Life's Fare

by Greg Yevko

  “I think we’ve nearly got enough for the deposit that we need for that semi-detached opposite the cider factory,” said Stanley one Thursday evening as the ritual came to its usual climax with Mrs Marley neatly re-folding the notes back along the same creases before tucking them into her purse.

  She looked at her husband with expectant eyes, coincidentally matching her expectant swollen belly with soon-to-be Marley child number three tucked safely inside in a tight ball.

  “Might not quite be in time for our boy here though,” he said, gently patting Marlene’s bump with his customary grin.

  “Stanley!” exclaimed Marlene in exasperation. “How many times have I said to you not to refer to the bump as a boy; you know your track record to date on forecasting has been a big fat nought out of two.”

  “Ah, this time is different”, said Stanley with quiet confidence, “I can just feel it.”

  Marlene just shook her head, but was both surprised and delighted when for once in her life, she was glad that her husband was actually proven to be right when the bouncing baby boy finally did come into the world.

  They had taken a long time to come to a name that they could both agree on. For a start off, Marlene had only really given boys’ names cursory consideration in discussions with her friends, having been convinced that the genetic line granted for her to bring forth was forever female.

  Eventually, after much back and forth and rejections from each of them at times and even one veto from her mother’s input, Marlene had agreed with Stanley that the new baby boy should be christened Robert. Everyone seemed satisfied with this outcome, although Marlene’s mother was visibly upset that her suggestion of Samuel had been rejected outright, even though it was a name that had been in the family line for several generations.

  “I know that Samuel has been a name in the family for many years,” Marlene explained to her sulking mother one afternoon as they sat staring at the small black and white television putting out the regular ‘Watch With Mother’ programme adored by both Nollie and her younger sister, Alvita. Robert was sucking greedily on his mother’s right breast and there was a Woodbine balanced as ever under Marlene’s top lip, always threatening to drop ash onto Robert’s soft head but never once succeeding.

  “But honestly, mum, there’s nothing wrong with being a bit different from the usual family line. And anyway, what if he hadn’t been a boy anyway, you couldn’t possibly call a girl Sam now, can you?” She had tried to put her case across as forcibly as she could.

  “It would have been a lovely gesture, Marlene,” muttered her mother, and no matter what Marlene did or said, she was having none of it.

  It was with mixed feelings that Marlene dressed Robert in his fine, flowing christening gown for the baptism later that morning; she knew that her mother was upset about finishing the family line of Samuels, but both she and Stanley had remained adamant that Robert was the right name for their son and they were not to be persuaded otherwise.

  There was a fairly small gathering at the church, most of whom if truth be told, were more interested in the prospects of beer and sandwiches which had been promised straight after the ceremony, rather than the induction of the crying Robert into the house of God.

  The ceremony was going along in text-book fashion, and they finally reached the naming stage as the vicar dipped his right thumb into the water of the font, over which he held Robert in a well-practised left hand.

  “… and we welcome young …?” and he paused, looking quizzically at Marlene, prompting for a name.

  “Robert,” whispered Marlene to the waiting vicar.

  “Very well,” he responded in hushed tones to her, before turning back to the crying baby, then in a raised voice for all the congregation to hear, he started again, “… and we welcome young Robert …”

  “Robert Samuel” called out a shrill voice.

  “… young Robert Samuel into the house of our Lord, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,” and the vicar proceeded to make the sign of the cross on Robert’s forehead.

  Both Marlene and Stanley stood open-mouthed and glared at the deliverer of the shrill instruction. Marlene’s mother ignored their stares and smiled smugly to herself; the family tradition would be carried on after all.

  Umhlabathi 3.5 1960s/early 70s

  Once again, Jeff had helped them move, this time into the run-down semi-detached house that was across the road from one of the sites of the world-famous cider factory that Henry Percival Bulmer had founded. The cider factory in Hereford dated back to 1887, and in 1938 the business had expanded further to acquire the Whitecross site; ever since then, when the wind blew in a certain direction, the all-pervading aroma of fermenting apples wafted across the busy road that separated the factory from the Marleys’ new home.

  The move itself had consisted of the usual moaning and groaning and breaking of wind, but overall Stanley had been pleased with the way it had all come together, especially since Grandma had agreed to look after all three children whilst he, Marlene and Jeff shifted all the belongings into the little room at the front of the house. Though she had pretended that it would be a great hardship for her, it was evident from all the cooing and the exaggerated infantile talk that she was bestowing upon them all, especially on the latest addition, her new grandson, that Marlene’s mother was in fact having a lovely time in her role as chief child-minder for the day.

  Stanley had been delighted that the £945 mortgage from the Halifax Building Society had been authorised, but was less pleased when he received the letter notifying him, “… but £200 will be withheld until a bathroom is installed and the front bedroom ceiling is renewed.”

  Carr and Fob’s had verbally indicated that there would probably be a little held back from the full price since the property indeed had no bathroom nor inside toilet, the previous occupants using a big, galvanised tub brought out to stand in front of the open fire in the small front-room for the former on a regular, every-Sunday basis. A 3ft x 3ft x 7ft high wooden shed in the back yard accommodated one user at a time for the latter.

  “Bloody hell, that’s more than a fifth of the whole lot!” Stanley had exclaimed in disbelief after he had read the contents of the letter.

  “Yes, but with the plans that we talked about, now is the perfect time to extend the kitchen back too,” said Mrs Marley with that faraway look that Stanley had come to recognise as a dangerous precursor to a large drain on their bank account. “It makes so much sense to bring both sides of the ground floor back at the same time,” she continued, “and just think how much better it will be with our own bathroom just across from the kitchen.”

  From previous shared experiences of many husbands down the centuries which has now come to be innate to the male species, Stanley knew that it would be pointless to try and argue this one out.

  The new kitchen and bathroom for the Marley’s house was not the only major event of the early sixties.

  As the years rolled by, a new style of music erupted on the scene with huge vitality and excitement, spearheaded by four young men from Liverpool. Alongside the screaming teenagers, even the young mothers like Marlene had been swept up by the maelstrom that went with whatever the ‘fab four’ as they had been termed, turned their hand to. Stanley had tried to convince people that he had only been marginally impressed by this “new stuff” as he called it, qualifying it with, “but of course it has nothing on those reggae root songs from back home.” However, even he could be seen and heard tapping along to Hard Day’s Night on the release of their first album, albeit when he thought no-one else was in the room.

  The other event was not so much a single, stand-in-front-of-your-face phenomenon, it just evolved and developed in its own convoluted fashion. And it had been around before. But this time was different; for some reason, this time it created a new way of life for just about everybody, impacting on people whether they were advocates of it or not, and it did not withdraw back on itself as it had in the twenties.
This time it was here to stay. It was the time of the sexual revolution.

  Stanley had had a liberated upbringing in St Lucia with numerous weekends and Friday evenings spent in a slightly hazy frame of mind during his teens, brought about by either alcohol, Ganja, or any combination of the two, and not infrequently had those evenings ended up in some sort of sexual romp.

  However, even he had raised an eyebrow on more than one occasion with some of the things being reported in the Sunday Mirror, and it was clear from the ever-increasing distance between the knee and the hemline of the skirts that the young girls were wearing, that the idea of being as daring as possible was gathering momentum.

  “I just hope that this phase of fashion will be gone by the time our two girls get a bit older,” he confided to Marlene one evening as they lay in their bed, she with her Woman’s Weekly, he with the Daily Mirror.

  “Shhhh,” she hissed to him, “The girls will hear you next door.”

  “No danger of that,” countered Stanley, “with all those layers of wallpaper you put on when we decorated, and with that new ceiling I put in using those polystyrene tiles, that room is as insulated as any sound-proof booth that you could imagine.”

  In the next room, Nollie was whispering to her younger sister, “See, I told you that dad was a stuffy old stick-in-the mud who’ll never let us do the stuff we want to. Did you hear what he just said to mum about skirt lengths? Just wait, in a couple of years’ time when I finish school I’m going to clear off as soon as I can.”

  “Yeah,” agreed her sister. “This place is a right dump anyway.”

  The girls’ teenage years were punctuated with frequent arguments with Stanley and Marlene as the pressures of socialising within the new parameters of acceptability clashed with parental responsibilities as Stanley and Marlene saw them.

  A good compromise was reached by Stanley and Marlene agreeing that the girls could use the cellar of the house to have the occasional party – at least that way, reasoned Marlene, she could “keep a discreet eye on things” as she explained to Stanley. There then began the game of finding the best way to outwit the parents, one of the most inventive being to discreetly remove the tops of the Bulmer’s cider bottles ahead of the party and then surreptitiously sprinkle in a crushed aspirin or two for that extra kick before carefully screwing the top back in place. Although he never let on to Marlene, Stanley had actually noticed this quite early on in proceedings, specifically on having a sneaky pre-party taster himself ahead of one of their Saturday night sessions, but seeing this as merely an update of what he used to do at a similar age, he was happy to let this go, and Marlene remained oblivious. In fact, Stanley argued to himself, sometimes Woodpecker needed a bit of something extra to make it a bit more palatable, and this would do nicely.

  The toing and froing of the disagreements between the daughters and parents continued throughout several years until in the end, after one particularly defiant stance between Mrs Marley and her eldest daughter, Nollie blurted out directly into Marlene’s face, “Well anyway, it doesn’t matter what you say because I’m going to London as soon as I can get out of here then I’ll be able to do what I want!” and with a flourish and swirl of her copper-coloured, wavy hair she stomped off to the bedroom. Stanley looked at Marlene, who was staring after her disappearing daughter. “Stanley, say something!” she cried.

  Stanley slowly shook his head and muttered under his breath, “Like mother like daughter,” and, turning his attention back to the sports pages, continued to evaluate his chances in the 2:30 at Doncaster. He absent-mindedly turned his worn bottle top round and round in his left hand as he scanned down the list of runners and riders.

  True to her word, after completing a hard-worked training programme to become a qualified hair-dresser, Nollie set off for London as many had done before her with hopes and expectations high; she enjoyed her life and was indeed able to do a lot of the things she had not been able to do at home under the watchful eyes of Mr and Mrs Marley. She stayed in touch with regular phone calls home from a damaged phone-booth at the corner of the street where she had found a small bed-sit, often being side-tracked during the call as her eyes fell on the numerous small cards adorned with Call this Number, offering an amazing range of services to meet any sort of deviation that one could think up. Stanley and Marlene were happy that she seemed to have settled into her new life without falling foul of the many nightmare situations that they had envisaged their poor daughter getting dragged into once she was on her own and out of their direct care. They didn’t even complain when they went to pick her up from Hereford railway station on one particular weekend visit and she greeted them wearing black lipstick with her hair dyed in a fetching green and purple striped arrangement – London had changed from what Marlene had remembered.

  Alvita looked on at her sister with her new-found freedom and felt a twinge of envy for her life style; after just a couple more years, she too had joined her sister for the siren-like call of the capital city, and once again Mr and Mrs Marley were back to having just one helpless two-leg to look after.

  Although the youngest Marley did not have exactly a hard time of things at his secondary school, not everything went exactly as he would have liked. He couldn’t really blame his parents for the stick he took once No Woman No Cry became a hit in 1974, but he eventually got so fed up with the calls of “No way! Hey, Bob, give us a song, man,” whenever he first introduced himself that he started to wish that he’d been given some other, different first name.

  “Why couldn’t I have been a Fred, or a Harry, or a Gregory, or anything other than Robert?” he had often cursed to his school friends.

  “Yep, life can be a bitch” agreed his good friend Hopper. “Anyway, could have been worse; you might have been christened ‘Farley’.”

  Robert looked at his friend with a puzzled expression. “What, you think a parent would name a child Farley, when their surname was Marley?”

  Hopper looked thoughtful for a moment. “Actually, that might work you know. Farley Marley – it has a certain ring to it.”

  “You don’t half talk a load of bollocks sometimes,” said Robert in a teasing tone, shaking his head, but still smiling. “I’m pretty sure that if ever you have kids, you’ll come up with something a bit better than that; Farley Marley, indeed. Sounds like a Cadbury’s invention, like a Curly-Wurly.”

  He hadn’t really known Hopper that long, since they had only really become friends during the same year that they had all sat their O-Levels, but a deep friendship had already started to flourish. Robert had decided that he would have to start taking rugby a bit more seriously since all of his closest friends were now regulars in the first team, spending a lot of time outside school hours either on training sessions or playing matches on Saturday afternoons. Added to the fact that Saturday mornings were taken up with school lessons from 8:30 am to 12:30, the result was that there was not a lot of time for socialising together. Much to Robert’s surprise, having assiduously endeavoured to avoid it by as many means as possible on the obligatory Wednesday afternoon games sessions, he actually found that he quite enjoyed rugby, though he wasn’t particularly fond of the occasional crunch tackle that he sometimes found himself on the receiving end of. Still, that was more than off-set by the fun times after the game itself, and Robert was soon another fan converted to the cause.

  He didn’t know it then, but his good friend Hopper would continue to feature in key events in Robert’s life for many more years yet to come.

  Robert’s school was considered to be The Posh School in the area. He had somehow been fortunate enough to secure a scholarship from the entrance exam, much to the absolute delight of Stanley and Marlene, and much to the incredulity of his Primary School teacher (his teacher at the time had told him “There’s only one entrance exam scholarship place, Marley, so don’t hold your breath.” Nice that they’ve got confidence in me, Robert had thought to himself.)

  The downside of getting a place at the posh
school, was that, in order to reach it, Robert had to walk from the rough side of town where he lived to get there. This involved walking in the opposite direction to a stream of people who were attending the downbeat secondary modern school for those boys who were “… unsuccessful in attaining a position in the grammar system….,” and that particular secondary modern was not far from his house in Whitecross. Therefore, each morning around about 8:15, a fresh-faced eleven-year-old would start his walk to school, smartly turned out in grey flannels and blazer (though admittedly the blazer being several sizes too big, hung on him in a tent-like fashion, Marlene having assured him not to worry as he would “soon grow into it”), cap pushed firmly down onto Brylcreemed hair and imitation leather satchel nonchalantly slung over his shoulder.

  Not surprisingly, on a number of occasions, Robert found himself on the receiving end of an ‘accidental’ nudge as he passed small groups of boys going the other way. He wasn’t sure, but he had a sneaky suspicion that his later obsession in life of bush-diving, perfected at university, might have been triggered by his earlier experiences of being directed into hedges on some of those walks to school. In a strange way, Robert felt quite grateful to the yobs.

  It was beyond question – Marlene just LOVED Fontegary caravan park. It had become a regular annual event come the summer holidays, and many happy days were spent shared between the amenities of the onsite entertainment arrangement, and the glorious golden sands of Barry Island beach front. Well, as far as Marlene was concerned, there were many happy days spent shared between the amenities of the onsite entertainment arrangement, and the glorious golden sands of Barry Island beach front. To be fair, Stanley also seemed to enjoy the break in the usual everyday routines, especially as it also meant that he could enjoy the occasional Black and Tan along with a complaint-free week of betting on the horses, since there were several dispensations that were bestowed on him since Marlene’s mantra on such occasions was along the lines of, “Well, I suppose we are on holiday.” She was even partial to the odd ‘Mackie’ or sweet Cinzano and lemonade herself, especially when they all went over to the main bar for “Night With The Stars,” the finale to the week for the camp-site representatives who did their best to sound as much as possible like the chart-toppers of the day. Nollie, Alvita and Robert had their own views on Fontegary.