Chapter 2

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0 height="100%"><tr> <td valign="top" width=200 BGCOLOR="#003333" TEXT="#F7F7FF" background="12ad4c00dduajq.gif"> <div> <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="2" CELLSPACING="0" WIDTH="95" BORDERCOLORLIGHT="#C0C0C0" BORDERCOLORDARK="#808080" FRAME="BOX" RULES="ALL" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" > <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 46 ><NOBR><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="46" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="91" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></NOBR></tD> </tR> </TABLE></div> <bR> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="stan hedges homepage"><U>Home Page </U></A></div> <bR> <div>  <FONT SIZE="4" COLOR="#FFFFFF" FACE="Times New Roman" >Chapters</FONT></div> <div> <A HREF="id132.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Autobiography"><U>One</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id144.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Chapter 2"><U>Two</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id145.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Chapter 3"><U>Three</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id146.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Chapter 4"><U>Four</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id148.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Chapter 5"><U>Five</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id149.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Chapter 6"><U>Six</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id151.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Chapter 7"><U>Seven </U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id156.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Chapter 8"><U>Eight</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id158.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Chapter 9"><U>Nine</U></A></div> <div> Ten</div> <div> Eleven</div> <div> Twelve</div> <div> Thirteen</div> <div> Fourteen</div> <div> Fifteen   </div> <div>  </div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="stan hedges homepage"><U>Home Page</U></A></div> <bR> </td> <td valign="top" BGCOLOR="#FFFBF0" TEXT="#080000"> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>Chapter 2</B></div> <div> Origins and Moonlight Flits</div> <bR> <bR> <div> AS a great deal of my personal story is bound up with Mother's personal history, I suppose I ought to explain how it is I know so much about her own early life.  </div> <div> In 1993, after finally losing out in my latest attempt to cock a snook at employers by making my own way as an entrepreneur (having lost not only the business but the house along with it this time), I finally faced up to defeat and accepted that I was just too old to try again.  Obviously, the time for writing memoirs had arrived.  But, on the plus side, retirement now afforded the opportunity of driving down to Canning Town every week to spend an hour or two with dear old ageing Mum (now widowed and in her eighties), and the thought occurred that I could use the opportunity to clarify some of the more unsavoury aspects of her life, things which had always puzzled me.  My childhood memories are truly excellent, but if my memoir was to be authoritative, there were certain details about her past that needed a little fleshing out.  And as she'd reached that age when reminiscing is a favourite pastime, I felt sure that she, too, would almost certainly enjoy the exercise.  </div> <div> So, after tidying up her tiny one-bedroom flat where she ended her days after my stepfather died, we'd settle down for a good old natter about 'the old days'.  `Oi!' she'd say. `That's enough of that. Sod tidying up.  Get that kettle on.  I want to know what's been going on.'  </div> <div> And in this way, over the course of many weeks and thousands of cups of tea, I do believe I eventually became privy to most of her darkest secrets.  'Here!' she'd say.  'How comes I'm telling you all this?  I wouldn't dream of talking to your brothers this way!  Saucy little sod!  Crafty, that's what you are.  It's what comes of being a writer I s'pose.'  </div> <div> So what with my smelly old pipe and she valiantly slugging away at her daily target of forty Senior Service before bedtime, the pollution level was usually dangerously worse than anything conjured up by the old London smogs, though the <I>real </I>atmosphere was always electric with the scandals and intrigues of her early life. 'Who cares?' she said one day, after imparting the details of some particularly hairy piece of history. 'What's it matter?  Nobody'll give a sod once I'm dead, now will they?  I tell you, Stanley; without me telly and me fags, life wouldn't be worth living these days.  It's good to talk.  Stuck here on your bleedin' own all the time, it gets so's you end up talking to yourself half the time.'  I took another puff, thinking, yes, what matter if a good old chinwag did come at the cost of shortening our lives by a year or two?  It'd be cheap at twice the price.</div> <bR> <div> ONE of my own earliest memories is the summer of 1937, a street party given in celebration of the coronation of King George the Sixth and Queen Elizabeth.  I was two and a half.  At that time Mum and Dad shared a house in Dersingham Avenue, Manor Park - and please do not suppose the word 'avenue' should be taken literally.  In the East End, all that's necessary to earn that distinction is a dozen stunted, soot-laden lime trees, pollarded to near extinction every two years or so.   Such roads may masquerade under the name of 'avenue' but I can guarantee they never lead to anywhere salubrious, such as a Greek temple or pagoda, for example.  In fact, our end of Dersingham Avenue was cut short by a railway line.</div> <div> Let me now explain why Ken (in a sense, the brother indirectly responsible for my being here in the first place), did not grow up with me and my brother Sid.  For it happened that, from the age of two, he was raised by Gran and Grandfather Hedges.  When Mum was about to have her second child, my brother Sid, Kenny was a little under two years old.  After Sid was safely delivered, and thinking to help Mum to settle in with her new baby, Gran Hedges kindly volunteered to take Kenny off her hands for a few weeks.  So off he went, never to return.  Mum tried dozens of times to get him back, but each time it was old Faf who would ask her to leave him just a while longer, `Just till you and Sid get yourselves sorted out.  You know, back on your feet, like...'  And so, recognising that Faf had come to dote on the boy, and would be lost without him, she could never bring herself to insist.  It's through Ken that Grandfather Hedges became known as `Faf'.  Unable to get his tongue around `Grandfather', `Faf' being the nearest he could manage, Grandfather decided that would do nicely.  And so the dear man became `Faf' to us all, including Granny Hedges.  </div> <div> So far as I was concerned, as a young child Ken was just an occasional visitor, Sid's friend, that boy who lived with Gran and Faf.  And I have to say I didn't like him much.  I had no idea of his being my brother until I was five years old.  Imagine my annoyance when that boy from Gran and Faf's joined Sid and me on the evacuee train in September, 1939!  There I was, having only just said goodbye to Mum for an unknown period (perhaps for ever), going off to goodness knows where, and this bully promptly begins taking over where Mum left off, saying he'd had orders to `take care of me'!  Straight away he starts bossing me about; telling me to stop grizzling, or else, and pull my socks up, or else, etc., etc.. </div> <div> However, back to Coronation Day. </div> <div> I remember the longest table I've ever seen.  It must have stretched for a hundred yards; dozens of trestle-tables laid end to end down the middle of a road, the street criss-crossed with bunting and Union Jacks, large and small.  It was my first real feast, a table laden with galvanised baths brimming with home-made lemonade, served in brown or yellow Bakelite beakers, fish-paste sandwiches, jam and cream doughnuts, blancmange galore, trifle, and  -  my utmost favourite at the time  -  lashings of jelly and custard.  Every child in the street not down with measles, whooping cough, mumps, impetigo, tonsillitis, scarlet fever, dysentery, diphtheria, polio or TB was there.  Not a seat to be had.  However (there's always a `however' isn't there?), something I've avoided mentioning so far is that, with Mum already delivered of two sons, she'd rather banked on my being a girl.  Ah me, what fools we parents are.  My penalty for sinning so badly was to be dressed as a girl with shoulder-length blond hair until I was three.  Not surprisingly, my memories of that day are the feast, the sunshine, the frilly dress, and everyone saying how pretty I looked. </div> <div> Mum and Dad moved house fairly regularly, though not always in daylight, and only after rent arrears had become uneconomical to sustain.  At that point, Dad would say, `Must be time for a flit, d'you reckon?'  Mum would then seek out another gullible landlord, give him one of her smiles, and after borrowing a wheelbarrow from the nearest greengrocer, off we'd go again.</div> <div> Soon after the coronation we moved to a new council house near The Fiddlers, a well-known pub in Dagenham.  It appears that Dad's main concern when moving was always the distance to a good, lively pub  -  preferably one with a decent piano player and plenty of young women willing to sing (or do a turn in any way at all, for that matter).  </div> <div> Until this time Mum and Dad had been able to move about freely because they had so little by way of furniture.  And so, rashly, as it turned out, and on the strength of his now having regular work at Fords, and what with having the key to a new house and everything, Dad had a brainstorm and decided it was time to set up home.  Without consulting Mum, off he went to the nearest furniture store and ordered a dining room suite, a bedroom suite, and a small divan for Sid and me; all, of course, on the never-never.  </div> <div> On Christmas Morning, 1937, I even remember waking to find Sid and myself owners of a shotgun apiece.  I was just three, and he seven.  (I say even, because, apart from bananas and oranges, I only remember receiving one other sizeable toy as a Christmas present in the whole of my childhood, and that was the Christmas of 1944, when I was given a wooden scooter which promptly broke in half on its first outing down East Ham station hill).  Not real shot-guns, you understand, but definitely black-barrelled, cork jobs with a range of about three feet, i.e., the length of string holding the cork.  I have to say that after realising its limits, the greater fun for me lay in simply breaking the barrel open to cock the spring; it made such a nice clunking noise.  Come to think of it, it was much the same sixteen years later on the firing ranges at Aldershot, where I did my National Service.  I could stand the loading of a .303 (nice clunking sound), it was the firing I loathed.  One tended to wake up the next morning with a shoulder black and blue, and the right arm would remain stiff for days.  However, that night, Sid and I were left alone to play with our guns like good little boys, while Mum and Dad went up to the Fiddlers as usual.  We were having a great time until I received a painful hit on the eyeball.  Naturally, I grizzled until Mum and Dad came home.  Well, it was the only way to ensure he got his come-uppance, wasn't it?    </div> <div> Now this grizzling.  I was celebrated for that.  I remember clearly I could grizzle for hours without stopping.  Not crying, you understand; just that tormenting, intermittent succession of shuddering sobs that drives people mad.  And it was this grizzling that was to lead to my first traumatic experience: </div> <div> Soon after that Christmas, just after my third birthday, Mum went into hospital with some gynaecological complaint.  Unable to cope alone, Dad hurriedly deposited Sid and me with some friends in Higham Road, East Ham, reasoning that as Bill and Madge Gregory already had a sizeable brood of their own, two more wouldn't make a great deal of difference.  Naturally, I grizzled and grizzled for Mum.  All I wanted was Mum.  Nothing could satisfy me but Mum, and all I could do was grizzle in expectation that it would surely hasten her return.  As you can imagine, two days of this and Bill and Madge Gregory had just about had enough.  Having reached the end of their tether, on the third morning Bill led me by the ear out of the back door and into the lean-to, where he proceeded to lift me ignominiously off the ground by my braces and hang me on a hook, leaving me to kick and scream for an hour or so, rightly judging that this would give me `something to cry for'.  </div> <div> Mum came out of hospital and duly came to collect us.  On the bus home to Dagenham, Sid told her all about my `suspension' ordeal and, to my utter delight, she was furious.  Bill Gregory was going to get a piece of her mind, she said.  After a look at my bruises and an even quicker cup of tea, we all took the return bus to East Ham, got off at East Ham Station, and marched down Higham Road to have it out with him.  All the way I was trying to imagine how one gave someone else `a piece of your mind' and was just dying to find out.</div> <div> `You cruel bastard!' she shouted at Bill, without an ounce of brains leaving her body  -  which I have to confess I found rather disappointing  -  `That's downright cruelty, that is!  You could've done the poor little sod a mischief.  A permanent mischief.  You should see his little whatsits.  All bruised, they are!  I've a good mind to get the law on you.'  </div> <div> I believe Bill Gregory answered to the effect that it would be worth it and, with any luck, could mean that mankind would be spared another of my ilk.</div> <bR> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <A HREF="id145.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Chapter 3"><U><B>Next Chapter</B></U></A></div> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>