Speaking for Myself (3 page)
People who lived through the depression have never entirely forgotten it. Make do and mend wasn’t some green-friendly exercise for my grandmother; it was the result of years of draconian economy. For the decade preceding the war, my grandad had virtually no work. Trade between England and America was at a standstill — no ships, empty docks, work only for those who knew somebody who knew somebody else. In those circumstances the women became the breadwinners. My grandma did anything she could, cleaning the houses of the well-to-do who lived in nearby Blundellsands — only a short distance away geographically but light-years from Crosby in terms of money and horizons. Her world was divided between the rich and the poor — and the Booths were definitely the poor. Before she married, she had worked in a draper’s in Blundellsands, and she would tell the story of how one day a young woman came in with a new baby. My grandma could never resist a baby, and after chucking him under the chin, she asked what he was called.
“Anthony” came the answer, pronounced with a soft “th,” rather than a “t.”
“Oh,” she said. “I love that name. If I have a little boy, I think I’ll call him Anthony.”
She said she would never forget the expression on the woman’s face — a “people like you don’t have Anthonys like my Anthony” expression.
My grandma remained class-conscious all her life and continued to believe that there was one law for the rich and one law for the poor. When my dad was about ten, he came down with scarlet fever and, as happened in those days, was sent to an isolation hospital, where his mother could only look at him through a window. When he was eventually allowed home, he asked her why she had never been to visit his bedside. “Because it wasn’t allowed,” she said. Then he told her how the boy in the next bed had had regular visits from his parents: a boy who came from Blundellsands. I don’t know how long my dad was in there, weeks certainly, if not months, and it undoubtedly affected him. I also think it affected my grandmother’s attitude toward him, as she felt so guilty that she had simply accepted what she’d been told and hadn’t insisted on seeing him.
When I was growing up, my source of stories about my father’s early life was my grandmother, because by the time I was old enough to savor and enjoy them, he had disappeared from our lives. He was born in 1931 and named, of course, after that superior baby in Blundellsands. Then came my auntie Audrey in 1935, and finally my uncle Bob, who was born during the first Luftwaffe bombing raid on Liverpool in May 1940.
With the outbreak of the war, everything changed. For a start, suddenly the docks were alive again. The merchant navy was desperate for men to work the Atlantic convoys, and so that’s what Grandad did. Dangerous though it was — more merchant seamen died than members of the Royal Navy — it was work, and it was patriotic. In fact, it was no safer to stay in Liverpool, where the docks were a prime target of the Luftwaffe. The attacks reached their peak in May 1941 with a weeklong blitz, when 4,000 people were killed, 10,000 homes were destroyed, and 70,000 people were made homeless.
War or no war, my dad was growing up. In 1943 he got a scholarship to St. Mary’s College, a Catholic grammar school run by the Christian Brothers, about half a mile along the Liverpool Road into Crosby proper. He was clearly destined for great things. St. Mary’s boys were famous for going into the church and higher education.
An academic future was not to be his, however. Shortly after my grandad returned from the war in 1946, he was hit by a crane and plunged eighty feet into the hold of a ship, breaking his pelvis. He was lucky not to have been killed. His pay was stopped immediately, and he was off work for nearly two years. Through the union he was eventually awarded compensation, but as soon as he was fit enough to go back, Cunard’s response was to lay him off.
In the days following the accident, my grandma did everything she could to find a job herself, but nothing would pay enough. The Booth family now had five mouths to feed, including a seven-year-old (Bob) and a twelve-year-old (Audrey), and no money to do it with. Eventually my grandma had to accept the inevitable, and my father left St. Mary’s. At fifteen he began working on the Cunard transatlantic route.
I remained with my grandparents for about two years following my arrival as a babe in arms, my parents coming and going as work allowed. At one point they did a summer season in Blackpool, close enough for them to come down to see me on weekends (which meant Sunday to Monday). Sometimes my mother stayed with me in Crosby, but usually not, and I certainly never traveled with them. I was left with my grandma, my mum now says, because she wanted me to have continuity, “a steady place,” though I suspect she already knew that to keep my dad, she’d have to stick to him like glue. And of course she wanted to be with him: he was witty and handsome, and she was in her early twenties and in love.
By late 1956 my father found the beginnings of fame, if not of fortune, with the play
No Time for Sergeants
, based on a best-selling novel. The play ran for eighteen months in the West End, and by the time my sister Lyndsey was born, he and Gale (as my mother is always called) were living in a settled way in a large Victorian house in Stoke Newington, north London. When Lyndsey was about three months old, my grandparents took me down to meet her.
On arrival, my grandma went straight to the nearest Catholic church and arranged to have the baby baptized the following day. The only Catholic my mother knew, another actress, was roped in to be Lyndsey’s godmother. This duty done, my grandparents left, at which point I discovered the hideous truth: I wasn’t going with them. According to my mother, my grandma’s last words to me as she and Grandad left the house were “You’re going to live with your mother now. You’ll probably never see me again.”
I was inconsolable: kicking and screaming and generally expressing my anger and distress in the only way I could. The woman I called “Mama” had gone for good. What it must have been like for my poor mother, I can scarcely imagine, overcome as she was, no doubt, with guilt and remorse, and possibly even jealousy. As for my grandmother, traumatic as it was, she had clearly fueled my dependence on her and so exacerbated my sense of abandonment. Later, when we were all happily (from my perspective) back in Crosby, she would repeatedly tell me how she could never listen to “I Could Have Danced All Night,” the Julie Andrews classic from
My Fair Lady
, without crying, because it had been playing on the radio when her “baby” had been taken from her.
I stayed in Stoke Newington long enough for photographs to be taken, including one of the toddler Cherie looking bemused, her baby sister propped up in her carriage beside her. The photo is of poor quality, but the general impression is not a happy one, and I think that was probably an accurate reflection of the circumstances. It couldn’t have helped that my parents were living in what was essentially a student house with rented rooms and no real structured family life. My dad would come home from the theater late at night, and inevitably I’d be woken up. I have a vague memory of the sporadic presence of another flamboyant actor couple, blessed with an equally cavalier attitude toward children and their needs. Apart from my mother — whom at this juncture I barely knew — the most stable presence in the house was my auntie Diane. Not a real aunt but my mum’s friend, Diane lived in the basement with another girl, both of whom were studying design at the North London Polytechnic, as it was then known. To make ends meet, my mum spent hours packing sherbet fountains — an English candy made of sherbet powder and licorice sticks — during the day. In later years I could never bring myself to eat them; the smell alone was enough to bring back twinges of anxiety.
Christmas passed. (The only Christmas I ever missed having with my grandma until she died.) Then spring. I imagine they’d been hoping I’d settle down, but I didn’t. For the previous two years I had been the apple of my grandma’s eye, and now I was just one of two little girls competing for affection. There is no doubt that, for all my grandmother’s iron will, I had been horribly spoiled. Shortly before Christmas my dad’s show closed, and having no means of paying the rent in Stoke Newington, our little family returned to Ferndale Road. Even now I can remember the joy of finding myself once again sharing my grandma’s bed.
It is only once I returned to Ferndale Road that my own memories really begin, starting with the smells: my grandad’s Senior Service cigarettes; the condensed milk he used to sweeten his tea; coal burning in the grate. In addition to the various humans in the house, we once had a cat and always had dogs — Alsatians, all called Sheba; Quin, a poodle — plus sundry white mice and tortoises. (In those days nobody connected the pets with my frequent asthma attacks.) There are fragments of other memories: A circular ashtray where the cigarette stubs disappeared when you pushed down the plunger. Linoleum that curled up at the edges. The gas meter behind the front door which we fed with shillings. (As a treat, I’d drop them in, and Grandad would turn the knob.) Except when Grandad was at home, I slept in my grandma’s bed, while Lyndsey slept in our mum’s. In fact, they slept in the same saggy double bed right up until Lyndsey left home.
For a long time I had an ambivalent relationship with my grandad. Of course I loved him, but whenever he came back from sea, I’d be ousted from my place, obliged to sleep on a camp bed in my mother’s room. My resentment was always short-lived. Who could resist someone who played all your favorite songs? The first Sunday he was back on shore, our front room would be filled with aunts, uncles, and cousins for a sing-along. Grandad would always start with “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” dedicated to Lyndsey and me. Then one tune would flow into another, and we’d all join in, with people asking for their favorites, Broadway musicals mainly:
My Fair Lady, South Pacific, West Side Story,
and, best of all,
The Sound of Music.
There was a time when I knew every single word.
Grandad was not without vices. The first was horses: he was always trying different “systems,” but he never seemed to win. The second was smoking: cigarettes were cheap at sea, and he would get through forty untipped Senior Service a day. He coughed his guts out the last few years before he died. As a result, I have never touched a cigarette in my life. His third vice was drinking: not alcohol, but very strong tea sweetened with lashings of condensed milk, which also came in handy for sticking tiles on the wall in the bathroom whenever they fell off, a regular occurrence.
For the next eighteen months, my father worked in various theaters around the north, based with us but in reality visiting only on weekends. The only time he actually lived with us was when he did a season at Liverpool Playhouse, but when that came to an end, he headed back to London. Realistically it was the only place he could forge a career. Once he’d found somewhere to live, he told my mum, we’d join him. It never happened. It was during this time that he first played opposite Pat Phoenix, then an unknown actress called Patricia Dean, who would later become an important person in his life — and in mine.
Growing Up
S
chool was naturally St. Edmund’s Catholic Primary, where my father, Auntie Audrey, and Uncle Bob had all gone before me. The school was attached to St. Edmund’s Church, where Father Bernard Harvey, my grandma’s cousin — the one who had baptized me — was the parish priest.
I suppose that for the first day or two, I must have been taken to school, but from then on I would go on my own and later took Lyndsey with me. Hand in hand we would walk or skip down St. John’s Road, past Ronnie the cobbler, who had been at school with my dad and who always said hello. Farther along there was the pawnbroker’s on the corner, with a window made entirely of black glass that came down to the pavement. If you pressed your nose to the glass and raised an arm and a leg, you looked as if you were flying. Then we’d continue up over the railway. If a train was coming, we would stand on the footbridge and shriek as the steam billowed round us, lifting our skirts and warming our bare legs in winter. On the far side lay Little Scandinavia, a shortcut to school. The streets here were still cobbled, making the game of never stepping on the cracks far more challenging than on the hopscotch sidewalks of Ferndale Road. In the middle of this labyrinth, the rag-and-bone man kept his horse. In Crosby we had had miles and miles of dunes — you could even see the sea from my classroom window — but this was the nearest we got to the country. So whenever the old man wasn’t around, we would clamber up and peer over the wall at his poor horse. If the old man found us, he’d yell abuse and we’d scramble down, scraping our knees on the brick, then rubbing them better with lick. Another game was breaking empty milk bottles. All you had to do was pick one up, drop it, and then run down one of the entries before an aproned housewife could reach the door. One morning my friend Margot and I were spotted, and I’ll never forget the shame of having to stand in front of the whole school while our hands were rapped with a ruler.
On the way home we might stop at my uncle’s shop, a grocer’s cum sweetshop, and buy a piece of candy. We had to pay: Uncle Bill was far too canny a businessman to give anything away, even to us. He used to have these little cereal packets for display purposes, though, and when he changed the window, he’d let us have them to play shop.
As soon as I was old enough, I’d be sent out on errands — “messages,” as they were called. Grandma made us memorize her requests, and they had to be delivered word perfect or else. “Four nice, lean lamb chops, please, for Mrs. Booth.” God help either me or the butcher if they weren’t. The question for the baker was “Is it fresh?” If what he gave me turned out not to be, then woe betide. I’d be packed off back with the stale loaf, where my new line would be “Mrs. Booth is not satisfied.”
Life could not have been easy for my mother. From the beginning, her mother-in-law made it clear that, grandchildren or no grandchildren, we would have to pay our way. If anyone had expected my dad to support his family, they were mistaken. His career was going well, with work on both the stage and the small screen (television) steadily coming his way, but that made no difference. Thus Mum would get Lyndsey and me up and breakfasted and ready for school before setting off by bicycle toward Seaforth, two miles away. There she would work behind the counter of a small fish-and-chip shop from ten o’clock till two. Grandma would give us our lunch, but Mum would be back in Ferndale Road in time to give us our tea. She would work again from four to six, then come home to get us ready for bed before heading back on the bike for her final stint from eight till midnight. All for a princely four pounds ten shillings a week, enough to cover the rent of a small room.