Owning Up: The Trilogy (3 page)

Carol Ann told me that Lark Lane was becoming quite fashionable. There was a wine bar nearer the park. The bistro, a word and concept unknown to my parents, stands on a corner with big windows along both sides. It was a junk-shop in the fifties and before that a record shop. I had bought many of my first jazz 78s there in the holidays from Stowe and on leave from the Navy.

You ‘come-to’ as a child as if from a major operation. Pink blurs loom up, solidify into faces, become recognisable. Objects materialise. Continuity establishes itself.

Early memory is fragmentary: a boxful of unsorted snaps, many of them of people and places whose significance is lost; a few film clips of random lengths shown in no particular order. Nor is it possible to distinguish in retrospect between what you can really remember and what you were told later, and anyway many early memories are false.

I am sitting beside my mother in an open car. She is driving along a seaside promenade festooned with fairy lights at night. Everything is in shades of milky blue: the sea, the pier, the boarding houses. I am very happy. I smile up at my glamorous mother. The only flaw is that my mother never drove a car.

A real one. A maid, a friend of my nanny’s, is hanging up sheets in a small garden on the side of a house opposite ours in Ivanhoe Road. A blue sky full of little clouds, blossom on a stunted soot-black tree, the sheets very white, the arms of the maid red from the suds, the whole composition cramped and angular, without depth. Why this image chosen from so many which have been forgotten? Why a white horse galloping across a green hillside in North Wales lit by brilliant sunshine under a dark sky? Early memory has no discrimination. When everything is equal, without associations, without any meaning beyond itself, there is no measure available, no scale. My mother drives her car; the maid hangs up the washing (wooden pegs bought from gypsies who came to the door); the white horse gallops under the dark sky.

I was a discontented baby. My mother, to amuse me later, would recreate her nights in that small bedroom in the flat in Linnet Lane. A whimper leading to a prolonged wail. Her leap from the bed before my father could wake up. Her walking the floor, rocking me in her arms, crooning one of two songs: Paul Robeson’s ‘Curly-headed babby’ or Harrow’s ‘Forty Years On’. My subsidence into silence and careful replacement in my cot. Her return to bed. The approach of sleep. A whimper leading to a prolonged wail…

On my afternoon walk I would scream in my pram and could only be quietened by her drawing an umbrella along the railings. By the time we moved to Ivanhoe Road my parents could afford and had room for a nanny, and anyway I was beyond the screaming stage.

We spent my early summer holidays in Llandudno or Colwyn Bay, those adjacent Victorian seaside resorts on the coast of North Wales. My maternal grandmother was often with us. My nanny, Bella, always. My father would spend a fortnight there and commute at weekends for the rest of the month. Sometimes his parents visited us in their chauffeur-driven car. Still an only child I exercised an iron will, insisting on a rigid and rather extravagant routine: a visit to the pier to feed the seagulls, to watch them banking down out of the salt air, beady-eyed and sharp-billed, to grab the biscuits. The biscuits came from a special kiosk. There was a notice in its window: ‘the biscuits the birds like’. The birds were selective in their tastes; the biscuits they liked were rather expensive. Soon it was time for Punch and Judy, for which I early developed a passion which has never left me.

The Professor was called Codman. He was a Liverpudlian who during the winter months performed on the steps of St George’s Hall in the city centre, and in consequence Punch and his victims all affected a strong, if squeaky, Liverpool accent and always will have in my ears. I soon knew most of the script by heart, deriving deep satisfaction from the thwack of Punch’s stick, and his raucous pleasure in his own wickedness. I didn’t mind the crocodile, accepting that Punch could believe, until the very moment his nose was between its jaws, that it was a domestic cat, but when the ghost appeared to drag him gibbering down to” hell, I demanded, panic-stricken, to be taken away.

The afternoons, while less crippling financially, were given over to equally obsessional activities. My projects were either the removal of innumerable stones from one part of the beach to another or the filling of a bucket from a rock pool and emptying it at a given point above the tideline. The first exercise was called ‘Stones’, the second ‘Bucket-a-boat’. I was prepared to spend several hours alone engrossed in these monotonous tasks, but preferred to enlist an adult working under my direction. Few were amenable for long with the exception of my patient, if rarely available, grandfather dressed, as always, in a grey homberg hat the same colour as his full moustache and wearing a three-piece dark suit of antique cut with a watch-chain across the waistcoat, and a starched butterfly collar – his bare feet and rolled up trousers the only concession he was prepared to make to the sartorial licence of the seaside. While we worked he would whistle tunelessly through his false teeth, an habitual mannerism which used to drive my mother mad with irritation. He smelt, deliciously, of Turkish cigarettes.

There were other entertainments. The pier itself with its salt-corroded penny-in-the-slot machines. There was ‘The Haunted House’ and ‘The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots’. Of these I preferred the latter: two doors slowly opening on the facade of a castle, the executioner bringing down his axe, the Queen’s head tumbling into the basket, the doors banging shut. I was mystified as to how the head rejoined the trunk in time for the next penny. There was also a ‘What the Butler Saw’ machine. I enjoyed turning the handle very fast so that the fly-stained sepia image of a massive-thighed Edwardian lady was forced to remove her voluminous clothing at breakneck speed.

There was a concert party which, until I was old enough to understand the jokes, my parents enjoyed rather more than I did. What they liked was it being so hopeless. There was a sketch one year, an exchange between the ‘light’ and ‘low’ comedians about a family called ‘The Biggers’. It described how the little Bigger had grown bigger than the bigger Bigger and so on. ‘I see’, said the ‘low’ comedian at the conclusion of this rigmarole, ‘there’s been a bit of bother at the Biggers.’ My parents laughed so much at this that a young man, sitting alone in a deck chair in the row ahead of them, turned indignantly round and told them it wasn’t kind to laugh at him just because he had red hair.

Sometimes I was put on a donkey but I didn’t enjoy it much especially when the donkey man would run with it jogging me up and down on its fat, yet bony, back. Nor did I appreciate being taught to feed a pony in a small enclosed field in front of our boarding house. My maternal grandmother, who was fond of animals, insisted I did this, balancing the lump of sugar on the palm of my hand, bending back my fingers to avoid them being nibbled. I can still feel the pony’s wet, warm, snuffling breath and see its dilating hairy nostrils. Often I would drop the sugar and she’d make me start again. She believed, unlike my mother, in discipline or at any rate didn’t lack the courage to apply it. My mother feared unpopularity, however short-lived, even from a child. ‘When did you last punish George?’ my grandmother asked her once. She couldn’t remember.

They were happy holidays. I was the centre of attention, my every word repeated later to others in my hearing as though a miracle of wit or perception, every pose recorded by my mother’s Brownie: the birds were fed on the biscuits they preferred, the stones were shifted, the water transported, and Punch was dragged squeaking and whacking his way along the road to perdition on the pebbly beach against the grey horizon.

As to why Llandudno comes back to me in such sharp focus from a time when Liverpool still seems fragmentary and vague I have, although it is apparently a common experience, no explanation. Perhaps the frame of the holiday, its yearly repetition clarified by growing terms of reference, developed and printed it in the dark-room of memory.

2

Number 22 Ivanhoe Road – a three-storey terrace house with steep front steps set back in a tiny front garden with a low wall. Behind its ornate brickwork and sash windows I spent most of the first nine years of my life. There were six of us living there to start with. My mother and father, my nanny Bella, a cook and a house parlour-maid. Later there was also my brother and, for a short time, my sister.

Opening the facade as if it were a doll’s house; thinking of it as a setting for a play described by the dramatist before the maid enters to answer the telephone; this is how it was arranged.

Behind the front door, to the right, a small pram-room with just enough space for the pram and later tricycles or fairy cycles. The pram an imposing object, its rubbery smell, deriving presumably from its concertina hood and clip-on cover, scented the room. After the war, unless very grand, it was rather ‘common’ to own a big pram; push-chairs, as battered as possible, became fashionable, but in the thirties the middle classes subscribed to these imposing objects, the insides of which could be adjusted later to accommodate sitting toddlers. Dark and highly polished, the pram, with its large spoked wheels, remained closer to a horse-drawn carriage than a motor car.

Facing the pram-room was the lounge. It was called that as a sign of modernity, implying gin before dinner instead of sherry, and the use of lipstick. My grandparents and great-uncles and aunts had drawing-rooms. There was a great deal of furniture in that small lounge: a ‘baby grand’ piano which my mother used to tell visitors was ‘off a ship’, its top covered with framed and signed photographs of actors and actresses she knew; a rather ‘good’ bookcase, glass-fronted shelves above, a cupboard below in which my father stored several cartons of Black Cat cigarettes in their tin boxes from which to fill his case. There were easy chairs and a sofa before the fireplace and, in front of the sofa, a long low oak stool with a webbed leather top with the
Radio Times
on it. In winter there was a coal fire in the modern grate, protected when the room was empty by a winged brass-netted guard, and the coal was kept in a beaten brass scuttle. There were two standard lamps, their bases in twenties black lacquer with gold dragons climbing up them and parchment shades.

In the space beyond was my mother’s desk with its reproduction Chippendale chair and, within reach on a little round-topped table, the flower-like, long-stemmed telephone. Opposite the desk, between the tail of the piano and the windows, was a wireless set (eventually to be replaced by a radiogram), with its heavy acid-filled batteries and its fretwork cloth-backed front. There was a built-in window seat. The carpet wasn’t fitted, the surrounding floorboards were stained a shiny black. The colour scheme, in keeping with calling it the lounge, was rather ‘daring’: cream wallpaper, oatmeal loose covers, and burnt orange curtains and cushions. There were no pictures in the room.

Next to the lounge, facing the bottom of the stairs, was the dining-room. It looked out over the back-yard, a scruffy little square of grass with an outside lavatory for the maids smelling strongly of Jeyes fluid, and a shed of the kind much-advertised in the back pages of the
Radio Times
against the far wall, next to a back door leading into the entry. You couldn’t see the back-yard from the dining-room because there were net curtains covering the bottom half of the window.

The dining-room, unlike the lounge, was entirely traditional except for its hemp carpet. There was a polished table with two leaves, Georgian chairs, a small glass-topped carving table, a corner cupboard and a square piano, bought for five pounds in an auction and wrongly believed to be a spinet. On the square piano, leaning against the wall, was a tray – a wedding present, with a collage of different kinds of Brussels lace arranged symmetrically behind its glass surface. There was a grandfather clock in the corner by the window with a phoenix painted on the face. My father wound it up on Sunday mornings after lunch. It gave me great pleasure to watch the heavy weights ascending on their chains as he did so, and to see the adjustable pendulum swinging to and fro through the narrow open door in the case. In the corner cupboard were heavy cut-glass tumblers, engraved burgundy glasses in beautiful glowing colours, claret glasses and liqueur glasses. Yet my parents, unlike my grandfather’s generation, never drank wine; indeed, my mother never drank at all.

On the walls were early nineteenth-century hunting and shooting prints: ‘The View’, ‘Gone to Ground’, ‘The Kill’ and gentlemen in frock coats and top coats bringing down partridges, snipe, and pheasants. The dining-room was warmed by a gas fire with fragile clay elements which slotted in over the jets. Gas fires then tended to bang loudly when you lit them, and sometimes when you switched them off. I imagine some early experience of this must have alarmed me deeply as I still have a phobia about lighting gas appliances, allied to a reluctance to open – although not to drink – champagne.

The only other door off the hall was at the back and covered with a fringed brown curtain on a brass rail to show that it led to the kitchen. This was far from streamlined. The solid wooden cupboards and drawers had big wooden handles, primitively carved curly bits at the corners and were painted white. There was a big, old-fashioned gas-stove and two battered wicker chairs in front of the
grate,
a scrubbed wooden table with kitchen chairs, a clothes pulley which squeaked when you raised or lowered it and, hanging from the light bulb, a sticky fly-paper textured with the corpses of many a summer’s bluebottle, plump on the manure of Hogg’s cows. There was no fridge, but in the back kitchen, with its sink and draining-board, was a wooden wire-meshed meat safe. Bread, flour and rice were kept in big round enamel tins, raisins, tapioca and sultanas in smaller editions of the same, and most of the shelves were covered in gingham-patterned oil-cloth for ‘easier cleaning’.

The hall itself had comparatively little in it. There was an oak ‘footman’s chair’, rather out of scale, and below the stairs a chest dated 1694 in which my father kept his rods and guns. On the chest was a little brass pestle and mortar and a small brass crinoline lady that was really a bell. Above it was a beautiful plate of the twenties, another wedding present. In brilliant blues, greens and gold, it represented some elves crossing a bridge in a landscape dominated by mushrooms. My mother, when I asked her later, could neither remember it nor imagine what had become of it. I expect it was broken in a move, and much regret it. It was the most magic object in the house. There was also a barometer you tapped to find out if it was going to rain and a useless and nasty little brass warming-pan.