The Scent of Dried Roses

Without so much as a word to the owners of the caravan, they set off again, to find another place to stay. Like Joseph and Mary, they knocked and pleaded and begged, but there was nothing; it was the height of the season. It was beginning to rain. Along the far coast at Watergate Bay there were a few more boarding houses. Jack revved the Vincent, as if its power alone could lead them to sanctuary. As the rain settled in and they drove along the beach road, Jack saw a colour, a flash at the edge of his vision. Stopping, pulling back, he saw there was a saint, Mary perhaps, a stained-glass glint above a door. He swung the Comet in that direction and pulled up before the beach hotel.

  Up a flight of stairs, a middle-aged woman welcomed them. No, she had no room, it was the height of the season! But then she saw Jean, and she heard the story, and she thought. A friend of hers…

  And so it was that the friend put them up for a few days, and after that there was a vacancy in the hotel for the rest of the fortnight. There was a beautiful room to rent, within their means, overlooking the yellow beach. As they left the hotel, the rain stopped and the sun cleared some scrap of raincloud and did not once go in again. And it was perfect, as the Virgin Mary smiled down upon these newlyweds, upon my pert, pretty, not-quite-sure-of-herself mother, Jean, and upon my solid, handsome, almost-arrogant father, Jack.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘The new suburbanites are the new estate of the realm… a new way of life around hire purchase, mass-produced household items, football pools, popular journalism and television. The new estate is a classless zone, neither proletarian nor bourgeois. It has turned its back on the first but does not wish to as-similate into the second’

  – Charles Curran, Encounter

  ‘Anyone who looks at the evolution of English social history over the 20 years following the Second World War must be struck by the profound change that took place in and around the year 1956’

  – Christopher Booker, The Neophiliacs

  ‘Stone me!’ – Tony Hancock

  Thus far, this true narrative seems to me to have acquired the air of fiction, a short story that might have appeared in one of the pulp magazines Jean would have read as a girl, Peg’s Paper or Secrets or Glamorous. Perhaps the story was called ‘Stolen Joys’ or ‘Dangerous Bliss’ or ‘Passionate Nights’. A pretty girl, swept away by a handsome sailor who arrives not on a white steed but, better still, on a black and chrome Vincent Comet HRD. Love, a white wedding, a honeymoon saved at the last minute from disaster by a glittering Madonna. Happy endings and a future that seemed to glow with all the essential ingredients of the perfect denouement: horizons, broad highways, new dawns.

  And this, for the time being at least, is how the story continues, as if underwritten by benevolent myth. Jean and Jack make up a flat at Hetty’s, where they will live until they’ve got enough behind them to have children. To have a family is not a decision; it is the grain of life, with which Jack and Jean know they must accord.

  Jean has not as yet given up working, but she will when the children come and without a second thought, for it is not a wife’s role to make money, that’s an accepted thing. She sews, from patterns in magazines, or bought at Rowses in West Ealing, which depict, in pastel sketches, graceful, modern women, in yellow dirndls and plum slacks and oatmeal jerseys. And knits and crochets, and chooses floral print curtains and pictures of cathedrals and landscapes, and china knick-knacks for the flat, to make it cosy, to make it their own. Nothing is bought on the knock, because the Victorian habit of thrift is too inbred to be dislodged by the new, bright and brittle appeals in Reveille and Tit-Bits and Woman’s Own to buy now and pay later.

  They save, cash put into a Post Office savings account, for there are no bank accounts and cheque books, no stocks or bonds or ‘investments’. Jack, the wage earner, rises at six every morning to go to the shop, where he will put on his starched dun coat and prepare for opening by scraping caked ice from the freezer, boiling beetroots, cutting back and cleaning the filthy soft lettuces, trimming slimed cabbage. Maggots and worms and tropical spiders crawl from the cos lettuces and the Webb’s Wonders and the great boxes of bananas. There are rat traps on the floor, where, on some days, fat vermin are extracted, their necks, or legs, or backs broken. At night the rats sometimes scamper across the window display: pyramids of foil-wrapped satsumas. Hanging paper advertisements for Outspan and Fyffes and Jaffa are the only decorations in the shop, apart from a cheesecake calendar in the dank back room, the pubic hairs blotted out. The twelve women – August is black, the rest are Mateus pink or the colour of weak porridge – each smile cheerily as if about to offer a cup of tea and a plate of Garibaldi rather than their airbrushed, depilated bodies.

  The range of produce is by and large modest, English and seasonal, but this being Notting Hill Gate, there are occasionally fruits and vegetables still on the borders of vocabulary. There are avocados, courgettes, calabrese, capsicum and mange tout, lychees and kumquats. In winter, there are hothouse grapes, Belgian Colmar and Muscats. They sell garlic, which Jack would never take home, for herbs and spices are still considered an exotic continental embellishment to food. There are tiny bottles of Sasso olive oil, V-8 vegetable juice, Epicure pineapple chunks and Del Monte mandarin pieces in syrup, and cobnuts and Ogen melons. In the freezer, a scanty selection of frozen prawns, frozen orange juice, fish fingers, cod steaks, a few luxury items from Young’s: Coquilles St Jacques or Sole Bonne Femme. Outside, plastic buckets of flowers by season.

  Each day is hard graft, with much lifting and bending and cleaning and cutting and serving. There are deliveries to be made in the Commer van, with its face as blunt and kind as a pig, up flights and flights of stairs to dowager duchesses and unemployed thespians and jazz beards in mansion blocks behind Holland Park. In the winter it is bitterly cold, even in the closed-off part of the shop in the back, and fingers are always numb and blue. But Jack likes his job, even loves it, because it is a people job. He gets to meet all sorts – actors, singers, lords and ladies, villains and tarts, you name it. And they would chat for ages about things you never got to talk about at home – politics, the scandal, what was on up West.

  At around twelve o’clock, Dennis, Terry O’Dwyer’s cousin, would cook a full meal in the tiny back room, or Jack would have dinner at one of the new Italian cafés that had opened around the corner, the Piccolo or the Varsi Grill, maybe one of these new pizza pies or a lasagna with chips, and some cassata or Neapolitan block for pudding, with a frothy coffee. Or maybe he would go to the Galleon in Pembridge Road and eat pork chops with cabbage and jam roly-poly, or shepherd’s pie with sprouts and rhubarb tart with custard, washed down by a cup of tea. As he ate, he would read: Ed McBain, Dorothy L. Sayers, James Clavell, Harold Robbins or short stories by O. Henry. After exactly one hour, he’d be back, sweeping the floor, folding and stacking boxes, trimming, cutting, weighing, measuring, serving. On his feet all day long, stamping to keep them warm in January and February when you could see your breath turn into clouds even with the one-bar electric fire turned on. But the wage was good, six pounds a week plus whatever you could trouser, within reason of course. At six o’clock he’d leave for home on the Vincent, arriving back at Hetty’s about six-thirty. Jean would have his dinner ready for him on the downstairs table.

  Jack now had two weeks’ paid holiday a year, and in the summer of 1953 they decided to take a caravan holiday in Mawgan Porth with Olive and Arthur, and their two kids, Jilly and David. Olive and Arthur were bringing them up in a rented two-bedroom flat in Chiswick on Arthur’s salary as a factory worker at Jantzen’s Swimming Costumes in Brentford. It was hard to make ends meet; Olive envied Jean, who seemed to have everything she wanted, spoilt by her parents and now spoilt by Jack. Ah, well. Olive had no clothes to wear; she even had to borrow those off Jean.

  The holiday went well, even though the weather was iffy, mackerel skies mixed with thunderstorms. The caravan smelled of Calor Gas. Jack and Jean took the double bed, and the children had bunks, while Olive and Arthur slept
on an inflatable Lilo that gradually, every night, lost all the air through the valve and left them sleeping on the hard floor. They didn’t let on, of course. Olive tried hard to get on with Jean, but it wasn’t always easy. They all played cards, but Jean wouldn’t join in and wouldn’t try to learn. She wouldn’t go for walks in the evenings because, she said, the flies got in her hair. She had tantrums when she couldn’t get her own way; Jack would not respond, would simply walk away. And one time – and this really got Olive’s goat – she slapped David hard on the legs when he accidentally kicked sand on her. Olive never said anything – you don’t, do you? – but Jean had no right to do that.

  Shortly after the end of the holiday, Jean missed her period and for one of the rare times in his life – for he was not given, at any time, to extremes of emotion – Jack felt elated, for Jean was pregnant, in the family way. In March 1954, Jack and Jean’s first boy, Jeffrey Stephen, was born in Perivale Maternity Hospital. He was perfect, without a blemish, with dark hair and eyes, and even, handsome features.

  It was another twelve months before Jean fell pregnant again. But something was wrong, as I unfolded, fish, then newt, then frog, then weird homunculus. Jean could not sense it, she had no instinct for disaster or omen. But a sort of omen there was, as, instead of the lush and lustre of her mane of hair growing as the months played out, dabs and clutches of growth began to stick in her widetooth comb and her peppermint mother-of-pearl brush.

  She started to fret, for what were a woman’s assets in this world, what was her capital? The breasts, the hair, the legs, the smile. In fact, Jack didn’t mind, thought physical attraction superficial, but it was hard for a woman to believe it. Already her figure had broadened and inflated below the waist from the first birth – Tree trunks, Irene, that’s what my legs are – while the six months of breast-feeding had stretched and neutered the tilt of her most vital statistic. If the hair went, she would be a monster, a circus lady.

  The doctors didn’t really know what was wrong with her. They called it alopecia, something to do with the nerves perhaps. Maybe it would recover on its own, but best be on the safe side. They gave her handfuls of pills, even though she was three months gone. Jean feared for the child, but they knew best.

  The moment I was born, on 23 January 1956, at 8.05 a.m., it was obvious that some kind of mistake had been made. They pulled me, all vernix and crimson, out of the womb and I panted without screaming and shivered. My colour under the ick was strange, not so much blue as gunmetal grey. There was a bloody gap where the centre of my upper mouth should have been. I was weedy, just under six pounds, and fretful.

  They didn’t cut me open right away, because they didn’t know that so hard on being born, I was dying. But I vomited up my food, my mother’s milk, so they X-rayed me and found something black where there should have been only shadow.

  There was a chance, but it was finer than lint. Too sickly, too fragile to be held, I was wired up in a pink plastic incubator, tubes forced into my day-old wrists and ankles, as thick as children’s crayons. After three weeks or so, perhaps I would be strong enough to survive the operation which would open my gut. Such an operation had never been performed on someone so young.

  Jean cried for sorrow and shame as the hospital priest, gauze-masked, in black, performed the rite of baptism, as I screamed and kicked, untouched by my watching mother, the proteins and warm fluids seeping into me through tubes like anchoring ropes. I kicked with outrage and punched the air to make my claim on life, with purple fists as small as monkey nuts. My hare lip was warped into a sneer, a parody of my father’s.

  Having no choice in the matter, Jack continued to work, while Jean sat helpless in the pink enamelled steel-frame bed and the doctors, the doctors of the still-new National Health Service, waited and probed and measured and pinched, brooding behind clipboards like judges’ lecterns. After three weeks it was decided, now and no longer. The priest, having provided the first bracket for my life, was now ready to supply the last, a sad sermon of analgesia; suffer little children to come unto me.

  So it was that my first real experience of life, beyond the instincts of breath and tears, was not my mother’s touch but the cut of a surgeon’s knife, opening me from chestbone to groin. They sought for the kidney that they knew to be raddled, but it had more or less gone, only a husk remaining that had not been consumed by cancer. It appeared that from my very conception, in and before my birthing, my bones and skin and organs had coalesced around a pivotal inclination to blankness, the size of a peachstone.

  But England saved me, in the shape and hope of the National Health Service, with its banks of doctors and new technology, all paid for by what would one day come to be known, with strange contempt, as the nanny state. After my hours under the tiny knives, the priest standing by with his magic book, I came to and began to scream once more. Jean watched as I kicked into life again behind my glass bubble, her arms folded, unable to hold what she had made.

  I would not let go of my life, although the trauma and bruising of the operation left me wounded and mottled, although my wrists and ankles were punctured. There was a gash half the length of my body struggling to heal. My open lip now wore a steel cage to protect it from my feeble punching. I was only partly there, my one kidney doing the job of two, as it would have to for the rest of my life.

  I was too weak to leave hospital and still close to death. Each day my mother stole sleep when she could, and in each awakening expected a stony silence and stillness in the crib. No one other than my father came to see her. Grief was private and to be quarantined, as if communicable by touch. Olive, all earlier reservations forgotten, made the effort on one occasion, to find Jean bored and wan. She was hooked up to a machine to extract her milk.

  Jack came every evening after work, to try and talk it out. What to do with Jeffrey Stephen? Eighteen months old now, he needed his mother, but Jean could, it was said, be in there for weeks. What it boils down to, as my father was fond of saying when he determined to reach the nub of a matter, is this: if Jeff was brought in once a week to see his mother, it might simply upset him, so it was decided that mother and firstborn would be separated for as long as Jean was in hospital, and that Olive would take care of him at the flat in Wolseley Gardens. It would be for a short while only, after all.

  As it turned out, Jean stayed in hospital for three months, separated from Jeff and with her second son still trying not to die.

  The family snapshots of my childhood are hard to decipher, fenced off as they are by the conventions of pose, lark and grin. I watch myself grow, still in monochrome, leaping by self-conscious smile and shy grimace towards adolescence. My clothes are lumpy and plain, and I am, in all honesty, an unattractive child, eclipsed by my handsome father and neat, Roman brother.

  There is just one photograph of me in my steel face-cage, which I was required to wear for more than a year after my discharge from hospital, to stop me picking at my wrecked lip. I am looking dumbly at the camera, apparently ungrateful that such a record is to be made of my disfigurement. Jean is holding me on her knee. She is not smiling as requested. She seems to look pained, even agonized.

  The remainder of the photographs of my childhood are more or less archetypal and with little to distinguish them from those of my father a generation before. There are donkey rides and petting zoos, long dune grass, buckets and spades, pulled faces, sack races. The cars are Fords, Mini Clubmen, Austin A30s, Morris Traveller Shooting Brakes. Here are Jack, Jeff and I posing with our heads in the stocks outside Corfe Castle. Here is my gaolbird uncle Norman with seaweed draped over his hair on the Devon coast. Here is Arthur carrying me in a hessian sack across an empty beach in Cornwall, with his too-small mouth, an unscarred copy of mine, stretched in a grin.

  As I get older, I grow fatter, some predetermination inherited from my father. My hair is white blond, shaved roughly at the sides. It occurs to me wanly that my mother made the right decision in abandoning hairdressing as a career. I look thoro
ughly piqued and there seems already to be bagging under my eyes. I stand at the centre of a cold fountain, holiday chalets, the size and shape of garden sheds, framed in the background. The half-tone photographs make it impossible to guess the weather.

  In later childhood, the holiday photographs switch from seaside boarding houses to inland holiday camps, which Jack and Jean discovered in 1963, and became enthusiastic about. We did not go to Butlin’s or Pontin’s, where, Jack imagined, you would get the hobbledehoys, or real working class. Instead, our camps styled themselves ‘Country Clubs’ or ‘Halls’, and offered a slightly less regimented, brassy regime than Billy Butlin or Fred Pontin. We mainly holidayed in Devon, at the Torbay Chalet Hotel, or Barton Hall or St Audrey’s Bay, which admitted that it was a holiday camp, and the Devon Coast Country Club, which pretended it was not.

  It was about this time that our class was beginning to discover the attractions of southern Spain, as charter flights boomed throughout the 1960s and factory workers and plumber’s mates brought back wire guitars, wineskins, ornamental maracas and flamenco dolls to place on G-plan shelves. But we stuck to England, a country still loved by my parents and their friends in a quiet, insistent way.

  So our souvenirs remained map tea towels, inscribed clogs, lucky Cornish pixies, Welsh slate etchings, novelty pennants, mottoed keyholders, layers of Alum Bay coloured sand in a glass tube. Or, from the holiday camps, nickel-silver badges and trophies for ping-pong or badminton.

  The pattern of each of the country clubs was much the same – bluecoats, or greencoats, or greycoats, urging participation from the wake-up call announced through the barking PA. Roll out of bed in the morning/with a great big smile and a good, good morning. Jack and Jean were treated as hybrids of adult and child, as evidenced by the signs on the toilets, ‘Lads and Lasses’, and the gamesmasterish invocations to ‘have a go’. We swam in unheated pools, secretly pissed in by children and stuffed with chlorine. There were card rooms and snooker halls, ping-pong tables, rooms full of dartboards and communal televisions. There were egg and spoon races, tugs-of-war, treasure troves, day trips, beetle drives, paper chases, crazy golf and gorgeous granny competitions.