Iron Man

By Lynne Bryan

In Iron Man, Lynne Bryan writes movingly and candidly about disability, the vulnerability of the body and mind, and the frailty and strength of our corporeality. She writes insightfully and thought-provokingly about the ways in which women's access to head space and the physical and economic space for creativity can be restricted or blocked – sometimes by the people they love best and who love them best; and, of course, sometimes by themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Salt
• Release date: Nov 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781784632243

Lynne Bryan

Lynne Bryan received her MA in Creative Writing in 1985. Her first book was a collection of short stories, Envy At The Cheese Handout (Faber & Faber 1995), which was followed by two novels, Gorgeous (Sceptre 1999) and Like Rabbits (Sceptre 2002). She is a frequent tutor for the Arvon Foundation and teaches Creative Writing on UEA’s undergraduate programme.

Book preview

IRON MAN

LYNNE BRYAN

‘… stories may enable us to live, but they

also trap us, bring us spectacular pain.’

Red Parts:Autobiography of a Trial

by Maggie Nelson

‘Part of what we fear in suffering – perhaps the

part we fear most – is transformation.’

The Return

by Hisham Matar

‘Inescapably, we are beings for whom

objects have a spiritual weight.’

Why We Make Things and Why It Matters

by Peter Korn

This book depends on my memory and interpretation of events. The scenes and conversations are not intended to be perfect representations but are evocations of the substance of what happened and what was said.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Epigraph

Dedication

His World

Story

A Beginning

Thresholds

Writing

Protagonist

You

M.E.

Getting it Out There

Point of View

Making

Pegg Wegg

Pacing

Woman

Seaside

Head Doctors

You

The Beginning of The End

Piss It All Out

Lady Artist

French Maid

Artist

My World

Girls

Iron Man

Mum

Woman Head

Idealised Dad

Feminists

You

Stories

The End

Vry Poorly

Ending/Beginning

Absent

Another Beginning

You

Our World

Merged

The Unstable Self

Thingness

What It Is To Be Human

Reasons Why

Final Parts: An Endings

Reference Materials

Acknowledgements

Also by Lynne Bryan

About this Book

About the Author

Copyright

HIS WORLD

STORY

There is a story I’ve carried with me since childhood. It isn’t a fairy tale and it isn’t enchanted. It’s more personal than that, and more terrifying. It has the usual story elements: a beginning, a middle and an end. But it’s a reversal of bad turning to good, dark turning to light. It offers no heart-warming redemption, no prince, no pot of gold or honey. There’s a transformation but the transformation is cruel. It is the story of my father’s terrible bad luck.

Once Upon A Time in Fleckney, in the English Midlands, just after the Second World War, my father was washing his hands in the kitchen sink, in the little house he shared with his parents, two sisters and younger brother. He was fifteen years old and a talented cricketer. Leicester County was interested in him. A village lad with real ability. He was washing his hands, thinking about County, when next thing he woke in hospital unable to move any part of his body except for his head. Everything between washing and hospital a blank. He’d caught the infantile paralysis disease, poliomyelitis. Or it had caught him. He was unable to sit, stand, bend, crouch, stretch, leap, hug, hold, draw, write, cross his fingers, do the V sign, thump, grasp, feed himself, go to the loo by himself, put his head in his hands and cry. But slowly the feeling came back. He was able to move his shoulders, to wave his arms. He found he could kick his right leg and flex his right foot. His left leg though … wasted, no strength, done for. He had to wear a calliper on this leg. His cricketing days were over. He had to learn to haul himself around on crutches. He’d become a cripple.

I can’t remember being told this story. It just is. It squats inside me: its brevity ominous and stifling. A story of impotence. Young, innocent, healthy boy felled, ruined forever. No reason why him. A terrifying story about fate, about not knowing what the future has in store. One moment you’re this person with these abilities, the next you’re somebody else entirely.

What does a child do with a story like that? It wasn’t a story I could repeat to my mates; I knew they’d all go running if I tried to share it. I also couldn’t discuss it with my family – with Mum or my sister Mandy or any relative – because this was Dad’s story and he’d shaped it and its tightness told me that it wasn’t to be messed with. There’d be no unpicking, no questions, his word was law.

Sometimes I see Dad’s story as an object, a punctuation mark, a full-stop, one of those monumental full-stops made by the artist Fiona Banner but not as glossy, a dark round thing blocking and ending and finishing off. Lump. I see it as a wall too, concrete and high, surrounding me and my family, keeping us trapped inside and life and everybody else out.

What the bloody hell is that? Dad would say, when we watched Top of the Pops together.

Mum would be taken up with housework in the kitchen, but Mandy and I would be on the sofa, trying not to reveal that we wanted to be one of Pan’s People or we fancied both David Essex and David Bowie, and as for Marc Bolan …

Jesus, is it a girl? Dad would say, sitting in his chair, which nobody else dared sit in, his crutches propped against the wall.

He’d scoff and swear, finding these weird pop creatures so very funny. Then in 1979 Ian Dury and the Blockheads appeared playing ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’, Dury growling out the lyrics. I was 18, desperate to leave home. And suddenly, explosively, there on the screen, was another man who’d been crippled like my dad. Dury had a gammy leg, he wore a calliper (an iron), his body was twisted. He was the only other physically-disabled person I’d noticed in all my childhood apart from the Spastics Girl outside Boots the Chemist, who wasn’t human but a representation of a human, a plaster model of a young girl wearing a prosthesis like Dad’s and holding a teddy and a collecting box: Please Help Spastics.

I found Dury gorgeous: vital and furious and cheeky and creative. It was love at first sight. This amazing man spat out his funny, jolting, colourful lyrics and our living room contracted. Dad said nothing. I daren’t look at him or my sister. I stared instead at the carpet, which was made up of brown squares within cream squares within brown squares, and I listened, thrilled and ashamed by the energy in Dury’s voice. So there were other men like Dad? Crippled like Dad but not like him too? A polio punk. A cracker’s cripple. I wanted to run away and live with Dury. I wanted to be him. His words were like balls batted out there, one hundred miles an hour. He thwacked his story into the world and he thwacked other stories too. There was no wall. There were The Blockheads but no block. I saw him as fearless and curious. No limitations.

My father worked in the shoe trade as a puller-over and a clicker, and later in engineering as an instrument fitter. Dury worked as an illustrator and art teacher before becoming a lyricist and vocalist. I love art and words too, and so in a way I have run away to live with him. I’ve studied and taught both subjects, and I’ve had books published, and my favourite thing to do is to read. I know the power of story.

Here’s another story: for years now I haven’t had anything published. I’ve been writing and writing but haven’t been able to finish a single narative. There’s a tower of uncompleted manuscripts in my office at home: countless short stories abandoned, five novels unresolved, essays, even a play script. An age thing perhaps, a loss of innocence, self-belief? Or something else entirely?

You should write a bestseller, my father’s fiancée often says to me, that’s what you should do.

No, that’s not what I should do.

I don’t say this to Sandra, but I think it; that’s not what I’m about.

Stuck. Lump. High wall. Trapped.

Fuck it.

Time to face facts. I’m about me and I’m about Dad and I’m about bloody polio and what it did to us. That’s what I should write. The beginning, middle and end of living with disability. The complications, stuff unspoken, the hidden, the denied, the shame and struggle of it. The brutality. The bravery. No condensed full-stop of a narrative but something more elastic. A story about the awful event that changed Dad’s life forever and a story about those futures that came after that event. Futures circumscribed by his bad luck and how he chose to handle it, and by the way society – or, as Dury put it, the normal folk – chose to handle him and others like him.

Because stories – like events – have impacts. Dad knew this; he wasn’t daft.

A BEGINNING

Inever have trouble with beginnings. The blank page doesn’t scare me. But perhaps I love beginnings too much. I can never choose: this one or that, which is best? My real-life beginning – if we ignore conception – is my date of birth, 10th May 1961.

I took my first breath in the City Maternity Home, Westcotes Drive, Leicester. Dad wasn’t in the delivery suite with Mum because that was how things were back then; he may even have gone into work that day. The labour was long and bloody. I was born with a nevus all over my back. Mum says the doctor had to stand on her belly to get the placenta out which I find incredible but I can’t quiz Mum about it because we don’t do that kind of thing in our family: we don’t ask questions.

So that’s a beginning but I have no memory of it, same as I have no memory of having my photograph taken propped on my father’s lap in the back garden of his and Mum’s first home. The home was a terraced house in Wigston, Leicester, a few doors down from Mum’s parents’ (although Roy and Dorothy weren’t her real parents but that’s another story entirely); its back garden was really a yard. Looking at the photo now I can see a small lawn divided by a concrete path and a border of bedding plants. The plants are in flower; it’s probably June or July, a couple of months after my birth. Dad’s sitting on a deckchair that is as wide as the path. He resembles a young Tom Jones. His crutches are nowhere to be seen, but part of his calliper is visible, poking out from under the hem of his trousers. He has me propped on his gammy leg, balanced in the crook of his arm. He is showing me off like a trophy. Big smile on his face, looking down at me. Dad was good with the smiles. He laughed a lot too. He had a ready wit, an answer for everything. Beware. Sometimes those answers would rear up at you, snarling.

But I’m stating more than showing. One rule of good story-telling is to show through scenes. Think sounds, sights, smells. Dramatise. Let the reader live the experience. 1969. Let’s begin again. I’m no longer a dumb baby but I’m still a long way from being an adult; I’m conscious of my surroundings and I’m developing some understanding that the world is complicated, and now there is no doubt I have Dad’s story squatting inside me and troubling me too.

I’m in Mum and Dad’s bedroom in the bungalow on Horsewell Lane, then a road on the outskirts of Wigston Magna, a village turning rapidly into a town. I’m allowed in the bedroom because I’m with Dad. He is playing darts.

Mum and Dad moved from their two-up, two-down when my sister was born. That place was impossible to live in because Dad wasn’t able to get up the stairs and so we all scrunched together in the tiny rooms downstairs. My sister was the tipping point. All the noise, no sleep, the danger of tripping over stuff, hot stove, wet nappies, Dad’s crutches and the Restmor pram, bloody chaos. So, Mum’s father Roy (who wasn’t really her father) built this bungalow for us. My sister and I will live in it for most of our formative years. A simple design of five rooms, including the bathroom, and an L-shaped hall. My sister and I share a bedroom at the back; our parents’ bedroom is at the front. Their view is of the front garden, which is full of shingle and one large leylandii and, beyond, the estate: rows and rows of yellow-brick council houses. From my position on their bed I can see the road opposite, just past the fronds of the tree, which is named after the famous highwayman George Davenport who, like Robin Hood, robbed the rich to feed the poor.

Bugger, says my dad. Get that for us, would you?

I clamber from the bed to pick up the dart that’s pinged off the board. This is one of my jobs today. It’s by Dad’s feet.

My friend Beverly can only see roofs from her bedroom: roofs and chimneys and fire smoke. She says she hates climbing stairs to get to her room; it’s exhausting. But I find stairs exciting. They go up. They lead away from things. You can run up them and hide.

Things to hide from: Mandy, because she’s annoying and fidgety and a pain; Mum when she’s ratty; Dad when he bosses me and when he’s ratty and angry too; Mum when she sews Mandy and me matching clothes to make us look like twins; my Clarks sandals with the toes cut out of them so my toes can breathe; Dad’s potty smell coming up from under this bed; Dad’s arrows when they ping off the board and try to stab me.

I give the arrow to Dad.

Right, ok, here goes, he says. Let’s get it right this time.

He squints at the dartboard and that’s my cue to run back round to Mum’s side of the bed, the safe side. I clamber up, grabbing the pillow to hide behind, Mum’s hairspray stink in my nose. The pillow’s my shield; it’s not metal, like a Roman shield, but it’ll do the job if an arrow hits the wire and pings off and whizzes at my eyeball. Pillow up, eyeball saved, that’s what Dad says. Eyeballs are important to save, and your other bits too. I know this. You have to keep your arms and legs and eyeballs and things working because when they don’t work it is Hell on Earth, a real fucking bugger.

Swearing: Dad and Mum can swear out loud, but Mandy and I can only swear in our heads or in secret, in whispery voices in our bedroom. Sometimes Mandy and me swear at each other and hit each other in our bedroom at night. I’m good at digging my nails in her and making curves that bleed. I’m older than her; she is an annoying little shit. She’s not here at the moment; she’s in the back garden with Mum. I’m helping Dad; I’m being his ball boy even though I’m not a boy and this isn’t Wimbledon, but I am doing the same thing, picking up and giving back. I am good at this; I do it a lot. I have to because Dad can’t pick up; he’d fall over because of his gammy leg.

Bam! The arrow hits the board, shivers, stays put. It’s near the other two, in a red bit. It’s good to get arrows in the red and green bits because you score more points. Dad adds up his points. Then he swings to the board, which hangs on the door. The door has some tiny holes in it because sometimes Dad arrows it, because sometimes life’s like that when your arms are too tired from your crutches and work. Dad pulls the arrows out of the board before swinging to his spot by Mum’s dressing table, getting ready to throw again.

Dad’s practising because he has a match at The Liberal Club tonight. He’s captain of the team. He’s won cups and medals and sometimes I polish them with Brasso and a duster. The cups are on the fireplace near the telly. There’s stuff written on them in posh curly letters scratched into the metal by a man in a jewellery shop. Sometimes the letters say his name: Donald Bryan. Sometimes they say a date. Sometimes they say what kind of cup it is: First Prize, Second Prize, Runner-Up.

Sport is Dad’s favourite thing, and numbers, and drinking beer as well. He’s different to me because I like thinking and reading and words. Church is ok too, sometimes, and the Dozen Club. I like school best because I’m a brain-box and a good girl. Mr Lee, my headmaster, says this is the perfect way to be. Me and Philip Dewhurst are his clever ones. We gave flowers to the Mayor of Oadby and Wigston; we were chosen for that. Philip Dewhurst has a huge head and floppy black hair, but he’s snooty because his dad’s normal and doesn’t work in a factory. Dad used to be a puller-over and is now a clicker. These words make noises in my head. Clicker. Clicker. Click. Click. Clicker.

Look at that, double-top, says Dad, his voice doing a jump.

Double-top, I say, trying out these words.

Click. Click. Double-top.

Double-top is a high score, gold stars. I know this, but I’m clicking inside and clicking is more interesting.

Two times twenty, Dad says, which makes?

I’m not sure. Two times twenty. I have to do this. I count on my fingers, behind the pillow. Two times twenty. Sometimes Dad’s voice barks. Sometimes, if something doesn’t happen quickly enough for him. Click. Two times twenty. Seventeen. Nineteen. Bugger. Click. Start again. Two and two then add nothing. Four then add …

Forty, he says, hurling the next dart.

Thud. The arrow stabs the board in the black bit, which is under the red bit, which is where the other arrow is.

Christ, says Dad, flat twenty.

He throws the final dart. Thud.

Better, he says.

I clap my hands, but not loudly. Another double-top. That’s good. I open my mouth to tell Dad that I know it’s good but nothing comes out, just breathing. This happens because I’m shy, that’s what Mum and Dad say; I’m the quiet one. I don’t want to be quiet. I don’t think I am really. My head inside is full of words and sounds.

One hundred, Dad says.

He has added up the lot. Click.

Darts: Dad says darts looks simple but it’s not. Darts is a man’s game. It’s a game of skill. If you want to be captain of the darts team then you have to practise hard and know your maths. There’s a lot of adding up and taking away. I’m not sure if there are percentages too. So darts is about that and then you have to have a steady arm and good balance and excellent eyesight, and you have to have arrows. Dad’s arrows are kept in the wardrobe. He sometimes lets me look. There are six boxes and every box has three arrows inside. An arrow is like a metal finger, which has to weigh just right, that’s what Dad says. Every finger has a flat end and a pointy end. The pointy end stabs the dartboard and has to be sharp to stick right in, as sharp as the needles that stitch up the shoes in Dad’s factory, that sharp. Then the flights, that’s their proper name, fix in the flat end. The flights are feathery and can’t be broken or snapped or ruffled up. Dad’s are white, but he has some posher ones for matches that are red, white and blue like the Union Jack.

Dad pulls the darts out of the board and moves back into position. I’m tired and think I need some air. Mum and Mandy are getting air. Mum says it’s important and that when I was very little she’d leave me outside in the pram in the yard at the old house. She’d do that even if it was snowing. Dad likes the outside too but only when it’s sunny because then he can take his shirt off. Can I ask to go in the garden to be with Mum and Mandy? Would Dad mind? He wouldn’t have anybody to pick up his darts, that’s the problem. I open my mouth, close my mouth, can’t ask.

 I will never be able to ask. Fast forward to the middle-aged me and I’m not so quiet but I still struggle to be direct, to make a request or, worse, a demand. I have the words, I am full of words, but they spill from my brain, down my arm, avoiding my mouth, into my fingers and onto the screen and page. The journey is longer and during it the spillage is distilled. I consider tone and rhythm and sense; I lose myself in the fiddling.

Clicker and puller-over. In 1969, when I am eight years old, I am attracted to these words. I don’t know what they mean but I enjoy them for their energy and oddness. I say these words to my friend Beverly and feel like I’m handing her jewels. I don’t understand that their difference is due to them being a lexicon within a lexicon, a language of specialism, the language of the shoe trade.

Another lexicon, the language of darts: arrows, double-top, double-bull, feathers, flights, high ton, Irish ton, iron man, upstairs, downstairs, leg, leg shot, one hundred and eighty, Robin Hood, round the clock, shaft, sticks, three in a bed, ton, ton 80, wire.

And yet another, used by members of my close and extended family, the language of Dad’s disability: crutches, sticks, polio, poliomyelitis, iron, calliper, leg iron, leg brace, knee brace, invalid, crippled, jalopy, paralysed, gammy leg, bad leg, dead weight, discrimination, rehabilitation, allowance.

I know this language belongs more to the adult world, to my father, than the language of darts or the shoe trade even, and so I don’t dare speak it. The lexicon crouches darkly inside me, along with the story of Dad’s terrible bad luck.

But:

Sticks: dogs like to play with sticks.

Iron: Mum does this when watching Coronation Street.

Leg: I have one right and one left, and I have a scab on the knee of the right and I’ve drawn a ladybird on the calf of my left.

These little words bridge specialisms and belong to everyday language too. They’re like the flights, like feathers, their fluttery mutability a relief. They are clever and graceful. Sticks. Iron. Leg. They are like water. I can swim around in them. I can swim and swim and not clonk my head on the sides of the pool because there are no sides. They are freedom, a way out.

I look at my drawing of the ladybird on my leg. I am wearing shorts today, but I am not a boy. Thud. Thud. Dad’s arrows hit the board.

Sometimes I draw myself as a boy and I draw Dad standing next to me. There is a football and Dad doesn’t have his crutches. But he still looks like Dad. He has black curly hair, which ripples like waves. He has big ears and a big nose and he’s wearing the jumper Mum knitted him. It’s brown with Fair Isle round the neck. I’ll take this jumper with me when I eventually leave home for college because it’s made of strong wool and will last for years, but I don’t know this yet. Dad is wearing the jumper now and he’s wearing trousers that aren’t as nice and his shoes are black lace-ups. He’s one kind of Dad at the top and another at the bottom. Top is dressing-up and the bottom is boring. Dad’s trousers have to be wide (but not too wide), so they can go over his calliper, his iron, which is like a cage round his left leg. His iron has to be fixed to his left shoe, which means he can never change his shoes for flip-flops or fancy slip-ons or wellingtons even.

Left. Right. Click. Click.

Dad is in his iron most of the time. He’s in it when he walks round home and when he goes to work or The Liberal Club and when he’s sawing-up wood on the coal bunker in our garden, when he visits the rellies or the bookies or Mouldens the newsagents, in fact for nearly every bloody thing. He doesn’t go to sleep in it though. Then it lies under the bed next to his potty. But I don’t look because that would be rude; I’d get told off and the potty smell would poison me. His iron is like the one that the Spastics Girl wears; I’m thinking this because sometimes people call him Spaz.

Final throw, he says, then we’ll have a cup of tea.

Dad swings back to his invisible line by Mum’s dressing table. The invisible line is what he has to stand behind before he can throw. He fiddles with his bad leg, checking his iron won’t let him down. He needs to be steady. He balances on his crutches, his sticks. I like his sticks; they’re ok. I hold them when Dad goes up and down steps. They’re taller than me and are made of wood and at the bottom they have rubber bits like little rubber boots. Dad sort of hangs himself over his crutches, making his shoulders bunch up. He can’t do anything about this; it is how it is.

Final throw, then Dad will have a cup of tea and I can go on the swing in the garden, if Mum will let me, if Mandy’s not hogging it.

Dad leans forward on his good leg and his right crutch. His bad leg stays put as he tries to sort himself out. He takes an arrow from the three that he holds in his left hand. Left, right. Right, left. Click. Click. He lifts the arrow, straightening his right arm. Click. He squints. Then he throws. Thud.

You little bugger! he shouts. Bulls-eye!

THRESHOLDS

2007, and I am no longer a child – at least not in appearance – and I’m back in Dad’s village where he was born and caught polio and became a cripple, and where he returned to live after Mum ended their marriage. His home, here in Fleckney, is another bungalow, not as simply designed as the one on Horsewell Lane, a bit of a mash-up really. He shares it with Sandra, whom he met at the British Polio Fellowship. I’m visiting with my daughter Rose.

We visit two or three times a year for two or three days, sleeping over in the spare room, which is hung with pictures of Sandra’s family and stuffed with pine chests of drawers. Our visits usually follow a pattern of watching television, going out for a meal at Table Table, looking at the shops in nearby Market Harborough, chatting, doing a bit of weeding in the garden and taking a couple of walks (Rose and I take the walks, just to escape; we feed the ducks on