The Bucket Read online

  Allan Ahlberg

  * * *

  THE BUCKET

  Memories of an Inattentive Childhood

  WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

  Janet Ahlberg

  Fritz Wegner

  Charlotte Voake

  Jessica Ahlberg

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Beginnings

  The Bucket

  The Bacon Slicer

  Documentation

  The Mangle

  The Worm Bank

  Bluebells and Yellowhammers

  Old Soap

  Brierley Hill

  The Clothes Horse

  The Depths of the Painting

  The Pillowcase

  Trapdoors in the Grass

  Mr Cotterill

  Apples of Old

  Sunlight

  Treading the Boilers

  Child Watching

  The Boat

  Dad’s Army

  Territory

  The Degrees of Life

  The Richest Woman in the World

  My Invisible Dad

  Fear of Eggshells

  The Fishing

  Seasons

  Cruelty to Animals

  The Things I Ate

  Poor Old Soul

  Street Lamps

  Reading and Writing

  An Elemental Childhood

  Ends

  About the Author

  Born in Croydon but brought up by his adopted parents in the Black Country town of Oldbury, Allan Ahlberg held jobs as a gravedigger, postman and plumber’s mate before becoming a teacher. He taught for ten years before collaborating with his wife Janet on a series of much-loved, now classic children’s picture books.

  If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it.

  So Long, See You Tomorrow,

  William Maxwell

  Acknowledgements

  JANET AHLBERG

  Illustrations: pp. 21, 69, 103 from The Bear Nobody Wanted (1992)

  p. 27 from Peepo! (1981)

  pp. 31, 33, 95, 97 from The Clothes Horse and Other Stories (1987)

  FRITZ WEGNER

  Illustrations: p. 55 from Heard it in the Playground (1989)

  pp. 114, 116, 117, 121 from Friendly Matches (2001)

  CHARLOTTE VOAKE

  Illustrations: pp. 83, 84 from The Mighty Slide (1988)

  JESSICA AHLBERG

  Original illustrations published here for the first time: Cover, half title, title,

  pp. 45, 47, 48, 65, 79, 81, 86, 125 (age 6), 127, 129, also endpaper

  James Hogg – extract from ‘A Boy’s Song’, p. 34

  Sir John Millais – Sir Isumbras at the Ford, p. 36. The Lady Lever Art Gallery; reproduced courtesy National Museums Liverpool

  G. E. Breary – The Bear Nobody Wanted (1944), pp. 100, 102, 105, 106

  The author (c. 1942) with book.

  Beginnings

  I came from Battersea

  In 1938

  Delivered by a steam train

  Forty minutes late.

  Not the Dogs’ Home, though.

  My mother went to fetch me

  By tram, then train

  With Dad, as usual, working

  Hopes’s – Window Frames.

  Or was it Danks’s Boilers?

  My mother had a shopping bag

  Bootees, bottle, shawl

  And knitting for the journey

  Not much else at all.

  A purse, I suppose, hat, glasses and such.

  She struggled across London

  Got lost near Waterloo

  And came at last to the Orphanage

  At twenty-five to two.

  Early, even so, for a two o’clock appointment.

  They sat her in the corridor

  Left her there till three

  Then gave her a couple of documents

  A form to sign – and me.

  She couldn’t see to write. ‘M’glasses needed wipers!’

  Back then to Paddington

  Weather wet and mild

  Brand-new mother

  Second-hand child.

  Good condition, though; one previous owner.

  And Mother clutched her secret

  On her lap

  From all the other passengers

  All the way back.

  Dad, still in his overalls, was on the platform.

  He squeezed us in a cuddle

  Gave me a clumsy kiss

  He smelled of wood shavings and oil

  Mum specially remembered this.

  And me? Asleep, apparently. I’d had a busy day.fn1

  In the early years of my childhood there was a war going on. The odd bomb meant for Coventry sometimes fell on us. My mother made me a den under the kitchen table, a solid table, a nest also of cushions and blankets. Soft toys. Toast. A cup of drink. It’s what I most remember, not the bombs or the craters even, into one of which on my tricycle at speed I one time tumbled, but that little secret place with its green tablecloth hanging down, velvet tassels and a fringe. And the sounds of the kitchen: cups, plates, conversation. And the light through the fringe. The green light.

  This is a book of short pieces in verse and prose, an attempt to recover or otherwise conjure up a particular time (the 1940s), a particular Black Country town (Oldbury) and a particular childhood (mine). There is, I will confess, some unreliability here. I start with good intentions and a true memory – day-old chicks, street lamps, a clip round the ear – but soon, often as not, the fictional habit kicks in and I am led astray. One sentence lures me on to another, has the seeds of another in it, or is a template almost. Like knitting, that first row of stitches which sets up the rest. Or a rhyme reveals, or the need to avoid a rhyme reveals, some possibility. And I follow.

  In ‘The Richest Woman in the World’ (page 72) which I have just completed there is a man in the Co-op serving my mother. I give him an apron, which I know he had, and place a pencil behind his ear, which I can only say I would like him to have had. He looks better with a pencil, in my opinion, more convincing, businesslike. He can tot up my mother’s bill with it. There again, it’s probably indelible. Yes, I think I detect a slight smudge now along his lower lip where he’s been licking it. Like a young child, me, for instance (or you, for that matter), from those days, those remote, mysterious days. Eating liquorice.

  The Bucket

  I had a little bucket

  Of brightly painted tin

  Which I carried from the wash house

  With my own river in.

  I tipped the silver water

  Where the soil was brown and hard

  And made a little valley

  In the communal yard.

  I took some little soldiers

  Some cows, a sheep or two

  And placed them on the muddy bank

  And told them what to do.

  I kept my river flowing

  (From the wash house to the sea)

  Till my socks and shoes were soaking

  And it was time for tea.

  The river and the soldiers now

  The bucket, all are gone

  The wash house too is washed away

  While time flows on.

  But still I have a job to do

  Some little tales to tell

  And I’ll bring my other bucket

  To the Memory Well.

  The Bacon Slicer

  Sam Wooldridge was our butcher. I did not like his shop. He dealt, of course, in meat and menace. I could not see above the counter, but through various gaps the bloodied chopping blocks were visible. Cleavers and a multitude of knives. Hooks from the ceiling, half-carcasses and other cuts of pigs and cow
s suspended. Plucked, naked chickens tied up by their feet, a line of lifeless rabbits dangling with blood-red bulging eyes, yet wearing still their furry paws like slippers.

  I did not like it (Bye, Baby Bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting). A smell of blood and sawdust. Striped, bloodstained aprons on the butchers, one of whom (not Mr Wooldridge) had a blackened, shiny artificial fist where his left hand had been. He had chopped off his own hand! And yet he smiled and chatted with the customers, casually using his fist to hold a rack of chops or cutlets steady while he carved them up. And took the money with his other hand. And tinged the till.

  I did not like it, pulled at my mother’s coat for us to leave. Worst of all, in all that slaughterhouse – or operating theatre, I had lately had my tonsils out – there was The Bacon Slicer, a spinning, fiendish, circular blade that hummed to itself, slicing the meat. It seemed like a person to me; animated. It was the noise, I suppose, that ‘whoosh’ of satisfaction with each slice. Also the smooth intelligence of it. It made no mistakes, no slicer ever sliced itself.

  We’d leave at last, out in the street a better smell, of factories and canals, to breathe. And I would gaze back briefly – tugging again at my mother’s coat, this time to detain her – at the only feature in Sam Wooldridge’s that I ever liked, or cared to remember, or strove not to forget (those nightmarish rabbits). A model of a pig in the window in a butcher’s apron and a butcher’s hat. A cheerful pig with a smile on his face. Waving a cleaver.

  Documentation

  I have in my possession an improvised payslip, three inches by an inch and a half, brown paper, faded ink. ‘Allan Ahlberg,’ it says, ‘Check N° 0000, Sunday April 18, 1943, 6.00am–6.00pm, 12 hours at 5½d per hour.’ My dad was a fitter’s mate. What the fitter fitted, or how my father assisted him, or how I, aged four and three-quarters (the fitter’s mate’s mate), assisted him that far-off Sunday at the height of World War II, I cannot for the life of me recall. My dad for much of my childhood was the invisible man. A fitter’s mate, a labourer really, his hourly pay so pitifully low, he needed all the overtime there was to make a living wage. He’d leave the house when I was asleep and return when I was asleep. From his point of view, I was the invisible boy.

  I try, even so, to capture some memories, some details of that tantalizing day (drop the bucket down) when I was with my dad. Did I have little overalls on? A knapsack, maybe? Bottle of cold tea, like Dad’s, with a rolled-up paper stopper in its neck (and haul it up)? Were we picked up in the works van? The fitter’s van? Did I, perhaps … (empty).

  I have in my possession, found among my mother’s effects in 1987, a Prudential Assurance policy: Whole Life Assurance on Life of Another for Funeral Expenses. It goes on:

  Whereas a proposal has been made by the person named in the schedule [my mother] to effect an assurance upon the life of the child named in the said schedule [me]. Age next birthday of the child stated at ONE years. Sum Assured Payable At Death Subject To The Conditions Indorsed hereon:

  £6 if the child dies under age 3.

  £10 do. do. at or after age 3 and under age 6.

  £15 do. do. at or after age 6.

  Amount of weekly premium. ONE PENNY.

  And again I lower the bucket down for the child, age stated at ONE years. Nothing. What a pity. What a shame that we’re unable – any of us really – to recover, draw up, those baby months, weeks, hours, when we were aliens on the Earth, drinking its milk for the first time, feeling its soft wool, smelling its fatherly and motherly skins, howling at it. Or later, going with our father for twelve whole hours, or even more with the journey time, to work with him at 5½d an hour, all day on a Sunday. In the war. When did you last see your father? When did you first see him?

  Dad was a smoker, all men were in those days. He was a Woodbine man, who would occasionally at my request smoke Turf so I could collect the cigarette cards. It killed him, of course, when I was seventeen and he was fifty-five. The thing is, I am not greedy. It need not be a bucket, an eggcup would do, a spoon, an eye-dropper. Something, at least, a little more than an oblong scrap of paper with sepia writing on it.

  The Mangle

  In the steamy wash house

  My mother’s face is pink

  As she wrestles with dad’s overalls

  In the soap-suddy sink.

  The overalls don’t like it

  I see them fighting back

  Mum wrings their arms and legs out

  The water turns quite black.

  My mother’s arms are mighty

  Her shoulders rise and fall

  The scrubbing brush is in her hand

  And green soap conquers all.

  The mangle’s my opponent

  It lifts me off my feet

  It takes the total weight of me

  To mangle up a sheet.

  Two heavy wooden rollers

  Cogs like a giant clock

  A handle for the turning.

  Sheet, shirt or sock

  Goes squelching in on one side

  Comes flattened out the other

  I fling that handle high and wide

  And help my boiling mother.

  With puny muscles all geared up

  My strength is that of ten

  We feed the overalls to their doom

  And feed them in again.

  The battle’s almost over

  The vanquished washing lies

  In a woven wooden basket

  The mangle creaks and sighs.

  A smell of soot from the boiler

  Sweat on my youthful nose

  Steam on mother’s glasses

  A pile of flattened clothes.

  The wash house stands deserted

  As silent as the grave

  The mangle, damp and dripping

  A monster in a cave.

  While elsewhere in the windy yard

  Pegged out and looking fine

  Dad’s resurrected overalls

  Are dancing on the line.

  The Worm Bank

  The world was at my feet when I was a little boy. I could squat down so easily to see it. And when you are little, you see the little. I was my own microscope: the chestnut-coloured, fine and furry coat of a caterpillar, the creamy dust of a butterfly’s wing that came away on your fingers, leaving a delicate tracery – like an old leaf – exposed; the tiniest transparent fish in the shallow margins of the park pond; the water boatman boating, the rapid centipede revealed beneath a house brick, scuttling for cover; slow unflappable woodlice; ladybirds, spiders, snails.

  I spent some time, happy half-hours, in the gutter in those days, or near it – the rainwater close up, like a river in spate – sailing cigarette packets, matchsticks, paper boats. And my eyes so sharp and my nose so keen. The smell of tar, still soft at the edges of a freshly made-up road. You could take it and roll it into a little ball and not have it stick to you. The smell of dirt, pond water, grass. Grass stains on your elbows and knees. A grub revealed in the core of an apple, fleas jumping about in Dinah’s coat. A daddy-long-legs drowning in a toilet. Worms on hooks. Yes, worms. (And my ears so … pricked up.) I remember The Worm Bank.

  The Worm Bank was a compost heap in the park, added to from time to time by the park gardeners. A secret, humid place, a tropical bubble surrounded by rhododendron bushes. It was beloved by boys and fishermen, home to a particular breed of thin red worm (beloved by fish). I was there helping another even littler boy collecting worms for his fisherman dad. Albert, his digging spoon in hand, was down on his haunches. Of a sudden, he paused in his work and cocked his head on one side, like a bird.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Y’can hear ’em.’

  I may have supposed he was pulling my leg, but paused then in my work and listened. And there it was, the faintest, tiniest sound, a dry rustling in the leaf mould. Worms on the move.

  Bluebells and Yellowhammers

  There’s an event that I remember, half-remember, misremember? I’ve looked at a
map, matched up the history and the topography of it: a couple of hills, two or three miles, seven or eight kids. There was a pram, I’m pretty sure, and a probable baby. It was May, had to be May, early June at the latest, and there were bluebells, definitely bluebells, that was the whole point. Bluebells, bluebells, all the way, a holy grail of them. And yellowhammers.

  We would have gathered in the morning after breakfast (and jobs). Me and Brian, say, or Trevor, Trevor’s little brother Malky, Spencer, possibly, Graham Glew, perhaps. Pat and Maureen, two popular girls – they’d have had charge of the pram – and a baby, a cousin of Pat’s or a neighbour’s child. Provisioned by our mothers, sugar sandwiches and Tizer, a few if-we-were-lucky sweets. Spanish root and liquorice. Bottles of water. Sticks of rhubarb.

  This is where we’d go. Up Rood End Road, past the Merrivale, up Barnford Hill, through Barnford Park – in and out of it – down a path between high hedges, across a field, across the dual-carriagewayed New Wolverhampton Road, around the edge of Brandhall golf course – away from the smoke and noise of the town (out from under it) – up a path beside more hedges, down a dip and round and on and into … Bluebell Wood.

  It took a day, a whole day there and back, of elastic time, the rise and fall of the sun, eating and drinking, talking and shoving, peeing in the bushes, soothing our nettle-stung legs with dock leaves. There was the colour of the floor of the woods (our reason for coming), a blue mist hovering, which we disrupted somewhat with bunches of instantly wilted bluebells, gifts for our mothers, trophies, carried off home. Yes, loaded on to the pram most likely. And the air was heavy and drugged, and so were we.

  But wasn’t there a stile somewhere we had to cross? A lumpy, rutted path around a field? A tank trap for a pram? Maybe so. All the same, there was a pram, a baby carriage come to that. Coach-built! And a baby, a wondrously placid baby – accommodating – with his or her own wondrous provisions: sweet milk, orange juice, rusks. A child-raised baby. Yes, we will retain the baby, not give him up for the world.