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Mum’s expressions of shock: ‘I don’t believe it! Not another one!’ The house was oppressed in those days by my parents’ exhaustion and tension; my mother’s desperate longing for something better. The atmosphere comes flooding back whenever I hear the strains of the radio hit song of those days from South Pacific: ‘Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger…’ Mum would sing it feelingly to herself, gazing longingly out of the window by the sink towards the gates of the sports ground.
    For a period, under the influence of a prayer campaign in our parish by Father Cooney, now our parish priest, Mum instituted the daily recitation of the Rosary. The slogan was: ‘The family that prays together stays together.’ With my father sitting in his armchair by the fire, present in body but hardly in spirit, and the rest of us on our knees, we prayed five ‘mysteries’ of the Rosary every evening after supper. For a time Dad came to church with us. He half-sat-half-knelt in the pew, breathing deeply and bathed in sweat with the discomfort the posture caused his leg. The experiment did not last.
    There were nights when we children huddled together upstairs as our parents brawled in the living room with crockery and kitchen pans, accompanied by the sound of smacks, grunts and curses. There were mealtimes when a bowl of stew or a custard tart would go flying through the air to explode on the opposite wall. No small matter for seven hungry people, and with nothing going spare. After a big fight they would refuse to speak for days and weeks on end, save for tight-lipped requests for basics: ‘Pass the salt…please.’ It usually ended with my father buying flowers, and promising a trip to the Odeon at Gant’s Hill, cajoling Mum back to normal communication before the next set-to commenced.
    Over the years, Mum’s contempt for Dad had infected ourregard for him. Yet I found it hard to dislike him. He often made us laugh with the peculiar literalness of his humour. In the height of the summer season, when he was working outside from dawn till dusk, he would limp in wearily for his supper saying: ‘Cor blimey, I’m as busy as a one-armed paper-hanger.’ When we were seated, eager for breakfast, five sets of hungry eyes, he would produce like a conjuror a tiny beef-stock cube, placing it in the middle of the table: ‘Here we are, kids. How about a square meal?’ One day I knocked down a tin of pennies and halfpennies we kept on the mantelpiece. He picked me up and rolled me about in the coppers: ‘Here we go, Jack: now you’re rolling in money!’
    He had a comic sense of mischief which often stoked Mum’s anger. One afternoon I was bouncing a ball against the back of the house when the bathroom window opened and Mum hollered out: ‘Sid! Sid! ’ Dad was in the garage, but he heard her clearly enough and came bounding along. I followed him into the house.
    Mum had been trying to clean up Gyp in the bathroom and the dog refused to get out of the tub.
    ‘Sid!’ she called out to Dad, now stationed at the bottom of the stairs: ‘Lift this bloody thing out of the bath, will you!’ Instead, Dad gave me a wink and made a shrill whistle with his fingers. Gyp came out of the tub like a rocket, flew down the stairs and into the living room where he shook gallons of filthy water over the walls and furniture. Mum’s execrations followed Dad as he retreated giggling up the yard path towards the field. By nightfall Gyp had been consigned to a stray dogs’ home.

13
    T HE END OF my delinquency and the growth of my devout life followed a trauma that I was unable to confide in anyone, least of all Dad. From about the age of ten I was in the habit of stealing money from Mum’s purse to take the tube up to central London. I would take the tram, clattering along the Victoria Embankment. I would find my way from the Monument, commemorating the Great Fire of London, to the dark magnificence of Saint Paul’s Cathedral with