Chapter Eight - Swings And Roundabouts.

In traditional small towns, churches are the tallest buildings and the communal life fans out from around the town's biggest church. Where we lived was different. Where dad worked was bigger than a medium sized aircraft hanger, and higher than every other building in the town. The factory was taller than a four storey house. It was one of the biggest covered factory spaces in the region, possibly the biggest in England, and possibly the biggest in the world before the build up to World War Two. It was built before World War One and the hubris that had inspired it's height and the space it covered evaporated with the recession that came soon after that war. The house I lived in as part of a family was built by the same factory owner, Henry Marshall, circa 1901. The inhuman scale of the cathedral to industry vs the cell to rest in outside of work was self evident. The brick work of the factory was mottled with decades of soot, the glass in all the many very tall thin windows seemed opaque because of the dust from the work that went on inside.

Dad's job title was 'plater's mate'. The plating he worked with was thick metal plate which was welded to other, similar, metal, plate, all for making giant boilers for heating systems for factories and large buildings around the world. The plater was the one to weld ready curved plates of steel plate together with rivets. Being the plater's mate was semi-skilled, it meant working around the plater, giving him tools and moving the materials to be joined.

Over-sized furniture apart, the first time we realised the house had one too many people in it was when Dad accepted the offer of similar work away by his factory. Dad was sent from the East Midlands of England to the southern tip of Ireland for maybe ten weeks at a time, three or four times a year for two or three years. It ended up being the work equivalent of a term at time, as if he were at some sort of working equivalent of school schedule.

The first time he was sent it seemed novel. Mother packed for dad and included a small iron for ironing his clothes in his suitcase. It had a medium length two core lead and plug that fitted into a light fitting at the other end. Mother had kept this iron from her bedsit days. She now believed that in the lodgings he was going to be put there might well not be a regular mains wall socket for him to use. But he could still iron his clothes by taking the bulb out of the light and using the light socket to power the iron. He was meant to wash his clothes by hand, get them nearly dry naturally and finish off the drying by setting up a table with a blanket or sheet on underneath the light placing the table to get as much natural light as possible then plug the iron in the ceiling light to set the process off. I remember speculating at the time that, assuming the lead would actually stretch, any ironing would require strong natural daylight. This must have limited the use of the iron somewhat. How likely was dad to try all that? He might, but it is more likely that he would rather pay his landlady a modest sum to do his laundry and go to the pub for a Guinness instead. 

And what was Dad was doing working in a country that was known to the English for being a remittance economy? A country that had for decades sent it's citizens abroad to earn money to send back to the home country? Was our part of the East Midlands that poor that it had newly become a remittance economy that was hollowing another remittance economy? Harold Wilson had already to told everyone how 'The pound in your pocket....   ....has not been devalued'. Something had clearly been devalued, and if it was not money that was getting cheaper and less useful for other people then maybe it was life. 

When dad went away my sister was the one to openly miss him the most. She was always 'daddies girl'. He had spoiled her, he had tried to spoil both of us but his spoiling had taken better with her than me. Mother could not shrink the new furniture, but with dad not about she folded down what she could to reduce it, thereby creating more of the old open space we liked. Without dad about Mother seemed more confident, and lighter in spirit. Where possible routines became more flexible. We felt more at ease, mother's jokes were less conry and cliched and our laughter felt more inclusive. She made the time to level with me and my sister, literally, by playing with us at floor level. Non-competitive games like marbles, which I'd like to imagine echoed in miniature the bowls she used to enjoy when single. Was this the real mother, in the playfulness and the newer jokes? The television stayed on for children's broadcasting. BBC shows like 'Vision On', the show for the deaf with sign language were a treat for me, they were my first exposure to art that was not like school lessons, over-timed and poorly managed. On the show They set a high standard for quietly and slowly engaging with the viewer. Blue Peter was okay too, and 'The Magic Roundabout' rounded off children's viewing every day. One time I made something that Blue Peter showed us how to make. Our viewing of children's television usually followed tea, which as I remember it now often come out of a tin, as in baked beans on toast, from a white pan loaf. If  we were far from rich then we were happier together. There was never any real undoing of old decisions and mistakes but there was a new better sense of space between them.

We even had days out together. Mother was often wary of visiting her parents, and restricted her times in their house to when they clearly needed her help. One of the times Dad was away coincided with a school holiday. Mother got my sister and I on an early bus to Gran and Grandad's. Gran kept my sister and I amused and made lunch and dinner whilst Mother and Grandad emptied the living room of furniture and redecorated it over the length of one day. They worked hard and had to keep going well after the last bus left the village in the early evening to reassemble the room as it was before they started. After that a light evening meal appeared at very short notice. 

It was dark and pouring with rain by the time Mother, my sister and I left their house. The last bus was long gone. But rather than stay the night as might have seemed more trusting, Mother took us to the bus stop outside the village, a good twenty minute walk.  She stuck her thumb out for a lift. One of her old friends in the village recognised her and stopped his car. We all trooped in the back and got a lift to the front door of the parental house. Aged in single figures, that would have been the first time I ever got a lift. It would be far from the last.

Who knows how courageously Mother lived when she was single? I didn't. I couldn't know. Her now being Mother restricted her ever thinking back over the risks she took as a single person, in a life where she had to take chances. The limited adventure we all had that day was a glimpse into the what-might-have-been for me, when we were not tied to dad who gave himself the right to wander off where he may but made us tightly dependent on him. Mother did hitch lifts when she was single, but equally when she was young there were fewer people with cars and life seemed safer. The area had many RAF bases around it, many of them set up in the 1930's. The decisions of cars drivers to give lifts mirrored the local politics. It was seen as 'patriotic' by some drivers to give lifts to men in uniform, and libertarian by other drivers to give lifts to people who did not wear uniforms too. In a culture where most people walked because it was practical and thrifty to do so there were relatively few car drivers and quite a few who tried to hitch, and further used bus stops as hitching points.  

When I was eight years old I didn't know how I was going to 'be a man'. Previously the nearest I'd got to picturing what being a man meant was my fantasy of being a steam engine driver from when we all went to seaside not that long before. All I could tell now was that being a man was not going to happen through attending Sunday School. That option was firmly closed off for me after the horrible Sunday morning that Mother had with me when I expressed my doubts with her, and she shouted them, and seemingly me, into an oblivion from which they could not return. Nor was it going to come through gardening, I did not know enough about it and I was never going to to be able to learn with Mother.

The example my dad set was impossible to follow. Either he was invisible for being immured behind local factory/pub walls or of a Sunday, his only full day off, he was in his brothers and sisters houses. If he went anywhere else we did not, could not, know about it. When he was sent far away to Ireland Mother waited on letters from him  and collected his pay packet from the works office to keep the house running. I have no recollection of Mother talking about him, or of us maybe reading postcards he'd send to us in his absence. It would be nice to imagine that there were many such small positive and personal gestures, but if they were actually received then none of them were remained in my memory.

When he was around the town then his shared public life was not just mostly invisible but it also seemed highly mechanised. Partitioning certain friendships and relations from each other was sort of normal  for him. He divided who he knew and how he acknowledged them by the capacity in which he knew them. Mother could real off long lists of names of relatives we had in his family, but if he knew these people then he kept his knowledge of them to himself. The sense I had of dad was that he seemed to be something of a rogue who would automatically tell lies and throw out verbal smoke screens, because any and all truth might cost him a future freedom of choice that he would regret losing after he lost it, and he had to make sure of his freedom.

I only ever saw dad get mad in his own house, and I can see now why it happened, one of the compartments that he use to control other people with had broken down and a little about how he compartmentalised different people had reached us and we had broached the subject with him little realising that our doing that was us breaking out of the compartment he had put us in. he was the last to recognise that in compartmentalising others he had falsely divided himself into what he gave to different people without acknowledging what he gave to to other people. What we learned sounded like ugly gossip by the time Mother learnt it. He thought it safer to be a huge disappointment to us then be honest about how he divided what he knew by who he knew it with, individually. 

My performance in class in Primary school alternated between hopeful and inattentive. When dad was away and the television stayed off more in the parental house then I perked up, when he returned my spirits sank again as he made the house run how he felt it should and kept the television on as long as there was something to watch, the better to screen us out of his attention span. Whether dad was in Ireland or not I had to endure going around the town with Mother. The going round town with her was not the problem. The difficulty was the being seen by some of the older, more aggressive and cruel, boys in school to be rather passively attached to Mother who they saw as eccentric and controlling when they saw us all together in public, as if somehow they saw the germ of weak single parenting at work in how we seemed. 

I never had answers to their taunts. Their talk implied that their dads were around and would back them doing what they wanted. My dad was not around. They talked as if my mother wouldn't let me do as I wanted which was true, and dad rarely mentally present which was no help. What they implied about their own families was probably inaccurate and what they said about me and my family was intuitively half right in ways that they did not actually know. Both my parents could and would pull me into their side, and their point of view when it suited either of them. I was uncomfortable about how much the school boys were half-right. Logically I should have felt mildly relieved at how wrong they were and how much cover that gave me, but even betraying mild relief was too much. What if, as bullies, they correctly guessed the tension of the emotional tug-of-war between my parents with me and my sister as the rope? I would have been ashamed and never have heard the last of it.

That Mother seemed tense and humourless compared with how I saw other boy's mothers being added to the effect of being caught between several several unstable worlds, like one of Dr Who's assistants. Mother was parenting for two whether Dad was present or absent. When he returned from Ireland he often seemed more interested in seeing his brothers and sisters than staying around us, before preparing for leaving again for Ireland again.

I have already recalled and written about the school boy taunts I endured and will not repeat them here. Suffice to say they had the same effect on me as the taunt in the parental house 'If you stick that lip out for long enough somebody will sit on it'. Whoever the teaser and whatever the taunt, my lack of comeback comment and amplified misunderstanding of the taunts made how much and how easily I felt hurt much worse. They ultimately became the background material for what became a full blown nervous breakdown, at aged ten.

Find Chapter 9 here 

Find the introduction and chapter guide here.