Christopher’s mother, Audrey, was a pretty girl with a trusting nature that men exploited. Harry, Christopher’s father, had been no exception. He told Audrey that she wouldn’t get pregnant if she stood up immediately after sexual intercourse. Audrey, who had been shielded from what her mother called ‘owt like that’, leapt to her feet three times during the first week of their courtship. Christopher was conceived a few minutes after his mother lost her virginity. Harry had no choice but to marry her. When Christopher was six weeks old, Audrey left him at the house of Harry’s mother, May, saying she had an errand to run. She never came back. There were rumours that she’d been seen running along the canal bank in tears. Other people reported having seen her sitting in the front of a coal lorry, kissing the driver.
Christopher and his father had moved in with his grandparents, sharing the small bedroom above the kitchen, where on Monday mornings the steam from the copper boiler crept up through the floorboards, dampening the air and causing the wallpaper to peel away from the wall. Two years later Harry went to Canada to look for work. A few postcards of winter scenes came during the first year he was away, then there was nothing.
When Christopher was five he had asked his grandmother where his mother was. “She’s gone to see the world,” she said. He imagined the world to be where the film stars and the football heroes and the royal family lived. It became fixed in his head that the world and Pathe News were the same thing, and he believed that his mother must be inhabiting a Pathe News type of life. On his weekly visits to the cinema, he waited eagerly for the crowing cockerel to appear on the screen and the newsreels to begin. He scanned the faces in the crowds, even the foreign crowds, half-expecting to see his mother, but she was never there.
When Christopher went to junior school his class teacher was astonished at his extensive knowledge of Canada. His grandparents boasted to the neighbours about his precocity.
Once when he was a small boy, Christopher had dismantled his grandmother’s cuckoo clock. She was outside scrubbing the front-door step, and washing the window-sill and the surrounding brickwork. But in that short time Christopher had sorted out the components of the clock. When she came back in she was astonished to see that the wheels and cogs and hammers, and the cuckoo itself, were all laid out across the chenille covering the kitchen table. He was equally curious about the solar system, the earth’s core, the migration of birds, everything. The world seemed to him then to be a miraculous place. Ordered and planned on numerical systems that made sense. Everything could be explained. There were tables and charts to aid his thirst for knowledge in the ten volumes of Arthur Mee’s encyclopedia which his grandfather had bought for him by paying six old pennies a week for three years. Christopher was numerate before he went to school. His grandmother unwittingly taught him to count by encouraging him to play with the hundreds of old buttons she kept in a Bluebird toffee tin. He spent hours sorting them by colour and size. He would form grids and columns and eventually he invented a hierarchical world where the brass greatcoat buttons ruled and the numerous white shirt buttons did all the work.
Christopher had no ambitions as a child, other than to go to work. The very word conjured up manhood and maturity. In the mornings he watched his granddad putting his work boots on. At night one of the last sounds he heard was the boots being taken off and dropped on to the wooden floor of his grandparents’ bedroom.
He usually read until the early hours, only stopping when he could no longer see the print. Then he would close his book and switch off his bedside light and think about his mother and father. One of his favourite visions was of them dancing together, in a ballroom in Canada, to the tune of the ‘Blue Danube’, which he’d heard on the wireless.