Chapter Three - Do It Yourselves.

I never knew my grandparents on my father's side. Both his parents were dead before he was old enough to know them. I knew two facts about them; when they both died. His mother died giving birth to him and his twin brother who was older than dad by a few minutes. His sisters partly ran the house after she died. His dad died when he was seven. After that death his oldest brothers and sister took over the running of the house. Mother told me about the deaths, the rest I derived from guesswork and her friendship whilst she was single with the sisters. The oldest sister was born in the early 1920s, and with a school leaving/starting work age of fourteen probably half the family were  working by the time dad died. 

For me to see dad at ease with his sisters was impossible; he went to see them on his own on Sundays. To see dad with his brothers was possible, but only if I went to the pub with dad. That was something that I did not want to do. The nearest that I got to seeing him at ease with his family was seeing dad dressed smartly for when he went to see his family, whether in the pub or in their houses. 

I dimly took in how happy he looked preparing to go and see them compared with how he was the rest of the time in the parental house. From his appearance he seemed to dislike the house he had bought that we lived in. The exception to the above was seeing his family at weddings. That was when Mother, sister, and I went as guests with dad to the service and the  reception of whichever of his nieces and nephews on his side of the were getting married next. There there was a clique-ish quality to the collected body language of his family at the receptions that said to me 'Your dad is ours, not yours. We don't know what you are doing here.'. With cliques nobody knows how they start, they only know when they feel excluded. And then the excluded person notices the clique more than the people inside it.

But I saw Mother's mother most of the times she visited the town, particularly during school holidays. It was natural for her and Mother to meet at the midweek market and walk together buy what they needed and walk bac to the parental house together. The bus stop for Gran's bus was five mins walk from the parental house. In one way I liked eating dinner in the parental house rather than having school meals; it meant that I saw Gran more often, though I had to leave them earlier than I wished to return to school. Gran lived in a village ten miles from the town, the village where Mother had grown up. Who visited who would vary. Gran visited the town most often the town was what drew her in, Mother rarely visited the village because the person from the village she most wanted to see came to her. In spite of Mother's fear of debt I would be sent to stay with Gran and Grandad for seven to ten days in the summer and I unashamedly enjoyed being with them.

The structure of paid work in the 1960's was so rigid compared with what we have now that it has to be explained to be appreciated. The government set the school leaving age at fifteen in 1964. Compulsory military service for young men aged 16-18 had only just ended in 1962. Single women worked whether they like it or not, and whether they liked or disliked earning much less for the equivalent in work than single men. Most married women were banned by their husbands from doing paid work. Those married women who were permitted to work had to accept their earnings being called 'pin money', money for spending on small luxuries around their appearance, luxuries which were meant to flatter men. Staying at home and feeling ignored was the fate of most married women. Often their former employers destroyed their employment records when they married because the record seemed to be pointless to keep when the women had become the property of their husband, even though these contributions would matter for the women's future pension pot and rights. This happened to my mother.

The only income women could easily receive outside of work was 'Family Allowance'. This was a benefit set up in 1949 that was directly to mothers. It was the first benefit given to married women who mothers in their own right. It was given to who mothers who had two or more children to pay for their clothes. To have one child was not enough. Mother did not get it for me when I was born, but she got it for both me and sister when my sister was born. But also the year my sister was born the rules changed to make the allowance available for mothers of just one child. Mother exuded a sense of 'feeling cheated' when she first got family allowance. That the rule changed when she would have got the benefit under the old rules was a coincidence, thousands of families in the country might be in the same situation. But to anyone, like Mother, who found virtue in thrift the rule change made their former financial forbearance seem pointless.

'Full employment' meant full male employment. Apprenticeships in skilled trades were common but by no means available to all men. Having a skill meant having more leverage with your employer, usually via the union. Having a skill did not mean increased social mobility or wealth sufficient to move to a bigger house.  Not being credited with a skill meant being more more tied to your employer than skilled workers were, and for less remuneration. The social mobility was limited whether skilled or unskilled. The unions were strong in most big factories but whatever good the unions did via improving pay, had to be weighed against how increased the machismo of their members more than any individual male would dare admit. When skilled men were tied to a place by their employment and they did not like living there, then the pubs consumed the surplus wealth that was not spent on the household budget and it was common for wives to never know how much their husbands earned, but only know how much he thought the house should cost to run. If the drink made them happy for the length of the time they drank, then life outside the pub was never going to make them happy, but the happiness they got in the pub was meant to make the rest of life more tolerable.

Bank holidays were days when everybody had the day off work. In the town paid holidays were set by the factories for every man for the first half of July, when the factory closed for a fortnight, and a week at Christmas/new year. Most men were still sufficiently poor that the nearest there was to a family holiday was a day out one Sunday in July to the nearest seaside resort. I remember the first day out that our family went with all the other families of men from the same factory, we went by train to the seaside. Seeing the train was the best part of it for me. I liked the faded luxury of the old slightly boxy carriages. There was something sharp that woke me up in the smoke from the steam train that left me excited for weeks afterwards. The year after the journey was by coach, as was every journey afterwards. I had my last coastal day out with the family when I was eighteen. The booking of seats on the many coaches was arranged by one of the chains of drinking clubs named after political parties where men organised themselves, socially. Dads social club was The Liberal Club. These clubs had started in Victorian times, they were benevolent clubs with links to the part in the name. The political link was long perished. The organising of the one day out a year for the whole family was the height of their benevolence.

 When they organised then was the annual day trip was for all the family the fathers would try to sit together, apart from their families on the coach. The coach would par in coach park some distance from the busy part of the seaside town. When the families disembarked from the coach they would be told when to be back by and how to recognise the coach. The day would be a social tug of war between the fathers pulling each other towards the pub, leaving the mothers to try to keep the sand out of the sandwiches and children entertained safely and cheaply on the beach, whilst trying to keep the older children from wanting to go to fairground attractions which might cost money that had not been budgeted for. 

Outside of this sometimes grizzly ritual the main purpose of the fortnight for married working men was to prepare their houses for the next year, to better adapt their houses for their growing families. Dad was no different to any other working man in this respect.

Between spring and summer 1968 the living room in the parental house was slowly cleared of everything that made it look like a nursery. My bedroom became more bunged than usual. Some weekends I was left to play in the attic in the natural spring light on my own with the toys that had been moved there. I was okay as long as I left the the room as tidy as it was before I started. As July and the end of school approached Mother said that I was going to stay with my Grandparents for ten days. 

What my parents didn't say was that they wanted me out of the way so they could decorate, which was one of the few activities in which they behaved co-equally and trusted each other most. I have said Mother was strong. She and dad moved heavy furniture together. In the wallpapering Mother pasted, he put the wallpaper on. She gave him the cloth for easing bubbles out of the wallpaper and sealing the edges. For that rare time in their marriage they were a team because they were lining their nest for the next year. As long as he chose the wallpaper, he was in charge on the day, and she was okay about him being in charge, then they were both okay.

Aged seven, my pocket money was three old pence a week, I was given the right bus fare and given some money slightly above my usual rate of weekly pocket money to spend at Gran and Grandad's, and sent to the nearby bus stop in my best grey short trousers. I was expected to ask for, and catch, the right bus by the time on the wind up clock on the mantle piece in the house. I never saw a bus schedule, there was not one at the stop, and I did not have a watch to know what the time was. I had less chance of going wrong than you might think-the bus driver would have known Gran, who would have talked to him to make sure he saw me. There were very few places other than the village I was going to where I could get off. I was actually quite good at memorising messages to repeat, requests for buses or what ask for when buying dad his 'Old Holborn' tobacco from the nearby sweet shop where I was treated as older than my age. Fifteen or older was the minimum age for selling tobacco to anyone. I was still six, going on seven. Gran met me at the bus stop at the other end.

I enjoyed my time at my grandparents on that first visit. I did not know what to do most of the time. At first I just sat in my child's size chair outside and did nothing. I could not think of what to do. Phrases like 'chilling out' did not exist then, but such a phrase would describe my inactivity well. With me being so disengaged Gran became concerned, and started to pay me an attention that it seemed nobody except Doctor Ward had before, and then the access was brief. Mother made sure of that. Gran sat besides me, asked me questions and listened and talked with me more than I expected. She found things for me to do, both with her and by myself. One of my favourite memories is of  being sat with her in the house as we shelled the garden peas that Grandad had grown whilst she said nothing. There was a stillness to that time, and a contentedness about her which both calmed me and lifted me up. The fact that I was sat underneath an attempted portrait photograph on me with my two older cousins posed with each other where fill in flash had been used for the picture, and as the flash went off I'd wet myself with the shock of it and the photographer had captured the wet patches on my short trousers was neither here nor there.

Gran was a strong church goer. Because she went Grandad and I went too. He said his prayers and the liturgy and sang the hymns but he refused to take communion. Grandma took communion and took me to the altar with her for a blessing. The church was small and full to the brim. The service was very high Anglican. There was lots of sitting down, standing up and different responses at different moments. Anyone trying to follow the service from The Book of Common Prayer needed guidance from those more experienced in it's use to keep them sure of which page in which book they should be using. The grandeur of it at all surely went straight over my head given my age. Outside of Sunday School the most active part I could play was be the one to put Grandmas envelope in the collection plate.

I went to the village pub with Grandad when he joined his friends in The Grand Order of Buffaloes on Sunday evenings. The Buffs was lower class version of The Freemasons. Where the Freemasons was supported by/infiltrated the professional classes, police, lawyers, judges and councillors etc The Buffs was much more for the working man. Country pubs seemed to be safer and more friendly than town pubs were, if the character of my dad was anything to go by compared with where Grandad took me. 

The village had one general store, one eighteenth century Church of England church, one closed Methodist chapel, a closed primary school attached to the chapel, two pubs, a village hall where mid week whist drives were held, and a bowling green. That bowling green was the one that Mother had been playing on the day before I was born. She would have been playing against her friends in the village, including her dad. The bowling green was next to the village store where there was a public telephone. I liked the sense of calm seclusion about the village.

The river bank ran the length of the village and beyond. The river was linked to a canal with gates on it. This formally marked one end of the village. Beyond that there was a marina with expensive looking boats in it which seemed rather separate and exclusive. It was possible to walk the length of the river bank to the town, where my parents were. Though it was a slow and solitary journey enlivened only by the sight of the occasional barge.     

The village was one narrow road with houses both sides. Anyone looking to cross the road would have heard traffic long before they saw it moving slowly, because of the narrowness of the road. That was partly why it was safe for me to cross the road on my own there. Behind the houses across the road from my grandparents house was the river bank where I went for short walks. I liked the series of narrow lanes between the houses which were a primitive drainage system for when the river bust its banks.

One of the best people to visit was a very old lady called Miss Hollinsworth. She lived in an eighteenth century three storey house that she had come to own because she was a former domestic servant there. As the longest serving servant to the old master of the house she was his sole inheritor of the building when he died. She kept chickens behind wire outside. She was as deaf as a post and had long grey hair which she kept bundled in a loose large bun. She lived in the kitchen where she always seemed to be in her rocking chair and kept everything she needed there. The house was big, three floors and an attic. There were at least four large rooms on each floor and a broad staircase connecting the rooms. All the rooms were half furnished and very dusty. In the top rooms the ceilings were loose. There were light sockets in most of the ceilings, but there were no bulbs in many of the light fittings. When I went across, on my own or later with my cousins who were down for the day we played hide and seek in the house, look around upstairs and when we found some small thing we liked in an old draw then we asked to keep it. Miss Hollinsworth said 'Yes' because Gran was close to her as a neighbour.

In later summers I would visit my grandparents with my younger sister. I had to stop the right bus and state our destination. I did did not always get the right bus. Somehow for having responsibility for my sister, or my concentration lapsing with the heat, I realised when we were on the bus that we would be left off well short of where we were going. By the time I realised it I knew that we could not change buses. We got let off two miles from the village and  had to walk in the hot sun. She was six and grew tired. I was ten and gave her a piggyback for part of the journey which made me a lot more hot and tired, but got us there faster. We got there intact. I explained why we were late. I half expected words of rebuke. There were none. Instead there was the offer of glasses of orange squash to put us at our ease.

With the redecoration every July fortnight I was sent to stay with my Grandparents every summer for the next four years. I liked their house. It was two workers cottages turned into one, between two farmhouses. It had a small front garden with neatly bordered lawn to the right, looking out of the house, roses to the left. From the variety of them Grandad must have looked after a lot of roses as a landscape gardener. The toilet was as far from the main part of the house as it was possible for it to be, at the end of the porch. Downstairs there was a tiny 'galley' kitchen, a living room with a working range, a cold and very posh reception room which was never used and a bathroom with a rarely used gas boiler. That was where the soap monster lived. That was a ball of all the scraps of soap that my grandparents had been taught to save since rationing was at its worst, twenty years earlier. Gran had never quite allowed herself to trust in plenty when relative plenty came, with her pension. Gran was 5 foot tall quite thin and the doorways were quite short. She did not have to duck, but every other adult had to bend their head going through the doors. Finally the L shaped pantry that wound itself underneath the very narrow stairs above was a period feature in itself. They did not have a fridge but had a small food safe for cold cooked meats etc. Milk was kept cool by sitting it in a clay base with water in it and a clay cover kept over the base.

Upstairs, the three bedrooms were small but homely. As with many a home my grandparents had more stuff than they could store neatly. They disbelieved in waste and yet they did not know who to give things to where they would be appreciated. But as messiness went it seemed charming and ordered. One of the highlights of that first year was reading an old copy of 'Peter Pan' at bedtime. We did not read books at home. In later years I would find a child sized bike in the outhouses of one of the farms and learn to ride it in the farm yard. The only bike at home was my Dads and too big for me to learn on. When I learned to ride a bike I had not just outgrown my scooter, but with my weight I had broken the axle of the wheels. I had not 'had wheels' for several years.

The end of that first ten days visit came, and I came back to the town on the bus with Gran since she had to buy food. Any sense of rest I had gained soon disappeared as I saw the changes to the house. The living room had new wallpaper on it, in a very large dark pattern. There was new furniture. My new bedroom was now in the attic and my sister had got what used to be my bedroom, the biggest room in the house. To get to my room I now took what seemed to be a long walk where there was no light until I reached the very end where there was a bedside lamp. It looked sort-of-okay at first. There was a small book case full of books with a blue curtain over it, the curtain matched the home made single bed cover that Mother had made. The single bed was was a metal hospital bed with long legs painted yellow, a gift from Mother's older sister, Alice. There was already food stored underneath it, different flavours of home made jams and bottles of Mothers traditional medicine against colds, blackberry vinegar. Below the book case there was the child's desk and chair recycled from the days when when I was much smaller and the living room was definitively a nursery. It would have been churlish but factual of me to tell my parent that the desk too small for me to sit at without trapping my knees and that it contained nothing useful to me now anyway. Saying anything would have been missing the obvious, that the desk 'was mine' and now it was meant for show only. It was put there to stop the room looking too bare and impersonal. 

There was room to get all round the bed and a large adult height curtain in pale blue and white that ran the length of one of the two sloping ceiling walls. Behind it to depth of three feet were all the things Mother wanted to keep for the house that she had to hide from dad. Two other walls were lined with hardboard boxes three foot tall by two foot by two foot, decorated with wallpaper right down to their hardboard covers. These boxes held the toys I was no longer to play with because I was considered 'too old' to enjoy them, or there was no longer the space in the house to play. A few teddy bears sat on top of the boxes, as if to guard the contents for their next user. My favourite stuffed toy-a small black dog-was now my sisters to keep or discard.

There was a black hardboard wardrobe. The top cupboard of it had been sawn off because it would have been too tall for the room were it left on. The sawn off cupboard filled yet another space around the edge of the room. The finishing touch was a pale green plastic bucket for me to piss in at night that stood below the skylight. I can still see the white deposit around the inside edge of the bucket where it never came clean.

This was what I had gone on holiday for. The oddest thing was how most of the books in the case seemed to me to be a job lot of children's books bought indiscriminately. There were a couple of books in the case that read and liked. But that was because I knew they were Mothers and that she had read and enjoyed them. The second strangest thing was the attention to detail to indifferent effect with the way the whole room was furnished. It was as if the room did not know whether it was a museum store room, a box room or a bedroom, and it shrank from being any of them.

This new arrangement was a clue to how the rest of my life with my family was going to pan out. Thrift, hoarding, and a sense of everything about me being  unfinished was going to be the values I presented others with for as long as I was influenced by my family.

My clothes wold never be new, and usually had to have 'growing room' in them for them to be the value for money for Mother that she needed them to be. I would always be the last to wear what I did. After me the clothing would not be fit even for rags. The arrangement of the room felt frozen, as if it was never to be changed or reflect the different ages I would be in future. The room was mean to freeze me at the age I was when I first occupied it.

For dad the truth was more prosaic. His smoking was what drove his need to change how a room looked. This meant that the room that was most updated through redecoration was the living room. Where nobody smoked he saw no need to change anything, ever. The unchanged decoration could freeze the person who lived in it but that did not matter. Only when the wallpaper was darkened by dad smoking would a room get new wallpaper. Nothing would be changed unless dads smoking habit required it to change.

Which room to redecorate, and why, would not be the last time virtue was driven by vice, and vice did not want to acknowledge it. It was merely the most obvious example in my life at that age. When that pattern started I did not know that it would repeat itself with variations until I found the right way of saying 'no' to having any more of it. 

Through before I  could say 'No' to anything when I needed to I had to have a means to an exit with  which put an end the sense of feeling trapped.

Find Chapter 4 here 

Find the introduction and chapter guide here.