Fragment 4: The Life & Times of a Social Experiment
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At the end of Fragment 3, you may recall, my strange little family was yet again in trouble. The primary issues, as ever, were keeping a roof over our heads and putting food on the table. Not easy with George spending at least half of the time in mental hospitals and Nellie struggling to work and look after me. And, remember, she was no spring chicken: in September 1952 she turned 54 years old. But the Lincoln option had run its course and a change was being forced upon us.
The necessary change involved yet another move, this time to a farm at a place called Odstone, near Nuneaton, in Leicestershire, in the English Midlands. The idea was that George and Nellie would do cleaning and other chores for the farmer and his family at Hill Farm.
A key benefit of this employment was that it came with a tied cottage, fulfilling the vital need to put a roof over our heads. The cottage was at one end of a terrace of three. So far as I remember the other cottages remained uninhabited throughout our time there.
If the word ‘cottage’ conjures up a sweet, bucolic image, think again. This one was hardly romantic. Bring to mind a mini-row of those small, terraced, back-to-back houses that used to define a lot of UK industrial areas, but plonked down in a rural setting alongside a dirt road that turned into a mud-stream whenever it rained. There was a living room with a tiny grate that provided the only means of heating, a kitchen with pantry, and two bedrooms. There was no bathroom – the weekly routine was a zinc bath in front of the grate.
The lavatory was outside – a lean-to built on the end that served the entire row. The cottage had an electricity supply, but no mains sewerage: perhaps our American cousins hadn’t made it to this neck of the woods during the war? The lavatory was powered, if that’s the right word, by chemicals. But the smell was overpowering. Maybe I was overly fastidious but I did everything I could to avoid this foul-smelling midden. (The fact that no-one occupied either of the other two cottages during our time there was a blessing.)
School, which as far as I recall comprised only some twenty of us children, was a mile or so distant in a village with the unlikely name of Barton in the Beans. Each morning I caught the bus at the end of the farm drive and was dropped back there at the end of the school day. Getting to the bus stop involved quite a long walk – or so it seemed to me as a seven- and eight-year old – but it meant that, on my homeward journey after school, after the bus dropped me off, I had the freedom to divert around some fields and do my lavatorial necessities. I was quite happy about this natural activity in natural surroundings except when it rained (which it often did) or froze (and the winters of 1952 and 1953 were very, very cold: the silver caps on the one-third pint bottles of milk that we received every school day were often jacked up an inch or more above the bottle tops as the milk froze and expanded). But as far as I was concerned, even having to endure spouting cataracts and hurricanoes would have been preferable to the hideous cottage bog.
Years later, reading Rabelais’s Gargantua, I would learn how the young giant tested a whole raft of things for wiping his bottom, as for example:
Then I wiped my bum on sage, fennel, dill, marjoram and rose-petals; on leaves of the vegetable marrow, of cabbages, of the vine, of mallows, longwort (which gives you a raw bottom), lettuces, spinach – which all did me a pile of good – pot-mercury, arse-smart, stinging nettles and groundsel.1
Displaying far less imagination I generally restricted myself to the humble dock leaf and am in awe of Gargantua’s discovery that …
I affirm and maintain that there is no bottom-wiper like a downy young goose, provided that you hold its head between your legs.2
By now you may have gathered that life wasn’t easy for the family into which I had been conscripted. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was a never-ending bloody struggle, even to the extent of not-infrequent instances of very, very limited food supplies. Mind you, Nellie tackled that problem with Bread & Butter and when possible the Currant Bun, all to the accompaniment of Cups of Tea. One of Nellie’s currant buns was small by comparison with the modern muffin but, to me, it was fabulous. I never tired of them and still regard a well-made currant bun or rock cake as a gastronomic wonder.
Then there’s the tea. Actually, a cuppa often fulfilled two functions. All year round it provided refreshment but, during the high-pollen months of May, June and July it also delivered relief from the hay fever that I suffered from an early age. Here’s how it works:
Take a cup of tea and drink a quarter or a third of it.
Raise the cup to your mouth and tilt it towards you until the liquid touches your lower lip. Then, breath out through your mouth across the top of the tea.
Breathe in the warm, moist, tea-infused air through your nose.
Repeat.
This, I found, provided some relief from the worst of the hay fever symptoms.
While on the topic of nostrums I should mention my problem with childhood nose bleeds. These would arrive without warning and could be quite scary. The cure that Nellie invariably applied was a cold key down the back of my neck. Yes, you read that right. The key was attached to a loop of string and the assemblage worn like a reversed necklace. I believe the idea was that the shock of cold metal on the back would cause a sharp intake of breath that would somehow reduce or stop the blood flow. It didn’t. Anyway, the key warmed up in about two seconds flat. Its effectiveness was nil but it did not occur to me at the time to question it.
Then there was the problem of dealing with this during the hay fever season. My nose would run like a tap and, trying to mop up with a handkerchief, it would not infrequently bleed. Trying, then, to apply the two treatments just outlined presented some problems because the ‘tea-infused nose salve’ required me to lean forward, but the ‘dorsal key cold-shock application’ required me to tilt my head back. It’s a bloody miracle I survived.
For anything else the cure was Andrews Liver Salts. I think this product is still on the market, sold as an antacid to help relieve indigestion and constipation. However, according to Nellie, when added to water and drunk in its brief effervescent phase, it would, apparently, cure anything from a stubbed toe to bubonic plague.
Don’t get me wrong, we did use the young National Health Service on occasion. A visit to the doctor happened if a worrying condition occurred, as for example, when I caught chicken pox and was, for a time, very unwell and extremely spotty.
Whether because of our straitened circumstances or my intrinsic nature, or perhaps a combination of the two, I found it hard to make friends. This wasn’t exactly helped by the fact that, on the farm, there was a distinct lack of other children. Sure, I mixed with other kids at school but you can mix without mixing, so to speak.
The shortcoming must have been apparent because, one day, Nellie armed me for school with a small bag of sweets, ‘a quarter’ (being a quarter of a pound, or 4 ounces, in old money) of brightly coloured stripey candy lozenges. My instructions were, at the end of the school day when all were gathered waiting for the homeward bus, to produce them from my coat pocket and offer them to the other children. Nellie explained the cunning plan: the other children, she said, would be forced to enter into communication with me – “I say, old chap, that’s awfully decent of you. How are you today?” – and this would magically convert at least some of them into life-long bosom pals.
So, at the appointed time, I produced the bag and held it out but rather than behave as Nellie had anticipated, the kids pounced and a couple of nanoseconds later I was left clutching a few shreds of the demolished paper bag. After their confectionery raid, the kids immediately regrouped with their chat-buddies. Not one acknowledged my generosity and I still had no-one to talk to. There was a lesson to be learned there. I should have told the little bastards to go fuck themselves but I was far too introverted.
The isolation inevitably continued: we lived in such a remote location, and this at a time when the vast majority of people did not own cars, that I spent most of the time on my own.
Throughout this period George was hospitalised most of the time, although the farmer and his wife were very kind, commissioning him to make rugs for the farmhouse. Rug-making and embroidery were two skills that he was taught in hospital as therapeutic activities and he was good at them. The rugs were made using a special hook to thread thick strands of coloured wool onto woven canvas bases. When he had made a few regular-sized rugs, the farmer’s wife asked him to make long, narrow ones for stairways and landings. Maybe the results were useful in the farmhouse, but I think she did it mostly as a means to justify paying us a few shillings (in those pre-decimal days the pound comprised twenty shillings, with twelve pence to each shilling) to help keep the proverbial wolf from the door. Either that or there were hidden corridors where the floors and walls were covered in George’s handiwork. Not likely, I think. Meanwhile, Nellie kept on cooking and cleaning at the farmhouse so I had no option other than to amuse myself.
Back then, mental health problems were more likely to be dealt with in mental institutions, out of sight of the general public. On most occasions, as I recall, George was taken to Leicester’s Glenfield / Groby Road Hospital. To visit him, Nellie and I travelled there and back by bus. The hospital had some fine grounds and my recollections of it are, perhaps counter-intuitively, as a very peaceful, calm place where I was introduced to some interesting people.
I remember, for example, George introducing me to a chap who, he told me, was in hospital because he lacked the fear response. This meant, he explained, that he was always in danger because he didn’t recognize the possible consequences of situations. So, for example, he might just walk into the path of an oncoming vehicle. This absolutely fascinated me.
But George was not hospitalized all of the time. On one occasion that he was home an incident seared itself into my memory. George decided that he would plant some potatoes in the small garden close to our cottage. This attracted the attention of the farm hand, from memory a dark, brooding bully of a man who clearly decided that George’s efforts were laughable and proceeded to mock him. I became angry and told the man to stop. He persisted. I cried in frustration and finally flew at him, fists flying. He put out a hand and held it against my head, keeping me at arms’ length so that I could only flail ineffectually into thin air. George quietly told me to ignore the man’s taunts. I had no choice other than to do so, but the feelings of anger and powerlessness remained.
Subsequently, we had trouble with the man’s two sons, both around my age, who it transpired got into our cottage and stole odd items. Let’s face it, there wasn’t much to steal but they too, it seems, were quite partial to Nellie’s Currant Buns. Nellie told the farmer’s wife about the mysterious disappearance and this prompted the farmer’s son, Gerald, to investigate. He discovered that our pantry window could be opened from the outside. When he fixed it, the problem went away. Nonetheless, I found the shadow cast over our lives by this family somewhat scary.
My main escape from the worries and loneliness was through reading. I was drawn to romantic visions of the past and the future, but rarely the present. Was that my subconscious reflecting some sort of view of the situation? In the past, I would join Robin Hood and his merry men, or be a young squire to a medieval knight. In the future, I might well be a space traveller. I loved, too, anthropomorphism: I remember Ants’ Castle by Elleston Trevor and, later, would fall under the spell of The Wind in the Willows.
All of this served me well, both as an escape hatch during the isolated times of childhood and as the basis of a lifetime love of literature and learning.
Some years later, by which time I had consumed John Buchan’s Richard Hannay novels, I happened across a first edition of his Midwinter and in it found a piece of prose that, for me, evokes that hidden land that I so loved as a child. The eponymous Midwinter will help the protagonist, Alastair, avoid dangers by guiding him through ‘Old England’. Alastair asks:
“Where is this magic country?”
“All around you – behind the brake, across the hedgerow, under the branches. Some can stretch a hand and touch it – to others it is a million miles away.”
“As a child I knew it,” said Alastair, laughing. “I called it Fairyland.”
Midwinter nodded. “Children are free of it, but their elders must earn admission. It is a safe place – but at any rate it is secure from common perils.”
“But it has its own dangers?”
“It makes a man look into his heart, and he may find that in it which will destroy him. Also it is ambition’s mortal foe. But if you walk in it you will come to Brightwell without obstruction, for the King’s writ does not run in the greenwood.”3
Yet another example of golden corn, but I love it still.
What about the school? It was little more than one room with, as I mentioned earlier, twenty or so of us kids. Oddly, one of my clearest memories is of our teacher (a nice woman who drove a Ford motor car with vacuum-powered windscreen wipers that seemed to operate in an entirely arbitrary manner. Strange the things that stick in one’s mind) getting us to sing a traditional song titled Early One Morning.
Early one morning, just as the sun was rising
I heard a maid sing in the valley below
"Oh don't deceive me, Oh never leave me,
How could you use, a poor maiden so?"
I remember, even then, thinking it an extremely odd choice for little people like us. Nonetheless, being corralled as a member of a makeshift choir prompted me to ask a question. In time-honoured polite fashion, I raised my hand. The teacher asked me what I wanted. “Please, Miss, what is singing?” There then followed what seemed to me to be an interminable silence. Did some of the other kids snigger? Maybe. Anyway, to break the silence I ventured, “Is it when you go like this?” and emitted a couple of trills. My enquiry was entirely serious, but she clearly thought I was taking the mickey, or barking mad, or both. So, answer came there none, but I got a sharp rap over the knuckles with a ruler. So much for the enquiring mind.
Through yonder grove, by the spring that is running
There you and I have so merrily played,
Kissing and courting and gently sporting
Oh, my innocent heart you've betrayed
Of course, had I known then what I now know about my conception, I might have smiled at the irony of these lyrics. But, as it was, I had no idea and sang along with the other boys and girls, but I thought it rubbish.
Thus sang the maiden, her sorrows bewailing
Thus sang the poor maid in the valley below
"Oh don't deceive me, Oh never leave me,
How could you use a poor maiden so?"
On one occasion at the end of a school day when we all piled out on to the village street there was a strange Lord of the Flies incident. A number of the kids picked on one of the boys and started shouting something. It became a chant. My ears pricked up. “Adopted! Adopted!” The picked-on lad, clearly distressed, backed away from the small mob, but they pursued him. “Adopted! Adopted!”
Nellie and George had never kept from me the fact that I, too, was adopted. From an early age they were anxious to explain this by telling me that: “We specially chose you.” This, I don’t doubt, was well-intentioned. Maybe someone, somewhere in authority had advised that adopted kids should be told the truth of their origins from an early age. The trouble was, I had absolutely no idea what it meant.
Put yourself in my place for a moment. You have the inevitable ignorance of a seven or eight years old, allied to the fact that you’re living a fairly isolated existence in the company of a Victorian, Methodist-minded parent for whom sex is not a topic that should be discussed. Hardly surprising, then, that you learn fuck all about sexual reproduction. The odd snippets you do hear from contemporaries don’t make any sense because they lack context and, as you later learn, are made up.
So, when Nellie says “We specially chose you” the reaction is one of complete incomprehension. What I probably should have asked, but didn’t, was: “Huh? Don’t all parents choose their kids?” However, because none of it made any sense to me, I couldn’t even work out the right question or questions to get at the truth.
Later, of course, I did learn that there was another arrangement for getting kids. I came, too, to learn that it seemed to be one that did not altogether meet with Nellie’s approval. This was a conundrum that bewildered me for quite some time. On the one hand, children were precious, innocent creatures who Jesus dearly loved. On the other hand, the actual creation of said precious bundles was somehow disgusting. This incongruity was incomprehensible.
When, a few years later at age 12 or 13, I was doing some biology homework that had to do with reproduction in rabbits, Nellie tut-tutted and expressed her disgust, “Call that education!” But, at seven or eight, I had zero comprehension of sexual reproduction, so the whole thing seemed simply weird.
Back in the village street, I had no idea why the kids were now using ‘Adopted’ as a pejorative term. Why? Why would they do that? And, as important, how should I respond?
I kept apart from the baying mob for a while, but then summoned up my courage. I ran up to the victim and told him that I was on his side. I did not have the courage to say that I, too, was adopted, but I did go to his side, and I did shout at the others to stop being beastly. Ah well, better than doing nothing, I suppose.
Having mentioned sex, it is perhaps time to tell you more about the farmer’s son, Gerald. You remember, he came to our aid to solve The Mystery of the Missing Currant Buns. He was in his early twenties and brought energy and laughter into an otherwise bleak world. Gerald was kind. Gerald was helpful. Gerald was a talented pianist. His mother adored him. Nellie adored him. He worked hard on the farm. He was the driving force behind the conversion of a cowshed into a gleaming whitewashed venue for our immediate local community’s celebration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953. He was the first on the scene when our cottage chimney went on fire, and first up the ladder to quench the flames. And he was a very naughty boy.
More about this coming up next time, in Fragment 5.
Rabelais, Francois. Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532) trans. M.A. Screech (2006)
Rabelais, Francois. Ibid.
Buchan, John. Midwinter (1923)