At My Mother's Knee (6 page)

I was turning deep purple and could feel Tina's eyes boring
into me.

'I'll be off then, Mrs Henshaw,' I shouted and got out of the
shop quicker than a rabbit with a ferret down its hole.

As I walked the streets on my round I questioned whether
my mother was capable
of poisoning
a dog. Surely not, I told
myself, not my mother, not a dog . . . My round took a little
longer that morning as I mulled over the facts and sifted the
evidence.

When I got home I came straight to the point.

'The dog in the end house is dead. Did you poison it?'

If she did then she deserved Best Actress at the Oscars. She
lowered the
Birkenhead News
that she was reading and stared
at me, shocked and disbelieving.

'How dare you talk to me like that!' she said. 'And don't
even think of saying anything to your father. Get yourself
down to confession and tell the priest what you've just accused
your mother of, wicked little swine.' And tut-tutting to herself
she went back to reading her paper.

I've often wondered if she really did have anything to do
with the sad demise of the hound. I wonder if she . . . no, I
think I'll let sleeping dogs lie. That's not the image I have of her
in my mind. Time has softened her.

On warm summer afternoons when the garden was looking
its best my mum would make herself a cup of tea and, grabbing
her library book, would sit contented at last, on a foldaway
chair in her beautiful little garden admiring the fruits of her
labour. I can picture her now, surrounded by her magnificent
roses, legs crossed, swinging her foot contentedly in time to the
music coming from the radio inside the house.

'Is that you, Paul? What do you want for your tea?'

M
Y MOTHER COULD BE A BIT OF A SNOB, PARTICULARLY
when it came to
holidays
. We never went to Blackpool,
which is surprising really considering the proximity to home. I
never got a chance to sample the delights of the Fun House or
have my picture taken at the top of the Tower until I was in my
twenties and worked a club there. My mother thought Blackpool
was common. It
was
common. We never went to
Butlins
either,
another magical place I was desperate to visit. That was common
as well. I'd watch the commercials on our telly and drool at the
images of holidaymakers having the time of their lives courtesy of
Billy Butlin. And there was the added bonus that once you got
inside the camp you could avail yourself of every single amusement
at no extra charge. I couldn't get over that. Apart from
Disneyland, which was in America and therefore out of the question,
Butlins was my ultimate goal.

'Mam, can we go to Butlins?' I'd plead.

'Butlins!' she'd scream, raising her eyebrows, in the same
tone of voice that the Beadle used on Oliver when he asked for
more. 'Good God, I'd rather die.' She'd have hated the
enforced joviality and feared that at any moment she might be
coerced into participating in a game, just as I would now. I'd
lock myself in my chalet and take to my bed, burying myself
under the blankets.

Taking to your bed
is a family trait, inbred in all of us. When
the going gets tough and a safe haven is sought from the afflictions
of the world, we take to our beds. Safe in the dark, it's
the perfect environment to mull things over and find a solution
to the problem that's been aggravating those vulnerable nerves.
You can wallow self-indulgently and allow all those petty
grievances that have lurked, festering, in the dark corners of
your mind to grow out of all proportion and blossom into
visions of revenge and retribution. Preferably violent.

'Me nerves are bad' signals a malaise peculiar to some
women and gay men in the Merseyside region. If not treated
fairly quickly, the disease can degenerate into a more
debilitating condition known as 'Me nerves are hanging out'.
The cures range from excessive intake of nicotine, caffeine,
antidepressants and strong drink to flinging the dinner up the
wall and taking to your bed. My mother was a great advocate
of the bed cure and frequently took it when she felt she'd been
pushed to the limit, with the addition of a little Valium 'to take
the edge off'. During my difficult teen years, when I drove her
up the wall she'd frequently declare, 'Right, that's it,' pulling
off her overall and flinging it on the sofa, 'I'm taking to me
bed. You can all bloody well get on with it,' emphasizing the
'all', drawing it out and using a sweep of her arm for dramatic
effect.

I don't know who the 'all' were as there was only me and her
in the house. Slamming the door behind her so that the crucifix
above it shook, she'd make the ascent upstairs, banging her
foot down hard on each step with all the ferocity of a
mountain troll in a Wagnerian opera. The entire house
trembled as she crashed about in her bedroom above me.

Minutes later she would be back out on the landing shouting
down the stairs. 'And you needn't think you're sitting up
all night smoking your bloody head off and watching
television using all MY electricity!'

I'd turn the telly up to drown her out.

'D'ya think I'm made of money?' she'd rant. 'If the leccy
goes, that's it, I haven't got any change for the meter so you'll
have to sit in the dark.' Slam!

'That's her closing the bedroom door then.'

Thump, Thump, Thump, THUMP!

'That's her going back to bed. Give her five minutes and
she'll be out again,' I'd mutter to myself.

Sure enough, she'd be out again, declaiming from her landing
pulpit in a voice that could've given the Revd Ian Paisley a
run for his money. 'And you can just pack your bags and sling
your hook, you wicked little swine, making me take the Lord's
name in vain when you know I've just been to confession.'
Slam!

After a period of time – you never could tell just how
long she'd confine herself to barracks; it could be a
matter of hours or a couple of days – her temper would burn
itself out and she would leave her mountain eyrie to
come back downstairs and rinse her face in the bathroom sink.

'I'm going to tell
Father Lennon
about you,' she'd sniff
piously, popping her teeth in. 'You'll roast in hell for what
you've done to your poor mother. What do you want for your
tea?'

A frequent threat she made – and as a teenager I'd pray she'd
carry it out but I knew she never would – was to cry, 'I'm off,'
as in 'Right, that's it, I'm off,' usually to the
Isle of Man
. She'd
done it many years before when she was a teenager herself and
was working as a tweeny for the
Mulligans, a wealthy family
in the prosperous district of Oxton. A tweeny was a maid of all
work, a slavey who toiled day and night above and below
stairs; between floors, hence the abbreviation 'tweeny'.

She'd heard that girls were earning good money and enjoying
a better lifestyle working as chambermaids in the many
boarding houses on the Isle of Man. To add to that, the weekly turnover of punters meant the prospect of generous tips. Oh
yes, there were chamber pots of gold under every bed in every
boarding house, waiting to be claimed by a girl who didn't
mind a bit of hard work in the Isle of Man. A girl could have
a bit of fun as well, being by the seaside with its many
interesting diversions.

Only a labour camp could be worse than life in the watchful
employ of the parsimonious Mrs Mulligan. The hours were
long and the work physically exhausting. Mrs Mulligan was a
tight-fisted tyrant who expected miracles for the pittance of
a wage she paid and treated her staff like galley slaves. She
gave my mother a length of cheap material as a Christmas
present so that she could make herself a new afternoon dress
for her duties in the parlour as she'd noticed that the one she
was wearing was looking a little 'frayed at the edges'. I'm
surprised that it wasn't hanging off her back in rags judging by
the amount of work she was expected to do. Her day started
at 6 a.m. and finished when the last member of the Mulligan
household had gone to bed.

After a year of this misery my mother finally rebelled and
persuaded her friend
Nora, the cook
, who was equally
disgruntled with life serving the Mulligans, to go with her to
the promised land that was the Isle of Man. Together they
escaped out of the kitchen window, leaving their miserable
employer high and dry in the middle of a dinner party upstairs.
Afterwards my mother always wondered what had happened
when Madam rang the bell for the main course to be served
and then, when nobody answered, excused herself to her waiting
guests and went in search of 'that wretched Savage', only
to find that the bird had flown the coop.

Once or twice, for our annual holiday we graced a
boarding
house in my mother's old stamping ground in Douglas, Isle of Man, that went by the predictable title of Seaview.
A big brass
gong hanging in the hall was rung punctually at mealtimes and it had 'a very nice class of residents'. One of the
chambermaids,
a sexy Cornish girl named Grace
who always managed
to look like she'd just fallen out of bed, gave me a box of pastel
crayons and a sketchbook and taught me how to use them. I
drew endless pictures of the little castle on the rock that sat out
in the bay and then hung listlessly around the landings, hoping
to bump into the lovely Grace so that I could show her my
etchings. A patient girl, she would sit on the stairs sucking on
the end of her pencil, pretending to be deep in concentration as
she cast an approving eye over my attempts to capture the
delights of the Isle of Man as seen from the bay window of
Seaview's television lounge. If she was in the mood she'd let me
put my hand inside her blouse and have a feel.

'Only a little one, mind,' she would purr, teasingly unbuttoning
her blouse. 'I don't want you getting me pregnant
now, do I?'

Since I didn't relish the responsibility of becoming a father at
the tender age of nine I made sure that I didn't linger longer
than recommended. I hope my dad gave her a decent tip; I'm
sure he did because he always tipped more than he could
afford as he liked people to think that he had a few bob. Grace
made a nine-year-old boy very happy. Not only did she teach
me to sketch with pastels, she also cleared up a few questions
I had concerning the female anatomy.

I was crazy for the Isle of Man when I was a boy. It ticked
all the boxes and suited every nine-year-old's requirements. I
thought it was rather chic, with a whiff of Monte Carlo about
it – not that I'd ever been to the South of France. The Isle of
Man had palm trees and a casino and I'd seen these on an
episode of
The Saint
, so they made Douglas an extremely
glamorous location. I wouldn't have been the least surprised if
Roger Moore had turned up at the door of Seaview in his white
dinner jacket, eyebrow raised, enquiring after a room.

We took coach trips to various parts of the island, driving over fairy bridges and shouting out as we went, 'Good morning,
little people, and how are you today?' to the fairies who
lived under the bridges, because, as the driver explained, if we
didn't the unpredictable fairy folk might put a curse on us. My
mother would mutter under her breath that they needn't
bother as she was cursed enough, thank you very much, and
continue to suck contentedly on a boiled sweet and stare out of
the window at the scenery. Headscarves bearing images of the
Laxey Wheel and other notable landmarks of the Isle of Man
would be brought back as souvenirs, together with 'amusing'
ashtrays and boxes of fudge. On the crowded beach my dad sat
in a deckchair wearing a shirt and tie while my mum poured
tea from a flask and handed out fish-paste sandwiches from
the meagre packed lunch provided by the hotel. Giggling girls
with beehives and skirts that stuck out strolled down the prom,
their arms linked as leery lads with Brylcreemed quiffs trailed
behind them making inane remarks. Cheery pensioners sat on
benches contentedly licking ice-cream cones and watching the
world go by. These images were unconsciously absorbed and
would re-emerge much later on when I was creating a world
for
Lily Savage
to live in. I believe that comedy is formed in
childhood and fortunately for me I had a wealth of memories
to draw from.

On one of the rare occasions when my mother and Rose Long,
our neighbour, were on speaking terms, Rose graciously
consented to rent out to my mother, at a reasonable rate, her
much-envied static
caravan
in
Talacre, North Wales
, for a
week in July. I can only recall going there once, when I was
about four. I got a fat lip from my
cousin Maureen
when I ran
round a corner and banged into her head on. I remember so
well the horrors of a hand-knitted pair of bathing trunks,
highly impractical but, for reasons better known to parents in
the fifties and early sixties, de rigueur for children on a beach. My mother had knitted mine and they grew heavier and
heavier with each trip into the sea as they gathered a mountain
of wet sand in the crotch. As the day went on they would sag
and swing between your legs obscenely, forcing you to swagger
as you walked across the beach with your legs bowed – much
to the merriment of the grown-ups.

Rose Long
was a permatanned peroxide blonde, who wore
open-toed sandals that revealed toenails painted blood red. She
had a bit of a mouth on her, did Rose, and was usually at
loggerheads with most of the women in the neighbourhood. 'A
dyed-headed bitch' was how my mother dismissed her. It didn't
help that she was a member of the
Orange Lodge
and grew
orange lilies in her front garden either. On 12 July, the day that
the Lodge marched through Birkenhead and then over the
Mersey on the ferry boat to Liverpool to catch the train to
Southport for their annual bash, Rose Long would open her
windows and play a pipe and drum band's loud and rousing
version of 'The Sash Me Father Wore' on her radiogram.