‘I am, Father,’ said my mother, looking down and smiling at me.
‘No,’ said the priest, ‘I meant your other son, Michael. It was he who was singing the solo part at this morning’s Mass.’
My mother had never recognized her son’s voice.
Once discovered, of course, Michael was encouraged to display his talent. My mother would invariably cry when he sang: ‘Danny Boy’, ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen’, ‘Galway Bay’, ‘Macushla’ and other sentimental Irish ballads.
Alec isn’t a singer but a talented guitarist. When he was ten and we were on holiday in Blackpool, our father bought him a cheap wooden ukulele. Alec mastered the basic chords of the instrument during the week, so well in fact that on the Friday he was entered for the children’s talent competition. Jolly Uncle Peter Webster hosted the show on the pier, and lines of children were keen to show their talents. At the audition Alec was picked to take part. The judges were selected from adult members of the audience who didn’t have a child performing. I guess we would have won (we were runners-up) if Alec hadn’t been burdened with me singing along with him. The winner was a precocious Shirley Temple look-alike, dressed for the part in a frilly dress and curly hair and carrying a great stuffed dog. She rendered the song ‘How Much is that Doggie in the Window?’ in a loud and shrill voice and finished with a tap dance. Departing with her prize and a smug expression on her face, she informed everyone within hearing that she had won the contest last year and the year before. I bet Jolly Uncle Peter Webster felt like chucking her off the pier. I know I did.
That cheap wooden ukulele never seemed to be out of my brother’s hands until his birthday, when he was given his first guitar. Then came the skiffle craze. At fifteen Alec formed a group: guitar, double bass (made out of a tea chest with a broom handle and a thick piece of twine for the string) and washboard. Richard Road became an open house for Alec’s friends, and the group would congregate in the garage and practise endlessly the Lonnie Donegan hits: ‘Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour on the Bedpost Overnight?’, ‘Last Train to San Fernando’, ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ and ‘It Takes a Worried Man to Sing a Worried Song’. The garden was full of Bill Haley, Little Richard, Tommy Steele, Adam Faith and Marty Wilde.
At twenty Alec moved to Ireland, and some years later, with the fiddle player Frankie Gavin, he formed De Dannan, one of Ireland’s leading traditional Irish folk groups. His solo albums Innisfree and Blue Mountain, with tracks arranged by himself, have become classics.
Since I couldn’t sing like Michael or play a guitar like Alec, it was decided that, at the age of eight, I should have piano lessons. When I was little I would love to sit beside my mother’s feet as she played the piano, my back resting in the polished wood, feeling the vibrations run through my body as she plonked away. Her feet would go up and down on the pedals and her body would sway from side to side. She would play sentimental Irish ballads, popular songs, favourite melodies and hymns, rarely using music but wonderful at improvisation. Sometimes on Sunday after Mass the family would retire to the Catholic Club and Mum would be persuaded to play. I was so proud of her as I sat in the corner with my bottle of ginger beer and a bag of crisps, the sort with the little blue twist of salt in the bottom. I wanted to play like that.
Each week I went for an hour’s lesson to Miss Platt. Miss Platt lived in a large semi-detached house on Worrygoose Lane. The ‘parlour’, as she called it, where she kept the large polished mahogany piano, smelt of cats and lavender furniture polish. I would catch the bus from town to Wickersley with my thin leather music satchel tucked underneath my arm, feeling very grand. Before my lesson I would wait in the hall listening to the expert playing of her star pupil, Ieuan Walsh, whose lesson was before mine. Listening to his flawless performance of ‘Für Elise’ and the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ didn’t make me feel all that confident.
Miss Platt had two Siamese cats. They would hiss and arch their backs when I entered the room, then leap on to the sofa opposite and purr softly, all the while keeping me under careful observation with their green almond eyes. I once made the mistake of trying to stroke one of the beasts and was rewarded with a vicious scratch.
Miss Platt was a small, cheerful woman with a lilting birdlike trill in her voice. As I banged away on the keys she would occasionally nod in the manner of a dowager at a soirée, craning an ear and keeping a fixed smile on her round face. If I managed to play the piece through without a mistake she would smile beatifically and raise her small hands like Jesus sermonizing. Miss Platt had a small stock of comments: ‘Delightful, dear,’ ‘A little more practice I think, dear,’ ‘Very nice, dear,’ ‘Careful with the crotchets, dear,’ ‘Coming along nicely, dear.’ She wasn’t one of those piano teachers who rapped your knuckles if you made a mistake or shouted at you if you hadn’t practised. She was a paragon of patience, particularly with a small heavy-handed boy who had little aptitude at the piano. While other students rose through the ranks of the pianoforte examinations, I, much to my chagrin, didn’t. ‘I want him to play the piano for enjoyment,’ my mother told her, ‘not pass examinations.’ I had no natural talent for playing the piano but I persevered for a time, until O levels reared their heads and then I stopped. Today I play haltingly but with enthusiasm any tune which happens to be in the key of D.
18
Uncle Alec was Dad’s elder brother. His dream was to become a pilot, and he passed all the ingenious tests by which potential air crews were selected but trained for the secondary role as a navigator and flew with the bombers during the war. I have his eight medals, which include the MBE, on my wall. Uncle Alec looked and spoke like a character out of my Biggles books. He was tall and lithe, with a great ginger handlebar moustache and hands like spades. He would appear at the door unannounced, with his brown canvas kitbag, stay for a few days and then depart. Once he arrived in the early morning and climbed through a window to gain entry. He settled down on the settee in the front room, only to be confronted later by my father brandishing a poker, assuming we had burglars.
On leaving the RAF Alec became a civil servant in London and travelled by train daily to his office with brolly and briefcase. When he retired he spent most of his time tending his garden and making wooden boxes for the blue-tits. It was such a different life from the RAF. I still have on the desk in my study a beautiful polished trinket box he made from the propeller of a crashed Blenheim bomber in which he had flown. I guess he must have had some close shaves, but, like many who had gone through the war, he would never talk about it.
Aunt Nora was my Mum’s elder sister and she, like my mother, had trained as a nurse. A striking-looking woman with large dark eyes and a winning smile, she was extremely witty, with a dry sense of humour and an amusing turn of phrase. For many years she worked in Rotherham as a school nurse, accompanying the doctor around schools to assist with the TB injections, the polio inoculations, the hair inspections for head lice and to undertake the regular medical assessments of the children. On one occasion, when visiting a school in Kimberworth, she discovered that a child, rather than having gained height since his last assessment, had in fact shrunk. The doctor was rather bemused, for the child was clearly not under-nourished. He expressed his anxiety to the headteacher, who was not at all concerned and quipped, ‘The lad seems to be settling down nicely, then.’ The doctor was not amused.
One of Aunt Nora’s main jobs as she toured the schools was the relentless search for nits. The ‘nit nurse’ featured large in school folklore, and every child dreaded the humiliation of being singled out as a carrier of these unwelcome little visitors. We lined up to have our scalps examined and when one child started to scratch his scalp we were all at it. Should any verminous creatures be discovered in a child’s hair, a letter would be sent home with the instruction that he should be deloused before being sent back. Headteachers would show her notes from parents, which included:
Ethel’s off with nits which are all down our street. I’ll send her
back when she’s been fumigated.
Our Maggie came home with nits last night and they’re not hers.
Nurse says she’s found nits in her head, well I’ve looked in her head and can’t see any because I don’t know what they look like.
In one school a new and rather naive young teacher was told by my aunt that it was not really a sensible idea to let her long hair cascade over her shoulders.
‘But I’m very proud of my hair,’ she told my aunt, clearly stung by the comment.
‘Well, I suggest you tie it back,’ suggested my aunt, ‘unless, of course, you wish to be infested with head lice.’
The young woman very nearly fainted.
Some children would present themselves to Nurse Lloyd smelling to high heaven. They had been sewn into their vests for the winter and emanated a most unpleasant smell, of which they had become oblivious. One child’s chest had been rubbed liberally with fatty, evil-smelling goose grease by his grandmother, who believed that it would ward off all known germs. My aunt was less tactful than my mother in these circumstances. She removed the vests and made no bones about telling the youngster that he smelt and needed a good wash, and should tell his mother to put him in a bath and get out the carbolic soap.
Uncle Ted was Aunt Nora’s husband. He was a quiet, rather shy man with a pronounced stutter and was firmly under his wife’s thumb. Aunt Nora called the shots in their home and no mistake. Ted had a rather mysterious past. Mum and Dad never talked about it and I can’t recall Ted ever saying anything about his childhood. I formed the impression, probably quite wrongly, that he was the illegitimate son of a wealthy man who had had an illicit liaison with one of his servants. I was reading Catherine Cookson when I came to this conclusion. It was very probably a fanciful notion, but on my twenty-first birthday I was presented by Aunt Nora with a set of the most beautiful inlaid gold cufflinks in a red-leather-covered box. ‘These were Ted’s father’s,’ she told me. ‘Ted never wears them and we would like you to have them.’ When I asked about his father Aunt Nora evaded the question. Then there was the silver-topped Malacca walking cane, which was kept in the umbrella stand in their hall. I asked about it once. ‘Ted’s father used to walk out with that,’ said Aunt Nora. Then she added, ‘Apart from the cufflinks and the china bowl, it’s the only thing that he got.’ She left it at that. Just before his death a half-brother appeared to claim the stick.
My father was a very generous man and he found Ted’s meanness irksome. When he joined my father in the Masons Arms, Ted was invariably last at the bar to buy his round, and on other occasions he evaded paying for any of the drinks. When his nephews and nieces visited he had to be prompted by Aunt Nora to dig into his pocket and give us a shilling. Mum put a charitable gloss on this tight-fistedness and told us it was down to his childhood, when money had been in short supply. ‘I guess he had very little when he was young and therefore is careful with his money.’
After coming out of the army, Ted set himself up as a plasterer working for a number of building firms. He drove a small white van which came in very useful when I started college and needed to transport all my things to Leeds. Aunt Nora and Uncle Ted did look rather incongruous when they went out for the evening, all dressed up, climbing from the small white van.
Grandma Mullarkey clearly thought Nora could have done better for herself. When she was a ward sister and stunningly pretty, doctors had queued up to take Nora out. Mum used to tell me how distraught her well-connected suitors were when Nora grew bored with them and moved on. She settled eventually for Ted, who was hard-working, reliable, even-tempered and adored her. There’s no doubt he was a handsome man in his youth, and a picture of him in his army uniform shows a dashing, dark-haired young man with a generous smile. I recall him once telling me he ‘fell on his feet’ when he met Nora and couldn’t believe his luck that she had fallen for him.
The only lengthy conversation I had with Uncle Ted that I recall was when I was in the sixth form and we walked from Bridlington to Flamborough village across Bempton Cliffs. He told me that as soon as he was able he joined the army and rose through the ranks to sergeant in the Royal Army Medical Corps. After a drunken night out and being late reporting back at the barracks, he was stripped of his stripes, so his time in authority was short.
When he went with the British Expeditionary Force to France he was angry that priority was given to constructing the officers’ toilets. Of course, it was inconceivable that officers and other ranks should share the same facilities. Ted told me that the French thought it laughable that the British officers had to have their own private little lavatory when everyone else performed under the trees or in a large smelly hole in the ground.
The experience of Dunkirk stayed with my Uncle Ted all his life. That dramatic escape from the clutches of the ravaging German army, when more than 300,000 British and French troops were rescued by a ragtag flotilla of naval vessels, fishing boats and paddle steamers, was a vivid memory for him, but one that was rarely spoken of. Winston Churchill had called that retreat a ‘miracle of deliverance’, and to rally the troops said the spirit of Dunkirk would endure as ‘an example of triumph in the face of adversity’. Ted didn’t quite see it like that. For all the heroism involved, he viewed the conflict as a colossal military defeat and it brought back painful memories. What he witnessed on those French beaches I never discovered, but it must have been traumatic because his stutter started from the day he left Dunkirk.
Along with many of his comrades he was stranded without food or water on the Dunkirk beaches at the end of May 1940. In spite of a rearguard action, the British and Allied troops had been practically driven into the sea by the numerically superior and better equipped German forces. Ted had lived in a cellar on puddle water and a pound of sugar for a week, finally escaping on 4 June. Crammed with other soldiers into a French fishing smack, he tried to tend to the wounded as the boat navigated a precarious course out of a harbour littered with the wreckage of half-sunken ships. He told me he had seen sights no man should see, how he looked back and saw thousands of troops still on the beaches, many wounded and dying, and felt helpless. It was chaos. As they were pulling out of the harbour the German planes circled like vultures overhead and then dived, and Ted, looking up at the empty sky, thought his time had come. To his amazement not a bomb was dropped or a machine gun fired. The Stukas dipped their wings and saluted the retreating British army.
When he died, Ted left me his medals. There was one he never sent for: the Dunkirk Medal.
Aunt Nora was a devout Roman Catholic and each Sunday morning Ted would drop her off at the church for eleven o’clock Mass. He would then go and have a pint at the British Legion and collect her later. I was the executor for Ted’s estate, and his strong desire was to be buried with his wife in the Catholic section of the cemetery in Bridlington and have Nora’s priest, Canon Plunkett, say a few prayers. I promised him when he was nearing the end that I would endeavour to carry out his wishes. When he died I made an appointment to see the priest, a large, forceful character with a pronounced Northern Irish accent. I imagined, as I was shown into his study by the housekeeper, that I would have a real job persuading Canon Plunkett to agree to a service for a non-believer, but I was wrong. I remember sitting facing the priest across his large mahogany desk, listening to his monologue.
‘Ted Lloyd was a good man,’ the canon told me, ‘and he deserves a Requiem Mass. I always had the feeling he wanted to come into the church when he dropped off your aunt. God will look upon him in a kindly light, for he was a devoted husband, a hard worker and a thoroughly nice man.’
I arranged with Ted’s former comrades from the British Legion and the Dunkirk Veterans that they would attend the funeral, and on the day a large group, many in blazers and berets, some with flags, others wearing chestfuls of medals, assembled outside the church. Not unsurprisingly, no one appeared from Ted’s side of the family. Just before the coffin was carried into the church the housekeeper could be heard com
plaining to the priest in the small porch.
‘It’s disgusting, Canon, disgusting. You open your porch for the down-and-outs and this is what they do.’
I asked what the problem was.
‘The vagrants who congregate in the porch of a night have urinated in the holy water font, that’s what,’ the housekeeper snapped, screwing up her face into a terrible grimace. ‘The good canon here leaves the porch open so those who have nowhere to go can shelter from the cold and rain. Many is the time he’s been knocked up, haven’t you, Canon, by one of these down-and-outs asking for food and money and I don’t know what. And this is how they repay his Christian charity – by urinating in his holy water. It’s disgusting.’
More holy water was blessed and the contents of the font replaced. Then the priest appeared resplendent in black cope and biretta.
After the Mass I had arranged for a reception in the church hall. Sandwiches and sausage rolls, pork pies, salads, cakes and desserts filled the tables, all overseen by the priest’s housekeeper. Only five of us stayed. The British Legion contingent departed and the Dunkirk veterans had other appointments to keep. My sister, wife, myself and two others surveyed the vast spread. It was a sorry little group.
‘What are you going to do with all this food?’ the housekeeper asked me.
‘Perhaps you might give it to the down-and-outs,’ I suggested.
‘Over my dead body,’ she replied, ‘not after what the dirty devils did in the canon’s holy water font!’
19
Uncle Jimmy was Mum’s younger brother. He was a slim, strikingly good-looking man with pale blue eyes and a captivating smile, so it came as no surprise that he was ‘one for the ladies’. He would always arrive at the door with a great smile and a present for me – I guess of all his nephews and nieces he had a bit of a soft spot for the youngest. I still have his presents: the pair of binoculars in the simulated leather case, the pencil box with the sliding lid, the Dinky toys, the picture book of famous British heroes, the Thomas the Tank Engine books. He was a romancer was Uncle Jimmy, an adventurer, a risk-taker and one of the most generous and loving men it has been my good fortune to meet. When only seven he left home, caught a bus to the station in Rotherham and went on to Liverpool, where he boarded a ship for Ireland. How he managed to get all the way from Yorkshire to Galway at that tender age without a penny is quite amazing. I was told that even at the age of seven he had ‘a touch of the Blarney’, for he convinced a group of friendly soldiers to take him under their wing and that his parents were waiting for him on the quay in Dublin.
Road to the Dales Page 16
