He gives me a look, had his eye on me, perhaps, for a while, before ever I thought to write this piece. A lopsided, reproachful look. Did you mangle the panda? (He sounds quite like my mother.) Did you flatten him out like a pancake, like pastry? Did you mangle him? Did you? I move him forward, lean him against a cup so that I can see him better. He looks pretty tough, it seems to me, for a soft toy. Time has dried him out, mangle-proofed him you might say, his head, especially, like a nut. And his gaze is full of accusations; implacable. Did you? Did you?
Well, yes, I did. I mangled the panda.
The Things I Ate
What did I eat when I was a boy
To make me the man I am?
Faggots ’n’ peas and porridge, of course
Bread ’n’ drippin’ and jam.
And pencils, the paint to start with
Flakes of it, yellow and red
The wood, all soft and shredded
And, last but not least, the lead.
Dog biscuits, rubber bands, cardboard
A pear drop plus pocket fluff
I was a locust back then, it seems
And could not get enough.
Was it the sardines that built me up
And kept me so bony and thin?
The beans or Batchelors peas, perhaps
The molecules, even, of tin?
A lick of another kid’s lolly
A sweet straight off the floor
A bite of another kid’s apple
A beg of another kid’s core.
Fish ’n’ chips ’n’ batters
Ketchup, vinegar, salt
Stick of rhubarb and sugar
Cod-liver oil and malt.
An ice cream at the pictures
Candyfloss at the fair
A bonfire-blackened potato
A brick-hard pilfered pear.
A baby cousin’s abandoned rusk
A grandma’s sip of stout
A sweet in its welded wrapper
An orange sucked inside out.
Was it the soap I swallowed
Or that half a ton of dirt
Curd tarts from Auntie Mabel
Humbugs from Uncle Bert?
Or even the air of Oldbury
That cloaked me from head to foot
A nose-tickling, eye-stinging, sulphurous soup
Peppered with sawdust and soot.
The fingernails I often chewed
The fingers I often ate
Bogies and blood from my own scraped knees
That lump of coal for a bet.
What did I eat when I was a boy
To make me the man I became?
If you’d fed me a different diet
Would I still have turned out the same?
All on account of a sausage
Or a secret swig of beer
Or a scab or suck of sherbet
Would I still be sitting here?
Poor Old Soul
Once more unto my mother, who, as it turned out, was not my mother. My mother was angry and strong. I would come home from school in the afternoon and find she’d moved a wardrobe. She had, as they say, an arm like a leg. Her anger, though, too often swung to violence. This was not all bad. One time Mrs Purnell caught us, me and Spencer, breaking bits of creosoted boards from her fence for Bonfire Night. It was pitch dark. She came out of her outside lavatory with a torch and fell on us like an avenging god.
‘That’s my fence, y’ little buggers!’
She landed me a fearful swipe to the head.
‘I’ll teach you!’
I fell back on to Spencer. Mrs Purnell hauled me up.
‘I’ll give you bonfires!’
She was a mighty woman, half as big again as my mother, but, as we discovered, not so tough. Mum was there, in her apron and one slipper.
‘Hey!’ She grabbed my arm and pulled me free. Mrs Purnell advanced. Mum stood firm.
‘Bloody kids!’
‘My kids,’ said Mum, briefly it seems adopting Spencer. ‘Hit your own.’
Undeterred Mrs Purnell came on.
‘Bloody bonfires!’
Spencer and I were tucked in behind my mother, like baby ducklings. Mrs Purnell sought to hit us with a broken board.
‘Hey!’ Mum grabbed the board and hit her with it.
Mrs Purnell staggered back, dropped her torch, and – ‘Bloody cow!’ – retreated.
That was me, aged eight. When Mum was eight, her mother took her to a doctor’s surgery at half-past seven in the morning, before school, to scrub the floor or help her mother scrub it, I suppose. When she was fourteen, her mother altered her birth certificate, changing the date (in August) so that she could leave school and get a job. She had two birthdays after that, Mum said, like the Queen.
When I was ten, this happened. A gang of us were playing in the street. A girl, responding to some spiteful act of mine, perhaps, or out of meanness, taunted me. ‘Your mother,’ she’d overheard an auntie saying, ‘your mother is not your mother.’
What an odd business. This news about my mother was news to me – a bombshell! – yet, there again, once told I never doubted it for an instant. That girl’s bright voice –Audrey her name was, or Gillian? – so vehement, so full of force, like a slap.
Home I ran with burning face and ears, down the dark entry into the house. Mum was in the kitchen listening to the wireless with the lights off, Dad round at the pub, Dinah asleep on the hearthrug. Mum rose from her chair, about to berate me for the lateness of the hour. I beat her to it. My mother, who was not my mother, I see her now, her raw red cleaner’s hands twisting away at her apron as she struggled to speak. Adoption was a shameful business then in many people’s eyes, the babies being mostly illegitimate. Better not speak of it. Eventually, her altogether collapsing face. Her tears. Her reaching out, my flinching away. And the love she urged me to believe in. And the years it took for me to do so.
My mother, who was my mother, loved me. I know this now. When I was forty-eight and she was eighty-two, and I was bigger and she was smaller (a leg like an arm), stoical, unselfpityingly, my mother died. In a hospital bed with a tube in her arm and a tube in her nose. Me beside her holding her hand. She is barely there, but produces for me a wry half-smile, acknowledging the tubes and her predicament. Meanwhile, along the ward between the rows of beds, another elderly patient advances with a Zimmer frame. Mum watches, nods in her direction and smiles again. ‘Look at her,’ she says, and squeezes my hand. ‘Poor old soul.’
And here’s another of The Clothes Horse stories that I wrote, or that popped up out of itself, so to speak. I’d always intended to fit it in somewhere. This seems as good a place as any.
LIFE SAVINGS
There was once a woman who decided to save parts of her life till later, when she might have more need of them. She had the idea when she was quite young, and her parents encouraged her. The first part of her life she ever saved was half an hour from when she was four. Later, she saved a day from when she was five, another day from when she was five and a half, six days from when she was six … and so on, all the way through her life until she was seventy.
Well, she put all these life savings in a safe in her parents’ office. (They had a fortune-telling business, with a little magic on the side.) Each one had its own special box with a label giving the duration – that means how long it was – and her age.
Eventually, as I said, the woman got to be seventy and decided to spend some of her savings. First she opened the box with a day in it from when she was eight. Her heart began to pound the moment the box was opened. She lost all interest in the office and the fortune-telling business, and rushed out into the park. Here she played on the swings and rolled on the grass and fished in the pond and ate ice cream. By the end of the day she was worn out, but her cheeks were rosy and her eyes shone.
The next morning after breakfast the woman opened the box with a week in it from when she was ten. After that a great deal happened – and a great
deal didn’t happen. Dusting didn’t happen, for instance, or washing up or making an appointment at the hairdresser’s. Not many bills were paid or weeds dug up. At the end of the week the woman needed another week to sort herself out. All the same her step was light as she walked about the town, and her friends said she was a changed woman.
Well, so it continued for some years with the woman spending her savings bit by bit. Not all her experiences were happy, of course; life is not like that. The two days from when she was fourteen, for instance, were dreadful. She felt terribly shy all the time and was desperately worried about an almost invisible spot on her chin.
Then, finally, when she had used up all her life savings, the woman took to her bed, read a book for a while and – presently – died.
Some days later when friends were clearing out the office, one box of the woman’s savings was discovered unopened. It was tucked away under a pile of old letters in the safe. The woman herself must not have noticed it. Its label (in her father’s hand) said: Half an hour, age four.
Well, as soon as the box was opened, odd things began to happen. One of the friends went racing up and down the stairs – the office was on the third floor; another made a den under the desk, and a third played with the phone.
Of course, as you will realize, it was the last half-hour of the woman’s life that was causing this. Now that the woman herself was dead, it had nowhere else to go and, apparently, no reason to come to an end. In fact, as far as I know, it’s still around … somewhere.
So, there we are. If ever you should feel the urge to act like a four-year-old (unless you are a four-year-old), you can blame it on the life savings of the woman in the fortune-telling business, with a little magic on the side. That’s what I’d do.fn1
Street Lamps
The street lamps of my childhood
Are gas-lit, yellow and green
A series of safe havens
With darkness in between.
On winter nights when I come home
From the chip shop or the park
The shadows lengthen between the lamps
And I feel the clutch of the dark.
It’s foggy, perhaps, rain in the air
An ebony pavement that gleams
Privet hedges, garden gates
But nothing is what it seems.
A limping man in the lamplight
With a scar or a blackened eye
A smoker or cougher or spitter of phlegm
An uninnocent passer-by.
A cat in a hedge, or something
A pair of eyes at least
A foot-dragging sound in an entry
Some nameless lurking beast.
While under each glowing umbrella
I shelter from the dark
With my hot chips from the chip shop
My cold feet from the park.
There’s a ruffian in the entry
A hunchback at my heel
I run for my life in stages
For fear that my fears are real.
An iron tree, a cross bar
(Where the lighter’s ladder leant)
A glass box with a pointed top
Like a small transparent tent.
The terrors of life await us
They lurk in the shadows between
The islands of hope and brightness
The pools of yellow and green.
Reading and Writing
I have a book. It is a book of Woodle Bear. And I am Woodle Bear. And Woodle Bear is me.
There weren’t many books in our house, when I was a boy. I seem to have acquired them at the rate of one a year, as Sunday School prizes. Starting at the age of four or five, by the age of ten I had a library of six books. There was a book about Banjo the Crow; a book about a Berkshire pig abandoned by his owner and left to have adventures on the high veldt and in the steaming jungles of South Africa. There was a book about Woodle Bear.
The Bear Nobody Wanted
Written and Illustrated by
G. E. BREARY
Flap copy: Although Woodle was a handsome Bear in a new red coat, Doreen and Pris didn’t want him and flung him out of the nursery window. Woodle was very sad; a Bear has to live somewhere, but where could he go? You will read here of his exciting adventures until at last he becomes King of Fairyland!
3 shillings net.
Well, this small book, 5″ x 7″, paper jacket, orange binding, 48pp, got its hooks into me from the very start.
Woodle Bear fell with a bump right into the middle of Doreen’s Family of Toys, who were all sitting upright with their backs to the wall waiting to be taken out for a ride in the doll’s pram.
They all looked at the little Bear in a superior sort of way, for they all knew that Doreen wanted them in her Family very much indeed.
Yes. I was Woodle Bear, all right, and Woodle Bear was me. The story had a potent effect on me. I loved to read and read again about those nasty girls. They had a ‘nursery’, they had a ‘porch’. And the words said things like ‘very much indeed’ and ‘returned Pris’. (What could that mean?) But the fate of Woodle Bear, even though I knew the happy ending, was dreadful to contemplate. You will see where this piece is headed. I was an adopted child, but, age five, I didn’t know it. Or did I?
A lifetime later, having parted company with and pretty well forgotten this book, though not its title, I chose, for reasons I can hardly fathom, to write my own version:fn1 6″ x 9″, paper jacket, orange binding, 144pp.
This is how a bear was made many years ago. The materials used were: brown plush for the fur, velvet or felt for the paws, and strong black thread for the nose and mouth. In addition the following things were needed: one pair of glass eyes, five disc joints for attaching the head, arms and legs to the body, and lots of kapok or wood wool for the filling. Sometimes an extra item such as a squeaker was included. Ribbons, too, usually red and in the form of a bow, were popular then.
Woodle Bear was not wanted because Doreen and Pris were mean-spirited girls. My bear was not wanted for a more intractable reason; the circumstances, you might say, of his birth, or more particularly his conception.
Now the particular bear this story is about was made in a teddy bear factory. Here at a long table a number of women or young girls would sit. (You could start work at fourteen in those days.) Each would make one part of the bear, or concentrate on the sewing, filling or whatever, then pass it on to the next. In this way, the materials – plush and kapok, velvet and thread – moved down the table slowly taking on the shape and appearance of a bear. The bears, as it were, materialized from the piles of stuff and the busy fingers of the women.
Every stage in the process was important, but one stage was vital. This was the stitching of the nose and mouth, and the positioning of the eyes. The women who did this job were called ‘finishers’, and theirs was the most skilled work of all. Just one slip with the needle or mistake in the positioning of the eyes could change a bear’s expression from cheerful to grumpy, trustworthy to sly, and ruin his life forever. For how a bear looked, especially when he was new, was how he was. His character was formed from the outside. It isn’t fair, I know. It was hardly a bear’s fault if things went wrong. But that is how it was.
Well, as you will see, the particular bear this story is about was to suffer in just this way. For as soon as his eyes were in his head, and his nose and mouth were stitched below them, this little bear was filled with a sense of his own importance (as filled he was with kapok). All of us have this feeling, of course, to some extent; but with this bear the conviction was too strong. It made him instantly proud and selfish. A couple of misplaced stitches, that’s all it took; a bit of crookedness about the eyes, and the job was done.
But back to G. E. Breary’s original, with which, you will have guessed, I am now reacquainted. It’s in my hand again, the same 1940s edition. It has that ancient-paper smell. My first copy had a smell too, of damp. It was permanently damp in the upper rooms of our cold house: s
team rising from kettles and cooking, tin baths in front of the fire, clothes drying on the clothes horse. The condensation then might have come back down as rain if only the ceilings had been higher. Paper of all kinds had a soggy time of it in those days.
And Woodle? He triumphs in the end, of course, returning to the porch resplendent in a jewelled crown, satin cloak, silver sword.
One day he flew down to the porch on which he had spent such a sad day long ago. Doreen and Pris were playing with their toys in the garden. Doreen saw him first.
‘Look!’ she cried excitedly, ‘there is a lovely little Bear on the porch dressed in a satin cloak!’
‘Goodness! I must get him, I do want him so,’ cried Pris, running off to fetch a ladder.
‘I do want him so.’ I liked that, though the ‘so’ was something of a puzzle when I was six. There again, at this distance, there are other larger puzzles. Why did this book have such a hold on me? What were my feelings, reading it, that I cannot now quite recollect or draw back up? What were my presentiments?
As each bear completed his journey down the table, he was put on a trolley with the others. Here he had a grandstand view of more bears being made, and could begin to puzzle out his surroundings (and his own existence).
It was a curious business with new-made bears. Only a little while ago they had been piles of fabric, spools of thread, sacks of kapok. And yet now here they were, knowing things. I suppose it was a sort of instinct, really. The way a baby bird, for instance, will crouch when it sees the shadow of a hawk. Whatever it was, these new-made bears knew things from the start; not just that they were ‘bears’ or ‘made’, but other things, too. Words like ‘shop’ and ‘present’ already had some meaning for them; words like ‘child’ as well, and ‘bedtime’ and ‘belonging’.
I’m in my shed now, writing this. It’s August. A small view of the garden, a blackbird on the grass and G. E. Breary’s paper-jacketed, musty-smelling, written and illustrated good book in my other hand. The endpaper is cream. It has the dealer’s reference number pencilled lightly in the top right corner. And the word ‘child’. And the amount, £40. Forty pounds, that’s less than a pound a page, isn’t it? Yes. Worth every penny.
The Bucket Page 5