Speaking for Myself (2 page)

September arrived all too quickly, and a new term at RADA was beckoning. Drama schools are all very well, but as any professional actor will tell you, there is nothing like the real thing, and Gale Howard never went back. More Welsh towns followed, and in one of them — possibly in Rhayader — I was conceived. Next to the only local theater was a café the company used to frequent, run by the mother and grandmother of an eight-year-old girl so taken with the theater that every night she would climb out of her bedroom window on the ground floor and persuade somebody at the stage door to let her in. After the show Tony and Gale — at twenty-one and twenty, barely more than kids themselves — would escort the little imp home, with no one any the wiser. That Christmas found them back in Rhayader, where the run comprised three pantomimes and one Christmas play. The name of the play is now lost, but the cast included two dogs called Schmozzle and Kerfuffle. In the pantomimes my mother played Cinderella, the princess in
The Princess and the Swineherd,
and one of the babes in
The Babes in the Wood
. The other babe was played by the ecstatic café owner’s daughter, achieving her dream of appearing onstage, albeit with no lines.

By the end of the season my parents knew that my mother was pregnant, and when the Armstrongs refused to increase their wages, they had no option but to head back to London. The café owner’s daughter was devastated that she was about to lose her newfound friends. Mum promised that she would never forget her, and if their baby turned out to be a girl, she said, they would name it after her. And they did: Cherie.

Tony Booth and Gale Howard were married in Marylebone Registry Office in London, a decent six months before I was born. In the end it was all a bit of a rush: a job had come up at Castleford Rep, and they were due to start rehearsals the next day. Their witnesses were the brother of the landlady my mother had had when she was a student at RADA and the registrar’s assistant, a Mr. Christmas. Afterward the landlady’s brother took the newlyweds to the top floor of Lyons Corner House, then a landmark restaurant, cheerful but cheap, on the corner of Piccadilly Circus. There, to the strains of a string quartet, they celebrated with tea and cakes in preparation for the four-hour train journey to Yorkshire.

They were still in the north the following autumn, my father now with the Frank H. Fortescue Famous Players. According to my birth certificate, Cherie Booth was born on September 23, 1954, in Fairfield Hospital, in the town of Bury, Lancashire — an event my father announced from the stage that evening to a rather bemused audience. His request for two weeks off to help with the new arrival was turned down, so in true Tony Booth fashion, he gave his employer the finger. With no work forthcoming and rent still needing to be paid, the young couple tucked their daughter into a basket padded with nappies and smelling of greasepaint, and boarded the train for Liverpool.

Crosby lies at the northern end of Liverpool, the Catholic end, where thousands, if not millions, of Irish families disembarked from ships that brought them from their homeland, convinced they wouldn’t be staying longer than a few weeks — months at the worst — until they’d be sailing across the Atlantic toward a new life in America. For some the dream came true, but for many it didn’t. Instead of Manhattan’s skyline, they had to make do with the Liver Building and the cranes and derricks of the Liverpool docks.

Crosby itself had aspirations. My paternal grandparents, Vera and George Booth, lived in a terraced house in Waterloo, the poorer part of Crosby. Upstairs were two and a half bedrooms (the half was a boxroom above the front door with barely enough room for a single bed); downstairs were a front room (the parlor), a back room (the sitting room), and the kitchen and scullery. It was fully plumbed, if basic. It was by no means a house to be ashamed of; indeed they owned it — an uncommon occurrence in those parts. Working-class people such as my grandparents rarely owned houses in those days. At the end of our road was a park with swings and a roundabout. This marked the demarcation line between Waterloo (terraced) and Great Crosby (semidetached). Our street, Ferndale Road, was the last of a grid of other “dales” — Thorndale, Oakdale, and so on — that all abutted St. John’s Road. This bustling shopping street, with its butcher, pawnbroker, grocers, barbers, and secondhand shops, seemed to me then to be the center of the universe.

Like all the other houses in our street, Number 15 had a bay window, a small garden at the front, and a slightly larger garden at the rear, made smaller by the presence of an air-raid shelter left over from the war. Unlike the other yellow-brick houses in Ferndale Road, ours was painted cream and green, from the time when, so legend has it, my great-grandfather decided to show where his political allegiances lay — the green a nod to his Irish nationalism — in as ostentatious a manner as possible.

With the largest Catholic population in England, Liverpool has always been a highly politicized city. It prided itself on having no industry — that was left to lesser places like Manchester — no idle boast when the industrial north was shrouded in smoke and washing hung out only when the wind was blowing in the right direction. First and last, Liverpool was a port, and Merseyside (for the river Mersey, which ran through the city) was thus built on transient labor. Unemployment was the baseline. You helped your neighbor out today because God help you tomorrow. In the years before the Labour Party’s general election victory in 1945 and the coming of the National Health Service and the British welfare state, Liverpool’s communities survived through networks of voluntary effort, and that habit never died. Lending a hand to those in trouble was not an option in our house; it was simply what you did, even if in doing so you went a few shillings short yourself.

Fifteen Ferndale Road was a very Catholic household. My grandmother, born Vera Thompson, was an Irish matriarch of the old school, though Liverpool-born and with a rich Scouse accent. She had two brothers, Edgar and William, and by the time I arrived, Uncle Bill was the proud owner of three small grocer’s shops, an empire started by selling tea off a bike with a box strapped on the back. Vera’s mother — my great-grandma Matilda, known as Tilly, the youngest of seventeen — came over with her family from County Mayo (or Cork, depending on whom you believe) on their way to America. But like so many others, the McNamaras got no farther than the Liverpool docks. At some point she met my great-grandfather, and that was that.

Her husband Robert Thompson’s roots have been the subject of much family debate. The version my grandma told was that he was from Yorkshire, a young man from a family called Tankard. After deserting in the First World War, the hightailed it to Ireland, where he changed his name to Thompson to escape detection. Another version is that he was simply another Irish immigrant who failed to get a passage to the promised land.

What is not in dispute is that he was a fiery character with a talent for drinking, going to horse races, and losing money. He was also a radical. He had been a local leader of the nationwide general strike that crippled the country for nine days in 1926. From then on, he earned his money as a barber, sitting on an orange box outside the dock gates, shaving sailors and cutting their hair when they returned from months at sea with money in their pockets and an urge to spend it. (Not everyone was willing to part with his cash, and my great-grandma would tell stories of how he’d end up accepting the strangest things in lieu, including a parrot that lived with them for years and a monkey she wouldn’t let inside the front door.) Eventually he opened his own barber’s shop on the corner of Denmark Street in the area known as Little Scandinavia, whose narrow, cobbled streets — back-to-back houses with outside toilets — were to become my route to primary school.

Sadly, I never met him. Robert Thompson died in 1946, and my dad, who adored his grandfather, said the streets of Waterloo were lined with mourners from Ferndale Road as far as St. Edmund’s Church when his coffin passed by.

On her husband’s death, Matilda moved in with her daughter. The little bedroom above the front door became her private domain. She remained there until she died, when I was seven. She was the only person in the household who had a room to herself, and yet in the years she lived with us, I don’t remember ever seeing her lift a finger to help, although occasionally you might catch sight of her flicking a feather duster to show she was willing. Her major preoccupation was watching the comings and goings in the street below from behind her lace curtains. She was tiny, like a bird, and gray-haired, but with a hint of the fiery redhead she had once been. Her legendary temper, however, was still firmly in place. Nevertheless, she was remarkably tolerant when, dressed in my nurse’s uniform, I would “inject” her arm with a plastic syringe, and she was always a good source of a sixpence.

From the perspective of an imaginative young girl, my grandfather’s ancestors had led far less exciting lives. They were resolutely English, with no unresolved mysteries — or so I thought then. My great-grandmother’s family ran a small fishing fleet out of Formby, about thirty miles north of Liverpool up the Lancashire coast, while my great-grandfather’s family were hill farmers from Westmorland, the English Lake District, just south of the border with Scotland. Nothing in our family is that straightforward, however, and after my grandad’s death I discovered that in the First World War, his father — my great-grandfather Booth — had been a pacifist and had gone to prison for it. He later served as a stretcher-bearer in the trenches in Flanders, where he was severely gassed. My great-grandmother’s father turned out to be a famous smuggler who ran a protection racket on the side.

In contrast to the Irish branch of the family, George Booth, my grandfather, was never a great talker, though it didn’t help that he was absent more often than he was at home. By the time I was living in Ferndale Road, this translated into ten days on shore for every six weeks away at sea. He was then the chief steward’s writer on the MV
Auriel,
which sailed from Liverpool to Nigeria, and his tales of the sights and sounds of Lagos brought Africa vividly to life. He only truly came into his own when playing the piano, which he did at every opportunity. My father claims that he’d had to turn down a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London when he was a boy and that later he had been offered a job with a famous bandleader. It may be true, but Grandad never mentioned it to me. He was much more than just a pub pianist, however. The piano stool was full of sheet music that he’d bought in New York on his sailings with Cunard, and it’s thanks to him that I can still sing most of the show songs of the 1950s and 1960s (though whether this is a good thing is another matter).

My grandfather was a gentle and sensitive man, with the most beautiful, but tiny, copperplate handwriting. He hadn’t been my grandmother’s first choice for a husband. Grandma would tell me how she’d married him on the rebound after the love of her life — a Protestant — refused to convert. It was only then that piano-playing George made his move. He was a friend of her brother’s, and it turned out he’d been nursing this secret passion for years. Although the proposed marriage was frowned on by both families, time was running out for the twenty-nine-year-old Vera, who probably realized that the love of a good man was worth any amount of family tut-tutting. Love her he clearly did, though whenever he tried to kiss her in front of us, she’d push him away with a fond “Don’t be so daft.” Only years later did it emerge that
he
wasn’t a Catholic either. On paper, yes: he had converted — my grandmother would never have married him otherwise — but religion was nothing to him. He hardly ever went to church, but as he was away so much, it didn’t seem that strange, and the family had plenty of priests to smooth its way into heaven. (I can still remember the mystique that surrounded my cousin Paul — Father Paul as he later became — when he visited from the seminary and how Grandma would insist that we girls keep our distance, to avoid corrupting him with our presence!)

My own relationship with the Catholic Church, though very important to me, has never been entirely conventional. It began with my baptism. Even though my parents had registered my birth in Bury, to a Catholic like my grandma, an unbaptized child was tantamount to a mortal sin. Luckily she knew that her cousin Father Bernard Harvey would quickly rectify the situation, and within hours of my arrival in Ferndale Road, she had been to see him.

“So what would the little one’s name be then, Vera?”

“Cherie.”

“What was that?”

“Cherie.”

“Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“Now, Vera, I don’t have to tell you, of all people, that the Holy Church . . .”

He didn’t. This was 1954, ten years before the Second Vatican Council. Services were still in Latin. Nuns were still fully veiled in habits that reached down to the ground. And Vera Booth knew only too well that a Catholic child could be baptized only with the name of a Catholic saint. Although there are more than seven thousand of them, no amount of scanning unusual saints’ names (and there are many) would have revealed a Saint Cherie.

A compromise was eventually reached, and I was baptized Theresa Cara: Theresa being a bona fide saint, and Cara being Latin for Cherie, which was probably Father Bernard’s attempt at keeping the peace. At the same time, my grandma opened a savings account for me in the name of T. C. Booth, which I used right up until 1997.

My mother, needless to say, had no voice in these decisions. Although she came from a religious background herself — her father was in the Salvation Army, and she’d gone to Sunday school as a child — she claims that she was quite happy for me to be baptized a Catholic, having no strong feelings one way or the other. There may have been another reason for her acquiescence, however. Locking horns with one of the most formidable women on the planet was not something anyone would do voluntarily — particularly if they were now living under the same roof. Nobody messed with Vera Booth.