Collie

By Robert Staines

You did this; you killed my brother, you and your fancy tart downstairs, you and your Hollywood ideas. You killed him, as sure as if you had taken a gun and shot him through the heart, now you can join him you bastard! She pulled one of the large kitchen knives from behind her back and raised it above her head then lunged at Lenny. I moved quickly and tried to grab her arm but she had the strength of a man, so much strength that she tossed me aside like a rag doll. I remember her eyes vividly, staring, empty, as though nothing else mattered but driving the knife into Lenny, as though there was nobody else in the room. I tackled her from behind and by this time Stan had managed to get a grip on her arm and all three of us fell onto the bed.

I was pleased to read Collie this is both a substantial novel and an extremely good one, with a story whose credibility rests on the authors literary style, which is assured, controlled and atmospheric. It is a touching and compelling work, balanced between detailed description and a paced narrative of events.

The story is built gradually and with a great deal of patience on behalf of the writer, who takes pains to increase the tension and atmosphere whilst drawing his characters with accurate and well observed characterisation. He weaves their relationships with unpretentious charm, marking the text with genuine warmth. The dialogue is believable and well written, the setting evoked clearly but with subtlety this is a novel with an individual and original style, one which will appeal to readers of quality fi ction.

Helen Pascall-Barton.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Oct 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465359766

Robert Staines

The Author was born in 1939 in Stepney, East London at the outbreak of W.W.2. By the time he was 5 years old, a large part of his life had been spent, in air raid shelters. His father was a soldier, fi ghting in North Africa and returned home on crutches, having sustained leg injuries, he couldn’t resume his job as a fruit buyer in Borough Market and was for some time unemployed, when, he was able to work, some years later, he could only get work as a labourer so money was very short. The story up until chapter 16 is based on fact, all that you read actually happened. The year of his birth plus names are the only fi ctitious entries. From chapter 16 onwards is how he would have liked his life to have turned out. However, the author has always been involved in music and now sings with an 18 piece big band and many other Jazz trio’s and quartets.

Book preview

Chapter 1

On the 12 of September 1936, Maud Collins knocked on her neighbour’s door at 3.30 in the afternoon. It was Wednesday, her neighbour Daisy Paget knew instinctively that Maud was having contractions, she took her inside, sat her down and sent her Albert to Dr Feinstein with the urgent message: come quickly, missus Collins is in labour. By 7.25 that same evening my bum was being slapped, not that I remember of course.

Brian, it’s a funny name, Brian, if you keep saying it. At the Christening, I’m told, the Vicar, who had a speech defect, named me Bwian and that’s how I became known to my family for many years.

Our house in Stepney, East London was one of those terraced rabbit hutches; one up; one down; narrow stairs; outside tap; outside toilet and a lean to that my mother referred to as the kitchenette. With two sisters, me, my mum and dad, it makes you wonder where we all slept, well, my two sisters and me slept in the bedroom, mum and dad on a bed settee in the downstairs front room, as my mother called it, we had no back room, so why she called it the front room I shall never know.

The bedroom we kids slept in, was separated by a curtain which was a wire stretched across the room with an old blanket draped over it. My sisters or at least the eldest Valerie, was always looking to see if I was peeking when she was getting undressed and if I was not lying in my bed with my eyes closed she would accuse me of looking, and call out mum Brian’s looking, at which my mother would reply in a loud voice Brian that’s all she ever said, that seemed to satisfy Valerie and she would finish getting her clothes off and don her nightdress and all the time I would be looking because after mum had shouted Brian, Val never re checked and so I got clean away with it.

Christine on the other hand, being younger than me, couldn’t have cared less if the whole street was watching her get into her nightclothes. In fact I used to get embarrassed and turn my back, she just didn’t care.

I don’t remember getting any sort of thrill while watching Val; it was just because she didn’t want me to. I used to get a devilish satisfaction out of her feeling safe.

You’ll drive me mad with your bloody tapping are words that still echo in my ears. Tap, bloody tap, that’s all you ever do, for Christ’s sake, shut up." I had rhythm in my blood and she couldn’t have cared less. Poor old mum, she didn’t have much of a life, my father was a dockworker who was more out of work than in. It was a funny way of working; I think there were too many of them because he used to go out at 5am in the morning every day without the guarantee of work and line up for hours hoping his name would be called when a ship docked. Bomping on, he called it.

All casual workers had a book which they had to get stamped when they arrived at the docks. They called the stamping bomping because that’s what sound it made when the rubber stamp was banged on the relevant page; Bomp into the ink pad, bomp on to the page in the book. Alternatively regular Dockers had work every day and a fixed wage. My father’s favourite adage was, I wouldn’t touch regular dock working with a bargepole. I still don’t know why anything that’s not worth doing isn’t worth touching with a bargepole.

It was better, apparently, to be a casual dockworker, that is, according to a casual dockworker. The permanent Dockers didn’t think so or they would have been casuals. It was better because, when the wharfs were busy and there were many ships to be unloaded, the casuals would work for a price and the harder and quicker they worked, the more money they earned. The only problem was that it was casual and all the time they had no work, all they had was their bompers which was the name they gave to the pittance of a retainer they were given when there was nothing to do. There were no facilities for washing or toilet. Many a dry dock ended up wet as the queue for labour lengthened. When there was work, it was the casuals who were galvanised into action to unload the likes of black-lead, frozen sides of lamb, beef or pork, fishmeal was another nightmare, stinking fishmeal, that was the one us kids hated most, dad would come home and wash in the old tin bath in the front room. The house would stink for days afterwards.

I resolved from an early age to get out of the environment that I was brought up in, not that I was unhappy, Quite the opposite, I just couldn’t bear the thought of ending up like my dad. We street kids had many ways of earning a few bob, pocket money was unheard of, only rich kids got that. If you couldn’t earn any money for yourself, then you had no money. With all the bombed houses around with lead piping, cisterns with brass fittings and copper ball cocks it wasn’t a hard task. We made old Charlie Wilson our local scrap metal merchant into a rich man, him giving us pennies and then selling on for pounds. Tarry blocks were another source of income. Many of the roads in and around East London were made of wooden blocks covered in a thick tar; they burnt beautifully with a lovely smell and thick black smoke. Hidden by darkness, we would lever up large quantities of the blocks and the next morning, with an old pram or other suitable vehicle, we could be heard shouting, Tarry blocks, get your tarry blocks, waste paper, rags, woollens, lugging coal and coke, chopping firewood, you name it, we earn’t by doing it. The money was spent on the pictures,( now known as the cinema), fags, pies and mash and the delights of having a Sam’s Super Special from The Hut; our local Jewish soda fountain shop owned by an ex-boxer we only knew as Sam. A super special from the hut was a mixture of all the flavours from his fountains with ice cream and chocolate sauce in the biggest glass you have ever seen.

I was 15 when my dad died; five years in North Africa fighting in the war and many years in the docks; drinking and smoking to excess took their toll on his lungs. He collapsed on the way home from work on a wet day in February 1951 and was put on a life support machine in Bancroft Hospital. We all seemed to know he wasn’t long for this world, so the blow was kind of softened. I’d left school on the Christmas of 1950 and was working at a garage in commercial road as a panel-beater in the commercial body shop, making new panels for Lorries. On the day my dad was rushed to hospital, Christine came to the garage to tell me the bad news but the foreman wouldn’t let me off, I had to wait until 5.30pm. By the time I got to the hospital my dad had been dead for an hour, I never forgave him or the foreman for that.

Mum went to pieces completely and was committed to St. Andrews Hospital for the nerves; she was there for three months and never seemed to improve no matter how we all tried. When she finally came out she seemed confused for ages afterwards, always talking to someone in an empty room. I think she was talking to dad but we never approached her about it.

Chapter 2

Music had always interested me for as long as I can remember, always tapping, always whistling, my mother’s words echoed again. I used to stand for hours just looking in the window of the music shop in Whitechapel Road. It wasn’t really a music shop, it was a pawn shop owned by Solomon Rosenberg or Soly to us kids, the window was mostly filled with musical instruments so I classed it as a music shop. Soly’s son Stanley was a tall, rather ugly boy who nobody seemed to like. He had a rather large nose, thick black curly hair and eyebrows that met in the middle. With all that and on certain days a tiny skull cap, he was a rare sight; he was regularly on the fringes of our crowd that gathered on The Mile End Waste outside Lyons Corner Shop every Saturday afternoon. You could tell he wanted to get into our company, we would all hang around telling jokes and generally messing about, catcalling to the girls that passed, some of whom would stop and join us until half the pavement was taken up with bodies jostling, laughing, making a noise and nuisances of ourselves. Stanley would hover around the outskirts of this melee, dying to join in and enjoy himself, but Jews were not allowed in our gangs.

It didn’t take me long to realise that Stanley could be my passport to the set of dusty drums that lay in a corner of his dads shop window. I had revered that set of drums for ages but £4.10 shillings was way out of my league and price bracket.

I made a friend of Stanley one Saturday in June 1951. He was in his usual position outside Lutkin’s Bakery, watching and envying our goings on, when a gust of wind blew his skull cap off. One of the boys who was nearby picked it up and threw it to a group of the others who in turn were throwing it to each other, while Stanley ran around in circles trying to get it. I joined in, caught the cap and handed it back to him, much to the disapproval of my mates, who started calling me Jew lover. After that I would stand and talk to him for a while on Saturdays until we became fairly good friends. He invited me to his house one Sunday; I met his mum and dad and found them quite nice people. I stayed for tea and had Gafilta fish and buttered matzos followed by tomato sandwiches washed down with black coffee.

Stanley had a guitar which he played quite well, we would sit in the back room of the shop and he would play guitar while I tapped on the table with a pair of old knitting needles. I started to see more of Stanley and whenever we met, music was the main topic of the conversation. Every time I went to his house which was the flat above the shop, we would end up in the back room downstairs; him playing guitar and me tapping along with my needles also singing and harmonising, every time I went there I would linger outside for a few seconds before I rung the bell and drool over the drum kit that was almost unrecognisable now, due to the thickness of dust that now covered it.

One Wednesday night on my way to Stan’s, Wednesdays had become our regular music night, I paused as usual and looked in the window and my heart sank; it had gone, my drum kit had gone. I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes as I stared in disbelief at the radiogram that now stood there. I knew one day it would be gone, but it was no longer there and I was devastated, I could not believe it. The family must have realised that something was wrong when they ushered me into the parlour and offered me a cup of coffee. Soly kept asking me why I looked so glum on such a lovely evening. Not many words were exchanged and Stan suggested we go downstairs as we normally did, he was standing at the door with his guitar tucked under his arm. I didn’t much fancy our usual musical soiree as I slouched down the stairs thinking; it’s gone, my lovely drum kit has gone.

He was at the door to the back room saying; Come on slow coach. When I looked up as he opened the door, my heart wanted to burst from my chest. In the room, fully set up, was the drum kit, no dust, polished and shining, it looked magnificent. Dad said we could borrow it till he finds a customer was all I heard. Tears were now filling my eyes and the kit seemed to sparkle even more and I felt really foolish, but I sat down on the stool, picked up the drum sticks and started to bang out a rhythm on the snare. I thought it would be easy, but to coordinate both hands and two feet, I realised I had a lot to learn.

It’s funny now when I think of it, but Stanley didn’t seem so ugly now and his nose wasn’t that big, even his eyebrows seemed to suit his face and I became quite envious of his curly hair. My hair was thin and wispy and used to look terrible in the wind, whereas Stan’s being thick and curly, always looked the same.

Chapter 3

Billy Owens was a thicko, he went to a backward school. I’d known Billy for years, and for some time I had fancied his sister Sharon, who was also a bit of a dunce, but had a very mature figure for her age. Billy had a wind up gramophone and a vast collection of old 78’ records, apparently left to him by his grandfather. He would sit on his front doorstep winding the handle of his beloved device and playing his records, nodding his head from side to side in time with the music. Sometimes some kids would run by shouting; Silly Billy got no wily. Billy would then leap over his gramophone and chase them down the street to the strains of Bing Crosby singing Just one more chance or something similar.

Billy learned of our musical talents one afternoon when he came to pledge his dad’s suit to pay the rent; until Friday when the whole circle would start again. Hock something in the week to pay bills, redeem it Friday or Saturday, spend the money in the pub at