In a black Zodiac Zephyr we cruise the darkened streets of North London. The radio plays Johnny, Remember Me and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.
At the wheel is my uncle Terry, who drives an oil tanker for a living and the Zephyr for fun. His face is dark and cruel-looking, like a crueler-looking Kirk Douglas. Terry was in the merchant navy during wartime, and boxed. He has belts for it in the cupboard in the house in Theobalds Road where I am staying. There is another belt in there, my cousins tell me, that he will beat me with if I get out of line.
They tell me a lot of stuff like that, my cousins; some of it I believe, other things I’m not so sure about. I’m only six – and a naïve, dreamy six at that: not London street-smart like them. Normally I live in Prittlewell, Essex, close to Southend Airport where my dad works as an Aircraft Inspector. I have been sent here to London to stay with my mother’s brother and his family for the Summer. I have no idea why. The latest thing my cousins have told me is that both my parents died in an accident but nobody has the heart to break it to me.
‘No they haven’t,’ I say.
‘Yes they have.’ Apparently, I’ve got to keep it to myself. ‘Don’t cause a fuss.’ I think of the belt lurking in the cupboard.
I look at the back of my uncle’s head; the blue-black teddy-boy hair, slick with oil. Aeroplanes run on kerosene, lorries on diesel. My Father smells different to my Uncle, and they are different in other ways too. My father doesn’t hit me with a belt: he uses his hand.
Next to Terry’s head on the front bench seat of the Zephyr is his wife Audrey’s. Audrey has button eyes and a soft smile. She washes her legs in the sink – they have no bathroom – and cooks Dambuster pudding with custard. Auntie Audrey reads to us at night from an Enid Blyton book, The Faraway Tree. At the top of the tree is a ladder the children climb up to a magical land. The land changes with each visit, but if you stay too long in the land it is possible to get stuck there, and you might never find your way back to the tree and home. The chapter where this happens – where the land moves and the children get stuck – is terrifying.
The music changes on the radio to a sad harmonica tune. Terry and Audrey talk together in low voices. I’m in a strange mood, feeling oddly disconnected from the wet streets and the lights of shops as they flash past.
Maybe they’re working out a way of breaking the sad news to me, so that I’ll take it well and not cause a fuss. But then they start laughing and I realise they’re not talking about me at all.
The shops and cafés glide past, lit-up cafés with Gaggia machines and red checked tablecloths. We stop at traffic lights outside a civic building – a modernist new build, all concrete and big glass windows. The lights are on and something is happening in there, some type of Town Hall discussion, perhaps; people in banked seating. But their top halves are screened off and all I can see are shoes and knees, trousers and skirts.
The lights change, the car moves on.
(Image credit: Charlesfrederickworth)