One of the most vivid early memories I have of Grandma was when she would read to me from a small hardbacked picture book about a shrewd little boy who outwits a greedy tiger. I soon knew the story of Little Black Sambo by heart. Conceived and written by Helen Bannerman in 1889, while passing away the long hours on a train journey between Madras and the hill town of Kodaikanal in India, the book is viewed by many today to be a racist text. The visual stereotype of the central character – a semi-clad, thick-lipped, frizzy-haired little boy with bulging eyeballs – is clearly a caricature of a native child seen through the eyes of a white colonial woman and is not appropriate to present to young children in this day and age. The illustrations apart, however, the story for me was and still is captivating. There was such power and emotional strength in the imagery, such skill and pervasiveness in the language, that this simple little story stirred my imagination. Little Black Sambo was the first black child I encountered in a book and I delighted in his sheer joy, courage and cleverness.
As an older child I would take along with me on my visits the book of the moment – Moonfleet or The Children of the New Forest – and Grandma and I would read quietly together. At other times she would read to me from one of the large illustrated books she kept on a shelf near her bed. One favourite was The Swiss Family Robinson, with its garish coloured plates and big print. I loved the story, where all the members of the shipwrecked family worked happily together under the benign guidance of a father who was both strong and wise and sported bulging muscles and a long chestnut beard.
When Grandma read, I thrilled at the sound of the words, the rhythms and the rhymes and would sit goggle-eyed at the power of her voice and her extraordinary memory. She knew passages of verse by heart and had a natural feel for measure and stress; I still recall snippets of verse she would recite:
And down the long and silent street
The dawn, with silver sandaled feet,
Creeps like a frightened girl.
I learnt later that these were lines written by Oscar Wilde, one of her favourite writers. She might not, I guess, have approved of his personal life but she loved his poems and stories, as I do.
Children in the schools I visit frequently ask me which is my very favourite story. I tell them I have read a good many books in my time but the story I love the most, one which brings back such happy memories of my childhood and one which I wish I had written myself, is ‘The Selfish Giant’ by Oscar Wilde. It was my grandmother’s favourite story and was read to me when I was small. It is a powerful, poignant and simply written narrative about a Giant who forbids the little children to enter his beautiful garden.
One Eastertime when visiting a small rural primary school in Nidderdale, North Yorkshire, I read ‘The Selfish Giant’ to a group of eight-year-olds. The children sat in a semi-circle around me on the carpet in the reading corner, and listened intently as I recounted the tale of the mean-minded Giant who forbids the little children to come into his garden to play. ‘My own garden is my own garden,’ he tells the children, ‘and I will not allow anyone to play in it but myself.’ When spring comes, the Giant’s garden remains cold and barren and a great white cloak of snow buries everything. The Giant cannot understand why the spring passes his garden by. Summer doesn’t come and neither does autumn and the garden stays perpetually cold and empty of life. One morning the Giant sees a most wonderful sight. Through a little hole in the wall the children have crept into his garden and every tree has a little child sitting in the branches among the blossoms. They have brought life back to his garden and the Giant’s heart melts. He creeps into the garden but when the children see him they are frightened and run away. One small boy doesn’t see the Giant, for his eyes are full of tears. The Giant steals up behind the child and gently takes his little hand in his. Many years pass and the little boy never comes back to play in the garden. Now very old and feeble, the Giant longs to see his first little friend again. One day the small child returns.
Downstairs ran the Giant in great joy and out into the garden. He hastened across the grass, and came near to the child. And when he came quite close his face grew red with anger, and he said, ‘Who hath dared to wound thee?’ For on the palms of the child’s hands were the prints of two nails, and the prints of the two nails were on the little feet.
‘Who hath dared to wound thee?’ cried the Giant; ‘tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him.’
‘Nay!’ answered the child: ‘but these are the wounds of Love.’
‘Who art thou?’ said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child.
And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, ‘You let me play once in your garden, today you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.’
And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms.
At the end my little listeners were clearly moved, as I was when I first heard the story, and they sat in silence. The teacher dabbed her eyes. Then a small girl sitting at the front declared, ‘I’m a Methodist, Mr Phinn, and I’m going to Paradise one day.’
‘I am sure you are,’ I told her, smiling.
‘I’m Church of England,’ volunteered another child, ‘and I’m going to Paradise as well.’
I nodded. ‘Of course.’
A wiry-looking little boy at the back stood up and announced loudly, ‘Well, I’m nowt – but I’m gerrin in!’
You will probably be first in the queue, I thought to myself.
It was Grandma Mullarkey who bought me my first dictionary when I started secondary school, and the treasured portable Olivetti typewriter with the black and red ribbon. I would sit with it on my lap feeling like ‘a real writer’.
Grandma would listen as I read my early efforts, while my mother would be in the kitchen talking to Aunt Nora. Sometimes she would nod in the manner of a dowager and make a small noise of satisfaction, but at other times there would be a slight raise of the eyebrow, a brief lift of the chin, a small shake of the head and she would tell me gently that the story or the poem could be improved. I learnt about plot, character, style and other textbook concepts well before I came across them later in my schooling. I was never undeterred by my grandmother’s comments, disappointed but never deflated. I learnt a lesson for all would-be writers: if you cannot accept constructive criticism and if you are unwilling to persevere with your work, then give it up. Grandma, interested in world events, politics and religion, was also fascinated by people and taught me another invaluable lesson for the would-be writer: to be curious and observant. ‘If you don’t understand something,’ she would say, ‘then ask somebody and if they can’t tell you, go to the library and get a book.’
Charles Dickens, in David Copperfield, said that ‘the power of observation in numbers of very young children is quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy’. From an early age I became adept at observation, encouraged by my grandma to question, watch, listen, seek out, and as a consequence I became a curious child, eager to know things. I would never intrude in a conversation but would like to observe and eavesdrop; I would steal, glean, collect information and anecdote, and always felt that in some strange way I was storing these impressions for a future date. To this day I still love to watch people and to listen to them and continue to record my impressions in a writer’s journal. I am fascinated by human behaviour, people’s mannerisms, accents, nervous tics, facial expressions, a curl of the lip, the arching of an eyebrow, a throbbing vein: significant details which are so invaluable for a writer. I will sit behind a couple of gossiping elderly women on the bus, overhear a snippet of conversation in the doctor’s waiting room, discreetly observe an angry customer berating a poor shop assistant, and store them at the back of my mind for possible future use. I can’t do anything about it; after so many years, I am programmed to do it. I am still like a magpie, obsessively collecting interesting material and feeding off memories.
Grandma Mullarkey opened a door in my early childhood and changed my life for the better, and when she died she left a great gap. When I was sixteen I accompanied my mother to Doncaster Gate hospital, where my grandmother, aged eighty-one, was dying of stomach cancer. There is no image in my childhood that I carry with me more clearly than the one of my grandmother in the hospital bed. She looked pale and weary, propped up in the bed clutching her rosary beads, but her eyes were as bright and intelligent as ever. She told me not to look so miserable. ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘a smile will gain you ten years of life.’ She died the following day, clutching her rosary beads.
11
My grandmother always spoke very fondly about her own father, who seemed to me to be very much like my own. Through Connie, a character in one of my Dales books, I expressed the sentiments I feel about my father.
He was the best father you could hope for, was Dad. Never raised a hand to me, never used a bad word. He was always there for me, he was … You never really appreciate your parents when you’re young. It’s only when they’re dead do you realize you never can get away from them. They’re always going to be with you in your thoughts and in your memories. And when they’re dead, you stop being a child, don’t you?
My father was a gentle-natured man who taught me much of what I know about integrity, honesty and taking pleasure in the simple things in life. He was not a demonstrative person when it came to outward signs of affection; I guess like most Northern men at that time he would have felt embarrassed hugging his son or kissing him goodnight, but for all that he was a warm, compassionate man, full of life and laughter, and gave me the sense of being loved. He rarely exercised discipline, seldom shouted and never smacked me. By mutual consent ‘tellings off’ were allotted to my mother.
It was my father who developed (for what it is worth) my sense of humour, indeed my sense of fun. It is said that we do not really get to know our fathers until we are adults ourselves and only then do we come to understand just what sort of person they are. This was not the case for me. I knew my father when I was young. I watched him, listened to him, spent time with him, was entertained by him and wanted to be like him. He was an extremely amusing and witty man.
Dad was typical of many Yorkshire folk: industrious, plain-speaking, generous and good-humoured, with strong views and a wry sense of humour. But there was much more to his character than that. He had a strong sense of justice and a real depth of sentiment. I can never remember him speaking ill of anyone or expressing a racist comment. He was a good father who provided for his family without fail. He was never out of employment and rarely had a day off work.
I was immensely proud of my father’s army service. He never won the military cross or got mentioned in despatches or achieved an officer’s rank, and from what he said he never saw any real action, but I treasure the photographs of him that were taken in a studio in Cairo. He poses, this handsome, clean-shaven man, hair neatly combed with a sharp parting, his beret tucked in regulation fashion under his shoulder strap. When my Grandmother Phinn remarried and his stepfather, Mr Craig, came into my father’s life, I guess things were not entirely happy for him or his siblings at home. My grandmother, still a relatively young woman, went on to have two more children so I guess the house became rather crowded. On the death of his mother my father left to live with an uncle before enlisting and eventually becoming a despatch rider in the Royal Artillery. I didn’t know until after his death, when I was looking through some old photographs, that he was a member of the Army Equestrian Team. He could be a dark horse, my father. There’s a picture showing him posing proudly in full uniform in front of a huge stallion.
On leaving the army he became a steelworker at Steel, Peach & Tozer. This huge works, where molten steel was poured from 100-ton cradles into ingot moulds and later rolled into billets and bars, is where my father spent his early working life. He then moved into the ‘finishing shop’, where his job was to chip out faults (scarfing) in the metal as the steel billets rolled out in the finishing bank. His correct title was ‘de-seamer’. As the steel emerged it might have a ‘seam’ or a defect that had to be removed, otherwise when the metal was rolled out there would be a fault. Nowadays a sophisticated machine, using oxygen jets, blows the debris away and the de-seamers can remain relatively clean. In my father’s day de-seaming was a filthy job.
He hated the night shift, having to go to work as it was getting dark when people were settling down to an evening, listening to the wireless, sitting in front of the television or going out to the pub. He would go quiet and we children knew to be on our best behaviour.
My father was not an ambitious man, otherwise he might have become a foreman and entered management. He certainly had the ability and the personal skills to be in charge of others, but perhaps not the drive nor the desire for wealth and position.
When I worked as an education adviser in Rotherham, the Education Department moved premises from the old Wellgate School to the new open-plan offices at Norfolk House. There was a great deal of clearing out, and many old files and records were sent to the Rotherham archive at the public library, computerized or disposed of. During the clear-out I discovered the scholarship scores, school certificate and Eleven Plus results of generations of Rotherham children, including those of myself and my father. I had performed well in the general knowledge and English part of the Eleven Plus but indifferently in the arithmetic and problem-solving sections of the paper. My father, in contrast, had achieved high scores in all parts of the scholarship examination he sat and was clearly grammar school material. My mother’s reaction when I told her was unexpected.
‘You must never tell your father,’ she said firmly. ‘It would only upset him.’
At the time I could not understand the logic in this, but reluctantly agreed and never disclosed what I had discovered to my father. Thinking about it now, maybe it would have distressed him to know that he had passed for the grammar school and, given the chance, could have gone on to greater things.
After his death, when I broached the subject of his scholarship examination, my mother told me that my father had been quite content with his lot in life and never aspired to anything more. I cannot believe that. I cannot believe that he was happy working in the steelworks with all the noise, heat, oil, dust and dirt. As a boy, on my way to watch Sheffield United (my eldest son, Richard, is, thank goodness, an avid fan), I remember well the bumpy bus ride from Rotherham to Sheffield via Attercliffe, past the place where he worked for thirty or more years. Down the depressing Don Valley rattled the blue and white double-decker bus, past dirty corrugated iron sheds, yards of scrap, rusty cranes and huge overhead transporters. It was an area that contained little but dust, dirt and an incredible ugliness. This is where my father spent all his working life. I knew, as I surveyed that grim environment, as young as I was, that I wanted more out of life than this and therefore from that point on I developed a tenacity and ambition that would drive me to work hard at school and achieve.
Years later, when I visited the magnificent Magna, the industrial museum now sited in the Don Valley, it was only then that I fully realized what an unpleasant and dangerous job my father had and what a very special man he must have been to have endured that smoky smouldering hell day after day, night after night, and never complain. Most of us want a job that offers some variety and challenge – to go in to work in the morning and look forward to something different. But the de-seamer had to go in to work day after day with the same predictable, monotonous and intensely dirty job to do. And the fact that my father did that work without moaning or getting moody or angry with us children seems to me to be remarkable.
My father was a man of routine. With six of us in the house all vying to use the bathroom, he would use the kitchen in which to wash and shave. I liked to watch him cover his face with shaving foam and then slowly and meticulously scrape away at his chin with an old silver safety razor. Then he would trim his moustache and comb what wisps of hair h
e had across his largely bald head. I never saw him in his work overalls, for he would set off for the foundry in a sports jacket and neatly pressed trousers as if he were going to work in an office.
I remember Mrs Harrap, who ran the post office on Badsley Moor Lane, once asked me if my father was ‘that dapper little man with the nice smile’. This is how others saw him and it summed him up pretty well.
Dad, along with my grandmother and my mother, was instrumental in developing my love of and fascination for language. Although he had left school at fourteen, he was a clever man with a sharp, comic talent for description; a man who read, told stories and recited poetry. He loved to tell amusing tales, employing as he did all the techniques of facial expression, timing and accent of the professional comedian. I imagine that some stories were invented, others were apocryphal, but I always believed implicitly in them. He would come home from his couple of pints in the Masons Arms in Wellgate following the afternoon shift and announce, ‘I heard a funny story today,’ and then he’d be off.
One story he told was of the elderly woman who had a pet canary. It would sing to her each day, chirruping away on its perch. When the plumber, a friend of my father’s called Reg, came to fix her gas fire he turned on the jet to test the appliance and accidentally killed the bird (canaries being very susceptible to gas). Not wishing to face the old lady and tell her what had happened, he stuck the bird back on the perch with a bit of putty and departed. It was some days before the poor woman, who had wondered why the canary had ceased singing and wasn’t eating its seed, discovered that the bird was dead.
Another story concerning Reg was when he arrived at a house to fix the gas oven. At the bottom of the back door was what he thought was a draught excluder: a long piece of stuffed multi-coloured cloth with a snake’s head at the end. Needing to get into the yard at the back, the plumber casually picked up the length of material only to find it was a real snake: a python which he later discovered was part of the act of the exotic dancer who lived at the house.
Road to the Dales Page 10