And came home to work. It fell to her – her phrase – to do the washing, the shopping, the cleaning, the cooking and those countless other jobs that were never called jobs. Even the verb ‘fell’ is shot through with a sense of the accidental, the clumsy, the easily overlooked. Women used to ‘fall pregnant’.
Which brings us to ‘the good table’ my mum so proudly kept. The phrase meant that the meals were regular and home-made; a bacon sandwich or Readybrek for breakfast (‘central heating for kids’), a packed lunch (meat or fish paste) for all three of us and ‘a hot meal’ at night, never later than six.
‘A good table’ meant that we never went hungry, rarely went to the chippy, and always had Afters after our tea. It meant that we ate around the kitchen table (‘setting the table’ was my one and only domestic task, carried out with martyred stoicism) and that the TV was turned off whilst we ate.
In the middle of the table is a plate of bread and butter, a salt and a pepper pot (white pepper: black pepper wouldn’t hit the North for at least another decade), a bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup, a bottle of Daddies brown sauce and a jar of pickled onions. The meal in front of me – this being a Tuesday – is potato pie and peas. The ingredients are: potatoes, corned beef, a carrot and an onion. On top of this lies a suet crust. The crust is slightly burnt brown on top and a chewy wallpaper-paste white beneath. The peas are mushy, a luminous green that may have been the result of Mum soaking them overnight. It is a concoction that demands the sharp vinegary twist of Daddies brown sauce. It glugs from the bottle, smothering the dense grey blandness of the stew. It is almost pure carbohydrate, a rich, glutinous expanse of a meal designed to weigh you down and keep you close. No little light supper this: this is food that can still remember the workhouse, food that is designed with insulation in mind.
Mum takes away the plates, scrapes the remains back into the deep white pan. This ‘will keep’, will be fried up later, crust and all: I prefer it this way. For dessert, a can of Heinz strawberry sponge pudding, steamed and served up with a trough of Bird’s Eye custard.
Our occasional meals out were obstacle courses in anxiety. My parents would fret about coordinating their appetites, having to re-set their internal rhythms to the idea of food at seven thirty (even eight o’clock!). What were they meant to do between teatime and then? Starve?
The waiters and waitresses were scary; enforcers of an alien etiquette. My mum would apologize before asking a question about the menu, pre-empting her own ignorance, her I-know-I-shouldn’t-be-here-ness. Dad would go quiet, shuffle, point to the thing that sounded as though it most closely resembled the things that we had at home.
He couldn’t see what all the fuss was about; it got on his nerves, all these sauces and the funny squiggly writing that you couldn’t quite make out. Food could be about pleasure for them, but it was about solitary or stolen time – ten minutes with a brew and a biscuit, a trip to the chip shop or something you got from Accy Market just because you fancied it. It was about the satisfaction of a full belly. Northern working-class diets were about fuel, cost-efficiency and sense of daily indulgence.
So food was good, in a non-fetishized, utilitarian kind of way. But what was really good – what was essential in fact to the lives of Jack and Kathleen – was the smoking of cigarettes.
To say that my parents smoked doesn’t come close to describing the centrality of nicotine to the rhythm and meaning of their days. Time was measured in cigarettes: or rather, time was measured in the things that had to get done in between cigarettes, as though a day’s activities were like words that had no meaning unless punctuated by the structuring grammar of a cigarette.
Cigarettes were the reason for drinking hot drinks; they were what you looked forward to at mealtimes. They were the afters that followed Afters. Cigarettes were necessary to watch television, to play snooker, to go to the pictures, to play bingo, to go out for a pint, to have a quiet night in. Cigarettes were necessary to talk to each other.
They smoked the same brand, Embassy during the seventies, Benson and Hedges in the eighties. I think the switch was something to do with loyalty coupons as much as taste. Certainly our house was partly furnished with items bought by fag coupons: an alarm clock, toasters, a portable radio, kettles, a set of kitchen knives. (Maybe they felt they couldn’t afford to stop smoking?) They smoked in tandem, synchronized smoking, a harmony of in- and exhalation.
In the evenings, in front of the TV, the adverts would allow for a trip to the kitchen and a shout of ‘Tea or coffee?’ Drinks would be brought through. Smoking could commence. One drink meant three cigarettes – one whilst it cooled, one to accompany it, one to signal its completion. Three fags to one brew, four brews a night. And so the nights wore on; mouths dry and then wet, cups replenished, ashtrays overflowing.
Need I say that their mouths were ruined? My old photos show Kath smiling in a way that tries to hide the browned and buckled teeth. Her lips are pursed, overstretched, hands hovering ready to cover the mouth in a gesture that foregrounds her shame.
She had been pretty as a girl and handsome as a woman, yet her confidence was undermined by her self-conscious mouth. Both of their sets of teeth had decayed by their forties, gone by their fifties, replaced by full sets of dentures.
My dad used his false teeth like a percussion instrument, expressing annoyance, approval, whatever, by clacking them together and swirling his jaw. If George Burns had his cigars, Dave Allen his stool, my dad had his dentures. They were the cymbal clash for his punchlines, the maracas of his routines. I can hear him now: ‘Look at that stupid bastard!’ (Usually Prince Philip, though other members of the royal family would do.) ‘I’ve seen . . . clack clack . . . better hair on a side of bacon . . . All that money and he still . . . clack clack . . . can’t afford a smile . . . clack clack . . . a face like a smacked arse . . . clack clack . . .’ and on he’d go, a running commentary on the state of the nation and the various bastards and bloody idiots who ran it.
I would love to say that John (Jack as everyone called him) was left-wing, or a hard-core union man, but the truth is that he was a conservative: a conservative who voted Labour all his life, but a conservative nonetheless. He too had been an only child, a condition that I somehow associate with Toryism, with the privileging of the individual over (what I imagined to be) the collectivity of larger families.
More importantly he was an only child who was even more Only from the ages of eight to fourteen. Whether my grandfather volunteered or was conscripted to fight in the Second World War I do not know, but I know that my dad relished his duty as his mother’s guardian whilst he was away. ‘Away’ seems an inadequate word for risking your life fighting Nazism for six years, but it was the word my dad grew up with: ‘your dad’s away’. And, once he came back, it seemed he didn’t want to talk about what he’d done or where he’d been. Thus did my grandfather return a stranger, to a boy who was a stranger to him.
And Jack? Was Jack glad to have his dad the hero back? Or was he resentful at the intrusion, jealous that his mother would no longer be his? Again! As if that first Oedipal trauma – the one that Freud was so keen on – wasn’t enough.
I think that these formative years left Jack with self-sufficiency certainly, but also a sense that the world was bigger than he could ever imagine, certainly too big for him to change. I never heard him voice a racist opinion, but I certainly never heard him voice any anti-racist sentiment either. He would refer to ‘the Paki shop’, but this was as a genre of shop – one that stayed open late – and I’m not even sure if he had made the connection between ‘Paki’ and ‘Pakistani’. (The last time I was back home in Accrington, I felt strangely vindicated that the local ‘Paki’ shop was run by white people, and yet still referred to as a Paki shop.)
I think that my grandfather’s time in the army had given him a broader perspective on race and identity. Simply put, foreign voices and black skins did not faze or affront him. In the most general of senses he had a respect for the
Otherness of other cultures. His army stories (never stories of combat) were always about the strangeness of foreign places. Not just ‘Johnny Foreigner’; but a much more exotic brand of folklore, one which you had to approach with care and caution. The world, said my grandad, was a much odder place than people said it was.
Next
‘. . . the only child’s relative lack of opportunity for expressing the aggressive side of his nature is a serious thing.’
D. W. Winnicott, The Child, the Family and the Outside World
Although Cedar Street was given as our address on my birth certificate, I have no memories of living there. The first house that I can recall was a council house in Oswaldtwistle. On the off-chance that you’ve never been there, Oswaldtwistle – ‘Ossie’ to the locals – is a suburb of Accrington. Ossie is the Brooklyn to Accy’s Manhattan, the Montparnasse to its Paris – an edgier, slightly scruffier location with an identity all of its own. There was an inevitable rivalry between the two, one of those mock-epic grudges that can always turn serious with the right mixture of beer, testosterone and unemployment. I was too young for these territorial battles, five or six, unaware that there were such things as ‘our end’ and that ‘they’ should therefore ‘get back down their own end’. Not that I was ever out much in Ossie.
I seemed to be permanently sick, lurching from gastroenteritis to whooping cough in less than a year. Wiser people than me have said that we don’t, maybe can’t, remember illness the way it actually was. What we think about when we think about being ill is being like we are now – well, healthy – but with bits added on or taken off.
All I remember from that time is bottles of Lucozade wrapped in sheets of orange plastic, and pink chalk-tasting syrup being coaxed into me on a deep white spoon. Later I would find out that I had nearly died – ‘we thought we’d lost ya’ – and that masses had been said for me. Once I got well, I fell in love with this story, making Kath repeat it in all its gory sentiment. She would indulge me, telling me how everyone had been really worried (‘really really really worried, Mum?’) and how I had been really (‘really really’?) brave.
The odd Dickensian flourish notwithstanding, my illness helped convince them that it was time to move. There was some untreated land across from our backyard which Jack became convinced was to blame and, besides, they were hoping to do something that no one in their family had ever done before.
They were going to buy a house.
Such a move had been unthinkable to both sets of my grandparents – they had rented the same houses all their lives, it had been the safest (the only) option. My parents were set to become part of a relatively new socio-economic group: the property-owning working class.
Years later, when I was a student on the obligatory left, I would hear talk of ‘false consciousness’ and ‘embourgeoisement’ – the process whereby the working class were effectively bought off, assimilated into the socio-economic power structures that had kept them oppressed. Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains. And mortgages, and colour TVs, shagpile carpets, three-piece suites and central heating.
The political muscle of the working class, so it was argued, was being softened up by giving them the illusion of freedom through material comfort. To which I say: outside toilets. No heroic struggles of the left, no strikes or wars against imperialist aggressors were made easier by having to go out in the freezing cold in order to take a shit. The prospect of becoming home-owners may have been fraught with all sorts of dangers, but an atrophying of class awareness wasn’t one of them. There was nothing ‘false’ about this consciousness; it was the very stuff of their lives. They had grown up pissing into chamber pots, paying money to slumlords who had thought it only fair that my parents should carry out the maintenance on their property.
And so it was that we ended up in Lister Street – number 24, opposite the chippy, next door to the corner shop. It had a vestibule, a word I always think has church-like connotations, somewhere where you might find a tabernacle. Everywhere you looked there was Catholic tat – small statues of the Sacred Heart, with His heart-shaped heart that glowed in the dark. Statues of St Christopher – patron saint of children. Tiny bottles of holy water that ‘never evaporated’ (want to test the science on that, Mum, every time you fill ’em up?); small cards bearing pious verses; a 3D picture of Our Lord looking gormlessly out over some sheep; palms when they were in season, rosary beads which were always in season. We had candles with Latin inscriptions, candles with fey poems and candles that weren’t really candles but that were battery powered and doubled as lamps. The Virgin made an appearance in nearly every room. Her statue had pride of place in the living room, on the mantelpiece, the body of her recently crucified Son draped operatically across her arms. Her picture was in both bedrooms, the blue and white of her headscarf blended into the whiteness of surrounding doves, her hands locked in supplication. The Pope kept watch over what we got up to in the kitchen, the watchful eye of His Holiness gazing tenderly upon our boxes of Shredded Wheat and Family Packs of Wagon Wheels. He blessed our newly fitted carpets, the three-piece suite which kept its wrapping for years.
I have my own room – the front room, looking out at a garden that has no grass. Both backyard and garden were paved over, reassuring slabs of concrete that only needed the odd bit of weeding. Given Jack’s job anything more would have been too much of a busman’s holiday. His love of being outdoors never extended to gardening. Or gardens. Or even indoor plants. The natural world in general was a closed book to my parents. And to me, still. Even now, if someone mentions that their clematis is coming along nicely, I tend to think of a skin condition or venereal disease.
At the bottom of the street is a playground, nothing more than a bit of spare ground with some swings. Everyone calls it ‘the wreck’. Later it occurs to me that what it is actually called is ‘the rec’ – as in recreation – and I wonder if the pun is intentional. I spend summer nights swinging on the swings on this wrecked rec. It is where I first hear Diane Hacking tell me about girls’ periods, though I wasn’t sure if I believed her. I thought she was just saying that, the way boys say gross stuff: just to gross you out. She tries to get me to push the swings so high that they will wrap themselves around the top bar, but I won’t. Doesn’t she see that if we wrap the swing around the top bar then we won’t be able to swing on it? She wants me to break it. Why would I want to do that?
Next
‘It is impossible to keep constant watch over your crib. In your breast – you poor little thing! – a mysterious combination is forming.’
Italo Svevo, Zeno’s Conscience
I can’t tell the kind of story that goes: ‘When I was seven and a half my mother bought me my first set of Lego and it was then that I knew I was destined to be an architect.’ Memory doesn’t work that way, at least my memory doesn’t. My oldest friend, Dave Hesmondhalgh, can do a version of this. Give him a year from, say, 1972 onwards, and he can pretty much give you where he was, the friends he had and the records they were listening to. It’s an impressive feat, one that I feel means that he is closer to himself, more aware of how his previous selves all connect and have developed.
My recall is more impressionistic: not so much chronology or linearity as disjointed montages of sensation. This makes for wild anachronism, as I lump together stuff from my late childhood with that of early adolescence. It is like a Godard film, full of jump cuts, a bricolage of photography and science fiction. Some of this has got to be the drugs. You cannot – as I have – live the life of a drug addict and/or alcoholic and still expect to trust your memory.
So I am ten, or I am seven or I am nine. On Saturday mornings my mum drops me off at the pictures, where a theatre full of kids the same age (a ‘bedlam’ of kids?) run around and watch cartoons. There is a serialized Western that always seems to be out of sequence. The goodie wears white and the baddie wears black and there is a stagecoach that is always crashing. Then there is the Emperor Ming, a
n imperious fellow who I secretly wish well, urging him on to victory as though him defeating Flash Gordon would also represent my own triumph over these other kids – such childish children – who are all screaming for their hero.
The shrieking of the kids is piercing, hysterical; toffee and pop fly through the air. The soft spring-back seats are being kicked and pummelled, a sort of percussion to accompany the soundtrack. My ten- or whatever year-old self is on edge: I want to cry but know I can’t. What I want is for the other kids to shut up and watch the film, for them to do it properly and silently. What I want is queues and rules and orderly adults ordering them to hush. I hadn’t then read Lord of the Flies, but when I did I recognized Piggy as my earlier self, insisting on the civilizing power of the conch whilst all around him boys were unleashing their murderous boyhood.
Was I really such a precious little bastard? It would seem so. Little Lord Fauntleroy, as my dad used to tease. The world of boys was a mystery to me (as was the world of girls). Their sheer physicality – all that rough ’n’ tumble – seemed an assault on my only child’s autonomy. It blurred the borders between me and them, between this loved and sickly child and the anonymous mass that is Children.
In an attempt to save me from those Saturday morning picture shows, my grandad teaches me to play chess. And cribbage. And poker. It’s the miners’ strike of 1974, and I have never been happier. When, ten years later, I spent time as an undergraduate campaigning for the miners, I am now convinced that it was partly out of gratitude for the favour they had done me in bringing about the three-day week and the blackouts. It can’t be true, but it seemed that the whole of the country, or the whole of Accrington (same thing), was bathed in candlelight.
I finish school early (no lamplights), go up Dill Hall Lane, past the newsagents on the corner who wouldn’t sell me a copy of a magazine with Marc Bolan on the cover because ‘you do know it’s for girls’ and knock-and-only-me my way into my grandparents’ tiny terrace. Sally, my grandma, makes me a milky coffee to go with the shortbread, and my grandad mock-spits into his hands and says, ‘Now then, I’ll stop you farting in church.’ And we play.
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness Page 2