Broken Music: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

know now he was really speaking to himself as a younger man, and ruing his landlocked captivity.
    Having received some training in the army, my dad then served his apprenticeship as an engineer’s fitter at the De la Rue engineering works, where they built massive turbines and engines for seagoing ships. We were not a wealthy family, but my father was earning enough for my mother to stop work and look after me at home.
    Three years after me, my brother, Phil, is brought into the family and my father will make another decision that he will regret for the rest of his life.
    When I am five years old, in 1956, my father decides to leave his engineering job and take over the management of a dairy. The owner, a friend of my grandfather Ernest’s whose name is Tommy Close, is retiring, and he needs someone to take over the business. The real incentive for my dad is that he will be virtually his own boss, and that along with the job there is a large two-story flat above the premises to accommodate our growing family—my sister, Angela, a year behind Philip, is on the way.
    Below the house is a shop that sells milk, fresh ice cream, chocolate, sweets, and bottles of fizzy pop, Orange Crush, lemonade, and my favorite, dandelion and burdock. There are two assistants: Betty, a plump, hysterical teenage girl with a delinquent “teddy boy” for aboyfriend, whom everyone thinks beats her up, and Nancy, a sassy redhead who will become a close confidante of my mother’s and something of an accomplice. Out at the back of the shop is the dairy yard, with two electric milk floats and a diesel truck called a Trojan on which the milk is delivered each morning. The town is split up into three delivery rounds by my father and two other milkmen, Ray and his younger brother Billy. Ray is a scurrilous, foul-mouthed dwarf of a man with slicked-back Brylcreemed hair. He shows me his hernia at every opportunity—“It’s like a fuckin’ orange, look.” His gentle brother Billy is soft-spoken and prematurely as bald as a billiard ball.
    From about the age of seven, on school holidays and at weekends I will go out to work with my father on his round in the High Farm estate and the miners’ cottages at the north of the town. He works seven days a week, every day of the year but Christmas. My dad is the boss, but he can’t afford to take a holiday. When I join him, he will shake me awake at 5 A.M., leaving my little brother in his slumbers, and I’ll bundle myself into the warmest clothes possible. Sometimes, in the winter, it is so cold that there is frost on the inside of the window and I have to fumble to get dressed underneath the bedclothes as my breath condenses in the chill air. I stumble downstairs where my father is pouring the tea and I begin setting a fire before the rest of the family rise. We load up the van, wearing old leather gloves with the fingers cut out and lifting the cold metal crates as gently as possible so as not to wake the neighbors. Soon we are making our way through the dark empty streets. I learn to love the unique quality of the early mornings. When everyone else in the town is tucked up in bed, we move quietly like cat burglars and seem to own the streets, investing them with an exclusive and mysterious glamour that will vanish as the morning progresses. Even today Ifind it hard to lie abed. I’m always the first up—sleeping long will not become one of my talents.
    The winters of my memory are grim, and there are mornings when I have no sensation in my feet for hours on end, my hands and face blue with cold. If the streets are icy, it makes it impossible for Bessy, as my dad affectionately calls the truck, to get up the steep banks near the river. I remember having to complete a lot of the round using my sledge. Sometimes the cold will force the cream at the top of the bottles to burst through the tinfoil caps and form solid tubes of frozen milk that protrude from the necks like strange mushrooms. We know that no