Owning Up: The Trilogy (9 page)

To children all grown-ups are about the same height, and I never thought of my grandfather as a very small man nor, as my mother maintained, decidedly plain. There was, however, no doubt that my father’s good looks came from his mother, who remained exceptionally beautiful to the end of her life. She was also the dominant partner, keeping an especially beady eye on my grandfather’s drinking habits. He was forbidden whisky but allowed sherry and sometimes, my father told me later, would secretly empty the sherry decanter and replace it with scotch. At the end of lunch or dinner he would walk purposefully towards the sideboard and pour himself a large Kummel, which his wife believed, incorrectly, to be comparatively harmless. To help defuse this moment he would make the same joke or, to be more precise, repeat the same ritual. No joke delivered twice a day can hope to retain that element of surprise which is the essence of humour. Between chair and sideboard he would ask a question.

‘What was the name of that Turkish General?’

Nobody was expected to answer this enquiry, and my grandmother would stare at the table with an expression in which exasperation and resignation fought for supremacy. Then, as he helped himself to a generous measure, my grandfather would answer his own conundrum.

‘Mustapha Kummel!’

I never saw my grandfather noticeably drunk but I dare say, like many of his generation, he was usually mildly fuddled.

Although he would occasionally visit the commercial district of Liverpool, he had retired from business in 1924 at the age of forty-nine. He had been Passenger Superintendent at Lamport & Holt, the shipping firm to which my father had been temporarily and reluctantly attached. My grandfather’s older brother George was joint Managing Director but had resigned following a row with Lord Kylsant who had taken over the company. My grandfather had left as a sign of solidarity, overshadowed, even here, by his ‘more brilliant’ sibling. No great sacrifice was involved. He had some money of his own and in 1927 George had died leaving what was, in those days, an enormous fortune to be divided among his brothers and sisters. From then on, apart from some charity work, my grandfather resigned himself happily to doing very little.

Nobody ever called him by his first name, Samuel, Although his middle name was held in common by most members of the Chatham Street Mellys, he alone chose to be known as Heywood. His wife often made it sound like a call to heel. To his older brothers and sisters he had apparently been known as ‘Pup’, but I never heard any of those still living refer to him by this affectionate diminutive. My father called him ‘Guv’nor’.

Collectively my grandparents were nicknamed ‘Mumbo’ and ‘Jumbo’. As neither of them was in the least elephantine, I suppose this to have derived from the parents of the hero of the then popular but now taboo children’s book,
Little Black Sambo.
Bill and I called them ‘Gangie’ and ‘Gampa’, obviously a childish mispronunciation of Grannie and Grandpa. The Griff was irritated that we should call my other grandmother ‘Gangie’ as, unlike ‘Gaga’, it carried no suggestion of senile feeble-mindedness, but she was in general jealously competitive of Gangie, a failing we were well able to exploit.

When speaking of him to servants and tradesmen Gangie referred to her husband as ‘the Colonel’, and his correspondence was addressed to ‘Colonel Heywood Melly’. He had indeed followed the family tradition of commanding the 4th West Lancashire Brigade, but in his case only from 1914 to 1916. He had led the regiment to France in 1915, but the following year was invalided out on account of acute dysentery. He was awarded the Territorial Decoration. It was hardly a glittering military career but he, or perhaps his wife, chose to retain the courtesy title.

On the eve of leaving for France, the 4th West Lancashire Brigade held a day of manoeuvres on a plain outside Liverpool. A tea-tent was erected on a nearby hill so that the Colonel’s lady and the wives and families of his brother officers could watch their husbands charging about below; a picture which bore little relation to the filthy, lice-ridden trenches which were their destination. Due to the hostilities the regiment had trebled its size and among the men were many volunteers from the Liverpool docks, a class far removed from the clerkly respectability of pre-war days.

Among the lieutenants was a very young man called Tom Todd who had never been exposed before to six hours of strong language on such an insistent level. During the tea interval, seeing my grandfather in conversation with his wife and without a cup, he hurried over to make good this deficiency. ‘Have a cup of fucking tea, Colonel,’ he proposed politely. The effect was that of an animated H. M. Bateman cartoon. This was a favourite after-dinner story of my grandfather’s, and my father would sometimes repeat the invitation as he poured himself out a cup from the dumb waiter between returning from the office and leaving for The Albert.

Until I was about five Gangie and Gampa lived in the large house where I was born. It was called The Grange and was built on the banks of the Mersey in the Parish of St Michael’s, a small pocket of
rus in urbe
which lay unexpectedly concealed behind the bustle of Aigburth Road with its small shops and noisy trams.

Even then I was charmed by the abrupt transition. You turned off Aigburth Road down the side of the Rivoli Cinema and walked along one of those two-up two-down terraced streets built of yellow brick with lace curtains and holy-stoned steps. This eventually petered out, and there were perhaps six semis of the early twenties, speculative building on a decidedly unambitious scale, and traversed by a very small street along the side of two of the houses but of great interest and pride to me in that it was called Melly Road. I imagined then that this was due to the proximity of my grandfather, but realise now it was probably named after the family. If so it was a very modest acknowledgement of a century of public service and commercial acumen.

Beyond the semis was the entrance to a lane, its surface unmac-adamed, partially cobbled, dusty in summer, muddy in winter. It was, according to its street sign ‘unadopted’, which meant that it was not the responsibility of the Liverpool Corporation. It was darkened by great Arthur Rackham-like trees and there were fields behind its tangled hedges and sandstone walls. At the end was a tiny lodge which served the four or five houses which surrounded it. The lodge keeper was a gnomish, startlingly white-haired Welshman called Mr Griffiths, who would emerge suddenly from his pointed nail-studded door to identify visitors, cackling high-pitched forelock-tugging greetings at those he recognised.

The Grange, shielded from its neighbours by tall shrubberies, was a long, low grey house of restrained early-Victorian Gothic. It had a large walled garden which ran down to the river. There were old fruit trees and little twisted walks. I found it enchanting if a shade sinister. The rooms of The Grange seemed, in contrast to Ivanhoe Road, enormous. My mother always maintained that ‘Mrs Melly has no taste’, by which I suppose she meant that she made no concessions to modernity. There were several good pieces of eighteenth-century furniture, polished floors with faded Turkish carpets and old glazed chintzes. It’s true the pictures weren’t up to much – mediocre water-colours in wide gold mounts and engravings of Arabs around an oasis – but my parents didn’t collect masterpieces either. There was one engraving I really liked. It showed an elderly but robust gentleman in eighteenth-century clothes toasting his beaming white-haired wife at the other end of a dining-room table. On the wall above the fireplace hung two oval portraits of them in their youth. I believed, despite their wig and lace-cap, that it represented my grandparents. Gangie, apart from her sternness over drink and frequent irritation at my grandfather’s unwavering devotion to the habit, was extremely fond of him. He for his part worshipped her; her very strictness compensating no doubt for the loss of his ‘five mothers’. He wasn’t wholly in awe of her however. He would occasionally stand behind her chair while she criticised some aspect of our behaviour, making his false teeth pop in and out of his mouth – a course which, much to her uninformed surprise, reduced us to instant hysterics. I, for my part, was much less intimidated by Gangie than by the Griff. She was more easily diverted from course, less severe in her standards.

There were only two indoor servants at The Grange, both of whom were there before I was born and who remained with my grandmother, heavily exploited and frequently abused, until her death in 1959. Her maid was called Marjorie, a large, rosy-cheeked, heavy-breathing woman who retained the slow rural burr of her native Shropshire. She had caught my grandmother’s feudal fantasies and whenever I went to call on Gangie at however short an interval, would greet me with a cry of ‘Welcome home, Master George’, as if I were the young lord returning to his great estates after completing the Grand Tour. When I was small this seemed merely peculiar. I knew that my real home was 22 Ivanhoe Road. It was later that I found it absurd, and especially after my grandparents had left The Grange, which at least resembled a modest manor house, and moved into a semi-detached facing Aigburth Boulevard. After my grandfather’s death Gangie rented a flat, but even this didn’t modify Marjorie’s ritual. Dressed during the war as a temporary post-woman, she would still evoke wide parklands and rolling acres.

Over the years she had developed several eccentricities which Gangie either failed or affected not to notice. When serving vegetables, if anyone, even for a moment, was slow to notice Marjorie’s heavy-breathing presence at their side, she would nudge them quite sharply with her elbow. Her obsession was tree-felling or, failing the opportunity for that, the illegal collection of firewood from public places, an activity she pursued with Freudian intensity. Once, on discovering my father cutting down a small tree, she warned him in words which seemed loaded beyond their overt meaning: ‘You be careful, Mr Tom,’ she said, ‘or you’ll do yourself a bad injury.’

In the late 1950s, when Gangie was senile and almost speechless, Marjorie used to wheel her from her flat into adjacent Sefton Park in an invalid chair. My mother, meeting them by chance one windy afternoon, noticed that my grandmother seemed to be perched unnaturally high beneath her rugs. Marjorie had been thrusting all available branches and logs under her charge, jacking her up several inches.

Marjorie’s greatest friend was the cook, Annie. They had been engaged the same week and were to share a flat together after my grandmother’s death some thirty years later. Annie was almost a midget and badly crippled. She had a sweet face, always smiling, and rolled about her duties on her bowed legs with cheerful vigour. She was also an excellent and consistent cook which in no way deflected Gangie from cursing her roundly for any minor shortcoming or misunderstanding, referring to her on such occasions as ‘Silly Little Annie’. Annie was especially skilled at soups for which Gampa had a particular liking, sucking them up with noisy appreciation from the side of one of the large crested spoons, a habit which set my mother’s nerves on edge but had no effect on my grandmother beyond impelling her to raise her voice. For Bill and me, however, it was Silly Little Annie’s puddings that won our enthusiasm, and in particular a creamy combination of rice and jam known as ‘Freddie’s Delight’.

The Griff, aggravated by our constant and maliciously appreciative references to Freddie’s Delight, badgered Gangie for the recipe, a word she always pronounced ‘receipt’. Gangie wasn’t having any. It was ‘her’ pudding. They were on very formal terms anyway, never progressing beyond ‘Mrs Melly’ and ‘Mrs Isaac’. Rather than admit defeat the Griff ordered her cook to try and create Freddie’s Delight from our description alone. Week after week we were faced by variations of rice pudding, some so congealed as to form a mould, others so runny that they were almost a drink, but none of them even approximating to the delicious original. Eventually, and to our relief, for we had in effect been penalised by our own mischief, the Griff gave up.

With two dailies, Marjorie, Silly Little Annie and a gardener five days a week, The Grange might have been considered adequately staffed, but my grandfather also employed a uniformed chauffeur. It was not that he went in for very grand cars. His Chatham Street brothers, his cousin, the shipping heiress Emma Holt, owned huge old-fashioned Daimlers with the chauffeur like a stuffed animal in a glass case taking his orders through a flexible speaking tube, freesia in little vases and sal volatile and smelling salts in silver-topped glass bottles slotted into the upholstery, but Gampa preferred a more modern if solid motor car, a maroon Armstrong-Siddeley. It was also his habit to sit by his chauffeur, with whom he chose to establish an officer-and-batman relationship, a military illusion reinforced by his being addressed as ‘Colonel’ and the obvious pleasure he derived from casually but inevitably returning the obligatory salute of passing AA men on their three-wheeled motor-cycles.

There were three chauffeurs during my childhood. The first, whom I can only just remember, was called Burscoe, a name that in itself sounded like the noise of an old-fashioned motor-horn. He was a small, thickset man like a sturdy little bull and apparently extremely randy. My father told me, although it may have been apocryphal, that Gampa once discovered Burscoe in the kitchen of a country house in Yorkshire where they were staying, rogering the cook from behind while she continued, impassively, to peel potatoes; a tableau which could well have come from ‘My Secret Life’, and formed part of my grandfather’s stock of mildly indecent after-dinner stories when the ladies had left the room. Burscoe was not dismissed for this peccadillo. Like Tom, Gampa had apparently a tolerant view of sexual behaviour.

After Burscoe retired he was replaced by Kane, a big ebullient man with an open mobile face as innocent as Tommy Cooper. He was married to a small woman with unfashionably long hair and the looks of a beautiful gypsy. Kane was marvellous at amusing us on long journeys. He would recite a string of gibberish which he pretended to be the Chinese alphabet. He told us that RAC stood for Running After Chickens. He kept us in such stitches that I even forgot to feel car-sick.