At My Mother's Knee Read Free Page B

alley, fish in mouth, before Mary caught up with him
and retrieved it. She rinsed it under the tap, said nothing and
served it up later that night with mashed potatoes. Frank was
none the wiser.
    I liked Mary and her good-natured husband. They never had
children of their own, which was a shame as they were great
around children. Mary was a child's delight, always up for a
bit of fun. She'd make ice-cream floats with lemonade and
vanilla ice and we'd sit on the backyard step drinking them.
She taught me how to play cards and knew the filthy version
of 'Maggie May'. Frank, a diabetic, let me watch him inject
himself with his daily insulin and, as he shaved in a mirror over
the kitchen sink with a cut-throat razor, told me stories of his
miserable childhood and how he survived the cruel regime in
the orphanage where he grew up. Frank's orphanage tales
worried me. My mother was always threatening to put me in
a home if I didn't behave. I didn't want to eat bread and
dripping and be beaten with a belt by nuns so I'd be on my best
behaviour for a while, making my mother instantly suspicious.
'What have you broke?' she'd ask.
    My mother didn't share Mary's enthusiasm for fillums and
wasn't very keen on going to the cinema . She'd been 'touched
up' (her words) during a showing of The Blue Angel and it had put her off. The film had been on at 'the Colly', the Coliseum Cinema on Old Chester Road, known locally for obvious
reasons as 'the Bug House', and during the show a man had
put his hand on her leg. She had not screamed out but had sat
in the dark, terrified, unable to move from fear. After that her
visits to the cinema were rare. It was my dad who sat through
all the Disney cartoons with me, not that he had to endure the
likes of Sleeping Beauty for very long. We'd be back on
the street within ten minutes, for as soon as the villainess
appeared on screen I'd shoot up the aisle like a bullet to get
away from her and back to the safety of Number 23.
    Whenever I dream of that damp little house, and I occasionally
still do, I recall it in vivid and minute detail. I visualize it
as I saw it when I was a child. Like an old movie shot in monochrome,
I can see a small boy sat on top of his sister's Dansette
record player watching the condensation running down the
frontroom window, protected from the heat of the coal fire by
a fire guard hung with damp washing. I loved that little house.
It was the backdrop for my formative years. It's in my blood
still.

CHAPTER TWO
    S IFTING THROUGH THE JUNK THAT IS OVER A CENTURY OF family memorabilia, I came across relics from my own
distant past that acted like jump leads on the rusty engine of
my memory. They brought an instant recall of incidents from
my childhood, not vague, dim recollections but crystal clear
images of times that I thought I'd long forgotten. I found an
old school report of mine from the sixties. Reading it, I was
transported back down the years, to Corpus Christi High School during an Eng lit lesson. My teacher, Dora Doughty , a
well-corseted and glamorous siren with big hair who looked as
if she was formed from the same mould as Elsie Tanner, sat
cross-legged on her desk wafting powerful fumes of scent as
she expounded the wisdom of Proust to an uninterested Class
5S. Pearls before swine, I'm afraid. We were far more taken
with Miss D's magnificent bosom than anything Marcel had to
say for himself. But now, years later, sitting in the loft,
absorbed by the account of a fourteen-year-old schoolboy who
was once 'bright and chatty but needed to try harder at maths'
and whom I can't imagine ever being, I can hear and see it all.
    A girl at the front of the class, egged on by her mates,
has got her hand up in the air. 'Miss, what's that perfume
you've got on called?'
    'Do you like it?' replies Miss Doughty, sniffing her wrist. 'It's
called Ambush,' and producing a bottle from her handbag she
proceeds to spray it liberally into the air. 'Now tell me, class,
what does that smell bring