KIDDAR'S LUCK AND THE AMPERSAND

Jack Common

Frank Graham 1975

ISBN 0 85983 027 6

INTRODUCTION 

Obsessed by a belief in Tower Blocks and Motorways and the idea that bigger must always be better, provincial cities in recent years have become prey to almost every kind of con­temporary folly. In Newcastle, in pursuit of what is thought to be civic fashion, melancholy buildings designed by strangers to the city's art, history, and architectural tradition rise on acres of 'comprehensive redevelopment' and present a forbidding spectacle. This compulsion to conform to fashion and failure to appreciate the value and character of what is local has resulted in much self-inflicted destruction and loss.

With this in mind as a background, perhaps the local neglect of Jack Common falls into place. His novels have been unobtainable by the general public for over twenty years; no University ever honoured him; nothing marks the house in Heaton where he was born. Yet this is the writer George Orwell so admired and of whose two novels Kingsley Martin said, 'If they were the only books the Turn­stile Press had ever published, that would have justified its existence.'

Common wrote at a time when there was a vogue for what was called 'proletarian' writing. By origin he was certainly a proletarian writer, but his work has nothing in common with that drab school, and I suspect that what led the critics and the New Writing enthusiasts of his day to undervalue it was its very elegance and wit, and a feeling that someone so pro­foundly funny could not be profound. As Sid Chaplin has said—

'He was indeed the nearest anybody ever got to Charlie Chaplin in print ... the sentences skid and dance and hop on one leg or take a custard pie right on the chin or duck and weave and leave you gasping behind. But he is more for the wry smile than the belly laugh.'

He was born the son of a Newcastle railwayman, in 1903 in an upstairs railway flat at 44 Third Avenue, in the suburb of Heaton, and was to become, in addition to several other things, a solicitor's office boy, a mechanic, a shop assistant, an intimate friend of George Orwell and the author of the two neglected autobiographical novels which should have won him a wide acclaim—and did not.

After leaving his Heaton school at the age of fourteen, the boy—who had shone at nothing except his English essays which the Headmaster read out to the whole school—went to a Com­mercial College (Skerrys College, which features in The Ampersand) and took a job in a solicitor's office at 12/6 a week; but in the early twenties the Royal Arcade, where many political groups—differing only in their degree of unreality used to meet, and where the People's Theatre group was founded—provided the only free education after the age of fourteen then available in Newcastle; and it was there that the young Common cut his intellectual teeth before leaving New­castle for London in the late twenties to stake his claim to a place in the literary world.

In 1932 he became the Assistant Editor of John Middleton Murry's Adelphi and in 1935 for a short time was appointed Editor. After that he worked for film units as a script writer and Literary Adviser and turned his hand to a variety of sad things.

In 1938 he edited and wrote the introduction to 'Seven Shifts', a study of men at work in a particular kind of society. In the same year the same publishers, Secker and Warburg, published his essays on the political and cultural convulsions of his time called 'The Freedom of the Streets'. In his review of this book in the New English Weekly, George Orwell wrote, 'This is the authentic voice of the ordinary man, the man who might infuse a new decency into the control of affairs if only he could get there, but who in practice never seems to get much further than the trenches, the sweatshop and the jail'. In 1951 Kiddar's Luck was published and in 1954 The Ampersand—its companion volume and sequel. In 1968 he died.

Kiddar's Luck is the story of Jack Common's first fourteen years of growing up in the Newcastle of the early 1900s up to 1917. Nearly all the background facts in Kiddar are true, his mother's limp, his father's giant stature, and the detailed description of the very house and street in which he lived. He sees through a child's eyes, the teeming activity in street and back lane, the scramble of vans, barrows, milk chariots, coal carts, steam wagons, the milkman's handbell, the Cullercoats fishwives' cry, the rag and bone man's bugle, the firewood seller's wail and the whole hierarchy of old people, adults, relatives, boys' and girls' street games and the place of the newly born—a whole culture that has gone;

'Everybody's washing hung across the lane, so that the appearance of a tradesman's cart meant a rush to tuck sheets and things round the rope and to raise the diminished bunt­ing high over the horse's head with a prop. The coal-man was the biggest menace, since a mere brush against his tarry sacks meant a second washing-day. At his cry every house­wife instantly rushed out to struggle with the props, and down the lane you'd see one line of sheets after another shoot up a couple of yards and the horse's head appear very black beneath the sky-flung whiteness. Naturally bad lads learnt to imitate his cry. They'd conceal themselves behind the last line of washing, and give vent to a convincing "Coal ter wagon!", then wait for the scamper.' 'Kiddar' tells of the boy's growing up in these streets, his growing humiliation at his mother's drinking, and his realiza­tion that his parents' marriage is falling apart.

Of Kiddar, Sid Chaplin wrote—

'There are four chapters alone on life before age five, a miracle of total recall including a description of how it feels to be a bairn in a pram with the sun kissing your face, or crawling and registering every detail of the furniture, every sound and smell in an Edwardian kitchen or seeing Mrs Buchan swilling beer from a jug or granny dead in her coffin...'

Hard times came to Jack Common after 1945 and in a letter to Irene Palmer dated 10th December, 1950, he tells of the circumstances under which Kiddar is being written:

'I am as thin as a rake, yes I am you know: terribly sober; a six in the morning riser; and a worker all the hours there are. These read like the qualifications for a very poor job. And I had three till a month ago. From seven till five, I was a labourer plying a nimble shovel (well sometimes nimble); seven till ten, a critic compiling film reports; Sat and Sun afternoons an author writing his books ... I thought of ten­dering my resignation. But you know I have never resigned from anything all my life. However, I got the sack—that is more in keeping with my tradition. So now I turn out three film reports on books very week which takes me till Thursday and earns me £4 10s. and then I turn to the book. It should be finished as per contract, by the end of the year—pub­lishers, if and when, Turnstile Press.'

And later (2nd April, 1951) to the same correspondent...

'I finished my book only two weeks behind schedule despite my five months hard labour at the nursery and the produc­tion of some 50,000 words of film reporting. Simultaneously with people snatching the roof off my head and turning out the electric light and littering me with summonses, and my typewriter breaking down in all directions and lack of beer thinning my blood, lack of tobacco making my lungs trans­parent—Irene, never was book writ before in such a ringing set of circumstances.'

Of these circumstances there is no trace in Kiddar. The writ­ing is without trace of self-pity and the witty and ironic style is best appreciated by being read aloud: here is his description of the blunder he made as an unborn babe in the choosing of his parents.

'... It's the operation I was about to take part in one cold November night in the year 1902 when me and my genes were barging about on the other side of time, corporally un­committed and the whole world of chance open to us. It was then that we made a mess of things.

There were plenty of golden opportunities going that night. In palace and mansion flat, in hall and manor and new central-heated "cottage", the wealthy, talented and beautiful lay coupled—welcome wombs were ten-a-penny, must have been. What do you think I picked on, me and my genes, that is? Missing lush Sussex, the Surrey soft spots, affluent Mayfair and gold-filled Golder's Green, ... I came upon the frost-rimmed roofs of a working-class suburb in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and in the back bedroom of an upstairs flat in a street parallel with the railway line, on which a halted engine whistled to be let through the junction, I chose my future parents. There, it was done. By the time that engine took its rightaway and rolled into the blue glare of the junction arcs, another kiddar was started, an event, one might add, of no novelty in that quarter and momentous only to me.

I at once came under the minus-sign which society had already placed upon my parents. They were of no account, not even overdrawn or marked "R.D.", people who worked for a living and got just that, who had a home only so long as they paid the weekly rent, and who could provide for off­spring by the simple method of doing without themselves. I had picked the bottom rung of the ladder with a vengeance, for it was that kind of ladder used in the imaginations of mathematicians, on which the rungs mount in minus degrees and the top is crowned with no opulence of over-plus but with the mere integer. A sad mistake; though millions make if I think it still deserves a mourning wreath.'

Most of the writing is of the same quality, right through to the final pages of savage self-mockery bringing both child­hood and book to an end in 1917 when he writes an imaginary letter to his future employer:

'Dear Sir,

With reference to your advertisement ... I beg to apply for the post. I am fourteen years of age, strong, healthy, bright, punctual, clean and willing. My parents are working class, my environment is working class, the school I have just left is working class, and with your kind assistance I feel qualified to become working class myself.

Because I have known poverty, I am certain to accept the small wage you intend to offer. Because I resent poverty, I am likely to join any organization or activity which has the object of making you pay bigger wages. Because I know how poverty cripples the humble, I intend to be ambitious, within limits, and ready to advance myself at your expense ... as a member from birth of the community of the streets I am aware that individual success for one of our sort, if contrived and not accidental, incurs a personal severance from the rest. That makes a man ridiculous, you know. The self-promoted working man is as much a living anomaly as the wealthy priest, the socially approved poet, the knighted scientist, or the bearded lady. Hedged off, therefore as I am from a conventional or an in famous success by these parallel electric fences, it is probable I shall tread the daily round for a regular pittance all my life—that suits you ...'

And in between describing the blunder of his birth and this bitter leave-taking of childhood, there is an unforgettable gallery of 'ordinary people, drawn sharp as a needle—whole streets of them eccentrics and relatives, drawn with such truth you feel you have met them—and if you live on Tyneside and are over fifty, you probably have. Here is one of them:

'My Aunt Mary Jane ... she was a tidier-upper, she was. Her whole life was a fearful struggle against the Apollyon of Dirt, or "Dort" as she pronounced it. Anybody but her­self would have said she was the victor. Not her. She would see "dort" on surfaces that to the uninstructed eye had been polished down to a new skin of cleanliness. "Dort" was always creeping in behind her, following after her broom and breed­ing even where the duster had just left off ... The working class wife who really goes in for cleanliness, as plenty do, especially if she has no children, keeps a home which easily outshines any in the country. People of the other classes have largely lost their standards in this matter ... The true graft of scrupulous dirt-hatred is not there. In the middle class home one is nearly always aware of a latent dinginess ... it is a safe bet that the corners, the places in shadows have been skipped; the swift wipe of polish doesn't really cover up the lack of scrubbing ... gardening she left to her hus­band, But the house—"hoose" she called it—was her sup­reme concern. When I was allowed inside it I had the sensation of coming into a glass palace. Breathe and you left a stain. Uncle Bill always arrived by the back-door, where he took off his boots and stepped in his socks from one bit of newspaper to another until he arrived at his seat left side of the hearth. There he sat most evenings, his feet still on news­paper ...

Aunt Mary Jane studied the deaths. Any of the Northum­brian names, Charlton or Foster or Twizell say, set her speculating on who the deceased could be. She and her husband were related to half the clans on the border; she couldn't realize that names once localized had gone into the city melting pot and were becoming meaningless as indica­tions of the owner's clan-membership. For example, when my father complained once that a watch-maker called Forster had made an unsatisfactory job of mending his watch—"Ay," says she, "the Forsters were always a bad lot. Ye should ha known better than take it theor" ... So they sat most evenings in the showcase of a room surrounded by reflecting surfaces and under the presidency of a proud and glittering grandfather clock which always seemed to me to be saying "NO DORT, NO DORT".'

Jack Common preferred Kiddar's sequel, The Ampersand, which carries his story on after the age of fourteen. In a letter he said 'I'm trying to get them (Turnstile Press) to give me an advance on my next, which IS a masterpiece'. Yet some devilish impulse of self-denigration (which was typical) made him change the surname of the boy from KIDDAR to CLARIS— although the father remained the same railwayman father and the mother the same limping mother. Kiddar, as we all should know, is the affectionate Geordie word for Boy—any older brother will refer to any younger brother as 'Our Kiddar'— whilst Clarts is a Geordie word with derisive overtones for Mud or Muck or a mixture of both.

This book has the same rare writing as 'Kiddar'. There is a description of an eccentric solicitor which is comparable to the best in Dickens. Here is the description of the Solicitor's office on his first Monday morning there—

'Then the air of the office met them. It had died in there over the weekend. The atmosphere was yellowish with yesterday's slain sunbeams still tepid with the warmth of their decomposing, and its burden of a fine dust, too thick to be merely a scent, too rich to be less than a taste, testified to the further demise of old deeds and dry volumes ...

... this was the epitome and concentrate of documentary catacombs. The atmosphere in this place had never been alive, surely. It must have come from mummy's lungs originally, and then hung in millennial stillness about dry Egyptian tombs. It stayed inert about a single electric light bulb ... it was the aspic in which sundry black deed-boxes with names like tombstones found eternity ... He wanted to get out at once. Why, you could die in here easily and you'd never rot, not perceptibly or in a century or two.'

The Ampersand is in no way inferior to Kiddar. Indeed whilst it preserves the comic genius of Kiddar there is an undertone of ferocity as his growing awareness reveals the tragedies around him and tells him what his own life is likely to be.

Both books are heavily flavoured with sentences and ideas that stay in the mind—

'Boredom or the ability to endure it, is the hub on which the whole universe of work turns. The genius and the chim­panzee are impatient of it, and here and there in a civilized society occur individuals who hark back to these ancestral types and are resistant to scholarship ... Most of us, how­ever, are unable to survive being educated. We learn reading and boredom, writing and boredom, arithmetic and bore­dom, and so on ... till in the end it is quite certain you can put us to the most boring job there is and we'll endure it.'

'When she explained that thunder was God's anger against the wicked ... my father pooh-poohed all this ... why did they have lightning conductors on churches? Couldn't they trust the Almighty's aim? Grandma would murmur darkly about the wicked in their pride, and though he stood there large and confident as ever I thought myself he was taking a risk.'

'Anyone who has ever had close dealings with women must have been struck by the curious knack they have of being impossibly in the right, and genuinely so, just at that point when you think you have really got them. They get murdered for this, frequently, but it still is so."

'Newcastle being a fine town to roam in ... since it is all hills, vales, bridges, and one view succeeds another every hundred paces in a manner which fascinates anyone with an eye for composition in a landscape. True, for two cen­turies or more the main endeavour of the city fathers has been to destroy this balance ... Still, there is a natural obduracy in the configuration of the place which resists all the erosions and excrescences which otherwise must have made a Hull or Birmingham of it.'

I have said that these books are neglected—but there has always been a minority of writers and others who have appre­ciated them and lent out their rare copies. And Common's literary friends encouraged him by making clear to him how much they admired his writing. He repaid them by talk, hours of talk, on beer (on which he could show astonishing erudi­tion), on politics, on art, on anything in the world that roused his anger or enthusiasm or appealed to his sense of the ridicu­lous. But his talk, although precious, took up much time that should have been spent in writing. It will be noticed that in a life of sixty-five years the two books for which he will be remembered (and I am grateful to Frank Graham for being bold enough to publish both novels in the same volume) were written between 1949 and 1954—a period of five years. He believed in himself—but only intermittently; and his self-destructive and self-deprecating sense of humour although very funny masked a nightmare sense of despair and disgust. In a letter referring to the death of a child he wrote "—a senseless calamity which brings one up against the awful grin behind the universe ... Everyone has their own technique for producing the boozy half-blindness which is the first con­dition for continued living. They'll have a way likely, a better way than I have. In that case, there's no talking to the lightning-struck, the fatally-illuminated are always alone.'

Wishing for literary recognition, knowing he deserved it, feeling contempt for the self-promoting salesmanship by which it is so often achieved, he never would in any event take him­self for long with that sufficient degree of seriousness which is so helpful. Self-derision would keep breaking in. And even had he won success, the painful honesty that went into the making of Will Kiddar and Clarts would not have allowed him to be satisfied and fooled by it—any more than was Siegfried Sassoon—

'I saw that smiling conjurer Success—
An impresario in full evening dress—
Advancing towards me from some floodlit place
Where Fame resides. I did not like his face,
I did not like this too forthcoming chap
Whose programme was "to put me on the map"
Therefore I left his blandishments unheeded,
And told him I was not the man he needed.'

In The Ampersand, there is a description of the boy's realization that he is different to others, and why, and he feels a terrible sense of loss as well as gain:

The sight of those good folk going home somehow in­verted his mood. He had now an immense awareness of the living community around him and felt the apartness that gave it him to be an amputation. And so it was indeed. His similars among the more fortunate classes are not likely to be put to so extreme a severance when their nature shows itself. They can usually be drafted into an intelligentsia that is well organized, tolerated, even socially blessed. This is only an oasis they are in perhaps; it isn't wilderness. But Bill Clarts, coming this cold night from the small room of a lonely, thinking man, contraband books under his arm, felt himself engaged in a traffic which must alienate him from his kind.

Suddenly he didn't want that ... the presence of the sleepy hosts around felt like a claim upon him. He was drawn to this huge, mute community that lay shut up in half-houses, family by family, under the uniform tile, each of them maintaining a warm hearth against all hazards by the slender defence of a weekly wage.

... Clarts merely fumbled with these premonitions. What he knew was that he wanted both to be good with his kind and at the same time fulfil the separate needs of his nature. Uncle Rod's solution of the problem was to be a crank. But a working class crank was really a kind of city-idiot.'

No writer's growing awareness of the conflict between his background and his art has ever, it seems to me, been better expressed. The tragedy is, that even as he takes up his pen to write the great novel, the divide between himself and his own people will widen. Yet in these two books, at a cost to him­self which only he could know, passing judgement from a lonely distance on himself and his parents with a passionate impartiality, Jack Common catches the very sound and sight and smell of growing up on Tyneside fifty years ago.

It would be good to believe (if there is any literary justice in the world), that so far as the books are concerned, that minus sign will turn out to be a plus sign after all. I believe that it will, and that they will be enjoyed as long as there are people on the banks of the Tyne who retain an interest in their past and value what makes their region unique. I have tried to avoid describing these books as masterpieces but in the end I have to say that is precisely what they are. 

Lyall Wilkes