This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (6 page)

When Lily won the pools in 1957, it wasn’t enough to start a new life. I think she won about £90, which was a significant amount in the 1950s – the equivalent of two or three months’ wages for a male manual worker. She used it to make down-payments on lots of things: a three-piece suite, a sideboard, a kitchen table, a Spanish guitar for me and a red and grey Dansette record-player for Linda. Inevitably, she couldn’t keep up the HP payments, no matter how hard she worked. One by one, her acquisitions were seized or had to be returned, except for the guitar and the Dansette.

For Linda and me, that record-player brought a sense of joy that is difficult to articulate. We placed it in the middle of our room and spent ages just looking at it, admiring its sleek lines and absorbing the glorious smell of new plastic and rubber. While we were yet to acquire any up-to-date records, we could at long last listen to the old 78s, although I worried that the huge shellac discs would damage the delicate precision of the turntable. My favourites were the records by Arthur Tracy, ‘The Street Singer’, and his rendition of Frances Langford’s 1937 hit ‘Was it Tears that Fell or was it Rain?’

I’ve never heard that record played on anything other than the Dansette in our damp room in Southam Street well over fifty years ago, yet I remember every melancholy word.

By the time she was in her early thirties, Lily seemed to be degenerating from a good-looking, petite young woman into a dowdy, prematurely middle-aged charlady. Her fresh, Liverpool-Irish prettiness was fading, the glamorous sheer stockings and bright red lipstick made fewer and fewer appearances and the hand-me-down fashionable clothes she acquired from various employers, or scavenged from the market on the Lane, remained hidden beneath the wraparound floral overall she’d once used only for work but now rarely took off. Her beautiful chestnut hair stayed bunched under her turban. Wounded by neglect and battle-weary, she began to put on weight as a result of the drugs she had to take for her heart condition, her legs became mapped with varicose veins and she developed bunions on her feet.

She was told to give up her cleaning jobs and rest. Any
exercise or activity that raised the heart rate, such as the nightly battles when Steve finally wandered home, made the symptoms worse. But Lily could not afford to stop working. When her increasingly frequent stays in hospital forced her to do so, we would be plunged deeper into poverty and debt and she had no choice but to work even harder when she came out.

When I was seven and Linda was ten, Lily was taken into hospital again just before Christmas. As usual, she’d been paying her few shillings into the Christmas club for a hamper, which was stashed in the pantry. She had also already bought and wrapped a
Hotspur
annual for me and a
Bunty
annual for Linda, placing them with boxes of sweets in two pillowcases for us to delve into on Christmas morning. I’m sure Linda must have abandoned any belief in Santa Claus by then. If I’d begun to doubt his existence, my suspicions were confirmed that year.

Steve went off on the afternoon of Christmas Eve and never came home. We were used to fending for ourselves but we’d never been on our own at Christmas before. We found our pillowcases and ate the sweets for breakfast while reading our annuals and waiting for Steve to return and cook our Christmas dinner.

When he failed to materialize Linda decided to take control. She put the chicken from the hamper in the oven, checking the instructions on the plastic wrapping carefully to make sure she cooked it for the recommended time. Lily had left a pile of shilling pieces to be fed into the meter so that there would be enough gas to cook the dinner. Unfortunately, the instructions said nothing about removing the wrapping, and while Linda prepared the potatoes and cabbage, the acrid smell of burning plastic filled the kitchen and eventually drifted into Southam
Street from the sash windows we’d raised to try to clear the air.

Alerted by the stench, Brenda, the young Irishwoman who lived with her husband and two young children on the next landing, tried to rescue the chicken but was forced to concede defeat. She showed us how the plastic had melted into the flesh of the chicken and explained that we wouldn’t be able to eat it now. She asked where Steve was. Ashamed to admit he had abandoned us, we made an excuse for him and said he’d be back later.

We ate the vegetables and some more of our Christmas sweets before setting off on the long walk to Paddington General Hospital for visiting time. Steve was waiting for us outside the ward. His breath reeked of beer and cigars as he bent down to speak to us in confidence. ‘Don’t tell Mum that I didn’t come home. Tell her we had a nice dinner together. If you say anything else it will upset her and she’ll have a heart attack and die.’ Hospital visiting times were very restricted then, even on Christmas Day, so we only had to keep up the pretence for half an hour.

When we left the hospital, Linda and I walked home while Steve headed off in the other direction. He didn’t return that night or on Boxing Day. He must have come back very late on 27 December, while we were asleep, because he was there the next morning. Lily was due to be discharged the following day and he reminded us again of the reason why we must keep our little Christmas secret. I doubt Lily ever knew that we’d spent Christmas alone that year.

The stay in hospital did nothing to halt her decline. She picked up the cleaning jobs again just a few weeks after leaving hospital, contrary to doctor’s orders. During school holidays
she had to take us with her. We were quite happy to explore this alternative universe. Instead of individual gardens, the residents of the grand houses in Lansdowne Crescent, off Ladbroke Grove, where she charred for Mrs Dehn, had exclusive access to a private park at the rear, and we were allowed to play there. But it was Mrs McLean’s, the refined boarding house off Church Street, that provided Lily’s most regular employment. She had started there when Linda was at primary school and I was still at Wornington Road. On Lily’s days at Mrs McLean’s Linda and I would catch the 52 bus with her. We got off just before it turned into Kensington High Street, where she’d give us our instructions before sending us off to play in Kensington Gardens: ‘Do not talk to strangers, stay together and shelter in the museums if it rains.’

Invariably she would spot a trace of dirt somewhere on my face (never on Linda’s) and a huge handkerchief would be produced, spat on and rubbed vigorously at the offending stain, which no doubt added more bacteria than it removed.

We would carry sandwiches in the waxed paper wrapping from a Sunblest loaf and a few coppers for sweets. We had to report back to Mrs McLean’s at 2.30pm, just before Lily finished at 3pm. We spent so much time in Kensington Gardens that we felt almost proprietorial. There was an invisible border with Hyde Park which we rarely crossed, although the two parks merged seamlessly. The little slope near the Church Street entrance seemed very steep to me at that age and our first ritual of the day was to announce our arrival by rolling down it. We loved the bandstand, from which we’d survey our territory, the statue of Peter Pan, the Round Pond, the
Orangery and the museum in Kensington Palace that contained a model of London at the time of the Great Fire. You could flick a switch and the scene would light up to replicate the spread of the fire from its source in Pudding Lane across the city. This effect was achieved by the simple use of tiny light bulbs, but it was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen – and I insisted on seeing it on every single visit.

Unlike the parks in Notting Hill – the Little Rec, the Big Rec and St Marks, where there were fights and thefts and tension – this was safe territory, and the many summer hours we spent in Kensington Gardens and Exhibition Road, away from the crumbling squalor of Southam Street, were a highlight of our childhood.

Linda, ever the mini-mum, always knew where the action was. There were regular Punch and Judy shows and, on occasion, films would be projected from a huge lorry with a screen at the back. This truck sometimes visited our area on a tour of ‘play streets’. We’d watch the film sitting cross-legged on the dirty road. Here there would be much pushing and shoving in the battle for the prime spots at the front. The audience in Kensington Gardens was much gentler.

Whether it was raining or not, we would head off past the Albert Memorial to the museums in Exhibition Road. We went so often that we could have been employed as tour guides at the Science Museum, the Geological Museum and the V&A. But our favourite was the Natural History Museum, and the best exhibit of all was the blue whale that dominated the huge hall in which it was suspended. We adored that whale. Even at that age we worried about it being dead and on display rather than alive and swimming around in the sea. Lily told us we were all
put on this Earth for a purpose and that the blue whale’s was obviously to educate and inspire.

The whale would have admired Lily. Like the captain of a ship, ever alert to the dangers that surrounded us, she steered us through perilous seas. We might have been left alone but we were never neglected. She laid down few rules but we knew what was expected of us: to be polite and courteous and to help those less fortunate than ourselves. Lily swelled with pride when shopkeepers remarked on how well-mannered we were, and how we always remembered to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.

In Southam Street, we were encouraged to run errands for elderly neighbours who lived alone, like Mrs Sudbury. Linda would do her shopping, while I carried her milk up from the doorstep. We were under strict instructions to accept nothing in return. When Linda once admitted that she’d been given a few pennies for helping with some task or other, she was marched off by Lily to take the money back.

In effect, Lily was a single parent. She compensated for Steve’s lack of interest in us in the same way that she worked to make up the money that went to the bookies. Her belief in God, while absolute, was informal and unevangelical. She told us that He was everywhere but seemed to have greater faith in astrology and spiritualism than in the established Church. Every year she’d buy
Old Moore’s Almanack
– a stubby little tome published on cheap paper – for a few pence. When she could afford it, a monthly magazine called
Prediction
would appear which she would pore over for hours, convinced of its integrity. Every morning, in the precious interval between getting us off to school and going out to work, she’d open her
Daily Sketch
at the horoscope page and sit with her varicosed
legs stretched out in front of her, resting on a kitchen chair. While enjoying a cup of strong tea, a slice of toast and her first cigarette of the day, she would study the forecasts made for the entire family’s star signs with the same intensity that Steve applied to picking winners (or more often losers) from the racing pages when he rose from his slumber later.

Lily’s determination to stay with Steve was in part dictated by the times in which she lived. When couples got married they stayed together, come what may. Children born outside wedlock were stigmatized as ‘illegitimate’, single women were referred to as spinsters and a failed marriage was unusual and invariably deemed to be the fault of the wife. Divorce was rare outside the upper classes and ‘living together’ was practically unheard of beyond bohemian circles of artists and poets. Poor Lily: every woman close to her had married well – not in the material sense, but in the sense that their husbands were good men. Her sisters were happily married and so were most of the people we knew locally, which can only have increased Lily’s feelings of isolation and sharpened her suffering.

Linda and I were certainly aware from an early age that our family was a poor example of what families were supposed to be. The father of Linda’s lifelong friend Marilyn Hughes worshipped his wife in the most flamboyant, demonstrative way and the parents of my school pal Tony Cox were the most perfectly suited couple imaginable.

I met Tony when I moved up from Wornington Road Infants’ School to Bevington Primary. He was tall and skinny with hair so blond it was almost white. With his blue eyes and fair skin, he looked positively Scandinavian. His sister, Carole, who was in Linda’s year at Bevington, had similar colouring.
They took after their mother’s side of the family. Their younger brother, by contrast, had inherited the dark, Mediterranean appearance of their father, Albert.

There are no surrogate fathers in this story. The lack of any meaningful relationship with Steve did not spur me to seek an alternative father figure. In fact it had the opposite effect: it made me mistrustful of men in general and uncomfortable in their presence. I much preferred being with women. But if I had been inclined to fantasize about the ideal father, as Linda was (she idolized her teacher at Bevington, Mr Freeman, and often voiced her wish that he was our dad), Albert Cox would have been my choice.