The Scent of Dried Roses Read online

  So, in the world of appearances, of processes and events, life in Southall was safe, dull, secure, reassuring, in slow forward motion. We lived enclosed in the dream of our own community. Yet other, half-hidden processes were taking place which we did not mind, or did not notice, a faint almost invisible fog of choice and movement, counterpointed by a sodden centre of ersatz, separation, drifting. The newspapers were blindly full of it, with their hints and headlines of a new age dawning.

  Thus it was said, in roaring feature headlines, that Jeff and I were the New Elizabethans, a unique generation in history. Our minds were to be shaped by Admass, a convocation of television and advertising, and we belonged to a class that even then was being called ‘the endless middle’. Instead of our parents’ wish for security and stability, our desires would be inflamed and our attention span limited by the cheap, glittering world around us. We would, within ourselves, find new instincts as we ingested the new world – ambition, freedom, possibility instead of stoicism and a willing entrapment. We would have opinions. We would count.

  The New Elizabethans – so the newspapers explained – were set quite apart from old stodge of England. We could all be vital, creative, original, sexy! We would own things, and they would be different shapes, made of different materials, than what had gone before, and the sensation of ownership would fulfil us. We would have fun, and time to have fun. We would be clever, with bagsful of qualifications from red-brick universities and white-tile techs. We would make more science, which would free us still more, and make Anything Possible (well, they said you could never get a man on the moon twenty years ago…).

  So the Herald and the Sketch and the Daily Pictorial had it, in ever spreading headlines, crammed between ever larger pictures and ever softer news. The posher papers – which, of course, we did not take – sounded a more doubtful note. The loosening of solid reality. The endless burgeoning of desires. The powerful, ill-defined longing for sensation. The mad scramble to be first under the deferred death sentence of the bomb. A no-tomorrow generation, a no-yesterday generation. A generation too sophisticated for the Bible, but too stupid for Freud, or Heisenberg, or Darwin. A recipe, in short – said the voice of ‘them’, the voice that still entirely populated the airwaves, that was authority – for disaster, for rootless and sullied confusion.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Man is the storytelling animal… He has to go on telling stories, he has to keep making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right’ – Graham Swift, Waterland

  And they, as usual, were wrong. Or perhaps they, as usual, were right. I wish I could tell which it was. I wish I could tell a story, a single narrative, like my father has, instead of this snakepit of narratives that compete, and eclipse each other, then slide mutely back into darkness. For my father, like all the fathers and mothers before the Great Flood that began around 1956, seemed to have a common story, with a beginning and a middle and an end in the right places. The story was a lie, of course, all the stories we tell ourselves are lies, but it was a good lie, a sustaining lie, and, above all, a single and comprehensible lie.

  My life, on the other hand, has been just a thin patchwork of disconnected impressions that seem to disable me since I am not sure which are true. If they are not true, some of them are actually quite bad lies – that is, unsustaining, cruel, self-defeating. But worst of all, none of them ever really comes into focus or takes on permanent shape. I wish for my father’s ballast. I wish for his quiet certainty, his sense of the shape of his own life. But I have only scatterings of impressions that light up the landscape like flares, then disappear again into the great, bubbling unconscious. We have no common story now, to hold them in place. We make it up as we go along, then forget it, and make up something else, because we cannot live without stories.

  My childhood, for instance, is it a story, in which consciousness grows, maturity is achieved, stages are accordingly approached, reached and passed – events that will teach me, wisdom that is passed to me? I do not know. I imagine so, as this is what I have been told, but I cannot even guess at the shape of it for myself, except that it seemed to be happy, more or less, and devoid of obvious cruelty or neglect. In the story I have told myself, my mother is loving, energetic, resourceful and inclined to easy laughter. My father is strong, essentially patient if sometimes tetchy, and always reluctant to praise. Jack believes, like many of his generation, that to praise a child is to spoil it. Yet he seems easy and confirmed in his idea of himself, and kind. In accord with Jack’s memory, there are never arguments between husband and wife, either publicly or privately.

  Beyond these vague, arching principles of which, I suppose, I am fairly sure (and if they are lies, they are lies I have confidence in), there are only scraps. These scraps are like random out-takes from a very, very long film. I hold them up to the light, I examine them. What they tell me is infinitely open to interpretation, but holds my attention nevertheless, because these scraps are the last relics of a time when I imagined myself holy, master of my fate, fitting tightly into a larger story.

  I am in my bedroom in Rutland Road, Southall, facing on to the street. For some reason, I am on the top bunk, which is strange, because I always sleep on the lower bunk, to my infant pique – it seems lower in status than the higher one, from where you can stare at the yellow stars on the ceiling paper and imagine yourself in a spaceship speeding across the void. Jeff is in the bunk below, sleeping. The sun has set and the room is illumined by a too-bright overhead bulb (unlike Grace and Billy, Jean no longer feels the need to economize by installing forty-watt bulbs throughout the house). Outside the bay window, there are a few cars parked in the street – Zephyrs, Anglias, an NSU Prinz – and the glow from the windows opposite – Mr and Mrs Jones, Mrs Van Breda, Mr and Mrs Wall – is reassuring, as if the transmission and reception of our electric lights connect us fundamentally. I can hear the sound of a train, from track which must be at least a mile away. This, too, helps to moor the night into something safe and cocooning. A rag-and-bone man shouts incomprehensibly. Buses clatter at the end of the street, heading east towards London, inscribed with their interim destinations – Perivale, Hanger Lane, Park Royal.

  I am wearing pyjamas made by Ladybird, and decorated with sprigs of green holly. On the floor there is a scattering of toys – a tin piano, a toy soldier, a stuffed bear, Noddy in Fuzzy Felt Toyland, the Magic Robot quiz game. There is a ragged pony on wheels that I call Neddy and ride fanatically for hours, like the possessed boy in The Rocking Horse Winner. There is Richard Scarry’s Best Storybook Ever and Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia. Downstairs there is the murmuring of adult conversation. The view out of the windows is unfocused because, in an attempt to warm the chilly room, my father has nailed sheets of transparent polythene across the struts of windowframes. Every morning they drip with condensation and leave pools on the windowsills, which my mother has to wipe dry with a linen tea towel that has shillelaghs and leaping leprechauns printed on it.

  I am jumping up and down on the mattress of the bed frenetically. I am four or five years old, and not yet tired out by the day. Soon, I know, my mother or father will come from the living room, their tread threatening on the stairs, to remonstrate with me and insist that I sleep, but I am lost in a particular fantasy in which I am Punch and a cushion is Judy. I thump and stamp and shout, and bash the cushion with my fist. Perhaps, although quiet and shy, I am an angry child – much mirth is made of the fact that I sometimes tie my stuffed bear to the bedpost and hit it for minutes on end. I am also inordinately fond of guns, with which I annihilate invisible enemies. There is still a livid scar on my stomach, and scars on my wrists and ankles from the feeding tubes, and a twist to my lip where they sewed it back together. But in every way I am strong and, it seems, normal. Certainly, my energy has not been stifled; I throw myself back and forth, controlled by an imagination that habitually takes possession of me entirely. Junior school teachers would note this absence again and again, in mani
la-enveloped reports, in scholarly resignation: Timothy lives in a little world of his own.

  I imagine myself to be on a trampoline, thinking that if I go high enough I will be able to touch the ceiling, the stars. I know it will be only minutes before my father, stern, will put an end to it all, so I push higher and higher, determined to touch the blue and gold of the paper. Jeffrey stirs underneath, maybe seven years old, but habitually impatient with his younger, disfigured embarrassment of a brother. I jump again, still inches away from the ceiling – it can never be reached – and as I drop, I lose my footing and tumble into the air.

  I sense my flight quite distinctly, as if it were 100 feet rather than maybe six, but I do not feel anything when I hit the sisal carpet, and I am silent for perhaps a few seconds. I raise my hand to my cheek and feel that it is soaking wet. Still, I do not cry. Jeff is awake now and staring at me with a detached curiosity. By this time I realize that something serious is wrong and I begin crying distractedly. Perhaps my parents will not come – Jean’s one child-care book, by Dr Spock, suggests firmly that children should be left alone to cry. But I can hear footsteps thundering up the stairs and shouting. Blood marks the already purple carpet.

  My father and mother run in, my mother first. She picks me up, blood soaking into her blouse. My father picks up the toy soldier on which I have torn open my face, the edge of the soldier’s cymbal having acting like a scalpel, leaving a flap of skin hanging from my cheek. There is no telephone to call an ambulance and no car to drive to hospital. My parents’ shock feeding and multiplying my own, I scream louder still. My father hurries next door to see if Norman Staple is there with his mother; Norman has a car. I can feel no pain, only amazement at the disarray and fear of the grown-ups, which stun me more completely than any physical reaction.

  In the back of Norman Staple’s car, I am wrapped in a tartan travelling rug and my father holds me tight enough to stop me thrashing about. I am in a panic now, a panic that worsens as we arrive at the hospital, when a man in a white coat separates me from my mother and father. Now terrified, I fight back, but a posse of nurses, six in all, hold me in place on a metal gurney, clamping, in turn, my ankles, my chest, my arms, hard against the surface. Someone approaches my face with a needle that reflects beams from the raging lights above and I scream for my mother, but she does not come, and as the stitches go in, I feel the pain, not of the needle, but of something sharper, invisible.

  I am around the same age, perhaps slightly older, and we are taking one of our pre-holiday camp trips, to a farmhouse in Scotland. We stop off first at Arthur and Olive’s council house in Acacia Avenue, Brentford, where they have recently moved from Chiswick. Inside, their house is more modern than ours – Ercol chairs with splayed beech legs, artist’s palette tables, a rod-and-ball sunburst clock. There is a Pacific maiden in the hallway and Tretchikoff’s Green Lady upstairs. In the bathroom, an Ascot water heater and pastel, multicoloured, wide-gauge Venetian blinds. Downstairs in the living room, a picture of a green sea that turns into white horses at the crest. A red soda siphon which is never used rests on the top of a miniature bar in the corner, decorated with sketches of cocktails. There is a ship in a bottle and a polished wood plaque that Jack and Jean gave Arthur and Olive as a souvenir from Tiverton or Swanage. It reads, ‘I may not always be right, but I’m never wrong.’

  Olive and Arthur load Jilly and David into the car in which we are travelling, an Austin Cambridge shooting brake – it seems enormous to me. It is borrowed for the week and there are stickers in the shape of acute triangles on the back window that proclaim visits to Clovelly or Cowes or Folkestone.

  The journey is arduous and boring. Jack drives; Arthur has not passed his test. The rest of us try to fill the hours by singing ‘Ten Green Bottles’, or ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, or ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’. We play games, I-Spy and Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. The car radio plays Semprini, or Mantovani, or the Mike Sammes Singers, scatting blandly. We have to stop from time to time because Jilly becomes nauseous.

  Half-way into the journey and we are driving across flat, endless moors touched by brushes of heather and rough grass. The car is in silence, as we have run out of diversions, and the sky, far larger than in London, is the colour of pencil lead. I stare out of the window at the electricity pylons strung out across the landscape like mechanical giants and thrill at the thought of the mysterious power that thrums down the lines from one tower to the next.

  All of a sudden, it seems, there are two mysterious shapes on the horizon, so outrageously at odds with the surrounding landscape that they must have been placed there by the invading aliens that I have read about in imported copies of Amazing Stories, or Tales of the Unexpected. We draw closer and my eyes widen. Everyone else in the car seems indifferent or asleep. The shapes are clearer now; they are massive globes, metallic, which shine with reflected light. They unnerve me for some reason; they seem sinister. In their shadow, there are vast, rotating silver scoops pointed towards the sky.

  I try to get someone to tell me what this apparition is amid the gorse and faint drumlins, this ridiculous conceit. People yawn, seem uncertain.

  What is that, Jack?

  That? Must be Fylingdales. It’s around here somewhere.

  Oh.

  And it is Fylingdales ballistic missile early warning station, for we are traversing the Yorkshire moors. Arthur informs me that it is a scientific system, for detecting incoming nuclear weapons, ICBMs. My curiosity is fired. How much warning do you get? Where do you go to be safe when the warning comes? What does the warning sound like? Will the bombs come on planes or on rockets? Is it the Germans who have the ‘new clear’ bombs, for I know they are our enemies from the comics I read, Commando and Captain Rock.

  Jean laughs at my concern – such an imagination, that boy! – Arthur and Jack are vague, though, not embarrassed or worried. They are pro-bomb – It’s a deterrent, isn’t it? No one will ever use it. I learn that I have three minutes, and that the Russians have rockets which can reach as far as America, but not to worry because the authorities will make sure that we are safe. They have secret shelters everywhere. Then, it seems, the subject is closed. I turn my head as the domes retreat into the distance, and the radar dishes swing endlessly around, feeling for impulses from space. Eventually, Fylingdales disappears from view entirely, but these shapes are in my head now and I cannot banish them.

  In bed that night, every time I hear a plane pass overhead I hold my breath, for fear that it is carrying an A-bomb or an H-bomb, though I do not know the difference. These nights continue, from time to time, when I return home to Southall, and for years after; somehow the lights in the street and the distant sound of the train and the cry of the rag-and-bone man can no longer protect me. I work out time and again where I can get to in three minutes, and decide that the coal shed at the back of the garden will be safe. But how will we all fit in there? And will the radiation get in through the cracks under the door? Perhaps it will be best, like my father later says, to just go and stand in the street – Get it over with. You won’t know anything. Yes, perhaps that’s best. After all, we go to heaven anyway, as long as we’ve been good, and I have, I have been good, except for when… and that time when…

  For the first time, I am going to the shop where my father works in Notting Hill Gate. It is a winter Saturday. At five in the morning we go to Covent Garden Market, to where my grandfather, Art, also travelled every morning. The market is packed with small, tough, loud men, pushing great hemp sacks of fruit and veg loaded on to porter’s barrows, which people scamper to move out of the way of, since once they have momentum they are hard to stop. The pubs are open, and dinner-jacketed spill-outs from Boodles and the Ritz mix with tattooed, grizzled costers. The impression is of chaos, and the air is stiff with fuck and cunt and fucking cunt. Effing and blinding, my father calls it; he rarely uses any word stronger than ‘ruddy’, at least at home. The smell is alternatively fragrant and foul, of flowers a
nd decay.

  We set off for the shop, the van loaded up. I am too young to do any proper work and so I loaf around, getting under the feet of the other employees. These are Doug and Mick, rougher than my father; they drink too much at the Uxbridge Arms at lunchtime and think that Jack, who is more or less teetotal, is a bit of a snob. Doug takes longer on his deliveries than he should. Jack suspects he is paying special attention to the society tart Janie Jones, who takes an order once a week.

  My father tries to make me do some work, folding and stacking boxes or trimming lettuces, but I am slow and clumsy, and he becomes irritated, feeling that I am showing him up, so he consigns me to the storeroom upstairs, where I listlessly stack cans of tangerine pieces in syrup and processed peas. When he comes in to check that I am doing something useful, he finds me staring pointlessly out of the window into the street. Irritated once more by my sloth, he insists that I come on to the shop floor and help serve the customers. My father is keen that I acquire a work ethic and has offered me a small sum of money, five shillings or so, if I make myself useful.

  Before starting on the task of bagging up quarters of button mush or toms or pots or snips, or wrapping flowers, he sends me next door to pick up some change for notes from Mr Salik’s delicatessen. Mr Salik is a sprightly Pole, mean with money, who works with a florid East End Jewish assistant, Wally. The shop amazes me, with its yards of tiles and racks of continental breads (cholla, pumpernickel, caraway rye, beigel) and marbled sausages and cheeses that smell of used football socks. There is nothing like this in Southall, only Wonderloaf and Wensleydale and chipolatas made of marrow-scrapings and brain-waste. Jeff, my brother, helps out here sometimes, but I am too useless and lazy and shy. Mr Salik is busy, so I spend what seems like ages staring at the displays, reading the packages and pronged signs stuck into the produce that seem to have a poetry all of their own: bockwurst, bratwurst, cervelat, provolone, prosciutto, apfelstrudel, stollen, Lindt Milka, pretzels, lox, gravadlax. These names, and smells, bewilder and attract me. But Jack, who will not even export garlic to Southall, never brings anything home from Mr Salik. He is content with his boiled gammon and cold lamb and corned beef salads – none of that foreign muck.