Gran and Mr Muckey

John Hollands

Description

Gran and Mr Muckey is the first volume in a family memoir, seen through the youngest of three brothers, Sajit Contractor. They live in Edgware among Jewish refugees from Hilter's Germany in 1938/9. It related hilarious incidents during the Blitz with Sajit having numerous exciting experiences at school in Caterham, Surrey, where bombing is frequent. It also includes a period of evacuation to Cornwall where he and his brothers are sent home through misbehaviour. Later, Sajit's school in evacuated to Exmoor where he enjoys a very odd education based on cricket, rugby and horse riding.After that, Sajit is taken fire-watching by his father in the family business in Camberwell Green. Here he has first-hand experience of the bombing of the East End of London. Through all this the author introduces a succession of fascinating characters, foremost among them being his Indian grandmother and the family's arthritic garder, Mr Muckey. They have a most odd courtship.Sajit's recalls all this with a sharp, satirical eye and his early experiences of racism and the peculiar behaviour of adults adds plenty of spice to the book.

Informations

• Publié par: eBookPartnership.com
• Date de parution: 28 août 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781909270268
• Langue: English

Extrait

Gran and Mr Muckey is the first volume in a quartet entitled Memory and Imagination.
Through Sajit Contractor, an Anglo-Indian (and the author’s literary clone, or alter ego), it covers the experiences of a young boy throughout the late thirties and early forties. It starts in Edgware where he lived in the midst of the Jewish immigrant population, and then progresses through bizarre and hilarious incidents to end Volume One with idyllic school days on Exmoor. On the way, Sajit introduces a succession of fascinating characters, foremost among them being his Indian Grandmother and his family’s arthritic gardener, Mr Muckey. Sajit throws a completely new light on the wartime ‘home front’ and his experiences of early racism and his blatant political incorrectness gives one the comforting feeling that maybe all is not yet lost after all.
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GRAN AND MR MUCKEY © John Hollands
Originally published by Edward Gaskell Publishers, 2003 Illustrations © Rene Cochlin
eBook published by eBookPartnership.com
eBook ISBN 978-1-909270-26-8
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
The right of John Hollands to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
MEMORY AND IMAGINATION Volume I
Gran and Mr Muckey
The fictionalised memoirs of SAJIT CONTRACTOR, an Anglo-Indian
John Hollands
Also by John Hollands
The Dead, The Dying and The Damned Able Company (USA Only) The Gospel According to Uncle Jimmy Never Marry a Cricketer Never Marry a Rugby Player Not Shame The Day The Exposed What a Fag! The Court-Martial
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Dedicated to the memory of Michael Lamb. One of the best.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Gran and Mr Muckey is the first of four volumes, embraced by the title Memory and Imagination. This volume covers the period from 1933 to 1944. All four volumes are based on my experiences, aided and abetted by touches of imagination, with locations and timings sometimes altered or transposed, purely to assist the narrative. All characters are fictitious with the exception of Sajit. He is my literary clone, or – if you prefer – my alter ego.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to Lesley Pyne and Paul Willey for their help. I have also gleaned much confirmation of details from: Sir Winston Churchill’s War Memoirs; London A to Z; Finest Hour by Tim Clayton and Phil Craig; Spitfire Summer by Malcolm Brown; and Children of the Blitz by Robert Westall.
Introduction
An early memory My fight against Alzheimer’s disease The use of the ancient art of regression An assurance of good intent.
My first memory in life is of an act of appalling vandalism. Such wanton destruction was beyond my comprehension. Why was Dad doing it? Why was he destroying our pictures of Sir Oswald Mosley and Herr Adolf Hitler?
Unlike the rest of the family, who were urging him on, I watched in dismay as Mum held the frames over the dustbin and Dad smashed them to smithereens with a claw hammer. Then Dad ripped out the photographs and put a match to them until they curled into ash and disintegrated, just to make sure the police didn’t discover any fragments and piece them together.
I felt a sense of deep betrayal. How could we be so disloyal? Hadn’t Dad always said that the partnership between these two great men would be the salvation of civilisation and secure Britain its rightful place at the pinnacle of world power? Their pictures had always held pride of place in the hall, so why were we suddenly ashamed of them? Weren’t we prepared to stick to our principles?
Every detail of that incident is crystal clear. It made me realise that everything in the world is far from simple and straightforward, that with adults there are always complications.
In retrospect the memory acts as a catalyst, a trigger mechanism which forces other incidents to the surface, giving me a broader perspective on what shaped my early life. Yet now, sixty years later, when I am at last ready to record these events, my doctor suddenly tells me that I am a clear case of Alzheimer’s disease. At least, I think that’s what she said. However, there are consolations. She added that Alzheimer’s won’t inhibit my long-term memories. Only death – which she implied was pretty imminent – will do that. On the other hand, the loss of short-term memories could be a major problem: I might even forget that I’m writing my memoirs, thus adding years to their completion, indeed jeopardising them altogether.
Fortunately, I am an experienced practitioner in the art of regression, so if, at any stage, my memory falters all will not be lost. Not that I will follow the modern trend and use regression to condemn wicked parents for molesting or abusing me, thereby excusing my own deplorable behaviour. I will use it to ensure accuracy. Also, if at any time I perceive certain events with an all-seeing, Godlike eye, or if I pass oracular judgements, this should be attributed to exhaustive research, not the ramblings of an ‘Old Fart’.
1
A clash of nationalities Our Jewish neighbours Gender domination Dad’s business obsessions Mum’s Welsh pride.
One of the highlights of my life was studying sociology. My tutor defined it as ‘the study of how man’s behaviour is moulded by his early environment and the conduct and expectations of those around him’. So that’s how I’ll start: with my early environment and those around me.
If you were able to zoom in on my life from way up in the sky, as they so often do at the start of epic films, you would think that my situation was ordinary to the point of tedium. First you would see England, then London, then Edgware, then Glendale Avenue and a semi-detached house, Number 49, one among hundreds in a long, long road with identical houses strung out along both sides; all the same design, all the same size, all the same colour, and with the same pint-sized gardens.
At that stage, as you zoom in through a conveniently open window, you would think, ‘Oh, God! Mrs Dale’s Diary all over again. Another every day story of the average boring English family’.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Glendale Avenue was completely untypical of Britain. It was a foreign oasis and provided a foretaste of the cocktail of ethnic culture and racial tensions that would beset the country in future years and contribute to the evolution of the new Britishness of which we try to feel so proud, yet of which we are still so uncertain.
The Contractor family led the way. We were a microcosm of racial friction. Sticking with the film metaphor, if you intruded even further into our house, and you were granted the short-lived miracle of Todd AO Smell-O-Vision, you would be assailed by the odour of vindaloo curry and you’d see a vast, steaming pot of it sitting on a low gas on our cooker. On going into the lounge you’d notice that all the ornaments and pictures betrayed split loyalties between Wales and India. Cobras ready to strike and elephants rearing their trunks stood next to Welsh dolls playing harps; pictures of the Taj Mahal and wood-carved monkeys nestled below cheap prints of Rhosllanerchrugog; small brass temples and statuettes of Bengal Lancers competed with gaudy, hand-painted plates depicting scenes of the Gower coast.
On one end of the mantelpiece was the first lump of coal Grandpa (my maternal Welsh grandfather) extracted from the Maerdy pit, and at the other end was a bottle of Holy Water Gran (my paternal Indian grandmother) had scooped from the Ganges. Gran cursed the coal, saying it symbolised evil Welsh ways, the rape of the land and the pollution of the air. In retaliation, Mum said that to call the water from the Ganges holy was downright blasphemous. Instead, she called it ‘international water’ on account of all the foreign bodies floating about in it.
The houses clumped around us in Glendale Avenue were in stark contrast. Individually, within the confines of their four walls, the residents were united, but collectively they were as diverse as us, the most polyglot gathering of Jews imaginable – Ashkanazim and Sephardim, Orthodox and Reformists; even atheists, Jews by race only. They all dressed differently, had different sized chips on their shoulders, ate different food, smelt differently, and clung tenaciously to different national traditions from all over Europe. They had moved into Glendale Avenue en masse when it was constructed in the early thirties, the first of a tidal wave of asylum seekers who established an instant Jewish enclave in Edgware, making it more like Judea than a suburb at the heart of the British Empire. How Dad came to buy a house slap-bang in the middle of them, I’ll never know.
Apart from the Wales/India divide, the fundamental conflict within our household was gender domination. Mum and Dad both thought they’d been ordained by God to be the head of the household. Because Dad was born and brought up as a native Indian, he was only aware of women having three functions in life: to do as they were told, to comfort and gratify their men folk, and to bear and raise children, preferably male children. On the other hand, Mum was from a mining community in the Rhondda Valley where women ruled supreme. From the very first week of her parents’ marriage, her father (Grandpa) had handed over his weekly wage packet to Grandma every Friday night and thereby abdicated all marital power. So to Mum, that’s how all married men were expected to behave.
Thankfully, the