I was spoiled as only a bastard can be spoiled, unless he’s ruined by being despised. I sat on a wall and aimed pebbles at passers-by, dropping over on to a wasteground when they saw me. My grandmother told me to be good, but I didn’t know what she meant because she couldn’t show me. All she could do was open her mouth and let go sounds like a flood-warning when she told me what would happen if I didn’t be good. But even this was so comforting in its tone of care and love that I laughed and asked for more cake, which she invariably gave me.
School was the torment of my life, and every morning my mother left me early by the closed gates because she had to be on her way and get to work by eight o’clock. She put a three-penny bit in my hand, and when I saw the shop opening across the street I’d saunter there and buy a lucky bag of sweets that tasted like honey as I sucked them, leaning against the school wall.
When the other kids asked what job my father did I said I hadn’t got one because he’d been killed in the war — which may have been true for all I cared. But even at five or six I thought my mother hadn’t married because no man would own me, and I didn’t much mind this, for I was used to it, and anyway liked to have her to myself. Sometimes she bundled me off to Grandma’s at Beeston while she went to Blackpool or London, but this was a glorious holiday because then I didn’t have to go to school.
My grandfather was the best of men to me, though when he stayed home from work and drank a lot of beer he sometimes got nasty-tempered and called me a bastard — which is what I understood a boy to be whose mother couldn’t find a husband to live with her.
One day when I picked up some marbles in the playground the boy cursed me by shouting I was a rotten bastard. I thought he’d rumbled my secret, and hit him so hard it got around I really was a bastard. Not that this grieved me because nobody had any proof, and also I’d become pals with a couple of boys who I felt sure were as much bastards as I was.
One was Alfie Bottesford who lived on Norton Street, and he had no father. His mother was fat and wore glasses, and she worked at Player’s on a cigarette machine. For a long time I imagined her sitting at a bench with a little rubber-rollered fagmaker in her hands, turning up cigarettes all day that other women smoothed and put into the packets to be sold in shops. Alfie was her only boy, and his great passion when he wasn’t at school, was playing marbles on the cobbled street. When he wasn’t playing marbles with himself he was eating bread and treacle. I never saw him eating anything else. Sometimes when I went to his house after school his mother would give me bread and treacle, which I ate hungrily because I had an hour to wait before being able to go home and find my mother there. Mrs Bottesford would also give me a cup of tea that was so strong it smelled like iodine. Being a man of many colours I drank it down, and dreamed all night, dosed by the fire-and-brimstone of that awful meal.
I was taught to read and write at school, but not much else. The teachers pushed me to the back, and ignored me. But out of spite, and perhaps a desire to please, I got good marks in reading and writing. Then they kept me at the back of the class because I didn’t seem to need the same attention as those duffers who couldn’t even learn that much. At about this time, when I was seven, my mother and grandmother got wind of a nearby house that had been abandoned. Someone had done a moonlight flit to Birmingham and left a lot of stuff behind because the van was full. So my mother shuffled herself through the scullery window one afternoon and opened the door for me and Grandma. There wasn’t much loot except a few old tats and pots, but I went into the parlour and saw that the floor was covered with large books of music. They were scattered everywhere and I sat looking through them, fascinated by the sheets of complex musical notation. They stood out black and plain — quavers and crotchets and minims, words I already knew from school — and I ran my fingers over them as if they were written in braille. I took two away under my arm, and was proud to own them, though later they disappeared to I don’t know where, but for years afterwards those lines of soundless music went through my dreams stoked by Mrs Bottesford’s iodized tea that you may have been able to stand a spoon in, as the saying goes, but could not have stood up in yourself.
My Beeston pal was Billy King, whose family lived in a cellar on Regent Street. He was unique among my friends in that he never asked me a single question during the year we knew each other, not even so much as what time do you think it is? or, are you hungry? This didn’t worry me, because having a fatal flaw to hide, I felt that his taciturnity in this respect was all to the good. But I regretted it when in my natural and more exuberant curiosity I wanted to ask questions of him, only to be met by a mind your own business, or don’t ask questions then you’ll get told no lies, or, if he was in an affable mood because he’d been able to acquire one of his father’s cigarettes, he’d simply say nothing at all, and dig both hands deeper into his pockets as he puffed ceremoniously away. I had to wait for him to tell me things of his own free will, and when he did it was like rich seeds falling on three-year fallow land as they took effect in my imagination, and the slightest event that happened to him achieved unwarranted growth. I mention this as a possible reason why I later became such a good listener, and often held back from asking the right sort of questions. People always tell you more when their boiling heart burst of its own accord, and I liked listening to stories, true or false, not out of idleness and the inability to tell my own, but because I am a gullible and good-natured man who listens to other people’s troubles soothingly, and who, while hearing obvious lies and boastings, accepts the entertainment of them without questioning their morality — unless I fall a victim to their tricks.
Yet, how could I be a born listener if I had an Irish grandmother? The fact was that she told me few ancestral stories that I could repeat, at this early age or even later. Mostly she did little except laugh and shout, and occasionally threaten her husband when he got too drunk to dig the garden, and bawl after her daughter who hadn’t been to collect me for three weeks. But I loved my grandparents even more than if they’d been my real parents, since it was two to one against. The proof of this is that when my mother left me at home to go to sleep at night because she was going up to the boozer with some boyfriend or other, I didn’t cry or let it worry me. Yet when at Grandma’s she and Grandad wanted to go for a walk or a drink I cried and all but panicked at being left on my own. The end of the world seemed close as the summer evening sun came into my bedroom and I had no one to share its light with. I wasn’t a mother’s boy, but a grandparents’ boy, and if one wants to divide children up I suppose that isn’t a bad way to do it.
I never went into Billy King’s cellar when I called for him but shouted down the grating that spread its steel bars under my feet. He’d come running out of the house to which the cellar belonged. His mother and father, who lived down there with two other children, had rented it on the understanding that they’d only use it to store furniture while Mr King found another house. But having been thrown out, the family had nowhere to go, and so camped between its whitewashed walls. Once, Billy came out totally black and bruised, saying that a coalman had taken off the grating that morning by mistake and dropped a full hundredweight down the sloping chute on to the children’s bed below, and if it hadn’t been that they were curled together under the clothes in one snug ball then their heads might have suffered from that thoughtless avalanche.
The winter was the worst in living memory, and in an igloo built around my grandad’s tree, Billy and I ate cakes and chocolate that we’d stolen from shops, looking out through a window-hole towards the gate in case anyone should come in after us. Our knees were wet on the floor of snow and soil, but it was our hideout that no one would imagine man or beast to be in, and we sat for hours in silence like two vagabonds waiting to be led off and hanged. The true and dreadful world was beyond the ice, and in our tomb of refuge we were untouchable because no grown man could crawl down that inlet of a hole — though at night in bed I dreamed of a pickaxe splitting through the ice-dome roof and barely missing Billy and me.