One day she sent me home with a packet of fat bacon from the latest pig killed, to be used for cooking. Later that evening, feeling hungry, I went to the scullery and ate most of it, piece by piece, like an Eskimo. An hour later, climbing the ladder to the attic, I made such an indescribable mess on being sick that my mother hadn’t the heart to shout, nor my father to put the boot in.
Whatever family tensions there were at the Burtons’, and my mother told me there had been plenty, the place was a haven of peace and privilege to me. Drawing or reading, I disturbed no one, and rarely went home without a few pennies rattling in my pocket. Burton did not like my father because he had been to prison, and never asked after him, thinking his daughter an everlasting fool for having married such a man, though Burton had made her life too hellish to say no when my father had put the question.
Chapter Six
Progress in learning was measured by tests, a system I liked, as well as the approval on receiving high marks. Knowing my position in the hierarchy allowed me to measure progress to the top. The class was divided into ‘houses’, of Windsor, Sandringham, Balmoral and Buckingham, each competing for good conduct stars of red, yellow, blue and green, any stars gained to be fixed on a chart behind the door. I was glad when the House of Windsor, to which I had been assigned, accumulated them more rapidly than the others.
A smell that has not changed is that of ink, going drop by ritual drop from a large brownstone bottle into the white pot fitting flush with the top of the desk. The same odour was sniffed when the blackly-scaled steel pen nibs were wrenched off with a scrap of blotting paper and discarded for new ones. The accomplishment of ‘flowing handwriting,’ or ‘double writing’ as my sister called it, came easily, and on Miss Chance asking whether I could use my right hand she was told I had tried but found it impossible. ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘go on using your left.’
A great discovery was the list of foreign words and phrases several pages long at the back of the dictionary, an appendix not often seen these days. Hair cracks appeared in the window of my own language through which I looked at the world, splinters of Latin, French and Greek, such as nil desperandum, tempus fugit, hors de combat, lèse-majesté and ariston metron. Reading assiduously to myself, I copied and transposed them in an attempt to join several of the same tongue and make a sentence, usually with puzzling if not disappointing results.
Another source of words was maps, the place names of Central and South America introducing me to Spanish, and translated by using a Midget Dictionary which I had saved sixpence to buy. The game of hunting across the map for Buenos Aires, Rio de la Plata, Monte Video and Belo Horizonte was enjoyable, the accumulation of such words not so much an attempt to know another language, though the desire existed, as an attractive extension of my own, a kind of word travel to soften the imprisonment of not being able to move beyond wherever I could get to in a day on my own two feet. Such avidity for foreign names and phrases was also useful in oiling the machinery of my perceptions with rudimentary English.
The language at home was different to that taught at school and found in books, richer in one way, yet inferior in others, English in the classroom seeming the equivalent of learning a foreign language which must be known so as to understand people and be understood by them on tackling the unexplored world beyond.
Verbal dexterity and fantastic humour were common between me and my friend Arthur Shelton, as it was with numerous cousins from Aunt Edith’s family. Later in life I took to the Yiddish brand as if born to it, for the poor share much in their twisting of language to reflect experience. Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker and Paul Robeson sang for us, while the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, the Dead End Kids, Charlie Chaplin and, later, Danny Kaye and Eddie Cantor made us laugh.
The ‘pictures’ were a solace and consolation, and it was a poor week if I didn’t get the few pennies necessary to take myself to a matinee on Saturday afternoon. Advertisement cards, collected from every local cinema and giving details of ‘coming attractions’, allowed me to mull in my vegetable way for hours over the exotic titles and names of stars in the hope of one day being able to see their films.
The names of the ‘kinemas’ were also exotic, far-fetched, yet within reach of understanding because none was beyond price or distance; outlandish names, one might have thought, but by constant use they became familiar and even homely: Scala, Hippodrome, Savoy, Ritz, Plaza, Elite, Grande — names to be surmounted, left behind, even scorned, but never forgotten because of the dreams they generated and the joy they gave when dreams and joy were cushions against despair.
The cinema, therefore, with penny comics, was one of my earliest influences. We roamed to find the best films if the nearest cinema was full or the programme did not inspire with its titles and outside photographs. One afternoon I subtracted myself from the group when a collective decision seemed intractable, and set off along the crowded road of a district only partially known, until coming across LENO’S PICTUREDROME, even dingier than the gang’s earlier choices, yet mysteriously beckoning because I was on my own. I paid twopence, and went inside. What was on?
The Last Days of Pompeii, and the happy finder was me alone, the only one in the family to see it, witnessing the cries of the trapped and fallen, descending blocks of temples weighty like iron, a startling occurrence catastrophically different to the feeble collapse of woodbrick palaces on the floor of my first day at school. This time, though I had not caused it, yet somehow wished I had been able to, I saw the earth opening like the crumbling lips of Hell’s worst animal to grab at heels, lions to beware of roaming from the arena, people running in panic and terror, all in the grainy form of ashy darkness that made it more sinister and exciting, a God-spun concrete-mixer chewing up such words in my brain as Armageddon, Eruption, Passion Dale and Earthquake: the end of the world, with knobs on.
In a corner, or suddenly across the middle, ran a pure white speckle against the black, of magician-like dolly mixture symbols — dots, triangles, squares and stars — so quickly as to make me doubt I had seen them, yet increasing the tension of everything still going on full tilt across the screen which by now had become a whole world that I was in yet not part of. Where was Pompeii, and why was it happening? The relief and entertainment was in knowing that you could be safe on your seat watching disaster overtaking others, caused by someone or something with, after all, no real name.
I made my way home as the lamplighter with his pole flicked on the gas as if to guide only me, reworking the spectacle time and again in order not to wonder what sort of food there would be on the table when I got there but hoping to find toast with real butter on it, and jam, and my parents at peace, though whatever violent mood they happened to be in could never match what I had seen in Leno’s Picturedrome.
Up the ladder and into the attic, my brother and sisters wanted a story when we got into bed, and the whispered rehash of dreadful occurrences viewed at the pictures, mixed with the murky imaginings of my sparked-off brain, mesmerized myself as much as them till the clutch of us were frightened into the relief of sleep, or bored enough to risk the takeover of dreams.