Chapter Seven
About the age of nine I went for a fortnight to ‘Poor Boys Camp’ at Skegness. I didn’t want to go, but willessly acceded after my mother’s effort to get me on the list. My cousin Jack had already been, and said it was marvellous.
‘I’m not a poor boy,’ I told him indignantly.
‘That don’t matter,’ he laughed, ‘as long as you enjoy it.’ Jack, a close childhood friend, was a year or two older. Small and wiry, with a half starved, exposed, yet mostly cheerful face, he was loved by his mother — my Aunt Edith — yet necessarily neglected because he was one of eight. We trawled the tips together looking for bottles to take back to the beer-off for a penny each, or for anything edible, or for scrap metals to be sold and the proceeds shared. At Goose Fair we tried to get rides for nothing, our bodies rubberized on rolling harmlessly off when the money-man held out his hand, or we searched for dropped pennies between the stalls. We roamed the parks looking for stray flowers to pluck out and try to sell. On spending cash at a sweetshop Jack would eat the best of what he had first, while I kept mine to the last.
A bus took two dozen of us to a large Edwardian house in a backstreet of the resort. My memory is almost null, mind cut down to absorb as little as possible, and endure it until the time came to return home. We were loaned mackintoshes, and grey felt hats which were soon reshaped to make us look like a gaggle of infant Bonapartes, going along the promenade under the charge of a bored young schoolmaster. We collected blackberries for the Home’s jam, were taken to a concert party on the pier, and passed rainy afternoons in a large mouldy-smelling hut at the end of the garden reading bound issues of Penny Dreadful magazines, or thumping on an out-of-tune piano. A boy taught me to play draughts.
Whether I came back any fitter is hard to say, though I was never unhealthy as a child. The experience faded into the mulch and was seemingly forgotten. In the midst of whatever happened on home ground the minutes went slowly enough, because all was being taken in. Everything was interesting, but my style of absorption bordered on the catatonic. Even so, every face was super-real, photographed in depth and never forgotten. Yorkie, sitting on the doorstep of his detached and larger house down the street, had a head like a piece of sculpture just out of the mould, jowled like a gigantic frog, a slender pipe either smoking or still between shapeless rubbery lips. Without apparent occupation, he always had tobacco, and was a mystery to everyone.
Neither did Mark Fisher work, a cheerful middle-aged man who was said to be going blind. Every day at five o’clock he cut several rounds of bread, spread butter on them, then set them down on the living-room dresser for his daughter Edna’s tea when she walked in smiling but dead-beat from the tobacco factory. Our next door neighbour was Mrs Hopps, who had brought her family down from Darlington so that her sons could get work at the Raleigh Bicycle factory. Whenever the wonderful aroma of baking drifted from her kitchen I played by the door till she came out and gave me a bun or pasty.
A woman wearing a red beret (signifying, everybody said, that she had no drawers on) stood by the entry leading into Peveril Yard, and a man would occasionally follow along that short tunnel to her house. Welsh Hilda, on her way to see a friend in the same yard, was a fat observant woman who, perhaps to torment us, opened a little snuff tin from her coat pocket to show the score of silver sixpences inside, before snapping it shut.
Eddie the Tramp was a brother of my father’s, and his cap and mackintosh stank rotten when he came into the house, which he rarely did, being uncertain of his welcome, though my mother was a little softer towards him. With no fixed address, he worked when he could as an upholsterer, but what money came from it usually went on booze. He had deserted in the Great War, but ended shell-shocked and captured on the Western Front.
We children liked him because if he had cash in his pocket he would treat us to comics and sweets, and amuse us by drawing German soldiers over and over again, and trying to teach us bits of French picked up in his army days. His definite vibrations of battiness sometimes exceeded even those of my father, though they rarely signified the same degree of violence. He would be diagnosed today as schizophrenic, but nobody cared about him then because no matter how much you helped (and his brothers and sisters did from time to time) he was too difficult to have in the house, and soon got rid of what clothes he was given for drink.
Books that filled a glass-fronted case in the Burtons’ parlour had been brought home by their eight children as end of term awards from Sunday and day schools over the years. I recall titles such as Beauchamp’s Career, The Lamplighter, John Halifax, Gentleman, and What Katy Did Next — to name a few. The sight of their several rows was more impressive than whatever wisdom or entertainment they might contain, but I liked the grim engravings of tragic shipwrecks, and the thumb-nail sketches of African scenery. It was thought I might tear their spines or desecrate the interiors with indelible pencil, but after giving my promise not to I picked out a boys’ yarn about smugglers called Dawn Raiders, and read my first novel seated on a mat under an oil lamp, daylight as yet too precious to spend with a book.
The BBC dramatized The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade, and The Count of Monte Cristo, each doled out in twelve weekly half-hour parts. My father had acquired a wireless on the never-never, paying three shillings a week when he could, against the ten guinea total. These serials were popular with the neighbours, as well as at Aunt Edith’s house, and during each thrilling instalment, the whole family transfixed, there was nevertheless a strong undercurrent of anxiety that the shopkeeper might walk in to claim his set back before the entertainment was finished.
When we could get a copy, the Radio Times was read from beginning to end, especially the advertisement strips extolling Horlicks or Golden Shred marmalade, those exotic foods with ambrosial-sounding names. One learned in the same magazine that The Count of Monte Cristo serial was based on a novel by Alexandre Dumas, so the long-term plan was formed of owning a copy in order to read what the serialization had left out, and to recall with the density of print some of the more significant episodes.
Mr Salt, whittling down his classroom collection before moving to another school, gave me my first book, History Day by Day. The compiler and publisher are forgotten, even supposing I noticed them, but two pages were allotted to each day of the year, one page having an account of the author or personage who was born on that date, and the other an extract from one of his works, or from a book about some notable event in his life. Among the latter was a description of the death of General Gordon at the hands of fanatical Muslims in the Sudan; of the butchery of women and children by Indian Army mutineers at Cawnpore; and of similar savageries at the Fall of the Bastille.
Alexandre Dumas was featured under the date of his birth on 24 July 1802, and facing a list of the main events in his life was an extract from The Count of Monte Cristo, the part where Edmond Dantès escapes from the dungeons of the Château d’lf — the cusp on which the fate of the hero turns. From being an unjustly imprisoned sailor he evolves into the sophisticated and powerful Count of Monte Cristo, enriched as much by the education received from the Abbé Faria, who was his prison neighbour, as from the fabulous treasure which the abbé tells him about, and which Dantès unearths from the island of his assumed name. Armed with wealth and knowledge, he relentlessly pursues the three men who put him into the fortress, and takes his revenge, but in the process losing all possibility of happiness.