by Mary Portas
Mum was always quiet when it came to dealing with us, never raising her voice as she broke up whatever fight had occurred. The only time she ever lost her composure was during a row that descended into chaos at the foot of the stairs one afternoon. I’m not sure whether she meant to lasso or whip us when she picked up the dog’s lead. But whatever her intention, she never got a chance to realize it: the moment Patch thought he was being taken for a walk, he started running in circles and barking as we carried on arguing. Mum looked around in disbelief before sitting down on the bottom stair and bursting into tears.
We stared at each other in shock. Our mother didn’t get ill. And she certainly didn’t cry.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ she wailed. ‘You children will be the death of me.’
But even the memory of our mother’s tears didn’t stop the fights breaking out again. Fighting, falling out, making up and covering up each other’s misdemeanours, we moved as a gang in a world that often felt far removed from that of adults.
I tried to be good. I really did. But the energy that made my eyes snap open by about six every morning, while everyone else was still asleep, fizzed continually through me. When Mum sat me down with her in front of Watch with Mother, I couldn’t stop fidgeting. The Wooden Tops made me want to scream. Andy Pandy bored me senseless.
The only time I came to rest was when I went to bed two or three times a year with tonsillitis. For about a week, I’d lie obediently upstairs as Mum ferried up cups of warm Heinz tomato soup or cold Lucozade to me. But the moment I was well again, my bright ideas were hard to contain.
‘Let’s have a go, shall we?’ I’d said to Lawrence, a few days before we were sent to church, as I stared at the rolling machine Dad used to make cigarettes when he wanted a change from Player’s.
I didn’t dare take the tobacco. Instead I decided to fill the fag with a couple of teaspoons of loose Brooke Bond after taking the machine, some Rizla papers and a box of Bryant & May’s into the garden.
‘Light it, then!’ I hissed at Lawrence, as he stared up at me with his big brown eyes.
With a shaking hand, my brother struck a match and lifted it up to the crumbling cigarette hanging lopsidedly out of my mouth. Then I took a long, deep drag as I’d seen my father do every day of my life. A thousand needles impaled my windpipe as dry tea shot down it and I started to cough so violently that Lawrence thought I was choking. Rushing into the house, he screamed at Mum that I needed the kiss of life.
‘What are you up to now?’ she exclaimed, as she ran outside to find me purple in the face.
Slapping me on the back until I got my breath, Mum took me inside, gave me a glass of water and told me that my father would speak to me when he got home. When he did, Dad sat me down at the kitchen table and told me that I should be ashamed of myself for playing with something that I had no business with.
Shame was only occasionally used by our parents as the ultimate deterrent against misbehaving. It was the Catholic Church that really drove the notion of it into me. When I was a child it seemed that every word and act in church revolved around it. You didn’t count blessings. You feared sin. It was the backdrop to every prayer and act of contrition, every communion wafer and confession.
‘God is watching you,’ we were told again and again, to make sure we understood that He would see us stepping over the lines of right and wrong even if no one else witnessed it.
Given that I was such a repetitive sinner, I was convinced that I would never get to Heaven. And even the chance of being forgiven after confessing and repenting didn’t help because I found it hard to admit what I’d done. Taking the handbrake off the car while sitting waiting for Dad to run an errand one day had seemed logical at the time. But explaining to a priest that the car had rolled back into another one because of me? Flinging my nylon knickers into the air and watching them sizzle on a light bulb during a particularly frenetic strip-tease rendition of ‘Big Spender’ for Tish had been funny at the time but was impossible to explain.
Sitting on the pew beside me, Joe shifts in his seat and makes a fart noise. I dissolve into giggles as the old lady in front of us turns around to scowl and Tish stares sadly at me.
‘Why do you do these things, Mary?’ she says, with a sigh, whenever I’m in trouble again.
Three years older than me, Tish might only be twelve but is already wise.
I bend my head. I must concentrate. Soon it will be my turn to go into the confession box. We call it the old wardrobe because it feels like you’re trapped inside one when you walk in and hear the door creak behind you, the rustle of the priest’s robes as he sits hidden behind the screen.
I’ll have to think of something to say. I wonder how I will explain to Father Bussey what I did. I could tell him that I only wanted to try smoking, just like my dad. But children are seen and not heard; we don’t do as they do, we do as they say. I think of the dark confession box, the Hail Marys and Act of Contrition that I will surely be given if I admit my wrongs. My mind is made up. I’ll stick with something middle-of-the-road, like not doing the washing-up or my homework. Even the fear of God is not enough to make me admit to a priest that I’ve tried smoking.
Sugared almonds
While the other kids at school whose parents spoke with the same lilting voices as mine made trips back to Ireland each summer, our family never did. Tish went occasionally on the boat from Holyhead to Dún Laoghaire with Don and Sadie but the rest of us stayed in London because there were too many of us to buy tickets for.
Instead Ireland came to us through letters, snippets of news and Sunday teas with my mother’s brother, Jim. Of the eight Flynn children – Patrick, Francis, Mary Theresa, Elizabeth, Margaret, Agnes, Patricia and James – only my mother and Jim had left Ireland for London. They were all each other had of home so once every few weeks, after mass, we’d take the train from Watford Junction to Euston, then walk to Jim’s flat in Camden Town.
The thought of anyone leaving her house hungry was akin to asking visitors to strip naked for Aunty Mary. Arriving at her home, we’d find the table heaving with food and, as skinny but greedy as I was, even I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the amount we were expected to eat.
‘Another sandwich?’ Aunty Mary would say, in between talking nineteen to the dozen. ‘How about another slice of cake? I’ve got Battenberg or some lovely barm brack. Maybe there are still some scones in the kitchen. I’ll go and get those, shall I?’
Chewing as furiously as I could, I would wonder if everyone in Ireland was as fat as a house because all anyone there did was eat, as far as I could tell.
Maybe, though, it was fear that made me feel sick because Jim’s flat overlooked Holloway Prison, whose most famous resident at the time was Myra Hindley. The image of her dead eyes was guaranteed to paralyse me with terror, and the sound of the women prisoners screaming at each other when we left the flat for the walk back to Euston only increased it.
‘We’ll take you to see Myra if you’re not careful!’ my cousin James Patrick would threaten, if I was being a bit too noisy.
Otherwise Ireland was felt in the frowns that knitted my parents’ brows when news of the Troubles came onto the radio or in the smiles that greeted letters when they dropped on the hall mat. None were from my father’s family because, as far as we knew, he had no relatives. He rarely spoke about the past except to say that his mother had died when he was young and he had no brothers or sisters.
My mother’s family, though, were constantly with us in the letters she would read as she laughed and tutted to herself before sitting down at the kitchen table and writing one back. Then, after twelve long months of waiting, my aunties Peggy and Betty would visit us with our older Irish cousins during the summer holidays. Cramming into our bedrooms with us, wedged next to whoever could fit them in, the house would be filled with people.
Aunty Peggy’s son Jerry wore an Afghan coat, played Donovan’s ‘Jennifer Juniper’ on the mandolin and Mum adored him. Peggy’s daughter – also Peggy �
� was always on the train up to London, for the markets and clubs she found there, while Aunty Betty’s daughter Sheila was a fan of Camden market.
Aunty Betty was my favourite, and my first taste of heartbreak came when I had to say goodbye to her each year because I knew I would miss her for weeks to come. The reason I loved her so much was that she felt like mine for those two precious weeks when she visited. Sharing my mother with so many people frustrated me so much that I even volunteered to go to early Latin mass on Sunday mornings just to be alone with her. But when Betty visited, she spent most of her time with me sitting on her lap or pleading to play a game of Mousetrap or Jacks.
Tiny and dainty, it was hard to believe that Betty had had twelve children – the oldest of whom were old enough to look after the youngest when their mother visited England. Not that the size of her family – or what it took to keep them all fed – ever occurred to me when she took me to the sweet shop and told me to pick a quarter of whatever I wanted.
‘Sugared almonds,’ I’d say, as I ruthlessly selected the most expensive sweets in Mr Tite’s shop.
R White’s lemonade 1
I hate the telephone.
I never thought I’d feel this way because I’d spent years longing to see one sitting on the hall table. I couldn’t believe our luck when it finally arrived a few months ago.
‘Watford 39708,’ I’d say, after lifting up the avocado green receiver, imagining that I was an operator in the phone exchange.
We were now a modern family. No more stuffing coins into the phone box for us and waiting for the pips to go. We had our own telephone and I wanted to ring Carina across the road on it every night.
‘You’ll not be using it except in emergencies,’ Mum told us sternly, when the phone first arrived. ‘Your father will be very angry if you run up the bills.’
With that, she put a silver lock on the transparent dial and any requests to use the phone were met by a series of questions worthy of a Cold War interrogator.
‘Who are you phoning? Why do you need to phone them? Why can’t you talk to them at school? Why did you not say that when you saw them? How long will you be? Don’t block up the line now, will you? I’ll be checking on you in two minutes to see that you’re finished. What did you say that you needed to talk about again?’
And so the phone sat mostly silent in the hall on a little wooden table that Michael had made in woodwork, and all I could do was love it from afar. Until today, that is.
I woke up this morning desperate for some R White’s. Mum buys us the odd bottle of cream soda or lemonade on birthdays or at Christmas but today was just an ordinary one. I’d never be able to persuade her to give me the money for a bottle. Instead, I decided to steal it.
I thought it was a fail-safe plan. Going into Mr Tite’s, I waited until he was busy with someone before slipping a bottle into my bag and walking out of the shop. Turning the corner, I glugged down the lemonade without a thought for Mr Tite and his profits. All I could think as I smiled to myself was that I’d drunk a whole bottle of lemonade that my brothers and sister hadn’t had a sip of. Then I innocently walked back into the shop and asked for a penny on the bottle.
Mr Tite – who had been watching me the whole time through a side window – didn’t say a word as he handed me the penny. I walked home with it in my pocket, feeling the lemonade rolling around my stomach and letting out a satisfied burp.
Turning the corner, I saw my mother standing on the front doorstep with a face like thunder. ‘Mary Newton!’ she said. ‘Get inside this house and don’t let me hear another word out of you! Mr Tite has phoned.’
‘Ride A White Swan’ by Marc Bolan
My mother was the one who read to us as children but it was Dad who introduced us to film and singing stars. Such was his love of old black-and-white movies that even the football matches that were shown on television on Saturday afternoons couldn’t stop him wanting to watch the films on the other side.
A compromise had to be reached, though, because Michael and Joe’s obsession with Manchester United knew no bounds. To them, George Best was a god and missing a match was unthinkable. Joe would put on his entire football kit and hug a ball during every game, while Michael was so devoted to his team that he spent hours painting every single one of his Subbuteo figures with the features of each individual player. Denis Law would be lined up alongside Bobby Charlton and then George Best would come on in a fanfare.
The decision was reached that we’d alternate each weekend between the films and the matches. I wasn’t interested in seeing Manchester United play but Gary Cooper, Edward G. Robinson, Hedy Lamarr, Carole Lombard and Claudette Colbert fascinated me. Unsurprisingly, given that he’d married my mother, my father was fond of strong leading ladies, women like Bette Davis and Rita Hayworth. He loved powerful women singers, too, like Peggy Lee and Judy Garland, women with a story in their voice when they sang. Elvis was a ‘handsome fella’, Josef Locke reminded him of home and he grudgingly admitted that even Frank Sinatra could hold a tune. Perry Como, Duke Ellington and all the big bands were played constantly on the Bush record player.
Then one day my dad told us about a Belfast bloke called Van Morrison.
‘He’s quite good,’ he said, and we gazed at each other because my father had never liked the Beatles, the Rolling Stones or any of that ‘bunch of long-haired eejits’.
Van was from Belfast, though, so he was acceptable – although not quite enough for my dad to actually buy his album. But as the times moved with musicians, Michael decided that we all needed to start earning some money and buy something for ourselves.
‘We’re going to get our own record,’ he told us, with a serious look on his face. ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water. It’s meant to be brilliant.’
By now Michael was fifteen, Joe was thirteen and they were both earning, doing newspaper rounds or working as delivery boys. I was ten, though, and had no idea how I was going to contribute because we weren’t given pocket money.
‘Just do some jobs and Mum will give you a bit,’ Michael told me, and I diligently started vacuuming and washing-up.
A command from Michael was something you rarely disobeyed.
I was disappointed, though, when he brought the album home. Staring out at us from the cover was a couple of men who frankly weren’t nearly as handsome as Frank or Perry. But when we put the record on in the Front Room and listened, I changed my mind. This was new, something different from Mum and Dad’s music. This was ours.
A year later Marc Bolan’s ‘Ride A White Swan’ was at number one, and it wasn’t just the music that drew me to him. Skinny, with a bush of brown curls and a soft voice, I’d never seen anyone like Marc.
‘I love that song,’ I said one day to Mum, as we listened to the radio, hoping she’d pick up on the clue.
A couple of days later, Marc came on the radio again.
‘You know, I love that song, too, Mary,’ she said, with a wink.
I soon came home to find she’d bought the single for me and my first love affair started. Marc Bolan was my new god.
Chopper bike
We were transported as babies in the Rolls-Royce of prams: a Silver Cross. More of a chariot than a pram, it had enormous silver wheels and a mattress that nestled on a fully sprung carriage with a hood overhead to protect us from sun and rain. It was the kind of pram that Mary Poppins would have pushed, and when Lawrence was born I was put onto a chair that straddled it while he lay beneath. Peering over my shoulder at the baby, I’d turn to stare up at my mother as she gave me a running commentary on everything we saw.
‘Look at the bus!’ she’d say. ‘Do you see the policeman, Mary? And do you think we might see a fire engine, too, if we’re lucky?’
By the time I was about seven, the pram had well and truly seen better days. With no more babies in our family, my brothers had been given permission to detach the carriage from the wheels and convert the Silver Cross into a go-kart. The best part of the summer after my te
nth birthday was spent pushing each other around the garden with Mungo Jerry’s ‘In the Summer Time’ blaring out from the radio, and I’d soon used our go-kart to claim supremacy in the neighbourhood gang I’d formed.
Aching to be in charge after a decade of obeying my older brothers, I breathed a sigh of relief when Michael and Joe declared they were too old for messing about with kids’ stuff. I soon found willing gang members: Trudie and Michelle, the granddaughters of Jack and Rhoda Evans who came to stay with them each summer, Carina Cooper and Debbie Richards. Then there were the Sweeney brothers, who were just young enough for me to lord it over them, and Lawrence, whom I made my second-in-command because I knew he’d always agree with me.
We were a summer gang of kids, who roamed almost wild during the long holiday weeks that seemed to go on forever. After throwing on some shorts and hurriedly eating a bowl of cereal each morning, I’d shout for Lawrence.
‘Sandwiches will be ready at twelve thirty,’ Mum would call, as we left the house. ‘And don’t get up to too much mischief.’
Our adventures were mostly innocent: games of British Bulldog or hide and seek in the alleyways of North Watford or in the old air-raid shelter that sat crumbling in Aggie and May’s back garden. Sometimes we’d go up to Leggatts Swimming Pool, and once spent weeks collecting abandoned Cadbury’s wrappers because there was an offer that gave you free sweets in exchange for them. Every time I walked into his shop, Mr Tite would scowl. Not because he hadn’t forgiven me for my theft. That was long forgotten. Instead his patience was worn thin by the mountains of battered wrappers I brought in, having commanded the Gang to hunt them down and scrape everything from dog turd to chewing gum off them.
‘Not more!’
‘Yes, Mr Tite!’
‘Well, thank goodness this offer’s only good until the end of the week. There can’t be a sweet wrapper left in Watford.’