That's Another Story: The Autobiography Read online

  A couple of years later we went up several rungs on the status-symbol ladder of car ownership, acquiring a two-tone Vauxhall Victor estate, in green and cream. I couldn’t wait to torment Dermot with it. In fact my father had hardly got out of the front seat after bringing it home than I was draped across its warm bonnet, in true motor-show fashion, while the hapless Dermot, caught innocently chalking on the pavement opposite, tried not to look, his bottom lip thrust out and his face turning cherry red in an attempt to control his rage. My father never ever told me off, but that day, on his way into the house, he wheeled round when he realised what was going on and shouted, ‘Wharaya doin’? Gerroff, ya daft cat, you’ll scratch the paint-work! ’ Whereupon, out of the blue, like a missive from the gods, a bird shat on the bonnet right next to me, splattering the fingers of my left hand. ‘Now, look! Come on, gerroff!’

  I jumped down and ran into the house, feeling vaguely ashamed of the excrement as if it were my own, while Dad whipped out an old handkerchief from his pocket and began to lovingly wipe the bonnet clean. I guess Dermot and I were even stevens after that and years later, on a visit home, I remember asking my mother to whom the flash car belonged that was parked opposite. I think it was an immaculately kept Cortina but can’t be sure of the make, only that it was extremely shiny, with a bigger aerial than most and enough headlamps for several cars. ‘Oh, Dermot is home to stay.’ And I felt my own little dart of envy; I wasn’t to pass my driving test until I was thirty-seven.

  It was here on Long Hyde Road, which ran along the side of our house, that during daylight hours and sometimes later, weather and school permitting, I would spend my time playing with any neighbourhood children who happened to be around. My first crush developed here when I was about five. Or, perhaps more accurately, I experienced my first feelings of loss. I’d been playing regularly with a boy called Robert, who had pale blond hair and lived on the far corner of Long Hyde Road. Suddenly he was going away; the family were moving house. He stood there, I can see him now, eating a piece of bread and butter, or a piece as we called it, whilst kicking the bottom of the garden wall opposite as he broke the news. I remember him not looking at me as he spoke and then running off, leaving four little crescent-shaped crusts on the top of the wall. Somehow it was the sight of those crusts that sparked off the grief of this separation. I picked one up and ate it, but couldn’t continue to eat the others as the damp edges where his lips and teeth had touched it brought a lump to my throat. I kept the other three pieces in one of my father’s old Senior Service cigarette packets until they dried out and went a bluish-green colour. I don’t remember much else about this boy’s family, except the reporting some years later of the death of Robert’s older brother whom I never really knew. He was killed in a climbing accident on Snowdon. And again the image of the small blond head with the blurred face, the foot kicking against the wall and the sweet taste of those damp crusts, slid into my head like a frame of film, as it has continued to do on the odd occasion ever since.

  Long Hyde Road was almost permanently marked out with white chalk for rounders or hopscotch, and a couple of times the whole length of the pavement, a good hundred yards, was marked out into four wobbly lanes for an athletics tournament organised by my brothers. Tommy and Kevin, at least in my eyes, were the cocks of the neighbourhood, heroes who made other boys look pitiably inadequate. To say I was proud of them could not be more of an understatement. It was unimaginable to me that anyone could possibly be cleverer or stronger or wittier or braver. They were the very best at everything and I as their little sister basked not only in their glory but also in their protection. They were knights in shining armour. This is best illustrated in an incident that occurred when I was about seven.

  There was a boy in the next street who, whenever I walked past his house, would leap out and attack me with his big, black-and-chrome plastic space gun. He would hold me there for what seemed like hours but was probably about twenty minutes or so, his great, long gun pinning my chest to the wall while my head and shoulders were stuck uncomfortably in the privet hedge above. On some occasions he was accompanied by Benji, the family boxer dog, which he would whip up into a frenzy so that it would leap about, whites of eyes flashing and long, jellied globules of saliva stretching and swinging from its jaws. He would then pat my shoulders so that the thing would jump up at me, its pink shiny willy out and fully ready for action and then, with an onslaught of slimy licks and fetid, wheezy breaths, it would attempt to mount me. It was rape by proxy. Needless to say I would walk miles out of my way to avoid this awful boy and his oversexed dog but one day, mistakenly thinking he was on holiday and that it was safe, I got caught again. It was a particularly lengthy session and, arriving home upset, I blurted out to my older brother Tommy what had happened. Within minutes, so legend would have it, he went round to the child’s house and not only soundly thrashed him but did so in front of his astonished parents. The boy never came near me again.

  Our house was north-facing and we didn’t get central heating until 1963. Climbing the stairs to go to bed at night was often likened to scaling the north face of the Eiger, and ice on the inside of the bedroom windows was usual throughout the winter. On the coldest nights my parents would simply pile the beds with coats and the resulting weight would make turning over in bed a feat of strength that just wasn’t worth the effort. This, of course, meant that the seat nearest the fire in the kitchen was fiercely fought over by the three of us and, once won, it would be given up only for the direst of emergencies. I remember my brother Tommy managing to stay put for a record-breaking length of time, eventually jumping up with a howl of expletives to find that his wellington boot had melted with the heat and had welded itself on to his leg. He still bears the scars.

  The house was on three storeys and there were three doors to get into it: the front door, which was rarely ever used, the middle door and the back door. The front door opened on to an oddly shaped hallway, one wall of which was almost all window. This was because the previous owner had an electrical shop and had built the hall on to display his radios. There were two doors off it, one leading into the front room, which was my father’s office. It smelt of tobacco and ink and him, and in the corner was his big roll-top desk, from which he ran his building and decorating business. It also contained the piano, upon which he could vamp anything by ear, and upon which I wrote hundreds of songs, all sounding very similar and which I sang at the top of my voice, over and over again, with my foot hard down on the loud pedal, hoping distantly that someone would say, ‘My God, that’s brilliant!’ instead of ‘For Christ’s sake, shut up! Your voice is so piercing!’ or my mother’s warning anthem of ‘Shut up or I’ll crucify you!’ which tended to persuade me to stop.

  The other door led to the sitting room, which held the television. We were one of the first houses in our road to have one and on important occasions like the Grand National, the Cup Final or the Queen’s Speech, various neighbours would be invited in to watch. It was a similar story with the telephone, which was also in this room. Most people hadn’t got one and so if there was an urgent need for a neighbour to contact someone, they would come round and use ours, always offering to pay. This would invariably result in the same scenario: my mother and one of her friends sitting at the kitchen table with cups of tea, pushing a couple of a coppers back and forth, with ‘No! No! I couldn’t take it from you!’ and ‘Yes! Now don’t be silly, Mary, just take it!’ This could go on for up to half an hour, broken every so often by little flurries of gossip and then taken up again with renewed vigour: ‘NO, no, I won’t hear of it!’ and ‘Yes! Yes, or I will never ask again!’ until eventually and with much tutting my mother gave in.

  However, the most important feature of the sitting room was the three-piece suite with its sofa, the back of which was the perfect height for saddling and mounting. Most nights after school I would jump on its back and go for a hack: my school satchel the saddle, its strap the bridle. I can remember a teacher once asking
me why some of my exercise books seemed to be bent in such a peculiar way. ‘Have you been sitting on them?’ I went red, inwardly horrified that someone might have a clue to my after-school, imaginary life on the range, and said that I thought the leather of my satchel had a natural warp in it, a bit like wood. After this incident I made sure my satchel was empty before saddling up. In my imagination I was the boy from Champion the Wonder Horse, trekking across the prairie and then sitting down to beans and coffee with the folks from Wagon Train. Eventually it was necessary for me to become the twin sister of the boy from Champion the Wonder Horse, when, after he rescued me from the Indians I married Flint McCullough, the scout from Wagon Train, with whom I had been in love for many years.

  It was on this sofa that my addiction to Coronation Street started back in December 1960, watching the first episode with my mother. I am slightly ashamed to say that when my own daughter was born and I brought her home, that very evening I was sitting in front of the television, holding her, and when the theme for Corrie came on she turned her little, week-old head around towards the television in what was obviously recognition. She remembered it from the womb, where hearing is the first sense to be developed. Sitting watching TV with my mother was a rare occurrence, her television viewing being confined to the Saturday-night variety show of the time and Sunday Night at the London Palladium. It was on that sofa that I would lie on a Saturday afternoon, the curtains drawn, watching the afternoon film. They were generally films from the thirties and forties, with Bette Davis being my favourite. I loved her in absolutely anything, although the ones that instantly come to mind are Now Voyager, Jezebel and All About Eve. She was unique; there was an exciting, un-Hollywoodish reality and lack of vanity in her performances, and she always played strong women who had to be reckoned with, who were not there simply to function as a fantasy to attract and please men. Now occasionally on a Saturday when no one is in, I try to re-create the Saturday afternoon of my childhood, the curtains closed, lying on the sofa with toast and jam, hoping that Bette will appear, brave and insolent, brazenly cutting a swathe through life, but more often than not finding that, although there are many more channels nowadays, the options are disappointing.

  I can still feel the rough, bobbly texture of that sofa with its maroon and grey upholstery, and smell its musty, ubiquitous aroma of stale tobacco and the unique essence that was us, as it warmed up on a winter’s night in front of the four-bar, Magicoal electric fire. We were allowed to have this on, and just the two bars only, if the weather was really cold; anything warmer than arctic and my mother’s voice would shoot up an octave, reaching a note she reserved solely to register panic and shock at the thought of an upcoming, potentially colossal bill. Her ancient and irrational fear of being without and in debt, and her resultant husbandry to the extent that she would walk several miles to save a halfpenny on a pound of carrots - meant that no bill ever went unpaid. In the latter part of her life the penny-pinching took a slightly different turn when she took to regularly trawling through the local charity shops, filling her wardrobe and drawers with tons of musty-smelling, second-hand clothes, most of which she never wore. She would often turn up on a visit to London, well into the 1980s, dressed from head to foot for a seventies night: in jackets with huge, pointy collars and blouses with Laura Ashley prints, all with the same stale aroma.

  The door leading out of the sitting room opened on to a little hall, on the left of which, down a couple of stone steps, was the pantry. It was a small dark room under the stairs, cool even in summer, with shelves laden with tinned food, a constant supply of my mother’s rock cakes and, on the floor, a huge basket full of clean, unironed laundry. I loved my mother’s rock cakes but their springy texture was the endless butt of jokes. I can remember my father up a ladder, mending a hole in the roof and shouting down to me in the garden, ‘Oh blimey! Hand us up one of your mother’s rock cakes.’ Or when the back door kept banging in the wind, my father suggesting that we shove one of Mum’s cakes underneath it. Once, my brother Kevin and I decided to put their robust quality to the test by playing a game of cricket with one. It lasted for several overs before the first currants began to work loose and it wasn’t until my brother hit a whacking great six that it finally disintegrated into a cloud of crumbs.

  The reason that the pantry is so significant is that it was brilliant for pretending to be Mrs Waller, who ran a small grocery shop over the road. Mrs Waller was a queen amongst shopkeepers; she didn’t so much run the corner shop as reign over it. A handsome woman in a pristine, pink, nylon overall that shushed every time she moved, she had beautifully waved, honey-blonde hair and perfect make-up. If there was ever more than one customer in at a time she would throw her head back, as if for all the world she was about to sing an aria, and call, ‘Trevaaaaar!’ Trevor was her shy, rather awkward, teenage son with whom she appeared to be endlessly impatient and disgruntled. If Trevaaar was not available her husband would be summoned. A quiet, bespectacled, careworn man would appear through the multi-coloured plastic strips of curtain that hung across the doorway and stand there, mutely, often unwittingly wearing a few of the said strips draped over his head and shoulders, like an Indian chief’s headdress. Then without deigning even to look at him, she would bark instructions: ‘Mrs Jordan’s ham, please.’ The men in Mrs Waller’s life were a burdensome source of regret to her and she had a particular tone of voice reserved only for them. It was strident, posh and imperious and every syllable screamed, ‘I am too good for you and I’m here only under sufferance!’ But when I walked into the shop, her face would lift into a pretty pink smile and I would have penny bars of chocolate and twopenny chews thrust into my hand, along with whatever purchase I had been sent there to get. Poor Trevor! If only he’d been a Tina.

  I would spend hours in the pantry, by myself, serving shopful after shopful of customers whilst acting out the Waller family drama, except that the Trevor in my fantasy grew into a bit of a hunk, so much so that he couldn’t possibly be called Trevor any longer and I was forced to change his name to Tony, at which point we became husband and wife. This could not, in any sense, be construed as bigamous, as the scout from Wagon Train operated in an entirely different universe to the one Tony and I inhabited in the pantry.

  It was in the pantry, some years after I had left home, that I mysteriously came across a copy of the Kama Sutra whilst looking for a clean towel in the laundry basket. It was hidden in the washing. I felt uncomfortable and a little shocked at the find. Where on earth had my mother got it? Surely she wasn’t attempting any of these Olympian postures herself and, if so, who with? My father had died some time back. I never did find out and in some ways I’m grateful for that but it did go partway to explaining something that my mother had said a little while before the discovery. We were sitting in the kitchen, discussing the new husband of a friend of hers, when she suddenly announced in a rather baffled but thoughtful voice, ‘I don’t think your father was very good at sex.’ End of conversation.

  Next to the pantry were the stairs, which like the little hall itself were covered with the same brown carpet, enlivened by a small, abstract motif in black that was repeated at regular intervals. Not long after my father had laid this carpet, my mother and I went into Freeman, Hardy & Willis on the Bearwood Road to buy me a new pair of shoes and there it was, our new carpet, all over the shop!

  ‘Mum, I—’

  That’s as far as I got. I was dragged outside, my arm only just remaining in its socket and my mother’s hot, urgent breath steaming up my ear, her voice like something from The Exorcist : ‘Don’t mention the carpet!’ My father was the shopfitter for Freeman, Hardy & Willis.

  At eighteen months I had trodden on my nightdress whilst going up these stairs to bed and put a tooth through my lip, which still sports a tiny hairline scar today. These stairs were where I had tested my mettle by jumping down, first two, then three, then four and five steps at a time. They were where, on dark nights, heart pounding, I had shouted endless
‘Goodnights’ to my parents, stopping each time to wait for the comfort of their reply, and where I sang nonsense lyrics to made-up songs as loud as I could so that any menace hiding behind the dark crack of a door or waiting to pounce on the other side of a billowing curtain would know how unafraid I was. They were also where I prepared for a possible career in bus conducting, charging up and down them wearing my father’s old Box Brownie as a ticket machine and a shoulder bag of my mother’s for the money. I wanted to wear that fitted, black, military-style trouser suit they all wore; I wanted to chew gum, stink of cigarettes and jingle with money as I leapt, gazelle-like, up and down the bus stairs, shouting ‘No room on top! Fares, please!’ I wanted to wear that ticket machine slung low across my hip, discharging tickets with expert ease and issuing that gorgeous metallic sound that almost made my mouth water. My conductress would wear loads of make-up and have lashings of lustrous, black hair, and she would always be accompanied by the same bus driver who would bear an uncanny resemblance to the scout from Wagon Train.

  Opposite the pantry and the stairs was the middle floor; this opened at the side of the house on to the garden, which ran around to the back of the house. The middle door was also opposite the back gate, which in turn opened out on to Long Hyde Road, and it was where everyone who knew us called; only strangers knocked at the front door. It was at the middle door that the milk was delivered and where the milkman called for payment of his bill every Saturday, his milk cart being pulled by a big brown and white horse. My mother would shout, ‘Get out there with a bucket and shovel, the milkman’s coming’ then she would keep watch from an upstairs window and shout, ‘Too late, SHE’S got it!’ thus referring to a neighbour who was already scooping the steaming heap of horse dung into her own bucket with a satisfied smirk. There was talk at one time of a small boy, a few streets away, who stuck a straw up the horse’s nose, resulting in the poor creature rearing up on to its hind legs, which caused the cart to overturn, smashing every single bottle, both full and empty, to smithereens.