Paperboy (9 page)

‘If you’re not happy with the way the story turns out,’ said Kath in exasperation, ‘go and write one of your own.’

I didn’t. Instead, by way of compensation, I became a fabulous liar. Simple truths were exaggerated out of all proportion. The smallest exchange of neighbourhood conversation became drenched with drama. The confabulations compounded into a towering Babel of untruthfulness.

To my father, this was a sure sign that
imagination
was taking a dangerous grip on his son’s brain, like bindweed. To be fair, he had been raised in a family that sent everyone out at fourteen to work like a dog until they contracted cancer. In post-war England, imagination was equated with daydreaming, an indulgence that belonged to head-in-the-sand toffs
⁴
who contributed nothing to the rebuilding of the country, and Bill couldn’t afford to have
a
son with ideas above his station, because it would end in failure and, worse than that,
show us up
.

I wondered who it would show us up to, as we had no friends to speak of. ‘You don’t need anyone else when you have family,’ was my father’s mantra. But we didn’t even have family – we were just people living under the same roof who pretended to know each other well enough to have arguments.

1
Strangely ageless performer, who, like Cliff Richard, Val Doonican and Lulu, is forgotten but not gone. Tends to reappear as Scrooge at Christmas.

2
A traditional working-class paid holiday that died out when everyone switched from bitter to lager.

3
A heavy suet dessert designed to slow husbands down and stop them wanting sex.

4
Not, in fact, short for ‘toffee-nose’ but from ‘tuft’, 1851, a gold tassel worn on the cap of an undergraduate with a voting peer for a father.

8

A Friend for Life

EVEN THOUGH OUR
family lived in a town that set great store by community, it was decided at an early point that the neighbours weren’t worth getting to know.

Percy, the boy next door, had consumption, an illness that resigned him to a living death on a deserted lump of windswept, seaweed-reeking coastline for several months of the year, ‘for the sake of his health’. On the other side, Mr and Mrs Hills were as old as them. They kept half a dozen smelly, moulting, squawking chickens in their rusty Anderson shelter, and once their pond froze solid and they removed the entire six-foot block of ice from it, placing it in a tin bath to melt before the fire, where, to my amazement, the giant goldfish trapped inside thawed and wriggled free, dropping back into the water.

Not to be outdone, we bought a tortoise, a pet you could only enjoy for half of every year, and an embittered mongrel cat called Wobbles, which my father purchased from a roadside bikers’ café when he stopped to get fags on the way to Brighton. Ginger cats were apparently lucky. Being from a superstitious riverside family – ‘naval’
would
sound too grand – Bill would not allow shoes on the bed because it meant death for a household member within a year (the superstition had something to do with setting out clothes for the deceased). Budgerigars were not allowed into the house for the same reason. I had my own theory about this one: if you were called up as a sailor during the War, it was common to buy your wife a caged bird to keep her company. And you probably didn’t come back, like Aunt Nell’s old man, who either went down on Scapa Flow or ran off with the barmaid from the Nag’s Head, depending on which family member you talked to.

The Fowlers had never been good with animals. My father insisted that a pet was a friend for life, but I couldn’t see how that was true, seeing that a cat only lived for about fourteen years. A pet was a friend with a builtin grief-factor. My mother warned that some of the really old pets in the neighbourhood had been traumatized in the War, and hated anyone touching them. ‘Mrs Lynch’s cat is twenty-two,’ she told me. ‘It lost its hearing after a V2 landed in their back garden, and when her little boy went to pick it up, it tore his eye out. You never know where you are with a cat.’

Bill had once tried to help out a neighbour by mercy-killing their sick rabbit. He elected to drown it in a bucket of water, which only made it angry, so he repeatedly hit it on the back of the head with a hammer. It still managed to get away, and lived for several months in a deep hole it had dug under the garden fence, where, now brain-damaged, it nursed a psychotic grudge, occasionally popping up to snap at anyone who went near it.

The feud between Mrs Fowler and my mother escalated after the incident regarding Sandy, Mrs Fowler’s beloved ginger tom, a surly yellow-eyed creature with a torn ear. When my grandmother decided to drag William to Kent for a fortnight, my mother agreed to take care of the cat,
and
brought it over to the house under her jumper. The moment it reached the safety of the sitting room it shot up the chimney, lodged itself behind the damper and remained there for four days.

Kneeling on all fours, Kath waved a mackerel under the flue, but nothing could be done to lure it down. Then, late one night, it dropped as suddenly as it had gone up and made a mad dash for the open yard door, hurling itself up and over the garden fence like a steeplechaser.

Kath, however, was in hot pursuit. Westerdale Road ended at an unfenced railway embankment covered in white trumpet vines, where anyone could follow the path to cross the railway line to the next street. I ran after my mother, she ran after the cat and the cat ran up the line, darting back and forth across the third rail. Kath was so scared of her mother-in-law by this point that she was prepared to risk electrocution in order to save face. I hopped about unhelpfully shouting, ‘I think there’s a train coming!’ while she, oblivious, threw herself at the demented feline.

It was no good. The cat kept a careful distance between itself and its would-be captors. After we had waited on the embankment for several hours, the wretched creature emerged from a bush and walked down into our arms. It seemed strangely docile now, and allowed Kath to carry it home.

When Mrs Fowler returned from Kent, she opened her front door and made a huge fuss of Sandy, only to recoil immediately. ‘This isn’t our cat,’ she exclaimed. ‘Sandy has a torn left ear. And it’s a boy.’

I had never heard of anyone who could tell the sex of a cat. My mother checked the ear and, mortified, confirmed its untorn state. There followed recriminations, tears, threats, and dismissal from the house. My father adopted a sullen, accusatory silence for three weeks. As if
to
punish all cats, he took out his bad mood on Wobbles, blowing cigarette smoke in its face and tripping it over whenever he thought no one was looking.

After being shouted at by both mother-in-law and husband, Kath stood her ground and did not cry or apologize. She started, in her own small way, to fight back. My father did not tip over any more meal-laden tables.

He took things to a more troublesome level.

9

Horror Story

MY FATHER HAD
a problem with Christmas. Although he appears in old photographs to possess a whippy, muscular frame, he was actually a frail man, and usually managed to cause some kind of drama just before the festivities were due to begin. One Christmas Eve he drunkenly crashed his motorbike and sidecar, overturning it on to his chest, and spent the holiday in intensive care. The following year he fell through a cracked coal-hole lid and broke his leg. The year after that, he sat in the darkened front room that was saved for best (he hardly ever put the lights on) and ate an entire box of ‘Eat Me’ dates that he’d bought cheap in the market, the ones that came on a cream-coloured plastic branch, not realizing that they were green and furry with mildew. That Christmas, instead of having his bones reset, he had his stomach pumped.

But there was one magical moment in a string of awful Christmases.

After glass-blowing, Bill had moved into a scientific lab where he designed and built vitreous instruments. He was regarded as brilliant at his job, and once constructed
a
human brain in glass just to show off his skills. When the company moved to Toronto he decided not to go with them, presumably because his mother would disapprove of the move. It broke his heart to watch his colleagues leave without him, and while he was looking for a new job, the family tightened its collective belt still further. But on that freezing, penniless Christmas night, I awoke to find the old leather armchair at the end of my bed covered in twinkling red and yellow lights my father had made, which were threaded around a dozen small boxes containing what seemed at the time to be the best train set in the world. How had he managed to pay for it? There was even a box of miniature coal pieces for the tender, to which I could add rubberized soot from Mr Purbrick’s shop.

Bill and Grandfather William spent the whole of Christmas Day and Boxing Day crawling around on the floor getting electric shocks. They finally decided on a suitable layout for the set, and permanently mounted it on framed hardboard that was unfortunately too big to go out of the sitting-room door, so it had to be sawn in half and put on hinges, during which Bill accidentally sawed through the coffee table. When the grown-ups grew bored with the technicalities of point-switching and went in search of brown ale, I finally got to enjoy the fun of being intermittently electrocuted.

A truce had been called, but it did not last long. My mother withdrew her money from the Christmas savings club and treated herself to a dress, flared and flowered – the only one that ever turned up in family photographs. It made her look like part of the modern world and therefore slightly weird, like a blonde Alma Cogan or a prettier Fanny Cradock.

My father went nuts. He told her she looked like a cheap tart, and that she was trying to encourage the men of the neighbourhood, only two of whom were
ever
visible during the day: octogenarian Mr Hills and the bloke with Down’s Syndrome who sat on his front step with his trousers pulled up high, looking like a big smiling baby. Dad never allowed Kath to wear any sort of make-up. There were only two items in her side of the bedroom cupboard (there being no bathroom). One was a Pifco hair-dryer in cream Bakelite that weighed the same as a leg of lamb, and was kept in its original red satin-lined box like a school trophy. The other was a scary-looking contraption with a pink rubber bulb and red tubing attached. There was an indecent intimacy about this device, but I could not begin to imagine what it might be for, other than watering plants.

The dress brought up the question of money, and money brought up unemployment, and the vexing embers of low self-esteem began to glow bright. Bill’s mother fanned the flame with her own sly whispers, and suddenly everything ignited. One night I awoke to crashes, screams, the sound of someone being pushed or falling. I looked through the banisters but the kitchen door was shut, so I crept downstairs and quietly pushed it open.

My mother was sitting on the floor, wedged into a corner, and my father was standing before her, flexing his right fist. There was broken glass and china everywhere. Kath’s mother’s ceramic statue of a lady in a green lace dress had lost its nose. At my appearance, the rage faded from Bill’s eyes and Kath climbed awkwardly to her feet. She had been punched and slapped, but I could see that she was not scared. She simply seemed emotionless, quiet and determined.

Kath pulled on her cardigan in stoic silence and went out into the rain, and around the corner to the local police station. A portly constable came back with her and spoke quietly to my father. The copper could not have been satisfied with Bill’s response, though, for he remained
outside
in the front garden all night, his cape wrapped against the downpour, keeping watch on the house. To be on the safe side, Kath slept with a carving knife under the bed.

In the morning, having satisfied himself that the house was at peace, the policeman quietly went away before the neighbours could spot him; it was what policemen still did in the sixties. A few days later, he came back to check on the inhabitants of Number 35 again and had a quiet word with Kath, advising her that perhaps she might like to rethink her decision to remain with her husband.