At My Mother's Knee (16 page)

M
Y DAD HAD ATTENDED A LITTLE COUNTRY SCHOOL IN
Glinsk, and although he had left by the time he was thirteen
to work on the farm he said that his schooling had been
excellent. He was certainly very clever. He had a good head for
figures, wrote in a beautiful copperplate hand and held
extremely strong and unshakable opinions about nearly everything
in life. He taught me
to read
. By the time I was four I was
able to read my copy of
TV Comic
from cover to cover. In a
way this went against me when I started school.

My first school was
St Joseph's
, a Catholic primary in a road
that went by the Blytonesque name of Dingle Dell, but was
actually a row of extremely run-down houses that had probably
once been grand but had long been converted into bedsits.
My
teacher
, Miss Bolger, thought she had a child prodigy on
her hands when she heard me rattle through the entire Janet
and John series in ten minutes flat and then proceed to read out
a hefty chunk from a
Reader's Digest
. Consequently, she left
me to it, giving her time and attention to the slower pupils in
the class of thirty-five kids.

I was more than happy to sit at the back of the class during
arithmetic lessons and mouth my way through the two times
table. I didn't have a clue about any of it, and had no interest
in figures. They might as well have been hieroglyphics.

It wasn't until I'd been there over a year that Miss Bolger
twigged that I had no idea what two times two meant. 'Paul
must apply himself and catch up with his arithmetic,' she had
the nerve to write on my
school report
. It was her bloody fault
that I was behind in the first place, and it's thanks to her that
I've been catching up ever since. You should see me trying to
work out my bank statements, VAT and tax bills. It's no
wonder I've had heart attacks. Maths is a complete mystery to
me. Everything about it eludes me. Logarithms, algebra,
fractions – they could be some sort of alien language for all I
know.

I sweated and fidgeted my way through every single maths
lesson as I went through school, dreading being asked a
question or, even worse, told to come out to the front of the
class to work out the sum on the blackboard. Blind panic
would grip me as I took the piece of chalk and faced the board,
all eyes upon me, everyone waiting to see what answer I would
come up with. I'd stare blankly at the incomprehensible figures
before me, and try to resist the overpowering urge to scrawl
something obscene across the board and then make a run for
it. Nowadays I would be recognized as 'dyslexic with figures',
but back in the 1960s I was classed as just plain thick.

'There are moments that you remember all your life . . .' So go
the opening lyrics of a song from the movie
Yentl
. I love that
film, and I ain't ashamed to stand up and admit it. I saw it
nearly every day for a month when I was working in a
club called Madame Arthur's in Copenhagen
. One of the regulars at
Madame Arthur's worked in the box office of a little cinema
just round the corner from the club, and he let me in each afternoon
for free. His name was Jens, and like me he was a big
Barbra fan. No, he was more than a fan – he was a crazed
obsessive. He lived and breathed
Barbra Streisand
twenty-four
hours a day. She was his purpose in life – the reason why he got up in the morning. Well, as you can imagine, it got a bit
wearing after a while. I mean, I'm a big fan of the woman
myself but I don't bang on about her all bloody day. Nor is
every conceivable inch of wall space in my flat adorned with
photos and posters of her.

I don't stand in front of the mirror on the wardrobe door
and throw my arms about dramatically as I mime to the words
of 'Don't Rain On My Parade' either. (Well, not all the time –
only occasionally, like when I'm feeling cheesed off or slightly
drunk. You should try it yourself some time. It can be quite
energizing, a bit like a workout. You can also march round the
kitchen to 'Before The Parade Passes By' from
Hello, Dolly!
if
you're up to it, using the mop as your baton, but be careful of
the light fittings.
Hello, Dolly!
is not one of her best films.
She's too young to play Dolly Levi, and— Oh, God, I'm
beginning to sound like Jens.)

I will confess to knowing all the words to 'Pappa Can You
Hear Me', but then so would you if you'd sat through
Yentl
every day for a month. It was either that or rot in the freezing
garret that the management of Madame Arthur's provided in
the way of accommodation for visiting acts: two tiny rooms
in the roof of a crumbling building that had formerly been a
wartime brothel. A slum, basically, but they thought it was
perfectly adequate for two struggling drag queens in the
middle of a freezing Danish winter. We worked each night in
the club, and slept all day; there was very little to do out of
doors that was warm and cheap. Jens was a godsend. I got to
keep warm and see La Streisand for free, even if it did mean
listening to his endless eulogies of his goddess.

But I'm digressing badly here. All I wanted to say was that
those opening lyrics – 'There are moments that you remember
all your life', in case you'd forgotten – apply to my first day at
St Joseph's
. It's a memory imprinted on my mind. I can see
myself now, hanging on to the hem of my mother's coat as she chatted to another mother called
Celia Mooney
, whose little
boy Franny was also starting
school
that day. He stared at me
indifferently from behind his mother's back, a pale, delicate
child with buck teeth and ginger hair.

'Go and sit down with Paul,' said Mrs Mooney, dragging
Franny forward by the arm and virtually swinging him into a
seat behind a double desk. 'He can be your little friend.' She
beckoned me to come and sit down next to him. 'Come on,
chuckles,' she called out cheerily, 'sit here next to our Franny.
You two can be little pals, can't you?' She stood back and put
her head to one side, considering. 'Ah, God love them, look at
them, they could almost be brothers, couldn't they?' she said
fondly to my mother. 'They've got the same colouring.'

My mother forced a nervous laugh. The snob in her would
rather I sat next to another boy. A posh boy, not one that
looked as though he'd been dressed by the parish. She also sent
up a silent prayer that no one in their right mind would ever
mistake Franny for her own flesh and blood. My hair was reddish
brown; Franny's was the colour of a glass of carrot juice.
'Yes,' she said faintly to a beaming Celia Mooney, her tone
lacking any conviction whatsoever, 'brothers . . .' Her voice
tailed off into thin air.

The mothers were told to leave. Miss Bolger was ushering
them out with a forced grin frozen on her face. 'Say goodbye
to your mummies, children,' she shouted over the mothers'
heads, setting half the kids off into a frenzy of hysterics. My
mother gave me a sad little smile and one last wave as she
left the room and I could feel the muscles in the back of my
throat beginning to contract. Suddenly I felt overwhelmed by
my new surroundings and I was unsure of what to say to
Franny.

'Are you going to cry?' I asked him, feeling my bottom lip
beginning to wobble dangerously.

'What for?' he asked scornfully, pulling a bag of sports mixtures out of his pocket, his sharp little eyes darting
suspiciously round the class as he hid it from view under the
desk. 'I ain't scared of her.' He nodded towards Miss Bolger,
who was bashing lumps out of her desk with the wooden back
of the duster she used to clean the blackboard with in a futile
attempt to gain the attention of the class. 'It's only school. D'ya
wanna sweet?' Franny might have looked like a nervous little
mouse on the outside but inside he was as hard as nails. A born
survivor.