Something to think about

Quotes: I've learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. (Maya Angelou)..The destiny of every human being is decided by what goes on inside his skull when confronted by what goes on outside his skull. (Eric Berne).. Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline. (Theodor W. Adorno)

Sunday 7 June 2015

17 Waiting (for God?)

I can't go back to yesterday - because I was a different person then.
Lewis Carroll

Most of my family except Mama, who can’t decide if she believes in God and is on the no-I-don’t side, make a habit of going to chapel. I have been introduced to this custom at an early age and see no reason to question its purpose or benefit. I am never asked if I want to go, but that’s probably because they wouldn’t have taken no for an answer anyway. As far as Mama is concerned, Sunday is a traditional day for the Sunday joint, Gardener’s Question Time and her afternoon sleep.
I am being brought up to believe that there is only one God and one religion worth the name. God lives in selected chapels, which do not necessarily include those surrounded by a barbed wire fence. When I start asking questions, I am told that we, the righteous, the true religion, are supposed to share God with a whole lot of gangsters, most of whom live in Albert Street and attend a barbed wire church, which belongs to, or at least is run by someone high and mighty but not quite God, who would never dream of coming this far down to see to his property. As landlords go, God must be pretty hopeless.
The incumbent barbed wire priest in charge of day to day business hasn’t got a family, because the God of his church thinks it’s a bad idea for priests to be tied up with mundane things like taking the wife shopping or writing sick notes for the children. But he does have a lady who goes in and does for him three times a week, and she has a little girl who looks the spitting image of him if you take away the long black smock and dog collar.
The priest is rather spitefully held up for the inspection of all his weaknesses and shortcomings and the local paper is regularly scrutinised for court reports of criminal activities involving the congregation, who represent about 10 per cent of the community but ninety per cent of the criminal energy - at least, that’s what people like us say. We don’t go as far as they do in Belfast, declaring one side of the street as theirs and the other as ours, but there is no doubt that they are different and we are better.
I later realise that what is happening in Northern Ireland could just as easily be happening in North Wales, had Henry VIII not had it in for the priests and monks and made his successful take-over bid for personal gain rather than ideological reasons. Priests and barbed wire churches are the exception in Wales, I am told.
Though the two ideologies are as far apart as we can make them, you can’t tell one of their followers from one of us just by looking at them, like you could if they were Chinese Buddhists. There must be something that distinguishes them, though. Mama can tell one a mile off. She does not go for religion at all, but if she did it would not be that one.
***
There are schools for them and schools for us. We do not marry them, nor they us. We do not share our rituals or even beliefs. And, most important, we do not borrow the same books at the local library, though what the books have to do with it, I don’t know.
The librarian is called Miss Watkins and she’s one of us, but obliged to work alongside one of them. The library assistant is unaware of any real animosity between herself and Miss Watkins. And there isn’t any, despite people thinking there probably should be. The fact is that neither of the women has any interest in religious politics and Mama actually feels the same, though she would never admit it, for fear of being branded a heathen, which is what she accuses me of being, though I go to Sunday School regularly and don’t charge when I sing for them.
But Mama has a sort of compassionate streak as far as strangers and people she considers below her station are concerned. She is one in fact one of the very few people who actually talks properly to Miss Watkins, who is quite an interesting lady, having been to teachers’ training college in her youth. What is better, Miss Watkins gives useful tips on gardening because her father has won prizes at local shows.
That’s another of Mama’s character traits. She always picks the brains of anyone she meets. I’m starting to think this is Mama’s autobiography, not mine.
We now live in a different house. Mama has a passion for moving house. This time we have moved to a bungalow next door to Uncle Frank and opposite the bungalow he once lived in with Auntie Sylvia, which was built by Mama’s brother on land owned by the farm and – according to her – her, Mama’s money. So we now live with our back garden overlooking my new primary school, which is quite convenient, because I only have to hop over the fence to get there, and I can practise my tennis on the school walls during the weekends and holidays.
On the other side of the road at the top of the steep hill leading to our place is the local vicarage, where the vicar from the church where wives are allowed resides with his. It is a tall, scruffy, Victorian building with a symmetrical frontage and a huge, overgrown garden. Mama reckons the whole place is going to wrack and ruin. She feels sorry for the vicar’s wife, who is forced to keep things going in this morgue of a place, and says they must be martyrs to their cause, even though they are only Church of England, and therefore only half belong to us, the real church, called – as I thought in those days - the "Pressed Material Chapel of Wales". Our chapel has fortuitously turned its back on practically everything the others slave at with the possible exception of God, and we are frequently reminded that the sovereign of the United Kingdom has also been done away with, theologically speaking.
I am now sent to Sunday school regularly at the pressed material chapel. They have discovered that I can sing, so I have been roped in for the annual concert, which is to be a rendering of "God’s Little Children", a cantata of obscure origin and little musical merit that is hell-bent on declaring children to be innocents in a terrible world nobody admits having been responsible for creating. The poor children are rescued by God in one disguise or another and whipped off to heaven singing all sorts of hell-bent tunes. The plot is diffuse and singing about it only confuses the issue further, not least because there is a terrible lot of squabbling about who is responsible for what on the night.
Perhaps because he takes a lively interest in my unflattering accounts of the goings on at the pressed material cantata rehearsals, Uncle Frank and I are getting to be good friends. He is usually morose and hardly ever leaves the house. Mama says he is suffering from chronic bronchitis and a broken heart. I’m not really sure which complaint is stopping him from going out, but who am I to question medical science? Anyway, a captive audience is often quite useful.
Uncle Frank has been a widower ever since a few years ago Auntie Sylvia suddenly collapsed and died on the steep hill leading back home. She had been out shopping in her second-best corset when it happened. Mama never forgets to mention the second-best corset. Somehow it is symbolic for the upper-crust kind of life this childless woman must have led. You put your first-best corset on when you have people to dinner or go somewhere posh, and your second-best corset on when you go down to the market or the bread shop. I suppose she left the corset off altogether when relaxing at home, but I can’t be sure about that. Corsets and false teeth were personal. You did not question their value or status.
I don’t suppose she had ever been to the doctor in the right corset, or he would have discovered her weak heart and done something about it. What I do know is that Auntie Sylvia’s last visit to the dentist had been just before her 21st birthday, because for her coming of age she had been awarded a stunning set of gleaming white dentures and had had all her own teeth removed to make room for them. Before I was born, that was quite a status symbol among the more well-to-do and had a charm all of its own.
***
Uncle Frank was a family butcher with great business acumen and a Good Samaritan philosophy before his bronchitis got the better of him. He was the Robin Hood of all butchers during the war, providing all his customers with their fair share of whatever he had been able beg, buy, borrow or otherwise procure from the local farmers, making up any losses out of his own pocket.
After the war, his grateful customers rewarded him for his generosity by flocking into his shop, which consequently thrived at the expense of those of meaner rivals, and he became quite rich, despite being robbed systematically by his sales assistant, Mrs Glotzky. It is no thanks to her that Uncle Frank isn’t bankrupt.
Mrs Glotzky is a dreadful woman of Eastern European origin with an incredibly obese daughter named Beryl, who is knock-kneed and pasty and always eating. Beryl is beaten regularly by Mrs Glotzky, who is always contrite afterwards and comforts Beryl for her own misdeeds and the pain suffered by Beryl by plying the girl with the contents of the sweet shop paid for by the proceeds of what she omits to enter into Uncle Frank’s cash register.
Mrs Glotzky is a thief and a child thumper. Everyone knows that, even if they turn a blind eye most of the time, as people often do in such cases. Anyone else would have seen her off to prison. But not my uncle. He is convinced that the root of the trouble lies with Mr Glotzky, who comes and goes mysteriously and invariably leaves Mrs Glotzky punched black and blue. Uncle Arthur provides fat Beryl and her thieving mother with a roof over their heads when Mr Glotzky finally beats them both up so violently that they have to escape through a window at dead of night with only the things they have on their backs. Mrs Glotzsky made a run for it with fat Beryl clutched in one hand and her collection of ancient Glotzky photographs in the other. Beryl, for whom I feel slightly sorry, is entirely at the mercy of her dreadful mother, who carries on the dubious task of beating her into submission, though for the life of me I can’t imagine how Beryl can be anything but submissive, so sullen and passive does she seem to me. Whether it is caused by Beryl’s pasty complexion, her obesity, or some kind of disobedience is not readily apparent to strangers, so society does nothing about the girl’s plight. On the contrary, Mrs Glotzky’s brutality is tolerated and even excused as being due to her devastation at being deserted, though I don’t understand the logic of that, since she was the one to leave and Beryl’s father was a thug.
One day, my curiosity gets the better of me and I take a walk to find out exactly where Mrs Glotzky and Beryl used to live. I’m not actually allowed to go to that part of town, which is near the station and consists of rows and rows of identical two-up-two-down terraced houses built to house factory workers from the artificial silk factory that had been built in the town decades previously. The terraced abodes had little wooden lean-tos built on as toilets, and very few tenants have even tried to improve that situation. Rows of houses were built on farmland belonging to my grandfather, and the family still owns some of them. The tenants don’t pay enough rent to make renovations possible, but you can’t charge more because you wouldn’t get it, says Mama. Most of the houses there look dilapidated and all sorts of indescribable people live there. Some of the men work at the factory, build roads, or empty the dustbins. Others are out of work and hang around all day with nothing to do till the pubs open. Some of the women go out cleaning in the posh houses and some of them work shifts at the local factory. They all have lots of children. Mama says it’s for the child allowance, which is spent on cigarettes and beer. The younger children go to my school, and one or two are quite clever, despite having to get up to do milk or paper rounds. They don’t talk like we do and they don’t smell like we do, either.
I can’t find the former Glotzky abode and I’m just about to give up looking for it when I notice one of the doors in a row of two-up-two-down dwellings is open. I think I must have peered in, because all of a sudden a gruff voice calls out:
"Lookin’ for summun’?"
It’s getting dark and I should have been at home long ago, so I call out "No. Just lost my way.”
"Oh, la-di-la just paaaarrrssssing, are we?" the gruff voice mocks. "Lhorrst hour way, ‘ave we?"
I am rooted to the spot.
"Come ‘ere!" the man bellows.
All of a sudden I am inside the door, standing in the middle of a cramped and grossly untidy, dark, dilapidated room, being stared at by several pairs of reddened eyes.
"’ungry, are yer?" someone says, seeing my eyes fall on the plateful of bread wedges smeared with something grey and unappetizing.
I am offered some of it and a drink of water, and I daren’t refuse in case I offend someone.
"Charlie can ‘ave a bit less tonight," a woman remarks.
"Or yersel’, yer mean," scoffs the gruff voice. He must be the man of the house because the woman cowers in a corner and bites her lower lip. I’ve been reading Mama’s red leather and gold bound Oliver Twist and am impressed by this Dickensian atmosphere, awful though it is.
They all stand around while I hold the bread in my hand and don’t take a bite. How could I, knowing I’m taking someone else’s share? And anyway, I don’t want it. I’m not hungry. But I have been stammering my story about being lost and not knowing the way home and now they are sorry for me and want to help me.
There’s good in everyone, Dada says. I must have found some now in this poverty-stricken room. I feel like the lady of the manor. I feel sorry for their plight.
I am sorry for myself, too. I love to tell stories, but usually no one believes them, and I take care not to get too involved, so I can disentangle myself at will.
This is different. The family is debating what to do with me. I could even stay the night, and share the girls’ bed. But in the morning I’ll have to leave as the bed’s wanted for Fred, who’s on nights. No one suggests going for a policeman. Dada says the policemen only go down that road in twos. The people in those houses don’t feel at ease with the local constabulary, and the feeling is mutual.
Meanwhile I have decided that the best solution will be to leave at the earliest opportunity, so I am feverishly planning my escape.
An older boy comes in from the street and their attention is turned to him because he has brought chips from the chip-shop and has news about some deal or other he has struck to finance the repast. While they are arguing about the chips and the deal I make a dash for it.
"Hey! Come back!" I hear in my wake.” ’ave a chip!”
But I run as hard as I can until I turn the corner into the road leading into town or up the hill to our bungalow. No one has followed me. I am saved.
I stop to listen if I can hear anyone running. A car pulls up beside me and the window is wound down.
"Jump in. I’ll take you home," someone says.
I freeze. If I had thought I was in danger in that slum dwelling, it was a nothing to the danger in which I now perceived myself to be.
In the darkness I can only see the outline of a man’s head.
"No," I shout. "I don’t get into strange cars."
I am so thankful that Mama and Dada have drilled those words into me. I’m really quite well armed for tricky situations, except the one I was in a few minutes ago, that is. I haven’t had any training for welfare work except occasionally doling out orange juice to poor mothers with ugly, screaming, incontinent babies at the clinic Aunt Jane runs.
"Don’t be silly," the man insists. "It’s starting to rain and it’s dark. Aren’t you afraid of the dark?"
"Yes, but I’m more afraid of you," I scream, and run on as fast as my feet can carry me.
After about a hundred yards I duck down behind a wall and listen. What will happen if the man follows me? How will I get up the long steep hill to our house without him seeing me? There is nowhere to hide. Most of the hill is walled on one side from the garden of the house Auntie Sylvia loved. There are trees on the other side of the road. I try a garden door on the wall side. It is locked to deter intruders.
What will happen to me if the man in the car catches me? Will I be murdered? Will they find my body in a ditch at first light? As the rain gets heavier I remember that I dropped my raincoat escaping from the house. Will they find it there and think the worst?
What irony. This maniac will get off scot-free and innocent people will be hanged for murder. Assuming they don’t hide the coat, or sell it, or burn it.
Nothing happens.
The car has gone.
I didn’t hear it drive off. The hysterical voices in my head were much too loud.
When I get home, I am surprised to see Uncle Frank sitting in our kitchen drinking a cup of tea. He doesn’t seem as breathless or sad as usual and he is talking animatedly to Mama.
"Where have you been?" Mama asks.
"Playing at Doreen’s," I lie. "We forgot the time."
"You should have been here before it went dark," Mama shouts. "Don’t you know it’s dangerous for little girls out on the streets on their own? A man in a car could have tried to kidnap you."
Mama’s guesswork is uncanny.
"I once knew a little girl who wouldn’t accept a lift home from her own uncle," Uncle Frank is saying.
"Really," I retort. "That couldn’t happen to me."
Could it?
Mama sends me to wash my hands before a belated supper, and not another word is said about me coming home so late.
For my next birthday Uncle Frank buys me a piano. I think he likes me. I make him laugh. I’m probably the child he never had.
Maybe he’s my guardian angel. Except that he’s still alive, of course.
After Auntie Sylvia’s death, Uncle Frank has spent most of his time sitting in an armchair with a rug over his knees, listening to the wireless. He isn’t much more than middle-aged, but he looks and acts like an old man waiting for the white horses of the Apocalypse to gallop up. A while later, quite unexpectedly, he is to slip away out of this world into the next to the signature tune of "The Archers", a daily story of country folk that many Brits have in the meantime been listening to for over half a century.
I will never forget my pride and joy at the sight of my new piano, and I will revere my thin, sad, tired patron as long as my fingers have the energy to pull themselves across the ivories.

Uncle Frank is on my list of angels.

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