Evil Relations (5 page)

The wisp of smoke carries me down another flight of stairs to the ground floor and the scullery at the back. All the cooking and washing are done in here, but I’m looking for something else, and behind the stove I find them: Mum’s pint bottles of Guinness. I used to fetch these for her, racing down Exeter Street to the illegal off-licence, where they’d hand me the bottles in a paper bag. Then I’d head home again, down the back entries into our yard and straight into the scullery, fast as my skinny legs would take me. Next to the scullery is a simple kitchen with a table and chair, cold meat safe and ceiling clothes maiden. Beyond it is the dining room – the most used and busiest room of all, dominated by a huge wall cupboard stacked to bursting every Christmas with home-made mince pies, cakes, biscuits and other mouth-watering goodies.

The wisp of smoke evaporates, leaving me where I want to be most: the room at the front of the house, facing the street. My heart is in this room. The door is always bolted (children are not supposed to enter the parlour, after all) but nothing can keep me out. A chair, a stretch on tiptoes, a small hand feeling for the latch and . . .

The door to the parlour opens and welcomes me in.

* * *

Withington Hospital was originally Charlton Barlow Moor Workhouse, serving most of south Manchester’s poverty-ridden inhabitants. It was converted to a hospital in 1864 and Florence Nightingale declared it ‘one of the best, if not
the
best, in the country’. David Smith was born within its red-brick walls on 9 January 1948 to a woman he can’t remember. Joyce Hull was in her late teens when she fell pregnant to John James (Jack) Smith, a 28-year-old engineer; they never married. Joyce vanished from her son’s life when he was one year old, leaving his paternal grandparents to adopt him on Valentine’s Day 1949. It was another 20 years before the opportunity arose for David to meet his mother.

‘I don’t know anything about Joyce,’ he shrugs now. ‘Not a thing. Only that none of the family seem to have liked her, and in those days if you weren’t liked, it was a serious business. I don’t have a single memory of her.’

All she left behind were a few photographs of the two of them together. One, included here, shows them sitting with a department store Santa, while another, taken on a shingle beach somewhere in the north of England, hangs on the wall just outside the kitchen in David’s home in Ireland. On both, dark-haired Joyce holds her warmly swaddled baby close, a wide smile on her strikingly pretty face. But within months, or even weeks, of the photographs being taken, she was gone and David Hull became David Smith, the adoptive son of John Richard Smith, a ‘commission agent’, and his wife Annie.

David grew up believing that Joyce was dead: ‘She was just a name somewhere belonging to someone far away in the past. I knew I was adopted, but Annie was
always
Mum to me. She wrapped me up in cotton wool so thoroughly that there was no reason for me to ever question how things had turned out. Being illegitimate wasn’t a problem in my early years – I wasn’t some abandoned poor little bastard running loose in the squalid city streets. Besides, there were loads of illegitimate kids after the war; every family had a skeleton in their cupboard. The only Mum I ever knew showered me with love and spoiled me rotten. Anything I ever needed or wanted was mine, I didn’t even have to ask.’

Annie was a tall and dignified woman. Slim as a cigarette, she wore her clothes – mostly print dresses and fashionable shoes, with a fur coat on occasion – as well as any professional model despite a slight hunchback. She was regarded as the matriarch of the family, yet there was a loneliness to her existence that David struggled to understand: ‘I worshipped her, and we were unimaginably close, but I still felt there was a sadness to her. She and Grandad got on well, but there was never any intimacy between them – not a shared joke or a kiss, and she always ate alone in the back kitchen. That was her way, whether it was Christmas or Sunday dinner. She’d cook for the whole family but then disappear into the kitchen by herself. I don’t know why. Her one indulgence, if you can call it that, was the Guinness. She enjoyed a tipple, but it was no more than that. Mum never drank to excess – she was a proper lady.’

He pauses, fiddling with the cigarette he’s about to light. ‘I trusted her completely. If ever I had a tooth that needed pulling, she’d tie a bit of string to it and the other end to the door handle, then tell me to shut my eyes while she slammed the door. Out the tooth would fly.’ He grins. ‘You really have to trust someone to let them do that to you.’

Annie’s secret melancholia probably stemmed from the loss of her son Frank, whose photographs adorned the walls and surfaces of David’s attic room. He remembers being ‘fed stories about how Uncle Frank had been part of the Normandy invasion or something similarly heroic. Any male relatives who’d died in the service of their country were regarded as saints. So it came as a bit of a shock when I found out later that Uncle Frank had died from pneumonia on the platform of Crewe railway station. He had been invalided out of the army and was on his way home. His photographs were everywhere I looked, this handsome boy in uniform with huge brown eyes, and I hated it. Mum talked about him constantly and I sometimes felt that she was shoehorning me into the Frank-shaped hole in her life.’

Annie’s other children, including David’s father, Jack, were scattered across the country. ‘Three of my aunties moved up the social ladder by marrying southerners,’ he recalls. Then he adds, with an amused curl of his lip, ‘They gave their kids names like
Nigel
and
Virginia
. Only Auntie Dorothy married a local chap, from Reddish. When I was older, I’d visit her with Dad on a Sunday – there was always Carnation Cream involved in the tea we ate – and afterwards we’d have a stroll on Reddish golf course. I saw a lot more of my Uncle Bert – everyone else called him Alf, but I knew him as Bert, for some reason – and Auntie Bet, who lived next door but one to us, at 35 Aked Street, with their kids Frank, John and Graham. John was like a brother to me, and Auntie Bet . . . well, she and Mum were peas in a pod. Everyone called her the Duchess. She had airs and graces, and liked to pretend she was posh, telling people she’d come up from Kent when in reality she was born in Woolwich dockyard of all places. The Duchess and Mum were a combined force to be reckoned with – cronies, conspirators and joint matriarchs, in charge of everything remotely “family”. Male role models? There weren’t any: Dad was hardly ever around and Grandad was just an old man, not even a husband to Mum, in my eyes.’

David’s grandfather was a bookmaker who liked to gamble himself; often he’d head off in a furniture van to Blackpool’s gaming houses with anything he could lay his hands on to use as stake money. His winnings were usually spent on dapper suits and hats. ‘Grandad was “Mr Cravat”,’ David remembers. ‘People regarded him as a gentleman because he was always immaculately dressed, mostly in a spotless Crombie with a silk handkerchief poking out of his breast pocket. Every Saturday morning he’d iron his clothes and set them out while the house filled with the smell of his breakfast kippers. His hair gleamed with brilliantine and he always carried a smart walking cane, which he would use to point at people and things. Footballer George Best was a friend of his – Grandad addressed him as “Georgie Boy”. He’d go into pubs, but he wouldn’t drink alcohol. Only once in many blue moons would he allow himself a rum and black.’

Growing up with a bookmaker who liked a flutter made David keenly opposed to gambling: ‘Underneath the staircase at home, in the cubbyhole where our dog used to sleep, was a pile of shoeboxes. On some days they’d be stuffed so full of money the notes would scatter across the floor, but on other days they’d be completely empty. Then Mum would have to traipse down to the pawn shop with her fur coat and whatever she thought might be worth something. A fortnight later, everything would come out of the pawn again. My dad was just the same, either rolling in it or without a penny to his name. That’s gamblers in a nutshell: they shout it from the rooftops when they’ve had a win, but never own up to how much they’ve lost to get there.’

Until 1961, betting shops were illegal and usually located on a back street. ‘Grandad would slip me sixpence to put each way on a horse and I’d leg it down Exeter Street – the street of a thousand vices,’ David explains with a laugh. ‘At the end of a couple of back entries was a terraced house where a woman used to stand at an open half-door running a book. If she wasn’t there, I’d push open the door myself and go inside. There’d be a group of old men huddled round a table, smoking like chimneys and listening to the radio. I’d lay my bet while the woman wrote it down in her book – there weren’t any ticket stubs then, mind. That wasn’t how Grandad pursued his own business; he was legit, a bookie on track, attending all the horse and dog races. My job as a boy was to run up and down the line to see who was laying what odds and report back. Then Grandad would alter his odds to suit. I’d watch him chalking the board and doing all the crazy arm-waving. Dad and Uncle Bert would sometimes be there too, putting bets on. I used to call them the “Crombie Boys” – all in their long coats and trilbies.’

The complexities of the family relationships were lost on David as a child: ‘I never gave it a second thought. Grandad was just the old man with the smart suits and the spittoon boxes, and Mum was the centre of my world. As for Dad . . . we didn’t see a lot of each other in those days, not for any length of time anyway. He would be away for months on end, working as an engineer. Those things were never an issue. My life revolved around Aked Street and I was a happy little fellow back then.’

One mile south-east of Manchester city centre, Ardwick was a small village in open countryside until the Industrial Revolution. Grand terraces of regency houses sprang up around Ardwick Green, a private park with an ornamental pond, but by the end of the nineteenth century Ardwick had altered beyond recognition: mills abounded in Union Street, limeworks lined the River Medlock and everywhere were factories – brickworks, chemical works, sawmills and ironworks. Waste was emptied straight into the River Cornbrook, renamed the Black Brook by disgusted locals. The wide terraces largely vanished, replaced by workers’ homes: long, narrow streets of cramped housing and small backyards. Nonetheless, it was a thriving community, and by the early 1950s Ardwick was famous for its scores of shops, picture houses, pubs, dance halls and the vast market with two entrances: one on Stockport Road, the other on Aked Street.

* * *

At the far end of my cobbled, gas-lit street stands Ross Place Primary, the school I attend from the age of five. At the other is the open-air market that heaves on Saturdays with the neighbourhood’s many characters and con men: Bible-pushers, Jack the Lads and hawkers shouting out their ‘never to be repeated’ bargains.

Every day the housewives can be seen scrubbing the windowsills and yards of pavement outside their front doors with donkey stone. Any occasion is an excuse for a street party; out come the trestle tables on Guy Fawkes’, with bed-sheets serving as tablecloths. Four or five tables are shuffled together in a long row and the women bustle in and out of the houses, carrying food they’ve cooked themselves. The air is thick with smells: parkin, toffee apples and crackling bonfires.

I’m an only child and I love it. Every day is a reason to jump out of bed with a smile, but Saturdays are best of all – Christmas and birthdays rolled into one. On Saturdays I become a miniature cowboy, learning my craft at one of the many picture houses showing morning and afternoon matinees: the Apollo, the Kings, the Queens, and the Shaftesbury. I can be the Cisco Kid at the Apollo in the morning and then at the Kings in the afternoon I’m the Range Rider or his trusty sidekick Dick West. I sit soaking up every gunfight and stagecoach hold-up, booing the Red Indians while sucking solemnly on an orange-flavoured ice-stick. I run home feeling like a real cowboy in my Davy Crockett raccoon-fur hat, shooting up the traffic with a two-fingered pistol and slapping my backside to spur on my imaginary horse, Lightning.

My weekly bath on a Saturday means more treats. Mum scrubs and dries me and then, whether it’s needed or not, she delouses me, lovingly combing my head raw and squashing ‘the bad little buggers’ under her thumb. After that she doles out syrup of figs followed by the dark, sweet laxative chocolate that guarantees I’ll be a ‘good, clean little boy’. Topped and tailed, clean-headed and cleaned out, I’m ushered into the parlour and presented with almost every comic from the week’s stands.

Those last two hours before bedtime are ours. It’s just Mum and me, wrapped in the secretive comfort of the parlour. I love the soothing smell of the room, its cosiness and privacy. I curl up with my comics on the bulky, floral-patterned settee while Mum fetches her newspaper. Before sitting down she turns to the mahogany gramophone player and inserts a new brass needle from a little cup full of them, then winds up the gramophone and chooses a record to play. There are stacks of 78 rpm singles in brown paper covers and I know the words to them all. A rustling sound precedes every song; I read my comic, mouthing along to Woody Guthrie, Frankie Laine and Hank Williams. After a while, Mum chooses a record for herself, and the voice of Dean Martin, usually followed by Doris Day, floats from the speaker. I peep from behind my comic at Mum’s far-away expression until she notices me and smiles. I wonder if she’s thinking about the photographs in our attic room, remembering her brown-eyed soldier boy.

There are photographs in this room, too. Unsmiling, sepia-tinted faces I don’t know gaze down on us, dressed in their Sunday best, stiff and uncomfortable. My eyelids start to droop. With a mug of milky Horlicks in my hand, I’m gently guided up the two flights of stairs to my bedroom where, tucked up safe and snug as a bug in a rug, I drift off to ride like the wind with the cowboys in my dreams.

And in the morning, when I awake, I’m wrapped in Mum’s arms. I love sharing a bed with her; I love the scent of her skin and hutch up as close as I can to feel her breath on my face. I want that breath to last until the end of time. Her room is on the floor below, perfect and feminine, meticulously clean, but she never sleeps in it, not once. The door is always shut, as is the door to Grandfather’s room; I can hear his snoring and coughing, if I listen hard. But Mum always sleeps with me.