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.

Chapter Four - My Family And Other Vegetables.

Small houses always encourage their occupants to live more fully away from them than in them. If a small house is all that the owner can afford, then the relative poverty of the owner limits their choice of decoration too. Unmentioned, the loss of choice becomes a powerful motive for the most powerful family members to go out particularly when their leaving makes other family members stay in. This was one reason why Dad drank, that his brothers all drank was another reason; the pubs were the family place of worship, due north on his moral compass and his most fixed point of reference for life outside the parental house. This choice had been fixed for him since he first worked and earned money enough to drink, underage, in the late 1940s.

When my parents decorated the living room his choice of wallpaper was oddly similar to the wallpaper of the pubs he visited. But it was not as tough, or as tasteful as pub wallpaper. When dad minded me because Mother was out at St John Ambulance every Thursday evening his choice of wallpaper reminded him of the pub. How could it do anything else? At the time I did not link his distant mindedness with what was on the walls, but with hindsight the link was there.

Dad worked a five and half day week until 1968, from when he worked a five day week and got Saturday mornings off.  His first choice of where to go was the pub, for which he would have a strip wash at the kitchen sink and smarten himself up. I remember the first time he was forced by circumstance to take me to the pub with him. Mother took just my sister shopping that Saturday because my sister needed new clothing and I would have been an unnecessary extra if I was with them. Dad had to meet his brothers in the pub to talk about the forthcoming day trip to the seaside. They had to sort out who was going to order which tickets for which family at which Liberal club for the annual day away. What also had to be considered was how the different coaches had different pick up points in the town and the brothers all lived in different places. 

The Horse and Groom was their choice place to meet. The pub was empty when dad and I got there, it was early. Still, I was scared, but I don't know what of. I don't know whether it was the atmosphere, the smell of polish, tobacco smoke and spilt beer, or whether it was dad doing maximum detachment without realising it. If I had known the word 'unwholesome' I would have used it to describe that room on that day. That the pub shared its grimy brickwork with the aircraft hanger sized factory dad worked in, as one corner of the the whole construction did not help. Pub and factory seamlessly shared each others brickwork, and both swallowed men up inside. Both spat the men out regularly too. Neither of them were places for children.

I did not know how scared I was but the following illustrates it well. I knew what the front of a jukebox looked like but I had never seen one up close before and I did not know how they worked. We were early and on our own. Dad gave me the money to play a record. I chose was Cliff Richard's anthem to positive thinking 'Congratulations'.  I thought that I had to wait until one record ended to put the money in because I would make the record that was playing jump if I put the money in whilst the record was playing. Dad must have wondered at me, and been quite annoyed at my apparent slowness. In the silence between records I put the money in and my record played. His brothers arrived and I sat at some distance from the men as they talked; another sign of my nerves and their confidence with each other. The distance was good for being observant though, I noticed that dad was the least best dressed among them. At least two of the five of them liked wearing suits, ties, and white shirts, and one had horn rimmed glasses which made him look very posh and managerial.

Back to life around Mother, inside the parental house, and outside it. The first pet in the parental house was a small wire haired ginger and white terrier called Snowy who I was very fond of. Mother was fond of him too. Dad had no feel for domestic pets, so she had surely got Snowy against dads will. She got Snowy partly because she grew up with animals and partly because she knew small boys and small dogs have always gone together, and they make companions for each other. Mother was the one who cared most for him, I was the one who thought he was mine. Being able to walk Snowy on my own after I had eaten lunch at the parental house was something of a draw for me to eat faster after I was forced to eat in the parental house for eating school dinners too slowly.

The only time I got into trouble with these walks it was dealt with efficiently. Snowy was small but strong. One day going across a patch of rough ground he pulled on the lead, sniffing after something and I fell over. As I fell forward on to the clay based soil my knee landed on piece of glass exposed above a small tussock. That was the one time our distant neighbour drew close. The husband of the couple, Harold, had a car. He took Mother and I to hospital whilst his wife looked after my baby sister and Snowy. Out of Snowy pulling sharply on the lead Mother got to practice her first aid close to home, I got a ride in a car to the hospital, and a neighbour was more neighbourly of his own free will. The wound was cleaned and stitched up. I had a scar that for as long as I wore short trousers which was a cue for a win-win story.

Alas the life of Snowy was seriously shortened when Jehovah's Witnesses in their long off-white raincoats came into the back yard, and knocked at the back door. They knew somebody was in by the washing on the line which obscured that the gate was open. Whilst they talked to Mother about Jehovah, Snowy played in the back yard. As they tried to draw the conversation out and draw Mother towards subscribing to The Watchtower Mother lost focus on where Snowy was and simply wanted the Witnesses to leave. They did leave in the end and shut the gate behind them. In the meanwhile Snow had got out, into the back lane whilst the Jehovah's Witnesses were talking. When they left Mother realised Snowy was not in the house or yard and she and I searched and found Snowy who could not go far on his short legs. Mother mildly cursed The Jehovah's Witnesses for the time they had forced her to waste both listening to them and getting the house back to order after they left. What we did not know was where he had been.

A few yards down the back lane there was a bakers. We knew that with the flour they stored bakers attracted rats, just like the grain store that always smelled yeasty or of vinegar that was also close by. Not long after the escape Snowy went off his food and fell ill, and hid behind one of the arm chairs. Mother knew what had happened, Snowy had unknowingly drunk rats piss which was poison to the livers of dogs. So the dog was dying slowly in pain behind the armchair that backed onto the front door in the living room. Dad was about, Mother felt frozen between being watchful of dad as he was inattentive for the television being on, and wanting to disturb dads peace by seeking to somehow humanely end Snowy's suffering.

I was distraught at the death of snowy, if life is a hard lesson to learn when you are in single figures, then death is an even harder lesson to learn. No doubt I was soft soaped by comments like 'Snowy is in Heaven now', perhaps due to my age I had to soft soaped like that. The alternative was much worse and lasted for much longer.

For decades Mother blamed The Jehovah's Witnesses for the death of the dog. I blamed them too. But as I found a life away from Mother, in which she had little to no bearing on everyday life, so I began to to recognise afresh the difference between symptom and cause, causation and coincidence, conditionality. It was true that the Jehovah's Witnesses were mainly to blame for the death of Snowy with how they sought to distract Mother. But equally the world Snowy was part of was always a place that was more dangerous to him than he, or we, could know.    

Soon after the death of Snowy Mother started renting her first allotment. In an isolated spot she was the only gardener around and enjoyed gardened on her own. No doubt an armchair psychologist would point towards mental and physical healing properties of growing things, and making your own decisions after living too long with the decisions of others. I am sure that played it's part. But it was not the first space she choice and control. When she lived in bedsits she had her own front door inside the front door of the house, but that period felt like a lifetime ago to her as she worked that first allotment. There was a small ramshackle shed on it which was big enough to store the tools that Mother brought with her with a little room to spare. She also started to put in that shed items she previously stored in the attic of the parental house. Chief among them was a chair that had once been her grandmother's. To Mother, Grandma Clifton's rocking chair was a special chair and she had nowhere to keep it where she could trust that the personal value that it held for her would not be derided by the owner of the space. It was padded on the seat and the back with a faded green and grey cloth. The rocking motion was quite small. She used to talk to Grandma Clifton whilst sat in the chair on her own, and sometimes pray in the chair too. It was no ordinary piece of furniture to her, and she feared other people seeing it so.  

As a piece of land it had been left untended for a long time. But it came with new life, the allotment had it's own cat, whom Mother named Sooty. It took a long time for Mother to gain the trust of the cat, much food was left out whilst Mother quietly did her own thing, the better to let the cat approach her. Eventually Mother coaxed the cat into being carried, and she brought him to the family house. Mother was right to do this. I was too young to imagine the difference between cats and dogs, the trade offs between an animal's relative autonomy and the safety of the animal. 

Sooty rebalanced the parental house in a way that Snowy never could. Sooty took up where Snowy left off, in making the parental house a more friendly place, and with his cat-like mix of autonomy and neediness Sooty was a strong character. He was dad-proof as well. When dad was being gloomy and distant Sooty gave us an increased resistance to dad being like that. Also dad could tease Sooty and Sooty did not mind, his claws were a match for dads teasing any day. Dad's favourite scene with the cat was putting his left hand down the over the arm of the chair and rubbing the cats belly on the floor. If dad was rough then the cat drew it's claws and got them into his wrists or the cloth of the armchair. All whilst dad never turned away from his television.

My favourite scene with Sooty was my knee being the his personal cushion whilst I was sat on the settee and Mother ironed and listened to her small portable radio set to Radio 2. My baby sister would be sat on the settee too and she was nearly as quiet as we were meant to be. Often when Sooty sat on my knee I read 'The Daily Mirror', the red top newspaper we got every day. As I puzzled over the stories and columns in it I am sure that I misunderstood a lot. But I misunderstood it quietly and the quiet was the virtuous quality that Mother appreciated most in this new way that the the parental house seemed to be evolving.

Find Chapter 5 here 

Find the introduction and chapter guide here. 

Chapter Five - Consider Yourself Part Of The Furniture.

When dad installed in the living room the large walnut sideboard with splayed feet which matched the table and chairs he had already bought he said to Mother 'I bought this for you'. He was half right. Mother had a new cupboard through which to exercise her hoarding instincts. Soon after it arrived it so full that retrieving anything safely from inside was difficult. For the two front doors to open out all the furniture in front of it had to be folded down or pushed out of the way. Then, when the doors opened the contents were bunged so tight that retrieving what you wanted was unsafe and took several times longer than you wanted. Between the taking what was in there out to find what they were looking for, and returning every thing the searcher had to go through, being that 'tidy' whilst having so much stuff seemed exhausting.

And then there was the number of pairs of shoes, which for having nowhere better for them to go, were pushed underneath the sideboard and became hard to find. I remember very well dad's panic when he had an early evening union meeting to attend where there was going to be an important vote, on a strike or a wage rise, and his shoes were deep underneath the sideboard and none of us knew how they got there or how to retrieve them. The image he presented of anxiety, anger and impotence was a picture to behold. He was close to swearing at us before he left. But he still got to his meeting on time. And more importantly for him he got to to the pub after.

One purpose for this large item of furniture was to help him show off his new wealth to his brothers and sisters. My sister and I rarely saw them. But we knew that they were arriving when the newspapers that were most recently acquired were hastily put under the seat cushions of armchairs, and other short term tidying up activities went on. Next thing we knew we would being bundled out of the house because dad wanted the house to himself. There was a proper place for newspapers, in the porch where when they reach a pile three foot high they were given to the local chip shop at the top of the street who used them to wrap the food they sold in. That was recycling 1960's style.

There was practical reason for keeping us apart from his relatives, with the new large items of furniture to show off with there was less space in the living room to invite people in to share his signs of wealth. The signs of wealth themselves took up much of the room. But as Mother herded herself, my sister, and I, out well before his relatives arrived we were usually went in the direction of the town where there was always something more for Mother to do. There was certainly nothing else we could do in the house when dad liked to keep his life rather like his relatives, separate from us.

The addition of the new furniture had an added personal effect on me. The more space that the new furniture took up in the living room, the smaller the amount of free space left. The sideboard fitted to right of the chimney breast, between the other end of the sideboard and the back wall there was a small bureau for the papers and accounts to run the house. The dinner table was nearly always set for four people. Dad's armchair was very close to both the sideboard and the high backed chairs which sat in around the table to eat. When all four of us ate I did not have a proper chair. I had to get in my place at the table first. To do this I had to go the table, pull out the two upright chairs from the table which backed onto dad's armchair, pull the chairs back in around me as I went forward, squeeze myself between the corner of the table and the sideboard, and go to sit on the piano stool which passed for a sowing box which backed up against the bureau. The main base that supported the table would be close against my knees. Then dad could get in second and sit on the high backed chair nearest me, my sister would get in third on a high back chair next to him. Mother served us all and served herself and sat down last. We used to say grace at meals but we said it by rote rather than conviction. Meal times were like both of the episodes in Alice In Wonderland where Alice changed her size due to what she had ingested at once. I was eating, I was definitely growing too small for the space I was  being squeezed into, but equally the furniture had grown even more, relative to me, than I had. Between the furniture and myself there was no more space, and I was still growing. The room was all furniture no room until in the end I felt absolutely small and trapped. And my family approved of this set up.

In spite of being hemmed in at the table I attempted some semblance of civility. One lunch time Mother had plated the food in the kitchen and mumbled a grace at the table as we all sat and ate. Without thinking through what might happen I asked dad a question I did not know the answer to and wanted to know what he thought. He was very good at being vague, but he was at the table now and unable to escape.

I asked dad how to deal with bullies in the school playground. His reply was short, 'Hit them before they hit you.'. I could not process what he said. I did not have a trigger mind and could not imagine the sort of foresight that recognised bullying before it gathered force and set me up as it's target. The only example I knew of dad hitting anybody was when he had attempted to strangle Mother not two feet from where we were sat, cramped around the table some time before the sideboard had arrived. If dad was right about being bullied and hitting out first then I could not see Mother as a bully, she had spoken, maybe shouted a little but he had hit her first as far as I remembered. Even if she he had hit him, then he had hit her much more violently back. So who was the bully? This was certainly a small and uncomfortable playground that I was trapped in. And I would have liked a teacher, even an ineffectual and weak teacher who could say something that was logical, and not arbitrary.  Whatever dad meant I would have got clearer answers from our red top paper of choice, 'The Daily Mirror'.

The clearest arguments that we ever presented to each other came though how we labelled each others' behaviour. When adults were angry their anger was not a sulk or a strop, simply because of they were grown ups. When children were angry their anger was wrong because they had no right to be angry; they were dependants. They were small people who should be grateful for being kept and not think for themselves because thinking was the job of the adult, particularly when it involved controlling or spending money. That said, my parents preferred for us to appear to be happier children for their own ease of mind. and to minimise the amount of work they had to do to keep a family together and under one roof, whilst sentimentally saying that we children were full of cupboard love.

When I felt angry I could not put it into words or actions. I might be angry at somebody my own age but my parents had taught me that I could never be angry with them and if I could not be angry with them, then I could not be angry with anyone else, except perhaps myself, either.  So my jaw and gums would tense up from the nerves and defensiveness that I felt when I felt anger. I still get this sensation as an adult, though less often. The anger seemed to freeze in my lower jaw and gums. It was normal for children when they felt angry and unable to express it any other way to stick their bottom lip out. It was also normal for many parents to say 'If you stick that lip out any further somebody will sit on it', thus both acknowledging and avoiding the anger simultaneously, in particular avoiding the cause of it and something was sitting on the lip-anger. 

There were two adult variations on the tense jaw/stuck out lip that I knew as a child. The first variant was shouting and it was done mostly by mother to us children when we were clearly in the wrong. The other response was domestic violence-one person hitting/bullying another and it went from straight from dad to Mother, never in the other direction. In both the feeling went from the brain, straight into the voice or hands and it froze the space around wherever it landed. When dad tried to strangle Mother she was shoulder height to him, this gave him a leverage over her. However strong she was, she would quickly submit. The domestic violence always happened seemingly with no preamble. After it had passed we never dared look back to discover how or why so much unhappiness had accumulated and exploded in front of us. And we had no idea how long the half-life/natural decay rate of the anger was after it was over, whilst in any polite proximity to each other. For me it was decades before I could undo the anger that I had ingested with witnessing what I did.

One reason it took decades for me to stop my parents going to war with each other in  my head was their insistence on outward politeness. As children my sister and I were taught to say 'Please' and 'Thank you' to everything the adults said we should say those words for, and to defer utterly to every adult we knew, to the point where the refusal of a thing, for even the best of reasons, became impossible. But our parents never said 'Please' or 'Thank you' to each other in our earshot, and open apologies were like hens teeth.

The mask of 'good manners at all times' was poisonous, but when I learnt something less poisonous and said 'I want... ' as if I might have a right to the thing asked for then the response was ''I want' never gets' which of course made me want more and be forced even more to say 'Please' and Thank you', because I was not allowed to not want either. Not wanting what adults wanted for me would be seen as sulking.  

Much later, as a teenager and well beyond I could observe how in matters of personal, sexual consent towards them many men seemed to take the word 'No' to mean 'Yes', and the word 'Yes' to mean 'Yes right now please', as if there was no possible refusal of them that they felt any duty to listen to and obey. 

I experienced this personally. Maybe it was the overfilled space of the parental house that we all lived in that first made the reasonable refusal of unsuitable gifts impossible. Maybe it was the custom of deference that made our lives seem full-but full of cheapness, but the more often that I said 'Please' and 'Thank you' as a child, and accepted the rules where I was meant to not think, nor to speak until spoken to, and then only say back what who had spoken to me implied I should say, therein lay the foundation for being further bullied in school and for a long term future passivity that very much left depressed, and well out of sync with those around me.  

Find Chapter 6 here 

Find the introduction and chapter guide here.

Chapter Six - Schooled In Insults And Indifference.

One of the redeeming virtues of infant school that I did not realise at the time was that organised sport was not played there. Competitive team games started in the second year of Primary School and it was one of several dire experiences that were compulsory. 

It was not until that second year that I began to realise that school sport was designed as competition where a lack of mentoring/coaching was the point. It was aimed at people who knew nothing about the advantages of being coached. The parents who surely knew a little more than the pupils about what sport involved, and knew a little of the advantages that coaching gave pupils, excused themselves by claiming to know very little about what was a rigid and central part of the school schedule. Instead they cast themselves as consumers to their children who they expected to do well to justify the outlay of money on football boots and other costly sports equipment the school expected parents to pay for, as if the mentoring lay in the claims of money spent on the kit. Parents then let their children absorb the inequality the school sought to foster in the name of fair competition whilst the children attempted to grade themselves as 'winner' or 'loser', when the odds were that there were always going to be however well pupils tried to do far more them would become losers than would become winners.

In the first class of the first year of Primary School we did not write much but spent a lot of time was spent with paper, glue, and scissors making patterns out of coloured bits of paper as if we were still in infants school. I got bored when I could not see the point of this inactivity. One of the status games that was going on around me in school was that bigger boys with richer parents got to wear long trousers sooner. So when the teacher was not looking I used the paper scissors to cut my  short trousers just an inch. When Mother noticed the cut in the grey short trousers I lied, and said another boy did it and I had wanted him to cut it for me, as I cut his trousers but he had refused to let his trousers be cut. The lie was pursued and found to be mine, and I was punished with the cane. The lesson I learned that I was second stream, among the also-ran's who were weak, and bad at lying/covering up how weak they were. Whatever I did to fit in with the school after that I didn't fit. I became a dreamer who was only ever half there.

Football started in the second year of Primary School, the year I chipped the corner of my left front tooth. At my parents house I was barred from playing outside the back gate lest I wander off. Inside the back gate there was a small concrete yard with clear space in it just big enough to draw out eight small hopscotch squares. Around that clearing there was dad's shed which was narrow and long, and where he kept his pushbike. There was the dustbin and the sides of the yard were lined with wooden plant boxes full with flowers and mint in them, all mounted on top of tins that had once had been filled with government issue National Dried Milk Powder left over from the days of rationing, 1939-53, any milk in them long since used up. The tins had probably been left in the house by the previous owner when my parents bought it and they became prey to Mother's hoarding instinct where everything had to have a use. Above me was the washing line which ran between the farthest corners of the yard. I was not allowed to play anywhere else and I thought there was space enough for me to play hopscotch on my own. Then I tripped and fell headlong, and my upper jaw met the step of the back door at an angle, with sufficient force that I had a rather different smile after that. It changed the official school photo that followed soon after somewhat, much to Mother's chagrin. She had already knitted me a heavy cream coloured jacket for the occasion of the photo being taken. I was good spoiling official photos of myself. 

School sport was no place for dreams, or dreamers. When I played football I recognised, but paid little attention as to why, when the older boys were team captains of the week and chose their teams. I was nearly always among the last to be chosen. I understood that the most popular pupils became team captains every week, and the prize for being popular was choosing other, slightly less popular boys to be on your team, until even the most unpopular boys were in a team. By the the the last were chosen any  sense of reward with being chosen was long gone. We were the dregs and we knew it. Experiencing this repeatedly was why my hair colour changed from sunny blond to mousy brown and I shrank as as a person.

Thus it was that to supposedly limit the 'streaming' effect of the most popular boys selecting only the boys nearly as popular as them, and to help the school look outward, a few team captains would be chosen for the Summer inter-schools competition. They chose their teams weeks before the competition and the rest of school were meant to assist these 'A' teams train. Uncompetitive people like me were formed into uncohesive 'B' teams. When the the A team captains formed their teams they had a defence and an attack. With the training for competition the 'A' team defence and attack would be split up and yoked to their opposite on a 'B' team, so the different halves of the 'A' team were confronted with each other and the 'B' team still-in theory-got a game. But when the two halves of the A team were the best and the rest of us were inferior then how could we improve their game? We couldn't, because as the different halves of the 'A' team played they kept possession of the ball and deprived the split up 'B' team of even playing at their own level. The 'A' team were far more interested in playing with themselves with how they made up opposing practice teams.

As it was in sport so it was in the classroom-the rule was crude; 'keep up or else'. If anyone got as far as saying the words 'Or else what?' towards even the least hostile of the staff then the reply would have been 'You don't want to know the answer to that question'. My biggest hope was that if there were enough stragglers like myself who did their work as well as they could but with a cheerful indifference to the results then we were at least equal to one another and we might drag down the average. 

A less obvious example of non-mentoring was 'swimming lessons' in the local public pool which is what we had from the first year onward. They were lessons because they were in school time but we were not taught to swim. We learnt more about following orders than anything else. The first order was have your trunks and towel with you, second order was the orderly walk for the whole class from the classroom, out of the school and across three roads, to the swimming pool. The third order was about the group we were put in for getting into and out of the pool, which was indicated by the colour of the band on our wrists. And we would be shouted at if we were in the water and our colour band had been called to get out and dry/dress ourselves in the primitive chalets at the side of the pool. 

Swimming was the least part of the exercise-no child who had not learned to swim outside of the lessons ever learned to swim in them. The time in the pool was a chlorinated version of life in the school playground, with increased supervision by teachers out of fear of the school's insurance policy being called upon. These lessons echoed the annual work's family day trip to the beach, but transposed to the school, more effort was spent on the journey than at the destination reached. The organisational effort was more than the educational and enjoyment possibilities to the point where the lesson all form and no content.

The swimming pool was opposite my old infant school and it was yet another fine Victorian Gothic building on the outside that had naturally had been hacked about on the inside to adapt it for use by the modernised education system of the early 1960's. Mother had bathed in the building there when she was single and it was a slipper bath. When there was nearly no plumbing in the building in which her bedsit was, the slipper baths were the place to communally bathe and wash. I have no idea how slipper baths once operated, or what they looked like inside, though I can imagine fine Victorian or Edwardian features to flatter the bathers with as they made up for the lack of running water at home. The crudities of the way the insides of the building were adapted for schools was rudimentary indeed. There were no showers. We just dried ourselves and dressed in the wooden cubicles painted a blueish off-white that lined up along the walls around the pool.

If swimming lessons were ritualistic and nothing like their description then the annual school photo sessions were another, slightly less strained, ritual that parents paid for which they often felt cheated by when the got the results. Being in the school choir was another more positive, ritual. The chipped tooth did not get me kicked out of the school choir though it altered my charm when I smiled. Getting kicked out of the choir came when my voice changed. I was disappointed because it was one of the more inclusive school activities, but when I they said my voice had changed it I knew what they meant. But I could not disguise that I was miffed at being pushed out, a lot more than just my voice had changed.

What I and many other pupils, along with their parents, resisted understanding was that Primary school was a clearing house for the next educational stage, Secondary or Grammar school. Poorer parents rarely thought more than the next day or few days, ahead. The poorer they were the more they got mired in endless everyday crises. Some parents thought barely one week ahead towards supplying the right sports kit on the right day, whilst struggling to keep their heads above the fear of debt and disgrace. When a child 'accidentally lost' their sports kit out of a dislike of the sport they could not get out of playing then many a mother would be more worried by the expense of replacing the kit than concerned for the sanity of the child who for being bad at activities, and unable to improve, was still forced to continue being bad at something s/he disliked. 

That chipped front tooth got me teased in school though it was not just that. There was a cruel taunt that some boys used against me that was horribly accurate that I could not answer back to however hard I thought to try to. It really hit a spot where I hurt. I had the chipped tooth and big lips and Mick Jagger was newly all over the red top press a lot back then. He was masculine and a rule breaker in his character and feminine with his lips. The taunt that the boys made was to do with me 'being a mother's boy', gladly subordinate to my Mother when we we were out together-as if they weren't equally controlled by their mothers. It ran 'I bet when your mother takes you shopping, with those big lips of yours she sticks you to the window [suction with your lips] when she goes in.'. They had captured something that was true of Mother, she could be almost masculine and quite driven in her character when she had to be. My mind went blank with that taunt, I could not think to answer back to the boys that said that. With that they knew they had won and would win further in future.

The best times with Mother were in the school holidays, walking up to her allotments. Less because I was with her but because there was nobody else with us, we were walking away from the house, and the further we walked from the house the calmer we felt. When we passed my cliquey school where I got bullied we soon stopped to feed the horse that we saw daily with the carrot peelings and apple cores Mother kept for the animal. Mother was carrying other veg scrapings too, but they were for the compost bin on her allotment. When the horse was not there we were disappointed and everything went on the compost heap at the allotment. The field the horse was in backed on to the primary school's land, and the sense of us having a private pets corner was to a small highlight of life that I was glad she shared with me.

The extremes of near zero food waste that Mother took to will be clearer when I say that she would carry a shopping bag full of vegetable matter over a mile from the family house to the allotment and walk there and back. When she returning it was with veg for the home for next few meals. Without the rotting veg up up there would be fewer fresh veg coming down the hill.

The allotment eventually became her church as well as her part time job. Gran had tried to get Mother and I to attend the nearest Church of England church. St John's was a pleasant 1920's brick building surrounded by trees grown in steep banks on two sides of it, with a school and vicarage attached. Gran's first effort was to get for Mother a formal letter of introduction to the clergyman of St John's, an idea which failed to work when tried. Then Mother attempted to connect with the church by herself, and failed. We, Mother, me and my sister attempted to attend a carol service. My sister was still itchy and sensitive and noisily cried through the service which Mother left half way through, out of sheer embarrassment. It was cold, wet, and dark outside which doubled the sense of rejection. 

The following summer that I attended Sunday School at my Gran's church. Gran wanted me to be interested in life, and to her that meant the life of the church. Had my parents backed me as a member of Cub Scouts or some other organisation then they might have been able to say 'No, he has other commitments' to Gran, to stop me going to Sunday school. But my parents disliked me joining any club as a child, and on the matter of 'belief' I was meant to make my own choice when I was old enough, and for it not to affect them. Clearly me joining even the easiest to join of boys organisations did not fit in with their needs. But still I went to the Sunday School at St John's for a while.

Perhaps Mother was pleased to have me out of the house of a Sunday morning-she could work in relative peace, or perhaps she worried that I might learn something based on the values her mother held to which she would want want to cut down in me if she found it. Either way without Gran being directly involved then my attendance at Sunday School was not sustainable. Either Gran could not be around often enough for me to be well supported whilst Mother kept herself at a sufficient distance from the idea, possibly on instructions from dad, or both parents wanted the commitment to fail. Dad's opposition to Gran, and their mutual dislike of each other, should not surprise anyone. Pub vs church had been a culture war for many generations.

One week, for whatever reason, probably because of some upset in the home that had happened between my parents, I did not want to go to Sunday school. I felt drained and tired. I only had Mother to talk to as to whether or not to go. Mothers response was cold to the point of withering. She treated me like the adult I was not and made my choice then and there the binary of 'Either you go every week, forever, from today, or you never go near a church again.'.  She was angry, though not really at me, and for my having doubts and asking for help I became the target of her anger. I did not go and I sat on the front pavement and cried, as far as I knew I had just got in the way of everybody as trapped children will. Mother's sliced right through me.

I sat outside the house and bawled my eyes out for two hours, the length of time that I could have been in Sunday School had Mother not poleaxed me. She was happy to leave me cry. My sister had cried for longer before the doctor found ways to get around her thyroid gland not working. I have written before about the law in the parental house about anger; anger would lock the jaws of passive children, make women shout with a vehemence and men spontaneously use their fists. The pattern held, Mother's anger was verbal rather physical and even as it was non-physical, it physically froze me. Not just in the jaw either, it was so bad that I could not get any angry words out, but I felt then dig into me. A fortnight later there was a picnic and I asked Mother if I could go to it and she 'No. You decided before to never go again.'. Her response was as crude and sharp as the brief time at the police station had been a few years before.

So the allotments became Mother's place of  worship and where I was her altar boy and cut the grass paths. The chair that used to be her grandmother's, Grandma Clifton, was kept in the shed and got out when she wanted to pray or connect with her gran. The value of home grown vegetables became more about her taste for the autonomy than flavour the veg gained for being home grown. The allotment was her space, somewhere that everybody knew to not come near unless invited/instructed so to do. She did not set the conditions where the allotment work she did was the nearest she could get to the paid work that she wanted to do, but she accepted that rule as long as she could do the work her way. She made more of a virtue of this limitation than most women would, and clearly took a measure of pride in her limited autonomy.

On the positive side the food she grew on the allotments balanced the household budget. The gardening also balanced her hoarding instinct positively too, by making it work better far away from the parental house than ever it could be made to work anywhere near it.

Find Chapter 7 here 

Find the chapter guide here.

Chapter Seven - Digging For Dystopia.

 As an adult I have done far more unpaid work as a volunteer in different organisations than ever I have worked for a pay packet. The work was there to do, I had the inclination and the time, so I did it; the work was mine to choose or refuse at least until automation made human labour seem irrelevant. Had Mother applied for paid work as a married woman she would have been rejected from any job she applied for simply for being married, if she got as far as an interview she would have been told by the male interviewer to 'Go home and be a better mother/wife' if he was even that civil. I was part of the reason she would have been rejected from paid jobs. The labour of parenting and housekeeping were very important, but openly not worth remuneration. 

I know what the importance of a lack of remuneration is like, I have been pushed to apply for more jobs that I was never going to get than I could count, record or remember. The reasons for rejection by employers has changed from generation to generation, but the depth of insincerity on the part of the employers remains the same. Always 'the market' is what matters, where ' the market' is the sum of popular opinion projected on the many as held by the few. False reasoning still makes a good disguise for self interest for those with something to protect.

The unpaid job that Mother gave herself for the longest period in her life was that of 'allotment holder'. She rented her first allotment when she was thirty. She is over eighty now and for all I know may well still rent an allotment and slowly keep active and grow just enough veg for herself. The price of being self employed, and being paying yourself-in-kind this way, started with rent paid to the council who owned the land, and the dues paid to the Allotments Association.

When Mother moved plots from the first isolated allotment she got to her first plot on a large popular allotments site she was the only female gardener among many male gardeners. She was respected for the knowledge that she gained from her father but held apart from the other gardeners. It was as if she were the allotment holders token suffragist. Her presence was a quiet protest against what was assumed to be a male club, though for many years she was treated kindly by quite a few of the men there. But to win their respect she had to be better than the male gardeners to be treated as equal to them. Good for her then that she was that good, if somewhat eccentric with it. The male gardeners only let their wives on to their allotments in high summer, and never let their children near because children required amusements and the men did not want to have to be amusing. For the men the point of the garden was to get away from family. My sister and I going up the allotment with her became one of several outward signs of Mother awkwardly trying to be twice as good as the male gardeners. I too had to be twice as good as I could be, to maintain the appearance Mother had to project. I let her down quite a few times, and to me my mistakes made me feel ashamed but I don't know what else I was meant to do; if I'd been told 'You are out of your depth here' I would have wanted to be in depths that were safe for me, but that would have taken Mother away from her allotment, so I was never told how out my depths I was. The shame that came with the mistakes and misunderstandings I made practically poisoned me, but I stayed to be poisoned enough for my misunderstanding to seem normal.

The walk up to the allotments was the best part of going there because when we arrived Mother would cut me off from her and go into 'work mode', lay out the tools and materials she was going to use that afternoon. My sister and I were expected to constructively amuse ourselves. Every gardener lived in their own space, though neighbours were there to ask for gardening advice if you could see that they had stopped work. It was non-competitive, up to a point. Gardeners often had surpluses when a crop cropped all at once and he would seek to share it with those who grew something else, knowing that the favour would be returned later. Part of Mother trying to be twice as good was her being keener than other gardeners at finding uses for their surpluses. One year she was offered vast amounts of quite ordinary apples which ended up being bottled and stored underneath my bed for feeding the family with as if they were cooking apples during winter.

When Mother got a second allotment next to the first, then her next door neighbour Stan, decided to get an allotment as well and became her allotment neighbour too. This was not in her plans, and not what she wanted. She already did Stan's laundry, ironing, and shopping for him. Stan getting the allotment next door to Mother looked like clinginess on his part.

One thing that she wanted to keep close to her was a chair that her grandma, the woman who brought her into the world Grandma Clifton, had once owned. Her allotment shed was the only place she was allowed to keep it, It had previously been kept in the attic before that room had been converted into a storeroom/a bedroom for me. It was a fold up chair with long side poles, the varnish on them scuffed and worn, and it had a faded pale green cloth on the back and the seat. When Mother was on her own at the allotment and wanted rest she would sit in it and talk to her gran as if her gran were present via the chair with her.

I was a bit of a ghost at the allotments too. I did not know how to be the grown up that I was expected to be. To do anything serious I needed that much instruction that it was easier for the teacher (always Mother) to not teach but do it themselves. I don't know what her father was like with Mother when the two of them went to his allotment and therefore how he dealt with teaching vs doing dilemma. What I do know is that she learned a lot, which tells me that he gave her time and attention sufficient for her to gain from being around him. There was not the same reciprocity between Mother and me. The difference between Mother and her father and me and Mother was mainly location. But there were more differences between Grandad's allotment circa 1940 and Mother's allotment circa 1968 and beyond. The pace of life was faster. Her dad could find the slow and consistent rhythm of the village life and teach her through it. Mother's parenting was not just mechanised, by washing machines and vacuum cleaners etc, but it was also hastily assembled in an ad hoc manner. The way she organised her self and us gave her little time for reflection or improvement through reorganisation, much less did it allow her to pass on life skills to anyone.

When Mother went to the allotment she left the machines behind, but for having to look after me could not leave the require to be parent behind as well. Gardening is often quite mechanical, but as actions repeatedly applied to organic materials rather other mechanical materials and mechanisms. The reward comes from the organic material making the activity seems more organic. Her father was a professional gardener. He knew his Latin names and growing seasons. He knew what to plant and when to plant it. He knew when to leave the ground and what to plant whilst 'digging for Britain' as the phrase had it during the 1940's. I was not a butterfly set on a flower listening in to when they talked and she learnt from him so I have no notion of what they shared in the quiet of his allotment. The nearest I ever got to being a butterfly on a flower was when Mother planted flowers at the front of one of the first of her two allotments on the new site. She planted about ten or twelve different types of fairly common types of flowers in a strip next to the central path down which all gardeners walked.

She said that that flowery part of the allotment was mine. It was bright and colourful, so it mine in so far as it symbolised her hopes for me. But I always had problems when Mother said anything was mine-in reality nothing was mine and everything was hers or somebody else's property. If anything was mine it was mine in name only at the time I was told and it would cease to be mine the moment anyone did anything with it. My education was 'mine' but I could not tailor what I was taught into a pattern that was in any way personal to me. I had nothing and was nothing beyond what I wore and the instructions I was obedient to, all of which I tried to do willingly even when I could only complete tasks badly because I needed more help than I could be given. Mother mistrusted me even walking between the rows of plants, the smaller the plant the less she trusted me. I tried to take what Mother said at face value about the flowers and appear to be this colourful 'free spirit'. But inwardly I was trapped by mistrust, being the property of others on other people's property and my own inability to know what to do without being told. 

The jobs I was safest doing was cutting grass paths with a push mower and keeping my sister entertained. I don't know what amused my sister but she tolerated the lack of choice without knowing how grudgingly I accepted it too. She would rather have been minded by her dad, who she felt closer to than I did. Some of the easier fruit and vegetables, such as peas and blackberries, I was instructed to pick and permitted to eat a few of on the way, to put the sense of play into my being useful.

There were worse times to be had than being an awkward non-gardener. Dentistry in the 1960's was vile. I was given gas for my first visit to the dentist for the removal of some baby teeth. The sleep was fine, there were even pleasant enough dreams that came with it. But to wake up with a headache, stood over a large sink lined with blood that had come from my mouth, knowing that I'd gone to sleep in a comfy chair and not knowing how I came to be awake and standing up was both memorable and horrible. 

Other ventures with Mother could be more unpleasant, longer term. Her buying of school clothes for me became an endurance test. There was in the Britain of WW2 an ordinary cruelty with clothing that marked many of the children of poorer parents, like Mother's,  that to them felt like it was the equivalent of wearing one of those six different coloured stars in public that the Nazis expected of jews, gypsies, political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, prostitutes and homosexuals. The wartime government declared the rationing of cloth and the handing down of clothing to be thrift, and part of the war effort, therefore they were virtuous ideas. But when richer parents passed on their children's surplus clothing to poorer parents, however ill fitting the clothing was, for poorer children to wear the children of the rich parents found ripe opportunities for snobbery when they saw other children wearing clothing that used to theirs.

There is an ancient rhetorical device where one person tells another what they are not going to tell them in great detail and the listener is split by having been told something they are also told that they were not meant to know. If had a want that I thought would help me in school then it was to be in long trousers sooner rather than later, to be the equal of my peers. But when Mother walked me to the local Cancer Research Shop to buy me school clothing she related to me how she had to endure how much she was not and never could be the equal of her peers when she was my age, how endured snobbery and bullying from other children during WW2. So even when I got the second hand long school trousers and she got the shirts 'with growing room in them' I could not enjoy having them because I now had better clothing, because Mother had gone without and been horribly bullied a generation before for me to be able to have them. The way Mother told her story of how I had so much more she ever had at the same age I became responsible for her being bullied. 

I knew the stories backwards. Not only did she lose her toys to St Barnados and the Church of England Children's homes, but she was clothed and shod with ill fitting cast offs donated by the parents of the children she went to school with. In the playground she was often reminded in bullying tones by the former owners of the clothes she wore, who were bigger than she was, and who her clothes once belonged to. The drama of her parenting, education, and 'community', made me want to give her my choices in schooling since they seemed better, and made me willing to do without if it improved her life. But such ideas of what to offer Mother did nothing to make her happier and made me feel more trapped for being unable to change the record of how inconsistent and unfair life seemed.

In the parental house on other occasions she claimed that she passed her 11+ but her father refused to pay for the Grammar School uniforms, which of course fits the 'woe is me' script but I Don't see now how she was so bullied and yet still bright and firm in spirit enough to pass that exam. Anyway passing the 11+ exam and not going to the better school the result designated for the parents being poor and not wanting grants was a common story in the 1940's, and since. But the bullying and her father's refusal of support can't have been so bad, it is more likely to have been conventionally sexist.

Dr Who with Patrick Troughton was popular at the time and it was a show that tried to process paradoxes with the plots it had. One narrative I told myself as we walked to the Cancer Research Charity Shop was that I had in a previous life actually watched her being goaded and bullied in the school playground by the children whose parents gave her parents the clothing Mother wore, and I had done nothing about it. That was partly why she was telling me these stories now-to make me feel an apt guilt for where I could have redeemed her suffering, but I had not done so. Her stories of poverty put me in debt to her and she was the one who virtuously said 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be'.

It would have been better for me to have concluded that with relative poverty then relative empathy was also in short supply and with relative poverty greater empathy is a necessity. But Mother's recounting of the material poverty she was raised in lacked empathy in itself. Something in the way she told her stories which ate through me. By the time I became an adult and my understanding of the detail and process of what she said improved, Mother had totally clammed up about what those cruelties of her past were like. Like the adultery and other events, it was was baggage she felt it was better to hoard without being seen to. She was absolutely closed up about about a lot more besides too.

My one time love of Mother's stories of enduring WW2 resurfaced when I started reading novels and essays as a teenager, rather than restricting myself to what my parents read, the red top press. As an attempted adult I developed a lasting taste for books about the Germany and the Europe of the 1930's and 40's, where the people of the time, including many talented writers, could not explain how they had endured a cruelty and ignorance that seemed so methodical and absolute that surviving it seemed to be unnatural. Which was why fiction had to be used to disguise the truth.

I am happy to credit Mother with my lifelong appreciation of the writings of George Orwell, in particular the infamous '1984'. I hope she wants that credit. The love of '1984', with it's paradoxical and black humoured recurring loops of suffering, was the most profound effect that listening to her stories has had on me.

Find Chapter 8 here

Find the introduction and chapter guide here.