An Elemental Childhood
I lower my bucket down into the well and draw up … water. Water was thicker in my childhood, time has diluted it. It came in coils and cables out of the mouths of drinking fountains and flooded, leaf-clogged gutterings. Small boys could pee with it halfway up a wall. It was like barley sugar or rope. Sometimes when it rained, it fell in soft fat lumps, impacting on the park pond (while we took shelter in the sheds), pockmarking its surface but not breaking it. The skin on the water, like the skin on a grape; a matchstick float could lie on top of it and would require some powerful fishy force to drag it under. Insects, water boatmen and such, bounced on or tiptoed over it as though it were a trampoline; flat pebbles skimmed it. Sometimes the raindrops were so fine, gravity could not draw them down. They hung suspended around the yellowish, greenish street lamps in glowing spheres, like jellyfish.
Water fought a battle with the earth – or dirt, as I more familiarly regarded it – for the possession of my small body. My fingernails were full of it. It was tattooed into my elbows and scabby knees, silted up between my toes. Mum scrubbed away at me, sluiced me down, corkscrewed my ears with a twist of towel, licked her hankie and wiped my face like cleaning a window. The dirt returned. Dirt was my friend. I played with it, rolled in it sometimes, like a dog. I ate it even, once in a while, when a biscuit or boiled sweet ended up on the ground and no adult was there to talk me out of picking it up.
And now there’s air in my bucket. It too has weight. Coming down off the Rounds Green Hills or from Dudley Castle, you’d hold your nose and dive back in. An atmosphere, a soup, cooked up to the town’s own recipe. Oldbury was a place you could walk around with your eyes shut and know where you were. British Industrial Plastics, Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds, The Brades, each had its own aroma. There was a glue factory that boiled up bones. The canals – Oldbury was a sort of Venice – were green and scummy. Marlholes bubbled away like New Zealand geysers and glowed in the dark. The smells were sulphurous, hot-metalled, lead-filled, but also, surely, medicinal. Microbes and germs had as tough a time as we did in those days, in that inoculated air.
Finally, there was fire. Fire was a fascination when I was seven or eight. I was a moth to it. Matches were treasure. We traded for them, begged them, stole them. Any form of fire would do, any sort of fuel. We cooked and ate potatoes; burnt black, half-raw, delicious. There was the smell of singed teddies, the whooshing disappearance altogether of a celluloid frog, burning rubber. Best of all, most memorably of all, there was fire in a can.
A fire can was a serious delight to me: portable fire! To make one you needed a can, a hammer, a six-inch nail and wire for the handle. Hammer some holes into the can, fill it up with paper, twigs, rabbit-hutch straw, firewood splinters, bits of coal. Set it alight and … swing. The rush of air was like a bellows. Sometimes a well-made can glowed red hot and melted. Sparks flew and boys set light to themselves; eyebrows and even eyes were lost.
And so it was. Our fires sent ashes and soot high up into the air, rain washed it all back down, brown rivulets on windowpanes and pavements, the earth soaked it up. The sun shone forth (as best it could) and dried things out, steam and dust motes rising. A circular engine, a swirl of ancient molecules round and round, the whole town in a permanent smoky flux, like a Turner painting. And me – who else? – slap bang, stage front in the middle of it.
Ends
What puts an end to childhood, of course, is time and, in my case also, football. The ref blew his whistle, you might say, and something else kicked off.
The power of any particular memory is, I have found (or seem to remember), in inverse proportion to the amount of detail it contains. There’s a lot of detail in this book, it’s crammed with it, but the memories that matter most are the ones I’ve had to stretch for, that shimmer on the edge of things: pillowcase, green light under the table, Dad’s dancing overalls. And once you arrive at a certain age, the memories of that age come thick and fast and fully clothed. You have no need of a bucket to draw them up, it’s all on tap.
Football: it was the extended orderliness of it, I think, that did away with my childhood. Its all-encompassingness. The gathering together of a team to play another team, the distribution of positions – how many centre forwards could one team possibly have? – the boots, the ball, the dubbin. And the leaving of the house, the demarcation of the pitch – coats for goals, trees, paths and shrubberies for touchlines – getting lost in a tribal ebb and flow in an ever-darkening park for hours and hours, till the bell rang and the keeper on his bike obliged us to leave.
So leave we did, and more than the park and the pitch were left behind, I’d say. Of course, you’re right – you mostly are – we were still children and it was still childhood. But there again somehow mysteriously … not. The crossing of that line between the little kids and the kids, it happens to us all, and always when we are not looking. A chalk line in the playground rubbed out by running feet. A curtain coming down behind us. When I was five, could I remember being four or three? When three, remember two or one? When one …? The fugitive pictures fade. Goodbye, Teddy, toy soldiers, clothes-horse-in-the-kitchen den. Goodbye, goodbye. I’m off to kick a ball.
In the poem which followsfn1 I should point out (for the purposes of the present book) that Albert Park was not Albert Park. There was (is) no Albert Park. It was West Smethwick Park. There was no boy named Tommy Gray either, or Briggs. Rhythm and rhyme had a hand in team selection. For that matter, alliteration – Rover, Rex and Roy – was influential, not to say decisive, in the naming of the dogs.
THE MATCH (c. 1950)
The match was played in Albert Park
From half-past four till after dark
By two opposing tribes of boys
Who specialized in mud and noise;
Scratches got from climbing trees
Runny noses, scabby knees
Hair shaved halfway up the head
And names like Horace, Archie, Ted.
The match was played come rain or shine
By boys who you could not confine
Whose common goals all unconcealed
Were played out on the football field.
Off from school in all directions
Sparks of boys with bright complexions
Rushing home with one idea
To grab their boots … and disappear.
But Mother in the doorway leaning
Brings to this scene a different meaning
The jobs and duties of a son
Yes, there are errands to be run.
Take this wool to Mrs Draper
Stop at Pollock’s for a paper
Mind this baby, beat this rug
Give your poor old mum a hug.
Eat this apple, eat this cake
Eat these dumplings, carrots, steak!
Bread ’n’ drippin’, bread ’n’ jam
Mind the traffic, so long, scram.
Picture this, you’re gazing down
Upon that smoky factory town.
Weaves of streets spread out, converge
And from the houses boys emerge.
Specks of boys, a broad selection
Heading off in one direction
Pulled by some magnetic itch
Up to the park, on to the pitch.
Boys in boots and boys in wellies
Skinny boys and boys with bellies
Tiny boys with untied laces
Brainy boys with violin cases.
The match was played to certain rules
By boys from certain streets and schools
Who since their babyhood had known
Which patch of earth to call their own.
The pitch, meanwhile, you’d have to say
Was nothing, just a place to play.
No nets, no posts, no lines, alas
The only thing it had was grass.
Each team would somehow pick itself
No boys were left upon the shelf
No su
bstitutions, sulks or shame
If you showed up, you got a game.
Not 2·3·5 or 4·2·4
But 2·8·12 or even more.
Six centre forwards, five right wings
Was just the normal run of things.
Lined up then in such formations
Careless of life’s complications
Deaf to birdsong, blind to flowers
Prepared to chase a ball for hours,
A swarm of boys who heart and soul
Must make a bee-line for the goal.
A kind of ordered anarchy
(There was, of course, no referee).
They ran and shouted, ran and shot
(At passing they were not so hot)
Pulled a sock up, rolled a sleeve
And scored more goals than you’d believe.
Slid and tackled, leapt and fell
Dodged and dribbled, dived as well
Headed, shouldered, elbowed, kneed
And, half-time in the bushes, peed.
With muddy shorts and muddy faces
Bloody knees and busted laces
Ruddy cheeks and plastered hair
And voices buffeting the air.
Voices flung above the trees
Heard half a mile away with ease,
For every throw in, every kick
Required an inquest double quick.
A shouting match, all fuss and fury
(Prosecutors, judges, jury)
A match of mouths set to repeat
The main and muddier match of feet.
Thus hot and bothered, loud and nifty
That’s how we played in 1950
A maze of moves, a fugue of noise
From forty little boiling boys.
Yet there was talent, don’t forget
Grace and courage too, you bet
Boys like Briggs or Tommy Gray
Who were, quite simply, born to play.
You could have stuck them on the moon
They would have started scoring soon
No swanky kit, uncoached, unheeded
A pumped-up ball was all they needed.
Around the fringes of the match
Spectators to this hectic patch
Younger sisters, older brothers
Tied-up dogs and irate mothers.
A mother come to claim her twins
(Required to play those violins).
A little sister, Annabelle
Bribed with a lolly not to tell.
Dogs named Rover, Rex or Roy
Each watching one particular boy.
A pup mad keen to chase the ball
The older dogs had seen it all.
The match was played till after dark
(Till gates were closed on Albert Park)
By shadowy boys whose shapes dissolved
Into the earth as it revolved.
Ghostly boys who flitted by
Like bats across the evening sky,
A final fling, a final call
Pursuing the invisible ball.
For Horace, Annabelle and Rover.
A multitude of feet retrace
The steps that brought them to this place.
For gangs of neighbours, brothers, friends
A slow walk home is how it ends,
Into a kitchen’s steamy muddle
To get a shouting at … or cuddle.
See it now, you’re looking down
Upon that lamp-lit factory town.
It’s late (it’s night) for Rex or Ted
And everybody’s gone to bed.
Under the rooftops slicked with rain
The match is being played again
By two opposing well-scrubbed teams
Who race and holler in their dreams.
I’m in my shed; early morning, late September. Once in a while an apple thuds down on to the roof. Pigeons land and walk about; I hear their scratchy feet. The book is finished, if not quite finished off. It shouldn’t take long, though it could in theory take forever. There’s probably a Borges story on the subject. The man who wrote a book, and who went through it at the end giving it a scrub, tidying it up, adding and subtracting. And then continued, correcting the corrections, the corrections, the corrections. This is how a book was made many years ago. The materials used were … and the materials not used?
There’s a man on West Bromwich market
At certain times of the year
With a hat made out of feathers
And a stall that you can hear.
Day-old Chicks: for instance, I more or less promised right at the beginning ‘day-old chicks’. So where are they? The rag-and-bone man used to give them away in exchange for a sufficient quantity of stuff. (Also – just remembered – paper windmills!) And we kept hens. I collected the eggs, helped my mother to boil the potato peelings, mix the mash. My mother, on one occasion to my absolute horror, put a dying day-old chick in the oven. But, as I quickly realized, only to revive it. My way in, however, my preferred approach to the chicks, was that stall on West Bromwich market, that noisy stall:
I hear it in the street outside
And slip my mother’s hand
And dodge along the gangways
To muscle in and stand
On tip toe; I can just see in
The stall’s like a giant tray
With sawdust, little drinking troughs
And a lamp as bright as day.
Yes. Then I got stuck. It took me a time to realize it wasn’t, in this instance, the chicks I was really interested in, or the stall, it was The Market. The cathedral-like, Bingley Hall-like space; an enormous, roofed-in world to run around in, free of my mother’s hand. It’s more than likely, by the way, that I made up the hat.
Snail Hunt: This is the fourth shed I have owned in my working life. Like all the others, it is lined out with pinboard, allowing me to pin things up (photographs, letters, work), encircle myself in a paper castle. There’s a newspaper cutting: How I Found Bliss in My Shed at 6.05am; a photograph of my dad, uncharacteristically in a suit and tie at a wedding. And a letter from Jessica, where, aged five or so, she proceeds to reinvent herself, enlarging her family and putting me to work in a shop.
No, on closer reading, it’s worse than that. I’m merely the addressee. Her father is the shopman. I’ve been written out.
At what age, how early, do we begin to reinvent ourselves, rearrange the story, take it over? I met a small child recently, named Norah. She was fifteen months old. Her first word to me, indeed almost her only word, was ‘up’. She liked our house, which is tall and thin. ‘Up!’ she would say, and point. And up we’d go. She, with increasing skill, stair by stair. Me, hovering. In one of the bedrooms there was a free-standing mirror. Norah and I played with the mirror. We kissed ourselves in it and laughed at the absurdity of kissing ourselves. Norah held her soft toy, a giraffe, up to the mirror, and the giraffe kissed itself. Norah laughed again. It was a play, a play to be repeated (and revised) as often as she wished, of kissing toys and things alive in mirrors.
Jessica’s letter, now twenty-seven years old, is faded, yellowed, but also, more recently along its bottom edge, nibbled at. It took me a time to notice what was happening and work out the cause. It was snails, tiny snails that got in under the door, scaled the walls and ate my papers.
Snails are slow eaters who hide out in the daytime, though left alone for long enough this particular tribe would surely have grazed their way across the walls, the shelves, the desk. This book itself, this earliest handwritten draft (do they like ink?) presently beneath my hand, would eventually in time have been chomped up and turned into snail. Snails are cunning creatures. There again, deceiving a grown man is one thing, but ‘when you are little you see the little’. They’d never have got away with it when I was four.
The Warmth of the Bed: I will end (I seem to have been promising this for a while) with a couple of late additions an
d a dedication. I have a picture in my head: me with my mum and dad at the table, Dad peeling an apple. He uses his pocket knife and completes the process in one continuous spiralling curl of green. (It’s always a green apple.) That’s the challenge, of course, to remove the peel, all of it, unbroken. Then we eat the apple. Then we eat the peel. Two different tastes and textures for the price of one, distinguished and revealed by my clever dad. He takes an apple in his ‘cracked and cut and calloused’ hand and turns it into a conjuring trick.
And the second scene: The Warmth of the Bed. With this one, it’s pretty well all there in the title. Jumping into my parents’ bed just after the last of them – my mother, usually – has left it. The hugeness of the bed, weight of blanket and quilt, surrounding sea of chilly lino. The afterglow of somebody else’s body, the after-shape of it … dinted. (In his master’s steps he trod, where the snow lay dinted.) A warm impression, encoded on my skin, perhaps; a brief remembrance of living heat. Like climbing into a hot pie.
Dedication: I propose to make a bit of a display here and, to this end, have commissioned artwork from Jessica. Here it is:
Two mothers, two fathers and me like a parcel or a baton (or a hot potato!) passed between them. There are mysteries at the bottom of the world for all of us. In such a context, four parents is hardly more remarkable than two. In any case, at this great distance I love them all. My stoical mother, who ran the home, paid the insurance, cleaned the houses, scrubbed the floors. My half-visible, selfless dad, a working man, who all his life got up and went to work. My other mother, unmarried, too young to be a mother, really; my other father … unknown.
And yet I fancy I look a bit like him. I bet I do – or her. And which one of them was it put a pen in my hand (a pencil behind my ear), or passed on – one touch – my phenomenal football skills? Where did my whistling come from? It took four finishers to finish me off, stitch in my nose and mouth, position my eyes, tie my ribbon. I have no wish – though this must sound complaisant – ever to complain at all, about the outcome.