Birthday

LIFE WASN’T SO BAD. I was in the last year of junior school. I kept telling myself I was okay and each time life bit into me I would find a way to cope.

Begging for food from the shopkeepers was more or less a routine thing now, although never easy and the trauma never got any better. I became ashamed of my family and the way we lived; our unique ways of getting food, money and clothes; and at the same time I had an acceptance of my situation coupled with a determination to hide it from the outside world.  For me, their way of doing things was not my way, and I vowed it never would be. But for now, I had to look out for myself.

I needed to fit in. Making up stories to pretend I was like everyone else, worked well for me some of the time. If my friends had holidays and birthdays, then I would make up even better holidays and birthdays. The fact that they never took place was a depressing disappointment, which I didn’t want to face. I had to live in this secret world, to which I came home. To me, the nights of darkness were part of me, and who I was. Other children played. I found I had lost the ability to play silly games. My play was keeping clean, staying warm and getting food.

At school my friends told me how they all went to what we called ‘The Green’ after school. It was a little patch of unkempt grassland where tarmac paths crossed, nestled in between the tall buildings. I was told that it probably was the result of bomb clearance after the war and was left, either because it was such an awkward shape, or the ownership was unknown. In any event, it provided an unsupervised patch of land on which older boys would build little camps, play cowboys and Indians, and girls would gather to play catch or roller-skating on the paths.

They would all meet up. It sounded great fun, like a little club. I went and watched the girls skating once or twice, but ended up playing with the boys in their camp. When I first met them, the boys were all throwing stones from the safety of an old wooden shelter. I say shelter, but it was more like a collection of old doors propped up against each other.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“We’re shooting stones at the old bottles over there,” one of them replied, pointing to a milk crate.

I followed his gaze and saw, thirty feet or so in front of the shelter, a little mound of earth, topped with an upturned milk crate. Mounted on this were four old lemonade bottles, two of which were shattered. My first reaction was horror. You could get three pence back on each bottle, and they had four. That was a shilling’s worth of bottles, or in my mind a whole loaf of bread. I wondered if they were rich kids.

The leader of the group was a lippy little rabbit of a kid, buckteeth and short trousers.  He turned back to me, his eyes sparkling as though he hadn’t had a girl in his gang.
    

“Do you want to join our gang?”

“Yes please,” I said cautiously. I wasn’t sure about this, but I was lonely on my own.

“All right, go down behind the target, and when I shout out, you get up there and put the bottles back. Then you can have a turn.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Oh, and here’s a white flag.”

“What’s that for?”

“You need to wave it before you get up.”

“Okay.”

I walked over the little mound and hid behind the target. Clutching the little white flag, I kept my head down as the missiles flew overhead. I heard one smash, then another, and then silence.

“Okay, stand the bottles up!” someone shouted, I didn’t know who.

I stood up and waved the white flag.

Thump.

It wasn’t the rabbit. Something hit my head. It felt like half a brick, although I couldn’t be sure. I reached up to my head and felt a cut. When I looked, my hand was covered with blood.

I rushed home, holding my head with a hanky. I burst in, shouted out for Mum, but she wasn’t there, and so I sat by the kitchen table.  I washed out my blood-soaked hanky in the old sink with cold water and then dabbed it on my head to see if the bleeding had stopped.  I went upstairs to my bedroom to check in the mirror.

Parting my hair and pulling it back, I struggled to see the cut.  I couldn’t see much. There was a little gash about half an inch long, which had quickly dried up. What I could see was a big dried clump of blood, which had stuck in my thick brown shoulder-length hair.

I decided I had to wash it out in the sink. I got a bar of soap, wet it and then rubbed it on my matted hair as if to melt the blood.  Awkwardly, I dipped my hair in the bathroom sink, running the tap and trying to wash the blood away. But it wasn’t as successful as I had hoped. It was some time before I managed to brush out enough of the blood to get a comb through it. I dried it as best I could on an old jumper I found in the landing cupboard, but time was against me; I had yet to light the fire.

School had just started for the September term in 1959 and soon it would be my eleventh birthday. Meeting up at school with all the other children after the summer break, brought with it a sense of belonging. The next time I went to The Green, I noticed there were a bunch of girls on roller-skates, running up and down the smooth tarmac paths which crisscrossed this little crack in the concrete urban sprawl.

I wanted to join the roller-skating, but I knew I could never afford the skates. Yet I was so desperate to belong—to belong to anything, really. It was so important for me to join the club and be accepted, instead of always being on the fringe, standing there, and just watching from the sidelines on my own.

I went home and asked my Dad for some roller-skates for my birthday. He promised, and I was full of hope. After weeks of watching the other children skating up and down, October 30th arrived: it was my birthday! I raced home from school so excited. I rushed around looking to see if Dad had got the roller-skates. But he hadn’t got in yet, and so I sat at my bedroom window and waited for him to get home. I thought he must have been late because he had to go and buy my birthday present.

I dozed off on my bed, until awoken by the slamming of the front door. Dad was home!

As he came into the hallway I bounded down the stairs and was still rubbing my eyes when I reached him.

I sensed something was wrong—I didn’t know what, but somehow I knew. He didn’t smile. I sensed something was coming—I felt it. But he had a parcel.

Shivering with excitement, I stared at the parcel in his hands. Was this really it? Really roller-skates in his hand? Maybe I was wrong in my feelings. I wasn’t always right. But I knew I was right an awful lot of the time. I had to be, otherwise we didn’t eat.

Standing by the door, Dad hesitated, then held back as if the parcel was about to explode in his face. It was the size of a shoebox, all wrapped up with newspaper and tied with a string. He held it out for me to take. I impetuously accepted it from him and felt the weight.

Turning away, he hurried into the kitchen where Mum was cooking mashed potato. I didn’t have a good feeling about that.

I expected it to be heavy. It wasn’t. It was so light that I was convinced it was empty, but then I thought that he had put some money in it for me to buy the skates, a postal order or something.

The familiar smell of drink still lingered in the air. Rum and Blackcurrant, I think it was. Usually that would have been a good sign, like he had won on the dogs, but now I wasn’t so sure. I opened the parcel and peered inside. There was a packet all wrapped up, and when I opened that a pair of white long bootlaces fell out.

I followed him into the kitchen.  “Why have I got Laces?”

For a moment he smiled, lurched to one side bracing himself against the wall, and then—suddenly he must have seen the look on my face.

“I’m shorry love. I couldn’t afford the skates, so I got the laces. I promisch I’ll get yer the skates another time.” He tried to steady himself.

I stared at him, and went right up to his face.

“What’s this, what’s this? I wanted the skates. Why have I got the laces? Why?”

Silence.

He just looked at me blankly, but I wasn’t going to let him get away with it.

“How could you? How could you?” I smacked him with my little fist, but he took no notice. He just stood there and let me swing at him.

“I’m shorry love.”

“Why have I got laces—come on, tell me, why?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t you see,” I bellowed, “I can’t join in… I can’t join in with just laces!” I shouted louder: “I’ve told everybody that I am getting skates!” I paused to draw breath, “Don’t you understand?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t you understand, I can’t join in with laces?” I gritted my teeth with anger. “I told everyone I am getting skates.”

He tried to sneak off into the living room out of the way, but I wouldn’t let him.

“I can’t have fun with laces, I look silly. You’ve shown me up and I hate you!” I lost it and kicked the table in my upset. “They will ask me where my skates are. What am I going to say now?”

He was about to say something, but I didn’t give him the chance.

“Can’t you see that I will have to stand there and watch them!” I banged my fist on the table until the cups clattered. “I can’t be normal, I can’t join in, and I will look silly.”

“Sorry.”

“It would have been better if you had got me nothing. Don’t you understand how silly I will look? I can’t go skating with laces!”

He reached out to hold and cuddle me, but I pushed him away through my frustrated tears.  I was so angry.

I turned and ran up the stairs to my bedroom and slammed the door as hard as I could. I threw myself on my pillow and banged my fist into it as hard as I could until I lay exhausted in my upset.

I couldn’t believe that I fell for it; trusted my Dad for a moment—when the whole of my body and mind was telling me he would let me down; and yet within me there was some part of my stupid brain still clinging to the faith in my Dad.

I was devastated, but worse still was what I had told all my friends at school, that I was getting skates for my birthday! I talked it up to boost my confidence and try to keep the friendships going.

“I told them, I told them,” I cried to myself. “Why did I let myself tell them?” I tasted that familiar torrent of salt running down my face that burnt into my very soul, each drop of poison slowly killing any hope for my little life. I plunged into a spiral of despair.

“I won’t make any friends now!”

I glanced up at the mirror and saw the reflection of my blotchy red face. I burst into tears once more. I jumped onto to my bed and buried my face into the pillow, trying to hide. I just wanted it to all go away. If I could snap my fingers and end it all there I would have done. If someone had given me a pill and told me I could go to sleep for ever, I think I would have taken it.

Gutted would be an understatement. There isn’t a word that described the shame of it. I had yet to face my humiliation. My life fell apart, like the shattering of a mirror, and in an instant the hurt and the upset rushed into me so suddenly that it felt like I had been shot—so great was the pain I felt inside. How would I face my friends now?

During my sobbing I wondered if it was always to be this way for me, to be different from my friends at school? It was as if I had some horrible disease that seeped into every part of my life, and no matter how hard I tried to stop it spreading, it always managed to break through.

The rejection pierced my very bones. My friends would all see me exposed naked and without dignity.  It was terribly important to me.  I so desperately wanted to fit in and be accepted, yet rejection was still with me and I could not shake it off no matter how hard I tried.

I had only one choice—and that is the choice I made. I kept it inside—bottled it up and swallowed hard. I kept the secrets.

I found some roller-skates later in a junkshop that I remember had a ticket for 6/- (6 shillings) and I managed to buy them myself. Of course the shame of not getting them at the time didn’t go away. But at least I had them. That was the important thing I told myself.

For a brief moment I was happy to play in the street skating up and down until one day, as all the boys and girls did in those days, I wanted more. I wanted to go to Alexandra Palace where they had a roller-skating rink. There was a bunch of us who were all going there and I was so excited that I put them on during the bus ride up there. But when I got there I couldn’t skate. They told me that because my skates didn’t have a rubber stopper at the front, they couldn’t let me use them, which perhaps goes some way to explain why they were in the junk shop in the first place.

I got used to my life as it kept repeating itself in a continuous cycle of disappointments relieved only by brief moments of happiness. The trouble was that the brief moments of happiness were getting fewer.