Still Standing: The Savage Years (37 page)

‘’Ave yoo met moi boifrind? He roides a mowtor boike. Id to tow in lither he is. We downt tayke ’im to the ’ospital if he cums off it, we ’ave ’im soled and heeled.’

‘Why are you hanging on to your mother’s house?’ everyone kept asking me. The reason was simple. To let it go would be akin to an act of betrayal.

Harry on the end and Dot-Next-Door, two of the few original neighbours left, kept an eye on it for me when I wasn’t there, which was often. Finally, reluctantly bowing to pressure from well-meaning friends and relatives who couldn’t understand why I wanted to keep a property that would cost a lot of money to renovate and that I wouldn’t be living in, I gave it back to the landlord.

My sister Sheila and her husband Peter, along with Aunty Annie and my cousin Tricia, came round to help me pack away what was left of my mother’s belongings. Her clothes, beautifully cared for and most of them hardly ever worn, were divided up into bags for the charity shop and bags of stuff they wanted to keep. The selection of bizarre items that I wanted I crammed into a selection of carrier bags: plates, cutlery, a blue blanket that had been on her bed, a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary containing a murky liquid that had turned green with age, trivial items but ones that all had a history and were personal to me.

From my bedroom I took back to London all that was left of my childhood and teenage years: a papier-mâché money box in the shape of a hippy’s head, an empty jar of French mustard that my mother had considered eccentric enough to put on the windowsill when she’d redecorated the room in the colours of Tara King of
The Avengers
’ apartment to give it an
air of authenticity, all my old books and school reports and two flannelette pillowcases that I’d slept on for as long as I could remember.

Aunty Anne and Sheila were quite tearful when the time came for them to say goodbye. ‘When I think of the things that have gone in this house,’ Aunty Anne said wistfully on the front doorstep, wiping her eyes and turning to take one last look, ‘hard times and happy times. The only link with the old days, the times when everyone was all together.’

She blew her nose delicately and kissed me on the cheek.

‘Ta-ra, son, don’t be hanging around for too long in an empty house full of memories, it’s not healthy. Get yourself back to London as quick as you can and get on with your life.’

She made her way slowly down the path, examining the roses for one last time.

‘Let it go,’ she said, pausing to sniff a peach rose that I remembered had started life as a cutting ‘borrowed’ from Lord Leverhulme’s gardens on one of their many ambles around stately homes. ‘Remember the past, but don’t live in it.’

My train wasn’t for another two hours, and as there was nothing to do since we’d cleaned the house from top to bottom and the electricity and gas had been cut off, I sat on the floor and waited. The rooms were empty, all the trappings that make a house a home, from the three-piece suite to the framed print of Polperro by Vernon Ward, bought in Boots on Grange Road by Aunty Chris for 7s. 6d. and that had hung proudly on the wall behind my dad’s chair for as long as I could remember, had been split up and dispersed to charity shops and the rubbish tip.

I sat and stared at the wall, wondering how I was going to kill time until I could say goodbye and catch the 6.30 from Lime Street. Idly I leaned across to pick at a piece of the ubiquitous magnolia chip that was coming away from the wall – and before I knew it I’d pulled half of it off, exposing a section of the O’Gradys’ very own Bayeux Tapestry. The next half-hour was spent scraping away furiously with a knife that had escaped Aunty Anne’s eagle eye until the majority of the paper was off. Underneath it, drawn on the wall and perfectly preserved, was the family history. A drawing of Chad, a cartoon character older readers will remember from the war years, depicting a fellow peeping over a brick wall, his truncheon-shaped nose hanging halfway down it and ‘Wot No Meat?’ written underneath dominated the centre of the wall, with a half-decent drawing of Cruella de Vil executed by me as a boy in pencils and crayons given to me by a chambermaid in the Isle of Man. Steve Davis, my childhood friend who lived in the first house on the Grove, had written his name, as had my father, who had added his Air Force number and dated it 1947. Slightly faded was a poem written by my sister in a careful hand in red pencil and dated 1959:

I wish I was a little fish that swam beneath the ice

For when the girls came out to skate it would be rather nice.

My signature featured heavily, progressing from the childish scrawl of a five-year-old through to the neatly joined-up writing of my teens. My brother and cousins John and Mickey had drawn Spitfires in combat with Messerschmitts and an army of stick soldiers with rifles firing a broken line
to represent bullets at the advancing enemy. In the corner by the pelmet it read ‘Christine Savage plastered this wall’ and underneath it some wag had written ‘and she was plastered when she did it!, arf, arf’ while in my mother’s unmistakable hand it said ‘Cockies keep away please!’, no doubt a reference to the plague of cockroaches that would scuttle around under the wallpaper, hungry for the homemade paste of flour and water. In the war years my mother had watched them, revolted, as she lay in bed with her two babies during the air raids.

How could I leave this behind? Why didn’t I have a chisel or, even better, a bloody camera so I could record it for posterity?

I gathered up the shredded wallpaper from the freshly vacuumed carpet and carted it out to the bin, picking up the Vernon Ward that was propped against a bin-bag to take it home with me. We’d been through too much together to part now, I reasoned. We might as well finish the course.

The phone was still connected so I rang Reg.

‘Prago?’ he said, answering the phone in his inimitable style. ‘Fong Towers, I’m afraid Her Imperial Highness is attending a rehearsal, this is her maid speaking. May I help you?’

I’d been offered a play called
A Vision of Love Revealed in Truth
by Neil Bartlett but in the end I’d reluctantly turned it down as it clashed with
The Bill
and Reg had taken over. I went to see the play when it opened at the Drill Hall and thought, like everyone else in London, that it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. It was wonderful and so was Reg, who was much more suited to the part than I was, and in the end I didn’t regret not doing it even though it would have been interesting.

‘It’s me,’ I said, trying to inject a bit of cheer into my tone.

‘Oh dear,’ Reg said, dropping the maid act. ‘Are you still in Liverpoolian?’

‘Birkenhead.’

‘Burke and Hare then, de-ar, whatever. How are you, dahling?’

I could tell he was high as a kite to be working in the legitimate ‘Fah, Fah’ again, his way of describing the theatre, and from how his career had suddenly picked up. He was hosting the Black Cap’s talent nights. David Rosen, the DJ, had put together some tapes for him, silly things like the theme from
Skippy the Bush Kangaroo
and the typewriter song that the audience would join in with gusto. It was hilarious to watch a pub full of grown men and women singing along to ‘A Windmill in Old Amsterdam’ led by Regina, who was fast becoming a cult figure on the gay circuit.

‘Come home, Miss Saveloy,’ he said. ‘Get yourself back to London, de-ar, on the next stream train out and make sure you don’t talk to any strange men in the carriage. Keep your bonnet tilted, my de-ar, and remember what your mother told you … Oh, I’m sorry, dahling, that just popped out.’

How could I forget what my mother had told me? If only I’d listened to her on the odd occasion I might not have made such a mess of things, wasting my time going from job to job and not applying myself to studying for a career with good prospects, an excellent salary and the stability that she believed went with it.

‘You’re a drifter.’ I could visualize her now, stood on the kitchen step shaking her head. ‘A bloody drifter. When are you going to settle down? Get a proper job, make something of yourself in the world?’

‘Never, Mam, never,’ I said aloud to the empty room. ‘It’s never going to happen.’

Taking one last quick look around the house I spotted her library ticket on the mantelpiece. One of the most poignant moments for me following her death was taking her library books back to the Birkenhead Central Library and closing the account that she’d had with them since she was a teenager.

Having spent at least one day a week in this library from as far back as I can remember, I knew every inch of the place and if I think about it now I can still smell that musty aroma from the long wooden boxes of index cards on the table and the noise from the date stamp as the librarian marked your book. The library ticket set me off into a violent bout of sobbing. How could such a small piece of light green cardboard be the key to so many potent memories?

‘Hang on here, Paul, while I go and see if that new Georgette Heyer’s in yet. She said she’d keep it for me …’

I felt better after a good cry. Pulling myself together and refusing to allow myself to wallow in any more potentially tear-jerking memories, I let myself out and without a backward glance struggled down the steep hill towards the station with my army of carrier bags and Vernon Ward’s ‘Misty Morning in Polperro’ tucked under my arm. The sky was grey and overcast and a biting wind blowing up Sidney Road made my eyes stream, not that I needed any help from the icy breath of the Mersey as the tears ran freely again anyway.

I’d never felt so alone as I did at that moment, desolate at the realization that I’d just said goodbye for ever to my home, the place of safety that was always there, somewhere that I could go running back to, and frequently had, ‘with my tail between my legs and no arse in my trousers’ when I had
nowhere else to go. Well, there was no going back now, my roots had been dug up and the ground concreted over. I was on my own. And, just as I’d wished, I was self-employed and self-sufficient and answerable to no one except myself, a person whom I considered unreliable and highly unpredictable.

How long would the Lily Savage act last? I’d given it a few years maximum before the audiences would tire of me and move on to a new fad and I was realistic enough to grasp the fact that if I were to rely on acting jobs as my sole source of income I’d be sat by a silent phone waiting for it to ring for the rest of my days. And what of Murphy? In my current pessimistic frame of mind with all the stops of misery pulled firmly out, particularly those marked self-pity, lack of self-worth and oh ye of absolutely little faith, I couldn’t see our stormy but nevertheless loving relationship lasting past Christmas.

I’d be alone, I told myself pityingly, a self-employed orphaned drag queen on the wrong side of thirty with an uncertain future in showbiz. What was it Aunty Chrissie used to say to me when I was full of woe? What were those warm words of wisdom she’d impart after she’d listened to me bemoaning my lack of funds and pathetic situation?

‘Get off the Cross for Christ’s sake, will you, we need the wood.’

Yes, that was it, subtle but practical advice that perhaps it wouldn’t do any harm to listen to. I might be down in my boots at the moment, unable to see any option other than to sentence myself to an indefinite term at the bottom of a dark well filled with misery, but at least I’d come out and told the family about my forthcoming appearance on
The Bill
. It had needed the fortification of whisky to loosen my tongue, and even so I hadn’t been drunk or brave enough to mention the
new woman in my life. I’d break them in gently about Lily Savage later on if the need arose, not that I thought it ever would as working mostly in gay bars and clubs I couldn’t see how they’d possibly find out about my alter ego. I could hardly imagine my sister popping into the Vauxhall Tavern or Aunty Annie mixing with the clones in Rockies on a Friday night. No, my secret was safe and would remain that way for the time being.

‘I wonder if Camden would have me back?’ I said out loud to myself, turning to the wall to avoid a particularly cyclonic blast of air and scraping one of my Co-op carrier bags in the process. It split and sent the chip pan, complete with basket, bouncing down the hill towards the busy Old Chester Road.

‘Bollocks,’ I said, putting my collection of bags down and making an attempt to go after it before anyone else did and saw the condition it was in from years of active service on the back ring of the gas stove. It was heavily stained, with a permanent tidemark running along the inside from where the fat had lain idle and still in between sessions. This chip pan was nearly as old as me and we had a lot in common – we’d both done battle with Molly O’Grady née Savage and lost – and was this the time, like Holly Grove, to let this old trouper go?

I watched it bounce off the kerb, an action that would no doubt add another permanent impression to the many indentations it already bore, war wounds, a testament to the vigorous shakings and hammerings it had received from that Eleanor of Aquitaine with a chip pan, my mother, as she took out her angry frustration over one of my many misdemeanours. If there were a Dignitas for chip pans then this battle-scarred veteran, at the moment rolling perilously
towards the busy traffic, should by rights have been sent to Switzerland with a one-way ticket years ago. Perhaps it would’ve been kinder to let it roll under the wheels of a 42 bus and join my mother in heaven, who’d no doubt be glad to be reunited with it as she could make chips for St Peter, served with corned beef and a tomato with a drop of Daddies sauce on the side.

I couldn’t let it go. Like Vernon Ward and the rest of the paraphernalia I was lugging back to London with me, it was an old friend with, despite appearances, plenty of life left in it yet. Cursing, I picked up the carrier bags and struggled against the wind to save the chip pan. ‘What Are We Going To Do With Uncle Arthur?’, the theme from
Upstairs, Downstairs
, was running inexplicably through my head.

‘Here ya are, lad,’ a woman shouted, running after me. ‘Don’t forget Our Lady.’ She was holding the plastic statue of the Virgin Mary aloft like the Olympic torch. It must have fallen out of the split bag along with the pan.