CHAPTER 10. FIFTY-FAFTY
Friday afternoons, my mother picked me up from school and we went shopping down the town. Out of our leafy suburb, down into the smoky jungle. Wondrous shops were there, full of dinky toys and pink ladies' corsets. But the poor were there too. Beyond the shops, all down to the river, they got poorer and poorer. In the lower depths they Drank, and had no drains; emptied their soapy washing-up water and worse straight into the furrows of yellow clay paths that trickled, in the end, into the black waters of the Tyne, iridescent with the sick beauty of oil and awash with broken fish boxes caught by boys who had no boots or shoes, and left lying to rot on the cobbled quays. Where dirty women hung out of windows and shouted incomprehensible things as you passed, and did incomprehensible things with sailors, then cut their throats as they slept and lifted their wallets and dropped their bodies straight into the river through trapdoors in their houses.

I don't remember how old I was. I know I had sadly abandoned hope of dragons. I had checked for wolves under the stairs and found only a sack of musty potatoes, and a meter with the faint exciting whiff of gas. But there were still monsters. The lamplighter walking in front of us was a minor wizard. He put up his long pole to the gas lamps and created darkness. It was broad daylight till the gas lamps flared instantly, night gathering around them like smoke. My own headmaster was a fabulous monster of sorts. Tiny, bent, wizened and silver-haired, we loved him. But the boys said that he had once been a six-foot sergeant major in the Welsh Guards, broad as a house with a voice like a bull. Till the gas got him, in the Battle of the Somme. And down the town there were much more satisfying monsters like Happy Ralph, who lurked at the bottom of Borough Road and rushed out at you with outstretched arms and incoherent cries, whether to embrace you or strangle you nobody ever lingered to find out. On Sundays, Happy Ralph went from church to church, roaming the aisles and terrifying the vicar in his pulpit and the spinsters in their pews.

A trackless safari into the dusk. But not without waterholes. First my Aunt Rose's house, only a little way into the jungle, where people still holystoned their doorsteps and polished their knockers daily. But Aunt Rose was definitely a denizen of the jungle, her living room long and dark as a dungeon, only a pale ghost of daylight trickling in past aspidistra and lace curtain, over the massive overstuffed three-piece suite crowded like cattle in a byre.

She gave us tea, which we balanced on our knees. She stayed on her feet, solid as a bullock in her flowered pinafore, hair in a tight black bun, and railed against God.

At home, God was the God of green grass and fresh air and Sunday best, the vicar in spotless black and white, missions to save the Africans from naked sinfulness and roast beef for dinner after. But down where Aunt Rose lived God prowled like a man-eating tiger, driving good men to drink by killing their young wives with TB, and slaughtering innocent babes in their cradles. And not one of his evil tricks escaped Aunt Rose's eagle eye.

'How could He do it?' she would thunder. 'To a little innocent lamb who had done no wrong?' as she stood against the oaken altar of her sideboard, arrayed with photographs of the dead of whom God had robbed her. I treasured her as I never treasured our vicar. The vicar had God on his side, was teacher's pet. My Aunt Rose stood and thundered, fearless and alone. She couldn't possibly win against God . . . could she? Still, I could imagine her smashing through the Pearly Gates, blazing out accusations like a Medium Tank.

My mother saw it differently. Pale, prim and pious, she sat through Aunt Rose's sermons in silence, and walked silently down the street afterwards. Glancing up slyly I would see a furtive tear trickle down her cheek. Often, afterwards, my father would shout at her, demanding to know why she bothered going to Rose's at all. All she would ever say, white as a stone, was:

'Blood is thicker than water.'

Then I would see the dead sailors' blood, thick as Tate and Lyle syrup, red as Heinz tomato sauce, coiling up through the black oily waters of the Tyne.

Next stop, the Co-op on Howdon Road. Sawdust on the floor, full of footprints where the bare floorboards showed through; sawdust that was carried by departing feet across the wet pavements for miles around. You could have tracked your way to the Co-op without ever raising your head, just by following the sawdust prints. There was a fat black-and-white cat, sitting on a sack of loose dog biscuits, licking sawdust off its fur; whole sides of smelly bacon, hanging from floor to ceiling; round blocks of dewy butter and cheese, big as barrels; gleaming brass weights and Jack Sylph.

Jack Sylph was also a magic monster, more magic even than my aunt. I knew from poems that I'd learnt that a sylph was a slender naked female. Jack, though undeniably thin was also undeniably male, and clad in a long brown coat, with a yellow pencil behind his ear. And though his face was young he was as totally bald as a polished egg. Did he polish his head every morning with a duster, after he'd cleaned his teeth? Did he use furniture polish on it? As my aunt used polish on the photo frames of her Dead? My mother said he'd been bald ever since he was eighteen, yet he had courted and married and had four children. I thought of his wife, waking up in the dark, and feeling for that warm bald polished egg, as I still reached for my teddy bear.

Jack was a wizard too. He could cut you a piece of cheese any weight you wanted. My mother always asked for odd weights, just for the pleasure of seeing him do it.

'Six and three-quarter ounces, please, Jack.' He draws himself up to a great height, his eyes as keen as Don Bradman scoring a six. Down comes the cheese wire. On the scales . . . exactly right. My father says he should be on the music halls.

And he makes up her order without ever stopping asking about her family. 'I'm glad her sciatica's better . . . and a pound of washing soda.' His head talks and all the time his clever white hands are reducing whatever bags, tins, drums or packets she has bought into an exact geometrical cube, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, with a double loop at the top for her to put her fingers through to carry it.

Next, to Tawse's the drapers, where my mother used to work before she married. Tawse's is a cliff, twelve foot high, of shelving behind the counter. There are ladders nearly as high as firemen's ladders, up which assistants run to lift down enormous overwhelming boxes and rolls of cloth. My mother has a huge dent in her shin where she used to lean into the rung of the ladder when she raised both arms to lift something down. Sometimes, on evenings round the fire, I grow fascinated by it, press on it, ask her if it hurts. She doesn't wince. I ask her if she was scared, up the cliff; she says she got used to it.

My mother, after endless pursing of her mouth and feeling the material between finger and thumb, proving to the young chits who are working there now that she is no fool and has been in the business, makes her purchase and hands over her ten-shilling note for a pair of rayon stockings at one-and-eleven-pence-three-farthings.

Now is the big moment. The assistant screws the bill and the note into a round wooden cylinder a bit like a shell. She loads it into a cage . . . I look at the ceiling. There is a kind of miniature tramway screwed along the ceiling. The assistant pulls a lever and the wooden shell whizzes along the tramway like a rocket with a fearful rattle, just like a tram, and vanishes into a mysterious little wooden house marked 'cashier'. After two minutes, the shell comes rocketing back, with the receipted bill and, magically, the correct change in it.

Why does that person hide inside that black wooden box? Has he no legs, like the man who sings songs for money from a little trolley at the top of Saville Street? Or is he hideously deformed, like the midnight mechanics who empty the earth closets in the cart-rumbling lamplit dark and never show themselves by daylight, because their faces are eaten away by unmentionable mysterious diseases?

Out into the rainy street. My mother takes my arm in hers now. For the unemployed men are squatting in groups at every street corner, passing a smouldering fag end between them, smoking it down to the last quarter-inch by impaling it on a pin they take from the lapels of their coats. You can see the heads of a row of pins, gleaming in each of their lapel tops, for they turn up their collars against the drizzle. They pick up the pins from the ground, like they pick up fag ends.

It is not that my mother is afraid of anything the men might do or say to her. They dwell in a world of their own, their heads much nearer the ground, their cracked boots polished till they shine like diamonds, their white mufflers spotless, their caps as sharp-set as the brave soldiers they once were. Wearing their hopeless pride like a wall. No, we did not fear them; but we feared what had happened to them. As if unemployment was infectious, like diphtheria or scarlet fever that could pass through the air from their very breath. My father is employed, at the gasworks. His work-muffler is filthy; he never has time to clean his boots. He is busy working.

Last stop, the chemist's. It glows through the dark like a jewel, huge globes with pointed stoppers, two feet high, full of mysterious liquid, red, blue, green, enough to poison the whole town. And inside, more huge jars with unreadable names. SOD BIC. AQUAE FORTIS. CANT MEM. Rows of varnished drawers full of wickedness.

But the most terrifying thing about the chemist is the way he speaks. He speaks posh, posher than anyone I've ever heard. My mother wants some Sal Hepaticah. I am always encouraging her to buy Sal Hepaticah. Every time we set out for town I ask her whether she has enough. The medicine chest in the bathroom must be full of it; I don't even know what she uses it for. But I long to hear this chemist echo her, with his utterly eerie voice.

'Sal Hair-pair-teeh-caaah.' It sounds like a spell, like the names of one of the Pharaohs in school, or of those volcanoes in Mexico.

In the street again, I chant it to the night. 'Saaaal Heeeeep-eeeeeh-tiiiii-caaaah. Saaaaal Heeeeep-eeeeeh-tiiiccaaaaah.' My mother tells me to stop; it is rude. So I chant 'Tuuuutaaaankaaaamun' and 'Coootooopaaaxi' instead.

And so to Nana's for tea. Her front door opening at a touch; my mother's timid 'Yoohoo' echoing through the church-like gloom of the cold front hall. Then the kitchen door opening, the red light, the blast of heat from the kitchen range, the sweet overpowering smell of baking bread and Nana, up to her elbows in white flour, wiping her pink perspiring forehead with the back of her hand, and adding more white streaks to what is there already. Behind her, the kitchen range gleams black and silver in the red gloom, and on the mantelpiece all the horse brasses and ornaments, polished till they too gleam silver. Nana polishes things to within an inch of their life.

Half the table oilcloth is covered already with the plump white female shapes of finished bread, cooling on wire grids. Inside the gleaming brass fender, great cloth-covered bowls, where domes of white female dough rise inexorably every time you lift the cloth to peep. And yet more white dough, twisting between Nana's strong hands.

'Sit yourselves down,' she says with a gasp of exhausted glee. 'Give the bairn a bun, while they're hot.'

At home, I might be made to wait. Not here. Here I am a little king. I can have all the buns I can eat. Instantly. Till I am sick, though I never am. That is her way, that is part of her magic.

The smell of the opened bun, the smell of the running, melting butter; the heat of the fire on my face, turning to pricks of perspiration on the back of my neck. The black horsehair sofa prickles against the backs of my knees, under my short trousers. My grandmother is a white breadwitch, solid and strong as her rising dough, and I am safe in her kingdom.

When I was born, my mother had a bad time. She often tells me and I feel dreadful guilt. Afterwards, she was too weak to carry me in her arms. But my grandmother carried me about everywhere, till I was three. My father often says, in a quietly glad voice, 'Your Nana's a strong woman.'

Yet she's as quick to joke as a child. Once, when my grandfather was washing at the kitchen sink, stripped to the waist, after work, she held a handful of snow against his bare back. His mouth flew open with the shock. His false teeth fell out and Nana still gets helpless with laughter when she remembers.

Sometimes, she still takes in stray men as lodgers. Lost dogs, down on their luck. An ex-army major, full of wondrous stories about pig-sticking in India, but often still shell-shocked and shaking with black memories of the trenches. The first Oriental merchant in the town, a carpetseller called Ali Hassan. He is prospering greatly now, but he still calls every year to bring her a Christmas present. He sits at the table in a turban, with two turbanned grown-up sons standing respectfully behind him, waves his jewelled hands and tells her stories and gives her huge drums of Turkish Delight. The real stuff, not Cadbury's rubbish; wooden boxes with Turkish writing on the side, powdered white, which I share while he is still sitting there. He is more exciting than Charlie Chan on the movies.

My mother realizes she has forgotten to buy my father's cigarettes. 'Run along back, hinny. You've just got time, before he comes,' says Nana.

I am alone with my magic woman.

She says, 'Eeh, where've I put my oven cloth?' I giggle, because I can see it hanging over her shoulder. She follows my eyes, and finds it.

'Eeh, aah'm daft. Aah'd forget me head if it was loose.'

I say, 'Fifty-fafty, you're a dafty.' I wouldn't dare say that to my mother. She would say it was rude. Nana doesn't care. Instead, she says, 'Do you know who Fifty-fafty was?'

'No. It's just something we shout to each other at school. I didn't know it was a person.'

Her eyes grow thoughtful. 'Oh, aye, he was a person all right. Poor bugger. But you don't want to hear about him . . .'

'I do.' I know she is only teasing. There is a story coming up. There is a glint of excitement in her eye.

She draws herself together, like Jack Sylph cutting cheese.

'He was a poor boy. Born down by the river. Fishermen. Hadn't two pennies to bless themselves with.'

I shiver deliciously; they put two pennies on the eyes of dead people.

'Anyway, Fifty-fafty was bright. He could see there wasn't any money in fishin', so he ran away to sea to make his fortune. Just like Bobby Shaftoe. An' when he went, he took his father's silver ring. The family heirloom, the only thing they had worth tuppence.

'Well, they cursed him an' forgot him. All except his sister – he'd been closest to her. An' they got poorer and poorer. Aah can't tell ye the things they had to do to make ends meet.'

I shiver again; I know the things they do, down by the river.

'An' then, one day, years later, this grand rich man comes to the town – wearing a fur coat and so many rings on his fingers it was dazzlin'. He was buyin' drinks for everybody he met. He was the talk of the town. But he had a great beard coverin' his face, an' he wouldn't tell anybody his name. An' that night he wouldn't stay at the inn – he walked down to the river and sought out that family an' asked them if they could put him up for the night. An' they looked at his fur coat an' rings, an' the great bag he carried, an' they said they could. And at supper, and all the time till bedtime, he talks about the places he'd been an' the wonderful things he'd seen, an' of all the ships and land and houses he owned.

'An' just afore bedtime, he catches the sister outside, an' swears her to secrecy an' tells her who he is. It was Fifty-fafty. He showed her the ring an' she believed him, even after all those years. He had come back, like he had promised all those years ago, to make them all rich, so they could live like lords. She begged him to tell everybody straightaway. But he wanted to give them the big surprise he'd worked an' slaved for all those years. An' it was Christmas Eve, an' his big bag was full of presents for them . . . An' she couldn't do nothing about it – cos he'd sworn her to secrecy. So she went to bed, upstairs, with her mam.

'And in the morning, when she came down, her father and brothers were all laughing and winking at each other, and there was no sign of Fifty-fafty. They said he'd had to leave early, to catch a boat on the tide.

'An' then she knew what had happened. They'd killed him in the night, when he was asleep, an' robbed him in the dark. It was his dead body that had sailed out on the tide, not a ship.

'An' then she burst out weeping, and told them about the ring. An' they took out the stuff they'd stolen, an' there was his father's ring they'd slipped off his finger in the dark, and never noticed.

'An' they fell to blaming and quarrelling, and word got to the magistrate an' they were all hanged. When they could've lived like lords.

'An' that's the story of Fifty-fafty.'

She sighed. 'If only he'd listened to his sister.'

I was silent, and she was silent. Then she finished kneading the last of the dough and set it to rise. And I thought of Fifty-fafty, and all his work and all his hopes, and the way he died, his throat cut in the dark, like a beast, on Christmas Eve. And the way, for hundreds of years, he had haunted the schoolyards, with the boys shouting:

'Fifty-fafty, you're a dafty.'

Poor Fifty-fafty, would they never let him rest? Would his daftness live on, to the end of time, in the boot-stamping dead-fly toilets, in the rain-soaked schoolyards?

And then my mother came back with my father's cigarettes. And then my father came from work, all grinning and greasy and black with his job, with his three-pound pay packet in his pocket. And Nana made the fire up and we had a slap-up tea with bacon and egg and new bread. And Nana drew her dark-red velvet curtains against the rain and the dark. And we were snug, as we always were.

But I listened to the wind and the rain, and thought how thin the glass of the window was, and out there was Fiftyfafty, at the bottom of the sea still, his blood that was thicker than water coiling up through the black depths, like the slime from a rotting cod's head. And Jack Sylph who lost all his hair at eighteen, and the unemployed men squatting on the corners when it was not their fault, and the man-eating God who killed good men's young wives with TB and drove them to drink, and my headmaster who had shrunk in the poison gas of the Somme.

And I cried for them all, quite suddenly.

My father was furious with me, saying I was going on like a wet girl. I had never seen him cry; I don't think he ever did. When I told him about Fifty-fafty he said Nana had just told me the story of an old play she'd seen years ago at the old Theatre Royal. That it wasn't true. But why should the boys call out about Fifty-fafty if he was just some old play?

My mother said, rather proudly, that I had too vivid an imagination, just like her. But Nana marvelled at the softness of my heart.

I was glad for once, that night, to get back up into the green suburb. It was some years still, before I realized that God prowled up there as well.