Remembering M

Someone I knew well went to Oxford as a mature student and I associate getting to know M with him although we actually met in a betting office where we both had a holiday job; the mutual association through Oxford a happy coincidence. We were the same age; he was, like me, a hard drinking, smoking, eldest child of five, a potential high flyer who spent his undergraduate years in activities outside the curriculum, with the net result - like me - of the "beer drinkers degree” (a third). I loved him like a brother not knowing then how men can despise that sentiment.

Fully aware of M's feelings for me, yet not understanding at all, I treated him as a great mate knowing he wanted more. How or even if we ever said goodbye I cannot recall. I know I heard he was working in public transport, that he married, had daughters, went to work in Malaysia, got divorced.

Many years later, I saw our mutual friend. “M was here last week, he came to stay.” “Why didn’t you tell me, I would have come then, it would have been really great to see him.”

“Oh no, he would never come while you were here. He never really got over it you see.”

I was truly shocked and full of shame that I had never appreciated such depth of feeling. By then, though, I had no real memory of what had ever passed between us, just vague recollections of fun, drinking, laughs and japes. Our shared politics and passion for social justice was acted out in an industrial tribunal we cooked up together. I remembered how he looked - very tall, slim, with disobedient hair and dark brown eyes. Nothing more.

Then at four o clock in the dark, silent morning I looked into his eyes, in an insomniac sensory memory that found us in a cottage in wintry West Oxfordshire, where a boozy party with loud music was happening, though there were few guests remaining. In that memory M's feelings were revealed to me and I responded wordlessly as we danced slow dances together, bare footed on the carpet, bodies barely touching but charged with the closeness, hearts racing, knowing and not knowing.

Back in time I felt that stomach churning electricity, stockinged feet damp with spilt beer, not caring, feeling only wonderful possibility. We did not kiss but we understood.

The next recollection played like slowmo. It was perhaps the following day. We were in the basement where my sister and I had a bedsit. M was hungover, half sitting, half lying, wearing a gorgeous white shirt. He was trying to make his feelings plain. I either turned him down or played innocent, but either way he gave up. I see him again give a frustrated groan and fall back on the pillow.

Did it end there, the thing that had hardly begun? I have no idea. We may have exchanged phone calls and letters but in those days you had to work much harder to stay in touch with people. I think I hurt him. I believe I took his feelings too lightly. I imagine I thought he was too nice - for me.

M was unrehearsed, his offer came unwrapped, revealing a naked need. I on the other hand was caught up in the performance of romantic and sexual encounters, where each side advances, retreats and side steps in a ritual pattern that is like insects engaged in a courtship dance. I was already locked into those habitual behaviours so when M revealed his naked truthfulness I instead looked elsewhere for the safety of artifice. Not ready for honesty in love, I pursued my own path blindly engrossd in the dance of the deadly insects,

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Holidays

I felt very lucky as a child to have three holidays a year. We always went to the south coast -Bournemouth, Poole, Swanage, Sandbanks, Highcliff. Two trips were organsied by the church, one for any child or family in the village and one just for the choir. Then there would be one more involving my relatives, either travelling by coach, like the church trips, or in a posse of cars, each packed to the roof with beach paraphernalia sticking out of the windows, children sitting on laps and bags strapped to the roofs. A small saloon car in those days could accommodate at least four adults and three or four children, depending on their age. We didn't expect comfort - the journey simply had to be endured. The coach trips were more fun as there was always singing, One man went to mow, and Ten green bottles were standards. On the home journey one time an auntie asked me to sing something my dad had taught me, so I sang

 

I'm Popeye the sailor man

I live in a caravan

Ther's a hole in the middle

Where I do my piddle

I'm Popeye the sailor man

Toot Toot.

 

"Your bleddy father" said his sister.

 

For me the holidays inspired excitement and dread. The dread was of being sick on the journey and ruining the holiday. I have always suffered from motion sickness and as the holidays were each one day long, I feared every minute of feeling rotten, or having vomit cleaned off me by an adult who would rather not.

 

The convention for the arduous journey from Oxfordshire to Dorset was to stop at a large roadside facility near Winchester, stretch the legs, have a wee and the adults get a cup of tea. We children would be given lemonade and crisps, rare treats that were remembered long after. In my family all the grown ups smoked but I would beg them not to do it in my car as it would guarantee to make me throw up. They would say "Hasn't she grown out of that yet?" "Have you took her to The Doctor?" and to me "If you stop thinking about it you wont be sick. Read a book"

 

So once we arrived at the halfway stop they would pile out of the cars and all light up in a great blue noxious cloud.

 

On the beach children were expected to leave the adults alone to natter and pour hot drinks from flasks. We would just luxuriate in the sand and paddle in the sea, endlessly fascinated by the rhythym, constantly surprised and delighted when again and again the waves broke into hissing foam and edged further up the beach. Sandcastles with moats, collections of shellls, mounds of seaweed to be poked with sticks.

 

For lunch there would be cheese and tomato sandwiches or ham rolls, hard boild eggs and sausage rolls, tepid orange squash. Cakes and biscuits would be saved for later so as not to tempt wasps. Before going home we would go to the shops and buy sticks of rock for those left behind and look at the saucy postcards where men were red faced and ladies had big bosoms. Kids with more money would buy little ornaments made from shells or water pistols. Some of the adults would get plaques for their house, with the number picked out in shells or coloured rock, others would search for just the right ashtray as their souvenir.

 

All too soon we were packing up, getting dry and hiding our bums from the world as we coaxed damp sandy skin back into our clothes. However hard we tried we couldn't go fast enough for those impatient and punctual adults, who, by now windswept and harried, were looking forward to going home for a proper cup of tea.

 

 

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From my memories: Saturdays

Looking back I see how we changed gradually from extremely polite well behaved children into feral nuisances. Money was always tight and as soon as I was deemed old enough I was left in charge of the house on Saturdays while Mum worked as a waitress and my Dad put in half a day's overtime. He would be the first one home, at about two o'clock. But if he had dropped into the bookies or visited one of my aunts on the way, it would often be more like 4. Mum would be back, exhausted, at 5. When times were really tough she would only have time to wash out the feet of her tights, smoke a couple of fags with a cup of tea, then go back out to work in the evening as a barmaid. My dad would normally go to the pub himself, so we were unsupervised for much of Saturday, into the night.

And our wildness certainly began on Saturdays. At first we were just a bit cheeky. We used to have fresh bread delivered from the Co-op, by a man we called Sid the Baker. When Mum was there she would say "Here's the baker. Go and ask him for one unsliced and half a dozen crusty rolls." We would beg for jam doughnuts and she might relent. Sid was nice and friendly so when she wasn't there we thought he would see the funny side of being ambushed. Every week that we were left to our own devices we would listen out for poor Sid, hide in the trees, behind doors, on the shed roof - and jump on him. In turn he would tickle us girls and shadow box my brother. In those days it was considered quite normal for a grown man unrelated to us to be free to tickle us until we were helpless. As I hurtled blindly into puberty I 'm sure I also flirted with him in quite a provocative manner.

Lovely Sid in his white coat, holding the big creaking basket full of goodies and smiling.

After the doughnuts housework had to begin in earnest. My job was to be in charge and allocate tasks according to age. There were always quarrels. This one hated dusting, that one shoved the vaccuum cleaner around in a huff. I would be puffing at one of the cigs I had stolen from my mum, or blagged from Mrs Cordell next door and drinking coffee while talking to friends on a phone. While there was often insufficient money to buy food pr pay bills, we nevertheless at one point had a telephone in every room. In those days many households did not even possess a phone and in the village the phone box on the high street was a vital community asset. But my dad worked for the GPO (general post office, later British Telecom) and had very flexible notions of property and ownership. Hence there was a red phone, a trim phone, a phone on the wall, phones with push buttons, phones with dials. Once I distinctly remember he climbed up the telegraph pole closest to our house and diverted our line to someone else, as we couldn't afford to pay the bill for all the calls we had made.

To my school friends I seemed to live a free, almost bohemian existence and as a teenager with pretensions to artiness I cultivated the lie. To be left without adult supervision for the whole day, seemingly at liberty to smoke, play loud music and generally run wild, I found myself at the centre of my friends' social map on Saturdays. Their homes tended to be chilly, quiet and regimented, ours was warm, noisy and busy. Some of them loved my power and joined in the general bossiness of playing mum, invoking rebellion from my sisters and brother, who could barely tolerate it from me. Others, free of parental restrictions, just came to our house to unleash themselves and caused me untold headaches. While they went back to the calm order of their homes I was left to conceal, explain and dissemble the series of breakages, alcohol related escapades and complaints from neighbours.

As long as the coffee, smokes and music could be kept in good supply, I went to great lengths to hide from my Saturday visitors that the cupboards were generally bare, or that we never bought washing up liquid because it cost too much, or that there was no dishcloth so spills would be wiped up with a pair of my dad's old underpants. Thus all my Saturdays seemed to be marred, first with the burden of responsibility and the inevitable guilt for not complying fully with my mum's instructions, then with the excruciating sensation of panic that came with the anticipation of being found out and humiliated by the shame of poverty - not so much the fact of it as its visibility through enactment in domestic detail.

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Me and dad

There were two ways to walk to the town; usually it was by the road. But some days, when time stretched ahead without limit, when the mood was on for adventure, we would go over the fields.
"What took you so long?" "We came back over the fields."

My dad first took me all the way to town over the fields. We started on the concrete road as it was known, a farm road for tractors which intrigued by its expansion joints that oozed molten tarmac on hot days. The concrete road was well known to me, but once we left it the terrain was unfamiliar. We walked a winding narrow track that at points was so overgrown we took to the edge of the fields and hugged the hedgerow. This eventually opened out to a wider dirt path bearing off to the right.

"This is the old canal." Water? In striking distance of home and I never knew it. Still and green. He took me by the hand to the edge and we threw stones to make big plop noises. "Come and see this. Quick." It was always urgency with my dad. He lay on the ground and I followed, both on our bellies, smelling the faintly damp grass and warming mud, hearing the small sounds on the water. We watched a colony of ants moving house. Long wiggly lines of them, each carrying a white egg the size of its own body. He told me all the heroism of ants. His face was very close to mine. He was absorbed. He was my dad.
"Come on then."

The canal ended soon and gave way to grassland. The walk started to feel long. We were in a hinterland, neither village nor town, not field or lane, a bit featureless I might have thought had I known such a word. But then I spotted the blockhouse where he would tell me something exciting about enemy and bombs and blackout. I would say "Were you in the war dad?" and he would stand to attention and salute, so I wouldn't know the answer.

I stroked the cows waiting to die, walked quickly past the slaughterhouse with its meaty smell of life and death. At some point we stopped and he rolled a cigarette in his big fingers, sticking it in the side of his mouth as he struck the flint of his lighter several times to get a long petrol flame. Then I would watch as the fragrant blue smoke was sucked back sharply and released with a satisfied sigh. He was my dad.

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From my memories: Fruit

Fruit would appear in the house at different times and for various purposes. We had no fruit bowl. There would never be, say, a bunch of bananas, but occasionally there might be two large ones sitting seductively in the kitchen, waiting to be sliced into custard. Sometimes we had oranges and the tops would be peeled off, allowing us to suck and gorge on the juicy flesh of a whole fruit. Tangerines and satsumas arrived in a large quantity at Christmas and no other time. The same with Coxes Orange Pippins. Both those fruits still betoken Christmas to me.


Other apples came and went - abundant while in season and absent the rest of the time - Discovery, Worcester Pearmain, Laxton Superb, Beauty of Bath, James Grieve. The exception was Bramleys, the cooking apples that were available all year as we had a tree in the garden. Towards the end of summer we would start collecting the windfalls for crumbles and pies and would be allowed to eat the small peeled pieces, sour and juicy, before they were cooked. Later the tree would be stripped, the apples picked over, wrapped in newspaper and stored in crates in the loft where they yellowed and mellowed over the winter months.

Mum grew strawberries, blackcurrants and gooseberries. We would be given jobs tending the soft fruit and spent hours crouched, staring at hard little green berries, willing them to become succulent and sweet, eventually yielding to temptation and having to spit out the bitter disappointment.

As we grew older we started scrumping. At first we didn't need to go far as there was a slightly neglected orchard that was separated from the end of our garden by a broken old fence. Apples and pears were there aplenty, but the real treats came in September with demure Victoria plums competing with the honeyed voluptuousness of golden gages. I sat in the gage tree for hours in the late sun scoffing its wonderful fruit until my stomach cramped.

Further afield throughout the season were damsons, cherries and walnuts, all begging to be taken, which of course we did. At the end of September we would be sent out with all kinds of receptacle - shopping bags, biscuit tins, enamel pudding basins, with instructions not to return until they were filled with blackberries.

My dad worked with two men, Amos from Jamaica and Billy from Pakistan. Sometimes they sent us exotic fruit, so laughingly amidst the general rural poverty of our lives we would occasionally feast on pineapple, coconuts, lychees and mango. These foods were unknown and unseen by the majority of the British public at the time and that to me typifies a certain kind of working class upbringing - harsh, deprived, yet punctuated by the exotic and picaresque.

All this time Mum would be making pies, puddings, cakes and jams, something I later did for my own family and still love to do now. Naturally when I made my own home I also made sure there was a fruit bowl and it was always full.

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Drayton County Primary

Yes we really did. It was hardly ever used though.
One of the highlights of my year was the village fete which was held at The Grange, a grand red brick house in beautiful grounds. Villages used to have a squire and ours had lived in the Grange. The family was still looked up to and resented in equal measure and the older villagers were deferential to them. When I was about ten we had a vote in school for the Rose Queen. The favourite was the pony tailed and perfect Helen, the girl I sat next to at the top of the class. Surprisingly I won the vote, I supposed on popularity rather than prettiness. I think there was maypole dancing that year.

I was in the last year group to occupy the original village school - a church building comprising one classroom separated by a partition, windows in true 19th century tradition too high to look out of and different playgrounds for boys and girls. As they would have said back then: Woe betide you if you crossed into the wrong playground.
A new school that was still under construction and housed the younger children was where we had to go for our lunch - or dinner as it was called. In those days few children took packed lunch and those who did were left out and considered odd. Our daily walk to the new school and back was supervised by two dinner ladies, Mrs Church and Mrs Barrett.
After lunch we would have some playtime before walking back to the old school. The boys would set up a big game of British Bulldog and the girls would head for the climbing frame, where they could be told off for being too daring or showing their knickers.
Not that we cared of course.

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We made it our home

After you were born I took to walking around the neighbourhood a lot more and I came to love the charming Edwardian villa with the rambling garden and ramshackle fence. We bought it when you were almost three. It was a real long term project that involved more labour than love and it was scarcely finished four years later when I left your dad and took you with me to live in the little terraced house in Whitehead Street. We moved in early October with the help of your Uncle Chris and the place was so small we had to remove the entire back window as the only means of fitting some of the furniture in.

Our Edwardian villa with its walled garden and nearby bluebell wood, on that quiet street, could have been in another universe. The new place was on a corner with a main road, cars and buses passing at all hours. There was dog shit on the pavement and on the stones outside the door, almost every day.

Inside was cold, the chill seeped up through the floorboards. The heating made strange cranking and wheezing sounds, coming on and off at unexpected times. One night I went downstairs to the bathroom and on walking across the furry rug in the sitting room, squashed a slug between my toes, treading slime into the woollen fibres. This must have occurred after Christmas as I had no bed until the January sales and had slept on the sofa for a few months.

In the night I would lie awake listening to boy racers using the traffic calming devices for exactly the opposite effect and sometimes coming the wrong way up our one way street. The squealing tyres were especially disconcerting after living in suburbia for several years. Suburbia was also less crowded and it was a new if unwelcome experience to hunt around the town centre streets, cars parked nose to tail, searching for a space, then dashing back to you and Bev in the freezing rain.

Once inside I would light the fire and the little sitting room would crackle and hiss, making us warm and merry while outside the traffic continued its incessant weaving. Opposite our house was a squat, dingy with grimy rags hung behind an upstairs window. The squat was always still and closed, shadows moving about and cardboard plugging a jagged hole in the door pane from a drunken boot.

A short walk in any direction took us to take-away land: curry, pizza, kebabs, Sam's Fish n Chips, cheap, huge portions. Once or twice we bought supper and scoffed in comfort, had salt and vinegar cuddles watching TV trash.

One black evening, turning a wind-frozen corner, with the shop fronts in chain mail and bolts, street lamps flickering I covered my ears and warmed my hands on box of pizza slices. At the opposite street corner I could see activity - a market stall? Hot dog van? There was no time to find out as I ran home, thighs numb and knees creaking from the cold.

When the clocks went forward the loud protests of the boiler continued well into daylight. Leaves sprang out of dead twigs. Between the kitchen window and the main road a Russian vine grew like a kind triffid muffling the noise. Soon there was sun, the Easter air was balmy and in the evenings there was high rise lustre as the setting sun cast a pink-orange glow on the David Murray John building.

Early one evening, out with neither scarf nor gloves and before dark, the neighbourhood felt less hostile - even the traffic noise was drowned by the sharps of blue above. Again I noticed the street corner activity, which was visible now in late daylight. It was a soup stall, bread rolls in polystyrene stacked on the pavement. Warm voices giving relief to shuffling figures. It was care for homeless people and I thought,

So this is where we live.

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Big red flower

Dorothy came round the other evening. Knowing her fondness for noodles I went to the Oriental supermarket to buy Korean pancakes and chow mein noodles with some spicy chicken. In the end we ate lots of French cheese and she took the noodles home in a plastic box.

While she was here Dot expressed surprise again that I had learned Chinese at school. I sang her a little communist children's song we were taught:

Da hong hua
Zhen mei li
Wuo ai wuo_de hao aiyi......

Big red flower
In my hand
I love my beautiful auntie..........
More about the auntie but I forget the words

......xing ge li, xie xie ni
Da hong hua song gei ni

"Were you taught by a Chinese person?" Well no I wasn't, my Chinese teacher was Mr Hunt, Reg as we later came to know him, who was also my form teacher (would you say tutor?) from the second to the fifth year (years 8 to 11).

Mr Hunt was a truly decent person. While the rest of the staff were busy condemning me for being lazy and good for nothing he recognised a sad girl who had been full of promise and had become withdrawn. Where they saw sullenness he perceived sorrow; they wrote me off, he got curious and decided to help.

I have told the story before. It means a lot to me, but like all interesting stories it has become over-rehearsed and that is a shame because with each re-telling it loses a little more potency.

Mr Hunt heard what was happening in my life and did not question it. He acted decisively and gave me a damage limitation plan for my O levels. I already had two passes in subjects I had sat a year early and I needed to select another four, abandoning six subjects. In honour of him one of the four was Chinese.

He emigrated before the exam results were published and it was to be many years before I would be able to tell him - by then as a University Lecturer myself - how he changed the course of my life. But in one of those funny coincidental events that just happen every now and then, I met Mr Hunt briefly about six years after he emigrated. Crossing a road in the centre of Oxford, a small car slowed down, swerved to a halt past the crossing and a man got out and ran towards me. We hugged, which was a lot stranger than it sounds and his first question was,

"Did you get the Chinese?"

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Ghost of Christmas past

It could have been 1969. I was fourteen and in love; it was the night before the end of term and the start of the holiday. Somehow at the last minute I had acquired some money and determined to spend it on a Christmas present for my boyfriend.

There were six shops spread over the village: the two on the green could be discounted immediately, Winters was a hardware store and the post office only sold stationery. Similarly Pete's shop on the estate only sold groceries,which left the three nearest to our house.

At the end of our lane was a real old fashioned village shop that always had a cooked ham in the window and sawdust on the floor. It was inconceivable that a place selling paraffin and chicken food could contain anything desirable so that left the papershop and Bettles. It had to be Bettles really because it was where we bought everything except newspapers and clothing.

The shop window had been stuffed with Christmas gifts - smoking sets, bath cubes, jellied fruits - and festooned with cottonwool and tinsel. Fairy lights blinked and made me feel warm inside because it was Christmas. I saw there were men's nylon shirts piled in one corner. My dad had just started wearing nylon shirts- what a liberation they were for the modern man, coming in every colour under the sun, with no need of being ironed (drip dry). I had just enough to buy the purple one.

I seem to remember the gift was received politely and my boyfriend appreciated the urgent desire to give and to please that it represented. Later in the holiday when he came over to the village to see me he was wearing a Ben Sherman shirt: two tone check cotton with button down collars. The purple nylon never made an appearance, nor was mentioned from that day to when we split up, acrimoniously and dramatically, much later. My dad though continued to weat his maroon one.

Our village was only about three miles from the town. From the town it was another six miles to the city. Buses to town were about two an hour and every two hours to the city. So you see we were not geographically remote. We were cut off by being poor and it made us ignorant and gauche, though we didn't realise that until we had nearly grown up.

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