Owning Up: The Trilogy (27 page)

Apart from comics there were conkers in the winter term which were allowed at Parkfield and, for a time, the renaissance of that craze of the twenties, the yoyo, which was banned. Tom surprised me by his expertise with the yoyo, a skill he had acquired in his youth. He could even do ‘round the world’ whereas all I could manage was to make it go up and down on its string and even then with ever-decreasing momentum.

My two best friends at Parkfield were both the sons of doctors. One was called David Hurter who was rather small and very serious. Tom called him ‘Mr Penny’ after a character in the popular radio programme ‘Monday Night at Seven’. Hurter – for although we were close Twimbo’s embargo on first names tended to apply even during the holidays – had a jolly mother who adored him. Their mutual passion was catching moths and I accompanied them on several expeditions to the heaths around Southport or the woods and fields of the Wirral. I enjoyed catching the moths in a net and dreamed of discovering a new species, but found it difficult to remember the names and distinguishing characteristics of those we came across and, although a dab hand with the killing bottle, I was useless when it came to mounting the specimens once I’d got them home. Still for Hurter’s sake I persisted for several years.

Desmond Julian’s father was a homeopath, at that time considered an eccentric if not positively harmful form of medicine. Desmond had an older brother called Adrian who seemed to me the epitome of knowledgeable sophistication, and a charming sister called Pauline. His mother was warm and loving and they were indeed a most attractive family. I went on summer holiday with them once in Anglesey and Adrian explained to me, quite without prurience, why Pauline couldn’t swim that day; another fact to add to my growing store of sexual knowledge.

Twyne didn’t like the Julians any more than he did us, not in their case because of any theatrical connection, but because he thought the Doctor to be dangerously left-wing. In fact Dr Julian subscribed to Sir Richard Acland’s Commonwealth Party, but anything less than a total commitment to the extreme right of the Conservatives was, for Twyne, tantamount to carrying a Communist party card.

Hurter, Julian and I formed a dissecting club. Both of them wanted to become doctors like their fathers, and it was the period when I, who couldn’t even mount a moth without the wings coming off, saw myself as a famous surgeon. Part of the reason for founding the dissecting club was in opposition to a boy called Nicholas who had started a model aeroplane club. Hurter, Julian and I all detested model aeroplanes, and we also thought Nicholas far too bumptious in general. I approached my father’s first cousin, Dr George Rawdon Smith, to ask for his help and he gave us the small dissecting table he had used as a student and a set of rather rusty surgical knives.

We met at our house on Sunday afternoons and went upstairs in procession accompanied by Hurter playing his recorder. There we cut up (or in my case hacked up) a rabbit or pigeon purchased from Glendennings, high-class fishmongers and poulterers, of Lark Lane, preserving the organs in jars of formaldehyde, before marching down the stairs again for a large tea. Among the rabbits’ brains and pigeons’ hearts was our prize specimen, Bill’s appendix which, after prolonged haggling, I had bought from him after his emergency operation for one shilling and sixpence.

Maud didn’t mind us cutting up pigeons and rabbits, but she drew the line when she discovered that I had been to see a vet and reserved a dog he was about to put down. She made me ring up the vet, much against my will, and cancel it. The dissecting club, like the model aeroplane club, gradually petered out, but both Julian and Hurter eventually became doctors.

Julian, who was a little older than I, left Parkfield just before the war. Shortly afterwards Twyne, reading in the
Daily Telegraph
of the Russian non-aggression pact with the Germans, jumped to his feet, threw the paper on the floor and shouted: ‘The Julians ought to be shot!’

16

At some point in the mid-l930s Maud and Tom decided that, with Andrée beginning to grow up, 33 Ivanhoe Road was becoming too cramped and that they should move. They first considered buying a very beautiful old house at the entrance to Fullwood Park, a private residential drive curving down from the bottom of Aigburth Road to the river. The house had been built in 1666 and was in bad repair, and Tom, ever cautious financially, decided against it. I was very disappointed as I was sure it must have had at least a couple of secret panels, one of my fixed obsessions. It was eventually bought by a prosperous doctor who immediately knocked it down and built a hideous villa faced in yellowish-brown pebble-dash. He even put a plaque up on the side reading: ‘Built 1666. Rebuilt 1936’, to advertise his crime.

It was surprising that Tom agreed to buy a house at all. He had always maintained that he preferred ta rent so that the landlords and not he were responsible for any repairs. I’ve no idea why he was so nervous about money – he knew that he would eventually inherit a substantial amount – but nervous he was. He even got quite cross if he felt we were using too much lavatory paper. ‘Quite unnecessary,’ he’d remonstrate; ‘all you ever need is two up, two down and a polisher.’

Eventually they settled on a very ugly but large late-Victorian house in Sandringham Drive, next door to York Mansions where the Griff had her flat. About forty years old and very solidly built, it was structurally sound and cost only a thousand pounds freehold, reasonable even in those days as there was almost half an acre of ground at the back. Faced with sandstone, it had bay windows and awkwardly pointed eaves. There was a large porch at the side leading through to a decrepit conservatory mounted on tall brick foundations with wooden steps down to the garden. The front, while badly proportioned, was at least symmetrical, but the back was a mess with haphazardly placed windows and naked drainpipes. It was, however, an undeniably solid property and inside, the rooms, as in so many Victorian houses, were large and well-lit.

Maud decided the way to deal with it was to ‘modernise’ it. She had most of the walls papered in cream and the woodwork painted shiny black. She replaced the elephantine newel post by a straight elongated cube and boxed in the ornate heavily carved banisters with plywood. She did the same for the doors, changing their large round china handles for angled chrome or bakelite. She also boxed in the elaborate plaster friezes and ripped out most of the fireplaces, replacing them with gas fires. In the lounge she installed a modern grate with geometrical cream and brown tiles. She carpeted the hall and staircase in ‘apple’ green and had the outsides of the doors and the boxed-in staircase painted to match. For the main rooms she had curtains made which went down to the ground and had square pelmets covered in matching material. She made two bathrooms: hers and Tom’s was called ‘the green bathroom’ because not only were the walls green but so were the bath, washbasin and lavatory – the
dernier cri
in 1935 – and the cistern of the lavatory was not high up the wall but behind the basin itself, another novelty at that time. The adjacent ‘blue bathroom’ for the maids and children was far less grand. It had ordinary white fittings, and only justified its name because the walls were painted a rather raw blue. The top floor, which we didn’t use, she blocked off with a cheap door and more hardboard, in case one of us ever needed a flat. It was in one of those empty, undecorated rooms that the dissecting club held its weekly sessions.

With the exception of a large divan for the lounge and some furniture for Andrée’s pink, sprig-muslined room, she had to buy very little. What had seemed cluttered in Ivanhoe Road proved quite adequate here. When I used to stay at home during the fifties it seemed shabby and dated but, freshly decorated inside and out, the effect for suburban Liverpool was quite ‘daring’. This was confirmed by Aunt Eva’s state visit. Looking very out of context in her floor-length black bombazine dress and jet jewellery, she went ‘over the house’ without comment, only to pronounce magisterially on leaving that it was ‘far too modern’. Maud had aimed at modernity and should have taken it as a backhanded compliment, but given her insecurity in relation to the older Mellys she was quite upset. Most people, however, found it ‘very exciting’, if, in some cases, ‘a little extreme’.

In the basement, running along the whole of the back of the house, was ‘the big room’. It had a fairly low ceiling, two central columns taking the weight of the building, eight windows and a door into the garden. Maud did no more than paint it cream, build a wooden wall-seat right round it, and put in a gas fire at each end. She knew very well what she would use it for. She would hold a series of huge parties.

Meanwhile it was a marvellous room for us. We had a full-length ping-pong table which, when stood on its side and drawn on with coloured chalk, doubled as the scenery for the later ‘Melly Versions’, while the space between the two columns formed an ideal proscenium arch. There was of course no secret panel, but in compensation there was a trap-door in a corner of ‘the big room’ with a steep little ladder leading down into the foundations and, at the front of the house, extensive cellars. In one of these was a large boiler and a pile of coke, for there was an antiquated but perfectly efficient central heating system, in itself a rarity in pre-war Britain where frost patterns on the windows and chilblains on toes and fingers were accepted as the norm in winter. It had to be very cold, however, before Tom felt there was sufficient justification for lighting it.

The garden consisted of a long narrow ‘top lawn’ which ran parallel to the garden of York Mansions. At the end, flanked by two ugly Victorian urns, were some steps leading down to ‘the big lawn’ with a herbaceous border along one side and a kitchen garden beyond. Across ‘the big lawn’ some more steps led up to a garage on a cement plateau and, for access, there was a sandy lane running up the other side of the Griff’s, with a double gate at the top leading out again into Sandringham Drive. Tom took over the garden and became quite keen on it. It was a bit too big for him and he wasn’t very interested in vegetables, which anyway grew badly in the sour Liverpool soil. In consequence the kitchen garden behind its ‘rustic’ trellis of rambler roses looked, with its little wooden hut, like an ill-tended allotment, but he mowed the lawns and took a lot of trouble with the herbaceous border. Maud raided this a great deal for the house, but it caused little friction as what she was after in the main was a tall plant called Golden Rod which he considered to be a weed and would like to have uprooted, but which she thought looked ‘very dramatic’ in a big beige jug on the square piano in front of the burnt-orange curtains. There was a little wooden gate leading into the Griff’s so we could play there too and, when we got a bit older, some neighbours, the Brocklehursts, had a door made in their fence on the conservatory side of ‘the top lawn’ so that we could use their hard tennis court. From a small terrace house with a back-yard and an ‘entry’ we suddenly had all this. How we could afford it remains a mystery. Had Tom come into some money from an uncle? Had Gampa advanced him some? Or was it that, with the Depression over, he was doing much better in the buying and selling of wool futures?

Yet despite enjoying our new-found grandeur, and because I was already nine or ten when we moved, it was Ivanhoe Road which remained for me ‘the house’. Many of the incidents and conversations with my mother which must have taken place at Sandring-ham Drive I remember as happening in Ivanhoe Road. I was convinced, for example, that Gampa died when we were still there, but reading in Willie Bert’s pamphlet that this took place in 1937 I realised that it must have been after we’d moved. Andrée confirmed this. Although not told about Gampa’s death at the time, she remembers going into the spare room at Sandringham Drive and finding Gangie praying at the foot of one of the twin beds with their shot-silk covers. It remained fixed in her mind, although she was barely five, because she found it so strange that Gangie should be saying her prayers in the afternoon. But then Andrée can hardly remember Ivanhoe Road at all. Just the pram room, she says, and mostly only its rubbery smell. A further factor in my confusion perhaps was that both houses had the same furniture arranged in much the same way.

Where was it, for instance, that I gave up listening to
Northern Children’s Hour
in favour of Henry Hall and his orchestra? I’d loved Children’s Hour especially
Toy Town
and a programme called
Out With Romany
in which ‘Auntie’ Doris and ‘Auntie’ Muriel pretended, in a Manchester Studio, to be out on a nature ramble with a rather posh gypsy and his extremely well-trained dog, Rack. Fooled by a convincing recorded background of bird song, Bill and I firmly believed that they were really in the country, although we were surprised and impressed by the number of creatures – hedgehog, fox, badger, otter, woodpecker, stoat, etc. – that Romany, in his stage whisper, managed to bring to the attention of the two ‘Aunties’ in only half an hour. Quite suddenly, though, I abandoned Rack and his master, Larry the Lamb and Mr Growser, for the suave bespectacled Hall. At first I only liked the comedy or novelty numbers like ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ and ‘Hush, Hush, Hush, Here Comes the Bogey-Man!’, but soon developed a taste for ballads: ‘The Isle of Capri’, ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, ‘The Story of Love’, and particularly ‘Pennies from Heaven’.

Miss Nangle, whom Tom had nick-named ‘Niddy Noddy’, had taught me the piano at Ivanhoe Road and continued to do so for a time at Sandringham Drive. I showed no aptitude for it and hated the simple classics I was expected to learn. Finally I delivered an ultimatum. I would only carry on if I could learn to play dance music. Niddy Noddy reluctantly conceded and I bought, from the music shop in Lark Lane, a song copy of ‘Pennies’ with a pale blue art-deco cover and a round inset photograph of the young Bing Crosby in the bottom right-hand corner. I thought I’d be able to play dance music at once but found out it was just as difficult as ‘The Merry Peasant’ or Brahms’ ‘Cradle Song’. Eventually I was allowed to give up music altogether, although I prevaricated about this for several weeks because Maud had often said that ‘poor Miss Nangle is very badly off. Finally, in defensive tears, I told her, and it was perfectly all right. She said she’d hated having to teach me dance music anyway, and that as I’d no talent even for that, it was really a waste of time for both of us. From then on I saw Niddy Noddy only at Parkfield and, as a bonus, the duets with the Griff came to an end too. Mrs Oochamacootch was no longer in a position to reprimand her partner Mr Umpty Plum, now that he had retired from the concert platform.