Life Without Armour (2 page)

When the four of us lived on Alfreton Road an unemployed man sat by his window all day looking across at girls working their machines in Player's tobacco factory, to contemptuous laughter from the women in the house. I also recall the crowded furniture in our single room, and two fishing boat pictures leaning against the wall, at which I frequently stared because the sails to my eye looked so wooden. They were a wedding present from my mother's brother, and in future years were often pawned, until finally sold.

A boy younger than me, who lived in the same house, defecated along the corridor and on the stairs, and even in our room if the door was left open. The women tried to keep a check on him, but he always eluded them. His own mother (no father was around) was out all day at a lace factory. The quantities of evil-smelling excrement smouldering in his wake seemed enormous compared to his size and the amount of food he ate, and there was an often expressed wish that he would evacuate himself totally – shit himself to death – and free the house of his curse. The kid must have been an ongoing victim of mild dysentery, but he certainly deserved his sobriquet of Ka-ka, and was talked about in the family for years.

Early memories, vivid and enduring, are in no kind of order. My elder sister is dead, so can't be asked about the places we lived in, but she was my patient mentor, instructing me in how to tie shoe laces and tell the time, and making sure to take my hand on crossing the road to school half a mile away. During our parents' fights we calmed our natural distress by playing with Billy French and Amy Tyre around the common water taps in the open space before the houses of Albion Yard.

When I was ill at four years old my mother must have been so afraid that she fetched a doctor. Not wanting anyone to touch me, I retreated cursing to the end of the bed, like some delirious animal backing into a non-existent lair of the darkened room, maybe thinking they would take me away, or hating to have a stranger touch me. My mother, trying not to be angry, knew well enough how such foul words had come into my mouth.

My father was out of work except for a short period of employment at a tannery, or skinyard as he called it. Walking along the canal with my mother one Friday afternoon to meet him coming home with his wages was pleasant, because even a modest amount of money gave less cause for argument, and my parents were as content as they could ever be. My father pocketed the two pounds-odd, and dropped the small brown envelope into the depths of a nearby lock, almost the last wage packet any of us saw until the prospect of a war against Hitler's Germany created a demand even for his labour.

The weekly dole for the eventual four children and two adults (we quickly became a family of six) was thirty-eight shillings a week, the equivalent of about forty pounds in today's money. My mother and her sister Edith took me to an orphanage called Nazareth House, where it was known in the neighbourhood that the nuns gave surplus bread to first-comers.

Besides running up debts for food my father bought furniture on hire purchase, and sold the goods for cash before he had paid much on the instalments. He was sentenced to three months in quad at Lincoln for fraud. After eight weeks he came out looking healthier than when he had gone in, due to regular meals, rest from quarrelling, and decorating work in the open air which the governor had given him to do.

My father dwelt more gloatingly on the fact that his brother Frederick who had tried the same scheme so successfully had never been traced than on his own criminal act which had been such a failure, but which enriched my mother's retaliatory epithets no end during their quarrels.

Chapter Three

Canvas bags of variously shaped wooden bricks emptied on to a polish-smelling floor were for us to build with. Even if I hadn't heard the word I would have built: Doric, Ionic and fluted Corinthian columns topped by entablatures and architraves and set on the firmest foundations: a megalopolis worthy of Mussolini, but ruined in five minutes.

Naked into cold swimming baths up to our chins, but holding a bar at the shallow end and ordered not to let go or we would drown, seemed a purposeless immersion. This other world of neither good nor bad was a two-storey red-bricked institution surrounded by railings and backing on to a canal where horses pulled barges to warehouses along its banks. Fear of strange territory was diminished by the relief of being a few hours from home, lured into the mystery of writing, the slowly dispersing puzzle of reading, and that comforting surety of arithmetic. Another world must be a better world.

Each morning the teacher read about God creating the heavens and the earth, and every living thing, told the story of Abraham and Isaac, the voyaging of Noah's family and all the animals in the Ark, of how the Israelites were troubled in Egypt, and of Moses leading them from the House of Bondage for forty years of wandering across the wilderness to the Promised Land. Saul and Jonathan in their deaths were not divided, and even the Mighty must fall.

She read from her own black leatherbound King James's translation of the Bible whose English, whether or not all parts were immediately understood, entered my soul for life. She intoned the Ten Commandments from Exodus and Deuteronomy over and over, so that if we couldn't recite them at least we would always know what was right and what was wrong, whatever right or wrong we committed.

She tried teaching basic musical notation but, in her lighter moments, rather than be discouraged, played the latest Jessie Matthews song on the piano, head thrown back and voice tremoloing happily around the room. Who she was, I'll never know.

Exotic and visionary biblical landscapes of mountains, a huge river, palm trees and bulrushes, and seas that fell back so that the People chosen by God to write the Bible could walk over on dry land, were different to the buildings and houses roundabout. Geography books described by simple word and picture such countries as Holland and Japan, Switzerland and India, pages turned with the firmest of infantile notions that as soon as I was able and old enough nothing would stop me going to such places. To the teacher I was no different from other smelly lumps of putty-flesh in the room, but though the diameter of my intake was little wider than a pinhole, what poured in was the purest gold.

Another moonlight flit landed me in a school opposite the church at Old Radford. The headmaster was a terror, and one day came into the class to find out how far we could count. A boy reached twenty, and a girl stumbled near to forty, but on asking me he had to call a halt when (thanks to my sister) I breached the hundred barrier, hardly knowing how close I was to my limit. He held up a penny for the achievement and, more amazed than pleased, my hand went out for the reward.

For some reason the Ancient Greeks featured prominently on the headmaster's curriculum, and I relished accounts of the various bloody skirmishes at the Siege of Troy, as well as a coloured illustration of Hector and Achilles fighting outside the tall grim walls, their shields resembling giant carapaces. The ruse of the Wooden Horse was unsubtle enough to be understood and approved of, while the story of Alexander the Great was enjoyed because of the beauty of his horse's name ‘Bucephalus', repeated half a dozen times by the headmaster so that we would never forget it. At the same school we were taken by a woman teacher to a green dell by the church and taught to identify leaves and trees.

While about six, or maybe seven, my mother heard of a school for mentally backward children. A neighbour had described the healthiness of the regime, and the feeding that went on there, and by special pleading at the education office in town a place was found for me. The building backed on to a public park called the Arboretum, and I was provided with tokens each day for the two bus rides to get there.

On arrival we received a bowl of rich porridge, and halfway through the morning a beaker of hot milk, whose wholesome and steamy odour I still recall. After a midday meal, safari-like cots were brought out, and we were induced to sleep for an hour. Large spoonsful of cod liver oil were poured into reluctant gullets, and we had tea and sandwiches before going home. No lessons were given, and between bouts of sustenance we were allowed to run free about the playground. For a few months I turned myself into a train engine, puffing and shunting around imaginary marshalling yards, until it was realized I neither lacked intelligence nor was stunted in my growth. My mother was disappointed, but had done her best.

The infants' and then the junior boys' school in Radford on Forster Street turned out to be more permanent. It was a mischance indeed if anyone misbehaved under the guardian eye of Miss Chance because, though slight in build and with short fair hair (as I remember), she was a fierce hand with strap, stick, fist or even boot. We understood that her fiancé had been killed in the Great War, common with women teachers of those days. She once came to school with a pot of home-made jam, and gave it to a boy whose father was on the dole. On Armistice Day we were obliged to buy a penny poppy, and stand for two minutes' silence at eleven o'clock.

Ada Chance taught me the importance of spelling. During the lesson she became the authoritarian little drill sergeant, her system rigid but effective. Beginning with the front of the class, of nearer forty than thirty children, we had to stand up in turn and spell a word which she called out.

‘Beautiful,' she snapped at me.

‘Beautiful,' I would repeat loudly. ‘Beautiful:
B
–
E
–
A
–
U
–
T
–
I
–
F
–
U
–
L
, beautiful. Beautiful:
B
–
E
–
A
–
U
–
T
–
I
–
F
–
U
–
L
Beautiful,' and then sit down, giving place to the next boy. This went on for an hour every day or so, and by the end of the term, and from then on, I looked at any strange word until the correct spelling went into my brain, or I would reach for the dictionary under my desk if at all unsure.

Mr Smith, the peppery martinet of a headmaster, came into Miss Chance's classroom to say he would shortly be sending the monitors around to collect money for the annual Christmas party. ‘Put your hands up,' he said, ‘those who want a party for fourpence, a sum, I might say, which won't provide anything very lavish.'

A few of us raised our hands. My father was on the dole, and it was doubtful that he would be able to part with even that sum.

‘Hands up,' Smith went on, ‘those who think that sixpence would give a somewhat better style to the festivities.' Most hands indicated agreement, though mine stayed down, as it did when he continued: ‘But
eightpence
would surely give us the best party of all,' to which, after a while, everyone but me assented.

His eyes glittered with amusement. ‘Hands up, once more, those who can only pay fourpence?'

My single hand would have stayed raised for ever, because I was far more comfortable than I would have been after asking my father to give money which he would have felt tormented at not being able to provide. He and my mother were continually nagged by children who wanted, wanted and wanted but could not be given. What we yearned for was usually no more than what we needed, such as shoes or clothes, extra food or even, in our hopeful daydreams, sweets and toys but, except for a modest treat at Christmas, we couldn't have those, either. A Christmas party at school was certainly not considered essential for our well-being and, aware of this to my backbone, it wasn't difficult to hold out against the sarcastic blandishments of Mr Smith who, when he repeated the question, got the same answer.

After he had gone, Miss Chance called me to the front. ‘You did well,' she said, turning to the rest of the class. ‘If you have something you believe in strongly enough, you must always stick to your guns.' She gave me her personal prayer book as a memento, which was all she could find in her desk to spare. I lost it soon afterwards, but never discarded her advice, which was already as much in my blood as having been put there by circumstance.

Chapter Four

You moved under cover, tactically alert, because rival gangs might be roaming the fields between the railway and allotment gardens. A straggler was in danger, so you maintained all-round vision, noting the nearest escape route to lane or road. You were grown up, and it was serious, everyone an enemy until proved a friend. Unable to stop and find out, friends were few.

The first indication of peril was a stone colliding with your head, and I would go home with a blood-streaked face to terrify and anger my parents, till a wash under the tap showed only a graze. The game was to flee, and hide, and as often as possible make others do the same, to fight openly only when numbers were on your side. Cunning was the policy, and since this was my world I blended in well. You were a scout on the prowl (not a
Boy
Scout) going from A to B with a heavy stick in one hand and stones ready warmed in the other.

Sometimes, going through the door with more than a graze, my father would laugh as he dabbed at the blood and say there were worse things at sea, and that no matter how badly off you felt there was always somebody worse, which encouragement to stoicism fitted with the general conditions of life.

We lived on a street with houses behind and fields in front. In the alleys of the urban zone I would lose any pursuer. Fields and woods across the stream formed equally versatile territory, where the art of concealment became a habit, and camouflage was a current word: ‘Get out to that 'edge near the 'lotments, and I'll stay 'ere on the railway. You've got to come to me across the field, and if I
see
you you'll get a brick at your 'ead.' Frank Blower, a few years older, devised tactical games and, holding a dustbin lid and a spear-headed railing high, looked to us like Goliath, with never a David and a bag of pebbles to slay him. We would have made good soldiers in an old-fashioned colonial war, rather than fodder for the trenches.