I was thrilled when I entered the barn to see the beautifully coloured swallows fast-winging acrobatically through the air to reach their nests of dried mud and grasses and feed their young. Mr Bramer directed me up a ladder inside the barn to a shelf in a corner where two white owlets, all covered in fluffy white feathers, were leaning out expectantly for the next feed. I didn’t go too close because I was being carefully observed by an enormous white barn owl perched on a nearby beam.
Mr Bramer showed me his pigs, some of which had litters of piglets, and I especially enjoyed standing in the chicken shed looking at some large hens called wine dots, a type I hadn’t seen before. I got the impression, though, that the large rooster wasn’t too happy about my presence, which was fair enough since he was the boss bird.
Mr Bramer said I could come to visit any time and before I left Mrs Bramer gave me a piece of apple pie and a drink of homemade sweet lemonade. I really felt at home there and I loved seeing the animals. I decided that next time I came I would bring an apple for Benny.
From that time on I would use Mr Bramer’s farm as an additional refuge when my life at home grew unbearable.
I have always been drawn to wild places, even if they have been turned into more orderly parks. Axwell Park is such a place. The woods, the lake and the streams were carefully landscaped to enhance the environment for those who live in the expensive private housing that surrounds the park. It had pathways and seats in convenient sites and there was a bridge over the lake. This led to a wide green expanse of grassland that had been thoroughly developed as a wildlife habitat and was dominated by a towering horse chestnut tree. In the very far corner of the field there were two grass tennis courts. Nevertheless, for a young boy living in the suburban backstreets of Blaydon, Axwell Park still had enough natural wilderness to explore and savour.
On some sunny summer days, as I lazily stretched out on the grass by the lake, alone with my thoughts, I would often hear laughter coming from adult couples playing mixed doubles on the courts. The sounds of such merriment made me feel empty inside as it contrasted so markedly with the way my mother and father related to each other. Cheerful laughter, more especially the uninhibited kind, was a singularly rare commodity in our house; in fact, it was probably viewed as a sin or likely to give rise to one.
Part of my family’s domestic routine at weekends involved social gatherings in which we would visit or be visited by one or two families from my father’s side. From a child’s point of view, they tended to be boring affairs where the adults shared reminiscences or gossiped about the failings of other family members who were not there. Meanwhile, children were admonished to be on their best behaviour so as to provide a showcase of family integrity. Great fuss had to be made of the younger children’s toilet skills and often commode pots were passed around for the assembled company to witness the proficiency of a particular child’s bowel movement.
I kept a low profile at these sessions, as did most of the other children, but not Harold. He was the six-year-old son of Uncle Patrick and Aunt Molly. Uncle Patrick held the post of senior staff sergeant at Sandhurst, the British Army’s elite training college for officers. He was a frightening man. He had a shaved head, small dark eyes and a thin moustache above his lip. It was rumoured within the family that he beat his wife who had been incarcerated in an asylum several times, apparently for treatment of nervous depression. But his son, Harold, was his pride and joy. Whenever I looked at Harold I felt a little shudder. He resembled the shape of the Neanderthal children, as depicted in my history picture books. He had a large head and virtually no neck, a jutting jaw and little piggy eyes. His body appeared to be fashioned from a single piece of solid rock.
However, I’m not one to judge by looks alone, and it was his crude behaviour rather than his physical appearance that gave most cause for concern. Harold was being educated at the Army’s expense at a private boarding school run by an order of ecclesiastical brothers but his manners left much to be desired. When sitting at the table he would suddenly say ‘Fuck’ – although prompted by nothing in particular – and repeat this word several times until he had everyone’s attention. He would then display an evil, gap-toothed grin. By this time his mother, Molly, would be in outraged hysterics and order him to go to the bathroom, where he would commence to yell, within everyone’s earshot, ‘Shit and piss to you lot of flea bags.’ This tirade would continue until his father would stick his head into the hallway and shout in the direction of the bathroom, ‘Attention! Shuuuuurrrr up!’ Then peace would reign again except for the suppressed giggles of the children.
At one of these family gatherings my mother took along my newborn sister, Gloria, the younger of my two sisters. At one point Molly, who was wearing a nasty bruise on her face, insisted on nursing the baby. She carried her over to where Harold was sitting and said, ‘Look, Harold, wouldn’t you like a nice baby sister like her?’
‘Cunt,’ said Harold, without a trace of shame.
This caused another scene in which Molly accused her husband of deliberately teaching Harold bad things. Uncle Patrick’s reply, made in front of the entire family, was, ‘Shut your stupid whingeing mouth or I’ll shut it for you.’
One time just after Christmas, crackers were provided at the dinner table for the children. I pulled mine with one of the other children and won a tin whistle. After the meal, Harold was prevailed upon by his father to recite a verse or two from some military poem, which I think was Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. I was playing about with my whistle when suddenly it blew, causing Harold to halt in mid recitation.
Furious, he turned on me and screamed, ‘You horrible little man. I shall cut your balls off if I hear another sound from you!’
Later, after Uncle Patrick had left with his family, talk amongst the remaining company turned to Harold and it was their unanimous consensus that the boy was a ‘chip off the old block’ whose language owed much to the influence of his father. There was great concern expressed for Molly whose temperament in no way suited such a family. Eventually Harold, at the age of twelve, was sent to Army school and I heard nothing of him again. Aunt Molly suffered several nervous breakdowns and on medical advice was finally taken into long-term nursing care.
Exposure to such incidents as these started me thinking about what kind of family I had inherited on my father’s side. They were certainly a rum lot. My paternal grandfather had apparently taken upon himself the duty, no doubt strongly motivated by his religion, of breeding for Ireland. As well as the twelve children he had by his first wife, who died at the tender age of fifty-six, he then had two more children by his second wife, whom he had initially hired as his housekeeper. The household in which my father and his siblings grew up was spartan to say the least. Some of my uncles, who would sometimes confide in me during parties, reported that there was never enough food to go round. Their usual diet consisted chiefly of potatoes, cabbage and home-baked bread. Butter and jam were luxuries but seasonal gluts of apples made up for deficiencies in other areas. Like many immigrant Irish families, they existed on a shoestring and the care of the undernourished children was sacrificed as the parents continued the prevailing dogma of unfettered procreation.
I only got to know a few of my father’s brothers, but they showed marked dissimilarities. Aside from Patrick the military man, there was John, who was probably the brother with the most pleasant disposition. He dabbled in vaudeville as a song-and-dance man – he once offered to teach me how to tap dance – but when that fell through he had to take employment at the cokeworks. There he contracted a respiratory disease, which killed him when he was only forty-two. Chris was a layabout cadger who gambled away every penny he got his hands on. He also drank a great deal.
Daniel, the youngest brother, was the star of the family. An intelligent high-achiever, he gained a degree in science from Strawberry Hill College on the outskirts of London and became a teacher. When the Second World War started he enlisted in the Army and was commissioned as a se
cond lieutenant. He went on to lead a team of soldiers who parachuted into Crete to help the partisans in their fight against the German occupation. Later, when he and his commando force were threatened with capture, he led them to safety along the twelve-mile long Samaria Gorge towards the coast. Once there, they were picked up by a British Navy destroyer and transported to safety. Daniel would always take an interest in me, which was not a surprise in the light of what I was learn when I was older. Years later, while on holiday in Crete, as a token of respect for Dan I walked the twelve miles of the gorge with my son, Christopher. By the time we had finished my feet had been reduced to bleeding tatters.
At these family gatherings my father hardly said a word and was especially deferential to Tony, his elder brother, who had a degree in engineering. My father had brought shame on the family by getting mixed up with a Protestant English girl and was not well regarded in contrast to the ‘stars’ of the family – Tony, John and Dan.
The women in my father’s family were also very different from each other. Irene was a calm lovable woman who married my favourite uncle on that side of the family, a debonair sportsman called Terence who had competed in the 1948 Olympics. At parties he had the patience to spend a lot of time talking to me and answering my questions. He was the person who first awakened my interest in cricket and he gave me my first cricket bat, which was almost too heavy for me to lift, let alone use, but his intentions were good. I also knew two of my father’s sisters, Florence and Kathleen. Florence trained as a nanny and moved away to work in the south of England. Kathleen had a hypertensive personality and was given to hysterical episodes.
Like my father, Kathleen was steeped in the punitive and judgemental side of Catholicism. I remember being told by one of my uncles about the depth of her religious guilt. One day after attending early morning Mass she was so engrossed in chatting with a friend as they left the church that she forgot to dip her hand in the holy water and make the sign of the cross. This bothered her all day and that night, as she ascended the stairs on her way to bed, she had a vision of the devil. At this point, thinking the story was being related for amusement, I laughed, only to receive a hard clout on the ear from my father and several reproving looks from the rest of the adults. My uncle continued, saying that the parish priest was informed about the vision and then the bishop had to be notified. Consequently, a Dominican father who was trained as an exorcist was despatched to carry out a special blessing on Kathleen and the house.
Most of family, including Kathleen, had been born in a town called Mullingar in County Westmeath, central Ireland. Whenever she came to visit our family she was always full of warning stories to us children about the dangers of opening the door to strangers after dark. ‘You must be careful after you’ve looked at their face to check their feet for cloven hooves, as they could be a devil after your soul.’
I remember my sisters becoming frightened at these stories and so my father taught them a prayer to say each night to their guardian angel.
Quirky aunts were not confined to my father’s side of the family, as I found out from my Aunt Mary Ann, my grandmother’s sister. She told me of a maiden aunt of hers who developed an infatuation for Earl Kitchener of Khartoum. Kitchener drowned in 1916 when the HMS Hampshire, on which he was travelling on a government mission to Russia, struck a mine and sank. From that day on, my aunt told me, her maiden aunt vowed never to eat fish again as a tribute to her hero and she kept her promise until she died.
As a child I was surrounded by so many prejudices, superstitions and religious beliefs, as well as some strange adults with misguided child-rearing practices, that I’m surprised that my own outlook on life managed to escape relatively unscathed. With the benefit of hindsight, I sometimes wonder how I managed to hang on to my sanity. I think that even as a child I was able to offset the bad things, the horrors in my life, with my attachment to nature and the wild creatures of the woods and hedgerows. I really believe that animals have a way of helping a person to make meaningful connections with the realities of life that most people cannot achieve alone.
I am obliged to a few teachers who inspired and guided me in the path of learning, but before I went to grammar school, I think I learned more insights from nature than I did from family or school. The repressive religious regime at elementary school did almost as much as my home life to dampen and break my youthful spirit. Whenever I thought I was just having a good time, the adults around me would tell me I was committing a sin, so in the end all pleasure seemed to be tainted with sinful attributes and all things happy were reduced to the miserable.
Even having a sense of humour seemed to place me at a perpetual disadvantage. Once, during a rounders match in the schoolyard, a classmate turned to me and said something funny and I laughed out loud. Instantly the teacher, a man called Wordsworth, marched across the yard and slapped me hard in the face. He didn’t say it on this occasion but the usual comment on bad behaviour at school was that it was an offence against God and needed to be punished. I wondered just what kind of behaviour did God expect of me? And what kind of God was it who allowed children to be abused in this way?
A much more serious incident took place that gave me severe qualms about exactly what Godliness entailed. Now that I was twelve and due to start grammar school in the autumn, my father decided that I should learn how to serve God at Holy Mass and he prevailed upon the parish priest to enlist me as an altar boy. I was given no choice in the matter. This meant rising early every day and attending church at 8 a.m. for early morning Mass in order to learn the ritual moves required of the altar boys. Towards the end of my first week, I served Mass with an older boy who gave me guidance. Once the Mass was over the older boy, who was at St Cuthbert’s, raced off to catch the bus for Newcastle. I was left to help the priest clear up. When I’d finished I changed out of my cassock into my jacket and was just about to leave when the priest, a man in his forties or thereabouts, stopped what he was doing and stood in front of me.
‘Now you need to learn to do as you are told as part of the discipline of the church. Do you understand that, Denis? And your first duty is to serve me,’ he said.
He then closed the vestry door and, turning to face me, exposed his genitals. He beckoned me to come to him and I froze on the spot. Panic seared through me and I bolted past him for the door. It was a struggle to open the heavy wooden door and I felt terror as I heard him coming up behind me. At last the door swung wide and I fled. When I reached the church exit I turned and looked back. He was standing watching me with a devilish smile on his face which gave me the shivers. I ran from the church and didn’t stop until I reached the town square. There I hunched down on my haunches against the wall next to the greengrocer’s display tables laden with fruit and vegetables. Now I had a fearful problem. Who should I tell? What should I do?
I went home and in a breathless rush told my mother. She was busy in the kitchen at the time and my disclosure had a serious effect on her because she came to face me and said, ‘Are you absolutely sure this is what happened or did you imagine it?’
Adamantly I asserted that I had told her only the truth.
She said, ‘You must not go back there again and see that you are never ever alone with that priest.’
I went upstairs and started going through my comics, trying to put the matter out of my head.
At about 3 a.m. in the morning I was rudely awakened by my father pulling me out of bed. As I struggled to come awake I could see that he was in a vile mood.
‘What you told your mother about the priest this morning, that was a lie, wasn’t it? It was you trying to get out of serving Mass, wasn’t it?’ he whispered harshly, his angry face close to mine.
‘No, I did not lie. It happened like I said,’ I stuttered.
‘You lying little bugger. I’ll belt your arse for lying to me!’
And with that he grabbed me by the hair and started laying into me with his hand, calling out ‘Liar, liar, liar’ as he did so.
He reared back at this, his faced twisted in an odd way that I hadn’t seen before. But I guessed what he was thinking. His precious, obsessive and unswerving belief in his religion meant that he thought that the Church was pure and infallibly good. He was imagining what would happen if people discovered that a priest, the anointed of God, was a paedophile. To my relief he turned away and headed back to his bedroom, where I soon heard my mother asking him questions.
I was shaken. I knew that the last thing he would ever do would be to defend me, and he would never take my word against anybody else’s in any situation. But I was glowing with satisfaction that at last I had succeeded in stopping his violence against me. To my horror he appeared at my bedroom door again. I held my breath, not knowing what to expect.
‘You keep your mouth shut about this! You are to tell nobody. Do you understand?’
I nodded agreement and he left. From then onwards the only time I went to church was with the school for Benediction on Thursday and for the mandatory family Mass on Sunday.
THE WHITE CAT
Starting on the Monday after this weekend, I was told by my father that I would be going with him to help out when he did extra jobs in the evening. On Monday evening we would be going to the Scotswood Co-operative store to do some extra work for the manager, Mr Grange, and I would be my father’s ‘helping hand’, as it was put to me.
I trembled at this development. Alarm bells began to ring in my head. Why Scotswood? To get to the place of work it would be necessary to cross the massive Scotswood Bridge from which I had been chased, along with others, many times by the Bridge Keeper. He was a rough old man who carried a red flag which he used to control the traffic and also sometimes to hit any boy that he thought was up to no good. My friends and I had felt that stick against our legs several times in the past when we were caught birdwatching under the bridge. The River Tyne flowed fast and wide under the bridge and I would always give a little shudder when I thought of what it would be like to fall into that mass of cold water that held many secrets in its murky depths.
Paw Tracks Page 8