That's Another Story: The Autobiography (3 page)

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.

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.