Owning Up: The Trilogy (7 page)

‘Mr Smith please,’ he shouted. ‘Mr Smith please.’

Uncle Fred was unable to resist the opening. He hunched his shoulders and spread the palms of his hands upwards: ‘Vat initial?’ he demanded.

My mother’s attitude was more ambivalent. She would often claim to be ‘proud of her Jewish blood’, but with her awareness of anti-Semitism, was very disturbed by any overt Jewish characteristics or any scandal involving Jews. She would express relief if a financier accused of fraud had an obviously Christian name and deplored, during the war, Jewish women wearing expensive fur coats in queues or talking too loudly to each other. Like Jonathan Miller in the
Beyond the Fringe
sketch, she felt she was Jewish rather than a Jew.

I don’t think the Griff gave it much thought. She would occasionally serve gefilte fish, but otherwise her cuisine was in no way kosher. From time to time she would invite the Reverend Frampton to lunch. He was a rabbi, a man of great culture and charm, but very anglicised. He dressed like a clergyman of the Church of England, and I was disappointed the first time I met him to discover he had no beard or high-crowned hat. The Griff’s main dilemma apropos her race lay in relation to her burial. Her husband was buried in the Orthodox Cemetery at Broad Green and she wanted to lie next to him. This however would involve being shaved and anointed with oil, and vain to the last, she disliked the idea of not ‘looking her best’ even in the coffin. In the end she had decided that the proximity of her much-loved Albert Isaac was more importantthan her invisible final bow. My mother used to say that the Griff’smain regret in relation to her funeral was the thought of being unable to see who turned up.

What with Fred’s resentment, my mother’s nervousness, and the Griff’s indifference, it was Alan alone who involved himself in the Jewish community, especially devoting himself to Harold House, a Jewish Boys’ Club, and to the Jewish Lads’ Brigade of which he became Colonel. When we were small we were sometimes taken to watch the Brigade move down Prince’s Boulevard with Alan, extremely smart in his uniform with its Sam Browne belt, marching at its head. It always seemed to be a clear grey winter’s day on these occasions. I can hear he drums and bugles drawing closer and I felt proud of my Uncle Alan, so serious and precise, as they swung past. Yet this didn’t stop me laughing when Alan had fallen asleep one Sunday after lunch and was snoring and Fred suggested that the noise he was making was ‘ooorghh-cadetzzz’.

Alan had been a Lieutenant in the 1914–18 war and a casualty too. While demonstrating he use of poisonous gas the wind had changed and, as a result, throughout the twenties and thirties he was in and out of a nursing home for major operations on his intestines. The scars on his stomach were as complicated as a railway junction but he never complained. The nursing home was in Gambia Terrace and overlooked a rather romantic graveyard in a steep valley of sandstone with the Anglican Cathedral rising slowly on the other side. Gambia Terrace was, like much of inner Liverpool, respectable Georgian architecture and, like the whole district, had already begun to ‘go down’. In the late fifties John Lennon had a chaotic flat there. It was close to the Art School which was itself round thecorner from the Liverpool Institute where Paul McCartney did less and less work as the two became involved with Rock and Roll. The Cathedral, of which my father had seen the foundation stone laid by Edward VII, was completed only very recently.

Between operations Alan worked on the Cotton Exchange and later for a large store called Owen Owens, but it was not until middle age that he was fit enough for long enough to pursue a steady career. He joined a firm that manufactured children’s clothes for Marks & Spencer and eventually became a director. He was also involved in managing the Basnett Bar, a seafood restaurant near the Liverpool Playhouse much used by the theatrical profession and the slightly raffish set which included Brian Epstein. When the Basnett Bar was pulled down he became a partner in a restaurant in Chester and still goes there most days at lunchtime to welcome guests and check that everything is ‘as it should be’. Alan has always been a meticulous believer in things being done correctly.

His other great passion was and remains The Ramblers, an amateur football club for Liverpudlian public and grammar schoolboys founded over one hundred years ago. He, as the longest serving member, was elected honorary President for the centenary year at the age of eighty-four and had to make a speech at the dinner, a task which occupied and obsessed him for three years before the event. He was especially worried that he might leave someone out from those who had to be thanked. But on the night it was a triumph, and he was much moved by the warmth of the applause. He was given a record of his speech on cassette but, while he was on holiday in the Isle of Man, it was stolen by a burglar. Happily, it was not the only copy and could be replaced. I believe that the Ramblers’ centenary dinner was the high spot of Alan’s life, all of it spent, with the exception of the 1914–18 war, holidays and trips abroad, within a quarter of a square mile.

Fred would never have spent three years worrying about a speech. He was a brilliant public speaker, much in demand for golf-club dinners. He never improvised, however, but would rehearse and time himself until he sounded entirely spontaneous. He had an equal talent for composing verses set to popular tunes for special occasions, which he and Alan would perform together accompanied by Fred’s ukelele. At my parents’ wedding reception they scored a great hit with Fred’s version of ‘It ain’t gonna rain no more’:

This afternoon at three o’clock

Our hearts were beating fast.

My brother turned to me and said

‘We’ve got her off at last.’

It was Fred who had been instrumental in my parents’ meeting. He had invited Tom home to tea after a rugger match and Tom had fallen in love with my mother immediately. It was not Maud’s first engagement. Just after the war she had almost married a rich man called Jack Eliot Cohen, but had broken it off because he had no sense of humour. The Eliot Cohens were the reverse of upset at this: not in this instance because of my mother’s race – their name alone would dispel this as grounds for disapproval – but because she had no dowry.

When Maud eventually became engaged to my father she received, as was then the custom, many congratulatory flowers. Reading out the accompanying cards to the Griff she came to Mrs Eliot Cohen’s contribution: ‘We are delighted and relieved’, she read. The Griff exploded with indignation until Maud told her that she had added the ‘and relieved’.

She was adept at teasing the Griff by such means. It never failed. On another occasion she was reading out a pamphlet in connection with an appeal for the Liverpool Foot Hospital, an organisation on whose committee she served. ‘And thanks are due to Mrs Tom Melly,’ she improvised, ‘for allowing her feet to be photographed.’ ‘You didn’t!’ shouted the Griff indignantly. My mother’s feet had always been a disaster area of twisted joints and bunions.

Serving on charitable committees was very much an obligation for the middle classes between the wars. My father, despite his indolence, was chairman of the Foot Hospital committee, although probably only to please my mother; his own feet were rather elegant. My mother did several days’ voluntary work a week for ‘The Personal Service’, a forerunner of the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, in which Tom was also involved, and Alan, as I said, was very active in this direction. Fred however did very little – his cynicism dismissed charity as beside the point – but he did join the Masons. I was very curious about the Masons even when I was quite young. He showed me his trowel and apron, but refused to tell me what they actually got up to, although sometimes I heard him in the ‘boys’ room’ reciting the ritual for his next step up the Masonic ladder.

My curiosity was intensified to an unhealthy degree after I had bought a pamphlet on the subject from a rosy-cheeked, beshawled old Catholic woman who came to the door. The cover showed some hooded figures about to commit a ritual murder; the whole text accused the organisation of every kind of wickedness and blasphemy. With an early taste for Gothic horrors, I was even more fascinated. Was it possible that Uncle Fred with his jokes and ukelele was involved in such things? I did not dare ask him, but I showed the pamphlet to my father. He dismissed it out of hand but added that he found the Masons both ridiculous and dubious in their support for each other in business.

Fred tried to interest Alan in the Masons but I don’t think he succeeded. I should guess Alan would have been discouraged by the amount of learning by heart involved.

That Alan and Fred, both over thirty by the time I was born, should share and continue to share the same bedroom for many years, may seem odd today. It was less so then. Alan was a bachelor, but Fred, on the contrary, was a great one for the girls. My mother frequently told me that she could remember him and his friend Cyril Banner, while still in their teens, going out to parade along the prom at Llandudno in the hope of picking up ‘a bit of fluff’. Fred was, I discovered later, highly sexed and perfectly prepared to indulge himself, but he had no intention of marrying until he was good and ready, and living at home was no doubt a useful alibi. I suspect he was mostly drawn to shopgirls, barmaids and waitresses although once, during the thirties, he had had a serious mistress, a rather glamorous blonde divorcée with a child, who gave my grandmother some alarm. It didn’t last, however, and he returned to more casual promiscuity. During the late fifties his sexual philosophy led to us quarrelling so severely that he cut me out of his will. Separated from my first wife, I resisted his instructions to divorce her before she ‘takes every penny you’ve got’. ‘Always wriggle,’ he told me, ‘that’s what kept me out of trouble. I always wriggled.’

Despite what I feel to be dubious in his character, I much regret we never made it up. Apart from the laughter he gave me, he was extremely kind and generous to me during my childhood. He was the first to take Bill and me to restaurants; my father considered it an absurd extravagance. We went to The State, a grand establishment by Liverpool standards with art nouveau stained-glass windows, a string quartet and the rich smell of roasts and stews. The speciality was ‘chicken on the griller’, a delicacy I misinterpreted, genuinely the first time, as ‘chicken on the gorilla’, a sinister form of cuisine that I was eager to sample. Having scored a hit with this notion, I didn’t hesitate to repeat it on every possible occasion. This I believe to be a universal vice in children and an extremely tiresome one. My subsequent malapropism, ‘suggestive biscuits’ for ‘Digestive biscuits’, was equally successful and I was guilty of looking on any lunch table as an excuse for reviving it long after I was aware of its inaccuracy.

If Fred was a bachelor from choice and the need to support his mother, Alan remained one from temperament. Several girls, according to my mother, were ‘keen’ on him but eventually turned elsewhere for lack of encouragement. There was one in particular whorprobably remained a spinster her whole life for Alan’s sake. She was one of the ‘Mother’ brigade, but a woman of spirit and dry wit, usually encountered riding a large bicycle down Lark Lane with a shopping basket on the front and a back pedal brake. Her devotion to Alan was so obvious as to arouse Fred’s mockery. He maintained every Christmas that she was crocheting a little net bag to support Alan’s ‘arrangements’.

‘Arrangements’ was the Griff’s word for the sexual organs. I was first aware of it when she took me, as quite a small boy, to the Walker Art Gallery. We stopped in front of a Cranach. She looked at it with some distaste. ‘You can’t tell me, George,’ she said, ‘that ladies’ and gentlemen’s arrangements are pretty.’ I had, at that time, no firm view on the subject, but at least I was more aware than most of my contemporaries as to what adult arrangements looked like.

This was because Maud and Tom had somewhere absorbed the theory that it was healthier for children to be exposed to their parents’ nakedness from the start. This was comparatively unusual thinking for the time and was especially odd in that they were not particularly ‘advanced’ in any other direction. Nevertheless we were encouraged to accompany them to the bathroom to watch my father shave and my mother in the bath, or my father in the bath and my mother on the lavatory. I am unable to analyse the effect of this on my sexual development, nor to decide what they imagined it might be. All it gave me during my childhood was something, like the French letter in my father’s ‘mess-box’, to swank about to my school friends.

As the Griff was one of twelve children she must have had a lot of relations and so, though on a lesser scale, had her husband. Nevertheless, although it is always said to be a Jewish characteristic, neither she nor my mother and uncles were at all obsessed by the structure of the family, and those I met or heard about existed in familial isolation. I didn’t even know in most cases from which side they came. It was on the contrary the Mellys who were concerned with who was whose second cousin twice removed.

Of the Griff’s childhood I knew nothing except that she had developed a precocious taste for wine, and that whenever she had asked hopefully what there was to drink for luncheon, her mother had always answered: ‘Water, Edith.’ Of her finishing school in Germany she was equally vague. She would sometimes recite a piece of doggerel about a miller’s three sons, all she retained of what was once presumably a fair knowledge of the language, and the only other thing she chose to remember was a visit to a famous sculpture, the nude torso of Venus, which was exhibited revolving slowly on a podium under a flesh-coloured spotlight in a dark room hung with black velvet.

I remained in ignorance as to how she came to meet my grandfather or the setting for their courtship. Of their early days together in Ivanhoe Road she told me only that she had ‘draped her own mantelpiece’, an accomplishment apparently denied to the majority of her contemporaries, but that was all.

Of her eleven siblings I met only one, her sister Lily, who was married and lived in Monte Carlo. She was a small, vivacious woman who always referred to herself as ‘Naughty Little Auntie Lily’, wore strong scent and seemed to me, on the one occasion she visited Liverpool during my childhood, the epitome of Continental sophistication. I suspect I first heard of her from my mother whilst walking past a particular house in Alexandra Drive, a long curving street of large late-Victorian houses which links Sandringham Drive to Ivanhoe Road with its more modest terraces. The house was of cream stucco in the style of an Italianate villa and with a glass porch supported on slender but ornate iron columns. The words ‘Monte Carlo’ have always projected this house like a magic-lantern slide on my mind’s eye, while similar architecture – in the Holland Park area of London for example – has the same effect in reverse.