Here are some true stories that helped me create
Harry Manning's world
Turning the cushion over
The night my dad died
When I looked at George’s face, I knew. He was in his fifties, overweight, didn’t exercise and smoked. That wouldn’t help to identify him. They were all like that. Dad was the same, except he didn’t make it to fifty.
I’d love to tell you about that night. What I watched on TV, it was a Sunday, so it was dreadful. What I had for tea (that’s dinner to you), probably chips and something. Was there a full moon? No. Was it cold? It was February, and we didn’t have central heating, so yeah, it would have been cold. What was happening politically? Google it. What was it like at school? Pointless in classes, fun in the playground. I’m sure it’s no surprise to you that some details have been lost, while others are burnt into my memory.
The first thing I can recall was him waking up. We shared a double bed and had done since mum had died. I don’t know what he got from that. I’m not sure what I got. Maybe just some relief from the fear of being alone. Hold on. Did you see what happened there? I’m filling in the blanks, and there are plenty of them. More blanks than memories. Retro fitting emotions into places you feel sure an emotion must have been. Using logic and reason to invent a memory that can’t be verified by remembering. When I tell strangers about losing both parents in the space of ten months, they say, ‘that must have been terrible.’ Maybe it was, maybe I’ve buried the horror so deep I will never unearth it. Or could it be, it wasn’t a big a deal?
I don’t remember the drama building. One minute I was asleep, the next I was awake, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed swearing.
I was thirteen, a late developer. Not assertive or outstanding. But I knew enough to know something had to be done. He didn’t want me to call the doctor. They had diagnosed him with angina, which at the time I didn’t even know was a symptom of heart disease. It was just something else he had, like a bad back or the gall stones he’d had removed the previous year. The angina diagnosis hadn’t stopped him from passing the medical for a new job. The coking plant had closed. He was the “Ambulance” driver. What that meant was, the minibus he used to ferry blokes around the plant was also the thing that took any injured lads to hospital. He’d recently completed a series of first aid courses with St John’s Ambulance Brigade. I still have the certificate, which stood propped against the radio, but not enough pride or money was available to have it framed. The mini-bus had a wooden sign on the dashboard that said, “Ambulance”. When it needed to be that, he tilted the sign forward, wedged it in place with a rag and became an ambulance. The fact it killed him offset the good fortune of having found a similar driving job at another plant in Rotherham. The pain was getting worse. ‘I could just chop the bloody thing off’, was the only thing I remember him saying. So maybe he didn’t understand the warning either. He wouldn’t let me call for help because he knew it might cost him his job. I don’t know how long I argued with him. All I know is, I did it anyway.
Gran lived with us, and always had, at least, all of my life. Her bedroom was downstairs. I can’t remember waking her, but feel sure I must have. (There, I’m at it again) The next thing I’m clear on is standing on the step of Kath and George Carr’s house, banging on the back door, asking them to phone the doctor. They didn’t question me about the urgency. We didn’t do “poorly”, that I’d arrived in the middle of the night, expressed the importance enough. They rang the doctor. I stayed at their house with Kath while George went over to ours.
Uncle George and Aunty Kath were almost daily visitors. As were many other neighbours. George had sat with dad on the morning mum and dad buried their first child, Elizabeth, eighteen months into her new life. It’s easy for me to visualise George helping dad down the stairs, his arm around dad’s shoulders, glancing out of the landing window for any sign of the doctor. Gran watching from the hall, twisting a tea towel in her arthritic hands. Can you see why I became a writer?
It can’t have been long before George returned, because the doctor hadn’t arrived. He didn’t get there in time. Would it have made any difference?
I will allow myself a moment to imagine what he must have felt, having to tell me that my dad had died so soon after my mother. Did he rehearse how would break the news? Like an understudy, pressed into action at short notice. Did he practice his lines on the back step before taking a deep breath and opening the door? In the end I saved him the trouble. One look at his face told me what I needed to know. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he.’ It wasn’t a question. I knew. Somebody must have hugged me, but I don’t remember. I’m sure we all cried, but I don’t remember that either. All I could think about, all I wanted to know, was, ‘are they going to put me in a home?’ That was a question. Gran replied immediately and with certainty, ‘no, they’re not.’ And they didn’t. Presumably there were some, but I was never privy to any discussions with social services or anyone else. Gran and I lived together until I bought my first house, age twenty-five. She died aged 94 in 1998, I was 36.
After the Co-op took dad’s body away and there was nothing else to be done, we left George and Kath and went back home. Gran sat in her usual chair by the cooker and I sat in the other favoured spot, next to the radio. As soon as I sat down, I stood up. The cushion was wet. I wasn’t the brightest, but I knew enough to realise that he’d died in that chair. Losing control of his bladder as the heart attack took him. Saying nothing to Gran, I just turned the cushion over and sat back down. Another chapter finished.
Turning the cushion over. I’ve thought a lot about that act and what it says about me. Good and bad.
I use this event almost exactly as it happened in the book, except Harry goes to grandad’s house for help.
What colour are buses?
The night the world changed
I was 10, lying on the settee and despite the fire roaring away only feet away, I was under the latest invention, a duvet. Although duvets had been invented, three seater settees hadn’t, so my head was propped up on a pillow at one end and my feet draped over the other armrest.
We always transferred the fire from the kitchen to the living room in the evening. I’d seen dad do it a thousand times. When I say transferred, I really mean it. We would get a small shovel and scoop up as much of the kitchen fire as we could and, quickly walk through the house to the living room and dump the coals in the living room grate. Setting us up for the evening’s tele viewing. It was a messy job, leaving a trail of smoke and soot as you went through the hall. But the effect was instant, so it was a price worth paying.
Anyway, I was on my own. Gran was in the kitchen, probably ironing or listening to the anaesthetic effects of night time Radio Two. Mum was getting ready for bed and already upstairs. We’d had tea together earlier, stew and dumplings with apple crumble and custard for pud. I’d been out on my bike but nobody was around, I checked out all the likely spots anyone might be, the playing fields behind the school, pub carpark. I’d checked around the back of the “power house”, an electrical substation on the edge of the estate, down by the local shops and under a hundred street lights. Dark or not, they were always a magnet that drew kids together. So I came home, sorted the fire out and settled in to watch whatever there was on TV.
I heard the car pull up. Dad coming home from work. He was on afters, the afternoon shift. On Friday night, they let me stay up to watch ‘Appointment with fear’, the regular 10.30 slot for a scary movie on ITV. Usually Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing chasing Christopher Lee’s Dracula around Eastern Europe.
Dad opened the living room door but didn’t come in. He looked at me, then at the tele.
‘I had to take Fred Ashcroft home from work earlier. He wasn’t feeling too good.’
Not the most startling story so far dad, ‘Is he dead?’ I asked casually, still concentrating on the undead. Dracula had just scored a direct hit on a busty maiden, but Van Helsing had caught up with him. Dracula looked up, the moaning woman’s ample cleavage on full display.
‘Don’t be daft; he’s got a new telly.’ I couldn’t see the connection, but I let it go. The villagers were gathering the pitchforks. It was a crucial moment.
‘A colour telly’. Now he had my attention. We didn’t know anybody with a colour telly. I sat up and looked at him for the first time. Then back at Chris Lee, blood dripping from his fangs. Oh yes, I thought, the future is bright, bright crimson!
‘On the buses was on,’ he said, as we both concentrated on the cleavage. Not one of my favourite programs, but in colour? I noticed nothing particularly odd about his manner, bearing in mind the grenade he was about to throw into the room.
‘Guess what colour the buses are.’
Even at this stage, I had no idea it was going to end so badly. It was a daft question. Buses were red. I’d never been out of Yorkshire. Yorkshire traction buses were red. My only other exposure to the bus world was through Corgi and Dinky toys. They made London transport buses, red buses. This must be one of his lame jokes, like how many beans make 5? Or how many ferrets can you get in a bag? 13 apparently. ‘It’s a big bag,’ he’d declare while grabbing me for a double kidney tickle. ‘Unlucky for some’, he’d shout. Ye I thought, as I collapsed in a heap, the ones at the bottom.
‘Red,’ I declared with as much conviction as I could with so much female flesh on show. Van Helsing pulled out a crucifix.
‘No,’ said dad.
‘What?’ Van Helsing dived off the huge table, knocking over a fruit bowl and the candelabra. His hand reached out and grabbed the curtains, landing in a heap as the dawn light streamed in.
‘There green,’ he said.
‘WHAT?’ Dracula’s face blistered, dried, then exploded in a cloud of dust.
‘Green buses’, he chuckled and went off to make himself a cuppa.
Van Helsing put his arm around the girl, lucky sod and they walked away from the horror in to the village as the credits scrolled.
If, I thought, you can’t rely on the colour of buses. What else can’t you rely on?
Quite a lot, as it turned out.
Again, this appears un-altered in Harry's life.