John Horley: Letters from my Mum

John Horley was my ‘real’ dad. Technically he was my ‘real’ dad. He left before I was born. I have never met him and don’t really know anything about him. About ten years ago, I wrote to my Mum to ask her about him. The following extracts are taken from the letters that she sent me. This is really all that I know about him:

“His full name was John Richard Horley, he was about 6 foot 5 inches tall and fairly big built. He had blondish hair and he always had it cut short, very much the same as you used to have it when you first left school. He had blue eyes and he wore glasses for reading.

He lived in Salterford Road, Tooting. I can’t remember the exact number but it was in the middle of the street and it was a terrace house.

He was six years older than me and his birthday was in September, I can’t remember the exact day – it was a long time ago.

Your dad had a mum but his dad was dead, and he only had one brother.

Your dad liked a drink, sometime she would get tipsy. He smoked quite heavily as well. He used to play the piano – not classical or anything like that – but just like you would hear in a pub.

For a living, your dad worked in demolition. He mostly knocked down chimneys.

Your dad did look a bit like Bobby Moore the footballer but a lot bigger built. You have the same nose and eyes as your dad but the rest of your face is more from the Allen side. Sometimes I watch you do something and I think to myself that’s the same as his dad did. Also, when you speak, little things remind me of him. Especially the bit where you would stand your ground and argue the point if you thought you were right.

Your dad drove a car. It was a cream and pale green Consul. Sometimes he used to have his old workvan. That was one of those Bedford boxy looking things and it was filthy. We often had a few words about that, when he expected me to go out all dressed up in it.

Your dad used to love Dean Martin records. I think sometimes he thought he was him because he would sing them but unfortunately, he wasn’t a very good singer. To be truthful, his voice was horrible.

Another thing I just remembered, he liked cowboy films especially one’s with john Wayne.

He was a smart dressed man when he was out of his working clothes. He would always wear a suit with a nice shirt and tie when he went out.

He hated having his picture taken, that’s why I never ever had a picture of him.”

elim estate

elim estate is in bermondsey, south london. to be more precise, se1. it was in a triangle shape and was bordered by long lane, weston street and wilds rents. we lived on the wilds rents side, overlooking the metal box factory, or ‘mb’ as the locals called it.

the estate was built just after the second world war and contained 121 flats. we lived at 119 and so there were only two more flats beyond ours. somehow it made us feel a little more exclusive than if we’d been at number 53 for example.

the flats were four storeys high – three normal floors with balconies and an extra ‘upstairs’ for the flats on the top floor. we lived in one of these in what i believe is properly described as a maisonette.

119 had a green door. it stayed green until the day my granddad died.

watch him burn

my grandad (ernie allen) put me off smoking for life. smoking in excess of 40 cigarettes a day – when he could afford it – his hands were permanently stained (nicotine) orange as indeed was his fringe.

to balance out the need to buy cigarettes, ernie used to have to cut back in other ways. most notably, he would never buy good quality or new clothes. instead he would go for the cheaper option or just inherit the wardrobes (and false teeth) of the recently departed from this world. because it was the 1970s and 1980s, the ‘cheaper option’ typically meant that his clothes were made from man-made fibres: raylon, polyester, nylon et al.

both my nan (ivy jessie allen) and ernie had their own armchairs, one each side of the gas fire in the front room of 119 elim estate. because of the heat – or maybe because they were too near to a gas outlet – they would often fall asleep. for ernie, who would rarely be without a cigarette, this meant that when he fell asleep, there was a good chance that it would be with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

my nan – despite regularly falling asleep herself, sometimes even mid-sentence – used to be disgusted that he could fall asleep with a lit cigarette in his mouth and would sit there, swearing at him under her breath. what she would relish most though was when he fell asleep with his head drooping forward and his mouth open. when this happened, his lit cigarette would teeter on his lip, sometimes hanging on for dear life: a slightly damp lip defying gravity by adhering to a benson and hedges filter tip.

eventually though, gravity would claim victory and the cigarette would drop onto ernie’s chest. with this, my nan would sit and wait. anticipating the next step, she would draw everyone in the room’s attention to that fact that they should “watch him burn”. let the entertainment begin.

given that he would rarely ever be wearing anything less than 90% man-made fibres, when the lit end of the cigarette made contact with his clothes, a rapidly expanding circular burn/ melt would begin. first the outer layer would go. so too would the same occur on the second layer. being a man who preferred the ‘layered’ look long before it was ever made fashionable by gap, the process was slow, but oh so worth it. as each layer disappeared (for ‘disappeared’ read melted because that is what happens to raylon, polyester and thier ilk), so the anticipation grew. when the final layer – the vest – became visible, the adrenalin levels of everyone in the room – apart from ernie – would reach a crescendo.

as the lit cigarette touched the skin on his chest, so the burn would immediately wake him from his sleep with a start. “fuck, fuck, fuck” he would say, jumping up as he manicly brushed himself down in a desperate attempt to not only rid himself of the cigarette but to ensure that it didn’t stay beneath one or more layers.

irrespective of who or indeed how many onlookers were present, all would be laughing hysterically as my nan would go into a diatribe punctuated with a variety of different swear words: “look at you…i’d have let you burn…silly bastard” (you get the picture).

ernie, being brought out of his sleep in possibly the most unkind of ways, would eventually come to his senses and return the verbal compliments to my nan.

everyone else would just carry on laughing: laughing as my nan told ernie that “it served you right” whilst ernie tried to casually make sure no other burning embers or ‘dog ends’ were left hidden somewhere on his person.

what was amazing about this episode was that it wasn’t a one-off. far from it, the same thing happened week in, week out. each time, the same series of events occurred – the snoozing, the drop, the melting, the vest, the burn, the waking, the swearing. week in, week out the same thing except when the burning cigarette would fall down the side of the armchair and a reconnaissance mission would be required before a low quality, toxic gas producing piece of furniture became a premature funeral pyre.

because of this, ernie had no clothes that were free from cigarette burns. and as with his orange fringe and fingers, so the obligatory circular burn became one of the trademark symbols that whenever i see it, immediately reminds me of him.

ivy jessie allen

ivy – or ‘big ivy’ as she was known – was my nan.

despite being ‘big ivy’ she was in fact the ‘little’ ivy in the family. like all her sisters, they too named all their first born daughters after themselves, and so in our family you had big ivy/ little ivy, big violet/ little violet, big rosie/ little rosie – you get the picture. unlike all the others though, my nan was shorter than her daughter and so ‘big ivy’ was a mere 5ft 2 ins whilst ‘little ivy’ (my mum) was 5ft 10 ins tall. as a child, i always found this funny.

my nan was born on the 5th august 1910 in bermondsey. whilst i don’t know much about her mum, i do know that her dad was from cork in ireland. he had a green birth certificate – something that she was always proud of – and his name was william hitchman (born 1875). she was one of a few children, and if memory serves me well, her brothers and sisters comprised william (uncle bill), albert (uncle bert), rose (aunt rose) and violet (aunt vi). i think that there may have been one more brother who moved to the east end of london but i can’t be sure.

ivy spent most of her life working as an office cleaner, doing so right up until she retired. it seems strange now, but rarely did you ever see her out of her ‘workwear’, always having a wrap-around apron on. most of her cleaning jobs were in the city of london – phoenix house was one place that i always remember – but in later years, she also cleaned at gonzalez byas, a purveyor of sweet sherries and fortified wines (i took this from their website). gonzalez byas always sounded far more exotic than anything we could ever imagine, even though its offices were situated at the end of the estate in what was, a far from exotic location. it was though good for when i wanted to go and meet her from work.

she was brought up as a catholic although she left (forced?) the church in the 1930s when she had an illegitimate son by a jewish man. she named her son joseph (uncle joe). as for the father, i have only just realised that i have never asked anything about him although if she carried on her tradition, no doubt the father’s name also was joseph.

my nan remained a believer despite having left the church. instead of going back to church though, what she would do is give people (mainly mrs murfitt) money to go the the church, light a candle and say a prayer whenever anyone was ill or died. she also used to have a crucifix in the hall that had a vessel for holding holy water in it.

during the second world war, ivy met ernest allen (ernie – my grandad) who she then married on st patricks day, 17th march 1945. i believe that they met at the cinema. in 1946, they had their only child together, ‘little ivy’ (ivy priscilla allen or mum). it was around this time that they both moved into 119 elim estate, initially with ivy’s parents.

as ‘the custard skin stabbing‘ highlights, they had an eventful married life. overall, i think that it was a success and that when all was said and done, they loved each other an awful lot. in later years especially, ernie lived solely for her and was lost after she died.

over the years, ivy had a number of illnesses that following her retirement, made her largely housebound. despite her diabetes, cataracts, varicose veins, angina and everything else, she was a happy person despite being able to ‘turn on the waterworks’ at the drop of a hat. she did also use her illnesses sometimes to make others feel guilty – for this, read christmas day.

growing up, ivy would regularly remind me of her own mortality, telling me that if she saw me go to school, she would die happy: not necessarily the thing you want to hear when you’re four. she then did this for when i went into the juniors, secondary school, sixth form, work and reaching 21. unfortunately, reaching 21 was the last of the milestones she reached, dying in guys hospital on the 5th october 1987.

dying shortly after we had left the hospital on a sunday evening, the last thing she said was that she wanted her hair combed as she wanted to look nice.

the custard skin stabbing

every sunday, my nan used to cook a ‘proper’ sunday roast. along with all the usual trimmings, she would also prepare a bowl of birds custard that she would leave to cool before serving with tinned fruit as dessert.

every week, my grandad (ernie) would ask without fail whether he could have the skin off the custard. the skin would be the thick ‘crust-like’ top that was be formed as the custard was left to cool. every week, she would agree. it seemed that to everyone apart from ernie, it was a given that the skin was his.

one week however, his desire to have the skin got the better of him. instead of waiting until finishing the sunday roast, he decided to sneak into the kitchen and steal the skin before my nan had finished the cooking the main course.

thinking that he’d got one over on her, he took the skin off the custard and downed it in one. it could be that he maybe thought that eating the first skin would mean that another skin would form before dessert was served. however, his motivation on this particular week remains to this day unknown.

my nan though was far shrewder than people ever gave her credit for. as ernie was eating the skin, she had spotted the dirty deed and watched him out of the corner of her eye. as he then turned away from the kitchen, reveling in his glory, my nan pounced.

unfortunately for him, she was holding one of those large forks that chefs use to hold a joint of meat in place whilst they are carving it. with the war cry of, “you thieving bastard”, she stabbed him in the back – just below his left shoulder blade – with all the force she could muster.

the fork entered into him pretty easily and lots of blood exited him even more easily. he screamed with the pain of being stabbed. she screamed with the vast amounts of blood spurting from him. he then fell to the floor with the cry of “what the fuck was that” and my nan screamed in the belief that she had killed him.

pandemonium ensued with various relatives in the flat hearing the cries and rushing to 119 to see what had happened. with my nan, mum, aunt rose and lally all being there, as well as myself and of course ernie who was still bleeding on the floor, there was lots of swearing and shouting going on.

thankfully my nan showed some remorse but only after she’d realised that she hadn’t killed her husband. her remorse though took the form of her asking him not to report her to the police or go to the hospital for treatment (despite the fact that he probably needed a couple of stitches in the still bleeding wound).

as for ernie, he learnt his lesson and never stole the custard skin again.

recurrent childhood dream

as a child in the early 1970s i used to have a disturbing recurrent dream.

i would be sitting on the patio of a house, at a small round table beneath a parasol. behind me would be a dividing outside wall.

i would be at the table with some people (who i could never remember who they were) looking at a scrapbook containing christmas and birthday cards from when i was younger. whilst enjoying the moment, the dividing wall would suddenly crumble (possibly through some sort of impact?) and i would be trapped underneath it.

starting to scream in the hope that somebody would rescue me, i would then wake myself up .

the interesting thing is that i could have this dream more than once in a night and could go back into it after waking.

it also felt in some ways prophetic as when i had the dream, i wouldn’t have been in a garden with a patio nor would i have sat at such a table. we did though have scrapbooks that contained old christmas and birthday cards.

lennie allen

lennie (leonard allen) was the brother of my grandad, ernie.

i didn’t know lennie too well as he moved away from the immediate vicinity of 119 elim estate and bermondsey. he lived in morden which to me as a child, was a million miles away from the flats. nowadays i realise that it’s merely the end of the bakerloo line of the london underground (which isn’t, just in case you didn’t know, not a million miles away from bermondsey).

lennie was always treated with respect because he had been a prisoner of war, held by the japanese in burma. more importantly, this was because lennie had also been severely tortured by the japanese army. the story goes that when lennie came back from the far east after the end of the second world war, no-one in the family recognised him due to the amount of weight that he had lost. despite the fact that he never spoke openly about the torture that he underwent, from the day he returned from burma until the day he died, he never took his shirt off (due to the scars that he had on his body), and he refused to watch any films or tv programmes about war. he also never attended or participated in any remembrance day events and because of this, i have always struggled as to whether or not i should wear a poppy.

two things i remember about lennie and his house in morden. the first is that i loved the ‘mouse in a brandy glass’ ornament he had and which were popular in the 1970s. and second, he was the only person i knew in that had a real sheepskin rug. when i visited him when i must have been no more than about 7 or 8, i remember laying on the rug and falling asleep, so content and warm was the experience.

lennie died some time in the 1980s with very few of us having seen him in his last years.

billy’s bed

i used to sleep in a small bed at the foot of my mum’s bed. one night, i remember being woken by the arrival of a lot of people in our bedroom. it was dark and my eyes were in that half asleep condition, where it takes a while for shapes to register and so it took me a while to realise what was going on.

as i was waking, i noticed that there was a lot of crying. i could tell that there were a lot of women in the room despite only being able to make out dark, slow moving, silhouettes. i remember though being able to make out that most of them were wearing fur coats. it was obvious that someone had died because it was traditional that fur coats only came out for special occasions and what better occasion was there than someone dying.

as i eventually came round, i realised that it was billy who was dead. it wasn’t really a surprise. i guess that it was because billy had suffered so many strokes and long periods in hospital that it was just expected, especially when so many others in the flats had also died around this time.

billy had only recently been discharged from hospital. i guess that they did this to let him die at home and to be the ones that he loved.

it seems creepy now but it was another tradition for the dead to be laid out on their beds so that everyone could pay their last respects before being sent to the undertakers or cemetery (the latter option being the cheaper of the two). they kept the door closed and people only went in there when someone came round to the flat. i didn’t realise it at the time but when we were eating, drinking and watching the telly downstairs, so billy was laying dead upstairs.
i can’t remember the exact date when billy either died or was buried, just that it was in january 1973. instead of going to the funeral, i stayed with my aunt lal who lived next door at 118. she wasn’t my real aunt, just another member of the extended family that lived on elim estate. billy was buried at brenchley gardens cemetery in nunhead, south london. his grave is now shared with both my nan and ernie, my granddad.

on the evening of the funeral, i was taken into billy’s room and told that his room was now mine and that i could sleep in there from that night. being just six years old, i really didn’t want to. i remember that they hadn’t really done much to the room since he had died and so the bed and room felt really cold. it stayed this way all the time that i had it. to this day i don’t know whether this was because a dead body had been sleeping there just the night before it became mine or just because there wasn’t any heating upstairs in the flat.

i remember laying in that room night after night as a child, not going to sleep but waiting for something to happen. most times i laid there waiting to hear my mum come home from being out with one of her boyfriends, whether manfred, colin, benny or someone else.

billy’s wardrobe stayed in the room and was scarily big and dark. all his clothes stayed in there until someone from the flats wanted maybe a suit or a couple of shirts and so came and took them. as more space in the wardrobe came free, so i was able to make the space my own. it didn’t do much though in making the room mine.
i never felt that the room or bed was ever mine despite sleeping there from 1973 through to 1978. it is still weird to think that i jumped into billy’s deathbed so soon after he died. maybe this is why i’m such a bad sleeper now.

billy hitchman

billy (william hitchman) was ‘uncle bill’ to me. he was my grandmother’s (‘ivy’) brother and lived with us. he had never married and – as i was enlightened a few weeks ago – was part of an unusual tradition our family had, where one of the sons would never marry, staying instead in the family home to look after the ageing parents (especially their mum).

billy was tall. probably no taller than i am today, but as a child, he appeared very tall: a giant even. when i knew him, he was an alcoholic and a very heavy smoker. he was always drunk and would regularly have arguments and fights with ernie, my grandfather (ivy my nan’s husband).

billy used to be a ‘barrow boy’, selling fruit and veg(etables) from a stall on jamaica road in the heart of bermondsey. he used to get up every morning, go to the stables, collect his horse and cart, take these to the fruit and veg wholesalers at the borough market before going to his plot just off surrey docks (now surrey quays). he did this everyday.

he did this until he was served a notice by the local council that they were planning to build a post office on his plot. with the loss of his plot, billy also lost both his livelihood and life.

being unmarried and without anything to fill his time, billy quickly turned to spending his time in pubs and bookmakers, borrowing money from my nan and my mum (ivy also) to feed his lifestyle. regularly he would come home drunk wanting more money and whilst my nan would try and give him what he wanted, ernie would step in to try and stop her. inevitably, the arguments and fights would ensue.

one of the few things i remember clearly about billy occurred one night probably in the late 1960s. i remember him coming home and he had a ‘jolly bag’ in his pocket. a ‘jolly bag’ was a little joke/ toy that when pressed, made a strange (scary) laughing noise: not quite real, but not quite unreal enough for someone under five to know the difference. all i remember was that i couldn’t work out where or who was making the noise and whilst crying because i was scared, everyone else was laughing more and more. even when everyone else thought that enough was enough, billy continued to make the thing laugh.

soon after, the drinking and smoking struck a series of ultimately lethal blows on billy. from 1970 through to 1973, billy had three strokes that left him largely paralysed. his speech was slurred and he was unable to feed or clothe himself. he was also incontinent and so we permanently had a cammode in the front room of the flat. it is quite surreal seeing a grown man going to the toilet in the middle of a room whilst others watch television and eat their dinners.

just before his third and fatal stroke, billy was transferred to new cross hospital. i remember travelling to see him on the evenings but never who with: i would guess, that it was my nan. we would get the bus – probably a number 53 – from the bricklayers arms and get off just before new cross. whilst i can’t remember ever seeing him in the hospital, i do remember watching the cockroaches in the corridor outside the ward. more pertinently though, i remember seeing the poster for ‘carry on abroad’ at the bus stop where we used to get the bus home from. it seemed, in those days at least, slightly more exotic than anything i had experienced.

‘carry on abroad’ was released in december 1972. billy died in january 1973.

1966

i was born on the 17th may 1966. it was a tuesday which, if the traditional poem is correct, means that i am full of grace.

unfortunately, my birth coincided with the only year that the england football team won the world cup.

since then, every time i have to tell somebody – for whatever reason – in what year i was born, that same person tells me that it was that year that england won the world cup. annoyingly, they tell me as though i would never have known this nor that anybody else would have told me previously.

1966 is a recurrent curse. birthdays and christmas’ usually include at least one reminder of 1966′s finest: videos, dvds, books, souvenirs, original newspapers…the list goes on. even baddiel and skinner reminded me of it with ‘three lions’ (the original) and ‘three lions’ (the remix). likewise, every four years when england either does or does not reach the world cup finals, the entire nation reflects upon whether we can ever repeat the achievements of 1966.

despite this, i was born in 1966. and yes, i was full of grace.