This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (3 page)

At some point Tottsy must have given up totting for a more respectable occupation as by then he was the only man I knew who worked in an office and dressed in a suit on a weekday. He left for Paddington Station every morning wearing his horn-rimmed spectacles and carrying a briefcase. Lily encouraged
Linda and me to look out of the back window at around 8.30 to wave to Uncle Tottsy as he went by on the train. We often saw a man with horn-rimmed glasses in one of the packed carriages. It may or may not have been our respectable relative: nobody ever waved back.

Nanny Johnson’s flat was provided by the Peabody Trust, established in 1862 by a London-based American banker, George Peabody. When he set up his donation fund, he wrote a letter to
The Times
stating that his aim was to ‘relieve the poor and needy of this great metropolis and to promote their comfort and happiness’. And Nanny Johnson certainly seemed comfortable and happy as we took our leave.

Although visiting Nanny Johnson was the purpose of the outing, we never stayed very long. Afterwards we usually called at an adjoining block of flats called Sutton Dwellings, where Steve’s friends Ted and Elsie lived. They had children of a similar age to Linda and me and we were allowed to go and play with them in the safe communal yard behind the flats.

After depositing us back at Southam Street Steve, like most of the men in Notting Hill, would go to the pub before his Sunday dinner (lunch was something you only heard about on
The Archers
and
Mrs Dale’s Diary
, just like that other mysterious meal, supper – in the evenings, we had tea). Unlike most of them, he had a professional reason to be there: entertaining the customers as the resident pianist. When the pubs closed the men would return home noisily for their dinner, after which the afternoon would be passed in a listless stupor, with parents dozing off and children bored rigid. England was not yet godless enough to allow shops to open or entertainment to take place on a Sunday. Even card games
were forbidden in working-class households, including ours.

Though nominally Church of England, neither Steve nor Lily ever went to church. While Lily believed fervently in God, she seemed to distrust organized religion, perhaps as a result of the sectarianism of her Liverpool childhood. Linda and I were briefly sent to Sunday School when we were small, probably as much to keep us occupied as anything else, but we hated it, and Lily soon gave in to our objections. The tedium of the long afternoon was relieved only by the arrival of a whelk and winkle man wheeling a hand barrow full of fresh shellfish. These vendors only appeared on Sundays and somehow managed to cover every street. Steve and Linda would scoff brown paper bags filled with shrimps and whelks doused in vinegar and carefully extract winkles from their shiny black shells with pins. Lily and I hated the stuff and would remain aloof during these seafood orgies.

The truth about Steve’s Sunday morning visits to his mother was bound to emerge eventually. It’s a shame that Linda had to be the one to spill the beans.

One summer Sunday, we walked round to see Nanny Johnson as usual and then dropped into Sutton Dwellings. Ted wasn’t at home. He was, I think, a lorry driver and often absent. As we played outside in the sunshine, Linda was her usual boisterous self, hurtling round the play area with a gang of kids in tow. She may have been a restless spirit, but she was always fiercely protective of her little brother and would be keeping a careful eye on me – static as usual, sitting quietly in the shade.
The good thing about being static is that it’s usually safe.

Linda, on the other hand, was for ever having accidents. As a baby at 107 Southam Street, she crawled through the window of our room on the ground floor and fell into the ‘airie’, landing on her head. Incredibly, a large bump was the only damage. On another occasion she fell over while fetching a bottle of vinegar from somebody called the Vinegar Man, who toured the streets with a huge barrel on a horse and cart, crying ‘Vinegar!’ at the top of his voice. The bottle broke and she cut her knee on the jagged glass.

On this warm Sunday the inevitable fall had happened on a patch of hard, gravelly shingle. She ran up to Ted and Elsie’s maisonette, suppressing her tears, to show her blood-splattered leg to her father. The front door was open. Finding nobody in the living room, she dragged her bleeding leg upstairs and opened the bedroom door. She must have been very quiet because Elsie and Steve were caught by surprise – in bed together, and if not in flagrante delicto, certainly approaching the delicto stage.

As Linda was only five or six years old there would have been a reasonable expectation that she didn’t understand what she had seen. At any rate, as Steve, Linda – her leg adorned with plasters – and I walked home together nothing was said. But Steve underestimated Linda’s maturity and she was soon treating Lily to an honest appraisal of her discovery. The prospect of enjoying the Sunday dinner we’d been waiting for and a normal, boring Sunday afternoon evaporated when Linda announced to Lily: ‘I saw Daddy kissing and cuddling in bed. He doesn’t love you any more. He loves Auntie Elsie.’

A hush hung over 107 Southam Street. The calm before the storm. But Linda, it seems, though correct in the first part of her analysis, was wrong in the second.

STEVE LEFT LILY
for Elsie when the truth emerged about his Sunday visits. Unfortunately, he came back.

Linda’s revelation had led to the kind of shouting and screaming that were a feature of Steve and Lily’s life together. In those pre-television days (or rather, the days before TVs were affordable for people like us) it must have provided entertainment for the other families sharing our house. For Linda and me, though, these rows were gut-wrenching periods of fear and misery. We would lie in our beds trying to shut out the noise by pulling the covers over our heads.

Around the time Steve went off to live with Elsie, Linda and I both had measles and Lily was unable to go out to work until we’d recovered. Money from Steve was elusive enough when he was at home, and he made no attempt to send any after he’d left. Six months later, Steve returned and Elsie went home to Ted – pregnant with Steve’s child.

I knew nothing of this for years: I didn’t find out that I had a half-brother, David, until I was in my teens. We’ve never met. His existence helped to explain the mystery of the famous ‘punch in the passage’ incident. A man had knocked on our
door one Saturday morning and insisted on seeing Steve. There was a commotion and the sound of a body falling to the floor. Apparently, little Linda then ran out into the passage to find Steve flat out with Ted standing over him. ‘Leave my dad alone!’ she yelled, but the damage had been done. Steve had been given a good thumping. I remember his grey face as he staggered back into our room, with Lily strangely unsympathetic to his plight.

Ted had agreed to bring David up as his own son, and Steve had agreed to make a financial contribution. When he failed to pay, Ted had come looking for him. The punch probably succeeded only in forcing Steve to prioritize payment to Ted and Elsie over his erratic support for Lily and us. When Linda asked Lily years later why she’d taken Steve back, Lily said that she loved him and, more importantly, that she wanted us to have two parents. Perhaps she also harboured a hope that he’d change his ways.

Early in 1954, after Steve returned from the six months he spent living with Elsie and fathering her child, there was a period of relative calm during which Steve and Lily tried to make a fresh start. It was during this rapprochement that we went on a holiday together to Liverpool. Lily missed her native city terribly. London in general and Notting Hill in particular were not welcoming to ‘outsiders’. She was self-conscious about her Scouse accent and tried hard to lose it – not because she was ashamed of it, but out of a desire to conform. Linda and I never noticed her accent at all, apart from when she said words like ‘look’ and ‘book’ which became ‘luke’ and ‘boowk’, and the occasional ‘Oh aye, yeah’ to indicate consent. Otherwise it emerged only when she was excited or angry.

Lily didn’t miss her domineering father but she pined for the
company of her sisters and her favourite brother, John. Three other siblings had left Liverpool during the war. The eldest, Joe (always called Sonny), had joined the RAF and now lived in Coventry, and a younger sister, Dolly, had worked with Lily in the NAAFI. They fell out after Dolly lured one of Lily’s boyfriends away from her – a dark, handsome soldier from Hull called Les Foster. The rift had become entrenched when Dolly and Les had married and moved to Hull, where they eventually raised nine children. It had taken several years for diplomatic relations to be re-established.

Jean had married another Londoner, George Heath, and moved to Walthamstow, where they lived in a semi-detached house owned by George’s family. Auntie Jean was Lily’s Liverpool lifeline in London but, with no phone, they couldn’t talk to each other unless we trekked out to Walthamstow, which was something of an expedition back then. Jean and George never came to visit us: Lily would have been ashamed of the conditions we lived in and Steve generally wanted nothing to do with Lily’s family, although he enjoyed flirting with her sisters. Lily, Linda and I managed to go and see Jean and George at least once a year, but Lily and Jean were very close and I’m sure it wasn’t as often as Lily would have liked.

Uncle George was a tall man with a shock of black, wiry hair and a low, booming voice. He had a good white-collar job as a Post Office clerk and drove a motorbike with a sidecar, in which he ferried around our cousins, Pamela and Norman, who were roughly the same age as Linda and me. Their house in Walthamstow was immaculate. They were the first people we knew who had had a telly and a fridge. Seeing Auntie Jean’s house with its neat little garden made Linda and me more
aware of the kind of home Lily wanted so badly to provide for us.

Lily would have been pleased to see her sister doing so well and to have her at least within more manageable reach than her other brothers and sisters. I do remember making one visit to Coventry and Hull respectively when Linda and I were small. Uncle Joe and his wife, Auntie Peg, were settled in a lovely new council house on the outskirts of Coventry. I can still picture the hills, fields and trees, and recall having egg salad for tea.

Hull, by contrast, seemed to have even more bomb sites than London but Dolly and Les, living in the midst of them, were very happy together. We liked Les a lot. He was sweet-natured with a disarming smile. On one magical evening during our stay there he took us to Spurn Point in a wood-framed Morris Traveller (what Dame Edna Everage once described in a spoof TV travelogue about Shakespeare’s heritage as a ‘half-timbered’ car).

Steve hadn’t accompanied us on these trips but in the period of glasnost post-Elsie, he agreed to come with us to Liverpool. So it was that we lugged our suitcases to the number 52 bus stop, headed for Victoria Coach Station, on a hot Saturday in the summer of 1954. Linda was six and I was four. For Lily, this visit was hugely significant. We were to meet not just her family but Mr and Mrs Ireland, who had taken Lily in when she contracted rheumatic fever in the early 1930s. It was the first time she’d been back to Liverpool since the war and her first opportunity to show off her children.

The object was clear. We must like Liverpool and Liverpool must like us. The ‘Provy’ was milked for a loan to pay for new clothes for Linda and me: matching red blazers with shiny
metal buttons, new shoes of black leather, neat little shorts for me and a flowery dress for Linda. These Provident loans worked like a credit card: you had to repay the money you had borrowed, plus interest, in weekly instalments. Lily grappled with debts like this throughout her adult life.

The coach station was bustling. Then, as now, coach journeys were much cheaper than taking the train, and with far fewer families possessing cars than is the case today it was a popular mode of long-distance travel. Linda and I were hugely excited to be going on this big adventure with Lily and Steve. We had to share a seat and for a while we were mesmerized by the landscape that unfolded through the large window beside us. As I was too young when we travelled to Coventry and Hull to recollect how we got there, this is my first memory of venturing beyond London’s borders. In those pre-motorway days, in a non-air-conditioned coach without a toilet, the journey was long – eleven hours – hot and punctuated by frequent lavatory stops.

Aunties Rita and Peggy met us at the coach station in Liverpool and took us on the bus to Anfield and the estate where Lily had grown up. Lily gave us a little walking tour, excitedly pointing out the schools she’d attended and the streets she’d played in. It was incredible to us to be staying in the room that had been Lily’s when she’d lived at Warham Road. I remember opening one of the drawers and finding a hairbrush that, she told me, she’d used as a little girl. Our grandfather must have been there, but I don’t recall meeting him at that stage. It’s possible that Lily deliberately kept us out of his way.

The people to whom she really wanted to show us off, apart
from our aunts and uncles, were the couple she considered her surrogate parents, Mr and Mrs Ireland. We spent a lot of time at their house where there was a pedal car that had belonged to their now grown-up son. I was thrilled to be allowed to play with it. It was a toy I craved throughout my childhood, but one to which I only had access that once at the Irelands’. I made the most of it, pedalling around happily for hours. The real highlight of our week, though, was our first trip to the seaside – we took the ferry, another treat in itself, across the Mersey estuary to New Brighton on the Wirral peninsular, where we paddled and ate ice-cream and built sandcastles.