At My Mother's Knee (30 page)

I
WENT STRAIGHT, IN THE CRIMINAL SENSE, AFTER THAT. OH, I
was the model penitent. I'd soon be sitting my O levels and
CSEs and
leaving school
. I had no idea what I wanted to do
with my life and no one to point me in the right direction. The
careers
officer was as much use, to quote Aunty Chris, as men's
tits. According to him, there were two options. You could
apply to Cammell Laird's for an apprenticeship in various
trades, everything from ship's fitter to electrician. My mother
was all for this. You could go anywhere in the world once you
had a trade under your belt. 'There's always employment for a
skilled artisan. Jesus was a carpenter,' she'd say cheerfully,
ignoring the wonky coffee table with the tilt to the left that I'd
spent two years making in woodwork. The other option was
an apprenticeship with my dad's employers, Shell Oil. My dad
arranged an interview for me as an electrician. It was fortunate
that I got on the wrong train at Rock Ferry that morning and
went to Chester instead of Ellesmere Port; if I hadn't, Shell Oil
probably wouldn't be there today. I was totally uninterested in
anything as mundane as electric wiring, and would probably
have blown it up. I had no desire to be an electrician or a
boiler-maker. I'd decided that my career lay in journalism. In
my mind's eye I saw myself as a hard-boiled hack, lurking
in the shadows dressed in a Sam Spade-style mac and trilby, tab-end stuck to my bottom lip, covering another dangerous
assignment for a big London paper.

'A journalist?' My ma's eyebrows hit her hairline. 'You mean
on a newspaper? A reporter? Good God, what next? You
know nobody likes a reporter, don't you?' she said. 'They're
the lowest of the low, in the same league as coppers and big
dogs – you can't bloody trust 'em.'

Nevertheless, I wrote to the editor of the
Echo
, impressing
on him how much the readers of his paper would benefit from
my ace cub reporter skills, and to prove that I was serious
about that week's chosen profession I signed up for a course at
Sight and Sound, a Liverpool typing agency that taught the
inept and cack-handed how to type and interpret the mysteries
of shorthand. I didn't get through the introductory course,
which seemed to me to be a form of brainwashing.

Unfortunately, the editor of the
Echo
turned me down, but
pointed me in the direction of the
St Helens Star
who were
looking for an enthusiastic youngster willing to sign his life
over to that paper. Surprisingly, the editor of the
Star
did offer
me a job, but my dad put the kibosh on that. He equated St
Helens with the Outer Hebrides and declared that it was too
far to travel and no place for an immature lad like me to live
and work.

'And besides,' my mother added dryly, 'you need a careful
eye keeping on you in case you feel inclined to put on your
striped jersey, grab your swag bag and start looting the poor
sods of St Helens.'

It was always the way. My dad was protective of me, my
mother suspicious.

I contemplated art school. I enjoyed drawing and was fairly
good at it, forever scribbling and doodling on every surface I
came across. ('D'ya know he's drawn a woman's face on the
lav door, Paddy?') One of my many fancies at the time was to
become a children's illustrator, or even – the ultimate dream – to be a Disney artist. But how does one get from Birkenhead to
California? Via the Laird School of Art? I took my artwork off
for an audience with the principal. He said it was promising
and that I had a degree of talent. There was one painting that
he really enthused over, raved in fact, and that was a dazzling
abstract in violent shades of red. 'This is wonderful,' he said,
standing back to admire it. 'Forget all the other little boring
daubs and doodles and concentrate on producing more
remarkable work like this.'

I was annoyed. The 'remarkable work' wasn't actually mine
– I'd borrowed it from the portfolio of an artistic genius who
had left school the previous year to become a welder and slid
it in among my 'daubs and doodles'.

'Why don't you attend a few classes,' the principal said, 'see
how we get along?'

We didn't. The still life class was made up of what we of the
Suede Head persuasion called 'trogs'. A trog was basically a
hippy – afghan coat, tie-dye T-shirts, bell round the neck, the
whole patchouli-smelling kit and kaboodle and the exact
opposite of everything the Suede Heads stood for. The twain
were never to meet. Trogs were mainly middle-class
Monty
Python
fanatics, quoting their favourite sketches ad nauseam
to each other. I thought they were a bunch of prize twats and
wanted to kill them all – I couldn't wait to get out of there.
Besides, they were all brilliant artists, making my pathetic
attempts resemble the kind of stuff that appeared on the
gallery wall in
Vision On
. In traditional style, I stuck it for less
than a week.