Kitabı oxu: «More Than Just Coincidence»

Chapter One Black Plimsolls Tied With Ribbon

I was an only child and likely to stay that way. My mother often remarked that, while she loved me dearly, she would have been just as happy with a litter of puppies. It was a sentiment that shocked friends and neighbours but I understood it completely: there were animal people and there were children people. My mother belonged in the first camp. For that matter, so did I.

At four years old I mothered my own ‘family’—hamster, tortoise and a tabby cat unimaginatively named Tiddles (I never knew an East End cat called anything else) who allowed me to dress him up in dolls’ clothes. I also trained our hen, Ada, to pick up washing in her beak from the laundry basket for me to peg on to the clothes line and rescued many a tiny sparrow, setting them carefully into cardboard boxes lined with cotton wool. Human babies, however, held no more fascination for me than they did for my mum.

While other mothers cooed over babies in prams, mine sat with me in the Rex picture house in Roman Road market, sobbing over the death of Shep or Old Yeller. When my father returned from work one evening to find us yet again red-eyed with grief (this time over Bambi’s mum), he insisted that enough was enough. From then on there would be only happy endings.

My mum, Margaret Mary Exley, always known as Margie, had had a tough childhood in London’s East End. One of five children whose father, a docker, had died of TB as a young man, she had left school at fourteen to help support her family. To her, work was not only a question of economic necessity but the key to self-reliance. She had given birth to me at the age of thirty-three—unusually late, in the 1950s, for a woman to be having her first child—and a schoolfriend once commented to me how different she seemed from the other mums, most of whom had jobs in factories but dreamed of having enough money coming in to be able to stay at home with their children. My mum, on the other hand, had to be persuaded by my father to give up full-time employment to take care of me. She did so until I was four, but she couldn’t wait to get back to work once I started infant school.

It was not as if she were a high-flying businesswoman with a fulfilling career. She worked as a waitress, on her feet all day, in a busy Kardomah coffee house on Kingsway in Holborn. But having known severe poverty growing up, she was in constant fear of sinking back into the kind of hand-to-mouth existence governed by pawnshops and tallymen. She seemed to live in a state of heightened reality, nerves strung taut, like a meerkat perpetually alert to danger. Yet at the same time she had a keen and tireless curiosity about other people, places and lifestyles that she could only glimpse in Hollywood films, and the coffee house, like the cinema, offered an escape from the daily grind of the East End. Every evening, she would come back with stale but exotic confections: sandwiches in rye bread, fruit croissants and Danish pastries—delicacies never found at that time among the custard tarts and pork pies of an East End bakery.

Many of her customers worked nearby at Bush House, the headquarters of the BBC World Service, and she would proudly bring home autographed photographs of 1960s ‘celebrities’ like the debonair newsreader Reggie Bosanquet, the actor Sam Kydd and even, rather surprisingly, strip-club owner Paul Raymond, the so-called ‘King of Soho’.

Years later, one night in 1978, the television news was headlined by the mysterious death of the Bulgarian dissident novelist and playwright Georgi Markov, believed to have been murdered with the tip of a poisoned umbrella. My mother was distraught. Markov, who had worked for the BBC World Service since being granted political asylum in 1969, had been not only her customer but also her friend, chatting with her every day over coffee and always leaving a good tip. She knew him as ‘my Georgie’. It’s a wonder MI5 didn’t take her in for background questioning.

My mother had been working at the Royal Mint at Tower Hill, swinging heavy bags of metal on to trucks, when she met my father, Bill Wassmer, a coiner who struck metal into money. Born in 1917, my dad was the eldest son of a soldier who had settled on Civvy Street as a baker. A dyed-in-the-wool trade union man, he was intelligent but for the most part self-educated. He became the long-term shop steward at the Mint, arguing his causes with considerable adversarial skill.

When they married in 1950 my parents put their names on the council housing list and moved into two upstairs rooms sublet to them by my father’s uncle and aunt while they waited for a home of their own. In my mind’s eye I can picture my father carrying their few possessions into their temporary accommodation at Lefevre Road whistling ‘If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake’, the cheery song popularised that year by Eileen Barton and Gracie Fields. Nearly twenty years later Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin supplied a grittier soundtrack to the times—and my parents were still waiting to be rehoused.

They had already been at 25 Lefevre Road for three years when I came along on 5 January 1953, and there we would remain until 1969. The house was a Victorian terrace with a bay window flanked by tall pillars. In the 1950s and 1960s it was impossible to imagine that such decrepit slums would be sought after and gentrified by Thatcher’s generation. They had leaking roofs and so much subsidence that the upper ceilings sagged alarmingly. Landlords never did repairs so, whenever there was heavy rain or snow, buckets had to be positioned at strategic points around the floors. We had a living room with a tiny kitchenette leading off it through an open doorway, one bedroom, an outside toilet and a rusting tin bath which hung on the garden wall—but no hot water. From time to time, mice scratched and scuttled in the wainscot. Occasionally they’d be sucked up by the Hoover, not a pleasant experience for us or for them. As I never had a bedroom of my own—I slept in the same room as my parents when I was small and graduated to the living-room sofa when I was older—I had no territory that was exclusively mine, no private place or space to keep my personal things, but as I knew nothing else I didn’t feel deprived until I came to see how other people lived.

My parents were not so much a couple as two soulmates with their own individual interests—in my mother’s case the pictures and her beloved Kardomah coffee house, and darts and the Hackney Wick dog track in my dad’s. They were opposites, owl and fowl—she was a night person; he rose early. He was easygoing while she did most of the worrying. Television adverts warning of body odour or bad breath provoked paranoia in my mum since she had been born without a sense of smell. As a result she moved around in a cloud of cheap perfume, forever checking gas taps to make sure they weren’t left on.

Although her education had been brief, my mother was bright and intuitive. An instinctive judge of character and situations, she seemed to understand what made people tick. She would instantly pick up on the importance of what remained unsaid in a conversation and at the Rex she always grasped the subtext of a film. My father often remarked that she was psychic. She certainly appeared to be able to read his mind and invariably knew exactly what he was about to say. Around him, she was never timid. Sensitive to the scars of her childhood privations, Dad had long ago assumed the role of her protector. Mum had been schooled by Irish nuns, and the Catholic guilt they instilled in her had been reinforced at home. After her father’s early death, one of her elder brothers had taken on the role of the head of the family and when she was fourteen he had given her a good beating after catching her talking to a boy in the street. She never forgot the lesson acquired so painfully: we may be poor, but heaven help you if you bring shame on this family. Thereafter even bare arms were taboo. I can’t recall her ever once wearing short sleeves, even during the occasional week we might spend at the Pontin’s holiday camp in Pakefield, near Lowestoft.

My father, on the other hand, was a staunch Protestant and had no time for Catholicism. He was fond of making speeches about the need for clear, rational thought, unclouded by religious doctrine. It was impossible, he would say, for anyone to get a proper education at the hands of priests or nuns because they failed to teach children to think for themselves. He was a big fan of Oliver Cromwell, who stood against Charles I’s assertion of the divine right of kings, and Martin Luther, who dared to rebel against the Pope.

At the age of four, safe from the clutches of priests and nuns, I started at the local infant school in Roman Road, opposite Kelly’s eel and pie shop. I ate pie and mash, covered in the thick green parsley sauce known to East Enders as ‘liquor’, almost every lunchtime. Outside the shop, on the stall, slate-grey eels writhed in metal trays before being grabbed, chopped and stuffed into bags, the individual chunks still squirming as housewives carried them home to boil or steam.

Many of the children already knew each other from nursery. Being an only child as well as a newcomer, at first I was painfully shy. I was luckier than some of my classmates in that my mother had already taught me to read. In the afternoons our teacher would tell us stories and encourage us to tell our own, something in which we could all participate. I remember listening intently to one little girl’s tale about a beautiful child called Ella who cleared the cinders from the grates for her ugly sisters. ‘And so,’ my classmate concluded triumphantly, ‘they called her Cinder…Ella!’ Oh, the wonderful logic of it! I was hooked.

‘Does anyone else have a story for us?’ asked the teacher.

In spite of my shyness, I felt my arm creep into the air almost involuntarily. I had a story to tell. I just hadn’t thought it up yet.

Slowly and carefully, I constructed my contribution as I went along. My classmates co-operated kindly, listening with apparent fascination to a rambling tale about a tortoise. My love of storytelling had been born.

At home, I finished reading a whole book and was spellbound by it. It was the story of Joan of Arc. I related it to my dad, who was so impressed that when a man knocked on our door promising education for the price of a simple instalment plan, he immediately signed on the dotted line. And so The Book of Knowledge entered my life, a set of leather-bound encyclopaedias with gold embossed lettering on their spines.

As an only child I was already a kind of mini-adult, sandwiched somewhere between the two grown-ups I called Mum and Dad and their separate lives and passions. I amused myself by drawing pictures, writing stories and burying myself in The Book of Knowledge. Opening any one of the volumes could transform a dull, rainy afternoon. Hours sped by as new worlds sprang to life. I could learn about ‘Our Giant Sun and its Gigantic Tasks’, or take in ‘The Story of Wheat’. In a section entitled ‘The Mistress of the Adriatic’, I read how Venetian prisoners would pass beneath the graceful Bridge of Sighs on their way to torture and death. Among photographic plates of amazing feats of engineering, or strange animals and insects like the Duck-Billed Platypus or the Bird-Eating Spider, were illustrated poems: ‘From a Railway Carriage’ by Robert Louis Stevenson I read aloud to myself, fascinated by its compelling steam-train tempo. Paintings featuring children, such as Velazquez’s portrait of the Infanta Margaret Maria, were mesmerising even in black and white. A stunning drawing of a bespectacled Gulliver towing a captive fleet to Lilliput led me on to the public library, where a lender’s card finally introduced me to a whole universe of characters and adventure. My head teeming with myriad stories drawn from Greek and Roman mythology, I allowed myself to dream: would I be as beautiful as the face that launched a thousand ships? As brave as Ajax? As wise as Minerva? I was venturing beyond the bounds of my childhood experience, and sometimes it could be scary. Was that a lorry that just passed, shaking our subsiding house, or the first rumblings of an earthquake like the one that destroyed Pompeii?

‘The child’s got too much imagination’ was a comment I heard almost daily. It was meant to be a criticism but my father always took it as a compliment and continued the instalment-plan payments.

Great Uncle Will and Great Aunt Carrie, who lived downstairs, became my surrogate grandparents since my father and his own mother, Will’s sister, Lil, were estranged. One Sunday afternoon, while I was still a baby, there had been an argument over the cooking of a joint of roast beef during which Lil had stormed out of our house, never to return. Both too proud to make the first move, my dad and his mother refused to contact one another and were never reconciled. We did once try to visit her, at my instigation: having no memory of my grandmother I was curious about her and questioned my father until he relented. It was a short trip—she lived in Stratford—but a long and tense journey for my dad. How would his mother receive him after not having laid eyes on him in almost ten years?

We knocked on the door and waited. In the end a neighbour came out and told us my grandmother wasn’t in. It sounds bizarre, in these days of mobile phones and texts and round-the-clock communication, to pitch up on the doorstep of somebody you hadn’t seen for years on the off chance she might be at home, but it wasn’t so unusual then. We couldn’t call ahead because we didn’t have a phone. Maybe my grandmother didn’t have one, either, I don’t know. But on that wet afternoon, as I watched my father’s fingers nervously lighting damp cigarettes, I had a clear sense of his disappointment, though he never once gave voice to it. We simply turned round and went home. The visit was never attempted again. Feelings ran deep in my family—even about something as inconsequential as the cooking of roast beef.

So Aunt Carrie and Uncle Will Tolliday filled this family void. Described by all who knew them as ‘characters’, they were both frustrated entertainers. Carrie had a belting voice in the style of Gracie Fields and whatever Will lacked vocally he made up for with a terrifying and inventive act which involved an intricate and grotesque mask of rubber bands that covered every inch of his face. They would perform at the drop of a hat at various East End civic theatres, to patients trapped in hospital wards—any venue that would invite them.

The Bridge House, a little brown-tiled pub at the end of our street, was once treated to an impromptu show by Aunt Carrie while several of the notorious Kray twins’ henchmen were trying to enjoy a quiet drink. After a few rounds of rum and blackcurrant, Carrie swept through the saloon bar singing ‘It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie’ and swiped the glass from the impressive fist of a lantern-jawed villain. His eyes narrowed as she upbraided him in song in front of all the other customers. Finishing, bravely, on an astoundingly long note, she completed her performance by downing the man’s drink. A hush descended on the bar. My mother leaned in quickly and whispered to him, ‘She don’t mean no harm. She’s a relation of my husband’s so if you can see your way to forgive, I’d be grateful.’ She offered him her charming smile. After a slightly worrying pause, a low, rumbling chuckle could be heard. As it developed into a bellow of deep laughter everyone joined in. My mother had won him round.

At home Aunt Carrie and Uncle Will always had some creative project going on but they acted on strange whims, suddenly dyeing all their net curtains a shockingly bright canary yellow, for example, or painting each individual brick of our house a different colour. Carrie was also in the habit of pumping floralscented fluid round her ‘front rooms’. She minded me during the school holidays while my mother was at work and we would listen to Mrs Dale’s Diary on the radio before sitting down to a lunch of tinned steak and kidney pudding, mashed potato and marrowfat peas. On long winter afternoons she would teach me complex card games like cribbage and solo. Resting by the crackling coal fire in the evenings she would weave romantic tales for me of how she and Uncle Will had met. I listened in wonder—until the object of her affections came home from the Bridge House with beer on his breath and a drunken domestic ensued, which rather ruined the magic.

In spite of their public ebullience, Will and Carrie were perturbed by any noise from upstairs—they were elderly, after all—and my parents, forever grateful to them for taking us in, bent over backwards to avoid annoying them in any way. The creaking of loose floorboards as we walked to and fro above their heads was a particular irritation so we all moved about on tiptoe, even my father, who was a heavy man and over six foot tall. Sometimes, to muffle the sound of my footsteps, my mother tied ribbon round my black plimsolls, encouraging me to imagine I was a ballerina. I would pretend to be Anna Pavlova dancing the Dying Swan, teetering lightly around the room en pointe.

When I started to make friends with other children at school it began to dawn on me not only that our domestic circumstances left something to be desired, but also that my family was, to say the least, a bit strange by other people’s standards. Some of my classmates’ parents had fared better than mine on the housing list and had already been moved into the new council tower blocks near Victoria Park. Their flats were luxuriously airy and light, yet warm in the winter—the kind of homes you might see on television adverts for gravy, where happy families sat smiling around the table as Mum, sporting a frilly pinny, served a slap-up meal in her spanking new Formica kitchen. Other friends lived in post-war prefabs, ramshackle but still standing, with wonderfully overgrown gardens.

What they all had that we didn’t was space. They also had brothers and sisters, and the moment I was over their doorsteps my nostrils would be assailed not by something akin to the floral scents that permeated Aunt Carrie’s ‘front rooms’ but by an unfamiliar cocktail of stale milk, sweet vomit and the unsettling aroma of cloth nappies boiling in a saucepan. ‘Hold my sister for me,’ somebody would say, casually handing over a small alien creature. These girls were already trainee mums, tending confidently to their younger siblings, but I was terrified by the tiny, bawling infants that wriggled furiously in my awkward embrace, their faces scrunched into tight, red balls of discomfort.

Everyone else’s parents appeared to have at least two children, and whether the adults had themselves grown up in happy or dysfunctional families, or in severe hardship like my mother, they all seemed to aspire to raising several kids, either to recreate a rosy childhood or to compensate for a rotten one. For a little girl whose ménage consisted of parents, assorted pets and the two oddballs who lived downstairs, it was something of an eye-opener.

Our extended family, on both my mother’s and father’s sides, was scattered, and with no phone and no car, it wasn’t easy to stay in touch on a regular basis. Occasionally we would visit my father’s sister, Aunt Joan, in Chigwell, but there were no big get-togethers with uncles, aunts and cousins all present. My dad’s brother Lenny had died in the Second World War and his youngest sibling, Johnny, was nearly twenty years his junior. They seemed to have lost track of one another after my father’s fall-out with his mum. As it was impossible for my parents to entertain relatives or friends in our cramped quarters at Lefevre Road, either we had to visit them or everyone went to the pub.

The exception was my mother’s adored brother, another Johnny, a stevedore at the docks in Wapping. We often spent weekends with him and his wife Kath at their tenement flat at Riverside Mansions. While they drank with my parents in a pub by the Thames called the Jolly Sailor, I played outside with my five cousins, pacified with pennies and pop. We never crossed the threshold of the saloon bar, but from the street we would hear the drunken chatter subside from time to time when the jukebox played a sentimental tune or someone began to sing a heartbreaking Irish song about love and separation. ‘I’m a Rover’ was a favourite, and we kids would join in outside.

…Though the night be dark as dungeonNot a star to be seen aboveI will be guided without stumbleInto the arms of my only love.

My father must have felt like an outsider among all the Catholic dock workers in the Jolly Sailor, and perhaps excluded by my mum’s close relationship with her brother, too, but if he did, he kept it to himself.

After a raucous Saturday night, there would sometimes be a church procession on Sunday. My younger cousin Catherine, dressed in lace like a baby doll, glided past Riverside Mansions one morning as though she had been set on a white raft sailing through the narrow docklands streets. I would be sent off to Mass with my cousins to stand mouthing an unfamiliar catechism while the priest came along flicking incense on us. Then, as if on cue, I would faint, sliding to the ground and regaining consciousness just in time to hear my cousins yet again blaming my father’s religion. ‘You’re a Proddy dog. The incense found you out!’ I don’t think I’m the first person to suffer from fainting fits in church. It was probably due to low blood sugar or kneeling and standing up again too quickly, but there again, maybe my cousins were right.

One year we spent Christmas with Uncle Johnny and Aunt Kath—a real treat as Christmas at Lefevre Road was often fraught. There wasn’t room for a proper tree so my mother would stand a small artificial one with silvery tinsel branches on the sideboard and painstakingly decorate it with lights and baubles. We had very few 13 amp sockets so the fairylights had to be plugged into the main light socket in the ceiling (all sorts of things had to be plugged into those sockets, including an electric blanket I had on my bed during the winter). My dad would come in from work and throw open the door. Being so tall, he would catch the wire and the whole lot would come crashing down. I have a memory of my mother once stamping on all the fallen baubles in frustration, crying, ‘That’s it! I give up!’

The flat at Riverside Mansions wasn’t exactly palatial but there was a real sense of a family Christmas there, with presents hidden in every room to be hunted for in a clamour early in the morning. In material terms my cousins were poorer than I was, but they had something I didn’t: each other. I shared a bed with my cousins Pat and Catherine. On the night before Christmas, as I lay there between them, still wide awake, Pat, sensing that I was fretful, took me in her arms and cuddled me. For the first time I was acutely aware that, as an only child, I was missing out on a sense being part of a loving clan of children. My cousins might have scrapped like cats and dogs but they would support each other through good times and bad.

There were other cousins I got to see less frequently because their parents had settled in Essex, part of the diaspora from the East End tempted either by the promise of work at the Ford car factory or by the offer of a brand-new council house. My father was always disparaging about Essex. The new housing estates there were, he said, ‘ersatz’ and he dismissed Dagenham as ‘Corned Beef City’. Looking back, these estates were rather sterile and soulless. The residents became overly houseproud and couldn’t help being sucked into a culture of keeping up with the Joneses. Front lawns were fastidiously manicured, cars washed even when they were already clean and curtains twitched in streets where very little happened. To an East End kid, a Sunday afternoon in Essex was depressingly quiet. In Becontree or Chigwell even the lone bell of an ice-cream van, isolated as it was from the accompanying sights and sounds of Sunday activities at home—the bustle of Brick Lane market, drunks singing in the pubs, radio broadcasts wafting from open windows—struck a mournful note. In spite of our less than ideal living conditions, my parents much preferred the rough and tumble of East London and would never have entertained the notion of moving away. For all its shortcomings, it was home.