CHAPTER 5
As my father drifted through his thirties, he became more and more restless. In Cowdenbeath, he was unhappy to be so close to in-laws who thought so little of him, but he was also in the place where he had lived all his life, a place where he could not help but be seen for what he was. I understand, now, why he would have found that restrictive: he needed to lie, in order to
be
, or, at least, in order not to be the failure he would soon become, in his own eyes, as well as in the eyes of others, if he didn’t get away. For the next several years, we would be flitting, if not in reality, then in our minds: my father talked about moving all the time, first to one place, then another. It was always the most seductive story he could offer us: a story about making a new start, about finding a better life. Margaret and I were all for that; we thought he would be happier somewhere else, and if he was happier, we would be happier too. As we understood it, all we had to do was move and we would have sunshine, bikes, rooms of our own.
While all these vague plans were being hatched, my mother sat tight, not arguing, just resisting with all she had. Silence. Patience. The momentum of daily routine. Even as a child, I knew she didn’t want to go anywhere: in Cowdenbeath, she had family, friends, support. She had well-tried ways of getting through the bad times. There were places, there, where she could hide, and not seem to be hiding; an agreed etiquette that allowed her to beg and not seem to be begging. I knew the words for this, even when I didn’t fully understand the system: coal towns were close-knit communities; everybody pulled together. The same machinery that allowed my father to get away with what he did also kept his family going, through fat and lean – though it was mostly lean, and that was also common knowledge. Meanwhile, I hopped out of the bedroom window a little more often. I even got to know, without telling, when it was time for me to go. My father never remembered, in the morning, that I’d been absent from my bed when he came looking for me to run errands, or entertain his friends, or whatever it was he wanted me to do. For him, mornings after were reserved for remorse and sweet tea, just as they were all over Scotland.
Our first move was to Birmingham. I was six. I had been to Edinburgh, so I knew what a city was like, but I had only ever seen the clean heartland of the capital: Princes Street, the Bridges, the Scott Memorial, James Thin’s Bookshop. Edinburgh, for me, was crossing the Forth Rail Bridge on a special day’s outing, when times were as good as they got. My mother would wear make-up, lipstick, her good coat, and she would give us a halfpenny each to throw out of the carriage window as the train crossed the firth. This was a tradition: a child tossed a coin out of the window and made a wish, right at the centre of the bridge; if you did it right, the wish would come true, no matter what you wished for. Naturally, I wished for extravagant, wild things: a big house at the edge of town, near Central Park; a car, like the one my uncle John had; happy parents. I didn’t expect to get any of it, though – not because I didn’t think it was possible, but because I knew I wasn’t doing the thing right: a halfpenny wasn’t enough, I wasn’t throwing it out at exactly the midpoint, it wasn’t hitting the water right.
Edinburgh was best clothes and afternoon tea with scones in the British Home Stores café. Birmingham was something else. To my six-year-old self, it was huge, dark and rainy, crowded with people who were unlike us in every way. I couldn’t understand what they were saying; I couldn’t figure out how the traffic worked; there were cars and buses everywhere. The house where we lodged was owned by a tall, striking Irishwoman called Maureen, who smoked all the time and watched over her tenants like a strict but benevolent headmistress, a woman who would rather have died than be seen without her make-up and lipstick, routinely obsessed with her personal appearance, but prepared to live in a house that was, quite literally, a midden. ‘I hope you like cats,’ she said, as she showed us to the single room we would occupy at the top of the house. ‘There’s not usually this many. Both my girls just had kittens.’
I watched my mother suppress her disgust. The stairway was oddly golden, bathed in a cool, syrupy light; it also smelled terrible, a mixture of smoke, cat shit and boiled vegetables. The understanding was that Maureen’s house was a cheap and decidedly temporary billet. On her side, Maureen seemed to think we were on the run from somewhere. She was careful not to ask questions, or act too curious, which only made my mother more awkward, as it began to register, over the first few days, that my father had spun our landlady a whole web of bizarre and unnecessary lies. The room was long and narrow, and contained two beds, an old wardrobe and a deal table. A mirror was screwed to the wall by the door, there was a battered bedside unit between the double bed where my parents slept and the narrower, not quite single bed Margaret and I had to share. The only light was a bulb overhead, almost obscured by a thick, crimson, velvety-looking lampshade with long, dusty tassels. Worst of all, it was unbearably noisy. As my mother said to Aunt Margaret, when we got back safely to Cowdenbeath, the walls were so thin, you could hear what the people next door were thinking before they said it.
We stayed in Birmingham for several weeks. In all that time, I never saw the centre, never went to any gardens or famous monuments, never had tea and scones. We were out in some anonymous, run-down district with all the other transient people who’d come looking for a fresh start – Irish and West Indians, mostly. I was fascinated by the Jamaican men, in their dowdy overcoats and trilby-style hats, like the detectives in old films, only black, with beautiful, soft voices that worked magic around them as they walked along, a magic I could hear but didn’t understand. Most of the time, though, I was scared. One rainy afternoon, I was hit by a car, just lightly, enough to knock me down, but nothing was broken and the driver was very good about it, calming my mother down, asking if she needed anything. It had been my fault: I’d stepped out into the road without looking, something I’d never done at home, but nobody was angry and, afterwards, my mother bought me a book. I remember it still:
The Pomegranate Seeds and Other Stories
, a piece of ephemera that was only a step away from being a comic, but had a proper story as well as pictures. It was stories from Greek mythology, so I imagine my mother thought it educational. I kept that book intact and spotless for years.
A week after the car incident, I came down with chickenpox. I had it first, then Margaret caught it. We didn’t mind having to stay indoors – my strongest memory of Birmingham, other than raw, itchy spots and traffic, was of rainy days and nowhere to go – but it was hard for my mother, with my father out labouring all day, and Maureen trying to help, coming into the room without knocking, bringing Kaolin and Morphine for the invalids and cups of hot, steaming tea for my mother, who could hardly refuse all this well-meaning assistance. I believe she did like Maureen, in spite of everything, but she would have preferred to deal with things herself, not among strangers.
My father loved Birmingham. Perhaps, for a drunk, cities really are better: in a small town, a man runs out of goodwill pretty quickly, and people soon know where they stand with him. In a city, he can go from pub to pub, hotel bar to hotel bar and, if he makes a mistake in one, there’s always another. Meanwhile, he can be anybody he chooses to be. He can walk into a strange place, strike up a conversation, gradually let slip the clues and revealing details of a life he has never known. A life he might have had, if things had been different. He can even believe, as he slips into the familiar-seeming role, that he came so close to making that life happen, his story might as well be the truth. If he hadn’t married that particular woman. If he’d never had kids. If he’d stayed in the air force, he’d be just a few years from a pension by now.
He must have known that it couldn’t last. He’d led my mother to believe that flitting to Birmingham was the beginning of new life, but he was just doing the same casual work on the building that he’d been doing at home. At least in Cowdenbeath, we’d had the prefab to ourselves; now, in Maureen’s house, we were living with strangers, some of whom were fixtures, like the furniture and the smell in the hallways, while others came and went, men from Cork or Somerset who stayed a week or so, then disappeared, women who were almost indistinguishable from Maureen, some a little younger and fresher-looking, some older, caked in dark, wet-looking make-up. The men were mysterious and sullen, which made my mother think they were criminals; the women popped in for a cup of tea one afternoon, stayed for a few days, then wandered off somewhere, never to be seen again. They were so like Maureen, I thought they must be her sisters, or cousins; they dressed in similar clothes, smoked the same cigarettes, talked the same talk. They might as well have been the same woman, variant incarnations of the coarse, good-humoured, hard-headed landlady who beguiled and frightened me.
My mother waited for a few weeks, as I remember, before she went to work on talking us home. To begin with, she was careful: it wouldn’t do to suggest that my father had been wrong, or that he was stuck in the dead-end work he’d been getting so far. It wouldn’t do for him to feel that he’d failed. He would have to be talked around slowly, with great care, like a sulky child. Towards the end, though, when it became obvious that he had no intention of leaving, she never stopped talking about going back, and my father got more and more angry, more and more desperate to get out into the world and show people what he was capable of. I think he really believed he could change his life, given half a chance; but the truth was, he wasn’t the type to charm success from the banal apparatus of the daily grind. As soon as he got ahead, he was in the pub, buying drinks for everybody; or he would spend the morning with the racing papers, studying the form, then he’d put everything he had on the one horse, to win. Soon, he was staying out late, or not coming back to the digs at all. One night, Maureen locked the door when she saw him coming back along the street, his face bloody, his clothes torn. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him, but she was afraid for him, and she had come to the point of believing that what he needed was a firm hand. She was afraid for my mother, too, and for the children of this unlucky pair, sick and thin, in cheap clothes, desperately homesick and frightened by what was happening to their father. She had said it before: one day, that man will say the wrong thing to the wrong people, and he won’t come home at all.
My mother assumed it was the West Indians Maureen feared. She came from West Fife, where black people were unknown, and she’d heard all the usual stories that went the rounds. I’d been embarrassed more than once by the exaggerated care she took when she was in a crowded place, among ‘the golliwogs’, as she called them. It was a small, dark shock to me, that she was prejudiced.
‘No, Tess,’ Maureen said. ‘They’re all right. Some people don’t like them, but in my experience, they’re decent enough.’ She sat with her cup in mid-air, her cigarette glowing in the half-light. ‘No,’ she continued, pursing her lips. ‘It’s the Irish you’ve got to look out for. I don’t like to speak ill of my own, but if there’s one thing I know, it’s that. When an Irishman goes bad, he goes all the way.’
That night, Maureen must have believed all her predictions had come true. My father got to the door and tried the handle. There was a long silence, then he knocked. Not loud, just a knock. If my mother had locked the door on him at home, he would have broken it in without a moment’s hesitation. But that was how he worked. It’s how so many drinkers work: at some level, a ghost of common sense still operates, and he knew Maureen wouldn’t stand for any nonsense. ‘Maureen?’ He waited. ‘It’s Tommy,’ he said. ‘I’m locked out here.’
We’d all been awake, and now we were up, Maureen downstairs in the hall, my mother, me, Margaret and a Maureen-clone in frozen attitudes all the way up the stairs and on to the landing. Maureen looked at my mother. ‘I’m not letting him in,’ she said.
My mother shook her head. ‘Go back to bed,’ she said to me. I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t want to stay to the end either. Not out there on the stairs. ‘Go on,’ my mother said. ‘It’s going to be all right.’
I didn’t believe her, but then, as I lingered, Maureen spoke. ‘Off to bed, you two,’ she said. ‘And not a squeak out of you.’ She smiled sadly. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Your Dad will be fine.’
That night was the end of our Birmingham adventure. My father tried to hang on, doing what he always did in such situations – acting as if nothing had happened, as if everything was going fine – but with Maureen watching him as closely as my mother had been, he couldn’t keep up the pretence. My mother had contacted the council in Cowdenbeath and found out we could have our old prefab back and, soon, we were on the road, traipsing from one bus to another with our boxes and suitcases, stopping off on the way at Blackpool for what was billed as a family holiday. It didn’t work out that well, though: after we’d got settled in our digs – a seedy, cramped guest house a few streets from the front – my father disappeared to the pub and we hardly saw him for the next ten days. What I remember best about that holiday is that Emile Ford and the Checkmates were playing in Blackpool while we were there. Somehow, my mother found the money to take me and Margaret to see them. Emile Ford was one of my heroes at the time, an extraordinarily good-looking man from Nassau, whose biggest hit, ‘What do you want to make those eyes at me for?’ was number one in the Hit Parade for several weeks in 1959.
After the show, we waited around at the stage door till he came out, and I got his autograph on a black-and-white
Postcard from Blackpool
showing the famous tower looming over the sands. Emile Ford told me they had a tower just like it in Paris, then he patted me softly on the shoulder and got into a car. I remembered him for months afterwards and, whenever anyone asked me about our trip to England, I talked about Emile Ford.