The Old House on the Corner (41 page)

She’d never go to sleep at this rate. There was
something missing. After a few minutes, she remembered what it was and went over to her luggage, still unpacked, and rooted through a suitcase until she found a packet of incense sticks, a holder, and a box of matches. She chose Golden Orchid, lit the stick and put it on the chest that Josh had painted so beautifully, and got back into bed.

Almost immediately, the room was pervaded by a musky, pungent scent. She snuggled under the clothes, acutely aware that she was lying in Sam’s bed, underneath his duvet, her head on his pillow and surrounded by his furniture. She was back again in the basement flat in Islington and, as she drifted into sleep, she could have sworn she could hear Isabella singing …

Judy Smith was a war baby. She was born in 1941 while her mum and dad, both avid film fans, were watching
The Wizard of Oz
in the Palais de Luxe in Lime Street. Mum experienced the first contraction just as Dorothy and her companions arrived at Oz and were waiting to see the wizard. She’d rather hoped to last the film out, but had another contraction almost immediately, more severe than the first. Time seemed to be at a premium. The manager had been asked to phone for an ambulance, but said it would be quicker if he took them to the maternity hospital in his car. After he’d delivered Mum – he meant to the hospital, not in his car – he’d take Dad back to Penny Lane where a neighbour was looking after the other children.

‘If this one’s a girl, you’ll have to call her Dorothy,’ he said on the way.

‘Can’t,’ said Dad. ‘We’ve already got a Dorothy, after Dorothy Gish.
Orphans of the Storm
was the first film I ever saw. I was only eleven and I’ve been hooked every since.’

‘Judy then. Judy Garland’s a real heart-stopper.’

‘That’s not a bad idea,’ Dad mused. ‘All our four kids are named after film stars. We were going to call this one Glenda, after Glenda Farrell who was in
I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
. It’s my favourite film.’

‘It’s mine too,’ the manager enthused. The siren went to signal an air raid had started, but both men ignored it.

‘But Judy seems more appropriate. What do you think, luv?’ he asked Mum, who was writhing in agony on the back seat and hoping they’d reach the hospital before any bombs fell.

‘Judy’s fine,’ she gasped.

‘What about if it’s a boy?’ the manager asked.

‘Clark, after Clark Gable,’ Dad replied.

‘Have you seen
Gone with the Wind
?’

‘Twice.’

‘Magnificent picture, wasn’t it?’

‘Superb. You enjoyed it, didn’t you, love?’

‘It was marvellous,’ Mum gulped.

Judy’s two brothers and two sisters were called Dorothy, Paulette (after Paulette Goddard), Ronnie (Ronald Colman), and Fred (Fredric March). The Smiths were a happy family. They weren’t exactly poor, but neither were they comfortably off. Dad didn’t earn much in his exceedingly dull job in an insurance office. Fortunately, Mum could do wonders with a couple of pounds of mincemeat and the younger children didn’t mind if they wore hand-me-down clothes.

Mum and Dad argued a lot, not over anything important, mainly the films with which they were obsessed: whether Ronald Colman was a better actor than Herbert Marshall; if Clark Gable was more handsome with a moustache or without; was it Jean Harlow or Rosalind Russell who had starred in
China Seas
– a few days later, Dad had gone round to the
local picture house to ask the manager and it turned out to be both.

Judy did well at school. She had ‘a quick brain’, according to her father. All Sylvester Smith’s children had quick brains, something of which he was inordinately proud, particularly when they all passed scholarships and went to grammar schools. They’d inherited their brains from their dad, he told them frequently, and their looks from their radiantly pretty, golden-haired, peachy-skinned mother, who could well have become a film star herself had she not fallen in love with you know who. ‘Old monkey face,’ he would add. It was his way of fishing for compliments, knowing that someone would insist he bore a striking resemblance to Spencer Tracy.

‘Perhaps we should have gone to Hollywood when we first got married,’ he would ruminate aloud, his brow furrowed, just like Spencer’s. ‘I could have become a director or a producer or something. We’d be living in a white mansion with a swimming pool by now, ’stead of Penny Lane.’

‘But if Mum was busy being a film star, you wouldn’t have had us,’ Dorothy once pointed out.

‘Oh, well, given the choice …’ Dad said hastily, leaving the rest of the sentence hanging in the air so his children could only guess what the choice would have been had he been given it. Dorothy thought he’d sooner be in Hollywood and Fred thought Penny Lane. The others couldn’t make up their minds.

Anyway, their house had a little touch of Hollywood about it. Dad collected the
Picturegoer
from the paper shop every Friday on his way home from work and, after he and Mum had read it from cover to cover, it would be passed on to the children who
devoured it just as keenly if they could read or, if they hadn’t yet learned, just looked at the photos of the stars and scenes of the films they were in.

The magazines would then be put in a box in the cupboard under the stairs where they were easy to get at for reference purposes. If there was a photo of a star he or Mum particularly liked, Dad would buy another
Picturegoer
and the pictures would be cut out and pinned to the walls of their bedroom.

They grew up, the Smith children, thinking that the little, unpretentious house in Penny Lane had something extra-special about it. The stars were their friends. Sylvester referred to them by their first names: Clark, Franchot, Ingrid, Humphrey. ‘I see Humph and Lauren are getting married,’ he would say looking up from the
Picturegoer
, irritating Mum no end because she preferred to read it for herself.

At nine, Judy wrote to the studios for a photograph of Alan Ladd, the first man with whom she fell in love. When it arrived, she burst into tears because he was so handsome, yet unattainable.

It struck her then, although in a way she could never have put into words, that her family were brushing with the softest of wings against an alien world far away across the ocean to which they didn’t belong and never would. Yet it seemed an innocent and charming thing to do, to escape from their own humdrum little world into a star-studded tinsel town in California, far better than being interested in nothing at all like most people.

From that day on, Judy regarded her family’s fixation with Hollywood with an amused tolerance, although stayed in love with Alan Ladd until she was fourteen, keeping his photo underneath her pillow to
look at before she went to sleep and first thing in the morning when she woke up.

It would seem all the children had come down to earth at some time during their young lives. Dorothy, the eldest, became a teacher, much to the disappointment of Sylvester who’d been hoping all his incredibly handsome children would go into show business. Then Ronnie chose a career in the Navy, Paulette went into nursing, and Fred took his A.M.I.Mech.E and became an engineering draughtsman. All her father’s hopes were now centred on Judy, who was to disappoint him again by getting engaged during her final year at school and marrying the following Christmas after spending a few months in an office as dull as his own.

Judy met Harry Moon in the Cavern, a jazz club that had opened in Liverpool a few years before – her father was a keen aficionado. One wintry Sunday in February, she was with a friend from school listening to Cy Laurie’s Jazz Band, when a young man appeared at the end of her row, his eyes searching for an empty seat.

‘Who does he remind me of?’ she asked herself and realized with a little thrill that it was Alan Ladd. He had the same blond hair and perfectly regular features. Someone moved up so the end seat became vacant and he nodded a ‘thank you’, and she saw he had the same smile and the same white teeth. He was smartly dressed in a grey tweed suit, woollen shirt, and check tie. The other men present were more casually attired.

During the interval, when people were milling around buying soft drinks from the bar and her friend had gone to stand in the queue for the Ladies, Judy
managed to let her handkerchief fall at Alan Ladd’s feet. She was looking her best that night, in a white angora jumper Paulette had given her because it itched, a maroon pleated skirt, a hand-me-down of Dorothy’s, and high-heeled boots Mum and Dad had bought her for Christmas. She’d only recently begun to use lipstick and the pale rose on her lips was the same shade as her cheeks. Mum had set her wavy hair in a casual style very similar to Marilyn Monroe’s.

‘You’ve dropped something,’ Alan Ladd said, picking the hankie up.

‘Thanks very much, I hadn’t noticed.’

‘Do you come here often?’ he asked conversationally. She identified a spark of interest in his blue eyes and wondered if it was reflected in her own that were a slightly darker shade of blue.

‘About once a week, usually on Sunday. I’m not too keen on skiffle. I like New Orleans jazz best.’ She felt slightly disappointed. Close up, he didn’t look even faintly like Alan Ladd. His nose was a tiny bit bigger, or possibly smaller, his mouth wider, or it might have been narrower. He just wasn’t the man she’d spent five years of her life madly in love with. She quickly got over her disappointment: despite the differences, he was just as handsome.

‘What do you do for a living?’ he enquired in a friendly tone.

‘I’m still at school. In May, I’ll be eighteen and I’ll be leaving in July. What do you do? For a living that is.’

‘I’m a photographer,’ he said modestly, though she could tell he was rather proud of the fact. ‘My dad’s got his own shop in Menlove Avenue.’

‘That’s not far from us. We live in Penny Lane.’

‘We might bump into each other sometime. Look, we’d better sit down.’ People were returning to their seats. ‘The Blue Genes Skiffle Group is on next.’

She wanted to spit, thinking that she’d lost him, but when the music ended and everyone was filing out, she felt a hand on her arm and turned to find Alan Ladd regarding her with slightly more interest than before.

‘Will you be here next Sunday?’

‘I expect so,’ Judy said casually, although she wouldn’t have missed next Sunday for the world.

‘See you next week then. What’s your name?’

‘Judy Smith.’

‘I’m Harry Moon.’

Within a month they were in love. They got engaged on her birthday and were married at Christmas. The youngest Smith, Judy was the first to marry. There was a flat over the photographer’s shop, which the present tenants were about to vacate, where they could live at a nominal rent.

‘Dad said we could have it for nothing, but that wouldn’t be right. I insisted we pay something.’

Harry was twenty-two, a cautious, honourable man, easy-going to a fault. Judy loved him for it. Always careful to do what he considered was right, he gave back change if he’d been given too much and, if they were on a bus or tram and the conductor was on the top deck and he hadn’t paid the fare when it was time to get off, he would run upstairs and pay, even if he sometimes nearly missed his stop – Judy and almost every other person she knew would have jumped off and considered themselves lucky. And kept any overpaid change.

She got married in her mother’s carefully preserved wedding gown that she’d made herself: cream crêpe, full-length, with a boat-shaped neckline edged with pearls and otherwise completely plain apart from the leg-of-mutton sleeves.

‘You look just as beautiful as your mum did on our wedding day,’ Dad said emotionally in the car on the way to the church. ‘Harry’s a lucky chap. I’m glad you’re marrying into an artistic family, Jude. Did you know his dad belongs to a film group? They actually make short films. He’s invited me to join.’

The Moons and the Smiths got on extraordinarily well. The two sets of parents had already become good friends and it turned out that Harry’s sister, Eve, was a teacher and already knew Judy’s sister, Dorothy.

Life, it seemed, was perfect. The wedding was perfect. Living in the flat over the shop was perfect, particularly making love with Harry. They continued to go to the Cavern where rock ‘n’ roll had taken over from jazz and scruffy young men who would eventually become world famous played their wild, raucous music, sending the crowds into a delirium of excitement.

Judy gave up her office job to look after the shop while Mr Moon was in the studio taking photographs that flattered the sitters no end. Harry did all the outside jobs: the weddings, christenings, parties, and family portraits.

They’d been married six months when Judy discovered she was expecting a baby and Joe was born in the spring of 1961. By this time, they’d already moved into their own house: a large, comfortable semi-detached in Heathfield Road, no distance from the shop, Judy’s mum and dad, and her in-laws. Harry was a partner in
the business and could easily afford the mortgage. Their second son, Sam, arrived a year later, only missing his mother’s twenty-first birthday by a day.

Judy felt as if she had been uniquely blessed, moving seamlessly from a supremely happy childhood to a blissfully happy marriage, now with the addition of two beautiful, healthy sons: Joe, with his delicate skin and golden curls took after her, whereas the more robust Sam had dark hair and navy-blue eyes and took after no one they could think of.

Her sisters hadn’t been so lucky. Dorothy, who had married the year after her, was having trouble with a husband who drank too much and had already had one affair – ‘That I know of,’ Dorothy said darkly. Paulette, now twenty-five, longed to get married, but so far hadn’t met a man with whom she felt inclined to spend the next fifty or sixty years.

Despite her state of utter contentment, Judy couldn’t help but worry that it might not last. Life was so unexpected. No matter how good things were, you could never tell what was waiting around the next corner. Look at her father, for instance! He’d been seriously depressed when nearly all the cinemas in Liverpool had closed down and were converted into Bingo halls, used for storage, or just left to rot. It was the last thing he’d imagined happening. And who would have thought that the day would come when the
Picturegoer
would publish its final issue, as it did in April 1960? Dad felt as if his world was falling apart. His idols were either dead or retired and had been replaced by actors who hadn’t the charisma of Clark or Humphrey, Rosalind or Rita, apart from Marilyn Monroe whom he worshipped. He was gradually sinking into a decline when his children clubbed
together and bought him a television and he was able to watch old films in the comfort of his own home, although it didn’t have the magic of a real picture house.