Uncle Cyril
Growing up in early ‘80s Lincolnshire was a bit like the 1950s. Our parents moved to the house I was born in and which my mother still lives in during the winter of 1977. The Winter of Discontent. My father said to me before he died he saw it as an act of supreme selfishness to bring a child into the rural wasteland of 1970s Lincolnshire, followed by the displacement and troubles of the Miners’ Strikes, and that he was sorry for it.
Still, there were enormous bonuses. We grew up feral, and happy. Horses and kittens and random dogs. Our indomitable mother, who bid on a dead car at auction, wearing a pussy cat bow maternity dress (me in the tummy) and returned the next day to crank it into life by changing the alternator and other bits and pieces, had moved to a new house and a new life, heavily pregnant, a husband working away, and with a lot to do.
Enter, Uncle Cyril. My Uncle Cyril was the village carpenter and made coffins on the side when the need arose, ‘laying them out’. He wore brown dungarees, a tattersall shirt and a flat cap except at Christmas. White hair in a side parting. The tub of Brylcreem on the bathroom sink was a thing of mystery. Never changed. Immaculate, with a carpenter’s square pencil in the front pocket. He came to the house to see about a job for Mum, and he went home to his wife, my Auntie Myra (THAT is a story for another time) and said, ‘There’s a new lass in the village that needs a friend’.
Thus began the story of Uncle Cyril and Auntie Myra - trust me, it’s a doozy - but for now, we have Uncle Cyril. He was a veteran of the Malaya Campaign, and his left leg was always a bit painful. As well as his memories. When he came back from Malaya, he smoked over 70 cigarettes a day, then went cold turkey. Except when he was laying out a body, then he smoked. His brother, Uncle Eric, was a Normandy veteran and lived in the next house, ‘under the roof’, as we say, and although you don’t realise these things when you are tiny, suffered periodically from shellshock. We used to take him sandwiches and cake after school, and have an alarm call of UNCLE ERIC CAN’T BEND HIS LEGS if you found him on the floor, which meant all hands to the pump and to hold him down until it passed.
Uncle Cyril and Auntie Myra had a smallholding, and after school, we would load up in the transit van with Tiny the vicious Jack Russell terrier and get off to Barnetby Top to ‘do the sheep’. Walt, another veteran, was allowed to live on the smallholding in a 1950s caravan with his succession of Border Collies, all called Pup. Walt wore blue overalls, always. (Mum was still checking on Walt a few years ago in the Post Office, making sure he got his pension, but he’s gone now.) Sheep, oh Jesus, the sheep. The mardy mums and the aggressive nannas. Nothing like getting smashed and trampled by an angry ewe. It’s OKAY, I’M FINE! I still have little patience with sheep - mainly because they die on you at a moment’s notice and I can never work out how to stare one down). But I did love the banty hens.
Uncle Cyril and Auntie Myra ended up being my godparents, but more on that later, and one of my first memories is sitting on Uncle Cyril’s lap driving the transit van home, me on the wheel, him on the pedals. All totally illegal, obviously, but like he gave a damn. He was enormous fun for a child. Encouraged me to be as wild as possible. A man of very few words. Veteran, survivor, carer for his brother, village caretaker; huge smile, huge heart.
He fell down on the smallholding when I was 9. Our GP said he was dead before he hit the ground. ‘No more heart left.’
That sodding Jack Russell never stopped looking for that transit van. And in some ways, nor have I.