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CHAPTER TWO

FEN BOY

My original sin was to be born in Littleport, a tiny town-cum-village struggling to keep its head above water in the heart of the Fens on the border between Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. In these days of high-speed motorways and second homes it is hard to imagine just how cut off from the rest of the world the Fens seemed in those days. Or indeed, to imagine how strange the outside world seemed to its inhabitants. My father, who ran his own construction business, would tell me about the time he had taken his workforce up to London to see the sights. This was reckoned to be a great success by the men, who spent the whole day going up and down the escalators at Liverpool Street Station. As a child, the only part of this story that I found improbable was my father ever allowing his workers off site for an entire day.

I was a wartime baby, born on 6 September 1941, but I cannot claim to have shared much in the war’s privations. Living close to the land we never went short, drawing nourishment from the acre of land we shared with an abundance of chickens, ducks, rabbits and a pig. At Sunday lunch it was my father’s proud boast that the only purchased ingredient was the flour to make the Yorkshire pudding. My father was often away in the army but he was not exactly a fund of conventional war stories on his returns to the comforts of home. By all accounts he spent more of his time fighting his own officers than he did fighting Hitler. A high proportion of his military service was spent in the glasshouse.

I have two graphic memories from my infancy. One was of a huge scary effigy of Hitler being burned in the centre of Littleport. That really was impressive, but not quite so entrancing as the visual experience I had when my father had the job of painting the Burnham Overy Staithe windmill. Before applying the pitch to the brickwork, he had me securely strapped to the windmill’s upper balcony. From this vantage I could look far out to sea through the tumbling sails. Magical.

Even as a child in the Fens you had a sense of living on the edge. There was always the feeling that the water might reclaim the land and that Littleport’s 4,000 inhabitants could be engulfed or, if they were lucky, resume their status as an island people. As kids we would go out with poles to certain fields and poke the apparently solid surface of the earth. Three or four feet down it would be like jelly. And if the place did not sink without trace, there seemed a good chance it would be blown away by the icy winds that came howling across the open spaces, straight from Siberia. At almost any time of the year the Fens could whip up a penetrating damp that chilled to the marrow. I don’t think I’ve ever been really cold since I left.

The character of the people was less wintry than the terrain, but it was to some extent shaped by it. From Roman times the Fen country has been a natural refuge for outlaws, as the bogs deterred hot pursuit by the forces of law and order. Hereward the Wake held out against the Norman invaders in the marshes around Ely before he was betrayed by a greedy abbot. In Regency times the Fens were a popular hideout for runaway black slaves, which accounts for some of today’s more exotic physiognomies.

The inaccessibility of the area was also prized by its more law-abiding inhabitants, who could comfortably subsist there by trapping, shooting and fishing the teeming water-lands. When they started to drain the Fens, there was no end of problems with the local labour hired to do the work. They would dig the trenches for money by day, and fill them in at night for free to deter the onset of progress. They were the original Fen Tigers. Eventually Irish navvies had to be brought in.

The works of central government were regarded with distrust, sometimes with good reason. It was a rising in Littleport that sparked the bread riots round the country in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. These were stamped out with great ferocity. The officer in charge of quelling the disturbances was quoted as saying, ‘Last year the battle of Waterloo, this year the battle of Hullabaloo.’ In 1816 five Littleport men were hanged for their part in the rioting. I was acquainted with many of their descendants.

A sense of being at odds with the world beyond the Fens, even though many people made a living by selling produce to it, was very much a part of my upbringing. One consequence of this peculiar solidarity was that there was not a lot of class feeling, though some were richer than others. Nor was there much in the way of professional arrogance. The ranks of Fenland doctors and dentists seemed to contain an unusually large number of people who had been chucked out of the Royal Navy. Nor, it must be acknowledged, was there much in the way of cultural diversity.

Growing up in Littleport, my first artistic inspiration was Mr Baumber, the sign-writer. The most impressive thing about Mr Baumber was not so much the excellence of his signs but the casual elegance of his way of life. Unlike my father and my uncles, he seemed to exist very much on his own terms. The little work that he did he seemed to enjoy, and the rest of the time he would be pleasantly inebriated. You could say, in modern psychological parlance, that he was my first serious role model.

Even Mr Baumber’s imperfections had charm. It was said that his one serious deficiency as a sign-writer was a tendency to spell in a highly individual way. Thus when he painted the sign for my father’s building business, Law Brothers Building Constructors, his version came out as ‘Law Brothers Building Constrictors’. I later came to feel that Mr Baumber may have grasped an essential truth about the enterprise.

Remnants of past ways of life and death were still in evidence when I was a child. Old people still drank poppy tea to ease the ague and the irritation of mosquitoes. There was also talk of the special brew, the black teapot, which I gathered – I don’t think incorrectly – was designed to help those who had become a burden to their families on their way into the next world. I would have nightmares about this vessel which I managed to exorcise later in life by making one. This black teapot – festooned with poisonous scorpions, spiders and snakes – is now on view in Norwich Castle Museum.

My family’s tradition was essentially muscular. My grandfather, Robert, had an iconic status long after his death, which occurred when my own father was eight years old. He had originally been a blacksmith with a sideline in breaking horses, before making a great success as a general dealer. He invested all his money in cattle and a large chunk of Welney Wash. He prospered to the extent of opening a couple of butcher’s shops in the village and even sold his meat pies in London. His business was then completely wiped out by drought, quickly followed by a foot and mouth epidemic. Soon after, he died a typical Fenland death. A horse and carriage crashed through the ice on the Wash and my grandfather helped rescue the trapped driver. He then went home and died of pneumonia.

He had thirteen children, eleven surviving, and these were farmed out among different families in Littleport, which gave me a tremendous range of aunts and uncles as a child. The Laws were a rather stoic breed, without being dour, and also quite ambitious, none more so than my father.

My father, I often felt, was a driven man, and the drive was to restore the fortune that fate had so cruelly wrested from the grasp of his own father. At various times he had three other brothers, Bill, Jack and Felix, working with him in the construction business, which hugely profited from the post-war council housing boom. But there were absolutely no family favours. The workers were expected to work at the double, but George Law’s nearest and dearest were expected to die for the business.

The more cosmopolitan side of my upbringing came from my mother, Winifred, and her family, the Hiblins. My mother’s parents ran the dairy in Littleport but they were acquainted with a much wider world. They had run a shop in the East End of London and my grandmother Jenny had worked in Birmingham for many years, in a supervisory capacity in the rag trade. She knew all the old music hall songs and was a lot of fun, if a bit sharp with it. Her husband was more subdued, but not unimpressive. Wilfrid had served in the First World War, and had lived to tell the tale, though with some difficulty. While he was on ambulance duty on the front line, part of his jaw had been shot away.

On weekends I would help out on the milk rounds. This involved venturing down tracks with names like Burnt Fen and Coffee Drove to lonely black pitched shacks and Fletton brick bungalows, flagged by a couple of desolate poplars as windbreaks. To survive this specialized work it was necessary to judge, within a gnat’s whisker, the length of the ubiquitous Alsatian’s chain.

My reward was getting to sit with my grandmother on Saturday evenings when, gin bottle to hand, she would do the books at a table covered with piles of coins and wads of notes. With the accounting done I was allowed to work my way through several bottles of Ely Ales from the crate in the pantry. Pleasantly inebriated, I would then listen to grandma’s tales of big city life, and get to sing some of the old songs along with her, the bawdier the better. My all-time favourites were ‘A Little Bit of What You Fancy Does You Good’ and the more intricate ‘Keep Your Hand on Your Ha’penny, and Hold Your Ha’penny Tight’.

My grandparents were also remarkable for being among the first people in the neighbourhood to own a television set, and I can remember, aged 12, being forced to watch a snowstorm on it called ‘The Coronation’ when I wanted to be out in the fields with my dog, Scrap, looking for birds’ nests. This undoubtedly damaged any royalist tendencies I might have had.

There was an unspoken but implicit assumption among the Hiblins that my mother, who had been to grammar school in Ely, had married slightly beneath her station. Apparently my father had wooed and won her by clambering over seven rows of seats in the Empire cinema, Littleport, to be by her side. He was seen as a man of purpose, but perhaps a shade uncouth. Politically, the Hiblins were quite sophisticated and refined, being of the Liberal persuasion.

My father’s political outlook is something I still find hard to define. From the frequency with which he said a problem could be solved by shooting somebody, you might think he was a Fascist. At the same time he had nothing but contempt for what could be described as the professional shooting classes, like the army for example. Military service, to his way of thinking, never made a man of anybody. Soldiers were not encouraged to think for themselves and became essentially lazy. His firmest belief was in work, and it would be hard to find a more instinctive capitalist, or a man more totally wedded to the proposition that people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. And his offspring were expected to demonstrate similar convictions. He had some time for Oliver Cromwell, Fenland’s greatest gift to Puritanism, but his real hero was the contractor Sir Robert McAlpine, whose dying words, according to my father, were, ‘Keep the big mixer rolling, boys.’

Yet when the Tories were in power they would be denigrated as ‘Them’ as opposed to ‘Us’. Like many people in the Fens, he was fiercely anti-authority while being quite a considerable authority figure himself. While I was growing up he always voted Labour, but he would have a late-flowering love affair with the politics of Mrs Thatcher.

I probably learned more trying to figure out where my father was coming from than I ever did from school, where I was mainly distinguished for my misbehaviour. After the Three Rs, education in the Fens did not seem to lead anywhere much. In those days there were eight grammar school places reserved for 11-plus successes in the whole Isle of Ely. There did not seem much point in trying, particularly when Littleport Secondary Modern had a reputation for being a good laugh.

When I first went there the headmaster’s favourite activity was playing the violin to the accompaniment of Fenland birdsong whistled by the boys. Unfortunately he left, to be replaced by Mr Browning, who had the much more ridiculous notion of turning the enterprise into a mini public school with houses, prefects and all that nonsense. I could not take to it, so I became disruptive. I would invite trouble by saying ‘Hello’ instead of ‘Yes, Sir’ when the register was being called, and I was caned for each offence until the form master got bored with hitting me. As I had no time for homework I rarely had any answers in the classroom, though the sullenness of my responses did help to sharpen up Mr Browning’s satirical skills. ‘Say something, Law,’ he would counsel, by way of encouragement, ‘if it’s only “Goodbye”.’

One new master marked our first encounter by belting me across the room and saying, ‘Now, Law, you can do one thing wrong.’ My reputation for making teachers’ lives a misery had evidently preceded me, and he was getting his retaliation in first.

My real education was in the holidays when, as the elder son, I was expected to immerse myself in the ways of the family business. That meant working with my father and his brothers on the building sites, where health and safety regulations were honoured only in the breach. On a Law Brothers’, more popularly known as Claw Brothers’, site everything was done on piece rates at breakneck speed, and if there was a corner to be cut my father would cut it. It was said of him that he did not lay bricks so much as ‘throw them down’. We would recycle track from disused railway lines, doors from old Nissen huts – anything that could be scavenged. We used wooden scaffolding, long past its day, and any deep trenches on site would routinely be left dangerously unsupported. The firm had acquired a reputation as the fastest contract builders in the East and my father aimed to keep it, whatever the building regulations might say. All this frantic activity would be laced with George Law’s special line in inspirational messages for the workers, all variants on, ‘If the dog hadn’t stopped for a crap he’d have caught the hare.’

If the building inspector came by asking who was the governor, we were trained to say, ‘We’re all the boss here.’ I remember that one inspector, more tenacious than most, managed to figure out that the man aloft bricking the chimney was the boss. So he took off after my father, shinning up one of our typical ramshackle structures, and caused the whole thing to collapse. He fell and broke both ankles, while my father stayed aloft, secure with his chimney.

Any impediments to the flow of work somehow melted away. I remember there was what seemed like a problem with a 70-acre parcel of land near Mildenhall, prime construction territory but for the preservation order on the Saxon barn and moat it contained. A mysterious fire removed the chief obstacle, and my father’s men promptly set to work building what is, as far as I am aware, the only moated council estate in England. Local gypsies were blamed for setting the fire, but I sensed that they may not have been the prime movers.

One day Uncle Bill had a heart attack on a roof. We had two pulleys, one of which worked fine but the other was known to be dodgy. As we were preparing to lower him with the sound mechanism, Uncle Jack’s voice floated up from below: ‘Don’t put him there, boys. We’re bringing up the bricks.’ So the sick man went down on the dodgy pulley, fortunately without mishap.

On another day my young brother Martin broke several ribs when the Law Brothers work bus, en route to a distant site, slewed off the road into a river bank. Minutes after the crash, with Martin and the workers slumped dazed and bloodied by the crumpled bus, Uncle Jack came by in his car. Martin can remember his first words of succour to this day: ‘If anyone wants to work, they can get in the car and come with me.’

Episodes of this kind began to concentrate my young mind. Long before I left school I had been acquainted with most of the trials and terrors of a construction worker’s life. I had worked incredibly long hours, staggering around under a hod full of bricks, longing to hear Uncle Jack’s familiar call for one last push: ‘The day is short, and the night is long, so get along my old beauties.’ I had enjoyed the experience of having my hands stuck fast by the hoar frost to scaffolding clamps, and having to prise them off with warm tea. I had crumpled under the weight of a concrete lintel and all but gone off the edge of the scaffolding. My Uncle Jack grabbed me and saved me, without saying a word. I got the impression that this was business as usual, so I went down and got another lintel.

The annual light relief was Feast Day, the main public holiday for the farming community Littleport when people came from all around to show off their heavy horses and their most exquisite vegetables. There would be little competition tents in which people could demonstrate their prowess. I would show a few rabbits and some drawings which invariably won first or second prize. There was also a beer tent which stayed open all day, and by the close of play it would be a seething mass of flesh and tattoos. In later life I introduced my Aboriginal Australian friend, Herb Wharton, to a Littleport Feast Day celebration. He was kind enough to say, ‘It’s just like the outback, mate.’

Very occasionally I would mention to my father that the work at Law Brothers did seem rather hard, but this would only lead to an early version of the Monty Python sketch in which the participants brag competitively about the awfulness of their origins. Whatever I might have suffered, he had suffered ten times worse. I couldn’t even begin to know what tiredness was. Why, in his young days he had been so knackered that when he got one leg out of bed in the morning he had to put it back in to get the other one out. To me this sounded like quite a gymnastic achievement for an exhausted young man, but it was usually best to let my father win such arguments.

At the same time, he was not an unkind man. He did not, for example, think I should go into the world defenceless. Sometimes, without my mother’s knowledge, we would sneak off to Chatteris where there was a boxing club, made famous by Eric Boon who became the British welterweight champion. I was shown the ropes there and introduced to the Noble Art.

Family holidays would be spent on the North Norfolk coast among the sand dunes and the broad sweep of reed marshes at places that I still think of as the acceptable face of the Fens. The North Norfolk coast in summer seemed to us a world away from the bleak Fenland winters. Initially we made day trips to Holme, Old Hunstanton and Wells-next-the-Sea. Later, as my father made money, we would take a week’s holiday in places like Sheringham and Cromer. My brother and I would net shrimps and butterflies and go cockling on the mudflats where my father would haul out crabs, big as dinner plates, from under the rocks until the tide turned. Then it would be home to boil up the shrimps until they were as red and ready to peel as the skin on our backs and faces. In Cromer I even managed to get a smattering of religious education from the evangelists who held prayer meetings on the beach, competing with the Punch and Judy show for the holiday-makers’ attention. I can distinctly remember Martin and myself enthusiastically singing ‘Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam’, possibly because it seemed like an agreeable alternative occupation to the world of work as we knew it.

Even on holiday my father was an active man, dedicated to improving some aspect of himself or his sons. He was a strong swimmer and a keen diver, specializing in the swallow dive (you throw both arms back like wings and arch your back in imitation of a bird). He was teaching me how to do this from a breakwater at high tide when, intent on maintaining my wing spread, I hit my head on the breakwater’s hidden prop. I then drifted unconscious out to sea until I was hauled back by father who, when I came round, naturally insisted on my repeating the dive in case I lost my nerve.

Despite this and many other kindnesses, a powerful conviction was forming in my mind that fulfilling my father’s expectations of me was just about the last thing I wanted to do on leaving school. The future leadership of the Law Brothers’ construction empire would, I felt, be much better entrusted to young Martin. But my way out was not immediately apparent.

I had always liked to draw, but there did not seem to be much scope for earning an artistic living in Littleport, other than in the sign-writing area which Mr Baumber had cornered. I had always drawn for fun rather than as a career prospect, though the activity had brought me some local notoriety. One of my more ambitious designs was a large crayon portrait of Clem Attlee, done on a hoarding, which had helped Labour to lose the 1951 General Election.

It was my mother who first grasped that this hobby of mine could provide my escape route. Though supportive of my father, she could at least entertain the notion that there could be more to her children’s lives than the high-speed laying of brick on brick. She made some inquiries and discovered that it was possible then (though alas not now) to gain admittance to an art school on the strength of work done, without any formal qualifications. Accordingly I submitted a slim portfolio of my Feast Day studies to the Cambridge School of Art and was, to my great surprise, accepted.

I was not unhappy to take my leave of Littleport Secondary Modern, and the pleasure, it seemed, was wholly mutual. Mr Browning’s last headmasterly words to me were: ‘I don’t know what will happen to you in life, but wherever you go I hope you will learn some manners.’