I used to start cycling at the back of the house, wobble unsteadily around the tight Oil Storage Tank corner with its faint but persistent petroleum whiff, build up speed down the crackling side path against the wooden weave fence, emerge into the daylight beyond the rose garden to complete a celebratory and triumphant sweep of the upper lawn before crossing the gravel driveway to the tarmac path on the other side of the house, past the basket ball hoop, over the slippery moss and back to my starting point.
Unbeknownst to me, I was tracing an infinity of infinity symbols – a ‘meta-infinity’, I suppose. How cool was that? My own children love the concept of infinity. I must tell them.
This was the route I sprinted down, my brother Bill’s hot breath singeing my back, after I had spent most of the afternoon baiting him. Bill was the closest man to a saint I have ever met or I ever will meet, and extremely hard to provoke, but I discovered that with careful training, and after a good night’s sleep, if I focused carefully and watched out for tell-tale twitches, I could finally persuade him to chase me exhilaratingly around the house before my parents managed to net him still frothing at the mind and swearing vengeance with diminishing breath and heaving body. There was a downside to this gratifying game. I was condemned promptly to bed to watch TV. It was that TV that was cited as the reason why I was sent away to a boarding school at the age of seven as a hopeless TV-addict with an unbreakable hour-and-a half-a-day habit unless incarcerated for my own good.
I am not sure whether this infinity which I repeatedly sketched subconsciously suggested that I wanted this way of life to last forever or whether it was rather a commentary on how endless the days seemed. That was the paradox of my life then. I was deeply loved, deeply loving and mostly alone, left determinedly to entertain myself. “Intelligent people do not get bored,” my mother would pronounce should I raise any hint of a complaint.
The problem was that I was ten years younger than my brother Bill, twelve years younger than my sister Carolyn and fourteen years younger than my sister Sally. In their time, my siblings were company for each other, as were the farm animals and the occasional passing German bomber. My sisters in particular were so removed from me by age that they were more like young aunts. Besides, Carolyn and Bill were away at school and Sally was working all day at Hawker Siddeley until she got married when I was five. By the time I turned up, my parents’ friends no longer had children my age and my parents did not yet know others who did. Suzie Craven, the daily help, was very kind to me, but she had fires to set and rooms to dust. Mrs. Liscombe had all that ironing to do when she visited us once a week and my mother committed herself to the ‘sweeper job’ of additional housework and cooking.
The house I was brought up in was an eight-bedroom mansion called Welton Rise opposite the church in the village of Welton, ten miles west of Hull. It had been built around 1900 as a vicarage at a time when the vicar was still the pride (or scourge) of the parish. It was the first house in the area to have central heating installed. I had four of those bedrooms to myself down a separate landing from the main ebb and flow of the house – my playroom and my bedroom (which I switched around regularly, possibly fearing impending assassination) and two attic rooms, one of which was usually covered in dead bees and the other permanently covered in a dead town. My father, who was no handyman, had built it for Bill to complement the Hornby Double-O train track he was giving him for his birthday. He had mapped out streets and hospital grounds, the railway station and a river, fields and parks in paint on the floor. He had even made a stack of wooden block buildings and a ship. Bill never played once with this intricately detailed landscape. He preferred the railway of the mind. Worse, I didn’t either. By the time I got my hands on it, the Hornby engine merely sat there braying angrily like an iron donkey threatening to burn the place down or at least to melt the wires.
Instead, I used this space as my table-tennis area. I had discovered that if I correctly angled the adjustable bedside table and hit the ball hard enough, the ball would loop back over the net poised enticingly for the next smash. As long as I kept smashing accurately, I kept playing. Carolyn was a University of London half-blue in table tennis who had doubtless acquired a full range of skilled manoeuvres (although I can never remember actually playing her). I only had one – the forehand smash – which I played from every angle every time. By way of variation in later life I learnt to smash off the backhand too but in those earlier days a backhand meant that the ball invariably bounced off my forefinger and hit the ceiling or a wall.
At night, I slept all alone down this side corridor closed off from the rest of the house. My mother would read me a chapter of a book – my favourite was ‘The Wind Over The Moon’ – and then kiss me fondly but resolutely good night.
“You haven’t kissed me yet,” I would invariably plead.
“Yes, I have.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“Sleep tight, darling, there’s a good boy and we’ll see you in the morning, not too early, and make sure that the bugs don’t bite.”
With that, my mother would descend the back stairs to rejoin the continuous party that was taking place directly below me between her and my father. Delivering the eulogy at my mother’s funeral, I listed many of my mother’s endearing and admirable characteristics, and indeed those of my father as well. Afterwards, a long-time friend of theirs, Doreen Harriott, came up to me and said “Parties. I will always associate parties with your parents. They always had such wonderful parties, and so many of them.” For me I principally recall the solitude but I was later to discover that while loneliness was bad, society could prove a whole torture chamber worse.
This is all by way of digression. I was intending to describe my garden to you.
Behind the house there was a top driveway with three prominent features. The first was a greenhouse which had been carefully placed in the shade where Charlie Craven and Mr. Ashby, the gardeners, used to pot up. Being entirely without direct sunshine, it was useless for growing things to maturity, but with the constant background heat of a paraffin lamp over winter it kept the frost off the plants. Next to it was a one-horse stable which no longer stabled the one horse which Sally and Carolyn used to ride. It did however contain all sorts of fascinating and grimy relics including a feeding trough, a nose bag and cord, various metal pails, a hay fork and assorted harness, all patiently awaiting a good scrub and re-employment while being functionally beyond repair. The most fascinating item there was a full-body gas mask which must have been distributed by the wartime government for Sally’s protection should the Hun get up to its nasty tricks again. It was like a small sinister diving bell which you dropped the baby into before tightly securing the overlapping flaps at the back with laces. On the side there was some concertinaed hosing that the baby’s mother must use to pump air through to her child. Apparently this ominous contraption was never used, which is as well because it would almost certainly have traumatised Sally for life to have been trapped for hours inside that monstrosity.
The third building was a breeze block double garage situated at the end of the driveway. There was a famous story attached to this. When Bill was ten, my father decided that he needed some more get up and go. So he backed out of the garage the three-litre Austin Healey sports car that he had supposedly bought my mother in compensation for my birth (but which only he ever drove) and proceeded to give Bill a driving lesson. He explained to him which pedal did what and tried to lead him through the complex task of how to synchronise the use of the accelerator and the clutch. After a few repetitions he asked Bill whether he understood. Uncertainly, Bill thought that possibly he did, he wasn’t quite sure. My father pressed ahead, instructing Bill to fire up the engine and gently engage the accelerator. Bill was extremely nervous and there ensued a couple of demented kangaroo hops before the engine stalled.
“Let’s try again,” my father encouraged him. “This time don’t be afraid to push down the accelerator more firmly.”
Bill took him at his word, kicking it flat to the floor while at the same time losing control of the clutch. Whatever the Austin Healey’s official 0-60 mph performance, it did it until well the other side of the garage wall, throwing my father heals over head into the cramped well to the back of the seats. My mother heard a very loud and sudden bang and ran out to investigate. She was met with the sight of Bill sitting in the driving seat with two tumescent black eyes and my father struggling to extricate himself from behind his seat. With her calm poise, my mother turned on my father and said “Of all the men I could have married, why did I go and marry a fool?” before swooping urgently to comfort a profoundly distressed and shocked Bill. Both the car and the garage were promptly rebuilt.
I bawled for days when my father sold that Austin Healey even though it nearly castrated me when I slipped down the boot and snagged my scrotum on the hooked boot handle, requiring copious consolation and six stitches. In the meantime it was the scene of another of my father and Bill’s intermittent comic double-act escapades. One Christmas Eve we had to ferry a great-aunt to the local Brough railway station to catch the last train into Hull. My father decided to take the Austin Healey, open topped despite the snow, and grabbed Bill for good measure to accompany them. My father’s favourite trick in the snow was to swing the Austin Healey around the corner at the bottom of the hill in a ninety degrees Christie handbrake turn, so he did one of those, pleasingly extracting a series of excitable squawks from the great-aunt. “Oh, Charlie, you are a devil.” When they reached the station, the car fuelled by petrol and my father by alcohol, the last train was drawing away. My father stood up in the car and yelled “Stop! Stop!” Miraculously the train did. My father seized the great-aunt amid another flurry of startled squawks and propelled her by the elbow towards the clanking grinding hissing train in order to shoe-horn her on. “You can go now, British Rail,” my father called and the train pulled away again. A few seconds later, an extremely irate train guard emerged from further down the platform screaming. “You bloody fool. You have just sent my train away and there isn’t another one until Boxing Day.” My father turned to Bill and said “Sometimes it is better just to run,” and they did. Several years afterwards my father was introduced by Gerald Appleyard, a customer in London, to somebody high up (so to speak) in the London Underground and, by way of conversation (not something my father ever struggled to generate), recounted the story as being intrinsically related to train and track. This well-positioned man reciprocated a few weeks later by sending him two flags – one red and one green – and a whistle courtesy of London Underground.
The final use of the top drive was as my rifle range. I used to crouch against the fence and shoot tiny Airfix soldiers from a platform directly to the right of the back door. I claimed repeatedly to have turned myself into quite a good shot although my mother was careful never to pop her head around the corner to test my assertions whilst I was practising. One day I turned the gun round and shot at random into the paddock next door until I heard a startled whinny. I felt rather guilty about that for days in case I had actually shot the horse. I have since discovered that a surprising number of people I know were wounded by air gun pellets during their childhoods.
Down the side of the house, off the dining room, there was a conservatory with fitted hardboard benches which had seen better days and would survive to see worse until we sold the house and the conservatory was knocked down. Each year it produced a reasonable crop of nectarines and a solitary peach which the birds mostly got to before we did.
Directly in front of the house there was a rose garden and a parsley patch. My mother used to love roses and feed them constant nutritional ash and horse manure which benefited the parsley (of the frizzy kind) too. Apparently you should always grow parsley and roses together.
Beyond that there was the top lawn which was also my cricket pitch number one. Elderly relatives and passing strangers were co-opted into bowling at me at a frequency of about one Sunday in the month. I remember that Carolyn’s boyfriend, Mike Roberts, was especially accommodating. There was also a large swing hammock which I used to love to sit in as it squeaked with the flaps down, and it was the site of my father’s well-oiled extemporised impersonation of Napoleon Bonaparte (don’t ask) captured on camera.
It also witnessed my father’s proudest hunting moment, when he leant out of the main bedroom window and bagged two rabbits with one shot, leading him to nickname himself ‘Deadshot Hewtson’ for several weeks which stretched out into several years. We never ate the rabbits who were eating my mother’s roses. One of them was pregnant and my mother couldn’t face it.
The bottom lawn was my exclusive domain apart from when my mother appeared mid-morning with a fork to dig over the flower beds or a trowel to attack the rockery borders, as she would always describe these operations. It had two huge fir trees which formed natural dens beneath their expansive prehensile foliage and a tree house, and sloped down into a dell which produced snowdrops, daffodils then crocuses to metre the first months of the year. The dell was bordered by some excellent ladder-like trees which almost allowed me to reach the top of them in order to clandestinely monitor activities in the churchyard below, not that there were many. The entombed were still mostly dead although one continued to amuse my mother by declaring from his headstone that he had been married seven times and now he was resting in peace.
I could also watch out for the red Indians who were continuously stalking me in order to rob me of my scalp and roast me alive. Given that I have always chosen to support the underdog, it surprises me that I chose to be a cowboy peering out between those leaves rather than an Indian. However in those days the cowboys were plain-to-plain heroic settlers and the Indians were sneaky invidious predators. Some are born with second sight, others of us have reconstruction thrust upon us.
These trees also overlooked ‘the tennis court’ as the final part of the garden, should you fear that I was getting cramped in there. Carolyn loved tennis but after she left to marry Steve, or even before then, I converted it to being cricket pitch number two over the summer and a goal mouth over the winter months, definitively putting paid to its career as a tennis court when the grass failed to recover. In the summer I used to bowl down there for hours with nobody to defend the stumps. In winter I used to practice bending shots into the goal or blasting them straight down the middle. One day, some village boys asked me over the wall if they could join in. I was momentarily so shaken that anybody should suddenly threaten to intrude on my lonesome world that I stood there stammering by way of reply before I ran off and hid from both them and the red Indians simultaneously. I should, of course, have invited them in. There were no rules as to whom I could or could not play with, although nice little boys with clean white socks, washed faces and combed hair were probably preferred.
The tennis court was also where I managed to provoke my father to his greatest moment of anger with me where he actually let slip the word ‘gump’. I think I heard him say ‘bugger’ a few times, but ‘gump’ was so much worse. Usually my father was as hard to provoke as Bill, except in the case of Bill. On this occasion, I had overheard him say that he wanted to demolish a wall. I thought I knew exactly to which wall he was referring and did my bit towards its deconstruction. It was, of course, the wrong wall. “You gump!” he fumed and stomped off to tell my mother (an infinitely scarier prospect).
Ten years later my parents built their retirement house on this tennis court. Within twenty years my father had collapsed into one of the flower beds surrounding it thus revealing the onset of the prostate cancer which would duly kill him. He died looking out over the wall which would have blocked his view through the spring trees over towards the church and into its graveyard except for the fact that I had mistakenly trimmed it in another lifetime. In fact, my father chose to be cremated. He didn’t want to be buried in the cemetery and be forced to look back as a solitary bystander on his family as it continued to party away. I taught him that.
