Owning Up: The Trilogy (28 page)

I kept the song copy though and bought others when I wanted to learn the words. For some reason I can ‘see’ the cover of ‘Pennies from Heaven’ superimposed, like a pop collage, on the sky above a road that led up from Aigburth Vale to the bottom of Mossley Hill. Perhaps one day I noticed that the sky was exactly the same shade of blue.

The wireless played an increasingly important role in Bill’s and my life after we’d moved to Sandringham Drive. We wouldn’t have missed
In Town Tonight
(‘Once again we stop the roar of London’s traffic to bring you some of the interesting people who are IN TOWN TONIGHT’);
The Palace of Varieties
with its signature tune ‘The Spice of Life’, and especially
Bandwaggon
with ‘Stinker’ Murdoch and Arthur Askey. Big-hearted Arthur and Stinker lived in a flat on the top of Broadcasting House. They kept a goat and two pigeons up there, and their char’s daughter was called ‘Nausea Bagwash’. On each programme Arthur would sing one of his ‘silly songs’, the most famous of which began like this:

Oh what a wonderful thing to be

A healthy grown-up busy, busy bee…

In the last programme of the series Arthur and Stinker had to move out of their flat and, despite the fact that I must have been at least eleven, I burst into tears.

Maud and Tom held a huge house-warming party in the Big Room; Tom never seemed to mind lashing out on entertaining.
Tout
Liverpool was there as well as many visiting theatricals. Ronald Frankau came and did a free cabaret with ‘Monte Crick at the piano’, although Maud, while grateful, really felt he went too far. ‘I like a bit of spice,’ she said, ‘but he sang a song about balls in front of all those young girls!’ Nevertheless the party was favourably reported at length, not only by Mary Ventris in
The Echo,
but by her friendly rival Kitty Russell, who wrote a column called ‘Rumour’ in the
Liverpool Evening Post.
Cousin Emma sent over a van-load of potted plants from her greenhouses so, for the only time in all the years we were there, the conservatory looked like a conservatory rather than a dumping ground for the detritus of the house and garden. There were so many cars parked in Sandringham Drive that the police came to find out what was going on. They told Maud they thought it must be a Fascist meeting.

One of the uses to which the conservatory was put, after the van had collected Cousin Emma’s potted plants, was as a place for me to keep my lizards. I’d always wanted to own reptiles but there just hadn’t been room at Ivanhoe Road. Now I bought a vivarium, built a little rockery in it and turned one of the dissecting club’s kidney bowls into a pool, and it was done. The lizards, bright green and about ten inches long, came from a pet shop in Park Road, and were fed on meal worms from the same source. They became very affectionate. I used to walk around the house with them sitting on my shoulders, a habit which once gave a nasty shock to René Beere, friend of Uncle Alan and son of Mrs Beere, the stingy millionairess who lived at the Adelphi. René Beere, while extremely amiable and no trouble, was a bad alcoholic. He had come to dinner and was just knocking back his third gin and tonic with my father when I came into the room with the lizards about my person. Poor René did a double-take and the ice began to rattle and crash against the sides of his glass. ‘It’s all right, René,’ said Tom, recognising the cause of his panic; ‘they’re real.’

Unfortunately, possibly because the conservatory was too cold for them, the lizards died and, although I replaced them once or twice, they continued to die and in the end the vivarium was left untenanted. We weren’t lucky with cold-blooded pets. Our succession of tortoises, always called Ptolemy after Jeremy Fisher’s guest, never survived a winter. With the death of the last lizard the cast of my bed-time prayer, both quick and dead, was complete and remained unaltered until I lost any semblance of faith. It went:

God bless Mummy and Daddy,

Dear little Bill, dear little Andrée,

Gangie, Gampa and Gaga,

Uncle Fred and Uncle Alan,

Jock, Zip, Ptolemy and the lizards,

All kind friends and relations,

And make me a good little boy.

Amen.

The fact that I continued, until the age of about sixteen, to refer to myself as ‘a good little boy’ would seem to suggest either that I was a moron, or that I wasn’t really thinking much about what I was saying before joining Little Ted between the sheets.

More successful was my career as a breeder of budgerigars. I started with two in a small cage in the nursery and graduated to a proper aviary in the garden with nesting boxes and lots of perches. We bought the aviary by mail order from an advertisement in the
Radio Times.
Tom and I tried to put it up ourselves with the help of the enclosed plan but we had to give up and send for the carpenter, Mr Hughes, whom we called ‘Good ‘eavens’ because that’s what he always said, in his light Lancashire accent, whenever we asked him to do anything. He said it now when he saw what a muddle we’d got into trying to erect the aviary, but he had it up in no time, and the budgies bred like mad – various blues, green, yellow and even white. I sold them through the pet shop where I’d bought the lizards and made quite a lot of pocket money.

Later, during the war, my father got rid of the budgies, added a rather untidy wire-netting extension to the aviary, and bought some hens which he called ‘The White Sisters’, not only on account of their colour but also because they reminded him of some nuns of that order who had bought the house next door from the Brockle-hursts and turned it into a Convent. The feathered White Sisters weren’t anything like as successful as the budgies. They laid very few eggs and what they did lay were extremely small and the shells, despite enormous quantities of grit, were disastrously thin.

Shortly after we’d moved into Sandringham Drive we had to put down Joey, our enormous, much-loved, neuter tabby cat, who had become almost blind and more or less incontinent. He was replaced by a ginger kitten not especially prepossessing, even at an age when most kittens are fairly irresistible. He was called ‘Ginger’, the lack of imagination indicating the low regard in which he was held. Ginger grew up to be a truly unattractive cat. He was ravenous but scrawny, slightly cross-eyed and, as his teeth didn’t fit properly, he dribbled continuously. Needless to say he was exceptionally and obtrusively affectionate, being especially fond of Maud who would occasionally feel obliged to stroke him once or twice with the same expression on her face as if he were a very large black widow spider.

Ginger had the habit of pacing from room to room with his tail stuck perpendicularly up into the air as though determined to display his sphincter muscle, admittedly clean and neat, but of an unpleasing pink which clashed badly with the surrounding fur. Maud was particularly dismayed by this spectacle, but one day, when there was something she desperately wanted to happen, or alternatively not to happen, said that, if she knew for certain her wish would be granted, she would be willing ‘to kiss Ginger’s arsehole’.

She could never, so far as I know, bring herself to put this to the test. If she had, and her sacrifice had proved worthwhile, it would have meant, among other benefits, that the Second World War wouldn’t have taken place. Later on Ginger was partially run over by a tram when he was crossing Aigburth Road. He recovered more or less, apart from a slight Byronic limp, but his tail was completely paralysed and now trailed behind him as he dribbled from room to room in search of affection. This would have made Maud’s task even less enviable. She would have had to lift this limp and useless appendage first before attempting to influence the course of history.

For each of us, except for Andrée, Sandringham Drive had both advantages and disadvantages in relation to Ivanhoe Road. For Maud it was too close to her mother, although she must have known this when they bought it, and the Griff was therefore in an easier position to exert her imperious will. On the other hand the size of the house at last allowed her to become a hostess on a scale denied her in Ivanhoe Road.

For Tom it was a bit further from The Albert but closer to Jack and Maisy Forster’s so he was more able to slip in there for a gin or two on his way back from the pub. This incidentally was certainly on Maud’s list of disadvantages. They didn’t row much as far as I know, but when they did it was usually about Tom’s boozing. ‘That bloody drink!’ I heard her shout in pain and rage one evening as I was passing the lounge, and then Tom, equally angry, stormed out of the room and subsequently the house, slamming the front door. I was very upset at this rare explosion and much relieved when, five minutes later, Tom returned and apologised.

Another advantage for my father was that it knocked a good ten minutes off the time he took to get to and from the office. He used to have to walk down to the bottom of Lark Lane or Parkfield Road and catch a tram. Now he could take the overhead railway from the Dingle, a beautiful bit of early twentieth-century engineering, later pulled down, which rattled along above the still prosperous docks and past the great berthed liners.

For Bill and me, it was a slightly longer walk to Parkfield, but in recompense we were less likely to encounter Twyhe during the holidays. Frustratingly the bottom of the playing-field with its tall wooden fence faced on to Alexandra Drive and was only a few yards from the entrance to Sandringham Drive. In the winter, when it was dark, we sometimes risked running down the field and vaulting over a low side-wall into the shrubbery of that house which I associated with Monte Carlo. It was an exciting and exhilarating dash, and we were never caught.

For Andrée there were no points of comparison, but she sometimes behaved oddly in relation to the new house. When the builders were still in, we’d gone there for a picnic in the garden, and when it came to be time to go home Andrée, who was about four, refused to move. She just lay curled up on the grass apparently deaf to pleas and threats and in the end Tom, who had become quite worried at her silent embryonic obstinacy, had to pick her up and carry her all the way back. A few years later, when Tom was getting out his key to open the front drive, Andrée suddenly dropped her knickers and deposited a neat turd in the drive. Tom was quite put out and made her pick it up in a laurel leaf and throw it in the shrubbery.

He called it ‘untypical’ and indeed it was. With her snub nose and enormous slanting eyes she was growing up, like the little girls in the advertisement for Pears’ soap, ‘to be a beautiful lady’. Very funny and observant, full of affection, at times painfully conscientious, adored but unspoilt, she might have been considered almost too perfect, and perhaps the occasional gratuitous gesture like the turd in the drive was her unconscious revolt against that possibility. Maud who, as the Griff never failed to point out, didn’t bother much about her own appearance, was rather clever about dressing Andrée. She didn’t try to make her look winsome and frilly, but bought her rather severe clothes and had her dark hair cut straight, although sometimes she added a huge brown Minnie Mouse bow on one side.

Like everyone else, I loved Andrée, but I wasn’t always very nice to her. I sometimes couldn’t resist snapping her hat elastic, but my cruellest tease was based on my discovery that, although extremely quick in every other direction, she couldn’t understand the mechanism of the joke. She probably would have done so in time, but having realised that the nervous laughter with which she hoped to conceal this fact was entirely spurious, I not only asked her to explain what she was laughing at, but worse, made up ‘jokes’ with no point at all to trick her into pretending she had got the point. As a result even today if anyone says to her: ‘Have you heard the one about…’ she is overcome by panic. Otherwise we became extremely close as she grew older, but although my influence, my Byronic adolescent attempts to mould her as an
alter ego
were dangerously manipulative, Andrée has always been too intelligent, too certain of her own moral position, not to remain her own woman. If anyone it was Maud, with her burning unfulfilled theatrical ambitions, who was a more serious threat to Andrée’s identity but here too, at times under considerable pressure, she has always managed to preserve her centre.

Bill had his emergency appendix operation a couple of years after we’d moved to Sandringham Drive. He was rushed off to hospital and for some hours his life was in the balance. I sat up in bed in our twin room talking to Ginny Duckworth who was our ‘paying guest’ at the time and her fiancé, Larry Rathbone. We told dirty jokes to keep our minds off it, but I was increasingly conscious of Bill’s neat and empty bed, and in the end we just sat there more or less silently listening to the hissing gas fire and wondering if no news really did mean good news.

At about four the phone rang. Is there a more sinister sound than a phone ringing when you know why, and that there are only two alternatives? It was Tom to say they thought it was going to be all right. I have questioned Maud’s assertion that the long night of tension instantly changed my relationship with Bill but, while we still had rows, and I at least remained very competitive, we certainly began to get on better from about that time. We’d come home from Parkfield together, play ping-pong (the only game at which I have ever developed any skill), listen to the wireless or, on summer evenings, get through a couple of sets of tennis on the Brocklehursts’ court with no more than a little mild bickering as to whether a ball was in or out. Every night before we went to sleep, we’d hold what we called the ‘daily chat’, much of it devoted to the immediate eccentricities of Mr Twyne or, in the holidays, an analysis, frame by frame, of any film we’d seen. We gradually became friends – even at times conspirators.