A Bradford Childhood: the date

Chapter 1

My hair reeked of hair spray as I stood between the photo booth and the automatic doors in Bradford Bus Station, waiting for Matthew Clayton.  A man glanced at me and cocked his head.

“Waiting for lover boy?”

“No,” I said, my face burning hot.

“Then will I do?” he said putting on a spaniel look in jest.  I looked away.  I was a 17 year old, stunted, spotty and shy girl, forgotten by boys and most people whereas Matthew Clayton was the most popular boy in the class, the wildest and the one wanted by all the girls and I’d asked him on a date.

I must have lost my mind. Mrs Drew had been doing her lecture on Cubism and I had noticed Matthew Clayton’s Adam’s Apple. It pulsed out of his soft neck.   His jaws were now a little prickly where he’d started to shave and where his tartan shirt collar opened out I could see the nook of his throat and some soft squiggly hairs on his chest.  He asked questions with a pleasant maturity about him: a free-spirited lightness to his voice so different from many of the programmed kids who had little ventured from their parents’ mindsets.  I found my stare lingering on him – observing the soft spikiness of his hair and the gentle blue of his eyes.  His presence caused a perky feeling to my spirits and the dreary groundhog nature of life was given a tonic by his presence.

Plus he played an electric guitar and there was something star struck about us all as he talked about his gigs and fans.  I imagined him on stage, playing his guitar and bouncing to the rock music and my heart seemed to swoon inside, a dizzy-like drunkenness.  His artwork was done with this delicate pen and coloured with watercolours.  I felt too shy to speak to him and kept to the other side of the classroom, blushing and confused.

As I looked about for Matthew Clayton the green double-decker buses arrived and left, blood corpuscles in veins and arteries.  They joined the heather laden moors to the inner city warehouses. People flowed into Bradford for an evening of fun: women wore their best high heels and men newly washed and combed.

*

When I was younger I had found a photograph of a man, hidden in a drawer.  He was blond haired with blue eyes, attractive and sexy.  He had a dreamy and sleepy look, ‘short back and sides’ not like the long hair and long beards of that time.

I had gone to my mother to ask about him.

“Mum, who is this man in the black and white photo?” I asked.

“Man?” she says, “what man?” and she looked at me startled.

“There’s a photo of a man, hidden in a red purse?” I said.  As soon as I said ‘red purse’ my mother went quiet.

“What are you doing nosing about in that drawer?” she said.

“I wasn’t nosing!” I was at an age where my mother’s clothes and handbags and shoes were an excitement to explore and dress up in.  I would pretend I was someone else and loved their smell and their colours.  My mother had gone into a mood and was not answering me so I glanced up at her face.  She had gone quiet and something in her voice had sounded stiff and sorrowful, as if I’d awakened some wounded part in her past. When my mother again she didn’t answer I felt uncomfortable so I took the photo back to its hiding place.

However a few days later, I decided to ask again while we were walking home from school.  I took hold of her large sausage sized fingers, the nicely manicured nails and the jingle of bangles on her wrist and said:

“Who was he?” I was walking quietly at her side, waiting for her to begin the story.  By now we were on the back lane and the muddy path with grassy edges were feather soft.  Green tomatoes in the glass house on the left were turning more red each day and the lettuces, small as fists, were growing larger too, frilling out like a lady’s green petticoats.

My mother felt my small hand in hers.

“Who was who?” she said.  Nothing is greater than palm to palm, my match stick finger bones in her large polish sausages bones, lifelines activated and fingers crowned and ringed with gold bands. My fingers linked into her hand, small as tendrils, sipping up the warmth and nectar my mother gave.

“That man in the photo” I said.  The sun in the garden was the colour of golden syrup and we could hear the clink of pans in the back kitchens. A scribble of untended brambles with bucket loads of blackberries bulged on our left and the walls of coalholes on our right.

“Oh he was just a man,” she said finally.

“Which man?” I asked, impatiently.  “Was he a boyfriend or just a friend?  Was he a friend of my dad?”

“Oh it doesn’t matter,” she said quickly.  “He wasn’t important” and she let go of my hand.

We came to the row of terrace houses now.  Ours was the sixth one along.  She descended the steps to the yard to unlock the back door.

“Omelette or frankfurters?” she said, changing the subject.  I stood and watched her go into the house and I wondered if the happy endings in the fairy tale stories were not real.  I wondered if my mother had been hurt by love?

*

My father was not handsome or sexy like the man in the photo and I wondered how he had won over my mother?

He was a different kind of man: with his National Health spectacles, long side-burns and tall, lank body.  His values were being compassionate and having empathy, believing it made a better society then being rich but had my mother stayed with him all these years out of love?

When they met he had insisted to my mother that they would stay in London and that he would pass his lawyer’s exams.  This would enable them to pay the high London rent of their Battersea apartment.

But after they were married, he had failed his law exams.

“I’m sorry, darling,” my father said to my mother, after a long silence.

“Well it’s not the end of the world,” my mother answered, looking as if it was.  She looked my two brothers playing on the floor of the flat anxiously.

“We will have to find another place to live” My father looked so pained.

They had had to move north, into a temporary flat in Bradford where they could afford the rent and my father could work as a clerk and study for his solicitor finals at the same time.

It was a long way north and Bradford was black as coal.

“I thought the buildings were made of coal,” my father said wondrously, when they arrived there for the first time.

The Yorkshire coalmines were not far away and the tower of Lister’s Mill, once largest silk factory in the world, loomed above their new flat, black as pitch.

My mother wasn’t sure it would work out. It was a small flat next to the two-up two-downs that formed row after row near the Bradford mills. Mirpuris and Kashmiris had also just moved into their colonial motherland.  Perhaps they had expected to see the pageantry of Elizabeth, where all the streets were paved with gold?

Bradford’s cars and electric lights and its cold, dark, smoky reality was a rude awakening.  The blackened brick terrace houses seemed to go on forever and cobbled streets lay around them. Some of the back-to-backs were like slums with poor hygiene, health and diet.

My father got up early in the morning to go to work as milk bottles clanked and the postman went from post box to post box on the streets, listening to the Western radio, interspersed with music made by the sitar.   People set off for their long, hard, dirty shifts working in the wool mills and on the Bradford buses.

At the end of the day my father studied for his law exams and at night returned home when the orange streetlights were already alight so that it looked like a field of flower heads.

“You were conceived at this time,” my father told me, “on a cold, winter night when we were trying to keep warm” my father laughed.

“You were not a planned baby,” my mother said to me.

Eventually my father re-sat his law finals hoping to have passed.

*

My mother used to push us in a big pram over cobbles and bumpy lanes laden with baskets full of potatoes and fruit from Kirkgate Market.

They say it’s a holy family and families are meant to love each other but certain clues began to appear in those early years of sibling enmity.

Daniel, the younger of my two elder brothers had a special valet seat at the front of the pram and Sebastian would hold the bar and walk at the side. I loved hearing my brothers’ voices and felt a benign connection joining my heart to those boys’ voices, like a holy family.

But then my mother left me alone on the table one day, to go off to fetch a nappy pin, and Daniel walked in.  Some moments later she heard me crying loudly and coming back, she found Daniel looking meekly at her and I: lying on the floor.

“Oh my god” she said, scooping me up worriedly. She never understood until this day if I had cried so he had reached to help me and dropped me or if he had pulled me off the table in full gladiator onslaught causing me to cry.

My mother watched Daniel thoughtfully.

“How can he feel loved, while the new baby is taking all the attention?”  He chewed on his piece of bread, a happy baby, who had invented his own language that no one understood, except for the word ‘clacks’ which meant lights. He had thick, golden, ginger hair, big blue eyes and plump cheeks and consumed maybe a loaf of bread a day, grinning as soon as a large crust was put into his baby fingers to maul and lick.

“How can we help Daniel feel noticed as much as before?” she said, looking at my father.

*

I was the third child and born in my parents’ bedroom. A home-birth was normal in those days and they’d not expected difficulties.  The TV was on while my mother was in labour. The midwife had driven up from the Bradford Royal Infirmary in an old Austen car.  My parents’ room had purple, blue and green flowered wallpaper and as my mother pushed and huffed on the bed, and I was pulled out by pinchers.

Then my father turned off the television to watch my arrival but I was a yellow, strangled thing with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck: a scraggly looking creature, looked set to die right then.

Apparently there was some commotion and then I turned blue.  Hurriedly, my cord was snipped, and my colour returned and kicked weakly in a Moses basket placed on my parents’ bedroom floor as the oxygen filled me.  I was given bottled milk to suck on because my mouth made my mother’s nipples sore.  Then while the bloody bed sheets were changed and my mother went to sleep exhausted, the nurse seemed satisfied enough that I would live and left soon after.

My parents watched me blankly in a void of girls’ names, for they had planned on calling me Adam and never thought I might be a girl.  The black sky was encrusted with stars and I was born like another grain of sand or another star.

Over the days that followed, rain tapped as loudly as a spoon on my pram roof and dazzling light would break into my sealed interior, where all outside sounds were muffled. Summer birds sang so loudly, each species sending its Morse codes into the air.  Daisies teemed with yellow centres as wide as eyeballs, bowing their headdress of white petals. August greenery was viridian and emerald, malachite and lime and its large, hand sized leaves waved above my pram, heaving with life and fused with an electric potency that fused my own blood.  Vast and huge, an azure blue sky, racing with diaphanous white clouds travelled over the roof.

Large, hairy hands and a prickled chin and glasses would be there, and then a skin which smelt of lemon face cream, and eyes that were cornflower blue before the wheels of the pram were folded and carried up the stairs.

Those early years I stayed with my mother in that house, knowing little beyond it. I toiled for hours, filling containers with water and putting hats on my head.  The house had soft wooden floors for walking attempts and proved gentle for those early manoeuvres. Banister rails could be grabbed while mounting stairways and the soft sandstone flags were soft on bumping bones.

Boxes of fascinating bricks, dolls, boxes and rattles were pulled and explored.  Our gummy mouths sucked rusks and there was hot milk by the coal stove at teatime.  I tried reaching for my milk bottle; the doorways were patiently knocked and chipped by wooden wheelie toys.

I remember the ‘baa’ of sheep, sunrays lighting up a yellow wall or the scent of farmyards from a cottage in Wales.

A Bradford Childhood by Keziah Shepherd