by David Nobbs
Such a thing couldn’t be. So why had she cried out? He reached over and gently patted the amplitude of her buttocks. She was asleep.
He swung out of the bed, fumbled for his shoes with his feet, tightened the cord of his thick, striped pyjamas, faintly clammy with sweat, and lit the candle at his bedside.
Another cry of agony rent the air, longer and rising to a crescendo. It was Ada, yet it could not be, for she still slept. She stirred, moaned tensely, but did not wake. The baby in his simple cot gave a cry that was half-gurgle, half-alarm, half-human, half-animal.
A hob-nailed boot rang out on the main road.
He peeped into the tiny front room, where Her Mother slept, snoring loudly, but certainly not shrieking in agony.
Another cry shattered the night. It came from downstairs, and the truth dawned on Ezra.
He hurried to the top of the stairs, the candle protesting at his speed. He crept down the bare, narrow staircase. A startled rat scampered off. The seventh stair creaked. The ninth groaned. The house smelt of soot and damp.
He entered the little room which served as kitchen, dining room, living room, bathroom and parrot house. It was warm from the heat of the range. The walls sweated gently with condensation.
He lit the gas mantle. The parrot’s eyes shone wickedly. His cup of cold tea still lay on the dresser.
The parrot’s eyes challenged the world. It screamed. It was Ada to a tee, and Ezra realised that the bird intended to reproduce faithfully the whole of her agony, scream by scream.
He grabbed the bird by the throat. It gave a dreadful scream which began as Ada’s agony, became a brief squawk of outrage, then a choking almost-human gurgle, and finally a parrot’s death rattle. Then silence.
He continued to strangle the parrot long after it was dead.
Grey, unshaven dawn found a still tableau in a terrace house in south Yorkshire. A polished range. A thin man with a grey face, rocking slowly in a chair. In his hands, a dead parrot.
Her Mother found him there. At first she thought that they were both dead.
Later, when he had dressed, Ezra wrapped the dead bird in the women’s page of the Thurmarsh Evening Argus – headline: ‘Cami-Knickers – Are They Here to Stay?’ He took it along the road and up the alley into the yard, and tossed it into the midden.
Later still, he tried to talk to Ada about it.
He tried to say: ‘I love thee, Ada. No creature has the right to mock thy suffering and live. I killed the parrot for love of thee, my darling.’
What he actually said was: ‘It were a dead loss, Ada. All it ever said were “Bugger off”.’
He hadn’t the heart to tell her that it had also said: ‘There’s nowt so queer as folk.’
2 Brawn and Brain
THREE DAYS AFTER Henry was born, Hitler introduced conscription. Twenty-five days after Henry was born, his Auntie Doris bought a genuine crocodile handbag for a pound at Cockayne’s Hand Bag Event in Sheffield. Eighty-six days after Henry was born, Baldwin became Prime Minister. Slowly the shadows of war grew darker. Slowly Britain rearmed. Henry remembered none of this.
Away to the south-west lay Sheffield and cutlery country. To the east was pit country. The road north led to textiles country. Thurmarsh and its immediate environs were steel country.
Many of the men in Paradise Lane were steelworkers at the giant works of Crapp, Hawser and Kettlewell, across the road. Some of them worked on the Thurmarsh trams. Others were in the army of the unemployed. Ezra Pratt made penknives. He wasn’t strong enough for the steelworks. Penknives were more his mark. Her Mother infuriated him by referring to them as pocket knives. ‘I don’t make pocket-knives, Norah,’ he’d say. ‘I make penknives. I’m a two-ended man. I wouldn’t lower mesen to pocket-knives.’ In the end he decided that she called them pocket-knives deliberately, and so he denied her the pleasure of seeing that it annoyed him. ‘I won’t give her t’ satisfaction, mother,’ he told Ada. He called his wife ‘mother’ and he called Her Mother ‘Norah’.
Ezra Pratt was paid fifty bob a week, and after Christmas he was usually laid off for two or three days a week until trade picked up again in March. Ada became a dab hand at making things go a long way She baked her own bread, and her brawn was legendary. Once a month they had roast beef for Sunday dinner, preceded by Yorkshire pudding served separately with gravy so that you weren’t too hungry when you came to the joint. Ada Pratt added herbs to her Yorkshire pudding, and it was grand. Her Mother made the gravy. Nobody could touch Norah Higginbottom when it came to gravy, and so it came to gravy fairly often.
Every Sunday, after dinner, Her Mother took little Henry out. Sometimes they went over to Thurmarsh Lane Bottom, to see her son Leonard. She’d had three sons. The eldest, Arnold, had been killed at Mons. Leonard was unemployed. Walter lived in Durban, and had never invited her over ‘because of Jenny’s nerves’. Dead, unemployed, and living in Durban with a nervous wife. She did not feel that she had been lucky in the matter of sons. Of daughters she had but two. Ada and Doris. One Sunday she took Henry to Sheffield to see Doris, but by the time they got there it was time to come back again, and Henry cried.
She was never sure whether these Sunday outings achieved their object. Certainly, no little brother or sister for Henry came along. Babies abounded in Paradise Lane and adjoining cul-de-sacs, but Ezra and Ada Pratt only ever had the one. ‘And what’s tha been up to?’ she’d say on her return, but Ezra could make a clam seem talkative when he’d a mind to it.
‘That parrot hasn’t come between you, has it?’ she enquired once, to no avail.
‘Oh, well, it’s none of my business, any road,’ she said when she received no reply. ‘Tha knows what tha’s doing.’
‘Or not doing,’ she noisily refrained from adding.
Henry remembered none of this.
Many years later, when Henry was thirteen, and living with Uncle Teddy and Auntie Doris, Uncle Teddy showed him some photographs of his childhood. There weren’t many, because Uncle Teddy and Auntie Doris were the only relations with a camera, and they rarely came to Paradise Lane. ‘What’s to do, Teddy?’ Her Mother had said, noting Teddy’s unease on one of these brief visits. ‘Does tha think poverty’s smittling or summat?’ Uncle Teddy had flushed, because she had touched a nerve, and Ezra had flushed too, at the thought that he represented poverty.
In 1936, George V and Rudyard Kipling died. Edward VIII came, saw and abdicated. Her Mother, who considered herself a student of politics, announced: ‘There’s one good thing about t’ abdication. It’s shown up that Churchill for what he is. We’ve seen the last of ’im.’ Hitler invaded the Rhineland, Italy over-ran Abyssinia, the people of Jarrow marched to London, and the Spanish Civil War broke out. Henry’s life during that momentous year was recalled only by two photos, taken in Uncle Teddy’s garden. He’d just begun to walk. In one snapshot he stood between his highly selfconscious, stiffly-posed parents. On his left Ezra, small, ill-at-ease in his serge suit, dwarfed by his flat cap. On his right, Ada, large, shapeless, defiant, challenging the camera not to explode. The other shot, taken by Ezra, showed him with Uncle Teddy and Auntie Doris. Auntie Doris was wearing a well-cut suit and a Tyrolean-style hat with feathers. She looked very sunburnt. Probably Uncle Teddy looked very sunburnt too, but it was impossible to tell as his head was missing. They had just returned from a cruise on the City of Nagpur, calling at Oporto, Tunis, Palermo, Kotor, Dubrovnik, Venice, Split, Corfu and Malaga. It had cost them twenty-five guineas each. Uncle Teddy had gone on about it, and Auntie Doris, who always made things worse by protesting about them, had said: ‘Give over, Teddy. Don’t rub it in to them that hasn’t got.’
1937 was a year of slow continuation. The world continued to advance slowly towards war. The factories continued to turn slowly to munitions. The dole queues continued to grow slowly shorter as the nation slowly discovered that it had a use for its manpower. Baldwin shrewdly retired, Ezra bought a wireless set, and there were two more photos of Henry in Un
cle Teddy’s scrapbook. They were taken on the beach at Bridlington. In one of them he was howling at being made to paddle. In the other he was with Auntie Doris, who was wearing one of the new two-piece bathing costumes. Henry had a bucket and spade, but didn’t seem to know what to do with them. He’d been sick all over Uncle Teddy, just beyond Driffield. Uncle Teddy had been upset, but Auntie Doris had been very understanding, and had said that it had been Uncle Teddy’s fault for driving too fast. On the way home Uncle Teddy had driven with exaggerated care, and Henry had been sick all over Auntie Doris, just beyond Goole.
That day, in his fourteenth summer, as Henry sat on Uncle Teddy’s settee, facing the open French windows, looking at his unremembered youth, Uncle Teddy said: ‘Now then, Henry. Doesn’t my Doris look a picture in that two-piece bathing suit?’
‘She certainly does, Uncle Teddy,’ said Henry, who could never think of anything interesting to say in Uncle Teddy’s presence.
‘Interested in girls yet, Henry?’ said Uncle Teddy.
‘Give over, Teddy,’ said Auntie Doris.
‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ said Uncle Teddy, stabbing at the old snapshot with a nicotined finger. ‘Look at that bust. You don’t get many of those to the pound.’
‘Teddy!’ said Auntie Doris.
Henry blushed, partly out of embarrassment and partly out of confusion at being seen to be blushing.
‘It’s part of his education, looking at a fine pair of Bristols,’ persisted Uncle Teddy.
Henry felt the blood rushing to his face. He felt humiliatingly crimson. He wished he was two again, at Bridlington.
‘Teddy!’ hissed Auntie Doris, who always made things worse by protesting about them. ‘Bristol was where it happened.’
‘Oh Lord,’ said Uncle Teddy, reddening in his turn. ‘Oh Lordy Lord.’
Henry rushed through the French windows, hurtled across the lawn, tripped over the tortoiseshell cat, and fell into the goldfish pond. It wasn’t the last pond that he would fall into, but it was infinitely the most humiliating
1938 was represented by a picture of Henry with Cousin Hilda, by the river at Bakewell. He was clinging to her hand, and she was looking down at him, her face radiant with affection, all sniffing forgotten.
Later still, when he was sixteen, and living with Cousin Hilda, he showed her this photo. She gave a stifled sob and rushed from the room. It was years later still before he realised why.
She was looking at herself as she might have been, if she had been born into a different time.
But I anticipate.
All the pictures of young Henry Pratt showed a distinctly podgy child. Since he was of a lively and nervy disposition, everyone knew that he would soon grow out of his podginess. But everyone was wrong. He never did.
When he looked at these pictures, Henry tried to fill in the gaps. He could summon up the old living room without too much trouble. The flagstone floor was covered with a brown carpet square, and lino edges. The rag rug stood in front of the leaded range, with oven, coal fire and hob. In one corner, behind a faded curtain, there was a sink with a square Ascot geyser. The window was over the oak dresser, and the street door led straight into the room. An army blanket hung over this door, to keep out the draught. Another door led down into the cellar. A tin bath with a handle at each end hung on this door. There was a battered mahogany sideboard, and an anonymous table. Over the mantelpiece there fitted an over-mantel. It was decorated with oak leaves and acorns. There were cracks in the walls and loose plaster hung threateningly from the ceiling. Condensation and rats were frequent visitors.
He could summon up Paradise Lane, the uneven cobbles, the two rows of brick terraces, wine-red, grimy. The cul-de-sac ended in a brick wall, beyond which was the canal. Between numbers 25 and 27, a narrow alley led to the yard, which was surrounded by blackened brick walls. At each side of the yard there were two lavatories, with a midden between them. Two houses shared each lavatory. You poured your rubbish in the midden, and when the midden men came they stood in the midden and scooped the rubbish out. The yard smelt of refuse, and the rats liked it.
He could summon it all up, but he couldn’t be sure that these were genuine memories of his early childhood. After all, he had known that same world many years later, after the war, for Paradise Lane survived the Thurmarsh Blitz, and the Baedeker raids didn’t touch it.
1938 brought his first genuine memory, dim and confused though it was. It involved the aforementioned wireless set, an argument, a sporting record and a dismembered insect. The date, had he known it, was Wednesday, August 24th.
Binks and Madeley Ltd were on holiday. Ezra had a whole week without making penknives. He didn’t go for a cruise on the City of Nagpur. He didn’t even go to Bridlington. He couldn’t afford it, because he’d bought the wireless. His parents had come over for the day. His father had been a miner, and he coughed a lot. and spat into his handkerchief. His mother was small and steely. They had another son in Sheffield, but they lived with their daughter, who had married one of Penistone’s foremost coal merchants.
Ada, Her Mother and Ezra’s mother were out shopping. They would soon return with the ingredients for the making of brawn, and a fish and chip dinner from the Paradise Chippy. Ezra and his father had been ordered to keep an eye on Henry and lay the table. They had done neither, being too engrossed in the wireless.
Len Hutton was approaching Don Bradman’s record of 334, the highest score ever made in a Test Match. Don Bradman himself was captaining the Australians. The tension in south Yorkshire was palpable.
Henry sat in the road, unwatched. A large, black beetle crawled over the warm, uneven cobbles towards him. He grabbed it, and began to pull its legs off. Quite soon it was dead.
He rushed excitedly into the house. His father and grandfather were crowded round the wireless, staring at it as if worshipping it, because they were afraid that they wouldn’t be able to hear it if they didn’t sit close to it and stare at it.
His grandfather smelt of moustache, blue cheese, tobacco and old age.
Fleetwood-Smith was beginning a new over, at the exact moment when Henry announced, proudly, ‘I killed a inseck.’
‘That’s right. Now ’ush,’ said Ezra.
‘I deaded ’im a lot,’ said Henry, producing a handful of limbs and organs to prove that this was no idle boast.
‘Grand. Shut up now,’ said Ezra.
‘Dad, Dad. Look, Dad, dead,’ said Henry, thrusting the evidence in front of his father’s face.
‘Bugger off, will yer?’ shouted his father, as a great roar came from the wireless. ‘Bloody hell. I missed it.’
‘He cut Fleetwood-Smith for four,’ said his grandfather, choking and getting out his handkerchief. ‘He’s got record.’
Henry wailed, hurled bits of beetle onto the floor, and began stamping them into the carpet, screaming.
The three women returned with their purchases, chatting happily, ignorant of the mayhem inside the house.
‘There’s nowt Cousin Hilda doesn’t disapprove of,’ said Her Mother. ‘I don’t like that.’
‘Betty Crabtree’s another one,’ said Ada.
‘Tha what?’ said Ezra’s mother.
‘Betty Crabtree,’ said Ada, ‘She never has owt good to say about folk. She’s a right misery, is Betty Crabtree.’
‘She gets it from her mother,’ said Her Mother.
‘That’s Henry screaming,’ said Ezra’s mother.
They hurried into the house. Henry was still screaming. On the wireless the crowd was cheering and singing ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’.
‘Shut that thing off,’ shouted Ada. ‘I can’t hear mesen talk.’
‘Tha what?’ shouted Ezra.
Ada switched the wireless off.
‘Ada!’ said Ezra.
‘That was cricket on there,’ said Ezra’s father.
Henry’s cries grew quieter now that they had no competition.
‘What’s t’ mess on t’ floor?’
said Ada.
‘Henry’s been stamping on an insect,’ said Ezra.
Ada slapped Henry, and he began to scream again.
‘Nay, mother, give over,’ said Ezra. ‘It weren’t his fault.’
‘Weren’t his fault?’ said Ada. ‘Weren’t his fault? Well whose fault was it? Neville Chamberlain’s, was it? Or was it Lord Halifax? Did Lord Halifax pop in and show our Henry how to trample insects into t’ floor?’
‘I told him to bugger off,’ said Ezra in a small voice.
‘Lord Halifax?’ said Ezra’s father, and immediately wished he hadn’t.
Her Mother began to clean the carpet with a great show of virtue.
‘I’m keeping out of this,’ she said, sweeping the beetle remains into the dustpan.
Henry howled.
‘Tha told thy son to bugger off?’ said Ada.
‘Aye, but there were extenuating circumstances, Mother,’ said Ezra.
‘Extenuating circumstances?’ said Ada. ‘There’d better be and all. He’s not content to strangle parrots now. He’s got to swear at his own son. Animal.’
Ada put her arms round Henry, and made sure that her huge frame was between Henry and his father. Henry’s sobs subsided slowly.
‘Can I put t’ wireless back on?’ said Ezra’s father, and immediately wished he hadn’t.
Ezra’s mother glared at her husband.
‘Well, they were having drinks,’ said Ezra’s father.
‘I thought it was cricket,’ said Ezra’s mother.
‘It was cricket,’ said Ezra’s father. ‘Then it was drinks.’
‘He wants to listen to people having drinks now,’ said Ezra’s mother.
‘Don’t look at me,’ said Her Mother.
‘It weren’t drinks as drinks,’ said Ezra’s father. ‘It were drinks as a celebration of a Pudsey lad getting highest ever score in test cricket.’
Ada glared resolutely at Ezra. She seemed to swell, and he to shrink.
‘Let’s get this right,’ said Ada. ‘Tha told our Henry to bugger off because of cricket?’