He stepped smartly down the narrow thirteen steps of the staircase which ran from the bedroom landing to the cramped hallway by the front door. His shoes clumped noisily on each step for the short time it took to negotiate the steps. His grey flannel long trousers, his first pair, hung an inch and a half above the stout black shoes on his feet. They were too small, but had little chance yet of being replaced. He had chosen these shoes at the outset of his new school year, two years ago. In a display of petulance he had insisted on the thick soled heavy unsightly black leather shoes, simply because his father had insisted he could not have the thin fashionable Italian pair he had set his eyes on. Now, almost two years later, he was paying for the petulance. The shoes were too small for his growing feet and would have to last almost another year before a new pair was bought.
His father never had money left over to buy new clothes, especially school uniform clothes. These were his first long trousers bought for him since he had started Grammar School, and though he was rapidly outgrowing them it would be something of a miracle as to when they would be replaced. The knees were running thin do to the cheapness of the flannel material. All that his father could afford at the time they were bought. Occasionally, he thought, mum would have bought me new ones by now. No, that was wrong. The thought passed through his mind almost every day, that and the thought of new shoes. The ones he wore had been outgrown at the same time as the trousers, and the shirts he used for school. Despite everything, he was growing, and fast.
He was fourteen now and had had been bought the majority of the school uniform just before he started his first year at Grammar School when he was just a few months before his twelfth birthday and a few weeks following the death of his mother.
His mother. Every day he thought of her. Almost every day he had wondered if she really was dead, after all nobody had every told him that she was dead. He had simply been told that she had collapsed. On his return home from school that hot friday afternoon his sister and her future husband were in the back garden as he opened the gate into the garden. She was being held by her fiance. In the house his sister and her future husband stood before the fireplace. She held out her arm to him, “Oh Alan, “ she gasped, tears filling her eyes,” Mum’s collapsed.” He burst into tears and bawled, unsure what the word collapsed meant. He dropped his school bag to the floor and flung his arms around his older sister. Had she just fainted? Had she just dropped to the floor? Nobody told him she was dead, not until he spoke to the sister when he was 55 and told her of the incident. “Well she is dead,” the sister had said.
For months after that Friday afternoon in June he had wished her to be alive, to be in some hospital somewhere recovering. That he would come in from school and find her sitting in her armchair waiting for him with that smile. As the months drew on he knew she was dead, but still, nobody had said she was dead, nobody mentioned her. Like she had never existed. God how he missed her.
A few days later following her death he was sent to stay with friends of the family. A man and woman he had never met who had a young daughter and two Pekingese dogs which snapped at him each time they say saw him. He had never been so unhappy. The weather was fine and sunny, so he played in the garden most of the day so that he would not have to talk to anyone else. Many times he cried quietly to himself hiding behind the metal sided shed at the bottom of the garden. He had nobody. During the days he stayed with the family his mother was laid to rest. He was never told when or how or told he could go to the funeral or couldn’t. Death was to be kept away from the young at all costs. The implications were long term and went on to form a major part of Alan’s life.
Some weeks after her death the memories of her refused to leave his mind. Two or three times during the night, whilst still in the last throws of summer, Alan lay in his bed talking to his brother in the other single bed in their room. Summer sun still shone through the curtains behind him and against the opposite wall where his younger brother lay. “What was it like?” he asked, “You know. When you were on the bus with mum. What happened?” His brother turned onto his back and looked up at the ceiling. Alan could easily make out his shape in the fading light. “I can’t remember.” he said. “You must be able to remember something” Alan urged him gently, desperate to be able to picture anything about her last moments. “She sort of fell against the side of the seat” was all he could bring to mind. Then he turned over and went back to sleep.
Alan pictured her in his mind, seated on the long three seater seats immediately to the left of the open entrance to the double decker bus. It was early afternoon on a hot Friday in June. She had been shopping in town with her youngest son and had had to rush to catch the bus. Soon after sitting herself and her son on the bus she had had a massive heart attack and almost immediately died. So the post mortem said. Now all Alan had left were the memories and thoughts, and as the months bore on, the memories did not diminish or go away. For years he thought of her and tried to force his memory to remember incidents from his life which involved her. Like being picked up and sat on her left arm as she stood by the front garden gate talking with a neighbour. Again during a hot summer, he must have been no more than three at the time or he would have been too old to have been picked up by her. He remembered after a few minutes wriggling around on her arm as the back of his legs resting on her arm had become numb, so she put him down.
And now, two years on, during the previous summer, his younger brother had died too, and his father was even more bereft, more sullen and depressed, even fewer words passed between them. His had died in hospital from Leukaemia, aged six. A nurse in the hospital who came to know my brother and father once told him that they had never seen so many childhood leukaemia cases as they had now. This was just a couple of years after the fire at the nuclear power plant at Windscale in Cumbria. Hushed up, swept under the carpet, but the number of cancer cases, particularly in children, grew and grew for several years in the counties forming the west coast of England. No government enquiry, no government acceptance that there was a problem. Swept under the carpet. Hidden from sight.
When his father had work to do in his job as a self employed joiner he would be gone from home by the time he rose for school and often did not arrive home until after he had arrive back from school. Today was different. It was winter and work was thin on the ground. In fact it had been some weeks since he had had a job, and so the little money he had, had dried up. What food there had been had grown more and more meagre. Now, this morning in February there was nothing in the house to eat before he left for school, and the fire had burned out during the night. There was no more coal. The house was cold and often during the cold days and nights he would wake to find frost on the inside of his bedroom window. This morning was no exception. As he had pulled by the think curtains they tugged in his hand against the adhesion of frost on the glass. He looked at the worn thin curtain to see where it had been held fast by the ice on the inside of the glass, and gently eased it away from the glass. Dim winter light had cast a thin light over the bedroom as he dressed himself in the half light and made his way downstairs.
His father was sat in the old wooden green cottage style armchair in front of the empty fireplace. The grate was cold and contained nothing but the ashes from the last pieces of coal scraped from the corners of the coal hole which formed part of the kitchen. “Morning Dad”, he said. His father looked up and returned the greeting, then without a further word continued to stare blankly into the fireplace. A mug of instant coffee lay on the carpet by the side of the chair. Without looking away from the bare fireplace he reached down and lifted the mug to his lips and sipped quietly at the half warm liquid. There was nothing to eat for his breakfast, or for his son.
“Do you want a brew Alan?” his father asked, and made to rise from the chair. Alan held out his hand to stop his father from rising. “Okay dad I’ll make it.” he said and went through into the kitchen to put the last of the cheap instant coffee and sugar into a mug, then poured water from the kettle into the mug. With the mug in his hand he walked back into the living room and sat in the other wooden armchair, the one his father had made for his wife but now normally used only by Alan. The room was cold and dark. The electricity had been disconnected by the electricity company because the bill had not been paid, so the water for the coffee had been boiled in a small pan on the fire using the last of the coal in the fireplace. Now that was gone. He sat for a few minutes sipping at the lukewarm brew, trying to finish it as quickly as he could in order to escape to school. Rising from his seat he took the mug into the kitchen and rinsed it under the cold water tap. The warm water from the last of the heat in the boiler had finished. As he placed the mug on the draining board he glanced though the kitchen window and out over the bedraggled garden. The Cherry tree was nude of leaves. The Californian poppies at the bottom of the right hand flower bed were almost dishevelled down to the soil level. Maybe next summer they would flower again. The grass on the lawn had not been cut before the end of summer and was long and now yellowing in the winter cold. Even the shed at the bottom of the garden his father used as a workshop looked to be on its last legs. Maybe it would last a few years more. Maybe not.
Going back into the living room he went through into the small hallway where coats were hung and took his school blazer and fawn mackintosh from their hook by the stairs. Struggling into the now too small jacket he then pulled on the waterproof mackintosh and buttoned it. Picking his school bad from its place by the foot of the stairs he took hold of the door knob of the door into the living room and leaned forward to poke his head around the door. “See you tonight dad,” he said. His father grunted a reply and sipped from his mug of coffee, by now cold. Alan pulled the door closed and opened the front door. The cold from outside hit him full on in the face. Despite the cold in his bedroom and the house in general, it was still far colder outside. Cold and damp and a sky filled with grey clouds threatening snow. He pulled the mackintosh closer around him and giving a shiver, started out to school, feeling as miserable and unhappy today as most other days for the past two and a half years.
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