That's Another Story: The Autobiography Read online

  Our coal was also delivered by a horse-drawn cart. Mr Charlton of Charlton Brothers, Coal Merchants, would call at the middle door throughout the winter for his money, after lumbering up the garden path, followed by a couple of his minions, to the coalhouse, each with a hundredweight sack of coal on his back. He would dump his load, the larger pieces of which - and some were a couple of feet in diameter - were smashed up by my father using a sledgehammer, then march silently back to the lorry for the next one. He was an almost Dickensian figure, sporting a nautical-looking black cap, shiny with grease, that was pushed back at a jaunty angle on his head, and a thick black jerkin that looked like leather. On his feet were a pair of huge hobnailed boots, dulled from layers of coal dust, and the bottom of each trouser leg was tied with a piece of filthy string. He was completely black from head to toe, while his face was like an amateur actor’s, blacked up to play Othello. The only bits that escaped were two pink crescents, one behind each ear, his pale-grey eyes, made dazzling by their smudgy black surround, and his pure-white hair. This last was only visible when, in a gentlemanly gesture, he would remove his hat to receive payment of his bill. Our coal fires were eventually replaced by gas ones in the mid-sixties and, although they were far more convenient with their instant heat, for me they could never replace the bright, ever-changing energy and cosiness of a real fire, nor the sense of achievement that I still feel today from getting a fire blazing away in the grate.

  Next to the middle door was the door to the kitchen. This was the room in which we mainly lived, as a family. My earliest memories are of this room; of clambering out of my pram, down on to a sofa, which the pram was parked next to, and finding Nelly, our black and white cat, in fighting form, buried beneath copies of the Daily Mirror and the Reveille, the latter probably being the equivalent of the Daily Star. One of the few times I saw my mother cry - apart from after the conversation about her stillborn daughter, at the death of her own mother and finally the death of my father - was when Nelly died of cancer. I suppose you’d call it breast cancer, as it first appeared as a swelling in one of her teats. She was at least twenty years old, but no one could be quite sure as she was already adult when she turned up out of nowhere and muscled her way in at number 69, ejecting the then resident and cowardly tomcat in the process. During her twenty-year reign with us she had over a hundred kittens, mostly delivered in the bottom drawer of my mother’s dressing table. Mum, cooing like a proud grandmother, fed any weaklings with an eardropper full of warm milk. There were times, when the births were at their most prolific, that the kittens would disappear soon after delivery and it was announced that Nelly had suffocated them by accidentally sitting on them, but I remember furtive conversations in the scullery, and my father coming in from outside with an empty bucket, and my brother Kevin getting it slightly wrong and telling me that Dad had flushed the kittens down the toilet. It was never discussed.

  Nelly wasn’t an affectionate cat that would snuggle up, purring, on your lap. On the contrary, too much stroking and the claws would be out like a flash and the old yellow teeth would be sunk into a girl’s hand before you had time to say ‘lethal injection’. When I was a child my hands and arms were permanently striped from Nelly’s bad-tempered lashings, but Mum adored her and reserved a special voice with which to address her. It was high pitched and squeaky with delight, framed in a language all of its own and warm with affection that none of us could ever hope to excite.

  As an adult I myself developed relationships, mainly with pet dogs, of a similar nature to the one my mother had with Nelly, although in my case they were often to the detriment of whatever relationship I was in at the time. ‘No, not the baby talk, pleeeeease!’ has been quite a common cry in my various households over the years. One day about eight or nine years back, a visiting friend overheard me talking to our Cairn terrier in my ‘special language’, which was barely intelligible to an outsider and would just bubble up out of me on a wave of elation, with no thought involved whatsoever. Full of strange Brummyisms and speech impediments, it was performed in what was to my ear the tiny voice of a child. ‘Comala Babala Momola, ’er wants a bit of lubbin’ is an example. My friend stared at me aghast and then said, ‘How does Grant put up with that?’

  I said, ‘Well, he didn’t for a long time but now he’s just given in.’

  She replied, ‘You do know this is your sickness, don’t you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  And she told me that this was the lavishing of the love and affection that I myself missed out on as an infant. There seems to be a grain of truth in this because one of the constant phrases that comes up in these streams of consciousness that the poor dog is subjected to is, ‘Love the baby . . . love the baby . . .’

  Once, whilst standing in the queue for the checkout at the supermarket, I heard my daughter, who had engaged a complete stranger in conversation, say that her sister ‘was a dog’, to which the woman replied, ‘Oh, you mustn’t talk about your sister like that.’ Maisie answered, ‘No, she is a dog.’ I felt slightly ashamed of this and later felt compelled to explain to Maisie that no dog could ever begin to rival her in my affections and that I didn’t see her in the same light as the dog at all. She replied, ‘No, I know, well, I should think not, I don’t go around sniffing strangers’ bottoms in the street, do I?’

  Strangely, the kitchen was not a kitchen at all. The real kitchen, which was called the scullery, was a tiny room next to it. The ‘kitchen’ was a smallish room; with the sofa now long gone, it was crowded with three easy chairs, one of which, of course, was Grandma’s, their thin foam cushions usually balanced on top of a heap of newspapers that had been stuffed underneath, an attempt at tidying up. There was a large Singer sewing machine on elaborate, wrought-iron legs, upon which our mother made all the curtains as well as a lot of our and her own clothes. In one corner stood a large kitchen cabinet with a flap that dropped down on which we made golden syrup or jam sandwiches when we came in from school, and in the other corner was a big, old-fashioned radio.

  This was of great fascination with its list of exotic-sounding locations like Luxembourg, Lisbon, Hilversum, all printed on a little rectangle of glass on its front that lit up when it was switched on. I loved turning the tuning dial and being plunged into some fuzzy foreign world called Hamburg or Bordeaux, to catch scratchy, distant voices speaking in unintelligible tongues that came and went, as if on the wind. It was a link with far-flung places and yet it was safe and cosy with its walnut fascia and its warm, yellow glow. It was a comfort to hear its familiar drone from other parts of the house. It meant that you were not alone, that life was being lived, and the velutinous voices of the BBC Light Programme or the music from the likes of Whistle While You Work promised that somehow, somewhere, we were in safe hands. The first sound of the day, as I lay in bed, was invariably the low drone of the shipping forecast vibrating up through the floorboards as my mother got ready for work. On Sundays our lunch, or dinner as it was called, was eaten to The Navy Lark, Round the Horne, Beyond Our Ken and Hancock’s Half Hour. We took our meals around the Formica-topped table that was stuck snugly into the bay window, but as we grew older we simply collected our plates and took them off to eat elsewhere, watching television or doing homework, leaving my poor mother, who had invariably cooked the food, to eat by herself, as my father always came in much later. She never complained and was probably glad to be left in peace. My sister-in-law tells of how she came round to be introduced to the family for the first time and to have tea with us. She says that once the meal had been served up suddenly there was no one in the room but herself and my mother and, with my mother nipping in and out of the kitchen, she virtually ate alone.

  The real kitchen, the scullery, was where as small children we stood in the big, old Belfast sink and washed. Water would have to be boiled up on the gas stove as there wasn’t a hot tap. It was where my father shaved. I would stand on a little table next to him so that I could watch at close quarters the very plea
sing process of shaving foam and bristles being removed in sharp smooth tracts, revealing the weathered hollow that went from cheekbone to jaw. I can still smell the soap and I cannot deny that to this day a whiff of Old Spice does cause a distant thrill. It was where my mother did her nightly ablutions, shouting high-pitched warnings not to come in as she crouched over a washing-up bowl on the floor, and it was generally where we all washed and brushed our teeth.

  The bathroom upstairs was used only once a week when the immersion heater was put on for the briefest possible time, closely monitored by my mother; otherwise it offered no hot water and was a room in which from November through to May you could see your breath. Lying in a hot bath during these months meant lying shrouded in steam so thick and opaque that you could barely make out the taps at the other end. However, once a week, it was an oasis of isolation. Unlike today, when it seems that most children’s bedrooms are a haven of warmth and privacy, furnished with both a computer and a television, when I was growing up the bedroom, its hypothermic temperatures aside, was purely for undressing (in winter, pretty quickly), sleeping and dressing again. It never occurred to anyone then that people might ‘need their space’. So apart from the lavatory, where there was always the threat of someone banging on the door, wanting to get in, the only other room with a lock was the bathroom. Once ensconced in the warmth of the water, the clouds of white steam softening and for the most part concealing, albeit only briefly, the cold, functional and often messy nature of the room, a girl could be transported for at least half an hour. With its echoey acoustic, a girl could all but fall in love with her own voice and hone to near perfection her impersonations of the likes of Sandie Shaw (‘Always Something There to Remind Me’), the Ronettes (‘Be My Baby’) and the Supremes (‘Baby Love’). And then, of course, the water would become tepid and the steam would turn to condensation. I can recall the mild pall of disappointment that would descend as the bleak old bathroom would gradually reveal itself out of the mist. It was lying in this bath, aged eighteen, knowing I was to embark on a nursing course in a matter of weeks, that I felt safe enough, under cover of the hot tap running at full tilt, to say, in a small voice to the palm of my hand, held very close to my mouth, ‘I want to be an actress.’ Words I had never spoken before. To anyone.

  The scullery led in turn on to a sort of outhouse extension, which was called ‘the back place’. In the corner there was a drain and there was always a smell of soapsuds in the air from the seemingly endless rounds of washing and washing up. In winter it also smelt of geraniums and coal dust, whilst in the summer the soapy freshness of the drain often turned a tad fetid. It was built on before our time to incorporate the coalhouse and the outside toilet, the latter often being referred to by my brother Kevin, for some unfathomable reason, as the Lah Pom. I preferred the upstairs toilet and rarely used the Lah Pom as it was often home to at least a couple of large house spiders. I was terrified of the creatures. These days, having lived in the country for many years, I am less so, but back then and well into my twenties and thirties I could not bear to even look at a picture of one, let alone be in the same room.

  This is amply illustrated by an incident in 1979, when I was working on a play at the Hampstead Theatre Club and was renting a basement flat from a friend. One evening I went to run a bath only to find a spider the size of a Bentley attempting to climb up the side of it, in order to get out. After letting out an unstoppable scream and trying, without looking at it, to flush it down the plughole from whence it came followed by an unsuccessful attempt to enlist the help of a neighbour, I ended up phoning the director of the play I was doing and asking whether he would be so kind as to come and get rid of it, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to sleep that night, never mind take a bath. After coming some way across town, and with much ribbing and hilarity, Mike Leigh humanely disposed of the thing and then went back to finish his tea.

  The back place acted as an overflow to my father’s garage, and it was here that, on coming in late at night as a teenager, I would reach up and blindly scrabble about on a dusty old shelf - amongst a jumble of plumbing items, heaps of tools, my mother’s geranium pots, a selection of old shoes and anything else that people saw fit to sling up there - in order to find the key to the middle door and let myself in. It was also home to a succession of pet rodents that I kept when aged about eleven and where I attempted to breed a couple of my best mice for business purposes. I pinned an advert on to the garage door for passers-by to peruse. It read: FOR SALE, ATTRACTIVE DOMESTICATED BABY MICE, TWO SHILLINGS EACH, OR TWO FOR THREE AND ELEVEN, PLEASE APPLY AT GATE ROUND CORNER. The breeding programme went rather better than I had anticipated and within a couple of weeks there were eight or nine tiny brown mice, no bigger than a thumbnail but able to jump at least three or four inches in the air. Before I could separate them they had bred and bred again. I remember only one small girl and her friend calling at the middle door and enquiring about the mice. However, when they clapped eyes on them they wanted a reduction in price, claiming, ‘They’m brown! They ent proper pet mice. Pet mice am white.’

  ‘Yes they are. Pet mice can be any colour.’

  ‘No they cor. I bet ya caught them in your house. I’ll tek two for a bob.’

  Needless to say there was no sale. I then became increasingly desperate as their numbers grew and soon the advert was changed to: FOR SALE, ATTRACTIVE DOMESTICATED BABY MICE. TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE, A SHILLING A THROW. APPLY THROUGH GATE AT SIDE. But no one did and to add insult to injury people kept crossing out bits of my advert to alter the meaning. We had: FOR SALE, ATTRACTIVE DOMESTICATED BABY MICE, A SHILLING TO THROW THROUGH GATE AT SIDE. Another was: FOR SALE, ATTRACTIVE DOMESTICATED BABY, A SHILLING, or we will THROW THROUGH GATE AT SIDE.

  Finally I came down one morning to find that the babies, whose multiplication was now way out of control, had eaten an escape route out of the little wooden box in which they were being kept, presumably because of overcrowding, and had disappeared into a very convenient, tangled heap of assorted piping that my father had dumped on the shelf next to them. Despite my not inconsiderable attempts to capture the little creatures - time after time, blocking both ends of a pipe, only to find that there was another pipe leading off it, out of which they had escaped - I managed to catch only two or three. For years whenever we went out into the back place there was the sound of tiny scurrying feet across the stone floor or up over the wooden shelving.

  Upstairs, there were three bedrooms. My parents’ room was at the front corner of the house and it looked down on to both Bishopton and Long Hyde Road. In the corner stood a large, mahogany wardrobe where our Christmas presents were hidden every year, so a quick recce in about the third week of December would usually give the game away. It was where I came across my beloved red and yellow scooter, upon which for years I went everywhere. Most people eventually graduated to bicycles but I was not allowed one as my mother thought they were ‘death traps’. I think if I were young today I would definitely be one of those kids hanging round city centres with the crotch of my jeans dangling at mid-calf, a good three inches of bum cleavage showing at the top, and a skateboard permanently welded to my person.

  My parents slept in a creaky old bed with a dark, walnut headboard and it was into this that I would creep every Saturday morning, once my mother had gone out, to cuddle up to my dad and, much to his annoyance, check his back for spots. On several occasions, seeing him get out of bed, I thought I had caught a glimpse through the flies of his pyjamas of something odd hanging around his nether regions. I subsequently asked my mother whether he was ‘the same as me down below’ because it certainly didn’t look like it and this needed clarification. She instantly looked away and, with what seemed like not a little irritation and impatience, but what I now see as total embarrassment, she said, ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes . . . Yes.’ I thought the yeses were never going to stop and, in my innocence, regarded them as simply an expression of absolute confirmation. You can therefore imagine my surpri
se when, around the same time as this odd little conversation, I came across my brothers playing about in the bedroom before getting dressed one morning. They were in fits of laughter, having put elastic bands on their willies. In complete confusion, I could only deduce from this that the willy detached itself and fell off at some point before boys grew into men and that perhaps the elastic band had something to do with it. This conundrum took a while to clear up; in fact, I remember fiercely debating and defending this theory with several of my contemporaries, thinking how out of the loop and uninformed they were.

  It was under my parents’ bed, aged about eight, that I found what looked like a kind of greasy, deflated balloon. I could see from its colour that it wasn’t a festive balloon, one that you might hang on a gatepost to indicate the location of a person’s birthday party, and that it might possibly have some sort of medical connection. I sat on the floor to examine it further; first stretching it this way and that, then finally blowing it up and holding it up to the light. Inside it was a kind of gloopy liquid. I stared at it and, piece by piece, snippets of overheard remarks and conversations that I had hitherto no understanding of, began to connect. The realisation of what it was that I had only seconds before held to my mouth and tasted sent me rushing downstairs, the thing held away from me at arm’s length, rudely deflating and spitting globules of the liquid as it did so. Once out in the garden, I couldn’t when it came to it jettison the thing into the wilderness behind the rockery, as had been my intention. Instead I held on to it for a few seconds more and the revulsion that I had felt just moments before melded in with something else, something like a sadness I couldn’t quite place.