Mr Starlight. Laurie Graham

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ could get more time on the piano.

      I loved my music. Mam had children sent to her for lessons who had to be threatened with the stick before they’d practise, but not me. And I caught on fast, too. Mam wasn’t a great one for dishing out praise but she did tell me once I had natural ability.

      Sel was a wakeful type of baby and he only had to see me lift the lid of the piano to start smiling. That’s how I picture us then: him propped up in the corner of the couch, big and bonny, blowing bubbles and dribbling down his bib, and me playing him my little pieces, still too short to reach the pedals.

      After he learned to walk he’d tag along behind me everywhere and on school mornings, when I had to go and leave him, he’d cry as though his heart was broken.

      Mam’d say, ‘You’re too soft, Cledwyn. Just walk out of the door and don’t be so daft. Babies are meant to cry.’

      I never really understood the wisdom of that.

      So me and Sel were close from the beginning although, of course, as the years went by we had our ups and downs. By the time he started at Bright Street I was nearly ready to move on to the big school. I didn’t want him trailing behind me, expecting me to play with him like I did at home, but one thing about Sel, wherever he went people liked him. He made some little friends of his own that first week and that was how he carried on. He was no footballer and I don’t even remember him joining in a game of conkers, but he got along with the girls, like Vera Muddimer and Joan Wagstaff, skipping with a rope and playing Kings and Queens and getting up little concerts. He joined the Cub Scouts but he only went once. He said, ‘I’m not going back.’

      And Mam said, ‘You don’t have to, darling, not if you don’t like it.’

      I said, ‘You made me go. You said I had to persevere.’

      ‘Selwyn’s cut from a different cloth,’ she said. ‘He’s not tough, like you.’

      So he was allowed to stay at home and develop what Mam called ‘the domestic arts’. Stitching an S on all his hankies. Rearranging Mam’s ornaments. Decorating biscuits. Dilys used to bring bags of mis-shapes home from Oven Fresh and he loved titivating them with coloured icing and silver balls. He could be quite artistic. I was already working at Greely’s by the time he passed for the Grammar School. I said to Mam, ‘I hope he’ll get on all right there.’

      ‘Why wouldn’t he?’ she said.

      I was worried about him because the Grammar School was boys only. I said, ‘He’s going to miss Joan and Vera.’

      ‘Selwyn makes friends wherever he goes,’ she said. ‘And there’s time enough for girls later.’

      And it was true, he did have the knack of playing the fool and winning folks over, even the ones who called him a sissy. It was as though he was daring the whole world not to like him.

      When Dilys was eighteen she started walking out with Arthur Persons. Mam never let them out of her sight. They had to keep the door open while they said goodnight out on the front step, even if there was a gale blowing, and if she couldn’t be in the room supervising them, I had to keep watch.

      ‘Play your new piece for Arthur,’ Mam’d say, which meant she needed to go outside and pay a penny and I was supposed to guard our Dilys’s virtue.

      Poor Arthur. He endured two years of that while they saved up for a bed and some easy chairs, and then they got married, in the spring of 1933. The wedding took place at Miller Street Congregational. Dilys wore a blue suit made for her by Mrs Grimley and Uncle Teilo walked her up the aisle, our dad having had to rush away to Gloucester to follow up a business opportunity. Me and Selwyn were attendants. I wasn’t keen but Dilys begged me. I was twelve years old by then and I’d seen some of the get-ups attendants were expected to wear. There were often weddings round the corner at St Botolph’s and I’d seen boys dressed in velveteen and lacy collars. But Mam said there’d be nothing like that, just a bath the night before and a nice clean shirt and tie, so I agreed. Sel had long white socks and new shoes, and he carried a lucky cardboard horseshoe to give to the happy couple as they came out of the chapel, and the reason I remember that is he was so pleased with his white socks he spent the whole time looking at them and worrying in case they got smudged. If you look at Dilys’s wedding photo all you can see of him is the top of his head because he’s busy gazing down at his legs.

      Dilys and Arthur started off in one room at Arthur’s parents’ house in Tysely, and then they got a flat with shared kitchen and bathroom on the Pershore Road, and all the while Arthur was climbing the ladder at Aldridge’s Machine Tools and doing very well for himself. By the time Dilys was in the family way they were buying a house at Great Barr with a garden front and back, so much down and then so much per month.

      Every so often Dad would turn up with a bag of laundry and holes in his socks, and I’d be sent to Jewks’s for a skein of darning wool. ‘And while you’re out,’ Mam’d whisper, ‘run round to Uncle Teilo’s and tell him your father’s home.’

      It was one of Dad’s homecomings that led to a big falling out between Mam and Dilys.

      ‘Tell Arthur your father’s available for work,’ Mam said.

      ‘No need,’ Dilys said. ‘I expect they’ll be giving it out on the wireless. But Arthur can’t get him work.’

      ‘Of course he can,’ Mam said. ‘If he’s any kind of son-in-law. If he’s as high up at Aldridge’s as he cracks on.’

      Dilys said, ‘If Arthur sullied his hands setting Dad on he soon wouldn’t be anything at Aldridge’s. I’m not asking him.’

      Mam said, ‘Then I’ll get him a start. I’ll go to Aldridge’s myself and tell them who I am.’

      ‘Don’t you bloody dare,’ Dilys was shouting. ‘Don’t you bloody bloody dare.’ I could see her point of view. There were always complications where Dad was involved, complications and recriminations. It was just as well Dilys stood her ground because Arthur was too mild to have done it for himself.

      Then Dad went off to the Labour Exchange one morning and didn’t come back. It was the usual pattern.

      Mam said, ‘I expect he was offered something. He’d heard there might be an opening in the Potteries. That’s how it is. If an opportunity presents itself you have to jump in quick, before someone else does. You don’t have time for goodbyes.’ But I noticed his spare shirt was gone and so was my Brylcreem.

      I went over to Dilys’s to tell her Gypsy was gone. I said, ‘So you and Mam can patch things up now.’

      ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s quite a relief not having to see her.’

      I said, ‘Sel misses you.’

      ‘Bring him over on the bus,’ she said. ‘I’d like that. And Mam doesn’t need to know.’

      But however much Sel missed Dilys it wasn’t enough for him to go behind Mam’s back. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Mam’s the mam and Dilys is the girl, so what Mam says goes. And if you go to Dilys’s again, I’m telling.’

      So we were incommunicado until Arthur came round one night and said Dilys had had two lovely baby girls and it was time to let bygones be bygones. And as it was Dad they’d quarrelled over and he himself was a bygone just then, Mam relented СКАЧАТЬ