Coronation Chicken

By Nigel Barley

It is 1953 in southern England, the time of the Coronation, and Jack is a small boy from the poor end of the village who is trying desperately to understand the strange people he has been born into. After the gritty, state-regulated austerity of the war, it is supposed to be a time for the celebration of cherished values and national renewal and the idea is to share the ultimate luxury food - a chicken - at a street party as a symbol of all that is eternal in the British identity. But things do not go as planned and begin to fall apart in the face of death, sex and changing reality.

Coronation Chicken is a darkly comic novella that mixes personal recollection, anthropological insight and humour to give a portrait of a post-war Britain that has now vanished for ever. It is at once nostalgic and more than a little unnerving.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456621971

Nigel Barley

Nigel Barley was born in Kingston-on-Thames in 1947 and studied Modern Languages at Cambridge before completing a doctorate in Social Anthropology at Oxford. Having taught at University College London and the Slade School of Art, he joined the British Museum in 1988 as an Assistant Keeper in the Department of Ethnography and remained there for some twenty years. After publishing several works of academic anthropology, he wrote The Innocent Anthropologist (1983) about his fieldwork amongst a hill people in Cameroon, West Africa. It contradicted so may of the cherished assumptions of the discipline that it led to calls for his expulsion from the professional body of anthropologists. He remained, however, and now the book has been translated into some twenty-five other languages and is often the first work encountered by students of anthropology in their studies. He left the Museum in 2002 and is now a professional writer, living in London but dividing his time between the UK and Indonesia. His most recent work is Island of Demons (Monsoon Books, Singapore), a fictionalised treatment of the life of the painter Walter Spies.

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Chapter One

There would be two Christmases for Jack that year. The second would be the usual arrangement of one child and three kings, the first a quite different encounter involving a slip of a girl and half the rulers of the earth. Coronation year in Britain - 1953 - was a time of pride hedged with the slight embarrassment of public falsehood. It was as if, in one of those medieval paintings of the Adoration, the king holding up the Christ child said, red-faced and foot-shuffling, ‘Er...actually ...It's a girl!’ Everyone pretended not to notice.

In the south of the Kingdom - not Queendom - of Britain, in a little village called Weylands, there lived a small boy called Jack. He was a quick, slight boy, dark-haired, light of frame with big earnest eyes that consumed the force of the rest of his body. He was not a pretty child but endearing, rather as terriers are endearing for their scruffy, self-absorbed determination in just being themselves. He was considered shy but that was simply because he seldom spoke unless he felt he had something important to say, so that his life would be fought against an encroaching ocean of silence that threatened to swallow him up in its depths and make him invisible. He did not feel himself at home in the world and sometimes was so puzzled by the ways of the people about him that he suspected he must be a cuckoo-child and whenever he thought he had understood the pattern of things, it would all suddenly unravel again, like the knots around a dropped stitch in knitting. He lived with his older sister Susan, younger brother Tom, mother, father and granny in what would later become a desirable cottage or artisan's dwelling suitable-for-conversion-to... It was currently a house of mean, yellowish bricks with a crumbly slate roof and a mainly dirt yard that had yet to recover from Jack's last attempt to dig through to Australia, looking for diamonds on the way. It was a house devoid of any charm or comfort. But at least it was a house.

***

‘Thud!’ The rock hit the roof of the railway carriage with a gratifyingly solid noise, denting the felt and resonating the rotting wood underneath before flip-flopping down the incline and toppling, swishing, into the long grass. In the silence, Jack looked at Tom and grinned wickedly. Anyone who didn't live in a proper house deserved all they got. The important thing in Weylands was not to understand the world but to know what parts of it you disapproved of and, more than anything, to have someone to look down on as others looked down on you. Both boys were poised to run, fists clenched, but no sound came from the faded, old carriage becalmed in the hollow. A last, fat-bummed bumble bee buzzed tiredly round the foxgloves on the bank of the old siding, fitting in a final shift before clocking off for the day.

Tom drew back his arm and let fly with a nice round stone. For one terrible moment they thought it would hit and shatter a sunset-soaked window but it cracked nicely into one of the doors and ricocheted off, taking a sliver of thick, cream paint with it. Still no response. But he must be there. His bike was leaning against the other side near the one door that wasn't locked, the pushchair filled with yellowing newspapers beside it. A tatty sheet was hung to dry on a clothesline and gathered up the lengthening shadows in its clammy folds.

The slope on the other side of the railway track was too steep and gravelly for reliable climbing and a rusty fence at the top only allowed egress through patches of sleek stinging nettles that would penalise anyone in short trousers. Their only escape, they knew, would be to flee up the path and back into the woods, ducking easily under the low, thorned branches that would slow an adult down. Still, the whole thing had to be finely timed.

Emboldened by the silence, Jack went closer and picked up a long iron handle lying on the ground that had once worked the points when this was a functioning siding. He stepped onto the crunching hardcore and crept softly round to the blind side of the carriage, brought the bar back over his head, like the Rank gong-basher in the pictures, and down against the wheel with all the weight of his body behind it. There was the clang of a great bell, followed by a cry of rage and the shaky thump of socked feet down the wooden ladder on the far side. It was a nasty, furry sound. He had been waiting at the top of the steps, then, an ambush, not fair. Dropping the bar, Jack squealed with delighted fear and fled up the track, overtaking Tom wild-eyed and gasping as Dick Moore reached the ground, half fell and scrabbled after them. He risked a look over one shoulder and uttered a long wail as Dick Moore closed down on Tom, drool flicking from his mouth, hands reaching out to grab.

‘Come 'ere!’

Tom danced sideways like a gazelle and Dick lost his footing, leaned desperately forward and felt his unshod feet slide out from under him on the loose surface. ‘Aagh!’

He crashed full-length and stayed down, whimpering softly. Tom dodged round him and both boys raced another twenty yards with lungs burning, then slowed at a safe distance and began a little dance of spite and triumph.

‘Dick, Dick. Thick as shit. Dick, Dick...’

The strong wine of adrenalin coursed exhilaratingly through their veins. They felt power, delight, the bursting vigour of their own hearts pounding in their ears. Dick stayed down, did not move. There was blood on his head. A dark chill swept over the boys and they stopped dancing. Suddenly, what they had done was shocking. They looked at each other for confirmation that this was still all right, that it was still a joke.

‘He's not really hurt is he?’ Jack whispered.

Two hands came from nowhere and grabbed their ears, crashing their heads sharply together with a sound of funfair balls on coconuts. Their heads were drawn apart and crashed together a second time with a duller thud not unlike that of the rock on the carriage roof.

‘You little sods!’ snarled PC Puddephat, finger-sucking. He had caught it between their skulls. That was their fault too and made him angrier.

Dick looked up but, instead of receiving comfort, an expression of terror crossed his thin face and he clambered blind and flailing to his feet and ran in the low slouch of a wounded man back to the carriage. The door was slammed. There was silence again in the dell. The bee was still grumpily charring round the purple flowers.

PC Puddephat gave their ears another hard yank and twist that made their vision swim and pulled them round in a great teetering arc to face him. He was sweaty and flushed in his blue serge and brought his thick, stubbly chin right up to Jack's face, breathing heavily. His breath smelt of mould and wet dog.

‘And just what do you think you're doing? I’ll tell you what. Breach of the peace. Insulting behaviour. Assault. Criminal damage. That's what. If he’s been really hurt that’s conspiracy to murder. I could send you both straight inside, right now, for years. Give you a record for life. Do you realise that?’

‘But...But... It was only... We thought...’

‘Oh no me lad. That's just what you didn't do, isn't it - think?’ He swung their heads together again. Crack! Jack could see hair sprouting obscenely in his ears. ‘Do you know what a criminal record could do to your lives? Poverty, hunger, death on a park bench with nothing to eat but your own snot.’ He shook them like a dog a rat. ‘Right you two. Clear off.’ He reached out for another painful twist of the ears. His nose was a meaty cleaver. ‘I don't want to see you back here again - ever. Do you hear me?’ Twist yank. ‘Or I'll make you wish you'd never been born.’ Twist shake. ‘I've got my eye on you. Put one foot wrong and you're for it, good and proper.’ Twist shove.

Jack backed away towards where PC Puddephat had parked his bike, opened his lips and breathed in to gob back a mouthful of shrill cheek, then thought better of it as a voice said very quietly.

‘I know where you live.’ Then the ultimate threat. ‘I know who your Dad is.’

***

Britain in the 'fifties was not at peace it was at post-war, or rather warfare had been exported to the safe distance of Asia so that the idiom of conflict was still everywhere. The young were mostly in uniform, army, air force, navy or the Scouts and Guides that anticipated military manners. Jack was a Wolf Cub and had a badge for cooking and knots and the semaphore with which messages would be sent following Russian occupation and they were all living in holes in the ground. The Third World War was developing nicely in Korea, turned from smoke to flame to raging conflagration. All around them, British cities were heavily scarred by bombing and still as blasted and devastated as the British economy. It was a pinched, careworn world where everything was either second-hand or army surplus.

PC Puddephat's gloves were ex-RAF officers' issue. He kneaded the fingers down into the knuckles and walked on down to the carriage, too warm in navy-surplus underwear, rubbing his hands on the greasy front of his tunic.

PC Puddephat did not see himself as enforcing the law. Rather, he embodied it. He was the law and his measured plod was the heartbeat of the body politick. He crunched slowly along the track, enjoying the metronome pace of his own boots and looked down on Dick's railway carriage home nesting in deepening shadow. He sighed and tipped back his helmet and wiped his forehead in what he recognised as a theatrical gesture.

Kids were just a sign of something deeper. They picked up and magnified adult tremors. The law was not just a negative thing. It was positive too. It was all a matter of fine-tuning the sticks and the carrots or was it the slings and the arrows? He hadn’t had much schooling. Anyway, it was time to do something about Dick again. For a start, he was living in a first-class carriage which couldn’t be right. He was getting too comfortable in his refusal to conform to the rules that everyone else lived by. And why should the kids have all the fun? He looked at his ex-US-coastguard watch decisively. It was nearly dark. No one to see. He clamped his glove to his mouth to stifle a naughty giggle.

***

‘He'll tell our Dad. We'll get belted.’ Tom snivelled and twisted round his grey shirtsleeve to wipe his nose on it. They were trekking back through the allotments, hushed and subdued.

‘No he won't.’ Jack was dragging a stick behind him, making very satisfactory snake lines in the soft dust. ‘Dad doesn't talk to him. He's an outsider - Scotland, Manchester, one of them places.’

‘Oh.’

Being an outsider was not just a fact, it was an affliction. There were no real immigrants in Weylands yet, to be accused of eating Kitekat and Brylcreem sandwiches, for it was a time when even British athletes were white. It is true there was a solitary French onion-seller who wallowed, perhaps to excess, in national stereotypes, cycling round the streets in a striped jersey and beret with skeins of large onions around his handlebars and sporting a bounder’s moustache. He did quite well in the upper-class areas but occasionally, in hot weather, fell foul of drink and scattered onions up and down the main road in fits of deep melancholy. The mechanics of his business were mysterious. It was popularly imagined that he returned to France, pedalling all the way, to resupply over the weekend. There were a couple of weird families with black Homburg hats and ringlets who were known simply as ‘the Acidic Jews’ but they lived a completely isolated, separate existence outside the village and what they wanted all that acid for, no one was sure. In Weylands thought, acid was associated with the irregular disposal of murder victims in the News of the World, so children were advised to avoid them. Apart from that, it was mainly Northerners that had to keep the ‘inferior alien’ slot warm until proper immigrants arrived. Northerners had silly accents and were a bit slow, almost one of the subject races of Empire. Elsewhere in the kingdom, full-time Northerners might be hard-grafting a proud folklore for their own region, compounded of pigeon-fancying, inedible food, bunions and a non-conformist religious sensibility. In the cities, kitchen sinks, still dreamed of by Jack's Mum as desirable items of sanitaryware, were becoming icons of identity for the industrial proletariat. In the countryside, alibis for rural idiocy had existed for centuries. But as a suburban Southerner Jack was not fooled by regional culture. The threadbare, State-regulated fabric of his life was not the stuff of legend. He knew he was set beyond all that myth and fakelore and only had stark reality to live in.

In later years, Jack would read of The Warm South and study the lush symbolism of oranges in the works of the German Romantics and D. H. Lawrence. In the Vietnam of his adolescence, the effetely sloe-eyed Southern capital, Saigon, would be opposed as a matter of course to horny-handed Hanoi where the purposeful Northern gaze burned with Marxist fervour. Ho Chi Minh doubtless began his rallies with, ‘Ee lads. Ahm reet chuffed to see thee 'ere,’ as he tickled oriental whippets under the chin. In Jack's readings of the United States, the South was a place where people did little but sit on porches bending hot and humid vowels into languid diphthongs, fluttering their fans and fiddle-de-deeing while Atlanta burned. Apart from cheerful Cockney sparrers, the South of England was depicted everywhere as a place of pleasure and wealth, sloth and smugness, a soft paunched underbelly fatted on the unearned tribute of Empire. So Jack might be one of the invisible southern poor but he knew he ruled the earth.

‘Puddephat eats tripe and trotters.’ Tom giggled, delighted. ‘Northern,’ he sneered. ‘Yerrgh.’

Jack swung his stick at the scaly trunk of the monkey puzzle tree that stood swirling by the main road. ‘Yeah. Yerrgh.’ But it was done without conviction for, at the back of his mind, Jack was dimly aware that he was too young yet to form opinions of his own so that those he had were second hand and worn out, like almost everything else in his world.

***

Crime was rare in Weylands yet not entirely without drama. Not so long ago, there had been a dispute at the aircraft factory over tea breaks and the workers had downed tools and gathered in a shouting mob around the gates. The manager, who had read Animal Farm, panicked and phoned the police, bringing Puddephat rushing round on his bike. By the time he arrived, it had all blown over and the men had trooped quietly back to work and a delayed tea break but PC Puddephat skidded on the trampled grass around the, by now, deserted gate and twisted his ankle. His nephew, also in the force, came over for a few days to help out and run messages. This was written up in the local paper as, ‘Police injured in aircraft strike demo. Local force doubled.’

A firm line was drawn between the street and the house and PC Puddephat knew that few things that happened behind the front door were to be dragged out into the light of day. The walls of the houses were walls of silence and decency and that suited him just fine. It was a line drawn early and children were taught never to reveal the secrets of the hearth. It would be another kind of sneaking to teacher.

Bible translators have torn their raiment and gnashed their teeth at the difficulty of turning into Eskimo the good book with all its unknown camels and unimaginable sand, its notions of pastoral care plucked from a sheep-herding culture that do not adapt to sealstabbers. The same might be said in Weylands of the term 'street life.’ The street was something to be scuttled through between the ordered islands of work and home as quickly as possible. It was a place in which PC Puddephat tolerated men to be occasionally drunk on Sundays as they struggled home but no decent people loitered there. Anyone aimlessly on the street was necessarily a villain. The Pied Piper of Hamlyn worried the children when encountered in their school fairy tales. Of course he had been up to no good. Imagine, just standing there, on the street playing a flute like a beggar. Stands to reason. He should have been run in. Look at the trouble it would have spared everyone.

In Weylands respectability was everything and a criminal record was a terrible and irremovable stain to be spoken of in whispers. Compared to the shame, the discomforts of jail itself were nothing. For, in the face of any possible decision, the first question asked was always, ‘What will the neighbours say?’ Usually the walls were so thin that you knew exactly what the neighbours were saying. Neighbours were the best policemen and being shown up in the local paper was the real punishment, for enormous glee was taken in the fall and disgrace of others. Respectability was a swaying tightrope where one false step might send you plunging to your doom. No one would be more vicious and dedicated in the persecution of an unmarried mother than ‘respectable’ women, eager to mark her off from themselves, just as 'respectable' felons persecuted sex offenders in jail. In the everyday life of Weylands, the chances for face-to-face humiliation were too high to permit anything but a minuet of careful reciprocal hypocrisy that allowed the keeping up of a front.

Like celibacy among medieval Popes, reputation was passed down from father to son. After thirty years in the village, Puddephat was still an outsider but knew most of what counted. So at school, there was young Toby Beak, whose coalman grandfather was disgraced forty years before in a scandal involving delivering customers short weight and short change. Whenever a child lost its dinner money at school, no one doubted