We'd Like a Different Room Please

We are in our new room. My mother didn't like the old one because there were no carpets on the floor - only polished dark-wood floorboards. This room has carpets, well, a huge woven rug over the floorboards. But there is no ice in this ice-bucket, and the one from our old room didn't follow us. 

"David, go get some ice from the machine outside, " my father says.

"Okay." I'm wearing jogger shorts and flip-flops - a big change from the corduroys and parka I arrived in two days ago.

The door closes behind me, and I am alone with the Gilbey's Gin ice-bucket. The hotel landing is quiet except for the vaguely reassuring hum of a wall-mounted air-conditioner below the window to my right, and the occasional faint rattle of ice-blocks falling inside the ice machine further down the corridor. Bright African sunlight streams through the window, and as I walk through the resultant rectangle of light projected onto the carpet I can feel its warmth on my legs. There is a smell; a smell I will remember for the rest of my life and still encounter. It is a smell of polished mahogany, of plush dark-green carpets, of starched sheets and old air-conditioners; a smell of hotels. 

The ice machine is at the far end of the landing near the stair-case that leads down to the ground floor, and as I slide back its heavy steel lid and start to take out some ice with the bucket's little scoop, ice-blocks falls onto my hand as the machine's innards disgorge once more their newly-frozen contents. I fill the bucket, replace the scoop, and then head back to our room where my father opens the door to my knock.

"I filled it," I offer, walking past him into the room and lifting the little bucket up above my head to show that's what I'm talking about.

"Thanks, put it on the table"

There's a small round table here, and I put the ice down on it, next to his glass. Across the room  I hear a noise from my mother, as if she has been punched in the stomach. As I turn she drops onto the double bed with her head in her hands and starts to utter a series of soft short wails. 

"Dad! What's wrong with her?" I ask running over to the bed.

"Look out the window," he says, plopping ice into his brandy and Coke, and ignoring my mother completely as if he's been here before and knows there's nothing to be done.

I'm kneeling next to my mother, asking her if she's okay; trying to get some response from her heaving form. She seems to be okay - just upset. I stand up and move across to the window on the other side of the bed. There's an air-conditioner below the window here, too. It's plastic vents are cold and wet as I press my palms on it, but resting my forehead on the window I can feel the glass is warm from the heat outside; the air-conditioners are left running during the day against its relentless January onslaught.

Down below us, on the other side of the road, there is an other-wordly sight, the likes of which I have never seen: a crush of African humanity. Hundreds and hundreds of black folk, and this close to the window I can hear the drone and din of all their voices. And there is music - the glass vibrates to the beat. Every now and then I can hear laughter and occasional high-pitched cries as wares are advertised or services offered. There are chickens in cane-cages; small fires with meat and sausages cooking on metal grids over them, each one effusing smoke that creates a haze over the whole fiasco; goats of all sizes tethered with lengths of twine to makeshift stalls, and unknown herbs and roots hanging from their corrugated tin roofs. Toyota mini-buses are parked haphazardly in among the whole scene.

I turn round to face my old man who's looking at me helplessly, opening his mouth to say something, but I get the words out first:

"It's the Market Square."

Quill Street

My maternal grandfather, Fred Richard Taylor, was born in Bradford, England, on the 26th day of November, 1912. We shared the same birthday.  

It took quite a few years for me to realise his name was actually Fred because everyone called him Dick - a short form of his middle name with the first letter swapped for a D. I don't understand the reasoning, but in England, apparently, this type of name shortening and first-letter swapping has been practiced for hundreds of years, and in the early part of the 1900s a person named Richard would almost certainly be called Dick. Whether Fred became known as Dick at birth or at school or later in life I'm not sure. And whether he liked it or not, as with so many other things that now seem important, I never asked him.  

I do know that his wife - my grandma - never called him Fred and never Richard, only Dick. 

His father worked as a typesetter for the Bradford Observer, and the story goes that he could read a newspaper backwards, upside-down, and back-to-front even on the press. This occupation, while still planting the family firmly in working-class ground, meant that Dick, and his little sister Annie, always had food in their stomachs, clothes on their backs, and went to school with shoes on their feet. 

 He went to Usher Street School, about a mile away from the terrace house in Quill Street where he was born and lived. The school, built in 1879 and now known as Bowling Park Primary, still stands, its slightly foreboding Yorkshire-sandstone buildings, typical of the working-class community-architecture of the era, are now at odds with the newly-painted bright blue doors and welcome signs. Its surroundings must have altered somewhat since his feet clattered across the yard, as just across the street from the main gates you'll now find a glass-works, a fitness centre, and a sikh temple.  

I remember fondly his stories and his nonsensical sayings (If it takes a man a week to walk a fortnight…), but unraveling fact from fiction is, of course, even more impossible for me now than it was then. "Is that true, Grandad?" I would ask of some tale or other, but this would bring just a shrug of his shoulders or a smile and a nod. 

I remember that one of his school-favourites was how the Master once stood in front of the class and, hovering one chalk-dusted hand over a map of the world showing England's empire highlighted in pink, brought the hand down in a long sweeping arc from Canada to Australia and asked, "Now, Children, d'ye see all that pink on there?"  

"Yes, Sir," came the children's rote reply. 

"That all belongs to us, that does!" The Teacher declared proudly, breathing in loudly through his nose and puffing out his chest as if he believed every word. But somehow the wealth of the colonies hadn't filtered down to home level yet, as most of the kids in his class were in threadbare clothes with their "arse hangin' out o' their britches," and no proper shoes to go home in - only wooden clogs if they were lucky, and nothing at all on their feet if they weren't. Besides Colonial Affairs and geography, the backbone of learning at Usher Street was the Three Rs: Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmatic, and as far as I remember, granddad was good at all three, but although his parents were relatively well-off, the thought of University or further education (if he even entertained such dreams) would have been out of the question, and he left school at fifteen.  

He played football at school, and then later for Bradford Boys' Football Club. He would tell me how this coveted achievement meant you were headed for a career as a professional footballer as soon as you were noticed by a scout from one of the town's two professional clubs: Bradford City or Bradford Park Avenue; the scouts must have missed his best games because Bradford Boys' was as far as it went.  

By the time I was born, Dick and my Grandma Olive, were living in a new house they had bought before the second world war in Fenby Avenue - less than two miles from Quill Street. As I got older, I would spend most weekends with them, and when the weather was fine, he and I would often go for long walks around Bradford on Saturday afternoons. The roads we walked must have been totally familiar to him - he played in these same streets and fields as a child - and we always found our way back home no matter where we were. We would walk past rows of silent sand-blasted terrace houses with tiny cemented or paved front yards, their gates closed, front doors locked, and curtains drawn across their bay-windows. "Shhh!" he would warn, "they're all on nights!" Just why everyone in this particular neighbourhood were all working nightshift at the same time puzzled me - perhaps they all worked for the same company. "Are they really all on nights, Grandad?" I would ask. 

"Aye, lad. They must be." But I made a mental note to ask my mother once I got back home.   

Mostly we would take a football with us on these walks - in a Sandmartin's carrier bag that also held the cheese teacakes that my grandma had carefully wrapped in tinfoil - and kick it around on any open field that we found along the way. I clearly remember one Sunday afternoon - I would have been around eight or nine - I wanted to show him how my goalkeeping skills were coming along, but we had forgotten the ball. So we walked for hours looking for a shop that was still open and had a ball to sell us - a combination not easily found in sub-urban Bradford on a Sunday afternoon in the 1970s. Eventually we found a corner shop that sold cheap plastic Green-Cross-Code balls that first go left, then right, then left again if kicked with anything resembling force. He bought one, though, and we played together on the brick-strewn barren landscape that was once Hepworths' Mill. The wind had come up now, playing havoc with the lightweight ball, howling across the wasteland and through our hair; both of us without a care in the world and laughing like we'd just discovered the secret to eternal happiness.  

Sometimes I would eagerly ask him to explain how football had changed over the years and what it used to be like so long ago.  He would describe how modern-day footballers of like Kenny Dalglish and Kevin Keegan would have been no good at all in his day. For a start, they just weren't tough enough; they would have been too soft to kick a ball from yesteryear, never mind head one. A real ball made of heavy brown leather, sewn together with something resembling a shoelace, was so heavy when it got wet that you needed steel-toed boots to be able to kick it. And God help you if you went up for a header and the wet shoelace had come loose and whipped you across t' for'ead, or, even worse, your cheek or your eye. 

Of course, he knew as well as I that modern footballers didn't use their toes to kick a ball, but he loved telling the story as much as I loved hearing it...

The tale of the Market Square (or how the Rubik's Cube came to South Africa)

So, it's January the 15th, 1981.  My mother, Freda, has just turned 39 a few weeks ago, and my father, Harold, is 41. I'm twelve, and all three of us have just touched down at Jan Smuts International in Johannesburg in a South African Airways 747. This is surely the largest beast I've ever seen, and it's interior looks even bigger. It's like a Tardis.

The plane has come to a stop but my mother's eyes are still red and swollen from the traumatic goodbyes spluttered to her parents yesterday afternoon, and my old man hasn't been able to shake the half-guilty, half-frightened look that he started wearing about a week ago. 

England is behind us, our little village, Wyke, is behind us. Were we just bored with that life? I'm not really sure.