I’d no doubt that it had been Keith’s fault. Everything was Keith’s fault. The van driver thought so, and so did Keith, which explained his agonised apology. ‘Ooh, sir! I’m so sorry.’
Where others would have cursed and railed at the motor that had just run them down, Keith’s natural and instinctive reaction was to apologise for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The driver, having checked that no bones were broken, and that he was unlikely to be sued, straightened himself up and said, ‘Daft bugger!’ Then he hauled himself back into his cab and drove off, drowning the two of us in a cloud of blue exhaust.
‘Oh, dear!’ wailed Keith, trying to get to his feet and failing. I gave him an arm and helped him up. It was difficult to work out whether he was more lopsided than normal. He brushed a tear from his cheek with the back of his dusty hand, and bent down again to retrieve his glasses from the gutter. Sometimes fate is unkind. The glasses were in perfect condition. He put them on, pushed back the lank of hair that had fallen across his face and said, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No bother,’ I said, trying to sound as though this happened to me every time I walked to school.
Keith’s home was in a small cluster of houses high up on the side of the moor. He was ferried to school every day, with the half-dozen other kids from the tiny hamlet, in a maroon minibus driven by a gloomy moustached driver who never spoke. In bitter winters they would often be cut off for days by snowdrifts and never make the journey to school. I envied him that. I could get there in all weathers on foot, on the bus or, in later years, on my bike. I asked him what he was doing walking.
‘Wanted to walk the last bit,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’ He volunteered no more. Then said, brightly, ‘I’m Keith. Keith Ackroyd. I come from Langbar.’
‘I know.’ I nodded, then glanced at my watch, anxious not to be late and earn yet another detention. ‘Want to carry on walking?’
He nodded, and after brushing the dust off his navy-blue school blazer, he limped along beside me, his satchel bouncing off his hip, and the knot of his tie somewhere under his left ear.
It was hard not to feel a stab of sympathy for him, and a wave of guilt swept over me. Guilt at not being nicer to him before, at not making conversation with him in the playground and at watching from a distance as he was ostracised by just about everybody.
Over the next few days I made a point of seeking him out at playtime. He wasn’t difficult to find. He would be standing in a corner, examining the contents of his pockets, and trying to look as if he didn’t mind being on his own.
But whenever I approached, his eyes lit up and he would show me something he’d found, or collected. Conkers or a foreign coin that ‘might be worth loads’ or mostly stamps.
He talked about his mother quite a lot, and his younger brother, Davey, who was brighter than he was and went to the grammar school. The stamps were for him. He had a sister, too, Cathy, who was still at All Saints Junior.
Mrs Ackroyd was usually ill, and seemed often to take to her bed. There was no mention of his father. He talked of his mother with a sympathetic fondness that built up a clear picture of her in my mind. She became Dora in David Copperfield. A beautiful, waif-like creature who would love to be stronger and look after her children like a mother should, but who succumbed to everything going.
I could see her in my mind’s eye, lying back in bed, her fair hair spread fan-like across the pillow, and her pale face pricked with pink at the cheeks as she murmured instructions to Keith about what he should make them all for tea.
The sympathy built, but every so often I felt myself giving in to the attitudes of the other kids. At moments like these I was less of a friend to Keith than I should have been, when they imitated his ungainly walk or poked fun at his slurring speech, thanks to the teeth that were too big for his mouth. I didn’t join in with them, but my failure to more openly take his side left me feeling weak and ashamed.
Then, one day, he asked me to go back home with him for tea. I was unsure about the idea. What if his mum was too ill? But he assured me that she was fine. She’d not been very well over the last few weeks, but she was on the mend now and up and about.
I told my mum that I would be late home.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To Langbar, with Keith.’
‘Do we know him?’
‘No. I don’t think so. He’s the one with the limp.’
‘In the minibus?’
‘Yes.’
‘How will you get back?’
‘Keith says the milkman will drop me back in town.’
‘Well, don’t be late. Be back by six, all right?’
I was surprised that I got away with it so lightly. Mum must have had her mind on other things.
That evening I climbed into the minibus with the other half-dozen kids and the man with the moustache who never said anything. He grunted as I clambered on board; there was no further communication for the entire journey.
The lumbering vehicle wheezed its way up the road out of town and climbed towards the distant moors. Now there were no sounds other than the doleful bleating of sheep. Houses gave way to green fields, and green fields to purple moors and drystone walls with the occasional stone cottage clinging to the side of hills thick with heather and bracken. The driver dropped off his passengers one by one, until Keith and I were the only two left. Eventually he pulled up smartly at the end of a row of stone cottages that crouched low against the moorland cairn. He slid open the door. No words, just a tilt of his head to indicate that we should vacate his premises.
As we stepped down on to the gravelly track, so he lumbered off into the distance, the sound of his engine drowned by the mocking cries of blackface sheep.
‘Come on, then.’ Keith nodded towards the open gate of the garden. Well, it wasn’t a garden, really; just an enclosed area of rough grass with a gate that had collapsed against its supporting wall years ago.
He led me down the stony path at the side of the cottage and pushed open the peeling green door that led into the kitchen.
‘Hello, Mum! We’re home!’
Sitting at the kitchen table, with a cigarette in one hand and her head resting in the other, was a lady with a twisted face, whose hair was scraped back into a greying bun. She looked up.
‘Well, put the kettle on, then.’ She didn’t smile. ‘And ask your friend if he’d like a biscuit.’ She drew on her cigarette and glanced wistfully out of the window. Her expression was that of someone who had a permanent headache. She seemed to be continuously scowling. Not like Dora at all. It was hard not to feel disappointed. I’d had such a clear picture of this elegant and fragile woman. And she wasn’t elegant at all. Just ordinary. And not remotely pretty.
I glanced at Keith. He was beaming from ear to ear and filling the kettle at the single tap that towered over the kitchen sink.
‘Alan’s come to look at Davey’s stamps,’ he said.
I tried to look casual. Relaxed even.
‘Oh. Waste of time,’ she said. That was all.
I sat for what seemed like an age, while Keith made his mother a cup of tea and put it in front of her. She never said thank you. Never met our eyes.
‘Come through here,’ he said, having completed his catering duties. It was as if his mother’s mood washed right over him. His face was bright and he seemed happy to be home.
We walked out of the kitchen through a darkened hallway and into the front room. There was a greying sofa pulled up close to an unlit fire, and in front of the net-curtained window a large square table with a checked cloth laid over it. Bent over several open albums, of the kind sold by Woolworths, and surrounded by envelopes that spilled out stamps of all nations from Abyssinia to Zululand was a ruddy-faced boy with a glint in his eye. He was not at all like Keith. He was good-looking and athletic, and leaned over towards me and shook my hand, eyes sparkling, a beaming smile on his face.
‘Hello,’ he said expectantly.
&n
bsp; ‘Hi.’ Shyness began to take hold. I wished I hadn’t come. I saw his grammar-school blazer on the back of his chair, and his cap stuffed into his satchel that lay on the floor.
‘Alan’s come to look at your stamps.’
I nodded, feebly. I had an album of my own back home. Once, I had tried to work up some kind of enthusiasm for philately. Along with ornithology, it was the only big word I knew. The main attraction of stamps was that you could buy a lot of very colourful ones for very little money, and the fact that you stuck them in albums in rows appealed to my orderly nature. But my heart had never been in it, as a result of which I had a large tin full of stamps and an album full of empty pages.
‘Hello,’ murmured a small voice from the corner.
I turned round to see a small, fair-haired girl with a length of blanket in her hand. She was sucking one corner. She sat curled up on the sofa, and neither moved nor said anything more for my entire visit.
I leaned over the table and looked at the stamps.
‘Great, aren’t they?’ said Keith. ‘Davey’s got hundreds of them, haven’t you, Davey?’
Davey nodded. ‘This one’s a good one. It’s a Penny Red. Not as valuable as a Penny Black, but it looks the same. Apart from the colour.’
It was my turn to nod. Sagely.
‘You like stamps, don’t you, Alan?’ asked Keith, clearly trying to demonstrate to his brother that we had something in common.
‘Yes. Yes, I do.’
‘Do you collect them as well?’
‘Yes. Well, sort of. I’ve had them for ages.’
There was the sound of movement outside the door, and Mrs Ackroyd came through from the kitchen.
She took a slurp of her tea and looked critically at the table and its mountain of stamps. ‘Another craze.’
‘No it’s not,’ murmured Davey.
‘It won’t last. What was it last time? Dinky toys?’
Davey looked crestfallen.
Keith tried to pour oil on the troubled waters. ‘Alan collects stamps,’ he said, hoping, I suppose, to find reinforcements.
‘Do you?’
‘Yes,’ I said, anxious not to let Keith down.
‘Well, why don’t you give them to him, then?’ asked Mrs Ackroyd, ‘’Stead of wasting your time on another craze.’
‘It’s not a craze,’ replied Davey, biting his lip.
‘Course it is.’ Mrs Ackroyd’s face twisted into a weary and disapproving expression.
Keith, anxious now to please both his mother and his guest, said the words that I really wished he hadn’t.
‘Yes, go on, Davey – do like Mum says. Give them to Alan. He collects stamps. He’s really interested.’
I wanted so badly to say that no, I wasn’t really, and that Davey should be allowed to keep his stamps. But I couldn’t, and I didn’t. For reasons of cowardice and of misplaced loyalty, the words would not come. Instead, I saw Davey’s look of disappointment as his mother and brother ganged up against him. I saw Keith’s lopsided expression as he tried to repay my kindness and placate his mother at one and the same time.
And I saw myself in a new light. That of a false friend who should have known better.
I cannot remember what I said as the stamps were put into their envelopes, the albums were folded shut and the entire collection was slipped into a brown paper bag for me to take home.
I only know that I never got round to sticking them in, and that somehow, after that, things were never quite the same between Keith and me.
To claim that my school days were miserable would be overstating the case, but compared with what has happened since, they weren’t a high spot. Try as I might, I didn’t fit in. It seemed that discouragement lay round every corner, and no matter how hard I concentrated, logarithms and algebra remained as impenetrable as Greek and Latin (neither of which I studied, and both of which would have improved my grasp of botanical names). Enthusiasm was no substitute for the ability to master equations and remember dates. Attentive as I might try to be in the classroom, I was seldom in full possession of the facts, and after a while teachers tire of relentless enthusiasm if it is not backed up by an apparent increase in knowledge. I was, in short, a bit of a lost cause.
I wanted out as soon as possible, but that seemed an unlikely prospect. O levels were a year away, and I was staring at the sheer rock face of French and physics, maths and English, when all I wanted to do was garden. Any parent could have been forgiven for believing that these feelings were nothing more than a manifestation of idleness. After all, what teenager does want to take exams and spend every evening shut up in their bedroom with subjects and predicates, specific gravity bottles and lead shot?
Mr and Mrs Titchmarsh should have told their young Alan to knuckle down and get on with it, and in another year get an apprenticeship with a joiner – he was good with his hands and joinery was a reliable trade.
But, as luck would have it, they didn’t.
Greener Grass
You could have called my dad many things, but surprising was not one of them. Since the day I had told him that I fancied a life as a gardener, he had not made any more discouraging noises, but then neither had he been overly reassuring either, so the conversation came like a bolt from the blue.
‘Algy … have you got a minute?’
He was leaning in the back doorway smoking a Hamlet cigar so that the smoke didn’t go in the house. I was just coming out of my greenhouse with a watering can. It was June.
I put down the can and went through the garden gate and across the back to where he was standing. He didn’t look especially cross, or especially unhappy. In fact, he seemed to be a bit pleased with himself. Mum was busy in the kitchen rolling out some pastry. I could hear her humming ‘Vilja’ from The Merry Widow.
Dad nipped out the end of the cigar with his fingers and slipped it into his jacket pocket. It always made me wince, but he never seemed to feel anything, and his jackets never caught fire so he must have done the job properly. ‘We’ve just been down to the school.’
I feared the worst. Parents only went down to the school when there was trouble. Or a parents’ evening. I knew that this was not a parents’ evening.
‘Why? What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing’s wrong. Only we’ve decided that it might be better if you left before you took your O levels.’
I felt deflated. I know I had asked them if I could leave, but the fact that they had taken me up on it sounded as though they had no confidence in me passing any of the exams. And over the past few weeks the pressure had grown much more intense at school. Mr Smith, the geography teacher, had warned us about those pupils who left school before they had taken their exams and ended up in dead-end jobs. ‘You’ll hear them playing out in the street in the evening,’ he said. ‘Laughing and joking while you’re hard at work. But put the work in now and you’ll overtake them and be better off in the future. Otherwise the world will pass you by.’ I didn’t want the world to pass me by.
My dad continued, ‘We went to see Mr Braban.’
Mr Braban was the headmaster. A thin, ascetic sort of man – a Geordie with a red face – he seemed always to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. I wasn’t aware that he had ever noticed me, or was even aware of who I was.
‘We told him that you didn’t really want to stay on and that you’d be happier to leave. And we told him that you were good with your hands, that you really wanted to do a practical job.’
I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure where the conversation was leading.
‘We said that you were keen on gardening but that we wondered if it would be better if you became a joiner and had a proper trade.’
There he was again – going on about a proper trade.
‘I see.’
‘Mr Braban said that if you were unhappy, he thought it would be better for everybody – including you – if you left.’
‘And became a joiner?’
Dad shook his head. On
his face there was a look of resignation.
‘No. He said that there are plenty of joiners in the world but that if you were keen on gardening, we should let you do that. There aren’t enough good gardeners, he said, and if you’re one of them, then you should be encouraged. I think that’s what he said, Beff, wasn’t it?’
Mum came to the kitchen door, wiping her flour-covered hands on her pinny. ‘Yes.’ She looked concerned. ‘What do you think?’
I tried not to sound too enthusiastic. I didn’t want them to confuse my glee at being allowed to become a gardener with simple relief at being allowed to leave school at fifteen and getting out of O levels.
‘I’ll need to get a job, then.’
‘Yes,’ said Mum. Then she smiled and said, ‘Talk to your dad,’ before going back to her pastry. Now she was singing ‘I’m Off to Kay Maximes’. She always got it wrong.
Dad pushed his hands deep into his pockets. ‘How are your plants?’ he asked, nodding in the direction of the garden. I followed him across the back and up the steps past the little polythene greenhouse. I didn’t say anything.
When he got to the top of the garden, he turned and looked back towards the house. Then he said, ‘I’ve been talking to Wally Gell.’
Try as I might, within the brief pause before he continued, I couldn’t see any possible significance in the fact that he had been talking to Wally Gell or why it might have anything at all to do with me.
‘He works at the council nursery. They’ve got a vacancy for an apprentice gardener. I told him you might be interested.’
In one brief moment in the back garden of 34 Nelson Road on a June day in 1964, my dad went against his better judgement. He might have done it because he was persuaded to; he might still have preferred it if I had become a joiner. But I like to believe that somewhere deep down inside him was a feeling that things might just might turn out for the best. If I stuck at it.
Dad had bowed to the inevitable. You could say that it was because he wanted an easy life, or that he didn’t really care what I did. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I prefer to believe that somewhere in his heart, although he hated gardening himself, he might have felt that I was following some kind of calling. He had watched me doing it for long enough, and noticed that the keenness and the passion for all things that grew and flowered and fruited had not subsided in five years.
Nobbut a Lad Page 21