Life Without Armour Read online

  Aunt Ivy, another of my grandfather’s daughters, worked at Player’s factory, and being unmarried had a boyfriend called Ernest Guyler, who was to die of tuberculosis. A tall, thin, sprucely dressed man, he used to come up the lane to call on her. The first love of my life was the fair and stately Queen Alexandra, whose picture was on a card Ernest gave me from his cigarette packet before walking with Ivy towards the wood.

  Ivy, and her sister Emily, who was also unmarried, would occasionally take down the long tin bath and set it under a plane tree between the back door and the coal house. Showing reluctance – to say the least – with regard to water, even after they had pulled my clothes off, I wriggled out of their grasp and ran away. They chased me around the yard, merrily laughing at the fun, as if I was one of the pigs that had found a way out of the stye. Cornering me by the poultry wire, they dragged me back to a lavish coating of White Windsor soap and the cleansing I certainly needed.

  I sometimes shared the bed of Uncle Dick who, a tall handsome man with plenty of girlfriends, rarely came in till the middle of the night. On Sunday morning he cycled along the nearby canal selling permits to fishermen for twopence each, of which he was allowed to keep a farthing for his trouble. He took me on the crossbar in order to amuse himself by scaring me on steering close to the deep and forbidding locks.

  Too scruffy a little prince in the house, my aunts went to buy me a new shirt, and I met them at the lane-end near the main road. They opened the paper and held it up, such a crisp bright yellow that I insisted on taking off my old one, which meant changing down to my skin, before going back proudly to show my grandfather.

  The lane at the Burtons’ was a dead-end to motors, deliveries of groceries from the town usually by bicycle or a tradesman’s van. The insurance, rent or tallyman for this and that knocked on the door once a week and were invited inside to be paid, a different procedure to that at home, when a knock at the door was feared, and my mother would usually send me or Peggy to say that nobody was in. Peddlers who called at the Burtons’ got no response from my grandfather if he was about, though his wife Mary Ann, whose kindly Irish soul had survived intact, would buy something if she could, or offer a cup of tea if she could not.

  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 Armagedd
on, 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.

  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 a
t 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.

  My father both liked and hated to see me caught up by reading to the extent that I was no longer aware even of myself. While he enjoyed with a kind of pride seeing me do something no one else in the family cared for, it was at the same time hard for him to put up with such a reproach to his deficiency. He might threaten to fireback the book, or knock it aside if my mother was about to set the table for a meal. Far from discouraging me, because reading was the only activity which made my existence tolerable, his attitude may well have been an added spur, giving me more to thank him for in the long run than if he had left me alone.

  By the age of nine, worn out with the unrelenting turmoil of emotion, it seemed as if half my life had already gone, and the idea of trying to kill myself was sometimes dwelt self-pityingly on. Either that, or there was the fervent wish that my parents would go out one day and fall under a bus. The utter unsuitability of one for the other – my father’s never-ending moods of depression, and my mother’s helpless weeping at his violence which was the only way he could free himself from them – seemed to fall even more heavily on the shoulders of Peggy and myself, not to mention Pearl and Brian. Their vitriolic bouts had a built-in conclusion of rough-and-ready armistice which would not work on the children, such miserable rages being passed on to us, much as an electrical charge going along a line of connected people injures only those at the end.