My Own Worst Enemy E-Book

Robert Edric

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 350

Beschreibung

'A small masterpiece' The Spectator My Own Worst Enemy is a wry and moving memoir of a working-class childhood in 1960s Sheffield, and the relationship between a touchy, tragicomic bully of a father and a son whose acceptance to grammar school puts him on another track entirely. With a novelist's eye, Robert Edric vividly depicts a now-vanished era: of working-men's clubs; of tight-knit communities in factory towns; and of a time when a woman's place was in the home. And he brings to colourful life his family, both close and extended – though over all of it hovers the vanity and barely-suppressed anger of his own father. My Own Worst Enemy is a brilliantly specific portrait both of particular time and place – the Sheffield of half a century ago – and a universal story of childhood and family, and the ways they can go right or wrong.

Leseprobe

for Gloria, Joan A, Joan R, Mary, Teresa & Valerie

1

One afternoon, when I was twelve years old and had recently started at grammar school, I came home at half past four to find both my mother and my father already there. This was unsettlingly unusual: ten to six was my father’s regular return from work, my mother having arrived a frantic quarter of an hour earlier to prepare the cooked meal he expected to be awaiting him.

All of us in that small house were acutely aware of my father’s comings and goings, of the shadows he cast, but what made this particular occasion even more unnerving was the fact that he was now sitting in his usual place – his chair, beside the fire facing the television – wearing an all-too-obvious wig to cover his balding head. He was still a young man – thirty-four or -five – but his hair was already half lost, leaving a thin, carefully configured wreath above his ears and across the back of his head. The few longer strands of hair were combed over the top, and everything was held in place with hair spray. The vivid scarlet and black of his Cossack aerosol can was decorated with the outline of a horseman – a Cossack, presumably – wearing busby-like headwear and brandishing a curved sabre. The smell and residue of the spray filled the small kitchen where my father prepared himself before his equally punctual departure at half past seven to one or other of the pubs he frequented most nights of the week.

My mother, a year younger, sat beside him, avoiding looking at his head, and both of them watched me closely as I came into the room. Naturally, I wanted to know why the pair of them were home at that earlier time and what this sudden drama of the wig meant.

My father was a vain, self-regarding man, endlessly preening and combing and brushing and checking his appearance; but even for him this seemed an excessive and ridiculous – ridiculously public – step to have taken. Both of them continued watching me, waiting for me to speak, causing me to become even more cautious with my response. My father would argue black was white, and my mother usually encouraged everyone present – more often than not myself, my younger sister and brother – to go along with this to prevent any further anger on his part.

I finally said something noncommittal, like, I can see something’s different.

This seemed to work, briefly.

It’s your dad’s new haircut, my mother said tentatively. He’s had it styled differently, something more modern.

Styled. Even the word and all it implied added another edge to the exchange. Nothing about that household or the five people in it was ever styled.

But even this clearly untrue explanation left me wondering. Whatever they might have wanted me to believe, it was still all too obviously a wig. The hair immediately above his ears was pale and greying, and while there was clearly some attempt to blend the artificial with what remained of the real, the join, like everything else, was glaringly evident. The new, flatter covering over the top of my father’s head was now a shiny, almost gingery colour.

Then my father broke the spell of uncertainty which held all three of us and said, He can see I’ve not had it cut different. Give the lad some credit. It’s a toupee.

That’s right. Not a wig, my mother added quickly, almost as though between them they had been trying to trick me.

It’s real hair, my father said, almost proudly. Human hair. Styled and fitted to match his own hair precisely, and coloured to blend seamlessly with what little of that hair he still possessed.

In my usual evasive, compliant way, I looked more closely and told him you could hardly tell.

Of course you can’t, he said. That’s the difference between a toupee and an ordinary wig.

I wondered if I was expected to reach out and feel it. I rarely went too close to my father, none of us did.

Only then, wondering what to say next, did it occur to me that, apart from my mother and whoever had created and then fitted the contraption to my father’s head, I was the first to witness this transformation.

You can hardly see the difference, I said again, pretending to search for the invisible seam.

I sensed even then, at that young age, that this was the great paradox, burden and fear of all wig-wearers, and especially male wig-wearers: that everyone, absolutely, positively everyone – even those people who had never known or seen you pre-wig – knew that you were wearing a wig. The wig-wearer was compromised and the person who knew it was a wig was doubly compromised. Whatever happened – whatever conversation or exchange now took place in my father’s life – everything would be overridden by those styled, pale gingery hairs sitting on his head. Whereas before, his vanity had been something those around him had taken for granted and either tolerated or ignored, now it shouted out at them every time he appeared and as they tried not to let their amused gaze wander above his eyes.

It’s called a Crown Topper, he said. He showed me a brochure that had been hidden beneath the newspaper on the floor beside him.

The glossy pages showed Before and After photos of once-bald and now-toupeed men. And on not a single one of them did their new head of hair look any more natural or any less obvious or ridiculous than it now did on my father.

It’s called a weave, my mother said. Every single hair, and there are hundreds—

Thousands, my father corrected her.

Thousands. And every single one of them has been put in place by hand and then cut and styled to look like that. My mother, I knew, was as wary and as fearful of her own part in the exchange as I was. I could hardly remember having had a normal conversation with my father before, let alone one as momentous and as dangerous as this.

Knowing some further admiring or encouraging response was being prompted, I asked him how it stayed on his head, and before answering me, he took hold of the hair at the crown of his head and peeled it slowly forward, flinching at the slight tug of the adhesive tape which held it in place. This tape, he explained to me, came in a roll, like Sellotape, but was double-sided, to be cut freshly and applied daily. He continued rolling the hair forward until the flimsy scalp sat in his hand. He held this out to me.

You can feel it, my mother said, as though this might help.

I touched if for a respectable second or two and then drew back my hand. I was more impressed by the fact that you could get double-sided adhesive tape.

Every six months I have an appointment to go to the Crown Topper agent to see if anything needs altering, my father said. All part of the Executive Service.

I wondered what he meant. Did he mean the hair would grow?

Colouring, my mother said. It keeps everything looking natural. Everything’s properly done. By experts. It’s not cheap.

For my mother, the lack of money in our household was a constant and worrying concern, something to be scrupulously controlled on a weekly, often daily basis. The wig – toupee – I was then told, had cost hundreds of pounds. I was expected to be impressed by this and so I let out a long, admiring breath and nodded slowly. My father, I knew, and despite his endless quest after Life’s bargains and knock-down prices, would regard the expense as a further guarantee of the wig’s quality.

I had started learning French only months earlier. Above the first ‘e’ of the word toupée was an accent, and I knew what that accent was called and what it signified. I knew what they were all called and what they all signified. I resisted showing off this cleverness in front of my father, but I knew that this additional, exotic, unnecessary extra would also have appealed to him. Just as it would have appealed to all those other men trying desperately to avoid using the word wig or hairpiece.

I went on nodding at everything the pair of them told me, wondering if either of them was convinced by this all-too-clearly rehearsed delivery. But even as I considered this, I remember feeling a vague sense of satisfaction in the knowledge that this side of his nature – his vanity and self-regard at the expense of his family – was now unavoidably and blatantly revealed to everyone else. It was unlikely that most of those others – family, workmates and drinking friends – weren’t already aware of my father’s nature, but at least now it was an undeniable fact, and one, in my own young mind at least, upon which our endless further conflicts might hinge and then be silently, albeit often tearfully and painfully, won.

My mother said something more about the toupee already making him look younger, knocking years off him. In contrast to the time and care my father took over himself, she had long since stopped paying attention to her own appearance, and had started to gain the weight which she would continue to carry for the rest of her life.

It also occurred to me on that awkward afternoon that few others would be as generous in their silence or feigned admiration of the toupee as she or I were being then. Others, I knew, would be only too happy to point out to him that he was wearing a wig. Worse, perhaps – they would keep their scorn, ridicule and amusement to themselves and then laugh at him behind his back.

He asked my mother to help him put the toupee back in place. A new circular, magnifying mirror and slender, tapering metal comb were produced. These, along with the double-sided tape, were all part of the Crown Topper Executive After-Care Package. As was the equally impressive polystyrene dummy’s head already sitting on the dressing table in their bedroom, upon which the sacred toupee would now sit and keep its shape overnight.

My mother smoothed the woven hair back into place and my father pushed its edges back into his thinning strands with the narrow end of the comb.

See how easy it is? he said. Wigs are nothing but trouble, but this…

I nodded. I was still in my new and uncomfortable school uniform with my stiff, heavy leather satchel at my feet. I began to resent the fact that he was home so early, that the precious time before his own usual reappearance in the house had been lost to me.

I wondered if I was now expected to pass on to my sister and brother, three and six years younger, everything that had just happened. Despite my growing awareness of what the wearing of the wig would come to mean to us all, I could not imagine what a terrible prospect faced my parents as this supposedly transformed man now presented himself anew to the world. I could certainly have had no idea then of the lies, evasions and other strategies the pair of them were already being forced to consider. And I gave no thought whatsoever to my father’s own understanding of himself, or to how this might now change his standing in the eyes of that watching world. And even if I had been able to imagine any of these things, I doubt I would have cared or sympathized with the man. One of the things I was able to consider, however, was the understanding that we, his family, would all now be expected to play our part in the deceits and subterfuges which lay ahead of us.

I doubt if any of us truly understood then what an explosive charge had been placed at our centre. The visible could never be made invisible again. People who looked at him might remain polite or pretend not to see, but what would happen when the first of them – provoked, perhaps, by my father’s own provocations – pointed to the toupee and said, It’s a wig. What then? What argument based on honesty or sincerity or openness was a man wearing a wig ever going to win? Even the knowledge of what the wig had cost – and would continue to cost if the Crown Topper programme was to be adhered to – would be a cause for finger-pointing or that same behind-hand mockery.

I learned soon afterwards that, following an initial consultation and down-payment, my father had signed yet another hire-purchase agreement and was buying his toupee – or, rather, toupees, as it turned out – on credit that we as a family could ill afford.

The polystyrene head was of as much interest to me as the wig itself. It was clearly a woman’s head, vividly white, egg-shaped and smooth, with only nominal eyes, nose and lips. The men in the glossy brochure were manly men, with cigarettes, golf clubs and sports cars, and with attractive, fashionably dressed young women on their arms.

When, finally, there was nothing more to be imparted concerning the wig, I was ushered upstairs to change out of my school uniform and to get started on my homework in the bedroom I shared with my young brother, looking out over the terrace of houses opposite.

Later, examining the polystyrene head, I wanted to finally laugh and to shout out loud that it was a fucking wig, that it was all too fucking obviously a fucking wig, and that soon the whole fucking world would know and finally see my father for exactly what he fucking well was. Soon everybody in the whole fucking world would be pointing at him and laughing at him. But all this was tempered by the understanding that those same people might then smirk and whisper to each other and point surreptitiously at the rest of us, puzzled, perhaps, by our collective complicity in pretending that nothing whatsoever had happened. Besides, it was a small house, and anyone shouting in any of its few small rooms would be clearly heard in all the others.

The grammar school had given me a homework timetable – three subjects, half an hour each, four nights a week; three hours every weekend. I was an organized child and I liked to get everything done – it usually took me no more than an hour – before making my tea. This was invariably followed by an hour of television before my father’s return from work. The drama of the revelation of the toupee had already upset this routine, knocking me off schedule, making me late.

2

I was delivered at Sheffield Children’s hospital, Jessop’s, in April 1956. I was told that I was born on the stroke of midnight between Friday the thirteenth and Saturday the fourteenth and that consequently my mother was given the choice of dates to put on my birth certificate. Being a superstitious woman, she naturally chose the latter. I was also told that because of these portentous circumstances, my eyes always shone red in photographs.

Mostly our few photographs were formal and carefully posed, full of grimaces and fixed smiles and taken only on special occasions such as annual holidays and Christmas. The majority of them were black and white, small and with serrated borders. There was no indication of my alleged red-eye look until the instant, flashbulb-lit Polaroids of my later childhood. My mother, then and ever after, always favoured the more melodramatic interpretation over the scientific, prosaic or rational. If there was intended to be something of the supernatural about my midnight birth, then as a young boy I understood and secretly appreciated the obviously demonic aspect of this.

As with many women of her generation, class and upbringing, my mother believed in what was broadly and enthusiastically regarded as the supernatural. Horoscopes were consulted and believed; séances, private and public, were a common entertainment, as were tarot, palm and tea leaf readings. Every family story demanded and was given its drama, its edge and its inexplicable elements.

My father mocked all this. He told his wife she was descended from gypsies – gyppos. He needed no further proof of this than her lustrous jet-black hair and her dark complexion. Her maiden name was Gregory. There had been a Pope Gregory, and so in all likelihood she was probably descended from Catholics, too. And everyone knew that all gyppos were Catholics. And everyone knew what Catholics were like when they were at home. Partly, I suspect, some part of my mother’s cherished melodramatic self appreciated this shadowy, unproven and romanticized background. The women she visited in their booths at the seaside had the same dark hair and skin. Their brightly coloured headscarves were pulled tighter to their heads and their bracelets, earrings and necklaces might have been gaudier, but, essentially, the similarities were obvious and the comparisons were there to be made and savoured.

As a child it was difficult for me to understand the true nature or source of my father’s humiliation and mockery of his wife, but it was an unmistakeable and ever-present fact of their life together. Sometimes it almost seemed a kind of affection between them – the only sort he might easily or openly express. At other times it was clearly the undisguised public expression of his frustration and anger at the way his own life had turned out. He was, essentially, a bully, and, as with all bullies, there always needed to be a target in sight, always a dependency or weakness needing to be exploited or punished.

Everything was a competition with my father, everything a judgement concluded by a condemnation. His anger at the world, and at his own unhappy place in it, seemed never to find a proper or positive focus and so it was cast around indiscriminately, serving a purpose only he truly appreciated.

I learned twenty-five years later, on the occasion of my parents’ silver wedding anniversary, that I was born six months after they were married, and that my mother’s pregnancy had led directly to that momentous event in their two young lives.

My mother, in her angriest moments – perhaps finally understanding all that she had forsaken in marrying this scornful, restless and resentful man, and subjugating herself entirely to him and bearing him two more children – would tell the story of how her prospective mother-in-law had warned her against marrying her own son. It was in his nature, my mother was told, to demean and to belittle, to make anyone close to him as unsettled and as unhappy as he was. But what choice then did my mother have? I doubt either of them did not have great hopes of their future together after all they had both been through in recent years.

There are those small black and white photos of the pair of them together before my arrival in which my mother looks the image of Audrey Hepburn. Slim, shapely, dark-haired and large-eyed, and in close-fitting dresses and blouses and slacks which showed off her figure and all-to-obvious appeal. Her lips are richly made up, perhaps because of her dark colouring. In some of the photos, my father, his white shirt tucked into his narrow and tightly belted waist, stares at her smiling with an intense affection that few ever saw afterwards.

He did his National Service between the ages of eighteen and twenty, part of it in Egypt. I was frequently referred to as a Suez Baby, and this, like my supposedly auspicious arrival, I also appreciated.

My father’s mother died eighteen months after my birth, aged forty-five. His father had died long before I was born, at the age of thirty-eight. Upon the death of his mother, the six children of the family – the eldest boy twenty-five, the youngest girl only thirteen – were left together in the council house into which the family had moved before the war. This created relationships and bonds – brothers and sisters turned parents and children – which, to begin with at least, served them all well. Perhaps, too, it was this that helped steer my youthful parents toward their marriage – a marriage in which my father insisted on using his own upbringing as a template both for treating his wife and for raising his own three children.

There is a solitary photo of me as a baby with my maternal grandmother, chubby – bonny, people would have said, meaning fat and healthy – barely upright on sausage legs, made even chubbier-looking by my hand-knitted baby clothes and waterproof pants over a nappy, short socks and bootees. My grandmother – though I never knew her as such – is standing over me, leaning forward, holding my shoulders, keeping me upright and facing the camera. In one hand I am holding the stem of a rose bush. I am looking anxious, ready to fall. My hair is vividly blond – soon to darken – and I am dressed in white from head to toe. Prominent at my grandmother’s throat is a large crucifix, dangling free of her blouse collar and cardigan. Her face is thin and drawn, though she seems genuinely happy to be holding her first grandchild in the front garden of the family home like that. Everything about the photograph yells Occasion.

The woman died soon afterwards, and perhaps she and everyone else around her knew she was dying when the photo was taken. Perhaps that was why it was taken. The picture was enlarged and then made permanent inside a glass and gilt frame with a hinged wooden stand suggesting it was meant to be displayed. We were not a family of photographic history – the odd and obligatory school photo here and there, perhaps – and this solitary picture of the baby and the old, dying woman always struck me as one of a kind.

I’d like to believe that my father himself took the photo and that his dying mother appreciated this connection with me before that short-lived, fragile bond was lost for ever.

If I sound intrigued and moved by the picture, then these are only recent sensations experienced upon looking at it now. Growing up, I knew neither the woman’s name nor that of her lost husband – Lillian and Norman – my paternal grandfather.

Curiously, I remember that the narrow path in the front garden of that council house was filled with clinker and lined with house bricks set into the earth at an angle to create a diamond pattern. In a world of coking plants, steelworks and decade-old bomb sites still mounded with rubble, these were common features of tens of thousands of carefully tended small gardens.

The only other photograph of any consequence that survives of my first year of childhood is one of me posed sitting on a sideboard, again clean and smartly dressed and bulging in handmade clothes. As in the picture with my unknown grandmother, my hair is shockingly white and seems now to have been raised to a central crest. I am still chubby and grinning, my arms and legs and cheeks still full and round. I appear to be clutching the edge of the sideboard, about to propel myself forward.

It was only eleven years after the end of the war; new-borns still routinely died in their first months, and I have always considered this picture to be a kind of recognition that I had survived and prospered. That there was something special about the picture is witnessed by the professional photographer’s stamp on the back of the photo. Faded and unreadable now, only the word ‘Studio’ remains – more than enough.

I was a baby and child of the recently inaugurated National Health Service. The same one that had seen my young mother through her partially unwed pregnancy. The same service that, had it been available to them sooner, might have saved the lives of both my father’s middle-aged parents, or at least have made the effort on their behalves.

In many of his arguments, my father would defeat his opponents by shouting at them that they had no idea what it was like to have lost both parents at such a young age. He resented the ease and comfort and certainty in the lives of others when in his own young life there had been only hardship, loss and struggle.

It was another of his argument-winning gambits to announce to us all that we didn’t know we were born and that, by comparison with his own childhood, everything in our young lives was handed to us on a plate, and for which we showed not the slightest bit of gratitude. There was a roof over our heads and always food on the table – two things he had never been certain of as a child. What more could we possibly want? And on the occasions when his anger curdled to violence, he would tell us that we should be grateful to him for only using his hands to teach us our lessons; his own father, he said, would have taken his belt off long before now.

Whenever my mother grew angry at us in his absence, her final, most potent rebuke was to tell us to wait until he got home when she would tell him of our bad behaviour. She seldom did tell him, of course, and her own affection for us was shaped and tempered as much by her husband’s predictable responses as by her own true feelings for her children. We all understood this, and while she did occasionally resort to proper punishments – slapping and banishments – they were, we felt, deserved and fairly administered only as a last resort.

She often told us that she was at the end of her tether, that we were driving her into an early grave. She saved her favourite pay-off – You’ll be sorry when I’m dead; where will you all be then? – for when the argument was over and we were already feeling remorse for having upset her.

My father was one of six – Ray, Valerie, himself, Gloria, Tony and Mary. Three boys, three girls, all of them bound together and dependent on the others by force of hard circumstance. It proved a difficult arrangement from which to extricate themselves as individuals when the time came, and especially when other wives and husbands and children eventually came along.

My mother was one of two. She met my father when she was fourteen or fifteen. He was her only boyfriend, then fiancé, then husband, then father to her children. Her sister, Joan, was a year older, and as girls they looked like twins, sharing the same good looks and dark features. In the photographs of the pair of them together they strike me as two halves of the same person. There is something both alluring and mischievous about the way they sit on a wall together, their arms and legs bare and their hair and faces carefully brushed and made up for the camera. There is also a confident, shameless, knowing quality to the girl my mother had once been that did not long survive the marriage into which she, still a teenager, may already have been drifting as the poses were being struck.

3

Deeming it both old-fashioned and too much like hard work every morning, my father blocked up our coal fire. No more sacks of coal tipped into the cellar and filling the house with its dust. No more sooty lines and shadows along the picture rail and thin skirting. And instead of the messy, ash and clutter-filled open hearth, we now possessed a clean and efficient – and modern – gas fire.

A wooden surround was quickly added, upon which my mother displayed her few knick-knacks, pottery and glass figures – figurines – the odd piece of onyx or crystal. Moulded golden plastic tiles formed a backing to this. The peeling mural of the Canadian Rockies which had filled the wall above the old fireplace upon our arrival in the house was replaced by a three-dimensional wall of plastic pebbles in grey, black and white, exactly like the pebbles on a beach, but in a repeating pattern which was disappointingly obvious, and whose rounded edges seldom matched up. It was a feature wall, my father said. Who else did we know who possessed a feature wall? Nobody, that’s who.

On either side of the chimney breast, in narrow alcoves, my father stuck up two more of the golden tiles. He’d bought too many in the first place and it would have been a crying shame not to have used them; they didn’t come cheap. The golden theme was completed by an Aztec-like sundial on one wall and by a precious golden carriage clock placed at the centre of the mantel above the new fire and its dazzling surround.

The carriage clock was always considered to be the most valuable and precious object we possessed. It had glass sides, revealing its intricate workings, claw legs, a black and white dial with Roman numerals, and a golden dome surmounted by an ornamental spire. It looked old, antique, but wasn’t; the box of such a precious thing was precious in itself and deemed worthy of saving on the top of a wardrobe. It would come in handy if ever we moved house again, which was unlikely. Besides, even if the clock wasn’t an actual antique, then the chances were it would soon become one. The word heirloom was used.

When anyone moved too close to the new fire – and who would be so selfish as to block everyone else’s heat? – we were warned to watch the clock. My father listened for the time signal on the radio and adjusted the delicate hands accordingly. Not that this needed doing. Accurate to within a second a year was the manufacturer’s proud and unlikely boast – as though that carefully regulated second might one day be of some great value to someone. But the greatest gift of that second was the opportunity it forever gave my father to ask the infrequent visitors to our house to guess how much time the clock lost in a year. When I once suggested that the second might be gained rather than lost over the year, my ignorance was laughed at. I was told – was forever being told – to stick to what little I did actually know about and to leave the rest to the experts. And if there were no experts present – meaning my father – then I was to defer to anyone older than me – again, usually my father.

When my mother dusted the clock she held it firmly in place and screwed her yellow duster to a point. It was a fiddly thing to keep clean. On the rare occasion the clock was actually polished – little need now that we had forsaken coal for gas – the task was undertaken as though it were a fraught and complicated piece of surgery.

To complete the modernization of our living room, in which all five of us could sit within easy reach of each other and the television controls, my father replaced the door between this room and the kitchen with a plastic folding screen – a door which concertinaed open and shut, and through which a cold draught always blew. This lasted a few years before being replaced in turn by a pair of highly varnished, chest-high, swinging doors. Just like the bar-room doors John Wayne swaggered through to get into his saloons and order his tiny glasses of whisky before someone started a fight with him and the whole bar erupted into choreographed violence and lively music. These left even more open space between the living room and the kitchen and the draught was correspondingly greater.

All repair and maintenance work in the house was undertaken by my father. Because who in their right mind would employ a professional builder or plumber or decorator or electrician and pay a small fortune for the privilege when anything that needed doing was usually just common sense anyway? And certainly nobody ever needed a window cleaner or drain unblocker or hedge- or lawn-cutter. A man cleared his own gutters and drains, cut his own lawns and hedges. He borrowed ladders and climbed up onto his own roof to fix the inevitable few loose slates when they started letting in water. And who even bothered with the odd rattling chimney pot or sagging aerial?

Our old sash windows were replaced with windows featuring adjustable louvres through which both the rain and the wind slowly seeped.

We acquired a large black leather-effect chair which cupped whoever sat in it, and which spun on its stand. My father sat in it like a judge in his court and warned the rest of us about using it. The chair was too large for the small room and blocked the door to the cellar head, where my mother stored her cans of food. The spinning chair was not a thing to play with. Wear and tear. In addition to spinning, the chair also tilted back and forth slightly, making it even more irresistible to us in his absence. A leather footstool completed the set. What more could a man ask for after a hard day’s work than to sit back and relax in his own home, in front of the television, with an ashtray on a stand close beside him, and with the ability to both recline slightly and to simultaneously swivel from side to side?

And then the black and white television was replaced by a much larger, colour set. People, places and events were revealed to us for the first time just as they looked in real life. The new television came in its own pale cabinet – veneer, but who was counting? – with slatted doors that slid open and shut in a curve. My mother put more of her ornaments on the narrow shelf at the base of the screen.

We acquired a circular glass-topped coffee table which fitted as awkwardly as the spinning chair into the small room, upon which was placed a three-tiered ‘humidifier’ – three plastic bowls connected to a bubbling waterfall. Plastic lilies floated in the largest bowl and the sound of gently bubbling water competed with the television.

Opposite the wall of plastic pebbles, more varnished wooden cladding appeared. Wall lights in the shape of Chinese lanterns were added, illuminated by dim red bulbs. A lava lamp was positioned on the television, and its floating fluorescent waxy blobs were never less than a distraction.

We were a household desperate to move forward, to leave the hard times of my parents’ own childhoods behind. My father frequently reminded us of how lucky we were to be the wife and children of a man with such vision and taste. His brothers and sisters – all those old-fashioned slum- and council-house-dwelling relatives – were stuck in the past and being left far behind us, as my father – and he alone – revealed himself to be one of those men with their fingers constantly on the pulse and their eyes fixed on the main chance directly ahead of them.

A further shelf was fitted to one of the alcoves and an eight-track cartridge player and six or seven cartridges were proudly displayed – Gilbert O’Sullivan, Andy Williams, Barbara Streisand, The Best of Yorkshire Brass Bands.

A bookcase appeared in the opposite alcove and what few books the house contained – Reader’s Digest volumes and the occasional Catherine Cookson – were lined up along its broad shelves. And not just any old shelving – adjustable shelving that could be moved up and down on plastic pegs depending on the size of your books and whatever other displayable knick-knacks you possessed. Ingenious.

4

I spent my first six years in the village of Ecclesfield on the northern outskirts of Sheffield, and toward which, from the end of the Great War onward, a vast council estate, Parson Cross, was already spreading, burying every field and copse beneath roads and houses, and leaving only the narrow floodplains of a few streams as any indicator of what had existed before. The garden in which I was posed with my unknown grandmother was on this estate. Trees were planted along the broader roads, and people were proud of their new homes. Corner shops, newsagents, bookies, greengrocers, chip shops and pubs were planted on avenues and crescents at regular intervals among the spreading houses.

Most of my wider family ended up on the estate one way or another. But not us. When I was six, we moved in the opposite direction, away from semi-rural Ecclesfield toward the cramped streets and industries of the city centre.

Buses connected Ecclesfield with that city centre, but these were infrequent and did not run on Sundays. Vast, millstone chapels stood on most of the main streets, mostly Methodist, but other, rarer sects too.

Along the valley bottom, amid scattered patches of untended woodland and slowly settling slag heaps, there were forges, mills and a coking plant, all of which pumped smoke and steam into the air and which made the sky glow at night. The beating of distant machinery could almost always be heard. A few local pits remained in operation, and it was evident everywhere that this had once been an industrial landscape. Despite the fields and woodlands and reed-fringed ponds, this was still coal and steel country.

Apart from brick, anything of any substance in the village was built of soft sandstone which quickly blackened in the sooty air, and which turned back to sand when rubbed vigorously. Failing farms and smallholdings sat amid the houses and factories; allotments with their ramshackle sheds and greenhouses abutted the high wire fencing of the factories and works.

Over a wall from the L-shaped court where I spent those first six years was a small pig farm, each creature and its litter contained in narrow concrete pens. The farmer collected food waste from the local schools and factory canteens and scooped this from galvanized buckets to feed the animals. The smell and the noise of the pigs were ever present, and people knew hourly which way the wind was blowing.

My parents moved from their parental homes into a two-up, two-down, gardenless house built around a tarmacked courtyard, at the centre of which stood a line of three toilets serving a dozen houses. The front door of our house opened onto a small patch of wasteland, the rear onto the yard and the toilets. Next to the house was a tunnel which led into the yard, and beyond this, on the corner of the court, stood a small grocer’s shop, where almost everything required was bought on a daily basis as needed.

Inside, the house comprised a single living room and an even smaller kitchen, in which sat a Formica-topped table and chairs. A shallow porcelain sink was served by a single cold tap. A gas cooker, upon which all water was heated, completed the kitchen.

In good weather, the yard outside was filled with housewives and playing children. It was a small but true community and I was happy there. Chairs and tin baths were frequently taken outside and children were bathed weekly and communally. Women contributed kettles of hot water. Children played naked and were guarded and cosseted by all present. Returning fathers brought sweets and whatever might be left in their snap tins. Men went out clean each morning and came home dirty. They washed at their cold water sinks and then came outside to smoke and to talk.

I attended the infant school directly across the street from my home. At the edge of the small playground there stood a corrugated iron air-raid shelter still haunted by the ghosts of all the children who had allegedly been killed there during the recent war.

One of the towering, solid chapels stood across the side road from the school, and beyond this the rapidly spreading housing estate continued to flow into every available and previously bypassed piece of land. The roads of the estate were said to have been laid in concrete by Italian prisoners of war. People still spoke of the men. Few people possessed a car, but everyone spoke of the makeshift quality of these concrete roads when compared to those constructed by Sheffield City Council Highways Department. People remembered taking in the Italian labourers for meals and accompanying them to church and chapel on Sundays.

My mother’s parents moved into a new house on the estate when their old one was finally demolished. A home with three downstairs and three upstairs rooms, an indoor toilet, a bathroom and a kitchen, and all for only two old people.

The house was fitted with carpets which reached to the walls, and which my house-proud grandmother covered with plastic pathways to keep clean. A cabinet in the front room contained our family’s only complete china tea service, along with a tea pot, milk jug and sugar bowl of Sheffield plate, allegedly the next best thing to solid silver. A boiler was lit to fill the bath and, again weekly, my parents carried me and towels to the house, and we all bathed and then ate our tea there.