At My Mother's Knee (9 page)

With Bridget's encouragement she produced sponge cakes
filled with freshly whipped cream, soufflés light as a feather,
scones, apple pies, biscuits, luxuriant egg custards and rich and
creamy rice puddings by the score. She baked from morning till
night. My mum was a wonderful cook and was delighted to be
able to show off her skills, particularly since she had this
infinite well of culinary riches to draw from. She secretly
basked in the praise heaped upon her by the Grady family and
she slowly thawed and began to blossom. Whatever my mother
said about Ireland – and she had a lot to say on the matter, all
of it contradictory – she and Aunty Bridget shared a lifelong
affection for each other.

My dad was born into good farming stock. Hadn't his father
fought for the right of the working man to farm his own land?
But my dad had no aptitude for tilling the land. His heart
wasn't in it. Years later he would reminisce about growing up
in Ireland, telling of how they would take the donkey and cart
down to the bogs and bring home the turf to provide fuel. He
would paint dreamy pictures of cutting the hay on balmy
summer afternoons and building golden haystacks until,
exhausted, they would collapse on top of the haycart and enjoy a supper of freshly baked bread with great hunks of cheese and
onion washed down with a bottle of porter. These were very
sociable occasions, armies of family and neighbours turning
out en masse. That was what he really missed about Ireland.
What he enjoyed was the craic, the good company and all that
goes with it. The physical labour was a necessary evil, tolerated
if it meant good times with family and friends.

In his teens he was a drummer in an Irish show group, playing
popular standards such as 'The Black Velvet Band' at
dances and carnivals in villages and towns. I remember seeing
a photograph of him many years ago; the photo has long since
vanished but the image of him sat behind a drum kit, his hair
and shirt soaking wet with sweat, eyeing up the line of drinks
on top of the piano, is imprinted on my memory. Playing in the
band broke the monotony of farming.

One morning he woke to find a note from his sister Sadie.
She'd packed her bags and emigrated to England. That was
probably the final straw for my dad, alone in the house, with
the daunting task of running a farm on his own before him. He
could see no future for himself in Ballincurry. He felt he was a
burden to his uncle James, who had his own family and farm
to look after, and so, like his sisters before him, he decided to
take the boat to Liverpool.

He put the farm up for sale, though it wasn't until July 1946
that it was finally auctioned off for the grand sum of £885. My
dad got £432 1s 9d, Sadie £50 and Mary £10, with the rest
going on legal fees. Hopefully Uncle James benefited from the
sale; that good man certainly deserved it as without his
sensibility and guiding hand over the years the farm would
have gone under long before.

The year after my dad received his share of the farm my
mum inherited £104 14s on the
death
of her father. This meant
that between them they had £536 15s 9d, nothing by today's
standards but a small fortune back in the forties. They blew every penny. When you've been used to a life of poverty,
common sense can go out the window when an unexpected
windfall comes your way. I'm surprised that they didn't invest
in some property – they had the perfect opportunity to buy a
house – but they didn't, preferring instead to continue to rent
Holly Grove. They ended up doing so for the rest of their lives,
something my mum deeply regretted in later years.

'That money just slipped through our fingers like fairy gold,'
she said reflectively. 'But we were young and stupid and we'd
had enough of scrimping and saving and wearing the same
dress
, so we went mad and enjoyed ourselves.' They certainly
did that. They celebrated on a grand scale, sharing their good
fortune with family and friends. My brother and sister were
kitted out with a complete set of new clothes; Mum and Aunty
Chris, able to indulge their fantasies for once, spent a fortune
on the New Look, a style introduced by Christian Dior in the
spring of 1947, adding a couple of fox furs for a touch of film
star glamour and, in Aunty Chris's case, a pillbox hat with a
veil that she would blow smoke through à la
Marlene Dietrich
. My dad, always a snappy dresser and recently
demobbed from the air force, treated himself to a new
wardrobe as well: bespoke suits, shoes, overcoats and trilbies,
so he cut a dash when he went for a drink to St Laurence's
club. On a Saturday night the walls of Holly Grove would
shake, the windows vibrate, only this time not from the effect
of German bombs but from the racket as my mum and dad
partied into the night. They went on a glorious spending spree
– and who could blame them? After the misery and austerity of
the war years, this influx of cash gave them a chance to live it
up.

Back in 1936, Paddy was green to the gills on that morning
when he dragged his case down the gangplank and on to the
landing stage at Liverpool pierhead. The Dublin-to-Liverpool run is a notoriously rough crossing and my dad was no sailor.
His one and only suit was crumpled and creased. He'd tried to
get a good night's sleep on the deck of the lurching vessel,
curled up underneath his overcoat for warmth, resting his head
on his folded cap, one arm flung across a battered suitcase held
together with string and a belt. Its contents were pitiful: a few
shirts, a change of underwear, a sweater, a pair of trousers, his
prayer book and a couple of pounds of bacon and sausage
wrapped in newspaper to keep him going when he got to
'heathen England'.

The landing stage was teeming with people, mostly immigrants
like himself. Thankful to be back on dry land, he stood
for a moment to catch his breath and acclimatize himself to his
new surroundings. He was still rolling slightly from the motion
of the ship. Jesus, he was feeling rough; his eyes burned from
lack of sleep, he ached all over and for a moment he thought
he was going to throw up. A good few pints of Guinness
and numerous shots of whiskey had been taken in Dublin and
on board the boat as he bade farewell to the owld country.
Little did he know that he would soon be bidding farewell to
his surname, for when war broke out and he joined the RAF a
careless government official mistakenly added an 'O' as a prefix
on his identity papers and we've remained O'Grady to this day.

Lighting a Sweet Afton to calm his churning stomach, he
looked about to find a place to get a cup of tea and something
to eat. The pierhead had plenty of cafés to choose from. He
found a hatch in the wall of a dilapidated hut and ordered a
cup of tea and a couple of rashers on toast.

'D'ya mean a bacon sarnie, paddy?' the ferocious-looking
woman behind the counter barked in her unfamiliar Scouse
twang. He'd changed his Irish punts for English currency in the
bank in Dublin and counted out the unfamiliar pennies and
farthings on the counter. ' 'Urry up, will ya,' urged the woman
impatiently, 'I haven't got all bloody day.'

'Now just hold on there, missus, and take a breath. I'm just
off the boat from Dublin,' said my dad in his easy way.

'Bloody micks,' spat the woman. 'Place is crawling with
them. Here's your tea.'

Feeling better after his breakfast, he rinsed his face and
hands in the public fountain, dampened down his unruly hair,
took out his cap and put it on. He weighed up his situation. He
had a couple of bob in his pocket, a local contact and the
promise of a job as a navvy on a building site. His sister was
living over in Birkenhead along with a smattering of cousins,
so he wasn't entirely alone. What was his problem? Wasn't this
what he'd left the farm for? Wasn't this what he wanted? A
fresh start? Maybe he'd even meet a decent girl and fall in
love.

'C'mon, Pakie, get yourself on that boat to Birkenhead,' he
told himself, suddenly optimistic as he joined the crowds fighting
their way up the gangplank of the Mersey ferry.

He found lodgings with a Mr and Mrs
Fawcett, a couple
known as 'Old Ned
' and '
Ma Fawcett
'. They had two sons
called
William
and Harold, both merchant seamen. Harold
had married my mother's sister Anne, so my dad would already
have been a familiar face through his friendship with Harold
when he approached my mother in that dance hall and asked
her politely if she'd like to 'get up'. Before the end of the night
my mother would be coyly asking him if he'd like to 'come
round for his tea'.

Her father, Mick Savage, approved of this relationship.
Wasn't
Paddy
a good Irishman who brought a drop of
whiskey with him when he came calling? They had a genuine
affection for each other. For my dad, Mick was a reminder of
home.

My mum and dad's
courtship
took place in dance halls and
picture palaces and the front parlour of Mick Savage's house,
29 Lowther Street. My dad was enchanted by this pretty young woman. She was unlike her sisters. She'd never stand at the top
of the entry and wolf-whistle like her sister Chrissie did.
Sometimes she could be aloof and detached, preoccupied with
her own thoughts.

When they were alone together he would tease her and sing
to her his Irish songs, charming her with his Gaelic magic.
Whenever they were separated for any length of time they kept
the torch burning in the many love letters that they wrote to
each other. As war loomed over the country, my dad asked
Mick Savage if he could have his eldest daughter's hand in
marriage.

'By all means, Paddy,' he replied, delighted, 'take the hell-cat
off me hands and good luck to you.'

They were married on 10 February 1940 at St Laurence's
Church. War against Germany had been declared six months
earlier and rationing was in force. A
wedding
dress required an
impossible amount of coupons so my mother was married in a
smart velvet hat with a veil and her three-quarter-length
Persian lamb coat. My dad wore his navy blue suit that was a
little short in the sleeves. The wedding breakfast was held in
Lowther Street.

Poor Ma
Fawcett, my dad's landlady, was to die in agony
from stomach cancer. Ned
, her husband, out of his mind with
worry, refused to give her the pain-relieving medication
prescribed by the hospital as he was convinced that it was
slowly killing her.

After Ma Fawcett died, Ned went into a decline. Unable to
cope without Ma by his side, he took his own life. Draping his
dead wife's coat over his head, he sat in front of the gas fire and
inhaled the deadly fumes, slumping forward as the gas took
effect and splitting his skull open on the corner of the hearth.
It was my aunty Chris who found him lying dead on the
parlour floor.

To a Catholic family, the unspeakable act of taking one's own life meant violating one of the commandments: Thou
Shalt Not Kill. Suicide was a mortal sin and your soul was
condemned for all eternity, cursed to roast in the fires of Hell.
Old Ned's death was never spoken about again. In the early
sixties, suicide was still a criminal offence. The family were
shocked and shamed into silence, the matter closed, the subject
taboo.

M
Y MUM, BORN IN 1916, WAS THE ELDEST OF THE SAVAGE
girls. Two years later Anne was born, followed by
Christine. My maternal grandparents,
Michael
and
Anne Savage
, had married in 1914 on the same day that
King George V
and
Queen Mary
made a royal visit to Birkenhead to open
the new entrance to Bidston Hill. This wouldn't have
impressed Grandad Savage, who wasn't a royalist. He was an
irascible Irishman and if the tragic death of his young wife
softened him he certainly didn't show it.

My mother would tell me the story of her
mother's death
in
the melodramatic style of Charles Dickens relating the death of
Oliver Twist
's Nancy on his American tour. Lowering her voice
to a suitably sombre tone, she would conjure up a vision of
backstreet Birkenhead and all its poverty-stricken misery.
Open sewers, workhouses, means testing, rickets, the whole kit
and caboodle. The way she told it made it sound like one of
Catherine Cookson's grimmer sagas – only sadly her tale was
true.

I didn't really find out how grim it was until the Winter of
Discontent in '79, a truly foul winter. (I know I'm jumping the
gun here but what of it?) I was back living at home, skint and
down on my luck again. The pipes in the loft had burst, as they
always did at this time of year, flooding the bedrooms. Outside a blizzard raged, and the volume of snow and ferocity of the
wind brought down the power lines and cut off the electricity.
Birkenhead came to a standstill. My mother and I sat in the
front room of Holly Grove wrapped in a duvet, the sofa pulled
close to the gas fire for warmth. Apart from the fire, the only
light in the room came from a couple of votive candles in little
blue plastic containers that she'd brought back from
Lourdes
and was loath to use.

She kept the candles in her bedroom drawer among her
smalls, along with other holy relics that she'd been given as
gifts or had brought home as souvenirs from her travels
to the various shrines that a peripatetic Virgin Mary
had appeared at some time or other. Wherever Mary had
appeared, my mother and the
Union of Catholic Mothers
would follow. Coaches bearing this horde of devoted
groupies would sweep into any town in the UK that had a
shrine to the great lady: Walsingham, Pantasa, Cardigan and
Doncaster.

The women would descend on these towns and their shrines
gripped by a frenzy of religious fervour, lighting candles, praying
at grottoes, flirting with priests, singing hymns with gusto
and then inevitably rounding off the session before they had
their sit-down tea by doing the Stations of the Cross. This
involved staggering up a hill barefoot, clutching rosary beads
to bosoms and stopping to say a decade of the rosary at
allocated points, each representing Jesus's journey to Mount
Calvary and his crucifixion. This act sorted out the women
from the girls and only the truly devout endeavoured to face
the stony climb without the protection of their sandals. But the
St Joseph's, Birkenhead, branch of the Union of Catholic
Mothers were hard. Without hesitation and regardless of age,
physical condition and capability, these game girls would whip
off their shoes and stockings and, hanging on to each other for
grim death, would slowly make the ascent up the hill, puffing and blowing, in a long unsteady line. From an aerial view they
must have looked like a crimplene snake.