At My Mother's Knee (28 page)

'Why?' enquired Aunty Chris, applying a bit of lipstick. 'Do
Catholics do it differently from everyone else, then?'

'Shh,' hissed my mother, hastily shoving
The Gift of Life
under a cushion and nodding furiously towards me before
hurrying out of the room.

'Oh, for God's sake,' said Aunty Chris wearily, putting her
lipstick back into her bag and sitting down to light up a fag.
She'd met Vera Lalley earlier in the day at Charing Cross and
she'd been persuaded to go to the pub for a couple of drinks.
The unaccustomed alcohol – she'd given up the booze years
ago – must have loosened her tongue, as what followed was
completely out of character.

'Listen,' she said, pursing her lips and leaning towards me,'it's all very simple, but if I tell you you've got to promise me
that you won't do it until after you're married. OK?'

I nodded eagerly, desperate to know even if it was from
Aunty Chris's lips. Better coming from her than either my mum
or my dad. I'd have died the death of a thousand shames if
they'd so much as mentioned it.

'Well,' she said, beckoning me closer and lowering her voice
until it was barely audible, 'what happens is this.' She inhaled
deeply on her fag and stared at the ceiling, thinking of a suitable
way to put it. 'Well, the man gets his thingy out and puts
it in the lady's doo-dah.' She was drawing strange shapes in the
air with her hands. 'Then a baby starts to grow and nine
months later the lady gives birth to that baby, d'you see?' No,
I didn't see, as I tried to match this exposition with the patterns
she'd drawn. She sat back in the chair, took a long drag on her
fag and nodded, satisfied with her explanation.

'How does the baby get out of the lady's belly, then?' I asked
after a moment.

'Well, it comes out of her . . . you know. Don't be so bloody
thick. I've just told you, her doo-dah,' she said, flicking her ash
casually into the palm of her hand.

'What's a doo-dah, then?'

'The thing a lady sits on, her . . . doo-dah.' Aunty Chris
crossed her legs and brushed ash off her skirt. She was
beginning to lose her nerve, not liking the way her impromptu
sex education
lesson was going. 'Get up and get us an ashtray,
will you,' she said irritably, 'and never mind doo-dahs.'

'So is the lady's doo-dah her bum, then?' I was relentless in my
quest for knowledge. This doo-dah held the key to so many puzzles,
and besides, I was enjoying watching Aunty Chris squirm.

'No, it's not her bum,' said Aunty Chris hurriedly. 'I think
it's going to rain, Molly,' she called, looking out of the window
at the cloudless sky, desperate to change the subject. 'You
haven't left any washing out in the yard, have you?'

'Well, if it's not her bum then what is it?'

'Oh, I've had enough of this,' shouted Aunty Chris, getting
unsteadily to her feet and scattering fag ash everywhere. 'It's
not her bum, it's her Anne Fran.'

'Her
what
?'

'Her Anne Fran . . . her Minny . . . her FANNY for God's
sake!'

'I hope Dot next door isn't listening to this conversation,'
said my mother, coming back into the room like an express
train and quickly closing the window. 'I've never heard the
like, and for your information,' she added, lowering her voice,
'it's not a fanny, it's a va-gi-na.'

Aunty Chris choked on her ciggy and went into a loud and
long coughing fit, laughing and gasping for air at the same time.

'You want to give those up, they'll kill you,' my mother said
sniffily. 'And hadn't you better get ready?' she went on, not
looking me in the eye. 'You'll be late for your paper round.'

As I walked to Prescott's shop to pick up the night's bag of
Liverpool Echo
s
to flog round the hospital I mulled over in my
mind the mystery of the elusive fanny. Suddenly, as if a bolt of
lightning had hit me, I saw clearly for the first time the answer
to my questions. The penny had dropped with a loud bang. I
understood exactly what the doo-dah was all about. St Paul on
the road to Damascus hadn't had a clearer vision.

I ran the rest of the way, delighted that I'd solved the mystery
and looking forward to telling Franny all about it the next day
at school.

The girls hadn't been impressed with our military uniforms.
They thought they were old-fashioned, or 'antwacky' as they
say on Merseyside, and slightly naff. They wanted to be seen
with smart young men dressed in the latest 'mod gear', not
nerds in uniform.

Time to change the image. The Gear Box Boutique on Borough Road was the place every aspiring man about town
shopped in, providing he had the money – mod gear didn't come
cheap. As well as my paper round with Prescott's, I
managed to get myself another round with a rival newsagent. It
meant getting up an hour earlier but who needs sleep when
you're driven by the urge to own a gingham Ben Sherman shirt?
I got a Saturday job in a fruit and veg shop on Church Road and
ran messages for neighbours. Everybody ran then. My mother
ran down to church, Aunty Anne ran round to the
betting
office,
my dad ran to the pub. My sister's nylons ran and were repaired
with nail varnish, dogs ran around the streets, water ran down
walls, my cousin Tricia's hair dye ran, noses ran, people ran for
buses, and kids ran to the shops on messages. With a little help
from my parents and money I'd got as birthday presents I managed
to earn enough cash to buy the full ensemble of clothing
and footwear necessary if you were going to be with it.

Up till then my 'best outfit' had been picked for me by my
mother and paid for with the ubiquitous Provvy cheque. It was
an oatmeal corduroy jacket, cream slacks, beige cord shoes and
a fitted orange shirt. I looked like the gay character from a Rita
Tushingham film. Not any more. I was going to be stepping
out at St Werburgh's disco the epitome of cool.

Admiring myself in the mirror of my mother's
dress
ing table
(if the mirror was tilted to a certain angle and you stood on the
bed, you got a good view of everything from the neck to
the knee) I thought I was the proverbial dog's bollocks. The
long-desired gingham Ben Sherman shirt, black barathea
blazer with brass buttons, two-tone parallel trousers with turnups
ending at the ankle and – the pièce de résistance – a pair of
beautiful oxblood Como brogues. To complement this outfit I
had a new haircut: my thick wavy hair cropped short, with a
razor parting down the side, known as the Suede Head.

'Suede Head?' my mother screeched when she saw it. 'You
look like you've been shorn for nits.'

I swaggered out of the house leaving a breath-strangling trail
of my dad's Old Spice
aftershave
in my wake to meet my mates
at Central Station. We knew of a few pubs that would turn a
blind eye to a lad's age as long as he was fairly passable as an
eighteen-year-old. Even in our barathea blazers we looked
about ten, but nevertheless we sailed into the public bar of the
Central Hotel, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched and heads
down, emulating the older lads we'd seen going into the alehouse.
Sauntering up to the bar, we would nonchalantly ask
for four pints of brown over bitter. I hated this concoction and
would much rather have had cider, but brown over bitter was
considered a real man's drink and consequently I'd sit sipping
it, poison or not. It was usually me who was elected to ask the
barman for the round of drinks as I had the deepest voice. I'd
lower it even more for these occasions, until I sounded like a
Scouse Bill Sikes.

'How old are yeh?' the barman would ask, deeply
suspicious. 'What's your date of birth?'

'June the fourteenth 1950,' came the well-rehearsed reply,
putting five years on my age.

'Don't shit a shitter,' he'd laugh, pulling the bitter into the
glass all the same. 'The lot of yeh haven't got enough hair
round your bollocks to make a wig for an 'ard-boiled egg.'

I don't remember any of us getting drunk at that age. I'd
been drunk in Ireland when I was nine. There, children are
allowed in the country pubs. You'd go into the post office,
which was also the general shop, and there'd be a little bar at
the back with some owld feller enjoying a mid-morning pint of
Guinness with his pipe. I was no stranger to a
pub called Creggs
, which was owned by friends of the family. They were
nice, easy-going people who didn't mind me going behind the
bar to 'help out', which in reality meant I helped the deliciously
creamy Guinness out of the drip trays, ending up stretched on
the bar top, blind drunk. Nobody seemed to mind. My dad and the cousins carried on
drinking
, but my mother sent my
dad to Coventry for weeks afterwards and my career as a
drinker was nipped in the bud. Shame, as I liked getting
slightly tipsy on the odd glass of cider that I was occasionally
allowed when out with my dad. But it was nothing stronger
than a bottle of Cydrax after that, non-alcoholic but close
enough in taste to the real thing.

Five years later, I'd have killed for a Cydrax to take away the
awful taste of brown over bitter mixed with a Sovereign cigarette.
I wasn't a committed smoker then – that addiction wasn't to take
a hold until a few years later – but I'd have one when I was
showing off, 'out with the lads', as we thought ourselves.

Even though we pretended that we already had, we couldn't
wait to grow up; to shave on a daily basis, to have a wild
expanse of pubic hair surrounding a penis the size of a Wall's
Pork Banger, to have sex – proper, all the way, full penetrative
sex, naked and in bed; to drink and smoke and stay out late.
And then came the great day when we queued outside St
Werburgh's disco, breathing in and exhaling hard to remove
any trace of fags and booze on our breath, in case Father
Lennon should smell it on our way in. I was mad for the
Upsetters' 'Return Of Django', although the repetitive little
dance that went with the music was as boring as it was tiring
to do. I executed it with a girl named
Anne Downey
, who carried
it out with military precision, head down and hands
clenched. I heard later she'd joined the army. I bet she was a
credit to the service. St Werburgh's disco sold orange squash
and tea and a parish priest walked around to make sure that
nobody got into trouble. The whole affair was hardly Sodom
and Gomorrah, yet it was here that I first became intimately
acquainted with the female anatomy.

There was a girl in our school – let's call her
Jean
– who
was only a year older than me yet could've passed for a woman
in her twenties. She was a hard-as-nails North-Ender with 'experience' written all over her, and was what my mother
called 'a dirty bitch'. When not playing truant, which she was
most of the time, she could be found working behind the bar
of a pub in Laird Street. I was in awe of her. No, I was terrified
of her – she was the toughest girl on the planet. She was
also startling to look at: extremely tall, with yellow hair and a
huge bust, and frighteningly confident. You didn't dare argue
with her: she'd have killed you with a head-butt. God knows
what she was doing in St Werburgh's disco. She seemed far too
worldly for the likes of us.

'Didn't recognize ya all got up like a pox doctor's clerk in
your new togs,' she said, standing over me. 'You don't look too
bad for a gobshite.'

Her maxi-coat was unbuttoned and I could see that she was
wearing a skin-tight jumper and the tiniest of miniskirts. She
turned towards her mates and grinned slyly, then turned back
to me and ran her hand across my thigh. 'Nice kecks,' she
growled. 'Let's have a better look at them, then?' And with
that she led me to the back of the hall, pinned me against the
wall and began to eat the face off me.

There was nothing remotely erotic about being kissed by
Jean; it was akin to being rubbed vigorously in the face with
half a two-day-old honeydew melon. However, once the lady
had made up her mind to have you, then the only sensible
reaction was a passive submission.

'Give us yer 'and,' she grunted impatiently, grabbing my
wrist and guiding two fingers inside her knickers. I was rigid
with shock. Completely paralysed. I had hold of what felt like
a warm, wet vole.

Jean groaned and proceeded to give my groin a brisk rub as
if she was cleaning brass. I levitated with fright. 'Nice, eh?' she
said, backing off and eyeing me up and down in the way the
praying mantis sizes up her mate just before she devours him
whole. 'Smell your fingers.' It wasn't a seductive request, it was an order. I reluctantly wafted them under my nose. All I got
was a slight whiff of the pickled onion crisps I'd been eating
prior to my run-in with Jean. I smiled sheepishly at her. 'Now
you know what a real woman smells like.' Her voice was
mocking as she pulled what there was of her skirt down and
went back to her cronies. The tension left me and I gave a sigh
of relief as I watched her, head hunched into her broad back
and hefty shoulders, swagger across the dance floor like a
prizefighter.

Suddenly, I saw myself as a real stud. Jean had singled me
out. That's right, me. The mighty power of the haircut and the
Ben Sherman shirt had obviously turned Jean's head. She'd
never known that I existed up till now, but all the same it was
me – yes, me! – who had been chosen by Big Jean, the girl who
only went out with grown men and could swear, drink and
fight like a navvy. The very same Big Jean who had let me slip
her the finger right in the middle of St Werburgh's disco.

My mates weren't impressed. 'She's takin' the piss out of yer.
She'd go with anyone, her,' they said pityingly. 'I wouldn't
touch her with two shitty sticks' . . . 'She's the school bike' . . .
'She'd let Captain Hook finger her' . . . 'You'd better go and
wash yer 'and before you catch something.'

'You're just jealous,' I said, annoyed at their blasé reaction
to my encounter with King Kong. 'She said she's fancied me for
ages.' I looked over to where she was standing and smiled,
giving her a little wave. She was preoccupied with pouring
Bacardi from a bottle in her handbag into a plastic beaker of
squash, and, glaring at me, mouthed the word 'Wanker'.
Feeling stupid, I went to the Gents and washed my hands,
secretly agreeing with my mates that Jean indeed wasn't worth
touching with two shitty sticks.