Queen of Green

by V E Rooney

  The year 1984 was pretty cool as well. Music-wise, it was all happening in Liverpool. We had Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Icicle Works, Teardrop Explodes, Mighty Wah, even Kirkby’s very own China Crisis. Every Thursday night I would sit in front of Top of the Pops, and on Friday night The Tube on Channel 4, soaking up all the new sounds. It seemed like the centre of the music universe had relocated to the northwest of England, what with The Smiths from Manchester as well. In Liverpool, Frankie Goes To Hollywood tracks were played non-stop over that summer, especially Two Tribes - that incessant synthesised boom-boom of the drums and those throbbing bass lines looped endlessly and emanated from neighbours’ hi-fi systems and radio stations through open windows all day long. Breakdancing had also become popular by this time and it was common to see small gangs of scrawny-arsed little trackie-clad scally boys wandering round the estate with ghetto blasters pumping out American hip-hop and rough-cut squares of kitchen lino hoisted on shoulders, always ready for an impromptu display of spins, caterpillars and robot moves. On a less cheery note, Everton won the European Cup that year but I don’t want to dwell on that.

  1984 was also notable for the Miners’ Strike. Once again the working classes were pitted against Maggie, and they gave as good as they got for a while. Miners’ support charities and groups would occasionally go round the estate, knocking on doors and asking people to donate any spare bits of food like tinned and dried stuff to help out the miners’ families in Yorkshire. No matter how skint everyone was, we all donated. The miners were eventually crushed and once again Maggie was cursed and condemned with even more visceral hatred than before. I swear, when she eventually dies, the miners and the Scousers will be lining up side by side to piss on her grave.

  My memories of 1985 are dominated by Live Aid and the Heysel stadium disaster. I had never seen anything like Live Aid. I had seen big concerts on the telly and I had vaguely heard of this Woodstock thing in America but Live Aid was in a whole new league. U2, Queen, David Bowie and the rest all taking it in turns to entertain the biggest crowd at Wembley Stadium I had ever seen. I got up early on that Saturday morning and was watching until the early hours the next day, discovering Run DMC, Led Zeppelin and other music I had never heard before. Live Aid even got me to like Phil Collins – not because of his music, that goes without saying, but because he played at Wembley Stadium and then got onto Concorde to fly to America and play there on the same day. That was cool. Music as a unifying force, eh?

  The Heysel match is a stain on the Scouse collective consciousness, well, the red half of it anyway. In the run-up to that match, Liverpool Football Club flags were flown proudly from windows all over the estate and people crowded round tellies and radios, anticipating a cracking match and the return of the trophy, Old Big Ears, to the city. You know the rest. Oh, how the blues on the estate taunted us reds after that. “You’ve got us banned from Europe, you cunts,” was the common refrain. It’s fair to say that the red half of the estate didn’t have much comeback for that.

  The only thing that really stood out for me about 1986 was how crap music was beginning to sound, especially after the excitement of Live Aid the year before. I blame Stock, Aitken and Waterman. OK, they had produced You Spin Me Round by Dead or Alive, that was a floor-filler, but the rest? Absolute shite, but they kept hitting number one in the charts, and then other producers started copying their sound and within a couple of years it was just identikit bog-standard dance-round-your-handbag crap with no discernable quality. All that would change soon enough with the arrival of a new musical movement from America, which would change the dance music scene forever, along with my own life.

  Other things? I know I’m making my estate sound like some sort of Lord of the Flies hellhole, and I may sometimes be disparaging about where I come from, but honest to God, looking back, I wouldn’t have wanted to grow up anywhere else. I suppose I just saw the reality of it at an early age. I did love the place for all its faults, and in the late 1970s and early 1980s, you could say the politics of the time acted as another shaping influence on me.

  I was only six when Maggie Thatcher got voted in. I remember watching telly with Mum, and Maggie appeared victorious outside 10 Downing Street on the news. I wasn’t quite sure what she’d done or who she was but I knew she was someone important. Mum told me she was the new leader of the government. I distinctly remember being unimpressed at this fact. After all, the Queen was a woman and she’d been in charge of the country for years. I thought it was normal for a woman to be in charge. It was nothing out of the ordinary as far as I was concerned. If anything, Mum was even more unimpressed than me. “Fucking Tory cunt,” she said as she watched Maggie waving to the crowds.

  Things got really tasty in the early 1980s when the Militants started showing up. This lot was so left-wing Labour that even the Labour Party viewed them as some sort of fundamentalist guerrilla unit. My first introduction to them was in 1982, tagging along on Mum’s weekly shopping trip to Kirkby town centre, the townie, which is basically a giant mish-mash of concrete prefab shops with dingy offices and flats above and a tatty market stall area on the side which resembled a third world ramshackle shanty town. Walking up from the bus station, we’d pass through a covered walkway and into the main square, flanked by shops, and I’d hear the Militant newspaper seller before I even saw him.

  But what was funny about him was that he wasn’t even from Liverpool, he was this southern middle class kid who had trooped up north to explain to us uneducated northern working class types about how downtrodden we were, like we had no fucking idea. Every week he’d be there, veins almost popping out of his head, righteous anger rising above the muffled voices of the shoppers, his indignation on our behalf audible to all.

  He’d be standing right in the middle of the square, waving his copy of the Militant newspaper about, screaming his lungs out about Thatcher, the unions, taxation and workers’ rights. How we good people of the northwest were being shafted by the Tory scum in the southeast. How we needed to rise up and fight back. “Better to break the law than break the poor!” he would chant. Truth be told, most people ignored him and saw him for the self-righteous tosser he was. I remember one little old lady saying to him: “Fuck off back down south, Citizen Smith, we’ve heard it all before.”

  Liverpool at that time was left-wing Labour through and through (still is) and that went for the surrounding areas as well. You could have stuck a red rosette on a dead pig and people would have voted for it. It wasn’t until I was approaching my teen years that I realised the Tories didn’t necessarily have the prefix ‘fucking’ attached to them. Come to think of it, when I recall the elections for the council, for MPs or whatever, the Tories never even bothered putting a candidate up in our area, such was the lack of support and outright hatred for them. Not surprising really, given that in 1979, the year Maggie got elected, Kirkby had an unemployment rate of around 20%, one of the highest in the country at that time. And it continued to go up during her tenure.

  All I knew about politics at that age, from the array of adult voices that I tuned in and out of as a kid, was that we hated the Tories and we voted Labour. Never mind that Thatcher was a woman - where I lived, her most vicious detractors were women. Fucking cunt, evil bitch and so on, that’s what they called her. As far as the Tories were concerned, us lot up in Liverpool were good-for-nothing toe-rags and that was reflected in their policies at the time – as investment and resources were redirected towards London and the Southeast, the impression was that the Tories were leaving us to rot in squalor. If you leave a vacuum somewhere, it will quickly be filled by the antithesis of whatever had left, in this case the Militants. They were getting more and more popular in the early 1980s. You only had to look around places like Kirkby to see why.

  You’ve basically got a dumping ground for the slums of Liverpool, for the overspill of people from the city who couldn’t be housed there any more. You couldn’t even call it a working class ghetto, because almost everyone was on the
dole. It was an underclass ghetto, but I was too young to know any differently. I just thought that this was Mum’s life and this would be my life as well. I thought I would grow up, get a fella, pop a couple of sprogs out and get a house off the social. I would spend my days chinwagging with the neighbours, spending my evenings down the social club, or if I was lucky and had some pennies to scrape together, afford the odd night out in the city centre. I thought I would turn out exactly like all the other girls on the estate and live a life that wasn’t particularly fulfilling or happy, but a life that was normal, or that seemed normal. A life just like everyone else’s. Needless to say, things didn’t quite turn out that way.

  ***

  I turn the conversation towards the relationship between Reynolds and her mother. Clare Reynolds died in 1995, at the age of 39. For the first time during our conversation, Reynolds displays a hint of vulnerability and wistfulness.

  “Well…I suppose…because she was so young when she had me, she really didn’t seem like a mum at all, or at least, she didn’t really know how to be one. Oh, I mean, she did the best she could, under the circumstances. She didn’t do typical ‘mum’ things with me. She wasn’t like…you know, like the mums in telly adverts, it wasn’t like The Waltons. She did teach me to read at a very young age, though. I remember we would be sat on the couch together, reading the Liverpool Echo, and she would point at different words and get me to say them and spell them, would tell me what they meant. When we went to the shops, she’d get me to identify fruits and vegetables, how to spell their names, you know, how much does one apple and two bananas cost. She was good like that. More practical than emotional, know what I mean?”

  I ask if Reynolds had a close relationship with her mother. She pauses for a while before answering.

  “She didn’t talk to me like I was a kid most of the time. Only when I’d fucked up really badly and then she’d do the full-on stern mother thing. I was just a younger version of herself in her mind, but kind of a stranger at the same time. Sometimes when we were in the lounge watching the telly, I would catch Mum looking at me in silence, like she was studying me, as if I were some alien creature and she was trying to figure out how I got here. The expression on her face would be one of bemusement – there was a slight frown, a slight furrowing of the eyebrows, an indication that she couldn’t quite work out how I had happened, or how I had happened to her. She never verbalised this, of course. I just sort of sensed that she was expecting something or someone different. Not better or worse. Just different. So I guess we weren’t close in that way. We had this unspoken understanding that we were never going to be best friends the way some mums and daughters are. But she was a good woman. Feisty…strong…well, she’d had to be, all things considered. Didn’t wrap me up in cotton wool but didn’t leave me to fend for myself, either.

  “I was pretty independent by nature, anyway. I had no trouble getting myself off to school and looking after myself. Because sometimes she’d be working cash-in-hand doing a bit of cleaning or what have you to top up the dole, so I would be in the flat by myself anyway. And that was the same for a lot of kids on the estate. Didn’t do us any harm. There were always neighbours and other mums on the estate looking out for each other’s kids. Everyone knew each other. When she went out to work, or out with her mates, she knew I’d be OK. And I liked having the place to myself. There was always someone nearby.”

  Did her mother have any other relationships?

  “Oh, Mum was a fit girl, everyone said so. She always had fellas sniffing around her, but she would fuck them off if she thought they would get in the way of her doing what she wanted to do. She had a few boyfriends, nice lads, no one who was a dickhead. I think after Dad left she developed an instinct for sniffing out the bad ones, developed a twat detector, you know. Which meant that ruled out pretty much all the fellas in Kirkby. She had fun, other men came and went, but she never wanted them to stay. She preferred doing her own thing. ‘I don’t answer to any man,’ she’d say.”

  In our short time together, Reynolds has already given me far more information about herself than I ever expected. I am slightly reeling from just how open she has been with me. I am already putting together a mental list of additional questions that I should follow up with her, but I am conscious that our time today is almost coming to end. Although we have agreed on two further interviews, there is always the possibility that for whatever reason, she could decide to call a halt to the process and refuse to disclose any more to me.

  I broach the subject of one of the pivotal moments in Reynolds’ childhood in relation to her future direction in life. The arrival in Kirkby of Janice Daniel and her twin daughters, Lucy and Lauren.

  ***

  5. THE BUDDING STAGE

  So Mum and I had one of the top floor maisonettes, and the one on the other side of the building belonged to this horrible woman called Maureen. Well, I thought she was horrible at the time, but looking back, clearly she wasn’t right in the head. Mentally ill, you know. Maureen wasn’t quite yet a pensioner and had lived on her own for years. Her kids had moved out long ago. She stunk the place out. There would be bags of rotting rubbish dumped outside the front door, out of her windows onto the ground below, out the back. By the looks of the contents of her rubbish bags, Maureen survived on a diet of whiskey, rice pudding and cigarettes. She also viewed toilet paper as an unnecessary luxury, judging by the assorted shit-smeared rags and underwear she routinely discarded as well. Complaints to the council were a waste of time, they didn’t know what to do with her. They would send someone round every so often to have a word with her but to no avail.

  I only ever saw Maureen wearing the same thing, this tatty pale blue nightgown and a matching housecoat, both of which stank of dried piss. People just gave her a wide berth if they could and Mum told me to ignore her. Not that I needed telling anyway. I lost count of the number of times I’d come into the maisonette communal entrance, and she’d be there staggering around, ciggie in mouth, Scotch bottle in hand, ranting and raving away.

  Of course, the other kids on the estate thought it highly amusing to make her life a misery. The usual things - playing knock and run, throwing stuff at her windows, shouting abuse at her on the few occasions she did venture outside to go to the off-licence down the road. ‘Smelly Maureen, smelly Maureen’ was the usual taunt. I guess it got to her eventually. I was coming home from primary school one afternoon, and turned into my road to see some of the kids from the next block of maisonettes whooping and hollering underneath Maureen’s front window. “Come on, you fucking old slag, come out here and give us a swig,” said Andy, who was this stocky 14-year-old who fancied himself as one of the estate’s hard knocks. The other kids were laughing and chucking stones at Maureen’s window. This went on for a few minutes and then one of Maureen’s front windows opened slowly.

  “Here she is, come on then, you smelly cunt!” whooped Andy. The next thing I saw, Maureen had poked an airgun out of the window and fired straight at Andy’s head. Then she started aiming at the rest of us. We were diving behind parked cars to take cover. It was like something out of Starsky and Hutch. Some adults who were mooching nearby came running over to see what the fuck was going on. The next thing I knew, the busies came and bundled Maureen away in a van and that was the last anyone saw of her. Andy’s parents wanted her charged of course, but Maureen was deemed mentally incompetent and got carted off to some secure facility somewhere. As for Andy, he lost his right eye. The kids he’d been lording it over soon began taunting him, calling him Popeye, and after that no one saw much of him either.

  Maureen’s flat remained empty for a couple of weeks, giving the council time to get it cleaned and fumigated and redecorated for the next tenant. I was nine by this time. I came home from school one afternoon and saw Mum chinwagging with this woman outside the maisonette communal entrance. This woman looked around the same age as Mum and they seemed to be getting along quite well.

  “Here, love, this is Janic
e, she’s moved into Maureen’s old flat. This is our Alison,” Mum said, pointing at me.

  “Oh God, isn’t she the spit of you?” Janice said to Mum.

  “I know, poor cow,” Mum said, and they both hooted.

  “Oh, take no notice of her, love,” Janice laughed, putting her arm around me.

  That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between Mum and Janice. Janice had twin girls, Lucy and Lauren, who were a year younger than me. Their dad was called Douglas and he spent most of the year in Jamaica, turning up sporadically a few times a year to visit. Not that Janice was too bothered by his absence, especially after quickly striking up a close friendship with Mum.

  Before long they were in each other’s flats every night, watching TV or having small parties where they would both get slaughtered, or they would go out to town leaving me to babysit the twins, who made it clear they didn’t need a babysitter, so more often than not I would have the flat to myself. I wasn’t complaining. Mum was happy and I was happy.

  I didn’t even notice it at first. The glazed look in her eyes, the weird mossy smell on her clothes and the slurred speech that accompanied her when she would come through the front door in the early hours of the morning after a night on the town with Janice. I put it down to her having a few too many Babychams. After a few weeks of this, and particularly when Janice would come in as well, I noticed that Mum had taken to smoking these funny-smelling roll-up ciggies that Janice would make and which they would pass between them, in between laughing at nothing in particular. Sometimes I would come into the lounge to see what was going on and catch them hurriedly trying to hide whatever they were smoking, before Mum would tell me to get back to bed.