This will be my first blog in a year mainly because I’ve been writing a prose/poem memoir of childhood and adolescence (1942 – 1962). Here is the whole of Part One:
RICH AND DESOLATE
a memoir
Part One: 1941 to 1950
Dockland, Claughton, Merseyside.
Forty one into forty two the Germans came bombing. The docks, the shipyard blasted. Houses, pubs, shops and public buildings fire-bombed. When sirens howled, people stirred, threw on coats, snatched up blankets, dashed. Down to shelters.
Winnie’s mum and dad give the signal. Last minute coats on. Door slams. Quick footsteps. Heavy breathing. Off they all go
on a blitz night:
Like screaming souls from
the Underworld sirens foretold
the oncoming doom. Soon
the drone of bombers filled
the night sky. Winnie grabbed
her coat and followed Dad,
Mum, the dog, her brothers
and the baby into the grim
night and the brick shelter.
Dad, was not easily ruffled
or rattled but when the bombs
hit the docks and shipyard, he
shook his head and drank
brandy from his flask. Blast
bombs and firebombs howled
and boomed closer and the one
that deafened them all shattered
the local cinema; no films
would be screened there again.
Dad cursed, baby wailed,
dog howled and Mum said,
“I need the toilet,” and tried
to leave the shelter but Dad said,
“No, use the bucket in the corner.”
The bombs fell, the night
was battered, the town torn
apart and Mum said,
“There’s a hole in this bucket.”
All was quiet outside but they
roared with laughter as loudly as
the bomb that hit the cinema.
Winnie worked in a decorating shop. So much better than her first jobs out of school: greasy café and steamy laundry. Run off her feet for a pittance in those grim places she was. Matching paints with papers, thumbing through colour cards to make rooms lovely – just her thing.
But up to the shop one day comes delivery man, Bernie. Proud in a smart van he delivers more than paints and papers. Trouble rides with him in the passenger seat. Bernie turns on the charm. He’s gifted with plenty of that. Piercing eyes and long lashes enhance his chat no end. The slicked back jet hair clinches it.
Soon he’s walking out with Winnie. Soon he’s talking love and marriage with Winnie. Soon they pledge themselves, even though they barely know each other. Bernie’s in a hurry. He’s enlisted with the R.A.F. He’s lived his life so far in crowded rooms. Never had a bed to call is own. He and his brothers were sent to other rooms in other homes for sleeping. Bernie longs for his own home. With a wife inside.
Winnie’s mum and dad have doubts. Grave doubts. Foresee times of worry for the family. It’s like watching the trailer of a tragic film they cannot bring themselves to see. But this is wartime, anything may happen. Besides Winnie’s insistent so they’re wed, a small wedding with a few guests, a few drinks and a meal.
Bernie’s soon off with the R.A.F. and Winnie’s job changes. Pretty wallpapers and matching paints no longer the priority, she’s taught to cut glass. All day the cutter
whines away in the blitz days:
So much broken glass!
Every bomb that fell
-even ones that missed-
smashed windows.
So much broken glass!
And buildings still standing
needed windows glazing
and Winnie’s war effort
was to cut up the glass.
So much broken glass!
Day after day she held
her cutter like a pen;
pressed it on glass as
smooth as the park lake;
pulled the tiny wheel along
the straight steel edge;
heard the fine, clear tune
like the tearing of silk;
grasped each side of
the clean cut and snapped
the glass like a biscuit.
Bernie wrote letters home in a beautiful cursive script. Stationed in Egypt he told of his war, servicing aircraft. His flat feet barred him from flying. On medical grounds. His letters are love-filled.
All seems rosy for the future beyond war.
Home on leave and sleeping in Nan and Grandad’s front parlour (no place for special meals now) Bernie picks up the marriage threads with his young wife. Weaves for her a baby in Bidston Avenue. And Winnie carries that baby deep inside her well into winter. She wonders about a name. If a girl maybe Juliet. Maybe Rosalind. Star struck she is by the heroines of Shakespeare.
No boy’s name comes to her. Romeo? No. Orlando in a working class home in 1942? Hardly. The Gaumont picture house rescues her. Dennis Price starring in a B movie. “If it’s a boy I’ll call him Dennis,” she announces to her mum. She waits long for that baby, till forty three for her Dennis. But wherever did Shakespeare go?
Poor Dennis can’t easily pee. He cries and cries. “Send for Dr Moore!” the shout goes up. Poor Dennis isn’t Jewish but has to lose his foreskin. What a bellow and a yell and a sobbing’s heard with that snip. Is that the siren? Is it another air-raid? “Get your coats. Get Tony. Hurry up down to the shelter.” Dad has them pretending to panic. But poor little Dennis.
By now the war was waged in the far beyond. Here it was day to day hardship. Daily grind. A family with a baby living with Nan and Grandad, who had their own and very last baby in 1939. Trouble-free Tony, brother of Winnie, of Allan, of Lawrie. Tony, Dennis’ uncle, more like a brother, soon to be his hero.
Two families. One roof. Work is there for Grandad. Part of the wartime effort in the shipyard. Roof over heads. Beds, chairs, table. Food on the table. Coal in the fireplace. Very little else. But this is a family schooled on hardship. This family went short
in the thirties almost to starving point at times. They counted blessings and recalled the Christmas of the empty pockets. A plight worse than the Cratchits’. No cash for food. Not a penny for presents for the children. Despair and anger were followed by a Christmas miracle. The arrival of that famous hamper, their saviour the lady Nan cleaned for, the hamper a large box with everything they could possibly want for a good Christmas.
V.E. day at last and “Dee-dor-ictoree! Dee-dor-ictoree! Dee-dor-ictoree!” little kids cry. Two years nine months Dennis cries “ickaree!” wriggling in Winnie’s arms. Round the corner for miles and miles into town the battered acres lie. Mounds of rubble. Trails of wreckage. What’s left of people’s homes. The ruins of lives, lives of the dockland poor. Not lives in the well managed mansions of Noctorum. There the business cliques live in luxury. Some made fortunes out of war. In previous centuries their predecessors made it from slavery.
Bernie comes home from the war. Demobbed from the R.A.F. Now it’s all cars with him. What he can’t do to a car is not worth doing. What he can do with a car is frightening. He buys them, dismantles them, repairs a fault here, replaces a dud part there, reassembles, turns the crankshaft. Here comes the purr and roar of a car. Bernie’s away. Just look at him in his latest car, brylcreemed black hair, brand new false teeth. It’s Bernie passing by with all the smirk and poise of a gangster. Soon he’s selling cars he’s bought for songs. Dodgy deals near and far. Places nobody knows about. And he’s making money. Doing foreigners to add to his engineer’s wages. But Winnie seldom sees the readies from deals made over pints. Those large crinkly white ones stay in Bernie’s wallet. Till she gets wise and steals from him when he’s drunk.
It’s 1947 and Dennis, the Boy, is Bernie’s one and only, a fixture in his arms at four years old. He recognises any car on the road: Hillman, Austin Seven, Triumph or Sunbeam Talbot. The Boy rattles off their names as easy as sucking a thumb. He’s Bernie’s mascot, good for a bet, a boast over pints. He’s a cocky little prize in the parlours of his mates.
Late one afternoon, the Boy wanders into a mysterious garden wild and walled, a magic place behind a garage where a deal’s being done. He’s following paths into fairyland. Here’s the place where Goldilocks came. That’s where Hansel and Gretel met a witch. And the Snow Queen lured Gerda through those bushes. This is the garden of gardens, the wildness of wilds.
Nan becomes a second mother to the Boy. A fixed point in his life. A jovial, good-hearted woman, as ample in generosity as she’s ample in body. She’s Babushka from Russian fairy tales. Source of solutions, stories and remedies, even if they’re no more than a spit and a wish. Nan loves him like her own. He loves her back. She always finds the good in him.
Of course, there is another grandmother. Bernie’s mother, a remote woman in a large house on a slope below Bidston Hill. She was given to laying aside Sunday afternoons to meet the families of her many sons. They were Roman Catholic so this meant scores of grandchildren who barely knew each other. They flocked to the garden like extras in a film called The Lady Bountiful, without the bounty, not even a slice of cake or glass of squash.
Grandma Wallace not Carter she was. She’d remarried after old Reg Carter’s death. At these visits the grandchildren, in family order, had the privilege of an audience with her. In a gloomy, net-curtained room she’d be sat before a bay window, shrouded in mystery as if to conduct a séance. In a far away whisper she asks, “Are you Bill’s girl?” “Are you Joe’s boy?” “Are you Bernard’s?” “Are you Gerard’s?” A vain effort to remember her grandchildren’s names follows. An impatient wait to be told. A few inconsequential questions and, to their relief, into the long garden at the back to play.
Bernie rented a house round the corner from Nan and Grandad’s. A terraced house with a high walled yard. For Winnie a wonder. Her own house and she only twenty eight. A place of her own to decorate. To clean. To cook meals in. To plant seeds. But her son is discontented. He hates the words ‘Mallaby Street’. Not as good as ‘Bidston Avenue’. The Boy wants to be at Nan’s with Tony in Bidston Avenue. He begins to hate the very word ‘street’.
One time the Boy journeys back to Nan’s with a plan and a plum from the fruit bowl. He climbs the wall, crosses a road, reaches the front door, rat-a-tat-tats on the knocker. No flutter of the net curtain. Nan’s out. He sits on the shiny brass step, eats the plum, swallows the stone, almost chokes. Waiting for Nan he’s leaning on her old green door.
Age five he’s in another house, near the docks in Birkenhead North. It’s even worse so after school one afternoon he catches a bus to Nan’s. Without paying the fare! Without being noticed he swings from the bar onto the pavement and away. Five years old. In Birkenhead North the Boy is getting wilder. Bernie’s never around. Already an absentee father. Now there’s a baby girl for Winnie to care for. She’s As You Like It’s heroine Rosalind. Dennis gets shown into the bedroom to see her. A scene is taking place on a huge high bed, beyond his reach, as if in a black and white movie. As if he’s watching from far, far away an enactment he cannot understand. He feels bereft. He wasn’t warned. It’s beyond him.
He plays chasing games at night with other wild ones in the street, under the splash of lamplight, barging in and out, pretending he’s Robin Hood, coat fastened like a cloak around his neck. He nightmares about a giant sliding a long arm down the passageway to the backs. Sees snatching fingers like jungle creepers. The world about him is unreal like waking up in a story he can’t figure out let alone read. One night when down with measles he sees himself spinning round the bedpost out of control.
The Boy no longer brags about Fords and Austins to boozy car fans. Bernie’s lost interest in him. His son was a gimmick. A proof of what a good dad he was, “Look at how clever my lad is. Show him a car, he’ll name it.” Like all gimmicks it was gone as soon as it came. The Boy drifts into disruptions and fights and still an infant. A wildness is all around. He’s attracted by the excitement of stone fights , has already made a boy’s head bleed after being called ‘Carter the champion farter’ at playtime. That was the day the headmistress sent him to fetch his mother to see what her son had done. On his own and five years old. “Go home and bring your mum here now!”
Weeks later the Boy’s volatility brings even greater trouble. On his way home for lunch he hears the ‘champion farter’ chant from the mouth of one of his enemies. A mouth he’d love to punch. This lad thinks he’s safe on the other side of the road. But the Boy dashes full pelt into the road, his hands already fists. A doctor’s car knocks him down and the doctor takes him home. Flustered Winnie says he should go to the hospital. The Boy hates the sound of the word ‘hospital’, runs upstairs to escape, blood trickling from his ankle. But he has to go, in the doctor’s car. The wound’s dressed, the scar an indelible badge of his prodigality.
By 1948, age five the Boy is strolling down the wrong back streets. He’s taking next steps into a career in recklessness. At the edge of Bidston Hill, among red sandstone rocks, like a Roman auxiliary he’s fighting in
The Battle of the Rods:
Tagging on the end of
the main troop from
the juniors after school
the Boy trails to the Rods.
The war may be over but
not in Birkenhead North.
Germans defeated, allies
still in triumph, now it’s
Catlick Cats v Proddie Dogs.
Poked sticks like spears
through fences between
St. Someone’s and Gautby
Road Infants, foul names
in the mouths of toddlers,
a new friend rejected for
being on the wrong side.
The boy remembers a hot
feeling toy fighting him,
then sudden coldness.
Was this hatred or disgust?
Battle lines drawn, the Rods
the field, a clearing amongst
firs, red stones the chosen
weapons and it’s Caesar’s
Gallic Wars, the sky dark
not with arrows but stones
long before the Troubles.
The Boy never knew his dad was a Catholic. Bernie never went
to church. There wasn’t even a Bible in the house. ‘Catholic’,
pronounced ‘catlick’, had a simple definition: ‘enemy of proddies’.
One day a visitation from Death dwarfs all other pain. Uncle
Lawrie, back from fighting in Burma, applied to join the police force. The kind of man they wanted, but he’d to wait two months before training. Lawrie’s happy to wait but not to linger for his sweetheart, Marjorie. They marry as soon as the future’s secured. To make ends meet he works down the shipyard with his dad, Marjorie in an office in town. All’s plain sailing, plans ahead, wars behind. Soon he’d be training to be a bobby.
Lawrie’s helping a plater rivet huge metal plates for the ship’s hull. But working at the side of a dry dock, ‘as happy as a sand boy’, Lawrie’s felled by a crane load. It swoops like a wrecking ball. It batters him into the dock. The crane driver didn’t see him. Lawrie’s brother, Allan, breaks the news to Winnie. Home from school, the Boy sees his mum red-eyed, hears her sobs, hears Allan’s story from ‘down the yard’. Allan often told tales from the yard, to make them laugh. Not ones like this. The Boy struggles to comprehend. It’s silent. It’s dark. A storm’s rolled in.
Uncle Lawrie, Lol, fun uncle who chased them from the raspberry canes, juice running down their lips. Uncle Lol, who brought strange things from India. Little elephants, statues of strange prophets. Uncle Lawrie, best for a wrestle. The man nobody ever ‘spoke a bad word about.’ Dear Lol, twenty one years old, six weeks wed, the world ‘his oyster’. Nan’s third lost son. Winnie’s favourite brother. Grief grips hard. Takes hold of the house. The world’s changed.
A fortnight later comes a letter addressed ‘Lawrence Brain, 24,
Bidston Avenue’. It looks official, important. It tells Lawrie to report for duty the following week. Nan breaks down, inconsolable. Grandad, aching inside, keeps his composure, quotes from the Rubaiat of Omar Khayam,
The moving finger writes and having writ
moves on. Nor all thy piety and wit
shall lure it back to cancel half a line
nor all thy tears wash away a word of it.
Most compensation goes to the widow, six weeks married Marjorie. She cuts a tragic figure ‘like Niobe all tears’. But she’s young. She has money now. She will grieve but she will heal. She will make a new life for herself when the veil of tears is drawn back. This feeling grew like a legend in the family’s history.
Nan shows her worst side. She feels cheated. She and Grandad raised Lawrie through all the hardship. All those difficult years. All that poverty. They get a mere fifty pounds. Six weeks wed and most goes to Marjorie. This wretched monologue of wrangling bitterness fills the airwaves for weeks. Grandad does what he can to calm Nan. He books a holiday on the Isle of Man. He does what he can. This wise, compassionate husband.
The Isle of Man holiday with Tony offers little relief. A three-legged brass plaque hangs in the hall. Empty seashells decorate the shelves of Ros and the Boy. They listen to the sea and watch the tragedy play out. When the curtain’s drawn there’s no applause. Merely a slowly fading ache.
Marjorie went to America for a long time. She returned with bubblegum for the kids. They chewed the cud for weeks with splats in the face from the bubbles. She brought Marvel comics with heroes like Captain America, Batman and Superman. As far as Tony and the Boy were concerned America was the place to live. Yet the ache of the loss of their very own hero, Lol, lingers.