GOING HOME.

A sentimental yarn inspired by growing ever older...

The last time I walked down this road, thought Isaac, was the seventeenth of June way back when I was a nipper and my birthday was tomorrow…

And it had been. But more than way back. Very way back. In the monochrome, black and white days.

The road led past an estate of back-to-back Victorian slums that had been occupied in the way-back days and were now no more than piles of bricks and rotting timbers that seemed to cling to a kind of life like an old man might, an old man with arthritic limbs and memories.

An old man like him.

A tear crept out of one of Isaac’s eyes. Memories, he snivelled, can do that to eyes. They can make them leak because memories have, in their cores, either good or bad.

And most of his were bad.

His parents had lived at number thirty-seven and it was there they had done their best to bring him up. But it wasn’t easy, bringing up a bright young boy like him, so they had thrashed him often enough to ensure that he saw their difficulties, and somehow he had become a man.

There had been no indoor toilet, only one in the yard reached by going down an archway into a space behind the houses, and there was one toilet for the twelve families that had to share it. If you got the s***s, he thought, there would be trouble.

And there had been, because half of mum’s cooking gave you the s***s. She hadn’t been able to help it, what with the mice that scurried about the kitchen when no-one was looking and leaving their mess wherever they could find a clean corner. Not that clean corners were that common, not in those olden way-back days. Clean corners barely existed.

Way back.

He paused and looked at number thirty-seven when he came to it. There was still a bit of a door hanging on a single hinge when way back it had sported two. If he wanted to, if he really felt like it, he could go into that house, and smell it.

Way back it had smelt of ordinary things like the washing drying near an open smoky fire, like the cooking in the kitchen that would give him the s***s tomorrow, like, like the urine that all the beds smelt of, not just his because he hadn’t been a bed-wetter, had he? But all the beds. Even mum’s and dad’s. And granddad’s.

Granddad’s had smelt the worst because granddad had always had a yen for the pub and its beer, but it wouldn’t stay in him at night when he slept, and squirted out into his mattress, making it stink. Making the whole house stink. And nobody said anything about it because nobody dared.

Way back things had been hard.

In a moment of almost terrifying bravery he pushed on the door, its barely green paint chipped and flaking and its single hinge protesting. But it opened. Not silently like he would have preferred, like it always had way back after dad had oiled it which he did most weeks, but with a squawking, wretched squeak, the sort that sent shivers down an old man’s spine.

Made his old heart throb awkwardly.

That door opened straight onto the front room. There was no little hallway, no little place for a wet set of shoes to be dried on a mat, but just the front room.

The paper on the walls was peeling, as much of it as was still there. He remembered the pattern: roses, he’d thought when dad had proudly stuck it up with flour-paste, all pink and green and happy, but now it looked like weeds. Old weeds at that, the sort that would never flower again. All sad and dead.

In the far corner a door opened on a small room that was used as the kitchen and a smaller room for storing clothes and coal and brushes. Not that they had many clothes, not back then, people only normally had what they were standing up in and some in the wash for next week.

Then there was a flight of stairs leading up to the two bedrooms that were all the house had to offer for sleeping in. As a lad way back he’d been put on the tiny landing, not a room at all, and the two rooms were shared by the two generations older than him.

Would those stairs hold him?

They look steady enough… I’ll go easy on them…

Isaac made it without incident to the landing where he’d slept as a youngster, his hearrt thumping wildly, almost painfully. There was still a mattress there with a mouldy copy of an ancient newspaper covering a patch he remembered well, the threadbare patch where his toes got caught if he wriggled too much.

He hadn’t thought about that patch since way back!

The Daily Mail. That was it. His dad’s favourite paper. He fetched a copy from the newsagent every morning on his way to the mill where he worked, and brought it back home with him every evening.

It was, thought Isaac, that very newspaper that had formed his father’s opinions on just about everything because, well, if it was in the paper it just had to be gospel. Didn’t it?

Isaac bent to pick the paper up, but it fell to pieces as he touched it, leaving a musty smell in his hands.

Yesterday’s news, he sighed as he watched mouldy fragments of newsprint return to the mattress.

That would have upset dad, he thought. Dad loved his daily paper, reading it on the bog until one or other of the neighbours raged at him to give them a chance to s**t…

He’d been dead for ages, though. Dead and buried and largely forgotten.

Isaac pushed the cracked door that led into his parents’ room. Their bed was still there … nobody would have taken it away for anything, it wasn’t worth the shilling it had cost way back when it had been bought, very second hand.

He’d been born on that bed! Mum had told him with a mournful smile when he’d had the flu. It had been before the NHS, there was a war on and old Mrs what’s her name…? Wilkins? Wilson? Something like that, she delivered all the babies on their street, and hardly ever lost one.

And when she was wasn’t delivering babies she was laying out those at the other end of their lives.

Wilkinson! That was it! Mrs Wilkinson!

He sat on the edge of the bed, and sighed. Born just here all those years ago, born inches from where he was sitting now, a squawking baby way back when…

He closed his eyes, and wept a little.

So I’ve come home… he thought, mum called me Isaac after someone in the good book and dad gave me Winston as my middle name because he had a hero called that, the man who saved a nation in a nasty bloody war and needed remembering in a small boy’s name…

His heart lurched awkwardly at the thought, and he sighed a long ragged sigh. He’d come home. That made him smile, that did. Home.

Another tear or so, another moment’s heart-breaking toil, and darkness, silence, bloody refreshing silence…

Sad, really, Mrs Wilkinson wasn’t there. Not this time. But he’d wait awhile. He had no choice.

© Peter Rogerson 17.06.17

Reviews

[writ rajat]

best line arthritis limbs and memories very emotional poem i read it out to my brother by translating it in indian language thanks

[Peter Rogerson]

Well done for translating it! And thanks for your review.