Owning Up: The Trilogy (14 page)

In 1932, when I was six and Bill was three, something extraordinary happened. My mother, then forty, had become pregnant again and my sister Andrée was born. I can’t imagine that this, given my mother’s age, was deliberate, but the birth was without complications and its outcome enchanting. Andrée had huge slightly slanting eyes and a snub nose. We all adored her and I felt none of the sibling rivalry which made my relationship with Bill so difficult to sustain. Nevertheless, when Andrée was at the crawling stage and we were all three playing in the nursery, she put a bead into her mouth and it became lodged in her throat. I noticed this, but was playing with some plasticine and totally absorbed. Andrée began to turn purple and it was Bill who thought to toddle on to the landing and shout down: ‘There’s something the matter with Andrée.’ Our nanny, who had been fetching tea, ran up the stairs, up-ended her and smacked her on the back until the bead was dislodged. Everybody was rightly appalled at my indifference and so, once I had taken it in, was I. Even now the heavy smell and oily consistency of plasticine triggers off a sense of guilt.

Andrée arrived at the height of the Depression. Maud used to say that when I was born my father gave her a diamond ring, when Bill was born a platinum ring, but that when Andrée was born all he could afford to do was shave off his recently cultivated moustache. She was very touched by this gesture as she could ‘never be doing with facial hair’.

6

Number 90 Chatham Street, first occupied by my great-grandfather George Melly MP in the late 1850s, was an austere Georgian corner house of some size. Many of its windows had been bricked up at the time of the window tax. Although the front door was indeed in Chatham Street, the main façade overlooked Abercromby Square with its small residents’ garden.

Chatham Street and Abercromby Square had once been fashionable but the merchant princes had long since departed. Most of the houses had become seamen’s lodgings, and Number 90 alone, like a Victorian whale stranded on a polluted beach, retained its original identity. The Mellys, with their passion for appropriation, referred to this one house as ‘Chatham Street’ or ‘Chatty’ for short, as though the lodging houses didn’t exist.

When I was born, there were still three members of the family living there: my Great-Uncle Willy or Bill (the names were interchangeable), and his sisters Eva and Florence. Their brother George had moved out after his marriage in 1917 to a lady called Lydia Elizabeth Edwards. Four years later she went mad, or as Willie Bert Rawdon Smith put it rather more tactfully in his notes on the family: ‘became a complete invalid’. Great-Uncle George died in 1927, but his wife lived on until 1932 I never met her, and am unaware what form her madness took although the Griff, rather surprisingly, let slip that she had once been invited to play bridge with her, and that ‘Mrs Melly dealt all the cards to herself. Great-Aunt Florence died in 1928 when I was two. By the time I was conscious of Chatham Street only Aunt Eva and Uncle Willy remained
in situ.

A visit to ‘Chatty’, most commonly for Sunday lunch, was an intimidating experience for a child. The short walk from the 33 tram stop outside the Women’s Hospital through those decaying once-handsome streets and squares, accompanied by the distant sound of a Salvation Army band, helped to build up a certain dreamlike anticipation. Standing on the porch step in front of the forbidding shiny black door, hearing the bell peel in the distant kitchen basement, Bill and I, and later Andrée, were sometimes overcome with giggles, sometimes unnaturally grave, at any rate very aware that we were on the threshold of a different world, as remote from everyday reality as Alice’s Wonderland. Maud, still in awe of the older Mellys’ initial disapproval, was in part responsible for our tension, but even Tom never seemed entirely at ease. Here no doubt his shortcomings as a schoolboy and business man had been made clear to him, the opposition to his marriage formulated. His defence took the form of affectionate mockery. It was the most common reaction among his generation of the family, a kind of nervous frivolity.

The door was eventually opened by Davis, curiously described as ‘the head waitress’, who had been at Chatham Street since 1914. Dressed in a severe black uniform with white cap and apron she nevertheless gave an impression of White-Queen-like dishevelment and calm panic. Like Gangie’s Marjorie, she identified members of the family by trusting the surname as taken for granted. She addressed my parents as Mr and Mrs Tom, Gangie and Gampa were Mr and Mrs Heywood, her employers Mr Willy and Miss Eva. Davis had a rapid, very slight Liverpool accent. I never knew her Christian name or, at the time, imagined that she even had one.

Despite its Georgian exterior, ‘Chatty’ was completely Victorian inside. The only concessions to the twentieth century were a telephone, a wireless set and, on the piano in the library, an anachronistic little nest of art-deco ashtrays in ‘jazz’ colours with aluminium rims. Otherwise it was as though by stepping into the hall one simultaneously mislaid at least thirty years and, in some rooms, fifty.

Just inside the front door, crammed into quite a small vestibule, was a huge glass case of stuffed animals largely engaged in carnage: a fox looked up from dismembering a rabbit; a stoat was in the act of pouncing on a fieldmouse; a squirrel, frozen in terror, recoiled at the descent of a swooping hawk suspended from a wire. There was also a large cupboard, carved with Melly crests, and containing several boxed grey toppers, and facing it a substantial table, flanked by two of those uncomfortable little high-backed armorial chairs, and on it a silver tray for visiting cards.

All the corridors at Chatty were painted a deep shiny orange-brown. When I was very young I was terrified by a picture hanging opposite the curve of the staircase. It was probably a copy of some detail from a seventeenth-century mannerist and showed the face of a bearded old man screaming in pain or terror. The fine curve of the staircase was broken by a series of small inch-worms of metal screwed at regular intervals down the handrail to discourage young Mellys, now old or dead, from sliding down the banisters.

I knew little of the upper floors. The nursery and schoolroom were long closed up. My grandfather and his brothers and sisters were the last generation to have grown up in the house. All I knew of the nursery was derived from a late nineteenth-century water-colour at The Grange; a fire glowing behind a high fender, a dappled rocking-horse, a Noah’s Ark on the floor. It’s true that the drawing-room was on the first floor, a high Victorian symphony of faded gold, rose and royal blue, but by the thirties it was only used for the grandest family occasions. Its chandelier, stripped of its branches and pendant drops, was wrapped in a pendulous sheet like a great bag of cottage cheese. As those who lived at.Chatty grew fewer and older, the number of rooms in general use contracted. Uncle Bill and Aunt Eva slept upstairs of course and there were guest-rooms when anyone came to stay. Davis and the servants climbed up the back stairs to the attics late at night and crept down again at dawn to black the grates, light the fires and dust and polish, but in my childhood the life of the house was effectively confined to three rooms on the ground floor: the library, the dining-room and the little morning-room, with their handsome mahogany doors.

The library was furthest away from the front door at the end of the shiny orange passage with its screaming old man. It was a room almost without colours – brown, sage-green, dusty blacks – and smelt of old leather. The only window to have escaped the window tax looked out on to Chatham Street, but there were some small French doors leading out on to a dark little garden yard with a tree in it. The light in the library was always subterranean. The nest of ‘jazz’ ashtrays on the piano was as incongruous as a clown at a funeral.

Although quite large, the room was cluttered. There were plants on stands and two marble statues on columns: a bust of an idealised woman with sightless eyes and a cherub with an intricately-carved swag of lace draped strategically across its presumably minuscule privates. The furniture was unmemorable and uncomfortable. Only Uncle Bill’s chair with its stuffed arm-rests and curved legs had a certain distinction. It was set to the side of a steel grate next to a small table for his silver cigarette box and table lighter. It was never moved an inch. It was the library, rather than the drawing-room, which was used for family parties.

Directly opposite was a lavatory with a porcelain bowl decorated with blue irises and set into a rectangle of mahogany; let into an oval indentation on its surface was a brass plug to be pulled upwards to flush the cistern. There was also a small stand-up lavatory basin for gentlemen attached to the opposite wall, and in the bottom of this lay several small pebbles. I couldn’t, I still cannot, imagine the function of those pebbles. Later, when I first heard about people ‘passing’ gallstones I wondered if that was what they were. The walls of this room were hung with old sepia photographs of my great-aunts in their youth, mostly seated in boats in the Lake District. As I knew that their generation never mentioned natural functions I found it odd and a little unnerving to encounter their fixed expressions gazing at me as I sat on the mahogany seat or stood at the little basin. This lavatory was used only by men and boys; the ladies were directed somewhere upstairs.

The morning-room, to the left of the front door, was small and undistinguished with wooden transom screens covering the lower half of the two windows to stop people in Chatham Street looking in and in consequence keeping half the light out. Aunt Eva did her accounts here and wrote her letters, but it was important to us in that one of the cupboards contained toys and books, the remnants of the abandoned nursery, with which we were allowed to play after lunch.

These were mostly Victorian and in many cases extremely ingenious. There was a twisted metal snake which crawled rapidly up or down a long flat rod held perpendicularly and pierced by evenly-spaced holes. There was a monkey which performed acrobatics on a trapeze and was set in motion by squeezing the narrow base of the two sticks between which it hung. There were diabolos, spinning tops with whips, bagatelle and spillikins, but our favourite toy was a more recent addition, probably Edwardian, possibly dating from the Great War. It consisted of two wooden ships, a’dreadnought and a submarine. The submarine was loaded with a torpedo, spring-activated by pressing a button. The body of the dreadnought, concealed a mousetrap-like mechanism and, after setting this, one replaced the top deck cautiously and built up the superstructure on top. The torpedo was fired across the carpet from some feet away and, if it hit the target painted on the side of the dreadnought, it set off the mousetrap, and top deck and superstructure were flung into the air with astonishing range and velocity. It took only a second to destroy the dreadnought and several minutes to put it back together, but it was extremely satisfactory to operate and Bill and I would frequently quarrel as to whose turn it was.

The books were rather dull on the whole, improving and pious works in very small print. But there were some splendidly engraved, hand-coloured volumes of fierce beasts and one fascinating book full of sadistic tales about naughty children getting their comeuppance, which even I was able to read as it deployed no word of more than three letters, a restraint which must have meant considerable circumlocution.

‘Ned,’ one story began, ‘why did you get the cat and put the cat in a bag, and put the bag in the sea?’

‘For fun.’

‘It is not fun for you and no fun at all for the cat.’

Needless to say this homily had no effect on Ned, but he was eventually bitten on the leg by a mad dog and lay in terrible agony, the jeering of the creatures he had tormented ringing in his ears.

‘Do you say it is for fun now?’ asks a fly he had partially dismembered or, to revert to the monosyllabic style of the original, ‘did get the fly and did get the leg off the fly’.

While we played or read, the grown-ups dozed in the library in the gap between lunch and tea. Everybody ate far too much at Chatty and most of the men drank too much. The liverish, rather disgruntled, state to which this reduced them between the enormous meals was known as Chatty fever.

It was in fact the dining-room I remember most clearly. We usually went straight in on our arrival. Uncle Bill, especially after Aunt Eva died, frequently spent the whole day there, sitting in a chair which was a pair to the one in the library, chain-smoking Turkish cigarettes through an ivory holder, a glass of brandy and soda on the little table at his side. When he had finished a cigarette he would lean forward and blow through the holder accurately projecting the dog-end into the fire. It was a completely traditional Victorian dining-room: the walls were crimson, the furniture mahogany, the pictures – a copy of a Murillo, a huge riverscape, still lifes with fruit or lobsters – all heavily framed. The dining table was enormous and would easily sit twenty people. There were huge sideboards at each end. On the other side of the fireplace there was a false door balancing the real one, with a cupboard behind it for glass and china. On the back of this door it was the custom for young Mellys to be measured at various ages; their height, name and the date pencilled in alongside the mark. I found it very strange to see my father’s name next to the figures three feet six inches, and the date, 12 October 1905, or my grandfather’s in 1876 when he was only three feet two inches tall.

There was seldom just us for lunch. Gangie and Gampa were often there, sometimes the Leathers, frequently several Rawdon Smiths. The volume of sound, a family characteristic, was constantly
fortissimo.

Eva, while short and plump, was a formidable figure. Her clothes made no concession to the century. She dressed entirely in black and her voluminous dress reached the ground. She wore a locket with a coil of hair in it, a memento of someone close to her who had died. Her white hair was worn up. Her face was ruddy and plump and her slightly protruding rather luminous brown eyes and flat features gave her a distinctly pug-like look. Like her late sister Florence, she had a passion for education and, to my apprehensive terror, insisted on seeing our school reports and on setting us mathematical problems or asking us to read to her. Her comments on our shortcomings were scathing and as painful to Maud as to us. She was, however, basically kind and once our inquisition was over, adept at amusing us. Eva did a considerable amount of charitable work, but her main occupation was running Chatham Street. Her hobbies were water-colour sketching and completing enormous jigsaws. Her paintings were not up to much but every body was expected to admire them. She usually submitted several to the annual exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, the Liverpool equivalent of the Royal Academy Summer Show, and they were most often hung. One year, however, her contribution was rejected and, to make matters worse, a painting of a bluebell wood by Dorothy Leather, my Auntie Golly, was accepted and hung ‘on the line’. Aunt Eva didn’t take this at all well and Uncle Bill, never noted for tact, attempted to reassure her, in front of Dorothy, by saying that the judges obviously didn’t know what they were talking about.