Still Standing: The Savage Years (13 page)

My happiness was short-lived. A few mornings later Phil threw a spanner in my smoothly operating works.

‘I can’t drive you any more,’ he said. ‘I want to earn some decent money so I’m going back as a driving instructor full time.’

I offered him more money but he turned me down flat. I pleaded that without a regular driver I wouldn’t be able to work.

‘Find another one then,’ he said infuriatingly, knowing full well that drivers were as rare as hen’s teeth, especially ones like Phil who also acted as a dresser. ‘No offence,’ he said, ‘but I’m getting a bit fed up with driving all over the country and hanging around in naff pubs. I want my life back. I’ll drive you till the end of the month and then that’s it.’

That certainly was that. The distances a pub and club act covered were ridiculous: it wasn’t unusual to go from Slaithwaite to Pontefract to Hull and back again in one night. Arrogantly I refused to believe that he really meant what he said about returning to civvy street and thought that after a bit of persuasion he would carry on driving me. Wrong again, O’Grady.

The end of the month came and I was due at the Red Lion Music Bar in Mansfield. As I was packing the bags to go to work he asked who was taking me.

‘You,’ I answered hopefully.

‘Not me, I’ve got a pupil in Holmfirth in half an hour. You’ll have to get yourself there, I’m afraid,’ he said, straightening his tie in the mirror.

‘Pleeease,’ I whined but my pleas fell on deaf ears.

‘I did warn you,’ he answered calmly. ‘Gave you plenty of notice.’

I rang the local cab company and they quoted me a price
that was twice the fee I’d be earning. Then there was the problem of Biddy – I’d never get the fat suit on the train so I had no alternative but to ring up the pub and cancel.

As he got ready to go out, Phil seemed unconcerned at my panic and frustration at not being able to get to work. I wanted to kill him, even more so when he calmly announced that a friend of his, a girl, would be moving in with us the following week. It was obvious that I was persona non grata and was being squeezed out. But where was I to go? There was no alternative. It was time to throw myself on the mercy of my mother and return to Birkenhead.

I left early the next morning, telling Phil that someone would be round to collect my records, costumes and books as there was far too much for me to carry. I didn’t ring and warn my mother that the prodigal was coming home, preferring an element of surprise that wouldn’t give her time to think.

‘Hiya, Mam,’ I said cheerily as I breezed into the house.

‘What the hell are you doing here at ten o’clock in the morning,’ she spluttered through a mouthful of toast, ‘and as cheerful as a cricket?’

Good start, I thought.

‘Up to no bloody good,’ she added, shooting me down in flames. ‘What exactly is going on?’ She leaned forward in my dad’s chair like Columbo in a flannelette nightie. ‘Something must’ve happened for you to be up and about at this hour of the morning and so bloody sociable with it, so c’mon, what have you done?’

‘Why do you ask that?’ I asked, bravely keeping up the Uncle Remus chirpiness in the face of the storm.

‘Because, Paul,’ she said, pointing at me with a piece of
half-eaten toast, ‘you know what you’re like of a morning – you don’t get woken up, you’re exhumed.’

I couldn’t argue with that so instead I told her the truth, minus a few facts. I told her that without transport I couldn’t get to work and that the guy I was living with was moving a girl in.

‘So there you have it, Mam, I’ve nowhere else to go,’ I concluded, hoping that my tale had appealed to her better nature.

‘And I suppose you haven’t got a penny to your name?’ She sighed, shaking her head sadly.

‘Far from it,’ I announced triumphantly, throwing my Halifax book into her lap.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ she gasped, ‘where in God’s name did you get all this?’

Again I was able to tell the truth – I’d worked for it, and was happy to see her reaction was not one of suspicion but delight.

It was a lovely March morning and to celebrate my successful reinstatement in the family home I offered to take her to Beattie’s of Birkenhead, a department store on Grange Road, for lunch. Beattie’s café, sorry, restaurant was where the ladies who considered themselves elegant and refined lunched. My mum wore her new coat and fluffed out her perm and we sat like gentry among the blue rinses and tweed jackets, my mother asking in her best half-crown voice for the ‘hem seled plis’.

Afterwards we browsed around the shops and I bought one of the new-fangled Walkmans, considering it the best money I’d ever spent. It was extraordinary, being able to stroll down the street with your favourite music blaring in your ears. The only thing was I found it difficult to walk normally if I was listening to a rousing bit of burlesque music and would
frequently find myself unconsciously adopting my version of a stripper’s strut.

Like me, Vera was back in town. He had returned from London due to ‘circumstances beyond his control’ and had moved in with his brother, in a large house in Prenton, a fifteen-minute walk from my mother’s house. It was a very convenient arrangement.

Vera’s brother worked abroad and was frequently away for long stretches, leaving Vera in charge of the household and taking care of his two dogs, a large Rottweiler and a Jack Russell. The Rottweiler, Ben, was a beautiful dog with a lovely nature but as soon as Vera took him out for a walk and he spotted another dog Ben would turn into an unstoppable psycho. Vera became quite a familiar sight in Victoria Park, travelling horizontally at great speed as he gamely hung on to Ben’s lead.

Times were hard on Merseyside; there was scarcely any work about. In the past I’d usually been able to find some sort of job easily but the vast majority of the independent employment agencies had gone out of business and even the Job Centre in the precinct was in danger of closure.

With all the drag safely transferred from Slaithwaite to Vera’s brother’s back bedroom I still managed the occasional booking, but without transport getting to venues up to sixty miles away was growing increasingly difficult. Once during a stint at the New Penny in Leeds I spent the long Sunday afternoon between the lunchtime spot and the evening at the pictures, trying to get some sleep during a showing of
Popeye, the Movie
and dining on a cheeseburger in a grimy café afterwards.

I travelled everywhere by train and if I couldn’t get home
because the last train to Liverpool left at some preposterously early hour I’d be forced to stay overnight in the cheapest bed and breakfast that I could find. You certainly get what you pay for and some of these places were grim beyond imagination. In a hovel in Grimsby there were skid marks on the unwashed bedding and in another dump in a run-down area of Sheffield the curious brown lumps stuck to the rotting lino behind the toilet turned out, on closer inspection, to be a family of decomposing mice.

It was a lonely life trailing around the north on my own and without a driver it was also proving very expensive. After paying my commission, travel and accommodation I’d often wonder if it was worth the effort.

Sometimes Vera came with me on the shorter trips. Much as I appreciated the company, having to pay his fare was yet another drain on my already depleted resources. Painting the slap on one Saturday night in the ladies’ lav of a pub in Preston, I declared to Vera and a strange woman who wouldn’t leave, preferring instead to lean against the sanitary towel machine swigging from a bottle of beer and hanging on to my every word, that I’d finally had enough. If this was showbiz I was sick to death of it.

‘This is it,’ I said, more to my reflection in the mirror than the company in the lav. ‘No more after tonight. I’m never doing this again.’

Vera said he didn’t blame me and the nosy woman asked if she could have my wig, seeing as I was giving it all up.

‘Some swine’s tried to shoot the Pope,’ my mother wailed, her anguished face a mask of concern as she watched the news bulletin on the telly.

‘Well it wasn’t me,’ I shot back.

‘God forgive you,’ she said, blessing herself with the speed of lightning, ‘for being so flippant about His Holiness when the poor man might die.’

‘Well, you’d convinced yourself I was the Yorkshire Ripper before they finally caught him,’ I replied. ‘So it wouldn’t surprise me if you accused me of jumping on a plane to Rome and taking a pop at the Pope.’

‘Don’t talk daft,’ she protested. ‘I never for once thought you were that Yorkshire Ripper, you’re making that up and unless you’ve got one of those boxes Dr Who’s got I can’t see you getting to Rome and back in a morning when I know you’ve been upstairs stinking in your pit. I think I’ll just run down to St Werburgh’s and light a candle for him.’

‘Who for? Dr Who or Stella?’

‘You’re going to get a thick ear off me in a minute, mate.’

Even though my mother was a devout Catholic whose faith played an important part in her life, she wasn’t precious about it and could take a joke, providing she didn’t consider it overly irreverent. I always referred to the Pope as ‘Stella’ after a joke I’d heard Dave Allen tell.

Pope John Paul survived and I grew a moustache. Aunty Chrissie hated it, she said that when I smiled it looked like weeds round tombstones. Nevertheless I liked it and refused to shave it off. This much-chewed moustache of mine was proof that I had finished with dragging up for a living once and for all.

Every day that summer the weather was glorious, halcyon days my mother called them as she pottered around tending to her precious garden in the cool of the late afternoon. I still hadn’t found a job and for the moment I was content to be unemployed and live off my savings. What I was going to do
when the money ran out was a bridge I’d have to cross later but for the time being I was happy doing nothing. Vera and I went out clubbing at least four nights a week and every Wednesday night without fail we took ourselves off to New Brighton to attend the weekly disco and bingo session at the Empress Ballroom run by the Wirral Campaign for Homosexual Equality, the CHE.

Hi-de-Hi!
, that glorious sitcom about a 1950s holiday camp, was very popular at the time, especially with me and Vera, and the Empress Ballroom was very reminiscent of that period. During the evening there would be a break in the dancing for a couple of games of bingo. We thought this was high camp and behaved accordingly, pretending that we were old women and shouting out to the caller, ‘Shake your balls, Jack,’ and other such ribald remarks. Some of the patrons of the Empress frowned upon such behaviour as they took these bingo sessions very seriously indeed, playing the game with the intense concentration of professional gamblers even though the top prize was only two pounds for a full house.

Diane and I buried our differences, mine deep in the earth and hers just below the surface, and we started going for the occasional night out together, surprising ourselves by getting along very nicely. She was helping her aunt Flo to run her stall in Birkenhead Market and most afternoons I’d go down and sit with her and even serve a few customers when there was an unexpected rush on. I liked working in the market, enjoying the banter with the customers and the buzz that markets have, even though a lot of stalls were closing and the aisles weren’t quite as busy as they used to be. I imagined that working in the market was akin to running a stall in a travelling fairground: lure the customers in with your
spiel and then razzle-dazzle them into making a purchase.

Flo’s stall specialized in rattan furniture in every shape and size. It was, to quote the great Barry Humphries, ‘rattan-infested’. She also sold vases, figurines and prints of the kind that depicted a naked woman posing in front of a swan, its wings outspread against a moonscape background. The front of the stall was stacked high with glass clowns balanced on rattan and wicker tables and a selection of ‘genuine’ silver-plated items (‘Lovely gifts, folks, at a very reasonable price, ideal for wedding presents, christenings and birthdays!’). I’ve still got a small statue of the Virgin Mary made of cobalt chlorine that was once covered in a glittery paint that changed colour to either pink or blue depending on the weather. Flo, ever the canny businesswoman, advertised them as ‘Miraculous statues from Lourdes’ and within a couple of hours all fifty of them had been cleared off the wicker furniture and into the shopping bags of satisfied customers.

Flo, who was always immaculately groomed and elegantly dressed, seemed to have the instinctive eye of the market trader when it came to buying stock for the stall. Considering her good taste and style I wondered why she didn’t go in for something a little more upmarket.

‘See that mirror,’ she replied, pointing to a little looking glass in a plain wooden frame unadorned by rattan or resin fairies and dumped at the very back of the stall. ‘It’s nice, isn’t it? Well it’s sat there for two years, can’t give it away. This isn’t Harrods, it’s the market, flashy and cheap is what sells here. It doesn’t matter that the silver tea service is plate. It’s only ten quid and will look lovely in some old girl’s china cabinet. Give the customer what they want and, more to the point, what they can afford.’

During the school holidays Diane would bring our
daughter, Sharon, into work with her and the pair of us would sit at the back of the stall and cautiously try to get to know each other again. She was shy with me at first and sulked at her mother’s side, clinging to her leg, progressing after a while to manic bouts of showing off, dancing, shouting and doing just about every trick in her inexhaustible repertoire to get my attention while driving her mother mad in the process. Eventually she calmed down and sidling up to me would slowly climb up on my lap and ask me questions. Where did I live? How old was I? How long was I here for this time?

‘Till the wind changes,’ I told her in answer to her last question, a phrase nicked from the Mary Poppins story I’d read Sharon a few nights before. It was the response Miss Poppins had given when asked the very same question by the Banks children. The truth was I had no idea when the wind would change or if it ever would, which for the moment suited me fine. I was happy to be home in Birkenhead.