The Scent of Dried Roses

  The routines of school were punctuated by the routines of family and English life. The three-times-daily food was plain stodge. They ate for sustenance rather than for pleasure, or theatre, or sensuality: boiled hams or fish, Cornish pasties, mince and onion pies, roast meats and fry-ups, bubble and squeak, bread with dripping. The vegetables – potatoes, sprouts, cabbage, peas – were heavily boiled. The puddings and cakes were dense, a kind of ballast – rock cakes, scones, semolina pudding, bread pudding, suet pudding, treacle tart, spotted dick, jam roly-poly, stewed rhubarb or gooseberries, custard, cake with salad cream on it.

  There was a fair amount of ceremonial life which would, decades later, be whittled away by shopping and home improvement. There were the now forgotten, abolished or largely ignored public celebrations of Empire Day, Commonwealth Day, May Day, the National Day of Prayer, St George’s Day and Armistice Day.

  Jack would actually dance around a maypole. Rural England penetrated deep into metropolitan life, with English country dancing, hornpipes and reels taught in all the schools. He went to Sunday school and sang hymns and folk-songs – ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘The Ash Grove’ were his favourites – and attended Cubs and Scouts at the 37th Croydon in Coopers Yard, behind the High Street, pledging loyalty to King, country and Empire, and occasionally going camping with the troop.

  What mostly engaged Jack’s attention, though, were the first ripples of the electronic common culture that was beginning to establish itself, operating from two poles, one of them domestic, the other largely – and uniquely in this England – foreign. The BBC had begun broadcasting in 1922 and by the 1930s nearly every household had a crystal set or wireless. The programmes were staid, educational, cosy, but it was an amazing thing to hear sounds collected from the air emerging from a rosewood box. Jack would fall asleep listening to In Town Tonight or Arthur Askey or the plummy, reassuring tones of the newsreaders.

  But it was the cinema that thrilled Jack’s – and every other child’s – imagination more than anything else – the first great hustle by another culture into the isolated life of England which, up until this point, had remained a unique, peculiar and yet essentially European place. Great cinemas were being built around him: the Electra, the Albany, the Rialto, the 4,000-seat Davies Cinema in Croydon. He watched cowboy movies, monster movies and war movies endlessly. You could stay in the cinema all day without paying extra, and they would bring you a cup of tea and cakes while you watched, and sucked it all in.

  I move to the next batch of photographs, the 1930s. In the larger world, there is the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Stalin and Hitler. But the faces in these photographs are untroubled, and there is a certain truth in this, at least for anyone who had work. Then, as now, the newspapers would talk about the ‘nation’ being shocked, or saddened, or outraged, or angry, but such a nation is largely fiction. Cissy and Art, and Grace and Billy – my mother’s parents, who begin to emerge tentatively from the photographic negatives now – are insular and uninterested in the larger world, except as a sideshow, as light entertainment or drama. They do not march, or write letters, or join political parties, or carry placards. King George, who dies in 1936 and is genuinely mourned nationally, had summed it up: I don’t like abroad. I’ve been there. Survival, and the family, are the only imperatives. What strange, irrational foreigners are doing is of only anecdotal interest in Lambeth.

  In these photographs, there are still only a few traces of my mother, my father dominating the family history still. Here he is once more in poses that are concentrating into cliché: lost in a group of grinning Boy Scouts, nervous on a donkey at Margate, attending to a kettle outside a tent. He is developing, like an emerging Polaroid, into the man I still recognize today, the narrowed, puffy eyes, the slight arrogance which I have inherited and inflated, the confident good looks, which I have not. Three photographs stand out.

  In one, Jack and his brother Arthur are standing in an alleyway. Jack holds the bat and Arthur, the ball. They wear threadbare V-neck pullovers, knee socks, shorts, sandals. The background is a brick wall and a gritted, unfinished street. It is not the content of the photograph that is unusual but the texture, the emptiness of the light, the particular grain – the atmosphere. It is washed out, closed in, somehow delicate. For some reason it reminds me of a still from Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They are a mixture of Puck and the silvery street urchins photographed by Bert Hardy for Picture Post, lost boys. The colour of the picture, a china tea stain, the colour of that world is touched with something like innocence, and is entirely gone now. I cannot explain its poignancy, yet it provokes a definite, rich sadness in me, like many of these pictures.

  In the second, Jack is standing as one of a group of four. He is at the back, with Arthur next to him and two young girls in front. They are seven or eight years old. They stand in an open field and a chestnut tree spreads in the far background. Arthur and Jack are in uniform, the Boys’ Brigade. They wear simple pillbox hats. Arthur blows a toy trumpet with a Union Jack attached to its stem. There is no wind to move the flag. In front of them, the two little girls are in white dresses and also pillbox hats. They too have Union Jacks, which they hold as if told to do so firmly by a grown-up. One of the girls is clutching a white handkerchief and looks shy. The other seems annoyed, and one imagines her knuckles white around the flag stick that she so fiercely clutches. Arthur is grinning full-bloodedly, trumpet to mouth, while Jack is smiling faintly, his hooded eyes almost disappearing under the squint of the light. It seems that he feels ridiculous.

  The third photograph is simply funny. It was clearly taken at the end of the decade, for Jack is now an adolescent. He is standing in a half-lit field, and the shadow of the photographer, a woman by the silhouette, is etched on his midriff. What is funny about the photograph is that Jack is ludicrously fat and is stuffed into a three-piece suit that does not fit. It is presumably his first suit and it is something he is very obviously unaccustomed to. His fists are clenched, perhaps in embarrassment, and his face is buried in a roll of jowl and cheek; he is grinning desperately. It is around this time that Jack is christened Fatty Lott at school and the appellation, though cruel, fits. The buttons on the suit are clearly defying natural laws in order to stay in place, suggesting that the cloth will burst off in all directions at any moment, leaving my father naked among the leaves.

  And this is the end of it for Jack, for my father, in these pre-war years; this is all I can make of him. A fat, ordinary kid with a tough father, a tolerant, rather lazy mother and a family rough as worsted at the edges. His childhood is unremarkable for the era, entirely typical, which to me is why it is interesting. However, in childhood Jack will witness two events which interrupt the accustomed banality, one of them poetic and national, one entirely personal, both of them disastrous.

  Chapter Five

  But where is Jean, my mother? Her ghost is still cautious, hidden, rarely captured by light. There are only two photographs of her and they seem simply echoes of the earlier snap, of her unfamiliar and perched on a cushion.

  Here she is on a rocky beach at Southend, in white, poking at the ground with a stick. She is staring into the distance, with clenched eyes. There is something in her whole self – perhaps this is my imagination only – that suggests determination. Is it the set of the mouth?

  In the second photograph she is older, maybe four or five. Now I begin to see her, but only very slightly. The odd thing is, she looks scared, nervous, in a setting that is clearly meant to be comic. It is the back yard of her parents’ house in Southall, a few streets away from Rutland Road. She is sitting astride the lid of a metal dustbin, wearing a coarse woollen pullover. Her legs are bare and her socks have ridden down to her ankles. Her hair has grown now, and is indeed beautiful, stuffed with ringlets, shining. In the background, the tiny house where she grew up. It strikes me that in none of the three photographs that exist of her before the war is she smiling.

  The only other sn
ared moment from Jean’s side of the family is a picture of Billy, my maternal grandfather, sitting in an anonymous field smoking a cigarette, wearing a three-piece suit and tie. He is a small, compact man, with hair brilliantined into place, which gives his face a severe, angular look. His cheekbones punch out from space between ear and mouth, and a cigarette projects from his lips as proud as a Churchill cigar. He too is unsmiling, and there is strength and a sort of anger in his face. His shoes are flashy, white. There are no photographs of his wife, Grace, or Jean’s brothers, Alan and Norman.

  But I know more about Jean and her brothers, and Billy and Grace, much more than the photographs can yield. I know that the world she inhabited was, in most of its fundamentals, a mirror of Jack’s: the same class, the same private language, the same cluster of attitudes, the same narrow clutch of possibilities. Of course, Jean was born a girl and this confined her in a number of unique ways, but mainly they grew up absorbing the same certainties.

  Jean was born on 17 January 1931 in a small rented flat in Shepherd’s Bush, west London. Billy Haynes had been a baker at the Lyons factory in Battersea ever since the end of the First World War. Then he was on the Russian front with the White Army, sent to crush the upstart Bolsheviks. Had he seen men die, perhaps killed one across the snow with his Lee Enfield? He never once talked about it. This blanket of silence, the suspicion of thoughts and feelings openly expressed, linked England, at all levels, like no other trait. Everything had to be guessed at, inferred. As if in self-defence, sadness was never aired, was walled up. Just get on with it. Life was life. Say what you like, it won’t change anything.

  Billy walked to Battersea every day, leaving Grace, his large, plain wife, to look after the three children. One generation back, Billy’s family were agricultural labourers, while Grace’s paternal grandfather’s profession is described on her parents’ wedding certificate as ‘artist’, and the maternal grandfather has the given name of Jacob. At the time of the wedding in 1897, they lived in Forest Gate, at the centre of the Jewish settlement in the East End.

  Rockley Road in Shepherd’s Bush was dirty and poor, though still respectable, but after Jean was born the flat became cramped. Like thousands of inner-city families in the 1930s, Grace and Billy began to hope that they might move out to the new suburbs that were rising on the clay at the city’s edges. A massive house-building process was under way, sucking the population into the inner-outer suburbs much as the railways created so many provincial towns in the previous century.

  Grace, who, it was accepted, ran the household, had begun to feel this pull, away from the grime and insecurity of inner London to a different dream, of gardens and trees and inside bathrooms. It would mean getting a mortgage, but they would have true independence for the first time. She mentioned it to Billy, who was normally compliant, passing over the pay packet dutifully, unopened, at the end of each week. But, always deeply conservative, he was against it, thinking it too big a step.

  Then, as chance would have it, it turned out that Billy’s manager at the bakery, Harry Hecken, was earning a little cash on the side by acting as an agent for a Wimpey site manager in Southall, where a new and quite archetypal development was sprouting at the edges of the Western Avenue on one side and the Great West Road on the other. The houses were small, arranged in terraces, brand new and bright as a pin. Harry introduced Billy to the site manager, in the hope of picking up his £5 commission.

  The site manager could see that Billy was nervous and wavering. He offered him six months in the house free, to give him time to earn the deposit for the mortgage company, and said that for fifty shillings he would put in a path at the back and build a shed. Even Billy was tempted, though it would mean two ten-mile cycle rides a day, to and from work. But to be a house-owner, a man of property, now that was something, that was substance. What with Grace gung ho, and the three kids running wild in the small flat, Billy made his decision. Harry, I want it. Harry was pleased that Billy, a good worker, a straight arrow, was doing the modern thing, quite apart from the commission. In the end he split the fiver with Billy anyway.

  When they moved into the house in 1934, the street was still being built around them and was full of gravel and cement mixers and shouting workmen. This was a different world from the Bush, though. It was clean and there was fresh air, with roses and rowan trees in the front gardens.

  There were two rooms downstairs. The parlour at the front, Grace decided, despite the lack of space, would be used only for best, on Sundays, for visitors. The back room, which had an open fire and french doors out to the coal cellar and scrubby garden, would be where the family lived. From here there was a door through to the tiny kitchen and scullery, with its deep sink, water heater and wooden draining board.

  Upstairs, Grace and Billy took the largest room at the back, which overlooked the garden and was next to the small inside toilet, which they would learn to call a loo when being polite, just as they would adjust to call a pudding sweet or pronounce garage (garridge) as garaadg. Alan and Norman took the larger of the front rooms, overlooking the still uncoiling Rosecroft Road, and Jean had the box room, no more than six foot by six foot but with the unaccustomed promise of privacy.

  Over the next few years the house began to take on the modest trappings of the entirely new class to which Billy and Grace now belonged, the suburban, home-owning working class. It was not prosperous – there were still children in the street who had no shoes – but it was undoubtedly progress.

  Grace and Billy set to work to make their mark and show they were in the ascendant. The floors were decked in a dun-coloured mosaic lino, with a scrap of maroon carpet in the back room and a stair runner laid by one of the neighbours who worked as a fitter at Harrods. The front room, as Grace intended, was pristine, a sort of shrine, with a hard, scrubbed clean settee, and a glass case full of souvenirs from Margate and cheap ornaments – nickel silver spoons, crystal glasses from broken-up sets, a bottle of sherry, a few books, Zane Grey or Edgar Wallace. There was even an upright piano which Jean would half-heartedly take lessons on, only to give up after two or three years. It was always cold in this room, with a prissy, formal air.

  In the hallway was a hatstand, a mirror and a framed print of a gypsy woman pouring tea in her caravan. The hard lino led you into the warmth of the back room, where there was the closest Grace and Billy had to an heirloom, a Victorian chaise-longue in red velvet plush, the wood polished furiously into a thick sheen. There was a table, usually with knitting needles and balls of wool on it, and a large mahogany gramophone, the turntable of which Billy would sometimes use for piping icing on to cakes. There were two brass candlesticks and a cheap oval mirror engraved with the image of a Victorian lady with a floral hat. There were plates with mottoes and sentimental rhymes about the sanctity of the family and the value of friendship. The ceiling was Camp coffee brown.

  The kitchen smelled of stewed tea, and the taps had long rubber nipples on them to direct the flow of water from the Ascot heater. In the larder, custard powder, butter, cochineal made of crushed red beetles, flour, Bovril, cream crackers, evaporated milk, Libby’s tinned peaches. Grace would wash clothes in the butler’s sink and work them on an old scrubbing board. Even when washing machines came within their budget, she turned the idea down. They couldn’t get Billy’s white overalls clean enough, she said.

  In the main bedroom upstairs, a large double bed, the bed Billy will one day die in, as I watch, a child, puzzled. Timmy, I’m so scared. There was a bolster under the pillow. Two paintings of Greek Muses, semi-nude, which disappeared when Alan and Norman reached puberty. An airing cupboard full of towels and fresh clothes, a candlewick bedspread, tasselled around the edges. There were doilies made out of heavy wool, a dressing table with three mirrors and a silver-backed brush with matching hand-mirror. It was a feminine room, soft with feather pillows and the smell of clean shirts, decorated with flowers, and cream print floral curtains. The wallpaper was pale green and blue flowers confined within
horizontal parallels.

  The boys’ room was sparse, two beds and a few cheap toys – Airfix models and Dinky cars, jigsaws – while Jean’s had hardly room for anything except the bed and a tiny dressing table. There was eau-de-Nil wallpaper, small soft squares that contained geometric patterns, containing, in turn, floral designs. The doorframes were cream, with opalescent lights above all the doors.

  After a year or two in the new house, Billy decided that the cycle rides every day were too much. There was a job for a baker at the Lyons factory in Southall and he took the job for a slight increase in wages. He and Grace were happy, although they didn’t think about it in those terms; you didn’t ask whether or not you were content. Everything was about continuity, nothing more. All other spoken or thought life was waste product, indulgence.

  Initially the children seemed to be doing well, all attending Lady Margaret Infants and Junior School, but then there was some trouble with Alan. He seemed a little slow and uncertain, unable to keep up. Some of the teachers thought he would do better at a special school and reluctantly, slightly ashamed, Billy and Grace agreed that he should be moved to Talbot Road School in Southall, where, they were told, his needs would be better catered for. It turned out that the school was full of the mentally handicapped, with Down’s Syndrome children and autistics. It seemed a bit extreme to put Alan there, just for being slow, but Billy and Grace decided that the authorities knew best.