This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (23 page)

Thus Mike Whitaker came into our lives on that winter’s evening in 1963. If the memories of his first date with Linda ever faded, he’d certainly never forget the second.

It was two weeks later, a Saturday evening in mid-November – the very day our gas and electricity supply was cut off because Lily had failed to pay the bills. When I returned from the milk round at about 5.30pm, our rooms were in darkness, apart from some flickering candles and a small fire burning in the back room where Linda was applying her make-up as best she could. Lily was unwell and had gone to bed to keep warm. There was nothing to eat.

Linda had agreed to meet Mike at a cinema in Edgware Road. Saturday was his busiest day and he wouldn’t be finished until early evening so this arrangement made more sense. It was just as well he wasn’t picking her up. She had been too ashamed to tell him we’d been cut off. When he drove her home, she told me, she had no intention of inviting him in, so our secret would be safe. She would get on to the Rowe Housing Trust on Monday to work out a plan to pay off the bills and have our power supply reconnected. It wasn’t the first time we’d been in this situation but she was determined it would be the last.

Concerned about Lily, she instructed me not to go out again that night. Not only had Lily looked awful as she coughed her way upstairs to bed, she seemed somehow crushed and defeated. Linda had made sure she’d taken the assorted medications she depended on daily and offered to go to the phone box to ring for Dr Tanner but Lily had told her she just needed a good rest and that she had an appointment with the doctor on Monday anyway.

I was tired, cold and hungry. With no electricity, I couldn’t watch TV or listen to records. I brought some coats down from my bed so that I could keep myself warm while I read my book by candlelight for an hour or two. We had a torch, but it was supposed to be saved for emergencies in order to preserve the battery. I used it to find my way to the outside toilet before settling down with my book in the little back room, pulling the armchair close to the fire. I remember what I was reading:
Huckleberry Finn
.

The house was silent. Every so often, I heard Lily’s rasping cough above me in the front bedroom. I picked up the torch and went to see how she was, turning off the beam as I pushed open her door. ‘Are you OK, Mum?’ I directed my question at the mass of old coats piled on the bed. The coughing had given way to slow, rhythmic breathing. It sounded as if she was asleep. She didn’t answer, didn’t ask me for anything. There was nothing I could have brought her anyway. With no gas for the stove I couldn’t even make her a cup of tea.

It was a cold night but the coal supply had to last through the following day so, after a couple of chapters of
Huckleberry Finn
, I decided I had better go to bed. I left the torch downstairs for Linda and felt my way upstairs in the dark. Lily’s door was
slightly ajar. I paused outside to listen. Silence. ‘Goodnight, Mum,’ I whispered. There was no response, only the wheezing lilt of her struggling breath.

I was too frightened to sleep. I lay awake anxiously wondering what to do, my ears straining to distinguish the sounds in the next room from the regular Saturday night noises of North Kensington: dogs barking, neighbours arguing, revellers passing on their way to and from the Latimer Arms. I’d seen Lily ill many times, but she’d never been so unresponsive. Eventually I fell into a fitful doze.

Linda came home at about 10pm. She’d been too worried to go straight on anywhere with Mike after the film and had asked him to wait outside in the car while she checked on Lily. She found the torch just inside the door of the back room and crept upstairs to their bedroom. Lily was still buried beneath the coats, in a state of delirium. When Linda spoke, her eyes flashed open and she screamed: ‘Steve! Steve! What are you doing here? Get out, Steve, get out!’ Her cry was so loud that Mike heard it from the car. He leaped out and knocked on the front door. I woke up with a start and ran downstairs to let him in.

Sheila Thompson and her husband, who lived on the top floor, called down to us. Linda told them that everything was under control. She told me to stay with Lily while she went to the phone box with Mike to summon a doctor. I sat on the bed alone with Lily, not knowing what to do or say. She seemed oblivious of my presence, of everything. Her breathing had become more laboured and she was sweating profusely. I was terrified. Finding her hand in the dark, I took it in mine and waited.

Linda and Mike were back within fifteen minutes. She found
more candles and lit them in the bedroom. I went back to bed to huddle under my coats until the doctor came. Mike waited downstairs. By the time the duty doctor arrived Lily seemed to have lost consciousness. It was a male doctor, one of the partners at Dr Tanner’s practice. An ambulance had already been summoned and as we waited for it to arrive the doctor railed against the appalling condition of our accommodation, declaring that Lily must never return to living like this. The ambulance crew struggled to get her downstairs by the light of our small torch.

I wanted to go to the hospital with Linda and Mike but Linda sent me back to bed. There was nothing I could do, she said. As usual I obeyed her. Although I had no wish to stay in that freezing house on my own not knowing what was happening to Lily, I hadn’t the energy to protest or the courage to insist.

And so it was that I slept while Lily was admitted to the emergency ward at St Charles’ Hospital and attached to an array of medical equipment. An oxygen mask was fitted while Linda answered a plethora of questions about Lily’s medication and her heart condition. She gave them the name of the heart specialist at Hammersmith and explained the opportunity he’d offered Lily to have a plastic mitral valve fitted. She asked if she could go on to the ward to sit with Lily. The matron would allow her in only briefly to say goodnight before they settled her down. She said Linda could return the following morning. Mike brought Linda home and promised to drive back from Watford the next morning to take her back to the hospital.

Linda got to bed at 2.30am only to find that it was soaked in Lily’s urine. She grabbed the coats and a pillow from the bed and trooped downstairs to sleep on the settee in the front
room. As she finally dozed off there was a loud rap on the front door and a torchlight beamed through the front-room window. It was the police, complete with flashing blue lights, and they were outside our house.

Linda feared the worst – that they’d been sent by the hospital with terrible news about Lily. She opened the door with trepidation. ‘Is Michael Whitaker here?’ asked the officer standing there.

Bewildered, Linda pieced together what had happened from what the policeman told her. Mike’s mother had been waiting up for him in Watford. Alarmed when he failed to come home, she had got hold of Cheryl Roberts’ parents to find out our address and then contacted the police. Linda explained that by now Mike should be arriving home. They checked. He was.

Linda, who had barely slept, woke me the next morning with the welcome news that Sheila Thompson on the top landing, realizing that we had no power, had invited us up for breakfast. I’d had nothing to eat since my milkman’s lunch of half a Swiss roll and a pint of silver-top the previous morning. I fell upon those eggs and bacon like a lion on its prey.

Linda stripped Lily’s bed and wheeled the sheets, blankets and pillow cases in the coal-fetching pram to a newly opened launderette in Latimer Road. There were no tumble-dryers in those early launderettes so Linda stuffed the wet bedclothes inside the pillow cases, brought them home and hung them on a line stretched across the kitchen. By this time Mike had returned. Leaving the damp clothes hanging in the damp room, the three of us drove to the hospital.

Lily was on a small ward with about three other people. It disturbed me greatly to see her attached to so many tubes and
wires. Heavily sedated, she just about managed to open her eyes, smile weakly and greet us. That afternoon she was to be transferred to Hammersmith Hospital, where her specialist would talk to her again about the operation he was keen for her to have. This time, Linda wouldn’t be privy to the conversation.

It was a week after the dreadful night of Linda’s second date with Mike that we went to Hammersmith Hospital to hear the outcome of Lily’s discussions with the specialist. By then, Linda had already embarked on the Herculean task of transforming our financial situation. The way she planned and executed this ambitious one-woman recovery plan is awe-inspiring – especially considering that she had only just turned sixteen.

First Linda had talked to her matron at Brook Green Nursery, who agreed to give her a week off, with pay, to sort things out. With Dr Tanner’s help she secured an appointment with the senior managers of the Rowe Housing Trust. She persuaded them to restore the gas and electricity meters and to have the power supplies reconnected. The trust would settle all the outstanding bills and Linda would reimburse them through an agreed weekly payment plan.

Linda then went to see Mr Berriman in the corner shop, where she’d given up her part-time job when she began training to be a nursery nurse. Mr Berriman had heard about Lily going into hospital and was keen to help. He said Linda could work there from 9am until 3pm every Sunday, as she had done previously and, during the week she was taking off, she could open the shop at 8.30 every morning and work until midday.

As Linda was leaving, Mr Berriman went into the room at the back of the shop and returned with a box of groceries – a gift to her and to me. We were overcome with gratitude. For me, it made up in one stroke for all the humiliation I’d endured on the countless occasions I’d had to ask for shopping I couldn’t pay for. There were sausages, pies, tinned beans, cakes and a fresh supply of candles. We fervently hoped we wouldn’t need those again.

Linda’s final job before visiting Lily was to buy her a couple of nighties, a dressing gown and a pair of slippers, none of which Lily possessed. Linda met most of the cost of these items from her wages but I was happy to make a contribution from my milk-round money. After we’d presented our gifts and pulled our seats close to her bedside, Lily told us that she’d decided to have the operation. The illness she’d suffered on that Saturday evening was the worst she’d ever experienced. If she did not have this procedure it was bound to happen again.

The surgery was planned for February or March the following year – three or four months away. She would have to stay in hospital until then, and for a few more months afterwards to recuperate. She told us how upset she was that we’d be alone at Christmas. She still had no idea that we’d already had that experience seven years earlier. We tried to put her mind at rest without revealing the precedent.

When I went to Colin’s house later that week to practise with the Vampires, his lovely mother asked me all about Lily. I understood little of the medical detail of Lily’s condition: if she’d spoken to Linda she’d have got a much clearer picture of the circumstances. I merely told anyone who asked that my
mother was in hospital recovering from an illness. Ignorance, however, was not the only reason for the vagueness of my responses. Linda had warned me not to say too much to anyone about the length of time Lily would be in hospital. Her great fear was that somebody would interfere and we would be taken into care – or worse still, forced to go and live with Steve. She herself had told her employers at the nursery only part of the story and nothing at all was said to my school.

But that evening, 22 November 1963, the focus was not on my family’s problems. The band – Colin, Jimmy and I – were in the cellar with Yvonne and Pauline. We were playing a Beatles record on the gramophone while I tried to work out the chords. It was ‘Thank You Girl’, which required Colin to join me in a simple two-part harmony he was finding impossible to master. As our caterwauling reached its crescendo, the door at the top of the stairs opened. It was Colin’s mum. There had been a television newsflash. Something terrible had happened in America. President Kennedy had been shot and killed.

Our efforts to emulate the Beatles were immediately abandoned. Even at our age we realized what an impact this dreadful news would have on the world. And I would certainly never forget where I was when I heard that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.

LINDA WORKED RELENTLESSLY
to try to ensure that when Lily came out of hospital she wouldn’t have to worry about a single debt. The Provident, the loan clubs, the gas and electricity, our local shops, the rent – all arrears were cleared, all debts either settled or forgiven, all payments up to date by the New Year of 1964. It was another bad winter. Nowhere near as bad as the Big Freeze the previous year, but it was such a long one: there was snow and ice from mid-February right up to the start of spring.

Steve hadn’t made any maintenance payments for months. Linda wrote to him explaining our situation. She told him about Lily’s prolonged stay in hospital and that we’d had our gas and electricity cut off. He wrote back saying that with a baby to support, he couldn’t afford to make these payments. His circumstances had changed since the divorce settlement. He enclosed a pound note and asked to be remembered to me. It was clear that we were on our own.