Climbing the Stairs (6 page)

There she was ranting and raving and thrusting her arms towards the pastor. I said to myself – steady, girl, here it comes: the big sin of the week. Then came the awful truth. One morning
she felt so tired she didn’t get up and make her husband’s breakfast. Well, I ask you. Omission it might be – sin never. It was all so piddling.

Then, after calling for a few minutes’ more silence, the pastor said that if there were any troubled souls there, would they come up to him for advice, and he’d lay his hands on
them.

Well search me, if I’d had all the troubles in the world nothing would have induced me to have gone up and let him lay his hands on me. I mean, all right if he’d been one of those
intense, spiritual-looking aesthetic priests, but a portly, smug-faced man that looked as if he’d just left the mayoral banquet – nothing would have induced me to have gone up there. In
any case they’d have all passed out if I’d have told them my sins, and even mine weren’t that bad. That was the end of The Ruth Elders.

Then Perce said, would I like to go round to the working men’s club with him? I’d never been to a working men’s club before and I had no idea what it was like so I agreed. This
was going to be another first and last for me.

Oh, what dumps they are! Maybe they’re not now but they were then. It was another bare room with nothing in it at all. No carpet, no rugs, no nice tables. Talk about a boost to the male
ego. Everything was there for men but nothing for females at all. Men had got billiard tables, card tables, and darts but all the women did was just stick up at one end of the room. It was a
working men’s club but never mind about the working men’s wives or their girlfriends.

When we got there Perce dumped me at the women’s end while he went off to play billiards. This after the prayer meeting was not my idea of going out with a young man.

Yet none of the other women seemed to mind about being down there, with their boyfriends and husbands up the other end all clubbing together. Some were knitting and some were just talking. They
tried to be friendly, I’ve got to give them their due. They asked me what I did so I said I was in domestic service and they said, ‘Oh, a skivvy!’ Not nasty at all; it was just
their name for domestic servants, but you could tell by the tone they said it in that none of them would ever be seen dead in service, for which I didn’t blame them.

One of them worked in a fried fish and chip shop. She needn’t have bothered to tell me that because you could smell it a mile off. One of them took rather a fancy to me. She was a woman of
about thirty-five – not married – a barmaid. Violet her name was. She said to me, ‘I wouldn’t stick that life. Why don’t you take a barmaid’s job?’

Why? My mum and dad would’ve gone stark raving mad if I’d ever written home and told them I was a barmaid. They’d have been up post haste to rescue me. All right. Nowadays
barmaids have got a certain status. Pubs are nothing like the riotous places they were in the old days, and half of them have been made into these cocktail-lounge things. But then a barmaid was a
low job. There weren’t many of them – mostly there were barmen.

I remember when Mum and Dad used to get me to go round on a Saturday dinnertime to get half a pint of Burton from the bottle and jug department. It was right next door to the public bar and the
language of the barmaid in there was worse than any bargee or labourer that I’ve ever heard.

This Violet, she said it was a lovely life – jolly and lively. I daresay it was, but I couldn’t help thinking to myself that men don’t marry barmaids. She was an example. She
was thirty-five and she wasn’t married and she was already beginning to go off, as you might say. Oh no, being a barmaid wasn’t for me.

After I’d been there for about an hour Perce brought me over a cup of tea and then he said that they were going up to the pub for an hour to have a drink. Naturally I thought we were all
going too. So I got up and he sort of hissed at me under his breath and said, ‘No, not you. You stay here.’

I was infuriated at this. Stuck there with all these women while he went out to the pub. So I said, ‘I’m certainly not stopping here’ – hissing at him too under my
breath. And he hissed, ‘Do you want to make me look a bloody fool in front of all my mates?’ Well, what could I do. I just had to let him go. But what an idea of enjoyment.

My mum would never let my dad go out without her and I don’t blame her in the least. When you get married to a man you never want to let him go out without you because once he starts that
he’ll do it for ever. When a woman gets married it’s her whole life – the man is her life. But to a man marriage is just another part of his life because he’s still doing
exactly the same sort of work that he did before he got married. And he’s still got all his pals and he doesn’t want to give them up. So you’ve got to keep a tight rein on
them.

I remember when I first got married Albert, my husband, and I had always gone out together. Then I had the first baby. And when the baby was about a fortnight old Albert said, ‘I think
I’ll go over the road and have a drink.’ I said, ‘Well, all right, I’ll come too.’ So he said, ‘What about the baby?’ ‘It’s your baby as much
as mine,’ I said, ‘and if you can leave it so can I.’ I wasn’t having any of that kind of lark.

Anyway Perce and the rest of the men poured out over to the pub and of course no sooner had they gone than a sexual conversation started, and amongst these females it was too terrible for
words.

The married women went into great length and detail. The act of sex might have been a private act physically but it certainly wasn’t private verbally. I’d never heard such things in
my life. And the jokes they were telling.

Mind you, it did make a change from The Ruth Elders. But doesn’t that show you the duplicity of people? That Perce must have known the kind of things that went on in the club.

They say that women are complex creatures, but believe me you can’t beat a man when he wants to put one over on you. This was one of my first lessons but I have had many others since.

After a bit this Violet got me on one side and said, ‘I wouldn’t waste any time on that Perce if I were you, because you’ll never get him away from his mother.’ She said,
‘He’s been coming to this club for the last eight or nine years and he often brings a girl but they never last long.’

I knew it was true that you wouldn’t get him away from his mother. You couldn’t really blame her because there’s nothing stronger than the maternal instinct. They don’t
think that they’re distorting their son’s life – that they’re making them not a real man. He had a feeling for his mother that he shouldn’t have had. I don’t
mean to say that they had an incestuous relationship. Of course they didn’t, but a man who’s been living with his mother alone year after year, he’d be simply no good as a
husband.

To start with you can never measure up to their mother. And then they’re not the kind of men that are interested in sex because if they were they wouldn’t have tied themselves to
their mother in the first place. The fact is that the maternal relationship is so big that they haven’t got enough left for anyone else. I mean, even if you went all out and got them
it’d be more like living with your brother than a husband.

So there was Violet telling me all this, but I already knew as much myself.

She said, ‘The only time that you can ever get his kind up to scratch is if you get them half canned or if you put in all the spade work yourself. In any case,’ she said, ‘the
end result isn’t worth bothering about.’

So with her advice and my own experience I decided that night was the parting of the ways for me and Perce. What with his mother fixation, his ‘men only’ drinking and his Ruth Elders
– even if I’d ever got him to the altar, which I doubt – I’d have had a scratchy sort of married life. For people mixed up with these strict religious sects the word sex is
taboo and the deed of the four-letter word is something too terrible for them to contemplate.

6

T
HOUGH
I
WASN
’
T
impressed by the working men’s clubs, I have always been a fan of pubs. You might say that
I’ve known three generations of pubs. There’s pubs I knew when I was a child, there’s the pubs I knew in my early married life in London and elsewhere, and there’s the pubs
that exist now. And the differences are vast.

When I was a child, it was true to say that for the middle and upper classes the Englishman’s home was his castle, but for the working-class man the pub was his castle. It was a place
where no do-gooders had the right or the courage to come as they did to one’s home where, for the sake of the charity they distributed, you had to listen to them and pretend that you believed
in what they were telling you. Once you got in a pub you, metaphorically speaking, drew up the draw-bridge and there you were – lord of all you surveyed. And what you surveyed was lively,
warm, and happy. It might have only been a superficial atmosphere and it could be quick to change. It often did, ending up in a free-for-all fight, but even those were enjoyable. After all
that’s part of a castle’s life, isn’t it – fighting?

When I was about seven or eight I often used to go into the pub on a Saturday dinnertime to get my mum and dad half a pint of Burton. The bottle and jug department used to be right next door to
the public bar and the people who were in it were the kind of people that I saw every day of the week – people who lived round us – but you’d never have thought they were the same
people. As I looked through they seemed to have changed their characters completely. The way they spoke and the way they laughed – they had come alive.

Kids used to be allowed in the bottle and jug department – it didn’t matter how young you were. I think there was just some peculiar rule whereby it didn’t matter about your
age if you got it in a jug but you couldn’t have it in a bottle with a screw top. Why – I don’t know. Whether they thought you might drink it out of the bottle – but I
should have thought it more likely that you’d do that with a jug. Mind you, I never drank any of my mum and dad’s half-pint of Burton – if I had my life wouldn’t have been
worth a tinker’s cuss. Dad used to measure it out – to him it was liquid gold – and if there was short measure I had to go back with it. When you could only afford half a pint you
saw that you got it. Then it used to be measured out fairly between Mum and him.

The life that used to go on in the pubs was as good as a variety show. Some nights my mum and dad used to let us stand at the doors and we’d be fascinated by it all. Publicans allowed
hawkers to go in selling matches, bootlaces, toys, scurrilous ditties, and a sure cure for the clap. Not that we knew what the clap was then, but it used to sell well – the cure I mean.

In our pub there used to be a man: on a Saturday night somebody would buy him a pint of beer and he used to balance it on his head while he slowly undressed as far as the waist, and if he could
get everything off without spilling it he could drink it for free. And sometimes after this he’d try dressing again for another wager but it was much harder and many a time he upset it and
it’d go to waste.

I know a lot of people used to think it terrible leaving kids outside a pub. But my parents were very good. They wouldn’t leave us there when it was freezing cold. If they could see we
were getting fed up they’d bring us biscuits or a bottle of lemonade between us. But generally we didn’t worry; there was so much going on. Today I don’t like to see it –
but only because I reckon the kids might die with boredom.

There was another man who used to come in who said he had a performing flea. He used to call this flea Algernon and he’d hold a matchbox in his hand, then open it a bit, and say,
‘Would you like to see Algernon do a somersault?’ And then he’d talk to this flea and say, ‘Come on, Algernon, show them how clever you are. There, did you see him do
it?’ And then back to the box again and he’d say, ‘Would you like to see Algernon do a double somersault? Come on Algernon, alley oop.’ Then he’d lose Algernon and
he’d cry, ‘Oh, he’s lost. Algernon’s lost. He’s fallen in love – I think with you, miss, or you, sir.’ But nobody got panicky; nobody worried about a flea
loose because fleas along with flies were the thing that you had in your home. For fleas, as I’ve said, we used Keatings powder and for flies those terrible sticky things you hung from the
ceiling. My mother used to put one up sometimes on a Saturday dinnertime and by Sunday there wouldn’t be one space left – they’d be two or three deep, you know, and it was
horrible if you hit it with your head. So nobody worried that Algernon was roaming. Then he’d say, ‘Look lady, he’s on your coat.’ And he’d go to pick him off her coat
and he’d lose him again. And then it would be, ‘There he is on the wall.’ And everybody would stand gaping, their eyes going all round the walls. But the thing was, there never
was a flea – it was an imaginary Algernon. But there would be the customers following imaginary Algernon, until at last it struck the landlord what money he was losing because while they were
looking they weren’t buying any beer. So eventually either the customers would buy the man beer to console him for the loss of Algernon or the publican would eject him.

Another person we used to watch was an old man who stood outside holding his hand out with a ha’penny in it waiting for someone to add to it. Perhaps when someone went in they
wouldn’t contribute but when they came out they were feeling far more mellow so they’d cough up.

Then he’d dart into the pub – have a drink – then come out again – put his hand in his pocket for another ha’penny and start once more.

Sometimes this happy jolly atmosphere would change and instead of the sort of friendly swearing a hard note would creep in and it would be swearing in earnest – and then the fighting would
start. But the publicans didn’t mind. There weren’t many barmaids, mainly barmen – great hefty fellows who also acted as chuckers-out. We’d stand away from the doors and out
the troublemakers would come, thrown on to the pavement covered in sawdust and beer. We used to think it was marvellous – as good as going to the pictures – and free too.