At My Mother's Knee (3 page)

'What do I owe you, Alf?' my mother would coyly ask as he
tipped the sack of coal that he had draped nonchalantly over
his shoulder into the bunker with a sly smile.

'Run away with me to New Brighton for a night of passion
and a fish supper and we'll call it quits,' he'd reply with a dirty
wink, making her blush and sending her into a fit of girlish convulsions.
He said the same line to all the housewives, making
them feel like desirable women again even if only for a moment.

During the winter, regardless of how well prepared my dad had
been with his primitive loft insulation of newspapers and old coats, the pipes always froze and burst, inevitably during the
night. Water cascaded through my parents' bedroom ceiling.
The neighbours, awoken by the commotion, would arrive,
their clothes hastily pulled over their nightwear, armed with
buckets and mops to help clean up the mess. My dad vanished
into the loft to assess the damage and my mother, soaked to the
skin and looking slightly demented, pushed the wet hair from
her face with the back of her hand and began mopping up the
flood. I'd be evacuated to
Mary
and
Frank's, our next-door neighbours'
. Mary worked in the brewery and got on my
mother's nerves because she used to 'pop in', unannounced and
uninvited, while we were eating our tea and hang over the back
of a chair, fag in hand and reeking of Guinness, expounding
some crying shame. Mary was an ardent movie fan and loved
a good 'fillum'.

'There's a marvellous Bette Davis fillum on the telly this
afternoon, Molly,' she'd say to my mum over the backyard
fence as she ran some washing through a mangle so big that
she had to jump as she turned the handle. '
Now, Voyager
, with
Paul Henreid.' She'd pause from her leaping for a moment to
remove the Capstan Full Strength from her lower lip, taking an
enormous pull on it first. 'It was Bette Davis that got me
smoking, you know,' she'd reflect proudly, exhaling a cloud of
smoke in a manner emulating her heroine. '"Oh, Jerry, why
ask for the moon when we have the stars . . ."
Now, Voyager
. . . they don't make fillums like that any more.'

As a testimony to her love of the silver screen, Mary had
developed a corned beef leg. The skin on the side of her left leg
had turned shiny and tight, red and mottled like corned beef
from a lifetime of sitting too close to the fire with her stockings
rolled down to watch fillums on the telly. According to my
mother, corned beef leg was the mark of a slut. So was going
about with your stockings rolled down to your ankles, a fag
dangling out of the corner of your mouth and more than a hint of Guinness and whisky on your breath. To be seen running to
the shop for the
Echo
in your slippers and a pair of men's socks
was inexcusable. Mary, staggering home from work slightly
the worse for wear one night, fell over the bin in the back yard
and revealed that her choice of lingerie was an old pair of her
husband's underpants, grey with age and secured at the waist
with a large nappy pin. This damning evidence was enough to
condemn Mary as a slut of the Highest Order of Sluttery for
life. Out taking his daily wander, Jacko the Labrador strolled
into Mary's kitchen one afternoon and helped himself to
Frank's tea, a nice piece of yellow fish. He was halfway down
the back alley, fish in mouth, before Mary caught up with him
and retrieved it. She rinsed it under the tap, said nothing and
served it up later that night with mashed potatoes. Frank was
none the wiser.

I liked Mary and her good-natured husband. They never had
children of their own, which was a shame as they were great
around children. Mary was a child's delight, always up for a
bit of fun. She'd make ice-cream floats with lemonade and
vanilla ice and we'd sit on the backyard step drinking them.
She taught me how to play cards and knew the filthy version
of 'Maggie May'. Frank, a diabetic, let me watch him inject
himself with his daily insulin and, as he shaved in a mirror over
the kitchen sink with a cut-throat razor, told me stories of his
miserable childhood and how he survived the cruel regime in
the orphanage where he grew up. Frank's orphanage tales
worried me. My mother was always threatening to put me in
a home if I didn't behave. I didn't want to eat bread and
dripping and be beaten with a belt by nuns so I'd be on my best
behaviour for a while, making my mother instantly suspicious.
'What have you broke?' she'd ask.

My mother didn't share Mary's enthusiasm for fillums and
wasn't very keen on
going to the cinema
. She'd been 'touched
up' (her words) during a showing of
The Blue Angel
and it had put her off. The film had been on at 'the Colly', the Coliseum
Cinema
on Old Chester Road, known locally for obvious
reasons as 'the Bug House', and during the show a man had
put his hand on her leg. She had not screamed out but had sat
in the dark, terrified, unable to move from fear. After that her
visits to the cinema were rare. It was my dad who sat through
all the Disney cartoons with me, not that he had to endure the
likes of
Sleeping Beauty
for very long. We'd be back on
the street within ten minutes, for as soon as the villainess
appeared on screen I'd shoot up the aisle like a bullet to get
away from her and back to the safety of Number 23.

Whenever I dream of that damp little house, and I occasionally
still do, I recall it in vivid and minute detail. I visualize it
as I saw it when I was a child. Like an old movie shot in monochrome,
I can see a small boy sat on top of his sister's Dansette
record player watching the condensation running down the
frontroom window, protected from the heat of the coal fire by
a fire guard hung with damp washing. I loved that little house.
It was the backdrop for my formative years. It's in my blood
still.

S
IFTING THROUGH THE JUNK THAT IS OVER A CENTURY OF
family memorabilia, I came across relics from my own
distant past that acted like jump leads on the rusty engine of
my memory. They brought an instant recall of incidents from
my childhood, not vague, dim recollections but crystal clear
images of times that I thought I'd long forgotten. I found an
old school report of mine from the sixties. Reading it, I was
transported back down the years, to
Corpus Christi High School
during an Eng lit lesson. My teacher,
Dora Doughty
, a
well-corseted and glamorous siren with big hair who looked as
if she was formed from the same mould as Elsie Tanner, sat
cross-legged on her desk wafting powerful fumes of scent as
she expounded the wisdom of Proust to an uninterested Class
5S. Pearls before swine, I'm afraid. We were far more taken
with Miss D's magnificent bosom than anything
Marcel
had to
say for himself. But now, years later, sitting in the loft,
absorbed by the account of a fourteen-year-old schoolboy who
was once 'bright and chatty but needed to try harder at maths'
and whom I can't imagine ever being, I can hear and see it all.

A girl at the front of the class, egged on by her mates,
has got her hand up in the air. 'Miss, what's that perfume
you've got on called?'

'Do you like it?' replies Miss Doughty, sniffing her wrist. 'It's
called Ambush,' and producing a bottle from her handbag she
proceeds to spray it liberally into the air. 'Now tell me, class,
what does that smell bring to mind?'

After a long pause and a lot of theatrical sniffing, the pupils
slowly give their opinions.

'Perfume, miss.'

'Toilet cleaner.'

'Me nan.'

'It reminds me of a particular Bonfire Night.' This comes
from
Dougal
, the class creep.

'And why is that, Dougal?' enquires Miss Doughty, silencing
our groans with a wave of her hand.

'Because it smells of burnt toffee, and we had toffee apples
at our last bonfire party,' Dougal answers, surveying the class
smugly.

More groans and catcalls.

'Dougal is right,' Miss Doughty triumphantly announces.
'Smell is the key that unlocks the secrets of the mind. Indeed,
as Proust himself believed, the most profound memory is
triggered off by smell.'

Funny the crap you remember. I can't remember my mobile
phone number but I can rattle off my mother's
Co-op
dividend
number: 28171 in case you are interested.

Proust was right, for inside an old red leather purse that once
belonged to my mother, nestling among the bus tickets and
holy medals, I came across a tiny bottle that had once contained
perfume. It was Honeysuckle, and after Tweed by
Lentheric it was her favourite smell.

I removed the minuscule rubber stopper and took a sniff.
Even after all these years, there was still a faint trace of
Honeysuckle. I closed my eyes, inhaled deeply and instantly
called to mind one of my
earliest memories
. I was staring up at a ceiling, lying on my mother's knee in my dad's armchair,
listening to the
radio
.

'This is the BBC Home Service for mothers and children at
home . . .
Dong de dong, dong de dong, dong, dong
. . . Are
you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin.'

I imagine
Listen with Mother
is a familiar memory to those
of a certain age. I never missed it. Every weekday afternoon at
1.45, I'd haul myself up on to my mum's knee for a quarter of
an hour's ecstasy with George Dixon and Daphne Oxenford.

My mum would sing along with them, 'This is the way the
old men ride, Hobble-dee, hobble-dee, hobble-dee and down
into a ditch.'

Because George and Daphne were very posh my mum would
adopt a highly refined tone for these elegant nursery rhymes. It
was the voice that she used when she was feeling flush and
shopped at
Stubb's, a smart confectioner's and baker's
at the
top of Grange Road West. It was her society voice.

'Tu skanes end a farncie pliss,' she would ask politely, pointing
towards the scones and sticky pink and blue fancies that sat
tastefully displayed on paper doilies in the shop window. The
crumbling assistant in her little white pinny and faded black
dress, with a white lace cap pinned to what was left of her hair
in testimony to her years of servitude rather than for reasons
of hygiene, would flutter behind the counter like a moth under
glass. She would incline her head graciously as an acknowledgement
of my mother's order and then, with the speed and
dexterity of a close-up magician, would make up a little box
out of a flat piece of card. I always wanted to reward this outstanding
display of origami with a round of applause but
Stubb's was not the place for such spontaneous outbursts of
enthusiasm.

The assistant would then lean effortlessly into the window
and, using a cake slice, scoop the skanes and farncies delicately
into the box. The climax of this enviable performance came when she took a roll of red and gold ribbon that hung by the
side of the ornate till and deftly wrapped a length around the
box, tying it in a bow.

As far as I was concerned, this woman was wasted behind
the counter of Stubb's. She should've been on
Opportunity
Knocks
. My mum would only enter the hallowed portals of
Stubb's if she was
dressed
appropriately in her smart woollen
coat with the shawl collar and big buttons. She'd rather be
strapped naked to the altar of St Werburgh's than cross the
threshold of Stubb's dressed in her 'scruff'.

Not that she ever really was. She was always smart when she
went into town. After she died and I went through her
wardrobe I was amazed at how many beautiful clothes she
had, most of them hardly worn.

She could be pretty scary if caught en déshabillé first thing in
the morning though. I remember one morning when I was
about thirteen. I was awoken from my slumbers at the crack of
dawn by the sound of frantic banging on the frontroom
window, accompanied by shrieks of 'Shoo!' and 'Gerrof me
bloody plants!' I ran downstairs to find my mum bent over the
gas fire like a malevolent crone, sucking on a piece of dry
toast, deep in thought. She wasn't looking her best in her
flannelette nightgown and derelict bedjacket, her teeth safe
for once in the pocket, and a solitary roller, around which
she'd absently rolled a couple of strands of hair as she'd said
her prayers the night before, swinging drunkenly in the middle
of her forehead. This perfunctory attempt at beauty
maintenance was meant to ensure that, when she awoke the
next morning, the fine hair she'd been cursed with from birth
would be transformed into a mass of fascinating curls. A
mug of tea perched precariously on the end of the mantelpiece
and a slice of burnt toast smeared with a scraping of
marmalade sat on a saucer in the hearth as she turned slowly
towards me.

'That damn cat's been at me plants again' was all she said,
staring forebodingly out of the window.

My mum's pride and joy was her little front
garden
. She had
a way with plants that unfortunately, try as I may, I haven't
inherited. She knew instinctively what to do with the delicate
cuttings that she nicked on her many excursions to the stately
homes of England, accompanied by her partner in crime, my
aunty Anne.

'Keep your eyes peeled, Annie, while I get a couple of
cuttings off this beautiful little astilbe,' she'd hiss to her
nervous sister as she surreptitiously stashed the contraband
inside her furled umbrella.

Aunty Anne would react as if they were smuggling heroin
out of Istanbul, her eyes wide with panic, her mouth set in a
maniacal grin as they walked out past the security guard on the
gate.

'Goodbye, thank you.' My mum would wave cheerily to the
guard as she elbowed my aunty Anne hard in the ribs and on
to the coach for home.

She could identify most plants by their Latin name and had
a knowledge of the medicinal properties of herbs that would
have impressed Culpeper. A visit to the doctor would be a last
resort. She was distrustful of doctors and hospitals and preferred
to self-medicate from the dispensary of pills and potions
that she'd accumulated over the years and kept hidden under
the bathroom sink. If she didn't have a suitable pill for what
ailed you, she had a neat sideline in
home remedies
that would
either kill or cure you.