Yesterday’s journey however was uneventful, and I was sorry to exchange the relative tranquillity of the Quiet Coach for the bustle and clamour of King’s Cross, where we arrived only a few minutes late. I descended into the bowels of the Tube and took the Northern City Line to London Bridge, and then a half-empty commuter train down to Brickley, a journey through Graffitiland. There are graffiti inside the train, gouged into the carriage windows with glass cutters, or scrawled on the laminated melamine panelling with coloured marker pens, and spray-painted graffiti outside - on the stations you pass through, on rolling stock inert in sidings, on buildings overlooking the railway, on walls and bridges and staircases and the doors of lock-up garages, on every inch of available surface. The riot of lettering adds a bit of colour, I suppose, to this drab segment of south-east London, but linguistically it always seems to me somewhat impoverished - mostly the names or pseudonyms of the artists, seldom a witty epigram or sharp political comment. When was the last time I laughed at a graffito? Years ago I spotted one which still makes me smile when I think of it: under a sign, ‘
Bill Posters Will Be Prosecuted
’ some wag had written, ‘
Bill Posters is innocent
’. Nothing as amusing greeted my eye as I made my way over the footbridge at Brickley Station. Just names, obscenities and acclamations mostly to do with football teams.
Brickley is one of the older London suburbs, first developed about a hundred years ago, with streets of squat identical terraced cottages on the flat bits, and larger terraced houses and tall detached and semi-detached villas on the hilly bits. These properties, built of the old yellowish London brick with stone and stucco decoration, much modernised, converted, divided and extended, still dominate the district, interspersed with more recent post-WW2 redbrick developments - low-profile blocks of flats and tiny terraced town houses for first-time buyers. But Lime Avenue, where I was born and where Dad still lives, doesn’t belong to either of these architectural periods. It’s a gently curving street of small inter-war semis squeezed in on rising ground between a main road and the railway, and it leads nowhere except to the main road at each end. The houses on the railway side have back gardens which abut on to an unusually high and wide embankment, with trees and bushes and grassy hollows; the kids who lived there in my childhood had access to this illegal adventure playground which I envied. Our house, number 49, like all the houses on the other side of the street, has a small back garden raised up artificially on landfill contained by a high concrete wall. A main road runs beneath our rear fence, and the tops of the buses that pass are just visible from the first floor, though you can always hear them in the garden. The street’s name derives from the lime trees which in my childhood were placed at staggered intervals along the pavement on each side, and have since been removed and replaced by rowans, after a campaign by car-owners who objected to the sticky gum dropping from the lime trees on to the bodywork of their vehicles. The houses are separated by narrow side alleys and have no garages or carports, so the street is lined with cars parked nose to tail on both sides. When I was a kid we used to play football and cricket in the road, pausing and stepping aside to let the occasional car or van pass, but it would be impossible now. Whenever I go back to Brickley and turn into Lime Avenue from the main road I experience a mental lurch of memory, and I am a short-trousered schoolboy again, coming home in the late afternoon, socks round my ankles, shoes scuffed from playground football, looking forward to another game with my mates before being called in for tea and homework. It always seemed to me a nice street to come home to, and it still looks smarter and more inviting than the drab older terraces that surround it. The houses are covered in pebble-dash, with timber features painted in a variety of contrasting colours, and neat little front gardens with shrubs and flower pots and crazy-paving, though number 49 is looking a bit sad these days: the privet hedge needs cutting, the wooden gate is rotting along the bottom, and the short concrete path to the front door is fissured and uneven, with weeds growing in the cracks. Dad still insists on doing the basic maintenance himself, which means that it mostly doesn’t get done, or not done very well. Ten years ago, when he was recovering from an operation, he grudgingly agreed to let me pay somebody to repaint the house, but I dare not suggest having it done again in case he gets his ladders out and tries to do it himself.
I rang the doorbell, and then when that had no effect, used the door knocker, banging hard four times. Dad is hard of hearing - not as deaf as I am, but as he won’t use a hearing aid he is, for practical purposes, just as deaf as me, indeed rather more so. Five years ago, after a long and exhausting series of arguments, I finally persuaded him to be tested and fitted with an NHS hearing aid, but he complained that it was uncomfortable and fiddly, and the batteries kept packing up, and it whistled. He soon stopped wearing it. Living alone, he didn’t have much incentive to persevere. He listens to the television through headphones since the neighbours on the other side of the party wall complained of the volume coming through the speakers, and he has a telephone with a specially loud ring and a flashing light. But he often misses calls by tradesmen because he doesn’t hear the knocker, and if he hadn’t been expecting me I might have waited a long time for him to open the front door. The first sign that he was about to do so was that a curtain behind the round frosted-glass window in the door was drawn aside. This is a thick felt full-length curtain which he rigged up himself to keep the draughts out and the warmth in during the winter months. He keeps most of the other curtains in the house drawn or partially drawn for the same reason, adding a sepulchral gloom to the general seediness of the interior. The door opened. An elderly man dressed like a tramp smiled at me.
‘Hallo, son,’ he said. ‘You made it, then.’ He stood aside to admit me, then poked his head out of the door to look suspiciously up and down the road, as if he feared I might have been tailed by criminals bent on armed robbery, before shutting it and drawing the curtain. ‘How was the journey?’ he said, as I took off my overcoat and hung it on the coat rack by the door.
‘All right. The train was on time for once,’ I said.
‘What?’ This word occurs very frequently in our dialogues.
‘The train was on time,’ I shouted.
‘There’s no need to shout,’ he said, and led me along the passage into what we always called the dining room, presumably the estate agent’s designation, though it was and still is the living room, and a very small one, about thirteen feet square, I would guess. It’s at the back of the house, next to the kitchenette. The front room or ‘lounge’ is a little bigger, but was rarely occupied in my childhood except on high days and holidays, especially in winter because of the bother of lighting a second fire. The dining room did, it is true, contain the table where we ate most of our meals, and a sideboard, but it also contained two easy chairs and a bureau desk and a radiogram and in due course a television, and it was there that we mainly lived as a family. In those days Dad used the front room to practise on the saxophone and clarinet. He was scrupulous about doing an hour’s practice every day, in the late morning, to keep his fingering supple and accurate, playing over and over again what sounded to me like fragmentary scales and phrases with no continuous melody. It was maddening to listen to and I wonder if that wasn’t one reason why I never seriously tried to learn an instrument myself when I was young - there seemed to be no pleasure in it. It was a revelation when I first heard him on the bandstand, playing a proper solo on the tenor sax. Later I got interested in jazz through listening to his records and had fantasies of playing the trumpet like Harry James or Dizzy Gillespie but I was on an academic track at school by then, aimed towards university with loads of homework, and not sufficiently motivated to give up any of my meagre spare time to music lessons, so I never learned to play an instrument, and now that I have plenty of time to spare it’s too late because hearing impairment has taken most of the pleasure out of music for me.
For Dad too, I think. He doesn’t play any more of course, he sold his instruments some years ago - his teeth have gone and he has arthritis in his fingers - and he doesn’t listen to music as much as he used to. The turntable and the cassette player of his music centre are broken and he won’t replace it or have it mended. When I offered to buy him a new system with a CD player last Christmas he flew into one of his irrational fits of temper: ‘Are you mad? What would I want with a CD player? You think I want to waste my money buying a lot of CDs, and they cost a fortune, a complete take-on if you ask me, when I’ve got a marvellous set of records like those?’ (Making a sweeping gesture towards the shelf that holds his modest collection of LPs.) I said, all right, I would get him a hi-fi with a turntable, and he said, ‘Where would I put it? I don’t have room for any more clobber,’ and I said you can put it where the music centre is now, and he said, ‘What? You mean get rid of my music centre? I paid a hundred quid for that.’ And I said, but it doesn’t work, Dad, and he said, ‘The radio works,’ though in fact he never uses that radio, because he can’t turn up the volume loud enough without annoying the neighbours. He has one in the kitchen which he plays so loud it rattles the crockery, and a smaller portable which he listens to in the dining room or in bed through a pair of lightweight earphones, mostly to talk radio. He might try Classic FM occasionally but gone are the days when he would sit down and listen to a whole symphony or concerto by one of his favourite composers, Elgar, Rachmaninov, Delius - late Romantic stuff, no Mozart or Beethoven for him (‘can’t stand the bloody Germans, too heavy’) - recording it on to a cassette for future use, an economy which gave him great satisfaction. Modern jazz no longer seems to interest him, though he does like nostalgic radio programmes about the big swing bands of the Forties, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey. Electric guitar-based rock and pop music he despises, needless to say, and always has done since it put an end to the dance-band business, though he made an exception of the Beatles. They were real musicians, he would say. ‘Clever tunes and songs you can understand, with proper rhymes.’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was his favourite.
‘So how are you?’ I said when we were seated in the two easy chairs each side of the hearth, where one bar of an electric fire was switched on. Although I forced him to let me pay for central heating to be installed at the time of Mum’s last illness he has never taken to it; he keeps the radiators turned off in the house most of the time for economy’s sake, and uses an electric fire in the dining room because he doesn’t really feel warm unless he can see an orange glow and feel his shins getting scorched as he used to with a coal fire.
‘What?’ he said. I’m sure he heard me perfectly well, but like most deaf people he’s got in the habit of saying ‘what?’ automatically to every conversational gambit - I notice myself doing it sometimes.
‘How have you been?’ I said, more loudly.
He grimaced. ‘Not too good. Never get a proper night’s sleep these days.’
‘You should get a new mattress,’ I said. This was a familiar topic, and the conversation took a well-trodden path, which went something like this, with much repetition and shouting:
‘There’s nothing wrong with my mattress.’
‘I’ll pay for it, Dad.’
‘It’s not a question of paying for it. I’ve got plenty of money.’
‘You would sleep much better on a firm mattress.’
‘It’s nothing to do with the mattress. It’s because of my . . . how’s your father. What d’you call it?’ He glanced down at his groin.
‘Prostate.’
‘That’s it. I was up four times last night.’
‘Have you been to the doctor about it?’
‘Old Simmonds? Oh yes. He says there’s an operation you can have. I said no thanks very much.’
‘Well, I don’t blame you, Dad.’ I essayed a joke: ‘I believe it can affect your sex life.’ But he didn’t hear and I didn’t feel like repeating it.
‘He gave me some tablets,’ he said.‘I suppose they’re sort of astringent. You know, to shrink the . . . whatsit. They don’t seem to make much difference.’ He shook his head gloomily. Then as usual he found a thought with which to cheer himself up: ‘Mind you, I can’t grumble. Eric for instance, he had it the other way.’ Eric was a second cousin who died several years ago. ‘He couldn’t go at all. They had to rush him to hospital. Put a thing up his . . .’ He mimed the insertion of a catheter with a wincing expression. Then after a pause, he said mildly: ‘No, I’ll get a new mattress one day. There’s no hurry.’
I could no longer restrain myself from commenting on his clothes. ‘I hope you’re going to change before we go out.’
‘Of course I’m going to change!’ he said crossly. ‘You don’t think I’d go out in these, do you?’ In truth I didn’t, but it irritates me when he dresses like a down-and-out at home, perhaps because there’s such a clear family resemblance between us. It’s as if he’s presenting to me a mocking effigy of myself. We’re both tall, bony, with high, stooped shoulders, and lined, long-jawed faces, so looking at him dressed like a guy on Bonfire Night is like seeing myself in dire straits twenty-odd years from now. He was wearing a pair of filthy high-waisted trousers, made of checked tweed so thick, and so stiff with dirt and stains of various kinds, that I imagined he stood them upright in the corner of his bedroom when he took them off, a soiled beige cardigan with holes in the sleeves at each elbow, and a frayed plaid shirt with the top two buttons missing, revealing his scrawny Adam’s apple and a crescent of yellowish undervest. With the possible exception of the undervest these clothes were not, I knew, worn-out items that he had long had in his possession, but fairly recent acquisitions scavenged from charity shops and jumble sales. On his feet he wore a pair of shabby carpet slippers trodden down at the heel.