That's Another Story: The Autobiography Page 6
The Walters, however, took their yearly week away within the confines of the United Kingdom and came home looking much the same as when they left. We holidayed in Wales and, like a lot of Birmingham folk, we went to Tenby and Sandersfoot, camping with a couple of other families. We had caravan holidays in Weymouth, Margate and Weston-super-Mare, and even now the smell of Calor gas takes me right back there, snuggling down under the covers on a narrow bunk bed, in the cosy, farting, giggling intimacy of a night spent in such close proximity to the whole family.
My earliest holiday memory, when I must have been about eighteen months old, was in the west of Ireland, visiting friends and relatives on my mother’s side of the family. We stayed at a farm where there was no electricity and my memory is of my mum getting me up to wee, hovering over a big jam jar in the middle of the night, by candle light, and it not being a great success, but the holiday location I most remember was Blackpool. We would save up for weeks, collecting coppers in an old biscuit tin, and then all five of us would pack into our Ford Esquire car, the roof-rack piled high with a motley collection of suitcases, wrapped in an old piece of tarpaulin and tied on with rope. We would head off on a journey that probably took about six hours as there were no motorways. I always had to sit in the middle, my two brothers on either side, and Kevin, who was generally on my right, was invariably carsick.
There were a couple of mysterious remedies employed to stave this off. One was a small chain that was suspended from just underneath the rear bumper, on the right-hand side, and the other one was Kevin having to wear a brown-paper vest. As neither worked, the smell of vomit, petrol fumes and cigarette smoke was the perennial olfactory accompaniment to these journeys, my brother insisting on the last - the cigarette smoke, that is - claiming that it would prevent the first. So my father, having been given the excuse to smoke continually, did so. We spent the whole journey in an eye-watering fug, my brother with his head stuck in a carrier bag, retching and belching, and the rest of us playing I Spy through the smoke, and eating the cheese-and-tomato or ham-hock-and-salad sandwiches that my mother had made before we set out, handing them out to my father as he drove and over her shoulder to us in the back. The game of I Spy would stop on the approach to Blackpool, if it hadn’t been stopped already by a fight or boredom, and would be replaced by ‘The first one to see the tower!’ and then, ‘The first one to see the sea!’
We holidayed in Blackpool three times during the latter part of the fifties and we always stayed at the same place: number 26 Empress Drive, a bed and breakfast that was run by a Mrs McGinn. Empress Drive was a quiet, residential street, each side of which was lined with neat, terraced, Edwardian houses, mainly with bright-white fronts, well-kept privet hedges and gleaming windows, and where nearly every other house was a B and B. Inside, number 26 smelt of fresh paint, clean carpets and lavender furniture polish. Every object, nook and cranny was dust-free and polished to a military shine. On one occasion, having returned in the evening with fish and chips for our dinner, we were told, ‘Don’t bring chips in th’ouse, they’ll make th’ouse smell.’ Once inside, we were encouraged by my mother to speak in little more than a whisper. Breakfast was a self-conscious, almost silent ritual, where the crunch of toast was deafening, the only other sound being the restrained scrape of knives on plates, the careful clink of cups on saucers and the occasional swallowed murmur of voices. It was as if we were guarding some terrible secret, the secret being, I suppose, us.
After breakfast we would gather our things for the day, because we were not allowed back in until the evening. If the weather was fine - that is, if it was not actually raining - we would walk down to the North Shore and my parents would ensconce themselves in a couple of deckchairs, both of them, whatever the weather, fully dressed, my father on occasion wearing a suit, albeit with sandals and socks. I would strip down to my stretchy, ruched bathing costume, having underdressed back at the B and B, in order not to have to go through the embarrassing palaver of trying to change on the beach and not show your nether regions to hundreds of other people. It was bad enough at the end of the day, wobbling about on one foot as you tried to remove a sodden swimming costume, then pulling your knickers on, dragging them up over damp, sand-coated skin, made sore from the salt, and all this whilst attempting to keep an inadequate towel wrapped around your vitals.
I would run off to the sea, dodging in and out of deckchairs, with my mother’s cries of ‘Don’t go out too far!’ hanging in the air after me. A few years previously, before I was born, my brother Kevin, who would have been two at the time, had nearly drowned in a deep pothole at Sandersfoot, but was saved by a family friend, himself only a boy at the time. He had held on to Kevin after seeing him in trouble, until my father reached them after running flat out without a thought for himself across jagged rocks and stones, cutting and scraping his feet and shins as he went. Then, with terrible irony, when he was a young man my brother’s saviour was himself drowned, after being swept away by a freak wave whilst on holiday. So my parents were ever vigilant when any of us were in the sea, my mother sitting awkwardly, with her neck craned, a squinting, hawkish look on her face, and my father sitting up straight and shielding his eyes, watching continuously until we came out. Then Dad would half get up and wave frantically so that we could spot them amongst the heaving throng.
The Blackpool sea was always grey, even on the odd occasion when the sky was blue, and during our last holiday there I found little brown particles floating in it. Luckily it was on the way home that I brought this up and my brother, his head as ever in his carrier bag, informed me in a muffled voice that the said particles were in fact shit. I don’t think I’ve ever swum in the sea without first checking it for excrement since.
In the event of inclement weather we would walk down the Golden Mile. In a small bag slung across my shoulder would be my spending money, saved from pocket money, and gifts at Christmas and birthdays from aunts, uncles and friends of my parents. The Golden Mile was an exciting string of shops selling tacky tourist trash: ‘Kiss Me Quick’ hats, sticks of rock, plastic miniatures of the tower, all sorts of incongruous items made out of sugar, such as bright-pink, giant baby’s dummies, false teeth, or women’s breasts. I remember on one occasion, whilst we were taking our late-afternoon stroll along the prom, seeing an elderly woman sucking, I presume innocently but nevertheless with great enthusiasm, on a pink phallus, wrapped in a bit of cellophane. I had never seen anything like it, but instantly knew from my giggling parents’ reaction that it was somehow lewd. There were shops selling every piece of crockery imaginable with ‘Blackpool’ plastered all over it. It was thrilling to my seven-, eight-, or nine-year-old self and I believe that at one time or another I bought all of the above, excluding, that is, the body parts.
The very best, though, was the funfair, the terrifying, wonderful, sick-making funfair. We visited this only once during the whole holiday because it was deemed too expensive. My abiding memory is of the Mad Mouse, a small bullet-shaped carriage built to hold two people sitting one in front of the other. The track along which it went was high up over the water. It started, as most of these rides do, going teasingly slowly up a steep incline until it reached the top and the first corner, around which it would abruptly swerve at breakneck speed, making the passenger feel that the little car simply won’t make it and that the whole thing is going to career off the edge and plummet into the water below. It was heaven! After going on it the first time, I was so gloriously terrified that when the ride finally came to a standstill my right arm was paralysed. I had to go on it again, several times, to get the feeling back.
I went back to Blackpool in 1995 when I was filming a BBC Television film called Wide-Eyed and Legless. I was thrilled to find that I would be staying at the Imperial Hotel on the front, because when I was a child whenever we drove past it my mother would suck in a deep breath, her accent becoming what she imagined to be refined, and with a wistful little laugh she would say, ‘Oh, the Imperial.’
As I stood at reception, checking in, I felt a lump gather in my throat and at the earliest opportunity, when I found that I had a morning off, I went in search of Empress Drive. As always happens when you revisit a place you frequented as a child, everything was smaller. The street was narrower and shorter, and the houses cowered back from the road, lower and less substantial, the proud glow of immaculate seaside white now a little chipped and bashed, a little grimier, poorer, less cared for. I walked back to the hotel feeling as if the sight of that road was an assault on my little, perfect bubble of memory; but the memory is robust and the Empress Drive of the 1950s is still preserved within it, in all its bright, optimistic glory.
4
‘A Fine Figure of a Man’ - Dad
I notice as I write down the memories of my life that I tend to constantly refer to my mother and far less to my father. This is because my mum was the emotional driving force and centre of the family, whereas my dad tended to hover, unsure, on the edge of our life.
Thomas Walters was born in 1909. The family lived in Ickneild Port Road in the Ladywood area, a poor inner-city suburb of Birmingham that was widely regarded as a slum. He was the second youngest of five children, comprising three older sisters, Rachel, Amy and Betty, and a younger brother, Reg. His father was killed in the First World War, during the battle of the Somme in 1916. He often told us how he was sent to the headmaster’s office and how, aged seven years, he stood there in the presence of this terrifying and often cruel man, holding the hand of his five-year-old brother, to be told, bluntly and without an ounce of compassion, ‘You’d better get off home to your mother, your dad’s been killed.’
I think it is significant that he himself didn’t have a father for much of his growing up, for he seemed ill at ease with some of the requisites of fatherhood. Dealing with my brothers, who were lively, combative, intelligent boys, he seemed to shrink back and it was my mother who was always at the forefront when it came to family discussion, or discipline and its consequences. If a fight or argument were to take place, he would disappear. There was one incident between my brother Kevin and myself, when he was about eighteen and I was thirteen, where I hurled an ashtray at him. I missed Kevin and hit my father on the knuckle. Dad, instead of intervening, simply said, ‘Oh, I’m getting out of here.’ And he left the room. He seemed to have little connection with his sons and, although he was proud, I believe he felt reduced to some extent by their academic achievements. However, it was his sense of humour that was the basis of his survival. When my brother Tommy won a scholarship to Cambridge to study for a PhD, and announced it to my parents, my father was sitting reading the Smethwick Telephone, our local rag, and without looking up he said, ‘I can’t see any adverts for philosophers in the Situations Vacant.’
He was a slightly built, wiry man with thick, dark curly hair, swept back and tamed by a daily dose of brilliantine. Both of my parents being small, dark eyed and dark haired, they were often, so my mother said, mistaken for brother and sister. Dad always, especially towards the end of his life, looked older than his years, his face hollow-cheeked, weathered and deeply riven with lines. Even when he was smiling, there was a permanent expression of worry etched deep into his face; across his forehead and between his brows were lines of anxiety and bewilderment.
I was his favourite and was in no doubt whatsoever of his love for me. My love for him, however, felt more like pain; it hurt and was suffused with pity. As a child, I fretted about him and for him. I feared somewhere that he wasn’t up to the task of life. This, I think, was in part because of his physical appearance. His smoking habit, having started in childhood, kept him very thin. When questioned by us as to why he never went into the sea whilst on holiday, he said, ‘Last time I went swimming, everyone thought it was a pair of braces floating in the water.’ In the later years of his life I would say that he was emaciated; his pulse didn’t need to be felt, it could be taken simply by looking at his outstretched arm and counting the twitches in the radial artery that ran the length of it.
But it was also due in part to the way my mother related to him. She constantly referred to him as ‘your poor father’ while commenting favourably about other, bigger men: ‘Oh, he’s a fine figure of a man.’ She spoke in reverential terms about men in professional positions, with the usual little gasp that would precede statements like ‘He’s a bank manager!’ or ‘He’s a doctor!’ Her breathy, wavery voice, lowered in register, indicated on these occasions the deep respect she felt for such a man in such a position. I don’t think these things were said with any malice towards my father. I think they were born more out of insensitivity, together with frustration about her own position in life and her own lack of self-esteem; but they fuelled the fear and pity that I felt for him and my brothers took much pleasure in whipping up these feelings with merciless teasing.
One incident has stayed with me. I was about five and there had been a snowstorm with high winds that had brought our garden fence crashing down. I watched, helpless and sobbing, at the kitchen window as it began to grow dark and my dad struggled alone, in the driving snow, with the six-foot-high fence as the wind lifted it and tossed it this way and that, its force sending him staggering under the weight of the big wooden panels. He looked small, David against the Goliath of the elements, and there was no one to help, all three of us having been told that it was dangerous and to stay indoors. I felt wretched watching this pitiful little scene, while my brothers, amused by and seizing on my misery, cranked it up several notches: ‘Oh poor Dad, look, he can’t lift the fence. Ahhh, poor Dad.’ I was conscious of the fact that he was a lot older than other people’s dads, forty-one when I was born, and this was a source of embarrassment; I felt guilty that I didn’t want friends to see him drop me off in the car anywhere and that I changed the subject when the age of people’s parents was being discussed.
He met my mum whilst drinking in the Leebridge Tavern on Dudley Road in the Ladywood area of Birmingham, where she was working as a barmaid, the job she landed when she first came to England. He set her on a pedestal instantly and proceeded to adore her, I suspect feeling that he had been lucky to catch this attractive, intelligent, driven woman who was a cut above those around him. No one could make my mother laugh as my father could. There was many a time that I would walk into the kitchen and find her doubled up, face bright red, unable to get her breath, to the point where I thought she might even be sick, because of some story or some joke that Dad had relayed to her. He would be laughing too but his laughter was more to do with the pleasure of watching hers. They courted for six months and then married in 1941. My father was never called up into the army, he said because, after his initial interview, they moved house to number 69 and they never contacted him again. Instead he worked at Lucas Electrics, making munitions.
His great pleasure in life was a pint with his cronies at the Dog Inn on the Hagley Road or the King’s Head, also on the Hagley Road, about three-quarters of a mile further down towards town. Which one he chose to go to depended on whom he was meeting. The Dog Inn was a place for a quiet drink with other regulars and friends, whereas the King’s Head was where Dad went to ‘see a man about a dog’, which presumably meant he was meeting a business associate. My mother continually complained about this, ‘Oh, your father’s down the pub again,’ and related to us in front of him how she had seen people ruin their lives by drinking their money away in the Leebridge Tavern, while claiming that her own father ‘never went into a shebeen in his life’. Eventually Dad developed some kind of intolerance to beer, resulting in urgent trips to the lavatory after consuming just half a pint, but after barium meals, enemas and every other medical test under the sun, nothing was found to be wrong with him.
His other love was horse racing. Before the First World War his father had been an illegal bookmaker. Some years there would be what he laughin
gly called a works outing to Ascot, where he and a couple of workmates would go to the racecourse for the day. He studied form and was often to be found in front of the television, in a smoke-filled sitting room, fag in mouth, with a couple of blue form books open on his lap, watching the racing on a weekday afternoon when my mother thought he was at work. He had several large wins, which paid for cars and holidays and suchlike, but I think there was never much money in his account; in fact when he died it was pretty much in the red.
When the war was over he started his decorating business. Although he was wholly uneducated, leaving school at fourteen, he had an eye for colour and form, and a strong visual sense. This could be seen in the way he dressed, as he was dapper and knew how to put clothes together, and in the few oil paintings he did, two of which were hung in a local art gallery, in an exhibition of local people’s work. He started late in life, in his fifties, and generally liked to paint portraits, having less success with still lifes, his only attempt, I remember, being a rather stiff, lifeless painting of a vase of daffodils. His paintings of people, on the other hand, had an energy and an honesty. He did a telling self-portrait; a portrait of me at about twenty-one, which I found embarrassing at the time, because it touched on my adolescent awkwardness; and a beautiful, oddly touching painting of three children, a black girl, an Indian girl and little ginger-haired girl, eyes fixed on the painter as if they were staring down the lens of a camera.
In his decorating business he employed one man full time. This was Leonard. My father was fond of Leonard, but he was often the victim of Dad’s sense of humour, once being asked whether he would drop in at the ironmonger’s on the way to work to pick up a box of bubbles for the spirit level. This he dutifully did, still not getting the joke when he arrived for work and reported that they had run out. He was a small, sickly, rather slow individual, with a tiny ball of cotton wool always shoved into each ear, his eyes forever watering, and his nose runny and red. He was constantly afflicted with ear, nose and throat infections and never had enough money to support his ever-increasing family. My father used to say that, every time he went down to see what was ‘up’ with Leonard after yet another period off work, he could swear there was another ‘nipper’ that he hadn’t seen before. My dad had several talks with him about perhaps cutting back on the procreation, pointing out that the number of children they had produced - I think six at this particular point - did have a bearing on the amount of debt they had accumulated. One time Dad said that Leonard had tried to conceal the latest addition to the family behind the door and that he, Dad, had nearly crushed the child on entering the living room.