by Paul O'Grady
‘Are you OK, Paul?’ Fudge asked, leaving the engine running as she waited for me to get out of the car. ‘You’ve seemed very distracted the entire journey.’
‘I’m going back to Birkenhead,’ I blurted out. ‘I’ve made up my mind, I can’t stay here.’
‘You mean you’ve driven all the way down with me only to turn round and go straight back up again? You’re crazy, certifiably insane,’ she said, turning the ignition off and folding her arms.
‘Yup,’ I replied, feeling like the biggest fool in Christendom.
‘Unpredictable as the weather, but then I suppose that’s all part of your charm and one of the many reasons I adore you,’ she said, stroking the back of my head. ‘I shall miss you, but if you insist on going back home to the frozen north then I’m damned if I’m going back to that God-awful pub without you. I’d shrivel up and die of boredom. I’m going to become a recluse and lie on my bed listening to Eric Satie and smoking copious packets of Camels.’
We sat in the car in silence, uncomfortable in each other’s company after my sudden and drastic change of heart.
‘Well, I suppose that’s that then,’ she sighed, breaking the silence and turning the ignition back on. ‘If I can’t get you to change your mind I’d be grateful if you’d hop it before I start blubbing.’
Standing on the pavement watching her pull out from the kerb I felt a hard ball of misery forming in the back of my throat, making it impossible to swallow without producing strange gulping noises. I was never much of a hero when it came to saying goodbye.
‘Turn again, Whittington, three times Lord Mayor of London!’ she shouted out through the open car window as she sped round the corner and out of my life. I never saw her again. She married her Spaniard and went to live in Seville, we exchanged letters for a while and then as so often happens we simply lost touch. So if you read this, Fudge, give us a call.
It was a grim morning at Liverpool Coach Station, the sky overcast and in the distance the sound of thunder rumbling, probably somewhere in the vicinity of Holly Grove and my fulminating ma. I viewed the storm clouds as a prophetic warning and needed to think things out before getting the underground back to Birkenhead and the inevitable Spanish Inquisition. Sat in the Punch and Judy Café on Lime Street I considered the situation, and after a second cup of frothy coffee and a piece of toast I thought it might be wiser to lie low for a few days rather than going straight home. After all, I’d only just left my mother the day before and I could imagine the line of enquiry when I burst through the back door unannounced. Maybe a friend of mine, Ron, could put me up. I rang him at work from the station.
‘Course I can, my pearwents are away for the west of the week on holiday. Tell you what, pop down to the office and I’ll give you my keys.’
Ron was rhotacistic (couldn’t pronounce his ‘R’s) and worked for a theatrical agency. He was very theatrical himself, tall with matinee idol good looks and known somewhat incongruously to his close chums as Trixie Delight. I dutifully popped down, my numerous carrier bags bursting at the seams, and gratefully collected his house keys.
Ron lived in an area that was unexplored territory up till then and I asked the bus conductor if he would mind giving me a shout when it came to my stop. You could still do things like that then. Nowadays, if such an obsolete curio as a bus conductor could still be found, your request would probably be met with a stony silence or a curt ‘dunno’.
‘So c’mon, what’s happened? Tell your aunty Twixie all about it,’ Ron said through mouthfuls of beans on toast as we sat at the kitchen table eating our tea. ‘I had Chris on the phone this afternoon wanting to know if I’d heard from you. He said you’d just packed up and gone. You’re not in any twouble, are you?’
‘Jesus, Ron, you sound like my mother. No I’m not in any trouble apart from being skint, jobless and homeless. I don’t know what to do.’ We sat in silence, listening to Bob Greaves on Granada Reports talking about the birth of a baby llama at Knowsley Safari Park from the telly in the front room.
‘Well, you do know that if I lived on my own you’d be welcome to stay for as long as you like,’ Ron generously offered, ‘but the pearwents are back at the weekend and then, well…’ His voice trailed off as he daintily picked up a bean that had strayed on to the table, putting it on the side of his plate.
‘I know, I know,’ I chipped in to save him any embarrassment. ‘I didn’t expect to stay any longer than a couple of days. You’ve been a real mate for putting me up in the first place. I’ll ring Nina, maybe I can stay there for a while.’
‘I’ve got an idea,’ Ron said, clearing the plates away. ‘Why don’t you go down to the employment agencies in town, see if there’s anything going, get a job, any job for the time being. You can then tell your mum the weason you came home was because you were offered a job. Pwoblem solved.’ He was right. ‘Now get yourself changed, I’ve got a friend coming wound from my theatre gwoup who I’m absolutely dying for you to meet. She’s divine. She wants to be an actwess.’
He was making her sound like Sally Bowles. The friend in question turned out to be a well-spoken young girl named Angela Walsh. She was a year younger than me and startlingly pretty with soft reddish-brown hair and pale translucent skin. She was wearing a 1920s black velvet evening coat with a matching beret and reminded me of a picture I’d seen in a film book of a young Greta Garbo. We hit it off right away. As Ron had explained, Angela went to the Unity Youth Theatre with him.
‘They’re always looking for new people who are interested in acting,’ Angela told me. ‘Why don’t you come down? We’re reading a new play next week.’
‘Do you get to perform in public?’ I asked, the not-so-dormant showbiz bug rearing its head again.
‘Oh yes,’ she replied, skipping around the kitchen, ‘we put on shows at the Everyman. Shame you weren’t here for the Marat / Sade. I played a lunatic, it was wonderful.’
I wanted to play a lunatic and be in a show with Angela Walsh, but first I had to get a job. The next day I took the bus into town and perused the vacancies on the board in the Job Centre. Even without being too particular I could see that jobs I was suitable for were thin on the ground, besides which the take-home pay was, as usual, laughable. One caught my eye: clerk in a meat business, a position that I had no interest in whatsoever but seeing as it was based in Birkenhead and the money wasn’t bad I presented myself at the desk with the job number. It turned out to be FMC Meats, the abattoir on the old Chester Road, and reluctantly I made the trip over the water for an interview, praying that I didn’t bump into anyone or, in particular, my ma. The job came with perks, my prospective boss informed me. Half-price meat, you finished for the day at three thirty and it was only a ten-minute walk from Holly Grove. Besides the mind-numbing banality of the work (adding up figures all day, great choice of career for a numerical dyslexic) and the fact that I was surrounded by animals being slaughtered, the only major fly in the ointment as far as I could see was the start time. I had to be in for 6.45am. I chose to ignore these drawbacks and gratefully accepted the job, promising to be in first thing Monday morning.
‘An abattoir? You mean that dirty, filthy lairage down the hill?’ My mother was incredulous. ‘You’re telling me that you came back from your precious London to work in a bloody abattoir? An abattoir? Well, I’ve heard it all now.’
‘I get half-price meat each week, think of that,’ I added feebly, throwing this nugget of information in as compensation.
‘I don’t give a shite if they send you home with a live cow each night,’ she squawked. ‘I’d like to know the real reason you’ve come back here with your tail between your legs. You’d better not be in trouble with the police again, my lad.’ She ranted on as she stomped from kitchen to front room. ‘And you needn’t think I’m getting you up every morning at half six. I should be taking it easy, not running around after you, cleaning and cooking all day. Jesus, wait till I tell our Annie that you’re back.’
All th
ings considered, the return of the prodigal went down better than I’d anticipated. I was a veritable paragon of virtue for the next few days, getting home at a reasonable hour, keeping the house clean, doing the shopping without complaint, all of which did nothing to allay my ma’s suspicious nature. Meanwhile, life at the abattoir was everything I’d predicted and more. I shared a tiny office with three other people. Dora, a rotund little woman who was in the Salvation Army, went around humming snippets of hymns under her breath all day. She’d been with FMC Meats since the Stone Age when it had been based at Woodside Ferry, as had the elderly man who sat facing a wall and hardly ever spoke a word. The final member of the team was Tony, only a couple of years older than me, who took his job very seriously, which was just as well since I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. The ever-patient Tony was forever correcting the piles of figures that I’d totted up on the antiquated adding machine even though he had enough of his own work to do.
Our depressing little time warp of an office overlooked the slaughterhouse. I very rarely went down there unless I had some meat to condemn, a process that involved filling in a lot of forms in triplicate and stamping the dead creatures’ flanks with a large rubber stamp that proclaimed ‘Condemned Meat’. The sight and smell of the slaughterhouse made me feel physically sick. I was forever talking through my nose so I didn’t have to inhale the smell of raw meat and blood, and the slaughtermen must’ve thought I had either adenoids or a permanent cold.
Occasionally a sheep or cow would escape, briefly enlivening the boredom, and make a bid for freedom up the old Chester Road with everyone in hot pursuit. Once a pig ran out of the gates and jumped on to a Crossville bus that had conveniently just pulled up at the bus stop outside. Somehow it managed to climb the stairs and get up on to the top deck, knocking an old woman over. Poor things must’ve been terrified, the pig and the pensioner.
A story that sickens me to this day was told to me by one of the slaughtermen. He was a big beefy bullet-headed hunk of a man, stripped to the waist, his magnificent chest and thighs covered by a blood-splattered black leather apron, a massive turn-on, I suppose, for some gay men and heterosexual women but one that did nothing for me. He had huge hands and swollen fingers with blood ingrained dark red and deep around each fingernail. Standing outside one afternoon having a fag and absently watching a small bonfire at the end of the yard, I wondered what it was they were burning. It certainly stank. ‘Spontaneous abortion,’ a slaughterman told me. ‘If a cow comes in pregnant then we abort it and burn it along with the condemned meat. If the abortion comes out a decent size then we sell it on as veal.’ I’m not sure if that story was true but it was enough to put me off meat for over a year, and even today I’m still slightly nauseous at the sight of a well-stocked butcher’s window.
The Unity Youth Theatre got me through the boredom of the daily grind at the abattoir. I’d been cast in a strange play called Punch and Judy! and we rehearsed in a building in an alley off Church Street. We were a mixed bag. There was Florence, small and plump with apple-dumpling cheeks who appeared to be very intense until you got to know her and made her laugh, then her eyes twinkled and her solemn little face lit up in a smile. Flom, as we came to call her, could play the piano and had been cast as the Proprieter of the Punch and Judy Show. Christina, a delightful redhead who came (according to gossip) from a very good family, played a jolly-hockey-sticks-type doctor. A lad named Dave made an excellent Mr Punch. I’m not implying that his nose met his chin or that he had a hump on his back; no, he was an energetic and inventive performer who threw himself into this peculiar role as if he were playing Lear’s Fool at the National. Angela was his Judy.
‘Not much of a part really,’ she said airily, in the manner of a seasoned actress who had done the rounds, over a half of cider in the pub after rehearsals. ‘Couple of lines and then I get hit over the head with a stick. I think I’m going to play her Irish, she sounds Irish with a name like Judy, don’t you think?’ I could only bring to mind the Judys Garland, Holliday and Carne (this last Judy from Rowan & Martin’s Laughin) and none of those seemed remotely Irish to me but I caught Angela’s drift and nodded in agreement like an old pro. In addition to Judy she was also playing Lola, Joey the Clown’s assistant. I was never off the stage, playing the roles of both Joey and the Hangman as well as appearing as chorus in a couple of numbers. I was in seventh heaven and if Ron, who’d introduced me to Unity in the first place, was a little put out that he had only been given the part of the Illustrious Gentleman, which he wasn’t very keen on, then he was big enough not to show it.
The part of the policeman went to a lugubrious chap with a face like Deputy Dawg whose name I can’t remember, and then there was Christine. Christine was understudying the women’s parts and also appeared as the Ghost. She was tall and wan, slightly old-fashioned and prim in appearance with her cardigans and pale pink lipstick, and we were surprised to hear that on the nights this shy creature wasn’t rehearsing for Punch and Judy! she was a hostess at the Vernon Johnson School of Dance in Bold Street, substituting as a dancing partner for those lonely souls who’d arrived at the studio unaccompanied.
Christine was an excellent ballroom dancer who completely transformed herself when she entered the doors of Vernon Johnson’s. With her sensible little hairdo teased into a coif of mightier dimensions and her shimmering ballgown with yards and yards of peach tulle underskirt to make it stick out, Christine was a knockout. She had a fabulous figure and was a real marvel when it came to dealing with her shy and clumsy protégés, who looked upon her as a goddess. She encouraged me and Angela to join up. We did, and for ten bob a lesson we learned how to samba, tango and do the American jive.
Our director at the Unity was an excitable and slightly hysterical fellow with a bright orange tongue that flicked in and out of the side of his mouth like a nervous lizard with a tic. However, he allowed us to improvise and include songs and sketches in this otherwise dreary production. Christine and Flom wrote a song called ‘Did Somebody Call For A Doctor’ and, surprise, surprise, I managed to get something from Gypsy in – ‘May We Entertain You’ as an opening number for Joey the Clown and Lola. We were in our element.
To prepare us for this epic the cast were treated to a private viewing of a real Punch and Judy show by the maestro himself, Professor Codman, a showman whose family had been presenting Punch and Judy shows on Merseyside since the late 1800s. I remember his booth outside St George’s Hall and no, before you start, it wasn’t in the 1800s, it was the late sixties. Punch and Judy fascinated me when I was a little kid and I’d have hung around the booth in the gardens of the Floral Pavilion Theatre, New Brighton, all day if I’d been allowed. In the end my dad made me my own miniature booth, complete with puppets. He even fashioned a link of sausages out of one of my ma’s old stockings stuffed with cotton wool and tied up with pink wool at regular intervals to form the links, and I performed shows for my mate Steve Davies, who lived at the top of the Grove.
Most of the costumes for Punch and Judy! were borrowed from Unity’s wardrobe store. Angela and I wore tatty old Pierrot and Pierrette costumes for the clowns, which she tarted up with a bit of sequin trim she’d bought in Blackler’s, but for the Hangman I had other ideas. A guy I was having a fling with made leather trousers for a shop in Church Street and he gave me a brown leather pair with matching waistcoat. They were a bit on the large size and what with me not having much in the way of a bum they hung in folds behind me like a pair of Odeon curtains, but I didn’t care. I thought I was the dog’s bollocks up there on that stage, head to toe in saggy brown leather, my chin smeared with black greasepaint to represent stubble, a veritable testosterone-fuelled killing machine.
In the Policeman’s number, three of us acted as chorus, dressed as coppers in ill-fitting uniforms poncing up and down behind Deputy Dawg, who was executing (literally) a shambolic dance routine while he tried to remember the words to ‘A Policeman’s Lot Is Not A Happy One’. I had a flash of what I co
nsidered comedy genius, fleshing out my part by doing it in drag. Just before I went on I quickly shoved one of the doctor’s coats down my tunic as a makeshift bosom, gave my already enormous barnet a quick backcomb, rolled my trousers up and smeared my gob with red carmine, not subtle but surprisingly effective. I drew on the dancer I’d seen playing a wonderfully deadpan tart in Lindsay Kemp’s Flowers for inspiration and went for it.
‘It wasn’t what we wehearsed,’ Ron sniffed, purse-lipped when I fell into the dressing room after the number had finished. ‘It’s not vewy pwofessional behaviour, y’know.’ I didn’t care, I was high as a kite on the laughter from what few punters were out front.
Despite all the hard work and effort we’d put into this ill-fated production – Angela and I had nearly been arrested illegally fly-posting homemade posters all over the city centre – Punch and Judy! wasn’t a hit. The odds were against us from the start as we didn’t go on until 10pm, after a play called Female Transport, about a gang of women who were being transported to Australia. This was a time when most sensible theatre-goers were on the bus home or in the pub, and hardly anybody came to see it. Of course it could have been a crap show but in our youthful optimism we could see nothing wrong with it, preferring to view Punch and Judy! through heavily rose-tinted spectacles.