Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  ‘He was a retired dentist,’ my mother was telling Jo about the neighbour. She was as interested to see the road as I was but a good deal less showily sentimental. ‘He kept a gun by his bed.’

  ‘Did he?’ I asked.

  ‘He had a very large collection of valuable snuff boxes. He said he’d shoot anybody who tried to get in. But he wasn’t a nice man. He was always complaining about the dog. He would send letters claiming that the dog was encouraging other dogs to come into his garden.’

  The dog, like most dogs do, entered the family under false pretences, obtaining a fake visa as my sister’s pet. She chose him because he was the shaggiest of a litter of Norwich Terriers. For a century, Norwich Terriers had been bred to be bright, attentive little short-haired frisky yappy things, but then something went wrong and this throw-back, flop-eared genetic mutation popped out. He looked like a two-inches-off-the-ground walking draught excluder, a type favoured by Victorian sentiment, which naturally found an echo with my eight-year-old sister. She had to have him. She called him Harold. For a week she shuddered in ecstasy over Harold the miniature Aberdeen Angus and then never paid him the slightest attention again. So my father fell besottedly in love with him instead.

  Never very profligate in the hugging and kissing department, Elwyn lavished every emotional excess he could muster on the dog. They had much in common: vile tempers if rudely awakened from a day-time nap, unquenchable appetites and severe territorial obsessionalism (to get the dog or my father out of ‘their’ chair required daring and cunning). And they both disliked the cat too. My father allowed Harold to kiss him, sleep in his bed and use him as a mattress. In return, he accompanied the dog to the end of Hartland Road for its comprehensive investigation of every kerb, stick, lamp post and bush in the street. Hours could be spent in mutual love-ins. The dog took precedence over everyone. Towards the end of my father’s life Harold was replaced by Judy, a Jack Russell, which snapped at my babies. My father seriously suggested that the children should be locked away upstairs to avoid annoying the dog. I have, incidentally, grown to have exactly the same relationship with my Labrador, ‘Cadbury’ (chosen and named by a twelve-year-old).

  Across the bottom of what was a steep hill for supposedly flat, uninteresting Essex, but a thrilling one to freewheel a bike down, I could see directly out on to open, arsenic-yellow countryside and a row of massive pylons. The suburb was skin deep. Out the back, behind Mikey Everard’s house, there had been the fields and copses where we played kick the can.

  Today, the front of the house in Epping looks stark. It has two bays with Tudorbethan timber-framed gables and is painted grey, despite the name ‘White Lodge’ that shines out on a brass lettered plaque in the porch looking suspiciously like my father’s handiwork. There is a small ledge above the door.

  I had climbed up on it once when I came home unexpectedly after some sort of Footlights summer tour and found the place locked up. I had been able to see a light on in my grandmother’s room and, indeed, her shadow playing on the net curtains, but no matter how much I hammered on the front door or stood in the front garden and bellowed at the window I couldn’t penetrate her deafness. So, mad with frustration, I had finally clambered up the front of the house and knocked on the bay window.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that!’ My father was aghast. ‘You might have given her a heart attack.’

  She didn’t see me. I was standing on the top of the front door, six inches from her face, yelling at her. She looked out into the darkness and addressed me throughout as if I was a hundred yards across the street. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Granny, it’s me. Griff!’

  ‘Griff’s not here!’

  ‘No. IT’S ME. I AM GRIFF!’

  ‘Griff?’

  ‘Yes. Let me in. I’ve forgotten my keys.’

  ‘Why don’t you come in?’

  My mother was away up the hill towards the town, not particularly bothered to explore the house we lived in for twenty years.

  She only really paused when we got round the back, by the alleyway that led out into the high street. She pointed out the pair of houses. ‘We sold the land,’ she told Jo, ‘to pay for the repairs to the house because the man who owned it previously had started stripping the place, taking out the fireplaces … there was a huge hole in the roof when we arrived.’

  The hole, I remember, was magnificent — quite frightening even — with jagged edges, in a sloping bit of ceiling just at the top of the first landing on the stairs. -My brother and I liked it. It made the place look like a ghost house from a film, or The Munsters. Almost the first thing we did, when our cast-iron bedsteads were put up on the bare floorboards in our room, side by side against a rough, unpainted grey plaster wall, was carve ‘home sweet home’ with a pair of dividers in what we thought was a good approximation of prisoner’s graffiti. My father exploded, in a good approximation of a ‘chief warder’s fury.

  White Lodge changed over our years of occupation, but in what order I can hardly recall. The hole must have been patched up pretty quickly The rudimentary servant’s quarters with big glass-fronted butler’s cupboards, which had to be shown to visitors, were opened out into a modern kitchen with a bar thing cutting it in half where a wall had once been. My mother and father applied themselves to fitting out their new sixties home with William Morris wallpaper upstairs (rather appropriate since Morris’ workshops were just down the road in Walthamstow) and bold Sanderson fruity stuff in the dining room.

  I rather enjoyed the element of surprise involved in this. We never seemed to have the money to do the things that other families did. We never went abroad for our holidays. Suburban Epping utterly closed in around us. But I was quite excited once to discover two brand new step ladders, standing in the garage. What big things to buy without telling us. The lack of conspicuous consumption in those years seems surprising now My parents were part of a generation still reeling from the War. We lived in a perfectly adequate manner but frugally. And we were the posh ones as far as our mates were concerned — in the big house.

  With a new boat in a muddy creek, my father seemed to have exactly what he wanted: his house to fiddle with, his hobby and a strict routine of work. He took up brick-laying and walled in a section of rose beds behind the kitchen. A gardener called Lofty came, and went, after he propositioned my mother. The sofas were covered in dark-blue squeaky fake leather. A big brick double garage was built next to the house. Daddy erected shelving in the living room. He built a puppet theatre. He bought a Cortina. Granny and Grandpa came to live.

  This must have been a stop on my father’s independence, though he never openly complained. Grandpa didn’t last long. But Granny hung on in. She moved into that room upstairs when she was in her early sixties and died at the age of ninety-eight, three houses later. ‘I think he just expected them to stay for a short while,’ my mother said ruefully ‘I don’t suppose he imagined she would outlast him.’

  My mother’s sense of post-partem proprietorialism even extended to houses built by a speculative builder on land she had sold forty years ago. ‘Well, they seem to have let that house fall into a state.’

  And it was in a state, with a shopping trolley bunged up against the side wall. I was prepared for change. How could I not be? It was effectively thirty years since I had been in Epping — at least ten since I had last had any reason to go there.

  The alleyway was still functioning. A billboard advertised ‘Holistic Massage’ on Wednesday, ‘Thought Field Therapy’ on Thursday and ‘Spiritual Healing, Shiatsu and Reiki Teaching’. When I was last there, every other shop in the high street sold shoes. Nowadays the holistic clinic was joined by two acupuncture centres, a Chinese herbalist and ‘Positively Healthy, the healthy living shop’ (in our old doctor’s surgery). Nobody came into town for white stilettos any more. They came to get their auras read.

  ‘It’s all restaurants now,’ said the man in the ‘Oriental Rug Shop’. It was all oriental rug shops too. But ‘Coles th
e Tailors’ was still flogging what looked suspiciously like the same stock, beneath its familiar sign (a man in inflated breeches wielding shears) and ‘Batchelors’, the smelly riding tackle shop, was still there. ‘Church’s the Butchers’, where, if stuck, you could almost guarantee to find your mother ordering pork pies, was there too.

  I stood transfixed at the corner of the high street. They had moved the zebra crossing twenty yards, but … ‘Look, look,’ I squeaked. Sitting where I had sat, over forty years ago, was a row of little boys waiting for the same Saturday-morning shearing in the same barber’s shop. ‘Just a little off the sides and back, please.’ They certainly didn’t listen then. Whatever you asked for, they scraped you down to the bone. Did they still get the long strands of cotton wool out of those chrome dispensers poked down behind the collar? Did they use those puffers that finished the job with a squirt of talcum powder? Were these kids going to glower at their own fat faces emerging from shaggy disguise, beg not to have any Brylcreem and rail at their mothers for sending them there?

  To escape the depredations of the Demon Barber we had moved to ‘Nigel’s’. He was my mother’s hairdresser. My father refused to be seen going to a women’s salon, so Nigel started coming to the house for private sessions. He ended up cutting all the local doctors and the vicar too.

  ‘You probably won’t remember me …’ she began.

  ‘Gwynneth, you haven’t changed a bit!’ Nigel himself, older and stouter, his business thriving, was misty-eyed for the old days when Epping’s entire medical community had sat in my mother’s kitchen waiting for their trim.

  ‘I used to get through a whole bottle of gin in an evening,’ chortled my mother.

  Across the road I had worked the pumps one Christmas, falling for the old ‘check the radiator’ gag in Volkswagens and waving goodbye to customers with their petrol cap still m my hand. Shell had gone. A car showroom occupied the forecourt. But the Methodist church, the big plane trees and the picket fences were still in place.

  On my first day in St John’s Primary, standing in assembly in that huge hall with the high windows and the gloss baby-blue wall paint, amongst another six hundred strangers, I had suddenly felt hopelessly lost. After moving from Harlow to a second school in the space of one year, and, at the age of eight, when I should have known better, I wept publicly and humiliatingly.

  I was over it by lunchtime. I was perfectly happy at an ordinary school, where you were safe enough as long as you kept out of the way of the nutters. We had a lavatory block that you avoided. It was better to do it in your pants than have to use the oozing facilities, with the unlockable doors, crashable by prowling junior sadists. We had the boy in class who got increasingly covered in scabs and got to smell so bad that the teachers had to step in. We had the church hall on the other side of the road, round the back of which certain of the more bossy girls would organize ‘you show me yours if I show you mine’ assignations. There were monumental playground games of British Bulldog. We collected Civil War bubble-gum cards, with ‘death on the stakes’ a prized rarity.

  Whatever time was left over from school was occupied in the pursuit of war. Obviously I had a massive collection of armaments which included, after much badgering, the black plastic Armalite rifle from Woolworth’s with real clip-on, knife-shaped bayonet in slightly bendy grey plastic. (It effectively out-gunned any silvery Colt cowboy gun in Epping because of its up-to-date murderous reality.) Although I was rather fond of a fine matching pair of mart-black long-barrelled six-shooters, now I come to think of it.

  I also had a massive army. At some time in the late sixties Airfix hit on the spectacular wheeze of the ‘little men’. They came in boxes with a Cellophane window: nicely detailed half-inch-high personnel pegged to plastic trees. They were cheap. A two-and-six pack provided two dozen soldiers. To begin with we got the British army in khaki, the German army in a bluey-grey and the Afrika Korps in a sandy yellow and ended up with thousands of them. We tipped the lot out on to the bedroom floor, grabbed a blanket which could be roughed up a bit to make a convincing landscape and spent whole days plonking them down in mammoth conflicts. Our main pleasure was lying with our faces pressed close to the carpet, closing one eye and going ‘Peyooow!’, ‘Pooorgh’ and ‘Acka, acka, acka’ while visualizing extremities of carnage.

  Mostly, these were years of routine. Out of the house, around the back, through the covered alley, past the newspaper and sweet shop, down to the pedestrian crossing (manned by the old bat who got in the papers because she was a devout Catholic and objected when her hand-held traffic sign was abbreviated from ‘Stop children crossing’ to ‘Stop children’) past the church-and down the road to the school. To begin with we even came home for lunch. It was a Church of England primary school, which owed much to the folk-myths of the pre-war education acts: pageants, country-dancing, queues, reciting, rote and willingness.

  Empty on this wet Saturday in November, the school was astoundingly familiar. We walked straight in. The main entrance door was painted the same eau de nil colour. There was a big new block where the prefab infants’ school had been. Everything- else was unaltered. The red bricks were spalling in just the same way, the high building labelled ‘Cookery School 1915’ was still the art room. I could see the paint brushes stacked against the window.

  ‘Come around here.’ I led Jo on. ‘Look at the back playground.’ There it was too, bounded by high walls, unremittingly tarmacadammed like a prison yard, exactly as it had been forty years ago. It lacked children, but somehow that made it like a visit to the silent past; as if some bell had just summoned everybody away.

  There was only one major change. Above the playground was a close-boarded fence. I clambered up. It was slippery and raining. I was peering at yet another abandoned swimming pool. There were tall weeds growing through the concrete tiles on the other side of the empty bath. The paint was flaking. This wasn’t winter storage. It was finished. And we had built the place ourselves. I remembered the fundraising drive. We had sold apples from our back garden in the corridor during the lunch break for two pence —’tuppence’ in fact.

  The highlight of the summer had been the races, won by the fat bloke with astonishing water-borne agility, who flung himself in, emptied half the contents and darted through the remainder like a walrus. But we were always standing by the poolside. It was always swimming. There had been swimming back in Midhurst, where I learned: getting one foot off the floor as I slipped towards the deep end of the little hospital pool (closed this year for health and safety reasons).

  In his book Waterlog, Roger Deakin charts the decline of the swimming pool. The health and safety lobby have successfully closed all the plunge holes and untended pools across Britain. Roger defiantly swam across the country, jumping into locks, closed lidos, canals and quarries on the way I went with him for a reedy dip in the Waveney But I wonder whether the lust for it has gone too.

  I walked back to St John’s church, where I’d left my mother. When I was nine she had fancied that I ought to be able to sing because I was Welsh and sent me off to join the choir. There was practice in the cold church on a Friday night, and I was expected to attend at least one service a week, preferably two, under the tutelage of a particularly twitchy, greasy vicar with a taste for High Church parade.

  Was it the hours I spent listening to his ponderous biblical readings that turned me into a life-long opponent of organized religion, or was it the boy führer of the choir, who jumped me during some spat, pinioned me across the shoulders with his knees and dug his extended middle knuckle into my temple screaming, ‘Repent, repent’? Either way, the place had seemed horrible, the ruffs and cassocks uncomfortable, the services interminable. Even the extra two bob that could be earned on a Saturday morning for turning out at a wedding never made the thing worthwhile. And now I thought the church was quaint with a beautiful pale-blue coffered ceiling and an estimable rood screen. The Harlow Choir were rehearsing. They were enchanting.

  When I to
ok the bus a few weeks later, back to Harlow itself, it ground through the back ways, as buses always do, skipping the obvious express route to the centre (raffishly called ‘Second Avenue’) and took me on a tour of the new town and its world-beating collection of mini-roundabouts. I looked at it anew Harlow wasn’t a brave new world after all. It was a brave new Hampstead Garden Suburb. Many of the houses had pitched roofs and tile-hung fronts. The blocks of flats were neat and unthreatening. There were dozens of recreation fields and hundreds of rhomboid green corners, seemingly designed as targets for used plastic Coke bottles and cans.

  In the seat opposite sat a girl wearing pink stiletto boots. She had bright white trousers held up by a pink belt, with a shiny pink anorak trimmed in fur and a pink baseball cap. I wanted to capture this genuine Essex Girl’s overheard conversation, just like Alan Bennett, except that he must have sharper ears or quieter buses. As I spied on her, she met a surprising number of former school friends. They were on their way to Harlow too, for a bit of mid-afternoon action.

  It had been the same for us. London had been an hour away; a giant step.

  In the centre of Harlow the original spare, tinky-tonk ethos has not aged well. All the geometric details — the concrete octagon half-roofs, the shell designs, the raised walkways and the sweeping underpasses — only work if kept spanking new We have more affection for the fantasies of Gerry Anderson and Ken Adams, the designer of James Bond, than we do for the concrete realities of Basil Spence. Yet Lady Penelope could have married the Saint in Harlow church with its bathroom glass windows and copper-coated needle spire.