At My Mother's Knee (46 page)

'Don't be such a twat and drink up. We've got to get to
Wigan,' Dave said pityingly. 'Two ProPlus and he thinks he's
Jimi Hendrix.'

We stood for hours in a queue that stretched literally the
length of the road, waiting for the bouncers in their frilly shirts
and bow ties to open the door. I have to admit that it was
worth the wait. Once inside I could see why the change of
clothes was necessary. Lads in trousers with waistbands that
came up to their armpits and feather-cut hair chucked themselves
energetically around the floor. It was quite unlike the
dancing in the Bear's Paw: here they were doing the splits,
back-flips, handstands – the whole three-ring circus. If you
wanted to dance you didn't need a partner, you just took yourself
off and did your own thing in among the mass of thrashing
bodies. It was liberating to be lost in my own world, out of my
drug-crazed mind on two ProPlus, dancing (or what passed for dancing in my case) to the likes of 'Cry No More' by Ben E.
King and 'That's No Way To Treat A Girl' sung by Marie
Knight.

Innocent as it all was, my dad didn't like me staying out all
night 'roaming the streets'. He liked to think that the members
of his tiny household were all indoors, tucked up safely in bed
with the door locked, before he pulled out all the plugs and
retired for the night. He had time on his hands since his retirement,
and he'd taken up various
hobbies
to keep himself
occupied: a rug-making kit that took two years to complete,
the end result a hideous chocolate-brown shagpile monstrosity
with navy blue and green chrysanthemums painstakingly
handwoven into it that now sat proudly in front of the gas fire,
clashing with the multicoloured frontroom carpet. He redecorated
the front room, encasing the chimney breast in pine
tongue and groove, which we all thought was the height of
style; painted the hall; built a cupboard for the bathroom that
shook violently when you opened it and leaned dangerously
towards the bath. He even took up making jewellery, intending
to sell the fruits of his labour and make his fortune. That didn't
last long. It was painstaking and fiddly work fitting tiny
marcasites into the back of a brooch, so he used up every bead
and stone he had in his 'Jewellery-Making Made Easy' kit
('Make and sell your own jewellery from home!'), dispensed
the resulting brooches and bracelets among my mum and the
aunties and called it a day, returning to visiting the sick and
the elderly for the Knights of St Columbia and drinking in the
Black Horse with his mates.

I hated coming home from a night out to find him still up,
sitting quietly, wanting to know, not unreasonably, what I'd
been up to and where I'd been till one in the morning,
questions guaranteed to drive a resentful teenager into a
paranoid sulk and wild accusations of 'persecution'. The night of my visit to Sadie's I just wanted to sit quietly for half an
hour before turning in. After putting Diane into the cab I'd had
to wait ages for the bus that ferried the night owls through the
Mersey Tunnel and then tackle the long walk uphill in driving
rain, wondering if it was all really worth the hassle for the
pleasure of a night sitting in a shitty garret with a jealous girlfriend
and a few ropy old queens. I was in a strange mood that
night, feeling for some reason unsettled and tense. In the words
of Mrs Garbo, I vanted to be alone. Fortunately my dad wasn't
up for talking; he was on his way to bed. 'Dry your hair before
you go up or you'll catch your death,' was all he said, adding,
'And don't be making a racket. Your mother hasn't been feeling
too good. Try to think of others for once if you can.'

I sat on the sofa drinking a glass of milk and eating a bag of
cheese puffs, listening to the floorboards above me creaking as
my dad got into bed. He was right. I was out nearly every
night, I spent my wages on clubbing and clothes and selfishly
thought of little else. I was in a day job that was bearable and
a parttime job of a night that I loved, I had lots of friends, an
interesting and busy sex life and money in my pocket, and
apart from strained relations with my parents life was good. So
why wasn't I really, sincerely enjoying it? Two little words:
Catholic guilt. It's inherent in me. When the going's good
there's a niggling feeling in the back of my mind that at any
moment it'll be payback time, that the clock will strike midnight
and Cinders will be back to rats and pumpkins again,
quick as a flash; this little voice whispering in your ear that all
good things inevitably must be paid for and that in all probability
an unforeseen and unexpected calamity is lurking round
the corner just waiting to pounce. 'The winds of remorse
whistling down the lobby, stirring up the leaves of emotion'
was how Aunty Anne would describe the way I was feeling.
Aunty Anne was a fan of Catherine Cookson and could be
quite florid, if a little over-dramatic, herself when foretelling the approach of impending doom. The way to break the curse
was to put something back, do something beneficial for others.
Not just any old thing – you had to really put yourself out,
show that you meant it. It was time to do something good,
hopefully proving to my dad that I wasn't quite the lost cause
he imagined at the same time.

I'd read an article in one of the thousands of
Reader's
Digest
s that occupied the house about the work of
Sue Ryder
and felt that I'd like to help out. I'd done some voluntary work
in a
Salvation Army
hostel while I was at Steers House. I'd
enjoyed the work and admired the practical yet caring
approach of the Salvation Army so much that I briefly toyed
with the idea of joining up. That's right, you heard me. You
see, I fancied myself standing outside Robb's in Grange Road
wearing a smart uniform, banging a drum and belting out a
rousing chorus of 'Rejoice'. I still can, really.

I got the details of the
Sue Ryder home
in Suffolk from the
reference library and wrote to them offering my services.

If they took me on then I planned to travel down on the odd
weekend. Two days later I received a phone call: yes, they'd
love to have me on board, they needed a strong pair of hands
so why didn't I jump on a train and come down to see them.
Blinded by their enthusiasm and confidence in me and also by
the saintly glow of helping others I went one further, offering
my services for a week. My mum and dad were off on a
caravan
holiday
with my sister and her husband and kids at the
end of the month and didn't like the idea, not surprisingly, of
leaving me alone while they were gone.

'I'm over eighteen now, Mother. I'm an adult.'

'You're a gobshite, you mean, one who can't be trusted, and
that's why you're going to stay at Annie and Chrissie's, my
lad.'

I'd take a week's holiday from work and go off and do my penance while my parents went on holiday, thus solving the
problem. As usual my mother was deeply suspicious as to my
motives, and even after ringing the home and getting to speak
to the great lady herself couldn't quite believe that I was giving
up a week's holiday to work with the survivors of the concentration
camps. Aunty Chris was equally sceptical. 'The
poor buggers,' she said. 'Haven't they suffered enough? A
week with you and they'll be wishing they were back in
Belsen.' My mother put Sue Ryder on the same level as Mother
Teresa and Padre Pio. She couldn't believe that she'd spoken to
her on the phone, a woman whom she considered a living
saint, and went about for the rest of the day in a state of
religious ecstasy. My dad was less impressed with Sue Ryder's
husband,
Leonard Cheshire
, questioning his activities in the
war, as he did Churchill's. Confused as they were by my
overnight change from sinner to saint, they nevertheless gave
me their blessing and I arranged to spend the week at the
home.

Cavendish was, and probably still is, a beautiful Suffolk
village, not that I saw much of it on that occasion. I didn't stop
from the moment I got there until the time I eventually threw
the towel in and left four days later. I only met Sue Ryder once.
She was small and thin, a little bird in an Hermès headscarf,
who never seemed to sleep. 'That's right, shoulder to the
plough,' she shouted cheerfully to me one morning as I was
taking bags of rubbish out to the bin. I didn't mind a bit of
hard work, but I drew the line at slavery. It was chaos. There
were not enough staff to go round and so from seven in the
morning till ten at night I scrubbed and cleaned, changed beds,
washed the faeces from the sheets in the sluice, sat with the
residents, washed 'em and shaved 'em and fed those who were
unable to do it themselves, lifted and carried, lugged and
dragged, and all in all acted as general dogsbody and skivvy.

The residents of the home were mainly Polish. I could hear
them crying out in the night as, too exhausted to sleep, I lay on
the camp bed in my cupboard of a room. This place made the
Wheatsheaf look like the Ritz. One man, who had survived
Auschwitz but had watched his entire family go to the gas
chambers, was obsessed by the idea that the Gestapo were out
to get him. Small wonder when you consider what he'd been
through. How could he possibly put his trust in anyone again,
coming from wartime Warsaw, a dark place of mistrust and
suspicion where even your closest friends turned informer or
appeared one day dressed in the hated Nazi uniform?

The staff worked like Trojans. I don't know how they coped
with it. Complaining to a nurse one night, as I washed a mountain
of dishes in the kitchen, about how exhausted I felt, I was
told to be careful what I said. The year before, a voluntary
matron had persistently complained to Leonard Cheshire and
Sue Ryder that the workload was impossible and that the
standard of care and cleanliness was abysmal – and she'd been
found dead by the lake in mysterious circumstances. The
official verdict had been suicide but the staff gossiped that it
might have been otherwise. 'You'll never get out of here now,'
the nurse said darkly. 'They'll never let you go.'

That was enough for me. I reckoned that I'd earned my
wings, having put in sixty hours' voluntary labour in four
days, so I did a bunk, taking myself off to London for a few
days before going home. I stayed with a couple I'd met through
a friend in Liverpool, who lived in north London in a cramped
little flat over a shop. They were the archetypical show tunes
queens, the walls of the flat covered in posters of every musical
ever made, every conceivable surface adorned with framed
photographs of film stars, all female.
To Chris and
Billy
, Yours
Sincerely, Mae West
.

I hardly knew them but they'd invited me to stay when I was
in London so I took them up on their offer. Although their home was a shrine to the goddesses of the silver screen, they
didn't take too kindly to less celestial females and distrusted
them every bit as much as Sadie did, refusing to have a woman
in the house. I didn't get this mindless misogyny and brought
back a girl I'd met at the Galtymore, an Irish dance hall in
Cricklewood. I didn't fancy her in the least, nor she me. We
were a pair of oddballs who'd hit it off and she stayed the night
rather than face the long trek home to Watford. That move
didn't go down very well, particularly with Billy, a vicious little
Scot with long fingernails and yellowing fangs who permanently
reeked of French cigarettes. Discovering us curled up in a
blanket on the living-room floor, he unceremoniously threw us
out the next morning.

Back at home they'd returned from a lousy holiday. They all
came back ill, and my
mother
, suffering from pains in her
chest, took herself off to the doctor, but owing to the fact that
she didn't have an appointment was told by the gorgon of a
receptionist to come back in two days and not to worry as
chest pains like hers invariably turned out to be nothing more
serious than trapped wind. The next morning at work cleaning
the Sandpiper club she had a massive
heart attack
and was
rushed to St Cath's. My sister rang me at work and
Joe Black
,
my long-suffering boss, allowed me to go home.

My dad was waiting in the corridor outside the intensive
care unit by the time I got to the hospital. He was sitting with
his head in his hands, barely holding back the tears, hardly
able to say hello without his bottom lip wobbling like a child's.

A doctor came over to him. 'Mr O'Grady? Hello, yes, do
you think I could have a word with you?' You could tell by the
tone of his voice that the news wasn't good. 'It's touch and go
at the moment, I'm afraid,' I heard him say. 'We're keeping a
close eye on her but I have to be honest with you, things aren't
looking good.' A stupid thing to say, I thought. What was wrong with being a little more optimistic? Hadn't I heard
someone say that where there's life there's hope? I wanted to
go over and shake him and point out that those three little
words 'touch and go', so carelessly spoken to a desperate man,
had in a single moment shattered my dad's world.

'Can I see her?' my father asked, ashen-faced. He was
allowed by her bedside for a few brief minutes, returning with
the tears streaming down his face.

'Take your father home,' the doctor said. 'There's no point
in your hanging around here all night. We'll ring if there's any
change.'

It was only a ten-minute walk back to our house from the
hospital, but it felt like a day's journey. My father was beside
himself. 'What'll I do without her?' he kept repeating through
his tears as we walked up the road. 'What'll I do without my
Molly?
' It was hard to keep up with him, he was walking so
fast, but when we got to the park he stopped and put his arms
round me. Please don't, Dad, I screamed out inwardly, please
don't do this in the street. We were not a touchy-feely family.
'What are we going to do if she dies?' he whispered, hugging
me tightly. 'I can't live without her.'