My Animal Life(4)
The Gees were clever and had standards, an end terrace house in Wolverton, Bucks, which meant they were upper working-class, a giant metal roller for the grass leaning against the garden wall, crimson hollyhocks six foot tall, and upstanding moral convictions. Wolverton was a grid of nearly identical red-brick terraced houses with blue slate roofs, a Victorian ‘New Town’ expressly built by the London and Birmingham Railway Company in 1838 to house the men who built the trains. Vic’s father, my grandfather Walt, was a Labour man and trades union leader at ‘The Works’, supposedly a hero for turning down a large cash offer from the bosses to go over to management, a figure in the community, as he let me know one day: ‘They’ll never let me buy my own drinks, in the club,’ he said with a wink. That didn’t sound good to me. ‘Why not?’
‘The Club’, the railway works pub-come-social club, was almost opposite number 62 Peel Road, and I associated it with happiness. Going up alone at night, since I was the youngest, to the dark first floor of my grandparents’ Victorian house, creeping into my soft snow-cold feather-bed with its small warm heart, the stone hot water-bottle put there in advance, I would wait shivering until the music across the way began, and the hum of male voices; then the light from the club, getting brighter as night fell, imprinted through the curtain an intricate, impossibly beautiful, longed-for pattern of lace on the wall.
Why couldn’t Grandpa buy his own drinks? ‘There’s always someone wants to buy me a drink,’ he divulged, and offered me another treacle toffee, a paper bag of which soft dark brown squares he always kept in the pocket of his jacket ‘to keep himself regular’, as Grandma explained, for pleasure in this ascetic family always needed justifying, except for my grandfather’s fondness for drink. At tea (which was also supper) there was a clear rule, no jelly or fruit cake without bread and butter.
Grandpa was a trim, fit man, with bristling white hair, kept short, and a neat moustache to disguise what might have been a hare lip but was actually damage he did himself as a young man in Cosgrove, the canal-side village where he grew up, by diving from the bridge into too-shallow water. ‘Pa’ (as both my parents called him) wore collarless striped shirts and a buttoned, fitted grey waistcoat, always smart, with a watch and watch-chain, which leads me to his special skill as a watch-maker and mender, with a workshop in the garden which was sacrosanct, next to the outside lavvy with its puzzling neat squares of torn newspaper speared on a hook. He sat in his workshop, visible through the open top of the split ‘stable-door’ he had put on, peering down god-like through his monocle-like watch-glass at the tiny gleaming mechanical galaxies of cog and spring he had opened up. No one dared disturb him there, still less go in and touch the minute spread pieces of metal that in my memory would cover the whole of his work-top like hard glittering fallen petals, infinitely interesting but forbidden. Once or twice he let me look in, but always with a firm, ‘Don’t touch, my duck.’ Did he understand how I longed to, loving as I always did (and still do) the detailed and microscopic? He made three grandfather clocks for his three sons, the wooden cases slightly dull but the faces meticulously scrolled and furled and the hands like the elegant dark outlines of heads of herons.
Pa was also his chairs; where the rest of the family relaxed in armchairs or on the brown cracked leatherette sofa with its worn velvet cushions, Pa was only ever seen to sit perfectly erect in one of two upright wooden carver chairs he had made, one at the head of the table in the kitchen where we ate, one, with a pale blue-green-silver brocade slip-over cushion sewn by Grandma to soften the back, in the little dark sitting-room, semi-obstructing the door to the hall, an en-garde throne where no one but Grandpa ever dared to sit.
It was a family of men, one of those families genetically biased towards boys. My father was one of three brothers, three sons, Cecil, Victor and Lloyd, though my grandmother was said to have wanted a girl so much that she kept my father’s blond locks long till he was five years old, thus causing him to be known as ‘Mrs Gee’s Fairy’ — not easy, especially when you secretly know you have a cissy second name, Valentine. Only Lloyd achieved parity between the genders, with a boy and a girl, Martyn and Susan, who (miraculously) always seemed to get on. Cecil had one son, clever Keith, who produced three boys; Vic had me, of course, and I, very late but lucky, gave birth to a girl, but he also had two boys, my brothers John and James, who fathered six boys between them. I grew up very used to men.