5

       ‘Bloody Cripples!’

      When Martin joined Short’s, another aviation company, the family followed him to Southampton, where Short Brothers was based. You saw little of your father. Politics kept him busy.

      You remember an occasion when he had been addressing a small group of men on a street corner. He came home and told you that a policeman had appeared and said to him, gently but firmly, ‘Move along there, there’s a good lad.’

      Your father had asked why he should move along. The bobby had replied, ‘Because I say so, sir, if you don’t mind.’

      Your father was furious at this demonstration of power.

      Looking back, you regret the disappearance of this kind of policing.

      Your early existence was trapped between the two world wars, your later one by the Cold War. Your father provided constant reminders of the first war. The injury to his leg pained him continually; the broken bone had been badly set in the first place, and had to be re-broken and re-set. Throughout your boyhood, he was in and out of hospital. The aggravation increased his bitterness and his silence.

      ‘Does your poor leg hurt very much, Daddy?’ you asked him on one occasion, perhaps trying to curry favour.

      ‘We all have to make sacrifices,’ he said. It had become a favourite expression.

      ‘Do you have to sacrifice us?’ Sonia asked. As the spoilt one, she dared to criticize.

      In fact, Martin had been lucky. He had survived the prolonged Battle of the Somme, a battle in which a million men had died – Germans, French and British – owing to a well-timed attack of pneumonia.

      Your home was not generously provided with books. You remember one book in particular from those early days; it was bound in half-leather and consisted of twelve volumes: The Daily Telegraph History of the Great War. Through an absorbed study of those volumes, you gained an insight into the various hells through which your father had suffered and through which humankind put one another.

      One painting reproduced in that book almost destroyed you with pity. The scene was in France; the ruins of a French town could be discerned mistily in the distance. In the foreground lay a wounded horse. It had to be left behind by the troops. The troops could be seen in the background, beckoning to a figure in the middle ground to hurry up and join them. But the figure in the middle ground lingered. His hand was raised in sad farewell to his horse. He it was who provided the caption to the picture: ‘Farewell, old friend!’

      You were inconsolable. You cried and cried until your mother became angry and left you to weep. The argument that this was ‘only a painting’ carried no weight with you, for you felt certain it was a representation of something that could have happened, where the innocent suffered along with the wicked.

      Surely at that time, one of your admirable qualities was born and fortified: compassion.

      For the first thirteen months of the family’s removal to Southampton, you all stayed in a rented flat. Your father and mother could not find a house on which they could get a mortgage that they liked enough to buy. You were allotted a small room in the attic, where you were probably better situated than were the other members of the family. Sonia had a small room overlooking a banana importer’s yard. The wallpaper was violently colourful and featured the endlessly reduplicated image of an animal with big ears driving a little red car. To this Sonia took strident objection.

      ‘I hate it! I hate it! Take it away. It’s horrid.’

      ‘You’ll soon get used to it, darling,’ Mary had said, wearily. ‘This was a child’s room and, after all, you are a child, you know.’

      Sonia screamed in response to this apparent injustice. ‘I am not that kind of a child. I am a child hunchback! A famous child hunchback! I’m special. I can’t sleep with this horrid thing hanging on the wall.’

      ‘Valerie would love that wallpaper! Please don’t be troublesome, dear.’

      ‘It’s not me. It’s the wallpaper.’

      But Sonia had to put up with it. And there in that flat you spent a confined Christmas. Before you had your presents, Mary insisted on crimping Sonia’s hair. Protest as Sonia might, the tongs, the crimping paper, were brought to bear, and soon her chestnut locks were covered with waves like a sea of frozen gravy. The scorching smell still lingered round her head even when you sat down to dinner later that day.

      Wished upon you was a girl of twelve, bigger than you and even more sulky, a girl of twelve with pigtails, by name Joan Pie. Martin had joined the local trade union. One of his docker friends had been struck by a falling girder. He was lying in hospital after a shoulder operation and his wife was ill, so Martin had generously volunteered to have Joan Pie come to stay with you all over Christmas and Boxing Day.

      ‘I don’t want to sit next to her,’ Sonia said, after one second’s inspection of the visitor. ‘She’s a pig.’

      ‘Ooh, snooty!’ said Joan Pie, and poked her tongue out at Sonia.

      ‘Behave yourselves,’ Mary ordered. But from then on, you two youngsters had conceived a hatred of this intruder into your uncomfortable quarters. You and Sonia were immediately united against her.

      You asked your sister at the dinner table if she had ever heard of such a funny name as Pie. ‘Fly is silly too,’ Sonia said in a judicious manner. She asked the visitor, ‘Do you know anyone called Fly, Pie?’

      ‘Stop that, or I’ll make you get down,’ said Martin from his side of the table.

      Now Mary was slicing and serving the Christmas pudding, doing it with slow care. You watched the operation like a hawk, alert for injustice.

      Your plate with a slice of pudding was set down before you. Next, Joan Pie was served. Then Sonia. Suddenly, your mother exclaimed. Leaning forward, she rapidly switched your plate with Sonia’s.

      You were angry at once. ‘Why did you do that?’

      Mary waved her hands about. ‘I gave you the wrong plates, that’s all. Nothing else. Have some custard, Stevie.’

      ‘How were they wrong?’

      ‘Just be grateful for what you’ve got,’ Martin said, sternly.

      ‘Yes, be grateful for what you’ve got,’ echoed Joan Pie, giving Martin a silly look, seeking his approval.

      ‘You’ve got a bigger piece of pudding now, Stephen, so be quiet,’ said Mary. ‘Valerie would never complain as you do.’

      You subsided. The Bird’s custard circulated in its little boat. You all ate in silence. Christmas pudding, dark, reluctant to crumble, heavy as mud, comprising many unknown things, bizarrely pleasing and quelling to the taste buds, a thing of the Stone Age. Eaten once a year like a human sacrifice.

      Sonia gave a shriek and plunged her fingers into the sodden mass on her plate.

      ‘Look! I’ve got it!’ She waved a little bright object, to which a squashed currant adhered. ‘A sixpence! I’ve found a sixpence.’

      You burst into tears. Well, you were only eight.

      Only eight, but a bit of a baby.

      You perceived that you had been swindled. It was a case of naked favouritism – And a reminder to me that I had been born into an unjust world.

      No, the world has its invariable laws. It is human society which has established injustice.