THE ORANGE SNOW
(Story about life in the inner slums of Tyneside (England) in the 1950s. )
THE ORANGE SNOW
It had been another bad day. Walking to school along Rawling Road in winter was awful. The wellies flapping against the bare eight year old legs wore a red ring around the calf which stung at every step. A slight powder of snow at school during the day had been transformed into ice-skid trails on the sloping tar of the playground. Brian's turns at run-and-slide had brought him two sore elbows and a scraped knee from falls. But sore as the legs, elbows and knees were, the worst part of today had been the Black Babies collection.
Collecting money for the Black Babies was a yearly class ritual at christmastime at the school. Each child in Miss O' Dowd's class was given a card to collect stamps for every penny raised. As the cash was brought to Miss O' Dowd's desk every Monday for six weeks, stamps would be stuck to the card from a booklet kept in her top drawer. At the end of the six weeks, Brian's card held only two stamps, a poor showing compared with the full or nearly full cards with their serried ranks of blue and red stamps belonging to most of the other children.
Each stamp showed a rhino and a peacock and three poor black babies of Africa, uncared for and unwanted by the unfeeling Africans, but being cared for and wanted by the deeply-feeling white missionaries sent out by mother church. The serried ranks of stamps on a better-off child’s cards showed what good, caring and charitable people the child had for kith and kin. And the array of blue and red peacocks also showed by implication what a set of good-for-nothings Brian had. And it was Miss O' Dowd's opinion that a card with only two stamps (held aloft for class amusement) was, after all, no surprise, for which pupils in the class were always regular mass attenders on Sunday? And which members of the class were not? And was Brian at mass last Sunday? No, I thought I didn’t see you. And the previous Sunday, and the one before that? And when was your last confession? And when did the sacred wafer of Our Lord’s body last slip onto your tongue? Can't remember?! Not surprising.
It was no good lying, Brian felt. This woman seemed to have the complete dossier on him and his family. She knew when everyone had and had not been to mass. It was certain Brian was going to burn forever in the fires of hell, along with his kith and kin. And no bad thing either, was the implication of her last hurrumph before sending him back in shame and disgrace to his desk. Brian hated those Black Babies and those peacocks.
And the same Miss O' Dowd had written superciliously on his copy book at the end of his essay about My Favourite Things To Do During The Week, "Do you really go to the cinema four times a week?" Her good income and car and husband and house in the leafy suburbs of Low Fell allowed her to range from the golf club at Gosforth to the seaside restaurants of Marsden to the theatres of Newcastle city centre. She could not countenance the cheap cost, the handy nature, and the sheer escapist quality of the local cinemas, the Palladium or the Bensham, two or three times a week, or four times if it was a good week's offering of titles. She strongly felt that it would be better for us all if the Black Babies had a whack at that cinema money. After all, other pupils had filled their stamp cards, and possibly even gone without dessert at the seaside restaurant to enable the red and blue, deep-feeling clergy-birds to be gummed all over their cards in time for this morning's final hand-in of the cards. It was the New Year offering to the Missionaries.
New Year didn't feel any different to old year when you were eight years old and had little money and no prospects of improving on that situation. Back at school the first week of term in January with the red welly rings on the legs was not an uplifting, resolution-minded state to be in. And in this depressed state, Brian and his mum that evening once again came to the escape of the cinema. It was a good western with John Wayne at the Bensham picture house about a mile up the Bensham Road. The old system of first-showing and second-showing with everyone turned out of the picture house at the end of first-showing had been changed the previous year so that you could stay in all evening and see it twice if you liked. Seeing that there had been the usual row that afternoon between the granny and the mum, Brian knew they'd enjoy being able to stay for two showings. Nevertheless, about ten minutes before the end of the second-showing his mother decided they would leave the warmth and comfort of the darkness early to be ahead of the crowd as the pubs turned out and not to have to wait in line at the chip shop down the road on the way home.
It had been snowing heavily again while they were inside and when they stepped down the three marble stairs to the pavement floodlit by the lights of the cinema there were about five inches of perfect white snow everywhere they looked. At that hour all foot traffic had stopped and only the occasional bus might be seen up Bensham Bank. But even the buses appeared to find the long slow hill climb impossible in such snow. So the snow remained perfect and unspoiled by any print from foot or tyre. Sounds were muffled, and the boy and his mum exchanged comments about the weather in a strangely closed and intimate silence. It was as if the world had closed down for the night, and was not moving, not making noise, nor even breathing out loud. At that, mother and son stepped out into the snow and began the walk down the long, long hill leading home.
Once away from the cinema the lights of the main road provided the only illumination, and they were the new sodium vapour lamps. Recently installed, they had replaced the old cold white light of the gas lamps that still provided the side streets with their illumination. They blazed a trail of modern life across the sorry, worn, inner city of Gateshead, and their light was a warm orange. The smoky sky above was orange, and the whitewashed walls of back alleys were orange, and everywhere they looked there was orange snow covering every horizontal surface. There was no wind, just silence and orange snow, fading away down the turning road into ever deeper shades of orange.
Away to the north the normal view over the industries of the Tyne valley was transformed. The Teams gasworks with its leviathan gas holder drum looked like an enormous christmas cake with beautiful icing layered on its gently curving, shallow domed top.
Beyond the works there was normally a view of mile after mile of the Derwent and Team valleys with their heavy concentrations of industry. Ropeworks and papermills, engineering factories and power stations illuminated at night and disguised from their daytime ugliness, coke ovens sending up enormous clouds of white hot steam every half hour as the twenty ton loads of red hot coke were cooled by dowsing. And just before the quenching steam the oven doors two miles away over the valley would open and the glare of the coke would look like a peep into the burning fires of hell itself.
Tonight, though, it was all gone, gone in a cloud of newly approaching snowfall coming in from the west, from the far-off Pennines; and the steep, shabby streets that ran down to the banks of the Tyne away from the main road home seemed to plunge themselves into an orange oblivion as the snowfall enveloped the two tiny figures walking slowly home. The flakes came down from the smoky orange clouds thick and slow, and covered heads and shoulders. Brian turned his face up now and then to catch flakes on his tongue and let them into his eyes, lost in an orange make-believe world of imaginary blizzards in the wild west just like John Wayne.
They arrived parallel with the chip shop and turned in without hesitation. This would be supper for the pair of them, free from the nagging of the granny at home and away from the petty criticism of every imperfect action of son or mother. The chips were a special treat, for mum couldn't afford to buy chips every time they went to the cinema. He felt sure that Miss O’Dowd would be relieved to know that they didn't really have chips four times a week.
No queue inside because it was too early for the pub crowd, and too snowy for the casual trade. Steam billowed out as the door was opened and closed. There was hissing and crackling from the big vats of hot fat, and the smell made Brian's mouth water. He'd been hungry all day and the meagre cheese sandwich granny had made after school had not really filled him. Brian momentarily thought of the starving Black Babies. Maybe they too would enjoy a bag of chips. Maybe they had uncaring grannies over there in Africa too.
The thought was momentary only, though, as two bags of chips came rapidly to their cold hands and a little cash was exchanged. With a sprinkle from the watered-down vinegar, a heavy shake from the big, greasy aluminium salt shaker, and a polite automatic cheerio, mum pulled open the glass door and the pair stepped back into the orange swirl, accompanied by another cloud of vinegary steam from the opened door.
The chips were served up in a shallow greaseproof bag with serrated edges, and this bag was itself contained in a much deeper brown bag which both stopped the chips spilling over onto the ground, and kept them piping hot because it was a good insulator. And tonight its services were tested to the full as the cold weather would quickly cool down unprotected chips.
The footprints of the adult and child slowly created a long track in the orange snow, a track which disappeared a hundred yards behind them as the snow fell in thick clouds. Talk was unnecessary and there was silent communion as the two of them enjoyed the chips and each other's company.
The chips were delicious, the smell of vinegar and salt hanging on the still air behind them in a noticeable little trail of orange steam. And towards the end of his chips Brian removed the greaseproof bag and tore a little off the corner allowing the vinegar to trickle into his mouth. It was a perfect end to a perfect meal. Almost. He'd finished faster than mum and, as all children will, he asked for one or two of hers. One or two, or maybe three or four. The last one to be given from her fingers was a fat, succulent four inch chip, with deep brown corners and golden brown faces, and its steam showed it was still lovely and warm.
The grains of salt were readily visible for his mother had always been a little heavy handed with the salt, much to the delight of the nagging granny who could therefore find fault with all of mum's cooking. Brian liked salt, and as she pulled it from the brown bag like a prize fish in an angling contest he knew it would be the best of the evening's feast. As it came up to be dropped in the boy's mouth an enormous flake of orange snow slowly came to rest on the golden upper face and the ice covered chip slipped
onto Brian’s tongue. A mixture of hot, vinegary potato melded with salty, orange ice-crystals. She knew he loved it. He knew she knew. Now, there… was real communion. It was indescribably perfect, a tiny diamond of an event never to be forgotten. One of those small, apparently trivial happenings of a child's life that never gets erased from the memory, even weeks after the snow has gone, or decades after the mother has gone.
It was food from heaven. This snow-clad pair had never been churchgoers. Mum made no secret of her view that it frequently happened that churchgoers could be the least christian of people. In spite of this, and in spite of the Miss O' Dowds of the world, Brian had a fairly well developed sense of religious appropriateness and Biblical allusion, mostly learned from Twentieth Century Fox. In his childish eight year old mind the snow and the food vividly reminded him of the Israelites led by Charlton Heston, and their manna from heaven, shown two weeks previously at the Bensham picture house at the top of the hill.
Some minutes after the manna, and despite their slow pace, the pair were nearing the granny's house, but not before Brian had tossed several orange snowballs at the laughing figure of his mother, she scurrying this way and that to dodge the fluffy missiles. As they neared the Bensham Settlement, coats were dusted free of snow to avoid criticism indoors, and they turned left off the main road and into the darkened Rawling Road. Here, the orange sodium lamps of the main road were left behind, and the snow, all scuffed up now with the people turning out of the pubs, was a harsh white, stained with gray. They were home.
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