The Scent of Dried Roses

by Tim Lott

  The habit of deference maybe stemmed more from an awareness of raw power weighing down on them than from any sense of inferiority. Doctors and teachers, and of course the king, were naturally regarded with respect. But policemen, army officers, civil servants, lawyers and pettifogging tax officials were simply to be tolerated, representatives of an unwelcome law of nature. My family were not so distant relatives of the lawless, violent, occasionally heroic slum cockneys and had not lost the habit of cocking a snook.

  At the same time, they were cautious and apprehensive of that true, lumpen working class, who were liable to be violent, bolshie, loud and stupid, and were just one degree away in the dense, complex social layering that divided up England then as it does now. Yet their characters overlapped, in their instinctiveness, irony, informality, warmth and honesty. This was a counterpoint to, a cancelling of, what they scorned as the stiffness, arrogance, frigidity, hypocrisy and pretence of their ‘betters’.

  As I stare at them, and they stare back, I know suddenly that they are in me, the stuff of their bones in my mine. But what world do they inhabit in their imaginations? Is there any connection there, in this pre-war, half-lit world, between them and me? Can anything so remote possibly have anything to do with Jean’s death, with my nervous breakdown? No, is my first answer. Then, clearly, the thought comes: perhaps. That air, that climate, which shapes their clay, which makes their thoughts, will also shape and limit Jack’s. And Jack’s world will be identical to Jean’s, for the English world was all connected up then, and it is a world that possesses him, and her, rather than the other way around. It is a world that I would one day struggle pathologically to escape from, to redefine, just as my mother would cling to it like precious, drenched jetsam.

  I stare at my grandfather, trying to make him out through the pall of seventy years. Art looks well-to-do, but he was brought up on the barrows, in the markets. He went from the stalls to a cart pulled by two horses, one called Bill and the other, with some irony, Lightning. Then he bought the Wolseley. He is still only one, maybe two steps from being a coster. Here is the first great dividing line between him and me. He knows who he is. An Englishman, and a native Londoner before the idea became themed, diluted, mocked and bastardized. He is also very clearly a man, a patriarch in the Victorian sense, and a worker, working class. These things define him, just as they hem him in. He is also poor, extremely poor by my standards, but not by those of his time. He lives in a two-bedroom flat above the shop, with his three boys, Ken, Jack and Arthur. He shares the flat with Floss and Charlie and their two children.

  The choice of the shop as backdrop for the portrait is apt. This world is one entirely driven and measured by work, for there is little in the way of welfare and the price of failure is shame and destitution, or worse, charity. Cissy, although known as something of a slacker, was back working in the shop the day after my father was born. At busy times, after the family left the flat in 1936, Art slept on the floor of the shop rather than wasting time by going home.

  Art worked from Tuesday to Saturday in the shop, then on Mondays used the shop van for furniture deliveries. There were no problems regarding the purpose, the use of time, as there will be for my relatively spoilt generation. It was there to ensure the only ambition possible, that of survival, through diligence and graft.

  I notice that the three women in the photograph – Floss, Cissy and the customer – each have precisely the same expression. Coy, noncommittal, bland, it is entirely sexless, for in this England, sex remains subterranean and furtive, couched about with ignorance and shame. There are in fact 75,000 prostitutes in London, but that is a world that does not stretch to this part of Lambeth, where people would not even kiss or embrace in public.

  I sort through the rest of the photographs. They can, I see, be divided into three categories: professional portraits, printed on to postcards, inscribed on the back with a gap for the address and stamp; group photographs, of family, clubs, associations; and snapshots, of holidays and picnics, and occasionally the streets of Crystal Palace.

  I inspect the postcards first. Here is Art, standing in front of his van in leather knee boots, jodhpurs, a flat cap and a cravat. Here he is again, this time in the uniform of the Royal Horse Artillery, holding a riding crop in one hand and his daughter, Vera, in the other. She will die a few years later. In this world, death is still an insistent and hectoring visitor, still devoid of the taboo that now labours to deny it. Cissy sits next to him, holding Jack’s older brother, Ken, who is maybe a year old. She looks fresh and pretty, and slightly apprehensive of her happiness, as if she senses some fragility in it.

  Here is Hetty, one of my grandmother’s five sisters, looking beautiful and shy in a black belted jacket and a wide-brimmed hat decorated with white feathers. The photograph is inscribed, in luscious copperplate, Yours Sincerely, Hetty. Further down the pile, another posed shot of her, her face now turned chisel-tough, posed in a blinding snowstorm, staged by a studio photographer. The bitter lines of her mouth suggest that her sons, unborn in the first photograph, have by now been swallowed up by larger forces, George, the RAF pilot shot down over France, and Arthur taken by epileptic seizures.

  It is as if Hetty has been paid back for her extraordinary good luck in marriage. George and Arthur were the sons of a Swiss ‘noble’ (the title was purchased) and Lloyd’s underwriter, the Count Emil de Villemieur, whom Hetty had skivvied for, then run off with. Such dalliances were not unusual – droit de seigneur for anyone who employed domestics was established practice. It was rumoured that Cissy herself was the daughter of the dentist who Granny Starr skivvied for. But to marry the help was virtually unheard of.

  Here is Hetty again with her daughter, the survivor, Ladybird, or Bud as she is known. And one more snap, all of my grandmother’s sisters together with their mother, Granny Starr: Edie, Rose, Daisy, Cissy, Nellie and Hetty. The choice of their names was strictly defined by their social place, as was every other aspect.

  Class was merely one of the many invisible borders that divided up England then, a time over-simplified as a single, seamless unity. Cissy and Art, apart from their social standing, were metropolitan, Londoners, English and powerfully prejudiced. They looked askance at, and down upon, country yokels, clog-wearing Northerners, the crafty Welsh, the thick Irish and the mean Scots. Art would have had no doubt about who was the feebler sex, and foreigners didn’t even count as proper people, except possibly Yanks, who were nevertheless flashy and big-headed. The rest were slimy wops, greasy dagos, funny coons, poofy frogs, rapacious Ikeys, humourless squareheads. When Bill Cole, Cissy’s brother-in-law – nicknamed Tony because of his Mediterranean darkness – was branded a dago while a farrier in the army, he threatened to put a pitchfork through his accuser. When the insult was not retracted, Tony threw a knife at him and narrowly missed killing him. Nobody calls me a black bastard, said Tony, proudly. It was the ultimate insult, to be supposed to be not white, not English.

  I pick up the last three postcard portraits, the only ones of this period from Jean’s side of the family. The first two show her older brothers, Alan and Norman, at about a year old, one perched on what appears to be a cheap mahogany table, the other balanced on a velvet cushion. Norman as an adult will turn to drink after his wife abandons him and his three daughters, and Alan will become a chronic mental patient. It is strange to see them here, innocent of the future and yet perhaps with the future stored up in them, as an oak tree is inside an acorn. And last of all, barely recognizable, here is Jean, also innocent of her fate, again on a cushion, this time embroidered with flowers. She too is maybe a year old. Her face is as round as a football and her hair sticks up like a rooster’s comb. Try as I might, I cannot imagine her as my mother. She is just an anonymous, rather overweight baby.

  I turn to the next batch of snapshots. These are group shots and the groups are large, thirty or so people, for this is an England that is collective, communal, extended. The loss of place, the vacuum that is around us no
w like murderous, invisible fall-out, is beyond their imagination. On top of the pile is a picture of the house in Essex Grove, half a mile from the shop, which Cissy and Art rent in the mid-1930s. They will share the house with Daisy, my grandmother’s sister, and her husband, the knife-throwing Tony, who is a bus driver. Ken, Jack’s oldest brother, shares a room with his wife-to-be, Irene. This is unusual, unconventional, and Cissy does not approve, but she puts up with it.

  Ken works in the Hey Presto! dry-cleaners on Anerley Hill, half a mile away. Almost immediately opposite lives Vic Cole (no relation to Tony), who is married to Cecilia’s other sister, Edie. Rose, another sister, who is wild, a little touched, lives a few streets away in one direction. Granny Starr, who has a job cleaning toilets at the Crystal Palace, lives a few streets away in the other, in Berridge Road. Everything is interlinked, communal, close-weaved.

  There are three group shots, each of them of the St Margaret Wheelers, the cycling club that Art ran from Essex Grove. Cycling, hiking and rambling are booming at the time, partly a manifestation of the ‘fresh air and exercise’ cult imported from Germany, partly of the bottomless English love of countryside. Cissy and Art, with Jack sitting on a petrol can, would follow the cyclists down to Brighton, ready to pick up anyone who got the ‘bonkers’, or cramp.

  The cycle club, along with the shop, is the hub of Art and Cissy’s social world. At weekends the place is like a club – Art even installs a cigarette machine when they move to Essex Grove. There are many forms of amusement, even in this work-haunted England: cinema, radio, eurhythmics (pre-war aerobics), dirt-track racing, wrestling, football, pigeon-fancying – the list is long and varied. There are also cheap books, for England, even working-class England, is by far the most literate country in the world. But the only bought book in the Essex Grove house is James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, a racy thriller that Ken hides in his drawer and Jack furtively speed-reads while he is out at work.

  Most of the people in the photograph are local and would have been known to Art and Cissy quite separately from their involvement with the cycling club. It is, in fact, unusual to see anyone in Gipsy Hill or Essex Grove whose name you do not know. The people in this England are not anonymous; they have names and histories.

  The faces in the photograph look tanned and healthy, and strangely modern since the hairstyles – long fringe, swept back or with side parting, short at back and sides – were rediscovered in the 1980s. One of the men, inexplicably, even appears to be wearing a baseball cap.

  The final batch of photographs comprises snapshots, mostly taken on trips to Margate or Brighton, or picnics at Runnymede or Windsor, but occasionally in the streets of Crystal Palace. Here is Jack in a heavy steel pram on a bright day. My father, when he appears in this first batch, squints at me through infant though recognizable eyes, pursing the mouth that would one day recite its single sad question. By the thickness of his mother’s coat, I suppose it must be cold. The street behind, which is wide and unmarked by white lines, is entirely empty of traffic, moving or stationary, except for one solitary black Wolseley. The car cult, which, like television, will tear apart these insular yet interleaved lives, is again beyond imagination.

  The seaside snaps are somehow the most evocative, because the sand and the sea feel buried deep in the English unconscious, the romance of starfish and rock-pools, red crabs the size of tea plates and cubes of ice-cream. Here are Arthur, Ladybird and George, in one-piece bathing singlets that cover their chests. Here are Arthur, Jack and Ken, paddling in the surf and digging in the sand. With their scratchy, soaked cotton shorts – there are no artificial fibres – they are wearing ties and white shirts. Formality is inescapable, even here. In the background of the photos are stolid boarding houses and low-rise hotels. Even if they could have afforded it, Cissy and Art would not have felt comfortable in the hotels. The buildings are organic, gentle, slightly pompous, not geometric, or brutal, or dynamic. The language is one of security and provincial snobbery, of tea-cakes and chequered Battenberg and fish paste sandwiches.

  In another photograph, this time of a picnic, Art and Cissy are in full Sunday dress, Art dark-suited and flat-capped, Cissy with fake pearls and a soft brimless hat. Here are Arthur and Jack, with handkerchiefs around their heads. They will be eating pies, pickles, Cheddar cheese, bleached white bread. They will not argue or shout too loud, even on this day off. Everything here is muffled, kept back. It is Japanese in its restraint.

  It occurs to me that almost every modern, ordinary English family must have photographs in their drawers of such familiar strangers, drenched in dead light. These photographs are a link between me and these other, faceless families, people I have always imagined as quite separate, nothing much to do with me. But perhaps we remain connected after all, if only by a lost, half-forgotten past.

  As I spread all the photographs from the 1920s randomly in front of me, it occurs to me that the black-and-white world they show is more true to life than you might expect, because England in the 1920s tended towards the monochrome itself. There is little in the way of coloured cloth or paint. The women’s make-up, if it is there at all, is pale and natural. The newspapers have no colour printing, the cinema has no colour movies. The sky is usually dun or grey, and there are frequent fogs, ‘London Particulars’, though more rarely here in Norwood – the ‘Fresh Air Suburb’, as the marketing men of the 1930s dubbed it. There are no lurid posters or psychologically colour-coded product packaging. Advertising is simple and informative rather than surrealistic and lurid.

  The monochrome wash goes beyond the visual, inside and under the skin. Values in this place are without grey tone, are well defined and stark. Right is right and wrong is wrong and the difference is simple enough, and inscribed in the law. Criminals can be hanged and are often flogged, for relatively minor property offences, but there is little crime, largely because there is very little to steal. Women guilty of under-age sex or adultery are sometimes put in asylums and prisons. Men who beat their wives and children are thought to be within their rights. There is none of the modern sense that what is clearly wrongdoing needs treatment rather than punishment – no counsellors, or helplines, or group therapy centres. You get on with it. You cope. If you break the rules, you face the punishment and you don’t bleat. It is this world, sanitized of course, that a rigid, regretful part of England even now aches for – that certainty.

  But if this world, or at least the myth of this world that Jack and, five years later, Jean were born into, was in some ways, to some eyes, enviable, it was also dull, cold, spartan and entirely hedged about by necessity. As Jack emerged into the London air, screaming blue murder, his family could have little doubt about what his future would bring. He would go to school until fourteen, changing into long trousers at the age of eleven. Then he would go to work, probably for the family. Having secured a job, which would be manual and at best semi-skilled, he would be considered a man. He would get married in his mid-twenties and have children, who would then have children in their mid-twenties. If they were lucky, they would live in a house with a garden. And that was it, that was life. Everything was mapped out in advance. There was no burden of choice or rage at limits, because that was a waste of time. The cake was baked and cut.

  Jack’s childhood was unremarkable in almost every respect. After a brief period living in the flat above the greengrocer’s shop, Art and Cissy moved into a rented house half a mile away in Essex Grove. The business was doing well and the Lotts, by the standards of the time, were growing prosperous. They even had a telephone. But if the trappings were upwardly mobile, the psychological place they inhabited remained fixed, with its private, particular language and customs. They ate dinner, not lunch, at midday, and tea, not supper, in the evening. If it was a special occasion, they had serviettes, not napkins. They listened to the wireless on a settee, not a sofa, in the lounge, not the living room. They used a toilet instead of a lavatory. The hats, when they wore hats, were flat, or small bowlers cocked to on
e side (parodying the larger bowlers of the professionals), trilbys or Homburgs. Each clearly advertised their origins, their immutable place.

  There was a parlour, a ‘best room’, that was almost never used. The front step was attacked with soap and bristle every day. Cleanliness was the totem of respectability. Neighbours – and the opinions of neighbours mattered – checked laundry and curtains for signs of slippage. They smoked Woodbines, or Players, not De Reszke or Du Maurier. Cissy kept the end on a hatpin so she could take it in to the last gasp – the best bit, she always said. Their language itself proclaimed their identity. Cockney – rhyming rather than the rarer backslang of Covent Garden market – although diluted and half-ironic already, was still threaded unselfconsciously through their language, and was still private to some extent, separate and secret to the other layers of England.

  The patterns of Jack’s life as a boy were much the same as any of the well-off working class. While Cissy worked in the shop, he was brought up much of the time by his Aunty Rose, who visited from Colby Road, 100 yards away. In the morning, he would lie in bed and listen to the cows come down from the field to the Express Dairy three doors along. Urban England even smelt different then, of horses, dung and soot, rather than petrol and dog shit.

  Jack loved Rose, although she was a rough diamond by any measure, a hobbledehoy. Tall and thin, with red hair and only one tooth, she would pick up men in the pub and let them take her in the backs of cars for the price of a drink. She drank, smoked and swore. She had three husbands: Ted, a no-good who beat her; One-Legged Jim, who left her; and Alf, who gave her triplets.

  At the age of five Jack went to Woodland Road School in Cawnpore Street, where he did well, but was teased because he was gnome-like and fat. At the age of nine, when the family moved to Essex Grove, he transferred to Rockmount School, where he was teased again, by Nobby Reeves, who had a hole in his nose where he had been shot by a peashooter. Nobby would swing him around by the legs and once swung him against an iron lamppost. Jack finally turned and attacked him, absolutely bloody creased him (no child would say fucking then, not even in their head). The bullying stopped.