ADVENTURES IN A DIFFICULT WORLD (CHAPTER ELEVEN)

I don't know why or how John Benson and my mother got together. It's a great mystery to me. I suppose I was too young to get it. I think it was after my first half-sister Jenny was born that my stepfather began victimising Peter and I.
Peter was nine and I was eight. Suddenly my new baby sister was there, and one day he and Mum got dressed up and went down to the register office, and my mother came back with another name. I remember my mother asking me and Peter if we would like to change our names to Benson. We both said no. Maybe this pissed him off. We would always now be between the children from his first marriage, and this new family with my mother. His favouritism was never disguised, and became, whenever he’d tipped a few jars, ever viler and more upsetting.
After staggering home from the pub it was only a matter of time before he would start to pick on one or both of us. My mother would try to defend us, and he would accuse her of spoiling us – making us soft -- and calling us mammy’s boys. If my mother as much as took one of us on her lap he would physically pull us from her, calling us babies, and then a row would break out between them, which could go on for days.
Peter and I were forever in trouble – unable to do anything right. Most of the arguments between them were rather over money, or his right to chastise us, which was no more than bullying. Whenever we tried to protest against his treatment we were accused of insolence – cheekiness -- talking back.
Besides the jibes, clips, smacks, and digs his discipline sometimes came in the form of his belt, which was used in proportion to his black-dog moods and tempers – always coming over him after the drink began to wear off. His drinking at home got heavier over the years. He drank every night at home, after one of us, Peter, my mother, or I were sent out to get it.
Then he would sit in his favourite chair, the nearest to the fire for the winters, and complain about everything. And we were at the top of his list. Rather we should get out in the street or get to bed.
He went out to get a belly-full every Sunday afternoon. Then he would come rolling home five sheets to the wind. If he wasn’t too drunk to stand, he would take the centre of the room, staggering there like a broken robot to keep his feet, so he could begin to lay down the law. And if he had won money gambling, he might produce chocolate for my mother and Jenny, or for everyone, and make a big thing of doling it out with a false generosity, as if he were a god bringing ambrosia and nectar to us inferior mortal beings.
If Peter and I were given chocolate it had to be stated several times before we got it, that we did not deserve it, and we had to recognise that he was ten times better than that no-good-father of ours, who had never given us anything. This teasing with the chocolate was his way of humiliating us. ‘Aren’t I better than that shit-house of a father of yours?’ ‘I’m your father now and you’ll do what I say!’ ‘It’s me who puts the roof over your head, and the clothes on your backs!’ ‘You are both just like your father – you’ll come to nowt like that shit-house who left you with nowt!’
Or he might want to play, as he called it. He liked to box and wrestle with us, which always ended with us in tears, after the slaps in the face or the twisting of our arms, the nipping of our skin, or the scrubbing of our heads with his knuckles, and such. And if my mother’s protests, that he was too rough with us, didn’t bring on a screaming match right then, it would definitely come later after he had fallen asleep in his armchair and awoke with blood in his eyes.
So Peter and I would try to keep a low profile – hiding in the street when he was due home – staying out as late as possible hoping he would still be snoring in the armchair when we got home. I more than Peter became more and more engaged with the street and all its evils, simply because I was spending more time trying to stay out of the house when he was around. I couldn't bare to see my mother so upset.
But in winter, the freezing weather in the end, would drive us indoors, with even more foreboding, for he did not like to be avoided. His hate filled, hawk like eyes would fix on us and burn us up.
He was a humourless and ignorant man -- the kind of person who would stand in your way just because he could – he was against ‘wasting time on reading bloody books,’ and he thought kids should get out of school as soon as possible and work. So he didn't go much on my orange ideas, which made me his pet hate.
He was selfish, and hoarded his money. He gave my mother a fixed amount as house keeping money every week, which was never enough. So when she asked for more she would get it, begrudgingly, and then she would be in debt to him until the next pay day, when he would make sure she paid it back from her allowance, and so the problem would go on.
But he always had money for his drink and betting on the horses, dominoes, and cards. We kids never got such a thing as a holiday. Holidays were only for those families whose parents didn’t sluice away the money in the form of beer at both ends. The most we could expect was a day at the seaside with my mother. He wouldn’t go anywhere unless there was a drink on the way or when he got there. The only time he was happy was when his mind was well on route to idiocy.
Sometimes, when my mother didn’t have the money for the seaside, and we were suffocating in the hot stinking street during those Summer school holidays, she would take us, and maybe a couple of pals from the street picking brambles along the foreshore of the River Humber. First, there was the long walk beyond the chaos of the docks and factories, and a lengthy stretch of the river, before finally reaching the foreshore. And there the world would suddenly double in size. The town was behind you, the sky was so big and looming it could have eaten us. Not only could you see for miles over the river and over the flat Lincolnshire fields and on and on, but there was also an open view of countryside on our side. Where, ‘sky and water and Lincolnshire meet’ as Philip Larkin elegantly said of the Humber.
At this point a madness would come over us – bliss! There was enough silence to hear the news from nowhere. Scream if you want – the sound would be sucked away from your mouth leaving only the ghost of its echo in your mind. Who was it said, ‘Poetry is also in the naturalness of living?’
As we slowly followed a narrow trail along the mud flats of the river bank, we would come to a disused railway track, along which were a profusion of bushes full of black pearly brambles, which were just asking to be picked, baked, and eaten in pies beyond belief. We would spend a couple of hours hypnotized by the insect sizzle, while filling first our mouths, and then the dried milk powder tins with those black jewel like berries, which stained our fingers and mouths bruise-purple.
The brambles picked; the rest of the day would be spent smiling, and laughing in ripples. For here were all the elements a child with an ocean of imagination could be arranged and put to work: exploring water reeds as high as an elephant’s eye, where crocodiles and tigers could lurk, with enough water to sail around the Spanish Main in search of treasure, and an abundance of green bushes to hide from the Sheriff of Nottingham and his men. And surely this was the territory of the Snark!
And as the day drew on, the large sky seemed to lose its distance, creeping ever closer, on the finest, and lightest of steps. It's very presence eased itself into me – it rubbed and polished me like a new penny. Like a blue glass the sky seemed to enter me – crystallize me. The gulls hung like mobiles in the air calling tributes to the sun, the king. The lapping of the muddy water slipping to and fro was like a slow pulse that I sipped at the rim of my consciousness, letting it spill into me like a sink. And the sun calmly and unhurriedly edged over his arc of sky, and the day dripped ever so gradually away like charged light, until finally into that twisted time of twilight we half-heartedly, step by step, tired from the hike, returned to the dreaded street with all its contrasting threatening ugliness. All of a sudden we were back within the limiting family thump, with its piss-pot full of bad feelings, which dragged us back down into that banal stream of just another shit shaped day.
I can’t fully describe the pleasure these trips brought me. Those long days are my richest childhood memories, which come back with pleasure, but which always have an unhappy ending.