Stanley

Stanley was a wonderful sight. The village we both lived in at the time had one very long street running through it. Every morning, as I drove back from the primary school run to the nearest town, I would keep an eye out for him walking the mile or so from his cottage to his barbershop. I’m not sure why he didn’t drive, even before his stroke. I don’t think I ever asked him. Often our times coincided and I’d stop to pick him up and drop him further down the road before turning back and going home. It wasn’t much of a detour and he was such a lovely man, I would have done anything for him.

He was the easiest person in the world to spot, even from quite a distance. He must have been around sixty when I first met him, and he was the only man in the village, as far as I knew, who would wear a beret and a knee length brocade coat, often of a rather spectacular colour, with contrasting frogging down the front. Sometimes he’d substitute the beret with a small velvet smoking cap, which was embroidered in gold and had a tassel of brightly coloured silk. He must have had a wonderful collection of clothes at home. His wife made the costumes for the local theatre and I think she probably designed his too.

He was well rounded, but quite tall so it didn’t show too much. He wore his greying ginger-blonde hair tied tightly back into a thin plait which reached halfway down his back and he had a sparse frizzy grey beard. Apart from the clothes and the plait, he bore a startling resemblance to Raymond Briggs’ illustrations of Father Christmas. Whenever I read that book to my sons when they were little, I would always make Father Christmas sound exactly like Stanley and now their two characters have almost fused into one in my memory. Stanley had a very soft voice and despite having lived in Suffolk since the sixties, he had never lost his East End accent.

You might think from my description that he was just an old hippy – someone who’d done one too many trips in the sixties, and fled London for the peace of what must have then been the back of beyond. This would be wrong; Stanley was never a hippy. He was a product of the same close knit community in the East End of London that gave birth to the members of those famous gangs, who tortured, intimidated and murdered, but who respected their mothers and who were celebrated in beautiful black and white photographs in the sixties.

Stanley grew up with those people and had known them well. He would tell me stories of them in his quiet voice, with a slight stammer. While he talked, he had a way of looking furtively around, as if worried someone might overhear, that I imagine he’d picked up from the streets he grew up on. I think his habit of smoking roll ups the wrong way around, the lit tip facing into the palm of his hand, came from his army days.

Somehow, after national service, Stanley had drifted into the Soho of the late fifties when it was supposed to have been at its disreputable best, and I think he did his apprenticeship there as a barber. I’m not sure what made him come to Suffolk, or to that particular area. I know that quite a few others from both Soho and the East End criminal fraternity did too. Mrs. Kray had a holiday cottage nearby, and there was also a small community of well-known artists in the area.

One of the things I like most about England – something I’d miss if I lived elsewhere, is the acceptance of eccentricity as a natural part of life. That village was teeming with strange people when we first moved there. The tall artist with masses of unruly white hair and a loud upper class voice who never seemed to know quite where she was; the woman I met at the vet once – she must have been at least eighty – a tiny little thing, with a strident voice, dressed exactly as a lesbian from nineteen twenties bohemia would have – severely cropped hair and a man’s suit and tie, in a beautiful tweed, with highly polished brogues, all obviously tailor made to fit her miniature frame.

There was a very camp solicitor who looked exactly like George V right down to the imperial beard, and dressed accordingly, with a big watch tucked into his waistcoat pocket. He was wonderful company. We used to go on long walks together with our dogs, and I almost never stopped laughing when I was with him. While he was at work during the day, his dog would let herself out of the house, go down to the pub for opening time, and then let herself back in again before he got home. Nobody minded at the pub. She would sit quietly and customers would give her crisps and a drink. There were many other interesting people in the village. Nobody turned a hair at them, and I never saw anyone treat them with disrespect or cruelty.

Stanley was a pillar of the community. His barbershop was right in the middle of the village, above a second-hand bookshop. All the men and boys went there – even some women, although I don’t think he really approved of cutting women’s hair short. I once told him I was thinking of cutting mine, and he looked at me for a minute and said he thought long hair looked better spread out on a pillow and he hoped I wouldn’t. It’s never been shorter than shoulder length since then.

Every couple of months I’d climb those creaky wooden stairs with my sons, hoping to get into the room before them. Sometimes, if there were no customers, you’d find Stanley whittling away at one of his erotic totem poles and, anxious to avoid the inevitable “what’s that man doing?” questions, I’d always try to get my head around the door so he could slide it under the bench before the boys saw.

They were quite extraordinary pieces of art. I’m not sure what he did with them afterwards – whether he sold them or exhibited them. They were very long pieces of wood, and when finished, they’d have been turned into a succession of couples having sex all along the pole, in many and varied positions, some of which didn’t actually look possible, although I never said that to Stanley.

My boys loved Stanley. He never treated them like children, more like miniature men entering some kind of exclusive male club, which was how it seemed in that tiny room when the benches were full of men waiting their turn. Then I definitely felt unwelcome, as if I were destroying the atmosphere just by being female. It wasn’t Stanley who ever made me feel like that, it was the other men, who would shift uncomfortably in their seats, and clear their throats. Quite often though, the room would be empty and then, once he had one of my sons settled in the big chair, with the rubber cape wrapped around his shoulders, Stanley would start cutting, and as he did, he’d talk to me over their heads.

Whenever he began a sentence with “I’ll tell you something”, you knew you were going to be on the receiving end of some interesting village gossip – something about the retired bank robber who lived in the little hamlet just off the village, who wasn’t retired at all, but used his helicopter to commute to a job occasionally – “that garden takes a lot of upkeep”, or maybe a story of the goings on at the house of the man who’d recently inherited the entire estate of a famous artist who’d been his partner. He also had a theory that the antiques dealers, for which the village was famous, were mostly drug smugglers. He said he knew the stock hadn’t changed for years in some of the shops, yet they always seemed so rich; “always flashing the cash, they are; and I’ll tell you something – if the police saw them big wooden crates arriving from Holland round the back, they’d want to know what was in them too”.

As they grew old enough to understand what he was saying, Stanley would moderate his gossip a little, but it was always just this side of thrilling, and the boys would sit quietly, listening with wide eyes. They thought he was wonderful. Stanley never told them off when they wriggled – instead he would say “keep still mate, or you might lose that ear”, and when he found bits of food in my youngest son’s messy, curly hair, he would pick them out and ask him if he was saving them for later.

Five or six years later, we moved away, but only by a few miles, so I still watched out for Stanley when I was in my car. Soon after that he had a small stroke and had to stop cutting hair. He recovered quickly, and it was always a pleasure to bump into him on market day in the town, wandering among the stalls with his shopping basket on his arm and an absent-minded smile on his face.

When I saw Stanley soon after I’d split up with my sons’ father, he blocked the pavement for half an hour while he told me how I was better off without him, and how he’d always preferred me anyway, and then he said he would send me one of his sons to sort out my new house “he’s been in a bit of trouble in the past, but he’s a good boy really, and he’s a builder now. I’ll have a word”.

Within a week or so, I had a procession of ex-convicts coming and going out of my house with buckets and wheelbarrows and bags of cement. George was lovely too, just like his dad, and we’d have long conversations about his complicated love life and drug problems. He never told me until the job was done, that my plasterer had actually been on day release, as he was getting near the end of his sentence for manslaughter; “ he was provoked mind you – it wasn’t really his fault”.

The last time I saw Stanley, he was on the corner, outside a shoe shop, looking confused. He was staring blankly at a list in his hand, and his basket was empty. It took him a minute or two to recognise me, but then he told me how he’d had a fall, and the doctors were making him have tests.