‘How would you like a nice bath?’ said the thin man from Greenwich Council.
‘How would you like a punch in the mouth?’ said Bill, who was usually never brave enough to say anything rude. Kath shot him an embarrassed look. ‘Well, he’s saying we’re not clean.’
To smooth things over, the man from the Council went into the front room and admired it. ‘Oh yes, very nice,’ he complimented Kath. ‘Do you collect art deco?’
‘No,’ Kath replied. ‘This is our furniture.’
The man noted the cream-tiled fireplace with disapproval. ‘You’re in a smokeless zone now, you know.’
‘Oh, we know,’ said Kath. ‘We don’t use it. My husband just keeps brazil nuts in the coal scuttle.’
Just two weeks after he went away, we received another letter with an offer for the house, only it was not really an offer because my parents could not refuse it. Kath had a little cry in the kitchen. Bill stood in the rubbish-strewn garden, looking out towards the railway embankment as if taking his last sight of England’s shores.
I sat on the end of the sofa, trying to console my mother. ‘Look at it this way,’ I offered, ‘we can finally get away from Mrs Fowler. We can move further into London, the other side of Greenwich, the nice side. There’ll be bookshops and cinemas and libraries and things for us to do. We can make new friends and start afresh in a nice brand-new house that doesn’t need anything doing to it. Dad will enjoy himself so much that he won’t feel the need to saw up sheets of asbestos in the kitchen while you’re trying to lay the table.’
‘Your father already has an idea about where he wants to move,’ said Kath glumly. ‘Further out, to a run-down place called Abbey Wood. He’s seen a great big old house in the middle of nowhere, away from anyone. It still has gas lamps fitted on the top floor. I haven’t seen it yet, but apparently it needs an awful lot of work. It’s cheap because it’s virtually falling down.’
If there had been a basement in our little house, my heart would have tumbled into it.
We were to be refugees. The Council was tying little tags on our raincoats and packing us off to the hinterland.
I had to say goodbye to Pauline.
She was sitting on the low wall at the end of the street, waiting for the express to pass by. Her summer eyes and bobbed hair made her look French, or what I imagined French girls to look like.
‘Have you finished with the Ark?’ I asked casually.
‘Oh, I’ve outgrown that,’ Pauline explained, tugging her dress over her knees. ‘I’ve moved on to a Junior Miss Make-up Kit.’
‘We’re going away,’ I said. ‘I’ll probably never see you again.’
‘Yes, we’re moving too, up to Derbyshire. They’re knocking down our house as well. My mother says the Council is full of Philistines.’
Trust her to bring up the Bible at a time like this, I thought. I’m better off without her.
‘Do you want me to kiss you goodbye?’ I asked.
‘It’s a bit late now, isn’t it?’ she said, obviously misinterpreting the concept of a goodbye kiss.
‘Do you want my new address then?’
‘I suppose so.’ She didn’t sound too bothered either way.
‘Can I have yours?’
‘I’ve no idea what it is. I’ll write to you once I get it.’
I had already scrawled out my new address on the back of one of my mother’s cigarette coupons. I handed it to her. ‘You won’t forget, will you?’
‘I’ll try not to, although I’ll be making a lot of new friends soon. Girls reach puberty earlier than boys.’
I had no idea what she was talking about. My sex education had consisted of my father coming into the kitchen one day and asking, ‘Do you know about the birds and the bees?’ When I had nodded, Bill said, ‘Thank God for that,’ and went outside for a fag.
‘I’m going to miss sitting here waiting for the five eleven to pass,’ she said wistfully. ‘Look, there are bluebells all the way up to the track.’
‘I’m going to miss you,’ I decided.
‘Don’t be soft,’ she told me, heading off to pick flowers on the embankment. I watched Pauline in her yellow cotton summer dress, intently uprooting stalks as clouds of dandelion seeds drifted past her into blueness. On that afternoon she was the archetypal fifties little girl in white socks, sandals and plaits. Soon she would grow tall and become aware of herself and what she meant to others. But for this brief moment she was still a child, intent and dismissive. The sunlight was so strong that perhaps she would leave behind an after-image of herself at this spot, untroubled, self-absorbed, picking flowers forever against an infinite azure sky.
I knew that I would never see her again. Five years later, she wrote to tell me that her mother had died, but her letter had the stiff formality of a stranger’s.
The next Saturday, we all went to take a look at the property. It was infinitely worse than my mother and I had feared, perched on a hill that managed to be in permanent shadow because it was surrounded by tall trees with dripping, sticky leaves. The house was vast, damp and rambling, half-buried beneath cobwebby undergrowth that would ensure it never saw light even in midsummer. It hadn’t rained for a while, but everything was wet. The peeling red iron gate stood beneath leering, broken gargoyles. Broken chequered tiles tripped us up. Fat dark spiders sat in the dripping eaves, waiting to drop on our heads. Cracked, filthy windows peered blindly down. Furry green stuff had formed on most of the brickwork and the window frames nearest the woods were covered in cankerous toadstools. It was as if the house had died about twenty years ago and was slowly rotting away. I looked up at the attic window, half expecting to see Norman Bates peering down.
We knew that Bill would never be able to afford to renovate the place. My heart had flattened to a pancake. My father would try to do it all by himself – or worse still, would get me to help him, which spelled certain doom. He would do this by making me put away my notebooks and forcing me to hold things covered in Bostik and G-clamps, and the house would never be finished as long as we lived, and we would be wretchedly miserable and it would spell a long, slow, damp, creeping death for us all.
So I decided not to go there.
On the Saturday morning that the Bishops removal van2 arrived, I packed a bag of books and some jam sandwiches, and ran away. In retrospect, I should probably have thought the whole thing through and picked somewhere less obvious to hide than in the Granada cinema, but the library was now off-limits. I watched a double bill of The Bulldog Breed and Carry On Regardless go around three times before the usherette grew suspicious and called the police. She knew that no one could survive such repetition unless they had an ulterior reason for doing so.
The new house was called Cyril Villa, which was about the most embarrassing name you could give to a human being, let alone a house. The woods at its edge were not beautiful, but filled with rotting ferns, reeking orange fungus, stinging stuff and dog shit. The other side was overlooked by an incredibly ugly council estate, where the residents kept bikes and laundry on their balconies, and shouted ‘Oi, d’you wanna punch in the faghole?’ if I caught their eye. The people who lived there instantly hated us because they thought we must be posh. Obviously, they had no idea who they were dealing with.
My mother made me stay away from the council-flat children as they swore and smoked and stared too hard at passers-by, as if thinking about robbing them. I imagined that as they too were broke and bored they couldn’t be all that different from me, except that they never seemed to carry books about, not even comics, and I couldn’t think of a way of talking to them that wouldn’t make me sound like Prince Philip, visiting their estate on a fact-finding tour.
My brother loved the new house and its secret back door into nettle-swamped woodlands, into which he could toddle out and fall down, to be lost beneath tendrils of bindweed. There were millions of places for him to get trapped in, including a dangerous derelict building with a collapsing roof and penises drawn all over
it. As a little boy, Steven was blonder, bluer-eyed and even more adorable than he had been as a baby, while I remained a knobbly, lumpy pile of bones arranged in a roughly upright stack.
The house was awful. Its aura of melancholy pervaded the very air, reducing my mother to tears. Bill failed to notice this as he set up his Black & Decker rotary saw and wondered if he could get Steven to hold a plank steady.
In order to protect the family in this remote spot, he bought a dog from a man at work which had supposedly been trained to attack burglars on sight, a hypertensive Dobermann pinscher with insane eyes and an uncontrollable drooling problem. It spent the whole time in the hall, staring at things that were either just out of sight or didn’t exist, and would periodically explode into fits of apoplectic barking for no apparent reason, before over-exerting itself and passing out. Apparently something had gone wrong during its training, and it now suspected everyone.
The dog and the house hated me. Even the woods hated me. I half suspected that the trees might start throwing things at me, like the ones in The Wizard of Oz. At the first available opportunity, I caught the bus back to Westerdale Road, and to my horror arrived just as the workmen were smashing down the front wall of our house with bulldozers.
A small crowd had gathered to watch as the wrecking ball swung and our interiors came into view. There was our kitchen, and now our outside toilet was being revealed in all its utilitarian shame.
Mortified by the sight of the silky, wanton Japanese wallpaper in my parents’ bedroom being exposed to the people on the street, I lowered my gaze and beetled off to the Roxy to fill my head with ludicrous stories.
1 Dr Richard Beeching, hated politician, who pruned back a railway system that had existed since Edwardian times. Made a Baron, of course. (It has been suggested that Beeching was unfairly scapegoated by other, more culpable politicians.)
2 Venerable removal service. Motto (over picture of chessboard): ‘It’s Your Move!’
18
Mother Makes a Friend
Reasons Why the Era of Swinging London Began in 1960
John F. Kennedy became President of the United States, a country England adored, despite the fact that their war reparations crippled the British economy for nearly six decades.
The UN called for the end of apartheid, which my mother said was A Good Thing.
National Service ended, giving rise to the phenomenon of the Hairy Good-for-Nothing Layabout, according to my father.
The Pill appeared, signalling the end of back-street abortionists and films set beside Black Country canals.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published uncut and turned up on Bill’s bedside table, the only time he ever tried to read a classic. Judging by the cracks on the spine, he got about a third of the way through.
Hitchcock’s Psycho gave birth to the slasher movie. Sales of showers dropped off.
JUST AROUND THE corner, temporally speaking, were sex and violence, Andy Warhol, James Bond, graffiti, the World on the Brink, the Berlin Wall, topless dresses, hippies, punks, skinheads, Vietnam, Crimplene, Carnaby Street, race riots, psychedelic drugs, Corfam,1 colour TV, Hair, discotheques, Monty Python and everything else that heralded the beginning of the end of the civilized world, according to my father. Not that he was involved in any world movements, because by this time we had lost him to the wonderful world of DIY.
Now that we had the new house and Christmas was approaching, Bill announced that he would get some serious home improvement done. My mother did not greet this news with enthusiasm. Humming to himself, Bill fired up his blowlamp and set about destroying Cyril Villa.
Being now geographically removed from his parents (albeit only by about six miles), Bill could not simply ramble up the hill to see them every five minutes. He needed something else to do, and as the house we had moved into was virtually uninhabitable, the siren call of DIY beckoned. Other men had a passion for busty platinum blondes who worked in espresso bars. Bill was in love with hardboard.
He scraped off half the wallpaper in the lounge, then sawed through several of the banisters. He demolished half the kitchen wall. He tore up carpets and some of the floorboards. He hacked a number of huge holes in the concrete side alley, just to see what was underneath. He fell through the ceiling in my brother’s room, then glued a sheet of brown paper over the hole, which remained in place for the next eight years. He painted over the beautiful Victorian varnished wood of the staircase with magnolia undercoat, then repainted it an unnatural shade of faux-wood, dragging a comb through the garish paint to create artificial wood-grain. The overall effect was like looking at a cheap prop staircase from an unpopular period TV series. He glued several rolls of wiggly-line wallpaper that resembled television interference all along the landing. It could give my mother a headache just walking past the bedrooms.
We spent our first Christmas in Cyril Villa without any heat at all. My father had nearly blown us up by demolishing the gas mantles on the top floor without realizing that the pipes were still connected. He tore out the boiler and the fireplaces, but didn’t get around to putting anything in their place. He laid thick olive-green nylon wall-to-wall carpet that electrocuted you if you walked across it in bare feet. Finally, he added more fake-wood panelling to the house, making it even gloomier and more depressing than it had been to start with, so that it eventually looked like a witches’ forest inside as well as out.
For reasons known only to himself, he decided to hardboard the walls of the upstairs toilet and add mock-Tudor beams, which he painted gloss magnolia, a shade that was fast shaping up to be his favourite colour. Then he lowered the ceilings, covering up elaborate cornicing and ceiling roses with more hardboard, polystyrene and asbestos, all of which he sawed up in the kitchen. For months I watched my father chain-smoking un-filter-tipped Woodbines and hacksawing, surrounded by drifting white clouds of asbestos fibre.
Bill learned how to varnish from a magazine, mixed his own solution and covered every remaining surface with it – only he’d balanced the solution wrongly, so it had the consistency of a freshly made toffee apple and never fully dried. Five years later, Kath’s cardigan sleeves would still stick to the dining-room table as though they had been Velcro’d in place. She only made the mistake of leaving table mats on the bare surface once – it had taken a chisel to get them off.
After the War, many of the houses that had been presumed to be sturdy survivors of the Blitz were revealed to have bomb damage. Sometimes mere hairline cracks had weakened walls so much that they simply fell down on random dates. As a small child, I had been taken to the doctor one morning with a chest complaint, and while my mother and I were out the lounge ceiling dropped down, smashing the furniture to pieces. For the next five years I had slept with a blanket over my face, in fear of my dream-weighted skies falling in and crushing me to death.
At least Cyril Villa wasn’t going to collapse. It would probably still be standing in a million years’ time, long after the rest of the country had been blown to Kingdom Come and the ants had taken over. Bill proudly pointed out that the walls were as thick as a church’s, which was probably why it was so depressing inside and nobody could ever get warm. Sometimes you could see your breath in the lounge.
Because the house was surrounded by high trees, the only place that had any television reception was a spot seven feet off the ground in the corner of the rear attic, so nobody bothered watching TV. Anyway, Bill preferred to bash things to bits in the back room while Kath tried to read. Gigantic rhododendrons with flowers the colour of fag ash blocked the remaining light from the windows, and as Bill wasn’t keen on putting the lights on, it was a wonder we didn’t all go blind. The building creaked and groaned. The floorboards broke wind and a cold draught seemed to come up through the toilet.
As Steven clearly wasn’t up to it, I helped my father by holding spanners, wrenches, socket sets, screws, nails, sticking plaster and bandages. And then, once I’d had enough of watching my mother tearfully eyeing yet another o
f Bill’s destroy-it-yourself jobs, I would go off to the Woolwich Odeon, an altogether spivvier picture palace than the Greenwich Granada.
This left my mother at home with a large, run-down house, a small child and an insane Dobermann. Bill’s determination that we should live inside a bubble, permitting no friendships or visits from neighbours, made life almost unbearable for her. Even though she took a series of unsuitable part-time jobs to get her out of the house, she was not allowed to have co-workers call, or be out later than six p.m.
But Kath wasn’t entirely alone; on two separate occasions, disturbed mental patients from the local hospital found their way into the shadow-filled house and threatened her, one of them with a serrated carving knife. The Dobermann, which had been intended to protect us, seemed to side with these intruders, as if recognizing fellow travellers in the realm of the deranged. At these moments, Kath must have felt that she was living inside a double bill of particularly bad horror films.
However, my mother did make one friend who was not daunted by the house, the dog, her husband or even me. At half past eight one evening, Maureen Armstrong came to call. My father heard the bell ring and pulled a sour face. ‘Who on earth can that be at this time of night?’ he complained, trying to see through the drab riverscape painted on the stained glass of the front door.
The overweight woman on the step was a riot of colour: red hair, pink glasses, green top, orange slacks. ‘Is Kathy in?’ she asked loudly in a broad Lancashire accent, peering past Bill, who had opened the front door a crack and was blocking her view of the hall.
‘She’s clearing away dinner.’ He tried his best to imply that it was a task which required privacy and great concentration, like tightrope-walking, but the visitor wasn’t having any of it.
‘I know she’s in, because I saw her pass by the window as I was driving up.’
So, I could tell Bill was thinking, she’s not only watching the house but a woman driver. ‘She’s very busy right now—’
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