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TWO

A photograph shows me playing in sand when I was eighteen months old. Another, a little later, shows me posed in a studio, sitting on a box draped with cloth, holding a toy wooden horse. In the first I was laughing, in the second expressionless, like a doll. And in the second the straps of my dungarees were crossed like reins. I had a puppy I took for walks on a lead and the puppy died. It had fits, ‘distemper’ my mother said. It had not had any injections and my mother said it died because I loved it too much. It was black and white, in patches. I was in black and white in the studio photograph. And there was sand in the great iron boxes by the roadside, mixed with grit for when the roads were icy. It was always black and white, thunder and lightning. My first suit was tweed, ‘salt and pepper’ she called it. The sand was next to the signal box where my father worked. Once he fell from a train, the driver forgetting to slow on the gradient so he could jump off by the box. For weeks his back was bruised. There were stripes on the blazer I wore for school, my hair was brilliantined down. 1 sat on a wall and gave grass to a nibbling goat and took a photograph of the landscape, fields laid out in squares like a board for draughts.

    Sometimes my father took me to work with him. I sat on the cross-bar of the bike, on a tied-on cushion. The tyres crunched on the cinder-track. The bicycle was old and heavy with a green frame and a bell that tinged and sometimes the top flew off and you had to screw it back on. Inside the signal box were the huge levers for moving the signals. My first toy train was clockwork, the engine was green, it was too heavy and always ran off the rails on the curve. There was a tunnel made of tin and the outside was shaped like a green hill. At school we sang ‘There is a green hill far away, without a city wall.’ We stood in rows, the words of the hymn printed in huge letters on a sheet of oilcloth which Miss Senior pointed them with a long stick. Her face was marked in purple, from small-pox in Ireland as a child.

      In Ireland as a child the nun had learned her creed. On a public holiday she stopped me and said ‘You boy, have you been to Mass?’ Then, almost as an afterthought ‘Are you a Catholic?’ And when I answered no she had a false voice and said ‘Isn’t it a fine day today’ for she thought I could be had for a small sin but it turned out I was damned.

    It was outside the sweetshop she spoke to me where I bought the toy gun that took a special reel of paper so the gun went bang and punched a neat round hole in the reel. My first propelling pencil was tin but it seemed like silver it was so bright. I came down early one morning and sat with it in front of the winter fire, reading The Coral Island from Woolworth’s. It had a deep red cover and coloured pictures on shiny paper. And my bare feet were on the bit rug, slips cloth from old suits sewn on a strip of hessian and full of tiny lumps of ash the fire spat out.

    When my father went deaf they gave him a huge hearing aid which said Bell-clear on the front. Constantly he fiddled with the volume control but it never came right. And he asked you to say it again and coughed apologetically, his eyes were bright with pain. My mother’s eyes were like crystal and never changed, not even when she wore glasses or grew old. She wore a wig to keep her head warm and kept her spare wig on a polystyrene head without a face, like a di Chirico. In the school geography room was a contour map of the world, painted green with the mountain ranges raised in mounds of papier maché. The head, the hymn sheet, the map were all in the di Chirico I handled in the art dealer’s flat. It had just ‘been proved’ and was waiting to be shipped to Australia. He kept it behind a door so that if thieves broke in they would think it was worthless. On his walls were fakes, beautifully lit. My face was startled like the nursed in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin when a bullet caught her in the eye and her glasses shattered. That image-caught and magnified by Francis Bacon - is the surprise when an individual life has its peace shattered by the sudden cruelty of chance. For Eisenstein’s nurse it was a stray bullet from one of the Czar’s soldiers, for me it was being taken from the serenity of the streets.   

    My mother did not go out to work; it was still not quite respectable for working class mothers to have a job outside the home though because of the war many did. Our next-door-but-one neighbours, Auntie Nellie and Uncle Arthur, had one child, Joyce, some years older than me. Like her mother Joyce was a delightful person but like her mother in that she was not destined for an easy life. Auntie Nellie was always busy and usually jolly. On Monday washing days I helped her turn the handle of the clanking steel and wood machine called ‘the mangle.’ Water poured from the dripping clothes as round we went and when she tired of mangling Auntie Nellie sat at the black-bosomed piano and thumped out the latest tunes with superb panache.

    Every Friday night she brought home the sheet music of the latest pop song, usually a sentimental ballad about love, Ireland and the old folks at home. The sheet music covers had pastelled around photographs of crooners and the legend ‘as featured by,’ followed by the name of a record company. No-one in the streets had a gramophone and for many years no-one had a car either. Eventually a young single man who lived with his parents bought a pre-war Ford. Black and shiny like a hearse it stood an omen of the changes that were to destroy working class life as I knew it.     

    Television, too, eventually arrived. Auntie Nellie was one of the first to afford one as she went out to work. The screen was tiny and the cabinet that housed it brown bakelite. We came back from our annual holiday with my aunt in Great Yarmouth I ran into Auntie Nellie’s and stopped suddenly in front of the tiny screen buzzing with figures darting here and there. Every Saturday morning at eleven o’clock I watched a children’s news programme and occasionally early evening films. The highlight of the week was Gilbert Harding in What’s My Line?

    Auntie Nellie’s house was more truly working class than our’s. They read The People’s Friend, filled in the pools, Uncle Arthur smoked Players and went to the betting shop - referred to lugubriously as ‘the Bookies’ and every year they spent ‘Bankie Week’ in Blackpool. It was always hot for them there, even if the rest of the country had a week’s downpour. We received Balmforths’ cards with messages of eternal sun and the whole family came back with their arms berry-brown, telling hilarious boarding-house stories about breakfast kippers and landladies’ henpecked husbands.

    Uncle Arthur was short, bald and cheerful. An apprentice-trained copper smith he worked for Hudswell Clark’s, which made railway engines for export to foreign parts. Even at the height of the thirties doldrums he earned three pounds a week and thought himself a king. Every night he got off the bus at the end of the street, banging his thigh with a rolled up copy of the Evening Post, wearing grubby overalls which gave off the pungent but friendly smell of engine oil. He told me the story of how before the war, as a young man determined to set the world to rights, he came on a couple fighting in the- street, ‘Knocking seven bells out of each other’ as he put it. Gallantly he waded in to stop them, whereupon they both turned on him with redoubled fury and chased him out of the street.

In the school holidays, Auntie Nellie used to take me on her weekly shopping trips to the city centre. The first thing she did was to buy me half a dozen tubes of sherbet sweets from a shop in the County Arcade. The arcade was paved with brightly coloured mosaic tiles. The glass in the windows was always beautifully clean and the surrounds were of ornately varnished mahogany. The signs above were in gold Gothic script. Recently the arcade has undergone a complete restoration and is almost as it was when it was built in 1901.

    We went to Marks and Spencer’s cafe where I drank milk and ate a large slice of angel cake, my madelaine. Then we visited The Strand, a commercial library for the working-class, where for sixpence you could borrow the latest best-seller in a shiny cellophane-covered jacket. Uncle Arthur was an avid reader and got through half a dozen books a week. Next we visited the market for cheap meat and vegetables, a packet of pegs perhaps and boiled ham for high tea on Sunday.

    There were few toys available in the immediate post-war years but I remember a wooden wheelbarrow I filled with aromatic bars of Fairy soap I trundled round the living-room. My favourite toy was a wooden scooter on which I played for hours every day. When I grew older the wood scooter was replaced by a larger metal version, then by a series of bikes in ascending order of size. I had a teddy bear which had lost most of its fur. One day I saw it disappearing on the back of a dustbin lorry, tied on with a piece of string. I felt I had lost a part of myself for ever.      

    At the end of the streets was a narrow track along which horses pulled drays laden with empty barrels into a cooper’s yard. The huge dray-wheels, spoked and steel-rimmed, bumped and jostled over the pot-holes into the early nineteen fifties. Tragically as soon as they were replaced with lorries, a toddler fell in front of one and died instantly. The streets were lit by gas lamps and at dusk they flickered then flared into molten light as we played beneath their mirrored slanting sides. We chalked hopscotch pitches on the flags and darted round sudden corners playing at hide and seek. Our mothers cleaned and cooked, our fathers in shirt sleeves smoked and read the evening paper. Big brothers and sisters went to the pictures or the chapel youth club. We were poor but not very poor, the very poor lived on the other side of the suspension bridge in Hunslet.

    Our next door neighbours were disliked by everyone. A retired couple with no children - enough in itself to condemn them- who eeked out their pension by loan sharking and by selling groceries out of their living room store cupboard. Although unpopular they tried to avoid open quarrels. Their faces were perpetually sour and I’m sure in an earlier time the old woman would have been burned as a witch. Her husband wore heavily framed spectacles and his main occupation seemed to be emptying tea leaves over the low cement wall which skirted the path in front of Bridgewater Place.

   Then came Aunty Nellie’s house and after her was Mr Sykes, a retired railwayman. Perhaps now he would be thought little mad. All day he sat at a table covered with green oil-cloth, eating ginger biscuits and drinking tea. On the wall was a faded photograph of his wedding day, a curled waxed moustache adorning his upper lip, a carnation in his button-hole, a bowler hat on his head. His wife died within a few months of their marriage so there were no children. Unless it was the depth of winter, his door stood open so he could see everyone who passed by. Many years later I wrote a poem about him, his only memorial. His neighbour was Mrs. Jones, incredibly old with a wrinkled-parchment face. When my grandfather met her he raised his hat. It seemed somehow very appropriate yet utterly strange, a salute to a bygone age.

    The only bomb which fell near our home in the war-years left a huge crater in the road which had been roped off by the ARP. My mother took me past the site on the way to the butcher’s the following morning. 1 must have been between two and three years old. When we got to the butcher’s he was giving every customer’s child a colouring book. Because of the war such items were scarce and I treasured this gift and remember the day I received it. The two memories are indelibly linked - seeing the bomb crater and getting the colouring book-and both are deeply etched into my psyche. The memory of the gift is saturated with a deep feeling of gratitude out of all proportion to the nature of the gift or the circumstances of its giving. I suppose Freud would call if a screen memory covering a more significant event which has been repressed. The bomb-crater, though quite real, came to symbolise some psychic loss in my early life. The gift of the book represented symbolic compensation..Learning and artistic creativity, my children and my two marriages were sufficient to make up for the initial emotional trauma until in my mid-forties -perhaps in a mid-life crisis - these defences partially crumbled. I knew I had to try and fathom the original loss and writing my autobiography was one step to this end.

THREE

Near the streets was a railway cutting where the slow goods trains plied up and down. Next to the bridge which spanned the cutting stood a pair of rusty iron gates secured by a double chain and padlock. Beyond the gates a disused path led to an embankment where in spring hundreds of lupins grew in every hue, threads of pale pink and blue. Because the area was so drab these colourful blooms were like a beacon to a nature I never knew. Until I was an adolescent I thought the black pitted stone of Leeds Town Hall was its natural colour. I think it was this total absence of nature as a child that led me to try and settle in the country as a young poet. Nature may be an inspiration to artists but country people seem equally hostile to both genres. In his study of the Enlightenment Peter Gay criticises the movement’s leading spirits for taking well-equipped libraries to their country hideaways but I don’t blame them. Perhaps Professor Gay should try living among rustics-give me the urban working class any day!

    The coronation of 1953 signalled the end of post-war austerity. The streets were decked with flags and there was a party for the children in the offices at the railway yard. We had endless cakes with red, white and blue icing and the council gave every child a mug with the royal coat-of-arms.

    Television aerials began to appear on chimney-stacks, second-hand cars and motor-bikes stood outside working class houses and inside was a plethora of plastic flowers, plywood cocktail cabinets and cheap gramophones. The designer revolution inspired by the Bauhaus in Germany before the Nazis took over was never absorbed into mainstream English culture. The symmetrical abstractions of Ben Nicholson hung in the Tate but nothing was learned from them. The Age of Anxiety was replaced by the Age of Vulgarity.

    I dreamed of the River Aire but the bridge which spanned it was for motor traffic only. The pedestrian walk-way had been demolished and the only way to cross the river was, to go down a flight   of stone steps and cross a walkway beneath. A voice from afar called me, it was Margaret’s voice, pure and clear as it had been forty years before: I am here, I am waiting. I ran and bounded over the path, kicking the water like diamonds, right and left. And the place I came to was Cockaigne as Elgar knew it, the children were the beautiful poor of Murillo, ragged in dress but bright in visage, were laughing as they played. There was not one I knew but yet I knew them all and the streets were as they had never been, bathed in perpetual celestial light and there were no mothers to call us in and darkness never fell and we played together in the unending twilight.

    I woke from the dream and saw the cold hard pavements of London and a bitter wind blew and in my mouth was dust and ashes. I looked up from the bottom of a cavern and buildings rose on every side into the grey sky and I dived down into the earth where the tunnels were dark as death.

    The dray horses needed a blacksmith and a working forge was still in existence in Hunslet  throughout my childhood. It was large, mysterious and exciting, built at the end of the eighteenth century. The forge was dark except for the red glow of the furnace and sparks from the fiery metal as the smith hammered the iron shoes. The horses stood in silence waiting their turn to be shod. The smith was proud of his craft and had no objection to a crowd of young admirers hovering around the door.

    Opposite the forge was a second-hand shop, the most interesting object I ever saw there was a stereoscopic viewer dating back to the early years of the century. Two paralled views of the seaside, through a lens, showed a three-dimensional picture of Edwardians on a beach, their figures hauntingly alive against a sepia backcloth.

    ‘Three D’ films came as a short-lived attraction at the local cinemas when I was ten. We had to wear special classes with pink cellophane lenses and in rapture we watched huge hypodermic syringes being loaded and lunging towards us.  I’m afraid I found this much more of an attraction than cinema verité, Nouvelle Vague, or any of the intellectual fashions of the cinema I saw as a student.

    Once Uncle Arthur took me to a Hunslet Rugby Union match. All I remember were myriads of black and yellow scarves, churning wooden rattles and the cheering as distant toy figures scurried on to the pitch. When I got to the grammar school it was strictly Rugby Union, a middle and upper class game with different rules. Some of the boys complained but were told to shut up. It was Rugby Union and that was that, it always  was.

    When winter came icicles hung six inches from the scullery window water pipes six feet underneath the pavements froze solid and we made slides polished like parlour furniture over the snowy paths.

    Our mothers scattered ashes on steps and round corners, spoiling the crisp hard-packed snow with harsh cutting clinker. We would stand at the bottom of the big hill and watch buses and lorries desperately try to make it to the top. If the snow was really bad they would cut the route in half to avoid the hill altogether. The fire in the living room would be banked high and the Hobson boys, Michael and Colin, would come round to play Monopoly or swap stamps.

    Sometimes the Australian curate from St. Hilda’s called and drank tea, stretching and warming his enormous thighs in the red glow of the fire. One of his jobs was to visit the unholy who never attended church. The parish priest, Father Mulcock, went to the homes of the holy old ladies who served tea in china cups and offered sixpenny iced fondants on willow-pattern plates. The working-class had its own aristocracy and these pious old ladies were equivalent to the bridge-playing dowagers of the upper class. White-collar workers like my father were considered a cut above skilled craftsmen like Uncle Arthur.

    All the houses belonged to the railway but there was a right of passing on tenancies which indicated that at some time at least one family member had been a railwayman. Auntie Nellie had inherited her house from her father and when he was an old man he came to stay with them until he died. He was thin and wizened with the hand of death already on his shoulder. His head seemed hardly more a skull, thinly covered with a parchment of taut skin. He would sit on the couch and stare ahead, dwelling on a sad life. His wife had deserted him when he was still a young man and left Nellie, hardly more than a child herself, to bring up the family and run the home. The old man’s bony fingers would grasp the stem of his worn pipe, his voice in measured tones relating fragments of a long-gone life. He wore the heavy brass chain of his pocket watch across his waistcoat - or ‘weskit’ as he called it. The watch was so worn it seemed moulded to the shape of his gnarled fingers. It had Roman numerals and thin gold hands. As death grew close he seemed to consult it more and more. One winter he fell ill with pneumonia and lay gasping in the small bedroom. A few hours later there was a thunderous knocking at the door. Auntie Nellie rushed in, tears streaming down her face, her whole body shaking with grief at her father’s passing away. ‘He just stopped breathing’, she said again and again. She borrowed a white sheet from my mother to lay him out. It was the first death I knew.

    Auntie Nellie’s own death and Uncle Arthur’s came early. The Hunslet Engine Company suddenly failed and for the first time in his life Uncle Arthur found himself out of work. He took a job as an unskilled labourer at the sewage works at a fraction of his old wage. The Maypole where Auntie Nellie worked closed down and she could find nothing else to do. Their standard of living dropped painfully and to save money Auntie Nellie did the weekly shopping at one of the first supermarkets to open in Leeds. One day, after struggling home with a heavy load, she collapsed behind the door. She had had a stroke.

    Uncle Arthur tried to nurse her at home. Desperately he went to the forerunner of the DSS but there was no money for nursing a patient at home. She went into hospital crying pitifully, the working class fear of being ill away from home taking her over utterly. Joyce rang to tell my mother on a Sunday afternoon I shall never forget. I was at Michael Holmes’ flat, talking, interminably as we always talked, about art and life. I asked Holmes to drive me to the hospital, which was many miles away. The wards there were makeshift wooden prefabs, the nurses over-worked and short-tempered. Fortunately I arrived, at the beginning of the two hour visiting period.

    Auntie Nellie’s relatives, for the most part embarrassed and tongue-tied shuffled in for fifteen minutes each as only two visitors were allowed for each patient. Auntie Nellie could not speak for her tears, she clasped my hands and would not let go. She was grieving for her own death and I could not console her. A week later she was dead.

    Uncle Arthur lived on for a few listless years. When the streets were demolished he moved to a terrace house opposite St. Hilda’s Church and nearer to Joyce. He took a part-time job as a dinner-supervisor at a nearby comprehensive. When he fell ill he died undergoing routine tests, his illness undiagnosed.

    My first venture into the outside world was when I was four and my mother took me to Hunslet Lane School, insisting that I should start a year earlier than the prescribed age. I can still remember the terrifying wave of noise from the shouting children as we approached the teeming yard edged with thick iron bars. My mother was told to stay with me for a couple of hours to see how I settled in, which turned out to be not at all. At playtime we were offered bread and jam sandwiches which for some reason upset me deeply. I burst into tears and refused to stop and the headmistress wisely decided I should be sent home until was five. I can still feel the exhilaration which swept over me as I left the school and walked with my mother into the still cold sunny morning of recaptured freedom.

    Near Hunslet Lane School was the Burroughs Welcome, a free mother and baby clinic provided by the Burroughs Pharmaceutical Company. The front door was painted pink and inside were beautifully polished linoleum floors. There was a huge wicker basket weighing scale and a glass case with sample feeding bottles. I can’t remember what happened to me when I was taken there but certainly the events must have been pleasant for I remember the pleasant aura with which visits there were surrounded. Near the Welcome was a pub with tinted glass windows, each of which had a legend saloon or tap room engraved and in front of each was a brass bar polished till it shone like gold.

    There was a resonance and a reality in physical objects when I was a child that seems to have all but disappeared in our age of plastic and computers. When you travelled on a bus you were handed a stiff deep dyed magenta ticket which the conductor pulled from a thick wad spiked to a heaver wooden frame Every ticket had to be clipped in a silver ticket punch which was strapped to the conductor’s waist by a leather belt. The punch gave a beautifully musical ping when a ticket was clipped, so different from to-day when conductors are no more and drivers issue thin strips of white tickets through an electronic machine from behind a toughened glass protective screen.

    Our family was not very close. My parents got on well enough with each other but there never seemed any deep or passionate feelings between them. My father was verbally assertive but ultimately passive. Perhaps because his family was more prosperous than him there was always an aura of could have done better about his life. He neither drank nor smoked which, coupled with his white collar job, gave him an aura of respectability. He wore heavy suits and a grey hat which he would put on even if he went twenty yards to post a letter. He was certainly not someone I could ever closely identify with. He was, as they say, too set in his ways and became even more so with middle and old age. As a young man he had read Bertrand Russell but I can never remember him reading anything more elevating than the evening paper. When he grew old and ill I felt very sorry for him and tried to get closer to him but it was no use. He was not really interested in anything or anyone very much and his deafness cut him off from whatever little joy in the world he had ever possessed. I was never afraid of him and always felt deep affection for him but we were never really close.

    On Sundays we went for walks down the Black Road and the Red Road. The Black Road was asphalted but petered out into nowhere, the Red Road was gravel and joined the Black Road to Knowsthorpe (pronounced Nostrop) where the Hall had given shelter to the Victorian artist Atkinson Grimshaw, whose views of city centre streets of Leeds replete with hansom cabs of Leeds still fill the better kind of Christmas card. Tangles of white weed covered the rusty railways on the Red Road. Inside the white cups scurried innumerable black ants. At the bottom of the Red Road was a Cooper’s Yard where thousands of steel barrels were stacked. The road twisted round a blind corner where high crumbling walls followed the curve and there was a road hedged on both sides which ended at a level crossing over a single-track railway. Beyond this point we never went.

    I have a memory of distant houses and a waterworks. Eventually the railway line was closed, the track pulled up and the sleepers taken away. So we could walk between the steep banks, following the meandering track and trying to move the signals standing like steel sentinels. The levers for points were huge and rusted. All my childhood there were abandoned railways, one in Hunwick, my mother’s home village in Durham, another in Middleton (Leeds) which has now been restored as a railway museum. But these restorations leave no room for the imagination. Let the railways, rust away slowly with their weed covered tracks and lonely, lofty signals. Auden was right, abandoned workings, ‘obsolete pieces of beautiful machinery’ are an education in themselves. When I was older I went for a holiday to Cornwall and saw the abandoned tin mines, grey ghosts in the heat of the day, stone teeth in the mouth of a dead dragon.

    Once Joyce was playing on the hill when she heard a pitiful whining from underground. She pulled away the soil and found two tiny puppies that had been buried alive. One was already dead but the other still was breathing. She carried the tiny black and white puppy home and warmed it in a blanket in front of the fire. It was so small she was not even sure it was a dog at all! And so Nigger came into the family. He was a family pet for many years accompanying me to East End Park on hot summer afternoons and running happily through the paddling pool. One day he got into a fight with a bull dog. Some burly labourers tried to pull the bull dog off Nigger but in vain. The vet came every day to dress his wound but in the end he had to be put down. Auntie Nellie wrapped the dead dog in a blanket and asked a furnace-man to cremate him. When Joyce came home from school Nigger was gone for ever. She was inconsolable.

    The only wild life I can recall were the brown sparrows and the slate-grey pigeons with their piercing eyes and machine-like pecking. We threw crumbs and the cobbles in front of the house for birds to swoop and strut. No zoos, foxes or swooping  eagles. Crude line drawings in well-thumbed early readers of smiling elephants curling their trunks round trees and snaffling coconut leaves: ‘Worlds we Explore’ books one to four. But there was only one reality, people and things, no middle ground of nature. A few trees in the park, some stunted grass but nothing that could assert itself as a separate otherness, just man and what man had made. Nature never came into it.

    St. Hilda’s on a Sunday rang bells, or rather one single bell, monotonously and aggressively. It got on everyone’s nerves and few responded to its call. The church is still there, black, locked up with heavy metal mesh over the windows. Untenanted. If that was the dullest part of my childhood the noisiest most jangly and colourful was the potman’s weekly visit. He had a huge wagon pulled by a single horse and the wagon was loaded with kitchen wares of every kind. When the wagon swung off the main road onto the cobbled street all the pots and pans, jiggled and jangled and banged against each other but nothing ever seemed to break. Pint pots on hooks, frying pans on racks, stacks of dinner plates in willow-pattern, milk jugs and teaspoons, saucepans and gravy-boats in a huge expanse of glaze and glass. The sweating horse with its finery of leather and brass, the potman with his money-bag round his waist and his roaring voice ‘Fine pots, best pans.’

    Slowly my world widened. There was a trip to York with the cubs and Father Trigear sweating and bad tempered. He miscalculated the cost by three hapence and when the trip was over came round to everyone to collect his extra money. I had only a hapenny, some had nothing, a few smug ones handed over the full amount, I felt humiliated and furious. I never went to the cubs again or to St. Hilda’s with its repellent smell of intense from swaying censers and credal intonations in nasal sing-song. Only in middle-age, reading Rahner and Tillich did religion come to have an intellectual content as well as an emotional shape. I wonder now about Father Trigear and Father Mulcock, did they really believe their mutterings and their genuflections   had any spiritual resonance?    

    When, in my early teens, I was invited to a Quaker Meeling House I found at least some sense of an intelligent faith but it was very middle-class, solicitors, doctors, lecturers, perhaps more humanist than Christian but it was at least something I could respond to. I remember long passionate discussions on the nature of the inner light and - most strangely - an even more heated argument on the sexual symbolism of Blake. A middle-aged couple, Frank and Barbara Aynsley-Smith invited me to their home every week. Frank was an official in the Bank of England. Barbara had a degree in Administration and lectured for the WEA. Their son was away at public school. It would be easy to caricature their pacifism and their earnestness. But they were warm and sensitive, if a little chaotic. Frank introduced me to Jung and Barbara lent me books of modern poetry. They re-painted their house in weird, garish colours. They took me to see the film ‘Ice Cold in Alex’ – strangely, for pacifists, as it was a war film. On the way back Frank asked me whether I thought he should buy a television and, if he did, should he dip into savings or go into debt with this new fangled hire-purchase. I was astonished and flattered that my advice should be so earnestly sought after.

    When their son was away at school they took in a lodger, a third world student reading theology at Leeds. The girl went to work at Butlins’ Holiday Camp in the long vacation and came back with shocking stories of promiscuous red-coats and drunken goings-on. Barbara was outraged and wrote to the Anglican chaplain of the Camp who denied everything. Barbara, even more furious, proposed writing to his Bishop but my working-class back ground gave me more of a sense of perspective in these matters and I told Barbara to let it be. Eventually she acquiesced but I shall never forget her eyes shining with Victorian evangelical passion as she muttered from between clenched teeth ‘Really, it’s no more than an organised brothel.

FOUR

The anticipation of Christmas was like a great wave gathering force. As soon as bonfire night was over we counted the weeks and then the days to the day. We made a list of what we wanted and gave them, pruned down, to our mothers. Usually we got most of what we asked for - one special toy, perhaps a bike, some comic annuals, a couple of games and a selection of sweets and chocolates. When it got to Christmas Eve the level of excitement became unbearable. I went to bed but I just couldnt fall asleep, I counted sheep into the thousands but all I was conscious of was being unable to sleep. My parents had to stay up until well after midnight to fill the neatly ironed pillow case draped over the bottom rail of my bed. When I woke it was usually between three and four am, I felt quite sick with anticipation. I switched the light on and dragged the heavy pillow case so I could rummage through it sitting up in bed. I ripped open and threw aside the crinkly wrapping paper in my rush to see what was inside. When I had laid everything out I would go through the presents again and again in an orgy of pleasure.

    There would be stamps to fill gaps in my collection, Rupert annual, toys and games. At the bottom of the pillow case was a selection of nuts, an apple and an orange. What I always enjoyed most was the smoker’s kit, fat chocolate cigars filled with cream, sweet cigarettes and a liquorice pipe.

    As soon as it was breakfast time I would take my presents to show Auntie Nellie and then the children would begin to congregate at the corner of the street to comparegifts. Even the poorest children would have something reasonable to show, even if it was just a new suit. Occasionally I received presents of clothing from well-meaning relatives. I despised such things whole-heartedly and detested the givers for their utter lack of imagination! 

    Auntie Nellie always had a lot of visitors at Christmas. Her small living room would be crowded with upwards of thirty people. Adults and children played the same games together, Musical Chairs, Postman’s Knock, Penny-a-horse Newmarket. Everyone had a wonderful time in the smokey room with streamers from corner to corner and a tray of port wine on the table. Usually Auntie Nellie would have over two hundred cards as a tribute to her popularity.

    My favourite radio programme was Wilfred Pickles’ ‘Have A Go.’ Pickles’ Yorkshire accent and bonhomie was something all the working class could understand and respond to. Many years later I read that when he visited a town for his programme he was always met by the mayor and driven in the civic Rolls to the town hall. It seemed only just that he should be greeted at least like minor royalty.

    When I was eleven I had my photograph taken with Pickles when he opened a careers exhibition in Leeds Art Gallery. There was a working model of a building site, complete with JCB’s and to provide what would now be called a photo opportunity he crouched over an excavator and made it work, saying “Sithee, lads, let’s mek it pick muck ‘oop” with a broad grin. The resulting photographs were published in both local evening papers. For many years I carried round the cut-outs in my wallet.

    During the year we couldn’t afford pop but at Christmas my mother gave me enough money to buy a large bottle of every variety. Up Easy Road was a small soft drinks manufacturer, who at the front of his tiny factory had a retail shop. With mounting excitement I would choose one bottle and then another and another from the crates dumped around the makeshift counter. My favourite was Portello, a fruity fizzy vintage, black in colour and ornately labeled in purple and green.

    The only other religious festival we celebrated was Whitsun, when new clothes for the children were bought, known as ‘Whitsies.’ On Whit Sunday morning the children would put on their new outfits and walk around the streets, knocking hopefully on neighbours’ doors in the hope of receiving a few pennies. My mother said it was a custom she hadn’t grown up with and wouldn’t let me take part in. Indeed I have tried to find mention of it in the sociology of the working class without success. Perhaps it was a custom unique toLeeds!

    Two or three times a year the feast, as we called the fair, would come to Hunslet Moor. It was a long way from the streets but well worth the effort. You could hear it from far off, a distant roar of engines and the crowd noisily having fun. There were huge garishly-painted roundabouts and dodgems, giant wheels circling sickeningly upwards, ghost houses with wailing mechanical banshees, coconut shys with coconuts surely glued to their bases, snapping rifle ranges with their pocked metal targets and stands selling crinkly brandy-snap and burgeoning candy floss, sickly sugar.

    You rolled pennies down wooden chutes and if they landed in a square you had two or three pennies back. In the middle of the squared oilcloth was pinned a large green pound note but I never knew of anyone winning more than a few pence. Everything was very expensive, a couple of shillings - a lot of money forty years ago - could be spent in half an hour and so most of the time we spent walking round, watching the young couples with big wages to spend, blowing in their pay packets on ride after ride on the wurlitzer which seemed to defy the laws of gravity as it hurled passengers in a gyrating spiral of perpetual motion. On the way home from the feast some few carried tiny goldfish bowls or cheap souvenirs but all had empty pockets. We envied the rough families who spent their lives touring and whose children could have all the free rides their hearts desired.

    When the six weeks summer holiday came we always spent a fortnight with Uncle Bill and Auntie Edna at Gorleston-on-sea, near Great Yarmouth. Because they were relations it meant we could stay free, our only expenses being fares and spending money. The day before we went my mother packed two enormous suitcases. It was a glorious day-long journey by train from Leeds City Station. At that time there were two main-line stations in Leeds, City being as beautiful as Central was ugly. The latter was demolished to make way for a new post office sorting office in the Brutalist style of piled-up concrete slabs.

    City Station was built in the thirties with a splendid central concourse high and full of light. It was quite the most beautiful station I have ever seen. I say was because British Rail fumed the main concourse into a car park and then abandoned it. Water pours in through cracks in the roof, unswept rubbish joining the pools of stagnant water I have never anywhere witnessed so callous and calculated an act of architectural desecration. It is only because the Queens Hotel abuts the concourse, making actual demolition impossible, that it remains possible to view even the crumbling remains. My mother would make delicious tomato sandwiches, exquisitely salted and peppered, together with hard-boiled eggs and a flask of tea to sustain us on the seven hour journey. We always tried to get a compartment to ourselves but always failed as we travelled at the height of the holiday season. Over the seats were pre-war photographs of Yorkshire coastal resorts in sepia tones, rather like the illustrations of H.V.Morton’s timeless travelogues.

    I knew when we were approaching Yarmouth when the train began to pass abandoned wind-mills scattered against a   backcloth of grey mud-flats and circling screeching gulls. In the distance was the blue blur of the sea and the air was tinged with the smell of ozone. Great Yarmouth station was small but always exciting, stacks of holiday luggage exuded up against wooden boxes stamped ‘Yarmouth Bloaters’ and the whole place exuded had a vague fishy smell. Auntie Edna and Uncle Bill were always there to meet us with their daughter, Christine. As Uncle Bill was a bus driver we all got virtually free travel. He would smile at the conductor, hand him a two shilling piece and then get most of it back in small change, together with a long reel of tickets!

The buses were pale blue with such exciting destinations as Yarmouth Beach, Seafront and - best of all - Pleasure Beach.

    Auntie Edna and Uncle Bill rented a corporation pre-fab on a small estate in Gorleston-on-sea. It was a bungalow, full of light and air and with a garden on three sides. In term time Auntie Edna worked as a school dinner lady so in the holidays she was at home.

    When we woke up it was always to a haze of light and the green dazzle of the garden. By nine at the latest we would be on our way to the beach bus, carrying buckets and spades and a giant pink beach ball you had to blow up every day. When you hit it there was a resounding thwack and once my father had to pay sixpence to an old fisherman to rescue it when it floated out to sea.

    We hired two deck chairs and my parents sat and sunbathed while I built castles and dug channels from the sea to fill a moat around them. I bought tiny union jacks and stuck them on the ramparts and as the tide came in I watched my castles crumble. Once a day I was allowed a ride the jerking donkeys that trotted along the sea front. I bought enormous cornets piled high with three-coloured ice cream. My parents had an ancient Brownie camera and took snaps of me playing and paddling in the often rather cold water or sailing my toy boat in the small pool built against the wall.

    There was a cement breakwater jutting into the sea, its sides verdant with green weed. Stinging jelly fish floated in the shallow water at its side. When I was older I joined the library as a holiday reader and made my way through dozens of yellow-jacketed Gollancz thrillers by Sidney Horler with titles like Needles of Death. In the evenings we would play cards and listen to the radio, which had a marine band on which you could listen to the fishing boats trawling the inshore waters. When I went to bed I fell asleep listening to the murmur of adult voices and dreamed of days to come on the burning sands watching the shimmering glimmering waters.

    We always went once to the theatre in Great Yarmouth to see a variety show which would have a famous radio star at the top of the bill. My favourite was Peter Brough the ventriloquist with his doll, Archie Andrews. At home I listened to his weekly comedy programme, ‘Educating Archie’ and seeing them in the flesh  counted as a great treat. On one occasion I volunteered to go on the stage to be swung round by a roller-skating virtuoso. I was immensely excited as I stood in the wings waiting for my turn. But the act ended abruptly with a volunteers trousers falling down. I felt cheated as I was hustled off the stage and propelled back into the audience as the curtain finally went down.

FIVE

On the other side of the main road lay an area of waste ground known as the hollas. It would be ingenious to think the word was a corruption of the hollows for this would certainly fit the assortment of lumps and hillocks where once had stood a dozen streets like our own. Rubble from the demolished houses had been used to fill in the cellars. Grass, weeds and occasional flowers grew. We made grottoes of small stones and flowers, an offering perhaps to the memory of the forgotten thousands who had been born, lived and died there. The streets were still laid out in cobbled rows, door- steps and window sills jutted out of the earth at crazy angles and there were sudden drops for no apparent reason. In one corner of the area a cement works had been built. A strange funnelled tower rose up, ribbed with a steel frame in which huge metal buckets rotated in ceaseless motion. No-one ever seemed to be there to operate the plant but occasionally a ready mix concrete lorry with its huge churning belly would drive in to be re-filled then roar off.

    A disused road went right through the hollas and then on between long abandoned factories which skirted the river bank. On the ground floor of a warehouse were stored sacks of lime which spilled their acid whiteness into the echoing girdered dark.

    On the other side of the disused road, beyond a tall fence, was a storage depot for massive underground electric cables which lay coiled on huge wooden reels like giant cotton bobbins, bleached by the wind and the rain. An occasional passer-by would stop for a moment to watch our games, sometimes shouting a comment but then pass on, abruptly, impelled by some alien, adult need. Once in a while a mother would come, searching for a too long absent child or wanting an errand run. There were no handy corner shops the nearest was ten minutes away, over a busy main road then up a short, steep cobbled hill, up which no vehicle could ever have climbed.

    The shops at the top of the hill were washed out, tired of waiting for customers who rarely came and, when they did, had little to spend. At one end of the row was a cobbler, a strange man with flashing eyes who hid nails under his tongue and spat them at the shiny newly-cut leather and brilliantly tapped an oval shoe sole into place.

    The newsagent’s shop harboured a coughing hunch-back and his asthmatic family. Coloured balls and jig saw puzzles in sun-faded boxes lay in disarray in the window. By the door tattered magazines were clipped to a wooden pole, their edges frayed like curled paper fingers. Inside the shop even at midday it was dark but a naked bulb  pooled some light over the stained brown counter. Shelves were filled with old shoe boxes packed with string balls, sealing wax and shoe-white. On the counter lay the week’s comics - Dandy and Beano with their red, white and blue covers, football papers and women’s romances.

    Twice a month sixty-four page, double-columned novelettes of Sexton Blake came out at tuppence and I bought every one and devoured it at a sitting. Millions must have been printed but never, anywhere since have I found one. In a fridge the old man made penny ice lollies in red, green and orange like icy traffic lights and we walked into the drab streets licking their tangy coldness. At the greengrocers the wares were equally tatty, the fruit seemed always spoiled, the vegetables mildewed. When my grandmother was dying I was sent to the back door of the shop when it was closed to buy a lemon to keep her lips moist.

    There was Cannan’s the bakers where they baked their own bread and sold it at 6d. a loaf, the government regulated price. The boy there was my friend. He was lucky because he could eat all the buns and cakes he wanted. His father told me how every Friday a coalman, his face and hands soot-black, would come in and spill his wages                from a grimed manilla envelope onto the counter. He would count out three pounds in notes and coins and say brusquely, ‘Mek us up that in cream ceks, Jack.’ In those days three pounds would represent a very considerable portion of a working man’s wage. No one had heard of cholesterol. Even cigarettes were somehow more real, brown shreds of tobacco in thick papers, enclosed in those immortal packets Players with the bearded seaman on a background of the fleet at Scopa Flow, Capstan in blue or brown with a real capstan in the foreground, slightly more exotic Three Castles with barrels of rum stacked on a quayside and the ultimate luxury, Wills’ Passing Clouds, made in an oval shape with Turkish instead of Virginia tobacco. The poor would smoke the lowly Woodbine, the very poor Turf, which could be bought in fives and had pictures of race horses on the back which we could cut out and swap. The real glory of cigarette cards had, alas, gone with the outbreak of the war. When I was a student I smoked Balkan Sobranie cigarettes. They were black with gold tips and sold in boxes of twelve. Later I took to a pipe and smoked Sobranie tobacco, which I still do. Real tobacconists have all but disappeared, but I recently found one in York which still sells a huge range of tobacco from heavy glass jars weighed out on a pair of brass scales.

    Behind the shops lay rows of better houses, through terraces with bathrooms and tiny prim front gardens bordered by insidious privet hedges, decked with myriads of leaves, the tears of an excluded nature. The streets ended where a railway embankment carried a single line to the goods yard. A narrow brick-lined ginnel burrowed underneath to give access to Easy Road with its array of more prosperous shops which had strident jangling bells and gleaming brass rails for bananas and baskets of fruit lined with red and green tissue paper. These were the shops that boasted registered customers, our mothers who each week queued for the meagre war-time allowance of meat, eggs and sweets. There was a chemist with two huge clear vessels of coloured liquid, red and green, in the window. At the turn of the road was the Easy Road cinema. The films they showed were of appalling badness, cynically and cheaply made in Hollywood or Ealing to exploit working-class taste. The only film I ever remember enjoying was Easter Parade - it had an ebullience which for me it still possess. I learned the words of the songs from Auntie Nellie’s sheet music and I still remembered them well enough to sing them to my own children thirty years later.

    No doubt the cinema was very profitable for its owners. It was always cold, the decorations peeled from the walls and the badly-paid staff vented their frustrations on the children who paid half price. It cost sixpence to go in the back stalls but down in Hunslet you could sit on a coconut mat for tuppence. The plush town-centre cinemas I never entered until my teens when, with the advent of television, they cut their prices and became suddenly affordable.

    If it was an A certificate film we had to find an adult to take us in i.e. to hand our entrance money over to the box office. This meant that the cinema foyer was always lined with children watchfully awaiting the advent of single adults, hands hotly clasping worn brown pennies. We always went to the pictures more in winter than in summer, when we would play out all the long hot evenings in the dusty streets.

    Where the road wound up and away from the cinema the shops became even larger. A Co-op with sawdust sprinkled on the floor, opposite the Maypole where Auntie Nellie worked part-time, wearing a crisply-laundered uniform with starched white cap. The walls were covered with glazed tiles painted with bright murals depicting country scenes. There were racks of glass-topped biscuit boxes containing over-sized ginger biscuits with real ginger in them, cream sandwiches with delicious white fillings you could lick off and throw the biscuit away. Rich, dark chocolate biscuit filled a single box in lonely splendour - not even Auntie Nellie could afford those.

    On the shelves behind the counter was Maypole tea, brown, the cheapest grade, for the very poor then, in ascending order, red, green and finally purple label for the better-off. These gradations were all within the working class- with other social groupings I had little or no contact beyond the doctors in their practice in Hunslet, who had telephones on their desks which they used with an awesome familiarity. Beyond these larger shops lay row upon row of back to backs until York Road a major traffic route into the city formed the boundary of Leeds nine.

    If you turned right instead of left at the Easy Road cinema you came to Eastend Park, hardly a couple of acres of worn grass with a central tree-lined avenue where once massive iron gates had hung on tall stone pillars until the war-time need for metal to make guns and bomb-casings had seen them off. Now the pillars stood like ghosts of a pre-war past, where parks were closed at dusk and uniformed keepers kept children off the grass and picked up rubbish with spiked sticks. On one side of the park there had been a half-hearted attempt to cover some small slag-heaps with a thin covering of soil, hopefully planted with saplings.

    The winding paths between the trees were soon dirt tracks round which youths raced their bikes. From the top of the mounds you could watch engines shunting trucks in Nevill Hill depot and look over miles of terrain in which facets of city and country life were curiously intermingled. One reason I like Leeds so much is that - unlike London- it juxtaposes houses with open spaces, factories with open spaces and, on the outskirts open spaces with woods. Further out into the West Riding houses became fewer and the landscape takes on more the effect of a patchwork quilt, green hillsides dotted with the remains of stone cottages abandoned a century ago, fresh streams running over mossy stones. Perhaps I am a city-dweller at heart. When I think of running water I remember the nasal twang of Donald Pears warbling

In a shady nook by a babbling brook

Was the place where I first

Fell in love with you

Pears had a weekly radio programme much beloved of the working class – it vied with Cliff Mitchelmore’s ‘Sunday lunchtime Family Favourites’ for popularity but I must confess I found both boring. I never came alive to music until Bill Haley and the Comets, closely followed by Presley and, best of all, Jerry Lee Lewis. British pop music of the forties and fifties - unlike its American counterpart - had no roots in folk culture, just a synthetic spin-off of American crooning.

    Near East End Park and to one side of Nevill Hill stood a tall concrete tower in the middle of the railway lines. Coal wagons were positioned beneath it and coal poured into them from the tower’s belly. How the tower – perhaps a hundred feet high – was filled remains a mystery. Perhaps there was some primitive conveyor belt hidden inside the structure. When I was a child I could imagine only some giant looming out of the clouds, scooping handfuls of coal and dropping them into the tower’s open top. This same giant I knew well from the advertising posters used by the insurance firm my father worked for, which showed a sinister giant’s hand hovering over the wagons of a goods train steaming through the night.

    Early in the war my father went deaf and sadly the process was irreversible. As a result he lost his reserved status as a railway signalman and, after trying several other jobs including a trainee draughtsman and an apprentice hairdresser, he settled down for many years in the King Street branch of the Parcels and General Insurance Company as their book-keeper. He had his own office and a low-paid female assistant to help him work out the monthly balances from tedious hand-written columns in heavy ledgers. Sometimes he had to go into work on a Saturday morning and he would take me with him as a special treat. I would sit a huge desk covered with what appeared to be highly-polished lino and play on an ancient type writer or explore the dingy attics above the offices where damaged goods salvaged from burnt out warehouses awaited disposal. I remember some strange tea-pots encased in chrome-plating, but every one dented and twisted in a strange way. I eventually found one with only a few scratches which we took home. For years it occupied a large space in the side-board until my mother in exasperation it was threw it away.

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