He was a good bowler, yer dad, quick.
He’d learned to bowl in Quarry End at the field at the bottom of the farm, before it was swallowed by the quarry. They used to play with stones and bat with branches from the trees, that was what my dad told me, but he was laughing when he said it.
There’s a cricket club every morning for a couple of weeks on the school playground. I tear in and bowl fast and the kids shout, Goo on, Sean, as I start my run-up. I’m faster even than Rodney James and can bowl out Michael Campbell and Mani Singh. This is all thanks to my dad showing me how. We keep the club going all summer on our own, a milk crate at one end of the pitch, a set of stumps painted on the wall at the other end. Mani comes in with a pot of white paint one morning and we go over the stumps and paint lines for the creases on the playground concrete.
One afternoon I get home and the garage door is open and I walk through and my dad has set up a barbecue outside. Barbecues are all the rage since the royal wedding. The garden smells of smoke and sausages. My mum sits in the swing, laughing, wearing big sunglasses and a skirt; she has her legs out in the sun. She holds a frothy yellow drink in a pint glass. On the table next to the barbecue my dad has slices of pineapple lined up and a bottle of white rum. He passes me a slice of pineapple; the juice runs down my arms as I eat it, like the way a lolly melts and drips.
Pina colada, my dad says, laughing, and my mum raises her glass.
I think of them together now, trapped in that oblong of sunshine out the back of the house on Elm Drive. I started to like the house more, with us all there together, without the threat of us moving away somewhere soon. There was no talk of that. My dad had to get a job first. When September came things were bound to pick up, that’s what people said then.
Not long after that my grandad lost his job. He turned up one morning and instead of a sandwich and cup of tea at breakfast, all the workers got called to a meeting and that was it. He was told to get his stuff and go home.
They’m putting the fire out, he said to me later, trying to explain what was going on.
I knew full well what was going on by then. Cinderheath was closing. All the men had to go home. There were no jobs any more. That was it.
I am sitting watching Barbara Castle flit around her cage while reading my Roy of the Rovers Summer Special when my grandad appears at the back door, not at three o’clock in the afternoon, but at half past ten in the morning.
My grandad says, Where’s yer nan, Sean? as he walks through the kitchen.
Upstairs, putting new sheets on the bed, I say, I’d helped her get them in from the line, and I can see something is badly wrong because he keeps walking straight through in his boots that he always leaves by the back door before having a wash in the sink when he comes home from work.
After he’s told my nan what’s happened, he has to tell Harry, who rattles the back door because he’s seen my grandad come home early. Then my mum comes back from cleaning, so he tells her too. My grandad gives my mum a hug and says it doesn’t matter, he’ll be retired now, he’s fifty-nine and who’d give him a job? They’d have more sense than that.
I’ve got more time to work on the garden and the allotment, he says. After he’s had two cups of tea and a glass of whisky he says that he worked there for forty-two years and they’d said get yer stuff, that’s it, don’t come back ever again. There’s been rumours, he says, rumours, gossip, that’s all he thought it was, even though it’s been happening everywhere else. Later, still sitting at the kitchen table, he raises his glass of whisky to Johnny, who comes in from work with the paper where there is a picture of the Cinderheath gantry on the front page and THE END written in big letters. My grandad does a toast to being retired.
Yow can keep me in the manner to which I’ve become accustomed, he says to Johnny.
I think you’ve had enough now, Dad, eh? my mum says, when he pours another glass and starts dozing off in his chair and he nods, which he never does normally. On a Sunday he usually says I’ve onny had a drop, when you can see he’s drunk from the way he’s standing all leaned over to one side. Then he goes to make a cup of tea and then my nan takes over and he goes off to bed.
Nice new sheets, my nan says to him, stirring the milk in his tea.
The next day he smashed the carriage clock that he’d been given for twenty-five years’ service on the back step. It used to stand on the mantelpiece in the front room. Not even my dad was able to put it back together again when my nan showed it to him that afternoon. My grandad went down to the allotment. My dad took out two little springs and put them in his pocket.
Put it in the bin, he said.
‘It is time to change people’s approach to what governments should do for them, and what they do for themselves. It is time to persuade ourselves that only by our own efforts can we halt our national decline.’
My dad has a clever idea for getting work. It’s Charlie Clancey’s idea, really. He gets a message to my dad through my grandad, stops by at the house on his round. With all the works closed down there are big machines left in all the empty factories. Some of the machines are being taken apart and used for scrap, which is where Charlie comes in, or they’re being shipped off to other countries that might use them in the future. There’s other stuff as well, like copper pipes and steel cable, but my dad’s new job, if he wants it, is to take the big machines apart, the ones that aren’t moving all in one piece. Charlie wants my grandad to work with him too.
Yow woh get another job at yower age, Jack, not with the way things am.
All right, steady on, I ay that ode, Charlie, but I’ll tell yer summat, I’m too ode for that sort of carry-on. I am retired, thanks very much. I would pass on yer offer to Francis but I’d tell him to tell yer where to goo, I’m telling yer that now. If yow want to speak to him yerself, well, thass between yow an him.
When Charlie leaves they shake hands as normal, but my grandad looks at the space where Charlie had sat and where he left through the back door for a long time; he sits there staring.
Charlie says, Think abaht it, Jack, through the kitchen window as he walks down the path. My grandad keeps staring.
He’s not really retired. He can’t get his pension until he’s sixty-five but retired is what he calls himself. I think he does it so he doesn’t have to say he’s unemployed. I can tell that my grandad is upset about it all, he reads the paper from cover to cover, and swears at the television. He even agrees with Johnny more.
Thass great news, about Charlie wanting my dad to do some work for him, I say.
My grandad doesn’t say anything.
Out the back of my nan and grandad’s house things began to change. You didn’t see smoke coming out of the works’ chimneys any more. The chimneys sat there getting rained on, and over time they took some of them down. The same with the gantry at Cinderheath; it stayed there with crows sitting on it and everything getting rusted in the rain. Things started slipping into the old workings. They put scaffolding up at the top end of Crow Street to hold the houses up. No one was allowed onto the allotments.
My nan and grandad’s next door neighbours, the Blowers, died within a few days of each other while all this was going on. I remember because Geraldine came banging on the back door on the morning of her mother’s funeral to say she didn’t think her dad was breathing. My dad went round there to check and my mum followed with Geraldine, holding her hand.
Thass the way to go, though, I spose, my grandad said later and my nan nodded.
They had a joint funeral in the end, with a horse and carriage that pulled its way up the hill with two coffins. All the curtains on the street were pulled tight across and even the people not going to the funeral stood on their front steps with their heads bowed.
No one could find Albert the tortoise. I wanted him, was sure I’d be allowed to look after him if we could find him, but he was gone, vanished. We thought he’d crept into the abandoned allotments. I stood at the fence one after
noon, daring myself to sneak through and search for him, imagining he’d found lettuce growing wild on one of the overgrown plots or that he’d crawled his way down into the caves somehow. There was no sign and my nerve went. My mum had told me over and over since they put the fences up that if I went in there the earth would swallow me up. The Robertsons’ cat, Cleopatra, went the same way, slinked through the fence to look for mice and never came back; perhaps she thought it wasn’t worth it, not without Ronnie to look after her.
I thought maybe we could have the Blowers’ house, now it was empty, but there was no talk of that. A young couple were moved in, called Trevor and Julie. I thought he was all right; he used to put his thumb up to me when he was out in the garden and say, All right, our kid, but he knocked her around. The police had to come a couple of times. My grandad went round there once when we could hear her screaming. My nan got upset and said that it used to be a nice road and that our row used to be the best of them all. Trevor and Julie got moved out. A bloke called Martin, who worked for my uncle Eric, lived there with his wife Kerry, then bought the house off the council when they got the chance, put a new porch on the front, had the windows replaced. Their daughter lived there afterwards. They rent it out now. My grandad says there are all sorts of comings and goings in the middle of the night. Johnny tells him not to worry about it, not to get involved.
My mum doesn’t want my dad working with Charlie.
Yow’ll get arrested, she says.
I woh get arrested. Wim being careful.
By working for Charlie! Everybody in Dudley knows what a rogue he is; yow’ve onny got to mention his name. I’m surprised yow ay bin stopped already.
It ull be okay.
Yer keep saying that.
Well, it will. Wim being careful.
And it’s dangerous, places yer doh know, without the proper equipment.
What would you rather I do? Tell him to keep his money? He’s helpin us out.
Helpin hisself. It ay even that much, Francis, not really. I bet Charlie’s mekkin a fortune somehow.
Arr, cos he looks like a man with a fortune stashed away.
I know that my dad is being sarcastic because of the way that Charlie always has the same clothes on, that hat with the feather in it and a check jacket, with his trousers held up with string, or a leather belt tied in a knot, not fastened with a buckle, and the way he smells, like the day I saw him at the tip, of all the rubbish and rag and bone. He lives in a broken-down shed on his scrapyard down by the canal. His horses live out behind it.
Doh believe what he looks like. Me mother says he’s worth a fortune.
What?
He’s got it buried under the house. That’s what my mother told me.
They are laughing now. I can hear them. That’s better.
I cor believe it’s come to this, my mum is saying.
Yow’ve done a good shift today, son, yome a good worker. My dad is doing an impersonation of Charlie now. My mum and dad have both had a bit to drink. Yow tek care o that lovely wench o yowers.
Now he’s gone back to his own voice. A good day’s work, I ask yer! Charlie Clancey! Yome right about what it’s come to.
I’m glad they’re happy now. Every morning my dad goes out to work as normal. I know that he leaves the car somewhere different every day, so that it can’t be traced by government agents, like the SAS. He walks to get picked up somewhere by Charlie in the van. Each night Charlie phones to say where the next day’s pick-up point is, like the end of Cromwell Green Road, or the entrance to Buffery Park, or at the front of the Lion, and my dad works out where to leave the car or whether to walk to the pick-up. I’m worried that the phone is tapped, though. That’s when the government records any conversations you have on the telephone and comes to arrest you. Johnny told me all about it. In the book he’s reading a man got arrested by the police and then put on trial, but he didn’t know what crime he’d been charged with, so he had to stand up in the court to defend himself not knowing what he’d done wrong.
Some days my dad has to drive to wherever they’re working and then hide the car there. On those days he has to pick up the other workers too because Charlie likes to use the horse and cart. Charlie gives him a bit extra for that. If the work for Charlie stopped we’d have to sell the car anyway; the house would be next. I’m not meant to know that.
On the days when my dad drives, my mum stands behind the front door or walks into the dining room and pulls back the net curtain to look out at the street. Sometimes she stands there for ages, just looking; then sometimes she goes and pours a glass of gin.
So if anyone asks yer at school, Sean?
I say he ay got a job.
He hasn’t, say he hasn’t, not he ay.
All right, he hasn’t got a job.
Exactly. Because he hasn’t, but he’ll get one again soon. He’s just doing a few favours for Charlie while he’s not at work.
The work for Charlie is such a big secret because it’s against the law, to work and get dole, except the law’s stupid and anyway the laws are being made by Margaret Thatcher, so it’s probably better to break them. It’s against the law to take the machines if they don’t belong to you, as well. There are people in our road that my mum is worried might phone the government if they think my dad is working and claiming dole. If anyone does that and we know who it is I’m going to make a petrol bomb and sneak out and set fire to their house.
‘I am very anxious about the West Midlands because I recognize that the people there think they have suffered.’
Months went by and this was how we lived. Some weeks there was no work from Charlie at all, but usually there was some. In the slow weeks, my dad sometimes worked on the cars for Harry Robertson.
Harry would swap bits from different cars around all the time. He would then stand there looking at the parts he’d laid out on the pavement or inside a car’s bonnet, scratching his head. Sometimes he’d sell one of the cars and stand shaking hands with the new owner in the street, trying not to look too relieved.
Nothing but old bangers, my nan, who knew nothing about cars, would say. Meks the whole street look a mess.
Sometimes my dad would help Harry fix one of his puzzles. My dad could fix anything. He stood there looking at the broken engine for a long time and then he’d move a few things around, or get Harry to fetch something from one of the other cars or his toolbox, and the car would start up again. If Harry sold a car that my dad had helped him on then Harry would give my dad some money. He’d take the notes out of his cigarette packet while they stood in the entry and pass them to my dad. It was the same as with Charlie; they had to check for government agents. I always kept a look out. My dad told me not to worry. I pictured the SAS coming from out of the allotments or over the rooftops and wondered how I wasn’t meant to worry about that.
When the dark nights and bad weather came there was less work of any sort. My mum and dad talked in whispers in the kitchen and sometimes I listened, sometimes not. They talked about money. My dad talked about moving, moving away to find work. I tried to imagine it. If we had to go I hoped it would be Australia or somewhere. My mum didn’t want to move.
I will move, she said, but not far, not far, Francis, our lives am here.
There’s nothing here.
Our lives am here, Francis. Our lives.
It’s February. I watch the clouds coming. They don’t come like usual; they come from the wrong direction. I tell my mum. Usually, if you’re out the front at my nan and grandad’s you can see the wind blowing the clouds past Dudley, they come, high and white, past the castle and Top Church. The best place to see them is from the top of Cawney Bank; you can see them drifting on their way. They’re called the Severn Jacks. Cromwell’s soldiers must have watched them, sitting here on the same hill, firing their cannons at the castle. Shakespeare used to watch them from the river bank in Stratford. The weather always comes that way. It starts somewhere near America, near Jamai
ca, and comes across the Atlantic and picks up rain on the way. It rains on Ireland and Wales and the clouds come up the Severn and sometimes they rain on us. Not today, though. The clouds come the other way. My mum’s not interested what direction the clouds are coming from. She says it looks like snow, though.
The clouds are a strange shape, dark on the undersides and there’s a glow around them on the horizon. When I go out it feels strange and still. I think maybe something has happened, like a nuclear disaster or something. The cloud isn’t in a mushroom but it billows like in the films of nuclear bombs on telly. If the weather comes the other way it’s from the mountains in Russia, the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. There’s nothing between us and those mountains, freezing cold air coming across Polish and German plains for hundreds of miles and all the flat land east of us, like Grantham, where Margaret Thatcher grew up. It must’ve been cold growing up on a flat plain like that with no hills for shelter. I think for a moment that it’s the end of the world, that we’ll see planes or angels come flying out of the dark clouds. Everyone thinks there might be a war at some point, but people don’t talk about it that much.
Wim done for with that clown with his finger on the button, my grandad says about Ronald Reagan, especially with her egging him on. He means Margaret Thatcher. There’s a button you can press, if you are President of the United States or General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and fire off all the nuclear missiles you want at different cities. It’s called Global Thermo-Nuclear War.
How I Killed Margaret Thatcher Page 12
