Nobbut a Lad Read online

  Grandma and Grandad Hardisty lived in Ash Grove, a street that ran parallel with the river. Grandad was a ganger for the council highways department – a sort of foreman – and cultivated his allotment in his spare time. He was everything a grandad should be – right down to the walrus moustache and the black trilby. Grandma Hardisty was tall and thin, with horn-rimmed spectacles and floral aprons. They were a devoted couple.

  Grandad would sit by the black range in the kitchen, slurping tea out of his saucer and smoking pipefuls of Condor tobacco, while Grandma baked biscuits in the oven next to the fire, and spooned sugar into her husband’s tea from an amber sugar bowl.

  They had two sets of boy-girl twins – Auntie Barbara (Bee) whose twin Charles had died on St Patrick’s Day when he was only six weeks old, and my mum, Bessie, and her brother, George Herbert (Bert). Between Mum and Uncle Bert there was always a sense of unspoken rivalry. They were not as close as many twins; their temperaments were probably too similar to make for easy relations.

  Auntie Bee lived with her husband, Uncle Herbert – a grumpy greengrocer – in Otley; Uncle Bert – a happier grocer – lived in Burley-in-Wharfedale with Auntie Edie, the daughter of the gamekeeper from Denton, a tiny hamlet on the hillside between Burley-in-Wharfedale and Ilkley. Each couple had two children. Most of the time they all got on reasonably well, though there were the usual family tensions.

  But Grandma and Grandad Hardisty were loved by their children and grandchildren alike, and every now and again some example of Grandad’s sentimentality would manifest itself, either in the form of the tulips, sweet williams and wallflowers that he grew alongside the path to their front door to scent the air in May or in the singing of a song.

  ‘We’ve been together now for forty years, and it don’t seem a day too much—’

  ‘Shut up, Herbert!’ my grandmother would admonish.

  ‘There ain’t a lady living in the land that I’d swap for me dear old Dutch!’

  ‘Daft beggar!’ she’d say softly, then wipe away a tear with the corner of her pinny.

  They did everything together, right to the end.

  I was eight when I broke my leg. The year was 1957. It was nothing spectacular. Someone stuck out their leg in the playground and I tripped over it. I was scooped up by Mr Wall, a teacher who wore brown tweed suits and a luxuriant moustache to match, and carried inside the school. I told him I’d broken my leg, but he didn’t believe me.

  ‘I have. I know I have.’

  ‘You’ve probably just sprained your ankle.’ He smiled an indulgent smile. ‘It might feel like a break, but it will only be a sprain.’

  It wasn’t. It was a break, and I came back to school a few weeks later with my leg in plaster – the headmistress having thoughtfully sent me work to do at home so that I wouldn’t fall behind.

  I rather enjoyed the fuss of it all. Everybody signed my plaster cast, from the headmistress to the older girls in the second form that I rather took a fancy to.

  Then came the day when I had to have the plaster cut off. We journeyed by ambulance to the hospital in Otley, where I was sized up by a particularly beefy nurse who reached inside a cupboard and pulled out what looked like a large pair of secateurs. With her tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth, the better to concentrate, she set to work snipping right down the side of the plaster. I kept deadly quiet, convinced that if she was distracted only for a second, the clippers would slip and I could say goodbye to my leg.

  After the final snip, the plaster came away, to reveal a shrunken, withered leg that was covered in wisps of cotton wool. I tried to stand on it and fell over. The nurse laughed. ‘It won’t be ready for that yet, but we’ll give you a pair of crutches and you can use them until it’s strong enough.’

  The crutches were too big and they hurt my arms. I felt particularly sorry for myself.

  The ambulance took us home again, and I sat in a chair by the fire feeling like a cross between Colin in The Secret Garden and Clara in Heidi while my mother went out for the afternoon. She was quieter than usual and I couldn’t work out why.

  Cookie, our next-door neighbour, came in to look after me, and early in the evening my mother returned, weeping. I watched as she sat down by the fire holding her head in her hands, and seeing her so upset, I burst into tears.

  That afternoon, as I had been having my plaster cut off, Grandma Hardisty had died in hospital. The doctor said it was a peaceful end. She was sixty-eight.

  My mother was distraught. When my father came home that evening, they disappeared into the kitchen together as they always did on his return from work so they could chew over the events of the day. Then the door would be opened again and family life would resume. The door stayed closed longer than usual on this particular evening, and when eventually it opened again, I could see that they were both red-eyed.

  Just a few days later I was taken to see Grandad Hardisty in hospital. He had been admitted while my grandma had also been there, but they had not told her. Neither had they told him that she had died.

  He was being treated for an ulcer. I didn’t know what that meant. I just knew he didn’t look right, lying back on the pillow with a brown rubber tube going up his nose.

  We stayed for an hour, my mother sitting by his bed and rubbing the back of his hand. Grandad didn’t say much. He was very pale.

  A few days later he died. At seventy-two, he was four years older than Grandma, but it was always she who wore the trousers.

  Once over her initial grief, my mother quickly came to terms with the simultaneous loss of both her parents, difficult as it must have been. She likely as not took the same attitude with herself when it came to health – emotional or physical – as she did with her children.

  She sat me on her knee one afternoon and tried to explain why, just a few weeks before, I had had three grandparents and now only one of them – Grandma Titchmarsh – was left.

  ‘It is,’ she said, ‘the nicest thing, really, if you think about it.’

  ‘But why? Why can it be nice that Grandma and Grandad have gone?’

  ‘Because Grandad and Grandma loved one another very much. They’d always done things together. All their lives.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Now they are together again.’

  ‘But why is that good?’ I simply could not see the logic.

  ‘Well, you see, Grandad was the man, and men are always in charge of the house.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘But Grandma could always get him to do what she wanted.’ Some parallel with her own relationship must have struck her here, as she quickly qualified the remark: ‘But only because he would always look after her and do kind things to make sure she was happy.’

  ‘So she wanted him to die?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Well, she’d probably have been lonely without him. And he wouldn’t have been able to cope without her, would he? We know that.’ Her eyes had a faraway look now. ‘So, you see, I think she just whispered in his ear, when she’d gone.’

  ‘Whispered what?’

  ‘“Come on, Herbert.” And what did your grandad do whenever your grandma said, “Come on, Herbert”?’

  I did not need to think about my reply.

  ‘He just went.’

  Mum nodded and her eyes filled with tears. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘He just went.’

  The relief must have been enormous when Mum and Dad found their own house. Number 34 Nelson Road was nothing grand. A bit bigger than 9 Dean Street, but with exactly the same number of rooms. It cost £800, and the mortgage was still being paid fourteen years later when we upped sticks as a family for the last time.

  We moved into Nelson Road in 1950 and my dad set to work to put the house to rights. He was always good with his hands and so he turned the cellar into a workshop and began to do what all couples did in the 1950s and that was to make a Victorian house into something more ‘contemporary’.

&nb
sp; The brass doorknobs were banished and the door mouldings removed. Each door was made ‘flush’ with hardboard and a smart plastic handle fixed to it at an angle of forty-five degrees. Ball catches were fitted everywhere. The doors were painted dove grey, which made a change from the dark-brown woodgrain stain that was used in both my grannies’ houses.

  Me Dad

  ‘You wait till your dad gets home.’ As a statement it doesn’t rank high in the intimidation stakes, but to lots of northern kids, ‘Dad’ represented the ultimate threat. If mine did, it was on a reluctant basis. He was never a violent man. Quite the reverse. He would do almost anything for a quiet life, but when rattled by my bad behaviour, he could run up the stairs three at a time with the whalebone hairbrush, even though he was only five feet eight.

  I have the feeling that Dad considered himself the odd one out in his family. His father had died at the age of fifty-seven, when Dad was twenty, leaving a determined and beady-eyed widow, a daughter who was resigned to a life of disappointment and two sons – James and Alan.

  Uncle Jim was nine years older than Dad, which would account, in part, for their lack of closeness as brothers. The other reason for their distancing could be put down to the fact that temperamentally they had little in common. Uncle Jim was lively and outgoing, a man who could spin out the simplest of stories to extravagant length. He was a dreadful joke-teller at our rare family parties and had a laugh that never quite made it into a guffaw. ‘Tzzz, tzzz, tzzz,’ it would go, and I could see my father bristling with irritation.

  You could never call Dad irascible. Irritated, yes. And uncomfortable when his family embarrassed him. He positively bridled when Uncle Jim referred to him as ‘our kid’. As a result he never sought out the company of his brother, or of his sickly sister; it was enough to turn up for the annual Boxing Day ordeal over the baize-covered table. At the end of the day we would leave with Dad under a cloud, ground down by the inconsequentialities of stilted conversation, and at the same time relieved that it was all over and done for another year. As far as his family was concerned, parties were not his strong point.

  At home, he could be quiet and withdrawn, but not always in an unhappy way. My mother was a demanding woman to live with. She liked my dad at home with her, not out with the lads, as he was a couple of nights a week. When he came home from work on Christmas Eve afternoon having had a drink too many at lunchtime, he would be greeted with a tight-lipped silence. But he knew it would blow over if he kept his head down. She liked attention and most of the time Dad was happy to give it to her, but he could also retreat into his ‘Yes, dear’ mode, behind the pages of the Daily Express, which he could eke out for hours. My dad was the only person I knew who would read in detail the small ads in a national newspaper. For as long as it was held up in front of his face, he would be assured of peace and quiet.

  I wouldn’t want to make him sound humourless. He wasn’t. Silly things would amuse him. He’d come downstairs from having a bath, beaming with delight and say, ‘No links!’ meaning that he’d filled the bath right up to the brim so that not a single link on the plug chain had been visible. He was not a man for aftershave, as a rule – reserving his Old Spice for special occasions – but he did come down from the bathroom one evening with the same beaming grin, saying, ‘I’ve got everything on.’ The tang of Old Spice was overlaid with that of Johnson’s Baby Powder, which he clearly regarded as the height of sophistication.

  He had phrases that he liked to use; ‘It’s immaterial to me’ being one of them. ‘I don’t mind’ would have done just as well, but he liked the word ‘immaterial’. Mum said he got it from Perry Mason.

  Deep down he was probably disappointed that he hadn’t made more of his life. Even when he was called up during the war, he was not allowed to join the navy – the service he would have preferred – because he had flat feet. Instead, he joined the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) and went out to India to repair tyres for Jeeps and lorries. He left school with no qualifications and became apprenticed to a plumber – three-quarter-inch nipples and ballcocks were his stock in trade for the rest of his life. He thought they might have made use of his skills when he was called up, and said he didn’t remember mentioning tyres anywhere on the form.

  Plumbing was not something he was passionate about. It was just what he did, where he found himself. He was never particularly ambitious, though there was a moment, towards the end of the 1950s, when he and Mum thought of emigrating to Canada, but it came to nothing. Dad would like as not have brought his usual caution to bear and thought the better of it.

  Where he came into his own was around the house. He had an ‘eye for a job’, and while not exactly in the Colefax and Fowler class, his sense of proportion when it came to domestic construction was finely developed. Be it a breakfast bar or bookshelves, a new set of cupboards or a toy zoo, Dad could produce soundly made masterpieces from a few lengths of deal and some hardboard. What he could achieve with twenty feet of two-by-one and some quarter-inch ply was astonishing.

  ‘Couldn’t we make it more modern?’ Mum asked, eyeing the front room up and down, glowering at the floor-to-ceiling cupboard in the corner and the blackened range that dominated her life. ‘We could go contemporary.’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’ My dad never expressed an audible opinion about interior design; Mum was the driving force, Dad the craftsman.

  The range, with its glossy black doors and shiny steel hinges, was ripped out to reveal a yawning black hole, and replaced with a tiny cream-tiled fireplace whose colour was something between biscuit and beige.

  Dad’s vade mecum would be Do-It-Yourself magazine. Here were black-and-white pictures of a man in a collar and tie, smoking a pipe and sawing up a length of wood. There were complicated diagrams of kitchen units that seemed to have exploded, and handy hints on how to make your cylinder cupboard blend into the background on your landing. Mind you, Dad never had much time for Barry Bucknell, the handyman on the BBC, who had his panel pins already knocked in. ‘He’s made it all before,’ muttered Dad, as though the broadcaster was cheating. Dad’s preferred viewing was Whirlybirds, about two American helicopter pilots, Chuck and P.T. I think he’d have liked to have flown a helicopter, but in reality his life was much more grounded. He had his dreams, but stuck to what he was good at, and one by one the banes of Mum’s 1950s’ life would be replaced with modern counterparts.

  Having been briefed by Mum as to her requirements, he would riffle through Do-It-Yourself every month for inspiration on how her dreams could be realised, and in the main they were. The kitchen cabinet with the drop-down front that gave out a high-pitched squeak as it was lowered into place on its metal rods was ousted in favour of the breakfast bar and buffets.

  Fitted wardrobes replaced the fumed-oak monument in Mum and Dad’s bedroom, and when my sister arrived and I moved up into the attic, fitted bookshelves and a desk were built against the wall and covered in dark-grey marble-effect Fablon. It was a feature I was ridiculously proud of – not just because it was better than the piddling little wooden desk that Mickey Hudson had in his bedroom, but because my dad had made it with his own bare hands.

  None of the other dads in the street seemed to do anything like that. They could hang a bit of wallpaper and put a new plug on an electric fire, but those were jobs that anyone could do. They shied away from anything structural. But my dad could do everything.

  He fitted a solid-fuel boiler in the kitchen, to take over the role of the big black range, and plumbed radiators into the bedrooms. They weren’t new; he’d pulled them out of some house up The Grove where they were being replaced with newer models, but he thought they’d be ‘just the job’ for us, so he brought them home and plumbed them in.

  I’d crouch down beside him while he worked away in his blue bib-and-brace overalls, smelling of putty and flux and that funny soft rope he used to seal the joints.

  The blowlamp would roar as he melted the solder on the copper piping,
and eventually would come the magic moment when he’d turn on the water supply.

  ‘Put your hand on it, Algy, and tell me when it gets hot.’

  I would lay my hand on the top of the fat, creamy-coloured radiator and wait.

  ‘It’s there, Dad!’

  ‘Is it hot, or just warm?’

  I felt again. ‘It’s warm at the top, but it’s hot lower down.’

  ‘Hang on.’ He’d wearily climb back up the stairs and pull a small brass key out of his pocket, slotting it over the tiny nut at the top right-hand corner of the radiator. The air would come out with a hiss as he turned it, and eventually there would be the sound of bubbling and spitting, and a little squirt of blackened water would dribble into the plastic beaker he held underneath it, so as not to make a mess on Mum’s rug.

  Every night at bedtime this process was repeated by Mum. It became a sort of ritual. I assumed that’s what you had to do with any form of central heating. It seemed a small price to pay for the warmth it provided. My dad never did let me into the intricacies of airlocks in plumbing, but then in our tall, narrow Victorian house they were probably a mystery to him, too.

  On Friday nights Mum and Dad would go out together, but on Tuesdays Dad went out alone. To the fire station to do maintenance. He was a part-time fireman, Ilkley being too small to warrant a full-time crew. Instead, the engine was manned by local tradesmen and council workers, who would drop everything when the ‘fire buzzer’ wailed over the town, or during the night when the electric bell at the bottom of the stairs rang.

  Dad would be up and out of bed within seconds, pulling on his trousers and shirt and fastening his shoes while muttering under his breath before running out of the door to the fire station in Golden Butts Road, two streets away.

  If the buzzer went during the day, you’d see the firemen drop what they were doing and hare along the streets of the town. The engine took a limited crew of eight men, and only those who were quick enough or close enough to get there first would be paid the full whack. The others would be on standby.