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‘This Old House’ - 69 Bishopton Road

Number 69 Bishopton Road was a big, draughty, end-of-terrace house. There was a song around in the fifties called ‘This Old House’, with lyrics like, ‘Ain’t got time to fix the windows, ain’t got time to fix the floors.’ Whenever it was played on the radio my mother sang along with such gusto and empathy that as a small child, whose universe began and ended at our back gate, I presumed that it was being sung specifically about our house.

Similarly once, whilst I was watching Watch with Mother on my own, aged about three, a kindly lady sat there holding a teddy bear and waving its paw straight at the camera, saying, ‘Look, Teddy, there is a little girl watching us and she’s got a teddy just like you!’ I was off that sofa and into the kitchen before you could say Andy Pandy, screaming at my mother that the lady on television could not only see me but she had spoken to me and she knew about Teddy as well, and there might be a damp patch on the sofa; but that was Teddy, not me. My mother simply replied mysteriously, ‘Don’t listen to Grandma.’ It was only when I asked my father why, when there were Tom cats, were there not any Kev cats, and he explained that Tom cats were not named after my older brother, that it began to dawn on me that the sun didn’t shine out of my arse.

At the far end of Smethwick’s Bishopton Road, about two hundred yards down, was Lightwoods Park, right on the border of Bearwood, which is part of the Black Country around Birmingham. As a child I was forbidden to go to the park unaccompanied because of ‘strange men’, the park keeper himself being quite possibly one of the strangest. Lightwoods Park, which covered about ten acres, had a bandstand with a large, domed roof, kept aloft by several spindly-looking, wrought-iron pillars, whose top-heavy nature sent my brother Tommy into a panic when he was small, with tearful claims that it was ‘Too big up there’. There were a set of swings, a couple of roundabouts, a see-saw and a defunct witch’s hat. This last was a conical roundabout in the shape of a witch’s hat, the top of which was balanced on top of a tall pole and, because of this shape, it not only went round but veered crazily up and down as well as from side to side. Next to this play area was the pond, about an acre of water, upon which people sailed their model boats and suchlike, whilst in hot weather it became a muddy soup of children and dogs, paddling and swimming. At the edge of the park stood (and still stands) Lightwoods House, built in 1791 for Jonathan Grundy, a Leicestershire maltster. It was eventually donated to Birmingham City Council in a philanthropic act by Alexander Macomb Chance, one of the Chance glass-making family of Spon Lane, Smethwick. In my day it had been downgraded to a caf’ where teas, ices and suchlike could be bought.

Never were my mother’s warnings to keep out of the park fiercer than during the summer holidays when the annual funfair came for a week. I found the smell of hot dogs, diesel and candyfloss, the garish colours, the loud pop music, half drowned out by the noise of generators, totally alluring, and I loved rides like the dodgems and the bumping cars where swarthy, muscle-bound young men, in dirty jeans and covered in tattoos, would take your money and jump on the back of your car, or better still on the waltzers, where the more you screamed the faster they would whip your car around. The fairground was always full of groups of adolescent girls careering drunkenly about in a whirl of light-headed hysteria and something closely akin to post-coital relief. According to my mother, ‘The fair attracted the wrong sort and no decent girl would be interested in boys like these; they were low types from God knows where,’ and were to be kept away from. Needless to say I went every year, mostly avoiding being found out. The fairground boys - the waltzer boy in particular, so poignantly described in Victoria Wood’s song ‘I Want to be Fourteen Again’, ‘The coloured lights reflected in the Brylcreem in his hair’ - played leading roles in an early fantasy of mine about living in a caravan, working on a stall involving goldfish and smelling of petrol.

Our end of the street formed the junction with Long Hyde Road. Only about a hundred metres long, it was short and there were rarely more than two or three cars parked in it at a time, one of them being my father’s, when it was not parked in the garage at the back. Dad always owned a car except for when he first started his business, when he pushed around from job to job a wooden handcart laden with ladders and tools. On the side it had THOS. WALTERS Ltd, builders and decorators and the address, painted by a signwriter. This, however, was before I was born. The first car I remember was in fact a small, bright-yellow van, which my father referred to as Sally.

Sally had no side windows at the back, just two little square ones, one in each of the back doors, and so her rear end consisted of a fairly dark space that was always full of tools, paint, bits of wood and the odd paint-spattered rag: the general requisites and detritus of my father’s work life. Yet if we went out in Sally as a family, she would be transformed; Dad would shift everything out of the back and sling in an old bus seat for my brothers and me to sit on. I can see it now and not only see it but feel it. It had a silky, soft pile if you ran your hand one way across it, although this became quite uncomfortably rough and prickly if you had the misfortune to run it the other way. It had an abstract, jazzy, brown and green pattern against a dull, beige background and the whole thing was edged in creased brown leather. This bit of ‘necessity being the mother of invention’ thinking on my father’s part worked really well unless we had to stop suddenly for any reason, such as at a traffic light or a pelican crossing or when arriving home again. The seat, having no support at the back of it, would abruptly tip over backwards, sending all of us sprawling into a chaotic backward roll. So any journey would mainly be spent scrambling about in the semi-darkness, getting the seat upright again just in time for the three of us with a mighty, united scream of ‘Daaaaaaaad!’ to be sent flying once more. In fact every journey ended like this as we pulled up outside the house, accompanied by my grandmother’s declaration, if she was with us, of ‘We’ve landed!’

Sally was eventually replaced by a far superior and very ‘modern’ Ford Esquire estate. It was a sedate grey colour and its main advantage was that the estate bit at the back served as extra passenger space for small persons when the car was at capacity. Of course this was long before seatbelt laws and would be illegal today. The small person was inevitably me and it meant that not only could I travel staring out of the back window at the car behind, possibly making faces or breathing on the glass and writing fascinating back-to-front messages, like ‘ylimaf neila na yb detcudba gnieb ma I !!pleH’ for the driver behind to ignore, but I could also avoid being poked or teased by my brothers.

The other advantage of this new acquisition was that it soon became clear that Dermot Boyle, the boy who lived opposite, with whom I played on a regular basis, was envious. As may be obvious from the name, the Boyles were an Irish family. Mr Boyle was a builder’s labourer who came from Kerry and, as my dad would say, liked a drink. He had very red, permanently wet lips that appeared to work independently of the rest of his face and, indeed, independently of anything that he might happen to be saying. They flopped around clumsily, an impediment to the words that came pouring through them in unintelligible strings. These were buoyed up on clouds of alcoholic breath and always accompanied by blizzards of spit. The whole thing was pretty hard to avoid for, once buttonholed, Mr Boyle would always address a person no more than three inches from their face, due to his poor eyesight. He was severely short-sighted, which meant he was forced to wear glasses with lenses so thick that it was like looking down a couple of telescopes the wrong way, his eyes becoming tiny, blue, distant dots. We often stood giggling at the upstairs window, behind the nets, watching Pat Boyle wobble up the street on his pushbike and stand swaying for a good ten minutes, trying to get his key in the front door lock, his face jammed right up against it. Then, eventually, the door would be opened by the long-suffering Mrs Boyle and Pat, with key still in hand poised to slip it into the lock, would go lurching forward like a pantomime drunk, Mrs B berating him as he stumbled in. The irony of the whole Boyle saga was that Mrs Boyle, who never took a drink in her life, died of liver cancer and Mr Boyle, who was rarely sober as far as I know, died of natural causes.

I am ashamed to say that I exploited Dermot’s envy of our car to the maximum and with relish. If he happened to be out playing on the street by himself, and the car was appropriately parked, I would sit provocatively on the front bumper, caressing its shiny chrome with one hand, the other stretched backwards across the bonnet, occasionally fingering the Ford insignia, one leg crossed over the other, swinging my foot nonchalantly back and forth, chatting inanely on whilst secretly clocking Dermot’s reaction. He would sit on the kerb by the side of the road, usually eating a piece of his mother’s home-made cake, squirming and covering his eyes. At last he would run off, mid-conversation, down the entry that led round to the back of his house, shouting ‘Stop it!’ and spraying cake crumbs, as he went.

A couple of years later we went up several rungs on the status-symbol ladder of car ownership, acquiring a two-tone Vauxhall Victor estate, in green and cream. I couldn’t wait to torment Dermot with it. In fact my father had hardly got out of the front seat after bringing it home than I was draped across its warm bonnet, in true motor-show fashion, while the hapless Dermot, caught innocently chalking on the pavement opposite, tried not to look, his bottom lip thrust out and his face turning cherry red in an attempt to control his rage. My father never ever told me off, but that day, on his way into the house, he wheeled round when he realised what was going on and shouted, ‘Wharaya doin’? Gerroff, ya daft cat, you’ll scratch the paint-work! ’ Whereupon, out of the blue, like a missive from the gods, a bird shat on the bonnet right next to me, splattering the fingers of my left hand. ‘Now, look! Come on, gerroff!’

I jumped down and ran into the house, feeling vaguely ashamed of the excrement as if it were my own, while Dad whipped out an old handkerchief from his pocket and began to lovingly wipe the bonnet clean. I guess Dermot and I were even stevens after that and years later, on a visit home, I remember asking my mother to whom the flash car belonged that was parked opposite. I think it was an immaculately kept Cortina but can’t be sure of the make, only that it was extremely shiny, with a bigger aerial than most and enough headlamps for several cars. ‘Oh, Dermot is home to stay.’ And I felt my own little dart of envy; I wasn’t to pass my driving test until I was thirty-seven.

It was here on Long Hyde Road, which ran along the side of our house, that during daylight hours and sometimes later, weather and school permitting, I would spend my time playing with any neighbourhood children who happened to be around. My first crush developed here when I was about five. Or, perhaps more accurately, I experienced my first feelings of loss. I’d been playing regularly with a boy called Robert, who had pale blond hair and lived on the far corner of Long Hyde Road. Suddenly he was going away; the family were moving house. He stood there, I can see him now, eating a piece of bread and butter, or a piece as we called it, whilst kicking the bottom of the garden wall opposite as he broke the news. I remember him not looking at me as he spoke and then running off, leaving four little crescent-shaped crusts on the top of the wall. Somehow it was the sight of those crusts that sparked off the grief of this separation. I picked one up and ate it, but couldn’t continue to eat the others as the damp edges where his lips and teeth had touched it brought a lump to my throat. I kept the other three pieces in one of my father’s old Senior Service cigarette packets until they dried out and went a bluish-green colour. I don’t remember much else about this boy’s family, except the reporting some years later of the death of Robert’s older brother whom I never really knew. He was killed in a climbing accident on Snowdon. And again the image of the small blond head with the blurred face, the foot kicking against the wall and the sweet taste of those damp crusts, slid into my head like a frame of film, as it has continued to do on the odd occasion ever since.

Long Hyde Road was almost permanently marked out with white chalk for rounders or hopscotch, and a couple of times the whole length of the pavement, a good hundred yards, was marked out into four wobbly lanes for an athletics tournament organised by my brothers. Tommy and Kevin, at least in my eyes, were the cocks of the neighbourhood, heroes who made other boys look pitiably inadequate. To say I was proud of them could not be more of an understatement. It was unimaginable to me that anyone could possibly be cleverer or stronger or wittier or braver. They were the very best at everything and I as their little sister basked not only in their glory but also in their protection. They were knights in shining armour. This is best illustrated in an incident that occurred when I was about seven.

There was a boy in the next street who, whenever I walked past his house, would leap out and attack me with his big, black-and-chrome plastic space gun. He would hold me there for what seemed like hours but was probably about twenty minutes or so, his great, long gun pinning my chest to the wall while my head and shoulders were stuck uncomfortably in the privet hedge above. On some occasions he was accompanied by Benji, the family boxer dog, which he would whip up into a frenzy so that it would leap about, whites of eyes flashing and long, jellied globules of saliva stretching and swinging from its jaws. He would then pat my shoulders so that the thing would jump up at me, its pink shiny willy out and fully ready for action and then, with an onslaught of slimy licks and fetid, wheezy breaths, it would attempt to mount me. It was rape by proxy. Needless to say I would walk miles out of my way to avoid this awful boy and his oversexed dog but one day, mistakenly thinking he was on holiday and that it was safe, I got caught again. It was a particularly lengthy session and, arriving home upset, I blurted out to my older brother Tommy what had happened. Within minutes, so legend would have it, he went round to the child’s house and not only soundly thrashed him but did so in front of his astonished parents. The boy never came near me again.

Our house was north-facing and we didn’t get central heating until 1963. Climbing the stairs to go to bed at night was often likened to scaling the north face of the Eiger, and ice on the inside of the bedroom windows was usual throughout the winter. On the coldest nights my parents would simply pile the beds with coats and the resulting weight would make turning over in bed a feat of strength that just wasn’t worth the effort. This, of course, meant that the seat nearest the fire in the kitchen was fiercely fought over by the three of us and, once won, it would be given up only for the direst of emergencies. I remember my brother Tommy managing to stay put for a record-breaking length of time, eventually jumping up with a howl of expletives to find that his wellington boot had melted with the heat and had welded itself on to his leg. He still bears the scars.

The house was on three storeys and there were three doors to get into it: the front door, which was rarely ever used, the middle door and the back door. The front door opened on to an oddly shaped hallway, one wall of which was almost all window. This was because the previous owner had an electrical shop and had built the hall on to display his radios. There were two doors off it, one leading into the front room, which was my father’s office. It smelt of tobacco and ink and him, and in the corner was his big roll-top desk, from which he ran his building and decorating business. It also contained the piano, upon which he could vamp anything by ear, and upon which I wrote hundreds of songs, all sounding very similar and which I sang at the top of my voice, over and over again, with my foot hard down on the loud pedal, hoping distantly that someone would say, ‘My God, that’s brilliant!’ instead of ‘For Christ’s sake, shut up! Your voice is so piercing!’ or my mother’s warning anthem of ‘Shut up or I’ll crucify you!’ which tended to persuade me to stop.

The other door led to the sitting room, which held the television. We were one of the first houses in our road to have one and on important occasions like the Grand National, the Cup Final or the Queen’s Speech, various neighbours would be invited in to watch. It was a similar story with the telephone, which was also in this room. Most people hadn’t got one and so if there was an urgent need for a neighbour to contact someone, they would come round and use ours, always offering to pay. This would invariably result in the same scenario: my mother and one of her friends sitting at the kitchen table with cups of tea, pushing a couple of a coppers back and forth, with ‘No! No! I couldn’t take it from you!’ and ‘Yes! Now don’t be silly, Mary, just take it!’ This could go on for up to half an hour, broken every so often by little flurries of gossip and then taken up again with renewed vigour: ‘NO, no, I won’t hear of it!’ and ‘Yes! Yes, or I will never ask again!’ until eventually and with much tutting my mother gave in.

However, the most important feature of the sitting room was the three-piece suite with its sofa, the back of which was the perfect height for saddling and mounting. Most nights after school I would jump on its back and go for a hack: my school satchel the saddle, its strap the bridle. I can remember a teacher once asking me why some of my exercise books seemed to be bent in such a peculiar way. ‘Have you been sitting on them?’ I went red, inwardly horrified that someone might have a clue to my after-school, imaginary life on the range, and said that I thought the leather of my satchel had a natural warp in it, a bit like wood. After this incident I made sure my satchel was empty before saddling up. In my imagination I was the boy from Champion the Wonder Horse, trekking across the prairie and then sitting down to beans and coffee with the folks from Wagon Train. Eventually it was necessary for me to become the twin sister of the boy from Champion the Wonder Horse, when, after he rescued me from the Indians I married Flint McCullough, the scout from Wagon Train, with whom I had been in love for many years.

It was on this sofa that my addiction to Coronation Street started back in December 1960, watching the first episode with my mother. I am slightly ashamed to say that when my own daughter was born and I brought her home, that very evening I was sitting in front of the television, holding her, and when the theme for Corrie came on she turned her little, week-old head around towards the television in what was obviously recognition. She remembered it from the womb, where hearing is the first sense to be developed. Sitting watching TV with my mother was a rare occurrence, her television viewing being confined to the Saturday-night variety show of the time and Sunday Night at the London Palladium. It was on that sofa that I would lie on a Saturday afternoon, the curtains drawn, watching the afternoon film. They were generally films from the thirties and forties, with Bette Davis being my favourite. I loved her in absolutely anything, although the ones that instantly come to mind are Now Voyager, Jezebel and All About Eve. She was unique; there was an exciting, un-Hollywoodish reality and lack of vanity in her performances, and she always played strong women who had to be reckoned with, who were not there simply to function as a fantasy to attract and please men. Now occasionally on a Saturday when no one is in, I try to re-create the Saturday afternoon of my childhood, the curtains closed, lying on the sofa with toast and jam, hoping that Bette will appear, brave and insolent, brazenly cutting a swathe through life, but more often than not finding that, although there are many more channels nowadays, the options are disappointing.

I can still feel the rough, bobbly texture of that sofa with its maroon and grey upholstery, and smell its musty, ubiquitous aroma of stale tobacco and the unique essence that was us, as it warmed up on a winter’s night in front of the four-bar, Magicoal electric fire. We were allowed to have this on, and just the two bars only, if the weather was really cold; anything warmer than arctic and my mother’s voice would shoot up an octave, reaching a note she reserved solely to register panic and shock at the thought of an upcoming, potentially colossal bill. Her ancient and irrational fear of being without and in debt, and her resultant husbandry to the extent that she would walk several miles to save a halfpenny on a pound of carrots - meant that no bill ever went unpaid. In the latter part of her life the penny-pinching took a slightly different turn when she took to regularly trawling through the local charity shops, filling her wardrobe and drawers with tons of musty-smelling, second-hand clothes, most of which she never wore. She would often turn up on a visit to London, well into the 1980s, dressed from head to foot for a seventies night: in jackets with huge, pointy collars and blouses with Laura Ashley prints, all with the same stale aroma.

The door leading out of the sitting room opened on to a little hall, on the left of which, down a couple of stone steps, was the pantry. It was a small dark room under the stairs, cool even in summer, with shelves laden with tinned food, a constant supply of my mother’s rock cakes and, on the floor, a huge basket full of clean, unironed laundry. I loved my mother’s rock cakes but their springy texture was the endless butt of jokes. I can remember my father up a ladder, mending a hole in the roof and shouting down to me in the garden, ‘Oh blimey! Hand us up one of your mother’s rock cakes.’ Or when the back door kept banging in the wind, my father suggesting that we shove one of Mum’s cakes underneath it. Once, my brother Kevin and I decided to put their robust quality to the test by playing a game of cricket with one. It lasted for several overs before the first currants began to work loose and it wasn’t until my brother hit a whacking great six that it finally disintegrated into a cloud of crumbs.

The reason that the pantry is so significant is that it was brilliant for pretending to be Mrs Waller, who ran a small grocery shop over the road. Mrs Waller was a queen amongst shopkeepers; she didn’t so much run the corner shop as reign over it. A handsome woman in a pristine, pink, nylon overall that shushed every time she moved, she had beautifully waved, honey-blonde hair and perfect make-up. If there was ever more than one customer in at a time she would throw her head back, as if for all the world she was about to sing an aria, and call, ‘Trevaaaaar!’ Trevor was her shy, rather awkward, teenage son with whom she appeared to be endlessly impatient and disgruntled. If Trevaaar was not available her husband would be summoned. A quiet, bespectacled, careworn man would appear through the multi-coloured plastic strips of curtain that hung across the doorway and stand there, mutely, often unwittingly wearing a few of the said strips draped over his head and shoulders, like an Indian chief’s headdress. Then without deigning even to look at him, she would bark instructions: ‘Mrs Jordan’s ham, please.’ The men in Mrs Waller’s life were a burdensome source of regret to her and she had a particular tone of voice reserved only for them. It was strident, posh and imperious and every syllable screamed, ‘I am too good for you and I’m here only under sufferance!’ But when I walked into the shop, her face would lift into a pretty pink smile and I would have penny bars of chocolate and twopenny chews thrust into my hand, along with whatever purchase I had been sent there to get. Poor Trevor! If only he’d been a Tina.

I would spend hours in the pantry, by myself, serving shopful after shopful of customers whilst acting out the Waller family drama, except that the Trevor in my fantasy grew into a bit of a hunk, so much so that he couldn’t possibly be called Trevor any longer and I was forced to change his name to Tony, at which point we became husband and wife. This could not, in any sense, be construed as bigamous, as the scout from Wagon Train operated in an entirely different universe to the one Tony and I inhabited in the pantry.

It was in the pantry, some years after I had left home, that I mysteriously came across a copy of the Kama Sutra whilst looking for a clean towel in the laundry basket. It was hidden in the washing. I felt uncomfortable and a little shocked at the find. Where on earth had my mother got it? Surely she wasn’t attempting any of these Olympian postures herself and, if so, who with? My father had died some time back. I never did find out and in some ways I’m grateful for that but it did go partway to explaining something that my mother had said a little while before the discovery. We were sitting in the kitchen, discussing the new husband of a friend of hers, when she suddenly announced in a rather baffled but thoughtful voice, ‘I don’t think your father was very good at sex.’ End of conversation.

Next to the pantry were the stairs, which like the little hall itself were covered with the same brown carpet, enlivened by a small, abstract motif in black that was repeated at regular intervals. Not long after my father had laid this carpet, my mother and I went into Freeman, Hardy & Willis on the Bearwood Road to buy me a new pair of shoes and there it was, our new carpet, all over the shop!

‘Mum, I—’

That’s as far as I got. I was dragged outside, my arm only just remaining in its socket and my mother’s hot, urgent breath steaming up my ear, her voice like something from The Exorcist : ‘Don’t mention the carpet!’ My father was the shopfitter for Freeman, Hardy & Willis.

At eighteen months I had trodden on my nightdress whilst going up these stairs to bed and put a tooth through my lip, which still sports a tiny hairline scar today. These stairs were where I had tested my mettle by jumping down, first two, then three, then four and five steps at a time. They were where, on dark nights, heart pounding, I had shouted endless ‘Goodnights’ to my parents, stopping each time to wait for the comfort of their reply, and where I sang nonsense lyrics to made-up songs as loud as I could so that any menace hiding behind the dark crack of a door or waiting to pounce on the other side of a billowing curtain would know how unafraid I was. They were also where I prepared for a possible career in bus conducting, charging up and down them wearing my father’s old Box Brownie as a ticket machine and a shoulder bag of my mother’s for the money. I wanted to wear that fitted, black, military-style trouser suit they all wore; I wanted to chew gum, stink of cigarettes and jingle with money as I leapt, gazelle-like, up and down the bus stairs, shouting ‘No room on top! Fares, please!’ I wanted to wear that ticket machine slung low across my hip, discharging tickets with expert ease and issuing that gorgeous metallic sound that almost made my mouth water. My conductress would wear loads of make-up and have lashings of lustrous, black hair, and she would always be accompanied by the same bus driver who would bear an uncanny resemblance to the scout from Wagon Train.

Opposite the pantry and the stairs was the middle floor; this opened at the side of the house on to the garden, which ran around to the back of the house. The middle door was also opposite the back gate, which in turn opened out on to Long Hyde Road, and it was where everyone who knew us called; only strangers knocked at the front door. It was at the middle door that the milk was delivered and where the milkman called for payment of his bill every Saturday, his milk cart being pulled by a big brown and white horse. My mother would shout, ‘Get out there with a bucket and shovel, the milkman’s coming’ then she would keep watch from an upstairs window and shout, ‘Too late, SHE’S got it!’ thus referring to a neighbour who was already scooping the steaming heap of horse dung into her own bucket with a satisfied smirk. There was talk at one time of a small boy, a few streets away, who stuck a straw up the horse’s nose, resulting in the poor creature rearing up on to its hind legs, which caused the cart to overturn, smashing every single bottle, both full and empty, to smithereens.

Our coal was also delivered by a horse-drawn cart. Mr Charlton of Charlton Brothers, Coal Merchants, would call at the middle door throughout the winter for his money, after lumbering up the garden path, followed by a couple of his minions, to the coalhouse, each with a hundredweight sack of coal on his back. He would dump his load, the larger pieces of which - and some were a couple of feet in diameter - were smashed up by my father using a sledgehammer, then march silently back to the lorry for the next one. He was an almost Dickensian figure, sporting a nautical-looking black cap, shiny with grease, that was pushed back at a jaunty angle on his head, and a thick black jerkin that looked like leather. On his feet were a pair of huge hobnailed boots, dulled from layers of coal dust, and the bottom of each trouser leg was tied with a piece of filthy string. He was completely black from head to toe, while his face was like an amateur actor’s, blacked up to play Othello. The only bits that escaped were two pink crescents, one behind each ear, his pale-grey eyes, made dazzling by their smudgy black surround, and his pure-white hair. This last was only visible when, in a gentlemanly gesture, he would remove his hat to receive payment of his bill. Our coal fires were eventually replaced by gas ones in the mid-sixties and, although they were far more convenient with their instant heat, for me they could never replace the bright, ever-changing energy and cosiness of a real fire, nor the sense of achievement that I still feel today from getting a fire blazing away in the grate.

Next to the middle door was the door to the kitchen. This was the room in which we mainly lived, as a family. My earliest memories are of this room; of clambering out of my pram, down on to a sofa, which the pram was parked next to, and finding Nelly, our black and white cat, in fighting form, buried beneath copies of the Daily Mirror and the Reveille, the latter probably being the equivalent of the Daily Star. One of the few times I saw my mother cry - apart from after the conversation about her stillborn daughter, at the death of her own mother and finally the death of my father - was when Nelly died of cancer. I suppose you’d call it breast cancer, as it first appeared as a swelling in one of her teats. She was at least twenty years old, but no one could be quite sure as she was already adult when she turned up out of nowhere and muscled her way in at number 69, ejecting the then resident and cowardly tomcat in the process. During her twenty-year reign with us she had over a hundred kittens, mostly delivered in the bottom drawer of my mother’s dressing table. Mum, cooing like a proud grandmother, fed any weaklings with an eardropper full of warm milk. There were times, when the births were at their most prolific, that the kittens would disappear soon after delivery and it was announced that Nelly had suffocated them by accidentally sitting on them, but I remember furtive conversations in the scullery, and my father coming in from outside with an empty bucket, and my brother Kevin getting it slightly wrong and telling me that Dad had flushed the kittens down the toilet. It was never discussed.

Nelly wasn’t an affectionate cat that would snuggle up, purring, on your lap. On the contrary, too much stroking and the claws would be out like a flash and the old yellow teeth would be sunk into a girl’s hand before you had time to say ‘lethal injection’. When I was a child my hands and arms were permanently striped from Nelly’s bad-tempered lashings, but Mum adored her and reserved a special voice with which to address her. It was high pitched and squeaky with delight, framed in a language all of its own and warm with affection that none of us could ever hope to excite.

As an adult I myself developed relationships, mainly with pet dogs, of a similar nature to the one my mother had with Nelly, although in my case they were often to the detriment of whatever relationship I was in at the time. ‘No, not the baby talk, pleeeeease!’ has been quite a common cry in my various households over the years. One day about eight or nine years back, a visiting friend overheard me talking to our Cairn terrier in my ‘special language’, which was barely intelligible to an outsider and would just bubble up out of me on a wave of elation, with no thought involved whatsoever. Full of strange Brummyisms and speech impediments, it was performed in what was to my ear the tiny voice of a child. ‘Comala Babala Momola, ’er wants a bit of lubbin’ is an example. My friend stared at me aghast and then said, ‘How does Grant put up with that?’

I said, ‘Well, he didn’t for a long time but now he’s just given in.’

She replied, ‘You do know this is your sickness, don’t you?’

‘What do you mean?’

And she told me that this was the lavishing of the love and affection that I myself missed out on as an infant. There seems to be a grain of truth in this because one of the constant phrases that comes up in these streams of consciousness that the poor dog is subjected to is, ‘Love the baby . . . love the baby . . .’

Once, whilst standing in the queue for the checkout at the supermarket, I heard my daughter, who had engaged a complete stranger in conversation, say that her sister ‘was a dog’, to which the woman replied, ‘Oh, you mustn’t talk about your sister like that.’ Maisie answered, ‘No, she is a dog.’ I felt slightly ashamed of this and later felt compelled to explain to Maisie that no dog could ever begin to rival her in my affections and that I didn’t see her in the same light as the dog at all. She replied, ‘No, I know, well, I should think not, I don’t go around sniffing strangers’ bottoms in the street, do I?’

Strangely, the kitchen was not a kitchen at all. The real kitchen, which was called the scullery, was a tiny room next to it. The ‘kitchen’ was a smallish room; with the sofa now long gone, it was crowded with three easy chairs, one of which, of course, was Grandma’s, their thin foam cushions usually balanced on top of a heap of newspapers that had been stuffed underneath, an attempt at tidying up. There was a large Singer sewing machine on elaborate, wrought-iron legs, upon which our mother made all the curtains as well as a lot of our and her own clothes. In one corner stood a large kitchen cabinet with a flap that dropped down on which we made golden syrup or jam sandwiches when we came in from school, and in the other corner was a big, old-fashioned radio.

This was of great fascination with its list of exotic-sounding locations like Luxembourg, Lisbon, Hilversum, all printed on a little rectangle of glass on its front that lit up when it was switched on. I loved turning the tuning dial and being plunged into some fuzzy foreign world called Hamburg or Bordeaux, to catch scratchy, distant voices speaking in unintelligible tongues that came and went, as if on the wind. It was a link with far-flung places and yet it was safe and cosy with its walnut fascia and its warm, yellow glow. It was a comfort to hear its familiar drone from other parts of the house. It meant that you were not alone, that life was being lived, and the velutinous voices of the BBC Light Programme or the music from the likes of Whistle While You Work promised that somehow, somewhere, we were in safe hands. The first sound of the day, as I lay in bed, was invariably the low drone of the shipping forecast vibrating up through the floorboards as my mother got ready for work. On Sundays our lunch, or dinner as it was called, was eaten to The Navy Lark, Round the Horne, Beyond Our Ken and Hancock’s Half Hour. We took our meals around the Formica-topped table that was stuck snugly into the bay window, but as we grew older we simply collected our plates and took them off to eat elsewhere, watching television or doing homework, leaving my poor mother, who had invariably cooked the food, to eat by herself, as my father always came in much later. She never complained and was probably glad to be left in peace. My sister-in-law tells of how she came round to be introduced to the family for the first time and to have tea with us. She says that once the meal had been served up suddenly there was no one in the room but herself and my mother and, with my mother nipping in and out of the kitchen, she virtually ate alone.

The real kitchen, the scullery, was where as small children we stood in the big, old Belfast sink and washed. Water would have to be boiled up on the gas stove as there wasn’t a hot tap. It was where my father shaved. I would stand on a little table next to him so that I could watch at close quarters the very pleasing process of shaving foam and bristles being removed in sharp smooth tracts, revealing the weathered hollow that went from cheekbone to jaw. I can still smell the soap and I cannot deny that to this day a whiff of Old Spice does cause a distant thrill. It was where my mother did her nightly ablutions, shouting high-pitched warnings not to come in as she crouched over a washing-up bowl on the floor, and it was generally where we all washed and brushed our teeth.

The bathroom upstairs was used only once a week when the immersion heater was put on for the briefest possible time, closely monitored by my mother; otherwise it offered no hot water and was a room in which from November through to May you could see your breath. Lying in a hot bath during these months meant lying shrouded in steam so thick and opaque that you could barely make out the taps at the other end. However, once a week, it was an oasis of isolation. Unlike today, when it seems that most children’s bedrooms are a haven of warmth and privacy, furnished with both a computer and a television, when I was growing up the bedroom, its hypothermic temperatures aside, was purely for undressing (in winter, pretty quickly), sleeping and dressing again. It never occurred to anyone then that people might ‘need their space’. So apart from the lavatory, where there was always the threat of someone banging on the door, wanting to get in, the only other room with a lock was the bathroom. Once ensconced in the warmth of the water, the clouds of white steam softening and for the most part concealing, albeit only briefly, the cold, functional and often messy nature of the room, a girl could be transported for at least half an hour. With its echoey acoustic, a girl could all but fall in love with her own voice and hone to near perfection her impersonations of the likes of Sandie Shaw (‘Always Something There to Remind Me’), the Ronettes (‘Be My Baby’) and the Supremes (‘Baby Love’). And then, of course, the water would become tepid and the steam would turn to condensation. I can recall the mild pall of disappointment that would descend as the bleak old bathroom would gradually reveal itself out of the mist. It was lying in this bath, aged eighteen, knowing I was to embark on a nursing course in a matter of weeks, that I felt safe enough, under cover of the hot tap running at full tilt, to say, in a small voice to the palm of my hand, held very close to my mouth, ‘I want to be an actress.’ Words I had never spoken before. To anyone.

The scullery led in turn on to a sort of outhouse extension, which was called ‘the back place’. In the corner there was a drain and there was always a smell of soapsuds in the air from the seemingly endless rounds of washing and washing up. In winter it also smelt of geraniums and coal dust, whilst in the summer the soapy freshness of the drain often turned a tad fetid. It was built on before our time to incorporate the coalhouse and the outside toilet, the latter often being referred to by my brother Kevin, for some unfathomable reason, as the Lah Pom. I preferred the upstairs toilet and rarely used the Lah Pom as it was often home to at least a couple of large house spiders. I was terrified of the creatures. These days, having lived in the country for many years, I am less so, but back then and well into my twenties and thirties I could not bear to even look at a picture of one, let alone be in the same room.

This is amply illustrated by an incident in 1979, when I was working on a play at the Hampstead Theatre Club and was renting a basement flat from a friend. One evening I went to run a bath only to find a spider the size of a Bentley attempting to climb up the side of it, in order to get out. After letting out an unstoppable scream and trying, without looking at it, to flush it down the plughole from whence it came followed by an unsuccessful attempt to enlist the help of a neighbour, I ended up phoning the director of the play I was doing and asking whether he would be so kind as to come and get rid of it, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to sleep that night, never mind take a bath. After coming some way across town, and with much ribbing and hilarity, Mike Leigh humanely disposed of the thing and then went back to finish his tea.

The back place acted as an overflow to my father’s garage, and it was here that, on coming in late at night as a teenager, I would reach up and blindly scrabble about on a dusty old shelf - amongst a jumble of plumbing items, heaps of tools, my mother’s geranium pots, a selection of old shoes and anything else that people saw fit to sling up there - in order to find the key to the middle door and let myself in. It was also home to a succession of pet rodents that I kept when aged about eleven and where I attempted to breed a couple of my best mice for business purposes. I pinned an advert on to the garage door for passers-by to peruse. It read: FOR SALE, ATTRACTIVE DOMESTICATED BABY MICE, TWO SHILLINGS EACH, OR TWO FOR THREE AND ELEVEN, PLEASE APPLY AT GATE ROUND CORNER. The breeding programme went rather better than I had anticipated and within a couple of weeks there were eight or nine tiny brown mice, no bigger than a thumbnail but able to jump at least three or four inches in the air. Before I could separate them they had bred and bred again. I remember only one small girl and her friend calling at the middle door and enquiring about the mice. However, when they clapped eyes on them they wanted a reduction in price, claiming, ‘They’m brown! They ent proper pet mice. Pet mice am white.’

‘Yes they are. Pet mice can be any colour.’

‘No they cor. I bet ya caught them in your house. I’ll tek two for a bob.’

Needless to say there was no sale. I then became increasingly desperate as their numbers grew and soon the advert was changed to: FOR SALE, ATTRACTIVE DOMESTICATED BABY MICE. TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE, A SHILLING A THROW. APPLY THROUGH GATE AT SIDE. But no one did and to add insult to injury people kept crossing out bits of my advert to alter the meaning. We had: FOR SALE, ATTRACTIVE DOMESTICATED BABY MICE, A SHILLING TO THROW THROUGH GATE AT SIDE. Another was: FOR SALE, ATTRACTIVE DOMESTICATED BABY, A SHILLING, or we will THROW THROUGH GATE AT SIDE.

Finally I came down one morning to find that the babies, whose multiplication was now way out of control, had eaten an escape route out of the little wooden box in which they were being kept, presumably because of overcrowding, and had disappeared into a very convenient, tangled heap of assorted piping that my father had dumped on the shelf next to them. Despite my not inconsiderable attempts to capture the little creatures - time after time, blocking both ends of a pipe, only to find that there was another pipe leading off it, out of which they had escaped - I managed to catch only two or three. For years whenever we went out into the back place there was the sound of tiny scurrying feet across the stone floor or up over the wooden shelving.

Upstairs, there were three bedrooms. My parents’ room was at the front corner of the house and it looked down on to both Bishopton and Long Hyde Road. In the corner stood a large, mahogany wardrobe where our Christmas presents were hidden every year, so a quick recce in about the third week of December would usually give the game away. It was where I came across my beloved red and yellow scooter, upon which for years I went everywhere. Most people eventually graduated to bicycles but I was not allowed one as my mother thought they were ‘death traps’. I think if I were young today I would definitely be one of those kids hanging round city centres with the crotch of my jeans dangling at mid-calf, a good three inches of bum cleavage showing at the top, and a skateboard permanently welded to my person.

My parents slept in a creaky old bed with a dark, walnut headboard and it was into this that I would creep every Saturday morning, once my mother had gone out, to cuddle up to my dad and, much to his annoyance, check his back for spots. On several occasions, seeing him get out of bed, I thought I had caught a glimpse through the flies of his pyjamas of something odd hanging around his nether regions. I subsequently asked my mother whether he was ‘the same as me down below’ because it certainly didn’t look like it and this needed clarification. She instantly looked away and, with what seemed like not a little irritation and impatience, but what I now see as total embarrassment, she said, ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes . . . Yes.’ I thought the yeses were never going to stop and, in my innocence, regarded them as simply an expression of absolute confirmation. You can therefore imagine my surprise when, around the same time as this odd little conversation, I came across my brothers playing about in the bedroom before getting dressed one morning. They were in fits of laughter, having put elastic bands on their willies. In complete confusion, I could only deduce from this that the willy detached itself and fell off at some point before boys grew into men and that perhaps the elastic band had something to do with it. This conundrum took a while to clear up; in fact, I remember fiercely debating and defending this theory with several of my contemporaries, thinking how out of the loop and uninformed they were.

It was under my parents’ bed, aged about eight, that I found what looked like a kind of greasy, deflated balloon. I could see from its colour that it wasn’t a festive balloon, one that you might hang on a gatepost to indicate the location of a person’s birthday party, and that it might possibly have some sort of medical connection. I sat on the floor to examine it further; first stretching it this way and that, then finally blowing it up and holding it up to the light. Inside it was a kind of gloopy liquid. I stared at it and, piece by piece, snippets of overheard remarks and conversations that I had hitherto no understanding of, began to connect. The realisation of what it was that I had only seconds before held to my mouth and tasted sent me rushing downstairs, the thing held away from me at arm’s length, rudely deflating and spitting globules of the liquid as it did so. Once out in the garden, I couldn’t when it came to it jettison the thing into the wilderness behind the rockery, as had been my intention. Instead I held on to it for a few seconds more and the revulsion that I had felt just moments before melded in with something else, something like a sadness I couldn’t quite place.

I could spend a whole afternoon in this room, going through the bottom drawer of my mother’s dressing table, leafing through the personal things of her past with frozen fingers. In my memory it was always arctic in there, the big faded rug cold and slightly damp underneath me. It was where I felt I could find her, touch on her history, discover clues to her, like a detective: clues to the girl she once was before we came along and disappointed her, before she became anxious and tired, when she was excited by life, optimistic, when the world was her oyster. It was full of old photographs of her as a young woman: dark and handsome. It is said that a lot of people living along the west coast of Ireland have dark complexions and this is attributed to the fact that the Spanish Armada crashed on the rocks there. My mother, with her dark hair and eyes and olive skin, could easily have passed for Spanish, but when questioned about this she was mildly outraged, claiming that ‘The Irish met them with pitchforks!’ To which my father replied, ‘I think the Irish met them with something else, Mary!’

In these photographs her dark, strong features were set in an unsmiling, no-nonsense face, against an alien, sepia background that looked more like the moon than anywhere on earth. The images were peopled by worn, dusty-looking folk, staring pale eyed at the camera with a self-consciousness that now touches me but then enthralled me and drew me in. There was a shabby leather handbag full of letters and postcards, from close friends and distant relatives long ago, from California and Australia and, of course, Ireland: friendly, chatty, intimate letters to a girl we never knew, who didn’t yet know us. I couldn’t get enough; I would read the same letters over and over again, and stare at the same photographs, at the same faces, often employing a magnifying glass, as if that would take me closer into them, into their eyes and through into their heads, hoping against hope that I would discover a vital secret. Also in the handbag was a faded, pink crêpe handkerchief that, as I read the letters and pored over the photographs, I would hold to my nose, breathing in the musty traces of a once-sweet perfume.

Up until about six or seven I slept in the room next door to my parents, the door of which was just down the landing that ran the full length of the house. I shared it with my brothers; they slept in a double bed and I in a single. It was in here that on God knows how many Christmas Eves my brothers called me to the window with great excitement, claiming that Father Christmas was just at that moment crossing the night sky on his sleigh, and each time I believed I’d had the misfortune to have just missed him. It was here, sleepless with anticipation of his arrival, that I lay under the covers pretending to be asleep, like millions of other children, and holding my breath as the door creaked open and in he came. And it was here that, one Christmas, before the discovery in my parents’ wardrobe, I saw Him, at least the red tip of his hood, but it was Him.

And it was here during the Christmas of 1955 that I shared my brothers’ double bed with my Auntie Agnes who was visiting from London. Auntie Agnes was my mother’s younger unmarried sister. In her youth, with her high, wide cheekbones, flawless skin, lustrous hair and pretty mouth, she had been quite beautiful. We were told that she was once pursued by the actor Trevor Howard and was never short of admirers. As a young girl, however, she developed an abscess on her hip that resulted in crippling arthritis and she ended up with one leg being several inches shorter than the other. This plus regular and severe migraines served to completely incapacitate her in late middle age. She would have no truck with men, my mother said of her rather disparagingly, ‘Ah, no one was ever good enough,’ and she lived alone in a bedsit in Shepherd’s Bush. I can’t help but link her antipathy towards men to the rather cold, dismissive attitude that my grandfather, Patrick O’Brien, took towards the women of the family. He had time only for the boys, my uncles, Joe and Martin John, doting particularly on the latter. My mother responded to his cold, domineering nature by choosing my father, a gentle man who simply adored her and thought her to be a cut above himself.

She seldom saw her sister, once a year at most, and when she did come to visit us, the visit was usually cut short by some sort of argument between them, resulting in Auntie Agnes flouncing out and, in an act of outrageous extravagance, taking a black cab to New Street station to board the train to London. My mother would no more take a cab to New Street station, let alone get on a train, when the coach was so much cheaper, than boil her own head. In fact the only time a black cab was ever seen in our street to my knowledge was when Auntie Agnes came to stay.

Their relationship was beset by a petty competitiveness. My mother once sent her a silk scarf for Christmas. Needless to say, she had not bought it; it was a gift that had been given to her by a work colleague. My mother rarely kept anything that was given her. All presents were recycled in this way. On receiving it my aunt sent it back immediately with a curt little note saying that she never wore silk next to her skin. During a visit one Christmas to her sister’s flat, my mother, noting the paucity of cards that Agnes, ‘the poor lonely thing’, had received, asked in her best, innocent, little-girl voice, ‘Oh, you’ve got a nice few cards. How many did you get?’

‘Oh . . .’ my aunt began, but that was it, my mother came straight back with ‘I had eighty-two!’

And so it was here, in this big sagging double bed that couldn’t help but conspire to throw its occupants together in the middle, that I have my earliest memory of wetting the bed. It wasn’t the first time, for I had never stopped; it was simply the first time I had felt ashamed. Bed-wetting for me was a nightmarish saga that lasted - although in the latter years it was rarer - through to the beginnings of puberty. Every night I begged God to spare me the usual morning humiliation of having to confess to my mother that I’d ‘done it again’ and met with her angry, exhausted despair. ‘Oh Gaaard, she’s done it again!’ she would repeat to no one in particular. Every night I stretched my pyjama bottoms to bursting point with a raggedy old towel or sometimes an old pyjama jacket of my father’s as a makeshift nappy, which more often than not I managed to circumvent, only to wake up in my own wretchedness at the familiar stench of ammonia and the cold, soggy tangle of pyjamas and sheets. How my mother managed, going out to work full time as she did, with three children, Grandma and no washing machine, is simply unimaginable to me. Today the sheets would be whipped into a machine, then into the tumble-dryer and be back on the bed before a person could say ‘incontinence pad’. Instead they had to be boiled in a bucket on the gas stove, rinsed, put through the mangle in the back yard and then transferred to the washing line, in all weathers, maybe taking days to dry.

The whole thing made staying at friends’ houses out of the question unless my mother had words and this brought its own shame: the whispered conversations in the hallway as we were about to leave; the little laugh that served to cover my mother’s own shame; the friend’s face as she greedily cottoned on to my deep, dark secret and then no one mentioning it, culminating in my not daring to allow myself to sleep at all and so returning home exhausted. The only time my bed-wetting didn’t provoke my mother’s wrath was that Christmas when Auntie Agnes came to stay.

At the opposite end of the upstairs landing from my parents’ bedroom, past the stairs to the attic and the bathroom, was the back bedroom into which I moved after my grandmother passed away, the scent of her skin hovering long after she had gone. It was an L-shaped room and, with the airing cupboard in the corner and the toilet next door, there was a continual and somewhat comforting sound of dripping, whooshing and ticking of pipes. There was a sash window looking out over the back yard, the garage, and across into Waller’s shop on the other side of Wigorn Road, a windier, longer, busier road than either Bishopton or Long Hyde Road, which ran along the back of the house. It was here that I lay in the very dark, wood-framed single bed that my grandmother had died in, listening under the covers to Radio Luxembourg on my father’s big blue Bush transistor radio, until late at night when a hand smelling of Boots soap and fags came and retrieved it from down beside my bed.

It was here one awful autumn in 1967 that I lay for a whole month in mourning and disbelief at my being ‘packed in’ or ‘dumped’, as they would say today, by my first love, a chap called Bob. Not turning up for work, I endlessly pored over his letters (he had gone away to college), which I kept in an old sewing box under the bed, called my Bob Box. It was a relationship that was never consummated, its physical side consisting of a lot of snogging to the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’ and well-mannered groping in Bob’s front room, either when his parents weren’t in or were keeping a discreet distance in the back kitchen.

In fact the only time we could have done the deed was when a group of us from school, who my parents thought were all girls, spent a weekend in a caravan on a windswept site somewhere in mid-Wales, the boys turning up later after our dads had dropped us off. Bob and I spent hours in frenzied snogging on a very narrow bunk once the lights went out but in an act of gallantry he placed the sheet between us, so that should his passion reach uncontrollable heights there would be this crisp, white contraceptive to save the day. However, it wasn’t to be the sheet that eventually cooled our ardour. It was the sound of whispering coming from the bunk opposite ours, where one of my friends was sleeping with a boy who was new to the group. The whispering then became more urgent.

‘No! No! No!’ And then, ‘No, please, you’re hurting me.’ And with every ‘No’ I remember that Bob squeezed me to him as if I were the one calling out. For what I think was several minutes, while the rest of us held our collective breath, this poor girl’s pleas hissed out into the silence, punctuated by pitiful sobs, which eventually died into whimpers and then finally stopped. What was chilling about it was that there was no utterance whatsoever from the young man, just the lonely, frightened sounds of the girl. No one spoke or moved. I know that, were my adult self to be miraculously transported back there, I would have spoken out in the darkness to that girl and put a stop to what was going on. But back then, we weren’t sure and, indeed, one of the boys the next day, when his girlfriend had expressed her concern, was reported to have said, ‘Oh, she was all right. She must have wanted him to or she wouldn’t have got into bed with him.’

Bob and I lasted only the length of the summer holidays but in my memory, like all summer holidays from childhood, the time was idyllically stretched. I have no photographs of Bob, but in my blurry memory he is tall, dark and handsome, with a bit of a Roy Marsden look about him, easily outclassing the normal run of suitor. So I thought myself lucky. There had been two or three before him, but they felt more like practice until the real thing came along. My dates with them involved mainly writhing about, while trying to keep straying hands out of my bra in case they should happen upon the handkerchiefs stuffed therein, as we sat in the back row of the Princess Hall Cinema on Smethwick High Street, on seats scarred with cigarette burns, black and shiny where thousands of bottoms had worn away the once plush-red upholstery. Some of them had large holes gouged out of the front so that when you sat down a great gust of air would be expelled, sending your dress flying up.

It always seemed as if very few of the audience had actually gone to see the film. People would be talking at normal volume, running up and down the aisles, fighting, or throwing things. I was once hit on the head by a flying shoe and another time, bizarrely, I saw half a grapefruit fly through the air and land ever so briefly on a chap’s head like a chic little hat. On one occasion someone actually set fire to his seat and we were all evacuated, but generally when the anarchy reached a certain pitch there would be a complaint, prompting the manager to storm down the aisle to the front and scream at the top of his voice, ‘All right! That’s it! All the one and nines out!’ And those in the cheap seats would be shown the door.

But my dates with Bob were on another plane. He had just left school, grammar school to boot; having done A levels, he was going to teacher training college; my brothers didn’t sneer and, most importantly, my mother approved. So when he came home for the weekend after being away at college for about a month and told me in his front room - the room in which we had rolled about, copping a frenzied feel in painful and awkward positions on the tiny sofa; the room that I had left on so many occasions with my lips and chin raw from kissing, relishing the soreness of the hot, angry beard rash as I lay in bed at night, dizzy with romance and lust - that he thought it was best that we perhaps finished, it was as if he was suddenly speaking Urdu and, indeed, everything in that familiar room instantly became unfamiliar. He too became unfamiliar; gone was the warm, crinkly-eyed, only-between-us look and here was the awkward staring-down-at-shoes-and-carpet look and body language that said, ‘Don’t make yourself comfortable, you won’t be staying long.’ He walked me to the bus stop. I don’t know what was said and I probably couldn’t have told you then either, overwhelmed by the terrible need to get away and cry.

As I sat on top of the bus as it bumped and swayed its way along the Bearwood Road, the tears began and they never really let up for about a month. My parents never once challenged my red-eyed silence or my staying off work for four weeks, dragging myself around the house, my eyelids swollen and puffy, and I had no inclination to discuss it with either of them, thinking that neither would understand or realise the magnitude of my feelings. I was bewildered: under any other circumstances my mother would have harangued me for taking to my bed and not going to work, and at the time though I didn’t understand it I was grateful for her silence.

I questioned her about it much later in my thirties, wondering whether she remembered and what on earth she had made of the whole thing.

She said, ‘Oh yes, we knew what had happened. We guessed that you had a broken heart, but we didn’t like to say anything. We thought it best.’

I’m not sure why I was immensely touched by the fact that they had known all along. I know that their silence was born out of an inability to deal with ‘feelings’, as it wasn’t the done thing to talk things out then, but it was also born out of recognition, sympathy and, of course, wisdom.

The main advantage of the back bedroom was that just below the sash window there was the roof of the back place. This could be seen very clearly from both Wigorn and Long Hyde Roads, and as the Boyle family were not only devoid of motorised transport but also lacking such a roof, it was another useful source of agony to be heaped upon the unfortunate Dermot when so needed, simply by doing a bit of sunbathing. However, this was not easy nor, may I say, comfortable as not only did the roof slope at quite an angle but it was also corrugated. There once existed a photograph, long since lost, of me lying flat on my back on this roof, my eyes tightly closed, my mouth clamped shut, lips pressed together in a thin line, arms and legs straight and rigid, a picture of endurance; instead of lapping up the sun, I looked as if I was braced for a cold shower. But I’m sure that if we were able to widen the shot out to the left and down a bit, we would come upon Dermot sitting in the gutter of Long Hyde Road, eating his mother’s cake and trying not to look. The roof joined on to the garden wall, which was about six feet high and separated us from number 68. This meant that it was possible to get out of the back bedroom window, down over the roof, on to the wall, down on to the dustbin placed conveniently beneath, and out into the world. It was also possible to do the thing in reverse if, as sometimes happened, the key to the middle door hadn’t been left out amongst the jumble of junk on the shelf in the back place.

At around sixteen or seventeen, I started going to clubs with Chris, my best friend from school. She was strikingly beautiful, with a mane of dark-brown hair and blue eyes fringed by almost doll-like thick lashes, causing male heads to whip round to look wherever we went. My mother knew nothing of our Saturday-night forays into town and thought that I was just spending the evening round at Chris’s house, watching television or listening to records. We would head to Birmingham, dressed and made up to pull, or at least impress, the thought of pulling a stranger in a nightclub being a little too scary for either of us. Once on the number 9 bus, we would go straight upstairs and, if it was free, on to the back seat. Then a small, silent ritual would follow whereby Christine would open her handbag and take out a bottle of Este’e Lauder’s Youth Dew. She would first spray both of our necks just below each ear and then, employing a huge circular movement, she would totally enshroud us in a cloud of the stuff. Next out of the bag came a little pack of Beechnut spearmint chewing gum, out of which two tablets would be dropped into our waiting palms and tossed with practised ease through the air on to our similarly waiting tongues. Then to finish off and complete the ‘style queens of the number 9 bus route’ image, out would come the Peter Stuyvesant’s or Consulate menthol cigarettes. We were good at the silences and expert at communicating solely by gesture or look. This was mainly down to the fact that Chris had a not insubstantial stutter. Conversations would go like this:

‘J-J-J-Julie . . . have you s-s-s-s-s-seen m-m-my b-b-b-b—’

‘Biro?’

‘N-n-n-no, m-my b-b-b—’

‘Brush?’

‘N-n-n-no! M-m-m-my b-b-b—’

‘Bum?’

‘N-n-no. Errr, . . . s-s-s-stop i-t! M-m-my b-b—’

‘Bag?’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

And so it went on, with me finishing off by guesswork whatever sentence she had started. On the day of her wedding, not many years later, she went through the whole ceremony without a single stutter.

We both purported to be Mods, which meant that we wore leather jackets over twinsets and pearls, below-the-knee pencil skirts and clumpy shoes, usually brown suede Hush Puppies, which would nowadays be worn by sensible old ladies with bad feet. On our nights out in town, however, we donned more slinky evening attire and Chris would often do our hair. One of the hair fashions of the day was a soft set of bubbly, bouncing curls and on a Saturday night Chris made a valiant effort at achieving this look for the two of us with the help of a set of rollers and a couple of litres of cheap hair lacquer. This sticky, sickly-smelling liquid set the curls into rigid little pompoms all over the head, so that not only was the soft and bouncing quality of the style never quite brought off but the whole thing was also rendered highly inflammable. There were terrible tales of girls bending their heads to light a cigarette and their whole hair catching alight instead of the cigarette, burning it down to the scalp and reducing it to a frizzled, stubbly mass.

There was an occasion once, after I’d started work, when I went out to one of Chris’s dos on a Sunday night. As a result there wasn’t time on the Monday morning before I went to work to comb out the stiff curls with their solid lacquered finish. After I had slept on it for several hours, my hair had taken on a very odd shape, completely flat on one side, whilst wildly frizzing out in all directions on the other. At the end of about twenty minutes in the toilets I felt, after much tweaking and despite its having a certain Brillo Pad quality, that my hair was in an acceptable state, so I slipped into the office at the insurance company where I worked - my first proper job on leaving school - and sat at my desk. Within minutes the boss was at my elbow, hissing in my ear: ‘You’re late! And take that silly wig off your head!’

On these nights out we frequented several different clubs: the Rum Runner, La Dolce Vita, Club Cedar, the Metro, but we would most often end up at the Locarno, a large club in the centre of Birmingham. In my memory at any rate, it was enormous and was divided, I think, into several bars and a couple of dance floors, each playing a different kind of music and so each appealing to a different age group, one of them for what we thought of as middle-aged people but who were most likely folk in their early twenties. Here the music was live and the band, usually something like a five piece, tended to play rock and roll, Elvis Presley, Frank Ifield, Tom Jones, the Beatles. No matter what, it always seemed to finish off at the end of the night with couples, some the worse for wear, draped over each other, in various stages of pre-coital foreplay, moving slowly round the room to ‘I Remember you’ by Frank Ifield and, later, ‘Hey Jude’. These were played solo by a bespectacled chap, sitting on a low stool, with a huge red-and-white electric guitar. At some point midway through the evening we would usually look in on our way to the toilets but mainly with the intention of mocking the ‘aged’ dancers.

On one of these occasions I was asked to dance by one of them, a tall, gaunt-looking Irishman with an engaging smile. After a few minutes jigging around he started to have a coughing fit and during the course of it something flew down the front of my dress. Whatever it was had gone down with complete ease of passage and had disappeared. Then I remembered the cigarette in his hand and, seeing that it was no longer there, began to jump up and down, frantically shaking the front of my dress. By this time the man was on the floor, flailing about amongst the feet of the nearby dancers. I shouted down to him not to bother about his fag, that my friend had some, but he was having none of it, eventually getting up and rudely lurching out of the room without a word. I thought no more of it. Later that night on the bus home, I reached down to adjust the handkerchief padding of my ill-fitting bra and entangled in it was a pair of false teeth on a little pink plate. The poor bloke must have gone home, his engaging smile disfigured by a big black gap in the front of his mouth, and talking with a lisp to boot.

The other room at the Locarno was presided over by a DJ and was dark and crowded. In here they played mainly Tamla Motown, the Four Tops, the Isley Brothers and the Supremes, which was our kind of music. ‘This Old Heart of Mine’ by the Isley Brothers along with ‘The Harlem Shuffle’ by Bob & Earl never fail to summon up the Locarno for me. We would throw our bags down between us and, fag in hand, coolly shift from foot to foot, our shoulders lifting and dropping to the beat in a kind of lazy shrug.

Christine was a good few inches taller than my five foot three and a half, and could easily peruse the periphery of the dance floor over the top of my head, where groups of young men lurked and perused us back. I would watch her face and await the signal that meant we were being approached by two eligible contenders; this would be an excited widening of the eyes and the hint of a smile with the tip of her tongue literally in her cheek. If, on the other hand, we were being approached by two chaps that she considered inferior in some way, she would throw me a look of horror that befitted the heroine in a silent movie, then drop her head and look to one side.

She was very conscious of her height and of the height difference between us. If, for instance, we were walking along a pavement that sloped to one side, she would drag me across to the higher side, in order to lessen the gap. However, it was guaranteed that if two blokes came over, one tall and the other short, it would be the short one that made a beeline for Chris, as if her height was a challenge, something to be scaled, like Mount Everest is to a climber. She would generally ignore them by staring imperiously into the middle distance above their heads.

On one occasion, however, a particularly small man suddenly appeared from nowhere, right in front of her, and started to cavort about in a horribly frenzied fashion. It appeared to be some sort of awful homage to Mick Jagger, with much leaping up on to the toes of one foot, bringing the other knee up and clapping his hands above his head in a completely abandoned way, and all done side on to Christine, like a matador with a bull. It was as if he were trying to show how physically liberated and virile he was, yet at the same time proving the exact opposite. ‘I am anally retentive, probably an accountant and don’t get out much,’ was writ large in neon above his head (no offence to accountants, especially mine). This, of course, we found irritatingly uncool and embarrassing, and Christine, who could blush for Britain, went purple. Then finally, having had enough, she stopped dead and stood there, staring down at him, arms folded across her chest; but to heap insult upon insult, the man didn’t notice, too wrapped up in his hip-thrusting, bottom-shaking, toe-curling dance. Finally he threw his hands up into the air above his head in order to clap them together. Christine caught hold of them with one hand and shouted directly down into his face, ‘Can’t you see I’m taller than you!’ And, in unison, we turned and left the floor, cackling cruelly as we went.

On these nights we would most likely get home somewhere between midnight and one o’clock. My parents, having gone to bed at about ten-thirty, assumed, because it is what they were told, that we had got in not long after that and that, after a night spent listening to records at Chris’s, she had walked me home and stayed the night. On many occasions when they had forgotten to leave the key out I scaled that wall up on to the roof and in through the bedroom window in evening clothes and high heels, having downed several rum and blacks. My mother never questioned why I had got so dressed up, just to stay in. I still don’t know whether she thought it was innocently done for the sheer pleasure of dressing up, as little girls do, or whether she secretly guessed but didn’t want to know. I suspect an exhausted mixture of the two.

Across the yard from the back place was a double garage, built by my father, that opened by way of a set of yellow sliding doors on to Wigorn Road. It housed my dad’s car and that of Reg Wood, his sometime partner who lived up the road. There was a poignant little echo when, twenty years later, I teamed up with Victoria for the Granada television series, Wood and Walters. As well as the cars, the garage was home to the guinea pig, which after much thought and debate was imaginatively named Guinea.

Guinea lived in an open cage; that is, with no front on it. This meant he was free to wander wherever he pleased. He pottered around the garden and grazed on the lawn during the day, going back into the garage at night, usually when my dad came home from work. Indeed, my dad missed him after he died because Guinea always ran out and watched as my father drove his car in, returning to his cage when the parking was complete. My father said that had Guinea lived much longer, he would have started shouting, ‘That’s it! Left hand down a bit! You’ve gorrit!’ For six years he led an uneventful, peaceful life until we introduced him to a female guinea pig called Janet. He went berserk, making a hitherto unheard-of noise, chasing and trying to mount this poor creature in a very agitated fashion. After only a few hours during which I left them, thinking that things would calm down in due course, I went in to check on them, only to find Guinea stone dead and Janet lying exhausted and spent in the corner. (My father said there was a lesson in that for all of us, so that when he died in 1971 of a heart attack whilst in bed, purportedly chatting to my mother, I did wonder whether he had quite taken that lesson on board.) However, it was a good long life - the guinea pig’s, that is, not my father’s - and goodness alone knows how long it would have gone on for, had it not been cut short by Guinea’s frenzied lust for Janet.

Many years later my daughter had a couple of guinea pigs of her own, a large grey male called Robin, named after the decorator, and a tiny chestnut one called Rosette. Remembering my own experience of Guinea’s right-to-roam lifestyle, I suggested that Robin and Rosette should also roam free and graze to their hearts’ content, on the little lawn at the back of our house. It seemed to make sense, as Robin wasn’t a sex pest as Guinea had been. They got on fine for at least half an hour, whereupon Maisie came screaming into the house, ‘They’re dead! They’re dead!’ I ran out into the garden, expecting them both to be prostrate from shagging, only to find that Plato, our big, gentle, black-and-white tomcat, had savagely attacked them, having Rosette for first course and Robin, which he couldn’t quite manage all of, for second. Of course I was wholly responsible for this and suffered many years of ‘You saids’ from Maisie, but I honestly thought all would be well. It remains a mystery to this day how Guinea survived all those years unmolested when he was surrounded by a neighbourhood full of cats, not to mention our own formidable Nelly.

The garage was also the venue for my first theatrical triumphs. These were shows, for want of a better word, put on by my brother Tommy with me very much in a supporting role. We bullied local children into getting threepence and some sweets from their mothers, then proceeded to lock them in while we terrorised them with our made-up dramas, mainly inspired by some television play or other and involving a lot of my mother’s old lipstick and a couple of her cast-off dresses.

It all came to a stop during one of my brother’s magic acts. He would stand there, in a magician’s cape and hat that he had been given for Christmas that year, and tell the audience that he was going to make me disappear by putting me in the special cabinet. This he had made himself out of bits of old wood that were stored in the corner of the garage. We had rehearsed and rehearsed, and all that I was required to do was to step into this cabinet. Whilst waving his wand about, Tommy would declaim in a high, moany sort of voice some mysterious incantation, which generally involved the words hocus pocus and abracadabra. Then touching the top and sides of the cupboard with the tip of his magic wand, he would close the door. After this there would be more incantation and magic-speak, rising in speed and volume to increase the dramatic tension. Meanwhile inside the cabinet I was simply meant to slip behind a bit of old red blanket that was hanging down at the back, so that when my brother at last opened the door I would have ‘disappeared’. The blanket was supposedly there as decoration, but of course its real function was to conceal a secret chamber or, in lay person’s language, a gap between it and the back wall of the cupboard.

However, one summer holiday after a long and successful run of the magic show, the act did not go to plan. We had gone through the usual procedure of my brother talking up the sensational nature of the act, then introducing me as his assistant, whereupon I would leap out and parade about with much waving of arms, dramatically indicating the various facets of the ‘amazing magic box’ and, at the same time, hopping from foot to foot and pointing my toes. Of course I wasn’t allowed to speak and was given a good whack once when I had offered - for just a few extra pence or, if people were short, sweets would do - to tell them where I had actually gone during the period of my magical disappearance. On this particular day, I dutifully got into the cabinet as usual. Whether my brother was rushing matters too much and I simply didn’t have time, or whether I was feeling mutinous, as the whacking incident had rankled, I don’t know, but I suspect I was simply bored and the thought of pricking the bubble of my brother’s theatrical pomposity as he preened and strutted about the ‘stage’ was terrifying, exciting and, above all, funny.

The door was duly whisked open with a grand flourish, Tommy announcing with great assurance that, as everyone could see, I had vanished. He didn’t notice for what seemed like an age that I was still standing there, rigid, in the same stiff pose as I had held when he had closed the door. It was only when the children began to titter and point that he cottoned on. He wheeled round on the spot and I can still see his face to this day: the shock in his little brown eyes, somehow made more vivid by the bright-red hieroglyphics painted on his cheeks and forehead with my mother’s lipstick. I can still feel that sublime surge of power as I watched him. Then the look of shock changed briefly to one of hurt, followed, in a second, by a flash of anger as almost in slow motion he came towards me. I jumped out of the box and ran, cutting a swathe through the audience, children falling off boxes this way and that, out across the yard and into the back place, where I locked myself in the dreaded, spider-ridden Lah Pom.

After the children had been dismissed, my brother came to find me and having been given several assurances that he would not hit me I opened the door. He was still wearing the red lipstick but the hieroglyphics had smudged into a vague, greasy redness, which, whether he was or not, made him look very angry indeed. He said, ‘It’s all right.’ And I could see that he wasn’t in fact angry at all. ‘Why did you do it?’ His expression was one of bafflement. I had betrayed him and I guess it could be said that this was an early lesson in stage trust, but there was something else and I think it was a little touch of respect. I had rebelled and he had caught a glimpse of the future actor in me, creating the drama and grabbing the limelight.

A year or so after our flurry of garage performances a man knocked on the middle door with a script in his hand. He was from our parish church, St Gregory’s, and having told my mother that they were doing a play at the church hall, he asked whether I would like a part in it. He gave me the script, retired with my mother to the sitting room, and I scurried off upstairs to the bedroom, like a dog with a bone, to read it. I have little memory of it, except that my character had quite a few lines in the form of a single speech and the play was vaguely religious in that it was a bible story of some sort. My mother made this man a cup of tea, and by the time he had drunk it, I was downstairs again, performing my part, the script held behind my back, the speech having gone effortlessly in, purely from the thrill of acting it alone upstairs and the thought of acting it on a stage in front of an audience. When I did come to perform it, it was my brother Tommy who rushed backstage to congratulate me and to tell me, with wonder in his voice, that not only was I really good but that I was the best! It is something he has done ever since.

In between the garage and the back place was the yard, with a high wall that separated us from next door at one side and a little strip of garden running down the other. It was crossed at wonky angles by a couple of washing lines and until about 1960, when we acquired a washing machine, up against the garage was the mangle. There were many gory tales regarding mangles, mostly, I suspect, coming from my mother’s imagination, in order to keep us away from it, stories of squashed fingers and, in one blood-soaked saga, the painful loss of an entire digit. This had to be tested out and obviously the use of my own finger in such an experiment was out of the question. So with the help of a wodge of plasticine, I constructed the nearest thing to my own forefinger as was possible and put it through the mangle. The sight of it coming through the other side completely flat made my stomach give a little lurch. I hadn’t allowed for the fact that there are bones in a finger, of course, but the totally flattened strip of plasticine furnished my imagination for many years to come with a graphic image of my bloody, mutilated and, naturally, flat forefinger, which actually made the said finger throb.