The document listed his prior convictions, which were becoming numerous:
• 9 months hard labour, Manchester City Quarter Sessions, 1929, receiving.
• 3 months hard labour, Preston Sessions, 1932, larceny, after previous conviction for felony.
• 6 months hard labour, Blackburn Borough Quarter Sessions, 9 October 1933, false pretences, after previous conviction of felony.
• 9 months hard labour concurrent from 10 October 1933, Burnley Borough Quarter Sessions for false pretences.
• Also seven convictions for gaming, drunkenness etc.
I did some quick arithmetic, taking account of jail sentences that were served concurrently. From mid-1929 to mid-1934, Harold had clocked up two years in prison. From my mother’s fifth birthday until her tenth, her father was in jail a little under half of the time.
His criminal ubiquity was such that I came across another document within another half-hour. There was one fresh crime added to the previous litany: a charge of ‘attempted larceny by trick’. Later I found a newspaper report that described the crime under the headline: ‘Gilded Coin Trick’.
The article, in the Manchester Guardian, recounted how my grandfather had asked to borrow two pounds from a Blackpool confectioner called Ruth Holt. He offered as security a gold coin, which he said was a two-pound piece, ‘but which was actually a gilded coin’. The case made no sense. I suddenly wished I had been a lawyer, arguing in my grandfather’s corner. Why would anyone want two pounds in return for two pounds? Why would Ruth Holt give him two pounds in return for two pounds? Why wouldn’t she just say, ‘Mate, you’ve already got two pounds’?
According to the newspaper article, my grandfather blamed the whole thing on his employer, a steeplejack called George Freer. My grandfather’s argument was that Mr Freer’s car had broken down and Mr Freer had given him what turned out to be a fake gold coin with the instruction to swap it for a real one so that he could repair his stranded vehicle.
Harold’s alibi seemed vaguely plausible until the police prosecutor jumped up to ask Mr Freer a question about his broken-down car.
Police prosecutor to George Freer: ‘Do you have a car?’
George Freer: ‘No. I don’t have a car.’
Whatever the nature of my grandfather’s criminal genius, coming up with an alibi wasn’t always his greatest knack. He ended the day being sentenced to another three months in prison.
I found one final document: the date was 1936 and this time my grandfather was charged alongside an associate, William Harrison, forty-five, a labourer. The pair were charged with Breaking and Entering with Intent to Steal from the shop of Herbert Hardacre of Burnley. Both were found guilty, and this time Harold’s sentence was lengthy: ‘15 months in the second division’. He was carted off again to Liverpool Prison.
That night I did a final calculation. On the basis of what I’d discovered, my grandfather spent at least thirty-nine months – three years, three months – in prison, for a total of eight crimes. He had also clocked up another seven summary convictions for matters such as gambling and drunkenness, and been charged without conviction on another handful of occasions. Later, I tried to use this information to find out more, but Harold seemed to disappear from the records. The final fifteen months in Liverpool Prison had, perhaps, shocked him into honesty.
For the years following his release, there was not much to go on. My cousin Dorothy had given me a photo of Harold and Annie sitting on a beach; he appeared to be in his late forties, respectably attired. I also found, via a genealogy site, a record of his will. Probate had been granted on his estate in October 1951, which means he died when he was just fifty-one years old. By that time he was living at 2 Westhall Road in Bath, another tiny terrace. He didn’t leave the world with much: 176 pounds and sixteen shillings. It was left to ‘Annie Sudall, widow’.
Some months later, Margaret sent me a copy of Harold’s death certificate, which she had located among Colin’s papers. It listed the cause of death as coronary thrombosis and arteriosclerosis and gave his occupation as ‘Supervisor/overseer at the Admiralty’. So maybe he did go straight for the last thirteen or fourteen years of his life. And, in the end, he did ‘work for Sir Winston’; well, sort of. The death certificate informant was Annie, and her address was 2 Cedar Grove, Morecambe – Bertha’s address – so my mother’s parents were in contact, but living at different ends of the country.
I wonder if my mother even knew about her father’s early demise. The last Christmas card to Molly had been in 1953, so I presume she was told. By 1981 when Annie died, my mother was secure in the hobbit hole. All contact had been abandoned many years before. My guess is that she never heard of her mother’s death.
We had one day left in the UK before catching the plane home. As well as documenting my grandfather’s criminal past, I wanted a better sense of the place my mother had fled. Debra and I set out with a list of addresses, starting with the terrace house on my mother’s birth certificate: 46 Charles Street, Clayton-le-Moors. It was two storeys, with a slate roof and a bay window, but squat and narrow. If you put two beds end-to-end, they’d be wider than the house. I took out my phone to line up a photo. A woman, probably in her sixties, was walking her dog in the park opposite and sang out as I clicked: ‘Did it smile for the camera?’
A funny line as usual.
We wandered over and started chatting. She asked if we were considering buying in the area, so we told her about my mother and my quest. The woman – Diana – had a cheerful manner, although everything she said was sharply negative.
‘Your mother was right to get out, you know. There are no jobs here now. Blackburn is the worst, but everywhere here is pretty bad.’
She pointed down the street to what was once the entrance to the English Electric Company, a heavy engineering firm.
‘After the war, four thousand men used to work there; there’d be buses lined up and down this street to take them home. Now there’s no work anywhere. It’s a sad time in the north.’
‘Is it really that bad?’ I asked.
‘My son is an accountant, he’s overseas, working. And I said to him, “Son, do people still talk about Britain?” and he said, “No, Mum, they never do. The government thinks they are in charge of this big thing called Britain, but it’s nothing. No one’s ever heard of it.”’
‘Oh, I think that’s an exaggeration,’ I said, smiling, trying to cheer her up. ‘I’ve heard of Britain. We’ve even come to visit it.’
‘Well, maybe you have, but nobody else has even heard of it.’
Despite Diana’s view that the UK virtually didn’t exist – ‘United Kingdom? Are you sure? You’re not thinking of the United States?’ – I decided to ask her about some local history.
‘I read somewhere that Clayton-le-Moors used to be divided in two, along class lines – a bottom end and a top end. It said the two ends would hardly ever mix, but then, once a year, both sides would play each other in a game of soccer.’
Diana nodded, as if everyone knew this.
‘So which end is this?’
‘Oh, this is the bottom end.’
The dividing line – I knew from my reading – ran through the splendidly named Load O’Mischief Hotel.
‘Is the Load O’Mischief still here?’ I asked Diana.
‘No, it was demolished in the 1980s.’
‘Why?’
‘To make way for the M65.’
Of course. Around here, the M65 is the answer to any question you may have the desire to ask.
I loved the combination of wit and misery that was always served up in the north; the dry humour doing daily struggle with the wet rain and the grey skies. On a previous trip to England, I’d had trouble finding my hotel in Liverpool. Chatting with the receptionist, I’d blamed the female voice on my GPS.
‘She didn’t know the name of your street,’ I said. ‘I’m going to have to throw her out.’
‘Don’t do that,’ the receptionist re
plied, deadpan. ‘Give her a chance to win back your trust.’
On the same trip to Liverpool, I asked directions of two paramedics, parked in their ambulance. One hopped out of the vehicle to show me the way, so I apologised for taking them away from their duties.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘we’re just sitting here waiting for someone to die.’
Or – this is weird: again Liverpool, same trip – I overheard two mates in a pub, one teasing the other for being ‘a wrinkly old bastard’.
First man: ‘Those are just laugh lines.’
His friend: ‘Mate, nothing’s that funny.’
In Blackburn, a few kilometres from Clayton-le-Moors, I took a photo of the house in which my father grew up. Despite my Aunt Audrey’s view that her side of the family was a tiny cut above my mother’s, to my eyes the house was identical to all the others I’d seen: two-up, two-down, lane out the back. It was the same when we swung into Oswald Street, where Harold was born. Number 50, his parents’ house, was part of a row of terraces, backing onto a cobblestoned laneway. It all looked like the Monty Python scene where they sing ‘Every Sperm is Sacred’. Again, I took some photos. As I snapped, a man trudged up the hill with two shopping bags. His name, it emerged, was John, and he’d lived in a house over the road ‘since I came here’.
‘Where did you come from?’ I asked, thinking this might be a story of immigration.
‘Out of me mam. That’s where I came from. In 1946.’
Again, funny.
Like Diana, he was not a big fan of the area, despite spending his life here. ‘They don’t need any people because there are no jobs.’ He talked about his various occupations – working as a lathe operator at a local firm, then at Rolls-Royce, then at a factory where he screwed together sporting trophies: ‘A cushy job, that one. I was sat down all day.’
It was just before noon and he told us that he’d just purchased five pints of beer from the shops: that’s what was nestling in the plastic bags he was carrying. Inside his terrace, he’d already put his lunch into the oven. He described, with some pride, what he called his ‘routine’:
‘I like to drink my beer first – and then eat. I eat like a horse because the beer gives you an appetite. And I’ve got five pints ready to drink now, right? So I’ll drink them. My dinner is in the oven, cooking, so by the time I’ve finished the five pints I just eat my meal. I don’t bother with television – I can’t stand it. I go straight to bed and it’s morning again before I know it. I sleep for ten hours right through, nobody bothers me.’
He seemed willing to offer his system – free of charge – to anyone else who might spot its considerable virtues.
We trudged around the streets. I felt a bit daft, to use a northern word, but I was looking for signs of my mother. I was trying to summon up an imagined childhood for her – to see her in these streets, walking home from school or playing with friends. She was proving elusive: I had this handful of facts at which I kept staring, broken shards in which I might see a tiny, fractured reflection of her. She was just short of three years old when her father was first sent to prison; by the time she was twelve, he would have been locked up for over a quarter of her life. In every court document he was listed at a different address. I’d been told my mother and her sisters lived with their maternal grandparents, the Boothmans, at their long-time home. But there was also Molly’s recollection of having attended a dozen different schools. Now, with the assistance of the court documents, I could guess the pattern: when their father was out of prison, the three girls and Annie would shift between a series of tiny boltholes in Burnley and Manchester; then, when he was sent back to jail, it would be back to Annie’s parents in Accrington.
I wrote out all the addresses I had for Harold, drawn from various documents. Starting when he was fifteen and living with his family at the local pub, the Borough Arms Hotel, until he was sent for his final long prison stint at the age of thirty-six, there were at least seven different abodes, not including the two places he just couldn’t help returning to: Manchester and Liverpool Prisons. No wonder, when I went through my mother’s things, she was lacking the sort of childhood memorabilia most people have, the sort of things I found in my father’s flat – the illustrated school projects on ‘Grand Houses of England’; the sports certificates and ribbons; the exercise book for junior arithmetic. I’d assumed she’d rid herself of this material in order to bury the evidence of a normal working-class childhood. More likely, she never had any of these things in the first place; the minutiae of her childhood had been lost as she shuttled back and forth between her grandparents’ house and her father’s various lodgings.
We walked and we drove. I was still feeling bad about Debra and her rather dreary holiday. I tried to apologise by making up the sort of headlines that might feature in a pamphlet describing our visit up north.
‘Experience Genuine Lancastrian Fog!’
‘Drive Up and Down the M65 Almost Constantly.’
‘See Buildings Black with Soot!’
Soon Debra joined in and we merrily laughed our way down the M65.
Debra: ‘Enjoy Fish Pies with No Fish!’
Me: ‘Kiss Visiting Irish Singers!’
Debra: ‘Discover your Grandfather’s Criminal Past in Our Attractive Archives!’
Me: ‘Drink Beer that Tastes like Dead Rat!’
Debra: ‘Watch Husband Take Photos of Innumerable Doorways!’
Despite the weather and the M65, Debra warmed to the task, working up a routine about my family’s criminal past.
‘Ah, there’s the courthouse,’ she said as we drove through Accrington, ‘a place that owes its imposing size to the existence of the Sudall family.’
Or as we passed the police station: ‘I wonder if they’ve installed a blue plaque mentioning the Sudall contribution?’
Or pausing for a cup of tea in a cafe: ‘I see they trust you with a silver spoon. Do they realise the Sudall gang is back in town?’
The two of us wandered out of the cafe and I promised that the afternoon would be more fun, at which point the fog instantly deepened, as if the weather itself was saying, ‘You are still in Lancashire.’ Everything felt slightly worn out. Most of the people on the streets were elderly; presumably anyone fleet of foot had fled. At the Oswaldtwistle shops – which you approach by simultaneously driving both ways along the M65 – they had a whole car-park reserved for disabled drivers. A smaller car-park over the road had been established for the able-bodied minority. In Clayton-le-Moors, the main street offered a corner store for rent: ‘Ideal for hair, beauty, nails’ said the sign, ‘£59 a week’. Rents this low were hardly the mark of a booming high street. My only question: since the factories all closed in 1967, why was everything still soot-covered? It was like being sweaty from some jogging you did when you were seventeen.
At the Oswaldtwistle shops, I bought a local paper, the headline of which claimed children in Blackburn were the most underweight in Britain: up to four hundred primary school pupils in the borough were suffering from malnutrition due to parental poverty. Later I found online a report into longevity commissioned by an advocacy group called Public Health England: several boroughs in this part of the north-west featured in the ‘top ten’ lists for the lowest life expectancy in England. In the Little Carleton area near Blackpool, boys born around now would likely live to the age of 67.3, a life expectancy worse than that in North Korea, where it’s 69, and a long way short of Knightsbridge, the highest in England, where a boy born now will live until he’s 97.7. In my father’s home town of Blackburn, life expectancy for males was still rated as 3.2 years shorter than the English average.
The only places going gangbusters were the local supermarkets, which were stuffed with the world’s produce. At the end of an afternoon of driving, we pulled into the capacious car-park of the local Lidl outlet. Our plan was to buy dinner and smuggle it back to our hotel, now eerily quiet since the departure of the Daniel O’Donnell fan club. We wandered aisle
s stacked with the best – well, the cheapest – the European Community could offer: Romanian pâté, German sausage and Lithuanian cheese. We assembled an enormously cheap feast. I added a £3.90 Chilean merlot to provide some cheer against the landscape. As we headed to the register to pay, I overheard a conversation between two middle-aged northern men, both pushing shopping trolleys.
‘How’s your boy doing?’
‘Good. He’s in remission.’
‘That’s great news.’
‘Well, I gave him my stem cells. We’re a genetic match, an exact genetic match.’
The father emphasised the word ‘exact’, and then smiled broadly, as if to say, ‘Isn’t the world a marvellous place?’
I pushed my trolley past, leaving them smiling at each other.
Chapter Eighteen
My mother was starting to come into focus; somehow her lies seemed less strange, less destructive. I saw her determination, her self-belief. How else do you cut yourself free from a difficult family unless through some quite brutal knife-work? The British class system is a terrible thing; it is pernicious and unfair. Maybe there was something admirable about a woman who refused to bow down to it; a woman who said: ‘I’ll just pretend to be something different and go to the other side of the world where no one will know the truth. Stuff ’em.’
Yet I’m still stuck with the old questions: did she have to also reject her mother and sisters? Make up a past? Talk endlessly about lavatories? Use that ridiculous voice? Behave in such a snobby way to other working-class people? Wouldn’t a move to Australia have been enough? Wouldn’t it have been more impressive to say: ‘I came from this messed-up past then made something of myself’?
Thinking about all she went through, I find myself in a forgiving mood – contemplating that tiny four-year-old whose father was marched off to prison. Then, a second later, I wonder if her brutal knife-work left her unable to form proper relationships with others. Among them, me. Should I think of her as someone who had the gumption to save herself . . . or as just another shyster conning people in the colonies?
Flesh Wounds Page 17