She gives me one of her best ‘don’t get smart with me son’ stares. She may not have read any Mary McCarthy, but she knows when her son’s being a smartarse. Yes, history.
Matthew Arnold would have loved my mum (and my mum, no doubt, would have loved Matthew Arnold). When, in the late nineteenth century, he was fretting about the Barbarians, the Philistines and the Populace, he was worried that the working class fell short ‘in those bright powers of sympathy and ready powers of action’ that were the qualities of the middle class. What they needed was Culture, and plenty of it. Literature, English obviously, would ennoble them, soothe their anarchic unrest and help fill them with all the sweetness and light of humanist understanding.
Kath had never read a book in her life, but she was a card-carrying Arnoldian nevertheless. She had a blind faith in books, in reading as a moral enterprise. As I’ve said, she’d boast of my bookishness in the same way that other parents might flaunt their child’s achievements in the high jump. When I needed to get her permission for a school trip to Stratford, she would positively glow. Shakespeare! The word was said like it was part of the catechism, reverentially, eyes closed.
The problem for me was that I shared her devotion to learning, but had nearly been consumed in its fires. Books hadn’t saved my life. They’d nearly ended it. It was books that had led me to Father Him. If it hadn’t had been for books, I would never have found myself sitting in his room late at night, lost in all that feverish pretence. There’d been a joke going round the schoolyard. An old man in a raincoat says to this young lad, Do you want to see some photos of puppies? And the young lad says, Only if you give me a suck of your cock first. Kafka was Father K’s puppy pictures, Beckett his bag of sweets. I’d had my sentimental education and it had made me anything but sentimental.
At the same time, reading was the only thing I’d got left. So books it would be: books it would have to be. I’d divorce Them from Him, the lesson from the teacher, the sweeties from the cock.
My parents approved of me getting all the qualifications I could, storing them up like the educational equivalent of my Post Office savings account. But, as they both agreed, it was a gamble. I could see them doing the odds: sixteen to eighteen equals two years’ wages: an office job, save up, possible deposit on a house. That would have been ‘doing very well for yourself’, a close relation to ‘doing very nicely for yourself’, but more honest, less of the got-lucky-on-the-pools about it. A mortgage and a white-collar job were not, as they said, to be sniffed at. They were the ingredients of ‘a good catch’. And if there was one thing Kathleen was certain of, it was that I would someday make someone a bloody good catch.
Or there was A levels: hard slog with no guarantees. But if it paid off you were made. Not just a cushy job but a decent job, a vocation of which you could be proud. Teacher, gasp. It was risky and, despite doing the pools (4 score draws 2, 7, 24, 26 – our birthdays plus house number) and the bingo, they weren’t really gambling people.
Then there was the matter of board. The lads who left school at sixteen – my cousins, for example – would ‘tip up’ to their parents, pay them a percentage of their wages for food and lodging. It was never said, but I knew that A levels were their sacrifice as much as mine.
Jack has an idea.
Walk up Lister Street to Blackburn Road and head towards Accrington. Pass the chemist and the hairdresser-who-does-your-mum’s-hair. Go past that strange-smelling takeaway cafe with all the taxis outside and on past the grocer-who-delivers, then Ivan the barber with the feather cut (who can only do feather cuts) and on until you turn down King Street. Before you pass under the viaduct, there’s a working men’s club on your left. It has lots of glass and white brick and smells of hops. Jack Caveney has been a member all his working life. He knows everyone.
Go through the backdoor to the lounge (the front will take you into the concert room). A man sits behind a Formica table. He’s there to check everyone’s membership cards and sign anyone in who isn’t a member. He still looks at my dad’s card even though he was at school with him; even though Dad will have paid his dues every year; even though he comes here at least twice a week.
‘And this is my lad.’
The man nods towards the visitors’ book, his cap moves back and forth. I sign in. He does not smile.
Jack buys himself a pint of mild and me a bitter shandy (‘with plenty of shandy’). He disappears around the back of the bar and when he returns he brings with him a man dressed in a thick grey woollen suit over a tank top, shirt and tie. It is the middle of August. This man is Tommy, the club steward. He looks me up and down and says, ‘Jack Caveney’s lad? Hmmmm. You’ll do.’
Thus did I get my first job. It can’t have really been like that (I must have said something) but that’s how I remember it. The job was Glass Collector – Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays; seven till closing, five pound a night.
Although the working men’s clubs were meant to be way past their heyday by the early 1980s, no one had thought to inform the patrons who kept my collecting basket brimming over three nights a week. And it wasn’t just King Street. There was the Poplar, the Pioneer, the Miners, the Dyers, Sydney Street and Willow Mount. Mrs Thatcher may have decided to transform the working class into the property-owning family units of her own dark-hearted dreams, but these clubs testified to a class still deeply invested in notions of community and tradition.
The WMCs carried with them all the tensions of their history – a shaky paternalism, rigid hierarchies (the steward and the committee were the boss and the foremen of leisure) and an ambivalent relationship to alcohol itself (the influence of the temperance movement, perhaps). It was fine to enjoy a drink but shameful to be drunk (to ‘be too fond of a drink’ was strictly for the pubs).
Women simply never went to the bar. Ever. It may well have been a club rule, like the one that forbade them from going in the games room (for their own good: ‘the language’). They drank halves of lager, or gin and orange, or port and lemon, or Babycham. Their hair was astonishing. The women had hair-dos like industrial sculptures, lacquered and backcombed and preserved throughout the week in hairnets and curlers.
The men had faces moulded from the cement of the brickyard, broken-veined noses and thinning slicked-back hair. They all had sideburns, all except the ex-military who wore their clean-shaven cheeks like medals.
Need I say that the club was ninety-nine per cent white? That the one ‘black fella’ was called ‘black Trevor’ and that there were no Asians (odd, considering that they were generally agreed to be taking over the country).
I spent most of my worktime in the concert hall, a spacious canteen-type room with a raised glittery stage at one end and row after row of long tables leading up to it. Next to the stage was a pulpit, sorry, a raised box, where a member of the committee would sit with a microphone telling us when bingo tickets were available, when the pies had arrived and to give a big King Street welcome to . . . Mike Marino, Casanova, The Enoch Powell Carol Singers. OK I just made that last one up, but I didn’t make up the other two. These artists – ‘turns’ – were huge draws across the north-west and commanded a loyal following with a fee that reflected it. Their repertoire was tailor-made to an audience reared on the softer side of rock and pop. Slim Whitman, Johnny Mathis, Neil Diamond, The Carpenters, Frank Ifield, Roy Orbison, this was music which wore its nostalgia openly. Elvis was relegated to his Vegas years, ‘The Wonder of You’ belted out, the audience happy to provide the bridging Whoooo—Hoooooo–Oooooo-s.
The key to a successful turn was a question of balance. They had to take the music seriously but not themselves, create a kind of schmaltz-free sentimentality. They also had to know when to get off. Because no matter how Rhinestone a singer’s Cowboy could be, or how high his una paloma blanca soared, he was always the supporting act to the club’s star attraction, Lady Bingo.
Next
‘He gives you so much trouble, doesn’t he? He simply will not understand, wi
ll not co-operate, will not see it your way. And your way, is it really your way? Can you honestly say that you have a way of life?’
Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
‘I’m not looking for philosophers, I’m looking for comics,’ says the soul-deadened agent to the group of would-be comedians in Trevor Griffiths’ 1979 play of that name. ‘The people pay the bills, remember . . . A good comic can lead an audience by the nose yes, but only in the direction they’re already going . . .’
(‘. . . and so Paddy says, yes officer, it was definitely her . . .’)
The days when a club comic could pack ’em in had gone long before I started working there, but the gap was filled by the singers providing one-liners in between songs and the occasional ‘free and easy’ (the WMC’s open mic night). Yet the real comedians, as Jack was keen to remind me, were to be found at the bar, or in the lounge, or upstairs playing snooker.
(‘. . . and so he says, not to worry, we do ’em in black for a shilling . . .’)
I wander round the club at fifteen-minute intervals, leaning over couples – a couple of couples usually, men talking to men, the women having a gossip (two terms whose irreversibility was iron-clad). ‘This done?’ ‘This one empty?’ ‘You finished with this one?’ I’ve got my rap down pat now, a kind of polite invisibility that, if the drinks put for me behind the bar are anything to go by, is serving me well. I know my awkward sods from my likes-to-have-a-laughs, the stuck-up cows from the all-coat-and-no-knickers. It’s convivial in a way that I love the North for being, every joke a heartbeat away from an argument: ‘No, but you bloody will be.’ ‘I’ll chop your bloody hands off, you little sod.’ ‘If you insist.’ On the stage Tom Jones has become Englebert Humperdink has become Paul Anka.
(‘. . . because fresh air’s free . . .’)
I bring the glasses back to Elaine, the dishwasher, a woman who insists that I look exactly like her nephew, as though this explains something important about both of us. I stand at the bar and drink. I’m allowed to drink any drinks the barmaids pull by accident, and there’s always a fair few accidents.
This then is my new now, my real hometown. Not all that nonsense with the Rev Kev. Because that’s what it was, all it was: nonsense. Behind me. No more. Push on. A levels. This will do in the meantime. Won’t it?
There’s Johnny Regan, an Irishman who made a small fortune tarmacing people’s driveways. He always smells of Brut aftershave. He drinks beer with whiskey chasers and I have never seen him drunk. At Lent he ‘stops drinking’, which means he drinks lager. He’s stood with Big Frankie Grant, a man who worked as a labourer on every A road and motorway going through Lancashire. There’s Ian with his DA haircut and Old Stan who is a midget. They’re playing dominoes, a game where they score points for making multiples of 5s and 3s. I’m not supposed to go to the bar for the punters (‘otherwise you’ll end up doing it for everyone’) but I go to the bar for this group. I watch and learn. So a double six scores 4 because it is 4 × 3; but if your opponent has a 6/3 domino he can match the 6 and turn the 12 into a 15. Which scores 8 because it is five 3s plus three 5s. Got it. They are keeping up a banter that is older than my sixteen years, jokes about their wives and people they used to work with.
Frankie plays a double blank – a domino with no white spots – and steals the points his opponent has just scored. He has a big bass laugh, chest hair made of steel. ‘Tha should a known I had the nigger if thy’d’ve been watchin’.’ No one blinks or coughs. There would have been more of a reaction if he’d have belched. His racism wasn’t malicious or even acknowledged as being racist. It was naturalized, so deeply ingrained as to be invisible, inaudible. He said it in the same way he called the barmaid ‘love’, or the corner shop the Paki shop. He said what he said because it’s what he’d always said.
Somehow the racism nestled with the sentimentality: they shared, as it were, an emotional etymology. It’s like the ‘I can’t live without you’ love of the wife-beater who’s just given his missus a good hiding. It’s cloying; it is deeply moved by itself. The same casual disgust that gave birth to the Paki joke was a close relation to the mawkish collective ‘aaahhhh’ that was let out at the mention of the word ‘kiddies’. The club comedians both on and off the stage for whom racism was merely a ‘bit of a laugh’ were the most adamant that they would never tell jokes about disability or children. Let alone disabled children: kiddies with cancer, kiddies in wheelchairs, kiddies without a proper home to go to. (Why not? If a joke’s just a joke, then why not make jokes about anyone and everyone? Because those kiddies are our kiddies: white kiddies, TV poster kiddies.) And let’s not forget to whip ourselves up into a frenzy of sanctimonious hypocrisy over swearing, as though the problem with the term ‘fucking Pakis’ was the ‘fucking’.
I want to write about the everyday heroism of my class, their triumph over the daily grind of crappy jobs or no job, of how they somehow made relationships work despite it all. I want to write about Northern warmth and Northern wit, the resilience and the defiance of people who put two fingers up with one hand even as they doffed the cap with the other. Yet I know it’s not quite true. Or only half-true, and that complexity is not something that traditionally belongs to the inner life of the working class. Their lives (it is said) are simple and so (it follows) that their inner lives are equally as regimented or impoverished.
The ambiguity I was taught to tease out and cherish as a student of literature doesn’t seem to apply to the people with whom I was brought up, and who brought me up (and even the ‘whom’ of that sentence causes me to check my nose to see if I’m talking down it). We were reading Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers for A level and I remember thinking that the dad never stood a chance. He’s a brute, a drunk, a cutter of Paul’s golden hair. He has a hard job, and hard jobs make for hard men. That is all you know and need to know about Mr Morel.
I want to write about the complexities of my class, yet ‘complex’ is not a thing they seem eager to embrace. When I naively ask friends of my dad’s about themselves, they say things like ‘There’s nowt to tell’ or ‘Whaddya wanna know for?’ It was a weird question to them; intrusive, impertinent. When I got to university I was filled with envy for the ease with which middle-class people spoke about themselves. They had been taught that they were interesting, that their stories were worth listening to. They accepted my curiosity as their birthright.
The truth is that my own class embarrasses me. All those names and their un-glamour, the ‘auld Tommy’s and the ‘Big Jim’s, the ‘Our Doris’-es and the ‘Your Hilda’s. Their stereotypicality has not been forced upon them; they embrace it willingly. They do it to themselves, internalizing their oppression, emerging at birth pre-stereotyped and ready for the brickyard, the shoddy; factory-fodder. They still speak broad Lancastrian, most of them, ‘thee-ing’ and ‘tha knows-ing’ their way through a series of anecdotes, most of which celebrate a certain kind of stupidity. A defiant, no-nonsense stupidity, a dumb insolence, one that appears to speak commonsensical truths to posh la-di-da power. And fails. It fails because they’re in a double bind, what I would later find out is called a dialectic. If they aim for something ‘better’, they fail to see what’s better about it. Or rather: the very thing that makes it ‘better’ is its exclusivity; is precisely that people like them don’t go and see it, hear it, read it.
There were advertisements on the TV around this time for complete record sets of mainstream classical composers. The ad featured Johann Strauss’ Blue Danube, which the voiceover would promise was just one of many of the great waltzes that had been recorded especially for you. Kathleen would toy with the idea of buying this. Or rather of me buying this for her. Because if I bought it I wouldn’t have wasted the money (‘it’s the sort of thing you’d like’), whereas if she bought it, she would have. Because she will never listen to it. She likes the idea of liking all those old Strauss waltzes. They signify an elegant form of deference, one which can be fantasized as being court
ly and romantic (‘Just think, them balls! Them costumes! All that bowing!’). And she knows The Blue Danube because everyone knows it. But this familiarity is fake. It also reminds her that that’s all she knows (Johann or Richard, Kathleen?) and that if she did really buy that three-box record set she wouldn’t know any of the other tunes. And they didn’t come cheap.
What was she going to do? Finish working at the bingo, the factory or on the home help where she would later work? Come home and make the tea. Do ‘a bit’ (it was never ‘a lot’, even though it was a lot) of housework. Maybe mend some clothes, do whatever bit of old people’s washing the home help were told they didn’t have to do but that all of them did, and then tell Jack to turn off the telly because she fancied listening to a couple of hours of Johann Sebastian Strauss? Too bloody right she wasn’t. And besides, there’s the bingo.
I am sixteen and I am picking up glasses and for three nights a week I listen to different turns butcher the same old songs. Yet that’s not all I’m listening to. John-no-longer-Conrad sends me a tape of The Fall’s Totale’s Turns (It’s Now or Never) from Cambridge, with a handmade postcard of Gene Hackman in The French Connection, the back of which says: ‘Keep picking yer feet in Poughkeepsie’. When I first play it I think that it’s bootleg, a bootleg from some secret gig that John is showing off about. I’m half-right. Most of it is recorded live, but not at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge or any other punk-friendly venue. It’s recorded live in working men’s clubs in Bradford and Doncaster, and if there is a better internal soundtrack to collect glasses to in King Street WMC I don’t want to hear it. Each track moves further and deeper into an ecstasy of loathing. There’s a three-way loop of disgust between Smith, the band and the audience; their hostility is perfectly triangulated. ‘We are the Fall-a, the crap that talks back . . .’ Smith shrieks, ‘the difference between you and us-ah is that we have brains . . .’ He introduces the third track, ‘Rowche Rumble’, with a goading reminder to the punters, ‘Last orders half-past ten’. It’s his Waste Land moment, his own punk spin on Eliot’s ‘Hurry up please it’s time’. And so King Street became a different space.
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness Page 14