The Blue Walkman
It's Saturday 3 August 1985 and it's my 14th birthday. We've driven into Oxford so that I can spend my birthday money on a Sony Walkman and cassette tape.
This is the first of two pieces of writing that mark a specific turning point in the story of our family life. I submitted this piece to the 2024 anthology and was lucky enough to be selected for publication.
Saturday 3 August 1985, Oxford
I inhaled the smell of leather as I walked into the men’s clothes shop, dad having disappeared through its doors as we zig zagged our way through the Oxford Covered Market. I’d been leading us on a brisk march from the car to the high street and Boots. And the mission? To spend my carefully counted 14th birthday money emptied from birthday cards earlier that morning, currently stowed in mum’s leather saddle handbag. I didn’t want a party; I didn’t want any fuss. Memories of embarrassed tears as mum led my friends in an enthusiastic rendition of Happy Birthday while I tried to blow out the seven candles on my chocolate marble birthday cake years earlier lingered. A trip into Oxford to spend my money was all I wanted.
But instead of helping me to choose my Walkman (I’m thinking blue or silver but definitely one with orange foam headphones) checking I’d picked up the right batteries or rolling his eyes as I dithered between Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’ or Eurythmics ‘Be mine tonight’, a smiling sales assistant was advancing, a pile of shoeboxes balanced on outstretched arms containing hand stitched, coffee-coloured leather brogues nestled in carefully wrapped in tissue paper. Dad was untying his shoelaces having already lowered his 6-foot 4 frame into a waiting chair, his long legs a trip hazard.
“I need a new pair of shoes; I can’t keep wearing these.”
I look down at his feet, his grey wavy hair and his plaid shirt, brown trousers. The brown lace ups on his feet seem perfectly fine.
“What does he mean he needs new shoes? Mum keeps saying we don’t have money and even if he does need new shoes, why here. It looks expensive?”
I fiddle with my watch strap but avoid the watch face, fearing the taunting ticking second and minute hands moving. We were already late. What should have been a morning shopping trip had already slid into the afternoon because he’d missed his train from London.
“Are you sure these soles are leather?”
The sales assistant kneeling at his feet recoils at this booming voice. Words often stick in the back of his throat, mouth and lips forming exaggerated shapes to free the sounds stuck further down, too often bursting forth only for him to sink back into silence.
There’s something else floating in the air because while he doesn’t do anything obvious like slur his words, or sway when he’s walking, I sense a touch of belligerence in the way he speaks to the sales assistant.
He’s been drinking.
I see anxiety flicker across mum’s face, her pursed lips and narrowed eyes. I know she won’t want to make a fuss in public and she quickly relaxes her face as she catches me looking at her.
I blink back tears of anger and frustration while he inspects hand stitching and leather soles and look down at my blue Miss Selfridge trousers and battered trainers, my only out of school clothes and after a cursory scan of the shoe racks and rails of tweed and Barbour jackets with their weighty price tags, I walk out, turning my back on my parents.
I hate the anger simmering inside me; I hate that feeling of unvoiced frustration as it fizzes through my body thinking about the dilapidated rented cottage I woke up in that morning. The so-called home we had to scrub clean before we could move in the summer before, bin bags filled with other people’s dirt and rubbish. Another forced house move, the third in under 18 months testing mum’s tenacity and resourcefulness yet further as she drove around the country lanes surrounding our local town, on the hunt for vacant, abandoned houses we might be able to move into.
We sit on borrowed furniture to watch the TV. Our fridge and food cupboards are mostly empty, petrol is rationed, and we’re kept warm by four Calor Gas heaters on wheels that we move around the house. Gas canisters that mum orders by phone, eking out every last molecule until she has to part with more money. The click of the ignition and whoosh of the flame the soundtrack to this home as much as the washing machine spinning or kettle boiling.
Two awkward cottages pretending to be one single home. Two blocked-up front doors and two backdoors but only one used by us. The other giving our farmer landlord continued access to a living room he wouldn’t let us use. An occasional Sunday afternoon hangout for him and his friends with its pool table, empty cans of lager and cigarette smoke. This home in a hamlet with a cemetery but no church, a post box but no post office. The nearest shop three miles away along deserted country lanes, our nearest family and friends even further. A trip to Oxford is a rare treat.
There’d been talk of a move to London if dad’s latest job went well, as in, they don’t sack him like others have done. I understand how mum needs this to be true. This London girl needs to be in the city, not out here, in the isolated countryside. But I just nod mutely when she talks of us moving to London because we’ve had these conversations before, hopes raised and silently dashed. And I’ve visited the Catholic hostel where dad’s living and working as a caretaker. I’ve seen his basement bedsit, its worn carpet, bare kitchenette and crucifix by the bed. I thought mum was seeing if he needed any washing doing but really, she was checking for hidden bottles of vodka while traffic and tourists clogged up the Cromwell Road outside and the young, male student residents came and went.
We even go to mass the Sunday, we visit him. A mass celebrated with the nuns in what looked like the communal dining room, tables and chairs pushed to the side, the smell of boiled vegetables, cleaning fluid and incense suffocating. I don’t understand how we can move to London.
I don’t understand how this can be the same man who used to chuck me around the swimming pool on a Sunday afternoon. The man who used to let me squeeze next to him on the sofa and wriggle under his arm as he read The Times in the evening. The man who famously emptied his jangling trouser pockets of all his change to carefully count out £2.99 to buy me a cuddly toy mole in Harrods. My teenage self is tightly wound, silent and confused, unable to see beyond the man in front of her trying on shoes, disrupting her birthday.
I try to catch Matthew’s eye, craving my brother’s reassuring sibling presence but he’s in his own world. At least he’s here, we hardly see my older sisters anymore. I distract myself by watching neighbouring café tables being wiped clean, listen to the scratch and swish of brushes sweeping the lanes and passing conversations while dad tries on another pair of shoes.
I’m only 14 but I’m good at being still and quiet. Years of mum’s raised eyebrows, sharp looks and a finger on the lips at mass on a Sunday morning has taught me well. Years of sitting in the audience at piano and violin recitals when I wasn’t performing. Her disapproval of any inappropriate sound was swiftly delivered, whether that sound came from one of us or someone else. She’d tell us with pride how she and dad rarely sat together at mass when we were young, one of them always ready to walk out holding whichever one of us was making a noise.
I loved kneeling on dusty church floors, hidden by the pews, lining up missals and hymnals, flicking through the pages trying to match the hymn numbers on the pillar with the pages of the book in my hands. I felt at home in church, happy to disappear into my own world whilst warmed by the presence of others and the familiarity of the prayers, readings and singing.
When dad finally emerges from the shop empty handed, I march us straight to Boots having worked out that it gave me the best chance of getting the Walkman and cassette in the quickest time available with the least fuss.
I seek Matthew’s nod of encouragement as I ask an assistant for help while mum and dad lurk in the background. I hand over my vouchers and notes. The blue Walkman and Eurythmics ‘Be mine tonight’ on cassette are now mine.
I don’t get a buzz from the handing over of the money and vouchers. It’s all about the click of the cassette as it slots into place and silencing the outside world as I place the headphones over my ears as Annie Lennox fills my head.
The guitar riffs, blasting brass instruments of ‘Would I lie to you’ jumpstart my senses and I play it on repeat for most of the hour-long journey home as we drive past Oxford’s handsome redbrick houses with sweeping gravel drives and gate posts, through traffic lights and over roundabouts until pavements and homes fade into hedgerows and farm buildings.
Turning into the farm track that runs alongside our cottage, I spy grandma and grandad, mum’s parents standing in our front garden. There’s something odd about this picture. Why are they there when we aren’t? When did mum arrange for them to come over? Is this surprise for me?
My heart lifts and I think how clever they are, this habit they have of appearing when we most need them Nanny McPhee like. The impromptu appearances on the doorstep of our old home in St. Alban’s, ready for a coffee and chat after mass. Or the time grandad magically appeared after my piano lesson when I was about ten. I’d been pacing the corridor at the music school waiting for dad to pick me up, but he’d got distracted by the bottom of the whisky glass at the pub.
There’s something in the way they’re holding themselves though that tells me they’re not here just for my birthday. They look the same, grandad with his wispy hair, wire rimmed glasses and battered jersey jumper, grandma standing next to him, arms crossed, stiff leather handbag clamped to her body. But despite the familiar warm hellos, smiles, hugs and kisses there isn’t the usual relaxed chatting round the kettle and sinking into the sofa for meandering conversations and birthday chat.
Their presence is balm enough, but I’m still surprised when an hour or so later, they announce they’re leaving, and that dad is going with them. He says nothing but they wave and tell us they’ll see us soon, but that they’d better get dad to the train station so that he can catch his train back to London. I’m confused. Why did he come back to the cottage with us? We could have dropped him at the station in Oxford. I’d have preferred not to have brought him home with us, but I’m content to hide in my room letting Annie Lennox fill my head, breathing more easily now that he’s gone.