Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
WHILE the taxi waited at the gate, knocking and c- ticking, the other Thurs- )day noon-time. I rushed into our Kentish Town house to collect an essen- tial notebook, left behind in the early morning panic to leave home before people started ringing me on the telephone. As I stampeded down the stairs hthe basement, I had the curious impression at the treads were bending, melting almost, rider my pounding feet. Having found the note- °k where I had filed it (under the bed)'I roared .11;tbe stairs again like a cartoon bulldog only to liiSe my first impression of a disintegrating. eliqUeseing universe was no hallucination. erbaps I should mention that, alone apparently :°hg sane people. I do occasionally have what i 4 only be classed as hallucinations—convic- "s that I can hear great pumps at work under- Qurid in the early hours of the morning, that r00m is diminishing and elongating as I watch hat I seem a large lonely eye in a doll's house, the photograph on the cover of a colour - agazine is changing while my back is turned, at hanged men are silhouetted at the windows c irsuburban villas, or that smoke is gradually hiing up the aisles in a crowded theatre. 1 put s, down to the lazy and inefficient operation of a' :1°05 scanning devices, installed by nature to I Sense impressions in the brain, and if any- "e has a better, but more worrying, explanation h(115 not want to hear it.) The whole staircase I time started to slot out of the wall a slab at time and sag like a bridge of cards. The faster Lan the harder it was to stay in the same place. ,neh eventually I reached the landing I had rated about twelve feet for an output of energy itch would normally have taken me to the top 1. the Waverley Steps—and behind me, the once It' geometrical fixture was now about as as and trustworthy as a rope ladder. It a moment of crisis and disillusion which rood house-owner—whcn he realises that there btirlo landlord, caretaker or rent collector to i.„„se as a representative of thc capitalist l'ateers. It wasp as my own, but a poor thing. And 4..%k the remedial action that Rachman would Ye taken. I slammed the front door (but with a arille slam, and half expecting the entire front ntC4(le to slide dustily into the road), got back to,ge in a long, sunken-backed row of one- 4° the taxi, and hoped the damage would some- .1‘roPair itself before I had to look at it again. eih.'"e experience set me thinking about the other e'S I had lived in—none of them owned by Or any relative of mine. The first I remember
Parents left when I was four, a stairless olta .
kip cottages. It always seemed to be dark there Q(11' a kind of shadowy blackness, away from the as filicker of the fire and the pearly glow of the to arrIP. which might almost have been painted Corners of the living-room. It was like being
a prisoner in a Rembrandt. But somehow all the associations were cheerful and reassuring and when I crawled away from the light (I was always a child for lying under sofas and sitting behind chairs) I could watch the rest of the family as if they were travellers through a jungle, resting thankfully in a flame-lit clearing, while outside the animals prowled and growled their frustrations.
I don't recall where I slept, or how many rooms there were. There was a tin bath which hung from a nail in an outside wash-house. There was a backyard. mainly pebble-dash concrete, which always seemed to be about a tenth of an inch from my nose as I fell over some bump and lay there, throbbing, with blood sweet on my tongue and salty tears tilling up the tiny lakes in its surface. At the bottom there was a wooden door into a back-alley of irregular, black bricks which appeared to be chipped out of lava. I used to fall over these too and I do remember that the earth around them was a particularly nasty, gritty paste which always had to be scrubbed out of my wounds with lots of carbolic. Water, almost certainly, came from a backyard tap because we kept an enormous earthenware Ali Baba urn in the pantry full of it. And I can feel in my Mouth now (shades of Proust) the peculiar pleasure of a hot ginger biscuit dipped in its cool depths and then allowed to distil a kind of fiery liquor on the tongue. Otherwise, tugging apart the rubbery curtains which black the screen of memory, I can only feel the scratchy slipperiness of the rolled head of the horsehair sofa as I sat astride it in short trousers, galloping away to the rhythm of the 'Light Cavalry Overture' on the tin-horned gramophone. Or the sweaty weight of the ear- phones, heavy on my small head, as I pretended to be able to hear 2L0 on a genuine wireless while tickling the fragment of crystal with a hinged wire-brush.
It must, I suppose, have been what planners call sub-standard housing, certainly not a slum, though grossly overcrowded. (Where did my sister and three brothers go at night-time? With the innocent egotism of a child I have eliminated them altogether from baby-of-the-family eye's view.) Before I was five, we had moved to a council house on an estate on the edge of the town. Green fields began at the bottom of the garden sloping away into a valley. We felt like pioneers colonising this strange grassy wilderness and I was proud to be told that we were among the first families to be chosen to push back nature in our red-brick hutches, four to a block. They didn't, of course, seem like hutches then, though the box-room (as the council called it— but what sort of millionaires had boxes that size I couldn't imagine) I slept in had space for a single bed and almost nothing else. It had no light fixtures (and naturally no heating) but the council obligingly put up a street lamp opposite my little window and I used to lie for years staring at the bulb as if it were the silveriest of new moons. My parents were delighted with the new house though it had some rather weird eccentricities of design. We could hear the people next door fairly clearly through the wall on one side—the other side was sound-proofed by a kind of tunnel which gave access to the back gardens for the two middle families in the block. This was one of the big jokes of the comedians at the local
music-hall and on the Northern Region of the BBC—but we were proud, rather than indignant, at being the famous butts of local witticisms. We even invented new twists and punch-lines for this endless source of laughs.
Nowadays I ani slightly unbalanced. on the subject of noise. And 1 tend to plunge the entire house into silence in order to strain my ears for a sound from the neighbours to feed my appetite for grievance.
But then, it seems to me, we rather enjoyed the feeling of being snug with the other bugs in the communal rug. We could tell when they were going to bed from the way they poked the lire which backed on to ours. We had something to speculate about watching them go to work, or hang out the washing, next morning, after having heard them squabbling and shouting at each other the night before. The man next door drove a horse-drawn van for a baker and he had been gassed in the war. I think he must have coughed all night every night because whenever excitement kept me awake, before a birthday or on Christmas Eve, I would always hear him rattling his lungs—a slow, erratic, automatic noise like a dozing sniper tiring off warning shots into no-man's-land. When we had the one minute's silence on Armistice Day, and the whole neighbourhood held its breath, I would think of him, and if he were home on one of his many sick-days off work, he would be the only human for a mile around who could not keep quiet.
One of the odd ideas of the architect (I suppose there must have been an architect some- where) was that the coal-house should be in the kitchen-scullery. It would not have been difficult to make a hole in the wall which backed on the alley-way so that the bags could have been emptied from outside. Instead the men had to tramp inside with their loads and the dust poured out like a slow black waterfall, forcing its way under the ill-fitting doors into the bathroom, lavatory and living-room. The sight of the coal- man's horse and cart galvanised every housewife like the sight of the Cossacks near a Jewish village in Czarist Russia. Every other activity stopped—newspapers covered the floor, the stove, the food, jammed the doors and shrouded the curtains. Still a thin film insinuated itself into the rest of the house to mark the occasion.
The water-heating system, fed from a ,boiler at the back of the fire, also seemed based on some fundamental misunderstanding of the principles of physics and hydraulics. In theory, the hot water gathered in a tank hanging from the roof of the bathroom and should have been sufficient for two baths a day. Instead, it usually seemed to stop in the pipe that ran through the china cupboard (usually full of old bills, medicine bottles and tins of rising dough for bread) and give out only about three inches of semi-steam. Occasionally, it roused itself unpredictably and got so hot in the tank that spouts of it hissed up through the floorboards to the bedroom above.
I lived in several other rented apartments since —half a house, so far from the centre of Oxford that it was practically in Cowley, where my land- lord shared kitchen and bathroom and insisted on me sieving the cinders from the fire each morning as though panning for gold; a top-floor eyrie, tiny but tailored to me like a brick suit, also in Oxford, looking out over the canal and Port Meadow; a tumbledown flat under the eaves, off the Porto- bello Road, around the corner from John Regi- nald Halliday Christie, where the man next door got beaten into a pulp by a gang with milk bottles while I shouted ineffective threats from the roof tops; a balcony flat, with an open-air run for guinea pigs, hanging out over the Regent's Canal where the lions coughed all night like my gassed baker's man. The present house is the first where every crack and bulge belonged to me. But when I think of 'house' it means the council house I
grew up in. There were manY.other things Wrong . with it as a. Machine for living in. But the stairs never fell down.
Previous page
