The Cuckoo's Child (3 page)

“You didn't need to get out the good china for me,” Mum said as she sank into an armchair. “I hope you didn't stand on a chair to get them down.”

You saved me the trouble of lying by starting to howl in her arms. She was too busy patting your back and jogging you up and down to worry about me approaching with a full cup, but just as she said, “Here, let me take it,” your arm jerked out and caught the saucer. The cup tilted and fell on the edge of the hearth with a tiny musical ting. A triangular piece from the rim lay in the stream of tea running into the fireplace. I ducked down to pick it up, expecting recriminations. My clumsiness has always been a byword in the family.

“Trip over a fag paper, you would,” Mum often said, but this time she ignored me, tickling you and chuckling indulgently. “Who's a bad boy, then? Throwing the china about already.” She looked at my stricken face. “Don't worry, pet, it was just an accident. Can't expect to keep china forever, can we? You mind how you go with those pieces, there's enough for Dad to clean up without you bleeding all over the place as well.”

I was bemused by this mildness. Normally I would never have heard the last of it. I wondered what could have brought about such a mellowing. Could it be the baby? To put this theory to the test, I produced the plate of cake.

“Good Lord,” said Mum. “Are you feeding the five thousand? We'll never eat that lot. Bill, you'll have to wrap the leftovers in greaseproof and put them in the tin before they all go dry.”

And that was that. Before the day was over, I had been allowed to peel the potatoes with the paring knife with the wicked blade worn thin from years of sharpening on the back step, something I'd been forbidden to touch before, I had got away with not eating any Brussels sprouts for dinner, and I had got myself ready for bed completely unsupervised, ignoring my toothbrush and the soapy-tasting toothpaste and managing to smuggle a book upstairs in the process. And all because Mum had been preoccupied with you! Obviously my life had changed for the better.

The change was overdue.

For as long as I could remember, my actions, my plans, my thoughts, even, had been hedged about with prohibition. It's odd to think that there are eight years of my childhood that you know nothing about, a whole different world you never shared, full of big things like war, bombs and terror and death falling out of the sky, and even when all that was over, there was still the rationing and the shortages and the endless skrimping and making do.

When I was very small, we lived in London, in a grimy-faced, terraced house off Tooley Street in Bermondsey. The steam trains from London Bridge rattled by, adding daily to the crust of soot on every building. Nearby, there were tumbledown warehouses, the homes of countless shabby pigeons, and dripping iron bridges, whose girders overshadowed rows of semicircular holes in the walls, like filthy caves.

Everywhere in the city of my childhood there were raw scars in the overlay of dirt. Streets looked like mouths full of broken teeth, buildings collapsed into piles of smashed brick or tumbled into vast craters, those left standing on either side cracked and bulging, propped up by huge timbers or held together by giant rivets. In places, whole streets of old tenements too badly damaged to preserve gave way gradually to towering blocks of crackerbox flats, one ugliness making room for another. For the most part, though, the rubble remained and life went on around it, so that the holes and the tottering bricks were the landscape of my childhood, no more worthy of remark than the crazed glaze of the kitchen sink, or the whitewashed walls of the outside privy with its nail for torn newspaper, or the patches of damp on the ceiling of the tiny box I called my room, or the dispirited privet hedge that divided us from the family next door.

I can understand any mother, more fastidious than most, holding the squalor at bay, encouraging a child to stay aloof, but in retrospect our retreat from the world was remarkably complete. I don't even have many memories of visits by or to relatives. There was an aunt who kept a boarding house in Southend, but we never stayed with her. A grandmother figures in my very first memory; at least I think it was a grandmother but don't know for sure. I was in my pram and it must have been raining, for the hood was up. Round the edge of the hood came a face, wrinkled as a withered apple. If it was Mum's mother, she went to live with her sister during the war and died soon after. I don't remember Dad having parents. Perhaps they were already dead.

There were occasional visitors to our house, mostly men who worked with Dad on the railway. They were loud and jolly, and I liked having them around, but Mum gave them a chilly reception. I didn't know why at the time, but one of them in particular always teased me.

“Blimey,” he'd say to Dad, “where'd you get this 'un? Bit of a throwback, isn't she?”

Dad would mumble, “Lay off, Ted,” looking sheepish, while Mum's lips would go thin and tight.

“Where'd you get that hair from, then?” Ted would persist, turning to me. “The milkman?”

Mum rose to the bait every time. “I'll have you know it runs in the family,” she would retort. “My father had bright ginger curls when he was young.”

“Is that a fact?” And Ted would roar, nudging Dad with his elbow as he did while Mum's face went bright pink with annoyance.

“Common as muck,” she'd snort when he'd gone.

I was never encouraged to make friends with the neighbours' children either. There wasn't much traffic down our road apart from the occasional car or delivery van, or the rag and bone man making his slow way past, his horse sleepwalking the route, and the strange dying cry—“Ragabo, ragabo”—lingering even after they had turned the corner by the tobacconist and disappeared. Most mothers let their children play in the street, but mine didn't.

“You don't want to play with those dirty ragamuffins,” said Mum firmly, “you never know what you'll catch from them.”

So I would raid the recesses of Mum's wardrobe and dress up in the old high-heeled shoes and hats I found there, strangely flattened, like roadkill, and stand in front of the cheval mirror in the corner of her room pretending I was a teacher scolding a class or reading to them from a storybook. Or I would poke around in the sour earth of the tiny yard, looking for worms and sow bugs to keep in a cardboard shoe box as pets. There weren't many to find, and all too often their discovery inflicted mortal wounds on them.

When this palled, I would stand in my clean dress and neat sandals by the window of the front room, which was rarely used and as cold as a well, and watch the ragamuffins enjoy their noisy play outside. They shouted and laughed, tormented one another and roared about, kicking balls or racing up and down the street on battered bikes. How I envied them those bicycles! To be able to go so fast, so far, so quickly; to hop the kerbs and perform incredible feats of balance; to throw the machine down with unthinking nonchalance when something more interesting claimed the attention, knowing it would be there, ready to speed off again on a whim!

“You don't want a bike,” said Mum. “You'd only fall off and hurt yourself, and what about the traffic? No, it's much too dangerous around here. You'd be under a lorry before you could say knife.”

School brought partial liberation. Even though it had its own brand of regimentation, this was a place where parents had little influence. From the very first day when I was marched along to the local primary school, a monolithic brick building surrounded by a bare playground and a wrought iron fence high enough for a maximum security prison, I was tipped into the sea of ragamuffins to sink or swim. That first day was cautious and reserved; my memory gives me no sense of other children around me, apart from one little girl with dark hair who cried all day long, but I have never forgotten the feel of high ceilings, and the big alphabet cards around the walls, and the squeak of the slate as I drew.

Knowing what I know now about world events, I am amazed that none of that global drama and agony ever coloured my life. Think about it: my first experience of school came soon after Hiroshima, the liberation of Auschwitz and other concentration camps, the V2s, yet all I retain of that time is the round of practising my wobbly printing, listening to stories, sewing animal shapes with thick yarn with bootlace ends, and making music with miniature triangles and castanets and—wonders!—cymbals. I suppose the only hint of the war came in the occasional male teacher with an empty sleeve or rigid leg, or the sudden news that we should all bring some kind of container to school to carry home our share of the drinking chocolate supplied in a food parcel from the United States.

We tumbled up the years, unknowing. Even for me, seldom allowed out, sent firmly to bed by seven o'clock, life was a game and an endless search. Our parents were all grimly coping with post-war austerity in a shattered city that smelled always of soot and boiled cabbage, but we chewed the delicate new leaves of the lime trees, and turned ourselves into racehorses by wearing our woolly scarves as bridles and galloping home from school, and grew like weeds, forcing our mothers to let down and out the clothes that were always bought several sizes too big so they would last. But our greatest sources of delight were the bombsites.

They were forbidden, of course, but we went anyway. Who could resist? You wouldn't have been able to, would you, Stephen?

Whenever anyone refers to something as an eyesore, I have an instant vision of the bombsite at the end of our street. It was the one I knew best, I suppose, though there was no shortage of them around my home. Being near to the docks and the main railway stations had turned the whole area into a target; every street had at least one ruinous wasteland slowly being softened by the invading weeds. Rose bay willow herb and golden rod were the first wildflower names I learned; the pink and yellow rioted over the broken masonry and piles of rubble.

Mum was able to prevent me from playing on the bombsite when I was at home, but there was nothing she could do to restrain my curiosity when I was on the way to and from school. Four times a day I passed it. The adults might shake their heads and mutter about the danger, but to the children it was fascinating.

For one thing, the bomb had smashed the house beyond repair but had not levelled it. Parts of two walls still reared into the air, splintered and blackened joists jutting out halfway up where there had once been a floor and ceiling. Tattered wallpaper clung to the filthy plaster—a faded blue like the sky on a misty morning, with the ghosts of vines and blowsy pink roses wreathed across it upstairs, and a sober cream with a thin dark red stripe almost obliterated by the trackmarks of soot-blackened water and rain below. A single door had survived the blast and stood, surrounded by broken brick, opening onto nothing. Part of a flight of narrow stairs still leaned drunkenly into the air as if groping for support. There had been a cupboard under those stairs, the air raid shelter for the owners of the house, I suppose, for the remains of a mattress, chewed by mice or rats, the stuffing oozing out, mouldered there.

That cupboard was the lure. It was a perfect meeting place for children: out of sight, unwanted by any adult, on the right scale for small people. Like the treehouse Dad made us in the poplars at the bottom of the garden, remember? We always knew we were safe from interruption up there. Mum couldn't climb the rope ladder, for a start. There were other attractions at the bombsite, of course: the old bath, lying on its side like a stranded white hippopotamus, its stubby claw feet futile in the air; the smashed sewing machine with the treadle that still creakily waved to and fro; a limitless supply of broken bricks, bright copper wire, lead piping flattened and strangely heavy, for our own construction projects. It was in the cupboard, though, squeezed into its dark corners, sitting in solemn circles on the decaying mattress, that we planned those projects and argued over possession of the things we found as we toiled over the debris just like the workers on Noddy Boffin's dust heaps.

For the place yielded up treasures too. Often we dug up single earrings, dusty beads, bent forks, matchboxes with a few broken matches inside, flowered cups without handles, candle stubs, a gas mask box with a broken strap. Things like this we stored on the little shelf in the cupboard under the stairs, knowing instinctively they wouldn't remain ours for long if the adults got wind of them.

Once, I unearthed a tiny glass bell, caked with mud but miraculously unscathed except for a chip out of the clapper, and was captivated by its tiny chiming voice as I shook it gingerly. I hid it from the others and carried it home and hid it again under my bed after I had carefully washed off the dirt and dried it on my blouse. I got in trouble for the mess on my blouse, but the reproaches rolled off me; I had something out of the ordinary, a voice left over, it seemed, from another world, and it was all mine to look after and enjoy.

Another time I took a brief detour onto the site as I was running home for lunch and found a dead cat lying beside the standing wall. It was the first dead thing I had seen, apart from the insects and worms I inadvertently killed in the garden. I can still feel the flood of sadness as I gazed at the stiff, dusty body, not so much for the fact of its death as for its loneliness, discarded and ugly in this blighted place. I felt compelled to do something for it; the only thing I could think of was to pick some of the weeds poking through the cracks and rubble and lay the pink and yellow flowers on the parched fur to cover the glazed eye and the frozen snarl. I revisited the corpse for several days, noting in a distant way its deterioration, the way it seemed to flatten and settle into the ground, and renewing the flowers every time.

One lunchtime it was gone. All that was left was a little heap of wilted willow herb. My stomach lurched. I knew all about this; hadn't we just spent the better part of a week in school learning the Easter story? Hadn't I made a model of the tomb, rather like an air raid shelter in green plasticine, with the stone rolled away from its mouth, and the grave clothes lying empty inside?