Fifteen two fifteen four fifteen six, two is eight and one for his nob makes nine. We do this night after night. We’re hypnotized by numbers, lost in the rhythm of those precious fifteens and the possibilities of those discarded cards known as ‘the box’. We are warriors in combat.
During these battles my grandfather seemed to me the kind of man that men should be. Here – across a makeshift card table – I was able to see how a man could be both daft and noble, delightfully playful and deadly serious. I was learning that the value of my own hand was dependent on the opportunities afforded to it by the other’s hand, and that both hands were at the mercy of chance. He taught me the value of play.
About poker he taught me that I should never play poker. Or at least not against retired sergeant-majors who had fleeced half the East Lancashire Regiment. We played for Monopoly money, equally distributed at the start of each session. He would tease me to distraction, punctuating the examination of his cards with an array of ‘Ooo, would you look at that?’s and ‘That’ll do nicely’s aimed – and succeeding – at instilling a fatal uncertainty into whatever hand I held. He would bankrupt me within a half an hour, lend me some more and then bankrupt me again. At the end of the session he would faithfully tot up my debt – often in the millions – and then offer me the chance to win it back the next night.
Was Dad jealous of the time I spent at his parents, of my closeness to a man he had never really known? There was, as we say, little love lost between them. They seemed so physically different: Dad small and compact, sinewy, his strength in his forearms and torso. Jack Senior was over six feet, his body broad in the shoulders, his chest wide and expansive.
There had been a huge fallout when I was still an infant, one of those stories that has reached mythic status by the time you encounter it as an adult. Firstly, Jack Snr had wanted me to be called Patrick – the name of his own father, a giant of an Irish patriarch who had sired eleven children back in County Mayo. Jack Jnr would have none of it: I was his boy and would carry a name of his (i.e. my mum’s) choosing. Besides, was it not time to leave behind the Irish association? Patrick Caveney for Christ’s sake! How bloody Oirish do you want the little sod to sound? Why not call him O’Kavanagh and have done with it? No: Patrick would mean Paddy, and this boy was not going to be anybody’s Paddy. And not another bloody John-Jack either. ‘Graham’ was just that little bit different, not one you hear a lot, not common.
There had never been a St Graham either; a fact that, as Mum used to point out, meant that I would get to be the first.
On top of that my grandparents had had a dog – a small yappy corgi called Reena (and yes I can hear every syllable of displaced Irish romance in that name as well). Reena had bitten someone – a neighbour I think – when I was still a toddler. It was Dad who gave the ultimatum: if you want your grandchild to come visit, get rid of the dangerous dog.
The feud went on for months apparently, the two men walking past each other in the street. Quite how it was resolved, history doesn’t relate, except to say that all my memories of my grandparents are steadfastly corgi-free.
After the war my grandad worked at Blythes Chemicals – a major employer situated on the canal on the road to Blackburn. The factory was there to dye the cotton, though to me its powers extended to alchemy. The water around it would turn into colours I had never seen before, or since; a kind of orangey turquoise overlaid with sickly viscous greens and yellows. We would have called them psychedelic, except we didn’t know what psychedelic was. Instead whenever we passed that part of the canal – Bridge Street – Mum would joke, ‘Grandad’s been cooking again.’ This probably wasn’t far from the truth, now I come to think about it. At some point there had been a spillage and he had received burns to his face, so he must have been directly involved with the processing. He even got some compensation, though it can’t have been much. I remember a Christmas food package arriving each year at their house, and my grandma’s bitter verdict, ‘Not enough to make up for his looks, is it?’
Over my summer holidays we walk: me, my grandad, and a non-corgi black Labrador that is also called Reena. We walk for miles: over Jackson’s farm, up the Coppice, out to Rishton, over Ribbesdale, down into Clayton. We walk and we talk, or rather I pester him to tell me war stories and he torments me about Diane Hacking, who may or may not have sent me a Valentine’s card.
He evades the war, I evade Diane Hacking. We settle on the subject of my ‘big daft’ great-uncle Clifford, a bland lumbering cartoon of a man who communicates solely in monosyllabic grunts. Go round and see my great-aunt Florrie – my grandad’s sister, wife to Clifford – and it is him, the dreaded Cliff, who will invariably open the door. ‘Who’s out,’ he will say when I ask ‘Who’s in?’ ‘Dunno when who’s back,’ he continues, the already unfunny joke becoming unfunnier by the second. I tell my grandad this and he is torn between not wanting me to talk badly of my elders, and wanting me to talk badly of this particular elder. He laughs and tells me a funny story about Cliff going for a packet of fags and coming home three days later, shamefaced, sans fags. We walk further on.
Everybody knows my grandad, the big fellow with the beret and the dog. A couple of people even salute. I am his lad’s lad: ‘our Graham’; soon to be ‘Our-Graham-Who-Goes-to-St Marys’ said in one breath, another name.
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From the Accrington Observer: cutting clipped and glued into album: date missing, but I’m guessing August ’75: ‘Eleven-year-old Graham Caveney, 24 Lister Street Accrington, is this year’s winner of a knockout putting competition held in Gatty Park by Hyndburn’s Recreation and Amenities Department . . . His efforts earned him the first prize of a £1 book token, a 50p record token and a set of book plates. Said Graham who is due to start at St Mary’s College Blackburn next month: “I’m going to buy The Fivepenny Piece’s record but I don’t know what book I’ll buy. I shall defend my title next year. The competition is a good idea because you can get bored during the summer holidays.”’
Need I say more?
Here it is: my very own Aspern Papers, the Key to All Mythologies. All future character traits are to be found – the annoying pedantry, the self-aggrandizement (‘I shall defend my title’ for God’s sake), the pious didacticism. And can we detect the spectral hand of Kathleen Caveney? Yes we can. For the bit about me being ‘due to start at St Mary’s College’ was her handiwork, her contribution to my entry into fame and fortune. She actually went into the offices of the Accrington Observer and demanded that they insert this vital piece of information, as though no Gatty Park Putting Contest Victory story could be complete without the knowledge of whether or not the winner was headed for the nearest grammar school.
It was the last year of the eleven-plus – 1976 – and a whole host of stories around social mobility and working-class education were being circulated and contested. For my parents there was no contest: this was my ticket out of having to do the kinds of jobs they had had to do themselves. It was as simple as that. It was only years later that I realized how complicated such simple stories are.
My passing the eleven-plus was not unrelated to my having become an altar boy a few years before, but I’m not sure how. The priest from my local parish – a scary jowly Irishman called Father McAvoy – had come to our school and told four boys to ask our parents if they would like us to ‘serve on the altar’. They had said yes – all four sets of them. They had said yes the same way they said yes when the same priest asked them if they could keep a missionary box for the starving children of Africa (‘just your spare copper’, which spare copper?) and yes when he asked them if they were truly sorry for their sins when they went to confession.
So an altar boy I became. And I loved it. I would be called out of school to serve at a christening or to a funeral, slipped some silver for the former, a pound note for the latter. I remember saying how weird I thought it was that leaving this world merited a bigger tip than arriving into it, and Father Mac joking that, unlike the dearly
departed, the newly arrived needed to be more prudent. I loved the long red cassock with its missing buttons, the white surplice, getting to bang the gong and checking that there was enough host and wine before the service.
I was confirmed whilst still ‘on the altar’, chosen name John (what else?). Confirmation is one of the three sacraments of initiation (along with baptism and communion). It was, I was told, the proudest moment of my life.
A sweet-smelling oil called chrism has been consecrated by the bishop, the arrival of whom is itself one notch down from the Second Coming of Christ. We kneel before him and kiss his ring. Acts of the Apostles are read. This will be a second baptism, one fitting the age of reason, a commitment between the confirmand and the Holy Spirit. We have been practising for weeks, rehearsing our lines, kissing Father Mac’s pretend-ring finger (which smells of tobacco). Photographers have been hired for the day, suits pressed. Mothers are spitting into their hankies and wiping clean their children’s faces. I look, in the words of my mum, like an angel. My hair is a mixture of buttercup yellow and sugar-stealer white. I am podgy-cute, with the kind of chubby cheeks that make grown-ups want to squeeze them. The bishop doesn’t squeeze them. What he does is to slap me on the face. It’s a gentle slap and I knew it was coming. In fact the slap had been eagerly anticipated, symbol as it was of the hardship I would endure as a follower of Christ. And as he slaps me – me and hundreds of other boys who are all lining the aisles of the Sacred Heart Holy Roman Catholic Church, all waiting to be slapped – he says, ‘Peace be with you.’
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‘Preacher in the pulpit roars with all his might / Sing Glory Hallelula with the folks all in a fright’
Lonnie Donegan, ‘Putting on the Style’
I am a devout child. I want to be good. Each night I kneel by my bed and pray, eyes squeezed tight: ‘Gentle Jesus meek and mild, look down on me thy little child. And if I die before I wake, I pray my Lord my soul to take . . .’ Then I remember that it’s selfish just to pray for myself and so I think of my family. I linger purposefully over the ones I don’t like, my way of doing penance for not liking them. I think of my fat cousin Simon and his fat face. I ask Jesus to make me be nicer to him, to stop me from hating his half-opened mouth and the way he says, ‘You what?’ I line up the people I love in my head and think warm thoughts to each of them. I then slot the people I don’t love into the line-up of the people I do. Father Mac has told me the best way to pray for people I don’t like. He tells me to try and think of them when they were babies, to remind myself that they weren’t always bullying idiots or annoying arseholes. This works for a while: I replace fat Simon the stupid grown-up with fat Simon the gurgling baby, and I almost like him. Then the picture changes to a grown-up with a baby’s head, and that doesn’t work at all. Besides, babies aren’t so innocent; they aren’t innocent at all. They’re born with original sin. It’s why they need to be baptized.
I become obsessed by the Stations of the Cross – a retelling of the various falls and encounters Jesus underwent on his way to being crucified. We – the priest, one other boy and me – walk one way down the nave of the church and stop beside a hung wooden carving, ‘Jesus Falls for the First Time’ or ‘Meets His Mother’, and my job is to wave incense whilst a prayer or contemplation is offered. Then we go back up the other side, dutifully stopping and thinking how awful it must have been when Jesus was ‘Stripped of His Garments’ (No. 10) and ‘Nailed to the Cross’ (No. 11) but thanking God that He is ‘Taken Down from the Cross’ (No. 13) and finally ‘Laid in the Tomb’ (No. 14). The incense ensures that the prayers get wafted up to heaven, although Father Mac also told us it was because people used to smell.
This story, the cross story, has a happy ending; but this isn’t happiness I’m feeling. It is something close to rapture, both ecstatic and absurd. My young boy ears hear the reality of suffering, not the finale of everlasting life. I cannot imagine eternity, but I can imagine a tortured body. Or at least I can try. If I stare hard at the nails and then dig my fingernails into my palm, then (scrunched face) nearly, but (scrunch even harder) not really. It is unimaginable. The pain and suffering that Our Lord went through is beyond my imagination, and yet that mustn’t stop me trying. It’s the least I can do to repay Him for His agonized Passion.
It is why – it’s one of the whys – I go to confession. Once a fortnight, usually a Saturday morning, I go to the Sacred Heart. It is the church for which I’m an altar boy, the church into which I was baptized. Which means that the Sacred Heart is also The Church, a synecdoche of the ‘one holy Catholic and apostolic church’ in the words of the Nicene Creed.
On the left-hand side is a row of confessional booths, maybe three or four of them. There is a small light over each one, a bare green bulb. Each confessional booth is divided into two parts, one half where the priest sits, the other half for the penitent. There is a priest in each. Father Mac will be one of them, the others will have come over from the surrounding parishes, or the schools, especially to hear confession. If the light is on it means that there is someone making their confession. I sit in the pew and wait my turn. A light goes out, the door opens and a woman hurries out from the penitent’s side of the booth. She keeps her head bowed. She is in a state of grace, or soon will be once she has made her acts of contrition. She goes to the side-altar – our Lady of Compassion’s altar – and lights a candle. She kneels, bows her head and prays. I know her. She is Mary Watson’s mother. I remember Mum saying that she suffers from arthritis and that this is somehow connected in my mum’s eyes with her house having had central heating installed. She’s mouthing her Hail Marys, counting each one off on the beads that she threads between her fingers. My turn. I step inside the booth, close the door and begin. ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost . . .’ The priest is sat on the other side, wooden panelling separating us. We communicate through a square latticed grille which slides shut when not in use. The voice says something like, ‘May the Lord in your heart help you to confess your sins with sorrow . . .’ It’s Father Mac, I’d know his voice anywhere, as sure as he knows mine. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last confession. During this time I have sworn . . . I have not honoured my mum and dad . . . I have placed other things above my love of God . . . I have had impure thoughts . . . I have not been as charitable as I should have been . . . and that is all I can remember, Father.’ ‘And for these sins, are you truly sorry?’ ‘Yes, Father, I am truly sorry and will try not to sin in the future . . .’ Father Mac – it is definitely him – tells me to say ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers before absolving me in Latin which I don’t understand but which finishes, ‘. . . in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.’
Quite what the relationship was between all this and my impending grammar-school education I was too young to know. Something to do with homework, conversations between teachers and priests, the guarantees of respectability and Good Catholic Families. I do know that the same four who got into St Mary’s were the same four who had been chosen as altar boys.
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‘How can they see with sequins in their eyes?’
‘Razzle Dazzle’ song from the film Chicago
Julie encourages me to do a relaxation exercise. I sit quietly, and focus on my body: aware of my feet on the floor, my arms by my side, my buttocks on the chair. I concentrate on my breath; slightly chilled at the tip of the nostrils as it goes in, warmer on its way out. She asks me to remember a time when I felt perfectly safe and happy.
And I think of Blackpool. Not the Lake or the Peak Districts, not the Yorkshire Dales or even the Ribble Valley, but the brash and trashy glamour of kiss-me-quick Blackpool.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Blackpool had been the destination for Lancashire’s textile workers, a pretty much en masse vacation organized by the mill owners, trade unions and schools. We went there with a sense of contained exploration, an excitement that was as much about familiarity as it was
about novelty. And when I say ‘we’ I mean the whole of Accrington, not just me and my parents.
This was still (just) the time of the Wakes, a whole fortnight when the town would close down and vacate. Going to Blackpool was not so much an escape from Accrington as an extension of it. We would travel with people we knew, lodge with them and meet up with them in the town’s various Working Men’s Clubs. My dad seemed to know more people on the Golden Mile than he did on Accy Market, or maybe it was just that he had the leisure to stop and talk with them. No wonder Kathleen’s assessment of the place was that ‘it was just like home’, although crucially for her it was a home in which she didn’t have to cook or clean.
They were both united in the belief that sea air – Blackpool Sea Air in particular – possessed medicinal, quasi-miraculous properties. ‘Get a lungful of that,’ Mum would say as I inhaled the mixed aromas of doughnut fat, burger grease and candy floss, ‘you’ll sleep tonight.’ Thus were the restorative properties of ‘a fortnight away’ announced, safe in the knowledge that we weren’t really Away.
I love being in Blackpool, and I love my mum, and I love being with my mum in Blackpool. We play telly bingo in the amusements arcade and win a crappy fluffy-toy prize. We call it Walter and bury him in the sand. We eat toffee apples at the Pleasure Beach, at the entrance to which is a glass case containing a mechanical clown who rocks back and forth laughing maniacally. It is like he is a prisoner inside his box but a tyrant-in-waiting to everyone outside it, a demon howling at jokes only he can hear.
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness Page 3