Paperboy (2 page)

But I felt that even here, behind the dullest daily routines, there was a dark and unruly strangeness that might somehow find a way to surface. It lay just behind a wooden fence, over a wall or through a hedge. It was hidden behind net curtains, in rooms where adults sat smoking in silhouette, in kitchens where wives washed up and whispered, in railway alleys where lovers clung guiltily to each other. It was tucked away just out of reach, on top shelves, in the backs of cupboards, deep under the stairs.

Or perhaps it lay within the pages of a forgotten book.

1
Breakfast cereal in tablet form that resembles roofing felt, or, when milk is added, wet roofing felt.

2
Faintly pretentious but peculiarly charming term chosen for those born in the reign of Elizabeth II.

3
Posh trendsetters showed their rebellious independence by spending Daddy’s allowance at the Chelsea Drugstore, a groovy bar on the King’s Road, Chelsea, now a McDonald’s.

4
It robbed Superman of his powers for ever. Needless to say, he didn’t come into contact with it much.

5
Seminal radio show by Galton and Simpson that changed the face of British comedy by foregrounding character. Sad, dry and hilarious if listened to with patience.

6
She sat and pinged it on her lap. An example of someone who became a TV star purely because she played an instrument no one had ever seen before.

7
Morning radio show that played slush for women trapped behind ironing boards.

2

Things to Make and Do

‘YOU HAVEN’T SEEN
my good trowel anywhere, I suppose?’

‘I didn’t know you had a “good” trowel.’

‘Yes, there’s my good trowel and my cheap trowel.’ Bill tracked dirt into the little red scullery as he wandered in, as if shedding pieces of himself. ‘It’s a small house. How can things go missing?’

Kath absently wiped her husband’s bootprints from the red-leaded floor. If he kept shedding and she kept wiping, perhaps there wouldn’t be anything of him left one day. ‘Why, what else have you lost?’

‘Bricks. The gas poker. Four planks. A geranium tub. Some sheets of corrugated iron. My best pliers. One of my crash helmets. A large panel of foam rubber. And the old playpen. I was going to burn it at the bottom of the garden, but it’s disappeared. And I’m sure we had a coil of rope somewhere.’

I’m sure we did
, thought Kath grimly. It was probably in the back room, beside the two motorbikes Bill was taking to pieces. A working-class habit, she supposed, always aware that she had married beneath her. Her
husband
did not distinguish between the inside and the outside of the house, which is why the tiny front garden was filled with engine parts, why there was an upright washing machine and a mangle in the back yard, why there were two motorbikes in the back room and a third leaking oil in the hall.

‘Where’s the boy?’ Bill plunged oil-smeared hands into luminous green Swarfega,
¹
gooshed them about, removed them with a sucking noise and wiped them dry on Kath’s only clean tea towel. To my father, I was always ‘the boy’.

‘He was under the kitchen table, reading
Where the Rainbow Ends
to the cat.’

Kath was cooking gammon with tinned pineapple rings and marrow, which she would cut into strips and boil until it jellified, held together by the rind. Then she would grate nutmeg over it, a mis-remembered tip from a make-do-and-mend wartime recipe book. You could eat most of her meals through a straw except for the meat, which had usually been cooked for so long that it couldn’t have been tenderized with a lawn-roller.

Kath didn’t approve of Bird’s Eye peas or Smedley’s frozen fish fingers because, being convenient, they were therefore common and eaten by people in council flats, as was Echo and Stork margarine. She experimented once with a packet of Vesta Chow Mein because it was exotic and bore the name of a Roman goddess, but didn’t buy it again because it was too spicy. Spices were not kept in the Fowler larder because they were nasty foreign things that spoiled the taste of food and took the pattern off your Fablon shelf coverings. Vesta Chow Mein comprised a sachet of grey powder with dried peas and unidentifiable red bits in it, like food designed for astronauts or arctic
explorers,
and came with a packet of little yellow strips that you emptied into a hot frying pan, and watched as they swelled up into crisp twirls. Even though it smelled like the stairwell beside Waterloo Bridge and probably contained more chemicals than the Greenwich gas manufacturing plant, I thought it was fantastic.

Bill lit one dog-end of a Woodbine
²
from the embers of another, flicking the first out into the yard, and peered under the table at the untidy stacks of picture books high enough to hide a small child behind. ‘Well, he’s not here now.’

A terrible howl of pain rose from the garden. My mother dropped a pan of water into the sink with a bang and ran outside, ready to face the sight of blood.

‘Christopher, what on earth are you doing?’ she screamed when she realized that I was trapped within a collapsed pyre of acrid burning wood and twisted metal. She only ever called me by my full name when I had done something terrible.

My father pulled at the flaming playpen, which had concertina’d over my legs, pinching the skin blue, and was the reason why I was shouting the place down. Gradually I was released from this homemade torture chamber and dragged aside, leaving the burning frame to belch oily smoke over the neighbours’ washing. The people next door had all filed out to watch with folded arms and pursed lips.

‘What on earth did you think you were building?’ Bill shouted, peering forlornly through the flaming tangle of embers and metal at his blackening best pliers.

‘A big dipper,’ I answered, as if it was obvious.

I had attached roller-skate trucks to the base of the
geranium
tub, tied the rope to it and hauled it over steeply angled tracks consisting of the planks and sheet iron, laid on top of the playpen struts. The poker had an unusually long hose, and was attached to the red-painted gas tap in the scullery. It made a wall of flame for the coaster car to blast through – I would have constructed a water flume, but the tin tub was still used for baths in our house and I did not want to risk denting it.

I had only ever been on one Big Dipper, in the hellish death-trap that was the Sheerness
³
Pleasure Garden, a funfair that Kath said was run by gypsies, or at least by people with curly hair, tans, gold teeth and earrings. The front car had part of its floor missing, so you needed to keep your feet raised to avoid having them torn off in the sleepers passing below. Fairgrounds provided a rich source of horror stories for my mother. ‘Mrs Reed’s sister was thrown out of the chain-chair roundabout just as it hit top speed,’ she told me once. ‘They found her handbag over by the United Dairies … Your grandfather was there the night a stray spark burned the ghost train down with children still inside, and the people in the queue outside thought the screams were part of the ride … Your cousin Brenda won a poodle at a sideshow and used to suck it at night to get to sleep. It turned out to be made of lead, and we think that’s why she went simple.’

I desperately wanted to build a funfair of my own at home.

Instead, I was carried indoors, bruised, noisy and smouldering from the conflagration in the garden, and sent to my room to recover. Luckily there was an unopened Jamboree Bag and a pile of comics up there,
and
I took consolation in them, knowing that I would never again attempt anything involving nails, saws, gas or wood. I was not, to put it mildly, a practical boy.

In 1960, when the accident happened, I was seven years old. Born during Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, I had been presented with a heraldic mug and a crested spoon, both of which my father had used in the course of repairing his Triumph motorbike, and therefore ruined. I did not hate my father, because to hate someone you have to understand what they are up to. Rather, it seemed that Bill was wired differently from me, like a Continental plug. We had no idea about what made each other pleased or angry, and as a consequence we could only communicate through a common element: my mother, his wife. Bill had a range of subjects he felt comfortable with: car engines, the War, boats, hardware shops. When Kath spoke, it was often to continue an abstract thought that had started in her head some time earlier, so that her conversation could border on the surreal. I happily related to that.

Low-evening sunshine heated the thin curtains in my bedroom. The air outside the window was alive with mayflies. My mother said they only lived for a day, but childhood seemed intent on lasting for ever. The sunset warmed the lincrusta wallpaper above my bed to a welcoming orange. Another hot suburban day tomorrow. In my memory it was always summer, except for the bits that were like living in a bowl of filthy water – there were still smogs. In December 1952, just before I was born, the worst of them had killed four thousand Londoners.

My mother came up to see me. ‘Back from Treasure Island?’ I figured she was referring to Long John Silver and my possible loss of a leg, because she liked all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s books except
Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
. ‘I suppose it hurt.’

‘I could have lost it.’

‘It’s a miracle we can find anything in that garden.’

She seated herself on the end of my bed, smoothing out the racing-car bedspread. Nobody dramatized cuts and bruises in the Fowler family; they were the medals of childhood, and not to be fussed over.

‘Your father is ready to kill you. I don’t know why you go so far out of your way to annoy him. Perhaps you need more fresh air. Why don’t you go with Percy to Greenwich Park?’

Percy lived next door and had to walk very slowly because he had TB. He had spent part of last year in an iron lung and wasn’t allowed to play cricket in case the ball hit him in the chest. Plus, he had to go through life being called Percy.

‘It takes too long. By the time he gets there, the park will be closing.’

‘You spend an awful lot of time indoors. You’re very pale.’

‘You feed me too much tinned food.’

‘Your father doesn’t enjoy market produce. He prefers to be constipated.’ My mother knew that things in tins weren’t fresh, but thought that things in jars were. Her first sighting of fresh ginger root gave her quite a fright, because she was used to seeing it floating in brown liquid. We never dreamed you could get fresh beetroot. She continued to buy tins until a scandal occurred involving poisoned tins of Fray Bentos corned beef.

‘I’ll cook you fresh if we can get it. It doesn’t make any difference to me, I get no pleasure from eating because I have no taste buds. I damaged my mouth in a bicycle accident when I was seven. But you’re a growing boy.’ She narrowed her green eyes at me, preparing to sum up. ‘Well, there you are, more outdoor pursuits, eat things you don’t like, make some friends, try not to annoy your father.’

She straightened the cornflower-blue apron she wore
every
day for the first fifteen years of her marriage, and quietly shut the door behind her. My mother had a way of closing herself off from difficult conversations.

There was a time when all lower-middle-class English families were this emotionless. I remembered seeing a Victorian cartoon in a very old issue of
Punch
⁴
magazine, in which a lady’s maid was calling to her employee in great distress.

As far as I could tell, there were three classes of people living in England, sandwiched together like the flavours in a Neapolitan ice-cream brick. People who were ‘not like us’, ‘people like us’, and people who were ‘not for the likes of us’.

The first lot were common; they exaggerated their vowels, especially the letter ‘a’ (as in ‘Haaang Abaaaht!’) and shouted at each other in the street. They laughed all the time, voted Labour, said rude words and drank bitter or stout. One of them, Mr Hills next door, took his teeth out and hung a teaspoon on his nose when he was tipsy.

The middle ones were bemused, genteel white-collar workers who put on airs and graces even though they didn’t have two halfpennies to rub together. They helped out at Tory party headquarters and admired the royals. They were always shushing each other and worrying about being embarrassed, or ‘shown up’. They were obsessed with the cleanliness of their shirt collars, and
although
they moaned all the time, were pathetically grateful when posh people deigned to acknowledge them. Most middle-class men stayed in one job for fifty years, at the end of which time they were presented with a carriage clock and packed off home to die.

The ones in the top bracket liked telling everyone else what to do but were generally invisible, only appearing on fête days to talk loudly about once meeting ‘the radiant Princess Margaret’.
⁵
They attended street parties for the poor, but never organized them. The ladies wore white gloves and the men never knew what to do with their hands.