Things Get Better

For Better or Worse

Life, like marriage is for better or for worse. One informs the other. So here’s my story, condensed into an hour of frantic telling…..

My father was a violent alcoholic, gave my mother years of hell almost killing her in the end. Domestic violence was so often hidden in the 1950s, but with our doctor’s help she managed to divorce him. My father then disappeared, returning later to our small rented flat to attack my mother in the lounge with a brass candlestick. Sounds like a Cluedo scenario, but this was no game. I was five years old but I still remember the blood stains by the light switch.
We lived above the ‘Bamboo Coffee Bar’ with throbbing jukebox and revving motorbikes outside. The adjoining bakery sent armies of cockroaches under cover of darkness. To and from the toilet, I could feel them crunching beneath the threadbare strip of carpet on the landing.
Even now, I recall the sound of my father’s fists, pounding my mother to a bloody pulp outside my bedroom door. Refusing to submit, she simply looked him in the eye, in silence. That made him even worse. He wanted to defeat her, dominate her, crush her, making up for his own inadequacies. But she would not be vanquished. She had survived the death of her first husband after just six months of marriage, an eighteen year old a war bride and war widow rolled into one. She survived that and would survive this.

Early memory: My father coming in, drunk as usual, grabbing a chip pan off the lit stove and throwing it at my mother, just missing her and passing clean over me, before hitting the wall.

Mum would keep his evening meal in the oven, waited for him to get in from the pub – God help her if she didn’t. God help her if she did and it was dry. Of course it was dry and he’d throw his plate of food across the room then turn his attention to her.
After the candlestick attack, he finally disappeared for good.

Things had to get better.

A period of calm ensued. My mother concentrated on her job at Ogla’s hairdressing salon. She established a loyal clientele. (She was a natural cutter, later training an international champion.) When I was seven, she bought me a special present……… a private education, and for herself, an Austin Mini, 156KTU, one of the very first off the production line. That weekend, we went to Blackpool in it, parked on the front and returned to a crowd that had gathered round. At first, we thought there’d been an accident, but no. They’d just never seen a mini before. I felt so proud.

Thing were getting better.

I was a day-boy at school, taking myself each day, unaccompanied, in a red carriage on a black and heaving steam train. That first week Mum made me travel first class and I sat, surrounded by silent bowler hats and towering broadsheets. With my school cap firmly on my head and my satchel on my knee, I held up my cardboard ticket with FIRST printed on it. At the end of that week I pleaded with her to let me go second class and she relented. Relief!

Things were getting better.

Two years later we’d moved into a small semi, Mum having established her own salon by then. I got my first bike and cycled to the station every day. If I had passed my eleven plus I would have gone to the local grammar school and relieved my mother of financial burden. But she never pressured me. Despite my exam failure, she let me stay on where I was, without a word of criticism or sign of disappointment. I never understood the sacrifices she made. I had pocket money for the first time, a penny-ha’penny each day to spend in the school tuck shop on a blackcurrant lolly to last the day while accumulating fluff in my jacket pocket.

What could be better?

When I was a little older My mother did, however, sometimes, almost in despair, say, “I work my fingers to the bone for you.” And she did. I remember her arriving home at about 8 pm approaching Christmas with fingers stained almost black and split and sore from perming solution and spikey rollers.
She expanded the business, developed her reputation and bought herself a white BMW, a real ‘hairdresser’s car’ with a black vinyl roof.

Things were getting better.

When I was twelve she sent me to night-school at the local Conservative Club to learn how to type. There, at the Willy Scheidegger School of Typing I was marooned amongst a clacking room of women tackling the arcane art of ten finger touch typing. Once I had achieved forty-five words a minute I baled out of the dog-fight, the sound of typewriters like Messerschmitt machine guns ringing in my ears. But if it hadn’t been for Herr Willy, I doubt if I would be so comfortable at this keyboard now. Skills learned young are more easily maintained.

Things were getting better.

At school I had an English teacher who inspired me, praising my awful creative writing, full of hyperbole and verbosity. He even encouraged my poetry which was just as bad. (He also let some of us play cards in his precious ‘Poetry Room’ at lunchtime. He certainly knew how to create bright young writers.) Years later I tried unsuccessfully, to track him down to thank him. I wish I’d tried harder. Later, I became an English teacher myself and I know what it’s like to get lovely messages from ex-pupils, out of the blue.

Makes everything seem better.

Frustrated by bureaucracy and educational jargon, but with a supportive wife and two great kids, I left teaching, to become a professional artist and found a way of successfully blending my art and poetry and, for many years, I travelled the country selling my work at events.

So things got better.

But…. then a setback with a silver lining.
I had a serious road traffic accident, suffering multiple injuries, which put an end to my peripatetic business. The day I came out of hospital (Nov 2022) I wrote my first really decent short story and I have been writing about six hours a day since then, trying to make up for the time I ‘lost’ as an artist rather than a writer. Now the dictionary has become my palette. I find all the words I need are there, ready for rearranging. Less profitable but at least as rewarding.

So things get even better.

My wife and I are blessed with four amazing, ridiculous and funny grandchildren and it is for their future selves I write. Last week I won the Cheshire Prize for Literature with a story, ostensibly, for children. But it is for the child in all of us that I write. My wife’s support has been fundamental to my progression and I can’t thank her enough for putting up with me and my obsessional drive. So, I sit here at the keyboard daily, until the sound of ‘Pointless’ from the kitchen interrupts and I know I’m needed to lay the table.

So things get better and success has come out of adversity.

Although, I do wonder how, in the case of Hour of Writes, a piece of writing that scores 95% (see ‘Soliloquy for a Rotting Apple’ in ‘ephemera’) is disregarded in the final judging when the winning entry scored 62%, questioning the value of the peer review process. It seems almost as pointless as the TV programme that brings my daily writing to a close. So, with that comment, churlish as it may be, I won’t expect too much from this piece and I certainly wouldn’t offer it as a submission had I not one stored credit left to spend.

But still, I have thoroughly enjoyed submitting over the past couple of years. Hour of Writes is a great idea. Writing to a prompt and under pressure is an interesting challenge and marking has forced me to unearth my rusty English examiner skills.

So, I wish everyone well on their personal writing journeys and may things always get better for you as, on the whole, they did for me.