East End Elegy , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Christopher Best

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131 pages

English

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In 2019 seventy-six year old Michael Wicking, born of a half-Irish Liverpudlian father and East End mother, recalls his life as he lies dying in a hospital ward. He reconstructs events from his past, partly for the pleasure reliving them, but also in the hope of discovering whether life, his or anyone's, has meaning or purpose, or is merely a succession of experiences. Born in 1943, we see Michael as a toddler, just after the Second World War, breakfasting with his postman father, Charlie, in a bare, cold room in a rented terraced house in Liverpool. His school life takes place in the 1950's in East End London and is amongst the hard but vibrant working-class social world of his mother's extended family. The killer London smog and trips to the coast show the lows and highs of his childhood. We follow episodes in Michael's later life, and how his father's anti-Semitism and opposition to black immigration is a rift in their close relationship. He enters the white-collar world in the City on the bottom rung of 'clerking' and gradually makes his way to prosperity. These are just some of the many recollections of Michael in this episodic novel, which recreates East End working class life since the war.

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London

Grand Londres

Greater London

Gran Londres

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	15 avril 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838598471
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

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Copyright © 2020 Christopher Best

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 978 1838598 471

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This book is dedicated to the past – to my past in particular; or rather to my era, since I have not written an autobiography. When I was a teenager my accumulated history, little though there was of it by then and rarely though I thought about it - this scant stock of unregarded and unlamented history seemed to be disappearing from view at great speed. Now that I am old my uneventful past, my own little bank of memories, which I lament and which matters to me almost more than anything else, I experience as a turned tide gathering speed and mass on its way toward me. It threatens to overwhelm but undoubtedly it is the great compensation of old age.

‘Even such is time, which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust:
Who in the dark and silent grave
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days.’

Sir Walter Raleigh
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
One
‘His servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahom to lie in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.’

Michael Wicking remembered the first time he heard Tolstoy’s story – How Much Land Does A Man Need? – these two sentences making its dramatic end. There was not much to distract his flow of memories as he lay in hospital looking at a bright white ceiling. There was no one else in the room. He was twelve or thirteen years old and at his secondary school in Hackney when the story was read to him. (In those days, the mid-1950s, his school was known as a central school, which meant it was academically somewhere between a secondary modern – the bottom rung, and a grammar school – the tops.) His English teacher, Mr Thomas, a small pigeon-chested Welshman who was thought by all the pupils at Upton House Central School to be a communist, though none knew why – little Mr Thomas had read the story to the class in one go. All was read in his distinctive, precise and musical enunciation – no attempt being made to differentiate characters by modulating his voice in any way – the delivery only marred sometimes by a lisp, which the boys mocked behind his back.
Mr Thomas explained before beginning his reading, ‘I want you boys to appreciate what a good short story sounds like.’ He also, doubtless as an encouragement to the boys to concentrate, told them that James Joyce had once described this short story as the finest ever written. No matter that none of them knew or cared who James Joyce was, and were equally uninterested in what distinguished fine writing from the merely worthy or the dross. Mr Thomas loved fine writing and in the rapture of reading aloud could easily forget where he was and the abilities and level of interest of those he was teaching.
Michael recalled that Harvey, the Jewish boy he sat next to at the time – Harvey Adams – had whispered just before the reading began: ‘Yeah, and we know, already, why he wants us to appreciate it: so we can write our own short story by next week. Some hope.’
The ‘already’ was a locution common among working class Jews in those days. Music Hall comedians who wanted the audience to know they were portraying a Jew had only to tack an ‘already’ to the end of every sentence, or redundantly somewhere, more or less anywhere, in it.
‘It is a parable of greed,’ Mr Thomas told the class at the end of his reading.
‘As if we could have missed the point,’ Michael now thought, gazing at the bright ceiling, ‘despite the trap, mind-numbing word, “parable”.’
But contrary to this initial recollection of Michael, he very soon recalled that the word ‘parable’ evidently had thrown many of the boys off the scent. A perplexed, guarded look had flitted across young faces when they heard it. Each of the boys feared being the one put on the spot and asked to define what ‘parable’ meant, which Mr Thomas was quite likely to do.
Michael had a feeling that at that stage of his education he would have associated the word exclusively with Jesus – thinking it was his, Jesus’s, special way of speaking; that Jesus invariably talked in parables, whatever that precisely meant. Early teenage Michael would at the very least have felt it was a Christian word, perhaps meaning that whatever was being said was of a deeply religious, Christian nature. Christian, that is, if what was being said could either be described as a parable or it contained the trap word itself.
‘Why am I thinking of these things on my death bed?’ Michael said out loud – and he did his best to smile despite his vague physical discomfort, and his future prospects – or lack of them. ‘It’s absurd… No, not so absurd when I think about it.’ It suddenly struck him. ‘It must be because I’m about to claim my own six-foot plot of earth. That’s why.’
He was aware of being under sedation and that this might be affecting the way he thought, as well as containing his pain. But a certain lightness and clarity of mind he was experiencing, in spite of the discomfort, presumably a side effect of the sedation, was delightful. Inside it was springtime, he felt – a false spring of course – but outside, he knew from the way people reacted when they saw him, he looked terrible; he was hoary winter. Like death warmed up – that was the expression he had often used in the past to describe others who looked very ill, an expression picked up from his dad.
Michael’s hair had gone, many of his teeth were missing (his plate was in a jar somewhere nearby), his mottled skin hung loose and lifeless, his ears and nose seemed to have grown disproportionately large, his once dark brown seductive eyes were watery and bloodshot. He knew he had lost height over the past ten years or so. Good that he did not have to look at himself! ‘A compensation devoutly to be wished,’ he laughed.
‘It’s as if I’m not seeing through a glass darkly anymore – for the moment at any rate. Who cares if it’s the drugs?’ He spoke aloud; why not? – no one was in the room. Human contact was a push button away.
‘That story of Tolstoy’s has often come back to mind at important moments in my life – not only when I have re-read it, of course; how many times? – three perhaps. I think it nags because I’ve never really bought into old Thomas’s opinion that it’s a parable of greed, boy-o. No. The point of the story, Mr Thomas, so I think, if you’re listening, is that you end up with a plot of six foot from head to heel whether you’re greedy, saintly – whatever. You can’t live your life in any way that alters the eventual outcome. Death. Life ends. So why strive – why bother? That’s what the story is about: the folly of doing, of striving to get on: of living, I suppose!
‘Why do we have to keep doing ? Even though it never rewards the effort and whatever we do, or get, we continue dissatisfied. Because we can’t help ourselves. We’re programmed to struggle – programmed to do , to acquire. Programmed even to sacrifice – we can’t take credit for altruism, I’m afraid. The will to compete, to strive, to overcome, governs the altruistic as much as the nakedly greed-driven; and neither the altruistic or the greedy are ever satisfied; what drives them drives them unto death … Helpless instruments of evolution, blind evolution at that. Horrible. Condemned to live: and condemned to a six-foot plot no matter how we live! Condemned to live, and condemned to die.
‘How did it begin for me? How did I get caught up in the net? What path has led me to this reckoning? It wasn’t the primrose path of dalliance, that’s for sure – that might have compensated: somewhat. Why do you find out how you should live only when your life is over? Or how you should not live, rather. If I have found out! Of course, it could have been much worse; I’ve known happiness, love, friendship, pleasure, some prosperity. But why are we here? What’s been the point of it all? That’s the fly-in-the-ointment question that occupies you at the end. Whatever else the reason may be, it’s not to enjoy ourselves – I’ve learned that lesson. If I’d achieved distinction or fame would that have made it easier to come to terms at the end? I don’t think so. Hemingway had fame and success