Tell Me Why

By Roger Smith

We only have one go at life. There is no second chance - this is all we get.
Tell Me Why is an exciting journey from the Second World War to the 21st century. It links a personal and private story to everyone’s public history, it is about living through a post war childhood, adolescent angst, commitment, families, children, love and loss. 
Read the poignant war time story of Syd Rogers - and how did Valentin Alexandrovich Arkhipov save the world and help us all stay alive? Move from the grey post war world through the flowers and beads of the 1960s and into post millennium Britain and begin to understand how politics, popular culture, education and revolution tried to change the world.
Laugh, cry and immerse yourself in all kinds of hilarious and heart stopping moments. In Tell Me Why Roger Smith has written an interactive, roller coaster of a story. He knows that once we die we become fiction, because once we stop speaking for ourselves, someone else will tell our story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jun 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789011463

Roger Smith

Roger Smith is Senior Lecturer in the History of Science at Lancaster University, England. He is the author of Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials (Edinburgh, 1982) and co-editor (with Brian Wynne) of Expert Evidence: Interpreting Science in the Law (Routledge, 1989).

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Roger Smith has worked in schools, a college of Further Education, The Open University and the University of Warwick. He has broadcast on BBC Radio, published widely in magazines and journals in Great Britain and abroad and has written numerous articles on Educational Management together with several manuals of training materials and lesson plans in Reading, Maths and Science for Primary School teachers. Some of his previous books include: Successful School Management [Cassell 1995]; Managing Conflict: A Guide for the Individual Teacher [Folens/Framework 1998]; Improving Pupil Achievement Through Target Setting [Folens 2000]; Making Your School More Successful Vol 1 and 2 [Pearson 2001]; Creating the Effective Primary School [Kogan Page 2002]; The Primary Head Teacher’s Handbook [Kogan Page 2002]; Training for Teaching Assistants [Phillip Allen 2006]; Effective Teaching [Phillip Allen 2007]; Improving Your Teaching: A Practical Guide [Kindle edition 2013]; Successful Head Teachers in the Primary School [Kindle edition 2013]; Improving Behaviour in the Primary School [Kindle edition 2013] and 100 Science Lessons [Scholastic 2014].

His most recent book, Finding Private Uttley [Matador/Troubadour 2014] is about the First World War.

Front Cover: The Dog [1820-23] Francisco Goya, from La Quinta del Sordo [The Black Paintings] now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Reproduced with permission from ‘Goya, Francisco de: The Dog [c1820]’ by Tom Lubbock, The Independent 10.7.08.

Tell Me Why

Roger Smith

Copyright © 2018 Roger Smith

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book and to fulfil requirements with regard to reproducing copyright material, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the author and publishers would be glad to rectify any omissions at the earliest opportunity.

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ISBN 978 1789011 463

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

For Rose

and of course for Sarah, Katie, Andrew, Daniel, Emily, Peter, Richard, Joanna, Sophie, Ellie, Ned, Lottie, Joe and William and … thanks for all the memories – Pete and Fenne Casey

Contents

Part 1: Who is it?

Prologue

The beginnings of mortality 1944-1963

Part 2: Where are we going? …

Hand me my traveling shoes [Statesboro’ Blues] …1963-2017 [ish]

Epilogue

Appendices

Appendix 1 – Jokes?

Appendix 2 – Lists

Where did it all come from?

Part 1:

Who is it?

They fuck you up your mum and dad.

They may not mean to but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy stern

And half at one another’s throats…

From This be the verse – Philip Larkin

Intertextuality – the process by which poets, songwriters, painters or artists and writers of any genre produce new meaning through the creative reuse of existing texts, images or sound…

Prologue

Who’s there?

Look, I don’t want you to sit passively and hide behind these words and pages. I’d much rather you were with me, out there, encouraging me to take the best decisions and make the best choices. I want you tasting the same air, smelling the dust and the flowers, hearing those summer insects and seeing all those people and all those places, all the biology and culture that has made me who I am. So why not do just that, and start by walking into the room where I am writing, and as you open the door try asking … ‘Who is it, who’s there?’ …

As you look around there are bookshelves lining the blue walls, filled almost randomly with all kinds of bright paperbacks, different sized hardbacks, a few first editions and some ornate, Art Nouveau children’s books in deep reds and gold. Run your fingers along the dust that lies on so many of them and read the titles on the bright orange Penguins. There are odd groups of ornaments scattered on the shelves, small boxes, old glass bottles and pots, some thoughtful, collected pieces placed there over many years, filling the gaps in a kind of ordered disorder. Do any of them interest you enough to make you want to hold them? Why not sit with me by the desk and touch the tactile dots of the Aborigine bark painting, or pick up the 1917 grenade cases, heavy and black like malignant, iron eggs?

There is an old Edwardian camera somewhere with brittle pull out bellows and a stiff leather case, a few postcards and Victorian tins, four Russian dolls, a Magic Roundabout toy, wooden boxes, a polished spirit level and a small, imitation suit case filled with bright costume jewellery. Two badly played guitars are balanced against a metal filing cabinet, and in its organised drawers are recent guarantees, death certificates, insurance policies, letters with fading, archaic writing, and old family snapshots of sepia tinted relatives. A distressed carpenter’s tool chest stands on top of a Singer sewing machine, next to the faded blue sofa and the deep reds of a Persian rug. It is filled with World War One medals and all kinds of fractured pieces of battlefield debris. My passport, with a younger more severe looking me, is in a drawer with a few abandoned euros. There are paper copies of next year’s early holiday bookings and an old biscuit tin filled with bank books, children’s forgotten NHS cards, and our creased wedding certificate.

I you are still interested, why not carry on and walk with me down the dog-leg stairs, where the white walls are filled with photographs of our mothers, fathers and grandparents. There are children on distant picnics, on past holidays and at old weddings. I am there, framed in a changeless, nostalgic black and white alongside my wife Rose and our house, this house a hundred years ago, all fixed and bolted to the past. In the kitchen, on a large, colourful calendar, alongside dentist’s, doctor’s and hospital appointments is our social life for the current month, scrawled and almost illegible. Open and close more finger scuffed doors and walk through other rooms, past another sewing machine, a small, wind up gramophone, tables with French polished tops, an Art Nouveau fireplace, ipads, phones and kindles charging, and scattered newspapers on the patterned carpets.

I could take you out into the bright, wild garden and we could drink tea or coffee sitting at the table, or on a bench by the pond and talk and laugh and imagine choices being made, lives being lived and remembered, and still being lived. What you can see out there amongst the flowers is a nervous robin and squirrels climbing on bird feeders that are crowded with sparrows and plump wood pigeons. A small boy, a grandchild might be feeding the fish, or inside kneeling on the floor surrounded by toys, or kicking a football in the hall with one of his loud and playful uncles. Daughters might be drinking wine and older granddaughters will be talking to their grandma, my wife, and by being there, they will all have something to say, something they have remembered, their own stories to tell.

You should be building a faint picture – and creating a pale, faded, outline of who I am, but the only way for you to find out more, to really know more is if I decide to tell you what happened. My role, which is quite difficult, is to write down what I remember – my memories of how it might have been at the time. Your role in this complex, ambiguous game, this adventure, this meandering, extended anecdote through most of the second half of the twentieth century and on into a new millennium, can’t be as active as I would like. It is all about you reading the words and climbing into the spaces between them. As you do that you might start finding answers to that first difficult and possibly elusive question … ‘Who’s there?’ …

It was Groucho not Karl Marx who said …’ Who are you gonna believe – me, or your own eyes?’ … Well this story, my story, is mostly true, and of course what isn’t should be. As far as I know, and I suppose I am the one who should know, there is no easily identifiable, fixed starting date, just a kind of vague time and a place where I suddenly realised that I was me, with my own sense of self importance and my own feelings not those that anyone else had told me I should have. There were no vibrant flashes of insight, but my remembered, conscious life was starting to make sense, taking shape in an ordinary place full of extraordinary words spinning in the whirlpool of my head and suggesting for the first time who I might be. Those words created an opening, a door or a window to myself, and allowed me to build my story, my cascade of memories, scattered narratives, faded faces, frosted images, real and imagined feelings and half remembered as well as half forgotten facts, fictions, truths and untruths. Of course there is a mysterious relationship between memory, truth and imagination, and all those unscrambled events were never just mine, they couldn’t be, that would have been impossible. As a solitary child I was often bored, and that boredom might have been the fire that lit my imagination, but even though there might have been times when I would have liked it to be so, I was never able to exist alone.

The Piraha tribe who live in the Brazilian rainforest are without any history, and by making no use of the past tense quickly forget what isn’t immediately important. All their experiences seem to be anchored and trapped in a present tense that should make everything easier and simpler than our written, spoken, monitored, referenced, analysed and remembered lives. They would never have understood Oscar Wilde’s idea that … ‘The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it’ … or the idea that … ‘What happened will happen again’ … We know that our memories help us interpret as much of our past as possible. In fact we all want and need a vivid ‘then’ that tells us who we think we were, who we could have been, and perhaps who we have become. But the past can be a strange and mysterious place, because remembering, with a distinct beginning, middle and end is difficult. There are just too many half hidden personal links, meandering side roads and uneasy and complex friendships, meetings and partings.

My memories didn’t suddenly arrive in my head as words; they weren’t waiting inside my conscious brain to jump out and surprise me. They were and still are slow burners that slip quietly from the past to the present, filtered and changed by what I know now. They often consist of a series of visual impressions and vaguely remembered people and words lacking any sense of chronology. In real life all those events, incidents and relationships often appear simultaneously, almost jumbled together, existing and coming alive alongside each other, but writing their story has to mean a fairly precise chronology, where, like history, one thing usually follows another.

So where are we now in this narrative, in this chronology, in this attempt to write one thing after another? Well I have a starting point, that place in my life where I had enough words to begin my story, but there has to be a middle and an end – that’s one of those classic narrative formats, but finding the end, the absolute end is going to be much more difficult. In fact what I think I am writing is a kind of coherent yet rambling obituary with the very last and final part missing. At some convenient, or probably inconvenient time, I will have finished what I want to say and will need to place an artificial punctuation mark – this narrative’s full stop. Where I put my false ending, the ending before ‘The End’ will not involve anyone else because I am absolutely certain the choice has to be mine.

So it starts when I was very young, a long time ago, when I first used words – but when did I try to collect my memories and place those words in a remembered order and begin to write it all down? Well come with me again – you and me – to a retirement party in a small, suburban Coventry pub on a warm and sleepy, summer evening in 2002. Nearly all the people there were ageing friends and distant colleagues, and we stood around smiling, laughing and talking, and even when there wasn’t much for us to say we seemed to need lots of words to say it. As I looked around at them all, I just had to accept that a lifetime had passed, and yet there we were, trying rather desperately and competitively to find out where we had been and what we had done, in what was not really a gathering of enthusiastic old friends at all, but a room full of relatively new strangers.

Eventually, after hanging on to the edges of conversations and waiting outside the shifting groups, a glass was tapped with a spoon and there were a few witty speeches, and one not very good joke. Actually an awful joke, but its inelegant and rather surreal punch line jump starts this whole story … ‘Two buckets of sick had returned to their home town after a long absence and were walking down the road revisiting old and familiar places. One turned to the other and pointing towards the roadside ditch said nostalgically … ‘ Do you see that hedge?’ … The other one replied … ‘Yes I can see it’ … ‘Well, I was brought up under there’…¹

There were a few polite sniggers, and like the punch line of another rather puerile, adolescent joke … ‘a titter went round the room’ … As the laughter stuttered and faded, I wasn’t just standing still and watchful, on that vintage1970’s patterned carpet in a city pub in the early years of a new millennium. Suddenly, fluttering erratically in my head were whole lists of vague, ambiguous questions, spinning and buzzing like trapped insects. … ‘Where was I brought up?’ … and as the words of the speech continued to drift languidly in the warm, summer air … ‘What had I actually done – who with and when?’ …

The clichéd wheel of my life was routinely turning. Day by day, week by week and year by year my clock was sleepily ticking and predictable events were rumbling safely and securely along. Despite the kind of louche, indifferent, lethargic, dismissive and often arrogant front that I know I present to the world, I had always worked hard to do my best, but even if that was ever noticed or achieved, I knew that it wasn’t all that mattered, or all that was important. The real entry codes to unlock the doors went beyond just ‘I’ and ‘me’, and were about all those people who I had met, and all those emotionally charged relationships that at the time seemed so life changing. I wanted to know, and I needed to remember who all those friends, colleagues and virtual strangers were who had inhabited my life. By stretching the ridiculous joke’s punch line to its limit, I was asking myself not only … ‘Where had I come from?’ … and … ‘Where was I brought up?’ … but … ‘Where had I actually been?’ … I really wanted to know where my journey, a journey without anyone ever offering me a ticket, had started from, and where, after pausing at all kinds of places and for all kinds of reasons it had actually reached.

As we left the party in a taxi, the road that linked the city to the town dipped and rolled through the darkness, and the headlights splashed across the trees in a hypnotic flicker of moving and shifting shapes. In a gentle and lazy haze of too much wine, I realised that when you first walked with me through those rooms I should have shown you the glass fronted Victorian bookcase, the one immediately opposite my desk, behind where I sit, with its middle shelf full of old, rejected soft toys. One of the scuffed teddy bears, with its single, sad eye and an arm hanging from its frayed shoulder is mine, and there is a direct line from seeing it now, neglected, but safe, to when I threw it around on a hand made counterpane as I lay in bed on quiet, empty, childhood mornings. I was often on my own, thinking and watching, and even from a very young age I knew instinctively that family warmth and any cosiness and close affection was hesitant rather than immediate, and had to be measured and carefully rationed. As I sat there, me and my scuffed brown bear, I realised that most emotions were too strong, challenging and disturbing to be allowed out into the open very often, and even more disconcerting was the feeling that happiness was not a natural part of each day, but was difficult to recognise, impossible to plan for, never accompanied by impromptu laughter and never allowed to burst out in a spontaneous surge.

My parents never expected answers to deep, philosophical or academic questions, but always showed they were practical and real by asking … ‘What do I do about this … or … ‘How can I deal with this?’ … At the same time they always seemed detached and isolated from their background, so much so that when I was old enough to enter their strange world, out there in crowded rooms in those houses, fields, streets and towns, it was all new to me and mysteriously different. I was a scientist, an anthropologist, suddenly fascinated by all those people and how they lived in that grey, noisy, dirty, industrial, yet often rural landscape.

I watched and observed, not really knowing how to behave, and as my parents lived their lives quietly and unobtrusively, my role became a kind of counterbalance, and I showed off in all kinds of loud, discordant and noisy ways. As an outsider I was unprepared for that cool, distant and alien world, where, if I didn’t try, I remained unnoticed and where everything that involved expressions of love had to be held in and kept tightly buttoned up as if to let it loose would have unleashed some kind of destructive, emotional anarchy. It was care and security in a kind of … ‘It is our duty’ … sort of way and I suppose like those people who talk about living through a Catholic education, I felt guilty and quite often had a feeling that I might have done something wrong.

I have no idea why I was thinking about my safe but abandoned teddy bear as we were driven home. Perhaps it was because it was an important part of my childhood. It was mine, a kind of comfort blanket, and for some strange reason it made me realise that I wanted to be able to remember it again, back there, somewhere in the past. At the same time I also knew that I wanted to reflect on at least some of my choices and aspirations. A few absurd, nihilistic sentences from Samuel Becket were stuck in my head … ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter, try again. Fail better’ … As the lights from expensive houses sparkled through thickets of trees I began to feel alert and sharply energetic, and I was filled with enough rather pompous self importance to think that if I could interpret my remembered past then perhaps someone, my children and grandchildren, perhaps friends, even strangers, might like to know who I had been. After all some of the incidents in my life must have a kind of universal appeal, and what I remember should link my personal story to someone else’s public history.

What happened to me is fixed in a kind of lost time, and inevitably many of the places, my places, have disappeared and are gone forever. In an instinctive kind of way I began to think they were important, well important to me, more important than meeting all those old friends and colleagues in that Coventry pub. I had known them all, and liked most of them when they had proudly but self consciously worn their duffel coats, donkey jackets, winkle pickers, desert boots, Levi Jeans, black sweaters and hush puppies in the baroque splendour of the1960s. But now, in their buttoned cardigans and tartan slippers, were they practicing golf shots rather than air guitar? Instead of aimless, guilt free sex, were they dutifully crossing their beige, shag pile carpets to read liberal newspapers in soft, secure armchairs? That surely wasn’t where we had all got to and what we had all become? It just couldn’t be the pinnacle, the summit, the climax, the absolute end to all our remarkable journeys. I had an impulsive need to remove the plaster, unravel the bandages, look underneath the dressing and pick at the sores.

I often feel that every time I remember something I alter it and record a newer version. As well as being similar to peeling the layers from an onion, it is almost like making it up as I go along – a kind of continuous editing process that I am not always aware I’m doing. Perhaps the stories we tell ourselves, those memories that help us make sense of our lives are partly fiction after all. I know that I have told many of my anecdotes so often that it is sometimes difficult to remember anything apart from the stories themselves, and many of the actual events have become opaque and fragmented. There is only my word for it that they happened at all, but if they are true – well then they are true – even if no one believes me. Of course if what I remember isn’t true, even if the whole world believes it is, it still wouldn’t make it true – or would it? Is the lie that turns out to be the truth still a lie? And what about a half truth? Is that a truth that hides a lie? Harold Pinter in Old Times says … ‘There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened’ … and Anthony Powell, the author of the 12 volume A Dance to the Music of Time once said … ‘It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them’ …

As I try to untangle all those past events I have used some of my mother’s and my grandparent’s memories, as well as stories from friends and all kinds of other random people. Those conversations and dialogues and remembered narratives are important, and they are there in all our lives. If they weren’t, how could we misinterpret them and inadvertently lie to each other? Occasionally a single person I have written about seems to stand alone, but others might have become a composite, a new whole, representing the ideas, beliefs and stories of several different people. Of course it goes without saying that some of the names have been changed to protect the innocent as well as the guilty. By doing that and reducing some real people to letters or initials, I have probably enhanced my own position and made my relationship with them sound more interesting and mysterious than it really was. By writing a real name I can make someone more alive and more vivacious and important than they or I imagined they would ever be. Some of the people have been given childish and immature joke names – well they often deserved it – but perhaps most important of all, I might have sometimes portrayed myself in the best possible light, or if not that, at least I have tried to put myself at the centre of everyone’s attention.

Although it might not be inevitable, it is certainly possible that some of my facts could be wrong, and those facts that read more like fiction will probably be truer than those facts that – well, that sound like – er – facts. Some of the clichés I will use and have probably already used were once bright and shining new inventions, epic flights of language, and as they are lazily resurrected might rise triumphantly in a surge of newly discovered excitement. I know my dreams are mine, but I can never be sure about my words. Actually I know that most of them came out of my head, but through what kind of filter? TS Eliot said … ‘Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal’ … and Anatole France made the point that …’ When a thing has been said and said well – have no scruple. Take it and copy it.’ …

So even though I know that my memories, like my dreams and most of my words are mine, I have to remind myself over and over again that what friends and strangers might want to know, if of course they want to know anything at all, will never be quite the same as what I want or am able to tell them. So bearing in mind that the past might possibly be really and absolutely past, let’s begin the journey, my journey and turn the key to start the engine by quoting from Arthur Seaton in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning … ‘Whatever it is people say I am that’s what I’m not ...² ³ or to misquote Gauguin … ‘all writing is either plagiarism or revolution’ … But let’s stop being pretentious and use a simpler, much less profound, and perhaps ironic line from the great Statesboro’ Blues … ‘I may not be good looking – but I am some sweet woman’s angel child.’⁴

One

The beginnings of mortality 1944-1963

1.   I was a war time baby

As well as being an only child I was the only child I knew whose maternal grandfather John Willie had a bullet hole in his shoulder. All his friends, his relations and my grandma called him ‘Jack’ and that fixed, solid and determined kind of name lay alongside a whole list of people who were either real aunts and real uncles or confusing first, second and half cousins. There was Florence and Samson – Clara, Cozzie, Lottie and Arthur – Jim, Harry, Albert, Eliza, Fred, Margaret and Maggie. There was a Steven, a Melvin, a Sally, an Edie and ‘Plug’, as well as Derek, Alice and Arnold, our Jim, our David, our Ted, our George, our Beth Ann, our Jud, our Charley, our Jack, our Young Jack, our Edna and Kittie and Barry, Gilbert and Marjorie. There were also lots of austere and distant adults who had be called Mr. or Mrs. and whose first names were unknown. They included my grandma’s mysterious friend from Greasbrough, Mrs. Hammerton, who I can’t remember ever seeing but, and this was best said in a hushed voice looking backwards to see that no one was listening, was a vegetarian … ‘Can yer believe it?’ … my grandma would say indignantly … ‘Nor eatin’ meat wi’ rationin’ still on!’ …

All those people seemed to drift seamlessly, energetically and noisily in and out of the same small, overcrowded room, but in different houses and in a place still called the West Riding of Yorkshire. It smelled of rich, bubbling, neck of lamb stews, hot milk and baking bread, of steam from boiling kettles, dusty carpets and dry herbs. There was the smell of damp dogs, carbolic soap, slightly stale butter and hair cream – of apple pies, cakes, tobacco, snuff, best dresses, talcum powder, and dark mothballed suits. Scents like 4711 Eau de Cologne, and Californian Poppy hovered in the air, with the slight powdery, rose petal tang of rouge. At weekends there was scorched hair, frizzled by curling tongs, and on washing days, hot flat irons sizzled with spit, and wet clothes, dried on wooden clothes horses in front of roaring fires that had the pungent and oily smell of hissing coal gas and spitting tar. If the doors were open on long, hot summer afternoons, the smell of cut grass, privet flowers and sweet peas, roses, damp earth, coke, and sooty, industrial air floated gently in alongside the hazy sunbeams.

The wall paper was always floral, there were no neutral whites or beiges in those busy rooms and it either matched or clashed with all the bright dresses and flowered aprons. Hands were large and red as they handed out home made scones, fruit cake, parkin, flap jack, and thick slices of apple pie. On special occasions, when I was slightly older, there would be bought in Battenberg, Angel cake, tea cakes, hot cross buns, Eccles cakes and a selection of Jammie Dodgers, Wagon Wheels, Penguins, Walnut Whips and more and more biscuits – a Rich Tea or Bourbon, a Fig or a Garibaldi, plain shortbread, fruit shortbread, or a chocolate digestive. Pinafores were often dusted with the same flour that hung in the summer light like dust motes, and on a wall in each of those small, boisterous, cluttered family rooms was at least one dark framed photograph of a young soldier in a sepia uniform, or a poignant scroll of condolence from King George V framed in chipped and cheaply varnished wood.

Most of the men – those close or sometimes distant relatives were quite short and stocky, drawn into their bulky armchairs as if they wanted to be held there cocooned and safely contained in the soft, secure background. They waited patiently to be given their cups of hot tea and cakes, shrouded and wreathed in smoke from their fragrant pipes and never ending cigarettes. Their hands were calloused and joined in an ungainly almost disjointed way to arms stippled with dark dots from sparks of burning metal, or interlaced with thin black scars impregnated with coal dust. Teeth sparkled and clattered in mouths that were too big for them and their round glasses with thin wire frames, often stuck together with pink strips of Elastoplast, were permanently fixed on their resigned, relaxed and shiny faces. If those Victorians and Edwardians weren’t dressed in their smooth, dark, shiny suits with creased, cracked and polished boots, they wore cardigans over their collarless shirts and grey waistcoats that jangled and glittered with their Albert watch chains and sometimes, when their shirt sleeves were rolled up and held in place by elasticated silver armbands, it was possible to stare in amazement at fading, anchor tattoos.

The women – those wives, sisters, aunts, great aunts and first and second cousins were always busy, and moved briskly and forcefully carrying plate after plate of sandwiches made from potted meat, brawn and fish paste, or sharp jam made from their own fruit and spread using knives with cream, bone handles on to home made bread cut into thick crusty wedges. They often dusted objects as they passed, out of a kind of nervous anxiety, as if each act was choreographed, and that if they didn’t the dirty industrial air might take a permanent hold of their hot, sparkling, ‘best’ rooms. Many were taller than the men, angular and slender in their Sunday holiday dresses. They called out loudly to each other and grumbled with a lively well practiced, hectoring tone as they stepped nimbly, almost balletically over feet and legs until they eventually collapsed with satisfied sighs to gossip together in heavy arm chairs filled with bright home made cushions and draped with ornate, white lace, anti-macassers.

And where was I? Well, I was there – I remember being there. As a child I was in each of those rooms, holding on to the back of a dress or an apron and listening and watching, or I was climbing on to knees, or on and over the scratchy and heavy settees. As I grew older I ran around their feet hiding from the fluttering chickens that pecked there way through the open doors, or I warily side stepped bad tempered dogs dozing in shafts of smoky sunlight and sleeping as close to the hearth of the roaring, spitting fires as possible. If I was on my way across the yard to the outside toilet where the News of the World or the Sunday Pictorial had been cut into neat squares, threaded on to string and hung on a nail, I would have needed an adult to help me cling close to the garden wall to avoid the hissing and chasing geese as they strutted and cackled between the yard and the fields stretching outwards from each compact industrial village.

Those people in those rooms and in those houses, were all in places whose names were linked so closely to them and were such a part of who they were that it was impossible to think of one without the other. They lived in Parkgate and Rawmarsh, Greasbrough, Kimberworth, Scholes, Thorpe Hesley and Wentworth. The men worked in local pits called New Stubbins, Silverwood, Thurcroft, Manvers Main, Carr House and Nether Haugh, and were coal hewers, banksmen, coopers, turners, fitters, coppersmiths or furnace men and brought their low wages home from Steel Peach and Tozer, Hatfield’s, or other filthy, sprawling Don Valley steel works, whose huge sheds, filled with fire and explosive heat, lined the road between Rotherham and Sheffield.

My grandad, John Willie – ‘Jack’ Uttley called his son Jack, and this Uncle Jack, my mother’s only brother obviously felt the heavy burden of tradition and called one of his two sons, my cousin – Jack. To avoid any future confusion he was always referred to as our Young Jack, but some of the other relations had much simpler, easier names. Florence Emma or Florrie was my grandma, my mother’s mother, a tall, bony, woman who, even in very old age was straight and slender. Arnold was my dad’s cousin Edna’s husband and lived on Richard Road. He had an aviary full of swirling and twittering budgerigars which you had to enter through double gates made of flimsy wire netting, and because he worked for KP nuts in Eastwood in Rotherham, there was always a constant supply of salted peanuts. Samson Uttley was my great grandfather and I remember seeing him once, leaning on a gate in his Greasbrough front garden. Maggie, my grandma’s sister, lived in Rawmarsh and was a dark haired great aunt, bubbly and loud, and from an early age I had the feeling that for some unknown reason she was flighty and slightly disreputable. Edna, Arnold’s wife talked and talked and then talked some more and words flowed like an endless, irrelevant river from her ever clacking jaws. She called Boots, Bootses – Woolworths, Woolworthses and Marks and Spencer’s, Marks’s.

There were lots of these tactile great aunts and uncles with shiny, knobbled heads and broad knuckled hands that held me and stopped me falling into the huge fires burning in the black leaded ranges. More often than not, and despite my many avoidance tactics, they would use their strong arms to lift me up and press my face against their rouged and powdered cheeks or whiskery stubbled chins and say loudly … ‘Eee I could eat ‘im up’ … or … ‘Come oer ‘ere yer little tinker and gi’ us a kiss’ … or if I was loudly showing off … ‘Shut thi noise tha’s mithering me lug hole’ … and in all its abstract, linguistic complexity … ‘ A’ tha laykin? Well stop doin nowt and get thisen oer ‘ere’ and I’ll gi’ thee a tanner’ … And my mother Iris? Well, even then she seemed to want to be away from her Auntie Cossie’s, Maggie’s, Lottie’s or Sally’s houses with the wandering chickens in the kitchen and geese pecking at legs and hissing menacingly in the small fields and flag stoned yards. She already wanted to distance herself from the shared outside toilets, with their flaky, dusty, whitewashed walls, the brown wooden seats, the brackish smell of overworked sewers and secret, hidden spiders. She wanted to be away from the pits and the farmland that divided them – away from those hot, small houses and away from all her relations who lived and seemed to work and play so closely together. That’s what I think she wanted, but in all her long life it stayed with her; it was always there, it was who she was, and although she tried so hard, she never really escaped.

Those small crowded rooms, filled to overflowing were in houses where having three bedrooms was a luxury. In the 1901 census, my maternal great granddad, Samson Uttley, a coal hewer was 36. He lived at 16 Fitzwilliam Square, Greasbrough, a few miles from Rotherham with his wife Lily [nee Braisby] aged 32 and a lodger, another coal hewer, William Swift, aged 31. Living in the house with the three adults was her son, Harry Braisby aged 12, and Samson and Lily’s own children – Elizabeth Ann 9, who was the oldest and known as our Beth Ann. She married well to a miner with his own house, but he drank heavily and had an unusual habit of peeing in their shared wardrobe. There was also Clara 8; Albert 6; John Willie, my granddad 4; Reginald 2 and Alan, 7 months, whose son Frank Uttley, a private in the 2/7th battalion of the Queen’s Royal Regiment, would be killed in Italy, aged 19 on 8th September 1944.

That’s ten people, who lived in what – two rooms downstairs and two upstairs in a street filled with other families, where the worker from each house was either a coal hewer like Samson and William Swift, or a road labourer or colliery banksman. In the late 1940’s where my memories started, I knew similar rooms in similar houses, where the numbers may have been slightly less, but the need and the willingness to be so close and tight was still there, but perhaps not by choice. It was there because it had to be. There was no point in dreaming of anything else. Low wages and unskilled jobs had trapped them where they had to tolerate each other’s closeness.

I was lucky to be a war time baby; we all were. I was born on August 10th 1944 in Kimberworth, a few miles from Rotherham on a door placed over a bath. I couldn’t have known that to be born then meant free healthcare within the genius of the National Health Service, free milk, free vitamins, free libraries and free education. I was going to be looked after in a civilised, communal and compassionate way through my childhood and adolescence and all the way to university. It was going to be a generous time to be alive, where the state valued all its citizens and was there to support everyone. I like to think that the door my mother lay on had vibrated, wood against metal to the sound of Dorniers or Heinkels droning up the Don Valley, or that it had rattled to the throbbing exhausts of my dad’s Norton motorbike as he careered through the lanes from Coningsby, Swinderby or Finningly where the Lancaster bombers were based.

Bombs fell on Masborough in Rotherham as early as August 1940, killing two men and making over 200 people homeless, but the most destructive German bombing raid was in December 1940 when most of the bombs hit the centre of Sheffield rather than the Attercliffe steelworks. By the time I was born the Luftwaffe had probably stopped devastating the industrial heart of South Yorkshire, but my mother wheeled me in my pram up Potter Hill in Greasbrough with shrapnel clattering on to the road from the anti aircraft guns that protected the pits and rolling mills from the final few bombing raids. Of course those aren’t my memories, but I can remember the first house, my first house, my grandparent’s house – 7 South Street in Greasbrough – a small village with a few pubs, a beautiful church and many terraced, stone cottages. Those maternal grandparents, Florence – Florrie, and John Willie – Jack Uttley, had lived in other houses in the same village – in Church Street and Rossiter Road, but moved into their new council house in the late1920’s.

My first real and clear memories are of a cosy, cluttered South Street back room, filled with upright chairs, a dark sideboard and a heavy table. I played in front of yet another lively coal fire on one of the rag rugs made by my grandad, who pegged them by holding the backing canvas tight against his withered right arm. In one photograph my dad in his RAF Corporal’s uniform is lying on the lawn holding me, and in another I am sitting alone on a blanket in the garden by a trellis filled with pale roses. A small, black and brown daschund, not quite a pedigree is sniffing the folds of my nappy. That was our Lofty who struck a fine balance between a strong stench of dog and high level flea infestation. Actually it was never a fine balance at all, he was always lifting with fleas, and it was possible to watch them jumping and scampering through his glossy, black fur as he lay splayed on the rag rug, happily snoring and gibbering to himself as he ran in his fetid sleep. Those fantasy movements as he dreamt of a fast escape were good practice for the reality of suddenly being woken up as the glittering sparks from the damp coal spat out from the hearth. He would leap up yelping and growling, biting at the small, smouldering specks on his back with sharp, snapping teeth. He always ran to my grandma so that she could rush into action and flick at his singed fur with a tea towel that she tucked in the waistband of her apron.

My dad was able to return home quite often from his bomber base in Lincolnshire. Apparently before I was born, and probably the reason why I was born, he would come roaring into Greasbrough just after dawn, his motorbike exhausts throbbing, carrying whatever food he was able to buy from the farms close to the airfield. My mother was embarrassed by his noisy, and I suppose ostentatious arrival, because it drew attention to her, and she resented the barbed remarks from neighbours of … ‘I ‘eard ‘e were back agen’ … or … ’E’s back on leave agen is ‘e’… Those comments would be repeated all day because she worked behind the counter in the village post office and would be on public display to all her neighbours whose husbands, brothers or sons were far, far away, out in Burma, North Africa, Italy or France, with no chance of arriving home for a couple of hours rest and recreation. One family story, that my mother didn’t like hearing in any kind of public arena was about one of his heavier than usual drinking sessions, when he rode through the flat lanes of Lincolnshire with a dead piglet clasped in his arms across the motorbike’s petrol tank and ended up in the fishing harbour in Bridlington.

Before I was three years old I had fallen on to the corner of the South Street sideboard several times, and I still have the scars above my eye and nose, but that was probably part of one of my grandma’s memories of my parent’s life after their marriage in Greasbrough church – Iris Uttley, aged 21 to Eric George Smith aged 22. Uttley was a fairly common, local name dating back to the Normans, when a distant ancestor was supposedly given farming land, an ‘oat lea’, and although this may well be apocryphal, a Richard of Oatlea fought at Agincourt. There were many stories that my mother tried to suppress by either not telling me or not remembering. It was as if she didn’t want some of the shared narratives to be part of her family’s history, and as with the dead piglet anecdote, she would often frown and sigh if anyone started talking about the number of times my dad had to take my grandad home from the pub in a wheelbarrow on lazy, beer infused, war time, Sunday afternoons.

She also seemed to feel that our Lofty, the dog, was ‘common’. He could certainly be obnoxious and disgusting, but I never quite understood why such a relatively inanimate part of her life was considered to be so unacceptable, and being ‘common’ in her eyes, was very, very unacceptable. Because of his high position on her ‘common – posh’ continuum, she was always wary of those warm, cosy, family stories about the dog’s odd and sometimes bizarre behaviour. The bus from Greasbrough into Rotherham had to climb out of the village up Potter Hill and my dad, after he had been demobbed, got on at the Prince of Wales Hotel, which is a grand sounding name for an ordinary pub that had played a destructive part in my grandad’s life. In November 1914 he met his ‘pals’ outside – in fact one of them was the landlord’s son – and they walked the two miles to the Drill Hall in Rotherham where they enlisted in the York and Lancaster Regiment for what was their first and for two of them, their last great adventure. Now thirty years later my dad was on his way to work, and from the house in South Street to the bus stop he had to constantly shout at Lofty and try and make him go back home.

He swore that the dog knew with intimate detail each hedge, gate and garden, because almost every morning after my dad had stepped on to the bus and it had travelled just a few yards from the stop, he would race out of a front garden where he had been hiding and jump on to the open platform. If he mistimed his run and didn’t quite complete his majestic leap the passengers in their greasy caps and fawn raincoats would cheer him on, cigarettes bobbing up and down in their mouths, as he ran behind on his short stunted legs. The dog’s dramatic and usually perfectly timed leaps occurred almost every day, but his athletic success didn’t last very long. Just as the bus slowed to a stop and changed gear to climb the steepest part of the hill the regular conductor with his ticket machine clinking against its leather straps would say, … ‘Abaht nah Eric?’ … look at my dad for a nod of confirmation and use his spit polished boot to gently lift the dog off the platform and back on to the road.

I don’t feel I am talking about that black and brown mongrel in too much unnecessary detail because to me as a very small child he wasn’t insignificant at all. In fact he soared majestically as this larger than life figure, although soared is probably taking it too far, because he really existed low down at my level. His eyes, teeth, tongue and lung sapping breath were all close to the carpets, rag rugs, grass, earth, dust and flagstones. When he wasn’t wandering around the village being chased out of the small Greasbrough branch library by a frustrated librarian with a broom, he was at home in the house, fixed in his space, down there by the hearth, and when talk faltered, or on rare occasions when those noisy boisterous rooms were silent our Lofty could re-start the conversation by reflecting and channelling moods. If my grandma was bad tempered she shouted at him and used her yard brush to push him out of the door, banging it shut behind him. If everything was calm and serene, she would sit at the table in a shaft of sunlight, and with him on her aproned lap scratch between his ears as he looked up at her with a benign and fawning expression.

Like most male dogs, and perhaps like most males, he was fascinated by his balls and fiercely determined to keep them clean … First man to second man as they see a dog licking its spuds… ‘I bet you wish you could do that’… Second man … ‘Well, yes it could be a great thing to be able to do ’… First man … ‘If you pat him on the head he’ll let you’ … The sound of him whimpering at the door to be let in and then slurping wetly under the table is one I remember well. The sight of him splayed on the carpet happily and skilfully using his wet, pink tongue to nuzzle his small, asymmetrical knackers always lit a fire under my grandma. It was the only time she was really angry with him, and one of the few times I ever heard her swear. Her shouts of … ‘Stop it, ger’ aht from under theer yer little bugger’… as she flapped at his smug, beaming, self satisfied face with her tea towel were frequent and predictable.

When he wasn’t bad tempered and growling he would messily lick my face as I lay on the floor with him and the short stump of his tail shook and beat against the dusty rugs. When that happened my grandma would first of all smile, look down fondly and then with an animated double take shout … ‘Stop ‘im doin’ that Roger, yer don’t know wor e’s bin lickin’ … Well actually I did, and the evidence was there for all to see. His sparkling balls glistened in the afternoon sunlight and lay damp and snug against my polished face, that being free of coal smuts and sticky food also shone in the fire’s flames with a moist, bright iridescence.

We lived with my grandma and grandad in their small council house, and unless there were visitors, everyone sat in the warm, stuffy security of the back room, where my grandma made jam from the loganberries that grew on trellises in the garden, and from the bowls of blackberries she took me to pick in the thick, tangled hedges that lined the village lanes between Greasbrough and Wentworth. A toad lived in the old Anderson air raid shelter that smelled of damp earth and fear, and was fed with any insects my grandad found trying to damage his prize roses. It was a typical and ordinary late 1940’s village life that was rapidly changing and dying, where seasons were still significant, and where generations still rarely moved far from its boundaries. Before the new houses in their sprawling, treeless estates were built it still retained a tight, separate identity. My cousin Barry drew up an interesting, unfinished family tree showing that my grandad’s relatives had lived in that same village since the early eighteenth century. He had married his girl, Florence Emma Guest from Rawmarsh in 1920 when he was a disabled 23 year old veteran of the carnage of the Great War and they had my mother in 1921 and my Uncle Jack a few years later. After leaving school at thirteen my grandad had been a miner, but when he was discharged from military hospital in 1919 he couldn’t work at the coal face and became a local postman. Unfortunately, because of his war wound that had severely damaged the nerves and tendons in his right arm, the strain of only being able to use one shoulder to carry the heavy mail bag caused his spine to begin to twist, so he stopped and took various unskilled and low paid labouring jobs in the open cast mines at Treeton, or in one of the large Templeborough steel works.

Both of my mother’s parents came from huge families, each having nine or ten brothers and sisters which is why there were always lots of noisy relatives lurking in the background where my mother hoped they would stay. My grandad had poached rabbits from Earl Fitzwilliam’s Wentworth estates, been a beater on his shoots, worked in his pits and stolen his coal during the nineteen twenties general strike. Although it was obvious that he and his ‘pals’ did steal the coal, apparently he pleaded not guilty and was acquitted. They, by being more honest, or less willing to take risks, were fined quite a significant amount of money. My early memories are of a small, severe man with close cropped hair who poured rum into his tea, and when he was allowed to, that is when my mother wasn’t there to make him feel guilty, drank it noisily out of the saucer. When he ate an apple he held it between his smooth and ageless, atrophied right hand and his chest and using his knobbled, army clasp knife, took the peel off in a continuous strip which he threw over his shoulder into the fire for good luck. On weekday evenings he sat at the back room table, that when it wasn’t being used for eating was covered in a hairy, green cloth, like shaved artificial grass, and worked out which draws to put on his pools coupon by gazing hopefully into the middle distance and sucking a purple indelible pencil.

As a child, that heavy, dark brown table fascinated me, because it had what I imagined were secret compartments. The top swivelled to one side revealing a sliding drawer system underneath. Inside those hidden sections were treasures I was reluctantly allowed to look at, but had to play with carefully under my grandma’s beady and watchful eyes. There was my Uncle Jack’s scout’s bugle with a green, silk lanyard, as well as a large collection of both his and my mother’s cigarette cards. Some of them, in loose bundles held together with brittle and perished elastic bands, were sets of wild flowers, fishes of the sea and butterflies. There were cricketers and footballers, posing with severe short back and sides, and Brilliantined,1930’s film stars holding long, effete cigarette holders. But best of all were the slightly foxed albums of kings and queens and soldiers in their uniforms. Hidden away at the bottom, in a small, flat, cardboard box were my grandad’s medals, his British War Medal and Victory Medal, both with their dazzling, brightly coloured ribbons. They never seemed much of a reward for the sniper’s bullet that hit his shoulder on May 3rd 1917 and disabled his right arm for the rest of his life. But searching and poking through the drawers under the table must have happened much later when we were visiting, because when I was three my mother and father became the first in their large extended families to take out a mortgage and buy their own house. In 1947 we moved to 54 Reresby Crescent, a steep, curving road on one of the new estates that were being built for the second group of 20th century heroes on fields and woods that had once belonged to the Sitwell family.

2.   Hells bells and buckets of blood

Whiston was and still is an old village on the southern edge of Rotherham, and many of its small stone cottages have gardens sloping down to a shallow stream, rippling across pale pebbles, and washing over swaying fronds of watercress. In the late forties, several farms still trailed their mud and manure through the narrow lanes, but the new estates, those post war, semi detached parasites, without status or history, were creeping steadily and remorselessly out from the town and squeezing out its separate, rural identity. From our front room bay window we could look down across the valley to the square Saxon tower of the tree shrouded church and see the solid, Georgian vicarage and the cricket field with its scoreboard and green and white, wooden pavilion. In the far distance were woods, hedges and farms meandering across the countryside towards the reservoir at Ulley. The house, that had cost them £1080, with a mortgage repayment of £4.17.8d [£4.75] each month, had a front and back garden, a short, straight, concrete drive with a gate, a brick coal shed and a tiny, cramped kitchenette rather than a full sized kitchen.

The back bedroom was to be mine for the next fifteen years. It was where I woke each day in my lumpy bed and found my clothes, even my socks and handkerchiefs, washed, ironed and neatly folded in the dressing table drawers. I looked out of the window on to a patchwork of neat, rectangular back gardens. They had an almost perfect, geometric pattern, but although they were the same, almost horizontal shape, they were never identical, and over the years, as I eventually leaned on the window sill, blowing out the smoke from my roll ups or Park Drive’s, they changed and became divided by more vertical planes. Trees and hedges were planted, garages were added, extensions built and lawns and patios laid. They reflected the changing aspirations of growing families, and in the early summer shone with bright, sparkling flowers and many vibrant shades of green. My bedroom was almost my own space and I stood Airfix models on the dressing table top alongside my school books and pencil cases. But it was a space where I didn’t really have everything I needed, because there was no heating, no desk or chair and nowhere that was really secretive and totally mine. My mother was constantly dusting, cleaning, tidying and rearranging my clothes, and I spent less time alone in my room than I would have liked. It was definitely their house – a house that I was allowed to share with them as I basked in the excitement and luxury of a bath and an inside toilet.

There were two rooms downstairs with open fires in cream tiled contemporary fireplaces. One of the two …‘t’front room’ … followed the long family tradition and for several years was kept for ‘best’. I was never sure what the best for it to be kept best for actually meant, but I knew that it had to be in readiness for visitors and that it was a kind of showroom, a mausoleum that told everyone who we were. Perhaps my mother didn’t want to use it because she still needed to be sub consciously cocooned in one hot, stuffy room where she could recapture the snug cosiness she thought she had escaped from. Her front room – hers because she controlled it not my father, was permanently cold, just like my grandma’s front room and contained what she felt was her best furniture and her isolated but precious ornaments. The heavy bulk of a largely unused three piece suite, faced a small occasional table and was neatly grouped around a fire