At My Mother's Knee (18 page)

'Wipe your nose, child,' the Bolger snapped as Plug sat blowing
a snot bubble out of his right nostril. 'Where is your
handkerchief, for heaven's sake?'

Plug, slow and adenoidal, looked up balefully. 'Haven't got
one,' he said, one eye fixed on the Bolger, the other staring at
the ceiling.

'Well tell your mother to give you one in future,' she said,
handing Plug a paper tissue from the supply she kept in her
pocket for such emergencies as blowing noses, wiping sticky
hands and removing vomit from suede shoes. Shuddering, she
moved quickly down the table and pretended to busy herself
with a small child at the end so she didn't have to watch.

'Yes, Miss Bolger,' chanted Plug, wiping his nose on the back
of his sleeve and shoving the tissue in the top of his sock.

Once everyone was seated and had finally calmed down the
Bolger gave the frightening woman, whom we now knew
as Miss McGregor, a curt nod. This was the signal for Miss
McGregor's minions to spring into action and remove the lids
from the great boiling urns. The rising steam was caught in the
solitary shaft of sunlight that struggled to make its way into
the hall through the big leaded window high up in the wall
above Miss McGregor's head. It looked like hell's very own
kitchen and the McGregor woman the devil herself,
surrounded as she was by curls of rising steam. So this was
what Methodists were like.

'Line up,' shouted Miss McGregor, eyeing our table. 'Little
ones first.' Open-mouthed with fear, we dutifully lined up
and filed past the counter clutching our plates, on to which
unsmiling women slapped the unappealing fare. The thin
watery discharge that called itself gravy was doled out by Miss
McGregor herself, who stood at the end of the counter, her
crimson face shiny with sweat, one hand on the ladle, the other
on her ample hip, dribbling the brownish liquid over our food
as parsimoniously as if it were her own lifeblood.

When every child had its food and was seated again, the
Bolger said grace. As I sat with head bowed and hands
clenched in prayer, listening to Plug sniffing and burbling next
to me, I opened one eye and took a sneaky peek at my first
school dinner. My heart froze. It was a piece of liver. Filthy,
stinking liver sat there sniggering at me on the plate, with a pair of cold, grey, waxen boiled potatoes, a trickle of cold
gravy staining their sides, for company, and a flaccid mound of
the ubiquitous vegetable common to all school dinners of a
certain era – overcooked, limp, wet cabbage. I could've heaved
again.

There was no way that these Methodists were going to get
me to swallow one mouthful of this disgusting fodder and that
was that. Fortunately, Franny would eat everything and
anything that was put before him, and as he was always
hungry it was no hardship for him to devour another piece of
liver that I'd deftly flicked off my plate and on to his. Franny
got two school meals a day for quite some time as I passed him
the food I didn't like, which was just about everything, until
eventually, to my annoyance, the Bolger caught up with me
and separated us, banishing Franny to another table. Luckily,
though, there was still Plug. Like his predecessor Franny, Plug
turned down nothing that was edible and was happy to take
over the role of human dustbin.

Once a week we were given a dish of gooseberries floating in
a sea of thin, anaemic-looking cold custard for dessert. The
first time this happened I sat staring mournfully at mine,
wondering if I should try it. I picked up my spoon and took a
small mouthful. Not bad. I might try some more, I thought,
and popped another couple of gooseberries into my mouth. It
was then that I made the mistake of looking at Plug. From his
right nostril he was blowing a gigantic snot bubble, a horrific,
quickly expanding monster, emerald green and glistening in the
light and not unlike the gooseberry I was chewing at that very
moment. It looked like one of the glass snot bubbles I used to
buy from the Wizard's Den, a joke shop in Moorfields over in
Liverpool. I loved that shop – every penny I had was spent on
phoney dog turds, stink bombs and magic tricks that I never
quite got the hang of. Plug's bubble of snot would put theirs to
shame. The gooseberry in my mouth suddenly became harder to chew, and virtually impossible to swallow. It was growing in
my mouth, clammy and gooey, expanding along with Plug's
nasal balloon. After a quick bout of projectile vomiting I was
ushered off to the toilet block by that woman on the edge of a
nervous breakdown known as Miss Bolger and cleaned up
none too gently. Plug, unfazed, wiped his nose on the back of
his hand and carried on eating his gooseberries. I've never been
able to look at one since. What little appetite I had was
finished off by school dinners.

I was picky when it came
to food
, and I still am. I see it now
as I saw it then, as a necessary evil, although I've got better
with age and can now actually sit down in a restaraunt and eat
a meal, providing it's served quickly and the food hasn't been
messed around with. I can't bear food that's been artfully
arranged on the plate. Nouvelle Cuisine. I sit and look at this
nonsense and wonder if the chef's hands were clean as he
fiddled endlessly with the two tiny lamb chops, the half-dozen
mangetout and the minuscule dollop of mashed spud 'drizzled'
with a rosemary jus displayed before me. Leave it alone. Just
fling it out of the pan and serve it up. It's food. If you want
something to play with, then buy a bloody puppet. I appreciate
that presentation is important, but you've got to admit that
some of these cooks get a bit carried away with their fanciful
endeavours to ensure that your meat and two veg arrives looking
less like food and more like a display in Tate Modern. I
don't want to sit there looking at it. After an initial couple of
words of appreciation I want to 'wire in'.

Nor do I want to hang around a restaurant for hours and
starve through forty-minute waits between courses, at the
mercy of over-attentive waiters fussing around, folding
napkins, pouring water and, in the good old days when a fag
could be enjoyed after a meal, endlessly emptying ashtrays.
Surprisingly enough I can pour my own water and fold my own napkin. I can even use cutlery, so I don't need assistance
just yet. There's plenty of time for that, if by some chance I live
to a ripe old age and find myself being 'cared for' in my
twilight years in some bleak council nursing home. I've made
a living will. Inside a rather large Jiffy bag is a pillow with a
note attached to it. It reads:
In the event of the said Paul
O'Grady ever being found writing his name on his bedroom
wall with his faeces please put pillow over his face and hold
down until he stops kicking
.

I'm not scared of dying, not in the least. After two heart
attacks I suppose I've come pretty close, although I have to
admit I've nothing profound to say about either experience
other than that it's thanks to the skill of the cardiologists,
nurses and the much-maligned NHS that I'm alive to tell the
tale today.

When I had the first heart attack I died in the ambulance on
the way to the hospital. I'd like to oblige and reveal that before
I was resuscitated I saw a long tunnel with an angel bathed in
light at the end of it but I didn't, or at least if I did I don't
remember. Which seems unlikely as I'm sure I'd remember seeing
such an interesting Ziegfeld Follies production as that. No,
much as I would love to say it happened, the heavens did not
put on a celestial light show for my arrival at the pearly gates
that night in the ambulance. Heaven, and I'm assuming it was
heaven and not downstairs, was obviously invite-only that
night and I was an unwelcome gatecrasher who was turned
away. Maybe it's true when they say your time is up or it isn't;
mine obviously wasn't. All I can recall as I re-entered the land
of the living is the paramedic shoving fizzy aspirins down my
throat. Hardly something to crow about on
Desert Island
Discs
.

It's not the actual dying, the final croak, that bothers me, it's
the speed of it. Will it come quickly? And will I know anything about it? Speaking from experience I'd favour a nice quick
fatal heart attack over a long lingering death any day. I don't
want to rot, slowly, before my loved ones' eyes. I'd rather make
a quick exit.

I don't know how I've managed to digress like this and
get on to the subject of death. It's not something I care to dwell
on unless it's late at night and I'm sitting with a pal, maudlin
drunk, recalling the friends we've buried. I seem to remember
that I was banging on about restaurants and celebrity chefs.
My favourite celebrity chef was a celebrated Edwardian cook
by the name of
Rosa Lewis
, a true eccentric who ran the
Cavendish Hotel in St James's and was the inspiration for
the BBC series
The Duchess of Duke Street
. I follow her good
advice. 'Potatoes are humble things,' she said. 'Serve them
gently boiled with a little salt and pepper and a knob of butter.'
It's not hard, is it? Good food simply cooked and served plain.
Pretentious arrangements get on my nerves. Why go to the
bother of cutting carrots into ridiculously thin slivers, calling
them 'julienne' and then dishing them up balanced one on top
of the other so that they look like a pile of loosely stacked
miniature deckchairs? Is there something shameful about a
carrot that I don't know about? Are they so socially unacceptable
in smart restaurants that they have to undergo drastic
surgery before they can be presented at the table?

And while I'm sticking the boot in, why must chefs be such
prima donnas? Is it the heat of the kitchen that brings these
men's blood to boiling point, so that they're off into orbit
effing and blinding and flinging pans because a sauce has
curdled? You'd never catch Delia telling you to eff off out of
the kitchen. Well, not on camera anyway. It's only cooking,
after all. A piece of dead animal, some vegetables, fling 'em
into a pan with a bit of water and cook over a low heat, adding
herbs and seasoning as you go. As I said, it's not hard, so why
all the bloody fuss?

*

Apparently when I was a baby I ate everything that was put in
front of me. It was after a holiday with the Gradys on the farm
in Ireland that I turned pernickety. How could I eat the roast
chicken on the table when I'd seen it walking around the farmyard
that morning hale and hearty and minding its own
business before my aunty Bridget caught it and wrung its neck?
I'd seen my uncle James milk the cow, sitting ankle deep in
cowshit on his milking stool in a cowshed swarming with flies,
pulling on the cow's warty teats, expelling the milk into an old
tin bucket, and now here it was in a glass in front of me on the
kitchen table, warm and creamy. Ugh!

Visiting an elderly aunt I was given a 'nice big soft runny
egg, freshly laid' to eat for my tea. The size of a pterodactyl's
offering, I thought at the time, it smelt strong and gamey, its
vile contents trickling slowly down the side of the shell like
yellow emulsion. Unlike the rest of the clan this aunt had no
truck with little boys who wasted 'God's good food'. Her name
was Aunt Sabina and she said I couldn't get down from the
table until I'd eaten it all. I sat there defiant in her front parlour
listening to the big old clock on the wall chiming the hours, the
hated duck egg untouched and congealing in front of me, until
the cavalry came to the rescue in the form of my dad, back
from the pub, to take me home to Aunty Bridget's.

Aunt Sabina said that I was a spoilt, wilful child and
threatened to keep the egg in the pantry for me to eat on my
next visit. Needless to say, I never went back and to this day I
could no more eat a boiled egg than I could stand in Selfridges
window bollock-naked.

I could go for days without food. I still can, although it's no
longer something to be endured instead of enjoyed. At one
time I would only eat three things: pancakes, roast potatoes
and spinach. The only reason I'd touch spinach was because my all-time hero,
Popeye
, ate it, but at least I was getting some
vitamins inside me. It was my sister who solved the eating
problem.

My mother was being driven slowly demented by my
reluctance to eat. She tried the 'You're not leaving that table,
my bucko, until every last bit on that bloody plate is cleared'
routine, she tried coaxing me with tasty morsels, she tried
pleading, cajoling and even praying to St Jude, the patron saint
of lost causes – and by now she'd given me up for one.

My sister Sheila made a can of spinach out of an empty
Radox Bath Salts pot. She rinsed it out and glued a crudely
made label on the front that read
Popeye's Spinach
. Well, that
was it. I'd eat anything, bar eggs, that was put into that Radox
pot. Fish fingers, mashed spuds, baked beans, all squished
together and then squeezed out of the pot à la Popeye straight
into my mouth, while my sister stood behind me feeling my
non-existent arm muscle and singing 'Na nana na na-na na'
which, for the unenlightened, is the theme that was played in
the Popeye cartoons when he was about to eat his spinach.

I realize now how lucky I was to have such a loving family.
I thought then that every child had a family like mine and it
came as a shock when I went to school and discovered
otherwise.

M
Y MOTHER WAS SMART AS A WHIP. WHEN I WAS GOING
through old papers in the box I found her school report
for 1927. Like her sisters, she attended St Laurence's School.
Of the three, Chrissie found it hard to sit still and was easily
bored, so 'the devil found work for idle hands' and she was
forever getting into trouble with the nuns. Annie liked the
cookery classes and would cheerfully turn out scones and rock
cakes which, if hurled with only a little force behind them,
could concuss a twenty-stone docker. Like Chrissie, she would
rather have been elsewhere. Not so my mother. She loved
school and couldn't get enough of it. When she wasn't in class
she could usually be found with her head buried in a book.
That term she had come top out of fifty-five pupils, was only
absent from school once and excelled in every subject the nuns
taught her including sports and games. In those days the latter
involved little more than skipping, or tucking your dress into
your knickers and playing two ball up against the playground
wall. Bored with these limited activities, my ambitious ma took
herself off to Livingstone Street baths and taught herself to
swim. Apparently she could have given Esther Williams a run
for her money, and she won all sorts of competitions. She
taught my sister and brother to swim, but by the time I came
along age had made her too selfconscious to appear in a bathing costume in public and so she made do with a paddle,
holding her dress a respectable half-inch above the knee so folk
would be spared the sight of her varicose veins.