In Attics Up and Down the Country

I have to admit, and maybe I should be ashamed to say it, but when I first set eyes on Golly George again all I could think about was the fond memories of youth he evoked in me. I couldn’t see what was wrong with him, son. And it made a break from sifting through box after box of the life your mother and I shared.

Gosh, what a thing to survive, tucked up there in a dusty corner of the attic. And how could something that gave me so much joy over so many years be so bad, really?

Please try to look at it through my eyes, my boy. I didn’t mean anything by it, giving him to little Finley – you know how much I love my grandson. And yes, I know what he represents, son. That’s history that I bore witness to –your mother experienced it first-hand, and I was by her side to live through it with her. But when I got Golly George, you have to understand, it was long before I met your mother. That first boat, just over the horizon, hadn’t yet touched our shores; all we had was shadows and representations.

Yes, I suppose there’s something deeply wrong in Golly George – those clothes, the outlandish features – but through my young eyes there was never any malice. Just look at him – that big beaming grin, the open, friendly face.

He doesn’t mean to me what he means to you. My dad gave me that. A bit of him is in there.

Just as a bit of you is in everything you give to Finley.

When my dad came with George that day, he would have placed him down in the cot next to me with all the love and tenderness as you placed Finley’s little grey rabbit next to him. The love I felt when I placed Boris Bear down next to you – remember Boris, son? We give these things to newborns – small, soft forms with hopeful eyes and stumpy arms – we give them as companions, to match our babies in innocence and purity and goodness, so they don’t have to grow up alone. So they have something to grow too old for, and cast off with fondness. That’s what George is to me, son. He’s my innocence. Look at his withered arm there – that’s where I used to suck, as a young kid.

And truth be told I hung on to him for longer than I should have – certainly longer than my mother thought I should have. As a boy I used to bound through the bigger streets after the older kids, holding George by the arm, his bushy head bouncing on the cobblestones as we went. Entire drizzly afternoons were spent in the front room, the two of us, getting into pretend adventures and scrapes together, under the old coffee table that doubled as our castle.

I didn’t have a lot as a kid. I had everything my dad could give. I had George, and an imagination. Everything I had I impressed upon that one dusty doll.

But I have to say, there was surely something rotten that crept into my games as I got older. Something hanging over like the smog in the air as I played those games. When we’re young, we mimic to survive. Just look at those odd phrases Finley’s picked up from his American cartoons.

Well, it was no different for me – whether through the whispers of older boys, the penny comics my dad used to hand me, I somehow got it into my head that in our games George and I couldn’t be equals. He took on that familiar archetype, I suppose – affable nitwit, loyal servant, bumbling vagrant. I was older now, and the game was to lord it over the silly thing. No longer the first mate, the fellow musketeer. Now the cabin boy, the servant. Always obliging with that big, red-lipped smile.

Please understand, son, these were simpler times. I hadn’t seen someone like George in real life. I remember snippets of the 6 o’clock news, sitting beside my dad in his armchair – reports of this new generation of people coming up through the docks of Tilbury and Bristol – but I didn’t harbour any ill will. I just didn’t know about them; I only knew Golly George.

God, to think all the things we didn’t know.

When my father passed, George was the only member of the household to keep smiling. Mum would stay up late, drinking Dad’s whisky, smoking in his battered old armchair, watching the static on the box long after the BBC signed off for the night; I’d be on the stairs, unbeknownst to her, with my fists wrapped around the banisters, just watching her through blubbering eyes. George on the stair next to me, smiling obliquely into the middle distance. I imagined him keeping my spirits up, while I tried to lift hers.

I suppose that’s why George hung around for so long, really. As I grew up, he became the younger brother I could never have; Mum, always out of patience now, called him the ‘mongrel boy’. I’d sit him on the chair next to mine at breakfast, demanding another boiled egg for him; on Sundays, I used to pretend to teach him how to read, giving George this slow, stupid accent, having him never quite grasp it. “Ah jus’ don’t make sense of the shapes.” Mum used to chase me out of the house, belt in hand, demanding I go out and play football in the street with the normal children, who had as little interest in me as I had in them; later, cast away under the lamppost, I’d pretend that George was soothing me with a simple, folksy wisdom.

And that’s how it went. And looking back on it, I know now that a lot was wrong with the picture. A boy under a lamppost in a grey English street, rehearsing images to his doll. What I didn’t see was that a fine, invisible web connects us all, and that one strand ran across distant seas. Images and motifs, seen in far-flung colonies through blue eyes, running buffeted by trade winds across the Atlantic, and into the studios of London; from there spreading outward, across England’s pleasant pastures, through these new-fangled TV sets and into the eyes of children. How the image is distorted in this journey – no longer real people who dream, but small, soft and stupid things, like Golly George.

And we were all subject to that distortion back in the day. Most of the folk I came across had never even been outside the Midlands, let alone abroad, apart from for the War. We called this area the Black Country, back in the day – not for any reason but the coalmines – and for a young boy growing up here, reality extended no further west than the Shropshire Hills. This was the world, the only world, for me to fit Golly George into.

So as I got older he changed again. No longer just a toy, especially after Dad passed. The men of the town used to troop down from the mines of an evening, faces black with coal, and there trooped George. That’s what he represented now. The way they joked, white teeth flashing in the winter sun. The bravery to keep going every day. And those occasional men like Dad, who went into the darkness one morning and never came out.

That was the last straw, actually, for Mum. When the years had passed, and her little boy was almost a man, dragging this raggedy little child’s doll around even as his voice broke. And when George underwent his final metamorphosis, and became one with the soot-faced, untroubled and eternally young face that sat atop out mantlepiece. When I first, jokingly, said he took after Dad.

She was scandalised with rage, naturally – most women at the time would have been. Why won’t you just grow up, she said, do you want the neighbours to talk. How dare I compare that thing to Dad. How dare I.

So I suppose that’s why Golly George was up there in the attic; when I stashed him there it was probably that or the fire. Still it makes me feel negligent, to tell you the truth, to think of him stuffed in that nook, smiling obligingly as your mother and I stacked a lifetime of memories up in front of him. But Golly George would never have minded. He would always have been ready for when he was needed again.

Did your mother ever know about it? Well, I suppose not. I hadn’t thought about Golly George for years. I bet your grandmother did, though, that first time I brought your mother home to meet her. God, but she was an evil woman from eviler times.

That evil seems all gone now, as I look out at Finley and George in the garden. Look how much fun he’s having, son. He’s rechristened him, you know – Jolly George now. It just made more sense, he said, he looks jolly, alright. And I suppose he’s right. That face, that seemed so open and innocent when I was a child, could be a little wry, I suppose. This new Jolly George is funny, Finley says, and smart and brave, just like Daddy.

Gosh, you’ve got so much of your mother in you, son. That’s what he sees in Jolly George.

And maybe that’s wrong, but maybe it’s a good thing; maybe that strand that runs from the colonies to here has gotten so much shorter. The picture clearer. Finley knows more than I ever knew at his young age; is closer to the source of it all.

And a bit of my dad is in that toy. A bit of me. A bit of the old Black Country too.