Byron Easy

by Jude Cook

  Let me think of her house for a moment, its hidden recesses of cubby hole and wardrobe. The red sticky lino of the functional kitchen; the settled stasis of living room, with its gilt-spined leather volumes. The must and the dust; the tubular steel of the Art Deco armchairs; the aroma of flapjacks (often still hot on our arrival); the dark mahogany of the picture frames; the oriental trinkets behind glass cases; the valuable Buddhas under their glow of polish; her collection of snuff boxes. The house seemed preserved from another era—the 1930s, at least. There was always something deeply suburban about its odours of nut roast and vegetable garden (Gran had been a vegetarian since her twenties, way before medical science made it fashionable); its long-fermented tangs of camphor and gloom. There were objects in her house that puzzled me, that didn’t seem in any way contemporary; as if they might have been constructed for an epoch that relied on bicycles and Model-Ts for transport. The big Roberts radio, or ‘wireless’ as Gran called it, for example—grilled and heavy, like a slab of wartime technology, with its three spare silver buttons for selecting wavebands and aerial as long as a fishing rod, which I spent hours extending until it snapped. Or the Victorian commode chair in her room, whose cushioned seat could be removed, revealing the mysterious and discreet hole to the basin below. Or the dark Edwardian wardrobe with its blast of mothballs on peering into the Narnian interior. Yet, I can never remember doing much at Gran’s, except wandering gingerly around, endlessly investigating; with a child’s inexhaustible curiosity. There are photos of Gran pushing me proudly in a wheelbarrow down the long, well-tended back garden that contained two park benches. Another of her kneeling next to me with a bubble-blower kit, her patient hand holding the plastic ‘O’ before the embouchure of my lips, sunlight catching the furrows of her forehead, her hair dramatically white. She had slow, calm movements and an interesting rasp in her voice. She always had the effect of making me feel safe, as if she had been waiting a lifetime to have this grandchild to hide presents for, or to prepare vegetarian salads for, with side-plates of thick-spread butter on gravid slices of brown wholemeal bread. The legacy of a life avoiding the flesh of living beasts was excellent teeth. Hers were strong-looking, white, orderly. And she didn’t appear or behave like an overlooked woman—a widow who had raised three children single-handedly. She was always smartly but inconspicuously dressed; though there cannot have been much love for her in that life—love just for herself, like any woman needs, regardless of age. Towards the end I recall all forms of exertion tiring her. Once, when I asked her to heave down a World Atlas from a high shelf, she had to sit down for a breather, as if after a long, exhausting hike. ‘I feel H and D,’ she would say. Only years later, I discovered this was short for ‘hot and dizzy’. Years later still, at her funeral service, one of the revealing readings stated that she loved ‘music, beauty, walking, flowers and birds’. As a child of five, this information was unknown to me; hidden, arcane—part of the secret adult life I couldn’t comprehend.

  The polished Buddhas had an unusual history. My Grandfather, Brian—whom I never met, and who died when Des was himself a child—was a Civil Servant and Sunday painter. Well, rather more serious than that. He had a shed in the back garden, preserved under tarpaulins, with his painterly equipment still dustily extant. An artist’s studio, no less, resembling the chaise-longue-littered attics of Beardsley or Augustus John. I loved to stare in fascination at the high easels and crenellated canvases; the ruptured tubes of umber; the dusty brushes in biscuit tins, and, best of all for a small boy, a real skull grinning from a lectern—a gruesome Yorrick of the suburbs. The Buddhas were part of this collection, along with intricately carved spice boxes, delicate Japanese prints of swift fishes, and a full set of Samurai swords. Brian had even exhibited a couple of times, and every available stretch of wall in Gran’s house swarmed with his oils and framed sketches. Maybe this early exposure to the creative process, so flagrantly on show, so successfully executed, convinced me that art was a legitimate job for a grown man. I didn’t know then that Grandpa slaved as a pen-pusher from nine to five in nearby Southgate until his last illness. One painting in particular fascinated me—the biggest in the house. At that age it seemed as vast as the side of a lorry, and depicted an Andalusian scene looking towards the sea: all hot yellow with burning vistas of indigo ocean. In the foreground was a flourishing cactus, an object that virtually blotted out the wind-beaten sierra. Not a Wild West cactus, but a broad-leaved thriving triffid. This plant struck me, at that impressionable age, with the force of myth. Like Van Gogh’s cypresses, it was immovable from the imagination. What did it signify for him, so obdurately central, blazing and mad in the midday sun? I would have loved to have known. Another adult secret. I had dreams where I found myself walking through this landscape, stirred by the sudden moment of recognition as the six-foot cactus confronted me, like Barton Fink finding himself on the deserted beach with the horizon-pointing bathing beauty.

  There were other more intimate pictures too. A number were of Gran herself. There was a profile of streamlined, elegant Chloe in a velvet fedora, her face a rich greenish hue, as if she had sat for the portrait in a semi-lighted hot-house. These pictures spoke of other times, of adult difficulties, joys, adversities, sexual secrets. The mysteries of a life that awaited me, full of the unknown things grown-ups do; the unknown places they go to work; the unknown conversations they have downstairs long after you’ve been put to bed. Another even smaller picture showed Gran in a lilac flapper hat, tight like a bathing cap; her face white as a lily—a young woman. I remember not being sure who it was. ‘Is that you, Granny?’ I asked, pointing at the beatific smile in the robust frame.

  ‘Oh, yes, when I was a young girl,’ Gran answered, with an air of slight regret. She didn’t want to be reminded of her former glory, though she allowed the picture a place among the landscapes and sumptuous still lifes.

  ‘It doesn’t look like you.’

  ‘That’s because people change as they get older. Their faces change.’

  ‘You fibber!’ I said, genuinely bewildered. ‘You always look like Gran.’

  ‘No, I used to look like her. But I’m still Gran … come here!’

  And she would scoop me in her arms and take me on the grand tour of all the pictures in the house. Though I had done this many times before, it never ceased to be an excursion of wonder. I used to think other children’s houses were distinctly lacking when I saw only the Pirelli calendars and peeling noticeboards or Monet’s tired poppies on the wall. She would take me up the staircase and stop to explain the sketches, many of them cartoons of political figures distorted by treasureable Groucho Marx noses and speech bubbles I didn’t understand. In the spare room, where I would sleep if we were staying over, terrified by the dark creaking of teak furniture, she would point out a seascape painted in Germany, where she had taken Grandpa when they were courting; or a dense sylvan scene in the Black Forest; or an oil sketch of Des as a boy my age, engrossed with a toy bottle-green double-decker bus. I didn’t know then that she and Grandpa were so poor that they both walked five miles into Kensington every Saturday just to save the bus fare when visiting Brian’s cherished galleries. Or that Gran would pride herself on finishing the housework by nine every morning so that there was time to do more interesting things with Des and his two sisters. Or that, after Grandpa died, she worked as a welfare assistant at a local primary school, making coffee and doing sum cards, and then for years as a dinner lady at another one. Or that she would arise early on tenebrous mornings to make bread and scrub the collars of school uniforms, also maintaining the long garden with its little pond and two park benches that Brian had created for the children he never got to see grow up. Or that, when Brian was gone, she couldn’t bear to hear Kathleen Ferrier singing ‘What is life to me without thee, what is life when thou art dead?’ on her old Roberts wireless. When it was time to leave, in evenings smelling of blossom from the cul-de-sac’s many apple trees nestling among the yews, this bitter pill wou
ld be ameliorated by a further present, often some home-made flapjacks wrapped in kitchen roll; now cold but still the most exquisite flapjacks this side of that great bakery in the sky. On the long journey home through the dark and forbidding adult streets, I would fall asleep on the backseat (in an era when seatbelts were only ‘clunk-click’ compulsory) and dream of all the fascinating things I had seen: the wide-grinning skull; the pale orange fishes in the pond, like the ones in Grandpa’s beloved Japanese prints; the hastily constructed concrete air-raid shelter still in the back yard; the tiny tin snuff boxes with their ripe and strange odours; the upright piano favoured instead of a television; the mysterious spreading cactus in the baking Andalusian scene, like Moses’ bush about to catch fire … And once back in Hamford, still asleep, I would be lifted from the car (by tired and irascible Des? By Sinead? I never knew) and placed in bed, a gesture I loved more than anything else in the world. It spoke of a family as a generous, happy unit: and I suppose we were for a brief two-swallowed summer. There I was, stretchered into my own bed by doting, considerate parents. Home again safely, to dream of strange, sunbeaten shores.

  So much for the dreams of a child whose life was about to change abruptly. For the grown-up there is only regret and damage control. Also, there is always an epicentre of dreams, dreams we have as adults, that, paradoxically, concern the important, never-forgotten places of childhood. Places formerly known as home. Once aware that we are visiting these locations during our nocturnal journeys, we quickly earmark them as sacred sites. Mayan temples of deferential worship and sacrifice, with all the fear of imminent excommunication. We greet them like old friends. They are locations that, when the soul arrives at them, deep in the early hours (maybe after an age of disturbed rambling through a deserted and crumbling seaside resort), we recognise as the inner sanctum, the master bedroom of significance. For me, this locus is the back door of number fourteen Dovecote Lane, the house in Hamford where I grew up. The White House, as we called it, since it was the only building in the lane to exhibit any colour other than brick.

  Dovecote Lane was a little backwater of tranquillity in a medium-sized market town. Built on a gradient overlooking the town centre with an alleyway that took you down to the main road, the house itself was a three-bedroomed semi on an unmade lane facing allotments of land. It was at the bottom of this alleyway that I recall my mother getting whistles from lupine teenagers on our journeys to the shops. There were also tall silver birches at the side of the lane and conifers in our back garden. This glorified dirt-track was called Dovecote Lane due to the squat, now-deserted pigeon coops at the civilised end, the end that annexed onto Annesley Rise, a steep row of non descript family houses each with a fussy wrought-iron gate out front. To the west was a hospital-sized telephone exchange, an ugly impersonal monolith seemingly manned by robots or monkeys, and filled with the soft efficient whirring of computers—I never knew, as nobody I spoke to had ever been inside. Next to the exchange was Water Hill, a rough, parky expanse that bulged upwards towards a girls’ school and a row of benches overlooked by a conical watertower. An Aonian mount for a young bard. The entire hill was man-made, a reservoir created to serve the surrounding area. From the hill could be seen the Lane and, on bright December days, I would sit on these benches and watch the towering sun-iced silver birches and their swooping gulls; the yellow haze of branches in front of number fourteen like an incandescent winter flame. From this vantage point, it was just possible to make out the uncivilised end of the Lane where a breaker’s yard and an old school playground gave way to a large wooded wilderness.

  In these dreams, these mythical homecomings, only the house is significant, though I know the rest of the town is out there somewhere, an ethereal context on the periphery. By the back door I mean the approach to it, down the tight concrete passageway that cleaved a thoroughfare between the grey, once-white bricks of number fourteen itself and the mysterious and tall privet hedges of Mrs Melbourne next door. In these dreams—which on average I have trembled through four or five times a year since I last saw Hamford—it is always night. The White House becomes the Black House. Good things of day have long since drooped and drowsed. A still night in an indeterminate season, neither winter-crisp nor summer-steamy, but an April midnight maybe; the softly permeating odour of privet as pungent as soil after fresh rain. There is often a tremulous yellow moon in the sky. The moon that is always rising. I am probably about eight or nine—ten at the most. And they all follow the same pattern. I am in a hurry. I am out of breath. I leave the wrought-iron gate clanging at the top of the passageway (where have I just been in these sagas? I never know), then I am bounding the short distance to the shrouded back door. The small garden is always sarcophagus-dark in its deeper recesses; two yards of patio illuminated by the strong light of the kitchen. The clutch of red-hot pokers, shorn of their furious crimsons and exotic yellows in the weird altered darkness, sway sagely on their moorings. The big stone flower tub is grave with neglect; the blustering evergreens like sinister sails … and the door, the door itself—eight squares of smeared glass in a glossy blue frame—is always locked.

  And I never have the key.

  What happens is that I peer through one of the panes, vaguely anxious at first as I notice the upstairs lights are on. This anxiety builds to a fever of agitation when I realise that pushing the doorbell creates no sound whatsoever. Somebody is in, but they are not letting me in. I can see the pale canary colour of the sunflower-print roller-blinds in the living-room window shift suddenly in response to an errant elbow—or maybe the shadow of an adult passing rapidly, plate or wine glass in hand. Yes, a gathering is in progress upstairs. This is strange as Des or Sinead never had anyone over, except at Christmas, and especially after Delph was on the scene, with Des wearing his horns on the other side of the English Channel. I can hear the swell and chatter of provoked laughter; the pump of seventies disco; busy bottles doing a round of refills. It sounds like they—whoever they might be—are having a swell time. But I am excluded, left to make the increasingly menacing acquaintance of the night garden, with its fecund odours, wind-rustlings and bottle-scattering tomcats.

  At this point I will begin rapping with a coin against the glass, the chink-chink-chink sound unbearably magnified in the transfixed silence of the back yard. The thought of throwing stones at the first-floor window will be briefly entertained, then dismissed. There is the possibility of shouting also. Amid this, a fierce sense of paranoia, setting in for the night, like fog. The overpowering component in this paranoia is petrification, in the Greek sense of the word: to be made stone, like the heavy flower tubs, like the statues seen by Perseus. I become stuck in a trauma of inaction, of procrastination. If I peer in deep at the glass I can see the uneven, wine-purple tiles of the corridor stretching to the imposing bulk of the dangling coats at the far end. The same rack of jackets and scarves that—as an even smaller child—I would be terrified of passing on a night-errand to the dank downstairs toilet. Terrified because of the very real danger of sudden twisting arms darting out to grab my neck, or tangle epileptically in the air as I hop past on bare feet.

  But no one ever appears. Just the inviting, quiet absence of the corridor and the disturbing vacated space of the kitchen, perhaps in a disarray of prepared food and empty bottles. A recurring dream in which nothing ever happens. Sometimes I am there for hours, heart racing—the party grinding on obliviously upstairs, me timidly tapping a two-pence piece against the pane in the tense solitude of the garden. Chink chink chink.

  And that back door—locked, blue-glossed—is a cipher for all that occurred in that house: an eight-squared honeycomb of history. The portal through which life came and went at number fourteen Dovecote Lane; the front door being hardly used, except to admit post that needed to be signed for, or visitors on special occasions, or anything that required access by car. But that navy-framed back door is where I remember my mother, battered briefcase in hand, leaving for school every day. Or where she’d greet or
adios dastardly Delph in my father’s absence. Where friends would stream expectant of jelly and ice cream or the pink Eden of Angel Delight. It was also the location for the washing machine: a noisy corner (especially during the insanity of full-spin), where you would find a disorderly mound of boots and training shoes. I can picture it in high summer too: open to the garden, July wasps streaming in and out; the comforting sound of plates being stacked emanating from the kitchen, which shared the same cracked burgundy tiles as the corridor. Also on the ground floor was the cellar. While technically not a cellar in that it was situated next to a kitchen, the gradient the house was built into meant that its rear had three storeys, while the front appeared to have only two. So the cellar was lit by a grate that let in light and dust from the unmade road out front. A dark repository for timber, sallowing cardboard boxes, newspapers, workbench, nails, tacks, screws, glues, private documents and all manner of secrets. In other words, a playpark for any boy aged between three and thirteen. This shadowy vault also added an air of unease to the bottom part of the house, what with the racks of coats and their phantom arms, the chill of the tiles and the rarely visited downstairs khazi, which seemed to contain every species of spider except those that absolutely had to have a tropical climate in which to survive.

  Then there was the small matter of the ticking. Every room in the house had a ticking in it, even the ones that didn’t have a clock. You thought you heard it. From the purple-tiled kitchen floors covered in dusty rush-matting to the woody, timber-creaking cellar, the house was abrim with dark, horologic resonances. Especially when you paused for a moment by the frosted panes of the mysterious blue back door—the door that led out into the wider world, away from home, into random and terrifying futures—with everyone upstairs on Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve. And especially at the foot of the stairs, the heavy winter coats on pegs, thick with ghoulish hands ready to grab a little boy, like young Jane Eyre trembling before the red room. Suddenly there, out of the silence, you would hear the ticking of the kitchen clock, also behind an impenetrable frosted-glass door, talking away to itself with the only two syllables it knew: tick, tock. The silence on that lower level seemed alive, as if the house were a recumbent sleeper, its respiration slowing as it approached oblivion; the clock marking its cold exhalations. Time the heavy breather, always advancing, always winning.