Try to Tell the Story Page 3

  I don't know how long we were at the farm in Nottinghamshire. It was not too long, but it was long enough for me to observe the bath night of a son of the house who worked at a nearby coal mine. He didn't bathe every day, but on whatever day it was he carried a large tank into the kitchen area where his mother heated saucepans of water to be poured over his grimy body. He sat there in his underpants! It was the bathing arrangement in the household—and my mother, as you may recall, had had ill luck with baths already.

  One afternoon, she took me on a country-lane walk. For all I knew then, she was in trembling doubts, wondering whether or not to submit to her own first kitchen bath!

  “So how do you like it here?” she asked me.

  “I hate it,” I said.

  She seemed to brighten. “Really? Fresh air, though.”

  I had never noticed anything wrong with London's air, an observation that reveals my innocence more fully than anything I have said yet. There were strategists of the war who believed that Germany could win just by shaking enough soot and toxic carbons free from existing building structures.

  “What don't you like?” she asked me.

  In such moments, perhaps, the critical spirit is born. “Everything” would not do, and I probably detected something in my mother that was ready to be talked back onto the London train. Did I know my mother yet? “The privy thing,” I said. I hardly knew what to call it. But this bounteous farm, so English in so many ways, lacked a lavatory or modern plumbing. At the end of the garden—ruining the garden's potential as such—there was a shed, a seat, and piles of old newspaper. And a hole in the ground. One seat for the crowded house. One lightbulb. And the full stink of purpose. At my tender age, I had no squeamish-ness about being or acting spoiled. “The privy is awful,” I said.

  “I should say so,” said my mother, and she looked a couple of years younger on the spot. “You know what? Even if one of Mr. Hitler's specials came through the window, I'd rather be sitting on a nice lavatory than in that privy. This war is being fought for civilization, and if a proper bathroom doesn't count as part of that, then I don't know what does.”

  I was ready to cheer, and though the sentiment never penetrated one of Mr. Churchill's speeches where Britain would be fought for on the beaches and in the streets, some passing remark on holding Jerry at the bathroom door could not have gone amiss. I was further confirmed in this opinion when my father told me—and where he got this information I cannot imagine—that when the wild Russian cossacks of the steppes rode into Vienna and such sites of sophistication, they were soon seen on the streets sporting the first fruit of plunder—a lavatory seat worn as a collar.

  And so we made our way back to that depraved London, where people gambled with bombs for a last few moments of scented comfort. Not that the bathroom at number 10 was ours alone, or anything like it. You remember that at least five people shared it, though my mother bowed to no one in the room's décor, its soaps and towels. It stayed a very pretty room (in gray and lilac), with a carpet over the linoleum and a sturdy air of privacy. The flying bombs were still falling, and my mother allowed how she was reluctant to get her ticket punched near the end of the war—as victory seemed more certain. She said it was a little more scary every day. It was odd: she was eager to shelter me as much as possible, but sometimes we were muttering together like two old gamblers hooked into the green baize. I didn't realize it until later, but her father, Bert, always played the horses. And my mother (Bert always called her “Non”) loved the word and the idea of “a flutter,” even though she was steadiness itself.

  So we weren't quite heroes, Mum and me, even if we did come back from Nottinghamshire like that. Still, I have thought about it a lot since and I daresay the people whose business is going to war should remember that liberty and so on will go just so far. But if you show people a nice bathroom, they might fight to the end.

  When we got back, taking the bus from the railway station and then carrying our suitcases down the road, there was Sally sitting on the doorstep in the long summer evening, getting herself a tan. She was not in the least surprised, or sympathetic. I mean, we had gone away at a time when no one we knew had a telephone. She might never have heard from us again. My dad had an uncle who had gone off, long ago, to Canada. Just sent a letter when he got there. Prince Rupert in Canada.

  “Well, look what the cat dragged in,” said Sally to me. (Actually, the cat—Mackie—was curled up on the step beside her. And all he brought in during the war was a dead rat every morning. Mackie had his wounds—bits taken out of him—but he was our ace, undefeated, and very smug when sleeping.)

  “Hallo, Sally,” I said. “It was awful.”

  “Was it? Well, you want to be more careful on giving up on your old Sal, don't you?” I realized she was the first woman I had left, and I was in tears there on the street in the lovely warm evening.

  “Oh, don't cry, love,” said my mum, and for days she was telling everyone what a good little boy I had been, hardly ever going to that horrid bathroom and then breaking into tears when I got home. And that sarcy sour smile never left Sally's face. But when she caught my eye, and the praise was pouring down, she'd stick out her wet tongue at me. And then she'd cuff me lightly on the head as she and her jasmine scent passed by.

  5

  DURING THE WAR people were steadily unwell in ways that made illness seem the norm. Or which left health a mystery. And although I could not realize it at the time, we were deprived of certain foods because of the war. For instance, my mother's mother-Grandma—gave me comic books every week. One of which was called Film Fun, which she would read to me. It was all in black-and-white, and it had stories in cartoon form on people like Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Joe E. Brown and George Formby. Formby was English—north country—but most of the comics were American and they were always slipping on banana skins.

  “What's that?” I wanted to know as Joe E. Brown took another skid.

  “That's a banana,” said Grandma. And then she cried out to a world at war, “Heavens, he doesn't know what a banana is!” A banana, she began … well, it's yellow with a skin that you peel. “And inside there's a sweet fruit. I used to slice it up in banana custard. You'd love it.”

  “Well, what happened to it?” I asked.

  “You may well ask,” she said. “The ships that carried bananas are now carrying guns and helmets and tins of Spam. The banana, you see, grows in tropic parts.”

  “Perhaps,” I said—and I considered this a very practical, sensible, and even grown-up interpretation—”the banana has been stopped so that people won't fall over on the skins and hurt themselves.”

  “What?” she said, and then burst out in laughter. It was the beginning of my reputation as a solemn humorist. “Did you hear what the boy said, Non?” This of my mother, who was making our lunch. It must have been a Friday, the day Grandma got on the 115 bus in Hackbridge and came over to see us. Sometimes the day changed, and—if you can believe this—since she couldn't phone us, because we had no phones, Grandma would post a letter, first post, saying, “I'm coming Thursday instead of Friday,” and we'd have the letter by eleven o'clock, second delivery. We were technologically nothing, but the post came three times a day—as if people needed it.

  But, going back to the banana, it wasn't such a silly idea if the skin was as dangerous as Film Fun said—I could imagine Winnie coming up with such a precautionary measure. Because Grandma had her bad leg and she smoked all the time. Even when reading Film Fun she liked to keep a cigarette in her mouth and the smoke went up and hit her head. Without a word of a lie, in her silver-white hair—the kind that red turns to—just to one side of the center was a nicotine flair. Smoked all the time and coughed and outlived her daughter, Norah, Non, my mother. Strong as could be. But always complaining about her leg and her back—indeed, I can still see it now, even as an old lady she used to sit with her legs tucked up under her on her chair. Like a girl. To stop them aching. Sally had the same habi
t, because she just longed to have Grandma's love. But Grandma never noticed her.

  We used to say that Grandma and Bert lived in Mitcham, to the south of Streatham. But it wasn't really Mitcham, not in the way Mitcham was Fair Green, the pond, and the cricket green. It was past that, over the Common, past the Mitcham Junction station. Beyond an army camp, and out into flat fields where cows fed and you could see all the way to the great cooling towers in Croydon. It was like country there, in a little stretch of houses called Hackbridge. And it was there my mother's family had always lived.

  We had a Christmas there, and it was a bad winter so I think we had to stay longer because of the snows. Grandma washed clothes in a big saucepan (she used the same one to steam Christmas puddings), and then they were wrung out in a wringer. That contraption fascinated me, and one day as I saw the moisture squeezed out of the clothes I stuck in a finger to see what would happen. That finger—the middle one on my left hand—still has the scars on the end section. I cannot recall the pain or the treatment, yet I feel Bert's arm around me as a kind of silent solace.

  Bert was the head of the family—he was Grandpa, really, but he wanted me to call him Bert. He was a sweet man, well read, a clerk in the City of London. He had a bad arm—I don't know how he got it—and he couldn't lift it, or tie his tie. But with just one arm at Christmas he had the knack of diverting my attention and slipping silver threepenny bits, as thin as petals, into my Christmas pudding, and then once, for the Queen's coronation, a sovereign. And he had a terrible cough for years before he got ill. He had a lovely smile, naughty, I suppose—and I did hear later that as a semi-invalid he had been a shy ladies’ man. He was very polite to women, and there were some men who couldn't talk to women without mocking them or tearing them off a strip. Where did that come from?

  Bert had books, a modest library, and he had a practice on weekends of taking a train and walking out to a nice country pub. Sometimes my dad and I would go with him, and Bert was very good on the trees and the birds in the Surrey hills. He loved Box Hill and Leith Hill, Dorking, Abinger Hammer, and the Spectacle Woods in Ranmore— places like that. He seemed like a country person to me, and his love of horses was a part of that character. After all, you could hardly have a horse in Streatham—though people did ride on the cinder track on the Common. He went to the races on Saturday afternoons, Sandown, Kempton, Hurst Park, Goodwood, and Epsom, of course, for the Derby. In the family, it was alleged that he was a dab hand at picking a winner. He studied form and knew how to look at a horse. And I remember Sundays when there was celebration for some coup on the previous day. I hope it was all real. Grandma was skeptical and aggrieved and sometimes said that Bert was like a child in the dark, just kidding himself that he understood anything.

  “Well, Lil,” he'd say, “I think I understand you.” And she'd sneer or turn very girlish and tell him to get on with it—whatever it was. They were a warring couple, but my mother told me that that was all down to Grandma's hot temper. “She had such red hair once,” she told me, “and you can never trust that.” Whereas my mother adored Bert and gave him credit for teaching her how to handle the fiery Grandma. Still, I have to say that Grandma never was angry with me. We were pals. She'd take me to the baker, where we'd buy a split tin out of the oven and play games all the way home about it being too hot to hold. And she'd slice the bread so thin you could see the blade like a shadow. Then she'd make hard-boiled-egg sandwiches, the best I ever had, because the eggs were a gooey stage just short of hard. And she'd boil eggs without a timer—would just watch them bubbling and say, “Don't you think they're ready? You don't want bullets, do you?” And she would peel them under the cold tap, like shucking shrimp—too fast to get burned. I still race her, peeling hot eggs for my children.

  Here comes another egg. It is a hot day and my mother and I are at the open window of her bedroom, which she liked to use sometimes as a sitting room. And we are looking down at our garden and the next-door garden. The man next door comes out to tend his chickens: he kept half a dozen or so in a hut. He collects the eggs, and sees us.

  “Fancy an egg?” he calls out.

  And my mother says, “Oh, yes, please.”

  Whereupon he takes out of his pocket a white handkerchief. He makes a clever pouch of it and puts the egg in the pouch. Then he hooks the pouch on the end of his clothes prop. Every house then had a line for the washing and a prop—a straight, slender branch—for pushing the line as high and taut as possible. (Clothes props were ideal fighting staffs for Robin Hood and Little John, too, and they usually ended as kindling.)

  And that's how he does it. He pushes the prop up to us at the window. My mum leans out and gets the egg, like a princess taking a gift of gold. And I look down at the man's face and it's absolutely clear—because I know the feeling— that he's in love with my mother.

  An extra egg could mean a happier evening. We used dried egg, too, and I can recall sticking my finger in and out of that jar. The truth is I had to be educated to appreciate real eggs and I still like an omelette made of dried egg and rolled up as tight as a carpet. But better go hungry than eat whale meat. Near the end of the war, the whale was spoken of as our rescue and reward for having so little old-fashioned beef and lamb. You never know—it could happen again. Emergencies come and go, and it is my estimate that it might be wiser to lose the war than have to eat whale meat. Now I warm to Moby Dick as well as the next man, and I am certainly disposed to see many metaphors swimming with the whale. But whale meat—gray, rubbery, chewy, oily, fishlike—is a hazard. As I recall, England turned on the whale in a week. There may have been whale mountains somewhere rotting in the sun. You could not persuade the British to eat it.

  The papers said we had won the war the way they said Arsenal 1, Chelsea 2, but we had food rationing for years—into the 1950s, as I remember. There was even the day when a banana boat docked at last, and the claws of pale yellow fruit became available. The children of Britain started falling all over the place, having been well trained in banana-skin jokes.

  There was an extraordinary day when a food parcel arrived from Uncle Sid in Prince Rupert. It had apples with skins so thick and red that the white fruit was stained. There were jars of barley sugar and fruit drops. And there were Canadian cheeses coated in red wax. My father did an act where he hacked the wax away, cut into the cheese, sniffed and licked, and declared that it might be British Columbian soap. The food parcel was astonishing bounty and both generous and thoughtful, but it said little for life in Canada. The only thing I liked were the canned pilchards in a heavy tomato sauce. I straightaway assigned them to Captain Scott's sledging rations.

  But the diet was a national worry, apparently. The British, the papers said, were not healthy. My mother was troubled by a kind of eczema—it was a rash with sores that affected her thighs and her arms. She used a foul-smelling ointment on it that killed her sweetness for an hour or two, but no one seemed able to explain what the rash was. Until one day, thinking I might be ready for the news, my grandma said it was probably living with my father.

  I could not understand how such a malady had come about, especially when Dad was just about the only healthy person in sight. He was all muscle and sinew He liked to run upstairs and on the Common, where we had sprinting matches—it was me as McDonald Bailey of Great Britain against all manner of American sprinters. He sparred. He shadowboxed. He was Freddie Mills or Jackie Paterson. And when he came home on Friday nights and I was allowed to stay up to greet him, he invented soccer in the kitchen, where he was Tommy Lawton firing in “raspers” at the end of the kitchen table and I was Frank Swift beating away the ball made of pink and white cloth. He was unstoppable and breathtakingly admirable, but he stammered sometimes if he tried to talk to me. And what he never did was say where he had been or even acknowledge that he had been away.

  6

  THE WAR ENDED IN EUROPE —that was the moment of Hitler on the Common and the Gurkhas in the Sunday papers. Across the road, my friend Brya
n's father—Tommy Hamilton—came home. He proved to be a very mild, amiable man, not especially bitter or darkened from the war. He became the manager of a branch of the Victoria Wine Company, on George Street off Baker Street, and as such he gave me my first job one Christmas helping the regular van driver deliver boxes of liquor to very distinguished West End addresses. Just as his son Bryan was my natural and best friend, so Uncle Tommy became a feature of my life. And once he was back home, he and his wife Connie had two more children, boys, and then, much later, a girl.

  My mother had a younger sister, Trilby, who lived in Mitcham with her parents. Trilby! Immediately, you get a feeling for Bert's library and a clerk's fascination with the story of Svengali and Trilby (published by George Du Maurier in 1894). Trilby was called Trill in the family, and she had served in the women's army, in sympathy with her boy friend, Reg, who had gone to Europe in the army and been captured in Italy He had been in prison camps and his health had deteriorated, and the first time I met him was during that spring. I was at the top of a flight of stairs and he was on crutches at the foot.

  “Hallo,” he called up. “I know who you are.”

  I didn't say anything. His helplessness frightened me. “You'll have to come down here to say ‘Hallo,’“ he said, and I went down. I had a game of sliding down that staircase on my stomach, and he was unable to climb it. “I saw you when you were very small,” he said. “But you wouldn't remember.”

  “No,” I agreed. I had heard stories about the war but this was the real thing, a wreck come home, hardly able to stand. And Reg would work on the railways, but he would have bad health for another forty years or so. It seems funny to say that, but as I said before, there were many people in those days who weren't right or quite well.