Art Sex Music Page 2

  Halfway through my junior school a new family moved into our street, about four doors away from me. They piqued my curiosity, not because there were so many children – that was normal – but because all the girls had their golden blonde hair styled into beautiful glossy ringlets. I got to know Margaret, who was my age, and I’d call for her on the way to school. I was always invited into their kitchen. The floor was bare concrete – no rug, nothing. I’d never been in a house that was so spartan. I knew about being poor and hard-up but this was poverty. It was most definitely not, however, a joyless place. It was warm and welcoming and heaving with children surrounding their mother as she sat busily getting them ready for the day. All the girls had sections of their hair bound in pieces of old cotton rags, which stuck out at funny angles or dangled down like thick strips of multicoloured twisted rope. It was a curious sight that I’d never seen before. Their mother carefully removed the rags from each girl’s hair and I watched, transfixed, as deliciously shiny long ringlet curls sprang out and tumbled down over their shoulders. I wanted hair like that, not my short, square bob with a token ribbon on top. Ringlets seemed more like me.

  Every day we paid sixpence for scrumptious hot school dinners and were given a third of a pint of milk for free, which was replaced, to our delight, by orange juice in summer. I suspect it wasn’t so much a treat as more to do with milk going sour in the heat. As it got nearer to Christmas, we were all instructed to save our silver milk-bottle tops, and the special tops with holly leaves printed on them, all to be washed, flattened and threaded together as classroom decorations.

  During the school summer holidays I’d often wander off on my own. I joined two libraries, both of which were a bike ride away. I tended to base my activities as far away from home as I could, mainly to avoid people I knew who might report what I’d got up to to Dad. One library was at the edge of our estate and the other on the neighbouring Longhill Estate. It was there that I discovered books on Greek myths, which opened a whole new world of thinking for me. I developed a voracious appetite for reading.

  Then I stopped going there, for reasons that had nothing to do with books. Over the course of my frequent visits to the library I became friends with a group of girls who lived nearby. A strange situation emerged. They invited me to go with them to see an old man they visited regularly. I felt like I was viewing from the outside as I stood back and watched their scenario play itself out. They’d knock on his door, be let in, and when he was out of sight one or two of the girls would go and steal sweets and money from a suitcase he kept under his bed. It was full of bars of chocolate and bags of sweets all mixed with silver shillings and sixpence pieces. I had an unnerving feeling that he knew exactly what was happening, as the suitcase seemed always to be restocked for the girls’ next visit. I have no idea how they’d even know there was such a suitcase – and in his bedroom. I only went a few times. It felt odd then, and in hindsight is rather suspicious.

  And maybe my dad was aware of such things, judging by his reaction to an earlier incident. One afternoon I had an accident. I fell off my bike and was knocked out cold. I remember waking up with a man stood over me asking if I was all right. I was pretty dazed and only remember him giving me a sixpenny piece, which I was very pleased with. I said thank you, took my bike and went home. When Mum and Dad got back from work that evening I told them what had happened. Dad went mad at me for taking money from a strange man. I had no idea what the hell he meant. Maybe it was Dad’s unexpected reaction to this that seeded my unease about the old man and his suitcase of sweets. But it was also due to an experience I’d had in Beverley Westwood, when me, Les, his sisters and two friends went on a ten-mile bike ride to the woods. We’d been there a few hours playing Hide and Seek and ambushing each other when suddenly Louy shouted, ‘Look at that man!’ Through a gap in the trees we could clearly see a man stood looking at us, then looking down at his hands, back at us, and down at his hands again. Our eyes followed his … down to his erect cock held in his hand on a pure white handkerchief. We were gobsmacked. Then the shout went up: ‘Get him!’ We grabbed the largest fallen tree branches to hit him with and set off at full pelt, hurling stones and screaming, ‘You dirty bugger!’ He ran out of the woods and across the field. I’m not sure he even had time to put his cock away. We talked about it all the way home and swore it seemed to be steaming in the cold air.

  Our ‘gang’, as it was, had quite a reputation and wasn’t messed with often. Louy was tough. One day, when we were playing in East Park’s ‘Rockies’ (a faux castle-like ruin), quite a way from our housing estate but a regular haunt of ours, we came across a group of kids from the adjoining Longhill Estate. There was a rivalry between them and Bilton Grange Estate children that often involved fights, bike thefts and night-time raids to steal the wood from each other’s Guy Fawkes bonfires. The group of Longhill boys were all yelling insults at us from the tops of the walls and throwing rocks down on us. Without hesitation, Louy ran up and laid into them all, one after the other. She was fearless and strong, as was her elder sister, Pat. If you came at them with any weapon, they’d swiftly toss it aside and give you a good smacking. That was all part of the pecking order of our environment, and not only on the new housing estates; a self-survival mentality extended across town, with some of the more deprived areas having the most violent and dirty fighters. Les and I were confronted by three boys from a rougher part of town when on a trip to East Hull Swimming Baths. When the head-to-head happened, Les quickly turned to me and whispered, ‘Scratch, poke eyes, anything, because that’s what they do.’ No etiquette, just the basics of striking first, fast and furious.

  The strategy worked and we got home unscathed … but not before making our regular visit to the sweet shop across the road. It was a typical run-down shop you’d see in any old British black-and-white film of the 1950s, and was owned by an old man who lived in the back. We were always ravenous after a swim and bought packets of Tudor Crisps and as many sweets as we had money for. One day the old man had to go out the back for something and left us alone. Big mistake. All those flying saucers, sherbet dips, liquorice and, my favourite, Fry’s Five Boys bars of chocolate screamed, ‘Take me! Take me!’ We scooped up what we could and ran out of the shop before the old man came back.

  We had no summer schools or clubs to keep us amused; just Brownies, which I’d got thrown out of when caught in the boys’ toilets with some Boy Scouts. When me and Les were about eight years old we took on a project – what I regard as my very first artistic ‘performance’. We decided to stage our version of The King and I in Les’s back garden. It was a big production – for us, anyway. We even made handwritten tickets and cakes to sell afterwards. I was cast as the governess, while Les took the starring role of the king and diligently practised his dying scene. Alas, that never happened because, when all went quiet in readiness for his star moment, his sister Pat thought the play had finished and put on a Billy Fury record full-blast. Everyone lunged for the cake stall, consuming everything in sight, then proceeded to dance to the music on Les’s dad’s precious lawn. Les was furious, all our plans to sell cakes failed, the lawn was ruined, and there would be repercussions when his dad got home. That was an exceptional day. Ordinarily I’d either venture off on my own or with Les to a small quiet village about three miles away that had a gentle stream set back from the road. We’d go fishing with a net on a bamboo cane, paddling barefoot in the crystal-clear water under the bridge, catching tadpoles or little fish to put in our jam jars. The surrounding countryside, away from watchful eyes, was my childhood heaven.

  When our parents wanted time on their own, it was common to be told to ‘Go out and play – but be back for your tea.’ That meant we were often gone for hours, and to wherever we felt like going, especially as our bikes allowed us to stray miles from home. Such freedom was a gift that fed my imagination and suited my inquisitive nature as we went on our explorations.

  Being given free rein inevitably lead to a visit from
the police after we’d had some very good times in the nearby churches. Churches were open 24/7 so, as we roamed around the area on our bikes, we’d pop into any church we came across. They were adult-free zones, places of old rituals that had an atmosphere of mystery and a point of access to another world. We got so excited when we discovered one particular church that had a microphone in the pulpit. That’s no big deal today – it’s a given – but we’d only seen microphones on TV. We had a great time singing our hearts out, screaming, laughing and loving the hugeness of our amplified voices echoing up to the rafters. We returned there often. Eventually we were reported to the police. I remember seeing the police car draw up at Les’s house down the road and my stomach lurched with fear and dread at the thought of my dad’s reaction. I hung around until Les ran out of his house to tell me he’d kept my name out of it and not to worry. He knew only too well what my dad was like and I’d have been given the hiding of my life. In fact, when my dad heard about it he knew I must have been involved because me and Les were inseparable. Dad delivered his warning in his deep monotone voice: ‘If I find out you had anything to do with that, I’ll knock you into the middle of next week. I’ll chop off all your fingers.’

  I believed him. Just like I believed him when he said he was going to kill and eat my pet rabbit, Panda. He made out it was a joke, but I thought he was capable of doing it. His ‘joke’ made me panic because he did go shooting rabbits at weekends. I took Panda to Les’s house for safekeeping and visited him when I could. In the end, I had to give him away so I knew he was out of Dad’s reach. I was quite confused over the whole situation because Dad had built me the rabbit hutch and put wheels on it so that I could easily take it from the safety of the shed into the garden, for Panda to have a run around. I just couldn’t understand why he’d want to kill him after doing all that. He never did mention the sudden disappearance of my rabbit, and I lost trust in him as someone I could rely on to protect me. I began to see him as an enforcer of my unhappiness. Yet I still wanted to please him, wanted him to love me (because I really didn’t think he did), all in the naive hope that I could reverse his feelings towards me. Although there were some happy moments with Dad, his orders and threats dominated and overshadowed my relationship with him, and ironically made me behave worse than I would have done had he been more reasonable and affectionate.

  The winter months were often too cold to play outside for very long and the nights drew in well before teatime. Winter indoors wasn’t warm once you stepped out of the living room. Our new house had three bedrooms and a bathroom, living room, dining room, kitchen and hallway. Unlike the old Victorian houses that sensibly had fireplaces in each room, the only room that had a fireplace in our so-called ‘better’ house was the living room. The kitchen had a paraffin heater. ‘The paraffin man’ would come down the streets with a huge vat of highly combustible paraffin in the back of his van. He’d dispense it with a large metal funnel-shaped jug into cans we brought from the shed, and it would slosh about down his van, on to the road and over my shoes, making them sodden and stinking of fumes. We had no central heating or electric fires in the other rooms of our house, which meant we hogged the living-room fire to keep warm. Winter bedtime meant my sister and I put on our pyjamas and socks, slid our feet through the arms of our dressing gowns to keep our legs warm, and then climbed into bed. Luckily we shared a bed at that stage in our lives, so we kept each other warm.

  When I wasn’t gallivanting about outside and was in the house alone, I’d frequently go into my parents’ bedroom to play with my mum’s jewellery and dress up in her numerous dance dresses. I must have looked a sight, me so tiny and the dresses so large, but once I slipped into them I was magically transported to imagined enchanted worlds, feeling like Cinderella or a fairy queen. Mum and Dad went dancing regularly and she had so many beautiful gowns, and all with matching stoles: from an incredible azure-blue silk-and-net gown shot through with silver thread, to luscious pink satin, to ones that were splattered with sequins, and an amazing Spanish-inspired silk-and-velvet dress with stripes of black velvet edged alternately with silver, red, green and deep blue. In my exploring I ventured from the wardrobe to the dressing table, where, in pride of place, sat a marquetry musical jewellery box that Dad had bought Mum on one of his journeys overseas. It had a main compartment on the top that was locked, and two small drawers either side. I soon discovered the key at the back of one of the drawers. This beautiful jewellery box was an inner sanctum I innocently breached time and again. It held my mum’s most treasured pieces of jewellery, all nestled together and sparkling on a bed of quilted pale-blue silk.

  Snooping around doesn’t always bring such joy. When going through my dad’s books, Les and I laid our hands on a small paperback full of black-and-white photographs. When we looked through it, none of the images made sense to us; we’d never seen anything like them before. We were shocked and silenced by what we saw. Why were all these people in their pyjamas? They looked so thin and ill. Piles of dead bodies. An air of sadness enveloped us and a sense that we had inadvertently ventured into very forbidden territory. We, as seven-year-old children, should not have been looking at these images. We returned the book to its place in the cupboard and I never took a second look. I later discovered that it was photographic documentation of the liberation of Belsen.

  My chaotic and risky play activities ran counter to my rather rigid home life. Obedience was the watchword. ‘Do as I say, not do as I do’ was my dad’s mantra whenever I dared to question his orders with ‘Why can you do it and not me?’ He was very strict and we had a schedule in the house. Both my parents worked full-time, my father as a fireman (later becoming fire chief) and my mother as a wages clerk for the Metal Box Company. My dad’s job meant that he stored some strange things in our house and shed. All the houses on our street had a brick shed and separate brick coalhouse. Me and Les had a kind of Enid Blyton Famous Five set-up in his Dad’s shed – it was our den headquarters and empty except for a solitary sweeping brush we used to keep it clean – whereas our shed was in constant use. It reeked of oil and was full of old cans, bikes and garden tools. Along the full length of the shed, my dad had built a big heavy-duty wooden workbench. It was filthy-dirty, chipped and worn with use, and strewn with all manner of tools for carpentry, jars of nuts and bolts, motorbike parts and whatever else he felt he needed to turn his hand to. There were two metal vices I played with constantly, even stupidly putting my fingers in them and tightening the vice until I couldn’t bear it any more, like thumbscrew torture devices. I’d rummage about in the shed for hours, but only when my dad wasn’t home. I was under strict instructions not to mess with his things in there – or anywhere. At any one time the hallway might have his rifle leaned against the wall for his weekend rabbit-shooting (and subsequent rabbit pie), or his oxygen bottles and aqualungs for when he went scuba diving. Sometimes he brought back sea urchins or starfish that ended up as ornaments around the house. One object I never quite understood as a child was a small grey metal container that had only a simple, odd-looking yellow pattern painted on the side. I asked my dad what it was but he just barked at me never to touch it and to mind my own business. I now know that simple pattern was the hazard symbol for ‘radiation’. Such were the 1950s, when you could bring your ‘work’ home with you, even if it was potentially lethal.

  Dad set out a list of chores for me and my sister, and in return we were paid pocket money. We started on two shillings and sixpence a week, increased as we got older to five shillings, then £1, from which we had to buy or make some of our own clothes. As we got older and more proficient at our household jobs, Dad kept adding to our long list of things to do. On returning from school we had to light the coal fire so the house could warm up for when Mum and Dad got home from work. We were both under ten and I still don’t know why a fireman would even suggest such a thing. Pam would be in charge and I’d help screw up the newspaper and lay the kindling on top. Then she’d light the paper and we’d e
ach take a corner of a large sheet of newspaper (usually the News of the World) and hold it over the front of the fireplace to draw the flames. That was my favourite part. I’d get so excited by the long, bright-orange flames shooting up the chimney, roaring like a rocket. Sometimes the newspaper would catch fire and we’d have to act fast and throw it in the grate. One evening I was sat in front of the fire with the poker in the red-hot coals, watching the end glow red, just like the irons the cowboys used to brand their cattle. Pam scolded me for doing such a stupid, dangerous thing and I waved the red-hot poker at her as if to say I’d put it on her arm if she didn’t stop bossing me around. She sat rigid, stern-faced like a teacher, and said very dramatically, ‘You wouldn’t dare.’ But I did dare to do it. I made as if to put the hot end on her arm, but misjudged it and actually made contact. I don’t know which of us was the most shocked. We both panicked and ran to the cold tap, then slapped butter on to her arm.

  All the chores we did were no doubt part and parcel of the nurturing of girls to be good, obedient housekeepers – priming us for married life. Sunday mornings, Mum and Dad had a lie-in and read the salacious stories in the Sunday People and the News of the World. We had to make them a full cooked breakfast of egg, bacon, black pudding, fried bread and mushrooms. Dad would then go to the pub until about 3 p.m., when we’d all sit down to a full Sunday roast dinner followed by one of Mum’s delicious puddings. The most wondrous smells of food permeated the house, making our mouths water and stomachs rumble. Occasionally Dad would come home from the pub having won on the one-armed bandit and he’d pour bags of copper pennies on to the living-room floor for me and Pam to count out and share. Being pre-decimalisation, there were 240 pennies to the pound, so the sheer volume of coins made it seem like a fortune.