OLD BUGGER
Oxford Villas - two semi-detached houses in a very ordinary road. One of them’s ordinary; the other’s painted chocolate brow, has a big, fancy, blocky modern front door and downstairs a Georgian-style bay window with toffee-whorl glass panes. It looks as if the owners expect ninety thousand, at least, the next time it goes on the market. When my granddad lived there it had cost £85 to build , and the rent was eight and six a week. That’s forty-five pence in the kind of money he wouldn’t have understood.
A small house - two up and two down, or three up and three down, according to how you looked at it. The difference between two and three was whether you counted the scullery as one room, and the tiny bedroom above it, that you got to through the bigger one. My mum slept in the bigger one, and my brother and I had the tiny one. From our window we could see the garden, which everyone called the yard - thirty feet of patchy grass and baked earth, with a blackened oversize privet hedge on one side and the brick path on the other that too you to the sheds at the hack.
One of the sheds was the coal-hole, where once we kept my pet owl. The other shed was “up the yard.” “Up the yard,” when I first became aware of it, was the kind of place the bogeyman lived. I first went in there as a small boy and came out an old man; they don’t build earth closets that way these days, even in France, and I don’t want to think about it, let alone describe it.
Except for my granddad, nobody stayed in there long. He did, with the door open for light, to read the Daily Herald and John Bull and the Saturday Pink ‘Un sports results paper, and I think he was really disappointed when the landlord, or the Council, actually had a proper water closet built in there. Still no light, though, and for a long time squares of old Daily Heralds, threaded on a string and hanging from a nail, were the only other civilised addition. Once a year, if 1 got lucky, I also got to help limewash the place.
“Up the yard” was where my granddad finally met his Maker (or his Doom; my mother always figured it was the latter.)
“They’ll not have him up there,” she once told me. “Not after the life he’s led.” My mother once spent the worst night of her life “up the yard,” waiting for the police to come for her. Because of granddad, too.
One night, late, he came home, in his beer as usu4 from the Eagle. his supper was dry, so he cussed out my grandma and then thumped her. My grand-ma was about four foot eleven and thin. My mother was five foot nothing, but determined. You don’t get to be a hospital sister by being soft. She took against the sight of my grandma stretched out on the kitchen floor and belted my granddad with the big iron frying pan. He didn’t have a lot of hair by that time, but he had a big, round, pink skull, and it made a very round, pink bonking noise.
So then there were two of them stretched out. My grandma was looking pale (which she always did., anyway) and my granddad was looking pink and breathing in a bubbling fashion. My mum took one look and ran. Once “up the yard” she fixed the latch with half a gypsy peg and sat there, expecting him to come up after her, with his two-inch belt or his boots or his walking stick or all the lot.
When he didn’t she knew she’d killed him. The rest of the night she sat there, waiting for the hangman. At first light she sneaked out and ran to Mrs Clarkson’s. Mrs Clarkson made Mr Clarkson put his collar and tie on over his
At nine o’clock Mr Clarkson returned, smelling of John Smith’s India Pale Ale.
“You’ve been drinking!” said Mrs Clarkson, aghast.
“Medicinal,” said Mr Clarkson. “Shock.”
“Oh my God, “said my mum. “How’s mother?”
“Cooking breakfast,” said my Clarkson. “Which reminds me (to Mrs Clarkson when’s ours?”
“What about FATHER?” said my mother.
“Looks bloody awful,” said Mr Clarkson. “Got a ‘cad on ‘im like a brewer’s drain and lump on it like a duck egg.”
“He’s not dead, then?” said my mother.
“No,” said Mr Clarkson, “but he feels like he is. Can’t remember a thing about last night - except he thinks he might’ve ‘ad a drop too much.”
Mum went home. “Where the bloody ‘ell have you been?” asked my granddad. “Your mother’s not well and she’s having to cook my breakfast.
“Up the yard,” said my mother. And left well alone.
Number 85 Park Road itself wasn’t all that more civilised, even if you left the earth or water closet but of it. My granddad and grandma slept in the upstairs front room, in a big, soft, lumpy bed with a chamber pot underneath it, on my granddad’s side. The state he was often in, he often needed it in the night, especially once he’d passed sixty.
The front downstairs room was for dying in. Well, really more for being dead
in. My grand-dead got laid out there, after he met his doom, and so did my grandma when she was dying of bowel cancer a few years later. Teddy Greathead brought in a narrow bed on a steel collapsible trestle for my granddad, and Mrs Shaw and my grandma washed him and laid him out, but I didn’t go in to see him. Teddy Greathead had him in his pine box before long, anyway. I did go to see my grandma after she died, though, and I’ve always wished since that I hadn’t. It wasn’t right seeing her in a white silk thing like a wedding dress, and it didn’t look right to see her cheeks sunken in. I’ve a lot of fond memories of my grandma and a lot, even now, to thank her for, but the memory that still stays with it is of her sunken and parchment coloured and dead.
Only mother, thirty years later, when she was dying, looked just like her. Only when those two women were dying was it really clear how they both had the same kind of nose that seems to run through a lot of my family. I’ve got it, even though I ~look like my father. Or so they say. I guess that when I’m dying one of my kids will say: “Hasn’t he got a big nose!” I know which one it will be , too: the one with the big nose. It’s very sad to spend a lifetime living and trying and failing and to be remembered largely because you’ve got a big nose. I wonder where they’ll lay me out, though? We don’t have a front room for dying in. My place is open-plan, living room into kitchen, and my corpse would interfere with the cooking. Well, bodies smell, you see.
Anyway, we didn’t worry about these things at 85 Park Road, because living was regulated. Even if it was often rotten.
My brother and I, being callous because we were also still young, quite got to look forward to the odd death, even of someone as nice as my grandma, or as terrible as my granddad. For one thing, it was very satisfying to sit under the table eating biscuits and listen to the kind of grown-up conversation which, if we’d used it, would have got us a fast belt round the ear.
“Eh, t’old bugger! ‘E were a right old bugger, bugger ‘im. ‘E’s better off dead, t’old bugger, ‘cos ‘e were bugger-all use when ‘e were alive.”
That was Fred Shaw talking; it could have been Mrs Shaw, except that Fred was alongside and he’d have looked heavily at her if he’d heard her talking like that. It could have been Mr Clarkson; Mrs Clarkson would have thought it but never said it. My mother said it often - before, then and since -
The best thing about my granddad’s funeral was how funny it was. Once Teddy Greathead shipped him back down the road into the carpentry shop, the house got full
We could hear the uncles upstairs, trying on his boots and his weskits and his best holiday shirts (striped blue or red and white, separate collars, with studs.) Nobody tried his trousers because nobody else had the same size and shape bottom.
Friday evening the house was full of uncles telling awful stories about him. Then they all went off to the Conyer’s Tavern to have a few and tell more stories, leaving my mum and my grandmas and Mrs Shaw and assorted aunties to wash up and tell still more stories. And then my uncles came back, beered up, and carried on. Nobody thought to send us to bed because, for one thing, they hadn’t noticed we were still under the table.
You have to understand about this, and perhaps you wouldn’t unless you grew up where and how we did. The one room I haven’t mentioned about 85 Park Road is the back room; that’s what we all called it. Not really the kitchen or the living room, or indeed any particular sort of room. It was more “The Room,” though we didn’t even call it that. It was just the room where all life was lived. Except for dying or being dead.
Now, the scullery: that you could define. It had a shallow stone sink, a pump
• you had to prime before you got any water from it, a gas ring for emergencies, a gas
The Scullery was,
Now, in museum books and estate agents’ windows this is called a York Range and is regarded as having the Great Virtues of Simple Living. My mum and my grandma used to bless it regularly; “bless” is the word they used when they’d rather have used “curse.” “Blessed stove!” (with the emphasis on the second ‘e’) meant the blasted thing was playing up again. Black-leaded cast-iron. A small central grate with coal ideally “halfway up t’ fire back.” An oven to its right, the locking lever glistening unpainted but well-polished steel. A black box to the left that kept water hot, though the water was never drawn off except on bath nights, because there was always a huge kettle simmering on the fire front and a big pan full of water on the fireside. Tea constantly mashing in a large brown earthenware pot. Stew, as like as not, several days old and topped up, brewing bacilli to which we were all immune after years of supping. My grandma, and thousands of women like her, were the true inventors of penicillin.
Above the fire, a mantelpiece. On it a clock, a box for the rent money, a brass shell my Uncle Ern had made at the munitions factory, my granddad’s pipe and football coupons, the few letters they got and the tea caddy with the pictures of Troops Defending the Empire in India. Hanging from the mantelpiece a brass rod turned by Uncle Ern, and hanging front that the towels, teacloths, oven-tidy and my Uncle Ron’s colliery lamp-shop overalls, newly washed. Why we’ve got a hanging clothes dryer now, suspended over our posh new matt-black Aga is because grandma also had one from the ceiling in front of the range.
On the wall opposite was the sideboard. It had photos on it in passe-partout frames, including great-great aunts photographed in Wombwell with aspidistras on stands beside them, and one of me and my brother, and one of my mother and father, when they were married (he was wearing spats!) and one, in a silver frame, of my missing Uncle Norman, supposed to have been killed in the Great War, but about whom there were doubts not unconnected with the “widow” to whom he’d failed to return. Norman, it was whispered, had been in prison for refusing to pay her maintenance, and it was on his release that he went missing. “She’s not worth tuppence. She’ll get nowt from me,” he said when warned that he would he back inside if he didn’t pay up regular. Then he disappeared.
My grandma kept the best Sunday pottery in the sideboard (I never heard it called “china” till I moved South in my twenties) and the best knives and forks, and the best cruet, and the best serviettes, which nowadays are called napkins. She also kept the insurance books there, a penny a week on all the family, collected by the Pru, whom we all knew was really Ron Thing, from Conanby.
A door to the left of the fire led down to the cellar. Grandma kept her food in there, on the whitewashed shelves, and for a time in the war we went down there in case of air raids. But the “cellar” was only three feet wide and ended at the foot of the steps, and it was cold and dark and smelled of batter and chitterlings, and it was crowded even though my granddad preferred to stay in his bed snoring, so we gave up on it quite soon.
On the right of the fire was my granddad’s chair. It was as shapeless ~as he was. Lumpy, like him. I used to sit in it sometimes, if he was out, hut never when he
was home. You couldn’t, because he was in it, unless he was sleeping or “up the yard.” The cat used to sleep in it, until my granddad sat down on it. The cat, I mean. My granddad’s view was that the cat shouldn’t be
The table, in the middle of the room, was where life was really lived. It was big and square and solid, with rude legs. Mrs Clarkson had one like it, but her legs -the table’s -
My brother and I used to live under it, often, with the dogs we had from time to time, listening to what went on and coming out now and then for sugar sandwiches. My grandma used to sit at it, on a hard, shiny armless chair, the few times she wasn’t actually slaving in the scullery or at the range or in the bedrooms. My granddad never went near it, except to eat and to fill in his football coupons.
All our family used to sit round it, at funerals. The sideboard was cleared of photos to make way for ham teas, with brawn and potted meat, and cold port, and Hovis rolls and sausages and Wensleydale (we only had Wensleydale at funerals;
otherwise it was Mousetrap) and, above all, pickles. Well, perhaps not “above all,” ‘because really above all were bottles of Light and Brown Ale (Taddy’s) and port for the women and the odd half-bottle of Johny Walker if one of the uncles had done well lately. Sometimes there was gin, but only if the bereaved were a younger woman and even then the best thing was to stick a baby or infant onto her lap to give her something soft to cry over.
And as we had more of them than we had wedding~, and as that was when the family all got together for once, and stopped feuding in mutual treaty against the dead, they were high-spots in the humdrum year.
My granddad’s, as you might expect, was one of the best.
Old bugger
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