Death Warmed Up

Two years ago, I’d been playing the fruit-machine at the pub, quaffing two pints of lager in quick succession, and found myself forty quid down. I call these ‘the twenty quid pints’ to highlight the shame attached to mindless gambling while drinking to get drunk.
Walking towards the door to race over to the cashpoint, a strangely familiar voice called my name.
I looked over and there was Dom, an old pub-bud from Chelsea.
He was sat next to a man that looked like death warmed up.
‘How the devil are you, old boy?’ he asked.
‘Good, yeah. How are you?’
We hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years. He told me that some friends had died and others, most of whom I struggled to recall, were big in this or that. Certain others had apparently gone mad and the odd few were still propping up the bar at the Goat in Boots, our old local.
The man next to Dom was his brother, Nigel, who was going through a messy divorce and pining for his children, who his ex was using as a tool to manipulate his every thought and to procure as much money as she could from him. His children had become an emotional pay-per-view with a dodgy contract on the side. Nigel seemed like a good sort, although the heavy, relentless custody storm seemed to have taken its toll on him.
As the pints came and went between us, I began to notice a drastic change in him. After four very quickly drained pints, his face crumpled into a seething ball of anger as he shared his awful plight, a plight that I somehow knew would fall upon me with equal intensity from that moment on.
People, I believe, are put in our path for a reason. Depending on how we interpret such interventions, we either learn from the shared experience, or go deeper into denial until it decided to bite us on the bum.
Things hadn’t changed, much. I was still writing fuckion and painting houses and Dom was still treading water and painting people. Nigel had always been a carpenter.
Two things we all had in common were that we were all Dads and we’d all been kicked out of the family home. Nigel owned his, paid a grand to the ex and was fighting for half the house in the courts, I owned nothing but paid a grand a month to the ex for ever-dwindling, controlled contact, and Dom paid nothing but had inherited HIV from his ex.
At that time, I’d been looking for a writers’ group to join. The one I’d found in Battersea had been weird.
They all seemed very nervous when I went for a try-out evening and after I read a portion of my work, they gave little feedback and appeared baffled. I felt like a criminal.
The next day, I received an email to say that I wasn’t right for the group, but thanks for coming. Undaunted, I tried joining one in Clapham, but they were too cliquey and seemed more interested in the host’s new kitchen work surfaces, a fusion of white marble mixed with dark granite uprights recommended by Darren, her interior designer.
I don’t think they got off the subject of that and property until we sat down, when the quality of writing was so awful that I fell asleep at my chair during a poetry reading on the balance of nature and nurture. I’d have preferred Neitcheze any day.
When the meeting ended, one member told me that a man who’d been part of their group and the one in Battersea had been found guilty of murder, which accounted for the general air of wariness afforded to me. There was no email to deny me further access, but I hadn’t returned for more beady-eyed character assassination.
‘Our mother holds a writers’ group every Wednesday,’ said Dom.
So, the Wednesday after, I arrived on time and met Eva and William, the lads’ parents. Eva’s group consisted of five British women, an Iranian man and an Englishman. The average age was about sixty-five, but I was made to feel very welcome and my first story went down well. Afterwards, I went out for a drink with Dom and Nigel.
One thing that stuck in my mind about the group, which took place in Eva’s dining room around the table, was a particular book sat on a bookcase in Eva’s dining-room.
Contrary to what most people think, I’m quite a shy person and tend to avert my eyes away from people, especially when seated in a confined space.
Listening to people’s writing around a table of relative strangers for an hour and a half, I tried to concentrate.
On the bookcase, my eyes seemed to go to one book in particular, and I felt happiest staring at this hardback book as I waited for my turn to read.
The book had a light browny-green spine with white lettering and was called ‘A Hoxton Childhood’, by A.S.Jasper.
The typeset was sort of psychedelic, a bit like The Grateful Dead’s, so I guessed it must have been published in the seventies, but as the weeks went by, I imagined that its subject matter must have been of a prior generation, especially as A.S.Jasper sounded like J.R.Hartley from the old Yellow Pages advert, when the old boy finally tracks down his own novel.
Perhaps it was Piers, my friend from the Paris days who’d made painted ultra-violet backdrops for the parties I organised, that drew me to the book on the shelf. He’d moved back to London and settled in Hoxton. We’d had some very wild nights there, but I thought that there must be more to the surreal comfort of looking at the book than that.
The day after my fourth week at the writers’ group, I received a call from my sister.
‘Rick,’ she said, in unusually high spirits, ‘you know you’ve always been a writer?’
‘Yeah?’ I replied with pricked ears.
‘Well, I got a call from one of Dad’s relatives last week and he came to visit me yesterday.’ This was a surprise to say the least. Neither myself or my sisters knew of any living relatives on either Mum’s or Dad’s sides. We had always imagined that, with all our grandparents dead and our parents both only-children, we were alone in the world as a family. ‘It seems that writing’s in the blood, Rick.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, but something inside me had clicked and I instinctively knew what she was about to say.
‘Terry, the man who came to see me, is Dad’s cousin and he brought a book that was published a while ago by Nana’s brother. It’s called A Hoxton Childhood. Have you heard of it?’
‘Heard of it,’ I yelped. ‘I’ve been staring at it for the last month!’
‘What?’ she replied.
I explained away the otherworldly coincidence to her but neither of us could grasp the strangeness, so we just burst out laughing together.
I drove down to her place in Bramley the next morning and gawped at the title. It was on photocopied paper and she let me take it away.
I read it that night.
My grandmother, known as Molly in the book, was described on the first page.
‘My baby sister Molly was with Mother and Father outside the pub in a pram…’
The book is about my grandmother’s troublesome family, told by her older brother.
I’d known nothing about my father’s childhood apart from that his house had been bombed during the Second World War and that he lived in a graveyard with his parents for a few years afterwards.
My great grandfather was the main character in the book, a raging alcoholic-petty thief-bar brawling nutcase who never paid the rent, forcing the family to move every year or so. My great grandmother was a fearsome character of great integrity, holding the family together by the skin of her teeth.
My sisters and I had vague knowledge that we came from a family of Dutch musicians, who’d played for the royal court but decided to move to England, presumably, according to the author, to get a better life.
The next time I went to the writers’ group, I told Eva about the strange coincidence and she let me have the book on the shelf.
I picked it out and when I held it to my heart, she smiled so kindly at me.
After the session ended, I went home and flicked through the book. There were three photographs, of the author, his mother and father. My great grandfather looked like death warmed up. All his skin had slid down his face, a bony mass of alcoholism. My great grandmother looked like my grandmother and the author appeared the picture of health. There were line drawings throughout the book, which was published as a freebie for Readers Union members in conjunction with Everymans Library.
As it happened, earlier that month, I had been introduced to a Dutch illustrator through a friend who worked at the local library, and had started to employ her to do line drawings for my first children’s picture book, ‘One of Those Days’.
She was a stunningly attractive young woman and had, like my great grandmother, come to England seeking a better life. Like my great grandmother, she had fallen pregnant to an untoward and unruly Englishman. She, however, was the picture of health and rode around on an old pushbike. I recently found out that her parents are both musicians and have worked for the Dutch royal court, which is mind-blowingly weird. Her drawings were excellent, and the children loved the book when I gave it to them.
My friendship with Nigel, Dom’s brother, has grown over time and we have helped each other to deal with the trials of having chosen a nutcase to be the mother of our children. After countless hearings, half of which the mother failed to turn up to, he has been awarded half of the house and started to see the children on a regular basis, but the mother has now reeled them in and continues to use them against him for money.
I’m in the middle of my battle for contact and haven’t seen the children for ten months. After waiting sixteen weeks for a full Cafcass report to be presented to the directions hearing, which was due to take place today, the date has been postponed till mid-December, but I remain positive that I’ll be able to see them again in good time. I can only hope that she hasn’t poisoned them against me so much that they don’t even recognise me.
Dom has been working on my second children’s picture book for the last two months and has almost finished the line drawings. His artwork is incredible and I intend to publish this book, which should be out before Christmas.
My children have moved and their mother refuses to give her address, but I’m hopeful that my solicitors will have it by Christmas (her firm of solicitors went bankrupt a week ago). Even if I can’t see the at christmas, I can at least show them how much I love them by sending them the book and a hillock of presents. In time, they’ll know how much I love them and all the lies that they’ve been told by their mother can be slowly replaced with the truth.
‘A Hoxton Childhood’ reads like ‘Oliver!’ with rats. It turns out that it’s a bit of a local classic, depicting East End life during the First World War as it really was. An ex-MP unashamedly stole the title for his own depiction of these times a few years ago. Both are available on ebay, and seems quite fitting that an ex-MP would stoop so low as to sell his book under the same title. Are there no limits to their blind stupidity?

What follows are the last few paragraphs of A.S.Jasper’s book.
‘So, out of so disastrous a childhood, I am now surrounded, in spite of poor health, with love and happiness -a happiness always denied to my poor mother without whom we should all’ (the family) ‘have either starved or become criminals. Looking back, I still keep asking myself how she survived and why she chose to stay with a man like my father.
In recent years I have become a believer in the after-life and, if my beliefs are correct, she has found her happiness there. Once through a well-known London medium, my mother told me, speaking of my father, that he was ‘more sinned against than he was sinned’; this I have never understood, but perhaps she saw qualities in him or has some knowledge of him that was not evident to us, and this accounted for her loyalty.

Postscript
These memoirs first appeared in Profile, the magazine of the Hackney Borough Library Services, which enjoys a large circulation in the district where the events it describes took place. Both the library authorities and I were surprised and delighted by the interest it aroused. Many letters were received, not only from the borough itself but from former residents overseas. These letters told of similar memories and similar experiences, so I am satisfied that the picture I have tried to draw was neither exceptional nor one-sided.
Talking to middle-class people who did not live in working-class districts, I find that few realise how bad conditions were such a comparatively short time ago. (’Your story reads more like something out of Dickens,’ was a typical comment.) It was easy, it seems, for the better-off to be unaware of the appalling poverty and near starvation that existed. But those of us (and there are plenty) who remember lining-up in the snow at the local Mission for a jug of soup or second-hand boots, begging for relief at the Poor Law Institution, being told to take our caps off and address officials as ‘sir’, realise it all too well.
Yet amid those terrible times, we found time to laugh. We did not expect many pleasures out of life, but those we could get we took to the full. Perhaps it was this that enabled us to survive and perhaps this is why some of my older readers said they looked back with nostalgia and even affection to some aspects of those old days.
To my younger readers, may I say, ‘Be thankful that you were born now and not then. Go forward, but try to be tolerant of your parents on the way.’

This book has helped me to forgive my own parents. It also explains my unnatural urge to help bring about change to the wretched government that we have endured for so long. Quite by chance, earlier this year, two friends insisted that I read a book of the same era that ‘A Hoxton Childhood’ depicted, called ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’, by Robert Tressell, nee Robert Noonan, after hearing my drunken rants in various places around town.
This book has been a Godsend, especially as the author was a house-painter to the rich, like me. Noonan centred his novel around a house called ‘The Cave’, where untold injustices took place as a matter of course for the benefit of those who employed the team of painters portrayed.
This book hit me with such ferocity as to induce and justify a need to fight for what I believe is right. I now know that I am a Socialist, not of the modern type, but of the type that was intended for the good of everyone in the land, including the rich. That it has taken so long to understand my political leanings only goes to show how easy it is to be led astray by society today, away from the true self.
If only I could thank Nana’s brother and Robert Noonan for writing their stories, I would, and perhaps I will, in the after-life.