Chapter 2
School was naturally St. Edmund’s Catholic Primary, where my father, Auntie Audrey, and Uncle Bob had all gone before me. The school was attached to St. Edmund’s Church, where Father Bernard Harvey, my grandma’s cousin — the one who had baptized me — was the parish priest.
I suppose that for the first day or two, I must have been taken to school, but from then on I would go on my own and later took Lyndsey with me. Hand in hand we would walk or skip down St. John’s Road, past Ronnie the cobbler, who had been at school with my dad and who always said hello. Farther along there was the pawnbroker’s on the corner, with a window made entirely of black glass that came down to the pavement. If you pressed your nose to the glass and raised an arm and a leg, you looked as if you were flying. Then we’d continue up over the railway. If a train was coming, we would stand on the footbridge and shriek as the steam billowed round us, lifting our skirts and warming our bare legs in winter. On the far side lay Little Scandinavia, a shortcut to school. The streets here were still cobbled, making the game of never stepping on the cracks far more challenging than on the hopscotch sidewalks of Ferndale Road. In the middle of this labyrinth, the rag-and-bone man kept his horse. In Crosby we had had miles and miles of dunes — you could even see the sea from my classroom window — but this was the nearest we got to the country. So whenever the old man wasn’t around, we would clamber up and peer over the wall at his poor horse. If the old man found us, he’d yell abuse and we’d scramble down, scraping our knees on the brick, then rubbing them better with lick. Another game was breaking empty milk bottles. All you had to do was pick one up, drop it, and then run down one of the entries before an aproned housewife could reach the door. One morning my friend Margot and I were spotted, and I’ll never forget the shame of having to stand in front of the whole school while our hands were rapped with a ruler.
On the way home we might stop at my uncle’s shop, a grocer’s cum sweetshop, and buy a piece of candy. We had to pay: Uncle Bill was far too canny a businessman to give anything away, even to us. He used to have these little cereal packets for display purposes, though, and when he changed the window, he’d let us have them to play shop.
As soon as I was old enough, I’d be sent out on errands — “messages,” as they were called. Grandma made us memorize her requests, and they had to be delivered word perfect or else. “Four nice, lean lamb chops, please, for Mrs. Booth.” God help either me or the butcher if they weren’t. The question for the baker was “Is it fresh?” If what he gave me turned out not to be, then woe betide. I’d be packed off back with the stale loaf, where my new line would be “Mrs. Booth is not satisfied.”
Life could not have been easy for my mother. From the beginning, her mother-in-law made it clear that, grandchildren or no grandchildren, we would have to pay our way. If anyone had expected my dad to support his family, they were mistaken. His career was going well, with work on both the stage and the small screen (television) steadily coming his way, but that made no difference. Thus Mum would get Lyndsey and me up and breakfasted and ready for school before setting off by bicycle toward Seaforth, two miles away. There she would work behind the counter of a small fish-and-chip shop from ten o’clock till two. Grandma would give us our lunch, but Mum would be back in Ferndale Road in time to give us our tea. She would work again from four to six, then come home to get us ready for bed before heading back on the bike for her final stint from eight till midnight. All for a princely four pounds ten shillings a week, enough to cover the rent of a small room.
It’s hard to imagine what working at the Seaforth chippie must have felt like for my mum. Only a few years earlier, Gale Howard had been a rising star at RADA, glamorous, accomplished (Jackie Collins had been one of her contemporaries), and with the world at her feet. Now here she was, serving penny packets of cod and chips and sausages to drunken sailors. I can just imagine the leers she got late at night. How long she suffered it, nobody remembers now. Months, certainly. Luckily salvation was at hand in the shape of Auntie Diane, her friend in Stoke Newington. Since qualifying as a designer, she had started work at Selfridges department store as a trainee buyer. Diane managed to get Mum an interview at Lewis’s, Selfridges’ parent company, whose flagship store was in Liverpool. Mum got the job.
Whereas an ordinary shop assistant’s wage was £7 a week, my mum went straight in at £11, nearly three times what the fish-and-chip shop was paying her. Every week from then on, she gave half of whatever she earned to her mother-in-law. In addition, she continued to do the washing and ironing — although the new job meant that we soon got a top-loading washing machine. Naturally she also bought our clothes. Another plus of working for Lewis’s was that she was entitled to a discount, which increased the longer she worked there. The bicycle was dispensed with, and from then on Mum took the bus, did a full day’s work, and then took the bus back in time to put us to bed. As for her own life, she put it on hold. For a while she kept nursing the hope that her husband would come back, but he didn’t. The money stopped; the visits stopped; there were no more telephone calls, or none that I remember, until the fateful one.
It was April 1963. The Easter holidays. I was eight, and Lyndsey was six. As a special treat, Mum had taken us to see Summer Holiday, a movie about a bus conductor who takes a London bus all the way to Greece for a holiday. We didn’t often go to the movies, and I’d been looking forward to it ever since I’d heard it was coming to Crosby. I already had a poster of Cliff Richard, the film’s star, pinned to my bedroom door. When we got back, Lyndsey and I were packed off upstairs to bed and banned from going downstairs again. Instead we played one of our favorite games, which we called “policewoman’s training.”
My grandma was always obsessed that burglars were about to come in and steal our nonexistent worldly goods. Policewoman’s training involved creeping downstairs, touching the front door, and rushing back up again, before Mum and Grandma, who would be watching television, could catch us. The rules were no noise and no giggling. Sometimes I’d lift Lyndsey onto the banister and give her a little shove so that she slid down to the bottom. On one occasion my hands slipped, so instead of putting her on the rail, I pushed her right over, and she plummeted down into the hallway. There was a sudden scream from downstairs, then Lyndsey was bawling out at the top of her voice, “Cherie tried to kill me!”
Lyndsey was only winded, and neither of us was punished, but I still remember hiding behind my grandma’s bedroom door, shaking with fear.
On this particular Thursday night, we were playing policewoman’s training when the phone rang. Scuttling hurriedly back upstairs, I crouched outside the bathroom as my mum came into the hall and picked up the phone. She didn’t say anything, apart from hello at the beginning. Then suddenly she began to cry. I had seen her cry before, but nothing like this, and it was somehow worse because she didn’t say anything to explain it. Then my grandma came out and started hissing, “How could he? . . . It’s absolutely unforgiveable! . . . As for the Crosby Herald . . .” Then she put her arm round my mum, which was something she didn’t usually do.
Eventually they went back into the front room, and I just sat there on the landing, feeling my eyes prick as if I was going to cry. Then I found Lyndsey and told her that something terrible had happened, but I didn’t know what.
The next morning at breakfast, everyone was quiet. Mum had obviously been crying all night, but nothing was said.
“Why don’t you two run along to the park?” Grandma suggested.
So we did. The park was just at the end of our road. It was a lovely, sunny April day, and you could always find somebody to play with. I remember Lyndsey took her jump rope, and there was some discussion about whether we needed sweaters.
As soon as the other children saw us coming, they began staring and whispering. Finally I got up the courage to say something.
“What is it?” I asked one of my friends. “What are you looking at me like that for? What’s happened?”
“You should know,” she said, then shrugged and looked down at the ground. Then a group of boys started giggling and chanting my dad’s name.
“Tony Booth, Tony Booth, Tony Booth!”
Even though he hadn’t lived in Crosby for years, everyone knew who my father was. He was on the telly!
And then it all came out: the Crosby Herald was published on Friday, but the first edition appeared the night before, and that week, on the announcements page, top of the list, was the following:
BOOTH, Anthony, late of 15 Ferndale Road, Waterloo, and Julie née Allan proudly announce the arrival at the London Clinic of their daughter Jenia, a half sister for Cherie and Lindsay.
We had no idea. Mum had no idea. Grandma had no idea. Crosby had no idea.
It had generally been accepted in the family that my father had abandoned us, and by then Mum knew he was seeing someone else: she was even considering giving him a divorce. But when the new woman, Julie Allan, decided to force her hand with this announcement, it backfired spectacularly. Divorce was the one thing Mum could withhold.
It is difficult to overestimate the humiliation — to my mother, to his mother, and, of course, to his children. This was 1963, in the heart of Catholic Liverpool. People didn’t get divorced, or if they did, they didn’t talk about it. Girls who had the misfortune to get pregnant were sent away to convents to have their babies, who were then offered for adoption. As for “single parent,” it was a term that hadn’t yet been invented. To broadcast your sins to the world by placing an announcement in the local paper which everybody would read was a crime against society, against the church, and against everything any decent-minded person stood for.
And he hadn’t even spelled Lyndsey’s name right.