Owning Up: The Trilogy (11 page)

The only advantage of Dunmail was that it was a few hundred yards from The Dell where the Leathers lived. Dorothy Leather was Gangie’s only living daughter. We called her ‘Auntie Golly’. She was a kind, pretty, rather nervous person with a talent for water-colours and writing sketches some of which were printed in
The
Lady.
She suffered terribly from migraines. Her husband, Ronald Fishwick Leather, was an energetic forthright man, who went bald early and wore a black moustache. He was very practical and used to make elaborate mechanised table-centre decorations every Christmas. The year Disney’s
Snow White
came out, he designed one in which the seven dwarfs emerged from their mine, crossed a bridge over a looking-glass stream and vanished into a wood, returning, concealed and upside down, to repeat the exercise. It was powered by a small electric motor.

Uncle Ronnie was a keen business man, and became Executive Manager of Pilkingtons, the glass manufacturers, in nearby St Helens. Unlike my father, who was only mildly Conservative, Ronnie was extremely right-wing with a deep loathing for the trade unions. He was rather short-tempered but good company. The Dell, like The Grange, was built at the end of another unadopted lane leading down to the Mersey. It had a large steep garden, which gave it its name, in which Ronnie worked fanatically. He was an obsessive perfectionist.

The Leathers had two children, John and Gillian. John was a few years older than me. He had a lopsided grin and had inherited his father’s biting wit; a kind of Noel Coward of the nursery. I was in some awe of him. Gillian was my brother’s contemporary and mad on horses. She pronounced her name with a hard ‘G’. They had a strict, rather handsome nanny called Cadwallader. In their nursery was an old glass-fronted music-box with huge flexible metal discs for different tunes. There was also a small wall-cupboard with a leering wizard painted on it mixing a spell from bottles and phials of poisonous coloured liquids. It was an image I found disturbing.

Bill and I once went to the pictures with my mother and the programme included a ‘short’ featuring Wilson, Keppel and Betty, a well-known variety act. Wilson and Keppel performed a lugubrious sand-dance dressed as unlikely looking Arabs. Betty just wiggled a bit wearing a yashmak. Bill and I became hysterical at this performance, not only because of its innate absurdity, but also jbecause Wilson and Keppel bore a strong resemblance to Uncle Ronnie. When they next appeared at a local music-hall we were taken to see them in the flesh. From then on we always referred to Wilson and Keppel as ‘The Uncle Ronnies’.

*

When I went with Gangie to put flowers on Gampa’s grave, I discovered for the first time that Tom and Dorothy hadn’t been her only children. On the stone, under my grandfather’s newly-chisled name, I read that he lay next to Mary Melly, a daughter who was born and died on the same day in 1914. I found this inexplicably sad.

A mystery I never solved was why Gangie was brought up by her grandmother. Not only had she a mother then, but she was still alive in my childhood. She was known as ‘Tiny Granny’, a very pretty little person like a Beatrix Potter mouse and in full command of her faculties in spite of her great age. She had a flat just round the corner from Christ Church, Linnet Lane, and we used to be taken to call on her after ‘Children’s Service’. Tiny Granny lived with my grandmother’s younger sister, my Great-Aunt Gwen, her husband Guy Watts and their eighteen-year-old son Newton.

Gwen, who had pince-nez and dyed red hair piled up into a kind of mad bird’s nest, was considered something of a caution. When she was driven anywhere in my Grandfather’s Armstrong-Siddeley she would imperiously order the chauffeur to drive faster or slower, to raise and” lower the windows as if the car were hers. ‘You devil Burscoe!’ she used to shout, much to my father’s amusement. Guy, a large, rather boisterous man, had been very rich at one time but was more or less ruined in the Depression. Their son Newton was incredibly spoilt. He was usually still in bed when we arrived about eleven o’clock, reading a risqué magazine of the thirties called
Razzle
which had a striking front cover in art deco lettering. My father maintained that Guy had indulged Newton ridiculously during his childhood, allowing him to take school friends to the Adelphi and sign the bill. No wonder he lay in bed and read
Razzle.
Later on Newton was always getting into scrapes. He had a mistress and a child, which everyone thought very shocking, but when Guy and Gwen were old and poor it was Newton’s mistress who went and looked after them.

I only discovered this much later when she turned up and introduced herself and her daughter at a club we were playing near St Asaph, North Wales, during the middle seventies. She had long left Newton. There was a question I was longing to ask her. Tom and I had once discussed fetishism, or at least I’d brought the subject up and he’d asked what it was. I’d mentioned rubber, fur, boots and shoes.

‘I wonder if that explains your Great Uncle Guy,’ he said. I asked him if what explained my Great Uncle Guy.

‘He was always buying Gwen kid boots,’ he told me, ‘and he used to clean them all on Sunday afternoons. She didn’t even have particularly pretty feet.’

I said it sounded like it, but he wasn’t entirely convinced. Fifteen years after my father’s death I asked Newton’s mistress.

‘Was he not!’ she said, ‘and right up to the end. A perfect old nuisance. I used to have to sit on my feet when I was reading to him!’ I wish I could have told Tom.

Newton, of course, was one of those people that Gangie wanted to shake until their noses bled.

5

One afternoon, above the yards with pigeon-lofts and the tall garden walls that faced the shops in Aigburth Road, I watched a small aeroplane sky-writing the word ‘Rinso’, a form of advertising quite common in the thirties. The wind had blurred the letter R before the o was completed. As I still couldn’t read, I asked my mother what it said. She told me. I knew Rinso was the name on the. soap-flake carton by the sink in the back kitchen but the concept of writing it across the sky as a commercial exercise was beyond me. I believed that what the aeroplane was doing related to our packet, a private message to me alone. When we got home, before even taking off my galoshes, I ran into the back-kitchen to look at it. I was surprised not to find the letter R blurred.

I demanded constant explanations. ‘Why? Why? Why?’ I nagged, tugging at my mother for attention, but her answers often confused me further. There was a middle-aged woman we sometimes met when we were out walking or shopping. She was usually on the corner of Ivanhoe and Parkfield Road, where a brick wall, banked high on the other side with earth, bulged dangerously outwards and a brass plate, screwed to the front gate, announced the practice of a certain Dr Mary B. Lee. The woman wore a purple hat with cloth violets hanging from it. Her face was heavily painted and she talked in an excitable and disconnected way. I usually got very bored when my mother stopped to talk to people in the streets and shops, but I was fascinated by this lady and didn’t, as was usual, pull insistently at my mother’s coat to get her to come along. On the contrary, it was she who appeared eager to break away. Once, after an especially long and disjointed monologue, I asked my mother why the lady seemed so different from everyone else. She told me that she drank. This made no sense to me at all. Everybody drank but they didn’t all wear purple hats and talk with smeared red mouths and lipstick on their teeth.

Rather precocious in some ways, I was incredibly backward in others. Anything which didn’t interest me I ignored. Why bother to learn to read boring stories with short words when grown-ups could be wheedled or bullied into reading to me about Mowgli carried off through the jungle by the Bandar-log, or Peter and Benjamin crouching terrified in the bone-littered darkness outside Mr Todd’s kitchen? I was seven before I could read at all but then, almost overnight, I could read everything. I couldn’t add up, however; I simply shut off when anyone tried to teach me. I developed like one of those crabs with a tiny body and one huge claw.

I worried sometimes that when I grew up I would have to make a living, presumably by going into business. The only thing was that I couldn’t understand what ‘business’ meant. I knew it was how my father and uncles ‘made money’ and that it took place in offices in the city, but even after visiting them I was none the wiser. My father’s office was quite small. It was high up in a tall narrow building near the pier-head. The hall was dark and had a board on the wall saying who was on each floor. There was a lift with open iron-work and a man in uniform with one arm pulled it up and down with a rope. The names ‘Seward & Melly’ were painted on the glass door of my father’s office. Inside sat a lady typing. The office smelt damp and pungent. This was because there was a little back room with big brown paper parcels with dirty black and yellow-grey wool bursting out of them. Did he sell the wool? No. They were what were called ‘samples’. My father was a wool-broker. What he tried to do, he told me, was to buy wool, which he never saw, when it was cheap and sell it to people when the price went up. I stopped trying to understand although I pretended I did. The lady, whom he called his secretary, gave me biscuits and let me bang away on the big old-fashioned typewriter.

Then my father took me to have my hair cut in a brightly-lit basement under a shop. It had tiles on the walls and lots of mirrors. If you stood in the right place where one mirror faced another you could see yourself over and over again getting smaller and smaller. The barber’s chair went up and down on a foot-pedal and tipped backwards like the chair at the dentist’s. There were lots of pretty bottles of hair oil on the shelves with names like ‘Honey and Flowers’. A respectful but cheerful man in a white coat cut my hair. When he’d finished he brushed the back of my neck with a soft brush which felt nice, but some little hairs from the clippers always got down the back of my neck and tickled. It was easy to understand what barbers did, but not wool-brokers.

Uncle Fred’s office at Samuel Banner was even more mysterious. It was round the corner from my father’s but in a much grander building. There were lots of offices in Samuel Banner and several secretaries. Uncle Fred had an office of his own with wooden panelling and photographs of ships. He sat behind a big desk. There was no room at the back with samples, only a little carved mahogany rack on his desk with test tubes in it each containing an oil of a different viscosity. Uncle Fred took me out to lunch. I was introduced to lots of big noisy men as his nephew, or ‘Tom’s boy’. He was always very funny in the restaurant. Afterwards my mother, who had been doing her voluntary work at The Personal Service, picked me up and we went home on a tram.

Would I really have to be a business man when I grew up? I’d rather have been a shopkeeper because I could understand what they did, but then all the shopkeepers had Liverpool accents. When Mr Arnold rang up every day to ask what meat we wanted he said: ‘Arnold the butt-cher’. There were other jobs people did. There were policemen, soldiers, park-keepers, tram-drivers and conductors, carpenters, decorators, ice-cream men, waiters, watchmakers, but all my relations, except for Uncle Percy and George Rawdon Smith who was a doctor, seemed to be in business and so did all my father’s friends. Later on I found there were other things I might do. I could become a barrister like my mother’s Uncle Fred, or an architect or a vicar, but all these meant years of study. I wanted to be something you could become at once. Above all I wanted to be famous.

Some of my mother’s friends were famous. Most of them were actors and actresses who appeared at the Playhouse. Their photographs were outside, taken by Burrell and Hardman in Bold Street which my mother called ‘the Bond Street of Liverpool’. The photographs were very dramatically lit with velvety backgrounds. One actor, wearing a soft hat, was pretending to light a pipe. The actresses all held their heads at funny angles like the ducks on Sefton Park Lake. They were the same photographs we had on the piano. I knew all their names because my mother said them so often in a special kind of casual throw-away voice: Bobby Flemyng, Geoffrey Edwards, Ruth Lodge, Harry Andrews, Michael Redgrave, Mar-jorie Fielding, Ena Burrill. There was also the producer William Armstrong. I thought he must be even more famous because my mother mentioned him most of all. She always called him
‘Dear
William Armstrong’. He was bald and funny and had a high-pitched Scottish accent.

I met all these people when I was very young because 1 was allowed to stay up and see them when they came to supper on Sunday nights. A bit later I saw them on the stage too, at first in the children’s plays which were performed in the afternoons at Christmas. They were usually very exciting with secret panels and children getting the better of crooks, but sometimes they were about animals like
Toad of Toad Hall.
What really made me feel special was that, after the curtain came down, my mother took me ‘round behind’. There was a funny dusty smell. The actors and actresses sat in their tiny dressing-rooms up steep stone steps. They wore dirty dressing-gowns and took off their make-up with cold cream. I was sometimes allowed to go on to the stage and was surprised but somehow pleased to see how, with the curtain down and the lights off, the set looked so unreal and sloppily painted. Sometimes the stage hands would be hauling up the backcloths and flats into the air and lowering others for the grown-up play in the evening: a drawing-room with French windows or a garden with a swing and a lake in the distance.

My mother didn’t only know the actors and actresses at the Playhouse. She was a friend of Douglas Byng and Ronald Frankau. Douglas Byng pretended to be a lady and sang songs about being Doris, the Goddess of Wind or someone called Flora Macdonald. Ronald Frankau was a comedian and was often on the wireless. I had records by them in the nursery and could imitate them. Sometimes when my parents had a party, I’d be woken up and brought downstairs in my dressing-gown to sing their songs. I didn’t mind being woken up at all because everybody laughed and clapped, especially when I imitated Douglas Byng.