Diamonds at the Lost and Found

by Sarah Aspinall

  The housekeepers had stacks of family photographs of smiling grandchildren and mementoes from holidays, things that made me long to go on a holiday: straw donkeys in hats, a mermaid made of seashells, tea towels emblazoned with lines like ‘Glorious Devon’. From her beloved Ireland Alice brought hundreds of knick-knacks in vivid green, with winking leprechauns and shamrocks that brought you good luck.

  Mrs Liddel’s ‘piggywigs’ peeped out from the window ledges, alongside decorated mugs and tea cosies; Mrs Braithwaite had her ‘plaques’, plaster sculptures which crowded the walls from their hooks – pirate ships, glades with Gypsy caravans, lagoons with Venetian gondolas and the heads of flamenco dancers. She gave me one for my room, of a pirate buccaneer with a beard who leered down at me, and I loved it passionately.

  They all were happy to feed me my preferred dinner of a chip butty and a cup of sweet tea before sending me back through the door to the gloomy spaces of the landing. I hated going back across that threshold.

  The Back Flat was slightly awkward and not where I belonged, but it was cosy. The Other Side, our house and my bedroom, felt dark and cold after my mother had gone out, and I was ashamed that I had to have a potty under the bed as I was too frightened to put my head outside the covers, let alone cross the landing and go down the long creaking corridor to the toilet.

  As an only child adrift in this great pile of a house, I loved to hear stories of my mother’s Bootle sardine-can childhood. If on a rainy day I could coax her to bring down that box, I would rummage through the treasure trove of photographs, pulling out this one or that, pleading with her to fill in the soundtrack, to conjure the atmosphere to go with these fading images. Life at Uncle Charlie’s sounded so safe, cocooned against the poverty and violence outside.

  There everyone was bundled in together around the warm fire, with the sound and smell of the horses steaming and stamping in the yard outside. Charlie Clarke’s own large family ruled the roost. ‘Nana and I just mucked in, sleeping together in a small bed and sharing a room with the cousins.’

  ‘Was it really, really cosy?’ I’d ask hopefully.

  ‘Yes I suppose it was, but very cramped and noisy. From dawn to dusk you could hear wagons clattering about in the coalyard and horses clopping in and out, and people shouting and joshing. There was always a great pot of Scouse on the stove, and it seemed to go with the endless chatter around the table: the craic.’

  My mother soaked it up, as I would soak up her tales in turn: the gossip, banter and stories of her Irish family roots, friends and neighbours, in which everyone was either a saint or a sinner. Words and thoughts came tumbling out of her, her cousins would later tell me, as she was lifted onto that table to entertain, to relate the story of some small triumph or disaster to make everyone laugh or cry. She made the stories crackle with life; she could just get people, their voices and little tics. It was a gift and she was going to make it work for her. She was going to be somebody; her mother Rebecca knew it, and was quietly determined. Audrey had absorbed this into her being, understanding that she was special, and one day her life would be somewhere else far from those dirty streets.

  This was where our history started; I never heard any of the Irish past from further back, except that I was told that my grandparents – Rebecca, my nana, and Len, my grandfather – had arrived here from Ireland just before Audrey, my mother, was born. She would describe the dockyard slums, built around courts, dirt-floored yards where there was a toilet and a tap shared by several families.

  ‘Nana was a real lady, and an angel,’ my mother always said, but I knew she had married a bad man, my grandfather, Len Miller. The family story was that he was a man with some plausible charm, which soon wore thin, revealing him as a charlatan and an operator. Nana quietly managed to get by, keeping house and her pride and doting on her small daughter.

  Mum, Bootle, 1932.

  Then Len disappeared, leaving them destitute. Without his income they were homeless and had to move in down the road with Uncle Charlie. Nana took on a coster barrow to sell fruit and vegetables. We had driven past that bleak stretch of road down by the docks, and my mother had pointed out to me where Nana had stood with her barrow all day and in all weathers.

  ‘But every night Nana twisted the rags round my hair with her poor sore fingers that were chapped from the cold, and in the morning, when they were unwound, my ringlets would tumble down past my shoulders. People would stop me in the street to exclaim at my hair.’

  ‘What did they say?’ I asked, wishing my own brown mop was long glossy red-gold ringlets.

  ‘They’d say, “Look at that colour, true auburn, and the shine to it. The glory of it,” they’d say.’

  ‘Tell me again about the parades?’ These were the kinds of questions she liked me to ask her: invitations to tell a story from those years when they were still happy and full of hope.

  ‘In the spring I’d be put in a dress made from lace tablecloths with a crown of flowers, and I’d ride just like a princess on top of Uncle Charlie’s coal wagon at the head of the May Day Parade.’

  ‘And where would you go?’ I’d ask, staring at the little black and white picture of the small Queen who stared back at me. She was my age, grinning at me, but from this other sooty and shadowy world.

  ‘We’d trundle down through the park, where I’d sit grandly on a special throne, with crowds all around watching me being crowned as Queen of May.’

  ‘Did they all cheer?’

  ‘I expect they did. Then in the summer it was the Orange Day Parade and I would be the Good King Billy, wearing a big floppy hat with an enormous feather. Uncle Charlie’s horse carried me all round the streets of Bootle.’

  I loved this bit, and would ask: ‘And what was it that they shouted at you?’

  ‘The Protestants all cheered us, but the Catholics yelled at us, like they did in the playground, “Proddy dogs!” And me and my friends shouted back, “Cat licks!”’

  I’d peer at the photos of Mummy in her finery and imagine being there, and yelling ‘Cat licks!’ too.

  Her happiest moments of all were on stage, in her fairy wings and ballet dress made by Auntie Sadie, her godmother and her mother’s younger best friend. The two women were very different. Rebecca, my nana, was quiet and modest, whereas Sadie had the same high spirits as Audrey.

  ‘People would think I was Sadie’s little girl, as the two of us would be laughing and skipping along the road while my mother walked quietly behind us. “No, I’d say, she’s my fairy godmother!”’

  Sadie was a waitress in a big department store. The wealthy merchant patrons were often generous with their tips, and she liked to spoil her little god-daughter. One day Sadie treated Rebecca and Audrey to an outing in the nearby resort of Southport. Despite being just a few miles from Liverpool, Audrey felt they had travelled far away from the grimy streets of Bootle. ‘I had a postcard which I pinned by my bed with its view of that magical place and on it was printed SOUTHPORT, RIVIERA OF THE NORTH WEST. Riviera! I dreamt of a life there, sitting sipping tea beneath those trees around the bandstand, an orchestra playing, then in the evening stepping out of a shiny car to disappear into one of the grand hotels.’

  It was only as I got older that she told me how much their lives had changed when, one cold winter night, a cousin had burst into the kitchen at Uncle Charlie’s. Had they heard the news? ‘Len Miller’s been seen back in Liverpool, and he’s looking for Rebecca and the girl.’

  ‘I was thrilled at first. I’d been so small when my father left and I’d invented a whole life for him, telling the other children about his heroic deeds in some distant country. I think I started to think it was all real. So, when I first saw him standing there, I couldn’t believe that this hunched, weasly little man, smelling of drink, was really my own daddy.’

  Worse still, he’d come to claim her. Her life would not be the same again, and I was already living with many of the consequences.

  IT WAS HARD FOR ME to imagine a dad
dy who was horrible. One door from the first-floor landing of our house was often closed, and this was the room where my own father lay very ill; the days when he felt better were fewer and fewer.

  When we first moved to this house we would both go down to the workshop he had set up in the cellar, and I longed for him to get well enough to do this again. The workshop had a delicious smell of wood and glue, and here he would build miraculous things such as record players and cocktail cabinets. He would lift me onto the workbench and let me ‘help’. I’d hold the frame down as he carefully glued onto it the wooden bas-relief shape of a puppy that he had carved specially for me. Leading from the carpentry workshop was a darkroom, pitch-black except for a red glow, and here we would develop the pictures he had taken. If the chemical smell was too strong I’d bury my head in his jumper, and he’d hug me so I could breathe in his lovely clean soapy smell. He worked quietly and intently, but every now and then he would peer at me through the darkness and say, ‘Where is she, where’s my little helper?’

  ‘Here I am!’ I could just make him out in the gloom. He’d lift the negatives up, choosing which to print – me, smiling just for him, freckled and happy. He would squint at each one and say, ‘Yes, here she is! And here she is again, even prettier! How ever will we choose?’

  These images, and the cine films he made, became an alternative version of my childhood and fixed forever my memories of him. They would capture these years in such shimmering colour and light that they seemed to obliterate the reality of it altogether.

  Gradually these days of making things from wood, or being absorbed in his darkroom with its clicking enlargers and splicing tables, became less frequent; his days of playing with me were also coming to an end, his energy draining from him till he became silent and solitary in his room. I would be told to let him rest. I would sit outside his door on the floor, with my book, feeling in some way that I was guarding him against danger, although I understood that really the danger was inside him. Sometimes I was allowed to go in and lie quietly on his bed. If he was asleep I would lie very still and watch him breathing, looking not ill but just tired.

  Me, 1961.

  The landing felt like a scary place, as across from Daddy’s door was Nana’s room, and from behind it came sounds of moaning and yelling. Nana was always either in bed or in her deep armchair, shaking and confused from her worsening Parkinson’s. Often I was sent in by my mother to clear the ghost people that were upsetting her. Nana would wave and shout at these people that I couldn’t see, but after I’d shooed them out and told her that they were now ‘all gone’ she would lie back with a sigh of relief. It was my special job and I did it as thoroughly as I could. But she’d then doze off and wake to find the ‘people’ had come back to torment her, and so the cycle would begin again. It was a house of sickness, and no wonder my mother wanted to get away from it whenever she could.

  4

  The Riviera of the North West

  THE BEST PART OF THE DAY was spent sitting in the gorgeousness of Marshall and Snelgrove’s restaurant with my mother, eating a banana split while the orchestra played, the violin mingling with the soft buzz of adult chatter. Elegant model girls in their gowns approached each table, delicately holding placards with the price, always in guineas, and they would do a pretty twirl to show off the dress to all its advantage.

  Auntie Ava would often be with us, and she and Mummy would talk to them about the ‘cut’ of the gown and discuss the style and colour. I loved the words they used. ‘Would you say that was fuchsia or mauve?’ ‘The silk mohair has a lovely sheen, and don’t you love the dear little sweetheart neckline?’ The model smilingly chatted with them, as they fingered the delicious fabrics.

  I’m not sure when it was that I first heard one or two of these young women described as Mummy’s ‘girls’. Was it overheard, or was it ever whispered to me gently, some kindly hand on my arm somewhere out of the softness, across the plush dreaminess of the afternoon?

  What did it mean, that in some curious way these beautiful creatures, along with a girl who worked in the make-up department, were connected with my mother? This fed the slight unreality that I sometimes sensed my mother floated in, and me with her; but in the respectable elegance of Marshall’s restaurant the willowy young women simply appeared to be queenly creatures.

  But then I would slip off away from them to explore, and feel that exhilarating thrill of freedom and excitement with the huge department store as my territory.

  I’d begun to have dreams, that would recur for the rest of my life, of discovering a door in a house that I’ve lived in for some time, a house that has become my home, and yet there is a door I’ve never noticed before, until quite suddenly it opens into a new world that is all mine: it may be a glittering ballroom with great doors onto a maze of walled gardens with fountains where people greet me as if they know me, or a palm house with an intricate webbing of glass and cast-iron tracery soaring above me with all kinds of strange plants thronged with colourful birds and people gathered in its secret corners. My excitement was always intense at these discoveries and it began then, during my forays into these old shops and hotels off Lord Street, as if from them there arose ghosts from a different age.

  I began to see that the immediate world beyond that unhappy house, Southport itself, was full of promise. What had been such a wonderland for Audrey, as a child, became one for me now, and Marshall and Snelgrove department store and the Prince of Wales Hotel were its great pleasure palaces, full of endless possibilities for exploring. In my own head this was who I was: ‘an explorer’.

  Some of my forays and adventures would take place while my mother was with Auntie Ava, her only friend. Ava was, by common agreement, the most beautiful woman in Southport. She looked and dressed like a nineteen forties movie star, and still wore in the more casual decade of the 1960s what my mother called ‘picture hats’, with a wide brim to frame her chocolate eyes and moon-pale skin. She spent a lot of time in bed, and was seen by people as a little ‘odd’. She could be funny, and even astute, but she had an air of childlike naivety and seemed to be incapable of doing the simplest of things. It was therefore hard to judge whether she was unaware of, or chose to ignore, my mother’s unusual lifestyle.

  Ava’s husband, Anthony, with his cravats and immaculate blazers had the suave looks of a matinee idol. He didn’t go to work and loathed my mother, for taking Ava away from him for so much of the day. He also feared that Ava’s friendship could affect their own reputation, which he cared about enormously.

  Anthony and Ava sat every summer’s day on a kind of stage set outside their house. They’d had the brick wall in their front garden specially lowered so that the whole town could see them there, on their elaborate patio adorned with beautiful furniture and parasols, dressed as if for Ascot, but simply taking afternoon tea brought out by the housekeeper. Buses went past and people pointed; they were famous locally for their gracious, old-fashioned appearance and general eccentricity.

  Perhaps it was Ava’s oddness that inured her, or maybe attracted her, as a fellow outsider, to my mother’s outcast status. For Audrey was increasingly ostracized by the town and this exclusion soon extended to Ava for being my mother’s close friend.

  During the times when my mother was in Southport their routine was always the same. Ava would spend the morning getting ready for Audrey to collect her at eleven for morning coffee at Marshall’s. After my own treat of an ice cream or teacake, I would be sent off to play. I had several favourite routines. One was to visit the make-up counters where the attractive ladies would let me try on perfume and put lipstick on me. Another trick was to goad the lift man; he seemed to dislike children, and would be mean and pompous if I rode up and down between floors with no purpose. My favourite pastime of all was to visit the manager.

  This involved getting past his fierce secretary who sat behind a desk outside his office clacking away at a big black typewriter which pinged occasionally. I would stand politely before
her, asking ‘Could I please, please say hello to the manager?’ Sometimes she would just say no, and that he was very busy, but sometimes she would say that she would ask him, although she expected he was very busy. Usually the answer came back that I could go in, but just for two minutes, as he was really very busy. The manager, Mr Naylor, sat in a wood-panelled office behind a large desk. The routine was always the same.

  ‘And what can I do for you today, young lady?’ he would ask.

  ‘Please can you make a swan for me?’ I would beg.

  He would then take a packet of cigarettes from his drawer, pull out the silver paper, and twist it into a delicate swan shape which he would present to me with a flourish. The charm lay in my knowing that this busy man had set aside a few minutes of his day for me, and also in the lovely masculine smell of tobacco that filled his office and could be revisited later by sniffing my swan.

  When she was not with Ava my mother was always out. The housekeepers in the Back Flat were more and more responsible for my welfare and the house the other side of the door became quieter and quieter.

  My mother was not at home most nights, but where does she go? There are whispers and murmurs that have now become familiar to me, like a soft insistent mantra. ‘There’s a new crowd arrived at the Prince’ is one. Another is ‘Peter Cooper is in town’, which always gives me a thrill in the pit of my stomach.

  Peter Cooper sweeps into our hallway like a tornado, his black eyes shining from under a big Russian hat.

  He shouts, ‘My little Aud,’ and sweeps my mother up in his arms and whirls her round and round.

  I shout, ‘My turn!’ and he does the same for me, spinning me till I’m dizzy.

  ‘You look like a Russian Cossack in that hat, a wicked marauding Cossack,’ she tells him, and he does a Russian dance right there in our hallway, his arms folded and his legs flying out.