Paperboy (5 page)

William and Mrs Fowler lived a few streets away from Westcombe Hill, at the leafy Royal Standard on the far side of Blackheath, and were genteelly working class, meaning William was poor but honest and lived within his means, occasionally going to church and only saying ‘bugger’ when he hit his thumb with a hammer. He was one of those men you saw in old photographs who looked really uncomfortable with the top button of their collar done up on a white shirt. They were only ever photographed in one of two places: squinting into
the
sun in their front garden or sitting on the beach fully dressed, cooking complex meals on a primus stove behind a rampart of sand and a striped windbreak. I remember Mrs Fowler once complaining that the hardest part of cooking on a primus stove on a windy beach was getting the Yorkshire Puddings right.
¹

Their house was neat and tiny, and had no bathroom or indoor toilet, just a big butler sink in the kitchen for washing. A single latticed bay window overlooked a neighbour’s sleepy beehives. The blue staircase to the bedroom was so steep that it had a rope running beside it rather than a rail, possibly as a reminder of the nation’s former status as a seafaring force. There was a three-dimensional concave ceramic plate on the lounge wall with a picture of a water wheel on it, and a brown Victorian print of a woman unravelling wool while two gentlemen in tight fawn trousers perched on bended knees to wind up the twine. It bore the caption ‘Two strings to her bow’ and Kath said it was a pun, but I could not see how. Surely it would have been better as ‘Two beaus to her string’?

The television set had shiny wooden roller doors designed to hide the screen, as if there was something vulgar about exposing a naked cathode tube. I was sometimes allowed to watch
Torchy the Battery Boy
,
²
after which Mrs Fowler would shut the roller doors with a bang. Beside the upright piano there was a scallop-windowed cabinet full of gaudy fairground knick-knacks that I was never allowed to touch. Their house smelled of polish too, but of a cheaper, less labour-intensive sort.

There was also something hidden and private about my paternal grandmother that involved tears and whispers in the kitchen, and doors firmly closed against young eyes. The lounge always felt like an offstage area to the hushed dramas that were unfolding in the main auditorium. Occasionally, neighbouring wives knocked urgently and headed for the kitchen, staying behind the door and speaking in low voices before rushing back to make their husbands’ tea.

The rest of my relatives were shadowy and indistinct. Bill’s sister Doreen was sweet and gentle, married to a kind, decent man and the mother of normal children, but she only met up with parts of the family at their supernaturally tidy house in Reading because Auntie Doreen and her mother ‘didn’t speak’ over something that had happened at least twelve years ago. When Mrs Fowler argued with members of her family, she left scars on them like radiation burns.

Mrs Fowler had a sister called Carrie who also had caring eyes and some kind of secret sorrow that nobody was ever allowed to mention. Kath had lost her brother Kit to diphtheria,
³
whatever that was, when they were six. She had a sister, Muriel, distant, religious and grand, who had married a Glasgow city archivist and given birth to a congregation of well-behaved children with biblical names. The received wisdom was that we Fowlers didn’t need them, and they didn’t like the Fowlers because Bill was common. At the slightest provocation, Muriel would unlock a gigantic embossed family Bible and read out bits in a condescending voice that gave us the creeps. We would endure an occasional Sunday at their house before fleeing at the first available opportunity. As
we
drove off in Bill’s motorbike and sidecar there was always a palpable sense of relief, and everyone could start laughing again.

Around the edges of these characters were the lost ones.

A sixteen-year-old cousin who had died after climbing under a motorbike tarpaulin to smell the petrol. An uncle who had fallen off a Thames lighter, and his brother who had dived into the fast brown waters to save him – both were wearing cable-knit sweaters and workboots, and were swiftly pulled under by the racing tide. A stillborn baby, a girl who ran away – subjects that were unthinkable to broach. There was a tiny sparrow-like aunt, loud, deaf, coarse, gurning and toothless, called Aunt Nell, whose sailor husband might have died at sea, and whose daughter Brenda was mute, ‘simple’ and uncomprehending. Aunt Nell lived in the basement of a damp Isle of Dogs
⁴
slum with a foul-mouthed mynah bird, and cleaned cinemas until she was eighty. I adored her.

It struck me that the War had turned all of these people upside-down; nothing was in its rightful place any more, which was why they seemed so lost. Over all of them, living and dead, lay a soft fog of mystery. No anecdote had an ending, no story was ever complete. Questions were diverted and details trailed off. Where was my other grandfather? Why didn’t Mrs Fowler talk to my mother or her own daughter? What had happened to Nell’s husband? How could the smell of petrol kill you? The stories remained incomplete for decades, until my well-intentioned sister-in-law decided to shine a torch on the family tree, affronting everyone in the process and accidentally closing the subject for ever. Kath, in
particular,
had kept her secrets close to her chest, and was mortified by the idea that her grandchildren might realize she had been born out of wedlock.

It seemed obvious to everyone that my parents did not belong together. Bill’s mother got the ball rolling by failing to attend her only son’s wedding and avoiding all contact with her daughter-in-law. Kath took her new husband to her mother’s house in Brighton, where her nervous beau committed so many cringe-worthy faux pas that he could never bring himself to go back again. Kath then went to
his
mother’s house to repair the ill-will, only to rush from the front step with her nose in a handkerchief, sobbing.

Early on, a sense of buyer’s remorse settled over my parents’ marriage. During their courtship Bill had presented himself as an open-hearted man of action, but he turned out to be a mummy’s boy who spent three work-nights out of five with his parents, leaving his wife alone at home. She, on the other hand, failed to live up to his strong-willed mother, and was considered by their side to be too high-minded. There was a general consensus that if she had Put Her Foot Down early on, things would have worked out satisfactorily. But she didn’t, and they didn’t, and so Kath and Bill remained padlocked together for fifty years of mutual disappointment and recrimination.

For me, this was where the early appeal of burying one’s nose in a book came in.

When we reached Reynold’s Place, where William and Mrs Fowler lived, my mother tidied my hair and pushed me towards the front door.

‘You knock,’ she said, knowing that I was awkward in formal situations. ‘I’m sure your grandmother will be pleased to see you.’

I knocked and waited. A thumping sound grew inside
the
still house. The great black door creaked open. Balanced on an ebony stick, a great navy-blue dress and coat appeared before me, topped with a stern face and a wicker hat like an upturned bucket.

‘You’re late,’ said Mrs Fowler, stepping aside to let me in. ‘Go into the front room and don’t touch a single thing, while I have words with your mother.’

She did not approve of kissing. As I passed, she snatched the book from under my arm. ‘You won’t be needing that,’ she told me. ‘It’ll be full of germs and bad ideas.’ She left it on the rainy step outside.

There were no books in the house at Reynold’s Place because books did not look nice enough to be displayed, and in Mrs Fowler’s eyes did not reveal themselves as status symbols to visiting neighbours. Books developed the imagination, and imagination was the enemy of hard work. Everyone in Mrs Fowler’s family worked very hard until they dropped dead. In Mrs Fowler’s experience, ‘imaginative’ people were usually neurasthenic girls who cried a lot and proved useless to themselves and others. They moped, or were hysterical and took to their beds on rainy days. There was a word for imaginative boys, too, but it wasn’t mentioned in polite company. If I had turned up with welding equipment instead of a book, Mrs Fowler and I might have got off on the right foot.

I weaved my way carefully through the fragile knickknacks, gewgaws and whatnots in the polish-squeaky front room, and perched on the guest chair in the corner, resigning myself to a very long afternoon. On my last visit I had dared to open the cabinet of not-very-curious curiosities to handle a china dachshund, only to watch in horror as it slipped through my fingers and snapped its head off on the floor. Balancing the head back on, I furtively replaced the guillotined dog, and there it
stayed
in the cabinet for years, awaiting discovery and retribution.

After that, each trip to my grandparents’ house was like being put on trial for a crime you had denied knowledge of committing.

1
For international readers, a light cake of baked batter, tricky to cook at the best of times. In Kath’s case, a concrete orange disc ideal for use as a paperweight or doorstop.

2
Torchy lived on another planet with a poodle and a talking letterbox for companions. He was incredibly gay.

3
One of a range of eerie Victorian illnesses like whooping cough and the dropsy, eradicated by inoculation.

4
Traditionally poor area of South London docks, now renovated for corporate singles.

5

Free Time

CHILDHOOD WAS FILLED
with agonizing afternoons spent waiting beyond the whispers, or attending bizarre rituals for the sake of my parents. The least pleasurable of these was the Cubs,
¹
presided over by a man who looked like Central Casting’s idea of a paedophile. His pressed fawn shorts were so wide at the hem and his thighs so thin that we all had to look away when he crouched down in front of us for fear of witnessing a testicular protrusion. There was a particularly trying bout of suppressed laughter in the troop after he asked whether anyone had seen his conkers during a park ramble.

Having failed to impress in Ropecraft, Woodsmanship (acts of arson involving the rubbing of sticks), Folk Dancing, Tracking or Being a Friend to Animals (due to an earlier incident involving a tethered stag beetle and a magnifying glass), I was luckily hit in the eye with a cricket ball and excused meetings long enough for the
Cubmaster
to wearily assume that I was unlikely to return.

With the woggle safely discarded, the other blot on my free time was Sunday School, which involved lolling around on hard wooden benches while Miss Parker, a dumpy, well-meaning woman whose bulky undergarments showed through her cardigan like riot-gear, bowdlerized the Bible’s more lurid tales into fables suitable for tiny tots. To do this she used an easel and a set of pastel-coloured Fuzzy Felt action figures. The set included stick-on halos, Jacob’s ladder (like a regular painter’s ladder but golden) and a boulder for removing from Jesus’s tomb in order to facilitate resurrection.

Miss Parker had the kind of mind that automatically went blank whenever it was confronted with images of fornication or retribution. Consequently, her biblical world consisted solely of kind acts, good Samaritans, loving thoughts and turned cheeks. She said that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’s ladyfriend and called the disciples his ‘best chums’. Everyone hated her except a pigtailed girl in the front row who got to put away the Fuzzy Felt figures as a reward for perfect attendance. She died of diphtheria in her second year, and nobody wanted her seat in case it was infected.

As a child of the fifties and sixties, I had several other claims on my precious free time:

Moorfields Eye Hospital (for eye-strengthening exercises that involved overlapping chipped Victorian slides of tigers and songbirds in cages, and flesh-coloured NHS specs held together in the centre with Elastoplast).

Inoculation queues (for Diphtheria, Tuberculosis and a variety of poxes left over from an earlier century, possibly the seventeenth). Weeks passed in a dark room with whooping cough, chicken pox and measles, when you
weren’t
allowed to open the curtains in case you suddenly went blind, and some kind of respiratory illness which required you to spend evenings with your face suspended above a steaming enamel bowl with a tea towel draped over your head.

Visits to bombsites, the source of all major childhood injuries due to the fact that they regularly required scaling up and sliding down. (‘He fell twenty feet into a pitch-black crater and nobody heard his desperate cries for help,’ ran one of Kath’s awful warnings. ‘His voice grew fainter and fainter until it finally ceased altogether. They didn’t find him until after Lent.’)

The fifties was also populated with the kind of characters who turned up in Ealing comedies, and some who didn’t, including:

Men in mackintoshes, who went funny during the War and were now likely to interfere with you if you were wearing short trousers.