Alligator Playground (12 page)

He liked his next school, knowing he was no longer an infant, and thinking he had left that King Arthur shit behind. A few weeks into the term the teacher got up in class one day and said: ‘We’re going to put on a play, and I’ll need quite a few actors for the parts.’

‘What play is it, sir?’ a bumcrawler called.

He straightened his Mao jacket. ‘Wait and see.’

Why not? They didn’t mind. All the time it was game or gamble, wait and get a shock or a nice surprise. It made life exciting, especially since they had nothing else to do but learn.

‘I want to know, first, how many budding actors we have in the class.’

His sister Molly had been given a cut-out theatre and they had put on plays, at first making them up as they went along, but then talking it over before starting, which way made the play last longer. They would take turns acting ‘God of the World’, and talk about making things happen that worried the other most. If he being God wanted all the toys in England to come into his room she would act a group of parents telling him it wasn’t right to rob children of their toys. Then she would play a boy or girl who would tell him what they thought of him. Or she would play the owner of a toy factory, saying he didn’t like – and neither did his workmen and women – that all the toys should go only to a greedy little bastard like him even if he was God.

You could imagine how they would go on for hours, but soon they got bored at every new idea even before they had put it on, and for more excitement acted at Punches and Judies till they made each other’s noses bleed. They even got fed up with that, and then their mother caught them one Saturday afternoon up to what she called ‘dirty tricks under the stairs’, saying that was enough of that.

Ron shot his hand up when the teacher asked for actors. Only a couple more did, so half a dozen had to be cajoled into putting their names down. Ron fancied himself on the assembly hall stage dressed as a clown or a sailor, tramp, prophet or pilot. He couldn’t think of what the theme would be but knew it must be something interesting.

‘Now I’ll tell you the text,’ the teacher said. ‘You’ll all be pleased to know – at least I hope so – that it’s one I’ve written myself. It isn’t Shakespeare, or Sheridan, or Shaw or Brecht – so you needn’t groan, Delph – but something based on a time when this island of ours was a happier and more interesting place than it is today. It all happened a long time ago, when men were free and respected and full of dignity…’

He knew already. He wanted to cross his heart and die. He should
have known. It was that King Arthur and his Knights turning up again. His veins were bumping, and all he wanted to do was jeer, though didn’t dare, having a good idea where it would lead.

The teacher looked at him while his batty talk went on because he’d been the first to volunteer, so thought he was dead keen to get on that stage. Thank God I’m not tall enough to be King Arthur, who would have to yank a sword out of a stone, because he knew he would never do it. He would push it further and further in or, if he did get it out, would slay the first fucking Knight that clapped him on the back, and called him King of Camelot for doing so. He couldn’t believe he’d been so daft as to get trapped in his own deepest pit.

‘This is the list of characters.’ The teacher read them out and told Ron who he would be. ‘It’s late now, so we’ll go through the play next week.’ They groaned at being left on tenterhooks, but the teacher smiled and said the tale was so good it could easily wait. ‘There are two months to go before the performance, so there’ll be plenty of time for rehearsals to get you into shape.’ He tapped his pack of papers. ‘I’ll have some photocopies made, and give out one between the two of you.’

King Arthur, he kept on saying to himself on the way home, King Arthur again, and when his mother said he was looking glum at teatime he said it was because he was going to be in a play at school. ‘Well,’ she laughed, ‘that’s not so bad. You’ll enjoy it, if I know you.’

Tea slopped in his saucer when the biscuit he was soaking broke and dropped three quarters into the cup. ‘It’s about King Arthur and his Knights.’

‘So what?’ she said. ‘You won’t be him, will you?’

It turned out that he was to be Mordred, his son. So More Dread he was. ‘I hope they’ll invite me and your father to see it,’ his mother said when he told her.

He held his shaking hand: they were bound to.

Merlin the magician brought More Dread up, he learned, and his job was to kill King Arthur. This news cheered him no end, because he’d always wanted to put a stop to that sword waving know-all of the round table. Unfortunately the cast only had wooden swords, and even the biggest stab he could give wouldn’t go in the King’s guts. In any case, Arthur was played by a pal of his, and he had no intention of hurting him.

‘You’ve got to look furtive and sly,’ the teacher shouted at him during a rehearsal, ‘and not have that silly smirk all over your face. You’re King Arthur’s son, and you’re going to kill him, so act as if you might, but not so that he would guess.’

It was hard to do both, but he tried. In fact he tried too well, because he became so furtive and sly that the teacher didn’t know what he had in store. ‘You’ve got to be two people,’ the teacher said, and two people he made up his mind to be because as far as he was concerned one person had never been enough. Two was obviously better than one. Two was double, which meant that you could do twice as much. In fact if you were two people and people only thought you were one you might even get to doing four times as much, which was better still, except that four might be a lot to look after.

Never mind, he said, listening one night in bed to the speech he was to give near the end of the play, a part the teacher liked because when he remembered all the lines and spoke them even he clapped at the end.

He told Ron not to strut as he walked across the stage, but that was what the speech called for, and he couldn’t help himself. ‘Walk,’ the teacher told him. ‘And remember, you don’t mean what you say. It’s not really how you feel. You’re trying to hide the real you who will kill him when the time comes.’

But the other part of him took control, though when the teacher shouted advice he said it as close as he could to the way he wanted:

‘My father King Arthur and his valiant Knights
Were victors in a hundred fights.
They rode into battle, rank on rank,
And took the Saxons in the flank.
At night they sat around the table
Wassailing over yarn and fable.’

Ron strutted like a cockerel, and the teacher clapped when he made the words as clear as if he believed in them. In his sleep the black-red dreams came back, and the only way he could fight them off was by making up his own speeches to replace those the teacher had sweated blood to write, thinking they were the best poetry in the world. Because he only wanted to save himself Ron couldn’t help himself, and he altered the speech as easy as pie. He’d never known he could do his own stuff so well, though it only came a few lines at a time, but in the morning he remembered them and wrote them down until the next two came. His dreams were H for Horror films, but with writing they didn’t even get started while working out what he was going to say.

With so much mist in the streets it was a wonder anybody turned up, but the hall was three-quarters full, and their teacher was happy as, behind the stage, he ran from one to another of his actors with his hands full of paper making sure they remembered their lines. Ron knew his, right enough. He could hear people laughing and talking out front through the big curtains, which made some of the lads pale and nervous. He felt as calm and brave as if he really was one of King Arthur’s screwy Knights.

The play seemed to go on forever, and in between walking on and off and remembering his lines Ron told himself that never again in his life was he going to have anything to do with King Arthur and his Crazies. He was only waiting to mouth his speech
at the start of the last act, surprised all through at how the people were loving their performance, and in some way sorry he wasn’t one of them who could see the play from the seats they were in, though he knew he would have hated it and maybe even gone into a fit if he had been.

All his life he had been persecuted by King Arthur and, now that the curtain was opening for the last time he was going to have his chance. He puffed out his chest and lifted his sword as if it weighed a ton, and strode to the row of lightbulbs at the front of the stage to chant his lines, not able to see anybody but knowing they could see him. He had been told not to shout, ‘but rather to recite,’ yet called out at the fiercest register of his voice, as if he wanted to be heard all over the city and even the world:

‘King Arthur and his screwy Knights
Got into many stupid fights;
They rode to battle dressed in tins
And there committed wicked sins;
They fought like dogs and fought like rats
Hitting each other with cricket bats,
Then got blind drunk around the table
And fell asleep in the castle stable
With Alice and Janet and Marlene and Mabel.’

People clapped and laughed, and somebody called out: ‘Good old More Dread,’ and when the commotion had died down Merlin came up to him, looking a bit pale through his beard, Ron thought, and the play went on it its awful end. When the curtain calls came he was sure people clapped him louder than anybody else, but at the back of the stage the teacher looked as if he was going to run him through with the big sword that had been snatched out of the rock. His face was close up to Ron’s, who could tell he’d had more than a couple of big whiskies. ‘What did you think you were doing,
eh?’ He would have throttled him if his parents hadn’t been out in front waiting to take their little
Lawrence Oliver
home – as his father mockingly called him for a few months.

‘I remembered my lines, sir, didn’t I?’ was all Ron could say to the teacher’s flushed and rabid face.

The teacher turned, and stalked off, and Ron knew he wouldn’t get much change out of him anymore, that in fact the school wasn’t big enough for the two of them. The teacher must have realised the same, because he went to some other school not long afterwards.

On the way home Ron’s mother said: ‘I enjoyed that little performance. Everybody did. You were smashing in your part.’

Never again did he put up with anything concerning King Arthur, because if someone began to yak about him he just switched off, or let them know in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t interested in such fairy-tale stuff.

Maybe that was what turned him into a poet, Ron Delph often thought. Or it was the start, anyway, because if you can see how much of a boring sham all that Camelot crap is you’re bound to learn the secrets of the universe, or at least make a start on it. Apart from which he had always known that asking questions about things people think they have the answers to never got you anywhere.

‘
IF YOU WERE EVER
in love with a man, and that man died while you still loved him, you could only have one love in your life. You’d always remember.’ Ivy knew what she was talking about, because it had happened to her. She meant it to her dying day, yet wondered at the time whether it was herself speaking when she said it.

Ernest Guyler had worked at the same tobacco firm but was forced to stop because he had caught TB. It wasn’t a good place to be when you started to cough. On saying, with a bleak smile of reality that was new to him, that he would most likely never get over it, everybody laughed and told him he would live forever. He knew he wouldn’t, and Ivy saw that he couldn’t, though she joined with the rest of them in saying that he would, because if you loved somebody what else could you say?

‘We never live for life with those we fall in love with,’ one of the women at work told her afterwards, when she was hard enough to comfort.

‘No,’ Ivy answered, ‘but we remember them,’ though she hoped, from the way she felt, that she would not have to go on remembering much longer. The grey-stone parapet of the railway bridge, with a colliery humming and clattering behind, and steel lines multiplying towards Radford station in front, took her so far from grief that she felt frightened of casting herself down into the emptiness after a line of coal trucks shook the world on its way by. Grief came back in the vision of Ernest’s face and, knowing he’d tell her not to be such a fool, she walked down the footway into the field and on towards home.

She couldn’t forget the Sunday afternoons when he had walked up the lane from the railway bridge, after taking the trolleybus from where he lived in Town. Her mother and father were upstairs in bed, and Ivy leaned on the rickety planking of the fence to wait, only her head and two arms showing. There was a reddish tint to her golden hair, tied with a band so that it spread over the shoulders to her full-sleeved dark blue frock. She was the more serious of the blacksmith’s grey-eyed daughters, with an occasional knowing laugh that the others were wary of, for there was a determination behind it that even her father saw as having come more from him than her mother, and so was something to be reckoned with.

A light overcoat would be folded over Ernest’s arm, and she knew there was a white scarf in one pocket in case it turned chilly, and a cap in the other should it rain. On a summer afternoon – the only ones worth recalling – there was a smell of fresh sawdust from the yard, where her father and Dick had worked that morning to make the week’s logs, and a sour odour of bran mash and muck from the stye where the pigs ceaselessly grumbled, as well they might, considering that one of them was to be killed in the autumn.

Ernest was tall and thin, and wore a brown suit, with a collar and tie, and there were three small triangles of white handkerchief showing from the line of his lapel pocket. Dark hair was combed more back than to the side, but was neatly parted. Ivy’s heart bumped when she saw him walking up the lane, eyes in front as if he hadn’t seen her. But she knew he had. They played a game as to who would see who first, and laughed when they decided that neither could ever win.

She ran to meet him for a kiss, uncaring as to who might see, though aware that few would be able to on the sunken lane half obscured by overreaching elderberry bushes, not expecting him to run in his condition, though he did increase his pace.

They walked hand in hand by the house, and then across the field and into Serpent Wood, and she would never forget what
took place there, though he always did something so that she wouldn’t have a baby. They were old enough to know better than that, in any case, because it was the nineteen-thirties, and both had been born with the century. On the way back she walked him to the bus stop, the nattily folded handkerchief gone in a good cause from lapel to trouser pocket, their moist hands clasped tightly.

Even her father had little to say against him, which was something of a marvel, because he had snubbed the occasional other she’d had. Perhaps her father didn’t dislike Ernest because he had the same first name as himself; or, as was more likely, he sensed he wouldn’t live long enough to marry her. She could just imagine that. But though her father seemed friendly enough when he met Ernest in the yard, she knew he didn’t like him coming to the door, which was why she leaned over the fence to spot him walking up the lane, and then hurried down to meet him.

Ivy was my aunt, and I recollect everything vividly from those days, some of which was not of course properly understood, since I was only seven or eight at the time. Yet in my heart I feel I know almost as much about her as she did herself, thinking back and putting all the evidence together. She was an aunt who is the ideal mother, no leaden hearts to join, nor even strings attached. The humorous connection of love and trust on both sides was even less complicated because she didn’t have a husband to be wary of, or children of her own.

A great event that she always harped on in after times was that of her giving me, as she said, my first bath. I must have been dipped when newly born, but wouldn’t have remembered that anyway, which therefore couldn’t be proved. One summer’s afternoon, when I was sent to stay because my mother was having another baby, she and her sister Emily chased me around the tree in the yard they said, ‘like a little pink pig that wouldn’t come in to have its throat cut!’

They caught me by the chicken coop, dragged me back kicking, and protesting with all the bad language already picked up (which was a lot, because even then I had a love for words) and plunged me into a large tin bath on the cobbles outside the door. I must have had an occasional soak with my brothers and sisters in front of the fire at home, but this seemed to be my first because the circumstances were so unusual. Not only was the bath for me alone, it was in the open air, fresh air, too, a breeze smelling of leaves and heather, odours soon to be overwhelmed by the smell of the same White Windsor soap that my grandmother used for the weekly wash. By the time my aunts had finished scrubbing me it looked as if they’d also had a bath.

That would have been on a Saturday afternoon, because next day Ivy was standing by the fence looking for Ernest Guyler. Being by her side – there was a log to stand on – I saw him too, and she held my hand on our way down the lane. ‘Come and meet my young man,’ she said, and I could sense her excitement, and also that of Ernest when he put a hand on my shoulder and said how big I was for my age but all the time looking into Ivy’s eyes.

He took out a packet of Players and gave me the cigarette card. Because he’d bought them from a machine there was a ha’penny as change in the shilling packet. He held the coin between his fingers. ‘Heads or tails?’

‘Neither,’ I told him.

‘It’s yourn, then.’ He gave it to me, and laughed, though his brown eyes didn’t.

He offered Ivy a fag and, ill though he looked, smoked one himself as they walked towards the field. Ivy called that I should go back into the house, where Emily would look after me, but I stood on a stone looking at the three pigs, now and again aiming a bit of coal to hear them grunt, until the stench made my eyes run, when I went into the house to annoy the cat.

The loss of Ernie Guyler wasn’t the end of Ivy’s life. She did go out with a few men during the War, once with an American soldier, who gave me some chewing gum when I met them on the street, but none of them were considered up to much, or they went abroad and were never heard from again, so she stayed on at the small house in Town where her parents had moved, with her sister Emily who hadn’t married either.

When she was sixty, and her parents had been dead ten years, I heard her laughingly tell my mother that she felt only half her age, and in many ways she looked it. That was when she met Albert Jones, a small thin man of sixty-five who had just retired after a lifetime’s work on the railway. If he reads this story I hope he will recognise himself, though it’s unlikely he’s alive. I don’t think he’s capable of reading anyway, but if he is soldiering on I’m sure he’s still puffing at his foul tobacco and putting back his daily quart, the only habit which could keep him going.

Ivy met him in the Boulevard Hotel, a glorified pub really, not far from the house, on what must have been the worst day of her life, though she wasn’t to know that for some time. She had called at the bar with her sister, and Albert happened to be standing there. It was a Friday, some time in the late fifties, and he wore his suit. Wavy grey hair, thinning compared to what it had once been, gave him a staid aspect, only belied by the light in his eyes which Ivy mistook, fatally, for a sense of mischief and fun.

He told them his wife had died only a year ago. ‘I buried her, and if you’ll marry me, duck, I’ll bet a quid I’ll bury you, as well!’

‘I suppose you say that to everybody, you cheeky devil.’

‘To every nice lass, I do.’

‘Anyway, you don’t look strong enough to lift a spade,’ Ivy said, ‘never mind bury anybody. You’d sprain your wrist.’

‘Not bad enough to pick this up, though,’ he said, lifting his newly drawn pint. He knew himself for a bit of a card, and was so full of conviction he could see her thinking so as well.

He made sure always to be there when Ivy went in for her weekend drink, and after a month of falsely charming banter asked her to marry him, making sure the light went out of his eyes so that she would see he was serious.

Nobody had asked her since Ernie Guyler, who had died before she could. She had never wanted to marry after that. Going out with a man now and again was one thing, but to live with one after a lifetime being bossed by her father, no thank you. She had her job, a house, and her sister to look after. So why did she say yes?

My mother told her she ought to have more sense, but three months later they were married at the registry office. ‘Aren’t you being a bit of a fool, Ivy?’ she heard a voice say during the ceremony.

‘It’s all right for you, Ernie, but you’re dead, and I’ve got to go on living.’

Albert was about to put the ring on her finger. ‘Who was you talking to?’

‘Nobody. My lips must have moved.’

‘I thought it was pigeons warbling.’

‘Come on, let’s get on with it.’

She found out later that Albert had been living with his sister, and had tormented her so much she told him to pack his tranklements and go, into lodgings for all she cared, because she wouldn’t put up with his selfish ways anymore. Her name was Hilda and she came to the wedding, but hardly spoke to Ivy, kept a tight lip as if, should she say much, a quarrel might ensue and Albert would go home with her.

He must have thought he would have the time of his life with two women to wait on him, but Emily liked the new arrangement less and less. She never said so, but Albert knew it, and begin to mock her slow ways. Emily had always been the backward girl of the family, and her mother before dying made Ivy vow to look
after her. Ivy would never have thought that getting married would make it such a hard promise to keep.

‘You get on my nerves,’ Albert would begin.

‘And you get on mine,’ Emily snapped back.

‘Why don’t you go out for a walk?’

‘I don’t want to. Why don’t you?’

He mimicked her in baby talk. ‘
Why don’t you?
’

‘This is as much my house as yours.’

We’ll see about that, his grin seemed to say.

‘Leave her alone,’ Ivy said.

Instead of two women waiting on him hand and foot, they combined to turn against him, he thought, and such venomous resentment he hadn’t bargained for. Ivy was appalled at the infantile way he carried on, which brought out more childishness in Emily and, God knows, Ivy thought, she had enough as it was. Even she didn’t always like it, but Albert made it worse. When she told him this he either asked her not to interfere, or acted as if he didn’t know what she was talking about, which made Ivy doubt her own grown-up judgement, though never for long.

Instead of having one old age pension to play around with, he soon had three. The house cost only twelve shillings a week, and he took charge of the rent book. Payments were often in arrears; they didn’t need to be, but he did it to keep Ivy in a state of worry. He often went out to the pub and came back drunk, though most nights he sat by the fire watching television. Ivy and Emily liked to smoke a cigarette now and again, but Albert’s continual puffing of his vile brand of tobacco made them complain of the stink.

I was in Nottingham for a few days, and knew my aunts would be glad to see me for half an hour. It was some time in the sixties, when I was always glad to get out of London and back in the steadier, certainly less frenetic life, of my birth-town. Knocking at the back door, I walked in without waiting for an answer, being
one of the family. In the big pocket of my overcoat was a half bottle of whisky for my aunts – I knew they liked a drink – and a tin of the better sort of tobacco for Albert.

They didn’t seem happy but then, would they be able to show it even if they were? Happy wasn’t much of a word in their dictionary, nor in mine, for that matter, and though I didn’t particularly like Albert, if I had known how he behaved to my aunts, and how they detested him for it, I would have liked him even less. I knew something wasn’t right between them, but hoped the tobacco would put him in a better mood.

It was obvious though that Ivy had got herself into a lobster pot of a marriage, and I thought maybe it would cheer her up to talk of old times and the people we had known. Her hands shook as if she had some kind of palsy. She wasn’t well, and it was only too plain that Albert didn’t care, that he even resented it. When she asked if I wanted a cup of tea I told her I’d just had a bucketful at home. It amused her to hear me go from London talk back to my rough childhood voice.

‘I met Ernie Guyler yesterday, up Radford Woodhouse.’ The words were impulsively out. ‘Do you remember him?’

Her grey eyes looked straight at me, hands seeming to shake less. ‘Oh yes, I do.’

‘I liked him, because when I was a kid he used to give me cigarette cards, and the ha’penny from the packet of Players fags.’