Leeds. England Sunday 24th August 1980 She hasn’t got long. He only naps for half an hour in the afternoon these days. The boy is like a racing car all the rest of the time. From before dawn till at least nine o’clock. Just racing all the time. Even on his little mattress, fast asleep he is still on the move. He never shuts up either. Even asleep his little mouth is going.
Getting the presents for Pateley’s birthday had been like a military operation. Those who have got money don’t know how complicated life is when you have ‘nowt’.
She had got just half an hours Donald Ducking film work in the flats last Friday. Chaz and Baz, the two brothers that made the films had a younger lass doing the main bits. They only did a back view of her with some feller from up York Road. That was only deemed to be worth a tenner. She argued with that but got nowhere. Told them to ‘fuck off’, they grinned and she had stormed out the door, money in hand and went straight to the post office and got a £5 postal order. That had been for the clothes catalogue. The other fiver was for Pateley’s birthday. This year he was three and knew a little about birthdays.
She had him in at the Pentecostals playgroup every Friday, 9-12. With all the pissing about with her money, she didn’t get out of the flat till 10.45, or the post office till 11, that only gave her an hour to get into town and back. So it had to be laying out bus fares instead of walking. No option.
So a bus to Eastgate in town left with just £4.50 left for the presents. Time whys she had a bit of leeway with the Pentecostals but not much.
The ‘War on Want’ charity shop on the road behind Eastgate, in Little China Town, was her plan. A lot of folk who signed on at the DHSS went there so it was very much hit and miss if there would be anything decent in after so many people had picked over what was on the shelves and tables. But Friday was often a good day. It was the stock top-up day. A lady had told her.
And thank God it had turned out that way. But she had been worried.
A fast scan and run-around got a couple of nice storybooks and an action man with a wonky leg. But the quantity was important. The boy had to wake up on his birthday and see lots of things. Make him excited. There had to be at least one more thing. Something a bit flashy.
The panic had been rising. The bus was due and the presents were not enough yet. There had to be something big, and eye-catching for the lad.
Just then a box of recent drop-offs by the curtain over the backroom door, got her attention. Balanced on top was an ‘Etch a Sketch’ toy, It was red, looked like a flat telly and it had two nobs and a slide thing what you pulled across. The screen was silvery. She has one as a little girl, and had loved it. You drew by twisting the two nobs. One did up lines and the other across ones, twisting them both together gave you a sloping line up or down. Then when you wanted to do another picture you just swiped across with the slide lever and it wiped the picture out. This one needed four big batteries, heaven knows what for. The one she’d had never did but maybe this one did other things as well.
Action Man, the books and the ‘Etch a Sketch’ added up to £3, so she came out one and a half-pound ahead. That would get a fair enough cake. Then she had raced back to the playgroup with all the stuff in a Lewis’s bag.
This had been the first chance since then to do the wrapping up. She had trailed a bit of superglue around the top of the Action Mans leg. His left leg would not shift anymore but she would tell Pateley it had got hurt in a battle.
When she got to the ‘Etch a Sketch’ she remembered that the four Size D batteries were needed. That would have to wait until she got the £5.40 Child Allowance on Tuesday. Her Giro cheque from the Social would come on Thursday morning early, but she would need to go begging to the brothers again for more work. Best to swallow her pride, and get that out of the way at the start of the week. Otherwise, she would have to go up Chappletown Road on Saturday. Leeds were playing at home to Leicester. If there was a win that might be okay as there could be a lot of post-match punters ‘on the look’, but best to get some Donald Ducking film money in hand any road. Chappletown was not the place to work at the moment till the coppers had got that Ripper feller. All being well her and Pateley would have a day out at Roundhay Park on his birthday. Make the day special best she could. So 31st August. Roundhay Park. The Little Lads Birthday.
Pateley now three years old. Bloody hell, how did that happen? The last three years had been like a tunnel, starting with meeting Barry Bridger and then getting the hell away from him at any cost. Then just living and working for Pateley. Nothing else in the world, just moving along down the tunnel-like that.
It would be just her and him for his birthday. That’s how it was. Certainly best without his dad but it would have been nice if Gaynor and her mate could have come. They had been a little like aunties.
Looking out the window at the weeds between the cobbles, Joan felt a rising panic in her stomach. Since Johnny and Cheyanne had gone from next door, and the daft old lass (love her) from up the street had been dragged off, there was only this house left in the street still being lived in. Number eight Lincoln Avenue. Two up and two down, back to back brick terrace. Six pounds a week from Edison’s. Scheduled for slum clearance. Soon to be dust. No date yet but it wouldn’t be long now. She, Joan needed something to happen and quick. And same as always no bugger was going to help so it had better be her.
Joan tapped three times on her forehead and repeated the words. ‘Don’t forget the batteries’.
This boy better grow up behaving right to women
-2-
Saturday, July 15th 1978
The Big Picnic
Blackbush Airport
Hampshire
It had been the Saturday before when he asked her out. His birthday. He was posing for a photo, sat astride his Suzuki 100cc motorbike in the cleared lounge of the nurse’s home, where they all lived. He was a second-year student, and she was getting to the end of her first year. He had seen her around but they had never talked much. He was in his underpants. His body covered in heart shape glitter. Sandra had made him lay on the bed while she drew the shapes with a bottle of Gloy Glue. Then sprinkled Christmas card glitter over him. Waited fifteen minutes, changed sheets, laid on his front and done it all again. So he, Johnny was covered in glitter hearts (and a few stars). She said it would look good when he drove into the big downstairs lounge. Lights off at first. Then three of them would point powerful torches which would catch the glitter, and then he would rev the engine and they would play …what else, ‘Born to be wild’. Pete Welby had called him an attention seeker afterwards, but the man did not get the scale. This was bigger than that.
He had driven around the room once (wishing he had put some toilet paper down the front of his underpants) and then stood in a kind of star shape astride the motorbike. The photos had taken a little while (all angles needed, this was his 21st Birthday and posters were going to get made) and by then another record had come on, ‘Whole lot of shakin’ going on’. Jerry Lee Lewis
He had got right in and started singing it (people used to think he was on drugs, cocaine or amphetamines but he wasn’t), and her eyes lit up and she joined in. Standing four square and screaming out the words. And that how he met the woman he was going to marry. Johnny knew right away that he wanted this woman. And she had a funny name, Cheyanne and that made it better. And she was a Jerry Lee fan. That meant she would probably be into Chuck Berry as well
Not a lot more went off that night. Just a lot of dancing (at first in his underpants and then with a sheet folded around him) and then some end of night snogging. Then Cheyanne went off with the other Mauritian girls. He did ask her out though. Would she like to go to a festival in Hampshire, called the ‘Big Picnic’? A place called Blackbushe aerodrome. About eight of them were going in a Bedford van. She grinned and said yes, that would be great.
In the week he had got her ticket from a music store off Briggate in Leeds, and then borrowed a copy of the music paper, Melody Maker. There was a full-page advert about the festival. He tore that out and slid it into her pigeon hole in the mailroom at the back of The Mansion, where all the staff picked up their hospital mail. He wrote on it. ‘See you on Saturday. Here are the people playing. Looking forward. The Big-Bopper aka Johnny Kidman’. And he got a little frisson doing that.
And they were big names: Dylan, Clapton and Joan Armatrading amongst others. The spelling of the name of the airport looked wrong. There was an ‘e’ at the end. Blackbushe, not Blackbush. But things were in motion.
He finds it hard now to remember the names of the people in the van. Paul was there, and he was driving. Just back from working in Libya on the oil pipelines and now employed at the artificial limb workshop at Chapel Allerton. He looked and talked like a druggy. He was but maybe not as much as he looked. He did wild things and they had got to be good mates. All the other faces are gone, but they would have been young men and women from Meanwood. Mostly nurses in training in what was then called Mental Subnormality Nursing.
The next thing in his mind is laying next to Cheyanne in two joined up sleeping bags among 200,000 people. They were about a hundred yards from the stage, front and centre. By lunchtime, they were hundreds of yards from the edge of the crowd. There was no possibility of getting to the bathroom, even if there had been enough to get to. He and Cheyanne never did drugs but everyone else was. But they were intoxicated on each other. They sort of got high on resting against each other and every so often the music broke through. There was Dylan in a weird suit and a top hat singing Rainy Day Women, or Clapton’s doing Layla. Everyone stood up apart from them so it was like being in a forest of people. They were so into each other that neither noticed when a dog cocked its leg and peed over Johnny. Funny as hell, but can’t remember now how he got clean. Maybe someone had brought wet cloths. God knows
Then next thing Cheyanne and I are in the back of the Bedford Van. Everyone is drinking except Paul. He has a joint in his hand. How crazy were we to trust his driving? Amway’s the Pink Floyd album was playing and Paul was on the Dark Side of the Moon track, or maybe another one, but the one where an alarm clock goes off. A police car overtook us and signalled to pull in. The officer came to the front passenger window (someone wound it down) and he was standing there. He wanted to do a Breathalyser on Paul, but the music was playing and they could not hear each other. Then the alarm went off in the music and the policeman dived to the ground. He probably thought it was a gun or something. We were all scared of IRA terrorism then (with good reason). But anyways he is on the ground, and it was funny as hell (which was not fair, the man was trying to do his job and we were idiots), but it was known forevermore as the time the copper dived into the ground. That policeman will be in his mid-sixties now. I wonder if he remembers like I do. And what he thought about us.
So like tonight when I’m sat with a bottle of Primativo and listening to tunes. I think about how Cheyanne and I started, I think about those three things that happened in the seven days between my twenty-first birthday and the festival at Blackbushe Aerodrome. The love we both had for Jerry Lee Lewis, and how I hoped she would get to love Chuck Berry.
Cheyanne had been seeing a man who was trying to get into Catholic Seminary College, but she told him some lies, and then we moved into a stinking flat above hairdresser soon afterwards. Four months later we got married.
I’m sitting here now more than forty years later when it seems just about everything has happened that ever could do, I think on that attraction we had. What was such a beautiful Mauritian girl, with a craving for Jerry Lee Lewis songs doing at my Twenty-first birthday party, and what did she see in the almost naked pale, lanky skinny idiot covered in glitter riding a Suzuki 100c motorbike.
And then I have to think about if we had never met, would life have been better for her. Or maybe only a different shuffle of the cards. Less me more her, it would have been better for her. But we don’t get to know that do we?
-3-
All Saints Church
Blackman Lane
Leeds
December 1978
The man looks like Bernard Manning, the comedian, the one that lots of people hate because of the kind of jokes he tells. If you don’t know of him (he is not around anymore) here is a picture for your head. A man around sixty still got all his hair, and it’s still got all its colour, heavy set (outsize, barrel-shaped), gravelly voice, Jowly. Looks like his skin has got too big for his head. A faint smell of Brylcreem styling gel, a bit of the north in his voice. That could be Bob. Reverend Bob, Vicar of All Souls, the soot-stained millstone grit Victorian Church on Blackman Lane in Leeds.
A lot of people really did not like Bernard. I try not to judge too harshly. His jokes sound very bad now (very much on the racist side…strongly racist even), and he told them with a knowing look like he was telling the audience ‘we both know what I mean’, a bit of a wink. Okay, that’s not good at any time, but in the 1970’s it was not particularly shocking.
I don’t know why I’m going on so much about Bernard sodding Manning because Bob might have looked a lot like him (almost as if they were twins) but character-wise (and note: I suspect Manning was very different from his stage act in private) they were nothing alike. Bob was everything the stage, Manning was not and visa-Versa. So there you have him. Bob looked like Bernard Manning’s twin but it worked out that in life he was the polar opposite.
If you had to pick out two or three words to describe Revd. Bob, they might be kind, hesitant. Generous has to be in there, and if I was allowed one more with an inappropriate hyphen I would choose ‘over-thinker’, a bit too much on the philosopher side. The kind of man who would miss a bus because he would be too preoccupied with thinking about the nature of buses to actually get on the thing when it stopped for him. So what we have is a case of an object which on the outside is nothing like what it is on the inside. And I’m not making assumptions about Bernard’s personality. I suspect he was a very lovely man… when he was off stage.
The resemblance between Bob and Bernard was so strong that on three distinct occasions Bob had been approached by strangers who shouted: “Bernard what you doing dressed up as a fxxxing vicar”? Twice in the northwest but once in Cornwall as well. And he did not have an answer to that. Bob would have been good at ‘Banter’ if he had been allowed more time to formulate his answers.
This day it was cold, as of course it’s supposed to be in December. And in 1978 before we got global warming, that how December was: bloody freezing. He was outside in the cold looking up and down the lane for two reasons. He was trying to find his wife, Ida and he was angry-scared.
He would have been at the church hall for 1pm to help set up for the Sunday School children’s Christmas Party, but he felt drained of any strength or energy and so had begged off. People knew why. He didn’t have to say, and anyway, he was not really needed for that. Bob had left Ida sleeping on the Zed Bed in the spare room (they had not shared a bed for months) and he now wanted a few minutes to think so he had gone into the garage to where he had his wicker chair and his thinking table. It was Maddy, one of the churchwardens and a beautifully kind woman who had come and found him, then woken him up (he, of course, had fallen asleep). That always happened when he stopped moving these days (and thank goodness he had not had the whisky out). She said, “Sorry Bob, Ida has done something you need to come and see”. When they walked in through the door of the church hall nothing looked wrong. Bob looked around a second time and still, nothing looked out of place, then Maddy pointed at the tall Christmas tree, which filled the far corner of the entrance extension. Instead of shiny baubles, it had Tampax’s tied by their little strings to the branches. And each un-sheaved Tampax was a different colour. Bob got closer. They were coloured by ink, calligraphy ink. It looked like each tampon had been dipped in one of the little bottles. That had been her hobby. Writing special cards for people. Dormant (no lost) for at least a year now. Like a lot of things. She had suddenly stopped doing it
Bob wasn’t shocked anymore. These kinds of things happened every day. At first, he had been horrified and enraged, but all that emotion just wears you out. Now, these crazy humiliating things just accumulated their weight and pressed down on him (and if he was honest, that’s how he felt. I mean it had mostly come down to Ida’s effect on him. He hadn’t considered how Ida had felt for a long time. When she first got ill there were these little rushes of panic that she got when she did something like The Farting Song, and a window opened in her mind and she thought ‘what am I doing’. She had gone well past that point where she got that she had done something awful (although now and again there was maybe a little flicker of recognition).
So these things that Ida now did were totally unsurprising. If they had stopped, that would have been the surprising (and joyful) thing. Now he just wanted her to get to the point where she got bedridden and semi-conscious. That would be simpler.
Bob knew what was going on or at least as much as medicinal science could supply a satisfying answer. The front of one’s brain is important. It carries out diverse roles. It organises you, it’s what you plan with, it monitors your own behaviour and crucially only allows out into the world properly vetted utterances and behaviour. It gets involved in working out what other people’s behaviour is about. Get that wrong and you are a big stakes loser. If you put a tumour in amongst the bits in the front of your brain it by necessity takes up ever more space in what is, after all, a closely compacted district. As it grows it presses up against its neighbours. Squeezing, squashing and then infiltrating. That’s what was happening with Ida.
The tumour is inoperable as it has been growing, in secret for a very long time. The doctors had warned him of ‘potential personality changes to come’. These mean nothing. It is not the real person doing and saying these things. And right on cue, they arrived; cruel, disinhibited, impulsive, fatuous. Irritable. Shameless. Then came the ‘not recognising him’, or their children, finding herself lost in what should have been familiar places or adding lard to the weekly wash (catastrophic).
And the more his wife went down that path, the more he thought about her when she had been a young woman. Just plain Ida Redman when they met. Bob was newly demobbed from service as an Army Chaplain in Palestine, and then at the Normandy landing and drive-through Europe to Germany. He was a lover of folk and country music and something of an idealistic Christian Socialist with a wish to serve back in Southern Africa where he had spent time before the war. Ida and he had met at a very earnest folk club in the Rising Sun pub on Kirkstall Road in Leeds.
Ida was jolly and easy to talk to and had a lot more self-possession and confidence than the other women. So much so that Bob was a little worried at first. Some women saw him as a curiosity or even more devilishly as an odd trophy to be bedded. There were such women, and they were characterised by their confidence. He had known them before the war. They targeted the theology students at parties and tried to de-rail them. No Ida was not like that but she was electrically charged and possessed of a shimmer. (Bob always looked for shimmer in women. It was a concept of his. Most women did not have shimmer, and others had it by the truckload. Ida was one of those).
He had walked into her (literally that, walked into her) in the Rising Sun (the shimmer had blinded him), she fell over and then he had hurt her again with an accidental kick, and then he poured lemonade over her head when he bent down to help her up from the ground. The obsessive, magnet-like attraction had started then. Some lads had got up to sing Ida Red, which everyone thought was a cowboy song. Ida had grabbed him and said, ‘cowboys be buggered, this song belongs to me’ (Bob understood, he felt the same way about ‘Fields of Athenry’). She later claimed that grabbing him, had been nothing to do with him as such. She just needed someone to dance with. It had been hearing her song that got her excited, not any particular interest in him, but as slow as Bob could be he knew that she was teasing him a little (and it felt nice). She was beautiful, in a highly sprung, gymnastic, and leaping over gates and fences type of way. A little taller than him, and one of those types alien to his sort, that is she was one of those people who lived in their bodies as well as their minds. The word was ‘lithe’. That was the word he wanted to use but these days kept forgetting. She was lithe and full of life. Red (even crimson) hair. She grew it long and sometimes piled it up. She looked at people sideways on (a result of a slightly lazy eye, which went its own way). But you needed that. The little supposed imperfection set her off. Ida employed it and that made her even more attractive. Red hair, lazy eye, springy lithe (that word again) body and an in your face frankness. Keen…like a razor blade intelligence. A fast talker. In days his head had been altogether taken over by her. He loved fast talkers, who were also fast thinkers.
In turn, Ida studied Bob carefully and watched how he operated amongst people. Years later she talked about this period of study.
Some intellectual types at the Rising Sun sang what they called ‘Negro Spirituals’. Many of these people were Communists and deniers of God. It didn’t matter if they had a religion or not they still murdered the songs, and employed the most appalling stereotypes. Ida would cringe. Bob would gently put these headstrong people right without them knowing they had been corrected. More than that, he left them feeling good. He was just that: good, but also gentle, rational, reflective, seeking to understand other perspectives and wholly unselfish. People genuinely loved him. Even the most ranting, hating ones. Ida mentally noted all of this. He was unusual and of a strange type, and she liked him very much. And they had rapport. They got married
What caught him by surprise (shocked and shamed him even) was how, thirty-five years later when she now needed him, he found himself hating her. Life had been busy. Very few things had been wholly good or bad in all that they had seen and done as a couple over the decades, but one thing was crystal. He loved her. No dilution no alteration, love without fading. Absolutely and totally. He had loved her, but this thing in front of him now was a parody and he had to stop himself grabbing the shell of Ida by the shoulders and shaking this crazy woman until her proper normalness came back.
When someone is close to you and they are mad you get terrified. It’s like suddenly you realise that you are standing on nothing but a stack of boxes piled high and they are rolling away under your feet. And you are flailing.
There had been one time fairly soon after he diagnosis when she had sung the ‘Ida’, song and made it sound lewd and obscene just with her (pelvic) movements (the words alone were a little bawdy but harmless) and that had marked the point when the strands snapped in him. They’d had the song ever since the times at the ‘Rising Sun’. They both favoured the Woody Guthrie version. It felt more authentic. And it had come to represent their togetherness. They (softly) sang lines when the lovemaking was gentle, and some phrases then felt like a sacrament. Unlikely but true (and precious). So when she made it lewd in front of old friends it was not the social embarrassment that stung. She could have been out in a field by herself, and he would have felt the same. The transgression was that she had pissed on the thing between them. Of course, Bob knew in his head it was not really her, but something the tumour had done, but never-the-less the memory became corrosive.
And there is something one was not supposed to even think about. It was supposed to wain and go naturally, and anyway it was selfish to be thinking of that. He was thinking of sex and making love. It had been their big brilliant thing. He had to face it. That part of his life was gone. He had made love for the last time and he could not even remember when that was. Never the less he was in mourning for the loss of sex. God knows what people would think of him if they knew that. Having sex with Ida as she was now was unthinkable. She was damaged, and it would have felt something like rape. He told himself to put those thoughts away.
The remarks and the crazy accusations were starting to get funny they were so awful. Or they would have been if people had understood. Ida was not mad, but her brain had been taken over by a tumour and it was destroying what she had been. It can be hard to believe such explanations at times. It is not something within the normal experiences of most of us. Maybe the illness was just stripping away her deceit and exposing how she had really felt. That felt more likely than talk of filter loss and randomly generated thoughts with no reason or antecedents. Maddy pulled on Bob’s arm again. Ida’s uneven voice was coming from the big room through the next doors. He noted how she had even lost control of that. Rapid and slow in the wrong places, up and down at the wrong times. Now she was going squeaky. Like a mouse might sound if you squeezed it. Sprightly Maddy was ahead of him and got the picture before he did. Bob stopped short of the door and so just got a partial view of his wife on the little wooden platform that served as a stage at the end of the room. She was wearing a short-sleeved, cotton print dress featuring pale pastel flowers. The belt was untied and it was evident that she was not wearing a bra. There were carpet slippers on her feet. In her hand (he noted now it was twitching) was a white, cotton sun hat. As Ida spoke the hat jerked. He knew the dress. It was the one she had sometimes warn for the little social events they had at the mission and its school in the Transvaal, near to the southern Rhodesia border. All of thirty-three years earlier, in the first months of their marriage.
Bob inched forward through the double doors and took in the wider view. About thirty, primary school-aged children were sat on the floor in a half-circle around Ida. Their parents lined the walls. People of many nations or at least five or so. Mostly immigrants but one or two-second generation. The walls and ceiling were thick with festive decoration. The Christmas tree was a glorious thing. That was Lithuanian Ona’s project, completed with the help of her children every year. The eight-foot tree looked spectacular, with everything to the max. Her kids had filled every inch with (incongruous) objects. When had unicorns become Christmassy? But they were there and so was a cowboy, and an Eskimo. Bob knew what he was doing. He was parking his attention on the tree, and Ona’s work so he did not have to look at Ida. Odd how his mind was working these days. And then a line of Ida’s words from the stage broke though into his consciousness, ‘No, I said she’s fucking Goofy’. Bob guessed that was a Disney themed play on words joke, but there were just shock and no laughter. Ida giggled at her own punch line but it sounded strained, and she looked awfully frail.
‘Muscley Maddy’, the daughter of a Jewish Hungarian wrestler who had survived the death camps pushed him gently again, but Bob did not really need it. He weaved through the chairs and stepped up onto the stage where he stood beside his wife. His arm around her back and tucked under her right arm, firmly. The words came out ‘My wife is not well, we need to go now’. Everyone smiled and tried to look at both of them with compassion, and to make sure Bob felt it they felt it; that is everyone except one person who wrote to the bishop and said Ida was a lewd inebriate and looked like a Chappletown slut. Furthermore, there were anti-Christian symbols on the Christmas tree and Revd Bob had done nothing about it. He sometimes smelt of whisky and Sharps Extra Strong Mints. The bishop called the woman an evil cow in his mind but he went ahead and did what he felt he had to do.
And that’s what led Bob and Ida to end up 133 miles away in the village of Godmanchester, near Huntingdon. A lovely rural place but one which Bob viewed with an absolute lack of interest. And he felt guilty about that (after all he was ‘here for God’, not for himself and he ‘better get on and serve’). At near on sixty Bob figured that this was the place that he was likely to end his days, or at least his working life. And that would have been fine just lately there was nothing in him anymore that wanted to do it…be a priest. And that was bad twofold: people were relying upon him, and also because of the other problem. Bob the vicar had a secret.
Ida Red-
The Woody Guthrie VersionIda Red, Ida Red,
Can’t make a living for Ida Red
Ida Red, big and plump
Eighty-four inches around the rump
Ida Red, big and plump
Got eighty-four inches around the rump
Ida Red jumped the fence
I ain’t seen my Ida since
-4-
Thursday 6th June 1968
The day after US Presidential Candidate, Robert Kennedy was assassinated
Hunslet Carr Primary School
Hunslet.
South Leeds
The new headmaster, Mr Garrat, had them all in the hall just before dinner time. He has stopped the lessons and told the teachers to bring all the children right away. He had something to tell the whole school. Barry Bridger sat with the others from his class at the back. The fourth years sat there because they were taller than the other children, and so could see over the heads of the younger, smaller ones. They were almost all now eleven and so would be off to the secondary schools after the summer holidays. A few would be off to the Grammar, but the rest of them were down for the Secondary Modern which his mum said was fine. He would be able to leave when he was fifteen and earn some brass.
Barry had decided the call to the hall would be about the stealing that was going on. People’s dinner money was getting taken out of satchels and somebody had nicked the big jar with all the pennies for Africa in it. Then he saw they had a big TV on a trolley. The one they used to watch the schools programmes on. This was probably not about stealing then.
Mr Garrat clapped his hands together and called out for everyone to be quiet. This was a bad day for the world. Somebody in America had shot a man called Robert Kennedy who wanted to be President. His brother had been shot almost five years earlier and was dead as well. This was very sad. A lady teacher then put the TV on because they had stopped the school programmes and were talking about Robert Kennedy getting killed. The TV was not working right and was just making a lot of noise instead, so Mr Garrat told the lady teacher to turn it off.
He picked up a card from the table in front of him and said he wanted to read out something that Mr Kennedy had said a while before he was shot. Kennedy had just found out that another man, a black man called Martin Luther King, who was trying to make things better for other black people had been shot. Kennedy was being a very good man and trying to help the people who were getting upset about the black man’s murder. Barry was to forget most of Kennedy’s words voiced in the hall by the Headmaster, but one line stuck itself in his head: ‘Tame the Savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world’. He remembered that.
That evening at the cubs when Akela asked if anybody had anything important happen that week, Barry had said he had heard about the Robert Kennedy being shot and that people had to ‘Tame the Savageness of man’. Akela laughed and looked surprised, and then grinned and nudged the lady who helped. Later on, there was a special ceremony they had when you got too old for the cubs and it was time to be a scout. Everyone stood in a circle and Barry stood in the centre. At the front, there was Akela again and next to him the Akela for the scouts. He, Barry had to recite the Scouts promise he had been learning and then the cub Akela had said what Barry had done in the cubs and what a kind of person he was. The cub Akela said that he, Barry ‘tried hard and was very good-natured and did his best to overcome his difficulties’. Then Barry was a Scout. He didn’t have the uniform yet but he told the Scout Akela his mum was looking.
When cubs finished he set off to walk home back home by himself, and on the way, he pondered what the cub leader had said. He knew that people thought he was slow or backward as they called it. His mum said he was a slow learner but everyone also said he had a heart of gold all the same. Mum had told the teacher not to put him in for the important 11 plus selection exam, as it was pointless and would just make him feel bad. Mum went on about how he would do well in other ways. The ones that would count for more in the end. But sometimes they almost made it sound like being ‘nice’ was a sign of being ‘backward’. That he was too stupid to be nasty almost. A happy, nice simpleton. And with that unsettling thought, he walked on.
The last stretch before home was through the derelicts. The houses waiting to come down because of slum clearance. Barry had on occasions got ‘a hiding’ there. You only had to be a little different and that made you a candidate for ‘a hiding’. He was small for his years, and his shorts too long and baggy. The girls would laugh at him, and then the lads would debag him, pull his kegs down and run off with them so he had to go home bare arsed.
It had got a lot worse since one teacher had started calling him, ‘Namow’. Mr Potter, who took them for sports and woodwork gave him that name.
‘Barry Bridger, you’re a ‘Namow’, a bloody ‘Namow’. Now ask me what that means’.
Barry’s eyes would fill up but he did as he was bid. ‘What is a Namow, Mr Potter’ he barked in imitation of the teacher?
Everyone would laugh because they knew what was coming. ‘It’s a backward woman, Bridger. And that’s what you are. A Backward Woman. You should be at the spastic’s school or with the ESN’s’. Even the girls laughed, and so did all of the lads he thought were friends. Barry knew they had to or Mr Potter would get them next.
It was going to be worse at the secondary. They had lads there who were fifteen. Some stayed on till they were sixteen. And he, Barry would be bottom of the pile..
He had seen the letter his mother got from the Secondary Modern School. He was going to be in a class called ‘A8’. An older boy told him that the ‘A’ meant he was ‘a first year’, and the eight meant he was remedial. That is somebody who is thick. Eight was the very bottom class. So there were seven classes above him who were cleverer and none below who were worse. And that’s not counting the Grammar School kids who were better even than the ‘A1’s’
The kids in ‘A8’ got called ‘Spazzers’, and there would also be lads in his class who were toughies. Boys like John Busby who sometimes had fights with the teachers. and stole a car from the airport and drove it to London with the police chasing him.
Truth be told Barry was not stupid. In time people would find he outstripped a lot who were supposedly smarter than him. Instead of stupid he was two things. A slow developer and wholly literal. A teacher had said that last thing. Barry had thought it meant he had done something wrong in Religious Education, and that caused some upset for a while. Most teachers are rubbish at understanding child development. They don’t get that children develop at an uneven pace and that some kids are a little like tortious (of tortoise and hare fame) but in a uniquely different way. They are slow all the way through but keep going, when everyone else reaches the winning post, they peak a good year or two after the others but typically out of view. They certainly did not succeed across the board, no not at all. They often stayed odd for example…but in specific areas (as was to be the case with Barry) they did well because they got a special love. For Barry, it was to be books, poetry and songlines. Unfortunately, by then so many of these slow and uneven learners are so angry and chippy or just so weird that they can’t function anyway. Barry felt that one of his special powers was ‘niceness’.
Hunslet like many parts of poorer Leeds in the 1960s was not a place where they valued niceness. Whilst London and down there was all peace and love, Hunslet and such like favoured meanness and spite and sometimes sadism. It was in possession of a love of hurting things (that is if the district had been a person). You saw it without searching. Local lads walking off to moor edge in search of mixy rabbits to bray with cricket bats or tormenting a Mongol lad who peed himself or terrorising the old and eccentric. It felt to Barry that if anyone stuck their neck out, or acted differently or showed weakness then that made them a target. When he was smaller the women might intervene and stick up for him but now they said he had to fight back. Stick up for his self…but Barry doubted if it was in him.
Hunslet was ugly and it smelt of rotten eggs and car fumes. It gave you a catch in the throat. Made you spit. Leeds had places like it all around its southern and eastern rim, at about a mile from the city centre. Hunslet was to the south and little below the dead and toxic River Aire. Pubs, terraced houses and the gaping spaces left by slum clearance gathered around unloved industrial premises. Hunslet had engineering, locomotive building and Tetley’s bitter. It had the second biggest gas works in Leeds. Proud boast. It had cream glazed pottery of no merit but its cheapness. Hunslet would never go away, but it would get uglier every year. It was like a seeping boil on the backside of Leeds that never got better with creams or potions and stained the cities trousers a yellowy, ‘brown red.
In pristine Norfolk market towns, civic minded people would scrabble about on their hands and knees if they accidentally dropped a scrap of paper. In Hunslet they would let it be, cough up some phlegm and then spit on it, and then tell jokes about shop doorway whores, VD, bodily functions and the fucking Pakis (or Irish, or Jews or …).
Eleven year old Barry; walking home from his last night at the cubs, on the day he heard about Robert Kennedy, was again about to witness the ugliness and meanness of this place first hand.
He heard the dog before he saw it Yelping and whining. He followed the sound out of an instinct of concern. When he turned the corner he saw a small crowd of boys hurling lumps of rubble at an emaciated dog cornered it what had once been someone’s cellar. The creature struggled to get up on its feet; the bones of the hind legs were smashed. There was terror in the dog’s eyes, but rather than drawing pity from lads it drove them on. The boys were only a couple of years older than Barry but they were already aping the mentality of the cruellest of the cities grown men; whilst vying with one another in callousness.
Barry ran right for the middle of the group. He gathered a half brick on his way, leapt slightly and then brought it down with force on the tallest boys head. The youth buckled at the knees and dropped like a sack. Barry’s rage was not blown. He grabbed a rust sheaved length of railing and lunged with a great outward swipe at another boy. It caught him on the tip of his chin and sent his head pivoting backward in a brutal, jarring movement. He too fell. Barry turned and now swung the railing like a baseball bat at the head of another child. But this time the blow was wide and the lad ducked and ran, quickly followed by the two others. Little Barry had felled or driven off five boys a full head taller than himself and he felt righteous and strong like an avenging super hero. The two boys were moving now, and would maybe be okay but places had been traded. They were now the scared ones.
Barry decided he had done well. Like Robert Kennedy. He looked over at the whining, broken creature and cried. Now he had to be brave like Kennedy as well. He picked up another brick and smashed the dog’s skull. It was something that a good person had to do even though it might seem bad if you didn’t know the whole story.
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would sit on the chair arm and laugh along while her funny dad played the
Finding Joan Again 