That outdoorsiness and sportiness should have informed so much of my imagined future suggests that I had only the frailest grasp of my capabilities. When I was thirteen I would be opening the batting for an eminent if undefined cricket team with my imaginary friend Andrew Parker. In fact I was a laughably incompetent cricketer. Had I dared wear glasses I might have ascended to mediocrity. But I didn’t because I feared losing an eye to a shard of lens, shattered by an improbably fast schoolboy bouncer. After the age of nine when my (unfulfilled) promise as a swimmer was recognised I was seldom obliged to play cricket. Now I dreamed of emulating teenage Olympians such as the Aberdonian Ian Black and Neil McKechnie who advertised Horlicks and came from Wallasey, which I knew to be nearby the glamorous-sounding New Brighton. My photograph would appear in the Eagle diary with my freestyle and butterfly records listed beneath.
Hark hark the dogs do bark!
The beggars are coming to town.
Some in rags and some in tags
And one in a velvet gown.
The rhyme was hardly affecting.
The illustration, in a poster style brazenly filched from the Beggarstaff Brothers, terrified me. The leader of the motley sordids was indeed resplendent in a scraggy, ermine-trimmed ceremonial robe – a hanging judge’s twin gone to the bad. He was gross, ruddy, unshaven, voracious, with obese predatory lips, a prognathous jaw and bared mustard-coloured teeth. Here was a truly aggressive beggar, a figure of abominable daymares. And my parents abandoned me to him. The very presence of the book on a shelf near my bed was discomfiting. Yet I was drawn to this beggar-king and, all affright, I would dare myself to peep at him with the pages hardly parted before I snapped them shut again lest he escape into the room. He was not the only figure I feared. Many of my earliest books had been my mother’s. A child born in 1912 was routinely subjected to imaginative horrors that her son, a New Elizabethan born thirty-five years later, might easily have been spared, protected from in that golden age of euphemism and evasion which saw our young Queen crowned. But I wasn’t spared: my mother still had those books, Grandma and Pop had not dumped them out the back in the steep alley behind the house in Shakespeare Avenue.
Here were Joseph Martin Kronheim’s giants and child-stealers. Here was Gustave Doré’s nocturnal butcher slitting the tender throats of sleeping children who had feasted on birds: poisoned birds? Here were the babes in the wood, the dark wood, the eternal wood, asleep now for evermore in each other’s arms. And everywhere was Camelot, swathed in dusty crêpe, in tendrils of desiccated caul, haunted, benighted, all decay, all death. Tom the chimney sweep died, he turned into a water baby swaddled in art nouveauish clusters of weed, befriended by crustacea and sea trout. To be a child was to be close to death. How I pitied the boy sailor sprawled weeping across his mother’s grave in Arthur Hughes’s Home From Sea: but at least he had a sister to comfort him, I would have no one. I feared for the filial resolve and life of the grave little boy being interrogated in And When Did You Last See Your Father? I fretted about him. What became of him? I knew all too well what became of the princes in the tower. Prescient of their fate they cowered together on a hamper in their cell or they clung to each other on a four-poster bed or they were smothered with a pillow by an armoured man whose rude companion holds a burning lamp or they were smothered by coarse mechanicals with beards and fringes or their bodies were lowered down a steep staircase by killers with the faces of angels taking them to a better place. Royal, incarcerated, innocent, prepubescent, (perhaps) pretty, defenceless, dead or about to die: the attractions of these victims to Victorian illustrators are evident. But the greatest appeal must have been that the plight of these two hapless princes of long ago would – through chromolithographs, steel prints, etchings, silk Stevengraphs – terrify countless children, incite them to tuck their head beneath an unsmothering pillow and will the image to quit their brain. Those artists manipulated my occiput which tingled in the night. Their gleefully cackling cruelty outlived them. They died knowing that children yet unborn would wake screaming from the nightmares they kindled, the nightmares that I craved: I relished oneiric abuse – the nightmares’ foals would do.
I dreamed of malevolent sheep surrounding me near an isolated railway halt in a landscape of drystone walls and tufty grass. Every attempt to escape over those walls was thwarted by further flocks who penned me in, baaing at high volume till a Wolseley police car arrived to apprehend me.
I dreamed of a lugubrious, flickeringly lit gilded room, with glimmering fabrics, a chaise longue, heavy dark scarlet velvet curtains from behind which, terrified lest I make a sound and am discovered, I spy on a brooding Napoleon. (I had never witnessed a performance of Hamlet. But I had read it, slowly, painstakingly. More importantly I had seen stills of distant, dusty productions. Paintings of prince and arras excited me.) There was the flash of a blade, a vegetal tearing and with it a rent in the curtains. Many years later it occurred to me that some part of my brain had, in REM, conflated the names Napoleon and Polonius and had decreed that my fate should be the latter’s at the former’s hand: he was, after all, still Boney. I no doubt belong to the last generation of British children to be casually warned of that spectral ogre. Mr Coleman used to caution me: ‘Old Boney’ll get you if you dawdle about there, Sunny Jim.’
If only! I wanted him to try to get me so I might experience the thrill of being quarry. I would of course escape. ‘There’ was the covered alley in the middle of the terrace on the other side of the road. It ran between the house where Roger lived with his parents and grandmother and its neighbour: the first floors had a party wall, a sliver of both ground floors had been sacrificed to this narrow passage. It was where I waited for him to come out to play. It led to the perpendicular alley between the Rose and Crown’s car park and the gardens of this terrace of about twenty houses (red brick, c.1912, each with a name incised in stone beside the front door, as well as a mere number like ours). Mr and Mrs Coleman’s house was three away from Roger’s.
Mr Coleman, a grocer on his day of rest (Wednesday half-day closing excepted), would open his back gate and say testily: ‘Can’t you nippers keep it down!’
His tone towards me when I skulked silently was more jocular.
‘Can’t do better than join ’em when you’re big enough, Sunny Jim,’ he’d instruct me, well-meaningly, on Wednesday evenings whilst Bishop Wordsworth School’s blanco-gaitered Sea Scout Troop, led by a youth twirling a baton with thrilling abandon, marched past hammering their drums and bugling their one and only tune under the martinet’s eye of a naval-uniformed and atypically spruce William Golding.
‘You make sure you eat them greens, Sunny Jim,’ Mr Coleman instructed me, well-meaningly, whilst I queued on my mother’s behalf at Mr Rose’s vegetable van.
‘Enjoy your pop, Sunny Jim!’ he’d instruct me, well-meaningly, whilst I bought my two bottles (fluorescent lime and American cream soda) from the gleaming Corona lorry. I resented being addressed as Sunny Jim. But I didn’t show it, would not have dared answer him back, for I knew that the reason the Colemans never smiled was that their son had been taken from them. Listening to the whoops and cries of their boy’s living contemporaries can only have intensified their loss. There were now just the two of them. It was for only five years that there had been the three of them. It must have been grief that made Mrs Coleman pendulous-breasted, gingery-grey, myopic, musty, thin-lipped: staleness surrounded her. It must have been grief that made Mr Coleman glue hair from faraway sources to his pate. My bald father mocked these strands as grocer’s stripes. They gleamed like oily feathers. The coarse artifice was appealing to a child who preferred plastic to leather, formica to wood, who delighted in prostheses. Every morning save Sunday the Colemans drove in an old Ford delivery van to their little shop where they whiled away their days till they too died. They left Little John Coleman in heaven and in a shaded corner of All Saints churchyard. The dead could be in two places simultaneously. At least two places: Mowbray Meades was in heaven, he was in all his family’s heart, he was in a war grave at Lille, where on 9 July 1918 he had succumbed to pneumonia. Afterlife and transubstantiation, prayer, angels, hell, miracles, holy rocks, voices from above, flying horses, visitations and the very notion