Once by Andrew McNeillie Read Free Book Online

misery and confusion, and only made things worse, by deliberate day-dreaming. I threw the switch on my heart’s ejector seat. My eyes skimmed off the page and my gaze turned inward in no time and I was away. The more I stared out the more I stared in. In fact day-dreaming has been my modus operandi ever since. Just so it invents this page with its illogical optimism and momentum, and air of necessity.
    My father was fierce but only meant his cruelties in the heat of the moment. We had many and frequent stormy episodes, with him ranting and raging at something, an inability to read, a pair of new shoes scuffed and battered on their first day out, or the need for new shoes in the first place, as if you could help your feet growing, a terrible school report (very commonly in my case), something and nothing, money, and work, Ratcliffe’s, and writing books, writing and writing in the middle of the family: hammer, hammer, hammer of the two-finger typewriter rattling and thumping and dancing a jig, as with a swipe he raced the carriage back, spawning millions of words, on the fold-down bureau, in the alcove under the hot-water tank, below the window, beside the backyard where with a rash kick of small hard ball I once shattered the glass about his head.
    But I got off lightly. An evening huddled in the dark on the stairs, on the rust carpet, with mother failing again to pack our bags and leave. I had a friend for whom a broken window meant the strap and the wooden spoon on his legs and three or four hours in the ‘spence’, or under-stair cupboard, dark as a coalhole, and stale with the odour of town gas that hung about the meter. Nor did the boys I knew have a father who wrote stories you’d hear on the radio, one about a boy called Andrew, a man who wrote books and was, to a proud boy at least, different from everyone else, in this and many another respect. A man who loved the written word and loved no less to fish for trout.
    But he did keep us a little strapped for cash. Not that we wanted for anything but that he made sure we did. These were the days in the lower middle classes of house-keeping money and the housewife, Monday washday, bubble-and squeak, Friday fish day, and penny-pinch through the week. As now seems glaringly clear, these were days in a system of oppression of women, and gross domestic injustice. If my mother found herself short, for whatever reason, she didn’t dare ask for more. If she had no choice but to ask, because of some unlooked for necessity, she always paid the price, in reproach and blame.
    Yet if he decided a new fishing rod, or some tackle, or other ‘essential’ purchase was called for, the new fishing rod was bought, money no object, and the best money could buy. Such things could be justified in that fishing took him to the wilderness. The wilderness was the icing on our cake. It did more than pay the bills, in that my father earned half his income, above what he earned at the engineering firm, writing about it, writing about the wilderness and the natural world. (In all he earned a thousand pounds a year in those days.)
    They were not the good old days. No matter the war did more to liberate the people than acts of parliament ever managed (than anything since the previous calamity), they were still relatively mean old days of deep inequality among nations and races, classes and sexes. (Housekeepers and house parlourmaids wanted.) Narrowness and prudishness tended to prevail. A divorcée was a fallen woman, little better than a whore. They were quaint days too, comic now to look back to. Businesses advertised for smart van boys. Sales ladies were required – for confectionary (experienced) – permanent position if suitable. Permanent? A thirty-nine year-old ‘gent’ of smart appearance ‘will do anything’. What does he have in mind? Not much. And down at the pier the comedy was the same, served up by the like of Ted Ray, Terry Thomas