That's Another Story: The Autobiography (2 page)

At the far end of Smethwick’s Bishopton Road, about two hundred yards down, was Lightwoods Park, right on the border of Bearwood, which is part of the Black Country around Birmingham. As a child I was forbidden to go to the park unaccompanied because of ‘strange men’, the park keeper himself being quite possibly one of the strangest. Lightwoods Park, which covered about ten acres, had a bandstand with a large, domed roof, kept aloft by several spindly-looking, wrought-iron pillars, whose top-heavy nature sent my brother Tommy into a panic when he was small, with tearful claims that it was ‘Too big up there’. There were a set of swings, a couple of roundabouts, a see-saw and a defunct witch’s hat. This last was a conical roundabout in the shape of a witch’s hat, the top of which was balanced on top of a tall pole and, because of this shape, it not only went round but veered crazily up and down as well as from side to side. Next to this play area was the pond, about an acre of water, upon which people sailed their model boats and suchlike, whilst in hot weather it became a muddy soup of children and dogs, paddling and swimming. At the edge of the park stood (and still stands) Lightwoods House, built in 1791 for Jonathan Grundy, a Leicestershire maltster. It was eventually donated to Birmingham City Council in a philanthropic act by Alexander Macomb Chance, one of the Chance glass-making family of Spon Lane, Smethwick. In my day it had been downgraded to a caf’ where teas, ices and suchlike could be bought.

Never were my mother’s warnings to keep out of the park fiercer than during the summer holidays when the annual funfair came for a week. I found the smell of hot dogs, diesel and candyfloss, the garish colours, the loud pop music, half drowned out by the noise of generators, totally alluring, and I loved rides like the dodgems and the bumping cars where swarthy, muscle-bound young men, in dirty jeans and covered in tattoos, would take your money and jump on the back of your car, or better still on the waltzers, where the more you screamed the faster they would whip your car around. The fairground was always full of groups of adolescent girls careering drunkenly about in a whirl of light-headed hysteria and something closely akin to post-coital relief. According to my mother, ‘The fair attracted the wrong sort and no decent girl would be interested in boys like these; they were low types from God knows where,’ and were to be kept away from. Needless to say I went every year, mostly avoiding being found out. The fairground boys - the waltzer boy in particular, so poignantly described in Victoria Wood’s song ‘I Want to be Fourteen Again’, ‘The coloured lights reflected in the Brylcreem in his hair’ - played leading roles in an early fantasy of mine about living in a caravan, working on a stall involving goldfish and smelling of petrol.

Our end of the street formed the junction with Long Hyde Road. Only about a hundred metres long, it was short and there were rarely more than two or three cars parked in it at a time, one of them being my father’s, when it was not parked in the garage at the back. Dad always owned a car except for when he first started his business, when he pushed around from job to job a wooden handcart laden with ladders and tools. On the side it had THOS. WALTERS Ltd, builders and decorators and the address, painted by a signwriter. This, however, was before I was born. The first car I remember was in fact a small, bright-yellow van, which my father referred to as Sally.

Sally had no side windows at the back, just two little square ones, one in each of the back doors, and so her rear end consisted of a fairly dark space that was always full of tools, paint, bits of wood and the odd paint-spattered rag: the general requisites and detritus of my father’s work life. Yet if we went out in Sally as a family, she would be transformed; Dad would shift everything out of the back and sling in an old bus seat for my brothers and me to sit on. I can see it now and not only see it but feel it. It had a silky, soft pile if you ran your hand one way across it, although this became quite uncomfortably rough and prickly if you had the misfortune to run it the other way. It had an abstract, jazzy, brown and green pattern against a dull, beige background and the whole thing was edged in creased brown leather. This bit of ‘necessity being the mother of invention’ thinking on my father’s part worked really well unless we had to stop suddenly for any reason, such as at a traffic light or a pelican crossing or when arriving home again. The seat, having no support at the back of it, would abruptly tip over backwards, sending all of us sprawling into a chaotic backward roll. So any journey would mainly be spent scrambling about in the semi-darkness, getting the seat upright again just in time for the three of us with a mighty, united scream of ‘Daaaaaaaad!’ to be sent flying once more. In fact every journey ended like this as we pulled up outside the house, accompanied by my grandmother’s declaration, if she was with us, of ‘We’ve landed!’

Sally was eventually replaced by a far superior and very ‘modern’ Ford Esquire estate. It was a sedate grey colour and its main advantage was that the estate bit at the back served as extra passenger space for small persons when the car was at capacity. Of course this was long before seatbelt laws and would be illegal today. The small person was inevitably me and it meant that not only could I travel staring out of the back window at the car behind, possibly making faces or breathing on the glass and writing fascinating back-to-front messages, like ‘ylimaf neila na yb detcudba gnieb ma I !!pleH’ for the driver behind to ignore, but I could also avoid being poked or teased by my brothers.

The other advantage of this new acquisition was that it soon became clear that Dermot Boyle, the boy who lived opposite, with whom I played on a regular basis, was envious. As may be obvious from the name, the Boyles were an Irish family. Mr Boyle was a builder’s labourer who came from Kerry and, as my dad would say, liked a drink. He had very red, permanently wet lips that appeared to work independently of the rest of his face and, indeed, independently of anything that he might happen to be saying. They flopped around clumsily, an impediment to the words that came pouring through them in unintelligible strings. These were buoyed up on clouds of alcoholic breath and always accompanied by blizzards of spit. The whole thing was pretty hard to avoid for, once buttonholed, Mr Boyle would always address a person no more than three inches from their face, due to his poor eyesight. He was severely short-sighted, which meant he was forced to wear glasses with lenses so thick that it was like looking down a couple of telescopes the wrong way, his eyes becoming tiny, blue, distant dots. We often stood giggling at the upstairs window, behind the nets, watching Pat Boyle wobble up the street on his pushbike and stand swaying for a good ten minutes, trying to get his key in the front door lock, his face jammed right up against it. Then, eventually, the door would be opened by the long-suffering Mrs Boyle and Pat, with key still in hand poised to slip it into the lock, would go lurching forward like a pantomime drunk, Mrs B berating him as he stumbled in. The irony of the whole Boyle saga was that Mrs Boyle, who never took a drink in her life, died of liver cancer and Mr Boyle, who was rarely sober as far as I know, died of natural causes.

I am ashamed to say that I exploited Dermot’s envy of our car to the maximum and with relish. If he happened to be out playing on the street by himself, and the car was appropriately parked, I would sit provocatively on the front bumper, caressing its shiny chrome with one hand, the other stretched backwards across the bonnet, occasionally fingering the Ford insignia, one leg crossed over the other, swinging my foot nonchalantly back and forth, chatting inanely on whilst secretly clocking Dermot’s reaction. He would sit on the kerb by the side of the road, usually eating a piece of his mother’s home-made cake, squirming and covering his eyes. At last he would run off, mid-conversation, down the entry that led round to the back of his house, shouting ‘Stop it!’ and spraying cake crumbs, as he went.

A couple of years later we went up several rungs on the status-symbol ladder of car ownership, acquiring a two-tone Vauxhall Victor estate, in green and cream. I couldn’t wait to torment Dermot with it. In fact my father had hardly got out of the front seat after bringing it home than I was draped across its warm bonnet, in true motor-show fashion, while the hapless Dermot, caught innocently chalking on the pavement opposite, tried not to look, his bottom lip thrust out and his face turning cherry red in an attempt to control his rage. My father never ever told me off, but that day, on his way into the house, he wheeled round when he realised what was going on and shouted, ‘Wharaya doin’? Gerroff, ya daft cat, you’ll scratch the paint-work! ’ Whereupon, out of the blue, like a missive from the gods, a bird shat on the bonnet right next to me, splattering the fingers of my left hand. ‘Now, look! Come on, gerroff!’

I jumped down and ran into the house, feeling vaguely ashamed of the excrement as if it were my own, while Dad whipped out an old handkerchief from his pocket and began to lovingly wipe the bonnet clean. I guess Dermot and I were even stevens after that and years later, on a visit home, I remember asking my mother to whom the flash car belonged that was parked opposite. I think it was an immaculately kept Cortina but can’t be sure of the make, only that it was extremely shiny, with a bigger aerial than most and enough headlamps for several cars. ‘Oh, Dermot is home to stay.’ And I felt my own little dart of envy; I wasn’t to pass my driving test until I was thirty-seven.

It was here on Long Hyde Road, which ran along the side of our house, that during daylight hours and sometimes later, weather and school permitting, I would spend my time playing with any neighbourhood children who happened to be around. My first crush developed here when I was about five. Or, perhaps more accurately, I experienced my first feelings of loss. I’d been playing regularly with a boy called Robert, who had pale blond hair and lived on the far corner of Long Hyde Road. Suddenly he was going away; the family were moving house. He stood there, I can see him now, eating a piece of bread and butter, or a piece as we called it, whilst kicking the bottom of the garden wall opposite as he broke the news. I remember him not looking at me as he spoke and then running off, leaving four little crescent-shaped crusts on the top of the wall. Somehow it was the sight of those crusts that sparked off the grief of this separation. I picked one up and ate it, but couldn’t continue to eat the others as the damp edges where his lips and teeth had touched it brought a lump to my throat. I kept the other three pieces in one of my father’s old Senior Service cigarette packets until they dried out and went a bluish-green colour. I don’t remember much else about this boy’s family, except the reporting some years later of the death of Robert’s older brother whom I never really knew. He was killed in a climbing accident on Snowdon. And again the image of the small blond head with the blurred face, the foot kicking against the wall and the sweet taste of those damp crusts, slid into my head like a frame of film, as it has continued to do on the odd occasion ever since.

Long Hyde Road was almost permanently marked out with white chalk for rounders or hopscotch, and a couple of times the whole length of the pavement, a good hundred yards, was marked out into four wobbly lanes for an athletics tournament organised by my brothers. Tommy and Kevin, at least in my eyes, were the cocks of the neighbourhood, heroes who made other boys look pitiably inadequate. To say I was proud of them could not be more of an understatement. It was unimaginable to me that anyone could possibly be cleverer or stronger or wittier or braver. They were the very best at everything and I as their little sister basked not only in their glory but also in their protection. They were knights in shining armour. This is best illustrated in an incident that occurred when I was about seven.

There was a boy in the next street who, whenever I walked past his house, would leap out and attack me with his big, black-and-chrome plastic space gun. He would hold me there for what seemed like hours but was probably about twenty minutes or so, his great, long gun pinning my chest to the wall while my head and shoulders were stuck uncomfortably in the privet hedge above. On some occasions he was accompanied by Benji, the family boxer dog, which he would whip up into a frenzy so that it would leap about, whites of eyes flashing and long, jellied globules of saliva stretching and swinging from its jaws. He would then pat my shoulders so that the thing would jump up at me, its pink shiny willy out and fully ready for action and then, with an onslaught of slimy licks and fetid, wheezy breaths, it would attempt to mount me. It was rape by proxy. Needless to say I would walk miles out of my way to avoid this awful boy and his oversexed dog but one day, mistakenly thinking he was on holiday and that it was safe, I got caught again. It was a particularly lengthy session and, arriving home upset, I blurted out to my older brother Tommy what had happened. Within minutes, so legend would have it, he went round to the child’s house and not only soundly thrashed him but did so in front of his astonished parents. The boy never came near me again.

Our house was north-facing and we didn’t get central heating until 1963. Climbing the stairs to go to bed at night was often likened to scaling the north face of the Eiger, and ice on the inside of the bedroom windows was usual throughout the winter. On the coldest nights my parents would simply pile the beds with coats and the resulting weight would make turning over in bed a feat of strength that just wasn’t worth the effort. This, of course, meant that the seat nearest the fire in the kitchen was fiercely fought over by the three of us and, once won, it would be given up only for the direst of emergencies. I remember my brother Tommy managing to stay put for a record-breaking length of time, eventually jumping up with a howl of expletives to find that his wellington boot had melted with the heat and had welded itself on to his leg. He still bears the scars.

The house was on three storeys and there were three doors to get into it: the front door, which was rarely ever used, the middle door and the back door. The front door opened on to an oddly shaped hallway, one wall of which was almost all window. This was because the previous owner had an electrical shop and had built the hall on to display his radios. There were two doors off it, one leading into the front room, which was my father’s office. It smelt of tobacco and ink and him, and in the corner was his big roll-top desk, from which he ran his building and decorating business. It also contained the piano, upon which he could vamp anything by ear, and upon which I wrote hundreds of songs, all sounding very similar and which I sang at the top of my voice, over and over again, with my foot hard down on the loud pedal, hoping distantly that someone would say, ‘My God, that’s brilliant!’ instead of ‘For Christ’s sake, shut up! Your voice is so piercing!’ or my mother’s warning anthem of ‘Shut up or I’ll crucify you!’ which tended to persuade me to stop.