Life Without Armour Read online

  The infants’ and then the junior boys’ school in Radford on Forster Street turned out to be more permanent. It was a mischance indeed if anyone misbehaved under the guardian eye of Miss Chance because, though slight in build and with short fair hair (as I remember), she was a fierce hand with strap, stick, fist or even boot. We understood that her fiancé had been killed in the Great War, common with women teachers of those days. She once came to school with a pot of home-made jam, and gave it to a boy whose father was on the dole. On Armistice Day we were obliged to buy a penny poppy, and stand for two minutes’ silence at eleven o’clock.

  Ada Chance taught me the importance of spelling. During the lesson she became the authoritarian little drill sergeant, her system rigid but effective. Beginning with the front of the class, of nearer forty than thirty children, we had to stand up in turn and spell a word which she called out.

  ‘Beautiful,’ she snapped at me.

  ‘Beautiful,’ I would repeat loudly. ‘Beautiful: B–E–A–U–T–I–F–U–L, beautiful. Beautiful: B–E–A–U–T–I–F–U–L Beautiful,’ and then sit down, giving place to the next boy. This went on for an hour every day or so, and by the end of the term, and from then on, I looked at any strange word until the correct spelling went into my brain, or I would reach for the dictionary under my desk if at all unsure.

  Mr Smith, the peppery martinet of a headmaster, came into Miss Chance’s classroom to say he would shortly be sending the monitors around to collect money for the annual Christmas party. ‘Put your hands up,’ he said, ‘those who want a party for fourpence, a sum, I might say, which won’t provide anything very lavish.’

  A few of us raised our hands. My father was on the dole, and it was doubtful that he would be able to part with even that sum.

  ‘Hands up,’ Smith went on, ‘those who think that sixpence would give a somewhat better style to the festivities.’ Most hands indicated agreement, though mine stayed down, as it did when he continued: ‘But eightpence would surely give us the best party of all,’ to which, after a while, everyone but me assented.

  His eyes glittered with amusement. ‘Hands up, once more, those who can only pay fourpence?’

  My single hand would have stayed raised for ever, because I was far more comfortable than I would have been after asking my father to give money which he would have felt tormented at not being able to provide. He and my mother were continually nagged by children who wanted, wanted and wanted but could not be given. What we yearned for was usually no more than what we needed, such as shoes or clothes, extra food or even, in our hopeful daydreams, sweets and toys but, except for a modest treat at Christmas, we couldn’t have those, either. A Christmas party at school was certainly not considered essential for our well-being and, aware of this to my backbone, it wasn’t difficult to hold out against the sarcastic blandishments of Mr Smith who, when he repeated the question, got the same answer.

  After he had gone, Miss Chance called me to the front. ‘You did well,’ she said, turning to the rest of the class. ‘If you have something you believe in strongly enough, you must always stick to your guns.’ She gave me her personal prayer book as a memento, which was all she could find in her desk to spare. I lost it soon afterwards, but never discarded her advice, which was already as much in my blood as having been put there by circumstance.

  Chapter Four

  You moved under cover, tactically alert, because rival gangs might be roaming the fields between the railway and allotment gardens. A straggler was in danger, so you maintained all-round vision, noting the nearest escape route to lane or road. You were grown up, and it was serious, everyone an enemy until proved a friend. Unable to stop and find out, friends were few.

  The first indication of peril was a stone colliding with your head, and I would go home with a blood-streaked face to terrify and anger my parents, till a wash under the tap showed only a graze. The game was to flee, and hide, and as often as possible make others do the same, to fight openly only when numbers were on your side. Cunning was the policy, and since this was my world I blended in well. You were a scout on the prowl (not a Boy Scout) going from A to B with a heavy stick in one hand and stones ready warmed in the other.

  Sometimes, going through the door with more than a graze, my father would laugh as he dabbed at the blood and say there were worse things at sea, and that no matter how badly off you felt there was always somebody worse, which encouragement to stoicism fitted with the general conditions of life.

  We lived on a street with houses behind and fields in front. In the alleys of the urban zone I would lose any pursuer. Fields and woods across the stream formed equally versatile territory, where the art of concealment became a habit, and camouflage was a current word: ‘Get out to that ’edge near the ’lotments, and I’ll stay ’ere on the railway. You’ve got to come to me across the field, and if I see you you’ll get a brick at your ’ead.’ Frank Blower, a few years older, devised tactical games and, holding a dustbin lid and a spear-headed railing high, looked to us like Goliath, with never a David and a bag of pebbles to slay him. We would have made good soldiers in an old-fashioned colonial war, rather than fodder for the trenches.

  Every morning we four children, whether frost was hard on the ground, or flowers in bloom on recreation plots, walked half a mile to a ‘dinner centre’ for breakfast of three half slices of bread-and-butter and a mug of sweetened cocoa. At school during the morning we were given a third of a pint of milk, and went back to the dinner centre at midday for a meal of main course and pudding. This wasn’t too bad for the children – though we never thought we had quite enough to eat – but we were harrowed by the plight of our parents, whose suffering was obvious to any child. They couldn’t do anything about what was happening to them, and bitter internecine quarrels were the result.

  In winter the pleasing music of rain pattering against the school windows lost some of its charm on knowing I would have to walk home afterwards with saturated feet and no coat. During holidays and weekends I spent days on the extensive rubbish tips by the canal, summer or winter, either idling (since it was more peaceful there), collecting wood for the grate at home, or looking for bottles to sell. I became adept at making fires: everything so difficult that on succeeding it seemed I had mastered an art. In the cold autumn rains a tatter might let me shelter in a lean-to, or stand by his blaze of tyres and old boxes. Occasionally I would bring a snack, otherwise it was a matter of going back to the house at dusk hoping to see a stewpot simmering on the hob.

  Walking along high banks of refuse across the tips, Bernard Clifford and I threw pieces of broken bottle playfully towards each other. A jagged bit that sped with too much enthusiasm scooped a hole in my lower leg about half an inch wide, and equally deep by the bone. The surprise was such, at seeing dull grey flesh inside instead of red, that neither alarm nor pain was felt on the way home, though many trips were needed to the school clinic before a scar began to cover it.

  What I had thoroughly done by this time was detach myself from my parents. They were my guardians, my protectors to a certain extent, and also the would-be providers of food, clothes and shelter, but beyond that – and what in any case was supposed to be beyond? – it was impossible to confide in them, or admire or respect them, or even trust them. Their mutual antagonism, their joint incompetence, their misfortune, and the too tangible anguish that came from both, embroiled me in their existence but eventually made me not only unable to love them but almost to consider them my own worst enemies.

  Such necessities as food and clothing might not have been in the first line of priority had there been less violent disharmony in the house. What a child wants is probably an impossible combination: parents who will provide, who will chide but not bully and, if they loathe each other, keep their differences as far as is feasible to themselves. Should these conditions not exist it would still be unjust to blame the parents for whatever isn’t right, and in my case I soon learned not to, since it was clear that they were as
they were, and could not help themselves.

  Even while in their orbit I was not basically unhappy, because there was too much to learn about the world beyond, which seemed full of promise in that so little was known about it. In a kind of slow-burning lackadaisical way I was anxious to discover everything, but only at the rate at which my powers of intake would absorb it effectively with little or no prompting from anyone else.

  Being an island unto myself gave less reason for discontent, and diminished the area of complaint. Ideally I would have liked not so much to be somebody else as to be in an entirely different place; meaning, with another and, to put it plainly, a better-off family. Since that could not be, the only thing was to keep going till something happened, though there was never much idea, beyond unwarrantable fantasies cooked up while roaming Wollaton Park looking for chestnuts with my cousin Jack, as to what that something might be.

  In another sense my childhood was as perfect as could be arranged. I lived in the same town up to the age of eighteen, my parents never divorced, I did not go to boarding school, and I always had something to eat, as well as shelter, and clothes on my back. I am harrowed with compassion on seeing photographs of Jewish children plainly starving to death on the streets of Warsaw or Vilna during the Second World War. Many were more gently brought-up than me, before the German plague struck, and therefore their fate was that much more terrible, something never to be forgiven or forgotten. Their faces tell me that compared to them my early days went by in absolute paradise, though certain it is that my mother never needed to say: ‘Finish your meal, or I’ll send it to the starving children of China!’

  The impossibility of abiding in however troubled the waters may in any case have been due to that unacknowledged urge of the deracinated formed in me even before birth. The map of the world became my talisman, the locality I was locked in having all the characteristics of a powerhouse which would one day lead me to more ease of living.

  When my father put up new wallpaper and gave me the scrag-end of a roll to play with I spread the white side up and, drawing a vertical line for the Greenwich meridian and a horizontal for the Equator, made a map of the world at which Ptolemy might have smiled, marking with red crayon as many British Possessions as could be remembered from the atlas at school.

  The stronger the sense of place, and mine couldn’t have been more rooted, the more I wanted to know the rest of the world. One part of me was bound for ever to where I was growing up, but the other told me I had to know the whole world if my head was not at times to burst from sheer misery. Such a project could not be embarked on until the territory over which it was possible to walk from the front door of the house had been thoroughly mapped and understood. Heredity is the cause: circumstances only exacerbate – the phenotypical conundrum.

  Chapter Five

  A sure qualification for turning into a writer is to grow up with a divided personality, and perhaps that dichotomy was nurtured by spending as much of my childhood as possible in the country. In the city I went to school, and in the country I played. In the city my father was out of work, but in the country my grandparents kept chickens, and a prime pig was killed every year. In the city there was mildewed brick and oily asphalt, and often the unmistakable reek of horse turds squashed flat by passing motors, while in the country there was the sweet odour of berries and fresh grass, and a clean wind even welcome when driving the first drops of rain to my cheeks.

  We lived in an odd kind of house on the edge of some back-to-backs, the accommodation consisting of a living room with scullery attached, a bedroom above, and an attic at the top where we children slept on one bed, and from whose single small window we could look out and see fields. My grandparents’ cottage was a mile away and, setting off with a stick and a sandwich across the narrow River Leen, every worry was left behind except that of getting to my destination with head unblemished.

  Just as meat is most tender when close to the bone, and cheese the tastiest where the rats have started to nibble, so the country immediately beyond the packed houses seemed rich and strange. I treasured the quality of that silver mile as terra incognita, and walking down from the high railway bridge into a cornfield the smell was second only to that of baking bread on opening the door of the Burtons’ spotless cottage.

  In early morning hedges were probed, trees walked around and sometimes scrambled up if the lower branches were within arm’s reach. Places of possible ambush were avoided, or danger invented to dispel boredom when the hour was too early for enemies to be on the roam. Bells tinkling so mellifluously on the still air, an archaic but not unfriendly tune, was the distant Sabbath call from Wollaton Church, in which my parents had been married.

  My mother sometimes tried to persuade me to take the main road and go along the frequented lane by Radford Woodhouse, but I preferred the heavy dew soaking my plimsolls and short trousers as I pushed a way through nettles and Queen Anne’s Lace taller than myself. Birds were disturbed, plate-sized clusters of elderberries stained my hands, and toadstools made me wary. The route was surveyed as if new every time, laying out my own peculiar mental map, while salivating at the thought of breakfast when my grandmother let me in.

  The cottage was on Lord Middleton’s estate, one of a group of three known for some reason as Old Engine Houses. It had neither gas nor electricity, and memories of the visual sort join with odours to re-create the topography: variations on stale lavender, lamp oil, strong soap and turpentine, wholesome smells no longer current but homely for that time.

  The only items of modernity were a bicycle, and an enormous gramophone with a horn I could have crawled into, too weighty to lift. Records were heavier than they are today, easy to chip but fascinating to endlessly rearrange, awe for some reason felt when the word REX showed on their paper sleeves.

  Cooking was done on a coal fire, in the kitchen-living room lit by a lamp above the table. For water my Uncle Dick took a yoke to the common well with its fairy-tale wooden hood on a rise beyond the garden, staggering back along the path with laden buckets slopping at the brim, and crossing the kitchen to set them down in the cool stone-smelling pantry.

  Walking by his side from the well I heard him effing-and-blinding in no uncertain terms at the burden, most of the livid expletives meant for his father, and on realizing I was close enough to hear he smiled and said: ‘Don’t tell yer grandad, will yer?’ – then fell to effing-and-blinding again, repeating his injunction, and his cursing, several times before reaching the door.

  Grandfather Burton, a tall blacksmith in his sixties, took to me because I ran errands, cleaned his Saturday night dress boots, and sometimes amused him by reading from the newspaper. His eye, he said with a wink, could not manage the small print, though I noticed it also failed to cope with the headlines, and a spark at the forge had blinded him in the other. He occasionally wore a black patch, and my aunts, who detested his caustic severity, referred to him when he wasn’t close as ‘Lord Nelson’ or ‘Old One-Eye’.

  Though Burton spoke little, the pertinence of the words he did use formed lodgements in my brain and joined into a solid bridgehead of memory. Such expressions had more telling effect than my father’s because there was no threat behind them. If you were snatched you were perished with cold; clambed you were faint with hunger; mardy whining childishly and without much cause; windy cowardly – a vocabulary of county argot passed down through generations.

  Regarding the discomforts of the senses or the body, everything was related, in the degree of its intensity, to buggery – which, I’m sure, he had never experienced in the common meaning of the word. It, whatever it might be, stank, itched, burned or chafed like buggery. As an indication of surprise he would say: ‘Well, I’ll go to buggery!’ I did not know what it meant, but Burton’s emphasis certainly made it clear as to his state of mind.

  Not given to much humour, the apotheosis came when he sat stiff-backed in his Windsor chair by the fireplace, held out a hand with a finger extended, and said to me: ‘Nim
rod, pull this.’

  Ever suspicious, I held back, noting the glint in his good eye. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘pull it. It’s giving me gyp. If you pull it, it’ll mek me better.’

  When I did so, and tugged with might and main, he let out a long splintering fart that almost tore the cottage apart. Another word learned, though the somewhat onomatopoeic tone needed in reproduction was not always available.

  In late summer I was awakened by the noise of harvest machinery from the field outside, and by sunlight coming through the bedroom window. My grandmother cooked the farmhands’ dinner, and Burton was given rights to wheat near the hedges that the combine harvester could not reach, his tall, shirt-sleeved, slowly advancing frame with the swinging scythe making an unforgettable picture of the grim reaper. The gleanings were winnowed and husked in the yard by my grandmother, who boiled them in the copper to mix with the pigs’ feed.

  Darkness was a long time coming on Saturday evening when my grandparents had gone to the Admiral Rodney pub at Wollaton and left me alone in the house. The grizzling anxieties of the cockerels, the fussy grunting of discontented pigs, and an occasional yap from the wary dog in its kennel came to me as I sat in my shirt at the dressing table in my aunts’ bedroom, arranging cosmetic bottles in ranks like soldiers.

  Beyond the cottage lay the Cherry Orchard, a large area not of fruit trees, but of scrubland backed by Robins Wood, where I imagined the famous Hood and his Merry Outlaws passing on their way from Staffordshire to Sherwood. I made friends with the children of a farmworker’s cottage called Cherry Orchard House, so close to the wood that their garden in spring was invaded by swathes of bluebells. Alma Ollington (or was it Amy? Maybe neither) came on pinafore wings to meet me as I crossed the open land, and we hid inside an enormous elm with the lower part of its trunk burnt out, pretending we had run away from home.