The Marl Hole Kid

By Anthony McCandless

Set in the industrial heart of England in the 1960s, The Marl Hole Kid tells the story of one boy’s struggle to maintain his dignity and compassion growing up in poverty, with a violent, alcoholic, Irish father. A variety of touching, humorous, and outrageous stories illustrate this inspirational journey of survival and the forging of the boy’s spirit and character along the way.

Anthony McCandless was born the second of 13 children in 1955 in Tipton, England. The area was known as the Black Country because of the dark clouds of smoke and soot that blanketed the area. With its foundries, factories, and coal-fired power plants linked by a network of industrial canals, the Black Country and its inhabitants were unique and in many ways isolated from the rest of England. It was a tough place to grow up, especially for a boy with a stammer and an abusive father, living right next to the marl hole dump.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthony McCandless
• Release date: Jan 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310599620

Book preview

Over the past 30 years, in quiet moments, I have shared childhood stories with my wife, and when she suggested I write them down, the idea was inconceivable to me. Even though the memories sometimes seeped to the surface, I avoided focusing on them, as they always took me to a dark place.

While I was unable to work for two years during a series of back surgeries, my wife finally badgered me into writing.

We started with the Cider Bottle story. It was awful remembering that night and even more difficult trying to put it into words. At first I didn’t want to show my stammer in the dialog. But strangely, I found myself stammering while telling the story.

The whole process began as sheer misery. I would get stubborn over wording and details and find myself feeling so much pain and frustration with the process that I would have to leave the room and sometimes not go back to writing for days.

I relived much of what I wrote about in nightmares and found myself awash with memories I had pushed out of my mind decades ago. When I was ready to give up, friends and family encouraged me to keep going. I couldn’t see why my story would matter to anyone. What use was all of this? Your story has always inspired me, my wife said. And so we sat and wrote, scene by scene, many of the experiences that shaped the rest of my life and who I am today.

As the months went by, I began to feel a sense of relief that these memories were outside of me—on the page. As the story progressed, the trajectory of my childhood began to take shape and everything started to make sense. Anger and resentment towards others were replaced with compassion and empathy for my younger self. I found myself able to laugh at much of the irony. For the first time in my life, I was looking at it from the outside in. I felt a strange sense of both detachment and ownership—of it all, the good and the bad. I was finally starting to heal.

In deciding to publish this book, I was inspired by the words of a friend and writing mentor: Such stories show us that dreadful things can be survived, that painful incidents can be overcome and outgrown, and that sharing them with other human beings is an act of love.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am forever grateful to my wife, Elise, for encouraging me to write my story and sitting down with me for the many hours and months it took to gather my thoughts and put them on paper.

My deepest gratitude to Carolyn Woolston and Liz Chapman for their generous efforts in providing feedback, editing, and support.

In addition, I’d like to thank the following individuals for their input and encouragement: Lorene Hall, Karen Moreno, Joseph Van Campen, James Van Campen, and Linda Kesler.

I did not realize how difficult this process would be, and could not have done it without the support and encouragement of all of these individuals.

Whistling Irishman

It’s late Friday night and I’m sitting downstairs with my brothers, keeping warm by the fire. The bright red coals in our iron range cast a warm glow in the room. My mother is hanging nappies to dry on the metal safety bow around the fireplace. Her long, dark hair sways gently at her waist as she moves. Baby David is sleeping in his cot next to us, and Butch, our mongrel fox terrier, is snoozing on the hearth.

The warmth of the fire is making me sleepy when a familiar whistling pierces the air. Butch jumps up and dashes into the bogey hole under the stairs and I hurry to the front window to see my father swaggering toward the house. Dad’s here.

You three had better get to bed, Mom says anxiously.

Why? I ask.

I’ve got to have a few words with your dad.

My older brother, Leslie, and younger brother, Johnny, and I head up the bare wooden stairs to our bedroom. We climb into the double bed the three of us share.

The back door shuts and I hear my parents’ voices as they move into the front room. Their conversation quickly escalates into shouting. I slip out of bed and sit quietly on the stairs in the dark, listening. I wonder why they are so angry. I hear my mother yelling and a lot of commotion and I make my way silently back down the stairs.

I open the door to the front room just in time to see my dad punch my mother in the mouth. She flies backwards over the sofa and crashes onto the metal bow of the fireplace, knocking the cot down and spilling baby David out.

Without thinking, I jump on the sofa and pounce on my dad’s back. When I’m big enough, I’m gonna do that to you! He reaches over his shoulder, grabs me, and throws me across the room. I hit the arm of the sofa, bounce off, catch my breath, and run at him again. He knocks me down with a backhander, picks me up, and shakes me. My feet are dangling. I hear him gnashing his teeth, and I smell the booze on his breath. I swing punches at him, but my arms cannot reach his head.

Get to bed you little idjit, before I throw you out the window! he snarls over the din of the screaming baby.

The neighbors can hear everything through the shared wall of our houses, but no one comes to help. And we don’t have a phone to call the police.

Just leave her alone! I shout over the ringing in my ears.

Put him down, you drunken Irish bastard! my mother yells as she picks up and comforts David. Still seething, my dad tosses me like a rag doll onto the armchair and stomps into the kitchen growling.

Mom grabs one of the cloth nappies littering the floor and holds it to her bleeding mouth. You’d best get to bed while you’re safe and in one piece. Go on. Now! she urges. Before he comes back. I don’t want to leave her, but I know she’s right.

I still hear them ranting as I climb into bed with my brothers, who have hidden their heads under the blankets. What’s going on? Leslie asks nervously.

Mom and Dad’s fighting. Best just go to sleep, I say, rubbing the knot on the side of my head. I stare up at the bare lightbulb hanging from the cracked, plaster ceiling, listening to the old man roaring downstairs and wishing with all my five-year old might that I were big enough to stop him.

My England

For many people, the word England conjures up visions of royalty, castles, high tea, cricket, and every manner of aristocratic delight. Green, rolling hills dotted with sheep and lined with majestic oaks, quaint, thatched cottages, and picturesque farmhouses.

But in the England of my childhood, in the area known as the Black Country, men with blackened faces walk home after working long shifts, six or seven days a week. Foundries and factories spew their ashen smoke and windowsills blacken within hours of being cleaned. Some days, the smog is so thick, school children have to be led home by the hand, covering their mouths with handkerchiefs that are black by the time they get there. All around hangs the smell of soot, decades-old soot that settles in every nook and cranny, in every lung and hair follicle, on the birds and their nests, blanketing the place and its inhabitants with a stale, metallic cloud that seems to hold them there.

Many of the people who live here never leave, except to fight in a war. The place is as hard and unforgiving as the brick walls that encompass the terraced houses, the factories, and the miles and miles of canals slicing through it. Here my parents raised 13 children. I am their second son.

How It All Began

My dad, Norman Leslie McCandless, Les, was born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, the oldest of six children in a Protestant family. In 1952, at age 21, he and his brother, Ronnie, traveled to Tipton, England, a small industrial town outside Birmingham, to find work. Les landed a job as a laborer at an iron foundry that produced engine blocks. At six feet and a muscular 200 pounds, he found the work easy. My father worked his way up to a position on the large, cupola blast furnace, so he could get regular overtime. It was dirty, hot, and dangerous work, but well paid.

Les met my mother, Joyce Herdman, in the shop on the high street where she worked. She was a tiny woman with a thick mane of long, straight, dark hair framing her delicate face and deep blue eyes. Though my mother was small, what she lacked in height she made up for in spirit. She was the second of six children, raised in a terraced council house in Tipton, squeezed between the gasworks and an iron foundry, backing up to a busy industrial canal.

Joyce’s father, Bill, was a humorless man with rigid, Victorian ideas. He was tall and gaunt and walked with a cane due to World War II injuries, which prevented him from working. Because the family had to get by on Bill’s meager social security income, Joyce and her siblings began working in their mid-teens.

In addition to having the responsibility of raising five girls, Bill resented the fact that his youngest child was a little slow. The boy was short and looked a lot like his mother and nothing like his father. Consequently, Joyce’s father insisted till the day he died that little Bill was not his.

When Joyce introduced her father to Les, Bill told Les that if he wanted to see Joyce, he would have to meet her at the pub. When Les arrived at the pub, Joyce’s father was sitting next to her. I hear you have a job, Bill said pushing his empty beer glass forward. It’s your round.

I don’t drink, but I’ll get you one, Les replied.

If you’re sitting at my table, you do now. I’ll have a pint and Joyce will have a half.

With love on his mind, my father forced down his first pints of the local brew with his future father-in-law. After an hour of treating Bill to pints and trying to keep up with him, Les excused himself, went out back, and barfed it all up.

Between dates at the pub with Joyce and her father and lunchtime beer breaks with his fellow furnace men, my father’s life in England began to revolve around the pub and the pint.

The Marl Hole

We live in the last house on Powis Avenue, right next to the marl hole. The street dead ends in an eight-foot, solid brick wall, with a pair of heavy wooden gates. The marl hole was created through excavating marl clay for brick making during the 1800’s. When the clay mining ended in the early 1900’s, the owners turned the site into a landfill. By the time we move in, the official landfill operation has ceased, and the remaining hole is about the size of a football stadium, 100 feet deep with a 50-foot-deep pool of water at the bottom. The north and south sides drop almost vertically down to the water.

Our house backs right up to the edge of the south side of the marl hole, separated from it by a six-foot spiked, metal fence. The less-steep west bank is higher than the surrounding houses and made of dirt, ash, and clay left over from the mining operations. The east bank is where trucks and tractors dumped soil and rubbish in an attempt to fill the hole before the housing estate was put in. It is the least steep of the four banks, overrun with colonies of rats and mice and haphazardly patrolled by a clan of feral cats.

Our three-bedroom, one-bath rented council house is on one end of four terraced houses. We share a wall with the Smiths, and they have to go through our back yard to get to theirs. Mr. and Mrs. Smith, who are older than my parents, have three girls and four boys; the oldest one, Alfie, is in his late teens. David (Smithy), the second youngest, is my age. He has a tuft of straw-colored hair, grey-blue eyes, and a nose like Elvis Presley. Together, we are fearless and game for anything. When we’re not running around getting into mischief, we’re in the front yard playing marbles.

Pudding ‘n Custard

Today is my first day of school. Yesterday, Mom came home with a new set of top dentures. They look shiny and white and even. After many embarrassing weeks of managing with missing front teeth, it is good to see her show her pretty smile again, though she seems to be having a little trouble eating.

Leslie, Johnny, and I are at the kitchen table having tea with hot buttered toast that Mom sliced thick off a crusty loaf. Eat your fill, ’cause you’re going to school with Leslie today. Johnny, looks up at me through his mop of golden, corkscrew curls.

Am I going, too?

You can come with us, but you can’t stay. You’re not old enough, Mom says. Leslie, Tony, here’s a threepenny bit each for your biscuit money. Put it in your pocket. Don’t lose it; I haven’t got any more, she adds, snapping her purse shut. You’ll be getting a free school dinner with pudding, too. I slip the biscuit money in my trouser pocket, looking forward to milk and biscuits at break and lunch with pudding! Leslie has already told me about the apple pie and treacle pudding dripping with hot custard, with seconds if you want.

With Johnny and David both in the pram, we walk the mile to school in the crisp, September air. Highfield Road School is a one-story brick building with a six-foot wrought iron fence around it. The school backs up to Jubilee Park. Across the street is a steep canal bank where you can see horses pulling 40-foot-long steel barges loaded with coal.

Through the gate I spy an asphalt playground surrounded by a generous L-shaped lawn. We pass through the big, iron gates and a set of double doors into an area lined with numbered hooks where the kids hang their coats. Tarah, Mom! Les shouts as he runs to catch up with his mates who are lining up for class. Lots of new kids are saying goodbye to their mothers; some are excited, others are crying and wanting to go home. I’m just looking forward to my hot dinner.

Come with me, Tone, Mom says taking Johnny carefully out of the pram, so as not to wake baby David. Leaving the pram with David in the hallway, she leads us to my classroom and stands me in front of a cheerful, silver-haired lady. This is your new teacher, Mrs. Worrell.

Very nice to meet you, Tony, she says, resting her hand on my shoulder. When you’ve said goodbye to your mother, come and meet your classmates.

I’ll pick you up at three o’clock. Now, be good. Mom smiles.

Can I stay for pudding, too? Johnny asks.

No, no. We have to go home, she says, heading for the door. Johnny’s big, cornflower-blue eyes sadden as he realizes he won’t be getting pudding and I won’t be home to play with him.

Family Fun

It’s three o’clock and Mom is waiting for us outside the school gates with Johnny and David. My belly is bursting with milk, biscuits, roast beef dinner, and two helpings of apple crumble with lashings of hot custard. Well, how do you like school? she asks.

I like the food, I say grinning.

Leslie laughs. He went round twice for seconds.

Johnny gazes sadly out of the pram. He’s had a lonely day.

On our way home, we notice women coming down the canal bank with buckets of coal. Where’d you get that coal? Mom asks a middle-aged woman with a dusty scarf tied around her head.

Luv, the city’s digging up the canal bank, exposing the coal. It’s free! The workers said we can have it. She smiles, revealing a missing tooth. I’d come back and get some while it’s going.

Mom glances over at the prospectors hurrying toward the canal bank from the terraced council houses. We rush home. She empties the pram, lines it with old newspaper, and gets the shovel and bucket out of the coal place. We’ll wait for your dad to get back and you can show him where the coal is, she says excitedly, grabbing some spuds out of the pantry. I’ll stay here and make dinner.

A while later my dad gets home from work. He peels off his jacket, exposing a sweat-stained shirt freckled with

Reviews for The Marl Hole Kid

[Neta Brooks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Amazing .I cried tears of sadness and joy.I grew up in this area and still do.Well done to the author.