At My Mother's Knee (27 page)

My mother was telephoned at her work. She was currently
putting tops on washing-up bottles at Lever's in Port Sunlight
and was not amused at being called to the hospital.

'If this is one of your games,' she said, dropping her handbag
angrily on to the counterpane and taking her headscarf off,
'I'll swing for you.' She eyed me suspiciously as I sat in the bed
propped up on pillows reading a comic, the picture of glowing
health. 'You were fine when you left the house this morning, so
what is it exactly that is supposed to be up with you? You don't
fool me. I can read you like a tuppenny novel.' The thing was,
she could. 'So go on, what in hell is supposed to be up with
you?' Jesus, she'd have given them a run for their money in the
Spanish Inquisition. I was spared further grilling by the arrival
of a doctor.

'Hello,' he said cheerfully. 'Are you the boy's mother?'

'Unfortunately,' she answered, through clenched teeth.

'I'm just going to examine him,' he said, popping on a rubber glove, and with that he stuck his hand up my bum.

I shot up the bed like a scalded cat and screamed the ward
down. The attempted suicide in the screened-off bed next to
me roused momentarily from his sleeping-pill-induced coma
and groaned.

'Tsk, tsk,' my mother said, 'such a fuss.'

'Count yourself lucky,' the doctor said, retrieving his hand.
'He's about to have his stomach pumped, next door.' He took
my mother outside the ward for a private chat, and when they
returned a few minutes later her face was grim. The doctor sat
on the bed. 'Now, young man,' he said, folding his hands in his
lap, 'I've examined you and you have an inflamed appendix, so
we're going to pop you up to theatre and whip it out, OK?'

No it's not bloody OK, I wanted to scream. You've made a
big mistake. There's nothing wrong with me. I only wanted to
come in for a few days' observation and be with Franny and
have ice cream and a sponge bag, and now I'm going to be cut
open.

'There's no need to worry,' he said, getting up to leave and
patting my head. 'It's just a little operation.'

My mother couldn't quite accept that I actually was ill. She
still had a nagging doubt in the back of her mind that the
pieces didn't quite fit, and that somewhere in this saga was
something vital that she'd missed. She took her coat off and
pulled a chair up next to the bed. 'Well, if you were putting it
on, love,' she said kindly, as if reading my mind, 'it's backfired.
But there's no use crying over spilt milk as it turns out you
really have got
appendicitis
after all, and it's better out than in.
That explains those stomach pains in the Isle of Man. I must
go and ring our Annie.'

Turned out that the appendix was just about to burst. I
ended up in hospital for over a month as I caught a serious
infection in the wound which meant it wouldn't heal and had
to be packed with gauze each day. I lay in bed listening to the radio on the headset and became addicted to
Waggoners' Walk
and was introduced by Pete Murray to Barbra Streisand
singing 'Don't Rain On My Parade' – another eye-opening
revelation. In all I missed nearly a whole year's schooling, what
with playing truant and the appendix fiasco.

I
T WAS
1969,
THE YEAR THAT THE
GIRLS
' SCHOOL NEXT DOOR,
Holy Cross
, joined forces with the boys and became Corpus
Christi High. Puberty was really kicking in. I was a raging
mass of confused hormones. One minute I was drooling over
the girl who worked in the hairdresser's on Church Road, the
next I was eyeing up the window cleaner.

A craze went round among the boys in class for joining the
forces. Most joined the army cadets, Franny joined the
ATC
and was instantly nicknamed Douglas Bader, and I went the
way of my hero Popeye and joined the marines. Surprisingly I
took to it instantly and stayed for over a year, but in any case
I wouldn't have dared quit. I'd wheedled a new pair of regulation
marine's boots, only this time out of my dad. 'If you give
up these marines after ten minutes like you did the Cubs, or get
kicked out like you did when you were on the altar . . . the
shame of that . . . then you'll be getting buried in those boots,
my lad,' my mother threatened darkly. She hadn't forgotten the
patent leather shoes.

We didn't do much in the marines at first, just endless
drilling up and down the hall of the headquarters in Park Road
East. We learned how to clean our uniforms and how to get the
toecaps of our boots shining like glass by rubbing Cherry
Blossom boot polish on with the back of a heated dessert spoon in a slow, circular motion, followed by a vigorous rub
with a rag until, quite literally, you could see your face in them.
We marched to the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool for
Remembrance Sunday. You kicked the back of your heel if you
got out of time to put you back in step. Things livened up for
me when we were introduced to weaponry. They taught us how
to strip down, clean and reassemble a rifle, then taught
us how to use it. Heaven. I was a crack shot on the rifle range
and prayed for a war so I could show off my new-found talents.

Walking home one night from the cadets I was jumped by
three older lads. They beat me black and blue and stamped on
my cap, flattening it. I owe the bend in my nose to those
bastards. Our captain was sympathetic but practical. 'We must
see that this never happens again, cadet,' he said and packed
me off to the
Boys' Amateur Boxing Club
. I hung around outside
the club for ages before plucking up the courage to go in.
I could hear lots of grunts and sounds of sweaty activity
coming from inside and it didn't seem encouraging – not my
cup of tea at all.

I was put through my paces by a big middle-aged man in a
tracksuit with a nose that looked like a large toad squatting on
his face. I think his name was
Eddy
. He watched my pathetic
attempt at skipping with mild amusement, and if he was desperate
to throw his head back and laugh like a drain at my
feeble jabs on the punch bag he disguised it well. Over the
weeks he gently coaxed and encouraged me, slowly building
up my confidence until I felt that I just might be ready to have
a go in the ring. It was a friendly fight, but I got hammered.
'Good,' said Eddy, applying a cold flannel to my cut lip. 'This
will sharpen your wits for the next time, put a bit of fire in
your blood, give you that edge. You won't let this happen
again if you can help it, will you?'

No, I thought, I bloody well won't.

From then on I fought to win. 'Punch through them,' Eddy would say. 'Aim for what's behind them, it'll give more power
to your elbow.' I swallowed an imaginary can of spinach and
laid into my opponents with the power of Popeye at my back.
Once I'd thrown a couple of successful punches the floodgates
opened and I smelt blood. I wanted more.

Occasionally a man would come into the gym and size us up
for small local bouts. Dark-haired and expensive-looking, with
a whiff of the gangster about him, he never picked me for any
of the competitions as I had no technique and only basic skills
in the ring. However, four years later, after the Boxing Dinner
and Dance at the Kingsland Restaurant, where I had a parttime
job as a waiter, he discovered that I had other skills when
he gave me a lift home. Not that I ever made it home – I ended
up at his 'pad'. Turned out he wasn't a gangster after all. He
owned a boutique.

My gentle dad wasn't too keen on the idea of me bashing ten
bells of shite out of someone every Tuesday night. He thought
it was making me aggressive. He was right – it was. I didn't
have a boxer's discipline; at the slightest sign of confrontation
I'd punch first and ask questions later. In the end I gave up the
boxing, but I stayed in the marine cadets. I really did love it.
We went on night exercises to remote parts of North Wales and
played war games and survival skills. It was pure
Avengers
,
crawling through the undergrowth with a rifle strapped to my
back, creeping up on the enemy and immobilizing him. In fact
when I eventually did leave the captain visited my parents,
much to my mother's surprise (and amusement), and asked
them if they could persuade me to stay, as he thought that I
might have a career in the marines. But it was too late. I'd
moved on to other things, discovered other pleasures.

My brother Brendan was a parttime marine, but he wasn't the
reason I'd joined the cadets. It was no big-brother heroworship;
I had no wish to emulate him. I hardly knew him, really. He was thirteen when I was born and deeply resented
this late addition to the family, so he more or less ignored me.
He was mad on motorbikes; I once fell off the back of his
Vincent coming up Sydney Road. I was six at the time and
didn't get a mark on me, just bounced when I hit the road and
went sailing up on to the grass verge. My mother, on hearing
the news, left her station at the gas stove and chased my
brother down the Grove waving the frying pan she'd been
cooking with round her head and leaving a trail of fish fingers
in her wake, to the delight of a couple of moggies. He had a
teddy boy's quiff and when he wasn't on his motorbike racing
on the Wall of Death in New Brighton he could be found diving
with the sub-aqua club off the coast of Anglesey, filling the
bath, when he came home, with scallops.

He married a divorcee and left home when I was about eight.
She was older than him and had a child, a little boy named
Keith
.
There were a few raised eyebrows when my brother brought his
new bride and her son home, but the family soon settled down
and welcomed them into the fold. Everyone loved Keith. He was
blond and cute, a few years younger than me, and would have
looked the archetypal all-American boy if he had not been so
frail. The aunties doted on him; Aunty Chris even took him to
New Brighton for the day. I'd been usurped! My nose had been
pushed firmly out of joint and I glowed an icy emerald green,
eaten up with hatred and jealousy and hell-bent on finding a
suitable and hideously painful way to get rid of my rival.

I did consider pushing him off the ferry into the murky
waters of the Mersey and in fact I came quite close once, but
luckily changed my mind at the last minute. On holiday one
summer in the Isle of Man I toyed with the idea of holding a
pillow over his face and suffocating him. Keith had a wart on
his leg, a great crater of a thing, and I had to share a bed with
him. He'd pick this wart until it bled as he lay there, turning
my stomach and forcing me to give him a couple of good kicks to get him to stop. 'Nan,' he'd scream, 'he's kicked me wart
and made it bleed.' For which I'd get a belt across the head.
Oh, I could've murdered him all right, quite easily.

The young ladies of Holy Cross came in all shapes and sizes,
from the glamorous
Monica Summerfield
, who looked like
Jessica Rabbit in a school uniform, to the
Mansfield twins
,
known to one and all, either individually or as a pair, as
'Twinny'. The Twinny Mansfields were terrifying, small and
skinny with pale skin and pink eyes, ginger rat's tails framing
their mean little faces. They had vicious tempers and foul
mouths and would attack with the ferocity of a particularly
evil pair of Jack Russells if they suspected that you were laughing,
or even looking, at them.

''Ey yew, worra yew fookin' lookin' at? D'ya wan' us to
wool the 'ead off yer?' You averted your eyes when passing the
Twinny Mansfields as you would on encountering a pair of
gorgons, in case they got it into their psychopathic heads that
you were 'takin' the piss'.

Once we'd got over our initial bashfulness at being in the
same room with these strange creatures and stopped sniggering
and shoving each other every time one of them walked past our
desks, we began, slowly, to start seeing them as individuals.
The goddess Monica was unattainable. She went around surrounded
by a gang of less attractive handmaidens, cold and
aloof, a tiger's mane of fiery red hair cascading around her
shoulders, and ignored us all. Some of the other girls were
more amenable.
Susan Ashton
let me take her to the pictures.
She had legs that went up to her armpits and full luscious lips.
Her only drawback was the Deirdre specs she wore. The lenses
were the size of greenhouse windows and as thick as the bottom
of a milk bottle. We sat through
Mackenna's Gold
at the
Plaza. She had a heavy cold and when the poor girl wasn't
blowing her nose she was busy fighting me off. In the end she gave in and let me have a snotty snog and a quick grope under
her jumper. I wouldn't have known what to do if it had gone
any further. I had a vague and inaccurate idea about the theory
but had not yet tackled the practical.

Fourteen and still a virgin: it was something that worried me
day and night. All we ever talked about was
sex
. We were
obsessed. Some of the boys would whip their tackle out and
have a surreptitious wank at the back of the biology class. I'd
draw obscene pictures of naked women, anatomically incorrect,
I'm sure, but close enough for my classmates' needs.

My mother bought me a book called
The Gift of Life
from
the Union of Catholic Mothers. I didn't have a clue what it was
about. It was full of ridiculous euphemisms such as 'the man
plants his seed in the woman's garden and slowly life starts to
grow' – it sounded like a gardening manual. It took Aunty
Chris, in her own inimitable style, to explain the rudiments of
reproduction to me.

'What in God's name is this rubbish?' she said, flinging
The
Gift of Life
on to the couch.

'It's a Catholic book on S E X edu-ca-tion,' my mother said
in her deaf person's voice, blushing beet red from the ankles up.