At My Mother's Knee (2 page)

Once I even found them biting into a toilet roll on top of the
cistern and another time
Jacko
, a neighbour's Labrador, a
lovely, friendly old hound who had a habit of coming into the
house and helping himself to anything he fancied, found her
teeth on the side of the bath. 'Where's me bloody teeth?' came
the gummy enquiry just before she glanced at Jacko and had
hysterics. Jacko was sat in the back yard gurning at her, his tail
wagging, proudly showing off a muzzle full of false teeth.

Sometimes, as she sat on the sofa chatting and shaving an
apple into wafer-thin membranes so that she could eat it with
some semblance of dignity, the top set would unexpectedly
slip their moorings and fall out into her lap, causing me,
callous little swine, to fall about laughing. Sighing
Garboesquely, she'd pick them up and, tossing them across the
frontroom floor, she'd moan, 'These bloody teeth, why did I
ever get them?'

In retrospect, I realize that she sometimes did the teeth act
purely to entertain me.

I was born in the Tranmere Workhouse during a violent thunderstorm
on 14 June 1955. That's only partly true, I just fancied
a bit of melodrama. I was actually born in
St Catherine's Hospital
, which in its day had been a workhouse. The weather
had been stormy but by the time I arrived at 7.30 a.m., a disgusting
hour to make one's debut, the storm had subsided and
the sun was cracking the flags. According to my
mother
, the
midwife who delivered me interpreted the storm clearing and
the sun coming out as a promising omen. My mother, possessing
an inherent pessimism, hoped that she was right.

St Cath's
was to feature heavily in the lives of our family.
Operations for ulcers and varicose veins were performed there.
My
father
died in St Cath's after a heart attack. My
sister
nursed in maternity. My mother did a spell in the laundry and
later she was an
auxiliary nurse
on the children's ward – at least
until the day the hated deputy matron, a vicious little gnome of
a woman loathed by staff and patients alike, hit a child across
its bare legs. Mum lost her temper and after she walloped
Miss Brindle
on the head with a bedpan she lost her job too.

I sold
newspapers and cigarettes around
the wards for
Prescott's, the newsagents
across the road from the hospital. I
wasn't allowed to go into maternity so instead I would position
myself at the end of the ward and roar '
ECHO!!
' at the top of
my lungs. I was accused of bringing on many an overdue
labour. Now I come to think about it, I did them a favour.

I nearly had my first sexual
experience
on one of the
psychiatric wards. An unwelcome one, with an extremely tall
male nurse who was married to a Thumbelina of a woman. We
frequently saw this incongruous couple shopping in our local
Co-op, when my mother would remark, 'Every pan has a lid.'
The male nurse made a lunge at me in the sluice, offering me sixpence if I'd 'just slip my hand' into his open trousers. Even at
the tender age of eleven I realized that the going rate for a quick
ham shank was a lot more than a tanner so I declined. What
would Emma Peel do? Or Napoleon Solo? A rampant fan of
secret agent programmes, I knew exactly how to react – I gave
him a swift kick in the goolies that would've done any Avenger
proud and said no more about it. I doubt if anyone would've
believed me if I had run home screaming child abuse and besides,
strange as it seems, I didn't want to get him into trouble. I saw
him not as a dangerous paedophile but more as someone to be
pitied. He certainly kept his distance from me after that.

The better part of St Cath's has long been demolished. Only
the old annexe, treating long-term psychiatric patients,
remains. The once-smart little porters' lodge is now a needle
exchange centre for addicts. Poor old St Cath's.

A week after I was born I was allowed home to 23
Holly Grove
,
Higher Tranmere, Birkenhead. I grew up in this little house with
my sister Sheila and
brother Brendan
, the youngest child of
Molly and Paddy O'Grady. I was the Last Kick of a Dying
Horse, an unexpected bonus, or a curse, depending on how well
disposed towards me my ma was feeling that day. There's an
eleven-year gap between me and my sister. My mother had no
idea she was pregnant until she went to the doctor complaining
of indigestion. Once she got over the shock, she quite warmed
to the notion of becoming a mother again at thirty-nine. (It was
in later years that I disappointed her when I failed to match up
to her lofty and sometimes unreasonable expectations.) My parents
couldn't decide on a
name
. My dad wanted to call me
James, after his uncle; my mother aspired to Damien. Thank
God my dad put his foot down on that one! With the advent of
the film
The Omen
I can't imagine the stick I'd have got with a
moniker like that. In the end they settled on
Paul
James, boring
but adequate, and I was duly christened at St Joseph's Church.

Holly Grove was, and still is, at the top of Sydney Road, a
steep hill that my mother once pushed a pram up, loaded with
coal gathered from the railway sidings by Cammell Laird's after
a direct hit in the Second World War. When she got to the top of
the hill she stopped for a moment, exhausted by the long haul
from the dock road and irritated by the inconvenience of the
perpetual air raids. She stuck two fingers up to the night skies.

'Take this back to Hitler,' she shouted at the planes above her,
'you miserable shower of bastards, bombing women and babies!'

An ARP warden came running up the hill, wondering what
this mad woman with a pram was doing, shouting abuse to the
skies in the middle of a raid. Shining his torch on the contents
of the pram, he realized. 'Gerrin, you daft cow, before you get
nicked for looting,' he said, obligingly pushing the pram up the
Grove for her.

Number 23 was the third house from the end of a winding
row of houses cut into the side of the hill. They were built in the
early 1930s on the site of an old quarry and there were signs of
subsidence everywhere. Ominous cracks would appear in the
walls and ceilings overnight and my mum was convinced that
one day she'd come
home
from work to a pile of rubble. In front
of the house was a grass bank leading down to the road. From
this I would watch the great Cunard liners sailing up the Mersey
and look across to Liverpool, another world when I was little. I
used to stand there and listen for the one o'clock gun, a cannon
in the Morpeth Dock that was fired electronically from the
Bidston Observatory every day promptly on the hour.

Number 23 was like a doll's house inside. Two rooms, a
bathroom and a kitchen extension that my dad built after the
war downstairs, and three bedrooms and a toilet upstairs, with
a postage-stamp garden in the front and a small yard at the
back. There were only two power points in the entire house,
one in the front room and a deadly old round-pinned Bakelite
antique in the kitchen that sometimes gave off electric shocks. All the electrical appliances in the house were fed from these
two sockets. Fuses blew regularly. My mother had a fear of
electricity; it was something else on her long list of what was
'not to be trusted'. Everything had to be unplugged before we
went to bed. It was a waste of time her ever turning in for an
early night as she couldn't relax until the rest of the family had
gone up. She'd ask repeatedly if we'd 'turned all the lights out
and pulled all the plugs out'.

'Yes, Mam,' I'd assure her, night after night.

'Are you sure?'

'Yes, I'm sure,' I'd reply absently.

'Are you sure you're sure?' she'd ask again. 'Go downstairs
and check, just in case.'

For my eighteenth birthday a power point was installed
upstairs on the landing wall so that I could play records in my
bedroom and my mother could have an electric blanket. She
was paranoid about that blanket. Even though it provided her
with the luxury of a warm bed she viewed it as a death trap.
At around 8.30 p.m. the Ceremony of the Electric Blanket
would begin. First she'd ask you to pop upstairs and turn her
blanket on. Ten minutes later she'd ask if you'd done it and
make you go back upstairs to check. This went on all night. I
was up and down like a whore's drawers. Sometimes she'd fall
asleep on the sofa or become so engrossed in her latest Jean
Plaidy that she'd forget the blanket was still on and when she
did suddenly remember, usually halfway through
News at Ten
,
she would react as if a time bomb was about to go off.

'Jesus Christ!' she'd scream, hurling herself off the couch
and rattling the dinner service in the china cabinet, a present
brought back from Hong Kong by my
cousin Mickey
. 'Me
blanket! Gerrup them stairs and turn it off! Quick! Before the
bloody bed catches fire.'

One night she fell asleep and forgot to turn it off. She awoke
hours later 'gasping for air' and 'sweating cobs', with the bed 'burning the back off her'. After that incident she banished the
electric blanket to the top of the wardrobe and took to using a
hot-water bottle instead. Like its predecessor the blanket, it
was not to be trusted. The bottle had to be bent nearly double
in case air got in as she held it by the neck with a tea towel and
filled it from a kettle of scalding water over the draining board.
She had a theory that if air got inside the bottle it would
explode later on in the bed. After she'd filled it to her exact
safety standards and screwed the top back on tightly, she
would shake it vigorously, upside down, to check that there
weren't any leaks. She would then wrap it in an old hand towel
and I would be dispatched to put it in the bottom of her bed.
The bottle didn't last long. It failed to provide sufficient
warmth for that iceberg of a bed. The blanket was soon reinstalled
and we reverted to the old routine.

It was always cold, that house. No, not cold – freezing. You
could've hung meat in the bedrooms during the winter
months. On a bitterly cold morning the frost created strange
patterns on the inside of the window pane. I'd lie in bed, the
blankets pulled tightly around me for warmth, desperate for an
early morning pee but holding out for as long as possible before
daring to make the dash to the arctic conditions of the lav. It
was a damp house as well, very damp. When the windows
weren't frozen up they were running with condensation. Tea
towels lined the window sills to soak up the lakes of water that
formed. I'm surprised we didn't have a family of otters move
into the back bedroom – the conditions were perfect.

The house had no central heating – that was unheard of. The
only form of heating was a coal fire in the frontroom grate,
which also heated the water. If you wanted a bath you first
used the poker to pull the damper down at the back of the
grate, then, after a wait of two or three hours, you could take
your bath. A bath, Holly Grove style, usually meant sitting in
two inches of lukewarm water, flinching each time an ice-cold drip fell from the wet washing hanging out to dry on the pulley
above you and hit you on the bare back.

On mornings when the temperature had dropped to Siberian
levels, my mother would give in and get the electric fire out
from the cupboard under the stairs. She didn't like using the
electric fire as she claimed that it 'ate electricity'. She would
panic if it was on for what she considered an unnecessary
length of time. If you really wanted to send her into orbit you
switched on both bars of the fire. She'd immediately go into
her act.

'Jesus tonight, the heat in here,' she'd complain, coming in
from the kitchen, fanning her face with the
Daily Mirror
and
opening her cardigan. Two minutes earlier she'd been shivering
like Pearl White on an ice floe. 'There's no need for an extra
bar, turn it off before I suffocate. If that meter goes we're buggered
because I haven't got a shilling, so get it off.'

She never had a shilling for the meter. I was always being
sent round the neighbours' houses with a fistful of pennies to
see if any of them had 'a single shilling for me mam, please'.

In extreme weather, when the water in the toilet bowl froze
over, a paraffin heater that belched out stinking fumes sat on the
upstairs landing. My mother instantly declared this a death trap.
Just like the blanket, the heater needed watching, only more so,
and it became another perfectly valid reason to tear me away
from the telly and send me running up and down stairs to 'have
a little look to see if it's OK'.

As the house was at the top of a hill and close to the River
Mersey, we took the brunt of the worst weather. A mist from the
river would creep up the hill and mingle with the smoke pouring
out of every chimney pot in Birkenhead, mutating into a freezing,
acrid fog that burned the back of your throat. This was before the
Clean Air Act put a stop to coal fires, which in turn meant
the loss of a familiar sight around the back alleys: the coalman.

The weekly delivery of coal was a ritual that all the women in the area looked forward to. They would fluff up their hair
and apply a little face powder and lipstick in readiness. The lid
of the coal bunker would be flung back in preparation, the
backyard door would be opened wide and the women, purses
in hand, would stand on the step and peer down the alley waiting
for
Alf, the Chippendale of coalmen
. Good-natured and
with a cheeky line in patter, Alf had the ladies of Holly Grove
eating out of the palm of his hand. He was tall and handsome,
with a set of magnificent white teeth (his own) and startling
blue eyes enhanced by the thick layer of coal dust that covered
his face. He wore a leather jerkin open to the waist, revealing
a well-defined hairy chest, and a leather cap perched at a
jaunty angle covered his greasy black curls. He had two sidekicks,
'the miserable one' with a lugubrious expression and
'the bit of a lad' who was very young and blushed under the
coal dust whenever a woman spoke to him. I thought that Alf
and his cronies were part of
The Black and White Minstrel
Show
on the TV, a suspicion that was confirmed by Alf's repertoire
of popular tunes. He fancied himself as something of an
opera singer and his powerful rendition of 'The Toreador
Song' echoed around the yards and alleys, transforming them
for a moment into the back streets of Seville and my mother
and the other women into Carmens.