Scullery
In the scullery, as a teen, I had accidentally slipped on the wet brick floor and blacked out somehow, fainted and came to wondering who or what had done this to me? There were no witnesses at the crime scene this time so it was a miracle that I didn’t get really badly hurt or seriously injured. Convincing my skeptical parents that it actually had happened was a trial all unto itself and made me very aware from then on not to allow it to happen again. The scullery window in the backyards faced each other across a small blue brick-tile square, tilted in the middle to form a gutter sloping downwards toward the half-white-painted wall of the shared brick toilets for the rain to drain into. Each lace curtained window being a vantage point for either viewing or spying on the neighbors. Pairs of houses used a single outdoor commode and shared cleaning duties, likewise. During the spring and summer and long boring school vacations, large green Bluebottles, or horse-flees would get stuck between the windows and lace curtain. This is where we would mangle them to death out of sheer frustration at the incessant buzzing noise of the fretful insects innocently trying to escape imprisonment. Mass extermination was swiftly yet effectively visited with a handy rolled-up newspaper, used like a cosh and thus ensuring a peaceful afternoons yet unbroken windows. Other practical uses, to which our daily supply of newsprint was directed even before waste recycling became so popular, came handily as toilet-paper.
The scullery had an orange-brick stone floor, cold in winter cool in the summer and normally covered with a small rag rug or an even smaller single sparse piece of scrap linoleum which barely covered its naked aspect; a small gas-stove occupying a strategic cosy corner. Maroon concrete would eventually take the place of the orderly brick pattern to make life more pleasant, more hygienic and more modern at ground zero. In the other corner, opposite the gas-stove, approximately where I had slipped on the greasy floor, sat a stone sink eventually replacing a good old-fashioned copper boiler which was where initially all the family’s soiled and dirty clothes were washed by hand. That meant everything and anything washable, including the usual shirts and pants of a busy group of adults, children and babies, humans large and small, as well as sheets and blankets and, in the early days until the advent of Laundromats, the numerous baby diapers glamorously known to one and all as “nappies”. The small narrow white marble-top table which served or functioned as a worktop to prepare food, pie-making, meals and the hot cocoa to go to sleep on, lived nearby. Sometimes to our child-like joy and comfort even warm Ovaltine, ginger nut biscuits and Jacob’s Cream Crackers! One of each biscuit was the normal ration in those thrifty days of economy and sage-like wisdom. Economy ruled the day in all things: food, travel or what little there was of it, to the Co-operative Wholesale Society (everyone had a membership number and ours was 48100) for groceries or to the town market, then, supposedly, at that time the largest in Europe, for fruit and vegetables. This even though we had our own allotment, but we hadn’t gotten to the point yet of growing our own bananas and pineapples. Other trips, apart from to the doctor or to the National Health Service dentist were few and far between. Dr. Craig, a Scotsman, was our local regular National Health Service physician. Occasionally we would go to visit the Leicester City Royal Infirmary for a broken arm or the odd cracked collar bone from too much tree-climbing and, we could often be seen in that pursuit, girls and boys just like little monkeys. The mention of the name Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) was frequently a topic of conversation but unfortunately, at that age with commercial TV fast becoming a permanent feature or fixture, Jane less frequently. We were safe from the urban jungle too, or so we thought, in our little red-brick terraced castle economically and in a very real emotional sense too, secure in the relationship, ownership, of not only real estate property but of more importance than that, a real home.
Outside the small scrubbed scullery in the scrupulously scurrilous blue-tiled cambered backyard public area was the little red-painted wooden boxed-in container, nailed at the sloping brick base of the living-room window onto the wood casement frame for the milkman, who visited us daily, to leave his dairy wares. Often, too, he would leave behind the thin lightweight blue plastic milk-tokens of the Co-operative Wholesale Society, to whom we belonged heart and soul. The curtained living-room window, which faced directly onto the blue-tiled square, was adjacent to the scullery, at right-angles and lay between the backdoor and the passage or ‘entry-way’ or exit common to all 19th century built row houses which divided and separated them. Our common name for this passage was the ‘entry’. This could be either good or bad depending on the shared goodwill and considerate-ness of one’s next-door neighbors, whether noisy teens or invisible yet retired church-mouse-like pensioners. On the outside next to the kitchen wall was usually hung a thermometer or a Barometer to, once again, emphasise the importance of knowing the weather. Sometimes the more voyeuristic of our neighbors would hang a folkloric piece of decorative seaweed, on a rusty nail, known to have a specific reaction to the normally unpredictable nature expected of a humid and wet climate such as our own. The seaweed would behave in accordance to highs and lows depending on atmospheric air pressure (14 pounds per square inch normal atmospheric pressure) incoming squall or depression or even the odd heat-waves of an “Indian Summer” we definitely didn’t expect and yet strangely which did occur on at least two occasions as a weather forecast in the 1950s. Often the seaweed was vindicated more than either the radio or tv predictions could jointly muster. The seaweed was often captured from the sea-shore or collected on the beach as the tide went out, during the two week holiday by holiday makers in the July August “industrial fortnight” when a spontaneous visit to the west coasts of Yarmouth, Cromer and Skegness or the east coast for Llandudno were obligatory to get away from the damp and muggy polluted atmosphere of the city. The city air was notoriously bad in the 1950s before the advent of pollution control came swiftly in about 1972 when new county boundaries were created. Our own adventures were more oriented toward the Bristol Channel, on the South Wales coast side as that’s where our origins spoke to us, where our roots sprang from in the coalmining villages of the Valleys (The Rhondda). Interestingly, it was never adequately explained to us as children why we had to have a Cuckoo clock in the living room by the doorway leading to the bedroom stairs, which worked sporadically if anybody bothered to wind it up. Perhaps, and it’s a possibility, that it was the subliminal thought of Switzerland and the belief that one day we would escape our common destiny of a damp and unhealthy climate. It seemed a strange anomaly in the world of local identity and provincial working class values where the street you lived on was probably the most ambitious you could ever get in terms of where you hailed from and where you might be headed to, and remain free. Seemingly though, there was also a definite yet distinctly ‘foreign’ link to the music we were permitted to listen to, almost hauntingly, of Europe on the radio and TV. The music we heard on occasion when we were allowed to stay up late by strict parents after 9.00pm for example for an especially late drama or detective show or a significant program on the “wireless.” By custom money was not the sole purpose, the ends and means, of this providential habit or existence, nor through the gathering of it (money). Yet it was through and because a lack of money’s common availability and the ever constant need to improvise and to be thrifty as a matter of habit, that we were naturally resourceful. It was not because a feast and famine, boom and bust cycle existed. Very early on we learnt to do without these unnecessary commodities, especially in the matter of luxuries such as bed sheets, although we had army blankets and eventually had sheets. Perhaps this was related to our good fortune, prosperity and good habits. We supposed that everybody was in the same boat due to the war and that everybody had to go without. Also, it was a condition inherited by the mentality of war-time survival to be thrifty.
An early memory was of the garden where we kept all our rabbits and chickens.
One day when I was about two or three years old, at any rate very young to be mischievous, I managed to slip the latches on the wooden gates especially built by my carpenter father specifically to keep out murders, marauders and foxes, thereby letting them all go free.
(All of these thoughts because of the rain . . . The busy streets of Leicester where we grew up and knew the simple warmth of family life especially in the rain.)
Simplicity now seems so near and yet at the same time, a century away. The radio and then later the TV. invaded our hearts and minds with such endearing titles as: “The Archers: An everyday story of Country Folk” “Mrs. Dales Diary” “Children’s Hour” “Down Your Way” (with host Brian Johnston) “In Town Tonight” and “Dick Barton, Special Agent” All special in their own inimical way, a word I didn’t even know existed until much later and then only after getting a formal education. And for a long time afterwards when even these glorious golden days of childhood had ended but were never forgotten, even for a single day.
Actually, in a sense, the perennial fact of it raining in the English East Midlands meant that we as dependent children had always to stay home and read, constantly in a state of preparedness of alternative “wet weather” programs. Thus we were forced by the climate and by persistently wet weather to conform to home activities as a family, as so little else by way of choices was available to us, and, given the size of our small establishment, constructively, which we as individuals could do. And that, my friends, is how a writer (this one you happen to be currently reading) began his writing life, in a sense, by reading because of the rain!
Engaging in indoor and outdoor activities as a binary condition is a continuously necessary agenda, induced by the dampness and foggy aspect of the tiny country called England. It is a precondition that living in this country you have to have, must need to have a “wet-weather” program for whatever you choose to do, or have chosen to do for you in life! That also is a precondition to the arts which includes the art of being a writer! Speaking of wet-weather programs: the other end of the spectrum to the Wyggestone Lane-Borstal School locations which is next to where we used to farm our family allotments is the rather well-to-do, well respected, Belvoir Drive and the rather posh and well-dressed citizens of southeast Leicester who inhabited that part of Aylestone Park. The sort of place where the Dr. Craigs have their homes, as well as the rather more conservative members of our Catholic church at St. Edwards, or Leicester City councilors.
In the well-stocked garden there were other interesting things such as the corrugated “Zinc” shed, not to be confused with the “shelter:” a wooden structure with a sloping roof fitted at the back of the whitewashed brick lavatory in back of the blue-tiled square, where the bicycles were locked and kept. At one time to feed the ever present and growing needs of the family we had an allotment too where we grew rhubarb, lettuce, potatoes, carrots, runner beans, and spring onions. This added to the produce from the garden at our little house, as well as the chickens and rabbits where we also grew mint. Behind the “shelter” was the folkloric and beautifully adorned lilac tree, blossoming every year, and fed with the residue of our habit of drinking mugs and pots of tea, the leaves of which fed this innocent-seeming tree.
As the family expanded in size, grew exponentially and the time swiftly passed, so did the technology of the little household which gradually yet inevitably, inexorably changed, from a manual body-heat, coal and gas operated system, to an electric-heating and centralized oil-fired heating to account for my ageing parents and the needs of a progressive smothering modernity to spread its predatory wings on the land and upon both the domestic and economic fronts. Recent comments on this historic change brought a sharp retort from a brother that it wasn’t unknown to wake-up in the morning to frosted and even ice on the inside of the bedroom window panes. The thrifty was still the watchword, though, but the item of importance was the efficient running of the household just like any other business. The coefficient of improvement corresponding to the economic and social factors of change, more or less.
I am convinced that my father traveled a lot in his nocturnal dreams. The belief comes, I suggest, from being a dreamer myself especially in the idea that the voyeur or visionary has a natural propensity to dream which has genetically been passed down. Not far from the house on Lorraine Road that we lived, being quite close to the “Great Central” railway line close to some recreational “playing fields” which yielded an acoustically large amplification of the railways traffic, going to and fro from north to south. Especially in the middle of the night or the quiet evenings before transistor radios and television arrived, and also assuming that we all equally received the same volume of sounds. There were a lot of silences in those days before commercial TV. assumed so much power and became so popular. That meant that all the sounds from the nearby Great Central Railways would clearly carry through the cool evening air as and when they did along and with the beautifully rung bells, when they rang the changes, of the stone medieval “belfry” or bell-tower of Old Aylestone church, St Andrews. The local church, a quarter mile away where our dad had worked in the boiler-room after the war and where we children could go help as volunteers with the cleaning of the churchyard as well as drink hot chocolate straight from a thermos flask while sitting or balancing precariously, even dangerously for our size, on the large yet slightly tilting upright ancient blue-slate gravestones lining the pathway. Where he, my father chose or not to go to in his night-time sorties, wherever he traveled in his past or future, the dreamings, where he went to in his dreams we can only hazard a vague yet half-educated insightful, though reflective, guess. But, for certain, his job as a steam-engine stoker fireman between the wars on the Flying Scotsman in the late nineteen-thirties—a fact not unconnected with his later boiler-room activities in the basement in the old church was one location. Besides these activities, then of course there were the three years stationed in Shanghai in China and four years in India with the British khaki soldiers between 1931 and 1938 before the war. Here I am assuming this fact of dreaming through my own vivid recollections of the silence and sound world, via radio, that we lived through during the 1950s and therefore, unconsciously, was a normal instance of the frugal existence we folks lived. We were fortunate where the enchanting “folkloric entertainment” of train noises were very much a part of this escaping persisting tenacious tendency, an idyllic life which we nomads lived, and suffered, in silence.
The grisly remains of wartime technology such as the gas masks, sometime even still wrapped in the brown greasy film of protective plastic embryo laying around on local waste-land sites, behind ruined buildings, testified to the mostly recent ravages of the late war-time preoccupation with military protective stores and the horrors of humanity’s cruel weapons of mass destruction and the rabid devastation of human conflict.
The Cellar:
The cobbler’s thrifty art on the cellar stairwell consisted in the shape of a three footed cast-iron shoe-horse for mending leather shoes with soles and heels which instrument sat next to the hammers, large carpenter and smaller cobbler with a rounded butt, tacks and nails and the dull gleaming metallic sheen of a Second World War silvery ration tin of chocolate. Below it on the second wooden plank shelf slightly beyond the reach of small children was the space for gloves and shoe cleaning cloths and brushes, tins of “wren” polishes both in black and brown. To the side walls were nails for the hanging of other tools. The machete, for example for splitting wood with its air of sullen malevolent murderously keen-edged violence and the fireman’s axe slung within easy reach. The exquisite wooden rifles carved especially for my older brother and me one white Christmas and the (bloody) blood-thirsty (lust) environment feeding the domestic convenience which consumed the murdered chickens and rabbits. The killing fields of the Cattle Market into which strolling trespassing direction, disturbing arena (not for sissies); we from time to time would casually walk “to and fro” from our home. Purposely on a Saturday when we were very young, as though and as if to remind us of our very existence, accidentally-on-purpose drift during a maiming or a electrocution or a shooting of an animal still are very vivid memories, very bloody and very real.
We had two very special dogs, Sally and Lassie and a small black cat suitably named Sooty who, after she or he disappeared one dark and rainy night, Tabby then showed up on the doorstep. Sometime, perhaps in tandem, we also seemed to have had the inevitable tortoise couple or two, a girl and a boy to watch over us and guide our un-reptilian lives. Unfortunately, but appreciatively, it finally dawned on us we would not live forever!
In the shadow of the brick half-white-washed military-looking out-building toilet or latrine, across the blue-tiled square yard sloping away in the back of the house (the “backyard”) stood a cast- iron mangle. This rusty relic of prewar, pre-laundromat/washing-machine era industrial laundry mechanics was used right up until the mid to late 1950s. Its sole function was for hand-wringing the excess water and dampness out of the washed sheets, blankets and towels as a matter of course: a routine, by turning the wooden handle and pressing the garment, clothing between revolving rubber rollers . Our next-door neighbors’ and their neighbor in turn, also had one too. Here was the white painted outside brick toilet complete with a wooden seat on a raised throne-like dais. As in military barracks we also would always normally have used “Snowcem” for the whitewashing of this not-so-rare out-building, at approximately shoulder height. At least it gave the visitor the right impression of cleanliness if not necessarily of godliness, and hygiene,. Recycled newsprint used instead for toilet paper had been the habit of our household, and universally by most folk, humble or not, ever since the war ended even of visiting cousins and uncles and aunts from Wales. Although this, the receptacle, was where we kept the spare back-door key in case we ever got locked out. It was simply the custom. Having an “inside” toilet was the start of “putting on airs” for us in our little terraced castle.
The beginning of the end for the Lorraine Road. Before this modest achievement we were a rude but simple and honest yet not overly ambitious, people, a family just like anyone else in the neighborhood; the Saffron Lane area was also included in this socialist affair. Now, that was all changed and in its place there was a sense of the ascendancy, as of royalty: the idea of owning an inside loo! But times were rapidly a ’changing’ and we didn’t aim to be at the back of the line, or indeed of any, queue. It affected our disposition to not have to go outside in the dead of winter to use the toilet. We were now irrevocably way ahead and even possibly beyond redemption and spoilt out of all recognition. No more chirping blue and green canaries or smelly Gerbils in the Box Room (which used to be my older sister’s bedroom before she took up nursing) where there now reposed, in minature, a modern equipped bathroom including a portable shower. Hot and cold water elevated us mightily above the hoi-polloi, equal at least and at long last with the Cravens the Rowleys and Marriots, our good but not exactly humble English neighbors. Almost on a par perhaps with old Mrs. (Ida) Cartwight who was in competition, but not directly, only fiscally, with the cooperative wholesale society, who busily ran the steady and lucrative corner grocery store up the street from us on Lorraine road. All the mod-cons (modern conveniences) of the technological trappings that would normally go with this modern addition, including the expensively posh multi-colored cellophane-wrapped rolls of white virgin tissues as toilet-paper (probably imported from Hong Kong).
Struck with the sheer novelty of this maddening change, progress after so much regress, struggle and hard times, barely had we time to think about this turn of good fortune, let alone wonder on reflection. That this was presumably what all the fuss was for, the politicians, both on the right and the left, had warned us about as they glibly or smoothly predicted the new world order of plenty.
Perhaps this was the reason for our sudden discontent. We were suddenly, like adam and eve made aware as children of our own sexuality. Not cats and dogs anymore, but “girls” and “boys”. The troubles then began:”privacy” became an issue and has ever since remained one and a giant hurdle in our mutual discontent.
The greenfly, gently milked by the red-coated black spotted Ladybird, on the freshly coated creosoted fences of the aristocratic Leicestershire County Cricket Club decorating the Black Pad, which joined our district with Grace Road, was the signal that we were now entering into summer. That with the sudden appearance of hoardes of Ladybirds and white Cauliflower butterflies. We would stop on the way home from school to gawk through the knotted holes (which we had punched out) to glimpse the cricket stumps and white-coated Druids on the other side. On Belmont Street, just around the corner was a large house. John Rowley and his older brother Cliff, who went to the Gateway Grammar School (perhaps named for the popular Christian pop-singer Cliff Richards) two brothers who lived with their parents around the corner, and sometimes referred to by their rude children as Ernie and Maud! John and our mutual friend Roy Marriot together attended the Secondary Modern Grammar Establishment known as the Landsdowne Road School for Boys, were as inseparable as most or any street neighbor’s kids could be living in the best and the worst times of the post-war 1950s. What separated us were the grown-ups except when they had to break up our violent moods of juvenile dissention. As the smallest of the group it was usually that trigger which led to these occasional fracas or after-school fights over disagreements about belongings such as origins and accents. We were the foreigners (still) from the ‘outside’. The roads surrounding this idyllic home are remembered as being tree-lined and in the summer months plagued beautifully with House Martins who would joyfully swoop full of life, playfully in the eves until late in the year before abandoning this activity to fly south for the winter to the Mediterranean North Coast of Africa.
At the local Granby Road Primary School we were educated until reaching the magical age of eleven years by Mr. Hurst, Mr. Twizleton (old “Twizletoes”) the headmaster, Miss Jelly and a Miss Green from Canada, another foreigner, with the caretaker Mr. Loach keeping the boilers always hot and steamy. Sometimes, even as a child, I recognized this steamy aspect in particular as fraternizing with certain of the female teaching staff. I still retain a certain frightening memory of a sordid incident (frightening to an 8 year old schoolboy) of a monstrous and infamous-seeming infidelity in the boy’s cloakroom one cold and wet winter’s day.
The school was and still is located on the dangerous Aylestone Road. The Borstal School for Boys on the Wygestone Lane which we passed on our way to and from the family allotments, kept us ever on our respectable, yet honest toes. Looking back from the position of today’s standpoint I think in terms of boxing by association of Rocky Marciano, Freddy Mills or Henry Cooper as the heroes of my father’s world in the 1950s. The association of welsh valley life with the rough and tumble of a coal-mining community’s lust for boxing glory. My dad’s cousin was well known as The Ghost with a Hammer in His Hand (another significant factor in the raging wars between the neighborhood boys, especially those of us gifted with imagination and outrageous short tempers. Jimmy Wilde, who died in the 1960s while running his Fish and Chip shop in Barry in South Wales. Not a romantic place and time, but only imbued from this historical perspective with romantic nostalgic memory.
(Part of the thriftiness in our daily living was comprised in the three- toed cobblers kit kept strategically on a shelf, one of two in the cellar stairwell and the machete which was used for splitting wood, with its violent aspects, or vibrations like the other blood-thirsty chicken and rabbit murders and the occasional accidentally on purpose visits to the Cattle Market to witness the electrocution of animals and the killing machines of our not-so-gentle society, during bouts of childcare from our father.)
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My first car was a 1949 one and half litre pre S-type-jaguar Mark IV, and ever since then at age 17, I have never been happy.
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