At My Mother's Knee (14 page)

Peering into the little mirror inside the lid, she applied the
black gunk carefully to her eyelashes. You weren't supposed to
talk to her during this tricky operation as it spoiled her concentration
and might make her flick a bit of the mascara on to
her cheek – and then she'd vent her frustration on the offender
with the kind of language that set Aunty Anne tut-tutting. I
always wondered why she found it physically impossible to
perform this task with her mouth closed. She sat combing on
the mascara like a giant goldfish, her mouth set in a perfect O.

'I'm running across to the bookies,' Aunty Anne said, coming
in from the kitchen. 'D'ya want me to put a bet on for you?'

'Yurgh,' Aunty Chris grunted, flicking the tips of her eyelashes
with the brush. They were sticky with beads of mascara,
one of which was threatening to drop on to her face if she
didn't act fast.

'Well, come on,' Annie said impatiently, 'they'll be under
starter's orders if you don't get a move on.'

'Urgh, uh, urgh.' The sound Aunty Chris made in the back
of her throat as a response to her sister's urging could be
loosely translated as 'What's your bloody hurry, woman? Can't
you see I'm at a critical stage in the proceedings and if you
hurry me this blob could fall on my freshly made-up face, ruining
the entire effect?' She caught the offending blob with an
adroit swipe from the tip of a tissue and transferred it to the
saucer of ash and cigarette stubs that was already beginning to
overflow on to the table.

'I wish you'd use a bloody ashtray,' Aunty Anne muttered,
lifting the cup and saucer and taking it into the kitchen. 'It's a
disgusting habit, this,' she said, tipping the stubs into the bin and tutting. 'Bloody disgusting.'

In the absence of the saucer Aunty Chris balanced her fag on
the end of the table. The line of burn marks that pitted the
table top, and her bedside cabinet, bore testament to the many
cigarettes that had rested there previously.

'Put two bob each way on Lucky Jim,' she said, taking the
money from her purse. 'And two bob to win on Saffron Sunset.
Give us a rub of your hump for luck and then get a bloody
move on, it's nearly five past.' When it came to bets Aunty
Chris liked to leave it till she was right at the wire.

Grabbing the money from the table and checking to see that
it was the correct amount as she ran down the hall, Aunty
Anne was off at the pace of a whippet to catch the ten past one
race.

'I hope her 'orse is as fast,' Aunty Chris said, watching her
go as she started to take out her rollers. Unlike the application
of her make-up, this operation was completed at high speed.
As each roller came out it was deftly thrown into the wicker
hair tidy. Then she attacked the tight blonde rolls with a brush,
backcombing bits here and there until she had teased her coiffure
into the required shape, finishing it off with a tail comb,
using the end to twist and curl the tips.

Satisfied with her crowning glory, she lit another fag and let
it hang from her lip as she proceeded to empty half a can of
lacquer on to her hair. It was a miracle she never went up in
flames as, one eye closed, she filled the room with the
poisonous fumes of Belair, the tip of her fag glowing ominously
as it caught the occasional tail end of a prolonged and heavy
burst. Next she'd go down the back yard to avail herself of the
outside lav, and after a 'quick pee' she'd go upstairs to dress,
reappearing minutes later in her conductress's uniform, looking,
as she liked to say, 'immaculate'.

'I'll just make that 22 down to the ferry,' she'd say, fixing her
tie in the mirror over the fireplace. 'If the Pools man calls, me
coupon's behind the clock.' She dabbed her cheeks carefully with a spot of rouge from an old-fashioned cardboard pot. A
little of that stuff went a long way. In the pot it was a vivid
scarlet, but applied carefully it gave her cheeks a rosy blush.

The last thing she did was put her lipstick on. This involved
a lot of smacking of lips and dipping back and forth into the
mirror so she could judge if it was going on evenly. When she
was sure the crimson coating on her lips was perfect she would
blot them against what looked like a cigarette paper. A squirt
of My Sin behind the ears and on her wrists and she was off to
catch the bus to the Woodside terminus to start her two-till-ten
shift.

Being on the buses and therefore in the public eye was akin
to show business, according to Aunty Chris. She wouldn't
dream of going to work with unpressed trousers, unpolished
shoes and less than perfect make-up, and neither would the
other clippies who rode and ruled on the Birkenhead
Corporation buses. They were a smart lot, both in appearance
and in attitude, and were admired and respected by the passengers.
Without doubt, though, Aunty Chris was the pride of
the fleet. She ran a tight ship, or rather bus, and passengers felt
safe on her route. She was scrupulously honest. If she let
anyone off their fare, for whatever reason, she would make it
up with her own money. Sometimes she let me ring the bell.
One ring for stop, two for go, and three for keep moving, we're
full up.

I regret the passing of the clippie and the conductor as I do
the Routemaster buses.When
Ken Livingstone
phased them
out and replaced them with the impractical and cumbersome
bendy bus in London it was as if he had removed a vital lyric
from a favourite song. There was something very reassuring
and nostalgically romantic about a London bus, lights ablaze,
going slowly over Tower Bridge on a winter's evening. Made
you want to get home for your tea.

*

When
war
broke out Aunty Chris was nineteen. She joined the
ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service
) and was stationed in
Norfolk, where she trained to be a height and range finder for
the men who worked the ack-ack guns. Having the sharp eye
of an accomplished darts player she found this no problem,
and she was invariably right on target. Occasionally she got to
fire the shells herself, even though it was considered a man's
job, and proved herself to be more than competent, earning
herself the moniker 'Never Miss Chris'. She was fearless
and quite a sight, apparently, blasting enemy aircraft out of the
sky during a heavy raid, her face fully made up as always, the
ubiquitous fag hanging out of the corner of her mouth.

There were plenty of US army and airforce bases in Norfolk
and Aunty Chris was very popular with the 'Yanks' at the
dances. She never ran out of Woodbines and stockings and
although she appeared to be the archetypal good-time girl it
was mostly bluff. She was nowhere near as world-weary and
experienced as she painted herself, and in reality she was rather
naive.

However, in the words of the music-hall song, 'Only a glass
of champagne, but it drove a young girl into sin,' though in
Aunty Chris's case it is more likely to have been a couple of
Guinness. For as D-Day approached, when she was on a boat
about to leave for France, the results of a routine medical disclosed
that she was three months pregnant.

She was discharged and sent home, but fearing her father's
reaction to the news she turned up on the doorstep of 23 Holly
Grove instead of Lowther Street.

It wasn't good news for a single, working-class, Catholic girl
to find herself pregnant in those days. It could mean a life
sentence in the Magdalen laundry, a cruel institution for single
mothers run by an unholy army of nuns who forcibly removed
the newborn babies from their mothers and gave them up for
adoption. The traumatized girls were left to a lifetime of slavery under a brutal regime in the laundry as a penance for
their sins.

Being a Catholic, however lapsed, meant an abortion was
out of the question; besides, Aunty Chris had heard too many
horror stories about desperate young women who had visited
Fat Pat Murphy
, a backstreet abortionist in Rock Ferry, and
ended up bleeding to death in agony, to even consider termination.
No, she intended to have her child and bring him up as
a single mother, a brave decision to make back then. The hard
part was going to be keeping it secret from her father and the
neighbours. My mother was angry but sympathetic; she knew
that underneath her younger sister's tough veneer lay a vulnerable
girl with little knowledge and experience of men. She
vowed to 'track down the bastard responsible for this' but got
no help from Aunty Chris, who was unwilling to give any
information as to the identity and whereabouts of the father.
She simply refused to discuss it, throwing a strop if the matter
was mentioned and 'taking to her bed'.

There were rumours, of course. She was, as they say, the talk
of the washhouse: she'd had one too many at a party for her
birthday and got carried away with a 'Yank'; she'd fallen in
love with an officer; there were even dark hints that her condition
could be the result of a rape. My dad, on leave from
France, went down to Norfolk to see if he could glean any
information around the camps, but came home none the wiser.
The identity of her child's father was never disclosed. The
subject was taboo. She never spoke of it over the years, and
took her secret with her to the grave.

A suitable explanation was concocted to explain Aunty Chris's
reappearance. She'd been discharged from the ATS due to poor
eyesight and she was living at Holly Grove to keep my ma
company and help with the kids while my dad was at war. This
would do at least for the time being; when Chrissie's
pregnancy
really started to show they'd have to come up with something
else. It wasn't an easy pairing. Both women were volatile to say
the least, and there were as many explosions inside Holly
Grove as there were in the skies above it. Chrissie teamed up
with Vera Lalley again and went back to work as a clippie on
the buses, and when she could no longer conceal the fact that
she was pregnant she hid herself away from the prying eyes of
her passengers and colleagues in a Chinese laundry. Working
six days a week from seven in the morning till eight at night
meant she was out of sight. The laundry was opposite the
brewery in Oxton Road, which meant that as well as the long
hours she had a fair distance to walk. Her job was to iron the
stiff shirt collars with an array of flat irons, heated by a castiron
range, hunched over an ironing board for thirteen hours a
day: back-breaking work for which she earned two pounds
ten a week.

She went into labour during an air raid. There was a shelter
in the brewery but she chose to walk home and take her
chances rather than risk giving birth in the shelter. It was a
particularly heavy raid but somehow she made it back to Holly
Grove, screaming with every twinge on the way. There had
been a direct hit on a street at the back of the house and my
mother was able to get her into one of the ambulances that had
turned up, slipping her own wedding ring on to her sister's finger
on the way to the hospital and registering her as Mrs
Savage to avoid the stigma of single motherhood. Aunty Chris
gave birth to a boy, whom she called John, in
Grange Mount Hospital
, her screams drowned out by the noise of the bombs
falling outside.

John was hidden in Holly Grove. Aunty Chris went to work
for
Littlewoods Pools
and if anybody asked who the baby
belonged to my mother would say she was minding him for a
friend. A deeply suspicious Rose Long refused to swallow this story, having guessed the truth a while back. She went about
the neighbourhood painting Aunty Chris as a slut, until Aunty
Chris got to hear the tales she was spreading and 'dragged her
out of the house by her bleached blonde 'ead'. On one of his
rare visits to Holly Grove, their father was told that the child
wriggling on the mat belonged to one of the neighbours.

Eventually my dad, home on leave, took the little boy down
to Lowther Street and introduced him to his grandfather. Our
grandfather's reaction was to go out and buy him a set of
clothes from O'Kell's in Exmouth Street. He was saddened that
Chrissie had thought she couldn't come to him for help, but
said no more about it, welcoming John into the family and
defying any outsiders to ask embarrassing questions about the
boy's parentage.

After that, Aunty Chris didn't last long at Holly Grove. Like
my ma she had an explosive temper and the two frequently
clashed. The front door was hanging off its hinges because of
the number of times it was slammed shut as one of the women
'banged out'. Eventually Aunty Chris, after a particularly
vicious row, banged out of the house for good and went back
to Lowther Street. Aunty Anne had just given birth to my
cousin Tricia, and as well as her young son Michael, she had
her irascible old father to care for. Nevertheless, she found
room for her sister and nephew and there they stayed.

It was a busy house. Annie and Harold had three kids in all,
with Maureen, the youngest, only a few years older than me.
She came on holiday to Ireland with us and we spent hours
together in the front of a bus whenever our mothers fancied 'a
little spin out', as they put it.

Our Mo, as she is known, had a friend who would call for
her by putting her lips through an open knothole in the backyard
door. In the vernacular of the day, this friend was said to
be 'a bit daft'.

'Is your Mooreeen in?'

'No, love, she's out.' Aunty Chris, filing her nails on the
backyard step, would answer the melancholy voice booming
out from the disembodied lips at the bottom of the door. 'Who
shall I say called?'

Tricia, Mo's older sister, had an auburn beehive that defied
gravity. She was never seen without her best mate Maeve,
whose name I was to borrow years later for Lily's confirmation
name. Tricia – I'm sure she'd deny it today but I could swear
that I saw her doing it – used to practise her jiving technique,
in the absence of a partner, by tying a stocking to the doorknob.