That's Another Story: The Autobiography (5 page)

It was under my parents’ bed, aged about eight, that I found what looked like a kind of greasy, deflated balloon. I could see from its colour that it wasn’t a festive balloon, one that you might hang on a gatepost to indicate the location of a person’s birthday party, and that it might possibly have some sort of medical connection. I sat on the floor to examine it further; first stretching it this way and that, then finally blowing it up and holding it up to the light. Inside it was a kind of gloopy liquid. I stared at it and, piece by piece, snippets of overheard remarks and conversations that I had hitherto no understanding of, began to connect. The realisation of what it was that I had only seconds before held to my mouth and tasted sent me rushing downstairs, the thing held away from me at arm’s length, rudely deflating and spitting globules of the liquid as it did so. Once out in the garden, I couldn’t when it came to it jettison the thing into the wilderness behind the rockery, as had been my intention. Instead I held on to it for a few seconds more and the revulsion that I had felt just moments before melded in with something else, something like a sadness I couldn’t quite place.

I could spend a whole afternoon in this room, going through the bottom drawer of my mother’s dressing table, leafing through the personal things of her past with frozen fingers. In my memory it was always arctic in there, the big faded rug cold and slightly damp underneath me. It was where I felt I could find her, touch on her history, discover clues to her, like a detective: clues to the girl she once was before we came along and disappointed her, before she became anxious and tired, when she was excited by life, optimistic, when the world was her oyster. It was full of old photographs of her as a young woman: dark and handsome. It is said that a lot of people living along the west coast of Ireland have dark complexions and this is attributed to the fact that the Spanish Armada crashed on the rocks there. My mother, with her dark hair and eyes and olive skin, could easily have passed for Spanish, but when questioned about this she was mildly outraged, claiming that ‘The Irish met them with pitchforks!’ To which my father replied, ‘I think the Irish met them with something else, Mary!’

In these photographs her dark, strong features were set in an unsmiling, no-nonsense face, against an alien, sepia background that looked more like the moon than anywhere on earth. The images were peopled by worn, dusty-looking folk, staring pale eyed at the camera with a self-consciousness that now touches me but then enthralled me and drew me in. There was a shabby leather handbag full of letters and postcards, from close friends and distant relatives long ago, from California and Australia and, of course, Ireland: friendly, chatty, intimate letters to a girl we never knew, who didn’t yet know us. I couldn’t get enough; I would read the same letters over and over again, and stare at the same photographs, at the same faces, often employing a magnifying glass, as if that would take me closer into them, into their eyes and through into their heads, hoping against hope that I would discover a vital secret. Also in the handbag was a faded, pink crêpe handkerchief that, as I read the letters and pored over the photographs, I would hold to my nose, breathing in the musty traces of a once-sweet perfume.

Up until about six or seven I slept in the room next door to my parents, the door of which was just down the landing that ran the full length of the house. I shared it with my brothers; they slept in a double bed and I in a single. It was in here that on God knows how many Christmas Eves my brothers called me to the window with great excitement, claiming that Father Christmas was just at that moment crossing the night sky on his sleigh, and each time I believed I’d had the misfortune to have just missed him. It was here, sleepless with anticipation of his arrival, that I lay under the covers pretending to be asleep, like millions of other children, and holding my breath as the door creaked open and in he came. And it was here that, one Christmas, before the discovery in my parents’ wardrobe, I saw Him, at least the red tip of his hood, but it was Him.

And it was here during the Christmas of 1955 that I shared my brothers’ double bed with my Auntie Agnes who was visiting from London. Auntie Agnes was my mother’s younger unmarried sister. In her youth, with her high, wide cheekbones, flawless skin, lustrous hair and pretty mouth, she had been quite beautiful. We were told that she was once pursued by the actor Trevor Howard and was never short of admirers. As a young girl, however, she developed an abscess on her hip that resulted in crippling arthritis and she ended up with one leg being several inches shorter than the other. This plus regular and severe migraines served to completely incapacitate her in late middle age. She would have no truck with men, my mother said of her rather disparagingly, ‘Ah, no one was ever good enough,’ and she lived alone in a bedsit in Shepherd’s Bush. I can’t help but link her antipathy towards men to the rather cold, dismissive attitude that my grandfather, Patrick O’Brien, took towards the women of the family. He had time only for the boys, my uncles, Joe and Martin John, doting particularly on the latter. My mother responded to his cold, domineering nature by choosing my father, a gentle man who simply adored her and thought her to be a cut above himself.

She seldom saw her sister, once a year at most, and when she did come to visit us, the visit was usually cut short by some sort of argument between them, resulting in Auntie Agnes flouncing out and, in an act of outrageous extravagance, taking a black cab to New Street station to board the train to London. My mother would no more take a cab to New Street station, let alone get on a train, when the coach was so much cheaper, than boil her own head. In fact the only time a black cab was ever seen in our street to my knowledge was when Auntie Agnes came to stay.

Their relationship was beset by a petty competitiveness. My mother once sent her a silk scarf for Christmas. Needless to say, she had not bought it; it was a gift that had been given to her by a work colleague. My mother rarely kept anything that was given her. All presents were recycled in this way. On receiving it my aunt sent it back immediately with a curt little note saying that she never wore silk next to her skin. During a visit one Christmas to her sister’s flat, my mother, noting the paucity of cards that Agnes, ‘the poor lonely thing’, had received, asked in her best, innocent, little-girl voice, ‘Oh, you’ve got a nice few cards. How many did you get?’

‘Oh . . .’ my aunt began, but that was it, my mother came straight back with ‘I had eighty-two!’

And so it was here, in this big sagging double bed that couldn’t help but conspire to throw its occupants together in the middle, that I have my earliest memory of wetting the bed. It wasn’t the first time, for I had never stopped; it was simply the first time I had felt ashamed. Bed-wetting for me was a nightmarish saga that lasted - although in the latter years it was rarer - through to the beginnings of puberty. Every night I begged God to spare me the usual morning humiliation of having to confess to my mother that I’d ‘done it again’ and met with her angry, exhausted despair. ‘Oh Gaaard, she’s done it again!’ she would repeat to no one in particular. Every night I stretched my pyjama bottoms to bursting point with a raggedy old towel or sometimes an old pyjama jacket of my father’s as a makeshift nappy, which more often than not I managed to circumvent, only to wake up in my own wretchedness at the familiar stench of ammonia and the cold, soggy tangle of pyjamas and sheets. How my mother managed, going out to work full time as she did, with three children, Grandma and no washing machine, is simply unimaginable to me. Today the sheets would be whipped into a machine, then into the tumble-dryer and be back on the bed before a person could say ‘incontinence pad’. Instead they had to be boiled in a bucket on the gas stove, rinsed, put through the mangle in the back yard and then transferred to the washing line, in all weathers, maybe taking days to dry.

The whole thing made staying at friends’ houses out of the question unless my mother had words and this brought its own shame: the whispered conversations in the hallway as we were about to leave; the little laugh that served to cover my mother’s own shame; the friend’s face as she greedily cottoned on to my deep, dark secret and then no one mentioning it, culminating in my not daring to allow myself to sleep at all and so returning home exhausted. The only time my bed-wetting didn’t provoke my mother’s wrath was that Christmas when Auntie Agnes came to stay.

At the opposite end of the upstairs landing from my parents’ bedroom, past the stairs to the attic and the bathroom, was the back bedroom into which I moved after my grandmother passed away, the scent of her skin hovering long after she had gone. It was an L-shaped room and, with the airing cupboard in the corner and the toilet next door, there was a continual and somewhat comforting sound of dripping, whooshing and ticking of pipes. There was a sash window looking out over the back yard, the garage, and across into Waller’s shop on the other side of Wigorn Road, a windier, longer, busier road than either Bishopton or Long Hyde Road, which ran along the back of the house. It was here that I lay in the very dark, wood-framed single bed that my grandmother had died in, listening under the covers to Radio Luxembourg on my father’s big blue Bush transistor radio, until late at night when a hand smelling of Boots soap and fags came and retrieved it from down beside my bed.

It was here one awful autumn in 1967 that I lay for a whole month in mourning and disbelief at my being ‘packed in’ or ‘dumped’, as they would say today, by my first love, a chap called Bob. Not turning up for work, I endlessly pored over his letters (he had gone away to college), which I kept in an old sewing box under the bed, called my Bob Box. It was a relationship that was never consummated, its physical side consisting of a lot of snogging to the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’ and well-mannered groping in Bob’s front room, either when his parents weren’t in or were keeping a discreet distance in the back kitchen.

In fact the only time we could have done the deed was when a group of us from school, who my parents thought were all girls, spent a weekend in a caravan on a windswept site somewhere in mid-Wales, the boys turning up later after our dads had dropped us off. Bob and I spent hours in frenzied snogging on a very narrow bunk once the lights went out but in an act of gallantry he placed the sheet between us, so that should his passion reach uncontrollable heights there would be this crisp, white contraceptive to save the day. However, it wasn’t to be the sheet that eventually cooled our ardour. It was the sound of whispering coming from the bunk opposite ours, where one of my friends was sleeping with a boy who was new to the group. The whispering then became more urgent.

‘No! No! No!’ And then, ‘No, please, you’re hurting me.’ And with every ‘No’ I remember that Bob squeezed me to him as if I were the one calling out. For what I think was several minutes, while the rest of us held our collective breath, this poor girl’s pleas hissed out into the silence, punctuated by pitiful sobs, which eventually died into whimpers and then finally stopped. What was chilling about it was that there was no utterance whatsoever from the young man, just the lonely, frightened sounds of the girl. No one spoke or moved. I know that, were my adult self to be miraculously transported back there, I would have spoken out in the darkness to that girl and put a stop to what was going on. But back then, we weren’t sure and, indeed, one of the boys the next day, when his girlfriend had expressed her concern, was reported to have said, ‘Oh, she was all right. She must have wanted him to or she wouldn’t have got into bed with him.’

Bob and I lasted only the length of the summer holidays but in my memory, like all summer holidays from childhood, the time was idyllically stretched. I have no photographs of Bob, but in my blurry memory he is tall, dark and handsome, with a bit of a Roy Marsden look about him, easily outclassing the normal run of suitor. So I thought myself lucky. There had been two or three before him, but they felt more like practice until the real thing came along. My dates with them involved mainly writhing about, while trying to keep straying hands out of my bra in case they should happen upon the handkerchiefs stuffed therein, as we sat in the back row of the Princess Hall Cinema on Smethwick High Street, on seats scarred with cigarette burns, black and shiny where thousands of bottoms had worn away the once plush-red upholstery. Some of them had large holes gouged out of the front so that when you sat down a great gust of air would be expelled, sending your dress flying up.

It always seemed as if very few of the audience had actually gone to see the film. People would be talking at normal volume, running up and down the aisles, fighting, or throwing things. I was once hit on the head by a flying shoe and another time, bizarrely, I saw half a grapefruit fly through the air and land ever so briefly on a chap’s head like a chic little hat. On one occasion someone actually set fire to his seat and we were all evacuated, but generally when the anarchy reached a certain pitch there would be a complaint, prompting the manager to storm down the aisle to the front and scream at the top of his voice, ‘All right! That’s it! All the one and nines out!’ And those in the cheap seats would be shown the door.

But my dates with Bob were on another plane. He had just left school, grammar school to boot; having done A levels, he was going to teacher training college; my brothers didn’t sneer and, most importantly, my mother approved. So when he came home for the weekend after being away at college for about a month and told me in his front room - the room in which we had rolled about, copping a frenzied feel in painful and awkward positions on the tiny sofa; the room that I had left on so many occasions with my lips and chin raw from kissing, relishing the soreness of the hot, angry beard rash as I lay in bed at night, dizzy with romance and lust - that he thought it was best that we perhaps finished, it was as if he was suddenly speaking Urdu and, indeed, everything in that familiar room instantly became unfamiliar. He too became unfamiliar; gone was the warm, crinkly-eyed, only-between-us look and here was the awkward staring-down-at-shoes-and-carpet look and body language that said, ‘Don’t make yourself comfortable, you won’t be staying long.’ He walked me to the bus stop. I don’t know what was said and I probably couldn’t have told you then either, overwhelmed by the terrible need to get away and cry.