On the first day I was sent to Infant School I went on my own, leaving my Mother and sister behind. The front door was opened and out I was sent. Mother knew I was safe because she personally knew the first crossing lady, Mrs Rumbold, who every day stopped the traffic and helped children and adults across the busy main road. They knew each other for another twenty years after Mrs Rumbold first stopped the traffic for me to cross the road safely. Mrs Rumbold became one more person who when she became a pensioner Mother went shopping for twice a week, when she did all our shopping, often with me in tow behind her.
Infants School was a curious mix of routine, noise, odd regimentation, genuine play, and quieter times in which I found adapting to being around so many other children my own age unsettling after the life I'd had of mostly being being on my own or with my sister, with Mother working a few feet away watching us. As pupils we could not go far wrong because we could not go very far; Basic literacy and numeracy were the limits set for us. Our times tables were drilled into us as a class by every child chanting them together, every syllable of the table. It worked. I can still remember my times tables when I need to, and I can still remember the sound of those infant class voices together. The chant was combined with the numbers being written out in a book by the teachers for us to take home. What made the book special was the pale green patterned wallpaper cover the teacher put on it. The wallpaper made it feel like a luxury to me. It was my first book.
That first term I was there I enjoyed staying for school dinners. Mother liked me having school dinners too. With just my sister to mind could rearrange her routines during the day and use her time more effectively. Though this period of everything working out well for all of us did not last long.
There were normally two crossing ladies on my journey to school. A few weeks after that first term started Mother sent me to school as usual on the Monday morning. But Mrs Rumbold was not at the first crossing. I managed to cross that road safely. When I got to the school I found that not only was Mrs Rumbold not there, but the second crossing lady missing too and the school gates were firmly shut. I don't know who did not tell the other the dates for half term but when I went home again and told Mother she seemed less worried than I expected her to be. I though she would worry that I had crossed the same big road twice, seemingly unassisted, without getting run over. I was rather used to her worrying about me, but she was more annoyed that she now had to rearrange the day because she now had to look after me and my sister. She had already moved the twin tub washing machine from the porch to the kitchen, in front of the sink. She was connecting hoses to different parts of the machine and filling one chamber of it with water, to do a day's washing.
The Monday wash was for three adults and two children, her own family plus neighbour Stan's dirty sheets and work clothes. It did not need saying that from exhaustion she had forgotten half term was coming and she had not thought make any preparation for me to be home. To me the mistake was on her part, at the time it seemed to be a small and spontaneous error. I saw no bigger pattern that it might be part of. It seemed to be an inconsequential mistake.
Mother had tight routines for every day of the week. It was quite easy for her to hide any forgetfulness or detachment she felt behind the many routines. But the proof that something was being covered up came from how she would over-react all too easily when she was disrupted from her work.
Her routines divided the week very precisely.
Monday and Thursday were washing machine days, washing for five, two children three adults. Drying and ironing got done the evening of the same day. Neighbour Stan paid Mother to do his laundry. When I was around I was always useful at the drying and ironing stage, at the other end of the sheet when she needed to fold the sheets.
Thursday evenings were set aside to do the weekly accounts, this was a strange hour long ritual. Mother would have lots of labels, small envelopes, and small piles of money on the table. The money was old money-large pound notes, 240 pennies to the pound, 12 pennies to a shilling, 20 shillings to a pound, half crowns, half-pennies, farthings, and silver sixpences. The labels and envelopes were put at one end of the table, the money was put at the other. The accounts were about the right money finding the right label/envelope and the envelope being correctly annotated. Then the envelopes went back into the finance cupboard until next week.
Tuesday, Fridays and Saturdays were shopping days. Friday was bill paying day, when the coal, gas, and electricity bills were paid.
Wednesday, and Sunday morning, were cleaning days. Sunday was the day to change the bed sheets. That was when I had to partner her stripping and remaking the beds. After stripping and remaking the beds on Sunday Mother was taken up with making the big family meal which sometimes Stan attended as well. He would bring them sweet white German wine to drink with the meal. This embarrassed my parents since alcohol was one of many subjects that they silently disagreed about. As a married couple they did not know what it was sensible to say, and how to say, it in front of children.
What nobody observed, because they never saw Mother in the house and she was always too busy watching us and shopping to talk with adults other than her mother when she was out, was that she could never give herself time to do things that she might have wanted to do for just herself whilst keeping the parental house running like clockwork. Whilst imitating a human perpetual motion machine, in the form of a housewife, she could not cut herself any slack.
There was something odd about labour saving devices, machinery like twin tub washing machines and vacuum cleaners; they were genuinely great machines. But the way that they were sold to people often made the people that used them work harder in the end because they made more work easier to do. This made it that the amount of time that activities that used twin tubs and vacuum cleaners in the process could spread to fill more time, leaving less time for other, more leisure based, activities that the users were told they would have as part of the selling pitch. I don't how any child recognises when their parents are on auto-pilot, but I know that I sensed something like that in Mother and it confused me. I did not know how to respond to it.
Some wiseacre would say to me now that many a mother had to force themselves to appear to be an affectionate parent, it does not come easily or naturally to them. But still her flattened moods became more persistent and took their toll on both her and me.
One summer school holiday Friday Mother, my sister and I were in the town, shopping. My sister was in the big pram and I was with her, outside the Yorkshire Electricity Board shop. Mother had wanted to put the pram and me in the shop to mind us whilst being in the queue. There was no room in the shop for a pram because because floor to ceiling, wall to wall, it was full of fridges and cookers. They went further back than the eye could see because the objects were solid. The exception to this solid mass was a narrow passage one human being wide, where there was a single queue and two counters at the end of the queue. Customers paid their electricity bills there, in cash. Mother got into this long queue that was near the outside of the shop to pay her electricity bill. One side of the thin corridor where she queued looked out on the street, the other side looked on to the solid mountain white goods for sale on HP that were piled higher than human height that blocked any view beyond them. The white goods symbolised debt to Mother who saw debt as personal and was apt to quote Hamlet without knowing it about the subject. 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be [For the loan loses both itself and the friend]'. The queue was slow that day. Life seemed hot and unfriendly. Possibly suffering from mild heat stroke or tiredness I wanted to see where Mother was in the queue. I walked away from the pram, which was at the entrance, but the weather was hot. I walked in the wrong direction to see her. I walked a few yards up the street, past about four shops and I felt lost.
A friendly lady policeman saw me and spoke to me. I could barely speak my first name with confidence, much less point back at the pram and pipe up 'Mummy's in the Y.E.B.'. It was an early example of me rather zoning out of where I actually was, and going into my own head as if I was not really there. That this happened close after the moors murders, with the hysterical media mantra of 'don't let children talk to strangers' didn't help. I probably thought that 'Don't talk to strangers' included not talking to the police. She walked me further away in the same direction, away from the Y.E.B. and my infant sister and Mother, to the nearest police station, 100 yards away. I sat and waited in the foyer of the police station.
Mother appeared a short while later, looking vehement and angry as she put the brakes on the pram. In front of the staff, without warning, she proceeded to bend me over her knee whilst she stood up, pulled my shorts down and tanned my backside in front of the assembled police staff. The policewoman tried to tell Mother that she was over reacting. Who was right? Mother or the lady policeman? Many people feared the police for no obvious reason, Mother might well have been one of them. I got a tanned arse in public for wasting Mother's housework time, which she regarded as precious to her. On the other hand, or red raw cheek of you prefer, what Mother did was plain over reaction. Control re-established, particularly over the young policewoman who had intervened in Mother's life, she was happy with me feeling the depth of her disapproval. If she could have punished the young policewoman for wronging her she would have. With hindsight perhaps it would be easiest if we had all punished the weather for leaving us so tired. The tanned arse felt quite personal to me at the time, and the shock of it remained with me.
These compound misunderstandings would occur repeatedly between Mother and me. To avoid them I liked the relative safety of doing the small and easy things that I knew I could do for Mother on my own. One of them was getting her magazine for her. She had a brown subscriptions folder in the small local W.H. Smiths in the town. She used to get in the queue to pay and I used to go to the folder and get her 'Woman' magazine and my copy of 'The Beano', both of which were put in the same folder. I would hand the items to her for her to pay for them. Then one week just before we went in she told me that she had cancelled my Beano. It was the first notice she gave me of the fact. Maybe she had to punish me after the YEB episode. If it was a punishment then she denied it by omission. She argued that I was too old for 'The Beano', and that I was effectively a grown up. It sounded weak logic and false flattery then, and it still sounds like that to me now. Maybe Mother cancelled my copy of 'The Beano' because my sister did not need anything to read at home, so in her Solomon like wisdom neither did I. Maybe the money to run the house that dad gave her was not stretching like he expected to make her to make it stretch. Maybe Mother cancelling my subscription to 'The Beano' was a sign of her depression. Often as not, her talk of the wisdom of Solomon usually preceded divisive suggestions that disguised how she felt at having to do what she had to do as a parent. Whatever.
She gave a false reason late in the day and it hid her true reason very well. I was coming into the age where I would appreciate the humour in 'The Beano' more because I understood it better, not that increasing such understanding was 'maturity'. I could not argue against her and continued to get her 'Woman' magazine. Unbeaten, I started to read her 'Woman' magazine when she was not reading it, instead. I can't imagine what sense I made of what was in it. That event laid the groundwork for what was to come much later, where lack-of-money became the neutral argument with which to neuter my wants into abeyance.
This neutralising effect affected free gifts as well. At the end of one school term term I was allowed to take home my partly used school exercise books with the unused paper in the back of them. The school allowed me to take them home but like 'The Beano' they were unwelcomed by my parents, even though what I had got had cost them nothing, materially.
When I took the books home I thought I might want to write in but in the end I wrote nothing. Me writing anything that I thought of by and for myself seemed like breaking the rules of the house. The rules about writing were that Mother was permitted to write weekly shopping lists and the odd chatty letter to a relative in a small writing pad in small unreadable writing. But beyond that nothing else was allowed. It might involve the imagination. Before anything was ever thought what had to be known was where the thought might lead before it go there. The thought had to be safe, for the individual and everyone connected to them. I was hardly going to write 'I hate Big Brother' in big letters in the back of the exercise book. I did not know who Big Brother was, though come to think of if he was a figure who disliked other people having their own private thoughts before he knew what those thoughts were, and if he disliked them writing their thoughts down then perhaps I did know more about him than I realised.
Mother lived as if there was a local paper shortage, as if paper was rationed, or as if the act of writing had to be rationed so that it served others and was never seen to be selfish. The idea of keeping a diary, writing thoughts down, or worse; sharing them with the public and other articulate writers would have horrified both my parents, for whom thoughts were for keeping to yourself, to the point of keeping them from each other.
Part of the reason for me writing here is there was a huge amount that we said and did as a family that I have clear memories of, but the memories felt both voluminous and impersonal. Writing them down is now my only way of personalising them and freeing myself for what and how to think in the present day.
There were lighter times when I alarmed Mother and got away with it, without knowing how I did it. One summer day aged seven I was allowed to take a walked along the river bank on my own. At one point there was a concrete platform over drainage pipe, where the water went away from the river in a small trickle which fed a shallow stream that was about a foot deep and two foot wide. I don't know how I did it, but unplanned I fell off the platform and into the water. I could not swim and panicked and thrashed about for a few minutes, but I got out intact but with very wet clothing. I did not want to tell Mother how I got so wet. My jumper and shorts were soaked. I went to the nearest house and asked for a spare dry jumper that I could wear to go home, to worry Mother less. I was given one by the old lady in the first house I went to. It was mid blue, my favourite colour, and it fitted perfectly. I went home in it and of course with her fear of debt Mother's worried about where the jumper came from, the jumper being a different colour to the one she sent me out in. So the story of my falling into the water came out that way rather than via me being wet and in the clothes I went out in. Surviving felt okay, but telling Mother the tale of how I survived was more scary. She insisted that I thank the lady and return the jumper after she had washed it. Mother thought that there was some moral debt that I had incurred akin to the never never which I had pushed her into with my small adventure. If so then I was scared of her fear of debt with good reason.
She never came clean about her fear of debt. But much later she was forced to admit to other cover ups which were relatives of the fear of debt, where at the time she had to ride out being out of her depth when she was not allowed to be seen to be so. We were both adults by then, and as she shared the evidence so our relationship partially matured. But in the longer term her honesty was the start of setting up the relationship to perish, because what was newly revealed severely weakened the foundation of the closeness between us.
Every working class child has to endure one horrible Christmas with their family. The sort of Christmas where the event goes so utterly wrong, that the magic of suspended disbelief that makes the event work is destroyed, for the event to never to work again. I had my horrible Christmas early.
One of my small jobs I had at the Christmas of 1967, aged 6, was to be the first to open and read out who the Christmas cards were from. On that Christmas Eve there was one which I read out. Uniquely for the cards that year, it was addressed to just dad, 'From Brandy' was what it read inside, nothing else. I read this out n a confident voice and it might as well have been the Guy Fawkes who actually successfully blew up The Houses of Parliament for the effect that what I read out had on my parents. But like all domestic arguments they were purely indoor fireworks, though. Nothing for public knowledge.
Prior to my reading the card out dad was slumped in his armchair. After I read the card he sat bolt upright like Frankenstein's monster after being fed electricity. His behaviour was quite fearful and destructive too. On the spot Mother loudly accused dad of adultery as if she knew who the other woman was. On being accused he stood up to answer her back. As they argued, and stood up to each other, the confined space we were all in rather shrank. The shouting match ended with dad, who was taller than Mother by five inches, holding Mother tightly by her throat with both his hands whilst pushing/bending her backwards over my sisters pram, with my sister in the pram, which was parked next to the chimney breast. my sister cried out loud, as well an infant might at being disturbed by their proximity to fear and violence. It started with me reading out a Christmas card from a stranger that fell through the letterbox. I didn't know how much I was going to the bearer of bad news. What happened after that rather over shadowed many a Christmas in the years to come. Fairly soon after the event was thoroughly denied and papered over, as if it had ever happened. Much later Mother tried to tell me that the card was a 'joke' about the alcohol culture from his mates and 'Brandy' was the name of drink, not a person, as if that made it better.
Up to the worst Christmas we would ever have Mother had sent me to school dinners to increase the machine like efficiency of the household. When I returned to infant school for the Winter term something happened to me. Like dad when he was in the parental house I became physically present but mentally absent, though unlike him I did it without any help from the drink. I don't know where my thoughts went or how they got there. Not knowing how they got there became a key part of the problem. Thankfully I was not bullied for being so absent minded. We were watched by the staff too much for that to happen. Nor did the teachers had much problem with me in class. The collective discipline and basic teaching dragged me along whether I liked it or not. But school dinners was where the sense of being far away found its target. Amid the clink of serving instruments and the noise of children having to shout to be heard above the echo off the hard surfaces of the room I could have quoted Marlene Dietrich, all I wanted was to be alone.
I got my wish too. When I sat with the other children they ate fast and left, but I ate slowly. Unsupervised, I began to enjoy the lack of supervision that much that the staff who washed up began to complain about the length of time I took to eat their food. It did not feel like my food, I did not feel like myself and I felt as if nothing was mine. The washing up staff complained to the head mistress. The head mistress wrote to Mother to the effect of 'get him to eat faster or take him at home'. The fact that the news came her in a letter, a form of writing, made Mother feel ashamed. So she chose to feed me at home and told me that I had got myself banned from school meals. Nobody asked me why I ate so slowly. To make me eat faster at home Mother took me to the family doctor, something she disliked doing because it took up his time and with doing that she might incur some sort of social debt towards him. I'd be curious to know now what unit of currency that debt would have been in.
I was interviewed by Dr Ward, the scary family G.P. He seemed quite small and distant when he was sat behind his big desk. As Mother talked to Dr Ward she apologised for being there and she was sorry for my slowness. She briefly conveyed to Dr Ward the chain of complaints about me, and who had said what to whom. As she spoke her words made me feel as if was not a person, and that I was plain wrong for being a slow eater and enjoying not being supervised. Mother was the one who had taught me how to enjoy my own company through having me play just by myself. In front of the doctor she was disowning how she had made me what she had made me. Behind her words Doctor Ward could surely hear the comic cry, now made more serious by the new context in which it was said, 'It wasn't me, it was them others that did it'.
When she had finished he asked me to approach him, by walking from Mother's side to his side of the big desk. He got up, and got out of his chair. Standing over me, he put his hand in my head and taking his time he quietly asked me if I wanted to grow up to be big and strong. I said 'Yes' like I was expected to. This was not an open conversation. In kind tones he replied 'Then eat your greens and vegetables.'. He succeeded where others had failed by appearing to listen. His argument was barely an argument, more a positive rephrasing of the obvious. Where others had expected to make both telling me and disengaging from me simultaneously work in getting me to do what they wanted and they failed, the doctor succeeded. He also also talked to Mother about making food more interesting and fun to me. With that advice Mother had been served all the prescription of humble pie she would willingly accept, on top of the debt of having been forced to visit the doctors. His advice worked. From then on I ate at my parents house, the lunch time food was more fun, and I ate faster.
My first favourite dish thereafter was called 'Islands'. It was mashed potato in the shape of a rock or island in the middle of a broad soup bowl with canned tomato soup served around the edges as if the soup were the sea. In my imagination and my appetite I fed richly on that dish. Perhaps it was Mother recognising that she had made me something of an island in myself. I still like tomato soup nowadays. But the best soups are made from scratch and don't come out of tins.
Not being allowed to return to school meals after the doctor's pep talk was an early example of Mother being risk averse. Whether her being risk averse came from her fear of debt or a fear of receiving forgiveness, and therefore being able to embrace change I will never know. When mistakes were many then second chances seemed to be nearly non-existent. The visit to the doctor was a second chance that half worked. Doctors were like policemen, authority figures we felt better for avoiding receiving help from even when the help was meant to be there for us. One reason the doctors visit worked was because his surgery felt like a private and neutral space, one that neutralised and modified even how Mother behaved.
Overall, during the time I was in Infants School I learned that knowledge and problems existed in three clearly defined areas, where became fuzzy where the boundaries between them overlapped.
If something was 'Public' then that meant it was official and everyone was entitled, and duty bound, to know it. The times tables that we recited together in infants school were public knowledge. 'Private knowledge' was more select. 'Private' meant that what somebody knew they weren't necessarily meant to know, or to tell anyone else. Often they would find it hard to remember how they came to know what they did because some degree of secrecy clung to how they were told. Private knowledge was strange stuff, gossip and the illnesses relative had fitted in that category. How to share gossip and infer it's secrecy to others was an art I never acquired. 'Secret' meant that you were meant neither know what you did nor to share it. Also you were meant to forget how you learned it, and lie, preferably convincingly, about how you found the secret out if you were asked. Secrets were like swear words, nobody was meant to share them or use them in public and yet everyone knew them. Nobody was meant to tell how they got to know them or how they were transmitted. This code thoroughly confused me. It was part of the reason I said so little. I had no way of measuring the effects of some of my words before I said them. Shame could easily follow me for owning what I said as sure as night followed day, and shame could swallow me up. The effect was multiplied with writing which had to be evasive, polite, and always cheerful to the nth degree. Bad news about matters that could not be fixed was mostly banned. It was only tolerated if it really had to be said.
Mother often shared with me me things she could not tell anybody else even though I was surely the least appropriate person to receive her words. What she said to me 'in secret' was like certain dramas I have listened to as an adult where one member of a family will talk to anther and be in a state of emotion and need as if the other person is their therapist, but the person does not know that they are meant to be therapists. The entertainment and conflict in the fiction comes from one side feeling shut out/not listened to and the other side mishearing what they expected to hear. But Mother seemed to have nobody her own age who was female to share the details with, where the response that she got back would have come from her being listened to better, and it would have been more mature.
Long after the first horrible Christmas that was the sign of life to come, Mother told me that she knew who 'Brandy' was. I would still have been in single figures. Mother continued, she had personally confronted this 'Brandy'. Not only had she gone to see 'Brandy' but 'Brandy' had denied everything, and said to Mother that she had got the wrong person. Dad was a nice person to have a drink with, nothing more. And since 'Brandy' was single and lived with her mother, by custom she was entitled to drink with him in public. That last point must have wound Mother up something rotten. Custom was that married women could not drink; it made them bad mothers, it was also part of putting motherhood on a pedestal. Mother also relayed a message to 'Brandy' that must have surprised her, 'If he leaves me I will have nobody to pay the coal bill', which was an oblique way of saying to 'Brandy' that having children equals lots of cloth nappies to wash very often, equals the necessity of a daily fires to dry them on, equals a huge amount of time spent in repetitive, uninteresting, and unavoidable work that men will never tell you about before you marry them.
Much of my retreat from reality in school came as much from having to listen to monologues like the one from Mother about 'Brandy' and working out what happened after reading the card from 'Brandy' card and why it happened. I was processing information that few seven or eight year old boys would have ever have had to attempt to absorb, unaided.
Mother need not have feared about 'Brandy'. Nobody else wanted dad that much. Only Mother was even half prepared to keep dad for for the rest of his life and accept the money he thought he could spare to run a house that he only ever half wanted to live in, whilst spending uncounted amounts of money on drinking, smoking, and gambling. Everyone else who drank smoked and gambled only wanted to borrow him for short periods of time to find the mutuality with him in those activities. He had been married for just shy of eight years when the crisis hit home, he would be in the same marriage for nearly forty years more before he was done. Through out that time his friends would take him out and let him point himself in the direction of the parental house after, as a happy wreck of a man who simply wanted to kept and have others care for him better than he cared for himself. In talking to 'Brandy' Mother took aim at the human being who was in her view, but the bigger target was the drink and gambling culture dad was immersed in, and it hid everywhere in plain sight.
I still don't know how my job with Mother became that of having to listen to what she said and carry it around inside me, as if what she said was meant to be mine to memorise. Maybe she thought I would forget what she said because she thought I was a bad listener. That was her under estimating me, just as she under estimated how I might survive being her chief listening post.
The best aspect of the horrible Christmas was how it shook Mother out of her machine like torpor. After seven years of being physically tired from the unpaid labour of being a housewife with only a small medium wave and long wave radio for entertainment she gave herself two new year's resolutions. The first was that she would go out one evening a week by herself, with nobody from family with her. Dad would have to stay home and child mind that night. The second resolution was to get her first allotment. The most idyllic part of WW2 for her had been spending time with her dad as he grew veg on the small allotment behind the village Methodist Church and School. He passed his 'green fingers' on to her so that she knew her plants, and how to grow them. Her dad was a self trained professional landscape gardener who looked after the small garden outside the factory two miles from where he lived. Growing what he wanted to grow must have felt good for him too.
As a married woman with no money of her own Mother could not go to a pub or join the drinkers, though when single she used to enjoy being among them; she could be with them in her own right. For her night out she joined St John ambulance, whose 'nurses' and 'officers' were meant to be a reassuring presence to the public as they provided first aid at public events like blood donors day. She could have joined the Red Cross, but their hall was almost at the back of the house. Her choice of going out had to have a fifteen minute walk built into it where the walk separated life at home from life on the night out.
Dad reasoned that if he had to stay in of an evening then he had to get a television. This was another change that changed the house a lot more than it appeared to change at first. Every week at 7 pm Mother left us to dads company every Thursday night, when she left for her first aid evening. Dad had to stay in and mind me and my sister, who by this time was considerably calmer than her former self. I remember how acutely the moral tone of the evening could shift. I'd be scrubbed clean and in my pyjamas watching Top of the Pops from the start at 7 pm whilst dad unknowingly put out his unsettled vibes of 'I wish I was at the pub, but I am not and you are the reason why'. I went to bed when TOTP ended. Before I got in to bed I kneeled by the side of the bed on the home made rabbit fur rug that Mother had made from the skins she got for free from the butchers, closed my eyes, put my hands together and said The Lord's Prayer as I had been taught to both by Mother and by my gran. Part of me should have been praying earlier against the strange atmosphere dad put out whilst I tried to enjoy the strange mix of sophistication and juvenilia that was 'Top of the Pops'.
I can't remember how often dad had this far away look in his eyes that made me look away from him. What the look in his eyes said about him was 'I am not really here, I am imagining I am at the pub.'. My earliest memory of feeling this emptiness in him came from a time when we were not the parental house, where I came to expect it most. I was four and he had taken me over the river to the summer fair, which was held on the local cricket field. I was sat in the child's seat on his bike which faced to the rear of it. I was in the seat as he walked with the bike along the pavement across the bridge, back to the town for our return to the parental house. I was chest height to him as he walked the bike forwards along the pavement. I felt as if either he had left his body or I had left my body behind for more of the fun of the fair, and it was the oddest feeling. Though both of us were physically present and his physical form just kept on holding the bike by the handlebars and walking.
For staying home and watching more television Dad observed more clearly how much the house was geared around children. It was very different to the houses of his brothers and sisters were when he visited them of a Sunday. There was nothing showy about the parental house compared with the effort shown to welcome him in the houses he visited. This would change. Newer and better, furniture was going to be bought, fifteen layers of wallpaper would be stripped and the space that clearly included children would give them less leeway in future. The whole of the house would soon be geared towards the life of the adults. Getting the television set set an agenda where in future the living room would be doubled less often as a nursery/laundry drying/ironing room. It would be remade as a room for adults to eat in or just watch television in when dad was there. When he was away there would still be plenty of drying and ironing, and weekly doing of accounts. But children's play would not be allowed.
From observing dads television viewing habits, I saw how dad was easily won over by the glamour of the adverts. He thought that BBC1 was a dowdy and worthy channel that talked down to him. With it's central place in the central room of the house, the television set became his remote control for controlling the whole of the house, to the discomfort of many visitors. The measure of how acceptable somebody was to Dad was whether he turned the volume on the set down or not when they came into the living room. The less he felt he had to defer to them the less he was inclined to turn the sound down; the less he turned the sound down the sooner they left, for it being made clear that they were not going to be listened to. Out of his earshot Mother spoke about wanting to get rid of the set. But she knew that the best deal she would be offered was for the set to be off as much as possible when dad did not need it as remote control for the house. Neither Mother or me liked the more openly macho programmes that dad really zoned out to.
The television arrived in the winter of 1968. The changes that followed took their time arriving from Spring to Summer that year. First his fishing basket and nets went. They had sat in the porch, at the back of the house, near the coal bunker from the day my parents had moved into the house. It was a birthday card fantasy but sometimes when I saw the fishing kit I imagined quietly going fishing with him. I wondered what sharing a peaceable quiet with him might actually be like, and fishing was the only mechanism by which I could see it happening. I was curious about what he might be like when he was at his ease. When the basket disappeared nobody dare ask where it had gone. Dad would have grumpily said 'It was not yours and where it has gone is nothing to do with you.'. So less 'gone fishing' more 'gone altogether'.
The attic was a place I was most not meant to go on my own. The front bedroom was the biggest room in the house and the space that was most personal to me in the parental house. My parents slept in the slightly smaller back bedroom, narrower by the width of the narrow stairs next to it. The door in the corner of their bedroom led to the stairs for the attic. To get to that door a person had to walk around the narrow space between their bed and the furniture that lined the wall. I was not meant to go into their bedroom. But when Mother worked in the attic I went around their bed to get the unlit attic stairs. Mother took me up there to mind me whilst she worked up there, rearranging the room. I saw the attic go from a dusty disorganised box room towards being a room somebody might vaguely comfortably spend time in, in spite of the amount of space diminishing the more she put more stuff in it and reorganised the room.
Mother was a hoarder. It was easy to learn why. But whenever anyone learned why, how they learned became the reason they could do nothing about it. Mother would tell somebody if asked but she would get incredibly tense as she told the story. Her anxiety made it impossible to say anything to her about, well, how she might redeploy her hoarding habit so that it took up less space and kept what was useful to hand. Early on during WW2 Christian families like hers were propagandised to make their children give up their toys so the toys could be redistributed to Dr Barnardo's Homes where children who were separated from their parents because either their parents had died, or the children had been moved away from estimated German bombing targets. The campaign was nationwide, and it ran through the churches. Mother's older sister, Alice was to years older than than Mother, old enough to know when to lie to protect what she had. Mother was about five and did not know how and when to lie. Alice hid enough of her toys from her mother, the better to keep them. Alice did not tell her sister to hide her toys, nor did Alice hide any toys for her sister. All of mothers toys were collected by her mother and given to, well, who knew what really? Patriotism hides so many motives for forced selflessness, good and evil, and much that is banal and dishonest besides. The older sisters toys remained in the house until it was cleared many decades later.
Nearly three decades since those toys were given away against Mother's will, nobody could say anything to Mother to reassure her that the days of things being taken from her against her will were over. Nor could anyone help her decide what to keep and what to part with whilst it had a life in it that others could use and she had no use for it. As far as she was concerned if the days of things being taken from her were over then she did not have to listen to anybody about any instruction for how to give things away or share the use of them.
With hindsight what surprises me is how I survived all the mood changes, the chaos and possessiveness that changed how the parental house worked as a space. It took a lot more of me being unable to read the character of my parents for me to significantly suffer. But like the rain that falls from Heaven those changes and moods would come, in their own time.
Find the introduction and chapter guide here.
