Driving back alone in the dark from London I lost all idea of where I was going and where I was coming from. It was not a new feeling. I’ve had it often before, of not belonging anywhere, or to anyone except myself. It is a precious and salutary sensation, like driving an aeroplane towards the Himalayas. The soft roar of the Peugeot lulled me on the motorway. I passed the tail-lights of another car as if they were sparks.
It was like lifting into the sky. In a motor-car one flies along, encapsulated in a comfortable seat, breathing stale air, all heaters burning, maps locked in the glove-box, headlights shining on a road that does not alter and so gets you nowhere. I am in a womb, sheltered, warm, and only half safe, waiting for the death-crash of being born, or the birth-crash of being dead, hoping whatever happens that I have loved my parents.
27
A man called Bill Gosse drove up from Cambridgeshire in a Rolls-Royce to visit the Burtons at Engine Town. Gosse’s wife was a niece of my grandmother, and his family enjoyed their trips to Nottingham in the thirties.
He parked his car on the unpaved lane, by a fence that stood at a crazy angle but never fell down. I felt sick when he took me for a ride so we had to turn back before getting very far. It wasn’t that my squeamish soul disliked his smooth machine, because I’d go pale in trolley-buses as well. It was simply that my inherited Tokinses stomach played up to its role.
As a young man Bill Gosse opened a small shop in a village near Peterborough. A craftsman saddler, he later stocked push-bikes and did repairs. He then took up cars via motor-cycles, and went on to install the first petrol pump in his village. After a while he moved into larger premises, and began to deal in second-hand vehicles.
Perhaps the Rolls-Royce was one of these, but its presence in the lane by Burton’s house made them seem fabulously rich, though Gosse and Burton were equal enough when they strolled down the lane together. But people who sold bicycles and cars looked to me like the gaffers of the world. They had no worries because they could buy a packet of fags without thinking twice about it, and didn’t need to know where their next meal was coming from since it was waiting for them on a warmed-up plate.
You could see it in their faces as they climbed from the car with royal nonchalance when they arrived before Sunday dinnertime, wearing caps and trenchcoats, scarves and shawls. Nobody held it against them, and there was a friendly atmosphere at Engine Town for this exotic branch of the family, good sports and fine mixers who made a more than fair living in the motor trade.
Charles and Mary Tokins shipped over from County Mayo during the potato famine of the 1840s and settled in St Neots with their six sons. For luggage they had a trunk, a hat-box, and a score of bundles. Three of the sons went on the land as agricultural workers, while the father and the rest became railway labourers in the days when tracks were being laid all over England and tens of thousands of navvies were needed for the rapid shifting of earth, clay, and stone. It was if the government of the day did nothing to curb the excesses of the Irish famine simply to drive enough men of muscle and intelligence to England at a time when the native energies of the Industrial Revolution were on the wane.
A grandson of Charles Tokins met and married Anne Gilbert of St Neots, and one of their children, born about 1870, was Mary-Ann whose fate led her to Nottingham and into the arms of Ernest Burton.
The Tokinses were always a family for railways, and maybe it is their blood that stirs in me when I hear train hooters in the night, noises which bring unquiet longings and fix me so much into the network of the world that I am never happily settled in the place where I happen to be.
Of Mary-Ann’s two brothers who worked on the railway, Bill was a porter in Leeds, and Ted had a similar job seventy miles down the line at Grantham. The same hat-box that had come over from County Mayo was filled with fresh Yorkshire bread baked by Grandma Tokins at Leeds in the morning, and sent in the guard’s van to Grantham.
Ted had a boy cycle home with the hat-box, whereupon his wife returned it to the station laden with new-culled Lincolnshire vegetables. These were put into the luggage van of the next train making the right connections with Leeds, and sent back up in the afternoon. This specimen of inter-family co-operation went on for over twenty years, and Bill, at the Leeds end, was the man whose funeral Burton was seen at with Mary-Ann in the twenties.
There are many such tales bursting from the genealogical rigmarole of the Tokinses line, telling of the ‘queer streaks’ certain limbs of it had. Maybe Burton felt out of it among that numerous lot, though he had two brothers, one a farrier with a forge at Ruddington Grange, the other with a smithy at Carlton.
Another grandson of the first itinerant Tokinses from Ireland became a prosperous builder. At sixty-eight he threw up normal domestic life, left his wife and three daughters, and went into the nearest workhouse much as another sort of man might enter a monastery.
A photograph taken during his sojourn there shows a large, broad-faced, flat-nosed man, a Tolstoyan figure with a bushy white beard, wearing a workman’s cap. Hands clasped, half-sitting on a full dustbin, he stares at the camera with an air of philosophical contentment. Behind is a flight of steps, and propped against a wall nearby is a long-poled sweeping brush I’m sure he never used. The sun shines as if on no one else in that place, and the photo is a good quality memento mounted on a piece of board. Between the name of the Leeds firm and a royal crest it says: PHOTOGRAPHERS TO THE LATE QUEEN.
He had ordered the cameraman in for himself alone, and paid out of his own pocket, for he was rich by any standards. When he died at the age of eighty he left £60,000 to the workhouse, and not a penny to his wife and daughters.
28
Ever since I can remember I have wanted to leave home, to pack up and go. This desire to tread places other than the one I lived in was so deeply implanted that it gave more power to the womb than was good for me, making it hard to avoid reckoning with. The only real journey away from it is death, which merely takes one back to it.
I also wanted to tell people things that they would believe in, a fatal (though honest) admission from someone who is searching for the truth. The wish to convince them makes it impossible for me to get at the truth. One can only state the truth as it appears to oneself, and if others get comfort out of recognizing it, then my difficulties are honoured. But I cannot claim that my own truth is good for anyone else — otherwise I run the risk of them turning on the gas taps like the friend of mine already mentioned.
A desire to tell the wrong kind of truth manifested itself at an early age, when I was fascinated by the news being read on the radio. What was said seemed of high interest and importance, dealing as it did with frightening items of oncoming war. I thought that the man allotted to make such announcements must be a great person indeed. But it was a phase of listening to his master’s voice which I soon threw off, though when my mother in an odd moment asked what I wanted to do when I grew up I confessed I’d like to be a news reader.
At eight years of age I used to go to a ‘dinner centre’ during the midday break from school to have a free hot meal. I went in at the first sitting, and then came out with the rest so that the second hungry group could take our places. For some reason I was possessed to put my head to the window and, thought it was shut, shout through the glass, so that I could be heard clearly, all the rich swearwords I had so far learned.