Naked We Come In

2003-03-14T10:20:00.000Z

CHAPTER SIX - FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Margaret Hilda Thatcher (nee Roberts) and I have two things in common. We were both raised "above the shop", and we both worked for the J Lyons Company in West London. That latter will have to wait for twenty odd years, but the first begins almost immediately.

My grandfather had long since left the cokeworks, taking a correspondence course in arithmetic and bookkeeping, and was now the manager of a furniture shop. It was owned by two brothers in Sunderland - Jews, my mother used to tell me - but grandad was their representative in this village. He'd got the job by the innocent process of entering into dispute with them over a purchase. They were so impressed with the way he presented his case that they promptly made him manager of their store.

Nowadays, working in retail isn't thought high up the food chain. But then, back in the forties, it was practically a profession. In the land of the semi-numerate, he who can multiply two pounds eleven shillings and threepence three-farthings by nineteen, with pencil and paper only, is definitely king of the hill. Grandad had his office now, and his electric fire. And those were the skills he was shortly to pass on to me. I lapped it up.

Village status was clearly marked out. At the top was the doctor - so remote as to be almost godlike. Well, he did have the sole power of life and death. One doctor for the village, treating generation on generation. Next came the Vicar, equating roughly to the schoolteachers in standing. Somewhere below that were the shopkeepers, and - sadly - last of all the miners, whose broken backs and ravaged lungs were what really fuelled the whole shebang.

If you read the local history, and learn of the animal-like way these men and their families were treated by their employers, you will have no further questions over the reasons for and the location of the early Labour Movement.

But grandad always voted Conservative - however pointless that was in a mining village. Shopkeeper now, you see. Above the common herd. As I would be too, they hoped and prayed.

So the first home I can remember was in a flat above grandad's shop. Above and to the rear. I guess my dad was pretty pissed off about that, still yearning to take his wife and child back to Buffalo and the life he knew was so much better. The kitchen downstairs was tiny. Sink with a cold water tap only, coal range for heating and cooking and a fold-down table for eating. Every time we came in, mother would scream at the cockroaches (blackclocks) dancing on the floor. It was roach city.

When mother wasn't screaming at the cockroaches, she would scream at dad. I hated it - sitting there mute and shaking as they let rip at each other, all the time it sometimes seemed.

Nana and grandad took me in a lot, and their house was where I felt safe and happy. Nana would play endless hours of card games with me, and grandad drove me around in the car to make his "collections". (No-one could afford to buy furniture outright - it was always done on a credit basis.) "All the bonny lights of the district" we would call it, as he drove past the cokeworks and steel mills, gushing their incandescence to the night sky and my wondering brain.

The rudiments of number and letter I grasped in a trice, and was reading in no time at all. Still I remember my mother's delight when she sneaked into my bedroom as I excitedly read out loud for the first time. "Chick's Own Annual" it was called - a picture book with the words split up into syllables. "You can read!" she cried, immediately rushing out to tell everyone.

Right there and then an extremely fundamental point sank in with a vengeance. My parents' love and approval had to be earned, and the wages were my intellect.
To be continued...

2003-03-12T14:28:00.000Z

CHAPTER FIVE - HERE AT LAST

Mine wasn't an easy birth. This often happens with a big man and small woman. Eighteen hours of labour and mam was about to lie down and fall asleep, possibly for ever. She was more exhausted than ever before in her life. The year was 1946, and the date New Year's Eve.

It was a home delivery, as was the custom. In nana and grandad's house, where my parents were living. The war was long behind now, with post-war Britain reeling from devastation and fiscal bankruptcy. Churchill was voted out, replaced by a Labour government, whose policies and institutions were to last for more than half a century. This was the time when both the National Health and State Education services were created. From each according to his means - to each according to his needs. Cradle to grave. The very architects of the future.

But one particular cradle was looking increasingly perilous. "Let me go to sleep," my mother begged the midwife. "I'll be all right if I just get some sleep..." The midwife shook her head, worried. This wasn't going well at all. So she sent someone for the doctor.

Now - at this point I can almost literally hear you thinking... "What on earth are you doing getting born in England? I thought the whole idea was that your mother would decamp to the USA at the earliest possible opportunity? Isn't that why she married your dad in the first place?" But things are never that simple, are they?

Mam had got herself caught in a two-edged trap. To her husband she was saying that - yes, she would go to "The States", but not quite yet. To her parents she was promising she would never ever leave them. In the end, my father compromised by saying that he would try out England, for one year only. After that he would return to his homeland, without her if necessary. And that was the atmosphere I was about to enter.

The doctor came, and sized up the situation quite quickly. "Just give me something to make me sleep for a bit," my labouring mother beseeched him. "OK," he said, firing up a syringe. "Take this," as he jabbed her arm.

I honestly don't know what insidious mixture he injected her with. Cocaine? Amphetamine? Medicine was on a huge high right then, what with penicillin just being discovered, and the classic infectious diseases were tumbling like nine-pins. For the first time ever, doctors could actually do something, rather than merely bask in the secrecy and fake authority of Latin prescriptions and suchlike.

One of the funniest things about Dad's new life in England was the hygiene gap. It was the absolute rule in NE England of the forties and fifties that people bathed and changed their clothes once a week. Friday was bathnight, and Monday was washday. Simple as that. Laundry was an immense task, involving vats of boiling water, hand-cranked washing machines, posstubs and of course the mangle (wringer) to squeeze out the water. Hard physical work. Believe me - I've watched it.

But dad - a middle-class upstate Noo Yoiker - would have none of this. Where he came from, people bathed and changed clothing daily. So you see the stage was set for conflict even at that level. "Look at these!" nana would say, holding up his one day-worn underpants. "There's nowt wrong with them. I'm not putting them in the wash. He's off his head."

And my poor mother was stuck in the middle. That's what happens when you marry exotic. So they compromised by simply ironing the underpants, and pretending they'd really been washed.

The doctor's injection certainly worked, whatever it was, and an hour or so later I made my entrance. Screaming, of course. Face pulled and distorted by the long labour. Dad took one look. "Looks just like an Englishman!" he joked, or not. "You couldn't pay him a finer compliment," the midwife retorted. Mam lit a fag. The relatives all came in. It was four hours to midnight and the birth of 1947. They drank, they smoked all over me, and that was my first evening in the world.

2003-03-12T14:25:00.000Z

EPISODE FOUR - DEATH US DO PART

"Have you told your folks we're getting married yet?" dad asked my mother for the umpteenth time. "No..." she answered, those familiar tensions building up again. "Then I will!" he said. "This has gone on long enough."

Together they walked into nana and grandad's living room, where nana was darning socks, and grandad just waking from his teatime nap. But dad wasted no time getting to the point. He'd spent weeks trying to get my mother to do just this. "Hello," he said. "We're going to get married."

Shocked silence. Although mam's friends had tried, first gently and then more pointedly, to soften up my grandparents to the idea, they'd stayed convinced that their dutiful daughter "would never marry a Canadian".

"Not with our blessing you don't!" grandad snorted. "Then we'll marry with or without your blessing," dad replied, angrily. And so the stage was set. Two worlds collide. Around me.

Sociologists put people into groups, for ease of misunderstanding. There's a fine line between "lower middle class" and "working class respectable", and I think both my sets of grandparents straddled that line quite proudly. Of my transatlantic grandparents I know next to nothing - we never met, and at the time of writing I can't even recall their names. But I do recall hearing my dad's dad having his own business repairing farm machinery, and I've independently learned that the street in Buffalo where the family lived was reasonably prosperous. But "grandad", my mother's father, was to be a huge influence on my childhood, so it's right that I should grant him his space now.

Rural County Durham before the coalrush was sparsely populated indeed. Farmers, a few landed gentry and the Church of England owned the rolling hillsides and gentle valleys, and life drifted along for centuries in much the same way. There were old families, and my grandad was born into one of those. Later were to come the miners, mostly Irish immigrants, but at that time, in the 1880's, all that was only just beginning.

His own father was a watchmaker, a highly-skilled if impecunious profession, and his family was customarily large - five sisters and three brothers, the boys redolent with the great names of the time... Havelock, Russell and suchlike. Schooling was brief and terrifying, discipline enforced with the birch. The (capitalist) cult of teenage was unheard of, and youngsters were put to work as soon as physically able. The marriage ages were 14 for males and 12 for girls, with parental consent.

After leaving school, grandad's first job was in the newly-emerging coal industry. Not in a mine, but a coke refinery, distilling the volatiles from the raw coal. "Benzol, toluol, xylol, solvent naptha," he taught me at a young age. But he was unhappy with the back-breaking conditions and slave wages, and one day got his Big Idea.

"I was walking home from the cokeworks in the rain and cold and dark," he would tell me at his knee. "And that night I went past this office. I looked in through the window, and there was a man sitting working at a desk - warm and dry with an electric fire beside him. So I thought - I want to live like that as well." And later, as time will tell, he did indeed.

Grandad was full of stories like that. He spoke. I listened, enrapt. Still now I feel in awe of his wisdom, and all he imparted to me. No wonder my poor father felt squeezed out.

Mam and dad's impending wedding was the hot topic of the village. Church of England, naturally - only the dreadfully blemished got married in a Registry Office. A Special Licence had to be got from the Bishop for some reason or other - maybe with dad being foreign - and preparations swung into overdrive.

Clothes were in even shorter supply than food during the war, strictly rationed, and a white wedding dress was only an option second-hand. But with mother being "petite" there wasn't a suitable one to be had, so instead she bought the best dress she could in dark blue. Shoulderpads and wasp waist. Think Bette Davis. Every woman in the discovered world thought Bette Davis. Dad wore his uniform.

And that was it. "I do. I do. Till death us do part." Me, I had no say in the matter, not having been conceived yet.

2003-03-12T14:20:00.000Z

EPISODE THREE - CHICKEN TONIGHT

And so dad came to tea the next day, feeling totally nervous, and what a shock that was to him! American and Canadian servicemen had "induction courses" to prepare them for the people of wartime Britain. The Brits didn't drink coffee, they drank tea. Beer was served "warm", not chilled. They didn't drive on the "wrong" side of the road, they drove on the "other" side. Local girls were very appreciative of nylon stockings, chocolate and cigarettes. And so it went. The contrast between the then-prosperous, middle-class Buffalo NY of my father, with the Durham pit village of my mother was as if between different planets.

But my mother had pulled out all the available stops, to impress her new suitor. And what girl wouldn't? Best table-cloth and china, kept from before the war, fresh-killed chicken from grandad's "hen-run", and even a few extra cakes from the bakery a little further down the street. In wartime, who you knew was everything. It was one huge, bustling black market - especially in food, which was the principal currency. (You couldn't eat pound notes, let's face it. But not that there were many of those, either.)

Most of the men in the village escaped call-up, because they worked in the local coal-mine - an essential war effort. Britain - and some say the very Empire itself - ran on coal. All the ships and trains, all the electricity, all the iron and steel production depended utterly on the black diamond. Oil had hardly started. Cars were so few as to be a novelty. Aeroplanes were as space shuttles.

So dad sat down to his roast chicken (a huge luxury, if he'd only realised), mashed potato, carrots and processed peas, followed by tinned pears (you could occasionally get them if you knew the right people) and "top of the milk". Plus a nice Victoria sponge cake. Like himself, the flour also came from Canada, shipped in grain convoys, and many brave lives were lost in this way to the enemy U-boats.

Mam was doubly on edge though, not only wanting to impress her potential new boyfriend, but also worried about the messages her parents were receiving. Differing agendas once again, you see. Her aim was to escape - off across the Atlantic - but theirs was to keep her at home, her being now their only remaining child. Although none of them knew it at the time, this conflict was to endure way beyond my birth, and cause lasting damage.

But the courtship proceeded, even against the odds. Romance in those days was a whole different ballgame from today, with its "your place or mine?" immediacy. Nearly everybody lived with their parents until they got married - and often after that, such was the housing shortage. So young couples depended for their wooing on friends who had homes giving some courtship space, usually in exchange for baby-sitting duties. And love will find a way, as they say.

So marriage was proposed and accepted. And then the shit really did hit the fan!

2003-03-12T14:14:00.000Z

EPISODE TWO - FIRST WALTZ

"Hello! Would you like to dance?" my dad awkwardly asked, his first ever words to my mother. And so they danced. Not the night away, but only one number, as dad turned out to be pretty hopeless - at dancing at least. But if there's one thing a wartime dance-hall was not about, it was the terpsichorean arts. Oh no - these smoky barns had two quite separate agendas - sex (sometimes called "romance") for the guys, and wedding bells for the chicks.

So a girl had to use her wits every bit as much as her other parts. Neither on its own would suffice to get her that married status, that escape from satanic mills to the sunshine on offer in the States, as seen every Friday night in that new-fangled wonder called cinema. Bette and Joan were there, right enough, but the ticket to their paradise was not a stub of paper. Oh no - the real passport was as old as Adam and Eve themselves. And poor dancing was no damn obstacle.

"Let's sit down and have a drink," my mother suggested with relief, to the dance-band's closing chords.

Mam's own background in the dark, depressed NE of England could hardly have been more different from dad's in upstate NY. She was born into a second marriage, her mother having been widowed in World War One. But despite already having two daughters, my grandmother still managed to entrance my grandad down the altar once again. My mother was their only issue. After that, nana retreated to her own bedroom, and grandad was banished from the marital bed for ever. It was her health, you see. She never kept well.

Considerably younger than her two half-sisters, mam was "spoiled rotten" as we would say these days. While the older girls had to pull their weight around the house (and don't forget, running a home was hard physical work in those days), mam was already regarded as the "delicate one", and treated accordingly. When war broke out, the older girls went to Nottingham, "into service" as they called it. Service meant working in some rich household. It happened to girls a lot then. Six and a half days a week of near-slavery, for room, keep and only nominal wages. Plus sexual duties for the Master if demanded. Don't be kidded - the books and films were correct. My mother told me.

But mam herself had none of that. Because of her mother's (real or imagined) indisposition, she escaped call-up to work as house-keeper in her own home. This was idyllic in comparison to the lot of many. And now she had a handsome Canadian Airman falling all over her. "Would you like to come and meet mam and dad tomorrow?" she invited.

2003-03-12T14:07:00.000Z

EPISODE ONE - OVERTURE

My dad was born in 1921 in Nova Scotia, Canada, into a large family - five sisters and a brother. When he was still young the family moved to the USA in search of their fortune, and settled in Buffalo, State of New York, which is where he grew up. Like many young men of his generation, he volunteered to fight in WWII, and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force.

He was stationed at an airbase in the north east of England, from whence lady fortune took him to a dance in Darlington one Saturday night, which was where he met my mother. (b 1924). I sense queens and young women had something of a ball during the war years, as Quentin Crisp so richly describes. By "dance" here I'm describing the smoke-filled dens you'll have seen in the b/w movies. Wall-to-wall uniforms and Bette Davis hair-dos. (Respectively, of course.) "Officers' doormats," my mother used to say to me. "Some of them were nowt but officers' doormats."

Here also you have to appreciate the enormity of the social and genetic effect that that war produced. Never before had so much eager fertility been moved around the globe in such quantity. And my mother and her immediate generation had the awesome task of handling it. Makes yer very eyes water at the thought!

But there was a pecking order, a hierarchy, in which the local boys came nowhere, unfortunately. The real prize, glittering in its (often eventually tarnished) promise, was a ring on the finger from a "Yank", an "Aussie", or a Canadian. (Don't think there was a nickname for that latter.)

How come? Because that was a girl's ticket out of the hell which was wartime England - particularly the already-depressed NE, which offered little more than subsistence wages and your husband's early death from coal-related disease in the mines.

My mother was sitting at a table beside the dance-floor, with her friend Celia Newton. Mam had only decided to go along at the last minute, for some reason I forget. "See that Canadian over there, sitting on his own?" Celia nudged mam. "He keeps looking over here..."