Diamonds at the Lost and Found

by Sarah Aspinall

  One flickering recollection is of a hot day in midsummer. We walk down to a seafront teeming with bank-holiday crowds as Mummy holds my hand tightly. The Marine Pleasure Gardens, with their rolling acres of lawns and lakes, are a magic kingdom to me, as we cross mock-Venetian bridges snaking over lagoons thick with chugging pleasure boats. The overhead rollercoaster creaks and explodes with screams. I am lifted up to wave at the miniature railway, rattling by us under the shadow of the pier and out into sunlight and past the cages of rabbits along the route on its way to the zoo.

  We approach the high circular wall of the salty Sea Bathing Lake where seawater was still pumped from the distant sea. It was here that Mummy had once been crowned as a beauty queen. Its grand, but now grubby, concrete spaces still echo each summer with the shouts of bathers. Today it is packed with wet pink bodies as we hurry up to the changing rooms ranged along the top, and here my pudgy body is pushed and prodded into my new bikini and my hair pulled into pretty hair slides. Other small girls in their frocks and swimsuits stand holding their mothers’ hands, waiting to approach a concrete pier that projects out into the huge round pool. The man in charge knows Mummy, as most people in Southport do. He gives her a big wink and we are moved up to the front of the queue.

  Within moments I am being pushed out along this lonely catwalk. I stop, but Mummy tells me to go on.

  ‘Don’t be such a silly, just walk to the end and say hello to that nice man.’

  She points to a figure at the far end of the pier. He beckons me to come and I totter bravely along, looking down at the water all around me. As I reach the end, he squats down beside me; his face is an odd colour, all puffy and tan foundation. He’s smiling, has bright white teeth, and yet it’s not like a proper smile. His face is now close to mine, and he says into a microphone that booms out from somewhere else, ‘So! What is the name of this little Rosebud?’

  I realize with horror that I am part of something I don’t understand, and can’t breathe.

  He tries again, but not into the microphone and as if through his teeth. ‘Just tell us your name, love?’

  I finally manage to whisper: ‘I’m Sally.’

  I try to find my voice. He has pushed the microphone closer to me and I take a deep breath and shout. ‘But I’m too shy!’

  I hear my voice booming and bouncing back at me, mixed with a roaring laughter from all around the pool. The sound of it seems to hang in the air, and I turn and run back along the catwalk to my mother. I know that they are laughing at me because I have done it all wrong.

  Mummy shakes her head, and points to the pink sashes on the table.

  ‘Why did you run away? Look, they just wanted to give you a pretty Little Miss Rosebud sash, and put a crown on your head.’

  I look over in wonder at the sashes, and then feel sadness that I have lost the crown and the chance to be something so special.

  ‘You could have had the prize and the lovely sash to take home if you hadn’t been such a sausage.’

  We trudge home and I somehow already know that I am as disappointing as everything else in her grey world.

  OUR HOUSE, 18 Saunders Street, was divided top and bottom and my nana lived upstairs and my parents and I downstairs. My father was already unwell with the sickness that would only get worse, but he still struggled out to his office most days. We had a gloomy living room with a brown sofa, rough to the touch, and a back door to a yard and small garden beyond. There was a fish-and-chip shop across the street where we got our dinner, groceries were delivered in a van, and a man called ‘Joe the Hoover Man’ came to mend things.

  There were long summer days with drawn curtains when I was put in front of BBC children’s shows that left me feeling upset and lonely. Torchy, the battery boy with his jerky movements, had strings you could see pulling on his puppet body. I remember hiding behind the sofa. I wanted something to wish for, but didn’t know what it was.

  Mum and me, 1960.

  Even after my first failure there was still a grim determination hanging over my future. Aged three, I was enrolled at the Betty Bursey Dance Academy, and given a patent-leather case with a picture of ballet shoes on the front, to carry my shoes for ballet and tap. The older girls giggled in the changing room and whispered, ‘Betty Bursey’s busty’, which she was. Afterwards Mummy and I practised song-and-dance routines at home in her bedroom, tapping to ‘Bye, Bye Blackbird’ and bending and tipping to ‘I’m a Little Teapot’.

  ‘Chin up and a pretty smile as you tip over, that’s it. You are my special girl, you know?’ she told me as she showed me the moves.

  Once the memory of the Rosebud contest had faded a little, I was taken for a second try-out. It was another warm afternoon; we walked down to the seafront, on the promise of an ice cream, but then arrived at the large stage that was erected each season in the gardens outside the Floral Hall.

  She bends and whispers, ‘Go on, just sing “Wiggly Woo” like we do at home.’

  I’m given a little shove, out in front of a sea of elderly day-trippers seated in deckchairs. A man holds the microphone for me to sing and off I go.

  ‘There’s a worm at the bottom of the garden, and his name is Wiggly Woo.’

  I glance to the side of the stage, where Mummy is mouthing the words at me, and wiggling her hips and arms, to remind me to wiggle like a worm as I sing the chorus. But without her at my side I feel lost and alone; I falter and can’t do my wiggle. As I curtsey, weak applause rises from the ranks of drowsy deckchairs.

  With an air of finality my mother decided that I just could not sing, and that I had my father’s ‘two left feet’ and would never dance. My role in the double act we were fated to be was yet to emerge. For the moment I was given up on until I could display a talent for something.

  For now, we both knew who was the real star. There was a big gold chocolate box with a sagging bow of ribbon glued to the top; it lived in wardrobes and I would beg for it to be lifted down and opened. Digging among the layers of photographs in different hues, I would pull them out longingly. These were small sepia windows to another life, and showed a little imp with dancing shoes and dressing up clothes grinning out at me.

  WHO WAS SHE, this little girl? She was my mother, but in quite another incarnation, and living in this strange, dingy and unrecognizable world of the ‘olden days’. If I caught her in the right mood, she could be drawn back there to the Liverpool dockyards, some twenty miles away from us in Southport. It was now only a few stops on the train, or a drive down past the sand dunes and through dull suburbs, past Auntie Grace’s house, and past the war memorial and not so far at all; but it was also another place entirely: the past. Although it lay a little beyond my childish understanding, I would still feel the dark clouds of the Depression hanging heavily over Bootle’s terraced slums, and the notorious Scotland Road roaring and rattling with life through those hard times. It was a place that was dirty, noisy and vivid. When the working day at the dockyards finished, the stream of men would head straight to the pubs, and by mid evening their doorways let out blasts of smoky air and maudlin drunken singing, until closing time when fights began on the pavements and the wives appeared, shouting, trying to get their husbands away home.

  Nearby, at Uncle Charlie’s coalyard, my mother – then Audrey Miller, aged six or seven – would be lifted onto the kitchen table, wearing her top hat, feet in shiny new tap shoes and clutching her cane. As the family crowded around she would start to sing, tapping her toes and swishing her cane from hand to hand, practising for her role in Babes in the Wood; the pantomime was to be performed at Liverpool’s most splendid theatre, the Empire, and she was to be Bootle’s very own leading light. Here she is with her shock of red hair, an irrepressible ball of impish energy, grabbing the limelight as she flutters by with the fairy chorus. ‘Give us a turn!’ someone calls. Immediately she stops dancing and pauses wide-eyed – she knows she has the room …

  ‘Shhh and I’ll tell you a secret,

  something to
open your eyes.

  Are you awfully excited?

  Cos it’s going to be … a surprise!’

  I learnt this same poem, widening my eyes, whispering the lines, just as she had done …

  ‘Daddy says there aren’t any fairies,

  But Mummy whispers low.

  “Don’t take any notice, darling.

  There are things even daddies don’t know.”’

  This little girl would see things that I would never see, although I grew up with her, hearing her stories; and as I grew older I would begin to learn her secrets, and about the darker deeds she became caught up in. Something had happened in that shadowy world, something that would affect both our futures.

  MOST DAYS Mummy and I strolled down to Lord Street, the graceful boulevard around which the town of Southport arranged itself. It stretched for almost a mile, wide enough to allow for expansive gardens, which ran continuously along its length. The elegant shop façades on the other side were fronted by a long cast-iron and glass canopy with fine detailing and ornate columns wrapped with plump cherubs. There were Tea Gardens, with playing fountains, and bandstands from which music was performed. Great chestnut trees made a cool canopy overhead.

  In later years, when I lived in London, I would learn not to tell people that this was one of the finest thoroughfares in the world. It would make me seem ridiculous to be claiming this for a town no one knew and usually mixed up with Stockport. If I added that Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte had lived here in 1846, and it had been the inspiration for Napoleon and Haussmann’s scheme in redesigning Paris, I would be certainly mocked. But it was true, and in years to come, as I travelled the world, I would see great abandoned cities once on the Silk Route, or ruling a forgotten empire, and come to understand how easily one northern seaside town could be lost or buried under the silt of only a few decades of history.

  My mother still had her postcards and pictures showing the town in the 1930s, when the rich and famous of the day came pouring out of the Garrick Theatre, the women in silks and furs, the men in evening wear and monocles. Uniformed chauffeurs waited in the glow of the street lamps, and behind them a thousand fairy lights glimmered in the trees.

  Leading off from Lord Street were narrow lanes with small mysterious shops selling magical things. One grubby entrance was hidden beneath driftwood and dangling conch shells and guarded by a hanging African juju witch-doctor doll, and, even more terrifying, within, by a thin stooped old man. If you were brave enough to duck down and get past the fierce witch doctor, you came to broken steps leading to a basement cave where the old man’s shell grotto sold everything it is possible to make from seashells. These barnacled wonders were some of the earliest things I can remember wanting.

  Alongside him were second-hand booksellers mixed in with greasy cafés and tawdry bucket-and-spade shops with rows of bright pink sticks of rock. These lanes led from Lord Street’s elegance to the part of town now judged to be ‘common’ and the Land of the Day-trippers. A grand Victorian promenade of large hotels, once the crown of the Riviera of the North West, was now beginning to tarnish, and beyond it the miles of pleasure gardens leading to the muddy beach were showing peeling paintwork and cracks thick with weeds.

  Yet Lord Street still prospered, and incredibly an orchestra still played each day in the glass-domed restaurant of the Marshall and Snelgrove department store. This was where my mother longed to be, cocooned in its gilded calm, or at the Prince of Wales Hotel where people stepped out of Rolls-Royces to vanish through great mahogany revolving doors into a world of luxurious wealth.

  This world was now lost to her. All she had was me and my daddy, her terminally ill husband, and her life in a shabby flat. So she sighed and fidgeted through most of the day, played her gramophone records over and over again, smoking her menthol cigarettes.

  She would sometimes leave me with Nana and disappear for hours, till my nana stood at the window with her Parkinson’s tremor getting worse with the worry.

  Sometimes mail arrived with foreign stamps, or someone telephoned from London, and my mother would brighten before falling into a deeper gloom.

  My poor father, Neil, had reasons to believe that he had ruined the life of the woman he adored, and that his death would mean leaving me with a reluctant mother. Because of him, for some reason I would eventually come to understand, she hadn’t been able to marry the man she really wanted to marry, or have the glittering life she had planned; and now he was going to leave her with no money.

  Did he wonder how all this would play out when he was gone, and if she would begin to chase her lost dreams once again, but with me in tow, now fated to a rackety life? Did he fear what this would mean, and how it would shape my future?

  He had contracted a rare disease while serving with the RAF in Africa during the war. He now struggled to carry on working, and increasingly he came home from the office to lie down or to go to his hospital visits.

  None of this was the life that my mother had hoped for, and she was never a woman to simply accept her fate. One day we were going to be far away from it all. There was nothing else for it; she was so full of wanting, and still craving all the things that she believed had slipped away from her. To get these things back she was going to have to cross a line. I don’t think she realized that this was what she was doing, or that she would be taking me with her to this life on the other side of that line; she was simply helpless and this was our fate. She had skills, honed in the back streets of Liverpool and learnt from her no-good father, which she was now quite willing to use to get her out of the mess in which she found herself, and who could blame her?

  3

  The Grand House

  OUR TAXI PULLS UP at what seems to be a mansion. It is an enormous gloomy Victorian house of red brick smothered in a blanket of dense dusty ivy. Set back behind a busy main road, its gates open to a circular driveway and neat lawns with beds of black earth and rosebushes that point their spikes to the sky. Behind the front door is a vast tiled hallway, and then more corridors and doors. Just this hallway alone seems bigger than our entire previous flat. High ceilings look down onto rooms with new names: cloakroom, larder, dining room, salon … I have no memory of it having a kitchen at all and, if it did, I don’t believe we ever used it.

  A van arrives, and a small plump man who smells of perfume begins telling the other men where to put all the big boxes.

  ‘Are you one of the Seven Dwarfs?’

  Mummy says that was very rude and to say sorry. His name is David Glover, an antique dealer, and I watch as the stream of wooden crates begins to be unpacked; their contents are placed around the rooms and David Glover puts things on top of other things. A pillar called a torchère has a boy with wings and a bow and arrow placed on top of it; it means that you have to be very careful. In the dining room a great table of gleaming mahogany arrives, with an army of chairs to go around it that no one will ever sit on. The new furniture has names like Sheraton and Chippendale, and a sideboard called William the Third. I hide under this sideboard when Mummy’s friends come round, and I hear the sparkly glasses taken out of the cabinet and the chink of a sherry bottle. I hear her friend, Auntie Ava, ask her ‘How on earth have you afforded all this?’ and my mother touches her nose and laughs, saying, ‘That would be telling!’

  Mum and Dad, (housekeeper in background) 14 Lulworth Road, 1962.

  It is a house with a mystery: I find another den at the foot of the stairs from where I overhear my Auntie Grace whisper to Uncle Phil, ‘How do you explain it, where’s she finding all this money?’

  It was clearly baffling to everyone that, just as we should have been sliding into poverty, we instead moved up in the world so spectacularly. My mother had no job, and her own mother, Nana, was mainly bedridden; my daddy was now very unwell, and there was me. Yet here we all were, and she had moved us from a shabby flat on the wrong side of town into a large and impressive house with live-in staff that she had apparently paid for herself. Even at a you
ng age I was becoming aware of these secrets that seemed to hang in the air of those endless rooms.

  FROM THE HALLWAY a sweeping staircase wound up to a landing and corridor, off which there were numerous bedrooms. At night the stairwell felt even bigger, leading to a pool of darkness below. It was a house that changed shape under cover of night. Corridors stretched out forever, the stairs doubled their length and there were strange noises, whisperings and banged doors.

  At the top of the staircase there was a door. This door was quite unlike all the others in the house. The others were of dark wood with brass, but this was painted white and had a plastic handle. This door led to another world, one so different it was hard to believe the two regions shared a roof. Through this door was the domain of ‘the Back Flat’. Here a succession of housekeepers lived a completely self-contained existence: in a warm, cheery fug, with a smell of sausages, and windows that streamed with condensation from the gas fire.

  The Back Flat had colourful lino and carpets, and a display of decorative objects that changed with each housekeeper but somehow shared a cheeky style, and seemed of a quite different order than the objects that had been carefully positioned around the main house.

  Some of these ladies came with husbands and some without. First was Alice, Irish, with pale powdery skin she liked me to kiss; then Mrs Liddel with her colostomy bag that smelt bad; then Mr and Mrs Braithwaite with their son Colin who wasn’t quite right; and there were others long since forgotten. They all lived similar domestic lives, in the glare of bright overhead fluorescent lighting, with TVs on loudly in the kitchen showing Opportunity Knocks or Coronation Street.