Road to the Dales

by Gervase Phinn

  Of course there are those in the world who will be sceptical of what I say, that no one could have had such a happy, untroubled and loving childhood. In They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life (the title taken from the poem by Philip Larkin), the psychologist Oliver James posits that the passing of the years allows memories to be selective and often fictionalized.

  My childhood memories may indeed be a little rose-coloured, at times patchy and somewhat selective, but I recall with clarity so many occasions when my mother demonstrated her love for me and her compassion for others. I remember once, when I was six and we were on holiday in Blackpool, I wet the bed. Mum had told me not to drink too much that evening but I had carried on downing a good few glasses of lemonade. ‘You’ll be sorry,’ she said, and left it at that. I was indeed sorry because I awoke in the middle of the night distraught to find my pyjamas sopping and a warm wet patch in the middle of the bed.

  There were no recriminations. ‘Don’t get all upset,’ said Mum, giving me a cuddle. ‘We all wet the bed at some time in our lives. It’s not the end of the world. Accidents happen.’ She washed me, changed me, put me in a clean pair of pyjamas and popped me in her bed next to Dad. I slept between my parents that night and felt safe and secure and loved.

  I also learnt from my mother very early on what kindness was. One day, when I was about six or seven, a fearsome figure arrived at the back door. She was old and wrinkled, with swarthy skin, dark shining eyes and a long beak of a nose. I remember well the heavy boots, the threadbare cardigan and the coloured scarf wrapped around the scrawny neck. For the entire world she looked like the wicked stepmother in Snow White.

  ‘Is your mother in, dearie?’ croaked the crone in a strange deep voice.

  My mother chatted with the woman for some time before buying from her a strip of lace and some crude wooden clothes-pegs. I eavesdropped behind the kitchen door and heard the woman tell my mother that she would have a long and happy life and her generosity would be rewarded.

  ‘Bless you, lady,’ said the gypsy. ‘You have kind eyes. May your three sons and dark-eyed daughter prosper and may your husband’s other children too reap the riches of the world.’ There was an interesting conversation at the tea table that afternoon when my father got home from work.

  I was told later that gypsies were travelling people who lived in caravans; they were not bad but simply poor and moved from house to house selling their wares, trying to make a living. My mother told me they were disliked and were often driven away, but they had as much right to settle on beautiful lands as the oldest families in their fine houses. My mother had a profound belief that dustmen, cleaners, road sweepers, window cleaners and shop assistants were all worthy of respect. Indeed, anyone who came to the door was greeted courteously.

  My mother was such a generous woman and never turned anyone away. Even when the Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on the door for the umpteenth time, intent on enlisting new converts, Mum would never be rude but would listen patiently and finally smile and shake her head and tell them she too was a Christian and happy in her own faith. One Saturday morning an elderly man and a young woman arrived at the gate as Mum was taking me to Miss Worrell, the dentist. I had a really painful tooth and had been up most of the evening before, biting on a bit of cloth soaked in whisky. Like most children I hated the dentist. It was the large rubber mask that was placed over your face and that noxious smell you had to inhale until you sank into unconsciousness. I was in a tetchy mood and needed some coaxing and a few firm words for me to put on my coat and go with Mum. So at the gate stood these two zealots, the man in a pristine suit, highly polished black shoes and carrying a briefcase, the woman in a smart jacket and both with great smiles across their faces.

  ‘May we have a minute of your time, madam,’ asked the first, ‘to explain a little about what we believe?’

  ‘Not now,’ said Mum, brusquely. ‘I’m in a rush.’

  ‘It will only take a moment,’ persisted the second.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ snapped Mum, ‘but not now! I have heard what you have to say before and have told you not to keep coming round. As I have told you, I don’t agree with any of your views. Now, I don’t wish to be rude but I am in a hurry.’

  ‘At least will you take a moment to look at our literature?’ asked the man, looking rather deflated.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Mum. ‘I’ve read it before and I have to say that the only thing we have in common is God.’

  ‘I see,’ said the man, rather disconcerted. ‘I take it then you will not be voting Conservative?’

  I was nine years old in 1955. The Daily Express carried a story of two black girls, Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks, who refused to give up their seats to white people on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. At teatime I recall my mother and father discussing the racism that existed in America. I can see my mother’s face now, red and angry, and can remember her sense of outrage at the injustice of making the two little black girls give up their seats for white folk. ‘And they claim to be Christian,’ my mother said, shaking her head.

  Being a trained nurse and midwife, my mother was in constant demand on the street for medical advice and to deal with accidents and emergencies. My father said once that we should have a sign on the front door saying ‘Casualty Department’. Mum would leave the house willingly, sometimes mid-meal, to look at a fractious baby, dress a wound or see if a doctor needed to be called out. On one occasion we were in the middle of tea and there came a frantic knocking on the door. A distraught neighbour, carrying a choking child, was ushered into the kitchen. My mother took charge with great calmness, applied pressure to the little boy’s chest and the offending peanut popped out. She then sat the trembling mother down with a cup of tea while I was deputed to keep the little boy occupied. A week later the mother reappeared with the child. He had swallowed a sixpence. Mum reassured the mother again and told her to give the child Syrup of Figs and the money would ‘find its own way out’. In due course, that’s exactly what it did.

  Another time a casualty arrived from the council estate at the bottom of the road. A little boy, crying piteously, stood on the doorstep with his mother. He was sporting a huge blood-soaked bandage, which was wrapped around his head like a turban.

  ‘Eric’s fallen into t’cold frame at t’back of t’house,’ announced the mother. ‘’Is ’ead won’t stop bleedin’.’ Mum took charge. ‘And when you’ve seen to ’im, nurse,’ continued the woman, ‘can you come and see to ’is dad? ’E’s fainted.’

  Bobby lived with his mother on the big council estate of Broom Valley. In the days when I was growing up, descriptions of those with special needs were blunt and insensate. Down’s syndrome children were ‘mongols’, those with cerebral palsy ‘spastics’ and those with specific learning difficulties ‘backward’ or ‘mental’. Bobby was a large, moon-faced, red-headed boy of about my age who talked through his nose and had a vacant expression. He attended the Newman Special School at Whiston and never came out to play with the other children in the street because I guess his mother knew he would be picked on and laughed at. Children can be corrosively cruel at times.

  When my mother agreed to look after Bobby one Saturday afternoon I was dragooned into occupying him. I found it a great ordeal. He arrived with a large bag of boiled sweets (we called them ‘spice’), which he refused to share. He filled his mouth with the sweets until his cheeks bulged out and clutched the confections to his chest, all the while shaking his head. He broke two of my Airfix models, and when he had consumed all his sweets he commandeered the swing at the top of the garden and would not budge. To my angry demand that he get off the swing and let me have a go, he picked his nose thoughtfully and shook his head.

  It was with a great sense of relief that I saw his mother waddling down the garden path to take him home. She coaxed him off the swing with the promise of more sweets.

  It was just before my tenth birthday when Bobby arrived at the gate at the back of my house. He was red
in the face and waving his arms about him. I could just make out in the garbled nasal rambling that he wanted ‘t’nurse’.

  I ran and fetched my mother. He flung his arms around her and buried his head in her chest. She patted the boy on the back like someone winding a baby.

  ‘It’s all right, Bobby,’ she said quietly. ‘Now you tell me what’s the matter.’

  ‘It’s my mam,’ he wailed. ‘She’s dying. Tha’s got to come.’

  I wanted to make myself scarce, embarrassed by this performance, but was told I had to accompany them in case I was needed to telephone for a doctor.

  We found Bobby’s mother in the front room of the house, stretched out on the settee gasping for breath and crimson-faced.

  ‘What is it, Mrs Stockton?’ asked my mother, kneeling down beside her.

  ‘It’s mi chest, nurse,’ moaned the woman. ‘I can’t breathe and I’ve got this terrible pain just here.’ She patted her heart. ‘If I bend it gets worse.’

  ‘Take Bobby outside,’ ordered my mother, ‘and keep him occupied.’ She closed the door. A few minutes later she emerged, trying to suppress a smile

  ‘Is she gunna die?’ asked Bobby, his cheeks wet with tears.

  ‘No, Bobby, she’s not going to die. She’s fine.’

  ‘What was wrong?’ I asked my mother as we made our way back home.

  ‘She had her corset on too tightly,’ she told me, ‘and when she bent over one of the metal stays must have snapped and dug into her chest. She thought she was having a heart attack.’

  Later that evening, having recounted the encounter to my father, my mother shook her head sadly. ‘Whatever will happen to that poor lad when she dies?’

  My mother was particularly kind to an elderly widower who lived a few streets away. Mr Parry lived at the bottom of Gerard Road, in a rather more exclusive area than the one in which we lived. The houses were older, larger and had a great deal more character to them compared to our redbrick semi-detached houses a few streets away. Most Sundays, after I had consumed a large lunch, I was despatched to Gerard Road with two metal plates on which a full roast dinner with all the trimmings was put. This was Mr Parry’s dinner.

  I never minded this particular errand because I loved visiting Mr Parry. He was an elderly, incredibly wrinkled man who lived alone in this tall, dark, imposing house with its peeling paint and overgrown garden. Mr Parry must have been in his eighties when I first met him but he walked, albeit slowly, with a straight back and without a walking stick. His appearance – the heavy, dark, hooded eyes, hatchet nose and teeth the colour of antique piano keys – could very well have been rather frightening for a young boy, but not to me, for when he spoke with that soft Welsh lilt he was mesmerizing. He was a deeply intelligent man and greatly interesting, and I would sometimes sit on the old sofa fascinated by the timbre of his voice and his wide knowledge and extraordinary memory. My mother described him as ‘a real gentleman’.

  Mum had known Mrs Parry through Church, both being stalwart members of the Union of Catholic Mothers. Mr and Mrs Parry had been in what the Catholic Church called a ‘mixed marriage’. He was from Welsh nonconformist stock, his wife from an Irish Catholic background, and the marriage service had taken place quietly in a side altar at the Catholic church with no special Nuptial Mass and without any fuss. My mother told me that theirs was a tragic story. Mr Parry’s family had nothing to do with him after he married a Catholic and they learnt that he had agreed to raise the children in her faith. Her family had little to do with her after she took up with a Protestant. Their only son had been killed in Italy during the war, and my mother told me Mrs Parry had died not long afterwards, probably of a broken heart.

  Going into the house was like stepping back in time. There was an all-pervading smell of dusty carpets and damp. You entered through a heavy front door with a coloured glass window in the centre, into a shadowy hall where a grandfather clock with a painted dial ticked away reassuringly. You walked through into a cluttered parlour with an ageing and sagging horsehair sofa, a green leather-covered armchair, an antique sideboard and a huge oak Welsh dresser. There were two bookcases crammed with leather-backed tomes and neatly stacked magazines and newspapers. In winter a huge fire would be blazing away. I remember there was always a large blue bowl on the dresser filled with shrivelled apples, and on the wall a black and white print of Lord Nelson as he lay dying on the deck of the Victory, a pale, pathetic figure in a white shirt, his breast exposed. Mr Parry told me the admiral’s body had been brought back to England in a cask of the finest French brandy and when, months later, it was taken out, it was perfectly preserved. A heavy and faded coloured cloth covered the table. But what fascinated me most about the room was the line of identical, highly polished black shoes that had been placed beneath the dresser – a pair for each day of the week.

  The mantelshelf was crammed with all sorts of treasures: two great twisted stemmed brass candlesticks, a pair of strange, fat-faced porcelain dogs veined with age, a silver-framed photograph of a man and a woman and in the centre an ornate carriage clock. I was most interested in the small ivory tusks with designs of sailing ships carved on them. I learnt that these were called scrimshaws and were done by French prisoners-of-war at the time of Napoleon. Above the shelf was a gilt-framed mirror with an eagle, its wings outstretched, set in the frame at the top.

  Mr Parry would take his lunch into the kitchen and put it into the oven to eat later, and then he would sit in his large armchair and light his pipe. I would spend the first part of the hour talking to him, mostly about what I had read and how I was getting on at school, and then he would tell me stories about when he was young. Despite my asking, he always steered well clear of talking about the war apart from the time he let me borrow a gas mask to take to school. He told me he had been a soldier in the Great War of 1914, when so many men had died in the trenches.

  I guess one of the reasons I liked to visit him was that I never left without a small present: a silver Victorian shilling, a German military button, a brass paper knife made from a cartridge shell by a prisoner-of-war, a shiny belt buckle with a double-headed eagle on the front, a dull grey medal with a faded red and black ribbon. Once he gave me a small brass scale for weighing gold sovereigns. I still have his presents today. I always had my eye on the scrimshaws, which were displayed on the dresser, but sadly none came my way.

  When I left the musty atmosphere of the house, I would take Mr Parry’s washing with me in a canvas bag and my mother would drop it back, washed and ironed, the following week, when she would also collect the tin plates.

  ‘Your mother is a very special woman, you know,’ he never tired of telling me, ‘and her rewards will be great in heaven.’

  He was right.

  5

  Although a loved child, I was not indulged and my mother could be firm and intransigent at times. She was no soft touch. There were boundaries I could never cross. These included: no swearing, being rude, dropping litter, fighting with my brothers, being cheeky and leaving the bedroom in a mess. If I had come home to tell her I had been in trouble at school I would have been in twice as much trouble. Rules had to be kept and occasionally I would feel the chilly wind of her disapproval. My mother never viewed parenthood as a popularity contest.

  No family is entirely free of disagreement and discord; every deep relationship has its tensions, moments of anger and annoyance, and there were times when I fell out with my mother. I can’t say, however, that I was unduly rocked by the storms of adolescence, but I did have my moments.

  One Christmas – I must have been about fifteen at the time – my mother bought me a corduroy jacket from W. Muntus, Outfitters, of Rotherham. It was a horribly thick, heavy garment with wide lapels, velvety ribs and a string of brass buttons on the cuffs. It was the sort of jacket old men wore. I hated it at first sight and told my mother so. She had a pale, hurt look on her face, as if she couldn’t believe what she had heard. I had wanted a tight-fitting suit like the ones
the Beatles wore, and a black turtleneck jumper, and I had been given this shapeless, old-fashioned jacket the colour of dog dirt. I wouldn’t even try it on. There was no way I was going be seen wearing this monstrosity and I stomped off upstairs.

  I emerged when Christmas dinner was on the table but sat in simmering silence and picked at the turkey. I felt everyone in the family was against me for being so ungrateful. No one spoke to me, which made it all the worse. My father took me aside later in the day and told me how disappointed he was in me, how I had upset my mother and how I should apologize and accept the coat with good grace. But I wouldn’t, and sat for the rest of the day in the front room, silent and morose and listening as the rest of the family enjoyed themselves next door. Of course, sulking is the last refuge of the powerless and gets you nowhere, but I stubbornly stayed in the front room and was ignored. It was a long and dispiriting Christmas Day. I never did apologize and the coat, which I guess was returned to the shop, was not mentioned again. Needless to say I never got the suit like the one the Beatles wore, or a black turtleneck jumper.

  On another occasion, around the same time, I asked if I could go on the school trip to Switzerland. My two best friends at school were going and I was desperate to go too. Mum read the letter from the school and, folding it carefully, placed it behind the clock on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Well, can I go?’ I asked excitedly.

  ‘No,’ she said bluntly, ‘it’s too expensive.’

  I tried to reason with her but to no avail.

  ‘You are not going,’ she said, firmly, ‘and that’s the end of it.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘No buts.’

  When Dad came in from work I tried persuading him.

  ‘What did your mother say?’ he asked.

  ‘She said I can’t go,’ I said glumly.

  ‘Then you can’t go,’ he said simply.

  I went on and on about the school trip for a good week, and felt like many an adolescent who feels his parents are being grossly unfair. Perhaps I thought the persistent nagging would wear my mother down and she would eventually concede. Not a bit of it. She calmly told me every time the subject was raised that I would not be going on any trip to Switzerland so not to waste my breath. Her refusal to raise her voice made it more irritating. Finally, in one desperate attempt for her to change her mind, and with a dramatic outburst of anger and frustration, I told her she was mean and selfish and no doubt various other things as well and made a grand exit, slamming the door behind me. I waited for her to come up the stairs and concede but she never did and Switzerland was not mentioned again.