This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (27 page)

It was the first funeral I had ever attended and I was bemused by its rituals. None of the adults who now surrounded Linda and me, people from the undertakers and the crematorium, had known Lily, been with her through her travails or offered her help when she needed it, yet here they were now, respectful and solicitous, when it was too late.

It wasn’t a grand affair. Women like Lily are dispatched quietly with little fuss and no obituaries. Her brothers and sisters swelled a thin congregation at the crematorium. Pat and Albert Cox were there, Mike’s parents’ came with him from Watford and Uncle Jim and Auntie Betty appeared, making around fifteen mourners in total.

I can remember nothing of the service but I do recall, when it was over, going into the grounds of the cemetery to see where Lily’s ashes would be placed. Mike had paid for a rose bush to be planted for her and Linda had arranged for a plaque with Lily’s name and dates to be displayed beside it.

As we paid our respects at Lily’s resting place, I caught sight of a man standing about fifty yards away, looking over at us. He was beckoning me. It was Steve.

Linda quickly spotted him. She grabbed my arm and led me towards him. ‘What are you doing here?’ she said, tears pouring down her cheeks. He mumbled something about not having meant this to happen and asked if he could have a few minutes alone with me.

To my consternation, Linda left me with him. The politeness that Lily had instilled in me prevented me from being rude or turning my back on him. It’s true that I was scared of him, too, but it was not fear that was crippling me now. Nor was it grief, or resentment, or anger, though I felt a measure of all three. The emotion that overwhelmed me was excruciating embarrassment. I simply didn’t know this man who was talking to me as if I ought to know him. But I knew enough to be painfully aware that he bore much of the responsibility for Lily’s difficult life and early death, and all I wanted was for him to go away.

The ordeal lasted for no more than a few minutes. He asked me how I was and said he had a gift for me. It was a key ring with a miniature football attached to it. I took it, thanked him and we walked away from each other. For ever.

Uncle George had paid a penny for a platform ticket at Liverpool Lime Street and now leaned his tall frame through the lowered sash window into our carriage, issuing firm instructions about staying in touch. If we moved we were to remember to take out a Post Office redirection. It cost nothing and would ensure that any mail sent to 6 Walmer Road would be forwarded to us.

Auntie Jean and Uncle George had made it clear that they wanted to make a home for us in Liverpool. We were adamant that we wanted to stay in London. We saw no reason whatsoever why we shouldn’t just continue our life as before. We had coped on our own through Lily’s countless hospital stays, the last time for over four months, and Linda was used to managing our finances as well as taking responsibility for our welfare. We intended to keep our heads down, say nothing to anybody and simply carry on living at Walmer Road.

Lily’s family had taken us back to Liverpool with them for a week following the funeral. Our holiday had its sobering moments, notably our visit to the house in Warham Road in which Lily had grown up, where we experienced for ourselves the icy disregard of her irascible father. But these were easily outweighed by the warmth shown to us by the rest of the Gibson clan, including many cousins we were meeting for
the first time. My favourite uncle was Auntie Rita’s husband Harry, a diehard Evertonian marooned in Anfield.

Harry had himself been a promising footballer in his youth and had been signed by Blackpool before the war intervened. He took me along to Goodison Park to see Everton play Nottingham Forest. The home side had won the League championship the previous season with Albert Dunlop, Brian Labone, Jimmy Gabriel, Roy Vernon and, at centre forward, the player known as the Golden Vision, Alex Young.

On the terraces, Harry asked me if I smoked. As I’d been puffing away for years and was eager to demonstrate my masculinity, I eagerly accepted the offered cigarette. However, I didn’t smoke more than about fifteen a week and Harry was a chain-smoker. Matching him fag for fag, I’d had my weekly quota by half-time. Moreover, Harry smoked Woodbine untipped – small, dark cigarettes made with black tobacco that probably belonged in a pipe, or fuelling an industrial boiler. It was like inhaling burning compost.

As half-time approached, Harry, engrossed in Alex Young’s humiliation of the hapless Forest centre half, rather absent-mindedly handed me another stick of black poison. When nobody took it he looked round to find me collapsed on the terraces – completely Woodbined.

The St John’s Ambulance first-aiders brought me round. Since neither Harry nor I was keen to leave, they insisted that I sat rather than stood through the second half and shepherded us to a couple of seats in the stand, close to the directors’ box. It was the first time Harry had watched his beloved Everton in such comfort. As he puffed his way happily through their 6–1 victory, he told me he’d have to bring me to every game now.
To get an upgrade like this for ten Woodies was a bargain, although he’d be grateful if I could faint a little earlier in the game in future.

Back in London, we mechanically picked up the threads of our daily routine. But our plan to carry on regardless was swiftly scuppered. A letter arrived, addressed to Mrs L.M. Johnson, from London County Council. It informed us that the Walmer Road building was no longer fit for habitation and had been earmarked for demolition. As she was a medical priority, Lily’s would be the first family to be rehoused. She was offered a new three-bedroomed house in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire – the house she’d always dreamed of, with her own front door – two weeks after her funeral.

Linda was particularly distraught. The prospect of a house away from the slums, a fresh start in a new place, might have helped to pull Lily through if the offer had been made a year or so earlier. It might have made a world of difference to her condition. I diplomatically kept quiet about our declared aversion to moving out of London. To be fair, I think once Lily’s health had taken its dramatic turn for the worse we’d have done anything to please our mother.

Linda went to the Rowe Housing Trust who, since we hadn’t notified them, were unaware that Lily had died, as, evidently, was the LCC. She was asked to wait and eventually to step into the office of the man in charge. He wore a three-piece suit with a watch chain dangling from his waistcoat pocket. As Linda gave a full account of the circumstances of Lily’s death, he made notes on a large ruled notepad that rested on the desk in front of him. Linda finished by passing him a copy of the letter offering Lily a council house.

He read it carefully. ‘How old are you and your brother?’

‘I’m sixteen and he’s thirteen’, she replied.

‘I’m afraid that by law you have to be aged twenty-one or over to hold a rent book with us or with the council. I’m afraid you won’t be able to take up this offer.’

‘But my mum was on the waiting list for seventeen years,’ Linda pleaded.

‘Your mother may well have been on the council waiting list for seventeen years but your mother is dead. You can’t simply inherit her place on the list. In any case, you’re too young to have a council property in any circumstances.’

The official said he’d ask somebody from the council to visit us and a couple of days later another man duly turned up on our doorstep. He was waiting there when Linda came home from work. She invited him in, made a pot of tea and there ensued a long conversation. This man wasn’t unsympathetic but he was equally unequivocal: there was no prospect whatsoever of us being rehoused by the council. At sixteen she was a child and we should go to live with relatives. When Linda told him that the only relatives who could or would take us in were in Liverpool, and that she was training to be a nursery nurse in London, he had a brainwave.

‘It’s beyond question,’ he said, ‘that your brother will have to be taken into care. He’s likely to be placed with foster parents. As for you, I’m sure Dr Barnardo’s could facilitate your childcare studies as part of a programme of care at one of their homes.’

This did not go down well with Linda. She went through everything again: the long periods of time we’d spent alone, the bills paid, the debts cleared. At the end of her peroration she
announced that if she and I weren’t given a place where we could live together, we’d refuse to leave Walmer Road and they’d have to pull the house down around us.

It was a bravura performance which obviously earned her the respect of the already kindly disposed council official. He left still insisting that allocating us a council house would be impossible but promising to speak to his superiors to see what could be done. A few days later he sent a letter informing us that we’d been assigned a social worker who would be in touch with us shortly.

Needless to say, Linda dealt with all of this on her own, and I’m sure my pessimism wasn’t helpful. When she told me of her plan for the Siege of Walmer Road, I pointed out that we’d be considerably easier to remove than the old piano that still occupied the front room.

I held out very little hope for our prospects of staying together, even less when Linda told me about the appointment of a social worker. He made his first appearance on a rare occasion when we both happened to be at home. His name was Mr Pepper. A tall man in his early thirties, with sandy hair, florid cheeks and a kind face, he always wore a white mac, irrespective of the weather.

Mr Pepper had evidently worked hard to follow up the council official’s ‘brainwave’ because he had a little presentation prepared. He’d found a ‘nice’ foster family who lived close to my school and were prepared to take me in straight away. After Easter, Linda could have a place on an NNEB course at Dr Barnardo’s at Barkingside with accommodation provided.

Coincidentally, we had visited that very institution a few years earlier after a fund-raising effort Linda had made in aid
of Dr Barnardo’s. This had consisted of attempting to sell bits of old tat at a penny apiece from a trestle table set up outside 6 Walmer Road. Linda had got the idea of this ‘table sale’ from seeing similar initiatives on the streets of Fulham, where she went to school. She had no doubt chosen Dr Barnardo’s as the beneficiary because of her desire to work with children; perhaps at the time she was thinking she might work for them. Anyway, we raised something like 10 shillings, of which Lily probably contributed a shilling or two, scraped together to buy some of her stuff back.

On receiving Linda’s letter and postal order, Dr Barnardo’s invited her to see their children’s home at Barkingside. The charity’s head office was also there, and I assume it must have been their showcase London residential home. Lily couldn’t go with her so she roped me in. I recall a series of houses set in a square round a kind of village green. Accommodation was allocated according to the children’s ages and each building had a ‘house mother’ or ‘house father’ in charge. It all seemed jolly enough but something about the regimented existence chilled our souls. Our perception was probably unfair and undeserved but we came away feeling glad we were visitors rather than inmates.

When Mr Pepper had outlined his solution he sat back on the old brown settee, looking very pleased with himself. Linda exploded. She leaped off her chair, stood in front of him, hands on hips, and gave him both barrels. ‘How dare you! You’ve never even met us, never spoken to me, and yet you’re asking us to do what I’ve already said is unacceptable!’ Mr Pepper looked like a schoolchild being told off by his headmistress. ‘But it’s all been arranged,’ he pleaded.

My guess is that the council official had given a somewhat misleading account of his conversation with Linda to Mr Pepper, who had gone to a lot of time and trouble to secure what he believed we wanted.

‘Well, you can just un-arrange it,’ Linda retorted fiercely, ‘because Alan is not going to live with foster parents and I am not going to Barnardo’s.’

‘But you’re too young to live by yourselves,’ Mr Pepper reiterated.

Linda snorted. ‘Too young? It’s a bit late to worry about that now. We’ve been living by ourselves for years.’

Linda could be very eloquent and persuasive and couldn’t have failed to convince Mr Pepper of her capabilities and accomplishments – or of the truth of her succinct concluding argument: if he was concerned about our welfare, he’d keep us together, not force us apart. She was even more confident that she’d be able to pay the rent on any council house we were allocated since receiving a letter from Steve the previous day. He said he’d resume his maintenance payments, if not on the same scale: the £6 10s a week he’d been ordered to pay originally would be reduced to £2 10s because Lily was dead and Linda was earning. Nevertheless, it was something. He told us that we could rely on him, and the postal order would arrive every week. We couldn’t and it didn’t, but at least the thought was there.

Mr Pepper’s conversion from villain to hero couldn’t have been easy for him professionally. On the strength of that one meeting, he must have decided that the risk of letting us stay together was worth taking. Who knows what machinations he had to go through to achieve that for us? We just waited to hear
from him, blissfully unaware of whatever battles he was fighting on our behalf.