The Scent of Dried Roses Page 15

  By now, my parents had progressed from badminton to tennis, although Jean still held her racquet as if for badminton, using too much wrist, wielding it like a saucepan, face always set in absolute determination to win. Underneath, the ever-present fear that a sharp gust of wind or a stray ball would knock her wig to one side, leaving her exposed, bald-pated. Jean, with this in mind, was always on guard, for she could imagine nothing worse than being exposed as what she was, the thing that people always – unwittingly – made jokes about over the cherry brandy or bottles of Stingo: chrome-domes, slap-heads, coots.

  In the evenings the main meal would be slightly continental – perhaps paella, or cannelloni, or curry with raisins – and the wine was rosé or Asti Spumante or Liebfraumilch. Then Jeff and I went to bed in monitored chalets, little more than beach huts with beds, Goblin Teasmades and nylon sheets that issued tiny electric shocks. After nightfall, ballroom dancing and novelty competitions – lookalikes, knobbly knees, fancy dress.

  In one photograph, engraved in copperplate ‘A Souvenir of Our Holiday Torbay Chalet Hotel’, my mother, Irene and her husband, Bob, are dressed up in pyjamas and nylon nighties, holding candles, for the theme of ‘Wee Willie Winkie’. A showgirl stands off to the left and Rory Blackwell, a bluecoat, to the right, his face screwed up in a showman’s smirk. A three-piece show-band is in the background in jackets and ties, playing ‘Spanish Fly’ or ‘Que Sera Sera’ or ‘Volare’. Later they will accompany the ritual singsong that ends the evening: ‘Run Rabbit Run’ and ‘Lily of Laguna’ and ‘Hello, Hello, Whose Your Lady Friend’ and ‘Ta Ra Ra Boom De Ay’ and ‘I’ve Got Sixpence’ and ‘Mairzy Dotes’ and ‘How Much is that Doggy in the Window?’. Always the evening will close with ‘Goodnight, Campers’ sung to the tune of ‘Goodnight, Sweetheart’.

  As I study the photographs, I begin, lazily, to intellectualize: it may be that the holiday camps prefigured and reflected, in their tired brightness and choreographed bonhomie, an emerging England, one where community was by agreement rather than instinct, a kind of prearranged herding, and where the insistence on fun, and vitality, and zest drowned out all other appeals to self-reflection and quietude.

  This, I then realize, is a defensive thought, the reflex distancing of a full-grown parvenu, ashamed of the fat boy in the corduroy jacket, plaid wool tie and paisley shirt, doing the conga and the twist and the March of the Mods amid the sparkling ballroom lights.

  Most of the snapshots are of these successive, brash holiday camps, but there are a handful from the family home, purchased by Jack in February 1958, when I was two years old, for £2,100. He had been offered a workman’s cottage behind the shop in Notting Hill for £500, but turned it down as slummy. Instead, there was the house at 31 Rutland Road, next door to Bertha Staple, whose son went dirt-track racing with Norman, Jean’s brother. Billy, Grace and Alan were two streets away, at 4 Rosecroft. Jean, dutiful in daughterhood as in everything else, would visit every day.

  The house that Jean and Jack bought was more or less replicated hundreds of thousands of times over in post-war Britain. It was part of a six-house terrace. There was a coal fire with a back boiler with wooden panelling around it. Plain lino was ready-fitted. French doors at the back led on to a small garden. A wire fence between concrete posts in turn led to the garage, anticipating a car that would not arrive until the mid-1960s. There was a connecting door in the living room to a small kitchen, the doorknobs brown Bakelite. Upstairs, a copy of Grace and Billy’s, two largish bedrooms, maybe ten foot square, one box room, and separate toilet and bathroom.

  Jack and Jean furnished the living room with a maroon velour, cord-effect three-piece suite and put up wallpaper showing cornstalks and wild flowers. There was also flock wallpaper and standing lamps with prissy fringes. The only evidence of the new scientific age that the newspapers claimed they were living through were classic, geometry-driven 1950s scatter cushions, depicting molecular shapes. Upstairs, Jeff and I slept in an army-surplus bunk bed, him on the top, me on the bottom. On the ceiling, night-blue paper dotted with yellow stars at which I would often stare and pretend that I was in the open, looking up at the firmament.

  The photos show a neat rear lawn being dutifully mown by my father while I sweep the path. There were rockeries, and concrete woodland animals, and snapdragons, and mind-your-own-business, and ivy and honeysuckle snaking along wooden trellises. Next door, at Bertha Staple’s, there was a pond with frogs, goldfish and dragonfly. I kept a tortoise for a short while.

  Here I am pedalling a tricycle along the path towards the garage. And here, years later, I pose in my County Grammar School uniform from Abernethies in Greenford, the prize for my sailed-through eleven plus. Around the same time, I stand confronting Jeff; we are caught like two boxers, which is apt, for there has been tension between us ever since Jean arrived home after a three-month absence with a squalling, mutant rival. Sometimes, I wish him dead.

  Out of the fifty or so photographs of this time – the late 1950s and 1960s – only three are colour, all from the fag end of this era, as it shades into the time-burb of the 1970s. Suddenly my past does not look elegant, muted, dignified, but lurid and vulgar. Jack and Jean, Olive and Arthur, stand in front of a bar decorated for Christmas, Olive in a navy blue trouser suit, Jean in a red cable-knit sweater and a miniskirt. Arthur is smoking a Manikin cigarillo. Both Olive and Jean have blue eyeshadow, betokening the 1960s, as does the short, piled-up hair. There is another colour snap of my elder brother, hair down to his shoulders, the beginnings of stubble on his chin. The flock wallpaper has gone now, to be replaced with bright pine veneer and violently purple curtains. The colour of history, the spectrum of England, seems to have suddenly changed, to have become as brassy and vivid as the 3-D shock of a plastic Mattel Viewfinder.

  And this is the story the newspapers told, of a country beginning to emerge from its perpetual Victorian mourning and formality around the time of my birth, and becoming Technicolor, Sensurrounded, free, flippant, classless, guiltless and disco-bright.

  My intellectual twitch recurs: the contours and content of the decade and a half after 1956 have been haggled over ever since, claimed by one faction as a disastrous prolequake, the beginnings of corruption and decadence, and by the other as the awakening of liberty and classlessness.

  But in Southall, in all the horizontal, racing spread of subtopia throughout England, the 1960s was little more than a rumour, indistinguishable from other forms of entertainment. Here, Vietnam or Grosvenor Square or the moonshot was no more, and perhaps slightly less real, than Danger Man or Compact or Our Man Flint, and less significant than a new flavour of crisp. If Jack thought about it at all, he would have been in favour of the bomb rather than Bertrand Russell, the police rather than the protesters, the Americans rather than the Vietcong. Despite lifelong socialism, his reflex was always to support authority. And it was a reflex; any serious moral thought – of which, in a way, there was much – was confined entirely to the private, the intimate, the local. So we did not protest, or grieve for Kennedy, or debate Betty Friedan. We just got on with it/took life as it came/did what we had to do/put up with it/just accepted it. We did not see Blow-Up or Zabriskie Point, but The Swiss Family Robinson and The Sound of Music and Zulu. For Jean and Jack, and the families of the new towns, and creeping green-belt housing estates, and the flat, ubiquitous edge of city developments, the 1960s was not ‘events’ but a sort of vaguely felt process that expressed itself largely through vacuum cleaners, glittering soapsuds, rising wages, Cyril Lord carpets, ever-lengthening holidays and, above all, television.

  The new, framed, packaged, spectral community magnetized people out of the dance halls and pubs and into overlit front rooms with deliberately parted curtains which would display to the street the largeness of their screens, each night, beckoning more like a hearth than their log-effect gas fires. Mr Wall over the road – hose Christian name, hilariously to me and Jeff, was Walter – had the largest, closely followed by the snobby Mrs P
ugh at No. 37, who always wore elbow-length gloves. Acquaintance was no longer through bothersome neighbours, but through Eamonn Andrews, Michael Miles, Millicent Martin, Val Parnell. The cocooning, the particle-by-particle separation of England had been sparked. It would later be flamed, intensified, by, in turns, the car, the telephone, the walkman, the PC and simple fear.

  Families were imperceptibly becoming partial, flyaway; but the life of my family, a cell of a much larger interior commonwealth still bleeding out from the inner cities, stayed firm, if nuclear rather than extended. There was no sense of gathering entropy; we were lulled by a gentle, growing security and confidence, and a decaying of work’s tyranny.

  The pattern of existence was traditional and conservative, a life more accurately reflected in ‘The Gambols’ than Cathy Come Home. Jean was a Daz housewife, a Gibbs SR mum, worried about the cleanliness of clothes and the neatness of home and children. She took pains to be bright and optimistic. She left money matters to Jack, since she considered herself innumerative. She stuck to what she sensed she was good at. With pinny and novelty oven glove, she prepared dinner every day for Jeff and me. We walked home from Lady Margaret Primary School at midday, to be met with skinless sausages, fried luncheon meat, liver sausage, boiled potatoes, bubble and squeak or leftovers from the previous night’s tea.

  Jean did not consider that her function was to hold opinions, or hanker for a larger life. Her particular job – apart from childrearing and hygiene – was to keep the threads of the family together. It was she who would remember birthdays, who would carefully pick a card from Forbuoys in Allenby Road, one with a soft toy or a sunset on the front. The sentimental rhymes were carefully and seriously examined for relevance. The love they spoke of, in copperplate decorated with fluffed clouds, was the solvent for all ills, all disadvantage. This, I imagine, was her great and deepest belief, and, by the ubiquity of these cards, she was not alone in it. The thought that all could be redeemed through love was perhaps the closest thing there was to idealism in the endless dull and practical blur of subtopia, unless you counted the closely related aspiration of ‘niceness’.

  Perhaps she would add a poem of her own, agonizing to get the rhyme and metre right. Her job, her role, was to maintain relationships, to smooth wrinkles and resolve quarrels. There was an almost complete myopia for anything outside the family.

  She went shopping once a day at the Top Shops, where she would ‘pop’ rather than ‘go’. Popping was the fundamental verb of suburban life – you would pop down the shops, pop in for a cup of tea, pop round the corner. Popping tended to be confined to small, informal journeys (despite the fact that to die was customarily simply to ‘pop off’). Jean did not pop when she did her once-weekly ‘big shop’; she simply went, or ‘schlepped’ in a scrap of Yiddish that had found its way into our vocabulary for some reason. She travelled to Bentalls or John Sanders in Ealing Broadway, stores that were filling up with novel objects and materials – Melamine, polythene, polystyrene, Bri-nylon, Terylene, Pyrex, Orlon and Banlon and Dacron, Crimplene and Perspex, Formica, aluminium, thermoplastics, tubular steel.

  Her chores were completed without complaint or resentment, with, in fact, pride. Jean did not consider herself a drudge and never seemed to be sapped of her childlike brio, her slightly taut ‘perkiness’, by the endless round of tasks. The women’s movement – women’s lib – did not register, let alone find a place in domestic conversation. If brought up, it would be left to one of the men to suggest, artfully, that he was thoroughly in favour of bra-burning. And that was as far as it went. Feminism was something ‘out there’, in a larger world which was ruled, and engaged in, by ‘them’, or more accurately, ‘they’. It was ‘they’ who shouldn’t allow this or that, ‘they’ who knew what they were doing (I suppose…), ‘they’ who made a lot of fuss about nothing. ‘They’ were sometimes benevolent and wise, sometimes hectoring and selfish, often stuck up and with no idea what ‘real life’ was about.

  ‘They’, never precisely named or defined, were the people who knew things, who were ‘experts’, who had power and money, who lived in a distant, invisible world that was as unchangeable by people like us as the weather. They held dinner parties, ate in restaurants that had candles in Chianti bottles, went to public schools and ‘knew all the right people’. There was ‘one law for them and one for us’. But by and large, ‘they’ were tolerated and not particularly resented – Good luck to ’em. I’d do the same in their shoes.

  Our England was to the naked eye, if perpetually lowly, slowly getting better. There were the new grammar schools, our local being Greenford County, which, if you were brainy, would see you through to your A-levels and maybe a job as a middle manager or computer programmer at Glaxo or Honeywell or EMI. Unemployment was practically non-existent, and much of London was clean and new, rebuilt from scratch. Rutland Road was as much subrural as suburban, with every house carefully tending its privet and close-cropped front lawn. Crime, though rising, was not a serious concern.

  Jean and Jack occasionally went to see the new wave of films that were meant to tell them about their lives: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top or A Taste of Honey. But the people they saw, the words that were delivered, belonged to a class that was already antiquated and on the verge of extinction – the back to back slum-dwellers of the northern cities or, in Play for Today or Armchair Theatre, the East End of London. To Jack and Jean, the kitchen-sink dramas presented people unrecognizably feral, crude and ‘gritty’.

  In these fictions, there was something conveniently observable and distinct, but the great endless, cultureless, billowing suburbs of the true, emerging England, made by the internal combustion engine and the arterial road – the Southalls, the Hemel Hempsteads, the Dagenhams, Staines, the Sloughs and the Sudburys – were largely ignored, perhaps because they were too vast and amorphous to get a grip on. In truth, the reality and aspiration of England was more likely to find an echo in Fred and Wilma Flintstone, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez, Dick York and Elizabeth Montgomery in Bewitched, than in the terraces of Salford or the tower blocks of Hoxton. Only Galton and Simpson with Hancock and, later, Clement and La Fresnais with The Likely Lads teased out the real, subtopian England – aspirational, uncertain, displaced, ridiculous, perplexed and, above all, with lives increasingly out of focus.

  This England, my England, was no longer held together socially by geography or class, in the way that had been true for Art and Cissy, and Billy and Grace. The great lumps of English life were flying apart. All that held them together now were – apart from TV – clubs, societies, evening classes, community centres, coffee mornings, Tupperware and lingerie parties, Avon ladies, bridge nights, sports centres run by the LCC or Ealing Council. Jean learnt to upholster, to flower-arrange, to practise yoga, to draw, to ‘appreciate’ classical music. Jack taught himself bridge and played competitions with Arthur at municipal halls. Every Sunday, whatever the weather, we went to the new open-air swimming baths at Chiswick, and played park tennis at the courts at Duke’s Meadows next door, leaving for tea at Jean’s, or Olive’s, or Irene’s when it got dark.

  If at any time the ‘high sixties’ that happened on television was to be discussed, it would be at these communal teas, over the cheese footballs, jammie dodgers, silverskin onions, large split tins and Cornish wafers. But any sort of sustained conversation was a rarity, and analysis tended to splutter out after a few exchanges, damped down by lack of hard knowledge. A heart transplant: amazing what they can do now. The moon landing: who’d have thought it? Isn’t it marvellous? The Aberfan disaster: terrible, isn’t it? Yes, but what can you do? But everything serious tended towards the private, and everything else towards a relentless, generalized commitment to frivolity and a gut tolerance: you can do what you like so long as it don’t harm anyone else.

  In the dull, pebble-dashed sandwich between the A4 and the A40, the high sixties hardly touched at all, unless you counted Olive’s daughter, Jilly, perched on the back o
f her boyfriend Tony’s Vespa in black and white chequerboard smock from Biba with Mary Hopkin droopy-dog hair, the Vespa farting its way to the Boathouse in Kew or the Ivy Shop in Richmond or the Hammersmith Palais. They would not, of course, sleep together until marriage.

  The families I watched on our Ekco sixteen-inch black-and-white television, people in cinema and TV dramas, did something strange and, to me, artificial. They picked up a subject or idea, ran with it, twisted and tweaked and manipulated it until some conclusion was squeezed out, some platform for action. But the conversations at Southall were truncated, purely functional. On the occasions they went beyond practicality to the realm of philosophy, it was largely a brief, confused sally with an end bracket of well-rehearsed aphorisms: these things are sent to try us/we live in hope/worse things happen at sea/there’s good and bad in everyone/you take people as you find them/money can’t buy you happiness/might as well look on the bright side/there’s got to be some purpose or else we wouldn’t be here.

  Yet my family and their friends were far from being stupid. My father and his brother swiftly became experts at bridge. Some of their friends were professionals: Johnny Amlot was an architect, his wife, Helen, was a maths teacher, Bob Downhill was a computer designer. But they were not middle class, or even lower middle class; they were New Subtopians. They did not have much use for abstraction, since their inherited instincts for sniffing through life were so much more effective than some sort of vague process which might have robbed them of those lodestones, those gut sensibilities. They had good instincts, Jean and Jack, Helen and John, Irene and Bob. They understood the value of friendship, and home, and family; they did not overvalue freedom or money; and they respected, and trusted, the police, the law and, to a lesser extent, ‘them’. The fact that ‘they’ sent their children away to boarding school, that ‘they’ sometimes got divorced, that ‘they’ drove their children with their own ambition, was thought of with pity as much as outrage. ‘They’ were seen as cold, arrogant, neurotic and, as such, unfortunate.