Child from Home (39 page)

It took the heavy rescue squads three days to dig the mangled bodies out of the rubble and Mam's light-brown hair had turned completely white, so that, when Renee went with Gran to the cold, white-tiled mortuary at the General Hospital, she did not recognise her at first. She told me many years later that, ‘Your Mam's skirt was blown off by the blast and your Dad was identified by his tattoos, which included the badge of the Royal Artillery on his right arm, and by certain items in his pockets.' Gran said, ‘Before the funeral service at St Cuthbert's church and the burial at Acklam Cemetery, Mrs Ethel Gaunt was really kind to us. She and your Mam had been very close and she loaned us clean white sheets to cover the mirrors and to put up at the windows.' It seems that in Suffolk, where Gran's ancestors originated, they held the belief that the reflection of a person in a mirror held that person's soul and it was customary to cover them to stop the devil gaining access to it. Gran then said, ‘Mrs Gaunt kindly paid for the bodies to be laid out in our front room.'

At least I had not been there when the stillness of death had pervaded the house, and had been spared from hearing the hollow thud as soil was thrown down onto the coffins, which lay one above the other. I think my anger would have flared up if I had been present, when the vicar had proclaimed, ‘Forasmuch as it hath
pleased
Almighty God to take to Himself Evelyn and Alf …' The Imperial War Graves Commission paid for a rose bush and headstone with their names and the badge of the Royal Artillery engraved upon it. In Haxby I had carried on blithely, completely unaware of these catastrophic, life-changing events, but I wouldn't say that my ignorance had been bliss.

As soon as she was able to get to the wreckage of our house, Renee had searched through the rubble for any trace of Mam and Dad's prized possessions but all she ever found was a bent spoon. She swore that Mam had a hundred pounds in a tin in the cupboard under the stairs but there was no trace of it. The rubble remained there until after the war ended, when it was used to fill in the underground air-raid shelters on The Common.

In early September I started at the local Junior School, the same school that Mam and all her brothers and sisters had attended over the years, and at which Jimmy had been a pupil for just over a year. The Victorian, brick-built school (founded in 1884) was tucked away behind a beetle-ridden pie factory (we called the shiny, hard-backed bugs ‘blacklocks'), the flea-ridden Pavilion cinema and
The Acklam
public house on Newport Road. Half of the school buildings were being used by St Paul's, the school just up the road, which had been destroyed in a bombing raid in 1941. Miss Leng was the headmistress of the girls' school, the boys' head was Mr Hague and my teacher was Miss Trewitt, who was man-like and had a thin black moustache. It took some time to adjust to the smelly old classroom, that was crowded with so many strange people and things, but Jimmy was in the year above me and he protected me from the rough, uncouth lads in the playground. Being orphans George and I were now entitled to free dinners. Jimmy again showed me where the best sweets and lovely, creamy ‘Dainty Dinah Toffees' and cinder toffee could be bought at ‘Toffee' Turner's little shop on the corner.

At home we had baths in front of the fire in the zinc-coated tub that usually hung on a nail in the back yard, and we had to go to the outside lavvy in all weathers. Its brick walls were whitewashed and a supply of toilet paper (made by tearing the pages of the
Radio Times
into four small squares) hung on a nail beside the high cistern. To get to it we had to hurry past Gran's chickens – which were meant to provide us with fresh eggs but had turned out to be cockerels – that pecked at our bare legs. Archie, now twenty years old, went down Cannon Street to the slipper baths where he paid sixpence for a good bath every week.

Every day I carried the hurt of my loss with memories forever crowding in on me. I suffered morbid nightmares in which I saw my parents mangled in the rubble; their life-blood draining into the dust from the hideous wounds in their bodies, which had the waxy whiteness of alabaster. As the light – which had once shone with joy and love – left their eyes, they slipped away into the long, deep darkness of death and I would wake with a start to find that I had been crying. In my sleep-fuddled state it would slowly dawn on me once again that they were no more. They say that those whom the gods love die young, so may they sleep long and well in that silence beyond all suffering. In other dreams I would picture Mam coming through the door smiling with love shining in her eyes, and I knew that their spirits had gone to heaven and were watching over me and one day I would be with them again. I sensed their presence in the air that I breathed and in the wind that ruffled my hair. How sad to die in your thirties but, as they say, ‘Time like an everlasting stream bears all its sons away.'

Gran was very friendly with the Reynolds family who lived next door but one to her. She had befriended the Nichol family when they first came to live in Middlesbrough from County Durham in the 1920s and Lily Reynolds was Mrs Nichol's sister. We called Lily Reynolds
The News of the World
as she was always gossiping and she knew everybody's business, and Gran used to say, ‘If you want anything spreading around, just tell her.' One day, when I was in the back alley, her ten-year-old son Terry made some disparaging remark about my Mam – something about her being a do-gooder – and I saw red and laid into him. I beat the hell out of him and had to be dragged away as blood was pouring from his nose onto my hands. After that, instead of looking on me as a soft country bumpkin, the local lads showed me much more respect and Terry and I became good pals.

I also became friendly with the local lads. Day-to-day life took over and we played the usual street games of tee-ack, leapfrog, tip-tap and marbles (we called the glass ones ‘alleys' and the big, much-sought-after metal ones ‘bongies'). We tied ropes to the crosspieces at the top of the lampposts and swung round on them like Tarzan, and we played football and cricket in the street with a wicket or goal chalked on the wall of the gable end of the house opposite us. Most Saturday mornings we went to the matinees at ‘The Pav', which we called ‘the penny push', to see
The Adventures of Flash Gordon
or
The Perils of Pauline,
which always ended in a cliff-hanger with the hero or heroine in grave danger of death but always managing to escape unharmed in time for the next episode. On many occasions the film broke down and we shouted remarks like, ‘Put a penny in the gas meter!' and stamped our feet until the film resumed. I even remember being taken by Renee to see Charlie Chaplin in the silent film
The Gold Rush,
in which he was so hungry that he boiled his boots and ate them putting the nails on the side of his plate as if they were small bones. A pianist played quickly or slowly to correspond with the action; the dialogue was printed out on the screen and the films were changed twice a week. Food rationing was still very rigorous and on returning to Gran's house we were often sent out again to stand for an hour or more in the long queue outside Meredith's bakery shop on nearby Union Street. After standing all that time, we got just one rice cake to share between the five of us, which was all that each customer was allowed.

In mid-September the blackout was lifted – after six long years – and the gas lamps in the street were lit each evening by a man carrying a long pole affair. We heard on Gran's accumulator-operated wireless, which stood on a shelf in the alcove next to the black-leaded fire range, that our hero, Group Captain Cheshire, had been awarded the Victoria Cross; Paris had been liberated; the Allied soldiers were sweeping through Belgium having broken through the Siegfried line, and that the Germans were on the run. Meanwhile, Hitler's new secret weapons, the terrifying long-range V2 rockets, had started to rain down on London. In October we heard that the first German city, Aachen, had fallen to the Allies. British troops retook Greece and landed on Crete again after an absence of three and a half years.

As the icy winter drew on, Gran sent us to buy a stone of coal whenever word got round that they had some in, and we brought it home on a rickety bogie made from bits of wood and old pram wheels. If we had a couple of coppers we walked down to the front room of Annie Storey's house to buy a bag of winkles in a paper bag and walked home eating them – pulling out the curled-up, snail-like molluscs with a pin. Still inclined to be moody and sullen I would sit moping for hours on the padded leather lid of one of the boxes on the end of the fender in which sticks for the fire were kept.

Gran would sit in her rocking chair in her pinny combing her long, greying hair that reached to below her waist, repeatedly singing, ‘Come in to the garden Maud for the black bat night has flown.' It seemed to be the only bit of the song she knew. Before bed each day she had a bottle of stout that she swore ‘kept her regular' and helped her to sleep. She was a good cook (maybe that's where Mam's cooking ability came from) and she kept our bellies filled with good wholesome food, despite her meagre income. We loved her home-baked fadgies that had a flavour all of their own, the like of which I haven't come across since, and her meat and potato pies that were very tasty and filling. We got jam (and margarine!) on thick, crusty, freshly baked bread and, if we were still hungry, we could always fill up with salted beef dripping on bread. Such a diet would be frowned on these days but at that time we loved it; we had a lot of catching up to do and were still quite skinny.

Gran went through to Haxby to visit Harry about once a month and Renee, now a pretty and petite twenty-one-year-old, looked after us while she was away. At school my drawing ability was finally recognised and put to use as the staff prepared to put on the Christmas pantomime
Aladdin.
I was asked to draw and paint a long frieze, portraying the genie of the lamp, on three long sheets of paper that were then stuck together and put up high on the wall around the school hall, and I was thrilled to bits. The recognition helped to boost my selfbelief no end but I was still near the bottom end of the class when we were tested.

In December the Home Guard was stood down but it was not officially disbanded just yet. Gran told George and me that as we were officially war orphans we had been invited to a Christmas party at the Assembly Rooms on Linthorpe Road. There was ham and fish paste sandwiches, meat pies, jelly and custard and the like laid out on long trestle tables and I thoroughly enjoyed the eats; but I hated the silly paper hats and party games when children raced around giggling, squealing and dodging the adults. I got embarrassed and annoyed when the mayoress and the other ladies in their fur coats and posh dresses fussed and petted us and ruffled our hair.

It was nice to see the shop windows lit up and decorated on our first Christmas back home, not that we had much, but we enjoyed its never-failing magic just the same. We didn't get many toys or clothes and by now our shoes had holes in the thin soles and we put cardboard in them to try to keep out the wet. Gran made us tasty meals, with Archie – who was looked on as the man of the house – always getting the largest portion. He ‘let the first foot in' at New Year when the house was open to any of our neighbours who cared to pop in for a wee tot and a piece of cake. Christmas was for the children and Hogmanay was for the adults and, as the year turned, the noise from the local works and the ships' hooters on the river was ear-splitting. The excitement was contagious and people's spirits were higher than ever this year following the good news from the Continent.

Enemy aircraft still appeared overhead from time to time (probably from Norway, which remained occupied) and when the siren sounded Gran hurried us into the nearest street shelter, but no more bombs fell on the area. We huddled in blankets while the adults made tea on methylated spirit stoves and had singsongs. Granny Knights sometimes had something stronger than tea, and when she sang and danced she showed her knee-length, elasticated, pink bloomers. Gran would say to her, ‘Sit down yer silly old bugger and stop showing yerself up!' We kids thought it hilarious.

Gran was dismayed to learn that the Germans, who were putting up stiff resistance, had made a surprise breakthrough in mid-December. The Americans had neglected to defend the Ardennes region of Belgium strongly enough, as had the French four years earlier, and the Germans were sweeping forward again in the mist and snow. When the weather cleared the Allied bombers took a heavy toll of the enemy tanks, but it took till the end of January for Germany's crack troops to be overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers and the six-week offensive came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. Meanwhile, the Allied forces were driving back the Japanese, who were a cruel enemy, and Soviet troops were advancing into Eastern Poland, and Gran's hopes of an early release for Uncle John rose.

So the long, bitterly cold winter passed and Jimmy and I played out in the streets, back alleys and on the Newport Bridge, where there was a steel sentry box in the shape of a policeman's helmet. We climbed all over the flat roof of the electric powerhouse that stood beneath the iron steps that led up to the top of the approach road of the bridge. Sometimes we swam in the filthy river with raw sewage floating past our noses, but we never came to any harm. At other times we went over the river bridge to a railway bridge on the far side, where Jimmy dared me to wriggle and weave in and out of the steel girders supporting the roadway until I emerged out the other side. Needless to say, I did it pretending that I was not scared of becoming stuck halfway along it, or of falling off the narrow concrete ledge onto the railway lines twenty feet below. On another occasion we were playing football in the back alley when the ball got kicked onto the lean-to roof at the back of someone's house, and Jimmy dared me to go and get it. So, of course, I climbed up and worked my way across the blackened top of what I thought was a solid roof, to find out – by falling through it – that it was made of glass, which had become thickly coated with grime over the years. How I survived to adulthood is a mystery, especially when Jimmy was around. George, who was now Gran's new ‘baby-boy', was too young to play with us and he stayed at home being spoiled and pampered.