No Excuse

Think For Yourself. ALTMEDIA- Whatever they don't want you to read- or Think.

Uncle Bruce was God. That’s how, as children, we want some adults to be. Some.

Out of the blue, he asked if I wanted to go to work with him. To his much-imagined office. At his garage. West End. Tomorrow morning.

Suburbs. Allotments. Barking dogs and rattling milk bottles. The sounds of another, better England. Better than this bland, imitation-leather of a sub-nation. Sore-eyed at 7AM under a tartan blanket. We drove across Tower Bridge. Mustn’t miss that. Big Ben, isn’t it slow ? Buckingham Palace. Is the Queen in? Regent Street. Uncle said he once saw a ghost cross the road near here. A Victorian gent in top hat carrying a Gladstone bag. Uncle followed The Doctor or the Ripper, but the apparition disappeared into a brick wall, like a shadow, he said.

Uncle Bruce’s garage was packed bumper-to-bumper with Daimlers, Wolseleys, the occasional “Roller”. Dark and brick damp. The smell of oil leaks in puddles and chamois leather and being, Grown Up. When cars were cars. With headlights dipped and chrome grilles that made smiley faces back at you. Each make, Jaguar, Rover, Jenson Interceptor and TR5, had it’s own personality in the engine growl and trembling exhausts Uncle Bruce revved and purred for the owners. Captains of Industry, Top Brass and even long-haired Pop stars. Those who knew, knew Bruce’s Garage.

Uncle ruffled my blond hair and disappeared up the wooden stairs into The Office. The ping of the bell of a typewriter. A bubbling tea urn. A woman’s voice. I, left looking up at the foot of the stairs, I would never take. With the smell of men: Uncles’ mechanics in Demin dungarees, wiping their hands and swapping knowing glances. Of adulthood waiting for me. Oak partner desks and green shade lamps burning late into the evening, as I fumbled with the stapler, ReXel Brand, repeating, Made in England… “Like me”, a man I had never seen before smiled.

A raised voice from behind the frosted glass of his office door. The Manager telling my Uncle off for something I did not understand. Not until thirty years or more later. When I realised I had been a pawn in a someone else’s game. An alibi. An excuse. Watching my uncle take so long to close the thin glass door after him. Descending the stairs, like a condemned man, rewound on the gallows. Head down, watching his step. Not knowing I was watching from behind the cardboard boxes. Observing a shrinking man. A fallen idol. A man becoming invisible. What did it mean, “Fired”? A voice from afar, saying how even the Boss wouldn’t sack a family man, father of the Boy, would he? Not with Christmas coming.

From that moment I knew God was a little man. With a receding hairline, round shouldered from day after day running his finger down the lists of accounts. God, with the remnants of a red neck, still sunburnt from his one week at Hythe. Who disappeared into the crowd of other Little Men down the tube at Piccadilly Circus. Men could never afford the Daimler with power steering, that Uncle Bruce polished. That belonged to the The Proprietor- the real owner of Uncle Bruce’s garage. I did not understand, or perhaps want to understand, the distinction.

So Uncle Bruce polished and invoiced his way to an early, dyspeptic death. Dying of old age, twenty years too soon. Dying to keep others, forever young. Forever being the one who opened the oak-panelled door of the Daimler, to the Proprietor and his “secretary”. Trying not to notice her white stockinged legs and the silken smile she gave him. The smile that said, I am not sleeping with one of the Little Men tonight after the show. Or any night. I know you are looking, and worse, trying not to look. The Smile that said, You know, I know. Our secret that all the world and his wife can see.

Uncle Bruce was one of the Little Men I would meet ever after. Every one different. Every one the same. Men who handed me my bill, or clipped my ticket. Who refilled the salt, and patted the cat, and counted the votes. A life, all without a soul noticing. Uncle Bruces who brushed my Grenson’s brogues at The Club. If any one had been near, remarking that “there’s a proper English shoe-and-a half for you”. A gentleman’s shoe, who ever wears them. You can judge a man by his shoes. Uncle Bruces, the world over, who took my wet raincoat in this “inclement weather for June”. Men who spoke silently, and gave me an Order Paper, as I stepped into the Common’s chamber. Men who, not money, make the world go round.

So it was my shrunken childhood God became pocket-sized. Like the monogrammed white handkerchief- no other “colour” would do- which Uncle Bruce folded, neat into his breast pocket, at the front door each morning. Wishing, but not wishing, he had another wife. That the glass wasn’t really half empty, only not big enough. Wishing it wasn’t always sausages-and-mash on Wednesday. Hoping it wasn't Early Closing, but it always was. Hoping that wasn’t his second glass of warm beer he had drunk already. Counting the years away in an empty half-pint glass on a sideboard.