At My Mother's Knee

A
T HOME I'VE GOT A BOX CONTAINING WHAT I SUPPOSE YOU
might call the Family Archives. Family Archives sounds
very grand but it's actually just an ordinary cardboard box
containing an assortment of birth certificates, letters, old
diaries and sepia photographs – the flotsam and jetsam of lives
past. There's even a pair of yellowing false
teeth
wrapped up in
a handkerchief. God knows who they belonged to. It could
have been any one of my long-dead forebears.

When I was growing up in Birkenhead, nearly every adult I
knew had false teeth or at least had a couple of fake choppers
on a dental plate – either that or no teeth at all. My mother,
christened Mary but known to everyone as Molly, had every
tooth in her head extracted when false teeth became available
on the National Health. She came from a generation where a
poor diet and only the most primitive dental hygiene had taken
its toll on working-class teeth, therefore a set of gleaming
white gnashers courtesy of the NHS was a highly desirable
acquisition.

In the early sixties, when she was only forty-four, she underwent
this extreme dentistry. I remember her then as being quite
slim and pretty, though I can't recall what condition her teeth
were in. She used to say that the reason she'd had them all taken
out was because she had a mouthful of teeth 'like a row of bombed houses', which was a slight exaggeration. Like everyone
else, she had all her teeth out because it was fashionable.

The sight of her lying in bed, moaning softly, a tea towel
pressed to her swollen mouth and a bucket for blood on the
floor beside her, horrified me. That nightmare scene put me off
going
to the dentist
for life. Nothing and nobody could persuade
me to go, and I'm still the same today. OK, I might not
develop rigor mortis, throw myself on the frontroom floor
and hold my breath until my face turns a vivid scarlet at the
mere suggestion of a check-up any more, but if a tooth is playing
up I'll stupidly ignore it until the final hour. When I'm
defeated by the pain and my cheek is as swollen as Popeye's I'll
give in and go for treatment.

My patient dad would try and gently coax me into taking the
trip to see
Mr Aboud,
our dentist, inevitably with no luck.
Eventually my mother, exasperated by my carry-on, would get
me there by means of devious trickery. On the pretext of
visiting a clothes shop called Carson's that just happened to be
close to Aboud's House of Torture, she'd whip me into his
surgery with the speed and efficiency of the Childcatcher
before I realized what was happening.

Mr Aboud, a dapper little man who wore neroli oil in his hair
and spoke with an exotic accent – if he had chosen acting
instead of dentistry he would have made the perfect Hercule
Poirot – would place me firmly in his chair and press the foul-smelling
rubber mask over my nose and mouth, telling me to
'Close your eyes, child, and breathe deeeeply, deeply . . .' To my
ears he sounded just like Bela Lugosi in the Dracula films I'd
seen on the telly. The gas would take effect and, slipping into a
coma for what felt like hours but was actually only seconds, I
would have wild, technicolour dreams and come to with a start
on the leather bench in the waiting room, retching from the
after-effects of the gas into a bloodied bowl held by my mother.

Dentistry has a come a long way since the sixties. I've been through more dentists than I have socks over the years, but now
I've finally found a sympathetic marvel I'm a lot better. I still
won't have an anaesthetic though; I don't like the after-effects.
The dentist's creed back then was 'rip them out'. My aunty Chris,
who kept all her extracted
teeth
wrapped in tissue in a jewellery
box in her bedroom and was always threatening to have the
poisonous-looking fangs made into a necklace, could never
understand 'why anyone would want to spend their lives rootin'
around people's gobs' and dismissed all dentists as butchers.

After she'd had weeks of soup and soggy toast, the long-awaited
day came when Mr Aboud proudly presented my mother with
her brand new set of dentures. She went straight from the
dentist's to her
sisters
, Annie and Chrissie, and the new teeth
were premiered in their back kitchen.

'Come on then, Moll, give us a gander at the new choppers,'
said Annie, rubbing her hands together like a bookie with a hot
tip. My mum, lips pursed tightly, removed her headscarf and
arranged herself by the kitchen sink so that the light from the
window would catch the full effect of the revelation. She ran
her tongue back and forth across the teeth, cleared her throat
and then slowly curled back her top and bottom lips, rather
like a camel, to expose a set of startling white tombstones. For
a moment, nobody spoke. You could have heard a pin drop.

'Jesus tonight,' said Aunty Chris, 'it's Mr Ed.'

My mum hated those teeth. They joined the ranks of her bêtes
noires. The reasons she loathed the teeth were many. They
were agony. They crucified her, it was like having a mouthful
of barbed wire wrapped around your gums. She couldn't eat
with them, they fell out when she talked and she wasn't bloody
wearing them for no amount of sodding money so you can
shove that in your pipe, sunbeam, and smoke it.

She was forever taking them out when she was around the house and then forgetting where she'd put them. 'Where's me
teeth?' was a familiar cry around the halls of Holly
Grove. These peripatetic choppers would turn up in the most
unlikely places, sometimes with embarrassing consequences.

In my teens, I'd go for a night on the razz, clubbing it over
in Liverpool. If I'd managed to pull a bloke with a car, I'd try
to convince him that giving me a lift home through the Mersey
Tunnel would be well worth his time. Inevitably, such was my
gratitude at being spared the hell of the tunnel bus, I would ask
him in for a 'cup of tea' – a familiar euphemism for a grapple
on the frontroom couch, but a quiet one because my mum was
upstairs in bed. During the preliminary necking session I
would open one eye and to my utter mortification spy the
Teeth, wedged down next to a cushion or grinning up at me
obscenely from the pages of an upturned library book. As I
tried to hide them by dropping them on the floor and pushing
them under the sofa with my foot I'd be completely thrown off
my stride.