bridesmaids.
'I wonder why your dad never remarried?' I asked my mother.
'Because who the bloody hell is going to take on a man with
three little children?' she replied incredulously, turning towards
me. Her eyes were rolling around in her head like the clown
outside the Blackpool Fun House. 'My dad couldn't look after
us on his own. He was working shifts at Lever's, used to walk
there and back every day to save money – it must be over ten
miles. He had no choice but to farm us out among various
relatives. Sister Martha looked after us first. She was a lovely
girl but she was going into a convent and couldn't keep us, so
we were passed on from pillar to post, to ever-increasing levels
of poverty and neglect.' She shuddered, more from the gale
force wind howling around us than the bitter memories. 'Two of my dad's cousins took Chrissie in. She was only a toddler.
They'd have been locked up these days for cruelty. Aunty Poll
went round and found her sat on the stone kitchen floor in a
filthy vest sucking on a stale crust, her little body black and
blue with bruises those wicked bastards had inflicted on her.'
Aunty Poll, my grandmother's sister, took the girls in and
gave them a home. She wasn't an intentionally cruel woman
but she was cold and unfeeling, a strict disciplinarian who
firmly believed that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. Yet
my mother had a fondness for her and spoke of her with
respect, even though she'd put Chrissie into an orphanage and
herself and Annie into domestic service. Maybe the years had
softened her memories and any anger had long subsided,
unlike the storm which was still raging outside.
We both slept downstairs that night as the damp, arctic bedrooms
would have meant certain hypothermia. My mother
slept on the sofa, me on cushions on the floor. During the
course of the evening we had got through a loaf of bread, a pot
of diabetic jam, half a packet of chocolate digestives, two fruit
yoghurts, cheese on toast and a Battenberg, and she claimed
that she wasn't stoned.
She slept soundly for eight hours, a smile on her lips. When
she woke in the morning she complained that she hadn't
managed to get a wink of sleep and that the sofa was 'agony'.
She looked remarkably refreshed and relaxed as she stood at
the window, a mug of coffee in hand, surveying the snowy
landscape outside. 'Don't you dare tell anyone that you gave
me drugs,' she said, blowing on the steaming coffee. 'Not a
word to Annie and Chrissie, and if I catch you bringing drugs
into this house again I'm calling the police.' She took a sip of
the scalding coffee and then turned to look at me, trying to
suppress the laughter in her voice. 'Do you hear me, my lad?'
'Yes, Mother,' I said, 'your secret life as a dope fiend is safe
with me.'
CHAPTER SIX
A UNTY ANNE LOVED A GOOD HYMN, AS THE RESIDENTS OF Lowther Street could readily testify.
'"So-well of my Save-eeour sancti-fy my brrreast,"' she sang
out lustily in her ear-piercing screech as she set about sweeping
the house through from back to front. Aunty Chrissie, sitting
at the kitchen table reading the paper, winced.
'Give it a bloody rest, will you?' she shouted over the din,
picking her fag up from its resting place in a saucer and taking
a drag. 'Jesus tonight, anybody walking past will think we're
being raped by the Russians.'
Chrissie's abuse fell on deaf ears. Aunty Anne carried on
with her concert regardless; she was used to Chrissie's slings
and arrows. '"Guard and defend me from the foe malign,"' she
howled in a glass-shattering soprano that was so high-pitched,
only bats and the local dogs could make out the lyrics. She was
attacking the hall, or 'the lobby' as it was known, banging the
brush against the skirting board as she sought out every last
speck of dirt and dust before sweeping the lot into the street
and swilling it away with a bucket of soapy water.
While she was at it she'd give the brass trim that ran along
the edge of the doorstep a 'good rub' with a
Frank Bank, Gibu Twyman
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