The Co-Op's Got Bananas

by Hunter Davies

  I kept up my first person piss-taking Palatinate column for a whole term, covering all the archetypes, all in the same format. I called the series ‘A Life in the Day Of ’. I thought it was witty, reversing the old clichéd phrase.

  I also started writing other columns and articles for the paper. Very soon I found that Palatinate was taking over my life. All I seemed to be doing was constantly thinking of topics and stories, jokes and columns, making endless lists and notes, laughing to myself, at my own amazing wit. When I was supposed to be writing an essay in our room, I would say to John, ‘Hey, John, listen to this, don’t you think this is really good?’ I would watch his solemn scientific Geordie face for any crease or semblance of a smile.

  For the first time in my life I thought, I can do this, this suits me. I had discovered that you don’t have to be clever or talented to write stuff, you just do it, don’t talk about it, get it written, amuse yourself and hope it will amuse others. After various cul-de-sacs, blind alleys, roundabouts, dead ends, skiffle groups, art appreciation, not forgetting shove ha’penny at the Buffalo, I had finally stumbled on something I really, really enjoyed doing.

  18

  MARGARET

  During that same final year, the other momentous event in my long-legged life so far also happened by chance – in a cinema queue, back in Carlisle during the long summer vacation of 1956. In June or possibly July. How awful that I can’t now remember the exact day of the week or month. I was coming through the town one evening, on the way home, when I passed the City Picture House. This was right in the heart of the city, near the Old Town Hall, one of Carlisle’s many cinemas, where at one time worked a character known throughout the town.

  There were three ‘characters’ in Carlisle in the 1950s, people nobody really knew, not even their proper names, but they stood out in some way. One was a dodgy, scruffy, slavering bloke known as Paddy Mason. He was a potter – a Carlisle term that covered rag-and-bone men or tramps, presumably because they had originally sold pots door to door. He was said to pester children, but was considered harmless, staggering around either Caldewgate or the centre of town most days.

  Then there was a man, name unknown, but everyone knew his voice. He stood in English Street, on the corner of Bank Street, and sold the local paper from a little booth. You could hear him streets away shouting the same thing – ‘NOT MANY LEFT! NOT MANY LEFT!’ – over and over, all day long, from the moment his first papers arrived. Yet he clearly had loads left.

  Then there was the woman at the City Picture House, a mystery woman who worked in the box office, sitting there with her Pre-Raphaelite hair and long red flowing velvet cloak. She never chatted, gave anything anyway, and when her shift finished she could be seen haughtily walking up Stanwix Bank, her red cloak swishing, to wherever she lived, presumably somewhere off the Scotland Road. There was endless gossip about her – that she was a woman whose loved one had been killed in the war, and since then she had vowed to talk to no one ever again. All small towns, small communities, have characters who are known, but not known.

  So in passing the City Picture House that evening, I glanced towards the entrance to see if the Lady in Red was on duty. I couldn’t see much as the queue was enormous, as usual, stretching for miles down the pavement and up an alleyway. I suddenly realised that at the top of the queue were four friends of mine, two boys and two girls. One of the boys, Ian Johnstone, was now at Durham with me, though at a different college, and the other, Mike Thornhill, was at Balliol, Oxford. They were with two high school girls, the two Margarets, Forster and Crosthwaite.

  Reg Hill, who was usually with the others, was not there. He had retaken his German A-level and eventually got into Oxford – to St Catherine’s Society (it did not become a college till 1962). But they could not take him for two years, so he had decided to go off and do his national service, get it out of the way. That evening he was probably on guard duty in some isolated army barracks in East Anglia, poor sod.

  I could see that the front of the queue was at least beginning to move. Like a worm, the queue did a little jerk, concertinaing itself, then slithering forward again, before getting ready for a last dash to the box office. They would all be inside in a moment, gone from sight, from my life.

  I had not planned to go to the cinema, did not even know what was showing, but I found myself pushing in beside them. People in the enormous queue behind groaned, objecting to me pushing in, having no idea where I had come from. ‘Thanks for keeping my place,’ I said to Mike and Ian loudly, pretending I had just gone off somewhere, but had always been in the queue.

  They, of course, didn’t know where I had come from, or why, and were rather confused and also a bit annoyed by my sudden appearance. They reluctantly budged up and I went in with them, chattering inanely to all four of them, without any replies or any encouragement. They were clearly a foursome, two boys and two girls, on an arranged evening out, yet here was someone barging in. They managed to get four seats together. I could only manage a seat in the row behind them. From time to time I leaned over and made funny or silly remarks about the film we were watching.

  Afterwards we all stood outside in English Street, talking about the film. I didn’t really know if they were two couples, each a boy with his girlfriend, an ‘item’ as we might call them today, though I had not heard of anything romantic going on between them. Or was it just social, school friends, who had known each other for years? As we all had.

  I kept up an inane rattle of chat, and it became clear they were about to make their respective ways home, and expected me to do the same, and as quickly as possible, leaving them to say their own farewells. I hung on, ignoring their snubs. When it was clear they were going their separate ways home, not as couples, I found myself asking Margaret Forster if I could walk home with her. Twice in the recent past I had been given the bum’s rush when trying to be chatty and friendly with her – in the Garret Club and on the Ribble bus. This time, to my astonishment, she agreed. I am not sure she actually said, ‘Yes, how lovely,’ but she didn’t say, ‘No, go away, you drip.’ I took her silence as an affirmative.

  She had very short hair, cut almost like a boy’s, much shorter than when I had seen her on the bus, not that I ever take in hairstyles or what people are wearing.

  I had no idea where she lived, about her family, what sort of house they had, or where we were heading. I was too busy keeping up the bright chatter, walking in a dream, no idea what I was saying or where I was going.

  I realised she was at the end of her second year in the sixth form, so must recently have done her A-levels, and must be waiting for her results, so I did at least manage to ask her about that. She said she was probably going to apply to Oxbridge, but she was worried that she had failed her A-level Latin. I was impressed by that, doing A-level Latin. She said it was a mistake, she was useless at Latin. I found that hard to believe, that she was useless at anything, not from all I had been told about her.

  She had heard about me failing my history honours exam – and had heard it was to do with my dissolute life. I didn’t know whether to deny this or boast that, yes, I was a helluva fellow. She said she had first seen me when I had played hockey for the grammar school against the high school. She was in the crowd of girls watching that day. Another girl had pointed me out, she explained, making clear she had not been personally much interested. But my heart gave a little nervous flutter all the same, that she had even remembered the incident.

  I told her how I had seen her about two years ago in a school play at the high school, when she had played the main part in The Snow Queen. Me and Reg and Mike had all gone, just to sit in the back and mock, but it had been rather good, surprisingly.

  I boasted how I had been to the Edinburgh Festival and also down to London to the Proms, on my own, thus showing what a true culture vulture I was. I dragged in my years learning the violin, playing and performing in the school orchestra. I told her I loved Sibelius. ‘What has he written?’ she aske
d, as if assuming he was a novelist. So she wasn’t quite the cultural brainbox I had been led to believe, which was a small relief.

  We somehow started talking about football and I discovered that back in 1951, when Carlisle United drew Arsenal at home in the FA Cup, while she was still in the second year at the high school, she had been the girl who had organised a petition to the headmistress, protesting about being given a half-day off school. At the time, it was a famous local story. She had maintained that lessons were much more important than any stupid football match, at least they were to her.

  We eventually reached Longsowerby, at the far end of the town, on a council estate I had never visited before. Her house was at 180 Richardson Street, opposite the main gate of the cemetery. It was dark, so I couldn’t see much, but her house was obviously a council house, though a lot neater than ours, with a trim hedge and a tidy garden.

  I did not attempt a kiss, just said goodnight at her front gate, thanks for the walk, thanks for the chats, could I see her again? She said yes, so we made an arrangement.

  I walked all the way home to St Ann’s Hill in a daze, a stupor, wandering in a dream. Talking to her had been so exciting, invigorating, stimulating. It had seemed endless, with so many strands and threads, jumps and bumps, that I could not wait to see her again to continue talking. I had never met or talked to or imagined a girl like her before.

  I felt so lucky to have finally met her, but realised it was probably to do with the fact that she was post-exams. That was the reason she had weakened and let me walk home with her, the relief and release of getting her A-levels over with, till the next hurdle. She had momentarily dropped her guard. That’s what most other people thought when they heard I had walked her home – and was going to see her again.

  I found out nothing about her personally or about her family during that first walk. That began to come out after a few more walks. But apparently, in my idle chat on that first walk, I had given the impression I must be from a higher-class home. I had mentioned going to violin lessons, my mother reading Dickens, describing our years in Dumfries in a house called Nancyville where I rode my bike down the corridors. I could well have been showing off, just a little bit.

  Her father worked at the Metal Box factory as a fitter, setting off each day on his bike. She had an older brother, Gordon, who had been in the RAF doing his national service and was now working in a photographic shop, and a younger sister, Pauline, who was in the fifth year at the high school. They had not long been in Richardson Street, having moved there from another council estate, Raffles, where she had been born at 44 Orton Road. This had been a model council estate when first built in the 1930s, but had become rough and run down in recent years and was looked upon as the worst estate in Carlisle. Longsowerby was considered a step up, and they had an indoor lavatory for the first time.

  We went on so many walks, almost every evening, plus longer expeditions at the weekends. Meeting Margaret also meant I got to know Cumberland for the first time. She knew it so well, coming from a proper Cumbrian family, who had lived there for generations, unlike mine who knew nothing about Carlisle and its immediate area, nor had they ever taken us anywhere. Her surname, Forster, is a common Cumbrian name, especially around the Borders. It appears in Walter Scott’s ‘Lochinvar’ – ‘Forsters, Fenwicks, and Musgraves, they rode and they ran’.

  I had not even been to the Lake District, but Margaret had been everywhere, either with her dad on the bus to Keswick, on the train to the seaside, or long bike rides on her own into the countryside. She loved Silloth, twenty miles away out on the Solway coast, and had such happy memories of being taken there on the train when she was younger. I never knew Silloth existed, yet it had been part of local culture and mythology for a hundred years, Carlisle’s favourite seaside family resort. I grew to love it as well, as Margaret took me on outings, walking along the front, round the green, looking at the docks, walking down the coast to Skinburness, round Grune Point, all the time having a bit of a blow. That was how most Carlisle families described going to Silloth – ‘a bit of a blow’ meant the wind practically took you off your feet and transported you across the sea to Scotland.

  I loved touching her, not just talking to her. I mean in the pure and chaste sense, which mostly meant holding hands. Her skin was so soft and smooth, slightly tanned. Like me, she easily got brown with the first hint of the sun. She glowed with health, didn’t have spots or rashes, unlike me. Not long after I met her, I imagined her as an old woman, that she would age beautifully, with a wonderful brown, rosy complexion and thick white hair. A bit daft, not to say premature, as we had hardly been going out more than a few weeks.

  She had bare legs most of the time, which made me shiver should I chance to touch them, and always wore flat shoes, often simple ballet pumps. She hated high heels and vowed she would never wear them. She also never wore make-up, which I approved of. I always hated make-up, the smell of perfume and creams. My mother hardly used make-up, but she would often dab horrible-smelling powder on her face with an elderly sponge if she going out somewhere, or smear on Pond’s cold cream, for no reason I could see.

  My sisters, of course, once they became teenagers, were always trying out make-ups and lipsticks, new hairstyles, buying the latest flouncy skirts and lurid tops. Margaret was totally unlike them; in fact, she was unlike every other girl in Carlisle I had ever gone out with. While most other girls of her age were growing their hair long, piling it up high, trying to manage a beehive by backcombing it to death and smothering it in lacquer, she had cut her dark brown hair short and simple, like Audrey Hepburn.

  She often wore a black polo-neck, which made her look like someone from a French film, very Left Bank and bohemian. She sometimes wore trousers, which girls did not do at the time. Not jeans, because they had not come in, but tailored slacks, I suppose they must have been called. Her style was understated, but utterly distinctive. Just as she was. I could not take my eyes off her, or my mind.

  On 4 August, just a month after we met, she announced that her parents were going away for a night to visit relations in Scotland, taking Pauline with them.

  I asked idly where they were going in Scotland, and to my surprise it turned out they were heading to Motherwell, to visit Margaret’s aunt – her mother’s sister – in the same road, Bellshill Road, where my grandmother lived, staying in the same tenement block where one of my own aunts had lived. I discovered I had played with her cousins, the Wallaces, on the Bing. I might well have played with Margaret as a little girl, or at least seen her, when she too was visiting her Motherwell relations. So, what a coincidence! We had met, or almost, in another, earlier Scottish life. It seemed a sign, a portent.

  While her parents were going to be in Scotland, the house would be empty, as Gordon was also away. But of course there was no suggestion that this would be a chance for me to stay the night with her, perish the very idea. But what it did provide was a chance for us to stay out together really late, without bothering about what time we had to come back.

  We got a bus to Keswick, arrived in marvellously unexpected sunshine, walked round Derwentwater and then sat watching the sun set lying on the grass near Friar’s Crag. Perhaps hand in hand, but nothing more, half falling asleep, only coming to when we realised we had missed the last bus back to Carlisle, some thirty miles away. Oh God, what were we going to do now?

  Margaret set off walking, and I trudged behind. Despite all those vacation jobs doing physical labouring, I certainly wasn’t fit or much of a walker. More of a trudger. Whereas Margaret could walk forever.

  Once well away from the town and any habitation, it was pitch-black. I had no idea where we were, and was getting more and more knackered. I suggested a rest, moaned I was tired, so we sat down beside a hedge. I tried to get her to lie down, and put my arm round her – when suddenly there was a loud yell. An old tramp jumped out of the hedge, shouting and screaming at us. He had been asleep under the hedge and we had inadvertently disturbed hi
m.

  We got back to her house at about five in the morning. I lay on the sofa in her front parlour for an hour, trying to keep awake and get some energy back, until it was time to stagger to the bus stop for the early bus into town, where I caught the St Ann’s Hill bus at the town hall. My mother never asked me where I had been, or noticed how late I had come home. I was a student, after all, practically an adult.

  It was quite a while before I was invited officially into her home. After we had been out somewhere, on a walk, or to the pictures, her mother Lily got into the habit of now and again inviting me in. We sat in the front parlour together and then her mother brought me milky Camp coffee and a Carr’s Sports chocolate biscuit, yum yum. Her dad, Arthur, coming in from the pub on a Saturday evening, might give me a grunt, but otherwise he ignored me.

  He seemed not to approve of me, or was just naturally grumpy. He apparently thought I looked foreign, with my thick, black hair, and didn’t really like students either. Margaret was staying on to try for Oxbridge but she thought her dad would really have liked her to have left school at sixteen, as her older brother had done, and got herself a decent local job, even if it was only packing crackers at Carr’s biscuit works.

  When her A-level results came out she had got Latin after all, just scraping through, and could now drop it forever. But her results in English and history seemed unbelievable, 95 per cent in each, so the headmistress, Miss Cotterell, had told her. You heard of people getting those sorts of amazingly high marks in science subjects or maths, but nobody got them in any arts subject.