Mr Cotterill
The man who cuts my hair
He makes me sweat
He takes his tea in a shaving mug
And smokes a cigarette.
He waves his clippers all about
Talks football with the men
Sat waiting – fags and overalls –
In Cotterill’s smoking den.
I kneel up in the chair
He wraps me in a sheet
And cuts off half my hair
It gathers at his feet.
He wears peculiar glasses
A knitted Albion scarf
His crazy clippers roaring in
To clip the other half.
I am a big boy now
(My mother tells me so)
But my head is getting smaller
And my mouth’s a frightened ‘o’.
I watch him in the mirror
As his clippers take their toll
His eyes swim out of focus
Like blue fish in a bowl.
The man who cuts my hair
He makes me quake
He drinks his tea with a slurping noise
And eats a Jaffa Cake.
I dream sometimes of haircuts
I’m in a mighty chair
In a forest full of scissors
In a clearing full of hair.
In a palace full of money
In a garden full of clothes
With a maid and one big barber …
Who snips off my nose.
Apples of Old
They don’t make apples like they did when I was a boy. Or breakfasts, bacon still flinching from the slicer, spiteful eggs spitting in the pan. Bread does not arrive still hot on the doorstep with its curve of crust all ready to be torn off, inverted like a boat or barge and filled with butter. The butter, almost green at the edges, with a delicious hint of sourness in its taste. They don’t make butter like they did. Or beer.
When I became a man and travelled, I’d seek out that taste of beer my father sometimes let me have: bitter, smelly, unpleasant really, but highly interesting when you are six or seven. On holidays I’d track down obscure CAMRA ales, ever hoping to be reacquainted with my father’s beer. For years I searched and supped until it dawned on me; the beer I sought was gone for good. Even if some cunning brewer brewed it up – hops, water, yeast – exactly as it was, I would not taste it. The taste was a contract, a particular deal between that beer and my mouth, my young six-year-old mouth, likewise gone for good.
Yes, like passing trains, I guess, the world goes one way and we, though gazing backwards, go the other.
Sunlight
The ever-increasing variety of the town’s industries augurs well for the future prosperity of Oldbury. Besides the wide range of its hardware output, from edge-tools to bicycle frames, and of its chemicals, from alkali to phosphorus, it produces blue bricks and cardboard boxes, tar, jam, and pale ale, immense engine boilers and delicate surgical dressings, and a catalogue of other manufactures equally strange in their diversity to say nothing of the railway carriages and the canal barges by which they may be expeditiously carried away.
Oldbury and Round About,
Frederick William Hackwood (1915)
The sun shone down on Oldbury
When I was growing up
Under the rusty Rounds Green Hills
In a hot and sulphurous cup.
Corrugated-iron roofs
Forty-five factory chimneys to count
Without even turning round.
Accles & Pollock, Danks’s
Chance & Hunt, The Brades
Used up the air of Oldbury
As they followed their various trades.
A layer of low commercial smoke
A lid upon the town
Shut out the feeble fabled sky
Kept us from turning brown.
Such little mushroomed kids we were
Our knees so nearly white
You’d spot us halfway up the street
In the middle of the night.
Yet everyone had his chimney
Kindling, coal or coke
Bonfires bloomed in gardens
Lives went up in smoke.
Dads cloth-capped and muffled
Dads with dogs in the park
Coughing their way to the factories
Puffing their fags in the dark.
A town of arsonists, you’d say
Combusting our desires
Even the mothers sooted their sheets
With their very own wash-house fires.
Then once a year in August
We’d quit the town at a run
And catch the train to the seaside
And lie down and worship the sun.
And come back burnt to a cinder
As red as a post-office brick
Back to our blanket of Oldbury smoke
And under it, quiet and quick.
It was our town, all said and done
Our home through thick and thin
The sun shone down on Oldbury, yes
But we wouldn’t let it in.
Treading the Boilers
Some memories I have of the most convincing kind that are not my own. I’m in a rowing boat on a river with my mother and father. A tiny little boy. The rowing boat, as we prepare to disembark, tips up. All of us then in the water. ‘Save Allan!’ my mother cries. ‘Save him! Save him!’ (i.e. not her). My father – an excellent swimmer, who as a boy had dived for pennies thrown by sailors off Tynemouth docks – saves us both. But it’s my mother’s memory not mine I’m remembering, and my father’s, diving for pennies, told to me when I was little, less little, and eventually not so little at all. Memories I’ve adopted, memories tailored for me by my parents, like a suit of clothes. Bespoke.
Or I’m on my tricycle in the yard behind our house in Birchfield Lane. An air-raid shelter has been dismantled (or bombed) and lies half-buried in a hole or crater. So down I tumble. I scrape my knees, lose a tooth, get a nasty cut from a jutting edge of corrugated iron. But again it’s my mother and others, aunties and such, who store the memory up and read it back to me in later times, rehearse me in it until I’m word perfect. Though in this case there is corroboration of a sort: a small white scar on the inside of my wrist that did not finally fade till I was forty.
And then there was Treading the Boilers. I cherished this memory so much that in the finish I worked it up and put it into a story.
On Monday morning in assembly Mr Reynolds talked to the whole school about boys playing on bomb sites, boys trespassing in Messrs Danks’s factory yard and storage areas, nits, Jesus and the Coronation Cup.
A boy named Horace Crumpton had fallen and dislocated his shoulder while fooling around in a derelict house. Mr Reynolds felt sure we could learn a lesson from him. Horace took a bow, embarrassed and pleased with himself, arm in a sling. Other boys, so far unidentified, had been chased out of Danks’s on Saturday night by the watchman. It was Amos and his lot treading the boilers again, but Mr Reynolds was not to know this. He was sick and tired of getting phone calls to his home, he said, and promised retribution.
And then, a day or so later …
Patrick, it turned out, had been one of the gang of boys – organized by Amos – who under the cover of fog and darkness had last night revisited Danks’s. Treading the boilers involved a dozen or so boys getting inside a boiler and walking in unison, causing it to roll. For some boys, notably Amos, this was an addictive experience. Danks’s manufactured boilers of all sizes, used in ships and so on. They stored them in a nearby field. The story goes that the first time boys ever worked this trick, the watchman had a heart attack. There was this huge red-oxidized cylinder rolling off all by itself in the moonlight.fn1
In the moonlight, yes – all by itself. What a scene! I can picture it – hologram it – even now. Danks’s was there, and Danks’s boilers in a fenced-off field, and the gang
of boys inside the boiler, they were there. And I … was not there. Not me. Never. It was Donald – Donald, my cousin. He was there. Yet somehow down the years I have been pulled into Donald’s memory, or insinuated my way into it, absorbing all the while its atmosphere, its romance. I remember it now better than Donald himself. The factory-lit sky, the moon, half in, half out of the clouds, so that the watchman’s revelation has a sudden, illuminated, religious almost, quality to it. The watchman’s wavering torch, his croaky voice, the wet grass, the running off and scrambling under a gap in the fence, gasping at last, breath smoking in the air, a congregation of little boys gathering to rehearse their memories, no doubt, beneath a street lamp. It is a memory. Oh yes, it is a memory all right, and – sorry, Don – it’s mine.
Child Watching
I am on a stage in a great big hall, called Bingley Hall. A big boy in a beard is lifting me on to a table. I am wearing a sort of blanket nightshirt with coloured stripes. It hangs down to my ankles. My face and hands and feet are painted brown with some cocoa-smelling stuff. My real clothes, socks and shoes, are backstage in the cloakroom. My brand-new blazer is there. It is a green one with brass buttons.
The big boy in the beard is listening. God is speaking to him. His loud voice fills the hall. It will be my turn soon. I must remember what to say. And speak up. The big boy in the beard is staring at me now. A drip of sweat is shining on his nose. He has a knife.
Forty years later, another hall. I’m standing at the back watching an infant assembly. Jessica’s class is performing a series of short scenes and tableaux on the subject of ‘Time’. Jessica has a major role as the little old lady. I am, of course, transfixed, though not so much that I cannot see this open goal before me; a poem on a plate. Other parents are snapping away with their cameras. I scribble some notes and hurry home to my shed.
THE INFANTS DO AN ASSEMBLY ABOUT TIME
The infants
Do an assembly
About Time.
It has the past,
The present
And the future in it;
The seasons,
A digital watch,
And a six-year-old
Little old lady.
She gets her six-year-old
Family up
And directs them
Through the twenty-four hours
Of the day:
Out of bed
And – shortly after –
Back into it.
(Life does not stand still
In infant assemblies.)
The whole thing
Lasts for fifteen minutes.
Next week (space permitting):
Space.fn1
And the question is, when did I leave the stage and join the audience? I was for a time in my twenties and early thirties a teacher. I remember a boy in my first class, Glen Brakes his name was. A mild, no-trouble-to-anybody sort of boy. On one occasion, and before he got to know me, my gaze fell on him in the classroom. He had acquired a feather and was dreamily stroking his own nose and mouth with it, and inside his ear. Glen had a pleasant face. He resembled Stan Laurel (of Laurel and Hardy). Well, Laurel and Hardy both would have admired Glen’s subsequent bit of mime when caught in the teacher’s (unintended) searchlight glare. He juggled with the feather, gazed at it in disbelief. Is this a feather that I see before me? Who’s put this feather, forced this feather into my unwilling hand? When I have work to do.
Sometimes at playtime through the staff-room window I would see a little infant haring by, take a tumble. He or she, briefly shocked, would scramble up and look around. A lower lip would tremble, a frown. Then came the fork in the road. If the fall had gone unnoticed, the child would, like as not, dust himself down and go haring off again. But if the dinner lady, say, or teacher on duty witnessed the event and caught his eye … Then, of course, the warmth of her sympathy, like a poultice with a bee sting, would draw his hot tears out.
There again, teachers for the most part mostly observe children, wouldn’t you say? In my case I did not start watching them with any serious intent until Jessica was born.
Bingley Hall is very big and full of people. They stretch away into the darkness. My Sunday School is there, and all the other Sunday Schools, and Sunday School teachers, and the mums and dads, and the aunties and uncles, grandmas and grandpas. We are doing a pageant. Oh yes, and there’s a balcony full of people. It is very hot in Bingley Hall. My cocoa colouring is getting streaky. It rubs off on to my stripy shirt, though I am lying on the table as still as ever I can. Hot lights shine down on to the stage. God has nearly finished, I think. I listen out for my cue.
A couple of years ago in the town where I now live, on the main shopping street, I saw a woman with two boys. The boys were five, perhaps, and three. They were identically dressed in what appeared to be home-made one-piece garments, like workmen’s overalls, with three-quarter-length trouser legs and straps over the shoulders. The material was striped and stiff; there was a good deal of orange in it. They looked like a pair of little walking deckchairs.
I was hypnotized by them, stepped into a doorway to see them pass and watched them out of sight. And it occurred to me later, suppose someone had been watching me; the trouble I might have been in. The end of a career. Thirty years ago you could watch children, talk to them even on occasion, in public places. For instance, recollect – as I am sure you can – the volcanic, all-encompassing turmoil and distress in the tiny heart of a tiny person in Sainsbury’s, say. Witness the brick-red face, hair damply plastered to the head, flailing arms and legs. Who would not wish to comfort someone in a state like that? Crouch down, lean in, offer distractions, sympathize. But it is almost, well almost almost, too risky now. These days I mostly share my sociable remarks with dogs. Dogs you can talk to, and the owners, of course, invariably appreciate it.
Meanwhile, back at Bingley Hall, high drama. God finally shuts up. The big boy in the beard says something. I sit up on the table and shout my lines. An organ plays. There is an organ in Bingley Hall. It is so big and loud you can feel it (hear it!) through the soles of your feet. The pageant now is nearly over. We all come back on stage, hundreds of us, for a final song. ‘Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam’, it might have been. Everybody claps. The clapping is louder even than the organ.
Now we are all backstage having our faces wiped clean of the cocoa stuff. I am getting dressed when suddenly dread fills me up. I cannot find my blazer. My brand-new, bought-specially-for-the-occasion blazer. It has gone. Some sinner has pinched it! Tears flood up into my eyes. I loved my lovely day-old blazer. The shine of its buttons, the green of its cloth, the brand-new smell of it. And what will I tell my mother? What will I tell her? She’ll murder me for sure.
It was a bad end to the day, a disastrous end. Oh yes, God saved me, Isaac, from my father Abraham’s knife – though it was cardboard – but he never saved my blazer, did he? No, too busy shouting his head off up in Bingley Hall.
The Boat
My mum came back from Birmingham
Removed her hat and coat
Kicked off her shoes and sighed and said
‘I nearly bought you a boat.’
I knew this boat, I’d seen it
In a shop on Colmore Row
A clockwork tin-toy steamer
Plus box: Chad Valley & Co.
I knew this boat, its painted tin
Its funnel with a key
Its painted passengers, its flags
It was the boat for me.
So all I heard was boat and bought
(The clock in the kitchen stopped)
I never heard the nearly
Until the penny dropped.
Mum made herself a cup of tea
And buttered me a scone
And spoke of Auntie Elsie’s legs
And switched the wireless on.
Some other boats I know I had
A paddle boat, a yacht
An Airfix model landing craft
All mo
re or less forgot –
Like paper boats in the gutter
Soon swirling down the drain –
Only that steadfast nearly boat
Sails in my memory, plain.
The prettiest, shiniest never gift
Just destined to become
The present most treasured from the past
From my old mum. Thanks, Mum.
Dad’s Army
My dad makes little soldiers
In moulds with molten lead
With caps and guns and bayonets
And paints them green and red
And blue and black and silver
They line up in a row
With hair and eyes and eyebrows
Each one of them just so.
My dad works as a labourer
His hands are seamed with grime
And cracked and cut and calloused
And no amount of time
Spent scrubbing in the wash house
Or soaking in the sink
Can shift that dirt away
Though the water’s black as ink.
The bosses in Dad’s factory
Don’t notice him, I’ll bet
No suit – no tie – no title
He’s easy to forget.
But back at home it’s different
Who’s bothered with a suit?
For me, I love Dad’s army
And the soldiers – they salute.
Territory
We alight at Oldbury, in Worcestershire, a place of smother amid smother, and, on leaving the station, can count seventy-nine furnace and factory chimneys without turning round, all of which pour forth their cloudy contributions, varied by the blue and yellow smoke of copper works, while noises resound afar.
All Round the Wrekin, Walter White (1860)
Oldbury was the town I grew up in, but the bit of Oldbury I really grew up in was Rood End, and the bit of Rood End I really grew up in – the territory of my childhood – was The Park, The Allotments and The Cemetery. The cemetery backed on to the park, and the park and the cemetery backed on to the allotments, and the allotments backed on to them. It was The World.