’ve said yerself, Francis. I doh know. I’m tellin yer own words back to yer.
Yome telling me yer dad’s words back to me.
Tell me yer doh think they’m true.
We’ll be okay.
How will we be okay? How will we?
Doh get upset.
But I am upset.
We’ll be okay.
Yer keep sayin that, but how?
I’ll get summat. There’s always work somewhere.
Try tellin that to the millions out of work.
It ay millions.
It bloody is millions. Even they say that. They fiddle the figures any road. I’m onny repeatin yer own words back to yer. Yer said this to Johnny the other night.
Iss just talk.
What, so yer doh mean what yer say now? Look outside. Yer can see what it’s like. Yer know what it’s like.
Okay. Calm down.
I want yer to tell me how it’s gonna be different for us. This bloody mortgage. I tode yer we should’ve stayed on the council list.
Doh start that now.
Start what? Start to think about how we’m gonna pay the mortgage on a house we could barely afford in the first place.
All right. I’ve tode yer it ull be all right.
But how? Yow live in cloud cuckoo land. All that talk of another house and we can barely afford this one. Well, thass over now, thass finished. I doh want to hear any more talk of it.
Look, you said to look out the winder. Think about it. If me an Harry Robertson, or folks like him, goo for the same job, who’s gonna get it, eh? If it’s me against twenty, thirty folks round here it ull be me that gets the job. We’ll be okay. I’ll make it okay. I’ll get summat else.
My dad says it’ll be okay over and over and strokes my mum’s hair; I can see the reflection in the hall mirror.
I’ll get another job, he says.
He didn’t get another job, but even if he had, things might not have worked out. Paul Hill’s dad got stopped at GKN, then started on at another place, a galvanizer’s down by Burnt Tree, and he was finished on his first day there. It messed his dole up for ages afterwards and meant Paul and his mum almost got evicted from their flat because Paul’s dad paid their rent after the divorce. This happened about the same time Paul split my head open when the Falklands War was on. He told me years later when we bumped into each other at the job centre, where else, that the whole thing with his dad’s work was why he had been so angry. I told him not to worry about it, that there was a lot of water under the bridge.
Yer know what’s gooin on?
I nod. She knows I’ve been listening.
Try not to worry, darling, she says. Everything will be okay.
I nod again, knowing full well that she doesn’t mean it. She smoothes down my smart clothes on the hanger on the back of my door: Farah trousers and a check shirt. They’re for the royal wedding. For a family who doesn’t even believe we should have a queen, or a king for that matter, we’re doing a good show of it. I’ve got a new pair of shoes and new haircut. We are going round to my nan and grandad’s house to watch the wedding on telly and then to Cinderheath, to the football club, for a Fun Day afterwards. There’s going to be a party and barbecue and games. There’ll be a bouncy castle and a five-a-side competition at the other end, with things like egg and spoon races between games. This seems a lot of fuss to me, for a boring wedding, for Prince Charles and his big ears. There shouldn’t even be a royal family; we should get rid of kings and queens and lords and all that and have a republic. That’s what I thought our family thought. That’s what Johnny told me. Instead, we’re getting all worked up about a wedding when it seems to me that we’ve got other things to worry about.
Don’t worry about anything. We’ll have a nice day tomorrow, eh? My mum flattened down the hair on the top of my head.
You need to put your kit in your sports bag. You can change for the races and things when we’re at the ground. You’ll enjoy that.
Can I just go in me kit?
No, we’ve been over this, Sean. Everyone will have their nice clothes on to start with, for the wedding and the party. Then you can change. That’s what Uncle Johnny’s doing, everyone.
Even Johnny’s been sucked in. He said for weeks that he was having nothing to do with it, that he wasn’t coming with us, that he’d sit out the back in the quiet and do a bit of painting on his day off. My nan had rolled her eyes and called him a misery and my grandad had shrugged and said, Suit yerself. Then the club phoned him up and asked him to go in goal for one of the teams in the five-a-side competition and suddenly he was all for it.
Why am we having a party if we don’t even believe in the royal family? I ask him.
Ah, well, he says. It’ll be a nice party and yer mum and nan’ll enjoy it. If I play well they might ask me to play again next season.
But I think it’s wrong. They spend all their money on this wedding and there’s loads of people with no money and who are unemployed and it’s their fault, the rich people’s fault.
You said because they live like they do that poor people have got no jobs and things. You said no wonder people was rioting. I thought you was gonna do a protest.
Thass true but, Johnny says and then he shrugs. Iss a game of football and a few drinks. We’ll all be there together. It’ll be good. We’ll have a nice time. There’s plenty of other stuff to protest about. Doh worry abaht it, Sean.
I’ve been told not to worry about it by every member of my family. I am eleven years old and can see better than any of them that this doesn’t make sense. I thought that maybe I would run off on the morning and go and hide over the allotments or even all the way over to the quarries so no one could find me. That could be my protest. But I realize as my mum is laying my clothes out, snuffling back tears, telling me not to worry like that’s going to make everything all right, that there is no way I can upset her any more, so I nod when she says I can’t go in my kit.
It’s a shame I didn’t think about her feelings more later on, that’s all I can say now.
It was brilliant, the day of the royal wedding. We all watched the service in the front room at my nan and grandad’s. Johnny was right that my mum and nan really loved it, even before we got to the party. They talked about how beautiful Princess Diana looked and cried through the service.
Years later, when my mum was ill, I drove her down to London in the days after Diana died. It was one of the last trips she ever made, in fact. It was a few weeks after I came back, maybe not even that. My mum placed flowers on th
e Mall. I took some photos. There’s one of them up behind the bar now. She looks too thin. You can see the smoke rising from the candles people had lit and the garlands that had been laid to Hindu gods. When I bent down near the spot where my mum laid her flowers there was a card with a picture of Saint Francis on it; the same image that used to hang up above the telly before Margaret Thatcher shamed him down. I felt the tears well up and I turned away from the card and moved towards my mum as if to hold her up. But she was holding me up.
My dad and grandad drink beer at the kitchen table.
Watch what yome having. Yow’ll be having plenty of that after, my nan warns my grandad.
He groans and nods at Prince Philip on the screen. Enough to turn yer to drink, he says but he’s joking, I think. The people he swears at most when they come on telly are Prince Philip, David Owen, Roy Jenkins, Norman Tebbit, Ron Greenwood, Lester Piggott and Bob Monkhouse. He hates David Owen and Roy Jenkins most of all out of the SDP traitors. If Margaret Thatcher comes on, he walks out of the room. I think it’s the biggest insult he can think of, the only thing he can think to do.
Propaganda, he says now, and winks at me.
We never called her Maggie. No one in our family did. It was as if calling her Maggie was something suspect, that it showed you secretly really liked her, thought she was just a pantomime villain that you could shout Out! Out! Out! at and she’d disappear back into the wings. No, better to stick to her full name, or better still, no name at all, a look and we’d know who you meant. She was always there, anyway; you didn’t have to name her.
He killed her, yer know. My grandad says this to me late one night when I’m sitting with him in the kitchen getting him warm after bringing him home from the pub. Johnny’s upstairs putting my grandad’s electric blanket on. For a moment I think he means my dad. Then I think he must be talking about my mum. The anniversary is a few weeks away.
Who?
That bastard, Philip.
What?
He had her bumped off. They think we’m all stupid.
Oh, right.
They should get rid on the lot of em. Them, the royal family, the House of Lords, the Tory Party, the City, all on em. They tek us for fools. They know we’m fools. We must be to put up with it all.
All right, Grandad, doh work yerself up now. Try not to worry about it.
Not worry?
He looks around the room blinking. He takes his glasses off and cleans them on the edge of his jacket and looks at the corner of the room; first with his glasses off, then with his glasses on.
They killed her.
He is talking about my mum. He never does. He’ll talk about my nan all the time, never mentions my mum; sometimes he even says things like, when yer dad was alive, but he never mentions my mum.
I’ll tell yer another thing, son.
What, Grandad?
Yer should’ve bloody shot her when yer had the chance.
He has never mentioned it before, never made any reference to what happened, or didn’t happen in the end, not a word in twenty years or more. Johnny is coming downstairs. He will put my grandad to bed. Michelle asked me to be quick. Lily wants a bedtime story before I go back behind the bar.
Yer know he voted for em, Grandad? Me dad? When her was first elected, me dad voted Tory.
I don’t know why I said this, wanted to tell him, after all these years. Confirm his suspicions, I suppose. He nods.
My old man used to vote for em. He got his vote after the war. The first war this is, 1918. He wouldn’t have been allowed afower then. Not all men could vote. Went off to vote Tory wi no shoes on his feet.
Johnny comes down the stairs.
Iss cold in here, Dad, he says as he comes in the room, shivers. We’ll get the heating on now the dark nights am here.
Johnny sits on the back step cleaning his boots and putting his keeper’s bag ready.
Doh yer wanna come and watch the wedding? my mum says, teasing Johnny. She has got two drinks, a glass of sherry, the same as my nan, and a glass of gin and orange on the kitchen table.
Johnny saved a penalty from Derek Dougan, the old Wolves and Villa player, in the charity shoot-out in the afternoon, and I won the eighty metres sprint. Rodney James tripped at the start and couldn’t catch up with me. Derek Dougan gave me a medal. We had a great time. Johnny had too many to drink after playing football all afternoon in the sun. When we got back to the house he walked straight down the entry, out into the back garden and was sick over the back wall into the allotments. He’d let me have a few sips off his pint while he was drinking with some of the Cinderheath players.
They’ve onny been drinking lager. I doh know whass up with him, my grandad said. Even now, despite being regularly presented with the facts, my grandad believes that lager is not as strong as darker beer, thinks of it more as a soft drink, like Coke, which he also hates.
We’ll never hear the last of this bloody penalty, either. My grandad was drunk too. I wouldn’t mind but Derek Dougan had had a couple of pints when he took it. I thought it was gonna end up through the clubhouse winders.
It was a great save, Johnny shouted from the garden. What a save! he said.
How about the ones yer let in? Yer day stop that one from Tommy Catesby, he’s onny got one leg.
Tom Catesby had played for Wolves but then got injured. My grandad worked with him for a while at Cinderheath. He got him to sign his autograph in Duncan Edwards’ book, Tackle Soccer This Way. He’d stood and had a drink with him after the five-a-side penalties. My grandad said I could have the book when he died, but that wouldn’t be for a good while yet. This was true: it’s still there in the bookcase in the hallway, next to the stairlift.
And he was wearing slip-on shoes!
My mum and nan talked about Diana’s dress again and my mum said how she looked like a real princess and how the happiest day of her own life had been her wedding day and then she kissed my dad. She was drunk too. My grandad started to sing ‘The Red Flag’ out of the bathroom window, his voice drifting out across the allotments and houses and dwindling furnaces. He’d locked the door so my nan couldn’t get in there to tell him to shut up.
‘I’m afraid some things will get worse before they get better. But after almost any major operation you feel worse before you convalesce. But you don’t refuse the operation when you know that without it you won’t survive. Is this perhaps beginning to get through?’
I wonder if it was a relief at first, for my dad, after the months of arriving home and then having to turn around and go back to work, months of the phone ringing in the middle of the night. At first, it must have felt something like a holiday. He got his colour back, was less grey, sat in the sun with his shirt off, came and met me on the way home from school in the afternoons.
One day, right near the end of term, I was sitting outside the Spar at the top of Crow Street with Michelle. We were sharing an ice lolly that we’d scraped some change together for, one of those fancy ones that came out around then, a pina colada. We were sitting on the milk crates out the front of the shop, in the shade under the awning to stop the lolly melting.
My dad walked from across the road. He was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled back, holding a golf club he must’ve found in the shed at my nan and grandad’s, letting the club head touch the ground softly as he walked. It glinted in the sun, making him look like a gent with a silver cane.
He smiled when he saw us, pointed the golf club at me as he crossed the road.
Thass my dad, I said to Michelle.
I thought we was gooin to the park? he says, pointing the golf club towards me and blinking as he reaches the shade. He’s still smiling, though. It’s not like we’ve made it a rule, it’s just that on the days since we’ve come back to school after the royal wedding, since he lost his job, he’s met me on the way home and we’ve walked over to the park.
Okay.
Doh get up, there’s no rush, enjoy yer lolly, he
says, and then he says, Hello, darling, to Michelle.
She says hello and he stands on the shop step for a moment, looking at us.
What yer got? He nods at the lollipop.
A pina colada, we say together. He laughs.
Thass a good un, he says. When he comes back out of the shop he’s holding a carrier bag in one hand and a lolly in the other. He hands the new one to Michelle.
Here yam, chick. Doh let Sean ate all yer lolly.
I can feel Michelle looking down the hill after us and smiling as we walk towards the park.
We take turns at hitting the old seven iron from the shed, that my dad has spent the afternoon polishing, until I can get the ball to go in the air and in the same long arc as my dad. I copy the way he links his little fingers on the club shaft.
Head down, he says. Look at the ball.
He says, Look at the ball, whenever we play anything. We go back and forth at the far end of the park. I see the ball hanging in the air in front of the castle and then drop against the green pattern of trees.
Thass it, perfect, my dad says. He says we’ll go over the pitch and putt with Johnny one day, maybe even persuade my grandad.
Iss a useful skill, he says, hitting a decent seven iron. Good for business meetings and the like, he says, smiling to himself.
That couple of months he was first off, he’d meet me, or take me over the park, with a ball or a bat, all different sports. So we’d knock the football back and forth across the long grass, or nip through the hole in the fence to the tennis courts. One night he bought a Frisbee along, the next a proper hard, red cricket ball with a raised seam, showed me how to hold it right, with my middle finger on the seam, so I could get it to move when it landed, try to nip it away, he said, side-on more, Sean, use your shoulder, get yer arm high, get side-on as you bowl, thass it, great stuff.
We went straight to my nan and grandad’s that night and I remember my dad tossing the ball into my grandad’s lap when we got there and my grandad telling me that the first time he met my dad wasn’t when my mum brought him home for a Sunday tea of tinned salmon and peaches, which was a story I’d heard a few times, but earlier on that afternoon when he’d been sat in a deckchair with a pint of mild by the Dudley pavilion, watching this young kid come in and bowl fast, thinking he’s a good un, this un; then seeing him come through the front door that night, with his hair combed, standing shyly next to my mum with everyone staring at him. My dad stopped playing cricket because of work, to start saving for a house.
How I Killed Margaret Thatcher Page 11
