Why?
So people outside Dudley can understand what yer say to them.
No, why is Margaret Thatcher not a nice person?
She’s not kind. She doesn’t care about people.
She’s selfish.
Exactly, she’s very selfish.
If we doh think the same as Margaret Thatcher why’s her in charge? Why doh we have somebody in charge who we do like?
Well, some people like her. I’d have thought Johnny would’ve gone through all this with you.
She smiled as she said this. She knew that Johnny wanted there to be a revolution and she thought it was a ridiculous idea. I wanted to say, Does Dad like her? Then if she said, no, I could have said, Why did he vote for her, then? and if she said Yes, I could ask why. If I had said that, though, she would have realized that I listened to them talking in the kitchen while I sat on the stairs above them. My mum put the iron down on the ironing board.
That’s why we have an election. So people can decide who they want. The people picked Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. Why am yer so interested in this, Sean?
What people?
All the people vote. Different areas vote for MPs. Margaret Thatcher’s party the Conservatives have got the most MPs so she’s prime minister. Some people doh think the same as us. Some people am different to us. Don’t worry about it.
Like the gypos?
Don’t you dare say gypos! I doh want to hear you saying that word!
She pointed her finger right in my face; this was one step away from getting a whack.
I said I was going to the Paki shop once because I’d heard Paul say it and thought it sounded good. My mum slapped me and as I tried to duck her engagement ring cut my eyebrow and blood spattered red on the kitchen lino. My mum burst into tears before the blood hit the floor. I still have a tiny scar. I never said it again.
You can call them gypsies. I don’t want you repeating what you hear other people say.
She says this all the time.
Actually, I have heard my dad call them gypos when he was washing the car, talking to a neighbour of ours called Mick, but I think I’d better not mention it. He’d said it about the Robertsons, so maybe that was different.
Like the gypsies then?
No, not like the gypsies. I don’t suppose they voted. They might not be able to vote.
I thought everyone could vote if you’re over eighteen. You told me.
You have to be registered.
This is complicated.
I doh know why yome so worried about it, Sean. It’s nothing for you to worry about. I’m gonna tell Johnny and yer grandad to stop talking about politics, putting ideas in yer head.
What about Jermaine’s dad?
What about him?
Maybe he likes Margaret Thatcher.
What?
You said not everybody is the same as us. And the Campbells.
She starts to laugh.
Oh, Sean. I shouldn’t have thought Jermaine’s dad or the Campbells was that keen on Margaret Thatcher. They’m West Indian, black, it’s not different. You might hear some people say that they’m different, though. I’m talking about people that think differently, not people with a different coloured skin.
But who, though?
Who what?
Thinks different to us?
Well, Margaret Thatcher, for one and yer uncle Eric. You heard all the fuss.
And my dad, I want to add.
Am we rich or poor?
Are we rich or poor? Why are you asking this now? I’ve told you, no more politics.
Would you say we’m rich or poor?
I’d say we’re very lucky.
Rich, then?
No, Sean, not rich. We’re not rich, no; just richer than we used to be. Ask your grandad, but no more politics.
She was thirty that year. My dad got Johnny to do a picture of my mum for her birthday. He used pastels and she looked happy in the picture, like when she’d stand in the kitchen on Crow Street and sing along to the radio. She was too embarrassed to put the picture up. My dad had to put it up in the garage. I don’t know what happened to it afterwards. We have old photos. There’s one that maybe Johnny used as a model that shows her turning her head, standing on the back step, holding me as a baby, my grandad’s rose bushes on one side, with shadows angled across the wall. She is about to smile, not quite ready to pose, happy; her eyes are happy.
We went to Stratford and walked by the river, looked at the Shakespeare statues, then we went on a boat and looked into the gardens of the big houses and my mum and dad imagined living there. My mum had long brown hair then; I remember her looking with wonder and anger at a grey hair she pulled from her head. She wore dresses that she made herself with big prints on them like butterflies or flowers. She had made all the curtains and bed covers for our new house and kept material in the cupboard under the stairs along with her sewing machine. When she cleaned at the solicitors, she had to tie her hair back in a ponytail or put it in a net, which she hated. She hated that job. She did it to get some extra money in because we had a mortgage to pay. It was my dad that wanted us to get money together and move again when he got another job.
They’d been married for ten years. I was born nine months after they got married. When I was a baby we’d lived all together at my nan and grandad’s, all of us in the back bedroom that I’d fallen out of. We moved to the Perry Court flats and had a balcony that looked back up to the castle and over all the works at Cinderheath and down towards Tipton. Then we moved to our house the autumn after the baking hot summer.
My dad grew up in Quarry End. It wasn’t there any more. They blew it up in a big explosion to join the two quarries together.
Pity they day blow the folks from theer up an all, my uncle Eric had said, before he was banished. Then he said, No offence, Francis, to my dad. I day mean yow.
I remember no one seemed that sad to see Quarry End go except the people who’d clung on there until the end, like my granny, my dad’s mum, living in part-demolished terraces with the quarries eating at the foundations of their houses. I liked it. My granny died before they’d have finally moved her out. She had nowhere to go. I remember going up there with my dad. He had to meet his brothers at the house to divide up my granny’s stuff. My dad didn’t like his brothers. We had to burn most of it; the furniture had woodworm and all the clothes and blankets were too dirty for anything else, not even rag and bone. We all stood round the bonfire and the smoke mixed with the dust that used to come from the blasting and cover everything with a light grey powder. That was what it was like up there, dusty and foggy, so to an eight-year-old boy it felt like monsters might come round the corner of every building. While we had the fire burning a fox came along the road with all her cubs in a line behind her; they were all grey from the dust in their fur. She came right by the fire and the men and sniffed at what was going on. One of my dad’s brothers, Harry, I think, who went to live in Worcester, worked on the oil rigs for a time, threw a brick right at it and the fox stood there and stared, like the wild things had taken over.
The road used to wind between the quarries, the new one and the old one, and the houses used to run on either side of the road at the top of the hill. That one narrow road was undermined slowly by the working, so that eventually the back yards of the houses were nearly at the quarry edges. My dad could remember when the new quarry had been much smaller and there’d been a farm with horses where the big hole was now. Although it was just two long lines of terraced houses, Quarry End was a separate place with shops and pubs in the row, and yards out the back where people kept chickens and pigs. I’m not sure my dad’s mum, my granny, ever left Quarry End.
People were scared to go up there if they didn’t know any of the families. They said you’d get beaten up or killed and thrown over the quarry or fed to the pigs. That didn’t really happen. Well, it happened once, which is where the story came from.
A man was walking from Black
heath to visit his sister on Kates Hill and instead of carrying on down Rowley Road or starting through White Heath and then past the Four Ways and up and over to the Hangsman’s Tree and that way, he decided to walk up through Quarry End. He didn’t know anybody up there and work was slow at the quarries, so the men were stood on the doorsteps and at the door of the pub and because they didn’t like the look of the man they started calling him names and hitting him. The man ran off and they chased him, a big group of them now, twenty or thirty, kids and grown men; that was how they did things up there, all together. The man must have been in a panic because he turned off the road down one of the lanes that ran off into the blackberry bushes and chicken coops and he went falling over into the quarry and broke his neck. Some of the gang climbed down and dragged the man out, but they didn’t know what to do with the body. The police didn’t go much to Quarry End but they’d probably turn up for something like this. So they fed the man from Blackheath to the pigs. The pigs ate him up. The best sausages used to come from Quarry End and after that people used to joke that it was because of what they fed the pigs on. It was no joke, though. The police came from Dudley and found some of the man’s bones in the pig trough. Nobody said anything. Nobody got arrested. My dad told me that his dad was one of the boys who did the chasing.
The best days at the caravans are the ones when we don’t drive anywhere. I wake up early because the sun comes in through the orange curtains early in the morning and makes the room glow. I lie awake while my nan makes a cup of tea for us all. Sometimes I sleep in our caravan, sometimes in my nan and grandad’s. My bed is in the same position in both. I wriggle down the bed a little bit and move the curtain with my feet so I can look out and see the line of the sea and the sky and the tops of the waves. Even when the sun isn’t shining it’s good. You can watch the grey waves and the seagulls as they fly across the space in the window between the curtain and the window frame. When it’s raining it’s even better because you can snuggle down in bed and hear the rain hitting the roof and the sound of the kettle boiling and usually the waves are white and foamy and they hit the sea wall and come splashing into the caravan site. If it rains in the day I don’t mind. I sit in the corner and read or write in my exercise book or chat to whoever’s around. Some days when it rains we go for a drive and look at the mountains and castles that appear through the mist.
I walk with my dad and grandad to get a paper and anything else we might want for breakfast, like more eggs. The shop for the caravans is part of a farm and the eggs are laid by the chickens that live up the hill. I walk up and see them sometimes. After breakfast we go on another walk along the beach past where the sea wall runs out and there are the rock pools where me and Ronnie caught his pet crab. Afternoons, we all play on the beach in front of the caravans and that’s when there’s a big game of cricket or football. We go in the sea, if it’s hot, and I run back and forth through the waves as they foam up the sand.
‘In Britain, we have a tradition of facing the severest tests as a family, working together to meet and overcome adversity.’
She stopped all the little children from having milk.
My mum lifts her head up from the ironing and says this to me while I line up my Star Wars figures on the table.
What?
You asked me why Margaret Thatcher was selfish, why we don’t like her. When I was a little girl all the children got given milk to drink every morning at school. As soon as Margaret Thatcher was in charge of it, she stopped the milk.
Milk’s really good for you.
Exactly.
She must really hate us, I think. You can see if you watch her on telly or even if you hear her voice coming out of the radio that we make her angry. At least, someone makes her angry. Even when she said that Saint Francis stuff, it was like she was telling everyone off. Things are getting out of hand. She wants to stop people going to work, let all the factories close. That’s what my grandad says. I want to know why. I don’t know what we’ve done to upset her, but we’ve done something. If we know why she’s angry maybe we can stop her.
Why did she do that, then? Why’s she so angry?
That’s just what she’s like. It’s what some people am like, Sean.
So why would people vote for her, then?
Just– I suppose they might think they’ll get something out of it themselves.
My mum holds a shirt of my dad’s up to the kitchen window to check it’s not creased.
What like?
I dunno, Sean. That’s enough of that, now. You haven’t got to worry about it. I’m sorry I mentioned it.
Like money or a new house?
Well, yeah, I suppose so. My mum blows out her cheeks and looks at the steam rising from the damp shirt. Yeah, that’s it exactly, really. Anyway, enough now. Carry on playing with yer little men. Why don’t you wanna see if Ronnie wants to come to our house for a change? You only ever play with him when we’re up at Nan and Grandad’s.
It’s funny that I have never thought to ask him. It’s as if he only exists on Crow Street.
I don’t want Ronnie to come here. I don’t like Elm Drive. I don’t like the way my room looks out on the trees and nothing else. At my nan and grandad’s you can see for miles and there are all sorts of things going on: the factories and allotments and the little cars far away on the motorway and the trains creeping alongside the factory buildings and by the canal as they go into Dudley Port station. I don’t like these orange bricks that our house is made with that are all the same; I like the purply-reddy ones on Crow Street where you find things growing or crawling in between them. Ronnie even pulled a brick out of their house once and hid a pound note behind it to stop his sisters finding it. When he collected it there were woodlice living under it like it was a tent. I don’t like how quiet it is on our road or that it’s a dead end. On Crow Street it’s all noise: you can hear everything, like the Robertsons shouting and playing next door, Jennie Lee the budgie, or Barbara Castle, as the new budgie is called, and the birds outside singing, metal clanging from the works, doors slamming, the radio playing, the men calling to each other on the allotments or on their way home from work. Even the car sounds there are different because on our street the sound is of cars that people have turned the key in and started up, cars they bought from a proper garage, but on Crow Street pretty much all the cars belong to Harry Robertson and he tries to fix them up and sell them. There are always cars attached to each other with spark plugs; me and Little Ronnie sit in them sometimes while his dad tries to get them going; or there are cars that Harry is taking apart or trying to put back together. If a car is beyond repair then Charlie Clancey comes along and takes it for the scrapyard. There’s always someone to talk to at my nan and grandad’s. My nan says it makes her head go round.
In our house I’m on my own. I hear my nan sometimes say that it would be nice if I had a brother or sister to play with. It would, it’s true. She’s been dropping hints lately, saying things like, Well, there’s ten years between yow and Johnny to my mum, doh give up on the idea. I know my mum and dad have tried to grow one loads of times, but they haven’t managed to yet. You have to try and grow a baby inside the woman’s belly. I don’t need Michelle Campbell to tell me that.
Even the garden at our house isn’t as good as it seems. We put a swing in it but you can’t really see anything while you’re swinging, only the fence. I prefer the swings at the park because as you swing you can watch the freight trains coming into the yard and if you go and stand at the wall you can see them shunting and look at all the different tracks as they criss-cross. You can see the cable-car at the zoo as well and sometimes you can make out the llamas on the side of the hill below the castle and the little splashes of pink that are the flamingos. And there are other kids. I don’t say anything, though. It seems important that I have my own swing. When I’m sitting out on the back step at Crow Street, my nan tells me how lucky I am to have such a nice house to go back to. I think,
If it’s that nice, why are my mum and dad looking at other houses even further away? And why are we always round here? But I don’t say anything.
I know that our house will cause more trouble than it is worth. That’s what my grandad says and I believe him.
And in the end that turned out to be true. That house brought more trouble than anything we could have imagined.
‘No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.’
Johnny comes in with the paper and my grandad starts on about the Wolves.
A million pound for him?
Million and half, really.
How have they got that much money?
They got the money for Daley.
He’s another un. They ay wuth that much, these players.
My grandad stares at the Express & Star. Wolves have bought Andy Gray from Villa. It’s great news. My grandad never thinks anyone is any good apart from the players from when Wolves were the best team in the world.
He’s a great signing, Dad.
Well, he needs to be Alfredo Di Stéfano for that money.
Iss the way of the world, Jack. Money decides things in the end, my dad says.
Does it? my grandad says. Does it?
He looks at my dad.
Yer know what I mean.
I think my grandad knows how my dad voted.
I think I do, arr. Yow watch what’s coming.
I have no idea why my dad voted Tory in 1979. It’s true that he wasn’t as political as my mum or any of the family but he’d voted Labour before 1979 and he voted Labour afterwards. It was a mistake, I suppose. I don’t know what he thought he was going to get from it: houses, money, cars. It was maybe a moment of rebellion; the possibility of stepping away from one life into another, a metamorphosis; the whole country changed. All I know is that he wouldn’t have, if he’d known what was going to be unleashed.
How I Killed Margaret Thatcher Page 6