At My Mother's Knee (7 page)

This inflammatory act would ignite my mother's Irish
Catholic blood, bringing it dangerously up to boiling point.
Thankfully her dignity and the fact that a doorstep confrontation
would mean 'making a show of herself in front of
the neighbours' prevented her from marching round to Rose
Long's and letting her have it. She remained on the sofa and
silently fumed, cursing inwardly as she furiously knitted, the
knitting needles going like the clappers as she conjured up all
manner of foul but deeply satisfying ways to put paid to the
hated Rose.

Aunty Chris
had no such qualms. She wasn't going to sit
there and ignore the gauntlet that her hated enemy had thrown
down. Impervious to my mother's pleas of 'Don't, Chris, the
neighbours!' she would open the frontroom windows,
drag the Dansette out to the middle of the room and play
a track from one of my dad's favourite albums,
Tommy
Makem And The Clancy Brothers, Live At Carnegie Hall
.

Up the short line,
Down the long rope,
To Hell with King Billy,
And God bless the Pope.

Not to be outdone, Rose Long would turn the volume up to
full on her radiogram and take herself out on to her front
step to treat the residents of the Grove, our household in particular,
to a rousing version of 'The Sash'.

'"My father wore it as a youth in bygone days of yore,"'
she'd croak, marching up and down on the spot, clapping her
hands in time to the music, '"And on the 12th I love to wear
the sash my father wore."'

'Right, that's it, Molly,' Aunty Chris would say, marching
into the garden. 'She's asking for it. I'm going to let that
lemon-pelting bitch have it.'

I was out of that house behind her faster than catshit on lino
to get a ringside seat, ignoring my mother's squeals of 'Get
back in here, you!'

'I'm surprised that a good Orangewoman like yourself isn't off
to Southport,' Aunty Chris would shout over the hedge, her arms
folded defiantly across her chest as she squared up for a bout of
verbal. 'You used to go, didn't you? Spent all day in the alehouse
getting rotten drunk while your kids sat outside on the step.'

Rose Long thrived on doorstep altercations. They were her
lifeblood. Aunty Chris was a worthy adversary for her to get
her talons into.

'Is that right?' replied Rose, slowly bringing her hands to her
hips and cocking her head to one side in the traditional stance
adopted when responding to a provocative remark. 'Well, it's a
damn sight better than her in there,' she spat, referring to my
mother, 'starving her kids all day and night just so they can have a bit of bread shoved down their throats by a bloody
priest in the morning.'

'"Keep thy tongue from evil and thy lips from speaking
guile," Rose Long,' Aunty Chris replied, pursing her lips and
raising her eyes piously to the heavens. She wasn't a churchgoing
woman but she did have a smattering of useful biblical
quotes at her disposal for when the occasion demanded it.

'You what?' mocked Rose.

'Psalm 34, verse 13,' she came back smartly, having heard it
from the nuns on numerous occasions. 'You should ask your
Michael
to look it up for you in the Holy Bible next time he's
in church.' There was a hint of menace in her voice at the
mention of Michael. Rose's
son
would these days have been
tagged and asboed at birth. 'Never out of church, is he?' she
went on, picking an imaginary thread off the sleeve of her
blouse. 'He should be on the altar, your Michael. Oh, but then
he was, wasn't he?' She looked Rose Long straight in the eye
as she stuck the knife in. 'He was on the altar of St Joseph's –
nicking the bloody candlesticks, the thieving little bastard.'
This statement was an outrageous lie, and Aunty Chris knew
it, but it was guaranteed to light Rose's blue touch paper and
send her off like a rocket.

Rose Long's nostrils flared and her voice went down a
couple of octaves. 'You're a fine one to call anyone a bastard,'
she hissed, starting to play dirty. 'At least our Michael knows
who his father is . . . unlike your
John
.'

Bedroom windows in houses up and down the Grove began
to open and the occupants, hidden from view behind their nets,
hung on every word.

'And at least I've got a husband,' said Rose, head in the air,
preening like an arrogant parrot.

'Jesus, I'd be happy to die an old maid rather than have to
share a bed with the likes of your George, the scrawny-arsed
rat,' sneered Aunty Chris.

Rage escaped from Rose like the air from a fast-deflating
balloon. 'You want to look at your own,' she spluttered,
pointing her finger accusingly at me. 'He's like an old woman,
that child, the way he hangs round adults. You don't want him
growing up funny.'

'Pecu or ha ha?' Aunty Chris said through clenched teeth,
tapping her foot dangerously.

'You know full well what I mean . . . one of them.' Rose
put her hand on her hip and minced up and down the path
blowing kisses.

'One of what, Rose?' said Aunty Chris, flicking the butt of
her cigarette into the hedge.

Although my mother, listening to this exchange from behind
the frontroom curtains, thought fighting in the street with
neighbours was beneath her dignity, she wasn't letting Rose get
away with that one. Smiling sweetly, she came out into the
garden and proceeded to give Rose a history lesson.

'Did you know that
King
Billy of Orange was a homosexual?'
she said matter-of-factly, emphasizing the
homo
and drawing it
out. I'd never heard her say that word before and neither had
Aunty Chris, judging by the surprised look on her face.

'Oh, didn't you know that, Rose?' she continued, going in
for the kill. 'Yes, he was an 'omo-sex-ua-l and that's the
reason why you lot are called "Orange" – it's because you're
named after a bloody fruit, you foul-mouthed, bleach-headed,
dirty-minded, slack-jawed owld cow, and if you don't want me
to come over there and slap that big orange gob of yours shut
I suggest you get in and turn that shite off.' And with an 'In,
you two,' she swept us into the house and slammed the door,
leaving Rose speechless.

It's not hard to see where
Lily Savage
learned her trade. This
colourful vernacular was stored away for future reference
and came in very handy when a heckler in the audience
chanced his arm.

*

When my mum wasn't feudin' with Rose they generally got
along quite nicely.
Relationships
had broken down during the
war years when my dad, exempt from conscription as an Irish
citizen, joined the air force and went to war. He could have got
himself a 'safe' job in
Lever's
or
Cammell Laird's
, a job considered
essential war work, and made himself useful in that
way. It galled my mother that her husband was away fighting
the Hun while Rose Long's cowardly George slept soundly in
his nice warm bed. It was a grievance that she bore for the rest
of her life.

Holly Grove was perilously close to Cammell Laird's, which,
as a shipbuilding company, was a prime target for the German
bombers. My mother refused to get in the
Anderson shelter
in the back yard during the air raids, choosing instead to
remain in her bed. My dad had built the Anderson, a small
underground bunker with bunk beds either side. The roof
was made of sheets of corrugated iron, buried under a mountain
of earth on which my mother grew tomato plants and
sweet peas.

A cockroach had crawled up her leg one night in the shelter
during a heavy raid while she was pregnant with my sister
Sheila. She ran back into the house screaming, preferring
to dodge shrapnel rather than share a bed with a cockroach.
Curiously enough, my sister has a cockroach-shaped
birthmark
on her thigh, a tiny thing, in exactly the same
place my mother felt the creature crawl over her. (I'm
afraid you'll just have to take my word for it unless I can
persuade my sister to roll her tights down and bare her leg
on television.)

Holly Grove was crawling with cockroaches during the war.
They'd crawl up and down in between the wall and the wallpaper,
'big as your fist', attracted by the homemade adhesive of
flour and water. She'd lie in bed, her babies beside her, watching the 'cockies' in the shadows and listening out for the
doodlebugs during some of the worst air raids over
Merseyside.
Dum dum, dum de dum, de dum
. The doodlebugs
were easily identified by the noise they made. She lay in the
dark not daring to breathe, waiting for the engine to cut out.
When it did she would begin slowly counting as the doodlebug
dropped, whistling, from the sky. Counting aloud in the dark
was a mantra to soothe and calm her, helping her to hold her
nerve as the evil thing fell, indiscriminately seeking out a
target.

'One . . . two . . . three . . . Please don't let it be us, God.'

God must have heard her prayers because it never was. The
church at the back of the house took a direct hit, as did many
houses in the area. Number 23's windows were frequently
blown in and my mother was often without food, water and
gas. Rats and cockroaches abounded, yet as well as looking
after two very young children she managed to hold down two
jobs, as an auxiliary nurse in St Cath's and
as a cleaner
in a
private house. When she spoke about her
experiences during the war
, she was dismissive. She never considered herself brave
in any way. Yet she dodged bombs on a daily basis; air raids
became a way of life. She ate whalemeat and spam and made
cakes with dried egg and carrots. She stood patiently in neverending
queues and, like millions of other women, shrugged her
shoulders and got on with it.

While Hitler waged war in the skies, my mother fought
many a battle on the terra firma of Holly Grove, usually with
Rose Long. My mother wasn't the only one at daggers drawn
with Rose, most of Birkenhead was. To coin a phrase, Rose
Long could cause trouble in an empty house.

Winnie Eatock
, who lived next door to the wood yard at the
bottom of the Grove, blamed Rose for bringing on a miscarriage
after a verbal spat with her in the street.

'She murdered my baby!' she'd shout pitifully from her backyard step whenever Rose, defiant and looking to cause
trouble, walked past her house. 'Murderer!' she'd scream until
her husband came and gently led poor Winnie back indoors.

Another of the
neighbours
,
Mrs Docherty
, put Rose's frontroom
windows in with a brick one drunken night after hearing
that Rose had accused her of 'going with Yanks' while her
husband Jimmy was at sea. Mrs Dock, as she was known,
always looked a bit grubby – 'like a bed in a flophouse' was
how my mother described her. She rarely washed her face but
just applied another load of paint over the previous night's.
Her sister Kitty, effortlessly glamorous even after a long shift
in the munitions factory, was the antithesis of her.

Mrs Dock would persuade my aunty Chris to set her hair for
her in a victory roll on the nights she went out lindy-hopping
with the Yanks, bribing her with nylon stockings and
American cigarettes. Aunty Chris wasn't keen on the idea of
being Mrs Dock's personal hairdresser as she'd once
discovered a family of lice setting up house in her neighbour's
less-than-savoury barnet. But Aunty Chris was a devoted
worshipper at the church of St Nicotine and she would've sold
a kidney for one whiff of a ciggie, and both of them for a
packet of ten. Cigs were a luxury, hard to come by in the war,
so she turned a blind eye to Mrs Dock's little infestation,
hoping that the strong setting lotion would kill or at the very
least stun the lice. As she got her comb out and proceeded
to tease Mrs Dock's rat's tails into a passable resemblance to
Anne Shelton's lovely locks, she'd say, 'Beggars can't be
choosers, especially when they haven't got a pot to piss in or a
window to chuck it out of.'

Aunty Chris locked horns with Rose Long nearly every
week. They hated each other. After getting wind of a vicious bit
of gossip that Rose had spread around about her, Aunty Chris
stormed into Rose's house all guns blazing, dragged her out of
the kitchen and into the back entry by the 'black roots of her bleached 'ead' and knocked one of her teeth out. No wonder
my dad joined up: it was probably a lot safer as a rear gunner
in the air force than it was getting caught in the crossfire of the
harpies who reigned over Holly Grove.

M
Y MUM MET MY DAD AT AN IRISH DANCE
IN BIRKENHEAD
.
Like thousands of other young Irishmen and women
before him,
Patrick Grady
had arrived in Liverpool on the boat
from Dublin looking to make a new life. He was a handsome fellow,
tall and slim with wavy red hair and a jaunty smile. He could
whistle through his teeth, beat a tune out by snapping his fingers
on the back of his hand and charm the birds out of the trees.

My dad's father, also Patrick, had died of a heart attack
when he was only thirty years old. I have a copy of his
obituary from the local paper of 1912:

It is with feelings of deep regret that we have to announce the
sudden and unexpected
death
of Mr Patrick Grady,
Glinsk
,
when just in the prime of life. The deceased was ailing for some
time in the month of November but seemed to have quite
recovered from the attack, as he was working up till the day he
died. He went to bed on Monday night in his usual health and
at six o'clock on the Tuesday morning, as he showed signs of
uneasiness, his wife spoke to him. He was unable to answer her
and passed away in a few minutes.

The deceased was a member of the Pollocks Estates
Committee and was on the committee of the Kilbegnet branch
of the
United Irish League
. He was an honest, straightforward and earnest worker in both. His death has come under very sad
circumstances. His principal desire from the time the sale of the
Pollock Estates was first spoken about was to see the poor
people taken from their miserable patches of bad land and
settled on the rich lands of Glinsk. He was the first to migrate
and got a good holding and nice house with offices, and was
getting on very well and improving it daily.