Songs of Innocence Read Online Free

along with an uneasy feeling that there was some uncharted sea of depravity on which few had yet dared even to set sail. On the other,
there was the belief that the family was the legitimate, the most wholesome and the most righteous social unit – a contradiction which persists, of course, in themodern day. And even the most chaotic and disrupted homes often had a curious veneer of respectability about them. Alice Foley, growing up in a poor home in Bolton, had a particular
job to do every Friday morning: to take the family aspidistra carefully from its place of honour on top of the sewing machine. ‘The ritual was . . . first to place the giant plant pot in
water in the kitchen sink. Even today I can hear the eager bubbling and gurgling of those thirsty roots sucking in the refreshing draught. Then the single leaves were carefully sponged with a
wash-leather, cracked portions and faded tips nipped off to make room for younger shoots, and finally polished off with a spot of milk.’
    In Alice’s case, the lacquer was a very thin one. In her biography, she described ‘an era of privy middens . . . each summer brought an appalling plague of house-flies. Most houses
had long, sticky papers hanging from gas-brackets; these trapped unwary insects who writhed until they expired. One of our street visitors was the “fly catcher man” who wore a tall hat
exhibiting a broad, sticky band, black with captive flies, and called out vigorously: “Catch’em, catch’em alive-oh.”’ 7
    Childhood in this era was a great deal more red in tooth and claw – perhaps more similar to adult life – than the popular imagination would have had it. Alice described her family
life as often impoverished, sometimes violent, but overwhelmingly tainted by a humdrum, everyday neglect. Her mother was kindly but undemonstrative, she said; her father, a firebrand and a drinker
who put his Irish political obsessions before his children – even storing ammunition in the bedroom he shared with his sons.
    ‘He worked in fits and starts, punctuated by bouts of heavy drinking and gambling. During these years mother plodded gamely on, battling with a feckless husband whom she neither loved nor
understood, and succouring her six children whom she never really wanted,’ Alice explained. 8 ‘Poignant memories remain of aparticular afternoon with mother bent wearily over the dolly-tub with her small child at her feet in a fidgety and peevish mood. Suddenly, she said quite sternly: “Now if
you’re not a good girl, I shall run away with a black man” . . . For days and weeks I moved around in terror and heaviness at the threat of desertion. If a coloured person came in sight
I wondered dumbly if that was the man mother had in mind. Pathetically, I tried to find ways of pleasing mother in the hope that she would not leave us, and on quiet evenings by the fire when we
played Ludo or Snakes and Ladders, I cheerfully manoeuvred to send my counter down a long snake so that mother’s could reach “home” safely.’
    Yet to the modern reader it is not her father’s drinking, nor even her mother’s offhand cruelty, that are thrown into the sharpest relief by her account: it is the Foleys’
casually neglectful attitudes to the nurturing of their children that now strike the harshest note: ‘At tea time our parents shared a savoury tit-bit from one plate, Father getting the lions
share, for Mother doled out tiny morsels from her portion to the younger children. At supper time Father drank beer, Mother relished a piece of bread spread with slices of raw onion, and we
youngsters went to bed on a “butty” and a drink of cold water.’
    Time and again, the children of the Victorian era describe their relationships with their parents as more remote, perhaps more wary, than the children of later years would do. A typical family
had more children, of course, and it was usual – particularly in poorer areas – for some of them to die without