Paperboy (8 page)

The baby’s name was Steven. He was adorable, with a quiff of whispy blond hair and big pale-blue eyes. He was a good, quiet baby whom everyone loved, so naturally I wanted to drop a paving stone into his cot.

My mother was thrilled because the birth had been so easy. ‘Not like having you,’ she told me ruefully. ‘That took six hours and was like passing a hot copper kettle.’

After Steven came along I saw even less of my parents, and began reading in earnest to the cat, the tortoise or anything else that showed vague signs of sentient life. If I was lonely, I was too busy hurting my eyes to notice.

1
Smutty cheesecake-filled periodical.

2
A Dane whose brutal first-person Nazi memoirs still spark controversy today.

3
Creepy dough-faced creatures that provided a disturbing glimpse into the Scandinavian mindset.

4
Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle upset parents by creating four volumes of delightful schoolboy memoirs in ungrammatical misspelled English, ‘as any fule kno’.

5
Why didn’t we have Dick and Jane like the Americans? I guess they had more Dicks.

6
Not buried under Platform Nine in King’s Cross station as previously thought. Typical that the British should venerate a warrior who lost her most important battle.

7

Turning the Tables

I FIRST SENSED
something was going badly wrong with my parents’ marriage when, during the course of a normal Sunday lunch, my father suddenly turned the laden dining table upside-down and stormed out of the room. I offered to help my mother clear up the food and broken crockery from the floor, but she said I would cut myself, and quietly got on with the job until everything was clean and tidy again.

Up until this point I had always loved Sunday lunch. Sunday was the one day in the week when my parents could lie in, and so the morning always coalesced slowly, starting with the newspapers, tea and biscuits, drifting into a late breakfast involving beans and sausages and
Two-Way Family Favourites
, the radio show aimed at BFPOs – British Forces Posted Overseas. Most of the songs they played were drippy, and the message was always the same: ‘Can’t wait to see you and the kids at Christmas,’ never ‘The government lied to us and I’ve had my legs blown off.’

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:

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 holiday
²
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-poly
³
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.