All along the street it was the same: fathers tinkered and mothers cooked, while fifty wirelesses played Alma Cogan, Nat King Cole and Tommy Steele.1 Everyone listened while they ate, so lunchtime was signalled by radio comedy. First there was The Clitheroe Kid, a funereally unfunny Northern sitcom about a schoolboy, with a lead character who spoke in the high, eerie voice of a medium receiving a message from beyond. There were rumours that Jimmy Clitheroe was a dwarf who wore a boy’s school uniform to get into the role, although actually he was a four-foot-three-inch comic who could only play children. Then came Round the Horne, which the whole family had to pretend they didn’t find dirty, because otherwise it would mean they got the jokes. I realized I was growing up in a time of spectacular hypocrisy. Everything I heard in adult conversation had to be translated:
‘Delicate’ meant pregnant or queer, depending on its use.
‘Funny’ meant queer or mentally ill.
‘Fallen’ meant that a girl slept around or had become pregnant.
‘Simple’ meant Down’s Syndrome.
‘Fast’ meant sleeping around.
‘More than her fair share of trouble’ meant her husband had run off with the girl from the launderette.
‘On edge’ meant suffering with nerves.
‘Suffers with her nerves’ meant hysterical.
‘Difficulties’ meant their oldest boy had been inside.
‘Doings’ or ‘Bits and bobs’ meant having a hysterectomy.
‘Poor love’ was used after a neighbour had lost a breast.
‘A bit niggly’ meant PMT.
‘Trouble downstairs’ could mean anything from your womb drying up to Siamese twins.
Clearly, being an adult was more complicated than it first appeared. It wasn’t all mending fuses and sitting in an armchair reading the paper until your tea was ready. Once my father gave me a warning. I had been holding a torch in place while he attempted to re-thread fuse wire in its ceramic block, and had momentarily lost my concentration. ‘One day when you’re grown up,’ he angrily told me, ‘all the lights will go out, and you won’t know how to repair a fuse, and the blackness will close in around you and there’ll be nothing you can do about it but sit in total darkness where anything can happen.’ I did not really want to become an adult after that.
Round the Horne was the first show that made me think about the comic possibilities of language, even though I didn’t understand what half of it meant. When Kenneth Williams said, in his best camp voice, ‘This is our friend the choreographer, Reynard La Spoon. He can do things with a bentwood chair that’ll make your eyes stand out like organ stops,’ I fell off my chair laughing, to the bewilderment of my parents.
Kenneth was up in the crow’s nest searching for Moby Dick. ‘Avast! Avast!’ he’d yell. ‘What is it?’ ‘I don’t know, but it’s pretty big.’ Howls of laughter from me, clutching my sides helplessly. ‘You all think I’m a raving madam,’ said Williams. ‘Madman, Kenneth, that’s a misprint,’ said his foil, Betty Marsden. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I fell off my chair again.
Stars were famous for their eyes, their lips. The singer Alma Cogan was famous for her sequined frocks (‘She makes them all herself,’ my mother would parrot every time doomed, tragic Alma came on to belt out ‘Fly Me To The Moon’), but Kenneth Williams was the only star I could think of who was famous for his nostrils.
As lunch came to an end Movie-Go-Round started, unveiling a week’s worth of new films by running audio clips. Without visuals, just clanks and bonks and booming voices, the films were more intriguing. Hidden things created curiosity.
‘There’s something wrong with the boy,’ my father decided. ‘I think he has too much imagination.’ He made it sound like smallpox or whooping cough.
The table-turning incident came after Bill had spent every evening that week up at his mother’s having poison dripped into his ears.
Mrs Fowler lived to judge others. She had never travelled further than a hop-picking holiday2 in Kent, yet sat at home in her navy-blue coat, holding court with a coven of the more easily swayed housewives in Reynold’s Place, Blackheath, offering advice about who to ostracize, who to shun and with whom to form an alliance.
Her husband had been made to feel unwelcome in the kitchen that doubled as her headquarters, and spent his daylight hours in the tool shed shaving unwieldy offcuts of metal into household items of quite astonishing ugliness. Although William was a fine craftsman he had no sense of design. He made a music box in the shape of a piano – not an attractive concert grand, but an upright pub Joanna. He also produced a coffin-thick clock with its fine teak finish covered in a layer of Perspex that trapped the dirt behind it, and a carved tug-boat which, he revealed with the proud flick of a switch, had port and starboard lights that turned it into a bedside lamp. There were many other large, riveted objects that never left his workshop for a place in their tiny house, and remained on the floor, turning rusty, where they could catch the ankles of any unsuspecting visitor.
Men always made things. Armed with a fretwork saw and reeking horse-glue, Bill also made stuff, most of it horrible. He had been a glass-blower, and filled Reynold’s Place with the kind of coloured glass animals I used to see at the seaside: ducks, horses, a drunk leaning on a lamppost, even an entire funfair carousel. Tales of Bill’s former job came with dire warnings – of the new glass-blowing recruit who had breathed in instead of out, filling his lungs with molten glass, and of delicate bulbs shattering in the hands, to send vitreous slivers burrowing so deeply into the skin that you had to wait for them to circulate in your bloodstream for years before they painfully emerged from a tear-duct or from under a fingernail.
The house in Westerdale Road had nowhere for Bill to work. His only escape from Kath was to go up to his parents’ house and sit smoking with William while his mother thumped about on her stick, dropping insidious criticisms designed to make him feel increasingly dissatisfied with his young wife. Everybody smoked all the time. My grandfather smoked Capstan Full Strength or some kind of bitter rough-cut tobacco with a jolly jack tar on the packet. My father smoked Woodbines. Even Kath tried Old Holborn roll-ups, and when told these were not ladylike had a brief flirtation with Consulate mentholated cigarettes – ‘Cool as a mountain stream’ – that were vaguely minty but still tasted like throat-searing gaspers.
It emerged that the table-turning incident was over the poverty of my mother’s cooking. Kath admitted that she had very little sense of taste after the bike accident and years of smoking strong tobacco, but she also had very little money, as my father refused to give her enough for housekeeping. Bill never did anything without first checking with his mother, and Mrs Fowler had presumably vetoed the idea of him surrendering part of his pay packet each week for something so prosaic as cooked meals. I imagined her warning him on the many evenings she had him to herself: ‘If your wife can’t make ends meet with the money you give her, it’s a sign that she’s a bad housekeeper. In our day we knew how to run a household and feed our husbands steak and jam roly-poly3 every night on a halfpenny.’
Since getting married and being told that she could no longer go to work, Kath had lost all confidence in her former clerical abilities. But one day Bill came home with the news that he had been fired for reasons that he would not admit in front of us children. It was clearly a source of great embarrassment; men were supposed to stay in one job until they were broken, then gratefully receive their carriage clock.
Bill’s loss of employment meant that Kath was to be allowed back into the workforce. With her shorthand, quick typing speed and sharp mind, she soon found a job as the company secretary for the National Association of Retail Furnishers, a Victorian organization populated by gentlemen who looked like casket-makers. The downside was that Steven and I had to be farmed out to a daytime carer. The very short-sighted, very elderly lady to whom we were seconded was affordable mainly because she looked after a dozen unruly kids in such an offhand manner that she made Dickens�
��s Mrs Jellyby seem like a smotherer. After our mother turned up to collect us, only to find yet another child bouncing down the stairs on his head, being strangled with a skipping rope or falling out of a window, she handed in her notice at the office, even though they offered her more money and a higher position.
I felt I was to blame for the loss of my mother’s potential career, but she told me not to worry. ‘I’ll get an evening job,’ she said. ‘Something not too tiring. It’ll be fine.’ Jobs were scarce, however, and the only available part-time work was inappropriate for a sensitive, well-spoken young woman. Kath became a cashier at Catford Greyhound Stadium, where she was nightly sworn at and spat upon by punters who failed to complete their jackpot combinations before the race bell, which made the tote operator responsible for the money rung up before the off-of-the-leg. Often she came home with an empty purse, her docked pay amounting to more than her wages, and had nothing to show for her evening other than another extravagant selection of bellowed abuse.
When she was able to stand this no longer she became a collector of bad debts on one of South London’s roughest housing estates, where she was regularly threatened with physical violence. Sometimes she took me with her, because the men were less likely to attack a woman clutching a child’s hand. My fastidious sensibility made me loathe the stairwells, which smelled of old vegetables, and the bright lonely corridors with hidden families shut behind chained doors.
As Kath was working, Bill took to getting his meals at his mother’s, not coming home until the end of the evening. My mother’s job was poorly paid – this was at a time when a wife could not take out hire purchase without her husband’s approval – and one morning she opened her purse to find sixpence. ‘This would appear to be our evening meal,’ she said, a statement of fact rather than complaint, but the butcher found a lamb bone he had shattered while cutting, and happily handed it to her. The meat was minced and served with peas, mash and gravy, a common post-war recipe that curiously falls below the radar of even the most basic English cookery books. Money was tight everywhere. Few families had accrued savings. It seemed to matter less then, though, because there wasn’t much to buy. Those who had grown up through the War were suspicious of luxury, and recipes were largely based on energy value, not taste.
While we ate in silence, we listened to a terrible BBC radio play – full of crystal accents, tinkling tea cups and ostentatiously clicked doors – although concentrating must have been a trial for my parents as I kept asking questions about the plot.
‘If you’re not happy with the way the story turns out,’ said Kath in exasperation, ‘go and write one of your own.’
I didn’t. Instead, by way of compensation, I became a fabulous liar. Simple truths were exaggerated out of all proportion. The smallest exchange of neighbourhood conversation became drenched with drama. The confabulations compounded into a towering Babel of untruthfulness.
To my father, this was a sure sign that imagination was taking a dangerous grip on his son’s brain, like bindweed. To be fair, he had been raised in a family that sent everyone out at fourteen to work like a dog until they contracted cancer. In post-war England, imagination was equated with daydreaming, an indulgence that belonged to head-in-the-sand toffs4 who contributed nothing to the rebuilding of the country, and Bill couldn’t afford to have a son with ideas above his station, because it would end in failure and, worse than that, show us up.
I wondered who it would show us up to, as we had no friends to speak of. ‘You don’t need anyone else when you have family,’ was my father’s mantra. But we didn’t even have family – we were just people living under the same roof who pretended to know each other well enough to have arguments.
1 Strangely ageless performer, who, like Cliff Richard, Val Doonican and Lulu, is forgotten but not gone. Tends to reappear as Scrooge at Christmas.
2 A traditional working-class paid holiday that died out when everyone switched from bitter to lager.
3 A heavy suet dessert designed to slow husbands down and stop them wanting sex.
4 Not, in fact, short for ‘toffee-nose’ but from ‘tuft’, 1851, a gold tassel worn on the cap of an undergraduate with a voting peer for a father.
8
A Friend for Life
EVEN THOUGH OUR family lived in a town that set great store by community, it was decided at an early point that the neighbours weren’t worth getting to know.
Percy, the boy next door, had consumption, an illness that resigned him to a living death on a deserted lump of windswept, seaweed-reeking coastline for several months of the year, ‘for the sake of his health’. On the other side, Mr and Mrs Hills were as old as them. They kept half a dozen smelly, moulting, squawking chickens in their rusty Anderson shelter, and once their pond froze solid and they removed the entire six-foot block of ice from it, placing it in a tin bath to melt before the fire, where, to my amazement, the giant goldfish trapped inside thawed and wriggled free, dropping back into the water.
Not to be outdone, we bought a tortoise, a pet you could only enjoy for half of every year, and an embittered mongrel cat called Wobbles, which my father purchased from a roadside bikers’ café when he stopped to get fags on the way to Brighton. Ginger cats were apparently lucky. Being from a superstitious riverside family – ‘naval’ would sound too grand – Bill would not allow shoes on the bed because it meant death for a household member within a year (the superstition had something to do with setting out clothes for the deceased). Budgerigars were not allowed into the house for the same reason. I had my own theory about this one: if you were called up as a sailor during the War, it was common to buy your wife a caged bird to keep her company. And you probably didn’t come back, like Aunt Nell’s old man, who either went down on Scapa Flow or ran off with the barmaid from the Nag’s Head, depending on which family member you talked to.
The Fowlers had never been good with animals. My father insisted that a pet was a friend for life, but I couldn’t see how that was true, seeing that a cat only lived for about fourteen years. A pet was a friend with a builtin grief-factor. My mother warned that some of the really old pets in the neighbourhood had been traumatized in the War, and hated anyone touching them. ‘Mrs Lynch’s cat is twenty-two,’ she told me. ‘It lost its hearing after a V2 landed in their back garden, and when her little boy went to pick it up, it tore his eye out. You never know where you are with a cat.’
Bill had once tried to help out a neighbour by mercy-killing their sick rabbit. He elected to drown it in a bucket of water, which only made it angry, so he repeatedly hit it on the back of the head with a hammer. It still managed to get away, and lived for several months in a deep hole it had dug under the garden fence, where, now brain-damaged, it nursed a psychotic grudge, occasionally popping up to snap at anyone who went near it.
The feud between Mrs Fowler and my mother escalated after the incident regarding Sandy, Mrs Fowler’s beloved ginger tom, a surly yellow-eyed creature with a torn ear. When my grandmother decided to drag William to Kent for a fortnight, my mother agreed to take care of the cat, and brought it over to the house under her jumper. The moment it reached the safety of the sitting room it shot up the chimney, lodged itself behind the damper and remained there for four days.
Kneeling on all fours, Kath waved a mackerel under the flue, but nothing could be done to lure it down. Then, late one night, it dropped as suddenly as it had gone up and made a mad dash for the open yard door, hurling itself up and over the garden fence like a steeplechaser.
Kath, however, was in hot pursuit. Westerdale Road ended at an unfenced railway embankment covered in white trumpet vines, where anyone could follow the path to cross the railway line to the next street. I ran after my mother, she ran after the cat and the cat ran up the line, darting back and forth across the third rail. Kath was so scared of her mother-in-law by this point that she was prepared to risk electrocution in order to save face. I hopped about unhelpfully shouting, ‘I think there’s a train coming!’
while she, oblivious, threw herself at the demented feline.
It was no good. The cat kept a careful distance between itself and its would-be captors. After we had waited on the embankment for several hours, the wretched creature emerged from a bush and walked down into our arms. It seemed strangely docile now, and allowed Kath to carry it home.
When Mrs Fowler returned from Kent, she opened her front door and made a huge fuss of Sandy, only to recoil immediately. ‘This isn’t our cat,’ she exclaimed. ‘Sandy has a torn left ear. And it’s a boy.’
I had never heard of anyone who could tell the sex of a cat. My mother checked the ear and, mortified, confirmed its untorn state. There followed recriminations, tears, threats, and dismissal from the house. My father adopted a sullen, accusatory silence for three weeks. As if to punish all cats, he took out his bad mood on Wobbles, blowing cigarette smoke in its face and tripping it over whenever he thought no one was looking.
After being shouted at by both mother-in-law and husband, Kath stood her ground and did not cry or apologize. She started, in her own small way, to fight back. My father did not tip over any more meal-laden tables.
He took things to a more troublesome level.
9
Horror Story
MY FATHER HAD a problem with Christmas. Although he appears in old photographs to possess a whippy, muscular frame, he was actually a frail man, and usually managed to cause some kind of drama just before the festivities were due to begin. One Christmas Eve he drunkenly crashed his motorbike and sidecar, overturning it on to his chest, and spent the holiday in intensive care. The following year he fell through a cracked coal-hole lid and broke his leg. The year after that, he sat in the darkened front room that was saved for best (he hardly ever put the lights on) and ate an entire box of ‘Eat Me’ dates that he’d bought cheap in the market, the ones that came on a cream-coloured plastic branch, not realizing that they were green and furry with mildew. That Christmas, instead of having his bones reset, he had his stomach pumped.
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