Nobbut a Lad

by Alan Titchmarsh

  A tiny shed, no bigger than a sentry box, stood in one corner of the plot, leaning downhill, and in it were Grandad’s tools, all stacked in a corner – a rake with a wobbly head, several types of hoe with rusty blades, a spade and a fork and a heavy pair of shears with wooden handles. There were other tools, too, that I never saw him use, and a rusty cobbler’s last – I thought it was probably there in case he needed to make a running repair to the black boots he always wore, but most often it was used to prop open the peeling door that had a habit of closing of its own accord and trapping your fingers when you weren’t looking.

  There were spilled seeds on the dusty floor – biscuit-brown beans and the blue-grey beads of cabbages. The granules of Growmore that leaked from the dampened lower corner of a paper sack leaning in the opposite corner filled the air with their acrid tang. He scattered it between the cabbages and cauliflowers every now and again, having decanted it into an old galvanised bucket. With his black trilby pushed back on his head and his pipeful of Condor sticking out from under his walrus moustache, he’d become the personification of the hymn, and I’d hum to myself as I watched him scattering the feed among his crops – ‘We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land.’ It didn’t matter that it was Growmore, not seeds, that he was scattering; the sentiments were still appropriate, and thanks to Grandad’s almighty hand, as well as God’s, we never seemed to be short of vegetables in our kitchen.

  A long row of rhubarb ran alongside the blackberries, and there were rows and rows of savoy cabbages whose corrugated leaves of rubbery leather were dappled with soot. The soot was mixed with water in an old washing copper sunk into the ground by the rhubarb row and sprayed on to the cabbages, cauliflowers and Brussels sprouts with a long brass syringe to deter caterpillars. It had to be scrubbed off before the crops were in any way edible, but it did keep off the caterpillars. It probably helped to build up our antibodies into the bargain.

  If you ever complained to Grandad about the blackened state of his greens, he’d shake his head and say, ‘Tha’ll eat more than a peck a muck afore tha dees.’

  On sunny Saturday afternoons I’d be wheeled down to the allotment in my pram or my pushchair, and from under the sunshade I could squint at Grandad and my dad as they turned over the soil together. In later years I’d sit on the grey plank bench by the shed, tucking into an egg sandwich – they were always egg – and a glass of pop while they did the heavy work.

  Grandad was always the boss; Dad the helpful, if reluctantly press-ganged, son-in-law.

  ‘When tha gets to’t’end o’t’row, will tha move t’line?’

  ‘Are we doin’ another row, then?’ my dad would ask wearily.

  ‘Aye. Then we’ll go to’t’club for a pint.’

  The pint of Tetley’s in the Liberal Club would be the carrot, and while I sat outside on the wall, drinking a glass of orange squash and eating a custard cream, the two men would risk a quick game of dominoes before saying goodbye and making their separate ways home.

  Dad never liked gardening, but home-grown vegetables saved a few bob. He took over the allotment after Grandad died, planting cabbages and showing me how to ‘puddle them in’, and earthing up long rows of potatoes. But his heart wasn’t in it and he finally gave it up, confining his attempts at vegetable gardening to a few desultory rows of blue-green Brussels sprouts in the back garden. There was a smile on his face when even that patch was put down to grass and Mum planted a hydrangea instead.

  We lived, for the first year of my life – the bit I can’t remember – with my paternal grandmother, Florrie Titchmarsh, at 9 Dean Street, a tiny two-up, two-down terraced house with an attic. It was a tricky time. My father’s mother was not an easy woman to get on with – bird-like and hard to please – a state of affairs not improved by the fact that my father’s spinster sister, Auntie Alice, frequently took to her bed with some ailment or other, which was known within the family as ‘idleitis’. For years I assumed this was a legitimate complaint. During the time when Mum and Dad lived with the in-laws, Auntie Alice was billeted with the lady she used to clean for – Mrs Heap – up the posh end of town. She would come round to Dean Street for meals, and to offer the benefit of her advice, which was usually based on hearsay or the homespun wisdom of her friend Phyllis Lupton rather than personal experience. Auntie Alice hadn’t had much of that.

  Grandma Titch and Auntie Alice

  It was a sort of double act – Grandma Titch and Auntie Alice – a bit like bacon and eggs, accident and emergency, or Morecambe and Wise. Except that they weren’t that funny. Well, not as reliably, though they did have their moments. If you’d have asked me as a child, I’d have said that they hated one another, though I suppose they had the same relationship as any mother and daughter living together – contempt born of familiarity.

  When I was born, Auntie Alice would have been forty and Grandma sixty-two. They were still living together when Grandma died at the age of ninety, and still arguing.

  To be fair to Grandma Titch, Auntie Alice must have been a bit of a pain. While Grandma worked like a Trojan from dawn till dusk, Auntie Alice would find any possible excuse to take to her bed with her nerves or ‘one of my heads’.

  Sometimes I’d have to take her up a cup of tea during one of her confinements.

  ‘Take this up to your Auntie Alice, will you?’ Grandma would ask. ‘I’ve lost patience.’

  I’d tap gingerly on the back bedroom door. There would be no reply to the first knock. Ever. Then I’d tap again, a little bit louder. That was the cue for a muffled groan. At the third knock, a weak ‘Come in’ would issue from beneath the blankets and I’d go into the darkened, airless room with the cup of strong, sugary tea, to be engulfed by the sweet-and-sour smell of spinster invalidity.

  Auntie Alice’s room always smelled like this. The window was never open, and the atmosphere was one that owed its complexity to a mixture of Germolene and stale talcum powder, boxes of Milk Tray and bedsocks.

  ‘How are you?’ I’d venture, trying not to breathe too deeply.

  ‘Not very well, luv,’ would come, muffled, from somewhere beneath the quilted floral eiderdown. It was too dark for me to be able to make out more than the vague form of a portly supine body.

  As a child trained to be jolly even in times of discomfort (often to the irritation of others), I could never understand how Auntie Alice could be so ungrateful to someone – anyone – who’d climbed the stairs to bring her a cup of tea.

  I’d try to be optimistic. ‘Are you any better than yesterday?’

  ‘Not really, no. Your auntie Alice is a very poorly lady.’

  ‘Oh.’ I didn’t feel there was much of an answer to that.

  The room was tiny. Just a single bed along one wall, a wardrobe and a dressing table with a chair. The wallpaper was one of faded flowers. A bit like Auntie Alice. There was barely room to walk around, and the only thing that would catch your eye would be the gleaming rim of the chamber pot underneath the bed.

  ‘Bye, then.’ I prayed that I’d get out of the door before the dreaded request was made. I usually prayed in vain.

  Auntie Alice raised her head from the pillow a fraction of an inch, her curly hair encased in a thick net, designed to keep it in place in case she met anybody important the following day. ‘Could you empty the article?’

  My heart sank. ‘Righto.’

  I felt under the bed for the chamber pot and carried it carefully at arm’s length out of the door and downstairs to the backyard, trying not to look at the contents. Grandma and Auntie Alice only had an outside lavatory, and if you were taken short in the middle of the night, you had to resort to the portable version.

  Right up to her death in the 1970s Grandma never had an inside lavatory or a bathroom. Once a week the galvanised tin bath would be lifted from its nail in the coalhouse at the end of the backyard and set up in front of the fire. Hot water from the gas geyser in the kitchen would be ferried to it in a large saucepan, and Grandma
would wash herself all over with a flannel and a bar of Fairy soap. Once our own bath was installed when we moved to Nelson Road, she’d visit us once a week to conduct her ablutions in more savoury surroundings, and the tin bath was left to gather coal dust in the shed.

  Occasionally I would stay the night with Grandma when Mum and Dad were going out and couldn’t get a babysitter. I’d sleep on a camp bed rigged up in a corner of her room, and if I happened to be awake in the middle of the night, I would hear her relieving herself into the potty by the side of the bed. I pretended to be asleep while she rearranged her nightie and pushed ‘the article’, as both she and her daughter always called it, back under her bed. Sometimes I could hear Auntie Alice snoring in the back bedroom next door.

  Auntie Alice had always been a bit fragile. My mum blamed it on something called the Oxford Movement – a religious body active in her youth who were bent on moral rearmament. Rather than gaining anything from her involvement, it seemed that Auntie Alice’s armoury had been sadly depleted. She spent the rest of her life in bits.

  But she was a good soul. She saved threepence a week for me and my sister and our two cousins all her life, and gave us the proceeds twice a year. That was undeniably useful – a lump sum, rather than a few pennies that would soon disappear on six ha’penny chews or a lucky bag. With several shillings I could buy seeds. Or Airfix kits. Or bits for my bike.

  Grandma herself was besotted by bingo, especially on her annual week’s holiday in Morecambe. She seemed exceptionally lucky, and would usually come back with an extra bag filled with her prizes. They were, without exception, things that no one could get excited about – a tartan umbrella made of cotton (not waterproof), a watch with luminous numbers but not luminous hands, an assortment of tin trays and the two basic prizes that always went down well in Morecambe – pac-a-macs and plastic rainhoods. At the time of her death Grandma had enough rainhoods in her sideboard to cover the heads of every pensioner in Ilkley. The more interesting of these prizes (and that wasn’t saying much) often found their way underneath our Christmas tree. My mother was not impressed.

  Auntie Alice was also a bingo fan and seldom missed a whist drive or a beetle drive, always in the company of Phyllis Lupton. They made a curious pair: Auntie Alice, plump and cylindrical in a tight floral-patterned crimplene dress and cardy, and over them a camel coat with a belt round the middle that made her look like a parcel. Phyllis, by then in her sixties, her face running W. H. Auden a close second in the wrinkle stakes, would be heavily powdered, rouged and lipsticked, and her body draped in a fake leopard-skin coat – the short, belt-less kind shaped like a bell that Hollywood starlets would wear. The two of them would totter up the road to the Church Institute, where they’d install themselves at their favourite table, and for the rest of the evening Phyllis would chain-smoke her Woodbines and Auntie Alice might risk a port and lemon. They usually did well, but always grumbled about some rival’s good fortune: ‘That Dorothy Hunnebell – you’d think she’d give up after winning twice, wouldn’t you, and give the rest of us a chance?’

  ‘She went to Otley last week. To the Mechanics Institute. Won the jackpot. Twenty pounds,’ complained Auntie Alice.

  ‘Don’t you worry, love,’ consoled Phyllis. ‘She’ll have no luck.’

  The effect that the chance of winning any prize would have on Auntie Alice was astonishing. Whenever a party was in prospect – be it a family get-together or something organised by the church at the institute – Auntie Alice would be at the front of the queue. Grown men would give her the benefit of the doubt in musical chairs. They didn’t need to. When the music stopped, she could have her bottom on the bentwood before the fittest of them had so much as crooked their knees. Then she’d laugh sheepishly in that fey little way she had as they retired to the side of the room, and make a great show of heaving herself up to the vertical and tottering round the room once more to the strains of ‘Country Gardens’. At bingo and musical chairs, Auntie Alice’s reputation was Olympian.

  When she wasn’t pursuing the glittering prizes, or cleaning for Mrs Heap, or so poorly that she took herself off to bed, she’d sit in front of the gas fire with a mug of tea, gazing into the flames until her legs were mottled maroon. Her hands would always shake when she lifted the cup to her mouth, or when she tried to get change out of her purse. I don’t know why; aside from the odd port and lemon, she was never one for the bottle.

  There was never a man in Auntie Alice’s life, at least not that I ever knew of. She probably hadn’t the energy. Instead, she just dreamed. ‘I wish I could play like that,’ she remarked on seeing Russ Conway fingering the ivories on The Billy Cotton Band Show.

  ‘Well, you could have done if you’d practised,’ came Grandma’s dismissive retort.

  Grandma was not a sitter. She was a doer. She’d be out working or shopping or driving my mum demented by turning up on our back doorstep just as tea was being served.

  ‘That looks nice,’ she’d say, leaning against the door frame as the MacRae kipper fillets were being served. My mum was never one for large portions – a single pack of fillets along with some mashed potato would be made to feed the four of us. Mum would be at the far end of the breakfast bar by the coke boiler where it was warmest, then me, then my sister, then Dad nearest the back door. Mum would sigh and take a bit off each plate, and Grandma would perch on a buffet and eat her portion, chattering all the while. We none of us grew very large.

  We had only one meal a year at Grandma’s and that would be on Boxing Day. It was not something that we looked forward to as children, not least because both Mum and Dad used to dread it. Mum would feel she was being got at the whole time, and Dad would know that she’d be in a right state by the time we got home and bend his ear something rotten.

  We’d turn up at about four o’clock in the afternoon to find that Grandma’s front room had been rearranged so that the lumpy black and grey sofa and the two hard-backed wing chairs were pushed against the walls and the gate-leg dining table was fully extended in the centre. It would be covered in green baize, topped with a white damask cloth that had seen better days. Set upon it would be a large pork pie, bowls of pickled onions and unidentifiable chutneys, plates of bread and butter, boiled potatoes and a small and particularly dry lump of boiled ham. The Ty-phoo tea in the brown pot would be eye-wateringly strong, and the mince pies that followed would be hard and dry. It wasn’t that Grandma was inhospitable; it was simply that she was unaware of the nature of her produce. Maybe after a lifetime of serving food, she’d ceased to notice what it looked like or to exercise any form of quality control.

  The air would be cold – the gas fire was small, even for a room of this size, and the blanket-like curtain fastened over the front door was not especially effective at keeping out the draught. The smiling, battered paper moon that hung over it would be blowing in the wind all evening.

  ‘Come on now, eat up. Alice! Is that kettle boiled yet?’

  ‘Course it’s not. I’ve only just put it on …’

  ‘Well, get yourself framed. I don’t know why it takes you so much longer than it takes me.’

  ‘You can do it yourself if you think you can do it any faster.’

  Grandma would bustle into the kitchen. ‘Well, I’m not surprised – the gas has gone out. Did you put the money in the meter?’

  ‘How was I to know we’d run out?’ would be the baleful reply.

  ‘Well, couldn’t you hear it?’

  Grandma would bustle back, muttering under her breath, and go to a box on the sideboard for a fistful of pennies. ‘Here you are, Alan,’ she’d say to me. ‘Put them in the meter.’

  I’d leave the table and open the low cupboard in the corner of the room – the damp-smelling one where the broken clockwork train and the toy polar bear with one eye were kept – and feed the pennies into the grey meter, turning the handle until each one dropped into the bottom of the metal box. The gas would once more leap into life with a hiss and Grandma would s
nap through the open kitchen doorway, ‘Alice! It’s on again. Light the cooker or there’ll be an accident.’

  Poor Auntie Alice. She seemed resigned to the fact that she was Grandma’s scapegoat, ever ready to cope with vented spleen and to take the blame for whatever might go wrong. Every family had an ‘Auntie Alice’ back then – the sort of disappointed elderly spinster that Noël Coward epitomised in one of his songs: ‘We must all be very kind to Auntie Jessie, she’s never been a mother or a wife. It’s unkind to throw your toys at her or make a vulgar noise at her, she hasn’t had a very happy life.’

  Maiden aunts were as much a part of family life as grandparents, and could be relied on to indulge their nieces and nephews. After all, as mothers would sometimes unkindly remark, they had nothing else to spend their money on. They fulfilled their role as the butt of family jokes, handy babysitters in emergencies and martyrs to ill health.

  By way of consoling herself in her position, Auntie Alice decided one day to have a cat. She brought home a tabby kitten from some friend of Mrs Heap’s, and I was allowed to give it a name. I decided on Penelope – the name of a rather nice-looking girl with dark and glossy plaits in a book I was reading at the time. ‘Penny’ she became, but, like Auntie Alice, she was not destined for a happy life. When she was two years old, she was kicked in the teeth by some young tearaways and, subsequently, her mouth went up at one side and down at the other, giving her an everlasting expression of disappointment. A bit like Auntie Alice.