Owning Up: The Trilogy (22 page)

We didn’t only go to the Pavilion at Christmas. My parents loved the music hall and would take us quite often during the rest of the year. It was there we saw ‘The Uncle Ronnies’ and, for the first time, Frank Randle, my favourite comedian of all. Dressed as an old hiker, glasses awry, sparse hair sticking up in tufts, his absurdly skinny legs emerging from baggy shorts, belching, burping and frequently removing his teeth, he presented a hideously ludicrous spectacle. ‘Eeeee,’ he’d start off, holding on to his huge phallic stick for support, ‘ah’ve supped some ale toneet!’ ‘A disgusting old man!’ said Tom admiringly.

Some years it was
Peter Pan
at the Empire instead of a pantomime, and it was always a children’s play at the Playhouse. One of these plays so impressed me that when we got back to Ivanhoe Road I reconstructed it with Bill and even Andrée, although she was only two and a half and needed a lot of direction, and we performed it for our parents. They were so amused that the following Sunday they asked the original cast to tea and we acted it out in front of them. It was a great success and the following years we repeated it. It became known as ‘The Melly Version’. As I grew older ‘The Melly Version’ became more ambitious, with scenery and some old candle footlights from Chatham Street. School friends too were recruited and I suspect that what had once been rather charming and droll grew to be a considerable bore for the poor actors and actresses on their one day off. This never occurred to me of course, and I very much doubt if it occurred to Maud either. Mary Ventris, alias ‘Little Runty’, the Louella Parsons of Liverpool, was also invited and wrote it up several times in her ‘Woman’s Note’ in the
Liverpool Echo.

11

Although I’d been taken to the theatre from an early age, I wasn’t allowed to go to the cinema until I was almost seven. Maudie had never cared much for the ‘pictures’ and had rationalised her dislike into believing them to be bad for children, a potential drug. I’d been chipping away at her resolve for some time before I succeeded. It was my enthusiasm for wild beasts that eventually won the day. Walking rebelliously down Aigburth Road with Hilda en route to meet her sister, I spotted a large poster outside the Rivoli, at that time the district’s only cinema. It was to advertise a film called
Trader Horn,
about a man who collected animals for zoos and circuses. The poster was in full colour. The hero with a gun glared with desperate courage from the edge of a swamp. Behind him an immaculate girl in an open-necked shirt and jodhpurs recoiled in some alarm. His desperation, her alarm were fully justified: a crocodile glided purposefully towards them, a giant boa-constrictor lowered itself from the branches of a tree, a lion and a leopard, crouching in the long grass that edged the swamp, showed more than a passing interest, while a bull elephant trumpeted its displeasure in the background. With all this at stake, I went down from the nursery after tea determined to use whatever means I could to break her injunction, and went up to bed triumphant. The very next afternoon we were to go to the matinée of
Trader Horn
at the Rivoli, Aigburth Road.

The Rivoli had been built in the early twenties. Like the Rialto a mile and a half away, but on a more modest scale, its inspiration was Moorish, the low facade covered in creamy ceramic tiles. The inside was fairly scruffy, many of the seats broken, the carpets full of holes, a stale smell of bodies masked by strong disinfectant. The matinée was sparsely attended; a few little gangs of noisy children and isolated old age pensioners. Nevertheless there was nowhere on earth I would rather have been. I was ‘at the pictures’.

In the event, although I was not so stupid as to let on, I found
Trader Horn
something of a disappointment. It had lots of good bits – lions caught in nets, natives digging concealed pits for elephants, a charging rhino, a lovable chimp – but what confused me was that at no point was there a scene which in any way resembled the multiple and highly coloured confrontation promised by the poster. Nevertheless I walked home with Maud as i£ I had successfully passed some initiation test, and boasted so much at tea that Bill became hysterical with envy and burst into angry and prolonged tears. As a result, and to my ill-repressed fury, he was taken to see
Trader Horn
the very next day! I felt I’d done all the spade-work only to allow Bill, three years younger than I was, to blub his way into reaping the benefits. Nevertheless I’d been to the pictures and there was no way now of stopping me going whenever I wanted to.

The only practical difficulty was getting people to take me, but here I discovered that most members of the family enjoyed the excuse, and also preferred this or that genre of film, so that after a certain amount of research I was soon able to cover the whole spectrum. My father, with his curiously narrow but intense tastes, liked
Mutiny on The Bounty,
which he was prepared to visit any number of times and even put up with my imitations of Charles Laughton for several hours afterwards, and gangster pictures. Maud hated gangster pictures, but quite liked Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and indeed all musicals. Gangie liked Douglas Fairbanks Junior pictures and costume drama in general with plenty of sword fights, but she hated the concomitant torture-chamber scenes for which I had a morbid passion. The Griff would take me to anything I wanted provided one answered in the affirmative a question dating from her youth: ‘Do they speak well of it?’ I didn’t really enjoy going to the pictures with the Griff though, because she fell instantly asleep and I would be forced, as I thought for her own enjoyment, to keep nudging her. Sometimes Bill and I – for I had soon become reconciled to his profiting at my expense in exchange for having someone to discuss every sequence in detail – would tease her by asking if she’d enjoyed scenes which weren’t in the film at all. Uncle Fred would always take me to Chaplin or the Marx Brothers. My only sadness was being barred from films which in those days had an ‘H’ (for Horror) certificate. I longed for Frankenstein and Dracula, for the Wolf Man and The Mummy, but the only time I could see them on the screen was when they appeared in spoofs, most often to the discomfiture of Old Mother Riley.

The cinemas themselves for me were almost as magical as the films they showed. The Rivoli, my first, held a special place in my affection, but I was tremendously excited by the ‘modernistic’ splendours of the big Picture Palaces in the centre of Liverpool. The commissionaires in their paramilitary uniforms, the thick carpets, the chrome banisters, the framed photographs of the stars lining the stuccoed walls, the ice-cream girls in their twin spotlights during the intermission. There were also, as a special treat, the cinema cafés with their ‘dainty teas’: fish and chips with very thin bread and butter, the scalding chrome tea pots, knickerbocker glories, fancy cakes. In the film and the cinema I had found my faith and my cathedral.

At some point in the thirties, and within a year of each other, two huge cinemas were built in Aigburth Road, both within a quarter of a mile of where we lived. This, once I had learnt of it, was a source of great pride and anticipation. The Gaumont opened first. It was at the Dingle, opposite the Corporation tram-shed and the Ancient Unitarian chapel. It was built of special pale brick in ‘streamlined’ art deco, like a modern liner. Inside too it was luxurious but not flashy, restrained in detail, comfortably functional. The Mayfair, despite a flat facade, and being a little farther away down Aigburth Road – almost next door to the Rivoli which must have suffered in consequence – was much more what I’d hoped for. In particular it had a sensational curtain, niched in many folds which were lit from both above and below in a wide spectrum of slowly changing colours: yellow with purple shadows, red with green, pink with blue. I thought it the most glamorous effect I’d ever seen. The cinema organ too (although as an instrument it bored me and I longed for its grimacing practitioner to sink back into the pit so that the programme could start) was bigger, brasher and with more effects, both musical and visual, than its nearby rival. In the end however, despite my aesthetic prejudice in favour of the Mayfair, it was what they were showing which decided whether I dragged my companion up or down Aigburth Road. The Gaumont, the Mayfair and the Rivoli are all bingo halls now.

Although films were shorter then – ninety minutes was the average – they gave you full value for your one and ninepence: the main film, a support feature, a comedy short or two (I was finally able to check up on the accuracy of Edna and Ethel’s appearance and demeanor as Laurel and Hardy at the Servants’ Ball), the news and a travelogue. I liked everything but the last two. I was very bored by a much-imitated man called James Fitzpatrick who seemed to end every travelogue with the sentence ‘… and so, as the sun sinks in the west, we say farewell to…’ But my obsession was the cartoons and especially the early Silly Symphonies of Walter (as he was known at that time) Disney.

They still revive and show on television the formative years of
Mickey Mouse
and
Donald Duck
and even, occasionally,
The Three
Little Pigs,
the most celebrated of the Silly Symphonies, but most of them are never to be seen and yet rank, I believe, amongst the Disney Studios’ most original works. The opening of the Tatler, Liverpool’s first news theatre, was an important date for me because it was there, despite having to sit through many tiresome features, that the new Silly Symphonies had their premieres:
The Pied Piper, King Midas (The Golden Touch), Rock a bye Baby
(with its bogeymen, a run-up for Dumbo’s pink elephants),
Peculiar Penguins, The Robber Kitten, Noah’s Ark, The Grasshopper and the Ant
and many more.

The fat, jostling, red letters announcing a Silly Symphony stood out against a background like a quilted yellow eiderdown. Then the screen went dark and an iris lens opened from the centre to reveal a country where the flowers had flat black centres and simple petals the colours of sweets and the trees were as plump as pillows. Certain images still haunt me: the rats in the Pied Piper covering a chicken carcass like a fur-coat and then retreating a second later to reveal only the bones, like a mounted prehistoric monster in a museum; the obscenely hairy and skinny wolf disguised as a mermaid, wearing lipstick and a gold wig, and strumming a harp in midstream in an attempt to seduce the wise little pig in
The Lie
Detector;
the passing of the storm in
Trees and Flowers.
I loved Mickey too; I was never as fond of the bad-tempered duck, but have always regretted the phasing out of the supporting cast. When was the last time Minnie fluttered her long eyelashes? What became of Horace Horsecollar, Clarabelle Cow, Peg Leg Pete, and the Mae-West-shaped diva, Clara Cluck, the farmyard nightingale? I shared this passion for early Disney with Gampa who was always prepared to take me to the Tatler until I was old enough to go by myself.

All these characters appeared in strip form in
Mickey Mouse
Weekly,
a comic published around 193 5. In the first issue, anticipated by me since its announcement some months earlier, I discovered you could join the Mickey Mouse Weekly Club and receive a badge, the password, how to give a secret handshake, and a diploma. I had included a page of rather stilted drawings of Mickey, Minnie, Clarabelle Cow
et al.
with my application. I spent a great deal of my spare time learning to draw them by heart and was absolutely delighted to receive a personal letter back from the editor. ‘Mickey and the gang sure thank you for their portraits,’ it said.

I would have spent all my time at the pictures if I could but there were other activities in which I was expected to take part. Dancing lessons, for example, first at Miss Jones’s studio in the centre of Liverpool. It was a proper studio with a barre and wall-length mirrors. Miss Jones was very old – she had even taught Maud as a child – and she wore a long black dress and held herself very erect. The forefinger of her left hand was in a fat bandage and according to my mother always had been. Apparently she had ‘a whitlow’. I absorbed this explanation, bujt had no idea what a whitlow was; indeed I hadn’t until a few moments ago when I looked it up in the dictionary:

Whitlow
(-o), n. Inflammatory tumour on finger esp. about the nail. [Earliest form
whitflaw,
app. = WHITE + FLAW]

It makes perfectly good sense.

Miss Jones taught very formal dancing: gavottes, quadrilles, reels and the schottische. We were expected to wear black, patent-leather shoes with buckles. We danced to an equally old lady at the piano.

I didn’t go to Miss Jones’s for long. Perhaps she retired or Maud felt she was too old-fashioned or expensive. We moved to a School of Dancing in the suburb of Allerton beyond Mossley Hill whose proprietor was a Miss Saul, obviously a professional name as her husband, who had the kind of hairline moustache Maud ‘didn’t care for’, also taught us. ‘Ballet, Modern, Tap’ it said on the board outside the semi-detached house. The studio here was the empty front room and we danced to a wind-up gramophone. It was less boring and intimidating than Miss Jones’s, but I never got to be any good, and gave up as soon as I was allowed.

We learnt to swim at the noisy Cornwallis Street baths which stank of chlorine and where Maud was always worried we’d ‘pick up a verruca’, and we were taught tennis by a professional at the Racket Club, the smartest club in Liverpool, on a wooden court where, under an echoing glass roof, the balls made an incredible noise like guns going off. I quite enjoyed playing tennis.

We went ice skating at a rink which had been one of the centres of Maud’s flirtatious social life before the Great War. I didn’t like ice skating as it made my ankles ache. I much preferred roller-skating but that, somehow an inferior activity, I had to learn for myself. On Saturday mornings we were taken into town where, in the restaurant of the Bon Marche, a Miss Eyenet ran what she called her ‘Fun Club’. I hated the Fun Club! Most of the time we spent doing Swedish gymnastics – one and two and three and four – but at the end of the two hours there was a bran-tub which you dug into and pulled out a present. One Saturday I won a tennis ball which had a very strong camphorated smell. I began to sniff at it on the way home on the tram, and continued to do so all day until I was violently sick on the nursery floor. It must have contained an intoxicant of some kind and what I was doing was the equivalent of glue-sniffing. I still sniff surreptitiously at tennis balls but they are always scentless.