Owning Up: The Trilogy (18 page)

Leonard and Fanny could, of course, have sold Riverslea with its large grounds and lived the rest of their lives in comfort, but I don’t suppose it even occurred to them. As it was, the wallpaper was damp and peeling, the carpets threadbare. In one room was a billiard table piled high with old newspapers. I once suggested to my mother there might be several dead Riverslea Mellys buried and forgotten under them. In one of the disused and empty bedrooms in the Tower hung a trapeze. Leonard was interested only in sport. When my mother was unofficially engaged and already under siege from the disapproving Chatham Street uncles and aunts she happened to be standing behind Leonard at an amateur rugger match in which my father was playing. She was appalled to hear Leonard say to his companion: ‘Young Tom’s playing very badly. Too many late dances with that damn girl I shouldn’t wonder.’ To me he would drone on about cricket, a game which, for reasons which will become apparent, I nursed a considerable loathing. He had been the President of the Liverpool Cricket Club for many years and used to arrange the public school tour.

Fanny died in 1942; Leonard in 1951. The house was left to the University who sensibly, if unimaginatively, knocked it down. I have the catalogue of the auction of its contents, a truly surreal list of accumulated rubbish: Lot 74: a small bronze depicting monkeys shaving a bear. Lot 113: laundry basket containing linen and sundry photographs. Lot 274: under-bed wardrobe containing model railway lines and preserved lizard.

The Liverpool Zoo marched on Riverslea. It had moved there from Otterspool Park, where I can only just remember it, despite vehement objections from the residents of Mossley Hill. The lions would keep them awake at night. A dangerous animal might escape. It would encourage
hoi polloi,
some of whom might trespass.

Despite Uncle Bill’s seal of approval, the Zoo was what Gangie would have called ‘a poor do’. Mr Rogers, who had hired to my father the monkey with such unfortunate results, was a big jovial pipe-smoking man who looked rather like the late Rab Butler. As I was among his most frequent visitors he made me a ‘Junior Fellow’ (were there any other ‘Fellows’ I wonder, either Junior or Senior?), and would sometimes show me around himself. In the reptile house there was a large python called Billy. One of my privileges as a Junior Fellow was to be allowed to drape Billy round my shoulders. Recently, outside the Tiger Balm Gardens in Singapore, I came upon an Indian gentleman with a snake he was prepared to hire out for a small fee so that tourists could take each other’s photographs holding it. I was unable to resist. It was the first time I had handled a python for over fifty years.

The Zoo was usually rather empty except on bank holidays. I preferred it that way, resenting the noisy jostling ignorance of the visitors almost as much as did the residents of Mossley Hill. I was delighted one such afternoon when a lioness turned round in her small cage and urinated vigorously over the crowd. The star turn was Mickey, a vicious, fully-grown chimpanzee. Mickey had two tricks. The first was to obey his keeper’s command to ‘blow ’em a raz, Mick’ by passing his lips against the back of his hand and emitting a loud and prolonged fart-like note. His other trick was quite dangerous. On warm days he was to be found in a large paddock surrounded by low railings. He was tethered in the middle of this by a long chain attached to a stout post. He had two footballs and, having blown his ‘raz’ several times to hysterical applause, would roll one of the footballs gently towards the perimeter and then make frantic signals for someone to return it. Eventually a father, hoping to impress his children, or a young man his girl, would bend over the railings. At this point Mickey would hurl the second football with great force and accuracy at his benefactor’s head.

Mickey substantiated another of the local residents’ worries by escaping. He headed for Aigburth Vale and broke into an office rented by a charitable organisation with which Gampa was connected. Here he had pulled out the files and scattered the papers, and shat all over the desk and into some of the drawers before his recapture. My grandfather was not lucky with monkeys.

Aware of Mickey’s trick with the footballs I knew better than to fall for it, but I did have a potentially alarming encounter with the Zoo’s solitary elephant. I had persuaded the Griff to accompany me on this occasion and we were standing comparatively close to the great beast in its garage-like shed. Suddenly and without warning it wrapped its trunk round me and lifted me high into the air. The Griff gave a little cry of terror and dropped her glove. The elephant put me gently down again, picked up the glove and ate it. The Griff’s panic gave way to indignation but the keeper, when we eventually found him, was most unhelpful.

‘I could luke for your glove like over the next day or two,’ he said, ‘but you wouldn’t want to wear it would you? Not after whur it’s been.’

I for my part pretended that the reason the elephant had picked me up was because I had deliberately given the word of command as used by Toomai in Kipling’s
Jungle Book.

I held my seventh birthday party in the Zoo’s gimcrack little half-timbered café followed by a conducted tour which included my handling of Billy, a feat which, as I’d anticipated and planned, quite impressed my school-friends.

The Zoo was never a success financially. Shortly before the war it went into liquidation and Billy, Mickey and the rest of its rather scruffy exhibits were transferred to other prisons.

Past the Zoo and Riverslea, right at the top of Mossley Hill and facing the large sandstone church with its resonant chimes loud enough, if the wind were in the right direction, to be heard in Ivanhoe Road over a mile and a half away, stood Sudley, the house and extensive grounds of Cousin Emma Holt. Cousin Emma’s mother had been a Miss Bright whose sister had married my greatgrandfather, George Melly. Her father, George Holt, was a partner and co-founder of the shipping firm Lamport
&
Holt for which Tom had briefly and reluctantly worked. George Holt was also a director of many companies and left what in those days was an enormous fortune, £600,000. A benefactor of the Liverpool University College, later Liverpool University, a collector of important pictures and an ardent Unitarian, he could well stand as the epitome of the benevolent Victorian capitalist.

Emma was his only child and heir. She never married, although the prospect of such a fortune must have offered a challenge to many an ambitious or mercenary young man. She was in fact remarkably plain with a long face, an incipient moustache, and very small eyes. At the same time she was both shrewd and self-aware. It is possible she knew that it was unlikely she would be loved for herself alone and rejected any suitors, but here I am only speculating. Her character on the other hand was original and her generosity, especially to young people, unstinting.

The gates of Sudley were actually around the corner from Mossley Hill. There was a small lodge and a long drive, with street-lamps at intervals, winding up to the house itself. This was large but low, built of sandstone in a restrained Victorian neoclassical style. The front with its Doric porch was comparatively narrow and in part obscured by rhododendrons. The main facade faced south, its tall windows overlooking a steep grass bank and narrow lawn beyond which, enclosed by iron railings, was a big field in which sheep grazed. The estate was ringed by bluebell woods.

There was an ornamental conservatory attached to the house and a walled kitchen garden with a range of greenhouses of ascending temperatures in which grapes were grown and orchids cultivated. At the back of the house was an enclosed courtyard with disused stables, one of them converted into a garage and, rather mysteriously, a row of occupied pigsties. The whole of this area, including the pigsties, was built of bright red, glazed brick, a startling effect which always induced in me a feeling of pleasurable anxiety.

Visiting Sudley, usually for Sunday lunch, was a formal experience which, like Chatham Street, intimidated my mother into using her ‘church voice’. She would implore us to behave even as we yanked on the bell-pull but, being in fact less in awe of kindly Cousin Emma than any others of her generation, we usually, much to Maud’s anguish, blotted our copy-books. Even Bill, in general more to be trusted than I, suddenly announced one lunch time that we had received a Christmas card of a monkey (presumably Lawson Wood’s repulsive ‘Grand pop’), which our nanny had said ‘looked just like Cousin Emma’. Maud turned crimson.

‘No, Bill,’ she improvised in panic, ‘I’m sure what she said was that Cousin Emma
sent
you the Christmas card of the monkey.’

This was a brave try, if unconvincing. Cousin Emma’s cards were inevitably of Beatrix Potter animals, and anyway Bill wasn’t going to let her off the hook.

‘No,’ he said emphatically, ‘she said it
looked
like Cousin Emma.’

‘What lovely plums!’ said my mother on the edge of hysteria.

I was watching Cousin Emma closely during this exchange. I could see she was not at all angry – if anything, she was, almost imperceptibly, amused.

The interior of Sudley was far more impressive than the dark jumble of Chatham Street. Apart from the kitchen area, never visited and concealed behind a green baize door, there were very few ground-floor rooms: a little cloak-room, a library and,
en suite,
a great drawing-room, a small morning-room and the dining-room, all three facing the field with its flock of sheep.

The L-shaped hall was enormous with a parquet floor and a fine staircase curving up under a glass dome. There was a delicious smell of beeswax polish and pot-pourri. The library was dark with mahogany shelves lining every wall, and fine leather-bound books, but the three rooms facing south were brilliantly lit and furnished in restrained high Victorian taste.

There were many objects to intrigue us, notably two stuffed cranes under the well of the staircase. In life these handsome creatures had roamed the grounds, but it was the picture collection which, from an early age, excited my interest. I have been fascinated by painting since I was very small, initially I think by the puzzle of illusionism, and, unlike many children, I was always pleased to be taken to exhibitions and galleries. Nevertheless it was at Sudley, for the Chatham Street pictures were a mixed bag and heavily discoloured with varnish, that I realised the charm and possibility of a private collection.

It was, I suppose, typical of the informed taste of its period. It included a large Turner in the dining-room, several eighteenth-century portraits by Lawrence, Raeburn, Joshua Reynolds, etc., a beautiful little William Dyce and a few Pre-Raphaelites, in particular the smaller version of Holman Hunt’s
Christ in the Temple,
a jewel-like picture in which the young Jesus is discovered by His parents lecturing the old rabbis. Once Cousin Emma discovered my potential liking for art she would frequently lead me round the collection and explain its history but it was the Holman Hunt that provided the climax to these little tours.

The picture wasn’t hung but mounted on an ornamental easel in the hall. Attached to the easel was a large magnifying-glass suspended on a brass chain. ‘You see, George,’ explained Cousin Emma, ‘Mr Hunt went to endless pains to be true to nature.’ She then picked up the magnifying-glass and focussed it on the head of one of the Jews listening to the young Lord Jesus. ‘He even,’ she continued, ‘painted in the cataracts on the old man’s eyes.’ At this she drew back the glass so that an eye increased dramatically in size. I could see the milky translucent skin over the eyeball, a demonstration I never tired of.

Holman Hunt had stayed with Cousin Emma’s father and it was his host who had been responsible for the purchase by the Liverpool Corporation of the painter’s grotesque masterpiece
The Triumph
of the Innocents,
in which the resurrected, recently-slaughtered babes accompany the fleeing Holy Family but are visible only to the Baby Jesus as they sport around him on what looks like a rainbow-tinted water bed.

Cousin Emma went to a lot of trouble to keep us entertained. She would read the
Tales of Beatrix Potter
and the poems of Edward Lear in her clear unpatronising voice with its Lancashire-inflected A’s. Most of my elderly female relations had this slight regional intonation, but none of their brothers or male cousins displayed the least trace. I can only suppose it was because the boys were sent away to public schools in the South while their sisters were educated in the school-room by governesses. Cousin Emma pronounced glass to rhyme with ‘ass’ and would offer us in consequence ‘a glas of mealk’.

In a cupboard in the library there was a marvellous collection of Victorian toys which she would show us but prudently refused to allow us to play with except under her supervision. There was a zoetrope, a forerunner of the cinema, with a circular metal drum which you loaded with a picture-strip of creatures in a sequence of positions. You then spun the drum round on its base and by looking through a series of little slits around the top you could watch horses apparently jumping over fences or clowns tumbling through hoops. There was a kaleidoscope and a three-dimensional stereoscope but above all – and in this case Cousin Emma wouldn’t allow us even to touch it, but wound it up herself – there was an incredible musical-box. This was in the shape of a lettuce. When the music started the leaves parted and the head and shoulders of a life-size white rabbit emerged. It twitched its ears and nose, nibbled on the edge of a leaf but then, when the music finished, popped abruptly back into the heart of the lettuce whose leaves closed over it again with a click.

There must have been a large staff at Sudley both inside and out, but I can only remember Aimee, the elderly head parlour-maid, and Stanley, the grumpy old chauffeur. They both exuded tight-mouthed disapproval of everyone except Cousin Emma but especially of children. Aimee would open the front door to us as though we were the first wave of barbarians at the gates of Rome. If Cousin Emma ordered Stanley to drive us home in the sedate Daimler his back would transmit his disapproval and resentment at such a course.