Life: An Exploded Diagram (8 page)

I
LIVED IN
that house for the next thirteen years, and in all that time I spent a total of maybe ten minutes in that front room. For some reason, Win lit a fire in its grate every Christmas morning; otherwise, it went unheated. In the bitter Norfolk winters, the room radiated cold like the exhale of a grave. Eventually, George rigged up a heavy curtain on a pole over its door, sealing Win’s past more firmly in its modern exile.

Gradually, as I made cautious friendships on the estate, I came to realize that almost all the other houses had front, or “best,” rooms similar to ours. And always the same one — on the right as you came in the front door. (Not that anyone used the front door; in accordance with rural custom, we were a backdoor community. A knock on the front door was always an occasion for alarm.) One or two families did not conform. The Rileys, fecund Roman Catholics, notoriously used their front room as an extra bedroom. As did the Moores, but they had a son with polio who had an iron frame on his leg. The Parkers, around the corner from us on Dryden Road, actually spent evenings in their best room. We’d see light seeping from the edges of their curtains and wonder what they could be doing in there.

Best rooms were museums. But unlike conventional museums, they did not commemorate the past. They denied it.

The inhabitants of the Millfields estate — with only a very few exceptions, among them my father — belonged, and knew it, to the rural working class. We had been, until comparatively recently, peasants. The world we lived in was still recognizably feudal, and we knew our subordinate places in it. So, if our best rooms had been museums in the traditional sense, they would have contained hoes and spades, jars of hoof oil, yokes for carrying pails, cracked boots stinking of dung, unworn christening gowns, wonky milking stools, superstitious medicines, rusted bayonets, crutches.

But they didn’t. Like ours, the best rooms on the council estate contained items of ponderous furniture, embroidered platitudes and biblical quotations in wooden frames, brass fireside companion sets, elaborately vulgar vases and ceramic shepherdesses, loud clocks, bone-handled cutlery in boxes lined with imitation velvet, black-edged plates printed with Prince Albert’s likeness, poufs stuffed with horsehair, out-of-tune musical boxes. Superfluous, boastful things that properly belonged in the homes of people from a social class above our own. Best rooms announced that we had those things, too, thank you very much. Yet they were quarantined, permanently, in the best room. And for a particular reason: if we had actually used them, if we had incorporated them into our daily lives, we would have been pretending to be better than we were. We would have been getting Above Ourselves.

Getting Above Yourself was a heinous and peculiar sin. It attracted vicious censure. Win, among others, had exquisitely attuned antennae for detecting the faintest whiff of it. For example, when, in 1961, our ambitious neighbor Maureen Cushion summoned the doctor to a home visit instead of walking to the surgery, Win was scandalized. From behind the curtains she watched the car arrive at the house and the doctor hurry in with his black bag.

She said, “Chuh! That Maureen, she think she’re got everyone at her beck and call, now she’re got the tellerphone.”

The fact that Maureen suffered a miscarriage two days later cut no ice with Win; she paid her cold courtesy ever after.

It must have been a torment to Win that her daughter’s husband was Above Himself from the word go, having been a bloody jumped-up noncommissioned officer. And later, when I got way, way Above Myself, she could only cope by pretending that I was mad, or a changeling, or invisible.

But I get ahead of myself, which is nearly as bad as getting Above Myself.

Now and again families would update their best rooms. Out would go the sullen black sideboard; in would come its perky modern replacement, a veneered plywood affair with splayed and spindly legs and sliding doors with recessed handles. It would stand abandoned among the glowering old stuff, as incongruous as a stripper at a Presbyterian funeral. A modern picture — an Asiatic woman with a green face, a stylized child with photo-realist tears running down its cheeks, a racing car taking a bend — would be hung above the mantelpiece. Tiled fireplaces would be boarded up and electric fires installed; families would stand and admire the way the curled elements reddened, then switch them off, wary of the demand on the meter, and close the door.

Our best room never went through such transformations. It remained as immutable as a Sicilian grudge. George lived with it in a state of blank denial, like a murderer whose victim is buried under the cellar floor. Later, and to Win’s immense irritation, he and Ruth developed a passion for redecorating. Every three years or so, they would hang new wallpaper in the living room or hall, paint the picture rails an adventurous shade of muted pink, the door panels duck-egg blue or primrose yellow. I remember them being almost in love at such times. Once I came home from school to find Ruth tiptoe on a chair, lining up a roll of pasted wallpaper on the living-room wall, the furniture herded onto the rug. George was pretending to support her, both his hands on her broad backside. They hadn’t heard me come in.

“Stop that, George,” she said. “I can’t concentrate. I’ll get this all wonky.”

Yet there was happiness, naughtiness, in her voice.

No, there I go again. Sentimentality. Maybe it wasn’t like that at all. Maybe she was just annoyed.

They never redecorated the best room. It stayed just as Win had re-created it, for almost thirty years. After she died, George and Ruth waited three weeks, then phoned a man called Cooper, who did house clearance. Cooper came and looked around the room. He pushed his cap onto the back of his head and made a sad noise through his plump lips.

“How much?” George asked.

Cooper shook his head. “I dunno. Say twenny quid?”

“Fair enough,” George said, and took his wallet out of his pocket.

Cooper raised his eyebrows but took the money. He’d meant that he’d pay George twenty pounds, but you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, especially one from an uppity northerner. He came back the following Thursday and loaded it all onto his lorry and drove Win’s family’s history to an auction room in Norwich.

Within a month, the best room had been papered in Regency-stripe wallpaper and recarpeted. Its windows were rehung with curtains (patterned side to the street, of course) that matched the wallpaper. Chintz-covered “cottage-style” furniture was installed. The woodwork was painted a shade called
dawn.
Ruth and George admired their work, feeling, I imagine, a spring tide of relief and liberation. It’s just possible they stood in the doorway holding hands, or almost.

All the same, they never had nor found a use for the room.

One night — in 1980 or thereabouts — after my parents had gone to bed, I smoked a joint in there. Just for the lonely naughty hell of it, and with the paint-stiffened window opened as wide as it would go.

T
HE HEADMASTER OF
Millfields Primary School was an overweight, kindly, bespectacled man with a face that was always a bright pink. His name, by happy coincidence, was Mr. Pinkerton. He was a romantic socialist whose ambition was to instill in his charges a love of those rich things — poetry, art, Russian achievements, music, the beauties of the natural world — that might console them during lives that would almost certainly be poor, coarse, and disappointing.

Early in the summer term of 1956, he eased himself smilingly into Mrs. Pullen’s classroom with a large, fat envelope under his left arm. The children stood up. He bade them, pinkly, to be seated.

“Boys and girls,” he said, “as you know, you will — I am sorry to say — be leaving us at the end of term. We — I — shall miss you. You were among the first children to come to this brand-new school, and you will be among the first to leave it. You will be going to secondary schools, where you will learn new skills and how to be grown-ups.”

Clem, seated in the third row, paid only intermittent attention to this speech. His eyes were fixed, sidelong, on Hazel Cork, who could be relied upon to have a fit when anything out of the ordinary happened. Hazel’s fits threw her from her seat onto the floor, where she would writhe and swear and try to eat her ponytail and display her knickers. Clem was unsure whether he wanted this to happen or not.

“Today,” Mr. Pinkerton continued, “you are going to sit quietly at your desks and do a test. There’s no need to be frightened of it. It’s just a way to help us decide which kind of secondary school will suit you. But I want you to concentrate and do your best. And Mrs. Pullen and I will be watching to make sure you do not copy answers from your neighbors.”

Mr. Pinkerton smiled to soften this stern injunction.

He sat in Mrs. Pullen’s chair while she heavily yet softly patrolled the room. He was not at all sure what he thought of the eleven-plus examination, or “the Scholarship,” as it was commonly known. On the one hand, it offered working-class children such as these a troublesome route to betterment. The brightest among them might, just might, claw their way to positions in life that their parents could not imagine. His own heroes had done exactly that and changed the world. On the other hand, the eleven-plus was designed to sort the sheep from the goats. It was socially divisive. (Even though there was no reason to suppose that sheep were superior to goats. Or vice versa.) Mr. Pinkerton entertained an idea — more exactly, a dream — of a system in which all children, boys and girls, were educated together and in which their particular talents were nurtured and equally valued. The details of such a system evaded him. They were beyond his imagining.

He surveyed his harshly barbered and unkempt flock. It was unlikely that any of them would pass, anyway. And as far as the boys were concerned, that might be just as well. Newgate Grammar School represented all that he found deplorable. God help a boy from a council estate who found himself there. Lamb to the slaughter. Kid to the slaughter. One or the other.

Someone in the back row farted, audibly, setting off a susurration of titters.

“Boys, girls,” Mr. Pinkerton said as sternly as he was able, “please.”

Seven weeks later, George Ackroyd came home from work to find his wife in a state of high excitement. She waved a sheet of paper at him, wobbling the pink hair rollers under her head scarf. She’d had a home perm; the kitchen was full of its rank and acrid stink.

“Clem’re passed the Scholarship, George! He’re got a place at the grammar school!”

“What?”

He read the letter, still wearing his bicycle clips.

“Ruddy hell.”

He read the letter again at the blue-flecked Formica kitchen table.

“Where is he?”

“I dunno. I told him, and he went off on his bike.”

Win came in from the garden, wearing her laundry whites.

“He go to that Newgate,” she said, “he’ll start to think his shit dunt stink.”

George’s feelings about the matter were complicated, as were his feelings about his son generally. His first thought was that there had been some sort of mistake. Clem was a quick little reader, and he was a dab hand at drawing. God only knew where he got it from. Other than that, he was not noticeably different from the other boys on the estate. He had the same yokel accent and rough manners, the same scarred knees resulting from bike accidents, the same obsession with climbing trees. He was hungry all the time. He ruined his clothes in bloody, muddy, and unruly games of football in the local park. And now this!

George lit another Player.

A couple of years earlier, he’d noticed that Clem’s drawings were mostly of war machines: tanks, planes, and imaginary monstrosities that spat flame and bullets, all rich in technical detail. This pleased George; he thought he’d found something, a common interest, that would span the silent distance between his son and himself. That Christmas he’d bought the boy a Meccano set, and the two of them had spent the long and dreary December afternoon building a dockyard crane, George’s fingers nimble with the fiddlesome nuts and bolts. Clem’s initial enthusiasm for the task had soon waned. He’d been more interested in the plans and diagrams than in constructing the machine. George had finished the job unaided, had experienced a childish pleasure winding the crane’s little winch to hook the lid off the mustard pot. Then Clem had spent much of cheerless Boxing Day drawing ever more madly complex Meccano plans, numbering each component and providing a number key. He’d covered the blank side of half a roll of leftover wallpaper. The set itself was never used again. George had been disappointed in his son, just as he had become disappointed with everything else. But here was a thing, now: passing the ruddy Scholarship!

George felt himself to be a cut above the rest of the estate. Rather than join the beery crowd watching Borstead Wanderers boot a ball about, he spent his Saturday afternoons doing jobs around the house, keeping it dress-parade smart. He wished others would do the same. The Leggetts had turned number 16 into a one-family slum. He’d seen a rat in the street the other night, and he was pretty sure where it’d come from.

There were three wages coming in, now that Ruth had her part-time job at Griffin’s, managing the till and checking the prescriptions. In all but name, he was the foreman at Ling’s. His wages went up a pound a week every year. They were doing all right. George was proud of the fact that his wife had a new washing machine that gurgled itself empty via a ribbed gray pipe into the sink. He’d bought himself a new bike. Secretly, he nursed plans to rent a television set. His son getting a place at Newgate seemed part of . . . it. What “it” was, George couldn’t rightly say. Change? Progress? Socialism? Well, that hadn’t lasted long. Bloody Tories were back in. Short memories people had. As soon as they could put bacon and cheese in their sandwiches again, they’d gone and voted Conservative, like the idiot sheep they were. “It” was a better life, though, no matter what. The future he’d fought for. He’d imagined love, respect, comfort, pranky sex. “It” hadn’t turned out to be that, though. Quite the opposite. But his boy had passed the Scholarship.

Suddenly and urgently George wanted to know if any of the other kids on the estate had passed. He hoped not, by Christ.

Sundays, in the 1950s, were days of fathomless boredom and infinite silence. Clem hated them, numbly. His grandmother’s power over the household had diminished since the move to Borstead, but in accordance with some deal or treaty he had not witnessed, she still held sway over Sundays. In fact, since she had fallen out with the chapel and joined those Brethren loonies, keeping the Sabbath holy had got a lot worse. Clem was not allowed to play football or ride his bike or go down to the park. Nor read comics, which gave off a satanic aroma that only Win’s subtle nose could detect. There was no proper breakfast because there would be a Big Dinner. The Big Dinner was mince-and-onion pie with potatoes and sprouts. The house brewed the smell of it through the morning. He had to wear Best Clothes, which, on this hot summer day, consisted of a clean Ladybird T-shirt and long khaki-colored shorts that bloomered out below a snake belt. In the afternoon, while the grown-ups snored to the wireless, he swung himself back and forth on the front gate, pushing himself away from the post with his left foot until the hinge groaned and sent him slowly forward to the post again, with a
clonk.
And a
clonk.
And a
clonk.
The sun burned his cropped head.

Something moved at the edge of his dazed vision.

“Wotcha, Ackroyd, you skunkwhiff.”

Goz Gosling, perched on his almost-motionless bike. Goz lived on Milton Road, on the far side of the estate from Lovelace. He was something of an outsider. In part this was to do with his odd looks. Goz had black curly hair that sat on top of his head like a nest that had landed there without him noticing. He had darkish skin and a long nose that widened at the end like a spoon. (It was a belief shared by Win, among others, that a Gyppo had once spent the night in the lower branches of the Gosling family tree.) Goz was strange in other ways, too. He had funny ways of talking, as if he hadn’t settled on a voice of his own. He laughed at things that no one else did. He didn’t like football. He was, however, the estate’s undisputed champion at slow biking. It took him ten minutes to cover the twenty yards from the corner to Clem’s gate, and when he got there, he held the bike stationary, jigging his shoulders and twitching the handlebars to keep his balance. Then, with a tragic wail, he fell sideways and clutched the gatepost.

“Orright, Clem? Hot enough for yer?”

Clem shrugged. “Nah. Call this hot? My dad says when he was in the desert, if yer wore a tin helmet —”

“Yer brains’d be cooked in quarter’n hour an you’d go mad an die. You told me.”

“Did I?”

“Yeah. Twice.”

Clem pushed himself away from the gatepost, and when he clonked back, he said, “What’re you doin?”

“Nothun. Thas bloody Sundy, ennet?”

Goz switched his voice to posh, like an officer in the films.

“So I thought I’d undertake a spying mission deep into enemy territory. Loaded the jolly old transmitter into the saddlebag. Codebooks in my pants, where Jerry’d never think to look. Cunning, eh? Sewerside pill on my tongue, see?”

He stuck his tongue out to reveal the Polo mint, sucked thin as a wedding ring but still intact, on its tip.

“Wanna come for a ride?”

“Yeah, but I can’t.”

Goz sighed, got off his bike, and dropped it into the hedge. Clem saw that he was barefoot, which was amazing. Goz sat on the curb with his naked feet on the hot road and his back to Clem.

He said, “I hear yer passed the Scholarship.”

“Yeah,” Clem said after a pause.

“So’ve I,” Goz said.

“You hent.”

“I hev.”

A long silence. Then Clem said, “Hev anyone else? Woodsy, or Cush, or any of them?”

It was a monumental question packed with fear.

“Nah,” Goz said. “Not as I know of, anyhow.”

He turned and looked up at Clem.

“So thas just me an you, then, ennet?” He grinned, displaying his buck teeth. “We’re gorna get some stick, young Ackroyd.”

George’s pride in his son’s achievement flipped into outrage when he received a packet of information from the grammar school. The first item was a grudging letter of congratulation on headed notepaper and signed by Miss A. D. Withers, Secretary to the Headmaster, Lieutenant Colonel B. O. Bloxham, MBE. The second was the school brochure in a buff cover featuring an ink drawing of Newgate’s splendid Jacobean frontage.

The Sir Henry Newgate School,
George read,
was founded in 1606 by Sir Henry Newgate, Bart, the grandson of Sir John Newgate, appointed Sheriff of Norfolk by King Henry VIII. Originally (and properly) known as the Sir Henry Newgate School for the Sons of Gentlefolk, the school’s values emphasized, and continue to emphasize, academic rigor, discipline, and Christian values. The school chapel, completed in 1621 . . .

George took up the third item. It was a list of what Clem would need when he went to Newgate. Everything was, helpfully, costed and could be procured, exclusively, from Treacle and Phipps, School Outfitters, of Cathedral Plain, Norwich.

“Hell’s bells,” George said, looking up at Ruth. “The blazer is five quid, and the badge is ten bob on top of that, sew it on yourself. And he’s got to have
house tabards
for sport, whatever the hell they are. Stone me.”

Ruth scanned the list. “That all come to more than thirty-five pound, George.” She’d gone rather pale. “An thas not countun shoes. He’ll need new.”

George ground his cigarette out in his saucer.

“I thought education was meant to be free in this ruddy country,” he said.

That evening Win went up to her bedroom and returned with four five-pound notes in her hand. She handed them to her astonished daughter, along with a heavy sigh.

“I dunt spose we can hev the boy gorn off to the grammar rag arsed,” she said sorrowfully. “Thas a good job some on us hev put somethun away for a rainy day insteada spendun it all on newfangled contraptions.”