Owning Up: The Trilogy (12 page)

‘Flora Macdonald,’ I’d sing, ‘Flora Macdonald. Heavy with haggis and dripping with dew…’

‘You’d almost think he knew what it meant,’ someone would say. I didn’t, of course, but I had listened very carefully to the intonation and, by exaggerating it, unconsciously emphasised the
double entendres.

Once, when I was brought down, Ruth Lodge was sitting on an actor’s knee and kissing him.

‘Not in front of the child,’ wailed William Armstrong.

My mother was also friendly with the ballet. When they were touring, Robert Helpmann and Freddie Ashton would always come to the house. She’d met Freddie Ashton first because he’d been asked to do the choreography for one of the big amateur reviews in which my mother took part, but Helpmann was her favourite. She always referred to him as ‘darling Bobbie’. My father sometimes called him ‘darling Bobbie’ too, but only when my mother wasn’t t.here so I knew this must be a joke. My mother ‘adored the ballet’, which I couldn’t understand as she didn’t like classical music at all. She divided it onomatopoeically into two schools which she called ‘mini-mini’ and ‘boom-zoom’. Mozart for example was ‘mini-mini’, Beethoven ‘boom-zoom’.

I was taken to the ballet when quite young and was amazed to see ‘Darling Bobbie’ twisting and leaping in a way that appeared to be against nature, but I felt no urge to become a ballet dancer because I was told that it was necessary to start very early, that the training was long and arduous and that even when one had become a star, daily practice was essential. More curious was that I didn’t set my heart on the stage, an obvious escape from the worrying idea of becoming a business man and a possible way to become famous easily. I think the explanation was that my mother constantly impressed on me that it was ‘a-n insecure profession’. If anyone else – my father, Uncle Fred, my grandparents – had taken this line I might have resisted their advice but that my mother, who adored actors and actresses, was against it forced me to affirm that I didn’t want to go on the stage.

The only other class of people of whom my mother spoke in her casual throw-away voice indicating their high place in her Pantheon, were those with titles, although these were much sparser on the ground than members of the theatrical profession. In fact there were only two. One was the widow of a judge, a kindly rather boring elderly lady whose observations were, in themselves, completely banal but which my mother nevertheless aired so as to be able to introduce the source of their origin. The other was infinitely more dashing; a certain Lady Peggy Lacon. Maud had known Peggy when she had been married to a plain Mr Duckworth. Then she divorced Mr Duckworth and married Sir George Lacon, a ruddy-faced, almost silent Norfolk squire whose principal interest was shooting pheasants. Lady Lacon was a very glamorous platinum blonde in the manner of Jean Harlow. She occasionally came to stay with us and what made this both worrying and yet fascinating was that Bill and I were always warned several times in advance
that she didn’t like children
!
.
This had the effect of making me determined that she should like me. I followed her around and fawned on her throughout her visits in the way that a dog or cat will often make for the one person in a room who dislikes animals. She looked at us with indifferent dislike but confused us further by bringing us very expensive presents. The one I can best remember took the form of a black dude on a little plinth. There was a tiny microphone attached to the plinth and when this was placed near the horn of a gramophone the vibrations caused the dude to appear to tap dance. My father thought it was a ridiculous present and must have cost well over a pound. Although he found her ‘decorative’, his favourite word to describe a pretty woman, he didn’t care much for Lady Lacon.

After the war, Maudie would frequently tell me that the thirties, her forties, were her best time. Although there was not much money, there was enough for her to entertain whenever she felt like it and her social life was full and busy. This centred on the Playhouse and the Sandon Studios Club, the Liverpudlian equivalent of the Chelsea Arts. The Sandon occupied a wing of a very beautiful eighteenth-century building called the Blue-coat Chambers in the centre of Liverpool. It had been built as the Blue-coat School and was of red brick with stone detailing, enclosing a large cobbled courtyard and separated from the street by fine railings and elaborate iron gates. At the back of the building was a garden surrounded by painters’ and sculptors’ studios and indeed the original purpose of the club, as its name suggested, was a meeting place for those exclusively connected with the arts. By the twenties, however, an alleged interest was considered sufficient justification. There was a long narrow unlicensed dining-room with a stained floor, oak tables and chairs and earthenware water jugs. It had a coal fire in the winter and the food, while simple, was excellent and cheap. The head waitress carried on like a grumpy old nanny and was much loved. When my mother was shopping in the centre of Liverpool or ‘town’ as she called it, she would usually have lunch there and would often take us with her. I was fascinated to meet painters and sculptors in their rough tweed suits, blue or rust coloured shirts and knitted ties. It was proof of another world unconnected with business.

From our perspective the point of the Sandon was the annual children’s party. It was held on New Year’s Eve afternoon and called the Hogmanay. It took place in the huge room on the first floor of the main block facing the street. The chief attraction was an enormous slide which you rode down on rather prickly door mats. After tea there was always a conjurer called S. Le Kessin, who wore evening dress. We didn’t only get to see S. Le Kessin at the Sandon; the smarter mothers used to hire him for their children’s birthday parties. To be frank his tricks, multiplying billiard balls and pulling chains of multi-coloured handkerchiefs out of his mouth, were rather tame, but he did eventually produce a ventriloquist doll called Tommy who sang ‘Show me the way to go home’, while S. Le Kessin drank a glass of water. At the time I didn’t realise that the conjurer’s name was made up of an initial, the French definite article and a surname. I thought he was called ‘Esslerkessin’.

The Hogmanay party was fancy dress; the usual motley of pirates, clowns, arabs and wild men. One year, when I was about five, I had an ambitious and major failure. I was addicted to a children’s strip in the
Daily Mail.
It was called ‘Teddy Tail’, and the hero was a rather wet mouse. His side-kick was an even less distinguished duck called ‘Douggie’. That November the
Mail,
to which the Griff subscribed, offered a series of dressmakers’ patterns representing these creatures, and I persuaded her to send off for Douggie Duck. It was duly made up from yellow towelling with a cardboard beak and eyes. I went to the party full of hubris, but nobody seemed to know who Douggie Duck was or even that I was meant to be a duck at all and I was much mocked and soon reduced to angry tears. My only recompense was that when my father came to pick me up it was pouring with rain, and I was able to provoke his laughter by running up and down the gutter outside the Blue-coat Chambers shouting: ‘Fine weather for ducks.’

As a family we were not very lucky with fancy dress. Tom himself had once gone to a party, for which the invitation had proposed a choice between fancy and evening dress, disguised as a snowman, only to find all the other men in dinner-jackets. As a very young man he had elected to dress as an Italian organ grinder and, for the sake of verisimilitude, had gone to the trouble of hiring a live rhesus monkey from a Mr Rogers, who at that time kept a pet shop but was later to open the small and rather unsuccessful Liverpool zoo. When Tom took the monkey back to The Grange, it had broken loose, run along the mantelshelf deliberately throwing a rather good clock into the fireplace, bitten my grandfather quite badly on the hand, and run up the curtains to take up a position on the pelmet from which it refused to be dislodged. Mr Rogers had to come round, recapture it and take it away.

The year following my failure as Douggie Duck, I elected to go as Mickey Mouse and was reassuringly successful. I was so delighted at restoring my credibility among my contemporaries that I insisted on a permanent record. I was photographed one January afternoon at a local studio staring solemnly at the big camera on its tripod, its operator concealed under a black velvet hood. I stood next to a toy Mickey Mouse as a proof of my authenticity.

Later the same evening, the children’s Hogmanay was followed by a New Year’s Eve party for the members themselves. There was a special licence and, judging by my father’s groaning recourse to Alka Seltzer every New Year’s morning, it was not wasted. Inpreparation for this Bacchanalia, huge murals, painted by the Sandon’s artists, were already in position during the afternoon. They showed, in caricature, the more notorious associates cast in the role of classical deities or historical figures, and engaged in activities just this side of decency. I was fascinated, not so much by what they were up to, as how it was possible to retain a likeness by means of such grotesque distortion. These men and women, whom I had seen lunching soberly in the club’s dining-room, were here presented as skeletal or pendulous monsters, writhing or monolithic, as bald as eggs or hairy as apes, and yet remained instantly recognisable. My interest in the ‘truth’ of distortion was born from speculating on this mystery during S. Le Kessin’s less riveting illusions.

Yet for my parents the most important annual event at the Sandon was not the Hogmanay (indeed my mother’s mistrust of drink and my father’s enthusiastic indulgence in it on these occasions, ‘spoiled’ it for her more often than not) but the annual ‘cabaret’. Both of them took part, but my mother’s suppressed theatricality was given full rein, and she was always the star of the night. These cabarets were no casual stringing together of acts, but specially written reviews with proper songs and sketches. The former were largely the work of a man called Alfred Francis who worked, without marked enthusiasm, for his family bakery business and managed the large central tea shop which provided an outlet for its products. He was an urbane, slightly plump man, handsome in the manners of the period, with hornrimmed glasses and a neat moustache. His passion was popular music and he was something of a jazz aficionado. He could play the piano well, conduct and orchestrate, and his songs, with titles like ‘High School Hartie’ or ‘Don’t Play Jazz on the Bechstein Grand’, while clearly influenced by Noel Coward and Cole Porter, were memorable and amusing in their own right.

Most of the sketches were written by a remarkable woman called Maud Budden. She was the wife of the Professor of Architecture at the University and one of my mother’s best friends. She was of Scottish origin and had a slight and attractive Edinburgh accent. She was big and rather untidy especially about the hair. She had a frank open face with amused blue eyes. Her tongue was sharp and witty enough to make her disliked and feared by anyone pompous or pretentious enough to provoke her ridicule. Among other activities she was responsible for the words of an anthropomorphic cartoon strip in the
Liverpool Echo
called ‘Curly Wee and Gussy Goose’. Unlike most strips this didn’t rely on balloons, but unfolded its story in a series of quatrains printed below each picture. They were always neatly turned and often very funny. ‘Maud Budden is a fool,’ said my mother as she read them aloud to me each night before turning to the children’s crossword. She meant of course the exact opposite.

The strip was drawn by another club member, an artist known only by his surname, Clibbon. He was obsessed by large busts, and the hens or ewes who were among the supporting cast of ‘Curly Wee and Gussy Goose’ were in consequence generously over-endowed. Clibbon carried this fetish into the Sandon cabaret where he insisted on transvestite roles as an excuse to introduce large balloons under the bathing suit that served as his foundation garment. One year he and my mother appeared as gym-slipped girls, Clibbon inevitably precocious about the figure. They had cut two skipping ropes in half and, by swinging these vigorously enough to deceive the eye, presented the illusion of surprising expertise. They sang a song which began:

We are two little girls

We are not fond of toys

We’d rather be smoking cigarettes

And mucking about with boys.

The more successful and less salacious sketches and songs from the Sandon Cabarets were recycled for three public reviews which were performed during the thirties at either the Royal Court or the Liverpool Empire to raise money for charity. They were based on the formula invented by Chariot and Cochran and were called
Murmurs: Northern Murmurs
(1933),
Southern Murmurs
(1934) and
Nursery Murmurs
(1935). Although too young to be taken to the Sandon Cabarets, I was allowed to watch my parents perform in the
Murmurs
despite the fact that the Griff considered some of the sketches unsuitable.

My mother was prominent in
Northern Murmurs
and stole all the notices in
Southern Murmurs.
As a result, she claimed, of jealousy among the other performers, she was given comparatively little to do in
Nursery Murmurs
and much of what material she did get was from another hand than Maud Budden’s and of inferior quality. When
Nursery Murmurs
turned out to be a comparative financial and critical flop, she was far from displeased. I remember her most clearly in
Southern Murmurs
as a Liverpool flower girl in a shawl and cloth cap commenting to an imaginary assistant about her invisible customers in the style perfected by Ruth Draper.

‘Here’s a widder, Meg. ‘and me them whites… Flowers, lady? Luke lovely on yer ‘usband’s grave, lady. Show up beautiful against the hoak and brass ‘andles, lady… No wonder ’e died. I’d die if I ’ad that face lukein’ at me over me fish and chips of a night.’