At My Mother's Knee (5 page)

It wasn't until a few weeks later, when I was searching in the
scary recesses of the cupboard under the kitchen sink for a tin
of shoe polish, that I came across the evidence that let the cat
out of the bag, so to speak. Hidden behind the assorted
bottles and tins that gather under kitchen sinks I found a tin of
Kitekat and a half-empty medicine bottle containing an
extremely suspect concoction.

I confronted her with the evidence.

'Give me that bottle,' she said, snatching it out of my hand.
'You haven't got any on your skin or drunk any, have you?' she
added, starting to panic.

'Did you poison that cat?' I asked, looking her straight in the
eye.

'Don't be so stupid,' she retorted, feigning outrage, and
claimed that the cat food was for 'that poor undernourished
creature that sometimes comes in the back yard' and that the
dubious contents of the bottle were for 'the drains'. Who did I
think I was?

Did this Birkenhead Borgia poison that unfortunate cat? She
always hotly denied it but I still have my doubts. I wouldn't
put it past her. She hated that cat with a passion and couldn't
have, wouldn't have, stood by and let it destroy her beautiful
garden and all the hard work she'd put into it without a fight.
Then there was the killing of 'her robin', an act that I think
finally tipped her over the edge and sounded the death knell for
the poor moggy. As she herself was wont to say, 'Desperate
times call for desperate measures.'

An Alsatian dog was kept permanently chained up in the back
yard of a house to the rear of ours and it barked incessantly,
twenty-four hours a day. All the neighbours complained, the
couple who owned the hound were reported to the RSPCA, the
police were called out when it escaped one day from its backyard
prison and supposedly attacked
George Long
, but still nothing was done about this poor dog who barked all day and
all through the night. After we'd endured two years of sleepless
nights, the wretched hound was found dead one morning
in strange and inexplicable circumstances.

At the time I was temporarily delivering papers for
Henshaw's
, our local newsagent-cum-grocer's.
Eileen Henshaw
liked to adopt a superior attitude, the sort she imagined befitted
a grocer's wife. My mother said she was common and that
she gave herself airs above her station. She was forever bragging
about her son's scholastic achievements and the fact that
he went to a grammar school. 'The teachers reckon the way
he's going on it'll be head boy for him in a few years,' she'd say
to my mother as she sliced into a lump of Cheshire cheese with
a length of wire. 'He's a child prodigal,' she'd add, picking
crumbs of cheese off the board and chewing on them, smiling
pityingly all the while over the counter at me.

'Common cow,' my mother would say on her way home,
'you'd think she ran Harrods instead of a shitty backstreet
midden.' My mother hated going into Henshaw's but it was the
only shop locally that sold newspapers. She didn't go in there
often, she usually sent me instead. She much preferred to shop
at
Mrs Profitt
's, but that good lady had sold up and gone to
live with her daughter, selling the house-cum-shop to the
couple who owned the dog.

Every Wednesday Mrs Profitt made her own meat and
potato pies in her little kitchen behind the shop. Her pies
had the distinction of being the 'talk of Tranmere' and
deservedly so, for I've yet to taste a better one. Her other claim
to fame was finding a tropical spider in a box of Fyffes
bananas. As she took the lid off the box and pulled aside
the straw, a hairy-legged monster hopped out and crawled
across the shop floor, causing more than a little fuss among
the women waiting to be served. Mrs Profitt, however, was as
cool as ice and calmly covered the spider with an upturned washing-up bowl and called the police. The spider was later
identified by Chester Zoo as relatively harmless but it rocketed
Mrs Profitt to fame. She ended up in the
Birkenhead
News
, photographed outside her shop holding a big bunch of
Fyffes bananas in one hand and a meat and potato pie in
the other, under the headline
SHOPKEEPER CATCHES DEADLY TARANTULA
.

Mrs Profitt was a real lady, not some jumped-up trollop who
didn't have an arse in her trousers, a pot to piss in or a window
to chuck it out of until she married that old nit,
George Henshaw
. . . My ma had a pretty low opinion of
Eileen Henshaw.

Eileen had a nasty habit of 'shouting your business' across a
packed shop. For my mother, if anyone, let alone a scandalmonger
like Eileen Henshaw, aired her private affairs in public
it was a crime punishable by death. She'd have been knitting a
noose if she'd heard Eileen spouting her venom at me.

'Can you tell your mother please, Paul, that she's overdue six
weeks now with her papers and if she doesn't pay by the end
of this week we'll have to cancel her
Echo
. It's getting beyond
a joke. Tell her I'm not a charity.'

Oh, the shame of it all. Ground, open up and swallow me,
let the Tardis appear and whisk me away to another dimension
where there are no mothers who make their kids go into shops
because they owe money and are too embarrassed to go in
themselves. Oh please, baby Jesus, let Eileen Henshaw fall
on her own bacon slicer and have her forked tongue sliced
from her wicked mouth and thrown to the dogs in the street.
In short, I was mortified. My only satisfaction was the knowledge
that my mother would go apeshit when I related this
message to her with a few exaggerations for inflammatory
effect, thrown in to stoke her furnace.

'Cheeky cow, who does she think she is, shouting me
business all over the bloody shop? I'll give her six weeks.'

She'd dip into either the rent money or one of the Prudential
Club books that were hidden against burglars underneath the
sofa cushion and pay up, worrying about how she'd balance
the books later on.

'Here, give her this,' she'd hiss, pushing the precious pound
into my hand. 'That's the club money short now, so when the
Rediffusion man calls don't answer the door.' We rented a
television from Rediffusion, everyone in Birkenhead did.

Reluctantly I shuffled off, dragging my feet, dreading the
humiliation that I was bound to endure at the hands of Eileen
Henshaw.

'Tell her to stuff her bloody
Echo
' was my mother's Parthian
shot as I slunk out of the back door. I'd hang about outside the
shop, trying to appear casual, waiting until it was empty of
customers and it was safe to go in. Typically, as soon as I
opened the door ten people appeared from nowhere and
followed me in.

'Don't tell me your mother's finally decided to pay her bill!'
Eileen would shriek in mock surprise, looking around the
shop at her audience and clapping her hands to her face. 'This
is a great day for the Henshaws, we'll be able to shut up shop
and go on holiday to Spain with the proceeds from your
mother's paper bill.' With what she probably considered a
refined laugh, the sort she imagined one heard in smart
drawing rooms all over Heswall, she tore the tickets out of the
big red order book that recorded the names of who owed what
and when.

Her husband George came in from the living quarters behind
the shop. He always wore a white overall with a pencil in his
top pocket as well as a permanent scowl. He took his
profession very seriously and that's why I was so surprised at
what came next.

'You've had experience as a paper lad, haven't you?' he said,
plonking a large freshly cooked ham on the counter. He prided himself on his boiled ham. 'Do you want a temporary job?'

Eileen's eyebrows shot up into her hairline along with her
voice. 'What sort of a job?' she shrieked at her husband,
picking bits off his ham like a carrion crow.

'We need a paper lad for a few weeks,' he said, moving the
ham away from the claws of his wife and to the safety of
the refrigerated glass-fronted counter. 'Do you have any better
ideas? We're desperate, we can't afford to be fussy, there's no
one else unless he wants to get up and do it.' Here George
Henshaw inclined his head towards the back room, where the
child prodigal sat stuffing his face with an Arctic roll and
watching the telly.

Eileen bristled and in no uncertain terms told her husband
that no child of hers was going to walk the streets of Tranmere
with a bag of newspapers weighing four times his own
body weight, twice a day in all sorts of weather, and if anybody
dared to think that she would be party to such a thing then
they didn't know her. 'And besides,' she added, 'he's far too
busy with his homework to deliver papers.'

She glanced into the back room to where the prodigal, now
replete, lay sprawled out on the sofa preparing for a long
session of children's telly and quickly closed the door. She
turned and looked at me over the counter as if she were forced
to buy a diseased slave at the market and then, shaking her
head in disgust, enquired grandly if I had any references.

'Don't talk daft, woman,' her husband snapped. 'We only
want him for a few weeks until the regular lad gets back. What
do you want references for? Get those papers marked up, he
can start now.' Child labour laws meant nothing to George.

And so, until Eileen sacked me a week later for missing a
Sunday morning when instead of dragging a sack of Sunday
papers around the streets I went to Wales with the
Legion of Mary
like the good Catholic lad I was, I became the Henshaws'
paper boy. My mother reckoned I was sacked because the Henshaws were Protestants and it served me right for working
for them. The
paper round
covered quite a large area, from
Old Chester Road to Church Road, which meant a lot of steep
hills with two sacks of heavy
Echo
s.

Eileen marked the papers up with the names and numbers of
the various streets, admonishing me all the while to pay
attention and put the right
Echo
in the right letter box, and not
to be late in the morning. The papers were then packed into
two large canvas bags and lowered over each shoulder. I
literally staggered off under the weight and out into the night.
I didn't care, I was earning half a crown a week.

Two hours later I reeled home and into the kitchen.

'Where the bloody hell have you been?' my mother said.
'Your father's been worried sick and your tea's ruined.'

'I've got a job,' I explained.

'A job? A job? What sort of job? Do you hear this, Paddy, he
says he's got a job?'

'I'm delivering papers for Henshaw's,' I said proudly, 'half a
crown a week.'

My mother stopped stirring gravy and stared at me as if I'd
just admitted that it was me who had shopped Anne Frank.

'Papers?' she exclaimed, screwing her face up and raising her
voice ten octaves. 'Papers! Henshaw's? Half a crown? Are you
listening to this, Paddy?' she shouted into the front room,
fanning herself with a tea towel. 'Delivering papers for
Henshaw's, how could you?' she asked. 'Mother of God!'

She couldn't have been less pleased if I'd announced that I
was joining the Ku Klux Klan. I'd thought she'd be delighted,
but there was no telling what the reaction would be when it
came to my mother. She used to accuse me of being contrary
and unpredictable – well, Mother, who did I inherit that from?
What's in the bitch comes out in the pup, to quote Aunty
Chris.

My dad came out from the front room. 'What's going on?'

'He's only gone and got a job with Henshaw's delivering
papers, that's what,' she said in the voice of a woman betrayed.
Glaring at me, she asked, 'What were you thinking?'

'Now, Molly . . .' My dad, forever the bearer of oil for
troubled waters, pointed out that it would do me no harm, was
only for three weeks and it would earn me some pocket money.

'Fair play to you,' he said to me over his shoulder as he
returned to his frontroom sanctum to read his
Echo
in peace.

'Working for that bitch,' my mother said, shaking her head
angrily. 'Well, tell her nowt, do you hear me? Nowt. She's a
nosey cow, that one, and I don't want her knowing my
business.'

I said nowt the morning that
Tina
, the owner of the barking
Alsatian, came into the shop to ask if she could use the phone.
She explained that hers was out of order, the phone box by the
flats had been vandalized and she had to ring the vet as a
matter of urgency, or words to that effect. Eileen loved this.
She could play Lady Bountiful and offer succour to one of her
flock, plus she got the gossip first-hand.

'I hope it's nothing serious,' she asked, brightening up and
opening the counter flap so Tina could 'come through'. She
stood listening at the open door while Tina made her call in the
back room, and repeated everything she heard to her willing
audience of customers. 'Oh, she got up this morning and the
dog was dead in the yard . . . stone cold by the outside lavatory
. . . doesn't know when it died, some time in the night . . . Oh
my God, she thinks it's been poisoned by someone!'

I kept my head down and loaded the morning papers into
my sack, hoping nobody would notice the deep red flush on
my face.

Tina finished her phone call and stood behind the counter.
Eileen, aware that she held the stage, turned her expression
into one of grave concern and put a solicitous arm around
Tina's shoulders.

'Here's the money for the phone call, Mrs Henshaw,' Tina
said in a small voice.

'I wouldn't hear of it, love, put it away,' Ma Henshaw said,
full of the milk of human kindness as she pushed the coppers
back into the pathetic Tina's hands. 'You put it back in your
purse, love. You poor thing, I can't believe that someone round
here would poison a dog.'

Her voice trembling, more from the attention she was receiving
than from the death of the dog, Tina said, 'Oh, I can, Mrs
Henshaw. They hated my dog, especially that lot at the back of
us.'