Speaking for Myself (4 page)

It’s hard to imagine what working at the Seaforth chippie must have felt like for my mum. Only a few years earlier, Gale Howard had been a rising star at RADA, glamorous, accomplished (Jackie Collins had been one of her contemporaries), and with the world at her feet. Now here she was, serving penny packets of cod and chips and sausages to drunken sailors. I can just imagine the leers she got late at night. How long she suffered it, nobody remembers now. Months, certainly. Luckily salvation was at hand in the shape of Auntie Diane, her friend in Stoke Newington. Since qualifying as a designer, she had started work at Selfridges department store as a trainee buyer. Diane managed to get Mum an interview at Lewis’s, Selfridges’ parent company, whose flagship store was in Liverpool. Mum got the job.

Whereas an ordinary shop assistant’s wage was £7 a week, my mum went straight in at £11, nearly three times what the fish-and-chip shop was paying her. Every week from then on, she gave half of whatever she earned to her mother-in-law. In addition, she continued to do the washing and ironing — although the new job meant that we soon got a top-loading washing machine. Naturally she also bought our clothes. Another plus of working for Lewis’s was that she was entitled to a discount, which increased the longer she worked there. The bicycle was dispensed with, and from then on Mum took the bus, did a full day’s work, and then took the bus back in time to put us to bed. As for her own life, she put it on hold. For a while she kept nursing the hope that her husband would come back, but he didn’t. The money stopped; the visits stopped; there were no more telephone calls, or none that I remember, until the fateful one.

It was April 1963. The Easter holidays. I was eight, and Lyndsey was six. As a special treat, Mum had taken us to see
Summer Holiday
, a movie about a bus conductor who takes a London bus all the way to Greece for a holiday. We didn’t often go to the movies, and I’d been looking forward to it ever since I’d heard it was coming to Crosby. I already had a poster of Cliff Richard, the film’s star, pinned to my bedroom door. When we got back, Lyndsey and I were packed off upstairs to bed and banned from going downstairs again. Instead we played one of our favorite games, which we called “policewoman’s training.”

My grandma was always obsessed that burglars were about to come in and steal our nonexistent worldly goods. Policewoman’s training involved creeping downstairs, touching the front door, and rushing back up again, before Mum and Grandma, who would be watching television, could catch us. The rules were no noise and no giggling. Sometimes I’d lift Lyndsey onto the banister and give her a little shove so that she slid down to the bottom. On one occasion my hands slipped, so instead of putting her on the rail, I pushed her right over, and she plummeted down into the hallway. There was a sudden scream from downstairs, then Lyndsey was bawling out at the top of her voice, “Cherie tried to kill me!”

Lyndsey was only winded, and neither of us was punished, but I still remember hiding behind my grandma’s bedroom door, shaking with fear.

On this particular Thursday night, we were playing policewoman’s training when the phone rang. Scuttling hurriedly back upstairs, I crouched outside the bathroom as my mum came into the hall and picked up the phone. She didn’t say anything, apart from hello at the beginning. Then suddenly she began to cry. I had seen her cry before, but nothing like this, and it was somehow worse because she didn’t say anything to explain it. Then my grandma came out and started hissing, “How could he? . . . It’s absolutely unforgiveable! . . . As for the
Crosby Herald . . .
” Then she put her arm round my mum, which was something she didn’t usually do.

Eventually they went back into the front room, and I just sat there on the landing, feeling my eyes prick as if I was going to cry. Then I found Lyndsey and told her that something terrible had happened, but I didn’t know what.

The next morning at breakfast, everyone was quiet. Mum had obviously been crying all night, but nothing was said.

“Why don’t you two run along to the park?” Grandma suggested.

So we did. The park was just at the end of our road. It was a lovely, sunny April day, and you could always find somebody to play with. I remember Lyndsey took her jump rope, and there was some discussion about whether we needed sweaters.

As soon as the other children saw us coming, they began staring and whispering. Finally I got up the courage to say something.

“What is it?” I asked one of my friends. “What are you looking at me like that for? What’s happened?”

“You should know,” she said, then shrugged and looked down at the ground. Then a group of boys started giggling and chanting my dad’s name.

“Tony Booth, Tony Booth, Tony Booth!”

Even though he hadn’t lived in Crosby for years, everyone knew who my father was. He was on the telly!

And then it all came out: the
Crosby Herald
was published on Friday, but the first edition appeared the night before, and that week, on the announcements page, top of the list, was the following:

BOOTH, Anthony, late of 15 Ferndale Road, Waterloo, and Julie née Allan proudly announce the arrival at the London Clinic of their daughter Jenia, a half sister for Cherie and Lindsay.

We had no idea. Mum had no idea. Grandma had no idea. Crosby had no idea.

It had generally been accepted in the family that my father had abandoned us, and by then Mum knew he was seeing someone else: she was even considering giving him a divorce. But when the new woman, Julie Allan, decided to force her hand with this announcement, it backfired spectacularly. Divorce was the one thing Mum could withhold.

It is difficult to overestimate the humiliation — to my mother, to his mother, and, of course, to his children. This was 1963, in the heart of Catholic Liverpool. People didn’t get divorced, or if they did, they didn’t talk about it. Girls who had the misfortune to get pregnant were sent away to convents to have their babies, who were then offered for adoption. As for “single parent,” it was a term that hadn’t yet been invented. To broadcast your sins to the world by placing an announcement in the local paper which everybody would read was a crime against society, against the church, and against everything any decent-minded person stood for.

And he hadn’t even spelled Lyndsey’s name right.

Chapter 3

Girlhood

S
hortly after the painful business with my father, Uncle Bob, who had moved in with us, occupying my great-grandmother’s former room after her passing in 1961, left home. He, too, had decided that he was going to be an actor and had taken up a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. All at once the house felt very empty. The sole advantage was that I was given his room, which I would gladly have done without to have him back. He had been more like a brother than an uncle, and in a fatherless household, he had contributed a healthy dose of masculinity. I also missed his car, a sparkling Triumph Roadster, which had facilitated numerous adventures.

Children can be horribly cruel to anyone they sense is vulnerable or different, and I remember standing in a corner of the playground, with taunts of the “you’re not a proper family” and “your dad doesn’t love you” variety ringing in my ears. Newton’s third law of physics tells us that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and mine was to fight. I pulled hair. I punched. I bit. Friends stopped knocking at the door to ask if I could come out to play. Whether this was their own decision or their parents deciding that the Booths weren’t the kind of people they wanted their kids to mix with, I don’t know, but the effect was the same. I remember going down to the swings in the park, swinging as high as I could, my legs pumping away, wishing that a rope would break, and like Katy in the classic children’s book
What Katy Did,
I’d come crashing down, break my neck, and spend a lifetime as a cripple. Then they’d be sorry.

During those dreadful months, reading became my refuge. Although my grandmother had no education worth the name, she had always been a great reader and would pass on books she thought I might like, books that were far more sophisticated than a ten-year-old usually had access to. One of her favorite authors was Daphne du Maurier, and in
Frenchman’s Creek
and
Jamaica Inn
, I could escape from the misery of the playground to nineteenth-century Cornwall and beyond. It was thanks to her that I discovered
Wuthering Heights
and fell in love with Heathcliff, Emily Brontë’s dark-skinned orphan from Liverpool. Luckily Mrs. Savage, my teacher, was a woman of both sensitivity and sense. I had read my way through all the children’s books in the local library, so not only did she arrange with the library to bend the rules and let me borrow adult books, but as the summer term drew to a close, she spoke to my mother and suggested that the following September I skip a year in school. I was bored, she said, and it was no wonder I was getting into trouble. It was simply that I wasn’t being stretched.

I remember my mum sitting on my bed that night, holding my hand and telling me what had been decided — and yet warning me at the same time.

“Now remember, Cherie, you’re going to be with children a whole year older than you, and it’s going to be difficult.”

Even so, it seemed as if I had won some sort of small victory, and my recent experience of trial by taunt only served to strengthen my resolve. I was, as my grandma used to say, “contrary.” If my mum was saying it would be difficult, I’d show her she was wrong.

I succeeded. At the end of the year, my final year at St. Edmund’s, I finished at the top of the class, and I remain convinced that it was the prompt action of this caring and farsighted teacher that stopped me from going completely off the rails.

The only thing that really suffered by my missing a year was my handwriting. To catch up, I had to do extra arithmetic while the others in the class were having handwriting lessons. As a result, it is still absolutely terrible (my grandad would be appalled). By the time I was in secondary school, it was too late for remedial treatment.

That last year at primary school was a magical time for me. Mr. Smerdon was one of those charismatic teachers you never forget. He had been a fighter pilot in the war and would devote hours recounting his experiences. However unconventional his instruction, it certainly did me no harm. A larger-than-life figure, he had theatrical aspirations and would occasionally disappear to London for auditions. He was also in charge of the school choir, of which I became a very enthusiastic member. He became a significant male presence in my life, the sort of man my father might have been if he had not left home.

Now that we didn’t have Uncle Bob to take us out, Grandma decided we needed a car of our own. So in 1964, in an uncharacteristic act of generosity and folly combined, she bought a Mini. I can still remember the number plate: ALV 236B. She had no intention of driving it herself; this masterpiece of modern engineering and design was for Grandad.

Grandfather loved that Mini and was ridiculously proud of it. There was one small problem, however: he couldn’t pass his driving test. I don’t know how many times he took it, but he always failed. It didn’t stop him from driving, although he never went very far. He and Grandma would take us down to the seafront, where Lyndsey and I could play on the beach while they watched the great ocean liners, including the
Queen Elizabeth
and
Queen Mary
, make their stately way from the docks to the open sea, bound for New York. Grandad had retired by this time, due to his bad heart, but the sea and ships were still in his blood.

Otherwise life in Ferndale Road continued much as usual: Mum went out to work, and Grandma stayed at home. Mum did the washing and the ironing, while Grandma did the cooking. She was what was known in those days as a plain cook, but a good one. The menu never varied. Sunday: roast shoulder of lamb. Monday: leftovers. Tuesday: mutton stew with potatoes. Wednesday was baking day, and we’d have steak and kidney pudding and apple pie. Nobody could make pastry like my grandma. Thursday was the “four nice, lean lamb chops” I’d learned to ask for. Friday was inevitably fish and chips, and Saturday was mincemeat pie. And so it continued, week in, week out. We rarely had chicken, which, in those days, before factory farming, was expensive. Shoulder of lamb was cheap (if bony), and the great Sunday treat was gnawing the sweet meat off the bone. I will never forget Grandma’s mortification when, right in the middle of Mass, my cousin Catherine shouted, “Grandma, are we having bones for dinner?”

Sunday Mass was an important ritual. It wasn’t simply our weekly appointment with God; it was the weekly get-together of the various branches of the family. The only person who didn’t participate was my mother, although she’d always come to the big celebrations, such as my first Holy Communion and Easter. Whatever the current crisis, standards had to be upheld, so we would always dress up in our best coats and hats. When I was very young, the Mass was entirely in Latin, even the gospel readings. Then, as the Second Vatican Council began to take effect, the gospel at least was in English, though sung High Mass remained in Latin. (This at least had the advantage that I can now understand the service wherever I am in the world.)

During the years immediately following the discovery of my father’s other family, he kept in touch with his mother sporadically but rarely came home. There came a point where my mum became a more important part of the household than he was. My grandad was especially fond of her, and he consistently refused to have anything to do with my dad.

From time to time Uncle Bob would see my father in London, and I remember on one visit to Liverpool, he showed me a photograph of my dad smiling broadly with Jenia, still a toddler, and a new addition: Bronwen, who had been born only a year later. I must have been upset — I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t have been — but whether I kept my feelings hidden at the time I can’t remember. As to why Bob showed the photo to me, who can tell? Perhaps he thought it was a way of easing me in gently.