By the municipal bowling green, still in reasonable condition, a pit bull off the leash and a scatter of Asian boys, once passive and polite, lauded by the Daily Express. Now they walk the pimp walk, the cockney strut, the Lambeth Walk, shoulders back, with a fuck-you swing. And the older men, turbaned and bearded, gossiping over broken park benches. They look wise and disappointed with life.
I leave the park. There are gypsy flower sellers working the porches and driveways. For some reason the sight of them annoys me. I walk down a small tunnel that traces the railway line. The graffiti now reads Chelsea and Clash. Through the tunnel there is a light industrial estate to the left, clean, ugly, then, incongruously, to the right, a dray horse in a field. Framed behind the field, a real factory, towering 100 feet high and issuing steam and unidentifiable mechanical grunts and swoons. Pastoral, urban, modern, postmodern, Victorian, an undifferentiated mess.
There is no sign on the factory. It pumps and boils anonymously. What does it make? The path is hedged about by wild flowers I cannot identify. There is a yellow sign set in concrete with an H and two numbers. I do not know what this is for. The leaves on trees I cannot name are filthy.
The path ends at Norwood Green, Old Southall. A lorry marked ‘Expandite’ thunders past. The neat houses are decked out with a jumble of modest details of dreamed life – a caravan or boat in the front yard, a cartwheel on the wall, carriage lamps at the entrances, We Love Jesus stickers. It is nice, quiet, unselfconsciously ersatz.
I walk on past the fir trees and privet hedges, and after five minutes burst through to the far end of Southall’s main drag, marked by another police station, with an old-fashioned blue lamp. At the Golden Chip, I order cod and chips and cover it with a crust of salt and vinegar. The woman who serves is white, in late middle age, with a blue rinse. The food tastes good. Looming above me to my left, the vast, abandoned Southall Gasworks, the scene of endless car chases filmed for The Sweeney or The Professionals.
This is Norwood Road. There is a St John Ambulance Brigade in the clearly Victorian Norwood Sisterhood Hall, whatever that is, or once was – perhaps a suffragette meeting house. It faces the symbol of a different, changed England: the Southall Black Sisters Women Only Advice Campaigning Resource Centre.
There are gnomes in rockeries, a gents’ hairdresser with Michael Portillo-type hairstyles, slightly blown, twenty years out of date. Further along, the Halal Fast Food Takeaway Tandoori and Sweet Centre, the window illuminated with a light that almost seems to come from within the eerily coloured confections. A poster: Vibha Bhangra Princess at Le Palais, Hammersmith, where Jean and Jack once did the jive and the jitterbug. Le Christmas, says another poster, hip-hop, bhangra, swing beat, rave, live PA, Wrecking Force, ragga, jungle.
The lollipop man who ushers me across the road is a Sikh. In the newsagent’s, a reproduction print is for sale, a river scene in Wharfedale. It looks like one of my mother’s paintings. At the back of the newsagent’s, a post office and a Giro queue.
It is entirely Asian now. I eavesdrop on the conversations. They talk of children, money, illnesses, marriage. Everything is the same at this level, the art of the necessary. On the corner, in front of the sari shops, drunks, also Asian, swaying in the slight wind.
There is a church opposite the sari shop. It is broken down, the gravestones worn or shattered. I now wish we had buried Jean, instead of cremating her in the light-industrial style. But we are a practical family, by habit. Here among the graves, I read the inscriptions. The drunks in front of the sari shop eye me amusedly, as if I am mad.
So Mote It Be, says one stone, and Until the Resurrection Morn. Heaviness May Endure for a Night But Joy Cometh in the Morning. There is graffiti on the church walls, but not the gravestones.
In front of the church is a war memorial, with fresh flowers and poppy wreaths. They are dedicated to the fallen, from the St John Ambulance Brigade, the British Legion, the Scouts, the Red Cross Society, the Royal Ancient Order of Buffaloes, Southall Working Men’s Club. A separate, unidentified, tribute to the those who died at San Carlos Bay. I wonder who these representatives of England’s grief are. I wonder if it is grief that is being represented.
Back in the graveyard I become entranced by the stones. His Life a Beautiful Memory, His Absence a Silent Grief; She Gave of Her Best; Think of Me As Withdrawn into the Dimness, Remembering Where I Wait, and So Where I Wait, Come Gently On.
Most of the carved messages have one thing in common, the conviction that the occupants are just absent, or waiting, or asleep, or have entered into rest. I carry on walking, thinking of Philip Larkin’s ‘What will survive of us is love’ and how he was wrong. What survives of us is denial.
And the Night Shall Be Filled with Music and the Cares That Infest the Day, Shall Fold Their Tents, Like the Arabs, And As Silently Steal Away. 1937.
The church is Pentecostal. What does that mean? I know nothing more about the creed of the Pentecostals than I do about the Hindu Temple opposite, yet I feel it is knowledge I am expected to have. Who are the Royal Order of Buffaloes? Was St John the same as John the Baptist? Who was Cardinal Wiseman? We are many, our name is legion, the British Legion. Those who died in San Carlos Bay, which England did they die for? Was it Jean’s?
I walk across the railway bridge, past Southall Manor House, the only genuine Tudor building in the borough. There is a sign for Beaconsfield Road School, where Jean worked. I turn the other way, walk towards the railway bridge and cross it. I used to stand here and watch the trains for no fathomable reason. On the other side is Bridge Road, and Southall Community Centre, astonishingly, just as I remember it as a child. It is reassuring, and a little unsettling at the same time, like a once-treasured toy found unexpectedly in the attic. The building is completely incongruous, stranded between the railway line, an urban clearway and a patchwork of dull factories.
Jack was unpaid chairman here for a decade. I would come when it was empty and he had paperwork to do, and I would wander on to the gilded stage and pretend I was famous. We would play badminton here together in the high-roofed halls. Jean and Jack always pronounced it ‘badmington’. Later, Jean came here for yoga evening classes. In cream and gilt, it is not architecturally remarkable – it is one of the lesser creations of Alexander Marshall Mackenzie, the architect who designed the Waldorf Hotel and Australia House, both in the Aldwych – yet in the context of Southall, it is a palace.
It was originally a recreation centre built for workers at Otto Monsted’s Margarine Factory, just before the First World War, when Bridge Road was still called Margarine Road. Monsted was a philanthropic businessman, a species now more or less extinct. Monsted’s Maypole Institute, as it was then known, was run by the factory workers for their own benefit.
Inside it is still almost perfectly as I recall: classical influence, in the Beaux-Arts style, with Doric columns, both solid and in fresco; vast plush, braided curtains; polished maple parquet floor; high windows allowing milky light into the rooms; the lush stage, as large as that of many West End theatres, with a gilded crest above. On that stage the factory workers would assemble their own orchestra and a male voice choir which would perform for audiences of up to 1,000. Singers, musicians and comedians from the workforce would all appear here. There was once a reading room, with a library of 1,000 volumes. There are still oil paintings and gilt mirrors. Not grand exactly, it is more like a location from a scratched print of a Powell and Pressburger movie; more like the Morris Oxford and the Ford Zephyr were shrunken, likeable versions of the real thing.
Somewhere in this hall, although I suppose it is, strictly speaking, French in style, I feel a resonance of the England Jean perhaps imagined she wanted to belong to – warm, slightly eccentric, innocent, quiet, decent, quaint, a bit pompous, fond of a lark. It is probably the same obscure, half-inherited feeling I get watching A Matter of Life and Death, Colonel Blimp, The Ladykillers or Arsenic and Old Lace. It is the sense of an impossible, gentle, romantic, imagined England, an a
lternative to the pompous, conceited, bullying, Imperial England hymned still by the politicians and nostalgists, or the irredeemably guilty, racist, rapacious England imagined by the marchers, the shouters and the air-punchers. Anyway, it is an England that has gone now, even as an idea, a dream. There is nothing we have thought of to put in its place. There is, in fact, no place to put it; the cohering forces themselves have collapsed. The centre could not hold, had gone even as I was born. But for Jean, it must have once meant something.
Forgive me, forgive me.
It isn’t a question of forgiveness. There is nothing to forgive. I admire what Jean did – I know the courage it takes to murder yourself – although I wish desperately that she hadn’t done it, although she was crazy to do it. No, if there is a question, it remains eternally Jack’s. Why, my Jeannie, why? And why had I wanted the same thing?
For Jean and me, when we plotted our own murders, our lives were good, better than most. We had friends, health, enough money, plenty of love. So what drove us both to madness? Was it hidden and interior, some sickness of the brain? No – it was larger external powers, the flooding force of a disintegrating England, of mobility, dislocation, crumbling identity, separation, unbelonging, advancing relentlessly, too slow and massive to see or resist. No, no again. It was our individual characters, weak, inflexible and unresolved. It was our fault. No.
I don’t know. Causes are more like vapour than facts. Facts are rarely hard, but soft as loam. Yet I like to make guesses, I like to tell stories. I can do that. To start to make answers, to have a framework in which to think, a line has to be drawn somewhere, and that line must be somewhere in the past. It is my frame, my lens. Where else is there to look?
It is arbitrary to a degree, I suppose, because causes go back – and in a sense, forward – for ever. You can blame a car crash on the invention of the motor car. You can blame Henry Ford for imagining a future with motor cars in it. Yet for Jean, and therefore for me, I have decided that the past begins on 27 January 1926. This is the day Jack was born, into an England quite as strange to me as China, an England before the flood.
Chapter Four
‘There is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization… it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something that persists as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person. Above all, it is your civilization, it is you… Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side of the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you’
– George Orwell, England Your England
I have thirty photographs in front of me of people I have never really thought of as human, as actual. They are my relatives, my most recent ancestors, momentarily trapped in the 1920s. I have sorted all my family snaps, several hundred of them, into separate decades up to the present day. Taken all together, given the speed of a camera shutter, they probably add up to maybe a few seconds of exposed life. It is as if a sudden flashlight has been held up to illuminate my past and is then tantalizingly switched off, leaving only an engram, a faint memory trace.
People in other countries formally worship these memories, but I have simply boxed them up and put them in a drawer and forgotten them until now. In parched black and white, in sepia and ochre, these ghosts run with my blood. I am soaked in, constructed of, their residues. But in my mind, they have always been no more than music-hall curiosities.
The tones in those photographs, mostly taken on Verichrome film on Box Brownies, can never be seen now. The colour of modern England, the England that dates from the mid-1950s, from when I was born, is different, primary-coloured, vulgar, brash, its inhabitants displaying their lobster skins as badges of new affluence, as trophies from the sun. These old prints, aged by the air, seem to speak of an elegance and gravity in their subjects, and an eerie magic. Looking at them – at that England – is oddly heartbreaking, like seeing a photograph of the face of a soon-to-be abandoned child, hopeful, before his mother has fled and stolen everything precious from inside him. Some of them are professionally posed, which adds to the sense of seriousness and gravitas. Also, most of the subjects are dead, and this rarefies the photographs, because you are touching ghosts.
The elegance and magic are an illusion. The people who stood in front of the camera were certainly as florid, loud and rough at the edges as anything caught fifty years later, by more recent relatives, at the Torbay Chalet holiday camp, for instance, toasting the camera with advocaat snowballs topped by fake, carcinogenic cherries and saucered glasses of Asti Spumante. And yet in another way these images suggest an England that breathed a different air, something that stains the photographs with more than just chemicals.
Here is the shop where my father was born, 100 yards from the great towers of the Crystal Palace, that incredible, glittering monument to the self-confidence of Victorian England. The shop sign says: Wells and Lott, Fruiterers and Greengrocers. The typography is that of a fairground roundabout – florid, stocky, confident, Edwardian. There are five people standing in the forecourt of the shop, which is decorated with wicker baskets and hemp sacks of podded peas and chestnuts. There are boxes of melons, potatoes, cabbages. Brown paper bags hang from the doorframe.
On the left, Charlie and Floss Wells are smiling dutifully for the camera. Charlie is wearing a short kipper tie, a black waistcoat and a white shirt. A watchchain traces the contours of his ribcage. He has the shadow of a moustache that suggests an office or town hall clerk. Charlie and Floss are serving a customer, a woman who could be anything between twenty-five and fifty. She is taking a pound of apples.
To the right of the photograph is Cissy – Cecilia Starr – my paternal grandmother. Her hair is tied in two buns, one on each side of her head – ‘earphones’, as Jack christened the style. Her husband, Art, will be devastated when, a few years after this picture, she impulsively cuts off all her hair. She wears a pinstriped blouse and high-waisted skirt. Her look is flat and neutral, her character – which is soft, kind and rather lazy – is hidden. She is averagely attractive, with a thin mouth, a sharp nose and a round, pleasant face.
To the right of her is Art, Arthur Walter Frank. He looks cocky – according to some, the origin of his closest named tribe, cockney – and handsome, pleased with himself. There is a trace of my father there somewhere, but I cannot pinpoint it. He is known as a tough, unsentimental man, not particularly fond of women or children, who nevertheless dotes on his wife and, it is said, spoils her terribly. Like his partner Charlie, Art is dressed like a clerk, in a white Eton collar, but his tie is as thin as his smile. The uniform is revealing. Even then, we were respectable, preparing ourselves for the shunt to home-owning, blue-collar suburbia. Art and Cissy did not fight, drink or gamble. Art did not swear in the company of women and never struck his wife, or anyone else. These vices were imagined to be more or less confined to the class below them, the working class of the Victorian imagination, roughnecks in gin palaces, slum cockneys, costers, totters and barrow boys, the feckless, undeserving poor. Jack’s family even had a private vehicle, a Wolseley van, and later, a Citroën Tourer. The van was used itself as a shop, on day runs to the smarter parts of south London – Croydon and Dulwich.
It would be easy to pigeonhole Cissy and Art, Charlie and Floss, as members of the lower middle class, the usual fate of such families when anyone bothered to chronicle them, right up until the present day. But this would be incorrect, sloppy. They were, in fact, a distinct, vast and emerging presence in England that remains largely, strangely unnoted, perhaps because they appeared as no more than a mongrel, a penumbra of other classes. And yet they were, as today, real enough, the upper, or well-off, working class, something quite discrete. It is not a trivial distinction, for England then as now was as tribal in its way as modern Bosnia, Rwand
a or Northern Ireland. The tribes, though, were more subtle, more finely graded and easy to confuse. Class was English life. Who you were was infinitely more important than what you did.
Unlike the lower middle class, they did not aspire to ape their betters. They disdained the hypocrisy, the airs and graces of the bank teller. They were self-confident, suspicious of education and ‘improvement’. When Rita Cole, Cissy’s gifted niece, was admitted to the local grammar in the 1930s, the other children in the street simply stopped talking to her. Such airs and graces were hated and sanctions were used against them. The peculiarly English phrase ‘too clever by half’ was hurled at her as a stinging rebuke, as was ‘getting above yourself’. To want to join the middle classes was an abandonment of pride and identity. For in this England there was an absolute suspicion of all that was not familiar, plain, straightforward or common sense. Having witnessed Rita’s fate, Jack, when offered a coveted grammar school place, turned it down, to the indifference of his – Tory-voting – father.
My ancestors were sceptical and secular, which once again fenced them off from the social layer above them. They did not bother with church except for births, weddings and funerals, preferring the cinema, cycling or cards – nap and pontoon. They were suspicious, often resentful of authority, the authority that was everywhere, whispering don’t do that or behave, behave. But that authority was feared or at the very least grudgingly respected. Even Old Tom, the park-keeper at the local rec. opposite the house in Essex Grove, was never known to be defied, or even much cheeked, by local kids. A uniform of any kind meant the prospect of retribution.