Authors: John Cornwell
O
DD THINGS HAD
been happening with Dad. Not long after I arrived home it was announced that he was going to take a holiday in Portsmouth with a married couple called the Pierces who were friends of the family. Mr Pierce was a tall saturnine man who originally came from Dorset. He had a strong West Country accent and smoked a pipe. He had a dumpy cockney wife with glasses who laughed uproariously every time her husband said anything mildly amusing.
Mum was happy for Dad to go off on this ‘convalescent’ break before the height of the cricket season. On the morning of his departure he appeared in the living room wearing a new blazer with a Plessey sports club badge sewn on the pocket patch. I saw my mother carefully hand over to him two pound notes which he put in his top pocket. She said: ‘By the way, you know you’re not entitled to wear that badge. I hope you don’t run into anybody who
is
entitled to wear it.’
He just blinked.
He was away for two weeks. I was at home on the evening of his return. The Pierces brought him to the house in their
car. Dad had a pipe stuck between his teeth and he was wearing sunglasses and a boater which he did not take off. He sat down in the midst of the family, puffing at the pipe, which had no tobacco in it, and embarked on an eloquent description of the delights of Portsmouth and neighbouring Southsea, with anecdotes and funny asides about the characters he had met – mostly in pubs. It was all delivered in a broad West Country accent. Every time Dad said anything funny, Mrs Pierce would screech with laughter, but Mum’s face did not smile once: her jaw and mouth seemed to be set in concrete.
S
IX OR SEVEN
weeks into my time in the dispatch department, I found myself thinking about a young shop assistant who worked in the lampshade department. The silken pastel shades were like banks of brilliant blooms. Among them stood Iris, a pretty, petite, well-groomed brunette with large dark blue eyes. She was older than me, I guessed, but I felt that we were equals, and I liked her apparent shyness. She had a pretty, bashful way of looking down whenever she was spoken to.
The principal shop assistant on lampshades was Sheila, a raw-boned girl with gypsy looks who had been at my primary school four years ahead of me. She knew my family, and vaguely knew me. When I approached the section with my trolley Sheila would nudge Iris and whisper to her. Iris would steal a look at me, followed by an appealing inward-looking smile.
It seemed no more than an innocent workplace flirtation, until the day Sheila found me sitting alone in the canteen.
‘Oy! You like Iris, don’t you?’ she said.
‘She’s all right.’
‘Come on…Yes, you do. I’ve seen you looking at her. She’s more than all right, isn’t she. And she doesn’t have a boyfriend. And…guess what: she really likes you.’
The idea that pretty Iris was interested in me made her suddenly fascinating. It had never occurred to me that I would ever speak to her.
‘Do you want to take her out?’
I just stared, a delicious feeling of anticipation stirring inside me. I could not say a word. Sheila giggled. She placed a hand on my arm. ‘She’s really sweet…You should take her out.’
As the days passed, an acute sense of that unmistakable and exquisite thrill of infatuation began to blossom. I was thinking about Iris all the time. Visiting the lampshade section was pleasurable torture. I began to invent reasons for passing by. It was a short cut on the way to blankets, bath towels, curtain materials and several other sections if I really came to think about it. There she stood, demure, ever-so-pretty Iris, a delightful ornament among the glowing lamps, looking more and more lovely every day. And there was Sheila, casting knowing looks, whispering and giggling. Whenever I found myself humming the song of that summer, Slim Whitman’s ‘Rose Marie’, she was my Rose Marie. I was always thinking of her.
Kneeling before the statue of the Virgin at Our Lady of Lourdes in Wanstead after work each evening, I was bound to ask myself whether it would be a sin to take Iris out. There was surely no guilt in accompanying a girl to the cinema. But there had been fleeting fantasies of placing my lips on her lovely, innocent, pouting mouth. In the meantime I was saving my daily lunch allowance so that I could afford a trip to the cinema.
It was Sheila who fixed it. She came up to me in the canteen and whispered in my ear: ‘Granada, Walthamstow, Saturday night, seven o’clock. All right?’
I stared at her.
‘All right? Come on! And you’d better be there on time, ‘cos
you can’t keep a girl waiting!’ We were staring at each other, Sheila’s eyes wide with anticipation.
Then I said it: ‘All right.’ With those two little words began a juggernaut of anxiety. What would we say to each other? Would I walk her home? Would we kiss? Was this the beginning of the end of my vocation?
On the Saturday of the assignation I cycled home, took a bath and made myself ready to set off for Walthamstow, a rough district of north-east London. I was under no illusions as to the step that I was taking. Saturday evenings were usually spent going to confession. Instead I was outside the Granada by half-past six, standing in a light rain, four shillings in my pocket.
I waited until nine o’clock. Iris did not turn up. The main film,
The Night of the Hunter
, had already started when I decided to go in. Robert Mitchum played the widow-slaying preacher man. His character, it seemed to me, was appropriate for a hypocrite seminarian making dates with pretty girls. The contradiction expressed on his fists, LOVE tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and HATE on the other, summed up my own attempt to have my cake and eat it. I was fascinated by the guilt-ridden widow, played by Shelley Winters, who declared: ‘My whole body’s just aquiv’rin, with cleanness.’ I even found myself identifying with her when she prayed imploringly to the Lord: ‘Help me to get clean!’
How disturbing it was, hearing over and over again the hymn that was the film’s sinister refrain, as if the sacred words were mocking my duplicity:
Leaning, leaning!
Safe and secure from all alarms.
Leaning, leaning!
Leaning on the everlasting arms.
I cycled back to the Peel in the rain and arrived soaked. I felt a fool, a victim, and I was full of remorse. But I was also
relieved. In a month’s time I would be going back to Cotton. I had eaten shame and humiliation over a silly girl, and I had learnt my lesson. I wanted to be going back to Cotton more than anything in the world.
On Monday morning, when I passed the lampshade section, Iris and Sheila were shaking with mirth.
Sheila called out: ‘Hey, you!’
I paused with my trolley; head down.
‘You kept Iris waiting outside the Rialto in Leytonstone all Saturday evening. That wasn’t very nice, was it!’
I looked up. ‘But you said the Granada in Walthamstow.’
‘No, you stupid boy, you obviously don’t know your Granada from your Rialto.’ Then she turned to Iris and said, just loud enough for me to hear: ‘Or ‘is arse from ‘is elbow.’ Then they both erupted with laughter. Now I saw that Iris was no coy maiden: she was, as my brother Terry put it to me later, ‘a sly little bitch’. I had been well and truly had.
As I looked around the store I could see several other assistants laughing at me. From that moment I knew that life at Bearmans was going to prove difficult for the next month. I was to be rescued sooner than I could have guessed.
M
Y SISTER
M
AUREEN
was mature for her age and a thoughtful commentator on family affairs and relationships. Sitting in the kitchen by ourselves one Sunday evening after I had returned from serving Benediction, she was talking about Mum and Dad. I must have been listening with only half an ear, since it did not occur to me that she was alluding to the possible break-up of their marriage.
Then she asked me about my job. When I told Maureen
about the foul-mouthed talk of the men in my hearing, she was appalled. She clutched her head with both hands, mussing up her beautifully groomed hair.
‘They talk like this in front of you all day? And you a seminarian?’ Not for nothing had my demure and devout sister attended the Ursuline convent in Ilford for five years.
Then she mentioned the matter to Mum, who saw herself, when the fit took her, as the embodiment of Catholic female rectitude, especially in the matter of dirty talk. Memories of that lump of carbolic soap were still fresh on my tongue. Mum, her voice low and trembling with menace, questioned me closely. Finally, she wanted to know: ‘Do they use the “f” word?’ I told her that they not only used the ‘f’ word, but the ‘b’ word and the ‘c’ word too; and they used them almost every other word in every sentence they spoke. Whereupon she let forth a tidal wave of wrath punctuated by the insistent question: ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’
Much as Mum was capable of vulgarity I had never heard her utter what we would term a ‘swear-word’ with sexual connotations. She was genuinely upset. And clearly she was at last suffering an element of inchoate remorse at having exposed her seminary boy to this abomination. What alarmed me, though, was her express determination that she would go into Bearmans the very next day – ‘you see if I don’t’ – to speak to the general manager and have it stopped.
She was as good as her word. Two hours after I had clocked on, Mum apparently arrived outside the general manager’s office door and, according to her subsequent version of events, set before him the verbal misdemeanours of my work mates. Sam was sent for. ‘Your son, madam,’ Sam said, ‘has a vivid imagination. We wouldn’t use bad language. Never.’
‘And
my
son, I’ll have you know, would be incapable of a lie!’
After which Mum appeared like an avenging angel in the dispatch bay just as I was about to load an armchair on to the
trolley. ‘John,’ she said in her most stentorian voice, large hands on hips, ‘put that thing down! You’re not staying here a moment longer.’ Eric, Reg, Bill and Sam stood shoulder to shoulder facing her. ‘And as for you lot,’ she said in a tone of withering disgust, ‘you’re not real men, you’re a disgrace to decent manhood.’
Reg flinched his shoulder, opened his mouth; and thought better of it.
M
UM, WHO HAD
never had a day’s unemployment from the age of fourteen, was not slow in finding me a new job. She returned from her night shift announcing that I would work for two weeks in the pathology lab at the hospital, and then a further two weeks mopping the hospital corridors. I was to cover for workers who were taking their holidays. The pay would be less than at Bearmans, but the hours were the same. It would be six days a week, but with a half-day on Saturdays.
I started on the following Monday. The pathology department was situated in the basement of the hospital, a gloomy Victorian edifice. My task was to wash Petri dishes and test-tubes containing every kind of secretion, excretion and excision from the anatomies of the patients in the wards above. The dishes and tubes were made of glass and were not disposable. They had to be rinsed and scrubbed individually by hand, before being placed inside an oven and sterilised. The worst of it was the first rinsing in the deep butler’s sink. As I continually took splashes of ordure in the face I reflected that even Saint Thérèse had not been obliged to endure such nastiness.
The wash-up room was separate from the laboratories where the technicians sat in their white coats doing biopsies and
assays, staring into microscopes and writing up notes. Sometimes they would grumble about the doctors upstairs when there was a rush on. For no good reason, other than not being a member of their caste of biochemical boffins, they treated me like one of my specimens. The head of the lab bawled me out one day for heating a quantity of cotton-wool swabs at the wrong temperature so that they went brown. In front of his colleagues he called me ‘cloth ears’ and a ‘stupid berk’, highly insulting epithets to English ears in those days. My arms and fists, hardened by weeks in the dispatch department, twitched. But I kept the peace and went home smelling and feeling like something nasty in that sink.
The next job, sweeping and mopping the corridors and public areas of the hospital, came as a relief. Anywhere on God’s earth seemed preferable to the path-lab wash room. I found that the best way to get through the day was, as Sam had recommended, to pace myself. I got into a rhythm and hummed to myself as I worked. Sometimes I prayed, saying the Rosary rhythmically in my head as I slapped the mop down, then squeezed it out. Plunge. ‘Hail Mary…full of grace…’ Slap slop. ‘The Lord is with thee…’ Squeeze squeeze. The corridors seemed to stretch to infinity, and there was no human contact, except when I got in somebody’s way. A cleaner should have sufficient good sense and manners not to impede the progress of important personages.
I thought I was working as hard as I possibly could. At the day’s end I was utterly exhausted and aching all over. But my efforts evidently fell short of the full-timer for whom I was covering. One day I was pausing outside a storeroom when I heard two ward maids gossiping within. One of them said: ‘ ‘Ave you seen that lazy little bugger they’ve got mopping the corridors? That’s Kath Cornwell’s son. I’d like to chuck that bucket of water all over ‘im: that’d get the idle little sod going.’ So much for worker solidarity!
The remark annoyed me; but not so much as when I was
criticised by the matron herself, a hugely self-important lady with a mountainous bosom and very thin ankles who sailed sedately along the corridors sweeping me aside in her wake. Every so often, however, she would stop to examine the terrazzo flooring in order to ensure that it was, as she insisted, ‘deep-down clean’, and not just ‘spit-and-lick dirty’. Sometimes she would say, very rapidly: ‘Change the water, change the water, change the water,’ because she thought that I was washing the corridors with dirty water, and she obviously believed that three imperatives worked better than one.
Our altercation occurred two days before I was due to leave. She came bearing down on me with an empty cigarette pack which she said she had found in the operating-theatre corridor, always the first to be cleaned each morning. She waved it in front of my nose between her thumb and forefinger as if it were a rat swinging by its tail. ‘Boy, boy, boy!’ she cried. ‘What’s this, what’s this, what’s this?’ I could see that it was a cigarette pack so there was no point in saying anything, but my silence evidently provoked her wrath.
‘What have you to say for yourself?’ she demanded.
‘I did sweep and mop that corridor, Matron,’ I said.
‘How could you have done? Here’s the evidence!’
In a voice that was not a bad approximation of Father Armishaw’s educated Black Country drawl, and with a raised forefinger for emphasis, I riposted: ‘Matron, has it not occurred to you that some individual might have dropped that cigarette packet after I cleaned the corridor? I did that stretch at half past seven this morning and it is now half past eleven. By my calculation, give or take a few minutes, that allows for four whole hours in which somebody might have perpetrated the dastardly crime.’
Her thunderous ‘How dare you!’ reverberated down the corridors. Then: ‘You will go back to the theatre corridor and clean it again. You will clean it so that I can see my face in it.’ With which she seemed to gather her skirts before heading off,
calling out to the various people who were popping their heads around doors: ‘Never have I been spoken to like that in all my life! In all my life! In all my life!…In all my life!’
I did as I was told, since I knew that I had still to collect my last pay packet at the end of the week. Also I had my mother to face, which I did the following morning when she came back off night duty, having heard the saga from Matron’s point of view.
Mum was already in an extremely volatile mood, as the domestic situation had been brewing and bubbling, and there was a sense of things coming to a head. Sam and his cohort at Bearmans were one thing, getting into quarrels with the matron of Wanstead hospital was another. Mum came very close to striking me as in days of yore. I saw all the warning signs: the mottling around the upper chest and neck, the itchy fingers, the flexing forearms, the restless prizefighter’s foot shuffle; but somehow she thought better of it. Four months of
being a sofa carrier, a sink operator, and floor swabber, and I was as hard as a concrete lamp-post. In any case, as that week came to a close, unknown to me then, Mum had much fatter flounders to baste.