Thursday 1 October 2020

An Introduction And Guide Of Contents.

This is the longest document I will ever write. It is the length of a short book. It contains nearly everything that I can remember of the first sixteen years of my life that lent itself to being shaped into a continuous narrative. The origins for this document started in my regular blog, here where the reader will find many entries on many subjects, including where I filed shorter pieces about the paradoxical life that my family offered me. It was a life that by quietly focusing on the very personal and day to day life it barred all wider and more forward looking logical sense being made of it. 

In these single paragraphs small scenes from that life finally made some sense to me in themselves even as the medium and longer term logic of that life remained opaque. But as each scene/paragraph was was published the larger logic became clearer. So far they come to 76 blog entries, all filed under the label 'more notes towards a biography that will never be written'. Here is where to find those entries. If you click where it says 'more notes towards a biography that will never be written' then those 76 entries will come up.

What follows is the bigger story. It was a work of slow and cumulative progress. I started writing it in December 2016 and, exhausted, finished a first full length draft of it in August 2017. A third draft, as free of typos, overlong sentences, and deficient English grammar as I could get it, was finished by March 2018. In that document I sought to explain who my old self was to the person I was as I wrote. I feared that what I'd written might read like a misery memoir, the genre in which childhood is remembered as place of sheer terror to escape from, in which the binary reading was escape or terror. My childhood had its fears, and moments of outright terror, but it was not the material for a misery memoir.

I sequenced as much as I remembered in a logical order to work out who I was through what I know I did. I have mild dyslexia. This partially accounts for the time it has taken to get the story into it's present shape, and why future work on it at after the third draft is occasional. As of June-August 2019 a further overhaul of the memoir was done. Much detail, previously misfiled in my memory, was added with less heed as to whether it made the narrative feel more sad or more angry.

My mother had a special gift for mangling a story in the telling of it. When she told a story she disguised both the bad and the good in her narrative before burying what would have been the climax. Many times in my life with Mother, and in the writing of this memoir, life seemed to be a long and oddly told joke. As I lived out the missed opportunities and bleak humour on offer to me I often thought that some events and processes would never end. But end they did, usually when the processes had gone on too long to reverse any damage I had sustained in enduring it. You will find people's first names here, but no sir names and no place names. Given some of the most personal detail I prefer the locations I grew up in to remain hazy. These places, and people I know in them, still exist. I have relatives who still anxiously misremember me, along with official records of my life buried in secret government files, and the occasional bit of old newsprint, along with some long lost bits of film from old television programmes with me in them.

As the phrase goes 'you can't go through the same river twice'. The following is the flotsam and jetsam from the river of my youth. It was more than symbolic that I learnt to swim at over thirty years of age. At the time of my youth life felt less like swimming, nearer half-drowning and not knowing how to calmly control my breath. I was surrounded by plastic and sewage whilst waving at nobody in particular for help. Others may disagree, and discern a clearer assurance than I felt at the time.

If anyone senses a direction in the writing then that direction is due to the writing, more than the life.

           The Author.


P.s. It is still technically a work in progress. It is as well edited an account of my life as I can create by myself. Many books are like their authors, unfinished works who have escaped into society full of further incomplete works and lives.


Chapter 1 Family life is always irregular in some way - life means work much more than it means play - a quiet interlude - goals are reset and money repurposed - a house is bought and a marriage starts - the life of being engaged is better than the reality of marriage - the next door neighbours - I arrive as a small trouble - the storytelling starts - my sister arrives and is bigger trouble - I am ill prepared for starting school.

Chapter 2 Infant school - routine helps Mother hide her moods and forgetfulness - the mechanical family life - I will 'slip off the lead' sometimes, to varying effect - when my being helpful to others does not help me - my first horrible Christmas - secret, private, and public - there is no recovery from some mistakes - dad buys a television and starts his take over of the house - patterns of presence and absence.

Chapter 3 Dad's family - meeting Gran in town - how work worked in the 1960's - strained day trips away - the happy times of going on holiday to Gran and Granddads, even with my sister - where are my toys going? - a change of bedroom whilst I am away - how much might was I meant to enjoy being in a store room that resists being personalised ?

Chapter 4 How dad's family are different to us - going to the pub with dad - feeling scared - awaydays - our first pet - Mother's first allotment - our second pet - how different animals saw us differently.

Chapter 5 Dad buys new furniture for the house - how dad's family are separate from us - I shrink compared with the new furniture - hierarchies of anger - how anger sticks in the mouth - the limits of action and language.

Chapter 6 I start primary school - competition without support - chips in my confidence - briefly going to church - how the allotment become Mother's refuge - growing vegetables to balance the family finances. 

Chapter 7 Unpaid work - green fingers - Grandma's chair - doing means not teaching - primitive dentistry - old dystopias renew themselves via the buying of school uniforms.

Chapter 8 The over sized factory - dad works away - primitive preparations for his departure - the three of us open out - Mother decorates at her parent's house - my first time hitching a lift - variable school results - nervous breakdown arriving.

Chapter 9 Dad arrives back permanently - another domestic 'scene' - shutdown - going missing from school and from myself - television is my comforter.

Chapter 10 Which hand to write with? - the anti-depressants kick in - physically present but mentally absent in school - my friend the radiogramme - on prescription drugs - which school next? - I fail my 11+ exam by a country mile - the 'wrong' result - social services intervene.

Chapter 11 Coming off the drugs - a new social worker - looking at a new school far away - dad ignores my choices - Mother prepares for me to go to the school anyway.

Chapter 12  How television killed the art of receiving guests - Gran and Granddad visit when we are poorly prepared - when dad is forced to be with us his bad escapism is his only retreat from us - we have no retreat from him.

Chapter 13  Reveal or don't reveal? The continuous question - I start at the boarding school - we were the chaos the staff were there to keep in order - room for play for the newbies.

Chapter 14  The food was good - bright new routines - what is the collective point of the new routines? - small amounts of nonsense pass the time better - overdrawing my small pocket money allowance- Mother on the phone.

Chapter 15  Food vs learning - a definition of 'maladjusted' - our near-criminality and the other place we might be - early lessons - memorable lessons - my first television appearance - the official school bad sex lesson.

Chapter 16  The school hierarchies - being bad at keeping rules - how the place understood us - too long on medication - the mystery of sex appears to me.  

Chapter 17  Moving dormitories - sex is a mystery that was not going to remain so for long - feeling horribly confused and unable to disguise how I felt - secrecy rules where shame holds sway.

Chapter 18  The wrong dormitory - the horrors of life after shower time - genuine relief - my first buddy in the school.

Chapter 19  A new room with one tempter and one friend - bad nerves and television - bad nerves and friends - my first brief approved of affectionate relationship. 

Chapter 20  More watching television and being unobservant of each other - a very odd sexual encounter - Mother goes into hospital - we think we do alright in the house but we don't - Mother and the radio- back to to school.

Chapter 21  More school rules mysteries - the hierarchy likes me - the pseudo - intellectual pleasures of music and - joining the public library - meeting relatives in school- free time where I din't have to explain myself away - amateur electronics are the gateway interest of the future.

Chapter 22  Comparing myself with the headmaster - being an honest klutz in sport - some actual mentoring in sport- the Christmas dinner speech.

Chapter 23  Visiting relatives and their dogs - suspect voluntarism - immunity from other peoples crises - the red top press press on my pressure points. 

Chapter 24  Hostile phrases - colour television arrives - my first hair shirt - the school buildings - my first 'gay' friend - looking back - difficulties with abstract thinking.   

Chapter 25  Feeling frustrated about being kept - new neighbours - dad's new job - school open days - Mother gets a job and new friends to shop for - the evidence was in the photo.

Chapter 26  Why can't I see my parents at w/ends as often as other boys - unease over money - wandering around town on my own - loose change - watching electronics work - real theatre.

Chapter 27  School seems positively familiar - weekend hosteling - the Lake District holiday - bravery through canoeing - staying for more distractions.

Chapter 28  The small mercy - money tightens - schooling gets more pointless - 'work experience' - the teenage language ceiling - don't answer back.   

Chapter 29  Reluctant departures - pointless careers advice - electronics by accident - dad seriously ill - the old routines and tightness renewed and revived.

Afterword, where I have ended up A summary of what I went through to reach the age of sixteen with links to the next memoir..










 

Chapter One - Make Your Own Distractions.

My parents met at a Christmas party in December 1957. Released from their work, and encouraged by the need for rest and the seasonal excess of alcohol with their friends, they found a quieter space to talk away from the noise, they found that they were charmed by each other. When they left the party they agreed to meet again in the new year. When they became friends they knew what others would think, but delayed getting engaged. They felt they were a long way from trading in the single lives that they both enjoyed for the irreversible step of marriage, the ultimate commitment that was expected of everyone. Any step up in personal commitment involved a financial commitment. A shared future required them to work and save hard first. They met well before the days of easy finance through Hire Purchase. Years later, when Hire Purchase first became available locally on household goods it was a ritual for married women to politely sneer at what they called 'the never never', and deride credit as 'immoral', the better to justify the 'do without' morality that they grew up with, based on wartime and post-war rationing. 

The morality that Mother had grown up with by often made a virtue of an unforgiving lack of choice. At the time Mother met dad she was living in the third of sequence of gloomy bedsits, where when they improved it was because the other tenants were better company. The nadir with the bedsits was the first one, in which she crashed for some time on a drinking friends floor with no notice, after she, at the age of nineteen, was thrown out of her parents house for missing the bus and coming home late once too often. When she knocked on the door of her parents house her father opened it, snapped, and told her to leave for good on the spot. No amount of apologies would calm him enough to let her in, even to collect what was hers. She left with her friends who ran a car, even whilst petrol rationing was still current, her father's anger ringing in their ears. 

When she met dad Mother had been working for three or four years in the same factory he started work in. There, her working life was spent tied to a large and very noisy piece of machinery which made constant movements as it wound heavy duty cabling for brakes, for industrial vehicles, onto huge spools. Her job was to make sure that the cable wound smoothly on to the spools. Through the work she developed broad shoulders, strong biceps and strong forearms, which she never lost. Much more embarrassing for her was that working the machinery somehow gave her a large bust which often drew a vocal male admiration from male factory workers that she did not know what to do with. 

What them finding each other and thinking in terms of a shared future meant to dad was reluctantly cutting back on the drink. What them finding each other meant to Mother was the end of all her plans to travel. Before meeting dad she had saved enough money throughout the year to go on foreign holidays, when independent European travels were rare and difficult to organise. When the factory closed for the first half of July of 1955, and everyone had their holidays at the same time, her first trip was to Paris. The following July holiday she went to Brussels. Both times she went with her best friend, Jill, who Mother met in one of the houses of the bedsits they both lived in. Jill intended to train as a nurse. Each July they took off with their schoolgirl French, enough savings to get back in one piece, clothes for the journey, and a planned route in which they knew they had to be flexible. 

The third shared holiday was meant to be in Germany in but it never happened. The following July she had to be present at registry office wedding of her sister. This became a low key family reunion. Her relationship with her parents had been practically non-existent for three years after her father angrily threw her out of his house for returning late once too often. When she was away from her parents she enjoyed living in the town and near her job. The town was more exciting than her parents village. In the town she had many friends, both male and female. 

I was told these stories, and many more about when she was single, when I was in short trousers. Mother told me them either to me to keep me quiet whilst we were at home or to make me walk faster when we were  out together and she had to shop for food. The paradox, which she surely knew, was that she told me the stories because I was too young to process them. I was too young to question her when one detail she shared fitted awkwardly around another. Her telling me the stories of when she was single was meant to help bolster her self belief in the earlier years of her being married, when she felt quite isolated. So when she told me of how she used to 'drink the men under the table' when she was single, to 'protect her virtue' I took the stories at face value. I had to take the stories at face value, because amongst other things Mother wanted to prove to me was how much she was the teller of stories. As far as I know she never told me about what would interest me as an adult, the actual mechanics of foreign travel from England to Europe in the mid 1950s, when she changed currencies, what transport she travelled on, how she crossed the channel, how adept her French was, where she stayed in Paris and Belgium, what her favourite food in France was. So anything I write now about it is guess work. As a child my not knowing to ask that sort of question was just what Mother wanted. 

My father's youthful travels were much more limited. At the age of 17 he was called up for National Service to train to fight in the newly declared Korean War. Late in his army training, however, he was found to have tuberculosis. He was invalided out of the service and went straight from the army into the TB isolation ward in hospital. He had the then relatively new operation to have one lung removed. After that he spent eighteen months enforced rest in a TB sanitorium. There were two items that were evidence of his time on the TB ward, both of which I rarely saw. Oddly both were connected with sowing. The first was the long scar on his back that ran diagonally with three cross points on it over, where the lung where was removed. I saw the scar only once, and that was by accident. The toilet was at the back of the house and the way to it was through the kitchen. I saw the scar when dad was having a strip wash at the kitchen sink of a Saturday morning to ready himself for meeting his mates in the pub. I wanted to go  to the toilet very badly, and I interrupted his privacy as I went through one door and then another. The second piece of evidence was more sociable but equally rarely seen. It was a cushion cover that I fleetingly saw some time when I was a teenager. Dad embroidered it whilst laid up in the TB hospital bed as something to do. In later years it was something he implied he did not particularly want, but then quietly hide, as if to resist parting with it. After leaving the sanitorium dad started work the same factory as Mother. They might well have seen each other there regularly, but at such a distance that the party was the first time they were able to allow each other a proper introduction.

Mother told me the above, about dad, and there was much more about privation being made to seem natural where that story came from. Dad never spoke to me about his own past. From what dad did say I could never tell what his past meant to him. Given how privation was sown into his life maybe that was natural. But when Mother appointed herself chief storyteller to me it did not matter to her whether the story was privation survived and adapted with, or privation that serious alters the course of her life or dads life before they married. Any story that would make my short legs walk a little faster was worth telling. My role when she told these stories was to be her attentive audience. The story would have a life with me long after the journey the day the story was told. With her telling me her stories she could have quoted Robert Louis Stevenson on travelling hopefully, particularly when we reached certain points in the day's physical journey where that the story was internally consistent took last place because we had to be watchful to complete that day's shopping.

I liked her stories so I did not interrupt her as she told me them. I did not stop her even when I half recognised that she had missed out some detail that was vital for the story to make good sense. Even as I remembered her stories accurately long after she told them, what I remember always had the gaps in it that she created in the telling. Her stories were never meant to be a reliable oral history that I might quote later, like here decades after she had lost interest in the life she was telling me about. 

It was only years after me remembering her telling the stories that I realised how big some of the gaps in her story telling were. By then it was too long after stories were told to check back with Mother and ask her about those gaps. One reason for me writing about her here is to write out what I remember and as an adult to guess where the gaps are and fill in some of the details, so the stories are more rounded out. What I am writing here is true to the times walking with her, but now they are my stories, because I am now the teller. 
The story of her being born is a one story that she always left incomplete. As her family we knew where she grew up, a one pub one shop one church village in the East Midlands. With that we knew all the misery that came from her childhood too. There were many stories about wartime and post-war rationing, and many more stories about being bullied by her older sister and other girls, where they were old enough to lie convincingly to the adults and she was the one they lied about. She did not know how to tell the adults a good lie. 

We also knew that she was born near the south coast of England. None of us ever dared to interrupt her flow as she talked about where she was born to ask her 'If you were born on the South Coast then how did you end up as part of a family who lived in the East Midlands of England?' The clues about her birth came from other stories she told. Her Grandmother, Grandma Clifton, was a bargee and a wise woman, i.e. midwife whose husband seemed non-existent in Mothers stories about her. By both her  professions she strongly related to water. I have no first name for Grandma Clifton. I have never seen a picture of her, but still I can imagine her as a resourceful and singular woman who briefly appeared in the lives of many women, and gave her strength to them as she helped them give birth. And then she left the mothers after the birth. The moment of closeness between them was over. 

It is obvious to me now that my mother was brought into the world by her gran, Grandma Clifton. My Mother's mother was called May Brigden. She married in 1930, and had two children prior to my mother being born, only one of whom survived. May worked in the fields of the farmers who owned the land around the labourers cottage she and her husband lived in to survive. Life was tough, but not so tough as the make May work the fields whilst she was heavily pregnant. The national canal system was extensive enough and active enough in the 1930's that a barge could go by canal from the backwater village May lived in to all the major artery canals in England, and right to the southern coast of England. So May's mother, Bargee Clifton took her daughter to work on the barge for the summer, collecting and delivering goods all the way the way from the East Midlands to the south coast of England. The birth happened on what must have been the near end of their 300 mile journey. May's journey on the barge would have started a few yards from the labourers cottage and for the following month or more would have been a lot of lighter work and a constant change of scenery for the mother-to-be. My mother was probably born on the barge and the birth registered at the nearest registry office, in Hove. The journey surely took at least two months as a round trip, minimum, and possibly a lot longer. 

Materially, life was hard from the time May arrived back in the village with her new daughter onwards. From what Mother used to tell me, her life really only improved when she got a job away from her home village that paid well enough for her to be able to be able to afford herself a night life in the town. If that nightlife was proof of her self-improvement to her, then her being banished from her parents house was the downside of such self improvement. After that her self improvement came slowly, through her going from one dingy bedsit with a dodgy landlord to the next, a better bedsit and more wholesome landlord. Travels with girlfriends to Europe was when she felt she was most herself. Travel was where Mother was most herself, as the details of her birth suggested that might be.

The stories she told of life after leaving her parents home and her meeting dad suggested strong friendships with other single working women. There were also many stories about her competitive drinking with single men, such that the men ended up under the tables at parties whilst in the early hours of the morning she would walk home with her female friends. 

For them being stories about drink there was always an oddly moral tone to them; women who could hold their drink better than men could hold theirs could also make sure that men did not take sexual advantage of the women they drank with, unawares, whilst they were both drunk to differing degrees. When women drank, as they could when single but not when married, they definitely had to protect their virtue and reputation among their friends and male workmates. Whilst drinking men gave every impression of caring little for the reputation of their gender, and they often revelled in images of drunken lawlessness. Men would put women's virtue on a pedestal and gossip about single women who were thought to have had sex outside of marriage, but they would never hold a similar judgement over the male that such a woman had sex with. On the contrary they would privately admire the man for breaking the moral code that limited the male choice of behaviour towards women. 

Just as in old town centres some streets were dominated by shops that did one particular trade so historically the social life of an inland port was always made up of the commercial street nearest the port having more public houses along it than any one person could remember having had a drink in. In these pubs women would always be more the measure of decorum than the men. Drunken men saw the drink as giving them license to behave badly, whereas a misbehaving drunken woman was to be mistrusted for the trouble she might cause. That was the accepted double standard.

What men did away from the company of women remained unexplained. The location was the clue: the pub, the secret bookies, or the dog racing track. The latter was where large amounts of money were placed in bets on greyhounds who chased an object they barely saw, called 'a hare', which the dogs pursued but never caught. Little did the men see themselves as being like the greyhounds which they bet on: caught up in a system that depended on them forever chasing something that most would never catch, with very few among them ever rewarded as winners-and then only for a very short time. 

The period between when mum and dad first met and when they married was two years and eight months. I know nothing about when in that time they got engaged, just as I know nothing about their decisions around marriage. The engagement could well have happened quite late in the two years plus that they first knew each other whilst they were both single. What is clear is that the idea of having being engaged meant focusing on buying a house in which to live when they were married, which meant that the engagement was linked to the deposit for the house. Though I doubt dad took easily to being parted from the drink culture. Mother might have been hesitant about commitment between engagement and marriage too. She might well have bridled rather at being seen in public, and with dad's friends, as 'his new property'.

My father was the youngest in his family. He was one of non-identical male twins, and the last of ten children. His mother died giving birth to the twins. His father died when dad was seven. The girls took over the running of the house after the death of their father in 1940. Mother was the younger of two sisters. I think she liked the ready-made 'sisterhood', of the sisters who were single and remained in the house. As each of them married so the sisterhood dwindled to one sister, the oldest Gladys who lived in the the house for the rest of her life. My father was the last of his brothers and sisters to marry. His twin brother Henry was a milkman, he never married. The story that he would never tell that was told about him was that he got a woman pregnant but he decided to not marry her. He lived on his own and paid maintenance to raise the child he accepted that he had fathered, and occasionally visited them. Henry became a mysterious and modestly presented bachelor. 

As an a youth and a young adult when I got on least well with dad I often wondered what life might be like if dad had done what Henry had, paid what he could for us and kept his physical distance. But that never happened. Instead dad paid for us, paid for the house, and stayed on even when a greater space between us might have given him privacy and made him seem more of a friend to us. I never tried to imagine what being a single mother might have been like, though some of the parents of the children I knew in primary school were single mothers and from what I saw of them life had aged them far faster than married women seemed to age. I never tried to imagine what sort of single mother Mother would have made for me and my sister. That Henry seemed so happy whilst he lived in such a detached way was as much as I wanted to see. 

Dad had five sisters. All of them were older than him. Some of them had already married and had children when mum and dad met. He had four brothers too, Mother had to make a go of getting on with this large and spread out family who had no parents. In the family home where the single brothers and sisters lived together the women were expected to tidy up after the men and themselves, which was how she bonded with them. There was the story for which there was no starting point, where somehow the brothers and sisters stopped putting out their milk bottles out for the milkman to take away. Presumably one brother thought they had told  another brother that the latter should put the milk bottles out the night before, for the milkman to collect. The brother who had been told to put out the milk bottles forgot and did not put them out. Jokingly, the dirty milk bottles got stored in the bath, which they never used, the house was too cold and water heating cost too much. The bath became full of milk bottles. Mother partly got to know her future sisters in-law through them all washing these milk bottles out of a Sunday afternoon, together, and putting enough milk bottles out after each wash that the milkman would not be suspicious that the hoarding had gone on. This sort of caper was the nearest they got to what we would now recognise as student living.
I don't know what happened between mum and dad getting engaged, saving the deposit for a house and choosing a house. Mother was that silent on that subject it was as if the subject did not exist. Perhaps she took no part in the process, so for her it was not a subject. But there must have been a sequence of events, and a fund of stories about how they both went from living singly apart to setting up house together. Looking for a house took time that was already squeezed between their five and half days a week work and their time spent with with friends. I'd like to think that they had friends who donated furniture and helped them physically move into the terraced house they bought. But equally part of me believes that they barely looked at the place that dad arranged a mortgage for before they moved in. I could believe it if more planning went into the wedding than went into the home making that started after. A lot of the home-making decisions they made were made on an ad hoc basis, long after the wedding. Like nearly every working class woman in that era Mother gave up her paid job prior to marrying. I can imagine her reluctance to leave paid work as the date for her being out of work, and becoming a housewife, loomed. Not even the bloom of being in love with dad would have stopped her recognising the social leverage she was losing as a single person and the lack of social leverage in the marriage  that she was going to step into. 

Mum and dad married in the local Parish Church on Friday 26th of August, 1960. Their honeymoon was modest; a stay in a small hotel in York, sixty miles away, for the length of the bank holiday weekend. They were seen off by the wedding party at the local railway station and got a train to York. They returned the following Monday in time to start married life in the house dad had bought and in good time for him to return to work the following day. They were now occupants of the house that I lived in the longest for the first twenty years of my life. I am sure that they did not lay down any plans for the future beyond Mother now being a housewife after leaving her job. One of her managers in work who personally dealt with her handing her notice in was one of the many men who she had drunk under the table and walked away from, with her female friends, into the night air just a few years earlier.

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I appeared 11 months after they married. The earliest image of the parental house that I remember was of the living room being half empty/half full with scrappy post-war/post-rationing furniture which was good in one respect; it was light and easy to move back when the room had to double up as a nursery or become a nappy drying space. Cloth nappies were the order of the day, and they had to be washed often, and then dried over a large fire guard around a coal fire. Heat was for drying clothes and nappies more than it was for keeping a draughty house warm, I remember the condensation on the unopened living room window on wash day. In the period of these memories there was no television; there was not the money for one. There was a radiogramme with a few 78rpm discs which I have no recollection of ever hearing. It was from dad's family house and he got the last of the working use out of it before it stopped working after which it was just a piece of furniture.

There might have been children who were my age locally, but if they did exist then Mother did not know their mothers so I never met them. If my arrival in the house trapped Mother into motherhood, then she returned the favour to me by having me mostly play on my own in the living room with the toys dad bought. She had a distant friendship with Olive, her next door neighbour. She and Arnold her milkman husband would in time adopt a child called Dale. When he appeared I was about five and he was two years older than me. He had been put up for adoption because he had been born with a cleft palate. It had been operated on. But the skin between his upper lip and nose showed why plastic surgery was so called; the skin looked plastic. We were both shy when we were stood and left to learn how to talk to each other. We did not know what to say. My years of playing alone, or later being lumped in with my sister, did their job, I became naturally uncomfortable and quiet around older children, particularly my older cousins. I preferred to play on my own. My oldest friend, Graham, who is three years older than me who is still a friend, told me recently that he first saw me with Dale. The two of them were getting on well and I was the gooseberry around them, for my being too young to know how to join in. 
Dad worked a five and half day week. His presence was felt most when he ate his dinner with us, at midday, dressed in his boiler suit. Mother put a cloth on the cushion of his armchair to stop dirt or oil from his overalls spreading where it shouldn't. The protective cloth remained on the cushion long after he stopped came home for lunch in his dinner in dirty work overalls. I remember him as not even being an absence when I was very young. He was more like how I might have imagined a lodger to be; a fleeting presence who was always going somewhere and mostly seen when he coming in or going out. I'd see him still for longest when he was still and looking in the small mirror in the kitchen as he applied Brylcreem to his slightly thinning hair. This was the last preparation he made before he went to the pub.

Like all men of his time he believed that child-rearing was like housework; an untidy business from which men should detach themselves as much as possible, the better to leave it to women because they were good at it. His life consisted of work, visiting his sisters most Sundays, and, like so many other fathers being in the pub all night every night. Even when he was physically present at home there was this unnamed but understood pub-shaped aura around him that his family could not penetrate with words, and said nothing about. But this aura could penetrate and dilute the aura of the family as we were without him. The older I got the more acutely I felt this pub-shaped protection around him. The more I felt it, the more uncomfortable I felt around him. His idea of being a father seemed to be about him being detached beyond the point any preparedness to engage. I found that he had no imagination and no child-like will to pretend. This blank detachment forced us to pretend about him to live alongside him and to keep our playfulness, and most of the rest of us, to ourselves.
My sister was born four years after me. I was told that I had been easy to carry to term and that I appeared on schedule. I was a blonde until I was nearly six. I was slow, and slightly nervous. But I was an apparently calm child. Mother was so calm carrying me that she was playing bowls with her family and her friends the day before I was born. I never asked her if she won that game of bowls, though I should have. Though in one story about me Mother told I was less easy to carry. Mother lost all her teeth whilst carrying me. Apparently they fell out several at a time. To this day Mother would think it humorous, and gentle teasing, to repeat in front of me and guests she needed to entertain the story of my role in her losing her teeth, I 'took all her vitamins'. As I saw it much, much, later before she carried me she did not eat well and when carrying me she did not get the right support or diet to keep her teeth. If Mother had been less 'at ease' during the pregnancy she might have thought more about what to eat and how to keep her teeth intact. I'd say now she had a gum disease called gingivitis, and dentists were hard to find and ill-informed. The NHS had been around for only thirteen at the time. With my sister Mother suffered much worse than losing her teeth, bad as that was at the time. 

My sister burst into the world after a tough ten month pregnancy. When she arrived she proved very hard to settle for reasons that were unclear. There were now four of us at the dinner table. I now got put in the tightest corner, on the piano seat that held the sowing kit. Dad remained physically-present-but-mentally-absent. He had wanted a girl first, he got a girl second. He chose my sisters first name, after one of his sisters and Mother chose her middle name after one of her close friends from her single life. Mother chose my first name; I was name after a boy that her parents adopted under the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society adoption scheme. My middle name came from one of Dad's brothers.

My sister howled most of her waking hours from the time she was born until she was more than a year old, seemingly solidly. It was a misery for all of us in the confined space of the two up two down terraced house in which we lived. It was an embarrassment out on market days too. Gran used to come to the mid week market to shop and see Mother, Mother would shop on the market to and it was easy with me. I am sure I felt spoilt by the company and was eager to please. But when Mother had to take my sister and I to the market to shop and meet Gran then my sister cried, loudly and seemingly unstoppably. The look on Gran's face said 'Don't you know how to quieten that child?', and the look on strangers faces said something worse that I did not know how to read. Mother did not know where to look, are how much her look suggested exhaustion and helplessness. And it was true, she was tired when she was meant to be ever more resourceful to make the money stretch. She had run out of energy and did not know where to turn. 

Eventually the doctor took blood tests on my sister and a diagnosis came. My sister's crying was caused by a painful rash on her backside that was in turn caused by her thyroid gland not processing sugar. When she ate anything with sugar in it, even the natural sugar in fresh fruit, her body would not process it. the rash was was unprocessed sugar. The doctor gave Mother a diet plan for my sister where what direct sweetness she was allowed had to be through powdered glucose, which her body would process. The more the new diet was adopted the quieter she became. After that we knew when she had eaten sugar, which she still liked, because she was always in pain afterwards. From the experiences we endured on the market I remember my wanting to loan my sister to the local police force or fire station as a siren. She would have been good at it.
According to the adults around me, a quiet child was a good child. For being quiet I was good. But 'good' quickly came to mean passive. There was something wrong with how that world worked and I could not give what was wrong a clear description. When the highest praise went to least enquiring, then for them being so quiet, they had no way of receiving the praise. So there became little point in the concept of praise in the first place. This was my introduction into a circular and quite trapping logic. If I could put the right words to it, I could get out of it. But not having the right words was what put me in the trap. For being noisy from birth for physical health reasons my sister never went near the trap I was caught in. People always knew she was there, and for being female she was easily liked. This imbalance of gender expectation would multiply and have consequences that rippled out and out, and out again, well beyond the parental house.

Our other next door neighbour was a middle aged widower called Stan whose wife had been German and she had died in 1955. They never had children and he was changed by being a widower. He talked a lot within earshot of many more people than he directly addressed, whilst showing no sign of being aware of it. He did not think he was holding court with his opinions, but he was a lonely man. For decades Stan used to swap red top newspapers with us every evening and make the swap a chance to come round and talk to dad for five minutes. If I looked like I was listening because I was in the living room whilst Stan talked to dad then he would always say to me "You are earwigging! you should not be listening to me,". But who would point out to Stan that if his conversation was only for dads ears then he'd better sort that out with dad so nobody else there? Dad  wouldn't. In later years dad often appeared to be glued to his armchair, whilst Stan stood next to the chair as talked at him. Dad would not get up, but would get us to change the television channel or turn the volume down in deference to Stan. But dad would get up to prepare to go to the pub. Neighbourliness and family consisted of such petty daily repeated conflicts, in among the bigger favours done for Stan by Mother. his weekly shopping and getting his laundry done with the family laundry for a small weekly fee. Once Mother started to take pity on him as a shy widower there was no way she could withdraw from doing his shopping and laundry for the rest of his life.
I did not want to be quiet, but I equally I did not how to speak so as to audibly hear my parents listen. If I wanted to speak to my parents then I had to sound something like an adult, even though I was very far from being grown up. Most times I tried to talk like an adult I could not do it. I would have ideas that would muddle themselves up, my words would trip up over each other, and when I did speak well then they would say that I sounded like a dictionary. The were partly right about the dictionary argument, I can imagine my mimicking BBC news presenters from having heard them. What I did not know about my parents ideas about adult speech was that adults knew what to leave out as if the absence of something suggested what was missing, and the speech still sounded fluent. I was too young to do my implication tables.

Part of my difficulties with speech came directly from Mother. In the house she was the master of the malapropism with her fearlessly mistaken speech. She would unwittingly entertain us with her contorted explanations for this or that situation, say gossip about a member of the family, in which some vital element was missing in her explanation. Those who knew her best covered for her. They regularly assumed what she meant to say to save themselves time better than I could. To explain to her the difference between what she said and what she might have meant would have embarrassed her and made the explainer seem condescending, souring future relations. And anyway most explanations of what mother meant vs what she said would have taken too long and would have been too difficult to make then memorable to Mother. If they did not do that for her they did less for those doing the explaining.
Where Mother was often most mistaken was when she thought she saw jealousy. She believed that if she treated my infant sister and I strictly equally, regardless of age, then I should not be jealous. And I was not, but I was different to my sister. Granted, Mother knew what strictness was she had been brought up as a High Anglican Christian. Whilst living with her parents she attended church three times every Sunday until she left home, under pressure, at the age of 19. Mother's ideas about fair parenting and discouraging jealousy were apparently based on the Biblical story of King Solomon. The original story can be found in The Old Testament 1Kings Ch 3 verses 16-28. Mother never ever read the original story to me. I doubt she knew where it was in The Bible and I looked it up for the purpose of this memoir. She misremembered the story as she bowdlerised it to me and my sister playing too noisily for Mother's liking in the living room, as she ironed or did some other domestic chore. 

It is easy to see why she did not tell us the original story too. The actual story is about two prostitutes who share a house where each bears a child at nearly the same time, one child dies in suspicious but not criminal circumstances and Solomon has to decide which prostitute the remaining child belongs to. This he does with the threat of a sword, offering them half a child each. The mother most prepared to disown the child and let it live with the other prostitute clearly has the greater maternal feeling. That mother was the one offered the child. The threat of the sword also proved that other mother was actually grieving for the loss of her child by wanting the child of the other prostitute. Not that grief was mentioned anywhere in Mother's world.
Terraced houses are very small. From the moment the family is started they will make every room is multi-purpose, often simultaneously. There would be no room in a terraced house big enough to have a heartfelt and highly vocal disagreement with anyone if those disagreeing cared about the neighbours. When children play they like to make noise, and they are at their most free making playful noises in the open air, or in large rooms. My sister and I were the same. In Mother's version of The Wisdom Of Solomon there was a busy and wise ruler/mother of two children who were being noisy in a confined space when she needed quiet to concentrate on her work. So the child who was most vocal about apparently being most possessive would be cured of their jealousy by being quieter and wanting less. My sister and I had to submit to what the space expected of us, and it wanted quiet so the wise ruler could get on with her work, and be relieved of direct parenting values whilst serving the adults and the household around her. My sister's age and the fight in her always made her the winner of any argument. 

If a quiet selflessness was the best rule for surviving the parental house, then school was a place where being vocal and outgoing was vital. I adapted badly in this new environment. The fear of punishment for speaking out came to haunt me and get me bullied in school. If children were roughly equal and obedient in the classroom, then the time in the playground was when children formed their own hierarchies. In the playground I withdrew, or stood as near as the teacher on watch as I could without being seen to want to be 'teachers pet' I was just not very masculine according to the model of masculinity required for the playground and sports field. Thankfully healthier and more open models of masculinity have appeared to me since. 
As my sister and I grew, so she exerted a pressure for the re-ordering of the parental house. Rooms were re-purposed through decoration. Mother treated me as older than I was, and though this I lost most of the toys that I had, and the space I had to play with them in. They were boxed up in boxes that took up quite a large amount of space to be kept for future non-existent children. My role in the house as the first child shrank. I remained caught between home and school; at home I had to put my sister first more often. In school I was meant to put myself first to keep my personal space, though I did not know how to. The adults inferred that I 'should be more responsible', though what I should be responsible for and how to be responsible, when the adults had taken over all the shared space in the parental house eluded me.  

Find Chapter 2 here

Find the introduction and chapter guide here.

Chapter Two - You Will Be Glued To Our Sets Not Stuck With Them.

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 Chapter 3 here 

Find the introduction and chapter guide here