The Faraway Places: Loss, Turmoil and the Glorious Game: Coming of Age in the Sixties

By Alan Richard Barton

A country boy's life is devastated when his family abruptly uproot to London giving no satisfactory explanation, a mystery he agonises over and must try to solve. Small for his age and in fear of his moody, tyrannical father, he struggles to come to terms with life in the big city. Then he discovers the glorious game. Could this be his path to deliverance? / / "Compelling - I couldn't stop turning the pages." Chris Stewart (author of 'Driving Over Lemons'.) / / "Beautifully written, perfectly paced. . . a work of art." Meg Robinson (artist, and author of 'Drawn By A Star: Adventures In Patagonia'.) / / "An engaging adventure through the highs and lows of life." Sarah Luddington (author of 'The Knights of Camelot' series.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alan Richard Barton
• Release date: Mar 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311295866

Book preview

1. The Hills

Adrian gazed mournfully at the ground and his lower lip began to tremble.

'It's not fair.'

'Course it's fair,' said Dicksy, his younger brother, turning to me. 'Ain't it, Alan?'

'I'm goin' 'ome,' Adrian mumbled, and with that he wandered off up the lane.

Dicksy, made of sterner stuff, burst out laughing.

''E's a twerp, inny?' he laughed, straight into my face, and spit hit me in the eye.

'Yes, he is,' I agreed, sorry our game had been spoiled.

The Hickey brothers lived just along the lane so perhaps in a while Adrian might decide to return. There being no-one else to play with on our lane it might even dawn on the dim-witted Adrian that righteousness carried a price. You couldn't always be sheriff. Sometimes it had to be someone else's turn.

My mother appeared at our gate.

'Who'd like some orange juice? Where's Adrian?'

'E's gone 'ome!' Dicksy exclaimed, as if this was the funniest thing that had ever happened. Actually it had happened before.

Snot dribbled from Dicksy's nose and my mother cast a troubled gaze over his grubby limbs and disheveled clothes. Though I couldn't have told you in what way my family was different from the other people who lived on the lane. It was somehow implied in things I overheard my parents say or perhaps in the way they said them. Or in the degree of care my father took polishing his shoes and arranging his tie in the mirror.

My sister's friends all lived in Great Malvern, the town where we used to live and where she still went to school. Sometimes at weekends someone gathered her up in a car and she was gone for the day. Later she would arrive home self-importantly, like someone who moved in different circles from low-life like me. Occasionally her arrival coincided with Nanny, our grandmother, reading me my bed-time story. Mostly these were the adventures of Rupert the Bear. I knew them all off by heart. So that when Nanny tried to hurry the story along by using the couplets beneath the pictures instead of the longer text at the foot of the page I was onto her in a flash.

'You missed a bit,' I told her, sucking on my thumb sagely. I wasn't having any of that.

'He's a one,' Nanny chuckled to my mother.

We lived in the little village of Upper Welland on Watery Lane. There was no church, just the one shop. Our house - 'Mitton Cottage' - was whitewashed and faced west towards the Malvern Hills which soared majestically half a mile away. A handful of cottages were strung along our lane, which descended into some woods where it crossed a cheerful brook before climbing towards the farm to which it offered a rear approach. Disorientated cows sometimes wandered up the lane to peer like zombies over the gate into our garden. The lane was rutted and when it rained hard a stream formed and you saw how it came to be called Watery Lane.

Everything grew in our garden: gooseberries, cauliflowers, runner beans, Brussel sprouts… A small orchard contained plums, pears, and seven varieties of apple. In years to come my father would speak of this with pride and a sense of wonder, as if hardly believing it himself, and taking a deep breath he would name them: Bramleys, Beauty of Bath, Discovery, Coxes Orange Pippins, Sturmers, Pearmans and, of course, Worcesters. There were chickens at the bottom of the garden and behind the cottage stood a large old greenhouse warm with the musty smell of tomatoes. An ancient grapevine had spread itself beneath the roof and sometimes a big old bumble bee would be bumping against the glass trying to find his way out.

I was just beginning to stand back a little from the mother I adored and unconsciously to form some assumptions. That our family had always lived on these hills, my father was born with green fingers, and Nanny had always lived with us. One day a very different past from the one I imagined would start to emerge, but for now I remained innocent of any such notion. My perspective though was changing. Sometimes we drove to a place on the hills called 'British Camp' - an Iron Age earth work - and walked along the hills. From here, my father said, you could see more counties than we grew apples in our garden. And I gazed uncomprehendingly across a sea of shimmering fields dissolving into a distant haze. And so we were Worcestershire folk and this was our world, these hills and the great skies and the woods along the lane where the bluebells grew. I knew precisely where I was born because my mother had shown me. At a nursing home on Graham Road in Great Malvern. The same road where my father worked.

'That window just there,' my mother said, pointing.

They were expecting a girl, my mother having been unable to imagine giving birth to a boy, and so she was astonished when the nurse placed me in her arms. If she looked upon my arrival as some sort of miracle however, my sister, Sue, was less ecstatic. Years later she would explain - though in a sense she had been demonstrating all along - that I was the one who had turned up to rock the boat. There is a touching photograph in one of the old albums that perhaps sums up her situation. The three of them on the beach at Woolacombe the summer before I was born. This cute little girl with pig-tails, her very own daddy holding one hand and her very own mummy holding the other. My sister's briefly perfect world.

To be honest, it wasn't that big a deal that I had to be sheriff. But it could hardly be fair for Adrian to be sheriff all the time. Though the diminutive Dicksy made a slightly implausible guardian of the law it was surely only right that we shared the role around. No, the truth was it mattered much more to me to be Roy Rogers.

Roy first galloped into my life at the cinema in Malvern, ten feet tall on his golden palomino, Trigger. He was cool, long before I knew such a concept existed. Where the other cowboys stumbled and fell over their feet, Roy smiled, sang a song and took his time. When called upon, of course, he was the fastest gun in the West, though mostly people knew this and kept a respectful distance. There he goes, they murmured admiringly, the great Roy Rogers. When my mother tucked me in at night and turned out the light I shuffled to the edge of the bed and dangled a leg over the side pretending I was hugging the edge of a cliff. Behind me, Teddy and Bambi and Rabbit and Little Mouse lay safely between me and the wall. For I was their protector, the king of the cowboys, Roy Rogers.

In the morning my father and my sister set off in his car and I spent the day with my mother and Nanny and Skippy the cat. The back door stood open onto the sunlit garden and I wandered in and out. Nanny sat reading the paper in the cool of the kitchen and listening to Music While You Work while my mother moved around doing her chores. With a click-click of my tongue I set off on Trigger, heading down the garden towards where some open ground stretched towards the chicken pen. We traversed a sprawling prairie before entering bandit country amid the fruit trees where I gunned down some desperadoes. Negotiating some Injun territory without further incident, I returned up the lawn and into town where I drew Trigger to a halt and dismounted.

A friendly lady was hanging out her washing.

'Howdy.'

'Howdy, pardner,' Mum said.

Later we listened on the wireless to Toy Town with Larry the Lamb. I liked the wireless. I liked it so much I sometimes went on the radio myself. To do this I stood inside the cupboard talking through the door, while Nanny, my mother and Sue sat listening outside.

Sometimes our nice neighbour, Mrs Jeans, let Sue and I watch Andy Pandy on her television.

Coming along the lane we held hands.

'Will you play with me?'

'Go on then, what do you want to play?'

'Cowboys and Indians?'

'That's all you ever want to play.'

I couldn't deny this, but why wouldn't I want to play my favourite game? When I was Roy the world was an easy place to understand. It was the times in between I sometimes struggled with. Besides, when she was in the mood Sue made an excellent cowboy. I imagined her moodiness was just her jealousy at all the fuss that was made about her weedy little brother. The bed-time stories. Our mother's cuddles. But what was a chap supposed to do?

My father worked, as I say, on Graham Road, at Buckingham House, a rather grand Victorian villa with a gravel drive and steps up to the front door where a shiny brass plate announced 'J. Newby Strickland,' followed by a string of letters and finally the words 'Dental Surgeon.' My father was one of Mr Strickland's technicians, not that I had any idea what this meant. His employer was also our family's dentist, almost a friend.

'And how's our little soldier?' he greeted my mother and me as we entered the surgery, before lifting me onto the chair and pumping with his foot until I rose up alongside his smiling, bespectacled face. A nice man, Mr Strickland. I liked him.

None of us had any way of knowing at this stage of course what was going to become of us, how dramatically our lives were going to change. Least of all how the name Strickland would resonate down through the years, to be whispered behind closed doors, bellowed on occasions with rage, hurled across the room to stun and appall. How innocent we all were just then in our sunshiny, half-awake world.

'Open wide,' Mr Strickland urged gently. And tipping back my head, I peered into the two dark caverns of his nostrils, from each of which sprouted a bush of black hair.

'And how are you finding Upper Welland, Rose?'

'Oh, wonderfully peaceful.'

'I gather Bert's enjoying his garden.'

'Yes, he is - that was the whole appeal, of course.'

'He caught the bug from your father, if I'm not mistaken?'

'Yes. After my parents came to live with us Dad taught him everything he knew. He came from a family of agricultural labourers, you see.'

'Irish, I seem to recall?'

He peered into my mouth and prodded me with a chrome-coloured implement.

'Ouch!'

'Sorry old chap - nearly done.'

As we came out into the foyer a door opened, and my father appeared wearing a white smock.

'All in order?'

'Just fine.'

My mother squeezed my hand. And I gazed up at them both feeling surrounded by good will.

Sometimes the bus ride into Malvern meant a visit to Auntie Mary Wheeler and my friend Robert. We were born two days apart, our pregnant mothers having passed each other a few times in the street before eventually introducing themselves. Robert had not one, but two older sisters, and as I had reasons for believing myself to be a nicer person than he was, I struggled to understand why they evidently thought the world of him while mine didn't care very much for me.

'You can look at my racing car if you like,' Robert said, knowing perfectly well I'd like this very much.

'Yes, please.'

He tugged open the side door of his father's garage and there, just inside the door, stood Robert's bright red pedal car, with a black number one on a white circle. Just to look at its sleek lines and waspish snout filled me with envy.

'It's a Maserati,' Robert said, looking at me significantly.

I had a pedal car too, of course, but for some reason my father had chosen a much more sober-looking model in a rather dull burgundy. Not being a racing car it didn't even have a number. I liked my car, but it didn't belong in the same stratosphere as Robert's, which resembled a miniature version of his father's red, open-top Sunbeam-Talbot, which loomed above us devouring the rest of the garage.

Once, Uncle John Wheeler - who was never at home and who we rarely saw - took Dad and Robert and me out for a spin along Jubilee Drive on the Malvern Hills, along which we hurtled at great speed, a not-nearly-long-enough journey I would never forget. Our own car was a rather worn out Riley 'Shooting Brake' of which my father was understandably proud, but which hardly bore comparison. Years later he liked to reminisce about his classical old Riley to people who no longer knew what a shooting brake was, in the years since such cars having come to be known as estate cars. Though I suspect my father preferred the old name with its association with the gentry, as if he himself had once owned guns and used to stalk grouse.

To me the rarely-seen, tall, broad-shouldered Uncle John Wheeler was some sort of god. When once he scooped me up in his arms I was flabbergasted and couldn't wait to be set down. Where we trundled along in our weary old Riley, Uncle John drove like the wind, and I'm afraid this rather appealed. I wasn't sure about trundling along, just as I wasn't convinced about my rather plain-looking purple pedal car. I was in no doubt at all however about Robert's and licked my lips as he wheeled it onto the pathway.

'You can sit in it if you like,' Robert said, reading my mind. I squeezed myself in and he allowed me to pedal back and forth along the garden path a few times while he studied me shrewdly.

After a while we steered it back into the garage and he closed the door. We were not allowed to take his car beyond the front gate, but he got out his tricycle and we began pushing it along the pavement while he told me about this amazing feat he had recently achieved. Apparently he had free-wheeled all the way down Pound Bank Road. I was very impressed.

'Do you want to do it?' he asked, something in the way he said this insinuating my weakness.

We stood looking down the hill.

'Your feet mustn't touch the pedals and it's cheating to use the brakes.'

I wondered how I might convey my uncertainty to the rather insistent Robert.

'It's really very easy,' he looked me straight in the eyes.

A moment later I was rolling along the road, which ahead of me grew steadily steeper.

'I want to stop!' I cried to Robert, trotting along beside me.

'The thing is to keep going!' he shouted, as the tricycle gathered speed and raced forward leaving him standing in the road.

'AAAAAAAARGH!' I yelled, at first in an attempt to summon some courage and then out of sheer undiluted terror. Fortunately no traffic was advancing up the hill just at that moment, otherwise the outcome might have been a good deal worse. The pedals flew around in a blur as I tugged tentatively on the brakes. Other than a nasty screeching sound however they had little effect. And realising I needed somehow to stop I steered across the road towards a high stone wall against which I brought about a terrifying, painful collision.

Peeling myself off the road, I got to my feet in a daze. And leaving Robert's tricycle where it lay, I staggered back to the house. Auntie Mary Wheeler and my mother were deeply engrossed in their conversation when I blundered, sobbing, into the room, blood gushing from both knees. Auntie Mary gasped and my mother, poised on the edge of her chair with her teacup on her knees, looked round, and catching sight of me, cried out and sent her cup and saucer flying.

Mum and I went home early that day. Probably no-one who hadn't witnessed the incident could be entirely sure what had happened. It turned out however that as far as my mother was concerned it wasn't entirely surprising, certain flaws in Robert's nature having already made themselves known. After this, whenever we visited the Wheelers, I was forbidden to venture beyond the gate, while Robert's mother appealed to him to please, please try and behave. The Pound Bank incident brought to a close, however, any ideas anyone might have had that because our mothers were the best of friends Robert and I must follow suit.

As for my father and Uncle John Wheeler, they were not what you would really call friends. It took me a while to realise that my father didn't actually have any friends, just acquaintanceships with the husbands of friends of my mother. Having said that, I'm not sure Uncle John had many friends either. A scientist at the local top-secret radar establishment, he was probably a handful for most people. I daresay my father, unusually self-conscious about his position in life's hierarchy, was frightened to death of him.

'Of course, she's got the transverse overhead cam,' Uncle John Wheeler might say, or some such thing, thrusting out his jaw meaningfully.

To which my father would probably respond, 'Absolutely, of course, oh yes,' anxious only for the other man not to realise he had no idea what he was talking about. For my father was someone for whom it was vital to make the right sort of impression, there being few things more important in life, he believed, than what people thought of you.

2. The Tunnel

I'm not sure when I began to be afraid of my father. One or two unaccountable incidents, I suppose, came to seem less unaccountable after all.

I was lying in the long grass beyond the orchard where Roy was about to ambush some bandits when he was startled by the sound of my father's voice coming from an open window. At first I thought it couldn't be him as it was a voice I hardly recognised. He was shouting. But more than this, his voice was ripping the air all around me, tearing the sky into pieces, startling the birds. As I lowered my pistol and raised my head to listen a door slammed like a gunshot and my heart skipped a beat.

Rising to his knees and tipping back his hat Roy peered through the trees towards the cottage. And as he holstered his gun and prepared to return up the garden he was stung by my mother's agonized cry. Forgetting completely to hoppity-hop like Trigger I broke into a run all the way to the cottage where I found her sobbing at the kitchen table.

'It's nothing,' she assured me, gathering herself and rising from her chair to straighten her apron, open a cupboard and start taking out some things.

'Daddy was shouting.'

'It was all a misunderstanding,' she smiled, brushing away her tears and blowing her nose.

I sat at the table watching her, trying to interpret the signals suggested by her slumped shoulders and the angle of her neck as she bent over the sink.

'And how's Roy Rogers?' she asked brightly, tossing some sunshine over her shoulder.

'He was out on patrol.'

And I allowed her to steer me away from any further thoughts about what had just taken place. For me this was only the beginning. The pattern had yet to emerge how these incidents would tend to unfold. The yelling, the door slamming, and afterwards the lingering, poisoned air.

'I don't like it,' I told my sister, feeling myself start to cry, when the incident was repeated a few weeks later and - not the most natural of allies - we sat with our arms around each other on the staircase.

'I don't like it either,' Sue sniffed.

What we were starting to understand was that beyond our father's handsome features and alert blue eyes lurked darkness. He was not as you might have supposed from his cordial behaviour at, say, the Wheeler's, always this mild-mannered man. On the contrary, he could be moody and had a talent for losing his temper. It wasn't enough for him to simply declare his annoyance and, as it were, trundle along in a mildly irritated fashion. He liked to get his foot down and race up through the gears and woe betide anyone stood in his way.

When Sue and I came into the kitchen, our mother was sat at the table dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief while our father was nowhere to be seen. Silently we comforted her, one on either side, until, shortly, the door cracked open to reveal Nanny's face. Entering, she came around the table and sat gazing at our mother. Everyone gazed at everyone.

'I'll put the kettle on,' Nanny said eventually.

For several days my grim-faced father came and went, saying nothing. Whatever the row had been about was supposedly by now forgotten, but someone had to be to blame for his having driven off the road. His family, it appeared. These difficult people with whom he shared his life.

As the days passed we tip-toed around him waiting for normal service to resume, signaled usually by some entirely unrelated comment to my mother such as, opening a cupboard and peering inside, 'Have you seen the Dettol?' Whereupon my mother, looking faintly appalled but unable to decline the opportunity, would say as evenly as she could manage, 'It's in the bathroom cabinet.' And off we all set once more, chastened but relieved.

For a while now I had been wondering about the secret tunnel I fancied was concealed in the wall of the outside toilet and I decided it was time to find it. With the Hickey brothers watching, I began chipping away at the brickwork with a hammer and one of my father's screwdrivers, all of us eager for the moment when the tunnel would be revealed and we could clamber through the hole and descend the narrow staircase to… who knew exactly where? Raised on a diet of Rupert Bear and the magical world of Nutwood just about anything seemed possible. Perhaps we would arrive through a grotto into an exotic garden to be greeted by Pong-Ping the Pekingese herself and find ourselves in the midst of some fabulous adventure.

My father, drawn by the sound of my hammering, came to investigate, and when he put his head round the door he practically exploded.

'What are you doing!' he yelled, so loudly I dropped the hammer on my foot.

I was becoming used to my father getting cross, but he had never been this cross with me. Grabbing the cowering Adrian and Dicksy by their collars, he pulled them out through the door.

'Go home the pair of you!'

As I gazed up at him, frightened more than anything by the sheer volume of his voice, and registering by now the pain in my foot, I burst into tears. As this was the same Daddy who sometimes gave me a pick-a-back up the stairs to bed, it was as if some devil had come alive inside him and he was no longer my Daddy.

'You wretched boy! Look what you've done!'

And what had I done exactly? Dislodged a few fragments of mortar, as much as a small boy could manage with a few blows of a hammer. Was it the end of the world? Apparently it was.

'You little idiot! What's the matter with you?'

He pulled me by my arm out onto the pathway and shook me. Not satisfied with this, he took hold of me by the shoulder and smacked the back my legs several times until I wasn't just crying, but shrieking.

My mother came hurrying out through the back door.

'Whatever's happened?'

'The little twerp was hammering holes in the wall, that's what!'

'Surely he meant no harm?'

'You should see the mess!'

My Mummy who had no devil inside her took me indoors and set about making the world alright again. She rubbed my legs and gave me a cuddle. She settled me down with my toys in the living room and found some nice music on the wireless. We had begun the soon-to-become-all-too-familiar process of moving on.

* * *

'Block it!' my father cried, as the tennis ball reared up in front of me and flew over my shoulder.

'It was too fast!'

'I can hardly bowl it any slower.'

I wanted to whack the ball the way Sue did, but somehow I kept missing it. Worse still, she didn't play properly. When it was her turn to bat she did this scraping shot all along the ground so that the ball couldn't go underneath, sending it racing across the garden. Surely this shouldn't be allowed? Yet whenever she did this my father said well done! As for me, he said I was there to catch it. But how could you catch the ball when it didn't go up in the air?

Somehow I didn't feel able to explain all this to him. For my father's character had fragmented by now into shades of light and dark. The amiable man who took us out in the car for picnics or to go shopping in the town, who could pull funny faces and make Nanny laugh, who did digging with me in the garden, had a dark side. His well-defined voice, usually so measured and clear, could also growl and bark.

'Can I bowl, Daddy?' Sue asked.

'Come on then.'

'But Daddy, I want you to bowl,' I said, but somehow he didn't hear me.

I didn't want Sue to bowl because she bowled it straight along the ground so you couldn't hit it. My father called these daisy cutters. I called it cheating.

'Get ready!' Sue called. 'Here it comes!'

I was boiling up inside. I wanted to whack the ball over the hedge into Mrs Jeans' garden. What happened instead was that it shot straight under my bat and hit the watering can.

'Out!' Sue cried, leaping in the air.

'It's not fair!' I wailed, sounding horribly to myself like Adrian.

'Shall I have a go?' my father walked towards me.

I dropped the bat on the ground and went to stand by the blackberry bushes.

'That's it, you field.'

My sister unleashed another of her straight-along-the-ground missiles, but my father planted his left foot forward and with the bat held firmly upright blocked the path of the ball.

He looked round at me.

'That's what we call blocking,' he said.

Something warm was happening between my legs and I pressed them together and tried to keep still.

A minute or two later my sister was batting. My father bowled to her and Sue whacked it through the air into the gooseberry bushes.

She started running up and down the lawn, calling out each run as she turned, 'One!… Two!… Three!…'

Though the words 'not fair' formed on my lips I didn't say them.

'What are you doing?' my father said, coming towards me.

'I don't know,' I mumbled, my breath feeling trapped in my chest.

He gripped me by the shoulder and gave me a shake.

'What's the matter with you?'

Wee was running down my legs.

'I couldn't help it,' I sobbed.

'Don't be ridiculous! Of course you can help it!'

He turned and strode away.

My sister was still running up and down, giggling like an idiot. 'Six!… Seven!… Eight!…'

My father went to retrieve the ball.

Sue was running as hard as she could go, 'Ten!… Eleven!… Twelve!…' each number driving like a nail into my head.

'How many?' he returned at last.

'Fifteen!' my sister screamed.

'Get ready then! Take guard!'

Unwanted, I wandered up the path and into the greenhouse where I found Skippy asleep among the tomatoes. I pressed my face into her soft fur.

'I couldn't help it,' I told her.

Shortly my mother came into the greenhouse to find me.

'I couldn't help it,' I wailed, burying my face in her apron.

'Of course you couldn't,' she soothed me, stroking my head. My mother always understood.

Which was wonderful, of course, but the thing was - and which afterwards hung darkly over everything - my father didn't.

Someday I would make sense of all this, but that lay far ahead. In the mean time I was left to ponder my inadequacies, my inability to measure up. Nor was my sister, closer to our father than me, immune to any of this. So that, accustomed though we both became to this regrettable state of affairs, and no matter how much we told ourselves otherwise, we were never entirely able to rid ourselves of the conclusion that our father's unaccountable losses of temper were not about him, but about us.

3. Wild Flowers

It never crossed my mind that my parents might not always have lived on the Malvern Hills. But then why would it? Oh, it's perfectly possible they mentioned it, but if so nothing sank in. Sometimes they listened on the wireless to a programme called In Town Tonight. There was the sound of traffic, car horns and excited voices. Beep-beep! Beep-beep! A man shouting, 'Paper! Paper! Read all about it!' London my parents may have said. The capital of England. Adding, quite possibly, where they used to live. But even supposing they did it meant nothing to me. I was too busy being Roy Rogers I suppose. When I wasn't in Upper Welland I was in the Wild West. Nowhere else existed, did it? Well, Neverland, to where we once went to see Peter Pan. And Nutwood, of course. Places in stories.

I was becoming aware of the seasons. Winter brought Christmas, carol singers to the door and presents to unwrap. The delivery of a crate of fruit and vegetables from my Auntie Susie and Uncle Jake's shop in Luton. And the arrival of a new white world. For there in the lee of the hills where the wind died the snow gathered into deep drifts and the lane was knee-high with snow. My father fitted chains to his tyres, without which his car couldn't get up the hill. Sue and I built a snowman in the garden. And we rolled a snowball all the way down the lane until it was as tall as me and we could push it no further. Overnight it froze, blocking the lane for days, and we danced around it for the devils we were. And looming all the while over everything was the great white whale of the Malvern Hills.

I thought my life would always consist of Roy and Trigger, Adrian and Dicksy, my mother and Nanny and Skippy. And so it was a