And We'll All Have Houses

By K.R. Lockett

Set in the landscape of 1960s’ working-class Britain, And We’ll All Have Houses tells the story of firstborn James Green who feels betrayed, sinking into a mess of ambivalence and dislocation, by his parents when they move from his hometown in Yorkshire to North Wales. But for James Green, salvation is at hand when the parents decide to migrate to Australia as ‘Ten Pond Poms’. What seems like a change of fortune turns to pain and bitterness when a tragic accident threatens to tear a family apart. Amongst exchanges of lies, candour and disintegration, and being ten thousand miles from home, James must take responsibility for his younger sister, Mary, and emotionally dysfunctional parents who are unable to loosen the shackles of grief. An intricately woven story of deteriorating families and lives is changed forever as James sacrifices his dreams to bring his family to safety. James’s story is one of shattered dreams, false hopes and suffering. Yet through the uncertainly of life, he never renounces his belief in the goodness of humanity and meets his challenges with dignity, which give us hope for the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Feb 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528988704

K.R. Lockett

Born into the tight community of a small coal-mining village in south Yorkshire, Lockett grew up greatly influenced by his working-class background and the unevenness of the world around him. He trained as an engineer, but after ten years of dissatisfaction with the repetition of corporate life, he decided to strike out by himself. He moved his young family to Snowdonia and became a mountaineer. He has climbed in Alaska, Nepal, the Rocky Mountains and the Alps. He has travelled widely, often in remote regions of the world. He has lived in Wales and Australia. And We’ll All Have Houses is his debut novel. He is married with two daughters and now lives in Liverpool.

Book preview

And We’ll All Have Houses

K.R. Lockett

Austin Macauley Publishers

And We’ll All Have Houses

About the Author

Dedication

Copyright Information ©

Synopsis

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

About the Author

Born into the tight community of a small coal-mining village in south Yorkshire, Lockett grew up greatly influenced by his working-class background and the unevenness of the world around him. He trained as an engineer, but after ten years of dissatisfaction with the repetition of corporate life, he decided to strike out by himself. He moved his young family to Snowdonia and became a mountaineer. He has climbed in Alaska, Nepal, the Rocky Mountains and the Alps. He has travelled widely, often in remote regions of the world. He has lived in Wales and Australia. And We’ll All Have Houses is his debut novel. He is married with two daughters and now lives in Liverpool.

Dedication

For Esme, Ben and Ada.

With love.

Copyright Information ©

K.R. Lockett (2021)

The right of K.R. Lockett to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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

ISBN 9781528988698 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528988704 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2021)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5LQ

Synopsis

Jimmy lives in a small coal-mining village in south Yorkshire with his mother, father and younger sister. His mother, Isobel, a Liverpudlian, is a theatrical woman of uneven temperament. She is a needy and selfish hypochondriac. Jimmy’s father, Sidney, is a steady, if uninspiring Yorkshireman.

Isobel’s beloved father was killed on the first night of the May Blitz, in 1942, when the Luftwaffe bombed Liverpool’s docks. It’s an event that will shape the rest of her life. Nellie, Isobel’s mother, evacuates her two children from war torn Liverpool to the north Wales town of Llandudno.

Isobel meets her future husband, a young conscripted soldier – one night in Llandudno’s town centre. They soon become a couple, fall in love and are married; all within twelve months. The married couple set up home with Sidney’s mother in south Yorkshire. It is not a match made in Heaven. Six years later Sydney and Isobel have moved into their own place with their two children, Jimmy and her sister Mary. Of course, Isobel never liked living in Yorkshire, she finds coal miners, coarse, uneducated people, lacking in refinement and fine feelings. Her dream is to return to Llandudno.

Against his better judgement Sidney is persuaded to make the move to north Wales. The family leave their three-bedroom house in Yorkshire for a little top-floor flat in Llandudno. Three years later another child, David is born. Times are difficult, as in most working-class families; money is always in short supply and they are stuck in a flat with little prospect of advancement.

Isobel’s life turns upside down when her elder brother dies of lung cancer. The family decides to apply for the assisted passage scheme and emigrate as ‘Ten Pound Poms’ to Australia. They are accepted and are booked to sail to Australia in the October of 1963. They begin selling off their belongings, then move in with Nellie in her two-bedroom flat while waiting for their departure.

Sidney and Isobel work all the hours God sends to build up their coffers to start a new life in Australia. Isobel works as a waitress in an hotel. On Easter Sunday she takes David with her to the hotel, but that morning five-year-old David gets killed in a tragic accident. The family is torn apart and emigrating to Australia is cancelled. Despair drives Isobel to make a botched attempt at suicide. She turns to spiritualism, during one meeting a clairvoyant tells her she has spoken to David and they must go to Australia and says that David is happy with his father in Heaven.

The family arrives in Australia, they are housed on a Migrant Hostel in Sydney with 1660 other migrants. By now Isobel has lost interest in life, all she wants is her baby back, she hardly notices her two other children. She is afflicted with one illness after another, each one incurable. After six months the parents decide to return to Llandudno, all they can think of is going back to David’s graveside. Jimmy leaves school as a damaged fifteen-year-old. He meets Katherine, a young migrant living on the hostel and they become inseparable friends. It’s meeting Katherine, and more importantly, her mother, that turns Jimmy’s life around. He becomes the glue or a sticking plaster holding a broken family together. He is torn between his devotion to Katherine and getting his parents and sister safely back to Llandudno. In the end, he simply cannot leave Mary at the mercy of dysfunctional parents so returns to Llandudno, back where he started. Nevertheless, the two years in Australia, and more importantly meeting Katherine and her mother have started a process of healing for Jimmy, a light by which he might make his way, and so, he tells us this story.

Chapter 1

I am not a man of letters. It is true I have read widely, but only out of habit. Never have I once opened a book for the purpose of study, so I should probably declare now my indifference to learning and academy. I know Julius Caesar was assassinated by Cassius and Brutus on the Ides of March, 44BC, as I know Tottenham Hotspur beat Leicester City 2–0 in the FA Cup Final of 1961. The former by thumbing through a volume of Encyclopaedia Britannica found abandoned one day last summer and the latter by reading Boys Own Christmas Annual of that same year. I have a keen eye for detail, and if I may say, I fall among that group of men who are said to have ‘a good memory’. I rarely take responsibility for my activities; and although I have a story to tell, I take no blame for the quality of this text. Nevertheless, some stories will not rest until told, even if the person to whom they are dedicated will never read them. But no matter that, the storyteller must begin somewhere, even if he invents affairs that allow him to put the first words onto the page. My tale begins in February.

The days are short and around the town one feels a sense hopelessness and demoralisation among the few pedestrians with the resolve to venture out into the biting wind. It’s on such a day, I find myself dallying outside the picture house on Mostyn Broadway. I feel drowsy as though sleepwalking or dreaming, it’s a sensation I’ve had for many weeks, it blights me daily if truth be told. I seem to be looking over the side of a ship and in the distance there’s some land I vaguely remember. People stand at the water’s edge watching the ship sail by, waving their hands as if waving goodbye. I think I recognise them but can’t remember their names and all the time the ship slips further away. Then, by chance, Bob Murdock comes out of the picture house and asks me if I’m feeling alright? You know, like making out I’ve been on the booze? I ask him what he’s talking about.

‘No Bob,’ I say, ‘I haven’t been on the booze, I’m alright, you know.’ And he tells me Rawlinson had gone and got himself knocked down by a drunk driver on South Parade.

‘Umm, serves him right, teach him to look where he’s going, next time,’ I say to Bobby, trying not to piss myself laughing.

‘Well, Yeah! I know what you mean, but even so,’ Bobby says, with a look on his face. ‘I saw Frankie’s sister, he’s in hospital, she said he’s in a bit of a state. Only happened on Friday.’

I didn’t reckon Frankie Rawlinson, nasty piece of work if you ask me. You’d see him drinking in the ‘Kings Arms’ or ‘The Palace’ in Rhyl, of a Sunday night. Frankie was an arrogant twat, had a sense of entitlement, like he was better. Bad mannered too. His old man owned one of the big hotels on the front, always sun-tanned, wore a gold chain round his neck and sunglasses even in winter. He walked two Alsatian dogs and if I remember right was forced to keep them muzzled after one of them bit a child. They reckoned it was only because he was in the same Masonic Lodge as the Magistrate, the dog wasn’t put down. Frankie took over after his old man, he didn’t give a fuck about anyone other than himself. I found it highly amusing though, you know, Frankie Rawlinson knocked down and all, but I must admit to being curious and wondered what it would be like to see these Rawlinsons come down from their high horse for a change. For once I almost looked forward to seeing Frankie Rawlinson.

Took me a week to catch up with Frankie. Went to visit him in hospital on the Monday and there he was, in the Tudno Ward, lying in bed with his legs in plaster. He had some other damage, internal like, broken ribs and something else they were still working on, running tests. He didn’t look very well.

It was about eight o’clock, Frankie said, that fine rain had been falling all evening, the sort that doesn’t look much, just drizzle really, but clings to your clothes like mist, so that when you get in you’re drenched. Made the roads look glossy under the street lights, slippery like.

Frankie said he’d seen the van parked up ahead, outside his old man’s hotel, it had its lights on, seemed unusual, he said. It was quiet and there was no one around. He heard the car start, he said the driver kept turning the key even though the engine was running and the headlights went all yellow like there wasn’t enough juice in the battery. It went slowly at first, creeping along; he could see it, then suddenly it veered to the left and ran straight into him, as though on purpose. Frankie didn’t have time to be frightened.

Turned out the driver was a painter and decorator, a one-man band, been working at the hotel doing up the bedrooms ready for the start of the season. Finished work for the day and being Friday his old man asked if he would like to stay on for a couple of drinks. The driver, bloke by the name of Williams, got a wife and two kids and now he’s in trouble with the Police. Been charged with dangerous driving while under the influence, he’ll probably lose his licence, could even end up in clink, a right mess it was.

This Williams had been to visit Frankie, said he was sorry for what he’d done, didn’t know what came over him, how it happened. Like one minute he was turning over the engine and the next he’d swerved and the front wheels were on the pavement, he said he just couldn’t understand it. Like he’d forgotten he was drunk.

‘Don’t waste your breath, you’re in enough trouble as it is,’ Frankie told him. ‘Best if you don’t come again; and I’d stay out of the way of my old man if I were you.’

Williams held his head low, like he couldn’t look Frankie in the eye, seemed like he wanted to say more, Frankie thought, but a silence had come over them and it was too heavy to shift, like pressing down. Williams put out his hand and faintly nodded his head. Frankie just lay back against the pillows until Williams left.

Frankie had a pile of books on his bedside cabinet; five or six stacked neatly. He said an old woman, some sort of charity worker, came around every few days with a trolley, see if you want a newspaper, crossword puzzles, reading books or that sort of thing.

‘I got this,’ he said, taking a book from the pile. ‘It’s really good, easy to read, you can read it in a day.’ He held it up for me to look at. It was only thin.

On the front was a picture of a big sky, grey and cold like you see in winter, and a bleak stretch of prairie with telegraph poles in the distance. There was a broken-down water pump tower, a couple of the sails were missing and some broken wooden fences, looked like they once corralled cattle or horses. There were no trees. The book was called ‘Of Mice and Men’, by an author called John Steinbeck. I’d never heard of him.

‘Here, take it, it’s a good read,’ Frankie said. ‘They won’t know if one little book goes missing, if anyone asks I’ll say someone from another ward borrowed it, but it’ll be alright, no one will ask.’ I put the book in my jacket pocket. The thing is, Frankie thought I was visiting out of concern, because I felt sorrow or sympathy that’s why he gave me the book. Idiot!

I read the whole book in bed that night, really enjoyed it, best book I’d ever read, it struck a chord. And when I put the book down, I remembered who was standing at the water’s edge waving goodbye.

I liked John Steinbeck and wanted to read more books written by this author but didn’t know how to get hold of them. Then it occurred to me that I could join the Library, reckoned they’d have some. So I did. I read ‘Tortilla Flat’, then ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, I read ‘Cannery Row’ as well. Wonderful Steinbeck stories, got your pulse racing. Though I liked ‘Of Mice and Men’ best. Seemed to me John Steinbeck wrote about the downtrodden, casual labourers looking for work, drifters searching for somewhere to put down roots, searching for a better life, battling against odds set someplace else. Schooled until they had enough strength in their back to work the land, men with calloused hands and worn out shoes, men with no stake in life. I knew what he meant, he could have been writing about us, about me.

We’d been back just over a year, fifteen months if it makes any difference. The old man said he would be able to put down a deposit on a house come the end of summer. He said there was one for sale he had his eye on and said he hoped it would still be on the market when he’d got the money together. Until then we’d have stay as we are, living with Nellie in her tiny flat, same as we were three years ago. The old man was trying to put his best face on it, but deep down he knew coming back had been a mistake, even Isobel knew.

The old man said I should be thinking about getting a proper job; become a fireman, join the Navy, go to the factory at the junction and work on the line assembling washing machines. There were lots of things I could do, he said. His patience was running thin. I said, ‘I had a proper job and he took me away from it, brought Mary and me back to this dump of a town.’ The old man didn’t take very well to that, he didn’t like being answered back. He reckoned the past was the past and we had to live in the here and now, look to the future. He must have been having a laugh, how come he didn’t do it himself then? Nobody lived in that place called the past like the old man and Isobel.

Anyhow, I did find work, didn’t I work last summer? Didn’t I work for the Council, hiring out deckchairs on the Promenade? And I sold ice cream from the kiosk outside Forte’s Milk Bar, it wasn’t my fault the jobs were just for the season, what did he expect anyway? Who did he think was going to take a lad like me on; no qualifications, no experience, bad attitude? I wouldn’t take me on.

I may as well tell you here and now, I didn’t want to find a job, not a permanent job, the type of job where you start at the bottom and work your way up, go to work regularly, year in year out, pay into the pension, you grow old and you’re still there, in the same place, and you’ve never enjoyed it. I didn’t want a job like that, especially in Llandudno, I hated Llandudno, always had, Llandudno had ruined everything.

Trouble is, when you’ve got no money in your pocket you can’t do much, can’t go to the pictures, can’t even buy a packet of cigarettes. You get left behind, scratching around on the edge like the characters in John Steinbeck stories. Maybe I would try to get something when the season started, just for the summer, something in one of the hotels, they were always after people; you know, scraping dishes, washing up; type of work anyone can do.

I decided I wouldn’t look for anything until Easter was over and done with. Easter’s a bad time in our house. It’s just a few days off work for normal people, you know. Get Good Friday over with, Easter Sunday, then the Monday and that’s it, all done and dusted. Couple of Bank Holidays in there as well, extension till eleven in the pubs, what’s wrong with that? Supposed to be a religious festival though, isn’t it? Resurrection of Christ and what have you, that’s if anyone still remembers. But Easter lasts about three weeks in our house, more than that. It’s rubbish in our house during Easter. Mary and me are glad when it’s over.

I was glad I’d read the John Steinbeck books, though, couldn’t remember feeling better than when I was reading John Steinbeck. But what about ‘Grapes of Wrath’, some story that is? You know; Tom Joad, just out of prison and old man Joad, Gramma and Granpa Joad, and all the rest of the Joads. They pack up their belongings into the back of a truck and leave their farm because all the land has turned dry and nothing will grow. Then poor old Granpa catches a stroke right there in the back of the truck. He’s just lying there dead as a Dodo, eyes open and wobbling around as the wheels go over the bumps in the road, going colder and colder as they tick off the miles. And they have no money to bury him proper like, so they stop the truck at nightfall, walk half a mile off the road and when no one’s looking, dig a trench, lay down the old man respectfully, then fill it in again and nobody knows he’s there except them Joads. Then they get back in the truck and drive away because there’s nothing else they can do. They’ve got to keep moving, get in line with all the other Oklahomans making the two-thousand-mile journey across the parched land to get to California. And they’re all in their clapped-out cars and trucks and all of them running on worn tyres, with leaky radiators and the kids with no shoes on their feet and no food in their belly. These Okies, migrants in their own country, destitute folk nobody wants. The way John Steinbeck told it made you wonder on the making up of stories and the doing of writing down on paper what’s going round in your head so that it becomes a book people can hold in their hand and read. And that’s what John Steinbeck did for me, he was the first who made me think more about the making up of stories.

Thing is, I’ve always made up stories, ever since I was a child but never written them down, though. Just written them in my head like thought writing. It’s better that way because if you write them down on paper people would know what you’re thinking. Then they might start asking questions, want to talk about it, what you’ve written, much better to do it in your head I figured.

But who am I kidding? I didn’t write stories down because I was rubbish at it. I had no sense of grammar, couldn’t spell, poor concentration and no staying power. Like if I started something, anything, first thing that went wrong, I just gave up, at the first hurdle so to speak. It was me, no one else, I was a failure, I’d failed and there was no way of getting around it.

I turned eighteen in July, Isobel and the old man gave me a wrist watch, an Omega, with a stainless-steel strap. I didn’t expect it.

They’d given me my old job back on the deckchairs, just for the summer, but it was something, and it kept the old man off my back. I enjoyed the deckchairs, you know, being outdoors all day when the weather was fine. All I had to do was hand out deckchairs to the tourists and put the money in a leather satchel, and if they didn’t bring them back to the enclosure I had to go around collecting them and pack them away ready for the next day. And I could keep the deposit. When it rained, I could just sit in the shed listening to the radio. It was easy, anyone could do it, they could have trained a monkey to do it if they’d had one handy. I worked six days a week, Saturday and Sunday were the busiest, Monday the quietest, Monday was the changeover day in the hotels. I had Mondays off.

It was on a Monday I bought my first ever book. Eighteen and I’d never bought a book, can you believe it? You might have thought I would have carried on borrowing books from the library after reading John Steinbeck. I mean, I loved John Steinbeck, wanted to be John Steinbeck, but I just stopped going to the library. I’d gone back on the deckchairs and forgotten all about John Steinbeck, it was like I could only do one thing at a time. Anyway, and I’m not trying to make excuses, give some mitigating circumstances, justification if you like, but books had never been a part of my life, not really. I’d only ever read a handful, and four of them were Steinbeck books. We read books at school, of course we did, probably more than I remember. Charles Dickens, everyone reads Charles Dickens at school, you know, ‘Oliver Twist’, we read ‘David Copperfield’ too, it was good, ‘David Copperfield’, all the kids liked it. But I wasn’t much good at school, seemed like a waste of time to me, I reckoned you could learn the things that really mattered by yourself if you put your mind to it. You had to go to school though, of course you did, all the kids went, but it wasn’t as if you were going to learn wonderful and stimulating things taught by charismatic and inspirational masters. You went because you were sent there, the whole experience was unsatisfactory.

I was buying a packet of cigarettes at the newsagent on the corner of Vaughan and Mostyn Street. Outside on the pavement they had two of those circular stand things, the type you can turn around. All the shops had them in summer. They were full of paperback books, top to bottom, three books in every space. I thought I’d take a minute, see what I was doing, just nosing, really. I turned the first stand round slowly, took down a couple of love stories. Chance encounters on Railway Stations, you know the type, tall, dark haired handsome man sweeps young woman off her feet, things like that. There was this book though, ‘The Devil Rides Out’, by an author called Dennis Wheatley. Had a picture on the front cover supposed to catch your eye; picture of devil worshippers in a dark place, like an underground cavern or something. They were holding up those torches, the ones you see in the pictures, with flames that make everything look eerie, or whatever it’s supposed to be. There was an alter with a young, scantily dressed woman tied down with rope, and standing over the young woman a man, wearing a sort of loin cloth, had nothing else on, looked all shiny as if sweating, or someone had rubbed oil on his body. The man had a mask covering his face, mask of a goat’s head with huge horns. I read the back cover and the first couple of pages, then put it back on the stand.

I turned to the other stand, just idling really, like I was filling time. I saw this book, ‘Borstal Boy’, author by the name of Brendan Behan. Don’t know why it was, why this book, but I reached up and took it down from its place at the top of the stand and read the back cover, like you do, gives you an idea what it’s about. Then I read probably half the first chapter. Well! maybe not half, but you know what I mean. And you can call it what you like, fate, how the cookie crumbles, but in the reading of these pages Brendan Behan took my arm and led me in the direction he was heading and I was happy to go. John Steinbeck had to move over to make room for this Irish writer, this Brendan Behan. I could hardly believe what I was reading, the first few pages, how beautifully happy this fellow’s voice, like birdsong in the morning. This was the voice of freedom; the voice of the untamed spirit, the feral voice; the voice of daring, violence, compassion, the voice of belief. It was the first time in my life I had heard such a voice and spoken by a youth not much older than me. Like Steinbeck, Behan’s voice was the voice I’d been waiting for. I held the book in my hand like you would a precious thing, felt its weight, nice weight for a paperback, plenty of gravity and good thickness, too.

Something else on the stand caught my eye, wouldn’t let me go until I took it down and looked it over. The book described itself as a ‘Penguin Classic’, too difficult for me, but I didn’t want to give it up without a fight. The author was Russian, named Fyodor Dostoyevsky, story about a young student living in St. Petersburg, called Raskolnikov. The student, finding himself penniless and indebted, murders a pawnbroking old hag to retrieve the pledges of his she holds. As the hag lays dying, her sister arrives unexpectedly, Raskolnikov, frightened and in a state of panic loses his mind and