"Stan, Stan, the Crackpot Man"
By the time I went to college I had lived in over seventeen different houses, flats and rooms. A nomadic lifestyle driven by my parents' inability to manage money...
More than once we were technically homeless and had to be found ‘shelter’ by the local council. Taken from the draft of an embryonic memoir, what follows is true…
We should talk about Stan. Not because there was anything climactic about that short episode all those years ago, but because in its almost literary combination of humour, pathos — and even tragedy — there existed something approaching a microcosm of a lifetime’s experience.
Imagine, if you will, a nondescript street. Terraced houses with narrow bay windows and small fronts; not gardens, because their entrance doors were only separated by low walls and some four or five feet from the pavement. These were terraces facing each other expressionlessly across a road that went nowhere. We can call this road Parham Road, as that may have been it’s name; a cul-de-sac in a Victorian rather than a modern sense. A road long enough to suggest a journey along it would lead somewhere, but one which merely offered a single escape half-way — and that the escape to a similar and parallel cul-de-sac.
Parham Road was, in those days, framed by a garage and a working man’s club which sat between the entrance to the two dead ends, and a hardware store on its other corner that offered the unique smell of sawn timber; ranks of variously warped golden beams, standing in mutual support more or less upright in their many and various dimensions. The garage, long since gone, for years left a scarred and abandoned forecourt as some kind of testimony to progress — or if nothing else, to the march of the commercial imperative.
If you had been a reasonably travelled individual and stood in Parham Road then — and by then we mean the very early-70s — you could have been forgiven for feeling that you could have been almost anywhere in the country, for surely every town has roads leading nowhere.
Now imagine that you are standing on the threshold of a house in that same road. The door is open. Ahead is a long passage which just at that moment seems to lead nowhere too. It is a dark corridor. The door to the front sitting room, off to the left, is somehow invisible, and the only possible focus, the only hint of promise, comes from a vague light in the distance.
And then, taking that first step across the threshold, you become aware of other things, like the dark grey unenclosed pipework of the utility meters there above your head to the right. And then that smell. A smell that you had never encountered before. A smell that seemed to suck any hope from the walls and from the dim light towards which you now travelled.
And imagine that you are just twelve years old.
*
Stan is of indeterminate history — and with an unknowable and unpronounceable surname. Perhaps he is a relic of the war. He is older than my father, so the timeframe fits. Although I am certain that at the time there was no speculation on my part as to where he had originated — nor how he came to own that somehow sordid house on Parham Road — it might be possible to invent a history for him that is, shall we say, generous. Perhaps he found himself in England following his escape from the Nazis in Poland. Perhaps he was a Jew fleeing persecution. Perhaps — and here generosity really takes over — he was one of The Few who fought in the skies for Churchill. Was he injured as a consequence of his bravery (for Stan walks with a limp) and is this house somehow his reward for services rendered?
But Stan has a hump at the top of his back too. And his bulging and discordant eyes are not properly set. And to a twelve year old boy, he is nothing like a comic book war hero.
*
The corridor leads into a small parlour that interrupts the route to the kitchen, the bathroom and the back yard beyond. There is a small, shabby sofa against one wall, and against the other, beneath the window, a table with three chairs around it. Stan sits at one of these — the one facing the passage — hunched over a bowl of food. It is this food (which many years later I might place as being sauerkraut or some kind of pickled cabbage) that generates the all-pervading smell. Almost impervious to the presence of the family of three now standing in his parlour, Stan clears his throat with the explosive guttural sound now made art by professional footballers — and spits onto the linoleum.
As if we weren’t there.
*
Money had brought them to Stan’s house on Parham Road. Both the lack of it, and — more significantly — the inability to hold on to it even when there was some to be had. It was a recurrent theme; even for a boy of twelve, there was an understanding of the cycle, and of the consequences. Of looking forward to Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays because those were the days of scones and steak and ice cream, before the week spiralled downwards into mashed potatoes (instant), sliced white bread, and sometimes little else.
The parents had been unable to handle the mercurial and slippery coinage of the realm once again, and eviction from a ninth floor council flat overlooking the bustling and always hypnotic harbour could be blamed on nothing other than a misunderstanding of money. Even still a pre-teen, the boy knew that there was more to the predicament than a simple absence of cash. He was aware of how it left the house — and how almost inevitably it failed to come back. It often galloped away on a Saturday, turned into corporate profits via small silk-clad men racing three-legged horses — or stolen by a golden-voiced man who stood on a garish stage and predicted the future through ninety coloured and numbered ping-pong balls. “Kelly’s eye, number one!” “All the eights, two fat ladies!”
When people think about homelessness, they instinctively resurrect newsreel images of cardboard cities under railway arches or along London’s South bank. They suggest that there are no real victims, merely people who seem to have brought it on themselves by running away from something — home perhaps, or responsibility — or who have chosen to embrace drink or drugs. It has a stigma about it; homelessness is a social phenomenon, something to be addressed by political policies or charitable works. People miss the invisible and insidious side of this all too human condition. They cannot see — either by choice or not — the other causes of being domestically nomadic, and the effect such a plague can have.
*
A little while later I was able to withdraw from the episode; withdraw enough to respond to a creative writing assignment in second year English with a poem of simple diction and meter that told the story of “Stan, Stan the Crackpot Man”. It made people laugh, though I’m not sure how many of them knew it was an abstraction of reality. In any event, for the majority in a class of thirty-odd twelve year olds harsh reality is something that wouldn’t hit them for a while yet.
The poem told the story of how, one day, Stan’s marbles finally fell out of his bag. The police — who were probably still at the house when we arrived back that evening — had been called by a neighbour when they heard Stan going at the gas and electric meters with something akin to a crow bar. Whether or not he let them in or they broke down the door, very soon they were chasing Stan through the house and out into the back garden where, defying his limp, hump and divergent eyes, he managed to throw himself over the next two or three garden walls (all six feet of them!) before being finally grounded. Not quite escaping the Nazis, but perhaps a throw-back to that romantic past?
It was clear that we could not return to the house, and the council recognised we needed rescuing again. Once again the nomadic life twisted the knife.
Images bounce out of the words — almost photographic . A tale told excellently
Art, whether with paint or words or voice, doesn't always (if ever) come out of beauty. It springs from hurt, from grief, from pain, from bitterness, from the ground, the dirt, the things you can't forget or understand. And somehow it turns it into a different form for those who see or read or hear it. And sometimes they won't forget, but they may understand.