The Heart of the Black Country

By Chris Snape

The Maskell family lives in West Bromwich, the Midlands. The year is 1971. Grandpa and Grandma Maskell rule benevolently over their three sons and their families. Ten-year-old Keith watches as the family grows – Eric’s wife is expecting their first child, Stephen has recently brought a girl home who to Keith is the epitome of beauty and perfection. For Keith the sweet aroma of an almost perfect childhood promises to last forever. Until his father, John, announces he wants to emigrate to Australia. The calm munificent façade of the Maskell family, so carefully constructed by Grandma Maskell, suddenly begins to crumble. Change is in the wind; things will never be the same again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris Snape
• Release date: Jun 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311193797

Chris Snape

Christopher Snape was born in the Midlands, England, and migrated to Australia when he was ten years old. He is obsessed with music of any form, but particularly The Beatles - he once met Ringo Starr and spent the next several days trying to convince himself it was not a dream. In between teaching History and English to senior school students, playing blues guitar and reading he likes to write fiction and travel articles. His work has appeared in The Adelaide Advertiser, Write Away, The Black Country Bugle and Aurealis.In his spare time he likes to indulge his passion for old television shows and trying to keep his blog up to date. He lives with his wife and two cats in Adelaide, South Australia.

Book preview

The Heart of the Black Country

A novel

by

Chris Snape

Copyright © Chris Snape 2011

Portions of this book first appeared in slightly different form in The Black Country Bugle, December 2007.

Cover Design: Sarah McDonald

The right of Chris Snape to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

For Sarah, Rachael and Ashleigh.

In the heart of the great empire on which the sun never sets, in the land of hope and glory, Mother of the Free, is . . . . . West Bromwich.

J.B. Priestley.

Chapter 1

It was a time of great historical change, and not least for us. When people say to me now, Were those some years or what? I think Yes; they were. But not for the same reasons they mean.

Every evening at nine o’clock we sat in front of the large brown television set watching the news on BBC-1, the year unfolding in flickering monochrome, my father saying wouldn’t it be nice to own a color television, singing a few lines from the song by The Beach Boys, making up his own words. My mother saying the one we already have is good enough, it suits our purpose. And what purpose might that be? my father wanting to know, saying purpose like it was coated with cod liver oil, making a mockery of it. My mother, having been through this countless times already, folding her arms and pulling the corners of her mouth down, saying, Besides we can’t afford a new one and I wish you would forget about it and let me listen to the news. Then smiling secretly because that was the point of the joke, to make each other laugh, though neither of them letting on just how funny they thought it was. It was something they had to do, make out they were entirely serious.

I heard my mother say once to her friend Margaret, who lived in the same street as us, He goes on about this bloody television set. A color one. He’s like a kid moaning until he gets what he wants. A toy he’s seen up at Marks and Spencer. Honestly. He drives me mad. Her mouth suspended above a hot cup of tea, her words travelling through steam. Though by no means heated – just weary and fed-up. I wish he’d forget about it, she said.

That was the reverse side of the joke. It was an ongoing battle, prolonged by my father’s dogged persistence, and it made me think that one day he would win out. I could already hear my mother saying, Oh, for goodness’ sake. Go out and buy your damn television and let that be the end of it. Ground into submission by my father’s tenacious will.

Jokes only stay funny for so long. After that they start to get the ring of truth about them.

As it was, if he felt like watching something in color he’d stockpile his longing and go up the street to the pub on a Saturday afternoon and sit in the front bar watching soccer or horse racing. It was a new thing, color television, and still a novelty. (Though three years old already it was an indulgence few in West Bromwich could afford, a subject to discuss when someone you knew bought one. A real piece of gossip. My aunt and uncle in London splashed out within the first year and bought a huge model that sat in their front room, the centre piece of attention. I’d watched it once and been amazed at the rich color of the Caribbean Sea, thinking, That’s not what our sea looks like, not understanding that blue – or any other color for that matter – when seen in some far-flung corner of the world, could be so dramatically different from the color I knew. That was the only color set I’d ever seen.) He’d sit with other grown men, transfixed by the glowing screen on the wall, saying, Bleeding hell! Look at that bloke’s hair. Someone else saying, I wouldn’t have thought it was so yellow. Would you? My father going, Nah!

The world came to us in Cygnet Road, still in black and white, via the rounded vowels of the BBC announcer, news with a plum in its cheek, correct and dignified.

We watched as the civil war in Nigeria ended.

When the Conservative Party attacked Labor’s management of the economy and gained a thirty-seat majority in the House of Commons, Edward Heath replacing Harold Wilson as Prime Minister, my father said, Bloody Conservatives. They’ll take this country to the dogs. They’ll ruin us yet. Then, leaning forward, I wonder what color Edward Heath’s suit is? What do you think? Black or dark blue?

I don’t care what color it is, my mother said. Though it’s probably grey, if you have to know.

That’s the television, you daft pillock! Everything’s grey.

Charles de Gaulle died and The Beatles called it quits. On one side of the Channel people cried into their handkerchiefs, old faces appearing young in grief, while on the other young women sobbed in the doorway of The Beatles’ Saville Row offices, pressing handfuls of Kleenex into their blanched faces, spitting incoherent words into the cameras, the interviewers startled and at the same time thinking how it would look on the evening news, screaming hysterical women. While the television showed Paul McCartney standing on the courtroom steps, dressed very smartly in suit and tie, my mother said, I can’t see why it had to end so poorly.

And in black and white, too, my father said.

That John Lennon’s gone a bit daft, don’t you think? she said.

There he was on the television, his hair cut short, saying he wanted to sell his hair and donate the proceeds to some radical political cause.

A lot of people felt the way my mother did. It sort of took the shine off the whole thing.

I guess the dream is over, my mother said, who didn’t mind hearing The Beatles now and again.

My father, who fancied himself a bit of a crooner, said, It wasn’t no dream. It was a bloody nightmare. Now perhaps the world will wake up to itself. In his view The Beatles had ruined everything.

US troops invaded Communist sanctuaries inside Cambodia. We saw half-naked children running along streets made dusty with the smoke and powder of shattered houses, and National Guardsmen firing on student protesters at Kent State University. Smoke drifting over long rolling lawns, through ornate groves of trees towards a group of buildings. Young wild-eyed men and women fleeing like distressed livestock escaping a forest fire, running in all directions, crashing through flower beds, falling flat against the ground, covering their heads with their hands, the faces of the soldiers fixed, unmoved.

Where’s Ohio? my mother said, and my father shrugged, saying, In America somewhere.

Well, my mother said, annoyed, I know that much at least.

A close-up of a boy lying in the arms of a woman made my father say, That blood’s a funny grey color look.

My mother shook her head good-humouredly and said, Thank goodness for small mercies. That’s one thing I don’t want to see on television – the color of blood. I see enough of it at the hospital, thank you very much.

How do you understand what the world’s like when you only see it in black and white? The world’s in color. Look around you.

My mother giggled and went back to her magazine. She seemed to be saying, You can be really daft sometimes, John Maskell.

It never occurred to me there might be something not quite right in the way we discussed the color of the television screen while right across the Atlantic Ocean people were being shot just for having an opinion. Who cared what the color of blood was? Or bone sticking out of a soldier’s leg? For someone claiming to be cognizant of the forces shaping our world, my father could on occasion be remarkably short-sighted.

Though every now and then he was heard to say, Bloody news.

It was usually when he was in a philosophic mood (that’s what my mother called it) that he began to doubt the merits of television journalism. And if this reflective turn of mind happened to coincide with a slow news night, when not much was happening in the world, we were in for it. (A good juicy story was the best distraction of all.) The signs were always the same, following one after the other, a recipe for boredom and disbelief. He would begin by sighing loudly several times, his way of saying, Who do they think they’re kidding? Then he’d shift about in his seat as though he were sitting on a large pebble and couldn’t be bothered fishing it out from under him, just moving around hoping to get comfortable. This followed by several earnest glances directed squarely at my mother and me, sequeled almost immediately by a phlegm-laden cough, his way of indicating he was about to speak. Finally he’d lift his hand level with his face and bring it crashing down onto his thigh, the sound enough to wake my mother and me out of any false expectation we have that this time things might be different.

The ebb and flow of History, he’d say, packaged as entertainment, making us see things differently to the way people saw them before television, years ago. It’s an altogether different thing when the only way you have of getting news is by reading the papers. A completely different slant is put on things. Different, different, different, he’d say, as though he hadn’t already emphasized the word enough. If you read The Daily Express you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s less urgent, less demanding. You have time to think about what you’re reading. But the television, the news in thirty-second melodramas, compact enough to fit inside a twelve-inch screen – it sucks you right in, draws you in until all that’s left is the sound and the picture. You sit there waiting to see what happens next. There’s no time to think. You’re not encouraged to consider just what it is that’s going on in the world. Some kid blown to bits, another sobbing over their favorite pop group breaking up. All presented with the same voice, that gloomy London voice, so that one story appears as momentous as the next. All one and the same. Where’s the perspective in that? No-one’s asked to comment. No-one has a voice. It’s about time we made our own history. Long overdue. History is calling us to do something. It’s got us pegged.

My mother would usually snort right about here, thinking, Here he goes. Off on one of his high horses.

It was a well-worn groove my father slotted himself into. Capable of going on for a couple of minutes or an hour, depending on a lot of things.

Yet despite my mother’s blatant skepticism my father, in late Autumn of that year, said at the end of one of his television-inspired harangues, ‘Many are called but few are chosen.’

‘Pardon?’ my mother said.

‘Us. We are numbered among the chosen ones.’

He was quoting, of course. But he would never admit it and would like us to think he’d made it up on the spot. He said something about packing us all up – himself, my mother and me – and plunging us into the stream of History. Right into the centre of it. The fast-flowing stream of History.

My mother arched her eyebrows at him. You’re so full of it, John Maskell.

‘It’s a great responsibility,’ he said, ‘being a Chosen One.’

‘You haven’t got a responsible bone in your whole entire body.’

‘That’s what you think,’ my father said smugly.

I remember we were watching Tomorrow's World – we hadn’t even got to the news yet. The black-and-white set flickering in the corner under the window showed a man driving to work in a hovercraft – a dinky cabin on a large bag of air, blowing a cloud of dust off to each side. It is most certainly the way of the future, the presenter said, stepping into the angle of the camera, Your own personal hovercraft. Roads will no longer be necessary, he went on, pointing away from the camera. Pointing and saying, The future is out there.

I slipped behind the curtains, pressed my face to the window, warm skin against cold glass, and blinked into the night. The future was out there somewhere, out amongst the dark streets, the pitch black.

But staring into the darkness I sensed the power of the neighbourhood, the vibration of its industry upon which an entire empire was founded. It was a crude and, some would say, brutal landscape. Factories, some war damaged or simply fallen into disrepair and never rebuilt, others in full boisterous swing, purposeful and unrelentless, circling about us like Indians round a wagon train, pressing in, a strong presence in our lives. They provided us with a living, they took our fathers from us, they ruined our health. We coughed up their produce and wiped their grit from our eyes. Our little street, and the several connected with it, was an oasis set down in the midst of it all, in the centre of a battlefield, a refuge in a zone of smoke-discolored walls and grimy footpaths, of windows streaked with dirt through which, at night, you could see fire glowing like demons’ eyes winking in the darkness.

I searched for the future, but saw only night gloom and the towering red-brick chimney of Hill and Jackson’s pointing like a finger into the black sky, belching leperous clouds of tar-colored smoke and glowing sparks into the frigid air. The future was here alright. Right here was where it began, in the white hot furnaces of the Black Country, the black heart of all that was visionary and inspiring.

What does the future hold for me? I wondered. Though what did I really care? I was nine years old. I possessed a pretty good imagination. Every day had enough packed into it to keep me completely satisfied. I wasn’t the type to grow bored easily. In fact, I could honestly say that before my teenage years boredom encroached upon my life maybe three or four times – at the outside. And it never lasted long. There was always a friend or a television show or a comic book to draw me out of it. Or my copy of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevensen, which I’d begun a couple of times and never seemed able to get past the first couple of chapters, right where the black spot came into it. There was a challenge tailor-made for combating boredom.

My father was sitting in his favourite chair, next to the record player, cradling a bowl of sliced peaches in his upturned hand, his finger tips against the underside of the bowl. He lifted his spoon and slurped a peach segment into his mouth, scooped it up with his tongue, swallowed and smacked his lips loudly.

My mother was flicking through a magazine. Woman’s Day. A picture of Ali McGraw on the cover.

My father said, ‘I have an idea.’

I went back to the settee, the heavy curtains folding shut behind me, and made a skreeking sound as I sat on the black vinyl.

‘Yes?’ my mother said without looking up.

She was used to my father. If he thought his idea was a good one – though it had to be or why else would he share it with us? – he’d keep us guessing for ages, waiting to stun us into silence. It was a game he played, stringing us along, and she played her own version of it, pretending not to be interested at all.

Her eyes were fixed to an article about the dangers of women smoking, a photograph showing lungs blackened and streaked with tar. It made her reach for a cigarette.

My father twisted in his chair, making himself comfortable, settling in for the long haul. He reached down beside him, down to the side of the chair we couldn’t see, and came up with a magazine, which he tossed into my mother’s lap, where it lay at an angle.

‘What’s this?’ my mother said.

‘Read it.’ My father nodded at us, made his eyes big, flicked his eyebrows. ‘Go on. Read it.’

My mother and I stared down at the back cover of the magazine, looked at the big question mark with drawings inside – a sheep with horns that curled into a bun-like circle on the side of its head; a woman sitting in front of a radio, leaning into a microphone; a man on a beach reeling in a long line onto some kind of barrel; several strange rocks sticking out of the ground. The dot at the bottom of the question mark wasn’t a dot at all but a strange shape of a face with a big smiling mouth. The words Do You Know . . . ? in big hand-written letters.

Then, Australia extends a warm invitation to enthusiastic people interested in building a secure future in the healthiest climate in the world. Already prosperous, tomorrow holds infinite promise. Now is an excellent time to find out more about this dynamic nation.

The rest of the page was mostly taken up by a quiz. Ten questions testing your knowledge about Australia. Afterwards, YOU’LL FIND THE ANSWERS DOWN UNDER. And there they were, upside down at the bottom of the page.

‘Do you want me to do the quiz?’ my mother said, turning her face to my father.

‘Only if you want to.’

‘What if I don’t want to?’

‘Then don’t.’

‘So why?’

‘Read the paragraph at the side of the page.’ He pointed at the magazine. ‘Underneath the question mark.’

My mother, holding an unlit cigarette between two fingers, looked back at her lap and started reading, though I was already halfway through.

Now your appetite has been whetted, you’ll probably want to know more, especially about Immigration aspects like the ten pound Assisted Passage Scheme open to British migrants. Write for details of a sunny future to: – Chief Immigration Officer, Dept. 652/63, Australia House, Strand, London, W.C.2.

‘I’ve read it,’ my mother announced. The ensuing silence said, Well, what about it?

‘What do you think?’

My mother frowned, her forehead pressed down into her eyebrows. ‘What am I supposed to think?’ Though she knew what he was getting at. Only an idiot would have still been wondering.

‘I have made certain plans,’ he said, pronouncing his words clearly, a sure sign that he’d thought long and hard.

My mother turned the magazine over in her lap. The date on the front was 27 August 1969. He’d been thinking for a very long time. Practically a year.

‘How long have you had this magazine?’ she said. The way she stared at him she might as well have added, And why haven’t I seen it lying around?

‘It’s been sitting in the canteen at work. There’s a whole pile of them. For people to read while they’re eating their lunch. I saw this one and it started me thinking. I’ve come up with a plan.’

‘Didn’t you say it was only an idea?’ she said.

There is something you should know about my father. He was always on his own, completely self-absorbed. He tended to make decisions based solely on his own thinking, without once consulting my mother, decisions leaning towards the magnitudinous, that had the potential to change things forever. Out of nowhere he might say, We’re moving. I’ve put a deposit on a house in Newton. Or, We’re going to Blackpool this summer.

My mother, of course, had her own way of dealing with his capriciousness. She was mostly able to circumvent his wild notions – for really, that’s what they were – by saying, You can live where you like, but me and Keith are staying right here. Or, Me and Keith are going to Bournemouth. Have fun in Blackpool. Bring us back some rock. No fuss, no bother, just stating the facts.

My father said, ‘It’s only an idea. I haven’t actually done anything about it yet.’

But there was that word – yet – hanging in the air like a reminder bill. And hadn’t he just finished saying he’d made certain plans? Though that could have been his way of letting us know he’d made up his mind.

‘Nor will you until I’ve heard what it is,’ my mother said.

My father paused and held his breath and gazed at the two of us, my mother and me, back and forth from one to the other and back again. He lifted his head slightly as if to sneeze, only he was smiling and I thought he might be about to present us both with a gift.

‘Why don’t we move to Australia?’ he said. Magnanimous. Like he was doing us a favour.

I stared at him while my mother’s face went wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

‘Australia?’ she said.

He nodded and made an affirmative face, frowning benevolently, beaming confidence.

‘But that’s so far away.’

‘Twelve thousand miles. Give or take a few.’

My mother flicked her eyes at the television, at the imitation brick fireplace,