Owning Up: The Trilogy (17 page)

Most visits to the park were less traumatic. Accompanied by my mother or a nanny we usually carried with us one of those creased and crinkly brown paper bags (no longer manufactured) full of crusts cut from sandwiches, and any stale bread on the point of claiming Mrs Spilsbury’s attention. This was to feed the ducks, and was indeed known as ‘the ducks’ bread’, but very little of it reached the throng of mallards, Canadian geese and the odd swan for whom it was intended. En route, almost before we had reached the bottom of Lark Lane, my brother and I and later my sister had eaten most of it. We wouldn’t have looked at it in the ordinary way, of course, but in the open air (and because it was for the ducks) it tasted delicious. The phrase ‘the ducks’ bread’ became in time shorthand for any eating up of stale or rejected food. My mother had a loathing of waste and would finish anything left on a plate or about to be thrown away. Such odds and ends – a spoonful of steak and kidney pie, some congealed custard, a wilting salad – never reached the dustbin. ‘Your mother,’ Tom would say on catching her guiltily but obsessively spooning them up, ‘is at the ducks’ bread again.’

The Park, like much of Liverpool, paid its reluctant homage to London. The sandy perimeter ride was called ‘Rotten Row’. At the end of the ‘little lakes’ was a cast of Kensington Gardens’ Peter Pan. During my childhood, a full-sized replica of Piccadilly’s Eros was installed opposite the café at the bottom of the hill which led down from the Lark Lane gates. The café was rebuilt at the same time. The wooden ‘Elizabethan’ shack was replaced by a more solid art-deco structure. Peter Pan and Eros belong for me in Sefton Park. When later I saw the originals
in situ
I thought of them as ‘displaced’.

There was little else of interest: a fine Victorian crescent aviary, an obelisk, two artificial ‘caves’ stinking of urine, a decaying Wendy House on the sward behind Peter Pan and a flat-bottomed Jolly Roger in the shallow lake below him. There was a Happy Valley and a Fairy Glen, a solemn statue of William Rathbone, after whom Uncle Willy was named, in a marble frock-coat, his hand on a marble book staring in side-whiskered indifference over the Big Lake.

The dangerous swoop down the Palm House hill apart, nothing extraordinary happened to me in Sefton Park. If I were to walk through it with a stranger to Liverpool, they would see a park and nothing else: dirty lakes, replicas of famous statues, a large conservatory, worn grass and undistinguished trees. I cannot explain, even to myself, why no corner of it leaves me unmoved.

If the park formed the ‘landscape’ of my childhood, the tram was its most potent presence. There are no trams in Liverpool now; they were phased out soon after the war. The point about the tram was that, because it never deviated from its tracks, the perspective of street and park was always held in exactly the same relation to the eye and gradually, through repeated journeys along the same routes, assumed the clarity of a Canaletto; the definitive view. Rattling along Park Road for example – a street of small shops, innumerable solid pubs and great soot-blackened Catholic churches – the cobbled, hilly streets of two-up two-down houses which led down to the river did so always at the same angle, and the horizon of the Mersey with its shipyard cranes on the other shore and the Welsh mountains beyond them remained fixed, imprinted on the memory with extreme precision. Trams were noisy. I could hear them whining and clanking from my bed in Ivanhoe Road, and occasionally a blue or green flash from some faulty electric contact would illuminate the night sky. The names of their destinations were printed on cloth and rolled into place behind a glass-fronted panel on both the back and front of the vehicle: Garston, the Dingle, Fazackerly, St Domingo’s Pit, the Pier Head.

The tram, like the ‘pushmi-pullyu’ in the Dr Dolittle books, was the same at both ends. When it reached its terminus and had to go back the other way, the driver would pull on the thin rope suspended from the sprung pulley which connected it to the electric wire above, and lead it round like a giraffe to face in the opposite direction. Meanwhile the conductor, in his dark blue uniform and peaked cap, would walk from one end to the other of both decks noisily pushing the slatted wooden seatbacks, which were hinged in such a way as to reverse their position so that those who boarded the tram were always facing the way they were going. The controls too, nautical in their elegance and simplicity, were identical and there were two entrances and a set of stairs at each end.

Liverpool people never called a tram a tram. It was either a tram-car or, more commonly, the car: ‘I went into town like on the car.’ The tram conductors had a certain bravura. They seemed to enjoy pulling on the leather strap, strung down the centre of the lower deck, which went ‘ting-ting’ in the driver’s cabin. They cracked their ticket punches with enthusiasm, and shouted ‘I theng yow!’ when offered the fare (or ‘fur’ as most of their customers pronounced it). The late Arthur Askey adopted that ‘I theng yow’ as his slogan but few outside Liverpool knew where it came from. Tram conductors’ fingers were black from handling the change in their big leather satchels. The tickets were very beautiful, rectangular, printed on slightly furry paper in faded colours, pink, pale green, beige, mauve, a washed-out blue. Painter Schwitters would have loved them. Children knew how to fold them in such a way as to construct concertinas.

When I was very young there were still some trams that must have gone back to the turn of the century with outside iron spiral staircases and tin advertisements for medical products, but most of them had been built in the early twenties. They were red and cream outside and had little stained-glass panels, either red or blue and engraved like pub glass, let in to the tops of the windows. On the poorer routes there were sometimes barefoot children in torn jerseys among the customers but most of them wore big boots. There were still a fair number of ‘Mary Ellens’, old matriarchs of the slums in great crocheted shawls and many layers of petticoats. They wore boots too and some of them male caps. The trams smelt of stale sweat and urine but it was never a smell I disliked. It seemed to suggest to me a dangerous freedom. My mother, who could remember horse-trams, would listen intently to the uninhibited badinage in order to improve the authenticity of her performance of Maud Budden’s Liverpudlian sketches. There was one mad woman who rode the number i or 45 very frequently. At each stop she would shout out ‘The back of the baths’.

Halfway up Park Road there was a junk shop we always looked out for as its owner went in for large hand-written posters of marked originality which were frequently changed. One read: ‘My dad was good enough for your dad. Let me be good enough for you.’ Another: ‘Get off that tram, it’ll never be yours. Save your fares to buy a bike.’ On the back of a tin bath hanging on a nail, he scrawled in chalk: ‘Big enough to bath a bobby in’.

Trams featured quite strongly in my mother’s inner life. Once, when she was a girl and the upper decks were still open, a man had spat and gob had landed in her hair. She mentioned this frequently and with shivering revulsion which was understandable enough. Spitting was still common in Liverpool in the thirties. All public transport had ‘Do not spit’ notices on them.

The other facet of her obsession with the tram was more mysterious. When I was in late adolescence and our conversations, frequently on the subject of sex, had become extremely open and intimate, I had explained to her, with all the smug assurance of one whose knowledge was extremely sketchy, the theories of Freud. She found them far-fetched initially, but then confessed to the following fixation. She was excited sexually by the following image: a small working-class child runs out into the road almost under the wheels of a tram. Its mother grabs it just in time, curses at it and slaps it vigorously. ‘What,’ my mother asked me, ‘would your friend Mr Freud make of that?’ She had this habit of referring to people I was enthusiastic about in this way. (Among my ‘friends’ at this period were ‘Mr Picasso’, ‘Mr Joyce’, and ‘Mr Eliot’.) I offered what I thought might be the explanation: unidentified early sexual feelings coinciding with witnessing such a scene in reality was my general conclusion. She didn’t really listen to my theory. It was too abstract to appeal to her rather literal view of life. I, on the other hand, was fascinated by so clear a ‘case’. I thought about it a lot. ‘Did you,’ I asked her later, ‘think about this scenario on the night I was conceived?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, quite openly, ‘I always thought about it when Tom…’ I found it very odd to think that at the moment when my future existence was assured, my mother was thinking of a child pulled from under a tram, cursed at and slapped.

In the late thirties the old red and cream trams were replaced by green streamlined models with seat upholstery, springing and more silent machinery. They were called ‘the Green Goddesses’ and were considered an enormous improvement. They continued to run for some time after the War and were then scrapped in favour of buses. I never took to them. It’s the old red bone-shakers that sway and clang through the Liverpool streets of my memory.

8

At the far end of Sefton Park, past the Big Lake with its skaters or rowers depending on the season, and across two roads, was the bottom of Mossley Hill, the grandest enclave in Liverpool. The ascent started inauspiciously with a few semi-detached houses and a tin tabernacle painted a rusty dark green, but then the great Victorian houses began, set in large grounds; many with lodges at their gates, and protected by high sandstone walls. There were three reasons for our visiting Mossley Hill: Riverslea, the Liverpool Zoo, and Cousin Emma Holt.

Riverslea was the house which the suicidally depressive, fountain-loving Charles Melly had bought for his mother and family after the death in Egypt of Andrée Melly and their return to Liverpool. Charles Melly had eight children, but with two exceptions they had either married or moved away from Riverslea by the time I came to know it. Of these emigres the most powerful and richest was Charles’s second son, Edward Ferdinand Melly.

Edward was a coal owner and lived at Nuneaton where he was twice Mayor. According to my father he had both a tyrannical will and a ferocious temper. Driving his gig through the streets of Nuneaton at the beginning of the 1914–18 war, he found his path blocked by a long column of volunteers under the command of a young lieutenant. Cousin Edward bellowed for the ranks to be broken so that he could continue on his way, and, on being refused, threatened to drive through them at a gallop. The young lieutenant drew his sword and said that if he tried he would run him through. My father considered this a brave and commendable action.

Tom was in some awe of his elderly cousin, having once suffered his serious if collective displeasure. In the early twenties Edward had taken a house on the coast of Scotland and invited several of the younger generation to stay. Among them were Tom, Young Nell, and Nell’s brother John, then a medical student and very addicted to practical jokes. There was a great storm and next day, among the rocks, were huge and almost solid drifts of spume and spray. At John’s instigation Nell and my father had collected some of this and persuaded the cook to serve it as a pudding that evening. It was described, quite accurately, on the individual menu cards as ‘Sea Spray’.

Cousin Edward, who, unlike Uncle Bill, had a sweet tooth, helped himself to a large dollop from the cut-glass dish; the storm after his first mouthful was the equal of the night before and those responsible were threatened with a seat on the next available train south. He eventually calmed down but was not, even in retrospect, at all amused.

As a small child on a visit to Riverslea I had, it seems, a brush with Cousin Edward. I disagreed with him on some minor point in the works of Beatrix Potter and obstinately proved I was right by producing the appropriate book. My parents had trembled, but Edward unexpectedly hadn’t lost his temper. I can’t remember the incident myself, but it had so impressed Maud and Tom that they frequently referred to it. Cousin Edward and his third wife – he had buried her predecessors – were killed by a bomb in 1941.

Cousin Fanny and Cousin Leonard were the only two of Charles’s children who still lived at Riverslea. Unlike their brother Edward, they were very badly off and the Gothic house was peeling and crumbling about them. Fanny looked like an improvident farmer’s wife and had a large mole sprouting hair, something of a hazard when she embraced us. She kept hens in the overgrown garden and even, it was reported, went puffing down to Aigburth Road to buy potatoes in order to save the minimal additional expense of having them delivered. Leonard was tiny and mouse-like. He wore threadbare grey suits and a wing-collar, and had a small but straggly moustache. He exuded a rather sweet melancholy like a character in Chekhov. Indeed the whole atmosphere at Riverslea, with its decaying grandeur and faded chintz furniture, was what I later recognised to be Chekhovian, especially on a late summer’s afternoon when the sun streamed through the French windows of the drawing-room and there was an air of mild regret hovering over the delicate but cracked tea service.

Beyond the windows, the garden was a jungle and very exciting to explore. Only the lawn was kept in order, and that because the Riversleas had a passion for croquet, that most ill-tempered of games, at which, Tom told me, all the envy and rivalry between the two branches of the family had found an outlet during his childhood visits. On Boxing Days too, in order to recover from the excesses of a Chatham Street Christmas Day, the George Mellys would mount an expedition to Riverslea to challenge their cousins at hockey, a perfect excuse for hacking away viciously at each other’s shins. Once, during my own childhood, Leonard and Fanny had two great-nephews to stay with them and the custom was briefly, although on a reduced scale, revived. They were tough and vicious little boys and I could understand why my father had dreaded the 26th of December, a day which also happened to be his birthday. Leonard and Fanny were in themselves gentle and unaggressive. Fanny, while so comparatively poor herself, did voluntary work in the slums of Scotland Road and was, according to Willie Bert, much loved. I can believe it. She was a most cheerful and uncomplaining old lady.