Little Betrayals
In 1962 my mother,
father and sister moved from our house in Hornsey, North London, to a small
farmworker’s cottage in Heathfield, Sussex, near the south coast. We were to
live there for four years. The year after our arrival saw the legendary winter
of ’63, the coldest for two-hundred years. It was so cold that parts of the sea
along the south coast actually froze. The mammoth snowstorm which violently
ravaged England – particularly in the south - half-buried the cottage. The
front door, which swung outwards in the old-fashioned way, could not be opened
against the snowdrift, which barged its icy shoulder seven-feet deep all around
the building. We were effectively marooned inside for several days. I can
remember the strange effect of the muted sunlight which struggled to enter
through the snow-covered windows and the sense of claustrophobia and panic that
filled me when I began to wonder if we would ever escape from this ice-shrouded
cell.
The cottage had a little cellar that lay underneath the kitchen. It had a small wooden door, whitewashed, as was the entire house, set in the wall behind the Formica kitchen table. It was always damp down in its depths, and pitch-black. It was the home of many woodlice and daddy-long-legs. It also contained enormous, leopard-spotted slugs, which left wide, silver, mucous trails across its walls. These creatures would often find their way under the cellar door, which was as old as the cottage and chipped and disintegrating at foot-level, and make their way across the linoleum of the kitchen floor; care are had to be taken, particularly in the morning, and especially if walking in bare feet. We used the cellar for coal-storage – this was in the days before the hazards of burning coal were embedded in anyone’s mind. There was one small fireplace in the cramped living room, and we would all huddle around this through the winter months, watching the big black chunks of coal slowly turn orange and red, sending toxic smoke up the narrow chimney to drift away across the Sussex countryside and mingle with the larger blankets of filth hovering over London, or else be blown out across the English Channel. My father would often send me down into the cellar with a metal dustpan, with which I was to collect coal and bring it up for the fire. Invariably, it was my father’s delight to play an amusing joke. He would wait until I was down in the bowels of the little black room and then he would shut and latch the cellar door. Panic would then rush at me and I would feel as tiny and helpless in the pitch-dark as Pluto, spinning mad, empty terror, at the edge of the galaxy. I also thought of the insect life down there silently watching me in the inky blackness. My cries would be ignored for as long as my father saw fit, and this could vary between a minute and ten. It is amazing to me that I ever agreed to go down there again, after the first betrayal, but there were many times where I wasn’t locked in, so my natural trusting nature was always hoodwinked.
The cottage was situated at the end of Mutton Hall Lane and was accessed by a gently sloping driveway, at the bottom of which a wide, swinging gate closed us off from the unsealed road. Across the lane from our drive lived the retired Mr. Batt, who kept prize-winning roosters, chickens and rabbits in hutches and cages behind his high, thick hedges. Mr. Batt was a mysterious figure, whom I never saw in person. Sometimes my mother would secretly lead me in through his gate so I could look at his caged beasts, and, on one perilous occasion, I harnessed the bravura to venture through the leafy portal on my own – I recall the event as being electrically-charged with the possibility of angry eviction.
Further down the lane, to the left, was a small chicken farm (or, more correctly, a chicken factory). The birds were permanently confined to a big iron shed, whose upper portion and roof only could be glimpsed from the laneway. The noise of the birds inside and the rich, pungent stench of their compost remain with me to this day.
Near the chicken farm lived a boy a year younger than me. He had a couple of siblings, but I was so mesmerised by him that I have no memory of them. I first caught sight of him in his small garden when I was seven. He was housebound due to some kind of disability. He couldn’t talk in any meaningful way, and his left eye was bulbous and distended and permanently closed due to some grotesque trick of Nature. I developed an immediate, irrational hatred for him, which was enveloped in a velvety eroticism. I used to fantasise that he had by some good fortune come under my unsupervised control: predictably, this fantasy included him being tied securely, naked, to a stake, so that my strutting, seven-year-old Caligula-self could visit untold atrocities.
Further down the lane lived a couple who are set in my brain as being elderly, but who were probably only in their late-forties. Both were barrel-shaped and red-faced. She always wore a headscarf over her greasy, grey hair; he steered a horse-drawn wagon in some collection-based activity. They had a rather simple, massively overweight daughter. One day my mother left my sister and me in this daughter’s care for the day. She walked us both through the little bluebell wood at the end of the lane and on to a small children’s playground somewhere beyond. There, we ate the picnic lunch that my mother had prepared. The lumpen girl began swearing at us for no apparent reason and pinched both our cheeks until my sister cried, and then she fondled both of us through our clothes as she pushed us ever higher on the swings.
A brother and sister, lived in the lane. I was invited to the girl’s seventh birthday party, but as she was not a friend of mine I can only think that I was dragged in to boost numbers. Their house was fashioned in the form of a massive A-frame, whose shingled roof flowed down on either side, almost to the ground. Sandra was a boisterous seven-year-old whose long brown hair was fashioned into a ponytail. On this, her special day, she ran screaming around the garden with a stick, thrashing the heads off all her mother’s flowering shrubs like a demented Samurai. She grabbed my arm and pulled me across the lawn to where a large pine tree stood. There, at its roots she proudly showed me a starling, which her cat had brought down, but had not dispatched. It lay on the crispy pine needles in shock; its beak opening and closing, continuously, without sound. Sandra poked the now flightless bird with her thrashing-stick; it attempted to raise one of its shredded wings. Sandra was wearing brown leather sandals over her white ankle-socks; they were highly polished for her special occasion. She brought one of them down, very lightly, against the starling’s iridescent feathers, which glinted in the late afternoon sun, in the rainbow manner of petrol on water. In its terror, the bird did now manage to break out a squawk as Sandra’s foot continued its gently crushing trajectory. She did this incredibly slowly, so that the terrible cry of the bird was long and drawn out under the press of her Clarks’ crepe sole. All the while, she laughed, and her laughter rose in volume and hilarity in tune with the increasingly desperate screech of the unfortunate bird. The effect was horrifying. The job complete, she eventually lifted her foot and we both surveyed the carnage. The starling was quite flat; a teaspoon of avian blood lay beneath its crushed head. Its beak was wrenched askew. Sandra laughed again, and then she turned on her shiny leather heel and ran off to destroy some rhododendrons. I often wonder if in later life Sandra became a company director.
The cottage had a little cellar that lay underneath the kitchen. It had a small wooden door, whitewashed, as was the entire house, set in the wall behind the Formica kitchen table. It was always damp down in its depths, and pitch-black. It was the home of many woodlice and daddy-long-legs. It also contained enormous, leopard-spotted slugs, which left wide, silver, mucous trails across its walls. These creatures would often find their way under the cellar door, which was as old as the cottage and chipped and disintegrating at foot-level, and make their way across the linoleum of the kitchen floor; care are had to be taken, particularly in the morning, and especially if walking in bare feet. We used the cellar for coal-storage – this was in the days before the hazards of burning coal were embedded in anyone’s mind. There was one small fireplace in the cramped living room, and we would all huddle around this through the winter months, watching the big black chunks of coal slowly turn orange and red, sending toxic smoke up the narrow chimney to drift away across the Sussex countryside and mingle with the larger blankets of filth hovering over London, or else be blown out across the English Channel. My father would often send me down into the cellar with a metal dustpan, with which I was to collect coal and bring it up for the fire. Invariably, it was my father’s delight to play an amusing joke. He would wait until I was down in the bowels of the little black room and then he would shut and latch the cellar door. Panic would then rush at me and I would feel as tiny and helpless in the pitch-dark as Pluto, spinning mad, empty terror, at the edge of the galaxy. I also thought of the insect life down there silently watching me in the inky blackness. My cries would be ignored for as long as my father saw fit, and this could vary between a minute and ten. It is amazing to me that I ever agreed to go down there again, after the first betrayal, but there were many times where I wasn’t locked in, so my natural trusting nature was always hoodwinked.
The cottage was situated at the end of Mutton Hall Lane and was accessed by a gently sloping driveway, at the bottom of which a wide, swinging gate closed us off from the unsealed road. Across the lane from our drive lived the retired Mr. Batt, who kept prize-winning roosters, chickens and rabbits in hutches and cages behind his high, thick hedges. Mr. Batt was a mysterious figure, whom I never saw in person. Sometimes my mother would secretly lead me in through his gate so I could look at his caged beasts, and, on one perilous occasion, I harnessed the bravura to venture through the leafy portal on my own – I recall the event as being electrically-charged with the possibility of angry eviction.
Further down the lane, to the left, was a small chicken farm (or, more correctly, a chicken factory). The birds were permanently confined to a big iron shed, whose upper portion and roof only could be glimpsed from the laneway. The noise of the birds inside and the rich, pungent stench of their compost remain with me to this day.
Near the chicken farm lived a boy a year younger than me. He had a couple of siblings, but I was so mesmerised by him that I have no memory of them. I first caught sight of him in his small garden when I was seven. He was housebound due to some kind of disability. He couldn’t talk in any meaningful way, and his left eye was bulbous and distended and permanently closed due to some grotesque trick of Nature. I developed an immediate, irrational hatred for him, which was enveloped in a velvety eroticism. I used to fantasise that he had by some good fortune come under my unsupervised control: predictably, this fantasy included him being tied securely, naked, to a stake, so that my strutting, seven-year-old Caligula-self could visit untold atrocities.
Further down the lane lived a couple who are set in my brain as being elderly, but who were probably only in their late-forties. Both were barrel-shaped and red-faced. She always wore a headscarf over her greasy, grey hair; he steered a horse-drawn wagon in some collection-based activity. They had a rather simple, massively overweight daughter. One day my mother left my sister and me in this daughter’s care for the day. She walked us both through the little bluebell wood at the end of the lane and on to a small children’s playground somewhere beyond. There, we ate the picnic lunch that my mother had prepared. The lumpen girl began swearing at us for no apparent reason and pinched both our cheeks until my sister cried, and then she fondled both of us through our clothes as she pushed us ever higher on the swings.
A brother and sister, lived in the lane. I was invited to the girl’s seventh birthday party, but as she was not a friend of mine I can only think that I was dragged in to boost numbers. Their house was fashioned in the form of a massive A-frame, whose shingled roof flowed down on either side, almost to the ground. Sandra was a boisterous seven-year-old whose long brown hair was fashioned into a ponytail. On this, her special day, she ran screaming around the garden with a stick, thrashing the heads off all her mother’s flowering shrubs like a demented Samurai. She grabbed my arm and pulled me across the lawn to where a large pine tree stood. There, at its roots she proudly showed me a starling, which her cat had brought down, but had not dispatched. It lay on the crispy pine needles in shock; its beak opening and closing, continuously, without sound. Sandra poked the now flightless bird with her thrashing-stick; it attempted to raise one of its shredded wings. Sandra was wearing brown leather sandals over her white ankle-socks; they were highly polished for her special occasion. She brought one of them down, very lightly, against the starling’s iridescent feathers, which glinted in the late afternoon sun, in the rainbow manner of petrol on water. In its terror, the bird did now manage to break out a squawk as Sandra’s foot continued its gently crushing trajectory. She did this incredibly slowly, so that the terrible cry of the bird was long and drawn out under the press of her Clarks’ crepe sole. All the while, she laughed, and her laughter rose in volume and hilarity in tune with the increasingly desperate screech of the unfortunate bird. The effect was horrifying. The job complete, she eventually lifted her foot and we both surveyed the carnage. The starling was quite flat; a teaspoon of avian blood lay beneath its crushed head. Its beak was wrenched askew. Sandra laughed again, and then she turned on her shiny leather heel and ran off to destroy some rhododendrons. I often wonder if in later life Sandra became a company director.
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