I climbed trees in the park and saw a kingfisher in the allotments. A brook flowed from the park into and between the cemetery and the allotments. I dug up potatoes on the allotments that were not mine, pinched peas in the pod, carrots. I saw a ghost in the boathouse, dug for worms in The Worm Bank that, you might reasonably suppose, had wormed their way in under the fence from the cemetery, where they worked. I climbed the, albeit smaller, trees in the cemetery, looking for nests; read about death (and resurrection) there:
Until the Day Breaks
Resting Where No Shadows Fall
Safe in the Arms of Jesus
Be Ye Also Ready.
Truth is, you needed to be ready in those days, for the freedoms we enjoyed came at a price: ‘Five-year-old Cedric Harry Cooke after bird nesting with his brother Anthony was found dead in six feet of water in a pool at Darbys Hill quarry. Police gave artificial respiration in vain. The facts have been reported to the coroner’, Oldbury Weekly News.
Our parents let us go. They let us go, back then in Oldbury, well Rood End, well … round by us. And poor Cedric Harry, or the boy who drowned in Tipton Canal with his foot jammed in a submerged tangle of bedsprings, or the boy who fell through the floor of a derelict house on to his head, paid the price.
Some of it was our own fault. We evaded, with no great difficulty, the park-keepers, allotment holders, grave-diggers who might otherwise have steered us to a safer path. We infiltrated that little and enormous world, ducking low and out of sight, guerrillas camouflaged as children.
Mr and Mrs Cooke could have saved their errant son by keeping him close, keeping him in, safe from motorbikes and buses, bombed-out buildings, marlholes and spiked railings, dangerous dogs … and men. Safe too, of course, from sticklebacks, bluebells and yellowhammers, wind and rain.
This piece is getting away from me. I had not intended to follow young Cedric quite so far. It’s supposed to be about territory. I took a wrong turning back there, round about ‘Be Ye Also Ready’. Hm … let’s try again, one more paragraph at least.
Territory: this patch of ground in which I am forever planted and to which, two or three times a year, I return. I visit my cousins up on the Rounds Green Hills, have a pint or two in The Lamp or The Waggon and Horses. The park has shrunk, the boathouse (a ghost itself) long since demolished, the allotments a billowing sea of poly tunnels. But the cemetery endures more or less as it ever was. Death and decay, it seems, have passed it by. I carry flowers to my parents’ grave, a pair of scissors to cut the stalks, J Cloth to wipe the gravestone, plastic bottle of water. Yes, the grave (George Henry and Elizabeth Mary) is there. You could find it, if you cared to, down at the bottom end, away from the park on the railway side, with a school and its playground beyond. Often then on such occasions I hear, as I tidy the grave and arrange the flowers, the invisible children’s bright high voices, that eternal playground sound, floating across the railway lines towards me on the now unsmoky, unpolluted, cleaned-up Oldbury air.
The Degrees of Life
What are the degrees of life in a plastic cowboy, say, or a snail? A dog is alive, a ladybird. Is a digger? My Dinky car goes, ‘Brm brm!’ My teddy talks. If something moves, is it alive? If it makes a noise? The kettle whistles on the hob. The lavatory makes a sucking, gurgling noise. It could suck you down, suck you in. If a thing can suck you in, is it alive?
I am a ventriloquist, lending my voice to a dozen little toys, helping them to live their lives. I play with them, they play with me. They wait for me in my room, in my bed. They behave badly. I forgive them. My teddy is as old as me. I am cruel to him sometimes. I am cruel to the cat. I make her wear a baby’s hat or my teddy’s scarf. I drop my teddy out of the window down into the yard. Is my teddy alive? I tell my friend when we are playing in the yard, ‘You hear a horse!’ I gallop up to him. He shoots me. I am dead. Then I am alive again. His mother smacks him round the head as he rides by. For something.
Tiny ants down in the dirt. I block their way with a matchstick or sweet wrapper. A blob of spit. Ants are alive. Grass grows. Rhubarb grows. Things smaller than ants inhabit the dirt, almost invisible. A mould spreads out on a bruised apple. Is a mould alive?
What is the degree of life in a beetle? A beetle goes crunch beneath the sole of my shoe. Another boy – not me! – pulls wings off butterflies, off moths. The legs off a spider. They crawl or limp away, still alive. I rescue a spider in the lavatory. He scuttles up a piece of paper. I shake him out into the garden.
At the Saturday Cinema Club I watch Flash Gordon and the Claymen. Are the Claymen alive? They appear out of the walls in the underground city, or blend back into them. Alive. Not alive.
Mrs Smith has a baby. My mother takes me against my will to see it. In Mrs Smith’s big bed with Mrs Smith. Inside of Mrs Smith the week before. Was the baby alive?
Our house on Cemetery Road. The black hearse crawling by. The coffin. The body. Is the body alive? Does it die and come alive again? If you shoot it, can it jump back up?
Bedtime. A living wind outside the house. A shifting shadow in a corner of the room. The curtains move. I wrap one arm around my teddy for both our sakes and tell him my important things. This, that and the other. Is Teddy alive? Just a little, as much, say, as a Clayman or an ant, or a beetle, or an unborn baby?
Yes, says Teddy. He thinks he is.
The Richest Woman in the World
There was a door that you came in through, counters left and right, a spider’s web of wires above your head and a glass box at the far end up a flight of stairs with a woman in it: the richest woman in the world.
It was the Co-op. There was sawdust on the floor. My mother bought bacon and cheese, eggs and butter, brown sauce, scoops of things out of barrels. Dog biscuits. (A lot of ‘b’s’!) Reluctantly, it seemed to me, she opened her purse and handed her money to the man. He wore an apron and had a pencil behind his ear. He put the money in a metal pot, screwed it up on to an overhead wire, pulled a chain – like a lavatory chain – and shot the money off. It whizzed up to the woman in the glass box. She opened it and kept the money, while returning any necessary change. Other men and women served other women and men. Other kids stood gazing up, desperate to get their hands on this spring-loaded, toy-like contraption. The air was full of flying money.
You could not really see the woman. Light reflecting from the glass box obscured her. I never saw her go into or come out of it. Yet I understood this well enough. It was no mystery to me. She was too busy counting her money.
My Invisible Dad
My dad is a mystery
He has a bristly chin
His hat hangs in a house
That he is never in.
He goes to work at half-past five
Comes home at eight
I hear him whistling in the yard
His dinner on a plate
Gets dried out in the oven
He washes at the sink
Blows water like a walrus
His hairy ears are pink.
My dad makes model soldiers
He has a fretwork saw
His flat cap on the cabinet
His work boots by the door.
I smell his overalls
He leans above my cot
His whiskery kiss upon my cheek
His smoky breath is hot.
The light shines on the landing
Some music down below
Descending steps upon the stairs
From the dad I hardly know.
Fear of Eggshells
I was afraid in those days of eggshells, horseflies, the man with the thick tongue that would not fit into his mouth, the Pooles, earwigs and my own mother. There was a boy at school who had no friends. I wrote about him later:
A friendless silent boy,
His face blotched red and flaking raw,
His expression infinitely sad.
Some kind of eczema
It was, I now suppose,
The rusty iron mask he wore
.
But in those days we confidently swore
It was from playing near dustbins
And handling broken eggshells.fn1
Yes, and you can add dustbins to the list. A horsefly, of course, since it could kill a horse, could surely kill me. Earwigs, by definition, crawled into your ear and burrowed their way into your brain, and ate it. Oh yes, and chewing gum swallowed could strangle your heart. Add chewing gum.
The man with the thick tongue, in a flat cap and a mac (rain or shine), who wandered the streets like a Cyclops, one eye hooded over, the other glaring out; I was mortally afraid of him. The Pooles – I wrote about them too, called them the Toomeys – were a large family of sons, any one of whom could beat you to a pulp for no reason. They were a tribe, a pack, one a year in ascending order from babies up to grown men, from pram to pub. Even the toddler was tough, even the baby could make a fist.
I was afraid of the pigs in Marsh & Baxter’s factory, squealing for their lives (afraid for them, you might say), the dark at the top of the stairs, that pool of thickening, malevolent air between the kitchen and my bed, and the hand which was under the bed waiting to grab my ankles. Yes, add the landing, add the pigs.
I was afraid of nursery rhymes:
There was a little man
And he had a little gun
And his bullets were made
Of lead, lead, lead.
He went to the brook
And saw a little duck
And shot it through
The head, head, head.
*
Bye, Baby Bunting
Daddy’s gone a-hunting
To fetch a little rabbit skin
To wrap a Baby Bunting in.
*
Ladybird, Ladybird fly away home
Your house is on fire, your children are gone.
Yes, skinned rabbits, dead ducks, desolation.
Then there was my mother. My mother was a detective and a mind-reader. I’d cut the merest sliver of cake in the pantry, consume it to the last crumb, wash the knife, replace it in the drawer, and she’d know. She could look at me and turn my head to glass and see inside. Then I’d be for it. My mother hit me with whatever was handy, her hand mostly. A quick and stinging clip round the ear. There again, Trevor’s mother hit him, I’m pretty sure. And Spencer’s mother. And when the mothers were weary of it, they’d tell the fathers when they came home from work, and the fathers would hit us. The teachers hit the big kids with a stick and little kids got smarting smacks to the tender calves of their little legs. The little kids, no doubt, copped it from the big kids too.
So, a clip round the ear from my old mum, who loved me and of whom I was afraid. She was very large when I was very small.
When I was just a little child
The world seemed wide to me
My mum was like a feather bed
My bath was like the sea.
My mother had a tiny birthmark high up on her forehead, almost in her hair. It resembled a bunch of grapes. She had her own distinctive smell: washing and ironing, the minty aroma of her medicine and Bible scent cards. She was also partially deaf in one ear from a blow to the head received in childhood. From her mother.
The Fishing
A garden cane, a cotton line
A matchstick and a pin
These were the things you needed
For the fishing to begin.
Secure the cotton to the cane
Bend the pin to a hook
Attach the matchstick for a float
Yes, this is what it took.
A chopped-up worm, or maggot
A ball of bread and spit
The park pond, grey and greenish
A place to squat or sit.
A waiting game, you watch your float
And eat a bit of bait
While light lies on the water
And fish swim up to their fate.
The little submarine fish
An inch or two, no more
Sticklebacks and minnows
Along that park pond shore.
Under that grey-green water’s skin
Beneath your quivering float
With flickering fin and poppy-eyed
And bright red butcher’s throat.
Hauled out at last into the air
(All for a mouthful of bread)
Deprived of life in the wide wild pond
Stuck in a jar instead.
A bloody hook, a ragged jaw
(All for a maggot-snack)
Though the stickleback has spines, y’know
With which to stab you back.
The park bell rings, the park gates close
You carry your catch away
And leave your jar in the wash house
And find it the following day.
A grey-green fish in the sunlight
Where its little corpse ascends
Floats belly up on the water’s skin
And that is how it ends.
Seasons
There was a season for nesting
One wren’s nest, full
Blown eggs and tiny labels
Shoebox and cotton wool.
A season for marbles
The losing, the winning
Glass balls of treasure
Light-filled, spinning.
There was a season for girlfriends
Kiss Chase and Truth or Dare
Maureen Copper’s ankle socks
Plaid skirt and pig-tailed hair.
A season for butterflies
For conkers, for fire
Fire cans in November
Sparks thrown high and higher.
And a season for snow
Piled up at the door
Pressed faces at windows
Hoping for more.
We had snow then. Yes I know, I know, you’re right, but we really did. In 1947 I opened the back door one morning and the snow was drifted up against the house and over my head. I made a modest living with our old pram fetching coke for Mrs Moore, and Margaret across the road. In the street we hurled our snowballs at the buses whenever they got through. And in the playground we turned the snow to ice … and slid on it.
THE MIGHTY SLIDE
The snow foams up around their feet,
And melts, too, in the friction’s heat.
It changes once, it changes twice:
Snow to water; water to ice.
Now others arrive: the Fisher twins
And Alice Price. A queue begins.
The slide grows longer, front and back,
Like a giant high-speed snail’s track,
And flatter and greyer and glassier, too;
And as it grows, so does the queue.
Each waits in line and slides and then
Runs round and waits and slides again.
And little is said and nothing is planned,
As more and more children take a hand
(Or a foot, if you like) in the slide’s construction.
They work without wages and minus instruction.
Like a team of cleaners to and fro
With clever feet they polish the snow.
Like a temporary tribe in wintry weather,
They blow on their gloves and pull together.
[…]
And all the while from the frosty ground
That indescribable sliding sound.
Yes, snow’s a pleasure and no mistake,
But the slide is the icing on the cake.fn1
Cruelty to Animals
I knew a boy once who had a reputation. I put him and his reputation into a story. I called him Billy Harold. Billy, it was said, blew frogs up with a straw. I never saw him do it. Nobody saw him. He was, I suppose, for us a sort of Playboy of the Western World. It was his reputation.
All of us were cruel, of course, in varying degrees in those days. A generation of little boys laying waste to wildlife, and, in my case, the not-so-wild. The tiniest wren’s eggs we took, pi
ercing their delicate shells with equal delicacy, blowing their oft-times addled contents out on to the grass. Half-formed, aborted baby wrens. Or the pale fat maggots we pinned on our hooks, their creamy blood seeping forth (like wounded aliens, they were) on to our fingers. The upturned dying fish in our jam jars. The battered but still fluttering butterflies caught under our coats. The legless daddy-long-legs.
My personal cruelties were numerous, I fear, though I never touched a frog. Two episodes remain with me, however, to prick my conscience and serve me right. I was cruel to our cat, a good-natured, middle-aged tortoiseshell. I rolled her up in a towel sometimes, and turned her ears inside out (they soon flicked back). I buried her under the bedclothes and ignored her muffled miaows.
But worse than this or any of my ‘naturalist’s’ crimes, worse than anything really, is what I did to the panda. When I was five or six, I took my well-loved soft toy panda into the wash house, soaked him under the tap, cleaned his ears out, scolded his grubby ways and mangled him. He went into the mangle round and came out flat. Not temporarily flat either, he was not well made to start with, but flat forever, hardly thicker than a slice of bread.
I work in a shed at the bottom of the garden. This shed contains many things: manuscripts, notebooks, dictionaries; a Prudential Assurance policy for the funeral expenses of a child (me); photographs, pencils, pens; a kettle; toy soldiers that my father did not make; an original 1940s clockwork boat with a key in its funnel that cost £375; a panda.
Yes, as I write these words, a crooked-eyed, glassy-eyed, eight-inch ancient panda is sitting on my desk. He is not my panda. My panda, remember, was mangled to a pulp. But he’s of the tribe of panda. Actually, he’s been on my desk for months, a candidate for a small part in another story. I’m auditioning him.
The Bucket Page 4