Floyd - Out of the frying pan: an autobiography

T he outside lavatory at 16 Silver Street smelt of urine and Harpic, dampness and earwigs. The green, gold, blue and red transfers which were meant to simulate stained glass were peeling. A rusty chain with a much-handled wooden handle hung from the hissing and leaking cistern. The copper pipe of the water supply was mildewed green. The shiny hardwood lavatory seat slid to one side if you sat on it and both it and the wooden cover on its old hinges would fall down when you tried to pee in it. From the outside lavatory were six steps that led into a small, walled yard. At the end of the yard, beyond the red sandstone wall with its purple and red weeds burgeoning defiantly from the simple mortar between the stones, beyond the smell of wet privet hedges dank with the slime of snails, and before a fertile garden of voluptuous plum trees, bleeding raspberry canes, blackcurrant bushes and runner beans, was my grandfathers workshop.

My grandfather had a tin leg. Strapped across his shoulders by broad braces, over this thick brown trousers he wore a wide leather belt, and at precisely ten to one you would hear his huff, hiss, puff and his stomp as he clunk-clacked down the yard and down the six steps to the outside lavatory, the one oclock news (previously, anxiously and obediently tuned in on the big, mahogany wireless that sat on a big brown sideboard by my grandmother) and his lunch.

He stomped down the steps and clumsily crashed into the kitchen, with its grey and white speckled gas range the colour of a heron and its brightly burning cast-iron burners. The kitchen units were cream-enamelled with red piping, a large copper boiler with a massive gas burner fed by a rubber tube issued the odours of washday. The steam from the boiling sheets billowed and entwined with the little jets of aromatic steam from the big aluminium pot which contained the beef stew and dumplings.

In the living room a Victorian mahogany table was laid with embroidered table mats and set with bone-handled knives and forks. Some of the little metal bands between the bone and the blade were loose. There was a large and softly chipped cut-glass salt cellar. There was a freshly cut loaf of burnt, crusty white bread from the Golden Hill Bakery. There was a weeping, golden yellow brick of salty farmhouse butter. There was a small, ten-year-old boy in a white shirt, tie, grey serge short trousers with a yellow and purple snake belt and sandals sitting, elbows off the table, waiting for his lunch which would have to be served and eaten in silence while his grandfather grumpily slurped his stew, as the announcer said, This is the BBC Home Servicehere is the one oclock news.

Sometimes my grandfather, noisily sucking Rennies, and smoking strong cigarettes always with a long drooping piece of ash on the end, which to my grandmothers fury he would flick casually onto the carpet, would tell me stories of the First World War. He had lied about his age in order to join up, but he never communicated to me the horror of it, rather more the lighter moments like playing football with the Germans one Christmas, drinking wine on leave in France, which made them tiddly. Sometimes there were subtle allusions to farm girls. He said he knew nothing of the shell that blew off his leg until he woke up in a field hospital and wondered why he could feel a pain in a limb that was no longer there. He had given me a sort of illustrated boys Bumper Book of the First World War, which of course showed war in its glory and not in its shame and 1 could sometimes sit with him for hours as he explained the trench systems to me, how the artillery was placed and such like. Only once did he ever refer to his officers and generals in a mildly angry way when he quoted the title of Henry Williamsons book (also author of Salar the Salmon and Tarka the Otter), Lions Led by Donkeys.

We, my Uncle Ken, my grandmother, grandfather and I, eat the delicious stew as the grim events of the Korean War are placidly announced on the news. It is the first day of the summer holidays. My mother is at work in Foxs Woollen Mills, my father is an electrician employed by the Electricity Board. My sister, Brenda, three years my senior, is washing up at the White Hart Hotel to earn money to buy a bicycle and a tennis racquet. At this time she is going through a period of religious fervour and attends Bible classes and frenetic Christian rallies organised by a trendy young doctor of medicine, who encouraged us to come to his Sunday Bible classes by offering lavish cream teas and lemonade. Later, his religion got the better of him and, in a moment of terminal madness, he blew out his brains with a twelve-bore shotgun.

But during the short time that my sister was obsessed by all things religious, she made my life hell by continually correcting or criticising any act or utterance that 1 made which, in her view, were ungodlike. She also made me clean her shoes. And when I dallied over the drying up, a compulsory Sunday lunchtime task, she would often put dried plates back in the water again so I had to dry them again. But because she was old enough to have a holiday job and was a member of the tennis club, with its attendant social life, I largely saw little of her and I was blissfully free to go up to the Wiveliscombe Reservoir and fish for trout. My Uncle Ken, the youngest of my uncles and very much the roguish black sheep of the family, helped my grandfather in his shoe repairing business. He played both rugby and cricket for Wiveliscombe, drank too much and was having an affair with an older, married woman. This caused the rest of the family, an extremely conservative bunch, a great deal of distress; to be carrying on in that way in the 1950s was not acceptable. I, of course, at the time, was unaware of all this and Uncle Ken, who was probably only twenty-eight or so at the time, was the person who came closest to being a hero to me. He kept ferrets, and on snow-covered winter days we would tramp across fields with nets, a canvas bag with a Thermos flask and cheese sandwiches, and drive demented rabbits from their holes. With fingers blue with cold and numbed feet we would paunch the rabbits, make a slit in one of the rear legs and hang them, sometimes quite frozen, from the crossbar of our bicycles. Sometimes, on summer days, we would steal worn-out 78s from my grandfathers ancient collection of dance music, and to the annoyance of everybody (but no one could control Uncle Ken), we would spin the records in the air like Frisbees and blast them to bits with Kens shotgun.

Some days I would sit on the edge of my grandfathers workbench playing spaceships with the screw-down wheels of a red shoe-press while he, with a mouthful of nails, rhythmically resoled farmers boots. Outside in the yard was a rainwater butt and every so often the traveller from the tannery in Bristol would arrive with several large sheets of leather. This leather was cut into rectangles and left to soak in the rain butt. Every night, when my parents came home from work, we would have a cooked tea. Sometimes rissoles made from the remains of Sundays roast, sometimes fish and chips, sometimes a baked, soused herring. But very often it would be a lentil and ham soup with thick chunks of carrot and swede, or a green pea soup enriched with a pigs trotter. Sometimes it was brawn and bread and pickled onions. Wednesday was always a make-do meal because groceries were only delivered once a week on Thursday, and often on Wednesday night my sister or I would be dispatched to the newsagents shop after it had shut with instructions to knock on the back door and borrow half a pound of butter until tomorrow.