The Cuckoo's Child Read Online Free

Nearby, there were tumbledown warehouses, the homes of countless shabby pigeons, and dripping iron bridges, whose girders overshadowed rows of semicircular holes in the walls, like filthy caves.
    Everywhere in the city of my childhood there were raw scars in the overlay of dirt. Streets looked like mouths full of broken teeth, buildings collapsed into piles of smashed brick or tumbled into vast craters, those left standing on either side cracked and bulging, propped up by huge timbers or held together by giant rivets. In places, whole streets of old tenements too badly damaged to preserve gave way gradually to towering blocks of crackerbox flats, one ugliness making room for another. For the most part, though, the rubble remained and life went on around it, so that the holes and the tottering bricks were the landscape of my childhood, no more worthy of remark than the crazed glaze of the kitchen sink, or the whitewashed walls of the outside privy with its nail for torn newspaper, or the patches of damp on the ceiling of the tiny box I called my room, or the dispirited privet hedge that divided us from the family next door.
    I can understand any mother, more fastidious than most, holding the squalor at bay, encouraging a child to stay aloof, but in retrospect our retreat from the world was remarkably complete. I don’t even have many memories of visits by or to relatives. There was an aunt who kept a boarding house in Southend, but we never stayed with her. A grandmother figures in my very first memory; at least I think it was a grandmother but don’t know for sure. I was in my pram and it must have been raining, for the hood was up. Round the edge of the hood came a face, wrinkled as a withered apple. If it was Mum’s mother, she went to live with her sister during the war and died soon after. I don’t remember Dad having parents. Perhaps they were already dead.
    There were occasional visitors to our house, mostly men who worked with Dad on the railway. They were loud and jolly, and I liked having them around, but Mum gave them a chilly reception. I didn’t know why at the time, but one of them in particular always teased me.
    â€œBlimey,” he’d say to Dad, “where’d you get this ’un? Bit of a throwback, isn’t she?”
    Dad would mumble, “Lay off, Ted,” looking sheepish, while Mum’s lips would go thin and tight.
    â€œWhere’d you get that hair from, then?” Ted would persist, turning to me. “The milkman?”
    Mum rose to the bait every time. “I’ll have you know it runs in the family,” she would retort. “My father had bright ginger curls when he was young.”
    â€œIs that a fact?” And Ted would roar, nudging Dad with his elbow as he did while Mum’s face went bright pink with annoyance.
    â€œCommon as muck,” she’d snort when he’d gone.
    I was never encouraged to make friends with the neighbours’ children either. There wasn’t much traffic down our road apart from the occasional car or delivery van, or the rag and bone man making his slow way past, his horse sleepwalking the route, and the strange dying cry—“Ragabo, ragabo”—lingering even after they had turned the corner by the tobacconist and disappeared. Most mothers let their children play in the street, but mine didn’t.
    â€œYou don’t want to play with those dirty ragamuffins,” said Mum firmly, “you never know what you’ll catch from them.”
    So I would raid the recesses of Mum’s wardrobe and dress up in the old high-heeled shoes and hats I found there, strangely flattened, like roadkill, and stand in front of the cheval mirror in the corner of her room pretending I was a teacher scolding a class or reading to them from a storybook. Or I would poke around in the sour earth of the tiny yard, looking for worms and sow bugs to keep in a cardboard shoe box as pets. There weren’t