From this I concluded that books were more cost-effective and enjoyable than girls, but also more predictable and less disturbing. Finding a combination of both was probably the best solution. It wasn’t first love, but it was first curiosity.
Even so, I was better off with a book than hanging around with Pauline, because she took the girl thing to some kind of extreme, like Lois Lane. I decided to return to the library, but would give up the children’s section and put in a request to join the Adults’, even though I was technically too young to do so. Besides, I felt sure that books could teach me everything I would ever need to know about girls, without actually having to deal with them on a regular basis.
1 This miraculously light material grows in South American rainforests. Its seeds are carried like a dandelion’s. It is still used to build gliders.
2 I don’t mean this to sound as if I prefer the toys of the past. I would have given my right eye for an iPod.
3 Mr Bygraves told me that he tried in vain to vary his repertoire when appearing in variety halls, but all the old ladies always yelled ‘Sing “You Need Hands!”’ (one of his more sentimental hits).
4 Corrugated-iron bomb shelters that accommodated up to six people. So strong that you still see them in allotments and back gardens. Ours fell down (not put together properly).
11
Lost for Words
IF THERE WAS a specific point at which the desire to read transformed itself into the need to write, it must have been here, seated at a scarred desk in the wood-damp library with an immense stack of books before me, far away from harmful sunlight and fresh air. I kept notes of everything I read and liked, along with lists of words that were inexplicably pleasing. Some words could be rolled around the mouth and savoured like melting ice cream. My current favourites were:
Peculiar
Colonial
Ameliorate
Serpentine
Paradise
Emerald
Illumination.1
There were words I hated as well, ones with sharp edges, all Ks and Xs that dug into you and were awkward to spell. Generally, the rules of spelling and grammar were easy to follow. I could not understand why so many people made such simple mistakes. It vexed me to see the greengrocer placing signs on his fruit filled with random punctuation, like Potato’s 1/6d or “Finest” tomatoes. I made fun of him so much that he threw sprouts at me.
Mrs Clarke, the librarian, allowed me to raid the reference section and read whatever I wanted, on the condition that I stayed inside the library to do so. Folding my pale bare legs beneath me, I pulled down one volume after another. One book, Uses of Speech, stopped me in my tracks because it turned out that there were all these devices you could use to illustrate prose. The first read:
Litotes – the utilization of a negated antonym to make an understatement or to strongly affirm the positive.
There were dozens of others, each more curious and convoluted in its meaning than the last. I read down the list with a sinking heart.
Metonymy
Anthimeria
Oxymoron
Metalepsis
Antisthecon
Paragoge
Ellipsis
Synecdoche
Epenthesis
Stichomythia
Zeugma2
What point was there in even attempting to write? If I learned one of the rules, I would need to learn them all. It was what you had to do if you were to become proficient at anything. My father had told me so. Whenever I read a copy of my mother’s Reader’s Digest I read the entire thing from cover to cover, including the adverts, even though 95 per cent of it was complete tosh.
‘Christopher, can I offer you a word of advice?’ said Mrs Clarke, sitting down beside me. ‘You don’t have to learn every single thing.’ She smelled of roses and peppermints. She looked dusty and ancient, as old as the volumes bound in cracked red leather that she kept locked up in her reference section, and yet she always seemed to be fighting down a smile, as if recalling a happy memory. She was thirty-four years old, and my mother referred to her as a ‘spinster’.
‘I’m just looking at the rules,’ I told her with a twinge of embarrassment.
‘Oh, they’re not rules. They’re just tools, and not even important ones. You wouldn’t learn how to use a spirit level before you knew what to do with a hammer.’ She studied my profile, my slender hands at rest on the pages. ‘You’re good at English, aren’t you.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘I like books,’ I said simply.
‘The words or the ideas?’
‘Both.’
‘Like writing stories too?’
‘Top of my class in essays. Bottom in arithmetic.’
‘Well, nobody likes a good all-rounder. The love of books is a quiet thing. It’s different to having a passion for, say, sport. It’s not a group activity.’ She gestured at the shelves. ‘I don’t own these books, sadly. There are not many things I can give you, but there is something you can have.’ She rose and returned with a slim volume. ‘You can take this one away and look after it for a while. Don’t worry if you find some of them hard to understand; at your age I wouldn’t expect anything else. I’m giving you this so you can see how words fit together. I’ve had it since I was a little girl of ten, and my grandmother owned it before me.’
I studied the cover. A Child’s Garden of English Verse. It looked really boring.
Glancing back at Westerdale Road as a young man, I saw the orange-brick terraced homes through yellow rain needles slanting in sodium lamplight, bedraggled little front gardens, the house next door with pearlized shells embedded in its front wall, the Scouts’ hall, the railway line – just like millions of other English childhoods.
And yet there were oddities, like the 1930s advertisement painted on a side wall, gigantic and fading, that showed a smiling housewife pouring boiling water from her kettle on to the surface of her dining-room table; what was it advertising, and why was this demented woman so happily destroying her home?
The twisting alleyways and tunnels behind and between the houses – where today kids would lurk to smoke dope – had been unfenced and completely safe, if a little creepy, but imagining the streets as they had been then, I was impressed by the sheer lack of things; there were no mattress farms on street corners, no skips, no dented metal signs, no road markings, no cars, no traffic bays, no yellow murder boards, no charity muggers, no litter, no graffiti, no noise, just the huff of the occasional passing steam train, just kids and stag beetles and butterflies and sparrows. You could hear conversation in the next street, and perhaps in the street beyond that.
Despite the sense of community, which everyone said had strengthened during the War, there were still endless household secrets, drawn curtains and muffled sobs, husbands’ dark whispers and wives commiserating, private sorrows, closing ranks, mothers with folded arms staring disapprovingly across the road, children whisked away to relatives because something dreadful happened that you must never talk about. Real life occurred behind the walls, between the casual conversations. The woman at the end of the street kept stuffed cats, twenty of them in all, and referred to them as if they were relatives. The man opposite talked constantly, even when he was alone, because during a wartime bombing raid his identical twin had run one way and he another, and his brother had been killed, and he blamed himself.
It was the age of euphemism. Nobody died of pneumonia, diphtheria or tuberculosis, they were peaky, then poorly, then passed over. Some adults had to be watched because they could turn funny. The bloke around the corner had become less of a man after the War. The boy in the next street had been interfered with behind Greenwich Park playground. I could have done with an Enigma machine to de-code our family conversations.
I picked my way over the broken triangle of litter-strewn grass at the edge of the motorway, all that remained of what had once been our family’s back garden. Here, at the very tip where the crumbling, graffiti-plastered walls
met, a small blackened patch of soil still remained, the spot where my father had burned old furniture and bits of wood. He had set fire to the librarian’s treasured poetry book, and pinned it in the flames with a poker until its pages were blackened, muttering through his teeth that no son of his was going to read nancy stuff.
I had been too ashamed to return to the library without it. Instead of telling her what had happened, instead of even saying I had lost it myself, I had simply stopped attending.
One evening Mrs Clarke came to the house looking for me. I heard her talking with my father at the front door and desperately wanted to speak to her, if only to explain why I hadn’t been to the library. Instead I waited behind the door, listening. My father made it plain that she was interrupting his evening. ‘I’m sure if the boy was interested in coming back, he’d have been to see you by now,’ he said, anxious to shut the door and return to his urgent rendezvous with the evening paper. ‘He’s probably found something more interesting to do.’
Mrs Clarke wasn’t angry, just saddened. She paused on the front step and peered up the stairs, hesitant. If she was about to speak her mind she must have thought better of it, because Bill closed the door and she was sent away.
I ran up to my bedroom and looked down from the window. At the corner of the street she stopped briefly and looked back at the house. That was the last time I ever saw her.
Even now the mysteries remained. My father’s fury over a book of poems, Kath’s tacit support of her husband. Unspoken fears and truths, held within the walls of the little house, that had been lost in the brickwork, and finally shattered by wrecking balls.
The biggest mystery remained my mother.
1 I know this because I still have the list. I made notes all through my childhood, as if there was going to be a test one day. Is this normal?
2 I still have no idea what this means.
12
Mother and Movies
AS ONE INDIGNITY piled on top of another, I wondered about Kath. Why did she stay on, like Lois Lane? Why didn’t she say to Bill, ‘Shag this for a lark, Superman, I’m off.’ Although she had never been scared of him, her new-found strength did not put her on an equal footing, or persuade her to back down. She returned to work and became more independent, but obeyed him because he was her husband.
On the day I returned to visit Westerdale Road, I noticed the proximity of the neighbourhood church and realized one thing that should have been obvious from the start: my mother was Church of England, and believed in the sanctity of her wedding vows. She had attended services twice every Sunday throughout her childhood, and always made the family say Grace before a meal. Bill was a shameless atheist, so the subject of religion was never broached at the table.
I had seen grim photographs of their big day, the depleted group of relatives in demob suits and austerity dresses, the ladies’ strange fifties hats that clenched their heads like silken sea coral, the grinning elderly couple who had crept into the picture because they just happened to be passing St John’s, Blackheath, on their way to the shops. My father always pointed them out because he had once done something similar, arranging to meet Kath at her friend’s wedding, only to find himself in the wrong hotel suite.
‘Didn’t you notice?’ asked Kath afterwards. ‘They were celebrating Divali, you were the only non-Asian in the room.’
But Kath stayed and the marriage held, after a fashion. Presumably she found enough snippets of pleasure to keep her from burning down the house, like Mrs Danvers. ‘You were lovely boys,’ she would tell me and Steven in her later years. ‘You were always making me laugh. You gave me the strength to stay.’ It was a compliment that carried the seeds of unthinkable guilt.
Was she happy? I found it impossible to tell. She loved her children, and immersed herself in the daily running of the household, keeping too busy for rumination on such woolly concepts as happiness. Presumably she and Bill occasionally made love, even though they didn’t get on with each other – the bedroom curtains in Westerdale Road stayed shut up and down the street until late on a Sunday morning, to allow time for a certain amount of fumbling beneath marital eiderdowns.1 But passion remained a word you were more likely to find in a book of poetry. I supposed Kath wasn’t that bothered, in much the same way that she had admitted not being able to appreciate food because she didn’t think her taste-buds worked properly.
I had the feeling she would have liked a cuddle or an occasional word of encouragement, though.
On the nights when she wasn’t working she went to the pictures alone, returning home to seat herself on the end of my bed, where she would describe, in exhaustive detail, the plots of the films she had seen. As a consequence, I had second-hand knowledge of a great many films, filtered through my mother’s enthusiastic but somewhat subjective perception. Had she described them for me, or for herself? Perhaps she had just been starved of conversation.
It wasn’t until many years later, when I finally saw 2001, that I realized it wasn’t really about ‘a man who uses a computer to go back in time to meet himself as a baby’. Rather, it contained the most profound surprise – that the discovery of life beyond our world would only make us feel more desperately alone than ever. Man remained at the mercy of something vast, terrifying and unknowable. The past was a puzzle, but at least it could be safely locked away. No wonder 2001 became my mother’s favourite film of all time. Mind you, her number-two spot was occupied by South Pacific, so you had to take her enthusiasms with a pinch of salt. And a part of me liked 2001 not because it revealed the infinite majesty of the universe, but because the space station was really clean.
Kath’s vivid descriptions of movies got me excited. 2001 opened in 1968, the same year as Rosemary’s Baby, Bullitt, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Lion in Winter and Witchfinder General, all of which she saw. Weren’t movies just animated versions of books? They weren’t, of course, but they could deliver an entire plot in ninety minutes, which was easier than hanging around the library knowing that I had failed the one person who had shown faith in me. In this I empathized with Mr Brownlow, who had trusted Oliver Twist to run an errand, only to be let down when the boy failed to return. It hadn’t been Oliver’s fault, but to me that wasn’t the point at all. The idea of disappointing others filled me with shame. I resolved never to be late for anyone, ever.2 Looking around the neighbourhood at the people I most admired, I decided to emulate their finest qualities, which were being polite, keeping your nose clean, pulling your socks up, avoiding embarrassment, being on time, staying smart, not making a nuisance of yourself, never being in anyone’s debt and making yourself invisible wherever possible. With these rules in place, surely I would be destined for a great future.
Meanwhile, there were more stories to be discovered, but with the library now out of bounds, the cinema seemed my best option. I wanted to go there by myself, but my mother suggested I start with Saturday Morning Pictures, where I would see some good films aimed at my age group.
So that was where I went next.
1 I longed to use the word ‘carphology’ here (‘delirious fumbling under bed linen’), but my editor felt it was taking the love of words a tad too far.
2 If you are ever required to fill in a form listing essential leadership qualities, do not put ‘punctuality’.
13
In the Dark
MY NEAREST CINEMA was the Granada Greenwich, where hunchbacked, chain-smoking pensioners whiled away their afternoons because they got cheap tickets to the early shows. When they weren’t noisily unwrapping boiled sweets in the quiet parts of the film, they were creeping around the toilets with bladder complaints.
It was here that I fell truly in love.
I had seen her before, watching the film at an absurd angle in the penumbral auditorium, and had felt a prickling warmth beneath her gaze, a confusion, a desire. I wanted to follow the warm red glow of her torch down the aisle, back to the little room where she waited between shows.
I sat fidgetin
g, waiting for the credits to roll, then looked around and saw her carefully making her way down to the front of the auditorium. She moved slowly because the floor was raked and she wore white high heels. Positioning herself between the aisles, she patiently waited for the house lights to go on. The bulb hidden in her white tray illuminated choc ices, Mivvis,1 wafers, tubs, ice lollies,2 and ridged plastic cartons of fluorescent orange juice, but also shrouded her face in shadow. Her proudly raised chin and disdainful air suggested that she might have been displaying ancient Egyptian artefacts, even though the effect was slightly tarnished by the fact that she was chewing gum.
Her strapped heels, her little Grecian skirt and her illuminated tray of offerings gave her the appearance of an electric goddess. Her blonde hair was fixed with a red plastic bow to keep her fringe out of her eyes, but the sides fell to her shoulders in an old-fashioned style. She wore a glittery white patent-leather belt and a short pink nylon blouse buttoned down the front. The first two buttons were undone, so that the rise of her pale breasts shone in the overhead spotlight. When I thought about undoing the remaining buttons, I could scarcely catch my breath.
Was she aware of her own perfection? Despite the fact that she had obviously been chosen by the management to entice men from their seats, she seemed not to notice her surroundings, as if her spirit was still far away in the Nevada desert, where this week’s first film had been set. Would she travel with me to the South Seas for the second half of the double bill, and swim in the warm clear waters while the Swiss Family Robinson prepared for their beach-side ostrich race? And why were they called Robinson if they were Swiss?
The cinema was almost empty; the double bill had been playing every Sunday for a month now. I knew I could wait until she began her walk back up the aisle of the great auditorium, but there was a risk that I might fail to attract her attention and my opportunity would be missed. I rose a little unsteadily from my seat, checked that I had money in my pocket and made my way to the edge of the stage.
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