A sister, Peggy Eileen, had been born two years earlier, so apart from my birth meaning one more mouth to feed the event was little remembered as a special day. In our family nothing was made of such yearly commemorations, because to be reminded of your birth meant disturbing those senses which were only to be used in existing from one dawn to the next; or it may have been that no one could be bothered to devise a gift or obtain the cost of one; and if no one thought of your birthday you had the advantage of not having to bother about theirs.
A mutual accord never to consider the ritual caused the reasons for it to be forgotten, though my father kept a list of his children as we appeared, as well as the dates, in order to tell at a glance how old we were if an argument on the matter arose between him and my mother. He had her write the first names of each child on a separate scrap of paper, and then he copied them facsimile on to a clean sheet which, found after his death, showed most of the names misspelt.
A few weeks after my birth I became ill, though no one ever told me the ailment, except that it was necessary to get me to a doctor before I crouped myself into extinction. My mother could not go into the snowstorm because she also was unwell, so her more robust sister Edith, who already had five children of her own, wrapped me in a blanket, buttoned the whole thing under her coat, and strove a mile through the blizzard, reaching the doctor’s house in time to save my life. I have often wondered where my father was; he could not have been in a pub, because at that time he didn’t drink, but if at home why didn’t he put on his coat and face the weather?
Except for the house of my birth every place thereafter had the mangonels of slum clearance rumbling not far behind. One tiny cottage on a lane running parallel to the River Leen was flooded after a week of rain, and had to be abandoned. My parents did not remain within the decent confines of a council house because my father was laid off from his job, got into arrears with the rent, and had to find a cheap bug-ridden back-to-back in the middle of the city.
The pattern of their lives was punctuated by journeys with a hired handcart transiting what little they owned beyond the heavy tread of the bailiffs.
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.