Alone

by Pip Granger

  Everyone mucked in at the Unity; amateurs and professionals acted side by side, sets were painted by anyone who could hold a brush, lighting was dealt with by any competent sparks who happened to be about and the whole place was kept clean and tidy by anyone who walked through the door. In fact, the first time Mother met Paul Robeson was in the Unity’s Ladies’ loo.

  ‘I heard this incredibly deep voice singing “Old Man River”, so I followed it to its source and found Paul Robeson, his face all covered in white spots like a reversed Dalmatian. He was whitewashing the Ladies’ and singing while he worked. He was such a nice man. Everyone liked Paul.’

  A combination of idealism and the terrors of a world war proved to be a powerful aphrodisiac for my parents, and, shamefully for the times, they wound up becoming lovers at their very first meeting.

  As Mother often said, ‘There’s nothing like the threat of imminent death for loosening knicker elastic, I can tell you. Lots of people dropped their drawers who wouldn’t have dreamed of it a few years before.’

  She never said if she was one of the newly converted drawer-droppers or an old hand. I suspect the latter, frankly: Mother enjoyed sex and made no bones about it.

  Sex without marriage was still frowned upon by the vast majority of people, war or no war, and many couples took the precaution of entering into hasty marriages that they lived to regret in more peaceful times, rather than carrying on an illicit relationship and risk producing a bastard – an appalling prospect. However, Mother was unable to marry Father straight away, because she had already galloped up the aisle in one such hasty ceremony. Her first husband was called Grenfell, and he was abroad in 1941, when Mother and Father met, fighting for king and country. It would take Mother several years to free herself of her unwanted spouse and to marry her second husband, Douglas, our father. In fact, my brother, who was born in 1943, attended their wedding. My poor grandparents must have been mortified, although they would also have been relieved that a marriage had taken place – at last.

  By 1944, Hitler’s determination to pulverize London with flying bombs had got way, way out of hand and was making the business of living tricky in the extreme, as well as dangerous and frightening. For my mother, a walk to the shops to queue for the family’s meagre rations meant manoeuvring Peter’s battleship of a pram – they came really large in those days – round craters great and small, dodging exposed gas mains, side-stepping gushing water pipes twisted into weird and sometimes wonderful sculptures and negotiating tons of broken glass glittering in the giant mounds of shattered concrete, brick and stone that littered the streets. Strangely, baths always seemed to find their way to the top of the rubble, and were usually intact, the same way that stairs seemed to survive to climb towards nothing. It was simply one of those crazy facts of wartime life. That’s why people who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, go to an air raid shelter often cowered beneath the stairs or huddled in the bath.

  All of these hazards made daily life an obstacle course for everyone going about their lawful, or indeed unlawful, business. Most depressing of all were the sad little reminders of lives once lived and then blown apart. There were a lot of those. It might be a teddy bear with one well-sucked ear, lost and lonely in its pile of broken bricks and mortar, or a large pair of bloomers blasted off their washing line and lying forlorn in a patch of rosebay willow herb, or ‘fireweed’. This was always the first plant to colonize a new bomb site, as if it settled with the plaster dust that drifted back to earth once a raid was over, giving survivors and rescuers alike a truly ghastly pallor.

  The worst thing of all was to happen upon a house that had just been hit by a doodlebug, because of the chance of finding a shattered body or two, or the odd limb missing its person. It all added to the gloom and doom that seeped into the psyche and reminded everyone who passed that, next time, it could be them. All these sights contrived to turn a simple stroll into an endurance test for both mind and body. They gnawed away at the spirit, and finally drove my mother and father to look for something better and safer for their brand new baby boy. It was all very well risking their own lives by staying in the capital, but a baby was a different matter altogether.

  So they moved away from the Smoke to Wantley Cottage in Cuckfield, Sussex, not far from Haywards Heath, the town where my mother’s parents lived. Later, they moved into another house in the village, Northern Breach, where I was born. Mother and Father took his widowed mother, Emily Alice, along with them to care for Peter, while Mother went out to work as a teacher to augment the family income.

  Most women and children had to move to pastures new by themselves, but the move as a family was made possible because Father had escaped active service on account of his limp. Father’s left leg had been attacked by polio when he was thirteen, and was left weaker and shorter than his right one.

  Father was deeply ashamed of his left leg, and went to enormous lengths to explain it away as an injury rather than admit to having had polio. He was so ashamed of it that, according to Mother, they had been married several years before she even caught a glimpse of it. He always contrived to undress in the dark, or in another room, anything rather than expose it, although as I remember it, it wasn’t badly deformed to look at. Before my brother’s birth and the move to Sussex, Mother and Father had been regular swimmers at the Hampstead Heath ponds, a hangout for the bohemian, arty, intellectual set to which they belonged. Even there, Mother said, Father managed to hide his poor leg. She said he was very inventive about it, distracting people’s attention just long enough to allow him to slip into or out of his trousers, or delaying his immersion with a last few drags on his fag, until everyone else was halfway across the pond with their backs towards him.

  His shame must have been very great, but its cause is still a mystery to me. Polio was something that people simply didn’t talk about in those days. Perhaps they were afraid to name the thing that they most feared, in the same way that the Victorians didn’t like to talk about TB, or ‘consumption’. For some weird reason, Father seemed to associate polio with poverty, which also harks back to the TB of Victorian England, which really did run riot where diets were poor and overcrowding in tenements was endemic. What had made Father so conscious of his humble origins I really couldn’t say, except perhaps that the class system was an even more serious business for the English then than it is now, especially if you were born into the lower end of it – which he was.

  An incident that occurred at the time illustrates just how badly the lower classes could be treated. Once Father was diagnosed with the dreaded polio, an ambulance was called. It’s hard to appreciate, now that polio has been virtually eradicated, just how deeply it was dreaded. At the onset of the disease, there was no way to tell just how severe it would turn out to be; it could kill, leave the sufferer in an iron lung or leg irons for life, or relatively mildly crippled like my father. Years later, the scene that followed the arrival of the ambulance was described to me by a very old woman called Ethel, a friend and neighbour of Emily Alice, my grandmother, who was there at the time.

  ‘The ambulance came and they loaded Douglas into the back. Emily went to climb in with him, but they wouldn’t let her. Mothers weren’t allowed, you see. She’d just lost her husband, only weeks before, and she was so frightened of losing her only child too, poor dear. She started to cry and carry on something terrible, pleading with them, but they wouldn’t have it. In the end, she got down on her knees right there in the middle of the street, begging them to take her along with him, but they still weren’t going to let her go with them.

  ‘That’s when I came out, me and the rest of the neighbours,’ Ethel continued with satisfaction, ‘and we told ’em straight that the poor woman had only just lost her husband to cancer and that they had her only relative in this world in the back of their ambulance and that it would be wicked, really wicked to leave her behind. In the end they took her, either because they felt sorry for her or because they thought us women would rear up and belt ’em
one: we did outnumber ’em about three to one. After all, if she’d been Lady Muck, they’d never have tried to stop her or given her any argument, they’d have jumped to it right quick. It’s only because she was a charlady from the backstreets of Kilburn that they came over all official.’

  Shamefully, Ethel’s assessment of the situation was almost certainly true. There was definitely one rule for the upper crust and another, and much crueller one, for the lower orders of the day. It was as if the poor didn’t have finer feelings, or, if they did, they simply didn’t matter. It’s possible that Father’s sense of shame came from that dreadful incident, along with his incredible drive to ‘better’ himself.

  Mother always ascribed the beginning of Father’s lifelong habit of telling whoppers to the need to cover up for his leg. Personally, I think it was also partly due to the fact that he was a writer by inclination. In my experience, writers rarely let anything as mundane as the truth get in the way of a good story. There’s always a cast of hundreds in the retelling of an incident, never the two women, one man and his flatulent dog who were actually there. Also, his own father seems to have been something of a liar, so maybe Father simply didn’t have the blueprint for being straight-forwardly honest.

  Over the years I have come to think that Father must have had a desperately unhappy relationship with his own father, a man he never, ever talked about. His lifelong tendency to tell porkies may have begun with the fear of punishment, as well as having had a bad example. My grandfather was sixty when Father was born, and it’s possible that a combination of being too old to tolerate a young child, jealousy at having to share his young wife with a son she adored and a stern, Victorian attitude made him a frightening and loathed figure to his son.

  There was an up-side to Father’s hated polio, though. It meant that not only did he get turned down for active service at the outbreak of World War II, but he also received a modest, but incredibly useful, petrol allowance. This allowance was often augmented by dodgy petrol coupons run up on a busy little printing press located in a backstreet somewhere in the Smoke, or liberated from an official stash at the Ministry warehouse by a suitably corrupt clerk with extra-large pockets. Naturally, Father made it his business to slip the printer or the clerk a few bob for the valuable coupons and so stretched his mileage a little further. Father enjoyed a freedom of movement not open to the majority of his contemporaries. He made the most of it; he was never one to allow an opportunity to pass unexploited, a handy skill he’d honed during the Depression that had dogged the 1930s.

  Both of my parents were creative, passionate and volatile by nature. Adding booze, and plenty of it, to this mixture, it often became a case of ‘light the blue touchpaper and stand well back’, but, for a time at least, they seem to have thrived on it. Perhaps the only real wartime casualty in the family was Mother’s relationship with my brother, Peter.

  She always said, ‘Almost as soon as he made his appearance, he was snatched out of my arms and handed over to Emily Alice to care for, and I was sent back to work so that your father could concentrate on his so-called writing career and I could keep everyone.’

  I know it made her both bitter and sad. She was bitter not only because she resented being the main breadwinner, but also because she wanted to be a ‘great’ writer herself, and felt that she had been granted little time to spare and no peace and quiet in which to concentrate on furthering her ambition.

  She also found that Peter never really felt like her own child, something that made her feel guilty and sad for the rest of her life. Today, we’d say that she wasn’t given the opportunity to bond with her son, but that was a notion that wasn’t understood at the time: she just knew that it felt all wrong, that Emily Alice was more of a mother to Peter than she was ‘allowed’ to be. What made it sadder, in my view, is that Emily Alice died of cancer just weeks before I was born, which meant that Peter both lost his ‘mum’ and gained a rival at roughly the same time. If you add to that the trauma of watching his other mother almost die in childbirth, I can’t help but feel it created a scar that troubled him always. He certainly had some bitterly negative feelings about our mother that I only learned about towards the very end of his own life. I was quite shocked at the depth of those feelings when he told me, and it was only after his death that I was able to work out what probably led to them.

  To begin with, living in Cuckfield was a blessed relief to everyone. What’s more, Mother and Father had the support of her parents and Emily Alice to help them along. Mother was always very fond of Emily Alice, and the feeling was, surprisingly, reciprocated. I say surprisingly, because Emily Alice was well known among her friends for being a very possessive woman, who adored my father. Everyone was astonished that she was able to share him with another woman – any other woman. But she did.

  She once walked in on Father and Mother having a screaming match, and immediately, without stopping to find out what the row was about, jumped on my father, grabbed his hair, and shouted, ‘Don’t you dare to talk to my daughter-in-law like that!’ She was, according to witnesses, genuinely devoted to my mother, and the three of them seem to have been able to live quite happily under the same roof, which, given the personalities involved, seems nothing short of a miracle to me.

  Emily Alice was, by all accounts, a fiery little woman. She was under five feet tall and Welsh in origin. Apparently I take after her in appearance and in some aspects of my personality, although nobody ever said which aspects. Given that the three of them seem to have been very close, I find it surprising that I have never even seen a photograph of her, and despite repeated requests from me, very little information about her was passed on.

  Perhaps, once again, it’s something to do with the times. Perhaps people didn’t talk too much about the dead, because after two world wars, the flu epidemic after World War I and the high mortality rate that was an everyday part of Victorian life, my parents’ generation and their parents’ generation didn’t talk much about the dear departed, working on the theory that it was morbid to dwell. It was simply a part of the famous English stiff upper lip that everyone was so proud of at the time.

  By my first birthday, my looks had improved enormously. So much so, in fact, that, during my party, Mother’s friend Rosemary suddenly exclaimed, ‘Good God, look at her, she’s pretty!’ And Mother always said that, sure enough, when she’d looked past the chocolate that covered my face from eyebrows to chin, I was indeed pretty.

  Nobody ever explained how I’d managed to smother myself in chocolate, as sweets were still so heavily rationed as to be virtually unavailable. I suppose it was Father again, wheeling and dealing like crazy to get hold of a bar of the precious stuff for his favourite girl.

  It was only days after this that we were evicted by our landlord, a Church of England vicar, for non-payment of rent. We wound up back in London, in a rest centre in Kensington. That’s when Mother was forced to go back to work, having insisted at my birth that she wasn’t relinquishing the care of her second child to anyone else. She’d done that with Peter and it had cost them both dear; she refused point-blank to do it again.

  The lack of Mother’s teacher’s salary during the first year of my life was one of the reasons we couldn’t pay the rent. Another was that what little money there was tended to wind up in the coffers of the local boozers and tobacconists. Anyway, we were evicted, and Mother wound up working again. With Mother and Peter out at school all day, I was left in the care of Father. Thus began my long love affair with Soho, and my precious ‘Marts toast, Daddy’ years.

  2

  No Rest for the Wicked

  The reek of carbolic soap, Jeyes Fluid, unwashed bodies, cigarettes, Evening in Paris perfume and over-boiled cabbage are what come to mind when I think about the Rest Centre, and I wonder if that particular blend of honks constitutes an actual memory or not. As I was just a year old when we wound up there in 1948, I have my doubts, but then again, they do say that smells trigger recollections better than any of t
he other senses, so they must linger long in the memory.

  Ceaseless noise is another thing that pops up when I try to think back. Coughs, snores and sobs in the night, laughter tinged with that sharp edge of hysteria that goes with endless stress, the shrieks of children playing, the clatter of feet on bare boards and stairs, and voices raised in anger, or complaint, or calling for wandering kids to come and have their necks washed, followed by the ritual whine of protest: ‘Aw, Mum, must I? You washed it last Sunday and it ain’t dirty yet, honest.’

  There was a time when to be poor and homeless was almost a criminal offence, for which men, women and children were banged up in the notorious workhouses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Winding up in the workhouse was considered so shameful that many people preferred to live and die in the gutter. The authorities were so keen to discourage the workshy that they made conditions in workhouses as wretched as possible, hardly more comfortable than the hedgerows or streets that they were supposed to shelter people from. They were not called ‘workhouses’ for nothing, either; inmates had to earn the right to forfeit their freedom of choice, their self-respect and their dignity. The work was menial and hard and the hours were long, and they had the unmitigated cheek to call it ‘charity’.

  That notorious slave-master Hitler, creator of Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald and the rest, where so many hapless souls were worked to death, played a part in changing the British attitude to the homeless. So many thousands of people lost their homes and all their possessions to his bombs that it was difficult for anyone to suggest that the indigent had brought it upon themselves. The piles of rubble and the bomb sites told a different story. But the memory of the old times was there, all the same. I remember having ‘the old workhouse’ pointed out to me with a shudder, in several towns across Britain during the 1950s and ’60s. They were always forbidding, grim buildings, and several had been turned into mental hospitals or orphanages once their role as workhouses was over.