At My Mother's Knee (12 page)

In the middle of the room, arranged in a semicircle round
the fireplace, was a 1940s three-piece suite covered in fading
grey leather, piped round the edge with a red trim. It had
smooth rounded arms ideal for sliding down, which if you
were caught meant a dig in the back from one of Aunty Anne's
arthritic knuckles followed by a 'Gerrowt an' play!' In the corner, in the spot where the bed that my grandmother had
died in had been, stood a Dansette record player, leaning
drunkenly to one side as it balanced on four wobbly 'screwin'
black legs, lurching dangerously close to a table under the
window where the obligatory aspidistra, an unhealthy specimen
with dull, leathery leaves, sat hunched in its pot like a
depressed vulture.

All the residents of Number 29
Lowther Street
, with the
exception of Aunty Anne and my cousin Maureen who was
too young to smoke, smoked like chimneys. Aunty Chris could
kipper a net curtain just by walking past it. She was an
inveterate smoker, never without an Embassy hanging out of
the corner of her mouth. Her dressing-gown pocket was full of
half-smoked cigarettes, or 'dockers' as she called them, handy
for hard times when she ran out.

Smoke permeated the whole of the house, and although the
parlour was only ever used for 'best' somehow the smoke
managed to curl under the door and through the keyhole and
get at Aunty Annie's nets, dulling their pristine whiteness with
a nicotine tinge. This was the house the Savage sisters had been
born in: end of terrace, three bedrooms, kitchen, parlour, no
bathroom, and the lavatory outside at the bottom of the yard;
a house similar to the many other back-to-backs built for the
working classes in industrial Birkenhead in the early 1900s.

It was a mainly matriarchal society as most of the men were
away at sea for long periods of time. My uncle Harold was a
master baker and confectioner for the
Cunard Line
. My
cousins John and Mickey were stewards, and all three could be
away from
home
for as long as six months to a year, depending
on the trip. Annie ran the household, keeping a tight rein
on the purse strings. If towards the middle of the week she
found herself short she could always rely on a bit of tick from
Johnstone's, a corner shop in Bentinck Street that at best could
be described as Dickensian.

When the tray in
Ma Johnstone's
window wasn't displaying
an array of dubious-looking pies and pasties, her big black cat
liked to stretch out in it, washing its paws and basking in the
sun like a feline Amsterdam hooker, pawing the window
coquettishly at passing trade. Ma Johnstone's enormous bacon
slicer stood in the middle of the marble counter, where she'd
slice raw bacon and cooked meats interchangeably, her only
gesture towards food hygiene consisting of a cursory wipe
round the blade with a grimy finger to pick up any stray bits
of meat. These tasty titbits she would suck on as she squinted
at the scales before announcing that your purchase was either
'just under' or 'just over'.

Across the road from Ma's was the Co-op, and next door to
that was
Barney's the barber
, who would put a plank across his
chair so his younger customers were the right height for him
when he cut their hair. Not that he actually cut it: he favoured
the National Service style, shaving it all off at the back and
sides with a pair of electric clippers, and then slapping a dollop
of Brylcreem on what little hair was left on the top, parting it
severely down one side and combing it flat across your head.
Sometimes he singed the ends of his customers' hair with a lit
wax taper. As I sat on the bench waiting my turn I wanted
nothing more than to have my hair singed, but this peculiar
practice apparently wasn't performed on little boys, or so
Barney explained, only on the men. God, I couldn't wait to
grow up and have my hair singed, spit in the spittoon by the
door, and buy a packet of something called Durex, whatever
they were.

Nicky Clarke's Barney's certainly wasn't. The air was
thick with the smell of brilliantine, sweat and cigarettes.
A haze of yellow smog hung low in the room, a few postcards
were pinned around the mirror and a small blue neon
sign advertising the mystifying Durex sat on a shelf above
it next to a radio that was kept permanently tuned in to the racing. A long queue of men waited patiently on a bench
against the wall for a haircut, sucking on their pencils
and scratching their heads as they studied the racing form in
the back of their newspapers. As he cut your hair Barney
would work the room with the confidence of a Las Vegas
lounge act, wisecracking with the customers and offering
racing tips.

Like most barbers of that time, Barney's was strictly men
only. Women only ever entered the shop either to collect their
offspring or to drop them off, and they seldom hung around.
The presence of a woman in this male bastion made the
customers feel uncomfortable and slightly resentful. The shop
would go quiet whenever a mother dropped her child off,
Barney's lone voice telling her to 'Come back in twenty
minutes, madam, and he'll be a new man.' He was right. I must
have unconsciously absorbed some of the testosteronedrenched
atmosphere after a visit to Barney's, as on being
picked up I would lower my voice to a growl and swagger
slowly around the house, legs bowed like a cowboy, causing
Aunty Chris to comment, 'Just got off your horse, John
Wayne? Or have you just shit yourself ?'

When I was six my mother went into hospital to have an
operation. She had an overactive
thyroid
. All I can recall is
being held up to a window outside the hospital ward and seeing
her in bed with a row of metal clamps à la Frankenstein's
monster across her throat. During her time in the
Birkenhead
General Hospital
and then later on, while she was convalescing
at the small hospital in the grounds of Arrowe Park, I was
packed off to stay with the aunties in
Lowther Street
.

Through my six-year-old eyes the house appeared huge.
When I sat on the bottom step of the stairs, the long narrow
lobby leading to the front door stretched endlessly before me.
Above me, the dark upper recesses of the cavernous stairwell seemed cathedral-like and forbidding. The upstairs landing
was a place of terror after dark: the ideal setting for Sweeney
Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, to lurk, razor in hand,
ready to slit an unsuspecting boy's throat as he made his way
to bed in the gloom.

Ever since I'd seen a wax model of Mr Todd dispatching one
of his customers at the Tower Waxworks in New Brighton I'd
lived in terror of him. I've heard people say that the
Childcatcher from
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
was the stuff of
their childhood nightmares, but
Sweeney Todd
was my
personal bogeyman, hiding behind the door of every wardrobe
and lurking underneath the bed, biding his time until that
moment when the landing light was turned off and he could
silently creep out from the shadows and pounce on his prey.

In the big cupboard at the end of the landing – a cupboard
whose door had the unsettling habit of slowly swinging open
of its own accord – my cousin Maureen and I once swore that
we saw a face. A tiny, childlike face, glowing like phosphorescence
and mouthing silent words at us as it bobbed up
and down along the shelf. Perhaps it was a trick of the light or
just the imagination of two impressionable children winding
themselves up in the dark, but at the time it was very real and
down the years I've never forgotten the experience, imaginary
or otherwise.

Aunty Chris, pleasantly pissed after a night out with the
Lord Exmouth's ladies' darts team and trying to placate me
after I'd charged down the stairs three at a time and run
screaming into the kitchen, told me that it was a fairy. 'A little
lost fairy,' she said dreamily, stroking my
hair
. 'A little lost
fairy who's had her head ripped off and is going around the
house looking for it.' If this was meant to comfort me then she
wasn't doing a very good job. As far as I was concerned there
was only one person capable of severing a fairy's head from her
shoulders in cold blood, and that was Sweeney Todd. He'd struck again, claiming yet another victim, slashing her fairy
neck with his cut-throat razor and then packing her off to be
made into meat pies, and all on my aunty Annie's landing
under the grown-ups' very noses. The cheek of the man.

I slept in between my aunty and Uncle Al that night. They
didn't mind, as I was by no means the only member of the
family to seek refuge in their bed in the middle of the night.
The house was reputed to be haunted, and a silent visitor once
shook Aunty Chris's shoulder as she lay in bed reading,
causing her to wake the best part of the street with her
screams. She ran from the room and jumped in between Annie
and Harold in their bed. A photograph taken in the back yard
had revealed the mysterious face of a woman hidden in the ivy
that grew up the side of the house, and you could sometimes
hear footsteps in the hall if you were in on your own and the
house was silent – not that that was a common occurrence.
Lowther Street was lively, to say the least. It always seemed to
be a hive of activity; Holly Grove was quiet in comparison.

Our house was considered to be posher than Lowther Street
for the sole reason that we had a garden and indoor plumbing.
Higher Tranmere was thought a better neighbourhood than
downtown Birkenhead. Lowther Street was 'rough'. At home
there were only a handful of kids of my age to play with but
Lowther Street and the surrounding area were teeming with kids.
Packs of them roamed the streets all day like young wolves, only
returning to their respective dens when the she-wolf called them.

'PAUL, GERRIN FOR YOUR TEA!'

'What have you been up to, buggerlugs?'

'Playing.'

As well as tribes of kids to play with Aunty Annie had a
cat
,
a great ginger monster called
Jinksy
who conveniently gave
birth to her litter of kittens in the outside lav, enabling Aunty
Anne to flush them down the pan with the minimum of fuss
while my cousin Maureen and I hid in the bedroom and covered our ears. Nowadays the RSPCA would quite rightly take
action, but in the early sixties nobody round us dreamed of
having their cat spayed. They couldn't afford it, for one thing,
and a quick drowning seemed a more humane alternative to
allowing litters of unwanted and feral kittens to haunt the back
alleys of the neighbourhood.

Uncle Harold once returned from a trip abroad with a
bushbaby
.
These were the days before quarantine and sailors
frequently brought animals back to homes ill prepared for a
menagerie of exotic pets. At first glance the bushbaby seemed
to be a docile little chap as he lay curled up in shredded newspaper
at the bottom of a box.

'Isn't he lovely,' cooed Aunty Anne, prodding the unconscious
critter gently with her finger. 'And isn't he well
behaved? Put him on the sideboard.' The bushbaby slept all
through the day and showed no sign of waking up.

'Maybe he's hibernating,' Aunty Anne said, peering into the
box. 'Anyway, he's as good as gold.'

Aunty Chris, eyeing the animal dubiously, was less confident.
'It's a bloody rat,' she said dismissively. 'Sling it out.'

That night, while the rest of the house slept, the nocturnal
bushbaby came to life and decided, as bushbabies do, to go in
search of food. The noise it made woke the house, if not the
whole street. As Aunty Anne entered the room and switched
on the light, the startled bushbaby, who had been sitting on the
pulley full of washing which hung from the ceiling over
the fireplace, leaped at her.

It ripped off her glasses and climbed on to her head, and
then, clinging on for dear life to the rollers wound tightly in her
hair, shat down the back of her dressing gown. Aunty Anne let
out a scream that would have rivalled Cammell Laird's siren.
In shock, the bushbaby hurled itself on to the mantelpiece,
bringing down the clock and a brass camel.

'Jesus Christ, me clock,' Aunty Chris screamed from behind the safety of Uncle Harold's back. 'I smoked like a bloody
chimney to get enough Embassy coupons for that. Grab hold
of that animal before it wrecks the gaff.'

As the bushbaby leaped across the room from mantelpiece to
curtains it emptied the seemingly endless contents of its bowels
with gay abandon, oblivious of the hysteria it was creating.

'Quick, throw a towel over it, Harold,' shouted Aunty Chris,
more than a hint of panic in her voice as she watched it fling
itself towards half a bottle of milk that sat on the table. But
before Uncle Harold could act, Aunty Anne, who had been
momentarily stunned by the loss of her spectacles and the
unfamiliar sensation of something warm running slowly down
the back of her neck, sprang into action. Pulling off her dressing
gown, she threw it over the bushbaby and brought it down
on to the sofa in a spectacular rugby tackle.

'Christ, she's nifty when she wants to be,' said Aunty Chris
admiringly. 'Now let's get that whoring thing back in its box
and clear this shite up.'

Before Uncle Harold secured the lid of the box with
Sellotape Aunty Anne threw in half a banana. 'Shame really
that it's not housetrained,' she said sadly. 'It had lovely big
eyes.'

The next day the bushbaby was taken to a pet shop in the
market, where it was transferred to a cage and later sold to a
wealthy and elderly lady who lived in refined squalor in a large
house in Oxton and wouldn't, as Aunty Anne said later, object
to a bit of shit up her walls.

It was no hardship for me to decamp to Lowther Street while
my mother recovered from her operation. My father was more
upset than I was at seeing his family split up, but with his
missus in hospital, my brother and sister at
work
and himself
on nights at
Shell
in Ellesmere Port there was no other option
but for me to stay with the aunties.