Mick’s ninety year old mom had moved into a nursing home, close to where he lived in Nottingham so he could take care of her in her final years. But she still owned her home close by to my parents in London. He was down from the Midlands renovating the house in order to rent it on her behalf. He asked me if I’d help him and of course I said “yes”. While at his mom’s slim old house I realized that, in all the fifty years I had known him, I had never actually been inside his family home. As we replaced worn out sinks, cleaned up bathrooms, and laid new brown carpet I asked him which was his bedroom when he was a kid. He told me he never had one, well only for a short time. I was shocked. Here I was in the house that nurtured him, which he had left at fifteen years of age to come live with us before he signed on for the Royal Navy, and it was only now, half a century later that the pieces of his early life sailed into view. For the first time ever he told me about the house and his grandfather. This is that story.
“I remember my grandfather vividly. His name was Arthur, like that of that legendary King of England. The four of us all lived together: my grandparents, my mom, and me. I shared a bedroom with my mom while my grandparents had the other bedroom. It was the 1950s. We had no television, telephone, or fridge. We kept the butter on a marble slab so it wouldn’t melt in summer. I remember grandad as being small, about five feet six, thin in face with a roman nose. He had a good head of hair even up to his death. He was slightly stooped and walked with a limp, a reminder of his time as a private in the Middlesex Regiment during the First World War. The wound was the result of shrapnel buried deep in his leg during the battle of the Somme. His was the fourth party to be ordered to take a German observation post. The first three parties had been annihilated. I remember the story he told me: “We were ordered onto the Somme. The mud was so heavy and thick that two soldiers who had bayoneted each other died standing up, their legs held fast by the black muck, stuck like statues. We passed them as we marched up to the front on our way to certain death.” But he didn’t die. They took the objective. He was wounded in the battle and sent home. He never got over the war.
Our house was important to him. It was his one asset. He and my grandmother had had to move to South London from North London because theirs was a mixed marriage – not mixed along racial lines, but religious ones. He was Protestant and she was Catholic. It’s almost forgotten now, but a hundred years ago there were fights, particularly in the Tottenham area, between the two religious factions. I remember my grandfather telling me that after school the tough lads would tie string around their caps, and twirl them like a scythe. The hard rubber peaks would cause serious pain if it clocked your enemy around the face. Both families frowned upon my grandparent’s marriage, and so they moved to this little house. But it cost them contact with the rest of the family I think my grandmother’s brother had been a judge in North London and had done very well for himself.
After I was born my grandfather struggled through a serious of odd jobs. I remember he worked as a car park attendant for the Granada Cinema in Kingston. He would catch the 667 trolley bus to his job. I would sometimes join him. I was a youngster then, not yet in my teens, but I helped him take the silver sixpences and shillings from the customers, shining bright in the palm of my unblemished hands. We would stay warm in the attendant’s wooden hut during the winter months, huddled around the heater like soldiers. He told me stories about the war and our family as we listened to the BBC on the radio. Saturday was a big day. It was busy at the movies and he was constantly parking cars as I collected the coins. We would listen to the football results on the radio just before five o’clock. He wanted to know how his Spurs were doing and whether he had been successful that weekend on the football pools.
He loved the wireless. I remember him returning home at night, sitting in the front room in his wing-tipped easy chair, smoking his pipe, listening, occasionally moving the dial through the many voices and languages of Europe. There, listed on the tuner, were names like Monte Carlo, Luxemburg, Paris and Moscow: an escape to foreign lands and another time just like all those years ago when he camped under the stars dreaming of innocent times.
I remember sitting on his knee, happy to be close to him.
Things changed dramatically after Grandma died. She had contracted food poisoning. It was so severe that she was hospitalized for life in Teddington hospital. When she eventually passed to the other side my grandfather became very depressed. He moved out of his bedroom and set up a bed in the dark, small wedge-shaped cupboard under the stairs. For the first time in my life I had my own bedroom as my mother moved into the now vacated other bedroom. But it was a sad situation. My grandfather would stay behind his slanted closed door almost for the whole day, hardly coming out. He pinned newspaper cuttings to the wall as if he was back in the trenches. My mom was angry, and worried, when he started to burn candles in the low ceilinged room rather than using the single naked light bulb. He could have set the whole house on fire.
The winter of 1957 granddad contracted pneumonia. My mom and I had to move him from his hide-away and back upstairs in his bedroom, so the doctor could visit and check on him. I’ll never forget the November day he died. I was twelve. It was very cold. I was busy laying a fire in the front room. My mom had the oven on in the kitchen. “What do you want for breakfast?” she shouted to me. Before I could answer we heard a thud from upstairs. My mom looked worried. She lit a cigarette. I’ll always remember that smell of burning tobacco. “You go up and check on him” she ordered. Sheepishly, I climbed the stairs and looked in the room. He had fallen on the floor. I noticed that he had **** the bed. I was horrified. I touched his body. He was dead. I was sure. I ran down and told my mother. She went upstairs and checked on her dad and then told me to run down the road to the public telephone box and call 999.
When they came to get his body my mom didn’t want me to see my grandfather that final time. Young people were not supposed to see the dead in case they were scarred for life. I was confined to the kitchen. I was not even allowed to attend the funeral. But I had to clean out his bedroom in the cupboard under the stairs, remove the press clippings from the walls, and tidy up his few remaining possessions. Inside I shut the door and sat in the darkness and thought about his life, and what he had given me, as he retreated back to the trenches: his dugout of dreams.”
Dugout of Dreams
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