Owning Up: The Trilogy (5 page)

My father, who was also fond of her, called her ‘Mrs Spilsbury’, after the eminent forensic expert Sir Bernard Spilsbury whose close examination of the corpses of murder victims had sent several poisoners to the gallows. The reason for this nickname was that Bella was always bringing him food to sniff in order to confirm her opinion that it had ‘gone off’. She was a strong swimmer and had once entered a contest which entailed battling against treacherous currents around the Great Orme in Llandudno. It transpired later that the other two entries were professionals and in consequence Bella came in very much last, but nevertheless finished the gruellingcourse. Bella stayed with us initially for at least five years, before she left to marry a long-distance lorry-driver called Jack, a gentle giant of a man who adored his small wife. Eventually they had a daughter called Beryl, who was very pretty and adept at tap-dancing in the manner of Shirley Temple. Unfortunately, Jack didn’t live very long and it was then that Bella returned to us.

One afternoon, when Jack and Bella were still courting and I was about three, instead of walking in Prince’s or Sefton Park, she pushed my pram down Aigburth Road as far as the rather run-down district of Garston and off into a maze of streets which led eventually to the yard somewhere near the Mersey where Jack’s employer housed his lorries. They loomed up all around me like elephants and Jack lifted me high into one of the driving compartments and allowed me to pretend to steer with the great wheel. The yard was paved with cinders and had its own petrol pump. It was a hot summer’s day, the sky was bright blue, the river sparkled and beyond it the Welsh mountains, some fifty miles away, appeared surprisingly close. That visit to Jack’s yard remains loaded with inexplicable significance. I felt a party to their happiness, almost a conspirator.

Minnie Roberts and Bella were very close. Minnie was a lively woman with springy dark hair, strong glasses, and the rapid high-pitched cadences of her native North Wales. She was adept at creating a sense of excitement at the thought of treats to come, in particular of the promise of ‘the beano’ when my parents and Bella should chance to be absent at the same time. This didn’t take place for several years, although she mentioned it frequently enough to keep me in constant anticipation. When ‘the beano’ eventually materialised, it turned out to be a very literal event encompassing baked beans on toast and staying up half-an-hour later than usual. ‘Don’t tell on me now,’ said Minnie Roberts, but her conspiratorial manner and frantic gaiety were sufficient to dispel any sense of anti-climax. She encouraged me, and eventually my brother and sister, to call her ‘Auntie Min’.

Auntie Min was married to an almost silent man called Tom who worked on the railways. Although Auntie Min lived in, they owned their own small house the other side of Sefton Park. The parlour was very clean and full of bric-à-brac, and had that mildly disquieting atmosphere of a room used for séances or psychic consultations although, despite her Celtic blood, Auntie Min was in no way ‘gifted’ in that direction. She was what was called ‘a good plain cook’, which suited my father who disliked elaborate dishes. Otherwise, apart from his insistence on finishing every meal with a savoury, he was not at all fussy. My mother on the other hand had a very sweet tooth. ‘I put sugar on everything,’ she’d say as though it were somehow a proof of her worldliness, ‘even salad, and I love Chicken Maryland – that’s a
banana
with
fried
chicken.’ In fact however she was perfectly satisfied with Auntie Min’s roasts, stews and over-cooked vegetables.

Apart from the anonymous housemaids, there was only one other creature in the house: a fat neuter tabby cat called Joey who lived entirely in the kitchen. My mother felt a cat to be necessary to discourage the mice, but she couldn’t bear him anywhere near her. She put this down to a dream she’d had as a child in which she’d found herself lying on a bed of partly squashed kittens scratching and biting in their death-throes. Her mother had thought this phobia ridiculous and insisted on having her daughter, aged ten, photographed stroking, with a look of agonised repulsion, a kitten seated on a velvet cushion.

When I was three my brother Bill was born. Unlike me with my reluctance to leave the womb, he was minimally ahead of schedule. My mother’s waters broke on the lavatory and I was rushed round by Bella to my maternal grandmother’s flat a quarter of a mile away. Again, whereas I had been underweight and fractious, Bill was plump and contented, but it was not for a year or two that I recognised in him a distinct threat to my position. With his blue eyes, curls and sturdy body, he was an infinitely more attractive child. His nature too was sunny and his manner easy and agreeable but worse, from my point of view, he was adept at learning necessary skills. He could do up his shoelaces long before I could and whereas I was seven before I could read, he could manage it at four and a half. His socks stayed up where mine fell down. He enjoyed physical exertion where I detested it. Admittedly there was a tendency to smugness in his reiterated cry, ‘I can do it easily’, but then he usually could.

Nemesis paid him out in one direction only. We both ran through the gamut of what were known as ‘childish ailments’: German and common-or-garden measles, scarlet fever, chicken-pox, mumps and whooping-cough but, although I nearly died of influenza when I was about six, Bill was continuously plagued by recurrent and painful attacks of toothache and earache. Huge water blisters like army pill boxes erupted on his fair skin (they had to be pricked with a sterilized needle and the empty carapace removed with tweezers, an operation which gave me enormous satisfaction). He had a hard time, frequently toddling into my parents’ bedroom in the small hours sobbing: ‘Why do I get everything?’ Otherwise I suffered from the comparison, not from Bella or Auntie Min, although the former could sometimes become exasperated by my ham-fisted obstinacy in contrast to Bill’s adeptness, and certainly not from my parents. My eagerness to show off appealed to my mother; my rebellious streak struck a suppressed chord in my father’s nature. But most relations and certainly other children’s nannies and their employers favoured Bill. I, who had been king of the castle, the centre of attention, the repository of lineal hopes, was entirely overshadowed by this golden child to such an extent that my mother felt obliged as some visitor lavished attention on him to cry out in defence of her less-favoured first-born: ‘George has his fans too.’

My revenge lay in my discovery that Bill was a highly conventional little boy. On our walks, for instance, if he refused to agree to some whim of mine, I would threaten to pretend to have a fit approaching strangers and would have my way. If I wanted some of his dinner I would tell him, while Bella was out, that the source of the meat was a dead tortoise which had ended its life writhing with maggots and, as he had a queasy stomach, we would rapidly change plates. Although I was sometimes caught out and reprimanded severely for tormenting him, he never sneaked on me, partly because he had from his earliest years an understanding of the correct code, and perhaps also because he suspected, quite accurately, that I would invent other and worse revenges if he were to do so. We quarrelled continuously as children, but later got on much better. My mother chose to date this from his emergency operation for a ruptured appendix during which, for a whole night, his life hung in the balance – a typically dramatic explanation on her part. My own view is that our improving relationship was more gradual and due to my realisation that our potentials were so different that we were not really in competition.

3

My mother and her brothers, Fred and Alan, usually called their mother ‘Griff when speaking to her directly and ‘the Griff’ when referring to her in the third person. This nickname was an invention of my Uncle Fred who had once introduced her, assuming the accent of a fairground barker or circus ringmaster, as ‘The only Griff in captivity’. He was adept at such nonsense. When my grandmother and I played duets together at the upright piano, she inevitably and rightly critical of my lack of concentration, he would announce us as ‘those famous virtuosi of the keyboard, Mr Umpty-Plum and Mrs Oochamacootch’.

‘The Griff suited my grandmother. It seemed to encapsulate her neat fastidiousness, her small but upright stature, her horn-rimmed glasses, her feet, permanently set at ‘quarter to four’ (another observation of Uncle Fred’s), the result of a broken ankle sustained while playing golf. We children called her ‘Gaga’, presumably due to my early inability to pronounce ‘Granny’. With its implication of senility she never liked this and was always trying to get us to amend it to ‘Gargie’, but we never did.

My mother and the Griff didn’t get on all that well. Many women of the Griffs generation deliberately prevented their daughters from marrying so as to have the use of an unpaid companion and dogsbody. There were many such elderly and embittered spinsters in our neighbourhood whom we would meet while shopping and whose entire conversation centred nervously around ‘Mother’. The Great War had helped to reinforce their ranks. They had lost sweethearts or fiances in the trenches, and afterwards found themselves ‘on the shelf. The Griff hadn’t succeeded here, nor in fairness had she wanted to, although my mother’s comparatively late marriage at the age of thirty-four must have made it seem a distinct possibility. Nevertheless she tended to treat Maud as though her main duty was to be at her beck and call.

She was also a skilful tease and my mother took teasing badly. The Griff’s main weapon here was the assertion that ‘Maud isn’t a sport’. This gibe encompassed not only my mother’s refusal to play golf and bridge, both of which the Griff did, although extremely badly, but also her neither smoking nor drinking, her refusal to go abroad; and even her inability to drive a car. The Griff had once been to Knocke le Zoute in Belgium to play golf; had been ‘finished’ in Germany; and drove a Morris Minor very dangerously right into her early eighties. She would also ignore my mother’s advice especially when she had asked for it. It wasn’t beyond her to make my mother go round to her flat, some ten minutes away from Ivanhoe Road, to help her decide between two hats, only to settle inevitably on the one my mother had rejected. Furthermore when she was on holiday she would encourage my father, who needed little persuading, to linger at the golf-club bar so as to make them late for lunch, one of my mother’s phobias which the Griff dismissed with a wave of her Gold Flake, although she herself expected punctuality from anyone lunching with her. Nor should one forget earlier traumas; the audition with the actor – manager, the photograph of Maud stroking the kitten. And of course, much as I loved her, it was not without some ambivalent feelings of pleasure that I would watch my mother rising to my grandmother’s teasing, turning red with irritation, clenching her fists, leaving the room to conceal her repressed anger, especially as the Griff would enlist us children as conspirators.

I suspect however that at the bottom of their antipathy was my mother’s grief at the early death of her beloved father and her resentment that during her childhood she had watched him treat my grandmother as though she were a precious piece of Dresden china, appearing to believe that she had done him an immense favour by marrying him. The Griff was, it’s true, very spoilt. As the youngest of her family she had been pampered as a child and she had been equally indulged by her husband. Both her sons lived at home for most of her life and my mother was never far away. She had a maid and a cook who adored her despite her imperiousness. She would ring the bell and tell Mary, the quiet and pretty Irish parlour maid: ‘You may poke the fire.’ ‘Suppose,’ said my mother, ‘she said “I don’t want to.”‘ As to why the Griff and my mother were on speaking terms, the reason was Maud’s terror of rows, of being thought badly of, whatever the provocation. What’s more in some ways, and with good reason, she admired her.

The Griff had indeed many admirable qualities: generosity, a sense of fun, self-respect. Her chests of drawers and clothes cupboards were in apple-pie order, her household accounts correct to the ha’penny, and she had never been overdrawn in her life, even after my grandfather’s early death had left her for a time in comparative poverty. My mother used to say, with a certain wistfulness, ‘She has a very strong character.’

With children, while firm, she showed great empathy. Her toy drawer, as orderly as the rest, was full of treasures which she would get out one at a time rather than allow us to rummage; a technique which made playtime with her very special by removing the unsettling element of choice. She had scrap-books, a top which threw out multi-coloured sparks, games of snap and animal grab, spillikins, “and a kind of bingo called Housie Housie. She would buy transfers where we damped a piece of paper bearing the faint imprint of an image, pressed it on the page of an exercise book and then peeled it back to reveal a brilliantly coloured butterfly or rose. Teatime was always a treat. She would roll chocolate finger biscuits in thin bread and butter, or sculpt an apple to form a chicken with its drumsticks, peas and potatoes. She could also peel an apple so that the skin remained an unbroken spiral. She read to us well and patiently: the Blue and Red fairy tales,
The Wallypug of Wye, The
Cuckoo Clock
and particularly the
Golliwog
books, large illustrated adventures, naturally in immaculate condition, in which the manly and ingenious Golly and some rather soppy wooden dolls emerged unscathed from terrible adventures. I still have a clear and anxious-making vision of them nearly drowning when the sea destroyed a dyke in Holland. Finally, and to the great embarrassment of my mother and our delight, she would sing and dance the favourites of her childhood: ‘You should see me dance the polka’, ‘Tommy make room for your uncle, there’s a little dear’, and especially a rather frisky number called ‘Now then, young men’. This went as follows:

Now then young men don’t be melancholy.

It’s my duty just to make you jolly.