Parker People of the Streets

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30437-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 264 Seiten

'People of the streets... you become aware of them, and wonder who and what they are... what kind of lives they have, and what living them means...' First published in 1968, People of the Streets was Tony Parker's sixth book, for which he spent a year approaching and interviewing people in London who were living their daily lives on street corners, along gutters or in subways. With his usual skill he coaxed them out of their natural reticence, born of solitude, into an unfamiliar but hugely illuminating spontaneity. 'In [Parker's] books the strength lies in the interpretive mind of the writer... He is a sociologist studying single cases in some depth and shows qualities of imagination shared by the historian and the biographer - a mixture of intelligence, sympathy and empathy.' TLS

Tony Parker was born in Stockport on June 25 1923, the son of a bookseller. His mother died when he was 4. He began to write poems and plays in his late teens. Called up to military service early in the Second World War he declared himself a conscientious objector and, in lieu, was sent to work at a coal-mine in the North East, where he observed conditions and met people who influenced him hugely. After the war he began to work as a publisher's representative and, voluntarily, as a prison visitor - the latter another important stimulus to his subsequent writings. After Parker happened to make the acquaintance of a BBC radio producer and imparted his growing interest in the lives, opinions and self-perceptions of the prisoners he had met, he was given the opportunity to record an interview with a particular convict for broadcast on the BBC. The text of the interview was printed in the Listener, and spotted by the publishers Hutchinson as promising material for a book. This duly emerged as The Courage of His Convictions (1962), for which Parker and the career criminal 'Robert Allerton' (a pseudonym) were jointly credited as authors. Over the next 30 years Parker would publish 18 discrete works, most of them 'oral histories' based on discreetly edited but essentially verbatim interview transcripts. He died in 1996 (though one further work, a study of his great American counterpart Studs Terkel, appeared posthumously.)

Autoren/Hrsg.

Parker, Tony

Leseproben

2

THE PRODDY DOG

drizzle. He went along Piccadilly, round the Circus and up Shaftesbury Avenue. He turned off along Wardour Street, went down a passage, crossed over another street and in a few yards came to a wooden hoarding round a derelict shopfront. He went round the side of it, felt inside the hole that had been kicked in the planking and pulled out a bucket with a damp wash-leather and scrim-cloth in it. He put his arm through the handle of the pail, looped it up on to his shoulder, and walked up the street to the public convenience. He nodded to the attendant and filled his bucket from a tap marked ‘Drinking Water’.

When he came out he crossed the road and went along the street opposite until he came out into the square where the parking-meters were. Not many of the spaces for cars were occupied yet, and he walked slowly up and down the pavement.

A short, heavily built man in an old black suit frayed at the sleeves and trouser turn-ups; an open-necked shirt and a dirty raincoat. A sallow coarse-featured face with a mesh of scar-lines down his cheeks and over his chin, and a flattened, twisted, broken nose; deep-blue eyes and black hair streaked with grey, and big hands that trembled as he rolled h

–Oh aye I’ll talk to ye now and again if you like, though there’ll no be much tae interest you in my life, I think. Afternoons’ll be nae guid, mind; you’ll have to mek it before ten o’clock in the mornings to be sure of getting me. O.K., goodbye for now; I’ll see you at the beginning of next week.

*

Well I’m forty-five years old and I was born in Glasgow. There’s two sisters older than me, they’re Georgina and Katherine, and I’ve a brother younger whose name is Tommy. My name’s John Robertson but nearly everyone calls me Jock.

My father he was a miner, he worked down the pit. He died of that disease they get, I think it’s called silicosis. That would be when I was about five or six so there’s not a lot I can tell you about him. A rather strict man as I remember him, but nice with it and quiet. As far as I recall he worked hard all his life for his wife and children, but he wasn’t a great one for having much to do with the family, he never talked to us much when we were kids or played games with us or anything like that. They usually do that up in Scotland, the man does the work and he leaves the bringing-up of the family mostly to the wife. I remember he was quite a big man with sort of gingery hair, and he had those blue marks on his back and shoulders that the miners get where they had cuts from the falling coal.

We lived in a tenement building, in what they call a single-end: that’s just one room, everybody lives and sleeps and eats in it all together, with a sort of little kitchenette place off one side for preparing the meals. The toilet was outside on the landing along the passage by the staircase, and next to that there was a kind of open room with a stone floor and four big sinks in it, and it had everybody’s washing hung up. Just cold water and if you wanted a wash you had to go there, everyone on the same floor as yourself used the toilets and the washroom, and sometimes it could get quite cold in the winter and all freeze up because the landings weren’t covered over from the outside. But it was no different for anyone else, everyone lived the same.

My mother, she was a tall woman too, very thin but a good-looking woman, carried herself well, very upright, and her hair all fixed up round her head with combs. She was very religious, brought us all up very strictly in the same way as my father would have done, we had to say our prayers every night and go to church and Sunday School on Sundays. When we got older sometimes we didn’t go, Tommy and me, we’d run off playing somewhere instead, and then our sisters’d tell on us when they got back and she’d give us both a good scalp round the ears and put us to bed without any supper and make us say our prayers to God for forgiveness. She was very keen we should grow up religious and learn how to behave.

I think she always favoured the girls a bit, we always had to be very polite to them and let them have their own way, the first pick of anything that was on the table to eat or the last of the jam if it was getting short. They were very good and nicely dressed all the time, and we used to try and torment them, poking them in the ribs or trying to kick them under the table at mealtimes, and then my mother’d hit us when they started to cry and give us a lecture about it. ‘You must always look after your sisters,’ she’d say, ‘and then one day when you need them they’ll always look after you.’ That wasn’t true, because when they grew up they both went off and got married and one of them went to Canada and the other one to South America, so she was wrong about that.

I suppose a single-end wasn’t very big for a whole family to live in, but I can’t say we thought much about that sort of thing. There was a bed down one wall that Georgina and Katherine slept in and another one across the end that Tommy and me had, and my mother herself slept on one of those sort of couch things that folds up into a settee during the day.

I think she had a hard life, my mother, trying to bring us all up on her own, but she did the best for us that she could. There wasn’t a lot of money for us when my father died but she was a very thrifty woman, I can remember her sitting down at the table with pencil and paper and working out what she was going to spend and how much it would cost. She was a very good cook too, very economical in the house, made things that lasted through for three or four days at a time like powsowdie and water kale. Powsowdie’s a sort of stew you make from boiled sheep’s head and trotters and barley, very good and very rich; and water kale’s a kind of thick soup made of greens and oats, it’s very filling. There was an old saying she used to recite to us, what was it, yes: ‘He that eats but aye dish seldom needs doctor, licht suppers mak long life.’ I can hear her saying it now, clear as anything, sitting up at the top of the table with her grey apron and looking very stern at us before we started to eat. Sometimes as a special treat she’d send us down the street to the shop to get Forfar bridies for our supper: they’re something like what they call Cornish pasties down here. They had meat inside and pastry with a hole in the crust, and if there was two holes that meant they’d got onions in them.

She was very stern and strict, but I think she had to be with the sort of life we had. I liked her but I was a bit frightened of her too sometimes when I was young, and she used to say things that she expected me to understand and I didn’t. Once when I was ill she put me to bed and as she went out she said ‘There’s a pig in your bed’ and I was really frightened about it, I jumped out of the bed as soon as she’d gone and I wouldn’t go near it. When my sisters came in they were laughing at me and teasing me because I daren’t put my feet in under the bed-clothes in case the pig got them, and when my mother came back she gave me a good ticking-off about it for being so stupid and a baby. What it means in Scotland is a hot-water bottle, one of those old-fashioned stone ones with a stopper. Any kind of a pot or jar is called a pig, there’s an old rhyme they have that goes ‘There’s eelie pigs and jeelie pigs and pigs for hauden butter.’ That means there’s oil-jars and jam-jars and jars for holding butter.

I think I must have been a bit daft altogether as a kid; I can remember my mother getting very cross with me one day about a boy who used to come in to play with me from one of the other families in the building where we lived. He had this great big...