All The Colours In Between by Eva Jordan

Author:Eva Jordan [Jordan, Eva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Urbane Publications Limited
Published: 2017-10-18T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31

SALOCIN LEMALF

Salocin

‘So, shall we begin? I’d like to start at the beginning. Well actually that’s a given, I suppose. What is debatable is where the beginning is. For most that would be the day of their birth, a particularly cold night in my case, 13 December 1945. The midwife was called and arrived by bicycle. Brushing snow off her shoulders and carrying her bag of tricks, she happily accepted a cup of rosie lee before attending to my rather unremarkable birth and arrival into the world.

Salocin Lemalf, I was reliably informed, entered the world kicking and screaming. Second son and last child to Wilfred (Wilf to his friends) and Martha Lemalf. Martha, an avid reader with ideas above her station, wanted to call her second son Nicolas, but Wilf was damned if any son of his would be burdened with such, and I quote, “a pansy, poofter, shirt-lifter of a name”. As a joke, Martha simply turned the letters of the name Nicolas around and convinced her ignorant husband the name Salocin was synonymous with that of a great ancient warrior. Wilf accepted this story and hence I was christened, much to my mother’s eternal amusement, Salocin Lemalf, aka famous alchemist, Nicolas Flamel.

Any show of affection by my parents towards me was rare, towards each other, rarer still. Their fights were loud and physical, but that wasn’t unusual where I came from. Family life in the overcrowded East End of London was lived at close quarters. As kids, my friends and I ran freely in and out of each other’s homes, including extended family. Aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents all lived within a stone’s throw of each other. The backstreets, with no cars, were perfectly safe and used as our playgrounds, as were the many bombsites with their ‘Danger, Keep Out’ signs, which were slightly less safe, but much more alluring.

Times were tough. Folk were still reeling from a World War following a previous one that had promised to be a “war to end all wars”. Most of the men from the area worked the docks. Employment was high but wages were low, especially for the unskilled casual labourer, which was the category my father fell into. The more skilled jobs had relatively high pay and regular hours but those jobs were ferociously guarded, their skills kept in the family, passed from father to son. Wilf, virtually illiterate, had been afforded no such opportunity. Dragged up, motherless and responsible for five brothers and sisters, the stories I heard about the brutality of his father, my grandfather (whom I never met), made the hidings I got seem like a walk in the park.

Wilf managed as he had always done, diligently working both sides of the law. A charming chameleon, he was as capable of a good, honest day’s work as he was of thieving. When an honest day’s work did present itself, usually unloading a boat, it would mean anything from a twelve to eighteen-hour day of unremitting manual labour.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.