LITMIR.BIZ

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past. Superstitiously, we’d hold our breath as we passed it, for fear something awful might befall us.

      Set on the corner of the road and raised above pavement level with a walled garden, Akaba had a turret which loomed proprietorially over the junction on which it stood. It also had bellpulls to summon servants from its kitchen and scullery, and a wide mahogany staircase which turned at right-angles past a stained-glass landing window. Not that I remember much of this. My only memory – indeed, my very first memory – of Akaba is of waking in my cot; I must have been less than two years old. Gripping the wooden bars, I hauled myself out of prison and, reaching up to the bedroom doorknob, carefully descended, with a toddler’s halting step, the big, wide, dark stairs illuminated by pale coloured light, looking for my mother. It must have been summer – it was still daylight – and as I made my surprise entrance in the sitting room downstairs, I saw the upturned and startled faces of my parents and three brothers. Amused at my audacious jailbreak, my mother scooped me up in her arms and carried me back, with certain praises for my adventurousness, to bed. It is a virgin memory, of a life light and uncluttered and untainted by anything other than love. The dark red brick of the house in which I lived did not register on my consciousness.

      In 1962, our house – which my parents had by now bought – was compulsorily purchased to make way for a bypass which would remain unbuilt for twenty years. When it was finally constructed, the planners had no need of the land freed by Akaba’s demolition, which was promptly acquired by a neighbouring garage and yet became a victim of the combustion engine as a forecourt dedicated to the display of used cars. In the meantime, saddled with an empty property, the council had tried to rent out Akaba, but found it difficult to lease. Tenants complained that it was haunted and called the police; later an exorcism was performed. Perhaps we’d left our spirits behind, although as my mother pointed out, the ghosts may have been due to the fact that we had left an unwanted upright piano buried in the garden which still tinkled as you walked over it.

      So we left Osborne Road and its monkey puzzle tree, holding our breath, driving in a family convoy – mother, father, my three brothers and their vehicles, my baby sister and our dog – for the sunny suburb of Sholing, away from the urban traffic which was already swallowing up Portswood. For my mother, it was a homecoming. Born that side of the Itchen, schooled in Sholing, she knew its valleys and lanes and funny little corner shops, its peculiar character, its strange mixture. It was a place where she felt at home.

      My second-ever memory is of the house in which I would grow up. Ruddy cheeked, round headed, blond haired and four years old, I ran excitedly through the front door and up the uncarpeted stairs accompanied by Bimbo, a blackish mongrel of erratic temper who later grew so wild and savage that when he eventually ran off, his absence went unregretted, at least by my parents. Having reached the top, we both promptly fell all the way back to the bottom, landing, unharmed, at the foot of the stairs. Soon after I had another accident, in the corrugated iron Anderson shelter which still stood in the garden. Trying to reach a large metal and wood model locomotive about half my size on an upper shelf, the train fell on my head, and – in my remembrance, at least – momentarily knocked me unconscious.

      The incident left me with an abiding image – as though knocked into my head – of the metal and wood of the toy and the metal and wood of the shed and its dark interior where a family had once sheltered from falling bombs. But life in Sholing was quiet now, following the pre-ordained, uneventful rites of suburbia. I went to a Catholic primary school a mile away in Woolston. St Patrick’s had been founded in 1879 by Fr Henry Patrick Kelly, the chaplain to the military hospital at Netley; its school hall was the old Edwardian ‘tin church’ of green-painted corrugated iron, and the rest of the school buildings consisted of the remains of what had once been the local police station. The boys’ toilets were roofless and open to the air, but dark and smelly inside, and in the grounds stood a bunker-like concrete air raid shelter, overgrown with brambles like barbed wire. A pair of classrooms were housed in corrugated iron huts like extended versions of our Anderson shelter, while in the far corner of the playground stood another shed, a smaller cousin of the tin church, also painted dark green. ‘Miss Enright’s hut’ had also come from Netley, where it had been the matron’s quarters in the First World War.

      It was in this little hut, with its tilting floor, that on my first day of school I answered the register by calling out ‘Yes, Mummy’, and shortly afterwards wet myself; the water trickled slowly down the slope to the back of the classroom. I was not easily reconciled to leaving home: no sooner had my mother put me on the bus in the morning than I got off at the next stop and promptly walked back again. An ex-police station, a military hut and open air toilets did little to allay the fears of a knock-kneed boy in a home-knitted green jumper and grey shorts; still less an elderly teacher with an iron calliper on her leg.

      In our tin classroom we would dutifully copy out Miss Clements’ copperplate writing from the blackboard, dipping our nibs in china inkwells filled by the ink monitor from a giant bottle of Quink, inevitably staining our fingers and our shirts dark blue. We recited our times tables, and on Wednesday mornings we’d file next door for Mass in the big ‘new’ church, built in 1939 (and promptly gutted by incendiary bombs in 1940). Now refurbished, with its green stained-glass windows, a stone statue of St Patrick over the entrance and, inside, another huge portrait of the saint driving the serpents out of Ireland, it was as invested with Irishness as were our green school uniforms and the bunches of shamrock which would mysteriously arrive from Ireland on St Patrick’s Day. They were symbols of a statehood I did not share, except by the association of faith, and, somewhere in my green eyes, the faint traces of a genetic Irishness.

      Class by class we’d troop across a parquet floor dented by a decade of Sixties stilettos, file into our seats and pull down the kneelers. Crouching, I’d look through my fingers to the wounded, contorted figure of Christ above the altar, and the glass mosaics on either side, art deco versions of Byzantine icons. On one side, Jesus pointed to the exposed and radiant heart, red and glowing in His chest; on the other, in front of me, was the Blessed Virgin, her oval face surrounded by a gold tesseral halo. Like her grown-up son, her body lay full length against the wall, floating in space and impossibly attenuated; but in the folds of her transcendent blue gown she clasped an unwounded and perfectly formed Christ Child holding up His baby hand in blessing. Sometimes, as I stared, I felt I too could float into the air, to be suspended above the congregation, to the amazement of my fellow pupils. At the end of term we would return for Benediction and its Latin litany intoned in clouds of intoxicating incense, and on May Day we would process through the church gardens behind a statue of Our Lady carried on a wooden stretcher, her beautiful neat head crowned with a garland of flowers as we sang, ‘Ave, ave, ave Maria’.

      One dinnertime I ran down to the school gate to see my father arrive in the big old family car with my beaming little sister, her brown hair in bunches, not yet old enough for school, jumping excitedly up and down on the passenger seat. We drove home to see our new baby sister, pink and bawling in crocheted wool and carry cot by my mother’s bedroom window. She was as blonde as my elder sister was dark; they were a perfect pair, and I loved them and they loved me. The world seemed as safe and secure as our new baby swaddled in her cot, her tiny fingers clasping the wool like soft pink bird’s talons. I read the Beano on my father’s knee on dark winter evenings and he cut my finger- and toenails.

      The house was yellow and warm, but one day I came home from school to find my mother airing clothes on a wooden clothes horse in front of the coal fire, upset by the news she had just heard on our old valve radio (with its illuminated dial and place names as strange as the lunchtime shipping forecast). Many children had died after a mountain of coal had fallen on their school in Wales. Later, on TV, there would be grainy black and white images of a destroyed building in a mining village, and men in coats picking over what looked like a bomb site. In my mind’s eye I saw the black soot engulfing the high ceilings of my classroom, pouring in through the big wide window, silently crashing and crushing.*

      But mostly life and death carried on over my pudding-basin-haircut head. I went to school as the sun rose at one end of the street, and went to bed as it set at the other. I saw my first streak of lightning make an electrified crack in the sky, and ran home for cover. I played soldiers and feared hospitals, and

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