Paperboy (19 page)

Mother Makes a Friend

Reasons Why the Era of Swinging London Began in 1960

John F. Kennedy became President of the United States, a country England adored, despite the fact that their war reparations crippled the British economy for nearly six decades.

The UN called for the end of apartheid, which my mother said was A Good Thing.

National Service ended, giving rise to the phenomenon of the Hairy Good-for-Nothing Layabout, according to my father.

The Pill appeared, signalling the end of back-street abortionists and films set beside Black Country canals.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover
was published uncut and turned up on Bill’s bedside table, the only time he ever tried to read a classic. Judging by the cracks
on
the spine, he got about a third of the way through.

Hitchcock’s
Psycho
gave birth to the slasher movie. Sales of showers dropped off.

JUST AROUND THE
corner, temporally speaking, were sex and violence, Andy Warhol, James Bond, graffiti, the World on the Brink, the Berlin Wall, topless dresses, hippies, punks, skinheads, Vietnam, Crimplene, Carnaby Street, race riots, psychedelic drugs, Corfam,
¹
colour TV,
Hair
, discotheques, Monty Python and everything else that heralded the beginning of the end of the civilized world, according to my father. Not that he was involved in any world movements, because by this time we had lost him to the wonderful world of DIY.

Now that we had the new house and Christmas was approaching, Bill announced that he would get some serious home improvement done. My mother did not greet this news with enthusiasm. Humming to himself, Bill fired up his blowlamp and set about destroying Cyril Villa.

Being now geographically removed from his parents (albeit only by about six miles), Bill could not simply ramble up the hill to see them every five minutes. He needed something else to do, and as the house we had moved into was virtually uninhabitable, the siren call of DIY beckoned. Other men had a passion for busty platinum blondes who worked in espresso bars. Bill was in love with hardboard.

He scraped off half the wallpaper in the lounge, then
sawed
through several of the banisters. He demolished half the kitchen wall. He tore up carpets and some of the floorboards. He hacked a number of huge holes in the concrete side alley, just to see what was underneath. He fell through the ceiling in my brother’s room, then glued a sheet of brown paper over the hole, which remained in place for the next eight years. He painted over the beautiful Victorian varnished wood of the staircase with magnolia undercoat, then repainted it an unnatural shade of faux-wood, dragging a comb through the garish paint to create artificial wood-grain. The overall effect was like looking at a cheap prop staircase from an unpopular period TV series. He glued several rolls of wiggly-line wallpaper that resembled television interference all along the landing. It could give my mother a headache just walking past the bedrooms.

We spent our first Christmas in Cyril Villa without any heat at all. My father had nearly blown us up by demolishing the gas mantles on the top floor without realizing that the pipes were still connected. He tore out the boiler and the fireplaces, but didn’t get around to putting anything in their place. He laid thick olive-green nylon wall-to-wall carpet that electrocuted you if you walked across it in bare feet. Finally, he added more fake-wood panelling to the house, making it even gloomier and more depressing than it had been to start with, so that it eventually looked like a witches’ forest inside as well as out.

For reasons known only to himself, he decided to hardboard the walls of the upstairs toilet and add mock-Tudor beams, which he painted gloss magnolia, a shade that was fast shaping up to be his favourite colour. Then he lowered the ceilings, covering up elaborate cornicing and ceiling roses with more hardboard, polystyrene and asbestos, all of which he sawed up in the kitchen. For
months
I watched my father chain-smoking un-filter-tipped Woodbines and hacksawing, surrounded by drifting white clouds of asbestos fibre.

Bill learned how to varnish from a magazine, mixed his own solution and covered every remaining surface with it – only he’d balanced the solution wrongly, so it had the consistency of a freshly made toffee apple and never fully dried. Five years later, Kath’s cardigan sleeves would still stick to the dining-room table as though they had been Velcro’d in place. She only made the mistake of leaving table mats on the bare surface once – it had taken a chisel to get them off.

After the War, many of the houses that had been presumed to be sturdy survivors of the Blitz were revealed to have bomb damage. Sometimes mere hairline cracks had weakened walls so much that they simply fell down on random dates. As a small child, I had been taken to the doctor one morning with a chest complaint, and while my mother and I were out the lounge ceiling dropped down, smashing the furniture to pieces. For the next five years I had slept with a blanket over my face, in fear of my dream-weighted skies falling in and crushing me to death.

At least Cyril Villa wasn’t going to collapse. It would probably still be standing in a million years’ time, long after the rest of the country had been blown to Kingdom Come and the ants had taken over. Bill proudly pointed out that the walls were as thick as a church’s, which was probably why it was so depressing inside and nobody could ever get warm. Sometimes you could see your breath in the lounge.

Because the house was surrounded by high trees, the only place that had any television reception was a spot seven feet off the ground in the corner of the rear attic, so nobody bothered watching TV. Anyway, Bill preferred
to
bash things to bits in the back room while Kath tried to read. Gigantic rhododendrons with flowers the colour of fag ash blocked the remaining light from the windows, and as Bill wasn’t keen on putting the lights on, it was a wonder we didn’t all go blind. The building creaked and groaned. The floorboards broke wind and a cold draught seemed to come up through the toilet.

As Steven clearly wasn’t up to it, I helped my father by holding spanners, wrenches, socket sets, screws, nails, sticking plaster and bandages. And then, once I’d had enough of watching my mother tearfully eyeing yet another of Bill’s destroy-it-yourself jobs, I would go off to the Woolwich Odeon, an altogether spivvier picture palace than the Greenwich Granada.

This left my mother at home with a large, run-down house, a small child and an insane Dobermann. Bill’s determination that we should live inside a bubble, permitting no friendships or visits from neighbours, made life almost unbearable for her. Even though she took a series of unsuitable part-time jobs to get her out of the house, she was not allowed to have co-workers call, or be out later than six p.m.

But Kath wasn’t entirely alone; on two separate occasions, disturbed mental patients from the local hospital found their way into the shadow-filled house and threatened her, one of them with a serrated carving knife. The Dobermann, which had been intended to protect us, seemed to side with these intruders, as if recognizing fellow travellers in the realm of the deranged. At these moments, Kath must have felt that she was living inside a double bill of particularly bad horror films.

However, my mother did make one friend who was not daunted by the house, the dog, her husband or even me. At half past eight one evening, Maureen Armstrong came to call. My father heard the bell ring and pulled a sour
face.
‘Who on earth can that be at this time of night?’ he complained, trying to see through the drab riverscape painted on the stained glass of the front door.

The overweight woman on the step was a riot of colour: red hair, pink glasses, green top, orange slacks. ‘Is Kathy in?’ she asked loudly in a broad Lancashire accent, peering past Bill, who had opened the front door a crack and was blocking her view of the hall.

‘She’s clearing away dinner.’ He tried his best to imply that it was a task which required privacy and great concentration, like tightrope-walking, but the visitor wasn’t having any of it.

‘I know she’s in, because I saw her pass by the window as I was driving up.’

So
, I could tell Bill was thinking,
she’s not only watching the house but a woman driver
. ‘She’s very busy right now—’

‘I’m here,’ said Kath behind him. ‘Hello, Maureen.’

‘I’m one of your wife’s ladies,’ said Maureen, stepping into the hall uninvited as my father took an alarmed step backwards. ‘I’m on her team. We do the top half of Woolwich together.’ My mother was currently collecting forms from low-income families for a status poll company. ‘Oooey, Kathy, he’s a right little terrier, is your old man. Doesn’t want to let me in! You want to keep him on a leash.’ She turned and barked merrily in his face. ‘Grrr! Woof! Woof!’

Bill had never been faced down by any woman other than his mother. He flattened himself against the wall as Maureen breezed into the house, trailing colour and energy like a dissolving rainbow.

‘Don’t mind me, love,’ she said, giving my father’s arm a good pinch as she passed. ‘I speak as I find. I’ll have a cup of tea, though, I’m ruddy gasping.’

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ said Kath.

‘No, I want a chinwag with you. Can’t your old man do it?’ she asked cheerily. ‘Husbands, they’re basically useless but we need them for babies, don’t we? If we could do it ourselves they’d be out of a job.’ Bill looked as if he was thinking about stabbing her rather than putting the kettle on.

Maureen found her way into the lounge and took a sharp breath when she saw the eccentric decoration. ‘Deary me, I see what you mean about your front room. Who did it up, Doctor Crippen? I bet you can’t wait to get this lot ripped out and replaced with something flowery.’

‘Bill’s just finished it,’ said Kath.

‘What a shame. You can’t leave it to a man to do. I’ve seen happier colours in a chapel of rest. And it’s cold enough in here to bring your nipples up. He’s not rationing the heat, is he? What are all those sheets of hardboard for? Bit of a DIY fan, are you, Billy?’

Dumbstruck, my father retreated to the back room, which he had turned into a workshop, although what he was working on was a mystery. He did not reappear until Maureen had bounced out of the house.

‘I don’t think we want
her
calling here,’ he announced, checking to see that she had driven off.

‘I can’t stop her,’ said Kath. ‘We work together.’

In the days that followed, Bill tried to ban Maureen from the house, but she stood her ground and nothing he could say would put her off. He referred to her as ‘that bloody laughing woman’, and came to dread her coarse roars, and her unflinching gaze when he tried to blockade her. She knew exactly how to handle men like him. She could have eaten him up like a sardine, crunching his soft bones between her strong white teeth.

‘I’m not stopping,’ Maureen said when she called one evening. ‘I’m just collecting your Kath for the pictures.
We’re
going to find ourselves a nice soppy love story and have a good cry. I always see weepies. If I wanted sex and violence I’d stay in with my old man.’

‘I haven’t had my tea,’ said Bill, shocked.

‘You’re not in leg-irons, are you? You must remember what the kitchen looks like. It’s down the end of the hall, where your missus lives. Come on, Kath, we’ll miss the beginning.’

My mother was different when Maureen was around. Stronger, braver, more sure of herself. Maureen always took her side, blocking Bill out of the conversation, but doing so in a cheery manner that made it impossible for him to take offence.

Soon the women had become so pally that Kath invited Maureen to the seaside with us, thereby breaking a centuries-old rule that no one was allowed to join us on a family day out. Maureen screamed when she paddled in the sea, screamed when she had to walk over hot stones in bare feet, and screamed when she dropped tutti-frutti ice cream down the front of her polka-dot bathing suit. She bought Kath a large straw hat tied with red ribbons, and took her on the dodgems. After a while, my mother stopped worrying about what Bill might think, and started to enjoy herself.

In retaliation, my father went on a conversation strike, but nobody noticed because we were all having fun. He sulked, then huffed, then stormed off, only to creep sheepishly back.

On the way home, Maureen suggested we stop at a country pub, and even I put away my books to sit on a five-bar gate in the garden with a pint of lemonade and a packet of crisps.
²
Maureen’s huge breasts quivered
when
she laughed, and she laughed a lot. She bought rum and gin, but would not let Bill have any alcohol because he was driving. I wished she was a relative, because she seemed able to counteract in a single afternoon all the horrible times we’d had.

Maureen wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but she understood the importance of enjoying life as it passed, and inspired others to do the same. When she stopped coming around, I was immediately suspicious. I assumed that my father had taken her to one side and said something unpleasant, scaring her away. But no, when she reappeared it was obvious that she had lost weight. Her once-rosy cheeks were yellow. She had come by to tell Kath that she would have to give up work for a while because she needed an operation. She’d had several operations before, and only took piece-work now because a regular job wouldn’t allow her to take off so much recovery time.

Maureen went into St Alfege’s Hospital, but the doctors were not able to do anything for her this time, and she died a few days later. Even Bill, who should have felt triumphant, knew better than to say anything mean.

1
‘The miracle leather replacement!’ Except it didn’t breathe and never softened. Bill had a pair of Corfam shoes and nearly crippled himself with them. He also owned an eight-track cartridge player that only had two tapes: Jim Reeves and Elvis.

2
There were no flavours other than Plain in those days, but at least you could choose if you wanted to put the salt on.