At My Mother's Knee (11 page)

We continued drinking our tea. She ate another sliver and
then another. I was beginning to panic.

Mine had kicked in, so why hadn't hers? She must have the
constitution of a horse, I thought, keeping a
careful
eye on her
as she stared into the hearth, smiling to herself, the glow from
the gas fire reflected in her eyes, which had suddenly become
suspiciously wide and shiny. The penny dropped. She was off
her face.

'Are you OK?' I asked her tentatively.

'I was just thinking about our Chrissie,' she said dreamily, gazing
into the gas jets, her thoughts lost in another time and place.
'It was a night like this when she ran away from the convent.'

She was definitely off her face. Aunty Chrissie a nun? She
never went near a church apart from weddings and funerals.

'What was Aunty Chris doing in a convent?' I asked, laughing
in disbelief.

'
St Margaret's Convent
in Rock Ferry,' she said. 'It was an
orphanage
, run by nuns. Wicked bitches they were, wicked.'
She shook her head sadly. 'We were living with
Aunty Poll
, at
least me and Chrissie were. Annie had gone back to Lowther
Street to look after my dad. Chrissie was wild in those days, a
wilful girl. Aunty Poll had her put into a home. I fancy another
cup of tea.' She broke off to pick up her mug from on top of
the library book lying on the floor that she was using as an
occasional table.

'I'll make one in a minute,' I cried. 'Tell me what happened.'

'There's nowt to tell.' She ran her finger around the rim of
the mug absently. 'Chrissie had been caught nicking a packet
of sweets. She must have been about thirteen. Aunty Poll said
she needed a bit of discipline as she was out of control, and she
turned the poor bugger over to the nuns, putting her away in
St Margaret's for a year. She ran away after six months and
you wouldn't blame her; she was half starved and made to
work in the laundry. The nuns crucified her. She had great
purple welts across her back where they'd beaten her with a
belt. And all for a packet of sweets,' she said bitterly. 'When
she escaped she went straight to Lowther Street. She had no
coat on, only a thin cotton dress and a bit of cardigan and on
a night like this. I'm surprised she didn't catch pneumonia; but
you know our Chris, hard as nails. Anyway, when me dad saw
the state of her he didn't send her back, he kept her at home.
He went up there and played merry hell with the Mother
Superior and didn't speak to Aunty Poll for years.'

She thrust her mug at me and pleaded for another cup of tea.

'My mouth's as dry as Deuteronomy,' she said, smacking her
lips as I braved the freezing kitchen once again, 'and make me
a bit of toast and bring those biscuits in,' she added. 'I'm
starving.'

Even though she refused to admit it she was well out of it.
She lay back on the sofa luxuriantly and wrapped herself in the
duvet. I groped my way around the dilapidated lean-to that
insolently called itself a kitchen, attempting to make tea and
toast by the light of a votive candle. My icy breath clouded the
sliding glass door on the solitary cabinet that hung from
the wall as I searched for a pot of jam. A mushroom that
looked like shaving foam was growing up the side of it. It
seemed unreal in the ghostly blue light.

I wish I had the money and the know-how to be able to do
something with this place, I thought to myself guiltily. I had visions of buying my mother a comfortable little house somewhere,
one that had central heating and a fully fitted kitchen
with every appliance known to man instead of this freezing
shack that had Walt Disney fungi growing up the walls, but
since I was unemployed with no prospects in sight it was a case
of dream on.

As I buttered the toast I could hear her singing:

'I wish, I wish, I wish in vain,
I wish I was a maid again,
But a maid again I'll never be,
Till cherries grow on an apple tree.'

She had a thin, reedy, tuneless voice that normally made me
laugh. Not tonight though; as I stood stirring the tea I felt like
crying. Christ, I must be stoned.

'My mother used to sing that song,' she said, hauling herself
into an upright position as I came into the room and handed
her a plate of toast. 'It's about a girl who gets pregnant to a
butcher's boy and then hangs herself. It's an old Irish lament,
terrible maudlin.'

'Aren't they all?' I said, joining her on the sofa. 'Can I
have a piece of that toast, please, before you demolish the
lot.'

She sat perched on the end of the sofa, humming softly to
herself as she munched.

'D'you like this jam?' she asked. 'It's diabetic. It was going
half price in Boots so I bought a pot. There mustn't be much
call for it.'

We sat in silence, slurping tea. Why is there no call for
diabetic jam? I thought. My mind wandered. Weren't there any
diabetics who shopped at Boots? Or, if there were any, did they
have an aversion to strawberry jam? My mother's voice broke
this chain of thought.

'My poor
mother
,' she said tenderly to herself. 'She died in
childbirth, you know.'

I did know. I'd heard it many times before and it looked like
I was about to hear it again. She had me trapped, a captive
audience. The stories my mother told about her
childhood
always left me feeling unsettled. A profound sadness hung
around me as I tried to link the lonely little girl of her stories
and my mother.

'It was a little boy,' she said sadly, settling back into the sofa.
'We called him James. He only lived for a week. A week after
we'd buried my mother at Flaybrick Cemetery we were back up
there with the baby. Four great black horses with black plumes
on top of their heads there was, pulling the hearse. It must have
cost my dad a fortune, money he didn't have.' She stared
unblinking into the glow of the fire, momentarily in a trance,
her eyes blazing like chip pans, recalling a memory of when as
a little girl she had stood by an open grave on a bleak winter's
morning listening to the rooks calling to each other over the
branches of the bare trees, and the quiet sobbing of the mourners
as the priest read out the final prayer. She gave a long sigh
as she came back from her dream and continued with her reminiscences:
'I can see my mother now, lying in bed in the front
parlour, her face white as a sheet and her lovely hair wringing
with sweat.' She paused to take a sip of tea. 'She was only in her
thirties, God help her. It was a complicated birth. The midwife
told me dad to run for the doctor, but it was too late . . . Her
heart gave out . . . When he got back she was gone . . . Before
she died, Aunty Anne crawled into the bed with her. She must
have only been five. Look after your dad, my mother said to
her, and d'you know what? It was a dying wish that your aunty
Anne kept till the day my dad died. Look after your dad . . .'

Her voice trailed off as she took another sip of her tea.
'Where was I? Oh yes, Annie and my dad. She was his
favourite . . . When Annie cooked his dinner he always used to leave a little bit for her on the side of his plate.' She laughed to
herself, nodding her head, enjoying some secret joke. 'She did
everything for him, even after she got married. Harold had to
move into Lowther Street because Annie wouldn't leave me
dad.' She lapsed into silence again. A blast of icy wind blew
through the entire house and the candles flickered.

Aunty Anne, known as Annie to the family but Nancy to her
mates, fell in love with
Harold Fawcett
from the moment she
first saw him serving on the altar of
St Laurence's Church
.
There was a touch of the Edward G. Robinson about him.
Determinedly she set about wooing him until eventually he
cracked and took her to the pictures. They were both fans of
American movies. Aunty Anne with her owl-like specs and
hyena's laugh fancied herself as a Janet Gaynor type and saw
Uncle Al as her Fredric March. Together they would quote
their favourite scenes from the movies they'd seen when they
were out courting. Aunty Anne, the eternal romantic, bagged
her prince and walked down the aisle with him wearing an
ivory satin dress from Guinea a Gown, a shop that specialized
in wedding dresses at just over a quid, with her sisters trailing
behind her as bridesmaids.

'I wonder why your dad never remarried?' I asked my mother.
'Because who the bloody hell is going to take on a man with
three little children?' she replied incredulously, turning towards
me. Her eyes were rolling around in her head like the clown
outside the Blackpool Fun House. 'My dad couldn't look after
us on his own. He was working shifts at Lever's, used to walk
there and back every day to save money – it must be over ten
miles. He had no choice but to farm us out among various
relatives.
Sister Martha
looked after us first. She was a lovely
girl but she was going into a convent and couldn't keep us, so
we were passed on from pillar to post, to ever-increasing levels
of poverty and neglect.' She shuddered, more from the gale
force wind howling around us than the bitter memories. 'Two of my dad's cousins took Chrissie in. She was only a toddler.
They'd have been locked up these days for cruelty. Aunty Poll
went round and found her sat on the stone kitchen floor in a
filthy vest sucking on a stale crust, her little body black and
blue with bruises those wicked bastards had inflicted on her.'

Aunty Poll, my grandmother's sister, took the girls in and
gave them a home. She wasn't an intentionally cruel woman
but she was cold and unfeeling, a strict disciplinarian who
firmly believed that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. Yet
my mother had a fondness for her and spoke of her with
respect, even though she'd put Chrissie into an orphanage and
herself and Annie into domestic service. Maybe the years had
softened her memories and any anger had long subsided,
unlike the storm which was still raging outside.

We both slept downstairs that night as the damp, arctic bedrooms
would have meant certain hypothermia. My mother
slept on the sofa, me on cushions on the floor. During the
course of the evening we had got through a loaf of bread, a pot
of diabetic jam, half a packet of chocolate digestives, two fruit
yoghurts, cheese on toast and a Battenberg, and she claimed
that she wasn't stoned.

She slept soundly for eight hours, a smile on her lips. When
she woke in the morning she complained that she hadn't
managed to get a wink of sleep and that the sofa was 'agony'.
She looked remarkably refreshed and relaxed as she stood at
the window, a mug of coffee in hand, surveying the snowy
landscape outside. 'Don't you dare tell anyone that you gave
me drugs,' she said, blowing on the steaming coffee. 'Not a
word to Annie and Chrissie, and if I catch you bringing drugs
into this house again I'm calling the police.' She took a sip of
the scalding coffee and then turned to look at me, trying to
suppress the laughter in her voice. 'Do you hear me, my lad?'

'Yes, Mother,' I said, 'your secret life as a dope fiend is safe
with me.'

A
UNTY ANNE LOVED A GOOD HYMN, AS THE RESIDENTS OF
Lowther Street could readily testify.

'"So-well of my Save-eeour sancti-fy my brrreast,"' she sang
out lustily in her ear-piercing screech as she set about sweeping
the house through from back to front. Aunty Chrissie, sitting
at the kitchen table reading the paper, winced.

'Give it a bloody rest, will you?' she shouted over the din,
picking her fag up from its resting place in a saucer and taking
a drag. 'Jesus tonight, anybody walking past will think we're
being raped by the Russians.'

Chrissie's abuse fell on deaf ears. Aunty
Anne
carried on
with her concert regardless; she was used to Chrissie's slings
and arrows. '"Guard and defend me from the foe malign,"' she
howled in a glass-shattering soprano that was so high-pitched,
only bats and the local dogs could make out the lyrics. She was
attacking the hall, or 'the lobby' as it was known, banging the
brush against the skirting board as she sought out every last
speck of dirt and dust before sweeping the lot into the street
and swilling it away with a bucket of soapy water.

While she was at it she'd give the brass trim that ran along
the edge of the doorstep a 'good rub' with a bit of Brasso,
greeting passing neighbours cheerily as she knelt on the
door mat and went at the trimming hammer and tongs.

'Hello, Mrs Duff . . . Just off to get your paper? . . . Mind
yourself then, love . . . "Jesu dulcis memoriaaa!"' she
screeched.

'Is there any need for that?' said Chrissie, raising her eyebrows
and picking a bit of tobacco off her bottom lip. 'Talk
about a one-note friggin' canary.'

A dirty step was the hallmark of a slovenly housewife, as
was a pair of grubby net curtains hanging at your window.
'Have you seen the colour of that one's nets?' was a damning
question heard during many a doorstep bitchfest. Aunty
Anne's nets were beyond reproach; when not hanging in the
window of the parlour they could be found steeping in
the kitchen sink with a bag of Dolly Blue for company. The
parlour was forbidden territory, used only on special
occasions. A smell of lavender polish hung in the air, the floor
was covered with blue shiny lino; against one wall stood a
piano that nobody in the family could play, but a piano was
an essential addition to the décor in most working-class
parlours.

Vera Lalley
, Aunty Chrissie's friend who lived further up the
street, had the reputation of being 'better than Winifred
Atwell' in the pubs and parlours of Birkenhead. She was
indeed an accomplished pianist, self-taught and able to play
any tune by ear, as she never tired of telling people, and after a
few whiskies and brown ales would happily sit down at the
piano and give an impromptu concert. She was very popular at
parties, and as long as it meant 'free ale' Vera would pull up a
chair and oblige with a few tunes.