by Pip Granger
I always took particular notice of families. I liked to watch how they got along together and compare it to the way my lot carried on. As I grew older, the oddness of our set-up became more and more apparent to me. If a man was with a party that included mother and children, I found that I tensed, waiting for an argument to break out, and was always amazed when one didn’t. I was incredulous – and more than a little envious – when families laughed together at shared jokes, teased one another in a good-natured way, and then rose from their table, leaving all the china intact. Such families actually appeared to enjoy one another’s company! This was a huge revelation to me, because I had never realized that such a thing was possible. I always noticed when young children grew strident with excitement, or shrieked with merriment, and nobody said, ‘Shut up, for Christ’s sake, can’t you see I’ve got a headache?’ To this day, I am genuinely surprised if I see parents, particularly fathers, playing with their children and looking as if they are enjoying it.
I remember the 1950s as a Golden Age of gloves. There were summer gloves, winter gloves, and spring and autumn gloves, too. Spring and summer gloves were made of cloth or lace, or were crocheted, and were white or cream for the most part, although other colours could be worn with formal wear, to match a gown. Autumn and winter gloves were leather, and in winter, fur was a popular choice, too. Colour usually hinted at the season. Dark green, russet tones or light tan were autumn colours, definitely. Dark brown or black were for winter. A very pale tan pair of gloves on a man suggested ‘spiv’ straight away, or ‘cad’ at the very least. Red gloves, like red shoes, screamed ‘tart’ or, just possibly, ‘arty’, depending on what was worn with them.
Some people coming into a room in the 1950s could make a whole business out of fiddling their way out of a pair of gloves. Gloves are very handy for appearing to take a lot of attention, while leaving the eyes free to take in the room.
While some made removing their gloves into a performance, an art form even – stroking each finger out of its sheath, peeling back the body of the glove and then, with a flourish, whisking the whole thing off with a nifty final twirl – others simply took their gloves off and made no bones about it.
Once you were in a station buffet, there was a limited range of options. You could bag a table by leaving a shopping bag on one of the seats, or approach the counter to order first, then worry about a seat. In the 1950s, self-service was still a very newfangled thing, and hadn’t yet taken off. So there was no necessity to juggle gloves, handbag, shopping bag and umbrella with a tray that held a scalding hot pot of tea, a jug of milk, a bowl of sugar, a cup, a saucer and a spoon. All you had to do was sail from the counter to a seat, and your order would follow along in due course.
Selecting a seat was fraught with difficulty for the naturally reserved English person. Alone woman would not sit at a table with a lone male if she could help it. It was far better to sit with another single woman or, better still, a woman with a child. That way, both women could concentrate on the kid, and it gave them a topic of conversation that allowed them to overcome the awkwardness of strangers sitting together at a table.
‘What an adorable little boy. How old is he?’ the new arrival would ask.
‘Thank you. John is just two and a half.’ John’s mother would answer proudly.
I’m not sure how I managed to melt into the background the way I did on these jaunts, but few people seemed to notice me, so I must have been quite good at it. I suppose I had honed my melting-into-the-background skills early in life when I tagged along after my father as he made his restless rounds of his favourite Soho haunts, negotiated with French booksellers in his fractured French or swapped tall stories with his drinking pals. While he chatted, wheeled, dealed, argued and philosophized above my head, I watched the world going on around me and listened intently.
I have never really understood what adults think children are doing while they wait for them to stop nattering; they seem to forget that children have ears and eyes and are busy taking everything in. Equally, as a child, I never understood those children who just stood there, eyes glazed with boredom, while their adults talked.
I was always interested in what other people were talking about or doing, and I still am. I can listen in fascination to gossip about the minutiae of the lives of people that I am never likely to meet, and if I am trapped with a load of strangers, say on a train that is stuck because of leaves or cows on the line, I am content to make up stories about my fellow passengers to amuse myself and pass the time. No wonder I eventually became a novelist. I have been observing human behaviour, practising storytelling and learning about dialogue through eavesdropping all my life. It is as if I knew that being a nosy little bugger would come in handy one day. And blow me, it did!
12
The Three o’Clock Tribunals
The divorce came through.
One day towards the end of 1955, I found my mother sitting at the bottom of the stairs with tears in her eyes and a large brown envelope clutched in her hand. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked as I slipped a tentative arm around her shoulders, uncertain as to whether I’d be told to ‘Piss off and leave me alone’ or not.
On this occasion, as it was a school-day morning in the middle of a week, Mother was not only sober, but not even remotely hungover either, and she was grateful for the comforting arm. She was going through a period when she reserved her drinking for weekends, as far as she was able. There were occasions when she failed in her efforts at control, but the night before had not been one of them.
‘Not really, darling,’ she answered gently. ‘But I will be.’ She squared her shoulders, stiffened her upper lip, got her coat on and handed me mine. It was time for us to head towards our respective schools.
I felt particularly lonely that morning on the way to school – and again in the afternoon on my way home. In the good old days, I would have had Peter for company. Mother had looked so sad when she got her letter and I knew that, had Peter still been at home, he would have made her laugh. I didn’t have the knack somehow, and the house still felt so empty without him. I missed him most when Mother needed cheering up, because he was so good at that. It was also miserable getting in from school and having no one to talk to – or to squabble with, which was more usual.
That evening, I was anxious as I let myself into the house because it had been obvious that Mother had received a hefty blow. I was dreadfully worried that she would hit the bottle to cheer herself up, and I was racking my brains trying to think of something to take her mind off things. Try as I might, I could come up with nothing. In the end, all I could think of to do was to wash up our breakfast things, put a match to the fire and to get the sausage dish on for our tea. At least, if I did those things, all Mother would have to do when she got in was relax with a coffee, her fags and her newspaper. Personally, I always found the smell of cooking very comforting when I walked into the house, and I hoped like mad that Mother would feel the same.
Mother always insisted to her friends that she was thrilled to be free of Father at last. I knew better, because I saw her tears and heard her crying herself to sleep for quite some time after the official notification of the divorce came through. It was her second dead marriage, although I only discovered that when I was an adult. Apparently, the first had been a rebound job that she was terribly ashamed of and kept a secret from Peter and me throughout our childhood. We only discovered it by accident when we came across her first set of divorce papers when we were looking for something else. Two divorces must have felt dreadful to a woman who had such a low tolerance of any hint of failure.
‘Do you mind?’ I overheard Mother’s friend Myrna ask, through a mouth full of chocolate biscuit, a few days later. ‘About the divorce, I mean?’
‘Not half as much as Doug does.’ Mother laughed bitterly. ‘It means Gaby will finally get him up the aisle. He’s been trying to dodge that all along, and now he can’t use me as the excuse any longer. The bloody man is footloos
e and fancy free. At least, he is for the time being, but I wouldn’t put any money on that state of affairs lasting for very long.’
‘So they’ll definitely be getting married then?’
‘Oh, yes. But I’ve no idea when they’ll do the deed. The damned thing is so hush-hush, you’d think it was a military secret. It’s just as well neither of them has access to a tank, is all I can say. Doug and I used to fight, God knows, but those two are really dedicated.’ Mother paused for a moment. ‘Why that idiot insists on marrying him, I really could not say. And why he’s not heading for the hills at a rate of knots is another question, too. You would have thought that living together for a few years would have cured them both of that particular insanity, but it hasn’t. So, there’ll be a wedding all right, but when we’ll get to hear about it is another matter altogether. Probably not until after the event.’
When I was younger, I often asked myself what kind of person marries a violent drunk. And my father was a violent drunk. I was told that on one occasion, he threw Gaby down most of the sixty-five stairs that descended from their flat to the street. And that was just once: I know there were more, because Gaby would insist on telling me all about them.
Time and more experience of life has supplied one answer to my question. That is, that a romantic will marry a violent drunk, happy in the knowledge that she can change him. I’m sure there are other answers too, but I have learned that romantics will believe what they want to believe, and nothing will shift them once their minds are made up. And Gaby’s mind was made up. Despite four years of living with him, Gaby finally got her man to mutter ‘I do’ in the spring of 1956.
Still, like many a romantic before and since, Gaby had a handy get-out clause if reality failed to live up to the fantasy. She could simply blame Father for not responding to the ministrations of a good woman, as he was supposed to do. And she did. Never, in all the years that I listened to her blaming Father for their collective misery, did she ever address the issue of the part that she may have played in forming, and maintaining, their unhappy, dysfunctional and abusive union.
*
I caused quite a stir the first time I walked into the scruffy old room above a pub with my father one wet Sunday afternoon. I had been to many a peculiar place with Father in my time, including snooker halls, drinking clubs, spielers and dirty book shops, and all had been tucked away out of sight, down a dark alley or above a legitimate delicatessen, shoe shop or antiques emporium, but there was something particularly odd about the men and women I could glimpse through the dense haze of cigarette smoke. The air was so thick with it, it was making my eyes water. At first glance, it was difficult to see the individual members of the group.
‘What ho, Douglas old chap. And who is this little lady? Isn’t she just a tad young to be in trouble with the demon booze already, or did you feed it to her with her mother’s milk?’
I realize now, of course, that, as a baby, I probably did get more than my fair share of booze in my milk, and even while still in the womb. Mother often said that, when she was pregnant with me, she survived largely on chalk stolen from the pub’s dartboard (other chalk would not do, apparently) and the large jars of pickled onions that were kept on the bar. She didn’t mention the endless fags and industrial quantities of alcohol, but I think we can take them as read.
‘Very funny, Julian,’ my father answered. ‘This is my daughter, and I’m meeting her mother here later.’ The man he was speaking to was vaguely familiar. He had a cut-glass accent and incredibly shabby clothes. His pinstripe trousers were shiny at the knees, and his turn-ups frayed and tatty; his black jacket had a light sprinkling of dandruff on the collar, and was also frayed, this time at the cuffs, as was his grimy shirt. His tightly knotted old school tie – or perhaps it was a regimental job – was almost clean, with just the odd spot of soup here and there. The upper of one of his battered black brogues was trying to part company with the sole, so that it made a soft, slapping noise as he walked towards us.
His face was coarse-skinned and red, as if he spent most of his time out of doors in all weathers, while the wrath of grapes showed up clearly in the twisted, thread-like veins that scurried frantically across his nose and cheeks. He squinted slightly as the smoke from his Woodbine curled past his grey eyes on its journey to join the rest of the fag fug that hung just below the ceiling.
Greetings over, all three of us moved as one towards a table at the back of the room. It was stocked with an urn, a large metal teapot, several cups and saucers, a bag of Tate and Lyle sugar with a spoon sticking out of it, three bottles of milk, one opened, a plate of assorted broken biscuits and, next to that, another plate of slightly curled fish-paste sandwiches.
It was when I clapped eyes on the sandwiches that I remembered where I had seen Julian before. He was one of the small army of sandwich-board men who paraded up and down the streets of the West End, advertising patent remedies such as Friar’s Balsam and Doctor Collis Browne’s mixture. They also advertised restaurants, clubs, shoe shops, dress shops, gents’ outfitters and various food emporia on their boards. One even told us that THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH, which scared me half to death until Father assured me that ‘it was a load of Christian cobblers’ and that I was not to take any notice of ‘all that bollocks’.
I hung tightly on to my father’s hand as I tried to take in what I was seeing. I was a shy nine-year-old, and I was overawed by this peculiar bunch of people. The tea lady behind the table was a heavily made-up woman who wore a lopsided hat with feathers and a dead fox draped over her shoulders. She twinkled at us as we approached.
‘Don’t tell me, Doug, dear, you like yours weak with a gallon of milk and four sugars – you greedy sod. And for young missy here? Can I interest you in a cup of milk and a nice Bourbon biscuit?’ When she smiled at me, I noticed that she had bright orange lipstick smeared on her teeth, but I was too polite to tell her. I was not about to upset anyone who was offering me a Bourbon biscuit, and anyway, I liked her twinkly eyes. They looked kind.
I nodded silently. ‘What do you say?’ Father prompted.
‘Yes, please,’ I answered quickly, too afraid to say that she could forget about the warm milk. I got enough of that at school. I hated milk. For some reason, the little bottles of school milk were usually plonked right next to the radiator and it was always lukewarm, in the winter as well as in the hot days of summer. It was disgusting.
‘Thanks, Hazel.’ Father smiled back. ‘This is my daughter,’ he told her, with a touch of pride – or so I like to think. He turned to me. ‘Take your milk and biscuit over there, and sit quietly while I say hello to a few people.’
‘Oh, don’t send the poor little mite off on her own, leave her with me. I like kids,’ Hazel told him. She winked at me. ‘I always wanted a little girl like you, so I can pretend for a little while that you’re mine – that’s if you don’t mind?’
I shook my head, still too shy to speak without serious prompting. I sat on the chair that she indicated and placed the hated milk on an empty seat beside me. While she got on with serving the men and women around us, I was free to give them all the once-over. I liked people-watching, but even I had never seen quite such an unusual selection of people socializing together before. In the 1950s, the posh usually stuck with the posh, working people usually stuck with working people, tramps with tramps, the middle lot with the middle lot, and so on through the myriad levels of the English class system. If you saw a working man talking to a posh lady, it was usually because he was receiving instructions on what she wanted him to do first, clear the drains or paint the guttering; they did not stand around idly chatting, the way the motley crew in front of me were doing.
Another thing that struck me as most peculiar was that nobody seemed to have a surname. Normally, people would be introduced as ‘Mrs This’, ‘Mr That’ and ‘Lord and Lady How’s-Your-Father’ and you only got to know their Christian names when you became friends. Nobody, but nobody, introduced an adult to a
child by using the adult’s first name. Children, in their turn, never used a grown-up person’s given name, even if they knew it, unless the adult in question was a relative or a close family friend; then it was always preceded by an ‘Auntie’ or an ‘Uncle’, even if they were no such thing.
A short man with wildly bowed legs and few teeth was hailed by Julian as he sidled through the door. ‘Arthur, old man, over here,’ he bellowed jovially.
Arthur nodded and approached across the scuffed floorboards like a crab scuttling along a beach. ‘Wotcha, Julian. ’Ow’re you doing? I’ll just get a cup of splosh and I’ll join yer. Strong with two sugars if you please, ’Azel.’
‘Right you are, Arthur. How’s your better half?’
‘Vera’s in the pink, ta, ’Azel, now that she’s ‘ad her feet done. Them corns of ’ers were pinching something cruel, they were. They made working down the caff a bleeding nightmare.’
‘You found a job yet, Arthur?’ Hazel asked as she poured his tea and popped a couple of Rich Tea biscuits in his saucer.
‘Yerse, as it ’appens, I ’ave. I’m doing a bit of portering down Billingsgate for a mate, temporary like, while one of his blokes is on the panel. Poor sod had ’is Chalfonts done, and something went wrong and now ’e can’t ’ardly walk, let alone sit down. So, if you fancy a drop of fish of a Friday, I’m yer man.’ Arthur grinned, and his gums gleamed dully in the weak light that fought its way through the sooty grime on the window. ‘I’ll just nip over for a chinwag with old Julian there. Let my Vera know if yer fancy some fish on the cheap.’
‘I’ll do that Arthur, ta.’
I looked around for my father and spotted him in the middle of a small huddle of men on the other side of the room. I whispered ‘Excuse me’ to the ladies and went over to him and gave his sleeve a tug, which he ignored. He was too busy listening to an Irishman with a beautiful soft lilt to his voice.