At My Mother's Knee Read Free

last long. It failed to provide sufficient
warmth for that iceberg of a bed. The blanket was soon reinstalled
and we reverted to the old routine.
    It was always cold, that house. No, not cold – freezing. You
could've hung meat in the bedrooms during the winter
months. On a bitterly cold morning the frost created strange
patterns on the inside of the window pane. I'd lie in bed, the
blankets pulled tightly around me for warmth, desperate for an
early morning pee but holding out for as long as possible before
daring to make the dash to the arctic conditions of the lav. It
was a damp house as well, very damp. When the windows
weren't frozen up they were running with condensation. Tea
towels lined the window sills to soak up the lakes of water that
formed. I'm surprised we didn't have a family of otters move
into the back bedroom – the conditions were perfect.
    The house had no central heating – that was unheard of. The
only form of heating was a coal fire in the frontroom grate,
which also heated the water. If you wanted a bath you first
used the poker to pull the damper down at the back of the
grate, then, after a wait of two or three hours, you could take
your bath. A bath, Holly Grove style, usually meant sitting in
two inches of lukewarm water, flinching each time an ice-cold drip fell from the wet washing hanging out to dry on the pulley
above you and hit you on the bare back.
    On mornings when the temperature had dropped to Siberian
levels, my mother would give in and get the electric fire out
from the cupboard under the stairs. She didn't like using the
electric fire as she claimed that it 'ate electricity'. She would
panic if it was on for what she considered an unnecessary
length of time. If you really wanted to send her into orbit you
switched on both bars of the fire. She'd immediately go into
her act.
    'Jesus tonight, the heat in here,' she'd complain, coming in
from the kitchen, fanning her face with the Daily Mirror and
opening her cardigan. Two minutes earlier she'd been shivering
like Pearl White on an ice floe. 'There's no need for an extra
bar, turn it off before I suffocate. If that meter goes we're buggered
because I haven't got a shilling, so get it off.'
    She never had a shilling for the meter. I was always being
sent round the neighbours' houses with a fistful of pennies to
see if any of them had 'a single shilling for me mam, please'.
    In extreme weather, when the water in the toilet bowl froze
over, a paraffin heater that belched out stinking fumes sat on the
upstairs landing. My mother instantly declared this a death trap.
Just like the blanket, the heater needed watching, only more so,
and it became another perfectly valid reason to tear me away
from the telly and send me running up and down stairs to 'have
a little look to see if it's OK'.
    As the house was at the top of a hill and close to the River
Mersey, we took the brunt of the worst weather. A mist from the
river would creep up the hill and mingle with the smoke pouring
out of every chimney pot in Birkenhead, mutating into a freezing,
acrid fog that burned the back of your throat. This was before the
Clean Air Act put a stop to coal fires, which in turn meant
the loss of a familiar sight around the back alleys: the coalman.
    The weekly delivery of coal was a ritual that all the women in the area looked forward to. They would fluff up their hair
and apply a little face powder and lipstick in readiness. The lid
of the coal bunker would be flung back in preparation, the
backyard door would be opened wide and the women, purses
in hand, would stand on the step and peer down the alley waiting
for Alf, the Chippendale of coalmen . Good-natured and
with a cheeky line in patter, Alf had the ladies of Holly Grove
eating out of the palm of his hand. He was tall and handsome,
with a set of magnificent white teeth (his own) and startling
blue eyes enhanced by the thick layer of coal dust that covered
his face. He wore a leather jerkin open to the waist,