Nobbut a Lad

by Alan Titchmarsh

  A few minutes later Billy came out. He nodded at me and murmured a greeting – as always, polite and, as always, softly spoken. Kathleen said goodbye, adding that it was nice to see me again, and slid back into the car. She turned round and waved as Billy Lawson’s Austin Cambridge slid out of sight round the corner, and I saw, again, the flash of those dark-brown eyes and the knowing smile.

  Back home, I considered asking my dad what I should do. But I thought the better of it. I mean, what could he do? Tell Billy that I fancied her and ask him if she could come on a date? No. I’d have to sort it out myself. And I wouldn’t say anything to Mum. She’d be against it, anyway, for reasons already discussed. And so I brooded and did nothing. But the look on Kathleen’s face I could not get out of my mind. It had a warmth I had never seen before, and her eyes seemed to see into my soul. A month later Kathleen Lawson died of leukaemia.

  I never said anything to my mum or my dad about our meeting. I didn’t need anybody to know what had happened between us. Apparently Kathleen had been ill for some time. They knew she was going to die. And so did she. I climbed up to my attic room and stared out of the window towards the purple moors. Below me, the rest of the curtains in the street were closed. I closed the curtains on my own window, and sat on the bed until long after it was dark.

  Running at right angles to the top of Brook Street is the Grove. This is Ilkley’s smartest street. Select. It has a Betty’s café and is lined with flowering cherry trees that are awash with pink blossom in spring. There are moments in April when Ilkley looks like Harrogate. But only moments. Ilkley residents regard Harrogate as pretentious. A town with ideas above its station. Talk to them in Harrogate about Ilkley and they’ll smile sympathetically and move the conversation on.

  The Grove used to have the art-deco-inspired Bluebird Café – all chrome and dark-blue Vitrolite – where Grandma Titch worked as a ‘nippy’ with ‘silver service and six plates up each arm’ until she was seventy-six and my dad suggested she might ease up a little. She cut the plates down to five.

  Mr Guy, the hairdresser, operates in a basement at the far end of the Grove on the opposite side to where the Bluebird used to be. It’s where my mum used to have her hair done, the same place as the now dowager Duchess of Devonshire, when she was up at Bolton Abbey. Mum rather liked that.

  She didn’t know the Duchess of Devonshire, but the Duchess knows me, and knew that my mother used the same hairdresser.

  My mother died four years ago now. She was crippled with arthritis at the end, but her hearing was always sharp as a razor. One day Mr Guy bent over her in the chair and said, ‘The Duchess of Devonshire was enquiring after you, Mrs Titchmarsh.’

  My mother looked round the salon and noticed that one or two of the ladies were under driers. ‘I’m sorry?’ she asked.

  ‘THE DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE WAS ENQUIRING AFTER YOU!’

  ‘Oh, was she? That’s nice of her.’

  The Posh End

  It wasn’t an inferiority complex – just a realistic assessment of our social differences. The folk who lived ‘up the Grove’ were different from us, though, as Grandad Hardisty put it, the difference was that ‘They owed more money.’

  Every now and again I’d find myself in the company of someone from the select end of town. My cousin David took me there once. We didn’t socialise as a rule; David was a year or so older than me and that meant different classes at school and a different set of friends. But for some reason or other we’d found ourselves in each other’s company on one particular day and he took me to meet Tim. There were instructions on the way. ‘Just remember, you’ve got to talk posh,’ he instructed.

  I’d never practised. I was stuck with ‘bath’ and ‘grass’ and felt odd saying ‘barth’ and ‘grarss’. It did occur to me that unless the conversation got round to personal hygiene, it would be unlikely that I should have to worry about the first word, but if we played football on his lawn, I could be in trouble.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked.

  ‘Just muck around.’

  ‘Do they muck around up there?’

  ‘Course. They’re just like us. Only posher.’

  I was not convinced. It sounded to me like a recipe for disaster. If Tim was a friend of David’s, did he think David was posh, too? Had David put on his posh accent whenever he was in Tim’s company?

  I tried to find excuses not to go, but it was no use. I had nothing else to do except tag along.

  ‘And when he asks what your dad does, say he’s in management,’ said David.

  ‘He’s a plumber.’

  ‘Well, he can still manage, can’t he?’

  I began to feel a bit queasy. We walked up towards the smart end of town, under the umbrellas of pink cherry blossom on the Grove that were shedding their petals like confetti, and then past the shops into the residential area. The Grove becomes Grove Road at its far end and leads upwards and westwards out of the town to a series of smarter streets with stone-built houses, some with little turrets and touches of Victorian Gothic or mock Tudor in King’s Road and Victoria Road; even the names have a regal ring to them.

  Nelson Road, where I lived, was east of the town. The houses here were two up, two down with an attic and a cellar, and their stonework was blackened by a century of soot. Along with Wellington Road, Trafalgar Road and Nile Road, Nelson Road was named after heroes who would presumably inspire the workers to achieve greater things. There was also Brewery Road, which would offer comfort when all else failed.

  David himself did live up the smarter end – just off Queen’s Road. This was because Auntie Jenny cleaned for a large house up there and they had a tied cottage – Shandon Cottage – which always smelled of damp. Clearly he got to meet a better class of person than I did down the east end of town.

  ‘Come on, don’t dawdle.’

  ‘I’m not dawdling.’ But I was. I walked as slowly as I could, hoping, perhaps, that Tim might be a stickler for punctuality and that if we were late he would have gone out.

  We reached a smart wrought-iron gate – a double one – across a wide tarmac drive. David opened it and strode purposefully up to the front door. They had a bell. And a drive. And double gates. He rang the bell. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other.

  The door was opened by a fresh-faced youth with thick, dark hair.

  ‘Helleao,’ said David.

  ‘Hi,’ said Tim.

  David turned to introduce me. ‘This is Ellan.’

  I smiled as bravely as I could and said, ‘Hi!’ It seemed a safer bet than, ‘Helleao.’

  ‘Come in,’ said Tim, holding the door open and stepping back into the house.

  We crossed the threshold – David eagerly, myself reluctantly – and I spent the next two minutes wiping my feet on the doormat.

  The conversation was stilted. It wasn’t that Tim was unfriendly, but that David seemed keen to steer the conversation where it did not naturally want to go.

  ‘Ellan’s very keen on gardening,’ he volunteered.

  It was not the most natural of conversational gambits for ten-year-olds. Even those who lived up the Grove.

  ‘Really?’ Tim looked sympathetic. ‘Would you like to come and look at the rose garden?’

  I nodded.

  We were taken through the house, which had very deep-fitted carpets into which my shoes sank. I fought to keep my balance. Then we were led through a chintzy sitting room, awash with shiny mahogany furniture dotted with silver, and out through the French windows into a formal rose garden.

  Tim, anxious to please, asked, ‘Would you like to do some gardening?’

  I thought this was a daft idea. And anyway, the rose garden was immaculate with its formal beds and dusty grey earth. They clearly had a gardener and I couldn’t see him being best pleased if the son of the household got a couple of mates round to tackle his sacred rose beds.

  ‘No … really … it’s fine,’ I offered.

  ‘No problem. The shed’s o
ver here.’

  He led the way across the immaculately striped lawn that bordered the rose garden, and guided us to a stone outbuilding with stable doors. He swung on the sneck and opened both doors to reveal an armoury of shiny tools hanging on the whitewashed walls.

  ‘Which ones will be best?’

  I was out of my depth. ‘No … I think we should just look …’

  David dug me in the ribs and shot me a look of irritation.

  ‘Will these do?’ asked Tim.

  He pulled down a rake, a Dutch hoe and a fork.

  ‘I suppose …’ was the best I could do.

  And so, armed with a tool apiece, we followed Tim across the hallowed turf and began to prod at the grey dust underneath the rose bushes. Tim had the fork, which he pushed into the ground and wiggled about a bit. He had clearly never used it before. David set to raking the level earth even leveller, and I hoed, scrutinising the soil for the merest suggestion of a weed.

  David said, ‘Ellan loves doing this, don’t you, Ellan?’

  The best I could manage was a weak smile. Tim looked at me pityingly. We had not been forking, raking and hoeing for more than a couple of minutes when a woman’s voice rang out across the garden.

  ‘Timothy! What are you doing?’

  ‘A bit of gardening, Mum. Alan’s a keen gardener.’

  The lady in the smart yellow suit, with pearls at her throat, who was standing at the open French windows looked pained. ‘Really? Well, Burgess only did the rose beds yesterday and he won’t be very happy if you make a mess of them.’ The neatly raked earth steadfastly refused to swallow me up.

  Tim looked at us apologetically and took from us the rake and the hoe. ‘How about an ice cream?’

  ‘Leovely,’ said David.

  I said nothing, but followed the two of them – first back to the shed to replace the tools (I worried that we hadn’t polished them), then to the back door of the house. We followed Tim to a small utility room. Along one wall was a large white box with an enormous lid. It must have been six feet long, four feet high and three feet deep. He lifted the lid and revealed box after box of ice creams and lollies. We had an icebox in our new fridge, but it was only six inches square. In it, my mum could make half a dozen iced lollies with wooden sticks in a sort of aluminium mould. She poured orange squash into the holes and in a few hours my sister and I could have a lolly that lost its flavour and its colour and its stick after just two minutes of sucking.

  In Tim’s freezer, there were choc ices and strawberry mivvies, tubs of soft ice cream and lollies of all flavours – raspberry, strawberry, lemon and lime, and orange.

  ‘What would you like?’ he asked.

  David asked for a strawberry mivvi; I said that an orange lolly would be fine.

  We got what we asked for, and then Tim said he was really sorry but he had to go now and be somewhere else. It was the best thing I’d heard all day, but I tried to look disappointed.

  We walked round the side of the house now, rather than through it, which came as a great relief. I was terrified of dripping on the carpet.

  ‘Au revoir, Tim,’ offered David.

  ‘Bye,’ was the best I could do, as we walked down the drive sucking our lollies. David looked pleased with himself and was wiping the pink juice from his chin.

  ‘Great i’n’t it? Bein’ posh?’

  I didn’t say anything. I just kept on sucking my lolly. It was big and full of flavour, but somehow it wasn’t nearly as much fun as the ones Mum made in her little icebox back home.

  Not all encounters with the folk up the posh end were quite so excruciating. It wasn’t long before I learned that the really well-to-do were usually people who had the same manners as we had and who were kind and considerate whatever your background. And they didn’t seem to mind if you said ‘bath’ and ‘grass’.

  The Brooksbanks lived in the largest house in Grove Road. It was right at the top and invisible from the entrance gates, which led on to a large drive that swirled downhill in a generous arc. Their chauffeur, Victor Bean, was a bellringer with Mum and Dad, and spoke of his employers in hushed tones and with the utmost respect. They called him ‘Bean’ and he called them ‘sir’ and ‘madam’. Victor wore a uniform and a peaked cap when he was at work, and drove Mr Brooksbank into Bradford every morning in a very large and shiny car. I think Mr Brooksbank was in wool.

  Mr and Mrs Brooksbank were both churchgoers, and both had a regal bearing – he was tall with wisps of white hair combed across his broad brow. He always wore pale-grey suits. Mrs Brooksbank wore floral-print dresses and sometimes a fur wrap. She was an ample woman for whom the word ‘largesse’ could have been invented.

  Every year, on the night before Christmas Eve, the boys of the church choir would wend their way up Grove Road, knocking on the door of selected houses and singing carols. At the end of the evening, charitable donations not having been invented back then, the proceeds were divided between us as a sort of Christmas bonus.

  The last house, at around half past eight, would always be the Brooksbanks’. They would be waiting for us with orange squash and biscuits.

  Huddled together against the bitter cold that whipped down off the moors, we’d pick our way down the curving drive that would have been swept clear of snow. The amber glow of lights would be obscured at first by the welter of laurel and holly that offered the large Victorian mansion total privacy against prying eyes. Eventually the enormous archway of the front door would heave into view, its wrought-iron lantern now clearly visible, and Arthur Pickett would ring the bell as we all stamped our feet to keep warm.

  There would be eight or ten of us, usually – enough to make a decent stab at ‘The holly and the ivy’ and ‘Away in a manger’ even if, by this stage, we had begun to feel a bit hoarse.

  The door would be opened by the butler, and we’d be ushered into the hallway. Tim’s hall had nothing on this one. It was huge, with a wide staircase and galleried landing that looked like something out of My Fair Lady. All the way up were paintings of hunting scenes and portraits of important-looking people in elaborate costumes. As scenes go, it was tremendously impressive, and yet, for some reason, not the slightest bit intimidating.

  Across the hallway, the polished wood double doors that led to the drawing room would be open, and a fire would be lit in the massive grate with its moulded surround. In a corner stood a grand piano, covered with photographs in silver frames.

  Mr and Mrs Brooksbank would walk forward from the fire and greet us as though we were long-lost relatives. ‘So nice to see you again. Thank you so much for coming. You must be frozen. Do warm yourselves by the fire before you start.’

  These were the sort of folk from ‘up the Grove’ for whom my parents had the utmost respect. They were not ‘snooty’ like some folk from that end of town; they were polite when they came into Uncle Bert’s grocer’s shop, and had good manners, just like Mum and Uncle Bert. They treated their staff well and paid their plumbing and grocery bills on time and in full. They were, in short, ‘nice people’.

  We took off our coats and soon felt the benefit of the crackling fire before Arthur sat at the piano and we launched into ‘Once in Royal’ and ‘The Angel Gabriel from heaven came’, eyeing up the bourbon biscuits, custard creams and orange squash that stood on the gleaming mahogany side table in readiness for our finale. That was always ‘Hark! the herald angels sing’, and the prospect of squash and biscuits always gave us additional energy for our very last carol before Christmas Day.

  There would be glowing faces from us, and hearty thank yous from the Brooksbanks and their daughter, who appeared every Christmas wearing a long tartan skirt that somehow added to the festive feel.

  ‘Do come and have some refreshments,’ Mrs Brooksbank urged. She reminded me of the Queen Mother, both in appearance and manner, and all of us felt pleased that she wanted us to be in her house at Christmas, sharing her hospitality. There was never the faintest suspicion of ‘them and us’ about it. We w
ere all there to celebrate Christmas and to enjoy being in the grand house with the sound of carols ringing around the rafters.

  Just as David had informed Tim of my interest in gardening, someone took it into their heads to inform Mrs Brooksbank of my interest in art. It was exactly that – an interest. I was neither especially well informed nor particularly accomplished, but I was interested and loved looking at paintings. Perhaps she would think that I knew more than I did. The warning bells began to ring. But I needn’t have worried.

  ‘How very nice,’ she said. ‘Would you like to see some paintings?’

  Instead of a mute and embarrassed nod, I plucked up my courage and replied that yes, I would love to, and so, while the others tucked into the bourbons and the custard creams, I was led out of the drawing room by Mrs Brooksbank and into the hall.

  ‘Come with me,’ she instructed, climbing the wide staircase with its patterned Indian carpet until we reached the galleried landing. Here, with the sparkling chandelier at eye level, and above the waist-high dark oak panelling, hung landscapes and portraits of varying age. There were some men in wigs and frock coats, others of ladies in velvet gowns, the folds beautifully painted. There were landscapes of Yorkshire and Scotland, of streams and rivers, woodland and moorland. It was as impressive as Leeds City Art Gallery to my young and untutored eyes, and she and I had it all to ourselves.

  I listened as she told me about the different paintings – about Peter Lely and Godfrey Kneller, Joseph Farquharson and Atkinson Grimshaw, but whether these were the artists whose works I was looking at I cannot say – I was lost in a maze of wonder among the folds of velvet and the dense forests.

  ‘So which one do you like best?’ she asked at the end of our circuit of the landing.

  I did not have to think for long. There was a portrait of a young man, perhaps ten years older than I was, holding a gun at his waist and gazing out over the landscape behind him. He wore a pale-blue shirt and dark trousers, and had a faraway look in his eye. His lips were half smiling; he seemed comfortable and at ease with himself.