For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are those ‘It might have been.’
- John Greenleaf Whittier
- John Greenleaf Whittier
Work was easy to
find in the England of the sixties, so that, following my dismissal from Mr
Quantrill’s enterprise of buttering up old ladies while touching up their properties,
I promptly got another job as a trainee seller of bread for the Mothers Pride
Bakery in Croydon, where my first task was to learn the tricks of the
trade by dogging the steps of an unashamed toady on his rounds. He was a lanky and lean
species of creature who habitually avoided your eyes, a kind of man you
felt would be in his element taking bets on horses.
Arriving at a client’s
house, he bounded out of his bakers van, swung round to the rear and jerked open the back doors. Next he hauled out a baker’s tray, inserted his left arm under the
handle and shepherded a collection of bread loaves and cakes into it with the
palm of his right hand. Thus equipped, he marched up to the customer’s door and
rapped rhythmically on its surface with clenched knuckles.
It was invariably
opened by a woman he unfailingly addressed 'duck', and at whom he launched a
barrage of hackneyed cheery chatter, while he peddled his bread. I said nothing, nor could I think of anything to say – if I’d had a chance to say
it. Evidently I was not the stuff of which bread vendors could be made. Also, it failed to escape notice that I was not the stuff that could avoid being several minutes late for the seven am start. Alas, I was
sacked for the second time in a week when I turned up late again on my fourth
day.
Not to worry. I
simply slipped round the corner of the street and got a job straight away at the Wonderloaf
Bakery. Contrary to practice at Fairfax, the bakery where I’d served some time in
Winnipeg, and where the bread had been moved through the production process
partly by hand and partly by machine, Wonderloaf was a more fully automated
place where a system of conveyor belts and steel rollers ground on through the
night and day, stopping only for a change of loaf. Though wages were lower there than at Fairfax seven am start.
Meanwhile,
trouble was brewing on the home front. I arrived at my grandparents’ house
after work one day in the middle of January to find my grandmother standing
beside my packed bags at the open door and shouting viciously.
“Get out, you
dirty rat! Get out!”
You can imagine my
astonishment. What in God’s name was going on? But I could not get any sense out of her. She just herded me out of the house with my suitcases and shut the door fiercely
in my face.
Could this really be happening? Or was I in the grip of some insane dream that I’d be sure to wake from soon? For this surely couldn’t really be happening! What on earth could I have done to deserve such vindictive treatment? And what in the world would I do now − could I do now − here on the street in late afternoon in the middle of winter, burdened with everything I owned, like a common beggar?
Could this really be happening? Or was I in the grip of some insane dream that I’d be sure to wake from soon? For this surely couldn’t really be happening! What on earth could I have done to deserve such vindictive treatment? And what in the world would I do now − could I do now − here on the street in late afternoon in the middle of winter, burdened with everything I owned, like a common beggar?
I dragged my
bags across the street and knocked at the door of my aunt and uncle’s house. My
cousin, Terry, answered. Taking a deep breath, I calmed myself as much as I
could to tell him what had happened. He led me then through the hallway to the kitchen
at the back and sat me down on a chair and made me a cup of tea.
Then, astonishment
at this sudden and unexpected rejection turned to rage and tears, as I tried to
describe the details of it. Why were they doing this? Why? Who would do
this to a dog, never mind a member of one’s own family! What heinous crime had I
committed to warrant this terrible ejection?
Terry didn’t know. But as the storm ebbed in my chest, we got down to the question of what I was to do now about finding a place to stay. Oddly, I remarked to myself later, there was no offer of a bed here, nor any attempt to explain the absence of my aunt and uncle from this critical drama, though they must have been settled just a few feet away in their lounge.
But what to do,
what to do about this chilling issue of having absolutely nowhere to lay my head for
the night? I dragged my thoughts from my distress to concentrate on
the sole course of action open to me. In the last few days I’d done a bit of
hunting for new living quarters because I had been vaguely aware of a growing estrangement in my grandparents’ household. As a result, I had the telephone
number of a house where a bedsitter was for rent at Raynes Park
As it chanced, the room I sought was still vacant, so my cousin chauffeured me the two and a half miles to the address and I
moved into a tiny bedsitter on the third floor of a large house set in a leafy
garden. But, unpacking my bags inside, I saw that I was short of a pair of trousers. Thus we returned to Morden in search of the
missing article. When, just as dusk was falling, I knocked at the door that had been recently shut in my face,
my grandfather opened it. I managed to state soberly the reason for my reappearance, but then I broke down into heaving lamentations.
“Just tell me
one thing,” I said, choking. “Why are you doing this? Why?” my voice cracking
at the end.
“Well, she said…,” he replied feebly, glancing back
into the gloomy interior…
But I don’t
recall what he said she’d said. It wasn’t very memorable anyway and I was
heaving on a sea of feeling at the time. Besides, there was no point in talking
to the monkey when the organ grinder was absent.
Incidentally, this episode led to an understanding of why my mother always seemed to have some affection for her father, but voiced none whatever for her mother. A monkey is, after all, harmless.
Or maybe it's more accurate to say that the harm they do stems from stupidity, rather than malice.
Incidentally, this episode led to an understanding of why my mother always seemed to have some affection for her father, but voiced none whatever for her mother. A monkey is, after all, harmless.
Or maybe it's more accurate to say that the harm they do stems from stupidity, rather than malice.
Over the next
few days or weeks, I dredged from Terry the ‘explanation’ for this callous act.
It seems that in gathering up clothes for washing, my grandmother had taken it into her head to rifle my two suitcases and turn up a packet of
contraceptives – the very same one that my friend, Willard, had bought for
me about eighteen months before. That infinitesimal possession, apparently, was enough to
convict me of unforgivable wickedness. But oh, isn’t life unfair sometimes? If
only I’d been using them!
Many years
later, I learned that my aunt - with my uncle in tow - had been the instigator
of a whispering campaign. I was a worthless idler, on the face of it, who’d never
amount to anything, but who had too much influence over her only son. Far from harbouring
the least idea of bettering myself, here I was wasting my life doing menial tasks in a bakery and actually entertaining notions of going off to France Spain
I suppose I was the first – but not the last – victim of my aunt’s machinations, because many years later both her son and her daughter refused to have anything more to do with her.
I suppose I was the first – but not the last – victim of my aunt’s machinations, because many years later both her son and her daughter refused to have anything more to do with her.
I can’t recall my first duties at Wonderloaf, as I was dismissed by my supervisor after a week for poor time-keeping. But another supervisor that I'd got to know a little and got on well with offered me a place with his gang, if I tried a bit harder to get to work on time. I said I would, but to be frank I showed little improvement. Finally I solved the problem permanently by getting a more punctual workmate to clock my time card when he came in. But in effect it was necessary to employ that stratagem for just one week in three, since the bakery operated all day and all night in three rotating shifts.
My first task with my new boss was to feed pans onto the line from tall stacks of them standing on the
floor. When I proved adept at that task, I was moved down the line to a place where
two belts conveying lumps of dough shaped like large white sausages converged
on either side of a stream of pans and ran parallel with them for some six feet
before abruptly ending. Now I was shown how to lift the dough-sausages one
after the other and drop them into the moving pans before the dough fell off
the end of the belt. As the work proved easy enough, I was presented with no
real challenge until the line was stopped and the dough changed to 'plaits'.
A minute or two
later all was moving again, but the sausages running along the dough belts were
now thinner and longer. I stood 'downstream' of the supervisor as he
demonstrated the procedure. He grasped the tail end of one sausage with his left
hand and the tail end of the next with his right hand. Now, grasping the head
end of the first one, also with his right hand, he lifted both from the belt
and swung the loose end of the one round the body of the other in a spiral movement
and flung the coiled creation into a pan, as if into a little tin coffin. The
pair of dough-sausages now moved down the line in a twisted embrace, while he
snatched up two more.
I watched him
perform the feat deftly several times while he explained each movement, and
then he asked me to have a go, letting two sausages escape from his hands. I
snatched them off the belt, fought with them clumsily for some seconds as
though they were live eels, and then dumped the mangled remains into one of the
moving pans. I didn't think I'd ever get the hang of the art, but the
supervisor was patient. Once more he explained the mystery he was performing with
his hands.
“Grasp – twist –
throw, grasp – twist – throw, grasp – twist – throw.”
Then he asked me
to try again.
“Ready? Here
they come!”
Two more of the
creatures escaped his hands and headed toward the end of the belt. I attacked
them desperately and left the twin corpses as before, strangled and mangled in
their little coffin.
I don't know how
long it took me to master the mystery of forming 'plaits', but there came a day
when I could stand beside the supervisor and do equal shares with him, and a
time came later, too, when – wonder of wonders – I stood alone before the
moving belt and caught every single one of those blind rushing things and
twisted it with its mate and laid the pair to rest correctly curled together.
One of my
workmates was a truncated Scot with a broad accent and strong Scots nationalist
views. We got on quite well at first, but when the boredom of the work began to bite we argued fiercely. It is likely he would have found a
sympathetic listener in me if he hadn't been a ranter who alienates potential
allies with the sheer venom of his views. He constantly cursed what he called
the 'Sassenachs' – though willing to accept employment from them – and it
seemed he had a sacred duty to creep up on any English prejudice lurking in his
interlocutor, however blameless, and drive a stake through its heart.
He tore into me
one night, I recall, when I made the mistake of confusing the words 'British' and 'English'. This thoughtless habit of the English irked him, he said, and he
apparently allowed no latitude to a fellow such as me, who could hardly be expected
to know the difference. In situations such as this, I consider that the best
form of defence is attack.
“Of course the
Scots are a conquered nation”, I
sneered.
To represent the
relationship between England Scotland
It was with a
sense of some relief when eventually I was removed from the line and provided
with a bucket of soap and water and set to work washing the giant proof oven
where bread dough was left to rise for a time before the baking began. But I
was a bit disconcerted when I met my new workmate on this job. He was black, as
black as the ace of spades, as they used to say. I’m not sure what his name was now
for we did not work together for long, but it was a common enough one, such as
George. I do however remember that he was short and wore glasses and that he
said he was from Nigeria
I had never ever met a black fellow before, but having grown up in the forties and fifties and been fed on
American adventure films set in ‘the dark continent’ where hordes of ‘natives’
regularly danced round a fire as a prelude to perpetrating some unspeakable evil
on some hapless whites that had fallen into their clutches, I was naturally a
latent racist. Black people (or rather ‘coloured’ people as they were called at
that time – or sometimes ‘darkies’) were inferior to whites, were they not?
But once I’d got over the initial shock
of having to work with a savage who might maybe have a shrunken head or
something like that thrust up his jumper, I found that George and I got on like a house
on fire. Perched together on our scaffold with our buckets of water by our sides we
chattered away like chiffchaffs about anything and nothing and sniggered like
ninnies at downright idiocies between odd swipes of a cloth, for our little
perch, you see, was somewhat outside the sight lines of our supervisors. No-one
pressed you very hard in those days anyway.
“You little
black bastard,” I often retorted to his horseplay. He never objected to the use
of the term. It was meant as an endearment, maybe also a means of banishing the
problem of race altogether by mocking colour differences, because race was a problem for white people of my
generation, I understood later, whether we liked to admit it or not.
All this joking
and laughter was all very well, but I didn’t want George to think that I was
just another ‘economic refugee’ like him and the many Asians that worked in
this place. I didn’t have to do this work
for a living, you know. I had an
education equivalent to five GCE O-levels.
Well, he had O-levels, too, he said.
Don’t be daft.
How could you get O-levels in a place like Nigeria
Because it’s a
former British colony and the education system there is modelled on the British one
Oh…
Now I wanted to
know why he was working in a place like this if he had O-levels. I, for
example, was working here merely to save up some money to travel around Europe .
His eyes lit up.
Travel round Europe ? Could he come with me? he pressed.
I bit my lip. I
shouldn’t have mentioned Europe . I was going to the Continent with McClain. Three of us would be
too many to hitch-hike together. Admittedly, whenever I’d been down on my
motorbike to visit my Canadian college at West Wickham, he’d never ever mentioned the hitch-hiking trip we had planed
together. Like me he’d carved out a little life for himself in England
My cheeks burned
a bit one night, I recall, when I found him in there company round a piano. Instead
of being garbed in Bermuda shorts so as to be ‘beat’, there he was primped in a
green suit and tie, with pint in hand, singing with his ‘mates’ endless verses
of a mildly vulgar, but pathetically unfunny, song. And when he spoke it was
with a carefully contrived cockney accent! He seemed quite content with his life. But then so was
I, which is why I never mentioned the trip either. It was just something that
was understood we would do, but it was shoved safely off in the future where it
wouldn’t ruffle our present lives.
But what if McClain backed out after all? I knew I would never decamp for France alone, and here was George eager to share the trip. However, his eagerness was a little disconcerting. He had just now decided to go off travelling just because I had said I was going, whereas I was following a plan I’d formulated almost two years before and four thousand miles away. Would he make a reliable travelling companion?
I declined − made
excuses − didn’t know if I’d be going, really – or when.
He took that
hard, but in a way that reaction helped convince me I’d said the right thing.
He was showing a dependence on me already. Would I have to hold his hand once
we’d gone abroad? However, I felt dreadfully guilty over the affair.
Hadn’t I refused to travel with him simply because he was black?
Another fellow I
met in the bakery was Vince King, who worked in the garage. I’d often see him
on my way in or out of the place attired in a boiler suit and Wellington
Unidentified
Wonderloaf Bakery Garage
The first time I
spoke to him he’d just arrived on a scooter clothed in a long khaki coat like
the ‘mods’ wore, for that was the era of ‘mods and rockers’. ‘Rockers’ wore
leather and rode motorbikes. Tabloids of the time were sometimes headlined with
stories of clashes between gangs of them in seaside resorts. But those warring factions
were made up of extremists. The vast majority of both types were quite
peaceable like Vince.
“Are you a mod?”
I asked, for I was curious to know a little about the flock he belonged to.
“Yeah,” he said,
a bit suspiciously. “Is that all right with you?”
Not at all the
kind of reply I’d been expecting. In my alien naivety I was hoping to be
treated to a little disquisition on what this mod movement stood for and what
were its aims, practices and interests. I’d got no answer at all in fact, only
another question. I realised only later in my experience of the country just
how ‘English’ this ‘answer’ was. The English didn’t like to be questioned on
matters of their culture, for they didn’t seem to have any answers to them.
Instead what you got was another question in a tone that suggested you’d been
impertinent to ask.
In spite of this
inauspicious beginning, Vince and I became friends.
With John now
gone, I began again to spend time with my cousin Terry, and when I was on morning shifts we often quaffed several pints in a Croydon pub on a Saturday night
before he dropped me off at the bakery. You see, my Sunday morning shift
started at six, but to arrive for work at that ungodly hour was quite beyond my competence, so I prevailed upon my cousin to drop me off at the bakery the night before to sleep
on an eight-inch wide bench in the cloakroom, where my indulgent supervisor
would find me in the morning and wake me for work at six. At times my fatigue on the line must have
shown pathetically, for my kindly supervisor sometimes took pity and permitted me to return to the
bench for a further snooze!
I remember him as the kindest man who ever had authority over me.
I remember him as the kindest man who ever had authority over me.
On January 30th
I took a day off work to go up to London
One evening in
March, Terry and I drove up to a place just off the Strand with a grand façade of
stone steps, portico and pediment that looked like the pretentious entrance to
some gentlemen’s club or other. This was the Lyceum Ballroom.
Modern photo of the Lyceum, no longer a ballroom
Inside, we were lucky enough to find ourselves dancing with a couple of girls, and after closing time we chaperoned them home to a street somewhere inNorth London . In the weeks that followed we enjoyed their company every Saturday night. Terry was matched with a small buxom blonde called Gwen with a bubbly personality, while Rita was dark and slim with a flick of hair to one side of her neck and a pert mouth
in a pretty face. Unlike her friend, she was self-possessed and womanly. In
fact she was twenty-eight years old and was the mother of a baby.
Inside, we were lucky enough to find ourselves dancing with a couple of girls, and after closing time we chaperoned them home to a street somewhere in
She lived at
home with her own mother as Gwen did, and at the close of our evening excursions
I’d say goodnight to her on her doorstep while Cousin Terry did the same across the road at
Gwen’s. Rita was apparently happy enough to be showered with kisses but seemed
somehow detached from them as if she were thinking of something else and she
stiffened with resistance whenever I essayed a little exploration of her form.
One Saturday night, however, three or four weeks after our meeting, I sensed that my kisses on the doorstep were returned more warmly than before. Moreover, the usual stiffening of her figure failed to materialise when my hand went a-roving inside her coat. To my surprise it was permitted to wander wherever it wanted to go, following the curves of the firm body that gave such shapeliness to her tight-fitting dress. The next thing I knew I was invited into the house. Where mother and baby were, I can't say, but I now found myself in the hands of a woman with a purpose. More kissing and fondling followed now, and next she drew me into a bedroom. God, she was going to give herself to me!
One Saturday night, however, three or four weeks after our meeting, I sensed that my kisses on the doorstep were returned more warmly than before. Moreover, the usual stiffening of her figure failed to materialise when my hand went a-roving inside her coat. To my surprise it was permitted to wander wherever it wanted to go, following the curves of the firm body that gave such shapeliness to her tight-fitting dress. The next thing I knew I was invited into the house. Where mother and baby were, I can't say, but I now found myself in the hands of a woman with a purpose. More kissing and fondling followed now, and next she drew me into a bedroom. God, she was going to give herself to me!
What in heaven's name had I got
myself into? My romantic history showed that making love even to a teenage girl
had proved a serious challenge for me. What could I hope to achieve with a
twenty-eight-year-old woman who’d had a baby! And she was undressing now in a
darkened bedroom right before my eyes! Without the slightest sense of shame or
embarrassment either! Whatever was I going to do with her? Any sexual enticement I’d sensed several moments ago was now smothered in a flood of anxiety!
Naked now, she slipped into the bed while I clumsily divested myself of my clothing and reluctantly climbed in beside her. What else could I do? I had made my bed, so to speak, and now I had to lie in it! And who knows? Maybe I’d be washed away in waves of passion that would persuade the act to happen naturally.
Forlorn hope!
Providentially, my memory has been spared the shaming details of what followed, but afterwards I sensed that Rita knew that I could not make love to her. Then she rose silently and got dressed again.
Forlorn hope!
Providentially, my memory has been spared the shaming details of what followed, but afterwards I sensed that Rita knew that I could not make love to her. Then she rose silently and got dressed again.
Putting on my
clothes I was swept with bitter feelings of regret, inadequacy and
self-contempt. What in hell’s name was wrong with me? How could I find myself
in bed with a naked girl and not make love to her? There was no question of
lack of passion. I had wanted Rita all right, but faced with the opportunity of
union I found I lacked any modus operandi
– I simply did not know what to do – and moreover I was so terrified of
showing myself up that this fear strangled what desire there was in me, making the achievement of the act physically impossible.
When Rita showed me to the door, she said it would be best if we didn't see each other again. That hurt, but in retrospect it was understandable. I was still a clueless youth in quest of sexual guidance, while she was in search of a man to be the father of her child.
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