Owning Up: The Trilogy (21 page)

God and Jesus were something of a puzzle. They lived in Christ Church, Linnet Lane, a quarter of a mile away, round the corner at the Sefton Park end of Ivanhoe Road. It was a big, rather simple Victorian church with stained-glass windows with a lot of purple and red in them. There was a stone pulpit and the Bible was on a lectern which was a fierce brass eagle. The clergyman’s name was Goodeliffe. He also was rather fierce but not very old. Maud ‘didn’t care for him’, but she went to the eleven o’clock service every Sunday and often to Holy Communion as well. Tom only went to church on Christmas Day.

When we were small we didn’t go to the eleven o’clock service but to the children’s service at half-past ten. Only middle-class children went to the children’s service. Working-class children went to Sunday School in the afternoon. Mr Goodeliffe seems to have subscribed to the verse in ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ in which it is firmly maintained that God ‘made them high and lowly and’ gave them their estate’.

There was a ‘Children’s Corner’ in Christ Church, Linnet Lane. You had to say a prayer there if you went into the church when there wasn’t a service oft. It had Margaret Tarrant pictures in it. One of them, which we also had at home in the night nursery, was an illustration of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ and was a bit like a coloured version of the Peter Pan statue in Sefton Park with rabbits and butterflies and a faun, but with Jesus instead of Peter Pan. Another was called ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me’. Nobody told me that ‘suffer’ in this context meant ‘allow’. I was puzzled and a little alarmed by the title, but then a lot of religion was like that. ‘Our father,’ I prayed, ‘witch art in Heaven.’ I knew witches were meant to be wicked. What were they doing practising their art in Heaven where everybody was meant to be good? In ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me’ Jesus was surrounded by children ‘of many lands’, but only one of each: a black boy, an Indian girl, a Red Indiani, a Chinese boy, a Japanese girl, an Arab boy, and by far the biggest, a rather stern British boy scout. Jesus was in a white robe. He had very long hair and a beard and a light round his head. Most of the people in the stained-glass windows had lights round their heads too, but enclosed by black lines. In Margaret Tarrant’s picture of Jesus it was more like a glow, as if He were an electric light bulb.

The theology at the Children’s Service was naturally enough rather simple: stories mostly, which I enjoyed, especially the bloodthirsty ones from the Old Testament; a few hymns and simple prayers. Mr Goodeliffe’s principal message was that if we were good we’d go to Heaven, that God loved us and saw everything we did, and that Jesus died op the cross for our sins. He told us it was the Jews who killed Jesus This worried me a bit. I couldn’t imagine the Griff or Uncle Alan aftd Uncle Fred doing something cruel like that, even if Fred did murder people in the Masons.

My main problem, though, was to imagine what God looked like. The best I could do was a kind of smile in the air, but if I imagined it for long the smile got fainter like Alice’s Cheshire cat. Jesus of course was easier because of the pictures, but I thought he’d look very odd walking down Ivanhoe Road or shopping in Lark Lane. Perhaps he dressed differently now, at any rate when he wasn’t in his house. Mr Goodeliffe dressed differently after all. In church he wore a long black dress with a white one over the top and a pretty coloured flat scarf hanging down the front, but if you met him in the street he was dressed in a suit like everyone else, and the only way you could tell he was a clergyman was by his black shirt with a stiff white collar turned back to front. Even so Jesus’ hair and beard would have made him look peculiar. Tom told me that when he was younger if you saw a man with a beard you shouted ‘Beaver’. Would people have shouted ‘Beaver’ at Jesus? Perhaps that’s what they did when they mocked him before he was nailed to the cross.

Later on we had to go to the grown-up service. That was very long and boring, but it was almost worth it when you came out afterwards knowing that once Tom got back from The Albert there’d be roast beef, roast potatoes and Brussels sprouts in the dining-room or at the Griff’s. We always had Sunday lunch downstairs and then Tom wound the grandfather clock.

Once, when I was about seven, I had a vision of God which was very different from the smile in the air. I had to have a tooth out and was given gas. Mr Williams, the dentist, faded away before I’d counted to six, and I found myself at the centre of the universe with all the stars round me and a kind, gentle voice saying: ‘I am God. I am God.’ But then the cosy universe I was enclosed in was shattered into thousands of pieces and I was faced by a limitless and terrifying void. Furthermore another, deafening, voice took over, bellowing and thundering: ‘No you’re not. I AM GOD! I AM GOD!’ Yet despite this apocalyptic vision which even at the time, like my subsequent headache and vomiting, I put down to the effect of the gas, I wasn’t so much worried by religion as simply puzzled. I just accepted it as something you had to do, like going to school.

I discovered later that my mother’s theology was almost as simple as my own. When Tom died in the early sixties she believed, and it was a great comfort to her, that she’d meet him again but couldn’t make up her mind if he’d be wearing his pyjamas or his old mackintosh. Tom himself was not at all religious. He still said his prayers when I was a child, but in later life got straight into bed. He always got very angry with Mr Goodeliffe on Christmas Day because he took the opportunity, given a full house, to tick off those of the congregation, of whom my father was one, who usually went to The Albert instead. In revenge, Tom would sing funny versions of the carols: ‘When Shepherds washed their socks by night’ and, in the year of Edward Vlll’s abdication: ‘Hark the Herald Angels sing; Mrs Simpson’s pinched our King.’

Although it was very long, I didn’t mind the Christmas service much. The carols had better tunes than the usual hymns and, from our pew, I could see in the Children’s Corner a lit-up crib with the Holy Family, the shepherds, the kings and an ox and ass carved from wood. I didn’t mind the Harvest Festival either. It seemed so odd to see potatoes, cabbages and other vegetables and fruit of all kinds piled up all over the church like the trestle tables outside Waterworths, the greengrocer’s in Aigburth Road.

Eventually Mr Goodeliffe left to tell off other fathers who only went to church on Christmas Day and his place was taken by a big man with tiny but kind eyes and a very red nose. He was called Mr Thompson. Maud liked him much better than Mr Goodeliffe and he was sometimes asked to tea. He made jokes too, something Mr Goodeliffe never did.

Tom didn’t like Christmas much anyway. He hated the paper-chains and holly they put up in The Albert. He called it ‘Christmas crap’. When eventually they took it down he’d come home looking very pleased. ‘They’ve taken down the Christmas crap in The Bertie,’ he’d tell us to explain his good humour. He loathed carol singers ringing the bell and would tell them, right up to Christmas Eve, that they were too early. Some of his resentment of the season may have been because his birthday was on the 26th. As a child, and indeed for the whole of his life, people tended to give him one present instead of two.

I myself had mixed feelings about Christmas Day, based I imagine on too great expectations. I quite liked helping to put up the Christmas crap in the nursery (the rest of the year it was kept in a cardboard box in the cupboard under the stairs) and especially the big green paper bells which lay flat in the box but opened up to become round and honeycombed. I also derived pleasure from the coloured glass balls we hung from the branches of the small tree we’d bought at Waterworths, although it was very annoying when they came adrift from their little silver collars and the two thin metal prongs which held them on their hooks. It was also a bonus that Hilda and later May were less strict. But nevertheless Christmas Day itself was always somehow a disappointment. It was not that we believed in Father Christmas (although I did, certainly until I left Camelot, firmly subscribe to the tooth fairy and her compensatory sixpence for a milk tooth placed under the pillow); rather it was to do with waking too early, opening stockings in the dark, going into our parents’ room and being told to go away and go back to sleep. Everything turned into an act. We were expected, except by Tom, to enjoy ourselves too much, to be ‘wide-eyed with wonder’. There was too much to eat at the Griff’s. The Christmas cake was too rich and too soon after lunch. At the end of the day I went – willingly for once – to bed, tired, bilious and obscurely disappointed. I still mistrust Christmas and understand perfectly why Tom was so pleased when they took down the Christmas crap in The Albert. I was twice, as a child, ill on Christmas Day.

Nevertheless the Christmas holidays as a whole were full of treats. One morning, for example, my parents would take us to ‘do’ the grottos in the big stores. These varied a great deal depending how up-market the shop was. The Bon Marche was too grand to bother. George Henry Lee’s was the most elaborate with Father Christmas reached only after a trip in a moon-rocket or a sledge-ride to the North Pole, and he wore proper baggy red trousers and boots. Lewis’s was average. You walked into the grotto past animated ‘Nursery Land’figures and Father Christmas allowed you to spend a bit less time on his knee before giving you your ‘present’, wrapped in blue paper for a boy and pink for a girl. The boys’ presents at Lewis’s were always rather large wind-up cars ‘made in Japan’. They had nasty sharp edges and soon broke. The girls got cheap dolls resembling Shirley Temple. But my father’s favourite grotto, and the one we rated least, was Blackler’s, a cut-price emporium in the centre of Liverpool. Here Father Christmas, assisted by a pert fairy in a tutu, sat among no more than a few papier mâché rocks and the presents were the sorts of things you got from crackers. Father Christmas himself had a beard which clipped on over the ears instead of a proper one stuck on with spirit gum, and he wore ordinary grey trousers Under his red robe. He also had a strong Liverpool accent and smelt of beer. ‘’Ave you been a good lad?’ he’d ask. ‘What yer want for chrissie den?’ One year, Tom told me later, the Blackler’s Father Christmas was sacked when the under-manager found him screwing the Fairy behind the papier mache rocks. When I was very small and the grottos were the only reason I was taken to the big stores, I believed that the lifts didn’t go up and down, but from shop to shop, from grotto to grotto.

The other, and indeed greater, highlights of the Christmas holidays were the pantomimes. Like the grottos, these could be graded. The Royal Court was considered the most ‘artistic’ with a proper transformation scene and a ballet, but we found it the dullest. Cousin Emma took a huge party of children to this, followed by a tea at George Henry Lee’s. The Court Pantomime sometimes engaged Douglas Byng as its dame, a considerable bonus for me who knew his records so well and had met him personally – a fact I made quite sure all the Holt cousins appreciated. In keeping with the refinement of the entertainment – and indeed his own persona – his dames were upgraded, never the nurse, always the governess, not a cook, but a housekeeper. Given that it was a family entertainment he didn’t, to my regret, recite any of his discreetly obscene monologues, but he was even so very flmny, something of a relief in contrast to the gentility of the rest of the entertainment. In
The Sleeping Beauty
when the Court, covered in cobwebs, awoke after the interval, Douggie’s reaction to the Fairy Queen’s announcement that they’d been asleep for a hundred years reduced Bill and me to helpless, if knowing, laughter and earned us a censorious look from Cousin Emma. ‘A hundred years!’ said the appalled Douglas Byng, ‘and I forgot to put the cat out!’ Like Maud and Tom, Bill and I were very much amused by scatological humour.

We were taken to the Empire, the huge Palace of Varieties opposite St George’s Hall, by Gangie and Gampa. This was a big brash show-biz panto with star$ like George Formby and Arthur Askey, and lots of catchphrases from popular radio shows and advertising slogans. It was very long but always very enjoyable, and by the time the ‘entire company’ came on for their final bow, dressed in elaborate finery, and swanning down a high bank of glittering steps to acknowledge their applause, we had been seduced into exhausted complicity by the slapstick, community singing and exuberant vigour.

Pantomime, despite the ‘I theng yows’ and the references to Bovril stopping ‘that sinking feeling’, was still comparatively traditional. The Principal Boy was always a girl, and the demon king shot up in a puff of green smoke through a trap door, and spoke, like his opponent the Fairy Queen, in rhymed couplets. Even so my father, while always very interested in the Principal Boy’s legs, complained that when he was young they didn’t limit themselves to the same few traditional stories:
Cinderella, Babes in the Wood, Mother
Goose, Humpty Dumpty, Robinson Crusoe, The Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Dick Whittington
and
Aladdin,
but drew freely from a wider field. ‘They did things like
The Yellow Dwarf,’
he’d tell us. He never mentioned any of the other things they did, nor indeed what had impressed him so much about
The Yellow
Dwarf,
but he’d bring it out each year as a stick to beat the unimaginative limitations of the modern pantomime. Nevertheless he was always pleased when it was
Cinderella,
then as now the most hackneyed story of all, but this was entirely because of the moment when the crystal carriage emerged from the wings to take Cinders to the ball. It was drawn by Shetland ponies and what interested Tom was the possibility, surprisingly frequently fulfilled, that one or more of them might shit on the stage.

My parents themselves took us to the Christmas play at the Playhouse and the panto at the Pavilion, a seedy theatre in Lodge Lane, a rather run-down area not far from Sefton Park. Here, all memories of
The Yellow Dwarf
obliterated, Tom’s relish for the tatty and the meretricious was allowed full play. There were lashings of vulgarity and in the second half the plot was more or less abandoned and everyone just performed their speciality acts. To call them pantomimes at all was really a misnomer. They were basically music-hall bills with a cursory nod towards the panto in acknowledgement of the season. We often went to see Old Mother Riley as the dame and ‘her beautiful daughter Kitty’ as the principal girl. Old Mother Riley’s real name was Arthur Lucan. His ‘daughter’ was, in fact, his wife. Never beautiful and, with the passage of the years increasingly less so, she was apparently a drunken termagant who made Lucan’s life a hell. On stage, though, they were in the great tradition: Old Mother Riley in her bonnet and shawl, writhing and banging her elbows together in paroxysms of anxiety as to where Kitty was and what she’d been getting up to. Then going at her hammer and tongs on her eventual return. ‘You went to a museum,’ she’d shriek. ‘You went to a museum to see the antiques! Why did you ‘ave to go to a museum to see antiques? Why couldn’t you come ‘ome and see your mother!’