As both my parents went back to work straight after I was born, it was my nan and grandad who looked after me during the day. Dad would pick me up at 4.15 on the dot. He’d knock off at 4 p.m. and it would take exactly 15 minutes for him to walk down from his workplace, Premier. I can still hear it now – the gate of Nan and Grandad’s front garden opening and then Dad whistling or singing as he came up the path.
Dad was a natural with kids – he was surrounded by them growing up and his time at Butlin’s further cemented that skill. Some parents read storybooks to their kids, but he wasn’t like that – his stories were all in his head and he’d just recite them on the spot, often making them far more elaborate as he acted them out.
One of my earliest memories is being fascinated by the story of The Three Billy Goats Gruff. I was convinced that they lived in Roe Lee Park down the road. When we all went to the park, we would go down to the small stream and act out the plot. Dad would hide under the small bridge pretending to be a troll, while myself and Mum would pretend to be goats crossing. Every so often he would jump out from under the bridge, scaring the life out of us. And I was convinced he could kick a football up through the sky. I’d shout, ‘Do it again, Dad, do it again!’ as I watched this tiny ball go high up to the sky, thinking that it would go so far that it would never come back. To me, he was amazing.
However, there was still a lot of drama in their relationship. As well as collecting me, it was Dad’s job to drop me off at Nan and Grandad’s each morning. He left the house at 7.15 on the dot as his shift started at 7.30. We raced up the hill each morning and I’d be dropped off to start the day with a cupful of raisins.
It was during one of these mornings that I remember just about getting to the end of Cedar Street near St James Road with my dad, when I heard this almighty scream: it was Mum. ‘Here! Here’s your clothes!’ and then all Dad’s clothes were thrown from the front door into the middle of the street. Then the door banged shut.
As a child I was terrified. Dad turned around and we both walked back towards the house.
Just as we got to the door, it swung open again. This time it was all Dad’s records.
‘And you can take your records too!’
I knew that wasn’t a good sign.
Mum and Dad have always had an explosive and passionate relationship, punctuated by huge rows and then making up. Both stubborn and independent, they were also bound together. They loved each other and, old-fashioned as it might seem, it was very much ‘for better or worse’; that’s the case more than ever now as Mum cares for Dad and mourns the man she used to be married to.
Dad had always been a sensitive child and that care for others continued into his adult years and the workplace. Hilda had identified an empathy in her small son that didn’t diminish with age. Dad showed this side to his boss at Premier. When he got to work one day, a group of blokes were stood around in the canteen. ‘Here, Ted, Astley’s upstairs, crying at his desk,’ one of them said. Astley was the boss; he’d built up the company along with his partner from scratch. Dad went upstairs to the offices and sure enough found Astley sat in his office with his head in his hands, crying his eyes out. Dad walked straight in. ‘Right, what’s going on with you?’ he asked.
The story goes that the company was in difficulty and that, combined with the fact a number of the guys had decided to go on strike, had pushed Astley over the edge.
‘Yam being daft. Everyone here wants to support you. You’re a good boss and we all want the work. Listen, I’ll go down there and tell them what’s going on. None of this matters. What matters is that you’re OK and you stop cracking up. And then afterwards, me and you are going to the races,’ Dad apparently told him.
That afternoon Dad and Astley went to the races, with Astley driving them in his car. ‘He hadn’t a clue what he was doing, but the first bet he put on, he bloody won two hundred quid!’ Dad told people at the time. ‘He was a good boss, he just let things get on top of him. He had a lot of worries.’ This was typical of Dad – he could feel the pain of others, which is perhaps why he felt his own emotions so keenly, something Iris had been so very aware of when they dated.
Dad knew everyone on Cedar Street. He was forever chatting and joking with Mrs Goodrich (the old lady who was forever telling us off) and Bloody Mary (another battleaxe). ‘It was because he thought they were lonely,’ Mum tells me. ‘He’d always go out of his way to talk to anyone if he thought they were lonely – he never liked to see people being on their own.’
Mrs Goodrich was divorced and was always stood in her front porch and, as I said, mostly telling us off. ‘Looking back, I think she probably had depression or something,’ Mum says. ‘But your dad would always make the time to say hello or talk to her for ages each time we passed. She was a nice lady – she was just fed up of you kids playing outside her house all day.’
I still remember Bloody Mary sat in her front porch with a face like thunder. I was scared of her because I knew if she saw me doing anything (walking on someone’s back wall, for example), my dad would know about it straight away and then I’d get a clip round the ear. Years later, I bumped into her in Blackburn Market and she was the nicest old lady you could ever meet.
Dad loved to please those he loved and so it was no surprise that, finally, after months of brainwashing and begging by me, he and Mum eventually gave in and we all caught the bus up to Guide in Blackburn, where there was a dog rescue centre. The day before a litter of puppies had been born and I was in my element as I chose a small cross between a Border Collie and a Labrador.
He was pitch-black with a white cross at the front of his chest. He hadn’t opened his eyes and I still remember the first time I held him, over the moon that I finally had a dog. Luckily for me, as I was holding him he opened his eyes for the first time; everyone was excited that I was the first thing he saw.
We brought him back home a few weeks later, with me carrying him in small a light-blue school bag with his head popping out the top of it. We named him Mac and for years he was to become a central part our family.
I took Mac everywhere with me, and the daily routine of leaving with Dad in the morning to go to Nan and Grandad’s now included Mac. Mum’s parents didn’t think that a dog was a good idea, but he soon became the favourite of them too, being fed the best offcuts of meat Nan could get from Blackburn Market.
As the years progressed, Dad found a happy balance of contentment at home while continuing to perform in the clubs and pubs, with the occasional singing job in old folks’ homes or charity shows. It could be said that he made peace with the fact that this was his ‘fame’ and that was OK.
When I was around six or seven, Dad had a gig at the Blakewater Lodge home for the elderly at the bottom of Whalley Range. While he was practising at home he taught me and my friend Ellen a couple of songs – ‘Roses of Picardy’ and ‘Milly Molly Mandy’ – which it was decided we would sing in his show.
Ellen wore her best dress, which I remember was blue and looked a bit like something Dolly Parton would wear, while Mum got me a navy blue suit from Blackburn Market. All of us walked down from Cedar Street, through Bastwell and down Whalley Range to the old folks’ home. Both myself and Ellen carried a small suitcase, which at the time seemed ginormous, but in reality were probably the size of a small book. In them we had our ‘music’ and lyrics – thinking we were about to do the performance of our lives.
The home had even given us our own dressing room; we thought we were the stars. While Dad was onstage singing we were playing around when out of nowhere a man dressed as the Invisible Man came into the room, scaring us on purpose. He had toilet roll around his face, black glasses, a suit and a bowler hat. We were terrified and ran screaming through the home – which at the time seemed a warren of corridors – straight onto the stage where Dad was performing. Everyone was in hysterics laughing.
After performing our songs onstage, our job was then to go around to all the residents topping up their drinks.
All the old people were plastered by the end of the night.
In the early 1980s Dad joined a group called The Versatiles, made up of three women, a male piano player and him, who did charity shows around Blackburn and Darwen. He would often take me along and I would sit in the audience or play backstage at venues ranging from the splendour (!) of the Darwen Library Theatre to an old folks’ home at the edge of town. Either way, I would be fussed over constantly by all the old women who came to see the shows and who would shower me with sweets.
In 1984, Nan told Mum about a woman who had sadly passed away up the road from her. She had no children and the house was going cheap for a quick sale. ‘There were two houses just doors from one another,’ Mum says. ‘But when we looked through the back bedroom window and saw the garden we both fell in love with the place.’
The house on Whalley Old Road in Sunnybower, just up the road from where Nan and Grandad lived, is the same house Mum and Dad live in today and the place I come home to, to help care for Dad. It’s a small semi-detached house, close to the dual carriageway. When they moved in there were red brick walls at the front of all the gardens and lots of trees – all of these gradually disappeared as people bought cars and put in driveways. The back garden was overgrown, with two huge greenhouses right at the back and a shed that me and my friend Jason would hide in. Inside, the house hadn’t been decorated in years; it needed a lot doing to it. Behind the garden was a massive field with overgrown allotments and a small stream. Coming from Cedar Street, I thought this was amazing and I’d bring the kids up from there to come and play.
After buying the house, Mum and Dad would spend every weekend doing it up, moving belongings from Cedar Street up to Whalley Old Road in a wheelbarrow every Saturday morning.
I have clear memories of us all walking up Laburnum Road, Dad wheeling the barrow full of pots or whatever they decided to move that day, Mum carrying bags and me and Mac walking behind. The day the big move came, I was able to sit in the back of the removal van. I can remember it to this day. It was bright white, stuffed full of all our furniture, and I was sat on top of some drawers. I remember the shutters coming down and then being tossed around in the back of the van surrounded by all the furniture from our house – a Health and Safety nightmare!
The summer felt like it went on for ever. We’d spend the weekend in what then seemed like a mansion, me and my friends playing in this huge overgrown garden, exploring the fields at the back and sometimes climbing into Premier where Dad worked and looking at the Page 3 girls that the men had pinned to the walls of the offices.
Because there was no cooker, most nights we ate soup, bizarrely heated over an old fondue set Mum had picked up. Dad continued his theme of being useless at DIY and so he was kept away from everything and Mum’s father was given the task. Grandad did most of the wallpapering, while Dad chopped back the garden, demolishing the old sheds. For years they always seemed to be decorating or doing something in the garden. Dad pulled down the old wall at the front of the house to make way for a drive to park the car. I’d help mix the concrete while our dog Mac would be sat on top of whatever bits of wall remained.
Dad also tried to teach me to sing. A friend of my mum’s had a son who was the same age as me and it was arranged that once a week he’d come round our house and Dad would give us singing lessons. It was a disaster: the other kid wasn’t interested, while I was prancing around like I was in the West End, singing songs from the 1920s. To be honest, Dad was a terrible teacher. He’d leave us in the backroom and just say, ‘Right, practise this’, and then go out and watch football on TV. It didn’t last long.
I wouldn’t say Dad was the most textbook of fathers. There was no ‘bonding’ by being taken to football matches, no particular father-and-son time. He got on with doing his own thing – which was singing. But when things mattered he was there, and I never felt unloved or uncared for. Despite the occasional argument between Mum and Dad, there was always a lot of laughter in the house. Dad would often have us in stitches with impressions of people he’d met, while Mum would flounce around the house pretending to sing and dance (painfully) like Kate Bush, or whoever she’d seen on Top of the Pops that week. Dad was now living the life that had always scared him. It was as if he’d spent so many years fighting the inevitable that once he embraced being a family man first and a singer second, it was almost a relief to him. Either way, there was a peace about ‘offstage Dad’ during the last few years before he became ill and that calmness disappeared for good.
Chapter 11
Dad and I were very different. Looking back, after leaving Cedar Street and moving up to Sunnybower, I made very few new friends and I became quite shy. I secretly wanted to be as confident as my dad, and if I’m honest, I was desperate to be like he was onstage. But it wasn’t meant to be, mainly as I lacked his ability not to give a damn about what people thought. On top of this, puberty was beginning to kick in, which made everything feel a hundred times worse. I was conscious that I was different from the other boys in the class, but at the time I didn’t know why. Despite being picked for the school football team, I would freeze when we had to play any matches. This wasn’t helped by the fact I ruined my kit before I’d even had the chance to play a single match – I was so excited I decided I wanted to iron it myself, with disastrous results. I remember taking out the iron, plugging it in and plunging it onto the front of the shirt, which immediately melted the polyester into huge strands of plastic. ‘Daaaaaaad!’ I screamed and spent the next hour in tears. Mum sewed up the hole, but it meant that my shirt was lopsided, literally hanging down to my knees on one side, while on the other it was higher than my waist. The team got into the schoolboy finals playing at Ewood Park, but while every other boy in the side was excited about running on the pitch, I was drowning in dread and distracted at the state of my kit, constantly trying to pull it down as I anxiously ran around.
Dad would come and watch me play but never seemed that impressed with my performance – and who could blame him? I remember him standing on the other side of the railings at the back of the field at Roe Lee School, shouting: ‘For Christ sake, Simon, PASS IT!’
Given how good he and his brothers had been on the pitch in their childhoods, how much time and energy they’d all given it and how proud Maurice had been of them, it didn’t take a genius to work out that he wouldn’t be turning cartwheels at my lack of skill. He would try and concentrate on the positives as we walked home (‘You’re bloody fast, Sime – you just need to learn how to kick it…’) but I think we both knew I was a lost cause. Afterwards Dad told my nan and grandad, ‘He runs around like a blue-arsed fly. He chases the ball, gets it, then panics’, which was a very polite description of how I looked on the pitch, but hearing that just reinforced the fact I felt I was letting everyone down.
I knew I was different from the other boys at this time, but I also felt like I wasn’t a son my dad could be proud of. This just intensified my feelings of inadequacy, especially as football had the potential to be the one thing we could bond over – it certainly wasn’t going to be music as I couldn’t sing anything like him and didn’t have the confidence to be onstage, despite secretly having the same desire. I know that Dad had looked up to Maurice because of a shared love of singing and that he was proud to have been nurtured by him. In turn, Maurice loved the fact that he was able to pass the baton to his son – as he got older and stopped singing himself, he would still go to The Cora to drink with his mates only instead of getting up himself, he would watch Dad go up and belt out the classics. It was a strong bond they shared and it made Hilda proud, too.
Despite the fact I didn’t feel I lived up to his expectations, Dad would always stand my corner. I saw him in action one night at the school parents’ evening when I was in Year 6 – I was waiting outside the classroom when he suddenly stormed past me, slamming the door as he went, and shouted: ‘Come on, Sime, we’re going!.’ I had no idea why he was so cross (I knew not to ask questions when he wa
s in a mood like that) and ran behind him as he marched out of the school. Years later, he told me that the teacher had said I wouldn’t amount to anything. He then told the teacher, ‘Maybe so, but whatever he does, he’ll still be better than you.’
It reminded me of the stories I’d heard about Dad from his younger days – how he would never let anyone disrespect his family or friends and how he wasn’t afraid to take on anyone who behaved unfairly towards the people he loved. That has always been something anyone who knew my dad back then would bring up – but I think it’s also something I have struggled with as his illness has progressed, because at times he becomes the very opposite of that loyal and respectful man. Often, during his rages he seems to go out of his way to threathen and insult Mum and me. The logical part of me knows it’s his illness, but it is an example of how dementia can totally hijack the mind and personality of the sufferer. Some days I have to look really hard to see any spark that reminds me of how Dad used to be, but I also have to be honest and remember that he was far from perfect before the illness struck and some of the impatience and dismissiveness I see in him today has always been there, bubbling under the surface since I was a teenager.
After leaving primary school I won a subsidised place at the local grammar school, Queen Elizabeth’s, or QEGS, which was 500 years old and had a good reputation. Dad was proud. Mum’s brother, my Uncle George, had gone there too, so when Dad went down to tell my nan and grandad that I’d got in, Nan ended up dancing around the living room. But going there from Roe Lee Park was a massive culture shock – most of the teachers at the time wore gowns and the old-fashioned mortarboards on their heads, and they took sport very seriously.
The Songaminute Man Page 12