Life Without Armour (5 page)

The BBC dramatized
The Cloister and the Hearth
by Charles Reade, and
The Count of Monte Cristo
, each doled out in twelve weekly half-hour parts. My father had acquired a wireless on the never-never, paying three shillings a week when he could, against the ten guinea total. These serials were popular with the neighbours, as well as at Aunt Edith's house, and during each thrilling instalment, the whole family transfixed, there was nevertheless a strong undercurrent of anxiety that the shopkeeper might walk in to claim his set back before the entertainment was finished.

When we could get a copy, the
Radio Times
was read from beginning to end, especially the advertisement strips extolling Horlicks or Golden Shred marmalade, those exotic foods with ambrosial-sounding names. One learned in the same magazine that
The Count of Monte Cristo
serial was based on a novel by Alexandre Dumas, so the long-term plan was formed of owning a copy in order to read what the serialization had left out, and to recall with the density of print some of the more significant episodes.

Mr Salt, whittling down his classroom collection before moving to another school, gave me my first book,
History Day by Day
. The compiler and publisher are forgotten, even supposing I noticed them, but two pages were allotted to each day of the year, one page having an account of the author or personage who was born on that date, and the other an extract from one of his works, or from a book about some notable event in his life. Among the latter was a description of the death of General Gordon at the hands of fanatical Muslims in the Sudan; of the butchery of women and children by Indian Army mutineers at Cawnpore; and of similar savageries at the Fall of the Bastille.

Alexandre Dumas was featured under the date of his birth on 24 July 1802, and facing a list of the main events in his life was an extract from
The Count of Monte Cristo
, the part where Edmond Dantès escapes from the dungeons of the Château d'lf – the cusp on which the fate of the hero turns. From being an unjustly imprisoned sailor he evolves into the sophisticated and powerful Count of Monte Cristo, enriched as much by the education received from the Abbé Faria, who was his prison neighbour, as from the fabulous treasure which the abbé tells him about, and which Dantès unearths from the island of his assumed name. Armed with wealth and knowledge, he relentlessly pursues the three men who put him into the fortress, and takes his revenge, but in the process losing all possibility of happiness.

My father both liked and hated to see me caught up by reading to the extent that I was no longer aware even of myself. While he enjoyed with a kind of pride seeing me do something no one else in the family cared for, it was at the same time hard for him to put up with such a reproach to his deficiency. He might threaten to fireback the book, or knock it aside if my mother was about to set the table for a meal. Far from discouraging me, because reading was the only activity which made my existence tolerable, his attitude may well have been an added spur, giving me more to thank him for in the long run than if he had left me alone.

By the age of nine, worn out with the unrelenting turmoil of emotion, it seemed as if half my life had already gone, and the idea of trying to kill myself was sometimes dwelt self-pityingly on. Either that, or there was the fervent wish that my parents would go out one day and fall under a bus. The utter unsuitability of one for the other – my father's never-ending moods of depression, and my mother's helpless weeping at his violence which was the only way he could free himself from them – seemed to fall even more heavily on the shoulders of Peggy and myself, not to mention Pearl and Brian. Their vitriolic bouts had a built-in conclusion of rough-and-ready armistice which would not work on the children, such miserable rages being passed on to us, much as an electrical charge going along a line of connected people injures only those at the end.

I would clear off for as many hours as possible, one day coming home to catch Peggy by the bed praying to God for peace in the house, hot and bitter tears falling on to her frock as she turned to me half ashamed and said: ‘It's the only thing to do, our Alan. You should do it, as well, then perhaps
he
won't hit her any more.' Supposing God to exist somewhere – a titanic figure misty at the edges, remote and pitiless, but no less God for that – it was nevertheless hard to believe that such prayers could be in any way answerable. So I ran from her, screwing back my tears at knowing she didn't even have the Burtons' cottage for a refuge.

Packed off on a summer's morning with a bottle of tea and some sandwiches, our feet gave salvation in taking us, under a perfect sky, on a round trip of five or six miles to the Trent. After infancy, none of us was ever ill, as if living in the middle of an emotional battlefield held off infection.

Peggy at twelve was in charge of me at ten, Pearl at eight, and Brian at five who travelled part of the way on my shoulders. Our only instructions were not to talk to any dirty old men and, happy to be out of the house and free, we found a ruined dredger moored by the riverbank, and chased each other around its rusting machinery for hours.

The way out was easy, but the road back a somewhat slower march, not altogether because we were tired – though we were – but due to anxiety as to what we would find on getting home. As often as not the pessimism was unwarranted, and our parents would be in a good mood, since they had managed to get some food on the table, or had spent the time in bed. But the more one went into despair at the state of things the more difficult was it to come up on the corresponding swing of the see-saw and think that times were not really as bad as they seemed.

The nadir was reached in the spring of 1937, when my father went to work at the Furse Electrical Company, the only job since his few weeks at the tannery around the time of my birth. For the first month he earned nine pounds nine shillings, and then walked out because such payment was only ten shillings a week more than he would have received on the dole. This was an ill-advised decision, for many families supported themselves on that amount, and the regularity of such an income would have improved our lives.

Perhaps he clocked himself off because it was found that he could not read or write, and the humiliation was too great to be borne. The shame at having to admit this to my mother would have been more biting still, for in the land of universal education the illiterate is a pariah.

Having given up the job, unemployment money was not paid for the ensuing months, and the family existed ‘on relief', applying to the parish for tickets which could only be exchanged for food, rent, some coal, and clothes from absolute necessity. There was no actual cash, and my mother was outraged at what he had done, accusing him during even more terrible rows of having given up work not so much due to the low wage as because he was, and always had been, ‘bone idle', a taunt Peggy and I began to see was true. He had, my mother shouted under his blows, made the family
destitute
– a new word whose significance was soon apparent.

My mother took to going out in the evenings with her sister Edith, dressing as well as possible and putting on powder and rouge to make her look and feel younger, and packing screwed up newspaper into her handbag so that it would not seem empty. They stood at the bar of some pub downtown till spoken to by a man, who would treat them to a drink or two, and give them a few shillings when they came back from wherever they went.

My father's fist was paralysed when the truth came home, and though his vocabulary was limited he certainly knew the word
prostitute
. So did we, for it was bellowed many times, my mother's perfect answer to his justified accusation being that with such as him to keep there was nothing else she could do.

She walked out, screaming that she would never come back, after throwing all the money from her handbag into his face. He hardly moved from the fireplace for a week, the house run, if that was the word, by Peggy, who picked up the coins and went out for food, bought some cigarettes, shook the rugs into the yard, and made sure we got up each day for school.

The man she had gone to live with brought her back after a while. Or maybe she persuaded him to do so, and my father agreed to take her in. Peggy and I were sitting at the table showing Pearl how to do a jigsaw puzzle, and Brian underneath stopped hammering a piece of wood, to look up at the man and say: ‘No nose', for he had been disfigured by a shellburst in the Great War. Thereafter, my father, when he wanted to pain and insult her, would shout that she could go back to old No-nose if she didn't like it where she was.

Being of a brooding disposition, even more so due to his disabilities, my mother's faithlessness led him to wonder who of her children had come from him. Such speculations must have tormented him for the rest of his life, though with diminishing force, for I believe that in happier moods he was certain enough that we were all his.

And yet the episode seemed to have broken his spirit, in that he tried harder to get work. The fights at home did not decrease, however, because there was never enough money for cigarettes, and my mother still went out now and again with her sister.

In the first ten years my father was employed for a total of just over six months. The fact was, he didn't like going to work, was uneasy with spade or hammer, or sweeping brush. Being solitary, melancholic and illiterate, he felt at a disadvantage to everyone else, and obviously was. On the other hand his father had taught him the basics of upholstery; he could paint doors and put up wallpaper, cobble shoes, mend a wireless, do carpentry and frame pictures, and was never happier than when at home occupied with such tasks, or even in somebody else's house, because he could be cheerful and obliging when out of his own.

Nottingham was a town of different industries, by no means an area of the highest unemployment. Work was available if you searched hard enough, but my father just didn't look very far, though it could also be said that when he did no one saw him coming. Social conditions were not good, but they never had been, so you could not blame them. You were a plaything of Fate, and hope was the only solace, and it was hope which gave me the energy to believe that I would one day get away from such a life, and never go back. I could hardly know that to do so I would have to become a different person, and was even then in the grip of a process that must have begun at birth – if not before.

Chapter Eight

Early in 1938 we moved to a terrace by the side of the Raleigh Bicycle Factory, a house with a parlour and two proper bedrooms, a small plot of garden back and front, and our own water closet across the yard. My parents made their bedroom in the parlour so that Pearl and Peggy could have the back room upstairs, and Brian and myself the other. Later that year my father got a job with Thomas Bow the builders lasting ten weeks, and then another in November with the British Sugar Corporation that ended after eight days.

Victor Hugo's novel
Les Misérable
, also done as a serial on the wireless, had as lasting an effect on me as the one by Dumas. A neighbour, Monty Graham, a fearsome little Scot who had fought his way through the Great War in France, lent me his musty-smelling and abridged Readers Library edition. Pages tended to fall out, and the first fifty were missing, but I read what remained, though later saved penny by penny to buy my own copy.

Set in France,
Les Misérables
nevertheless seemed relevant to life roundabout and, apart from
Beatrice
by Rider Haggard, it was to be the only adult book read before the age of nineteen. The story (though who doesn't know it by now?) tells of Jean Valjean, hounded by the sinister police agent Javert even after he had been nineteen years in the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister and her starving children; the painfully hard existence of Fantine who became a prostitute so as to pay for the upbringing of her illegitimate daughter Cosette; the ingenious street urchin Gavroche whose secret den was in the foot of the statue of an elephant, and who reminded me of my cousin Jack; then the 1830 Revolution in which Jean Valjean rescues Cosette's wounded lover (who is thereby going to rob him of the only person
he
ever loved) by carrying him through the sewers of Paris on his shoulders. Such grand themes blended into an exciting narrative which couldn't be seen by me as anything but real.

It was fortunate that
Les Misérables
and
The Count of Monte Cristo
were known to me so early on, and had such a deep effect, for between them they lit up my darkness with visions of hope and promise of escape. Dumas' story was one of revenge, and Hugo's of justice, both books powerhouses buried in the heart which they helped to survive.

Concurrent with my reading, a phase of acquiring lead soldiers lasted till well after it should. Matchsticks set in cracks between the floorboards, and a wall of joined Woodbine packets, did for fortifications, a few neat grenadiers deployed on one side, and a half section of khaki Great War soldiers on the other. Such arms expenditure was financed by pennies cadged or donated at the Burtons', spoiling my economy with regard to books but giving hours of brainless diversion.

When I was coming up to eleven my grandmother thought I should take a Free Scholarship examination which, with sufficiently high marks, would get me to a school until the age of seventeen, instead of starting work at fourteen. One's age began to assume importance: a change in life at eleven would decide how the next six years were spent.

Grandmother Burton had taken in my preoccupation with the school prizes in her parlour, and habitually gave me old laundry or penny cash books with pages still clear at the back to write on. My grandfather must have considered buying the house, because he let me have two cadastral plans of that part of Lord Middleton's property on which it stood. These were drawn to a scale of 1:2,500, and I learned that one inch on the paper equalled 2,500 inches on the ground.