Owning Up: The Trilogy (13 page)

The music for these reviews was arranged and conducted by Alfred Francis in white tie and tails. In the middle forties, when I had begun to collect jazz records, Tom rushed excitedly into the nursery where I was playing Ellington’s ‘Rockin’ in Rhythm’. He had recognised it as the overture music that Alfred Francis had chosen for
Southern Murmurs.

Maud tried briefly to break into radio and appeared in a few plays broadcast from the BBC’s northern studios in Manchester. I can remember hearing her in the small role of a Liverpool woman deprived of her son in a play about the press gangs in the eighteenth century. It was called
Hawks Abroad.
She didn’t make much progress however and soon, easily discouraged if she didn’t succeed at anything instantly, relinquished her ambitions. She told us that the doorman at the Manchester studios had said to her: ‘You won’t get anywhere here, love, if you’re not in’t click.’ But how, I now wonder, did she come to discuss her frustration with the commissionaire?

Her other great woman friend during the thirties was called Sylvia Maxwell Fyfe, the sister of Rex Harrison. She was married to a Scottish barrister who looked rather like Mussolini and was to become a post-war Conservative Home Secretary with a draconian belief in capital punishment and, more oddly, given Sylvia’s many gay friends, a relentless prosecutor of homosexuals. Sylvia was very chic and wore pearls and scarves and little hats with veils. She radiated enjoyment and enthusiasm. She and my mother organised several parties together, usually hiring one of the rooms at the Sandon for the purpose. Sylvia had a rapid rather quacking voice which made everything she said sound amusing.

The other reference point in Maud’s ‘smart’ Liverpool life was David Webster who lived with his parents and his friend Jimmy Bell in a handsome early Victorian terrace house overlooking Prince’s Park. Maud was a little in awe of David whose plump persona and rich Dundee cake diction dominated the arts and whose circle extended far beyond the confines of the city. David, later to become General Manager of Covent Garden, was then General Manager of the Bon Marché, epitome of fashion in Maud’s admittedly provincial experience. There was a restaurant on the top floor where we sometimes had tea. I loved going up in the lift and hearing the lift girls intone like a ritual the various departments in their rather affected voices. ‘Going up. Next floor boys’ and girls’ wear, evening wear, ladies’ retiring-room, restaurant.’ Sometimes there was a trio playing in the restaurant led by Alfred Francis at the piano, whom I supposed to be playing hookey from his cake shop round the corner. The restaurant was in art-deco pinks and greens. The ice-creams came in metal cups on long stems.

David and Jimmy were always asked to my mother’s more interesting dinner parties and usually came, but they didn’t often ask her back. This rankled, but David was too much of a catch to allow her to do more than grumble. My father, on the other hand, was quite irritated by his insisting on whisky instead of gin as this meant getting in a special bottle. Yet David was such good value, so full of gossip and name-dropping tales of the world beyond the city limits, that he was always welcome, and his stately arrival eagerly awaited. He was also a member of the Sandon and in one cabaret he was concealed, with the exception of his face, inside a cast of Epstein’s neo-primitive Genesis, a marble statue of a pregnant woman which had been exhibited, amidst much moral outrage, at the Blue-coat Chambers to raise money for the building’s restoration. His simulation of Genesis’s labour pains at the end of the sketch was considered a triumph. It took place in a green spotlight and David’s 6nal line was: ‘I’m such a very young girl to save such a very old building.’ My mother was fond of describing review sketches and when, as in this case, the end was signalled by plunging the stage into darkness, would cry: ‘Black out!’ with definitive emphasis.

These names: Maud Budden, Alfred Francis, Sylvia Maxwell Fyfe, David Webster, played as much part in Maud’s conversation as her theatrical list. For me they epitomised the exciting life she led. Until I was almost grown up everything Maud did and said seemed remarkable. ‘If I’m at home,’ she’d say, ‘all I have for lunch is Ryvita, cheese and an apple’, or ‘Keith Winter [a well-known playwright of the period] always says he’s seen me breathing over a tomato juice at more cocktail parties than any woman he knows.’

My father fitted into her life perfectly well. He was liked by all her friends and never tried to impose any of his. Even when, later in life, she became more difficult and occasionally hysterical, he never criticised her. The only clue he ever gave of mild irritation was to refer to her as ‘your mother’. The only one of her friends he actively disliked was a bossy and dwarfish woman journalist called Mary Ventris who wrote a column in the
Liverpool Echo
called ‘A Woman’s Note’. Tom called her ‘Little Runty’ and groaned audibly when he spotted her through the window waddling up the path on her bow legs – but then, my mother didn’t like ‘Little Runty’ much either. She was just rather intimidated by her, as she was by anyone of forthright opinions. Only once, to my knowledge, did she stand up and be counted and that was when a woman criticised the actress Ena Burrell for having affairs with young men. ‘She is not only a great actress,’ said Maud, ‘but a loyal and true friend’; and with this she left the room. She repeated this curtain line many times in my hearing, by which I deduce that she believed it to be an act of great moral courage reflecting on herself. Indeed, given her placatory and timid temperament, it was exactly that.

The other important aspect of my mother’s life was her voluntary work. Part of this, the organisation of an annual charity ball at the Adelphi, her presence on appeal committees, her involvement in sales of work and bazaars, tied in with her social life, but most of it was the reverse of glamorous. For at least three days a week she sat behind a desk at The Personal Service visited by ‘clients’ who were in trouble with bureaucracy or felt they were entitled to grants or supplementary benefits and didn’t know how to go about it. The Personal Service, which later amalgamated with the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, was Maud’s cause. Through it she experienced a sense of purpose and of fulfilment.

Politically she voted Conservative. Not to have done so would have exposed her to criticism, but she always said she felt ‘tempted’ to vote Labour in local elections, although she believed that it would be to everybody’s advantage if politics played no part in municipal affairs. Nevertheless she was appalled by poverty and her instincts, while perhaps occasionally patronising, were generous and sincere. It’s perfectly true that The Personal Service was run on behalf of the working classes by middle-class ladies, a concept now generally suspect. But at the time only middle-class confidence could deal with indifferent bureaucrats and red tape. Maud, so timid in controversy on a personal level, was a tiger on behalf of her clients. She knew their rights backwards and was determined they should get them.

She had become involved in social work during the First World War when she had trained under the formidable feminist Eleanor Rathbone, a cousin of the Mellys, working for the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Family Association, much of whose activities were devoted to ensuring that widowed common-law wives received their pen-sions. Maud was not without an awareness of the ambivalence of charitable endeavours. She recalled walking down a slum street to further some enquiry and hearing one elderly ‘Mary Ellen’, the Liverpool name for those beshawled old women who were the matriarchs of the slums, remarking sarcastically to a contemporary: ‘There goes a bit of charity for someone’s back-yard.’ There was, however, a tendency to use her clients as a source of mildly snobbish anecdote, to relate how a child opening the door told her that she’d ‘see if the lady was in’ and then shouted up the stairs, Eh Mam, there’s a woman ‘ere from der Pairsonal Sairvice.’

She also claimed to ‘respect the Conservative working man’. ‘Why?’ I asked her in my angry teens. ‘Because he votes against his interests?’ As always, when criticised, she coloured and changed the conversation. It was just one of those remarks which, she’d discovered, pleased most of her acquaintances and which she’d never actually thought through. Sometimes also there was a failure of empathy. As a non-smoker she was always indignant whenever a woman, deserted, beset by debt, another child on the way, chainsmoked through an interview. On balance though, Maud did a great deal of good and was frequently asked for by name by those in recurrent difficulties. Occasionally she was genuinely surprised. ‘My husband,’ one woman told her, ‘does it up me be’ind not to have no more kids. He empties the chamber-pot down the sink, when me mother’s in the ‘ouse, and he calls me a Roman Catholic bastard – now that’s not nice is it?’ Of course she didn’t tell me about this until much later, when I was almost grown up. She saw that what made it funny was the incongruous and even restraint of the woman’s reaction to this catalogue of various marital failings, but I’ve no doubt the advice she offered was constructive, or at any rate uncensorious.

Although her work over the years gave her more awareness of working-class life and more than most of her set, she had no working-class friends, although she once admitted rather coyly to being kissed by a one-armed liftman during the 1914–18 war. Years later, during the early days of the jazz revival, I brought home a piano player I had met at a concert. ‘He must be the most Liverpool person we’ve ever had in the house,’ she said, before adding, ‘as a guest.’

On a more personal level she called on several old women, most of whom had been ‘in service’ and now lived in the small dark over-furnished houses off Aigburth Road with a canary for company. There was something of the Lady Bountiful about those expeditions and they always made me uncomfortable even before I was able to understand why. The old women were ever impressed by Maud’s condescension. She basked a little too easily in the sycophancy. Still less did I enjoy the visits to the Home for Incurables, a charitable nursing home where ‘worthy’ cases were admitted to die. I hated the sweet sickly smell of the rooms, the scared old faces, the yellow hands fumbling with the bedspread. Even then I found the name intimidating, grotesquely Victorian in its determined refusal to conceal its function. It was however slightly less brutally identified than the Catholic equivalent (all the ‘Incurables’ were Church of England). The Catholic institution was called The Hospice for the Dying.

Maud was of course a woman of her time. It is pointless to apply today’s standards to her social assumptions. Certainly she derived satisfaction from being admired for her ‘selfless’ dedication, but she achieved certain positive results, relieved some hardship. She didn’t only visit the poor. There was also an American millionairess who lived permanently in a suite at the Adelphi. Her name was Mrs Beere and she was a tiny little woman whose amiably bemused son René, a friend of Uncle Alan’s, was to die of alcoholism towards the end of the thirties. Mrs Beere was pathologically mean and expected my mother to bring her own sandwiches while she herself tucked into smoked salmon and creme caramel sent up from the French restaurant on an elaborate trolley and served by an obsequious waiter. Once, when I was about nine, Mrs Beere sent me out to buy some medical preparation from a nearby chemist. She gave me the approximate money and on returning I offered her the penny change. ‘You can keep it,’ she told me with an air of great magnanimity. She was very proud of her ‘petite’ appearance and once asked a Jewish acquaintance what nationality he would imagine her to be if he didn’t know she were an American. She hoped that the answer would be French, but it wasn’t. ‘Jewish, Mrs Beere,’ he told her with firm realism. I didn’t mind visiting Mrs Beere because I was fascinated by the idea that anybody should live in an hotel, especially one so grand as the Adelphi with its 1930 Louis Quinze decor and rosy silk wall-hangings.

There was also an old plump myopic woman on Maudie’s list. She had been the mistress of a famous actor, but had later become a devout Roman Catholic. She was badly off and her flat was both dusty and depressing, but the decor was pure Ballet Russe with tasselled light shades and an ottoman covered with huge cushions and grubby pierrot dolls. The cheap crucifixes and madonnas looked out of place in such louche, if dilapidated, surroundings.

From an early age I enjoyed going out with my mother even when our destination was not all I could wish. I was impressed by her knowledge of Liverpool, her sudden purposeful dives into sidestreets, her ascent up the linoleumed stairs of scruffy buildings full of small wholesalers to an upper floor, where there was a man who mended watches or a ‘little woman’ who made hats. Her dressmaker was the fattest woman I’ve ever seen outside a fair booth. She worked in the tiny front room of a decayed Georgian house, her mouth bristling with pins. She smelt of rancid fat. She would copy, rather approximately, photographs of clothes Maud had torn out of Vogue. My mother spent very little on herself. While some of her richer or vainer friends wore mink or sable she made do with a ‘pony’ coat bought in a sale or a rather beady-eyed, moth-eaten fox fur that bit its own groin with a clip. Tom, given his careful nature, did nothing to encourage her to build up her wardrobe. When I was about seven I decided to remedy this. At my request she released me at the entrance to the Bon Marche and I went to ask if it were possible to buy a fur coat for about five shillings, the amount she had ‘lent’ me to get her a birthday present. They told me it was not possible, but Maud pretended to be just as pleased with the ugly ‘slightly shopworn’ fake crocodile handbag which was within my budget.

My father’s life – golf on Saturdays, snooker at The Albert on Fridays, occasional invitations to shoot or fish – naturally involved me far less during my childhood. Even my mother’s interests impinged only occasionally although, as I grew older, she began to spend more time with me, to include me in many of her activities largely perhaps because I showed such a precocious and enthusiastic interest in everything she said or did. Even so the nursery remained the centre of my life, the afternoon walk the principal event of the day. Gradually things assumed a pattern. The seasons established themselves. Christmas, Easter, and the summer holidays became fixed rather than unplaced occurrences.