A Start in Life (2 page)

I was taught to read and write at school, but not much else. The teachers pushed me to the back, and ignored me. But out of spite, and perhaps a desire to please, I got good marks in reading and writing. Then they kept me at the back of the class because I didn't seem to need the same attention as those duffers who couldn't even learn that much. At about this time, when I was seven, my mother and grandmother got wind of a nearby house that had been abandoned. Someone had done a moonlight flit to Birmingham and left a lot of stuff behind because the van was full. So my mother shuffled herself through the scullery window one afternoon and opened the door for me and Grandma. There wasn't much loot except a few old tats and pots, but I went into the parlour and saw that the floor was covered with large books of music. They were scattered everywhere and I sat looking through them, fascinated by the sheets of complex musical notation. They stood out black and plain – quavers and crotchets and minims, words I already knew from school – and I ran my fingers over them as if they were written in braille. I took two away under my arm, and was proud to own them, though later they disappeared to I don't know where, but for years afterwards those lines of soundless music went through my dreams stoked by Mrs Bottesford's iodized tea that you may have been able to stand a spoon in, as the saying goes, but could not have stood up in yourself.

My Beeston pal was Billy King, whose family lived in a cellar on Regent Street. He was unique among my friends in that he never asked me a single question during the year we knew each other, not even so much as what time do you think it is? or, are you hungry? This didn't worry me, because having a fatal flaw to hide, I felt that his taciturnity in this respect was all to the good. But I regretted it when in my natural and more exuberant curiosity I wanted to ask questions of him, only to be met by a mind your own business, or don't ask questions then you'll get told no lies, or, if he was in an affable mood because he'd been able to acquire one of his father's cigarettes, he'd simply say nothing at all, and dig both hands deeper into his pockets as he puffed ceremoniously away. I had to wait for him to tell me things of his own free will, and when he did it was like rich seeds falling on three-year fallow land as they took effect in my imagination, and the slightest event that happened to him achieved unwarranted growth. I mention this as a possible reason why I later became such a good listener, and often held back from asking the right sort of questions. People always tell you more when their boiling heart burst of its own accord, and I liked listening to stories, true or false, not out of idleness and the inability to tell my own, but because I am a gullible and good-natured man who listens to other people's troubles soothingly, and who, while hearing obvious lies and boastings, accepts the entertainment of them without questioning their morality – unless I fall a victim to their tricks.

Yet, how could I be a born listener if I had an Irish grandmother? The fact was that she told me few ancestral stories that I could repeat, at this early age or even later. Mostly she did little except laugh and shout, and occasionally threaten her husband when he got too drunk to dig the garden, and bawl after her daughter who hadn't been to collect me for three weeks. But I loved my grandparents even more than if they'd been my real parents, since it was two to one against. The proof of this is that when my mother left me at home to go to sleep at night because she was going up to the boozer with some boyfriend or other, I didn't cry or let it worry me. Yet when at Grandma's she and Grandad wanted to go for a walk or a drink I cried and all but panicked at being left on my own. The end of the world seemed close as the summer evening sun came into my bedroom and I had no one to share its light with. I wasn't a mother's boy, but a grandparents' boy, and if one wants to divide children up I suppose that isn't a bad way to do it.

I never went into Billy King's cellar when I called for him but shouted down the grating that spread its steel bars under my feet. He'd come running out of the house to which the cellar belonged. His mother and father, who lived down there with two other children, had rented it on the understanding that they'd only use it to store furniture while Mr King found another house. But having been thrown out, the family had nowhere to go, and so camped between its whitewashed walls. Once, Billy came out totally black and bruised, saying that a coalman had taken off the grating that morning by mistake and dropped a full hundredweight down the sloping chute on to the children's bed below, and if it hadn't been that they were curled together under the clothes in one snug ball then their heads might have suffered from that thoughtless avalanche.

The winter was the worst in living memory, and in an igloo built around my grandad's tree, Billy and I ate cakes and chocolate that we'd stolen from shops, looking out through a window-hole towards the gate in case anyone should come in after us. Our knees were wet on the floor of snow and soil, but it was our hideout that no one would imagine man or beast to be in, and we sat for hours in silence like two vagabonds waiting to be led off and hanged. The true and dreadful world was beyond the ice, and in our tomb of refuge we were untouchable because no grown man could crawl down that inlet of a hole – though at night in bed I dreamed of a pickaxe splitting through the ice-dome roof and barely missing Billy and me.

When spring came our house melted into the soil, till only a patch of black earth was left around the tree. Billy and I climbed over a wall off the High Street and found a fruiterer's cart inside that was loaded for his next day's outing. We threw as many tins as we could over the wall and packed them into Billy's barrow, pushing it away in the dark. We stopped by Billy's cellar to lift off the grating and roll down his part of the loot, which fell softly on to the children's bed. His underworld parents thought it food from heaven, and stowed it in the sideboard. Grandma was glad of my share, and opened two tins of chunks that night to have with our bread and butter.

I saw a policeman and the man who owned the fruit barrow come into the gate, and for the first time shot up Grandad's tree, to the topmost branches, without any effort at all. They begged me to come down, but I hung on like a cat, eyes paralysed at that half-circle waiting to drag me to the darkest prison as soon as my feet touched earth. But a bigger voice than mine had a say in what I did, for the branch snapped, and as it splintered somewhere behind my feet I felt that this was my plain death, that at lucky seven years I was bound for hell, and shouted in terror as I felt myself flying down.

Arms spread wide like a bird's wings, as if to clutch at the horizon and hold myself safe, I hit the ground before the branch, and felt it bounce by my side a half-second later. I was stunned and scratched, and some of my teeth were loose, but otherwise I was sound enough when Grandmother carried me into the house and sat me down; screaming all the while at the policeman: ‘Murderers! Murderers! You'd kill a child for a few tins of fruit!' My grandfather went into the parlour with the policeman and the fruitseller, and settled everything with ten shillings recompense, and a few glasses of best Irish whiskey.

The next day I skulked around the garden before he got up. Grandmother had gone shopping, and I suddenly saw him at the back door beckoning me. ‘What for?' I said.

‘Come here, my boy.'

When I got close he gave me a ferocious slap across the face that bundled me against the shed. He picked me up and threw me half across the garden: ‘Next time, don't get caught, d'you hear me? Never get caught.' He slammed the door and went in to eat his breakfast.

It was all right for him, but how was it possible to separate getting caught from stealing? If anybody could tell me, I'd listen eagerly. I was forbidden to leave the garden for a week, but got out before then by a bit of skilful climbing and ran off to find Billy King. Putting my face to the cellar grate I softly called his name, then louder when he didn't answer, and louder still. Neither he nor his family were there, and I could only assume they'd found a house at last. Wherever it was, it must have been a long way off.

All I liked to do at school was read. There wasn't much else. I didn't like arithmetic, and couldn't stomach writing. Reading took me right out of school, and into the world of the book-adventure, so it was like not being at school at all, and was the only way to avoid it without playing truant. The teacher caught me at it time and time again, but I always took the book back that he snatched from me, even when he lost his temper and thumped me. He was a young man, so it puzzled him, because he couldn't honestly call me the fool I probably was for not learning other things as well.

At home I wouldn't be seen dead reading a book, not until I left school anyway. If I did they'd have thought I was either mad or ill, and I didn't want them tucking me up in bed or sending for a doctor without good reason. When I did leave school, I read at work, and it was taken more amiss than before. After being sacked for this from a couple of factories (that I couldn't stand anyway because of the stink and noise, not to mention the
work
) I was careful to get jobs as an errand boy or messenger, pushing a bike with a high front loaded with cloth or groceries from one place to another. On my way back I'd lean the bike by the wall of a canal bridge and take half an hour at my book or comic. I was consequently looked on as intelligent because I never lost my way, but not very diligent because I always took so long over it.

On one trip I lingered through town and looked in a bookshop window. One of the titles which caught my eye was
The Way of All Flesh
. I stood in my overalls and gazed at it, and when a young girl also looked into the window I felt embarrassed in case she thought I had nothing but eyes for a book with a title like that. In a way I had, but I held my ground. I'd always liked books about sex, and this one I hadn't heard of, and as it was a paperback I went in to buy it. The girl had also decided to buy something, a young fair beauty of an office tart no doubt, and she stood by the row of books wherein I knew I would find the one I was looking for. So I held back, and glanced at a row of prayer books and Bibles, and I couldn't understand why they were in the same shop with the sort of book I longed to get.

An assistant asked what I wanted, and I told him I was just looking around, so the toffee-nose slunk back to his desk to wrap up parcels. I'd been out from my work-place too long to stay much more, and because the girl wouldn't move from the paperback shelves I made up my mind to come again the following day. This I did, handed the book to the man, who took my money and slid it into a bag so that no one would I'd stolen it as I went out.

But I'd slid one book under my jacket, on the principle of buy one – nick one, which merely meant I'd got them both for half-price. I certainly wasn't a thief, to get them for nothing. The book I'd taken free was called
The Divine Comedy
because I thought that was dirty as well, especially as it was written by an Italian. I was so pleased with my haul I began reading by the fire that night after Mother had gone out. My eyes were avid and my mind eager as I propped both feet on the coal scuttle and opened
The Way of All Flesh
. I didn't imagine it would be easy, because I knew that in this sort of Penguin book you could hardly expect to read about anybody in bed together for the first fifty pages. But it turned out to be so interesting that I stuck at it, and by the time Mother came back at half past ten I'd forgotten what I'd expected from the book when I opened it.

After that, other good books were chewed into my maw, and though I never got the throstle-titillation that drew me to them in the first place (which is not to say I was always disappointed), I nevertheless saw that there was more to books than reading about sex and gangsters. I had always been unsatisfied by these two subjects, because the sex seemed unreal and always had to be paid for in some grisly way, and the gangsters were all rotten and made of cardboard and so got what they deserved at the first punch of the law. I can see how innocent I was, and though this may be usual in any ordinary youth it was no great advantage if you were a bastard. While labouring under my pleasurable education of reading, I began to see that all was not well with the life I had chosen to lead, because it was life itself that had chosen to lead me a dance that. I did not want. To put it bluntly, I was fed up with work, with home, and with living the way I did.

I was eighteen by the time this slow fuse started burning, as if my litmus toes had been touched off and were smoking slowly up to my heart. When Mother asked what was up I said the sky, and grabbed my coat to go, before she could begin her carpet-bombing about how useless and dead stupid I was. She would have been right, and I couldn't stand that, so the only thing left was to wander up Norton Street and see if Alfie Bottesford was back yet from the foundry office he worked at.

It was mid-week but he unlatched the door wearing a collar and tie, creased trousers, smart coat, and an extra polish to his glasses. ‘Are you in?' I asked.

‘I might be,' he said, ‘but my girl is here.'

‘That's all right,' I said, edging closer.

He opened wider: ‘Come in, then,' whispering in the scullery: ‘Her name's Claudine, and we're going steady.'

I boggled at this, and he introduced me (as he called it: I'd never been ‘introduced' before) in the proper way, meaning he allowed us to shake hands, which was his first and last mistake. ‘This is my girlfriend, Claudine Forks,' he said. ‘Claudine, this is an old friend of mine, Michael Cullen.'

She sat back in an armchair by the fire, and I tried to catch her eye and give her the wink while Alfie was turning the record over on his gramophone. She had a small mouth and big breasts, and as she sat back I could see halfway up her thin legs.

There wasn't much of a welcome for me from either her or Alfie, and I supposed that his mother was out, and that they'd expected a frolic all to themselves before she came back. I wanted to spoil their fun, if not take it over, and when Alfie went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, which he saw as the quickest way of getting me to go, I concentrated my gaze on his sweetheart, till she stood up and looked along the mantelshelf for a cigarette.