Seminary Boy. John Cornwell

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      AFTER THE WAR Dad became a grounds keeper on various sports fields. Eventually he became the chief grounds keeper at the Peel playing fields in Barkingside, a working-class suburb at the outer reaches of London’s East End. The sports facilities – a twenty-acre field and clubhouse – were used by the employees of several companies including the Plessey electrical engineering factory in Ilford. After a succession of temporary lodgings we had come finally to settle in a whitewashed box of a dwelling by the gates of the place we were to call ‘the Peel’. The house faced a highway lined with houses and blocks of flats. In one direction the road headed out towards the industrial wastes of the Essex estuary; in the other it merged into London’s North Circular Road. Frowning down on the district from a far hill was Claybury Hospital, the principal mental asylum for the East End. Claybury was a byword for lock-up wards, a threat not infrequently employed by Mum against Dad and each of us when we failed to live up to the standards of behaviour she set for us.

      There was one habitable living room which contained a gas stove and sink, a built-in larder, and space for a small dining table and chairs. We had two uncomfortable armchairs lined with canvas, purchased from the Cooperative Society after the war. A corresponding room on the ground floor, where the old piano was situated, was too damp for habitation through much of the year. Upstairs there were two bedrooms and a ‘box room’ where my sister would sleep.

      Living on the sports ground gave us an unusual sense of outdoor freedom. To the delight of my sister the former grounds keeper had bequeathed us Gyp, a shaggy sheepdog the size of a small pony. Maureen took over this lolloping animal, taking it for walks around the field. I once saw her clutching an umbrella in the pouring rain as Gyp dragged her towards the filthy, fast-running drainage ditch. For my brother Terry, the Peel was paradise. When the summer came around I watched with growing admiration as he bowled for hour after hour in the cricket practice nets. To my tearful disappointment, he would not allow me to even fetch the balls. He was on the way to becoming a demon bowler and sometimes managed to break a stump in two.

      Dad tried hard to make something of the Peel, but when it rained there were gull-infested lakes where the pitches should have been. Despite his handicapped left leg, he managed to drive the pre-war tractor, working the brake and clutch like a gymnast. He became an expert on grass and spent hours gazing at seed catalogues. In 1951 he laid out lawns and flowerbeds at the entrance to the grounds to celebrate the Festival of Britain Year: the theme was strident red, white and blue. He earned five pounds a week, with free rent, and I remember his wry announcement that his pay had been increased by one penny an hour after he had agreed to squeeze another sports club on to the fields. He tried to make a few shillings on the side, bounding with his balletic stride out to the wealthy suburbs to do private gardening jobs.

      At weekends Mum managed the cafeteria in the clubhouse, preparing drifts of Spam sandwiches and pyramids of cakes. Mum’s cakes hardened on cooking to the consistency and taste of baked mud. We called them ‘rock cakes’. When bad weather turned the cricket pitches to miniature lakes, and the matches were cancelled, we would be eating stale Spam sandwiches and rock cakes all week.

      There was never enough money, and every household bill was attended by Mum’s expressions of shock: ‘I don’t believe it! Not another one!’ The house was oppressed in those days by my parents’ exhaustion and tension; my mother’s desperate longing for something better. The atmosphere comes flooding back whenever I hear the strains of the radio hit song of those days from South Pacific: ‘Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger…’ Mum would sing it feelingly to herself, gazing longingly out of the window by the sink towards the gates of the sports ground.

      For a period, under the influence of a prayer campaign in our parish by Father Cooney, now our parish priest, Mum instituted the daily recitation of the Rosary. The slogan was: ‘The family that prays together stays together.’ With my father sitting in his armchair by the fire, present in body but hardly in spirit, and the rest of us on our knees, we prayed five ‘mysteries’ of the Rosary every evening after supper. For a time Dad came to church with us. He half-sat-half-knelt in the pew, breathing deeply and bathed in sweat with the discomfort the posture caused his leg. The experiment did not last.

      There were nights when we children huddled together upstairs as our parents brawled in the living room with crockery and kitchen pans, accompanied by the sound of smacks, grunts and curses. There were mealtimes when a bowl of stew or a custard tart would go flying through the air to explode on the opposite wall. No small matter for seven hungry people, and with nothing going spare. After a big fight they would refuse to speak for days and weeks on end, save for tight-lipped requests for basics: ‘Pass the salt…please.’ It usually ended with my father buying flowers, and promising a trip to the Odeon at Gant’s Hill, cajoling Mum back to normal communication before the next set-to commenced.

      Over the years, Mum’s contempt for Dad had infected our regard for him. Yet I found it hard to dislike him. He often made us laugh with the peculiar literalness of his humour. In the height of the summer season, when he was working outside from dawn till dusk, he would limp in wearily for his supper saying: ‘Cor blimey, I’m as busy as a one-armed paper-hanger.’ When we were seated, eager for breakfast, five sets of hungry eyes, he would produce like a conjuror a tiny beef-stock cube, placing it in the middle of the table: ‘Here we are, kids. How about a square meal?’ One day I knocked down a tin of pennies and halfpennies we kept on the mantelpiece. He picked me up and rolled me about in the coppers: ‘Here we go, Jack: now you’re rolling in money!’

      He had a comic sense of mischief which often stoked Mum’s anger. One afternoon I was bouncing a ball against the back of the house when the bathroom window opened and Mum hollered out: ‘Sid! Sid!’ Dad was in the garage, but he heard her clearly enough and came bounding along. I followed him into the house.

      Mum had been trying to clean up Gyp in the bathroom and the dog refused to get out of the tub.

      ‘Sid!’ she called out to Dad, now stationed at the bottom of the stairs: ‘Lift this bloody thing out of the bath, will you!’ Instead, Dad gave me a wink and made a shrill whistle with his fingers. Gyp came out of the tub like a rocket, flew down the stairs and into the living room where he shook gallons of filthy water over the walls and furniture. Mum’s execrations followed Dad as he retreated giggling up the yard path towards the field. By nightfall Gyp had been consigned to a stray dogs’ home.