DIAMONDS AT THE LOST AND FOUND
A Memoir in Search of my Mother
Sarah Aspinall

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Sarah Aspinall 2020

Cover photographs © Sarah Aspinall. Background image © Shutterstock

Image of Louis Jourdan © Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo

Image of Ronnie Carroll © Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

All other images provided by the author

Sarah Aspinall asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008375164

Ebook Edition © August 2020 ISBN: 9780008375171

Version: 2020-06-11

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1: Hong Kong

Chapter 2: Star Quality

Chapter 3: The Grand House

Chapter 4: The Riviera of the North West

Chapter 5: Bookie’s Runner

Chapter 6: Goodbyes

Chapter 7: America, 1965

Chapter 8: The Kill Devil Hills

Chapter 9: True Love

Chapter 10: The Further Adventures of Audrey

Chapter 11: Palm Springs

Chapter 12: Sally and Audrey at Sea

Chapter 13: I Yabba Dabba Doo!

Chapter 14: The Antipodes

Chapter 15: Pearl of the Orient

Chapter 16: A Cold New Year

Chapter 17: The Midnight Kiss

Chapter 18: The Young Eve

Chapter 19: Crashing into Gateposts

Chapter 20: Further Afield

Chapter 21: High Hopes

Chapter 22: What’s Good for the Goose

Chapter 23: The Wedding

Chapter 24: Breaking Away

Chapter 25: Rebellion

Chapter 26: A Journey North

Chapter 27: Arrival

Afterword

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

1
Hong Kong

I AM EIGHT YEARS OLD and it is 1965.

I look around the softly lit bar. A man sits across from me on a high stool, well dressed, alone, drink in hand; I notice him straight away. The air is smoky and the distant lights glittering below us could be those of Tokyo or Cairo or San Francisco, or any of these cities that we find ourselves in. The glitzy decor, rich smells and leather dinner menus give no clues as to even what country we are in, only what level we are currently at in International Hotel Land. This week it is Hong Kong, the hotel sumptuous, and we are hopeful this may be one of our winning streaks.

‘I’ve got you under my skin …’

A pianist is playing Sinatra songs. He drifts seamlessly from one to the next –

‘… In the wee small hours of the morning …’

I know the songs; they play everywhere we go and my mother sings along to them all.

In the hotel lobby is a Chinese emperor’s throne that you can sit on to be photographed. A kindly American couple takes a picture of me sitting on it, lifting me onto the scarlet cushion, putting the Mandarin hat with tassels on my head and telling me to smile. They scribble down the address that my mother gives them, promising to mail a print of it to my ‘home’.

I keep thinking about this, and wondering if one day we will go to a place called home. Will this photograph be waiting for me, lying on a doormat in an envelope with an American stamp? I try to picture ‘home’, and to remember the gloomy tiled hallway in the big Victorian house in the damp seaside town, but it only feels like somewhere that I’ve once visited, and not much liked.

Tonight we eat dinner in the dining room off the lobby and bar, and for once my mother can find little to say. Around us is the usual hotel mix of tanned tourist families and businessmen having serious conversations, or off duty with a beer, chatting about golf. I’m not allowed to read my books at mealtimes, so I look around the room trying to find something to be interested in.

‘… do be do … the lady is a tramp …’ The pianist drawls, Audrey joins in.

‘Why is she a tramp?’ I ask.

‘She wants to be free, do her own thing,’ she says, ‘you know,’ then she croons about having the wind in our hair and being without a care. As she sings she does the thing she calls table jiving, her hands criss-crossing through the air, fists thumping each other, thumbs pointing over her shoulder as if she was hitch-hiking right out of the restaurant.

‘So why won’t she go there in erming and pearls? What is erming?’

She sighs. ‘It’s ermine, min, fur, you know like my mink coat.’

She doesn’t like these sorts of questions. Sometimes she will give me a number, like ‘OK, three, two more’, and hold three fingers up, taking each finger down as I ask her something.

She takes out one of her menthol cigarettes and smokes it slowly, then tries to be kind.

‘Have an ice cream, sweetheart? You’ve hardly eaten anything.’

But I don’t want an ice cream and I feel sick. I know she is bored, and I shouldn’t ask anything else.

‘Shall I get myself a Coke then?’ I offer. Audrey looks over at the bar again, at the man sitting there.

‘OK then.’

This is code and we both know what is going to happen next.

I get up and make my way across to the bar; I manage to wedge myself right next to the man sitting on his stool and I can feel the rough cloth of his jacket against my arm and smell that faint male smell of aftershave and car leather and five-pound notes. The waiter fills my glass with ice and I turn to the man with what I hope is a cute smile.

‘Hello.’

He looks down at me from his bar stool. ‘Hello, princess.’

I give him an innocent look. ‘I don’t suppose you can look after my Mummy when I go to bed?’

He seems taken aback, but then laughs and turns to glance behind him. ‘So which one is your mummy? And are you quite sure she wants to be taken care of?’

I nod and point across to her. Audrey gives a puzzled smile as she gets up to come over, pretending she doesn’t know what is happening. She transforms herself in those few moments, into someone happy and fascinating.

‘Oh dear, is my little girl being a pest?’ she says, and puts her arm around me.

She has a voice that sounds excited and drowsy at the same time, and an accent she has invented for herself, a trace of her parents’ Irish Liverpool mixed with something faintly American. People are intrigued and ask her, they always do … ‘Where do you come from?’

Now with the man there is that sudden shift, a change in the atmosphere, and in him. He suddenly looks younger and more alive as he takes in the strands of red hair that fall across her face, the look she has, bright-eyed and as if there was some joke going on that no one else knew about, a joke just between them. It makes a room feel like the chandeliers have just been lit and everything sparkles.

He responds as they so often do, with that look of keen, warm interest. ‘This little princess was just telling me that she was going to bed?’

I decide then that I don’t think he is very nice, not really. I think he might be what my Auntie Grace, who doesn’t like my mother, would call ‘one of her smooth smoothies’. Audrey gives me what she believes is her motherly look.

‘She certainly is off to bed. Come on, Miss Flip!’

I get up and say goodnight to my catch of the evening. She is pleased with me. She has a hundred names for me: Miss Doodlemepop is my favourite.

Then, just as we are leaving, he takes the bait as they always do. He leans in towards her.

‘Maybe we could have a little nightcap?’

His voice is full of meaning. He smiles down at me.

‘So this little lady won’t have to worry about Mummy being all alone?’

‘Oh I don’t know,’ she says modestly, thinking about it, wondering if it would be OK. Then, with a ‘what the heck’ air as if throwing a lifetime of caution to the wind, she gives in.

‘It wouldn’t hurt, I suppose, just a quick one. I’ll settle her down first.’

Back in the room ‘settling me down’ means that I pull on my nightie, guiltily ignoring the flannel and toothbrush that Auntie Grace had presented me with. She’d been horrified that I’d never had a toothbrush, let alone been told to use one. Then I get into bed to watch the delicious routine of Mummy ‘freshening up’: the grey-green eyeliner smudged along her eyes, the coral lipstick blotted with a Kleenex, and lastly the squirt of the perfume bottle and the cloud of Youth Dew which she will lightly step into. In that moment I am entranced with her. It is like a special dance, swirling into a haze of fragrance as it curls around her, settling on her hair, her skin, as if a magical dew. Hers is the smell of the fresh early evening, black taxicabs and Martinis, mink coats and diamonds. Sometimes she will let me step into that perfume cloud and I fantasize about what my own grown-up special scent will be. I imagine honeysuckle and bluebell woods, and try to remember what these things smell like. Does England smell this way after summer showers? It should, but all I can remember is the cold sea air and rain on the windows of that sad, faraway house.

She’s ready, and there’s the feeling of her cheek brushing mine and the click of the door closing behind her. I lie in the dark, listening for the reassuring sounds of other hotel guests running baths and the murmur of conversation. Tonight I feel that she won’t be back till morning, but I know she will come back. She always comes back.

I switch the light back on and reach for my book.

The random books I collected as I passed through childhood had become, at this time, my entire guide to life. Bought in haste at airports, found abandoned in hotel lounges or given to me by sympathetic strangers, this odd library system yielded up occasional gold. Some of the content was baffling, or dull, or written in impenetrable language, but I kept going just for those precious moments of illumination when something in the story gave me a key to understanding the strange situations that I found myself in. One current favourite was called Coffee, Tea or Me?, which followed air stewardesses Trudy and Rachel as they engaged in a daily battle to ward off the attentions of the airline pilots, drunk passengers and ‘love ’em and leave ’em guys’ travelling the world. We met a lot of these ladies, who seemed so kind and elegant. We would see them again after our flight, crossing the airport concourse or hotel lobby, as they walked behind the captain and co-pilot, in their trim uniforms. But I now realize that behind that poise was a struggle for survival. A hunt of their own, the same hunt we were on.

Tonight I would struggle on with a book I’d found: Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham. It begins with the hero Philip as a child, sleeping safe and loved in his mother’s arms, and then being told, ‘Your mamma’s gone away. You won’t ever see her any more. Your mamma’s in heaven.’ The sense of panic and abandonment that he felt is exactly how I had felt at the death of my father. I was still unable to think of his sad, kind face without a frozen sense of misery.

As a guide to how adults love each other this story couldn’t be more shocking. Philip has a deformed back, and is terribly sensitive; he falls in love with a waitress called Mildred who is cruel to him, and who he seems to find repellent with her ‘common nasal voice’, but he cannot think about anything else. Love was my chosen subject of study, and the feelings of Philip for Mildred were so different from any childish idea of love that I felt some trick was being played on the reader.

I didn’t want to ask my mother, as she didn’t like to talk about things in books. But if a man like Philip could love a horrid girl like Mildred, then why didn’t one of those men who my mother met ever love her, when she was so beautiful and could sing and dance and tell funny stories and make the room light up? It must just have been a run of terrible, terrible luck.

Sometimes on our adventures, ‘our travels’, we were in luck. We could stay in lavish hotels with gorgeous lobbies and mirrored ballrooms, with long corridors and caged lifts: wonderlands that I could explore for hours. Then we would suddenly lurch into an entirely different world of cheap rooms and panic.

Morning comes, and I wake up with hot light coming through a narrow line down the side of the curtains, cutting across the hotel room. Audrey is sitting in a chair with her wrap around her. She isn’t doing anything. Just sitting there.

THIS IS AUDREY.

She looks so small now.

Today she’s made up like a doll; I can’t get past the likeness. Then I note the empty space in her oversized coffin has been padded with sparkling pink gauze.

A doll in a presentation box.

And yet I look at her now and that strange magnetic aura is still there. The rumble of a bus on the road outside does little to erase it. Otherwise this room is so silent, she is so still, her stories already drifting away from me, some already half forgotten.

I see now that my mother and I lived in a land of these stories. It began back then with my own escape into books, and Audrey’s myriad tales told to strangers. Ours was a fairyland of myth and anecdote, sometimes in dull black and white, sometimes Technicolor; always a musical and often a romance. Only once or twice was it a tragedy, but we got over it.

As a child there was this constant swirling mist around us, made up of all these fragments of my mother’s past, her thousand and one tales. Many were extraordinary accounts of ingenuity and good fortune, most were true, but even then I believed there was another, untold story, which hovered over us, a story that we were either leaving behind or travelling towards.

I knew, even then, that my mother was many things – a chancer, a dreamer, a procurer, a delinquent, as well as a teller of tales.

Here is one of her tales: Marilyn Monroe’s favourite bungalow was Number Seven on the studio backlot, the Norma Jean, which sat behind a dapple of succulent foliage; beyond it a path wound through tropical gardens to Bungalow Four. An assistant was taking room-service sandwiches wrapped in white linen to Clark Gable and another a tray of Martinis to Frank Sinatra in Bungalow Five. Against these tangled depths, shaded by twilight, the flames of bougainvillea match Audrey’s lipstick, and a lamp glints off her auburn hair. She has found her way to Oz, and infiltrated the magic kingdom of the movies at last. There is a patter of rain, the sky is darkening and Sinatra steps outside holding a drink – he puts out his hand to catch a raindrop and smiles.

‘What do you call a wet bear?’ Audrey asks him.

‘I don’t know.’ He grins. ‘What do you call a wet bear?’

‘A drizzly bear.’

He laughs, and raises his glass to her before moving back into the shadows.

Clink.

This is Audrey.

Crimson lips, salty tears, the sad house and the windy dunes.

Bougainvillea, Sinatra, warm breeze through the Hollywood Hills.

And me here to work out how she and I fit in between.

There’s a thread running through our story, our harum-scarum life, and it is love; perhaps, more than that, a hunt for love?

The love between a man and a woman was clearly everything. I think back to myself as a child and realize that this was coded into me. All the nooks and crannies, breezes and becalmings, the highs and lows that rattled us over the world and back are somehow connected to that thread.

Love was everything to her. To us. That hunt was everything.

I now see it drove her every day.

My mission is to work out why it took us so long to find it.

It made me who I am, that adventure, and those years of being her small partner in crime. I wasn’t always able to see where we were going but, like the back of a pantomime horse, I could hear, and in time I learnt so much. So my own story must now be about what I lost and found along the way.

2
Star Quality

THE SOUTHPORT SEA had receded to a faraway ribbon of silver, and a ghostly view of Blackpool Tower shimmered across the mud and water of the estuary. On autumn nights this mirage would pulsate with light and colour and I was told that it contained a circus with dancing ponies and roaring lions.

Our first house was pebble-dashed and on a dull road of bed-and-breakfast VACANCY signs. The road went down to the so-called seaside, a dark mudflat lit with pools of reflecting water as it stretched into the distance. Silt had slowly filled the bay, and the vanishing sea had already robbed Southport of its life as a genteel resort; but at the end of the 1950s it was still holding on grimly, propping up the old fairground and planting its municipal pleasure grounds with cheery geraniums.

There was a box of cine films in the sideboard at home, labelled in my father’s careful handwriting. These were eventually lost in my mother’s endless house moves, so it is now hard to be sure what is a memory of life, and what is a memory of these flickering records of my childhood. Both have the same uneven quality, the shifts in luminosity, the haze of things that are glimpsed through gauze. My earliest childhood summers still have, in my mind, that fragile vibrancy of watercolours, and in every frame my mother sparkles. She steps out of shadows and into a transparent glow as if lit from within and fluttering with life, quivering with the next thing she wants or needs.

One flickering recollection is of a hot day in midsummer. We walk down to a seafront teeming with bank-holiday crowds as Mummy holds my hand tightly. The Marine Pleasure Gardens, with their rolling acres of lawns and lakes, are a magic kingdom to me, as we cross mock-Venetian bridges snaking over lagoons thick with chugging pleasure boats. The overhead rollercoaster creaks and explodes with screams. I am lifted up to wave at the miniature railway, rattling by us under the shadow of the pier and out into sunlight and past the cages of rabbits along the route on its way to the zoo.

We approach the high circular wall of the salty Sea Bathing Lake where seawater was still pumped from the distant sea. It was here that Mummy had once been crowned as a beauty queen. Its grand, but now grubby, concrete spaces still echo each summer with the shouts of bathers. Today it is packed with wet pink bodies as we hurry up to the changing rooms ranged along the top, and here my pudgy body is pushed and prodded into my new bikini and my hair pulled into pretty hair slides. Other small girls in their frocks and swimsuits stand holding their mothers’ hands, waiting to approach a concrete pier that projects out into the huge round pool. The man in charge knows Mummy, as most people in Southport do. He gives her a big wink and we are moved up to the front of the queue.

Within moments I am being pushed out along this lonely catwalk. I stop, but Mummy tells me to go on.

‘Don’t be such a silly, just walk to the end and say hello to that nice man.’

She points to a figure at the far end of the pier. He beckons me to come and I totter bravely along, looking down at the water all around me. As I reach the end, he squats down beside me; his face is an odd colour, all puffy and tan foundation. He’s smiling, has bright white teeth, and yet it’s not like a proper smile. His face is now close to mine, and he says into a microphone that booms out from somewhere else, ‘So! What is the name of this little Rosebud?’

I realize with horror that I am part of something I don’t understand, and can’t breathe.

He tries again, but not into the microphone and as if through his teeth. ‘Just tell us your name, love?’

I finally manage to whisper: ‘I’m Sally.’

I try to find my voice. He has pushed the microphone closer to me and I take a deep breath and shout. ‘But I’m too shy!’

I hear my voice booming and bouncing back at me, mixed with a roaring laughter from all around the pool. The sound of it seems to hang in the air, and I turn and run back along the catwalk to my mother. I know that they are laughing at me because I have done it all wrong.

Mummy shakes her head, and points to the pink sashes on the table.

‘Why did you run away? Look, they just wanted to give you a pretty Little Miss Rosebud sash, and put a crown on your head.’

I look over in wonder at the sashes, and then feel sadness that I have lost the crown and the chance to be something so special.

‘You could have had the prize and the lovely sash to take home if you hadn’t been such a sausage.’

We trudge home and I somehow already know that I am as disappointing as everything else in her grey world.

OUR HOUSE, 18 Saunders Street, was divided top and bottom and my nana lived upstairs and my parents and I downstairs. My father was already unwell with the sickness that would only get worse, but he still struggled out to his office most days. We had a gloomy living room with a brown sofa, rough to the touch, and a back door to a yard and small garden beyond. There was a fish-and-chip shop across the street where we got our dinner, groceries were delivered in a van, and a man called ‘Joe the Hoover Man’ came to mend things.

There were long summer days with drawn curtains when I was put in front of BBC children’s shows that left me feeling upset and lonely. Torchy, the battery boy with his jerky movements, had strings you could see pulling on his puppet body. I remember hiding behind the sofa. I wanted something to wish for, but didn’t know what it was.

Mum and me, 1960.

Even after my first failure there was still a grim determination hanging over my future. Aged three, I was enrolled at the Betty Bursey Dance Academy, and given a patent-leather case with a picture of ballet shoes on the front, to carry my shoes for ballet and tap. The older girls giggled in the changing room and whispered, ‘Betty Bursey’s busty’, which she was. Afterwards Mummy and I practised song-and-dance routines at home in her bedroom, tapping to ‘Bye, Bye Blackbird’ and bending and tipping to ‘I’m a Little Teapot’.

‘Chin up and a pretty smile as you tip over, that’s it. You are my special girl, you know?’ she told me as she showed me the moves.

Once the memory of the Rosebud contest had faded a little, I was taken for a second try-out. It was another warm afternoon; we walked down to the seafront, on the promise of an ice cream, but then arrived at the large stage that was erected each season in the gardens outside the Floral Hall.

She bends and whispers, ‘Go on, just sing “Wiggly Woo” like we do at home.’

I’m given a little shove, out in front of a sea of elderly day-trippers seated in deckchairs. A man holds the microphone for me to sing and off I go.

‘There’s a worm at the bottom of the garden, and his name is Wiggly Woo.’

I glance to the side of the stage, where Mummy is mouthing the words at me, and wiggling her hips and arms, to remind me to wiggle like a worm as I sing the chorus. But without her at my side I feel lost and alone; I falter and can’t do my wiggle. As I curtsey, weak applause rises from the ranks of drowsy deckchairs.

With an air of finality my mother decided that I just could not sing, and that I had my father’s ‘two left feet’ and would never dance. My role in the double act we were fated to be was yet to emerge. For the moment I was given up on until I could display a talent for something.

For now, we both knew who was the real star. There was a big gold chocolate box with a sagging bow of ribbon glued to the top; it lived in wardrobes and I would beg for it to be lifted down and opened. Digging among the layers of photographs in different hues, I would pull them out longingly. These were small sepia windows to another life, and showed a little imp with dancing shoes and dressing up clothes grinning out at me.

WHO WAS SHE, this little girl? She was my mother, but in quite another incarnation, and living in this strange, dingy and unrecognizable world of the ‘olden days’. If I caught her in the right mood, she could be drawn back there to the Liverpool dockyards, some twenty miles away from us in Southport. It was now only a few stops on the train, or a drive down past the sand dunes and through dull suburbs, past Auntie Grace’s house, and past the war memorial and not so far at all; but it was also another place entirely: the past. Although it lay a little beyond my childish understanding, I would still feel the dark clouds of the Depression hanging heavily over Bootle’s terraced slums, and the notorious Scotland Road roaring and rattling with life through those hard times. It was a place that was dirty, noisy and vivid. When the working day at the dockyards finished, the stream of men would head straight to the pubs, and by mid evening their doorways let out blasts of smoky air and maudlin drunken singing, until closing time when fights began on the pavements and the wives appeared, shouting, trying to get their husbands away home.

Nearby, at Uncle Charlie’s coalyard, my mother – then Audrey Miller, aged six or seven – would be lifted onto the kitchen table, wearing her top hat, feet in shiny new tap shoes and clutching her cane. As the family crowded around she would start to sing, tapping her toes and swishing her cane from hand to hand, practising for her role in Babes in the Wood; the pantomime was to be performed at Liverpool’s most splendid theatre, the Empire, and she was to be Bootle’s very own leading light. Here she is with her shock of red hair, an irrepressible ball of impish energy, grabbing the limelight as she flutters by with the fairy chorus. ‘Give us a turn!’ someone calls. Immediately she stops dancing and pauses wide-eyed – she knows she has the room …

‘Shhh and I’ll tell you a secret,

something to open your eyes.

Are you awfully excited?

Cos it’s going to be … a surprise!’

I learnt this same poem, widening my eyes, whispering the lines, just as she had done …

‘Daddy says there aren’t any fairies,

But Mummy whispers low.

“Don’t take any notice, darling.

There are things even daddies don’t know.”’

This little girl would see things that I would never see, although I grew up with her, hearing her stories; and as I grew older I would begin to learn her secrets, and about the darker deeds she became caught up in. Something had happened in that shadowy world, something that would affect both our futures.

MOST DAYS Mummy and I strolled down to Lord Street, the graceful boulevard around which the town of Southport arranged itself. It stretched for almost a mile, wide enough to allow for expansive gardens, which ran continuously along its length. The elegant shop façades on the other side were fronted by a long cast-iron and glass canopy with fine detailing and ornate columns wrapped with plump cherubs. There were Tea Gardens, with playing fountains, and bandstands from which music was performed. Great chestnut trees made a cool canopy overhead.

In later years, when I lived in London, I would learn not to tell people that this was one of the finest thoroughfares in the world. It would make me seem ridiculous to be claiming this for a town no one knew and usually mixed up with Stockport. If I added that Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte had lived here in 1846, and it had been the inspiration for Napoleon and Haussmann’s scheme in redesigning Paris, I would be certainly mocked. But it was true, and in years to come, as I travelled the world, I would see great abandoned cities once on the Silk Route, or ruling a forgotten empire, and come to understand how easily one northern seaside town could be lost or buried under the silt of only a few decades of history.

My mother still had her postcards and pictures showing the town in the 1930s, when the rich and famous of the day came pouring out of the Garrick Theatre, the women in silks and furs, the men in evening wear and monocles. Uniformed chauffeurs waited in the glow of the street lamps, and behind them a thousand fairy lights glimmered in the trees.

Leading off from Lord Street were narrow lanes with small mysterious shops selling magical things. One grubby entrance was hidden beneath driftwood and dangling conch shells and guarded by a hanging African juju witch-doctor doll, and, even more terrifying, within, by a thin stooped old man. If you were brave enough to duck down and get past the fierce witch doctor, you came to broken steps leading to a basement cave where the old man’s shell grotto sold everything it is possible to make from seashells. These barnacled wonders were some of the earliest things I can remember wanting.

Alongside him were second-hand booksellers mixed in with greasy cafés and tawdry bucket-and-spade shops with rows of bright pink sticks of rock. These lanes led from Lord Street’s elegance to the part of town now judged to be ‘common’ and the Land of the Day-trippers. A grand Victorian promenade of large hotels, once the crown of the Riviera of the North West, was now beginning to tarnish, and beyond it the miles of pleasure gardens leading to the muddy beach were showing peeling paintwork and cracks thick with weeds.

Yet Lord Street still prospered, and incredibly an orchestra still played each day in the glass-domed restaurant of the Marshall and Snelgrove department store. This was where my mother longed to be, cocooned in its gilded calm, or at the Prince of Wales Hotel where people stepped out of Rolls-Royces to vanish through great mahogany revolving doors into a world of luxurious wealth.

This world was now lost to her. All she had was me and my daddy, her terminally ill husband, and her life in a shabby flat. So she sighed and fidgeted through most of the day, played her gramophone records over and over again, smoking her menthol cigarettes.

She would sometimes leave me with Nana and disappear for hours, till my nana stood at the window with her Parkinson’s tremor getting worse with the worry.

Sometimes mail arrived with foreign stamps, or someone telephoned from London, and my mother would brighten before falling into a deeper gloom.

My poor father, Neil, had reasons to believe that he had ruined the life of the woman he adored, and that his death would mean leaving me with a reluctant mother. Because of him, for some reason I would eventually come to understand, she hadn’t been able to marry the man she really wanted to marry, or have the glittering life she had planned; and now he was going to leave her with no money.

Did he wonder how all this would play out when he was gone, and if she would begin to chase her lost dreams once again, but with me in tow, now fated to a rackety life? Did he fear what this would mean, and how it would shape my future?

He had contracted a rare disease while serving with the RAF in Africa during the war. He now struggled to carry on working, and increasingly he came home from the office to lie down or to go to his hospital visits.

None of this was the life that my mother had hoped for, and she was never a woman to simply accept her fate. One day we were going to be far away from it all. There was nothing else for it; she was so full of wanting, and still craving all the things that she believed had slipped away from her. To get these things back she was going to have to cross a line. I don’t think she realized that this was what she was doing, or that she would be taking me with her to this life on the other side of that line; she was simply helpless and this was our fate. She had skills, honed in the back streets of Liverpool and learnt from her no-good father, which she was now quite willing to use to get her out of the mess in which she found herself, and who could blame her?

3
The Grand House

OUR TAXI PULLS UP at what seems to be a mansion. It is an enormous gloomy Victorian house of red brick smothered in a blanket of dense dusty ivy. Set back behind a busy main road, its gates open to a circular driveway and neat lawns with beds of black earth and rosebushes that point their spikes to the sky. Behind the front door is a vast tiled hallway, and then more corridors and doors. Just this hallway alone seems bigger than our entire previous flat. High ceilings look down onto rooms with new names: cloakroom, larder, dining room, salon … I have no memory of it having a kitchen at all and, if it did, I don’t believe we ever used it.

A van arrives, and a small plump man who smells of perfume begins telling the other men where to put all the big boxes.

‘Are you one of the Seven Dwarfs?’

Mummy says that was very rude and to say sorry. His name is David Glover, an antique dealer, and I watch as the stream of wooden crates begins to be unpacked; their contents are placed around the rooms and David Glover puts things on top of other things. A pillar called a torchère has a boy with wings and a bow and arrow placed on top of it; it means that you have to be very careful. In the dining room a great table of gleaming mahogany arrives, with an army of chairs to go around it that no one will ever sit on. The new furniture has names like Sheraton and Chippendale, and a sideboard called William the Third. I hide under this sideboard when Mummy’s friends come round, and I hear the sparkly glasses taken out of the cabinet and the chink of a sherry bottle. I hear her friend, Auntie Ava, ask her ‘How on earth have you afforded all this?’ and my mother touches her nose and laughs, saying, ‘That would be telling!’

Mum and Dad, (housekeeper in background) 14 Lulworth Road, 1962.

It is a house with a mystery: I find another den at the foot of the stairs from where I overhear my Auntie Grace whisper to Uncle Phil, ‘How do you explain it, where’s she finding all this money?’

It was clearly baffling to everyone that, just as we should have been sliding into poverty, we instead moved up in the world so spectacularly. My mother had no job, and her own mother, Nana, was mainly bedridden; my daddy was now very unwell, and there was me. Yet here we all were, and she had moved us from a shabby flat on the wrong side of town into a large and impressive house with live-in staff that she had apparently paid for herself. Even at a young age I was becoming aware of these secrets that seemed to hang in the air of those endless rooms.

FROM THE HALLWAY a sweeping staircase wound up to a landing and corridor, off which there were numerous bedrooms. At night the stairwell felt even bigger, leading to a pool of darkness below. It was a house that changed shape under cover of night. Corridors stretched out forever, the stairs doubled their length and there were strange noises, whisperings and banged doors.

At the top of the staircase there was a door. This door was quite unlike all the others in the house. The others were of dark wood with brass, but this was painted white and had a plastic handle. This door led to another world, one so different it was hard to believe the two regions shared a roof. Through this door was the domain of ‘the Back Flat’. Here a succession of housekeepers lived a completely self-contained existence: in a warm, cheery fug, with a smell of sausages, and windows that streamed with condensation from the gas fire.

The Back Flat had colourful lino and carpets, and a display of decorative objects that changed with each housekeeper but somehow shared a cheeky style, and seemed of a quite different order than the objects that had been carefully positioned around the main house.

Some of these ladies came with husbands and some without. First was Alice, Irish, with pale powdery skin she liked me to kiss; then Mrs Liddel with her colostomy bag that smelt bad; then Mr and Mrs Braithwaite with their son Colin who wasn’t quite right; and there were others long since forgotten. They all lived similar domestic lives, in the glare of bright overhead fluorescent lighting, with TVs on loudly in the kitchen showing Opportunity Knocks or Coronation Street.

The housekeepers had stacks of family photographs of smiling grandchildren and mementoes from holidays, things that made me long to go on a holiday: straw donkeys in hats, a mermaid made of seashells, tea towels emblazoned with lines like ‘Glorious Devon’. From her beloved Ireland Alice brought hundreds of knick-knacks in vivid green, with winking leprechauns and shamrocks that brought you good luck.

Mrs Liddel’s ‘piggywigs’ peeped out from the window ledges, alongside decorated mugs and tea cosies; Mrs Braithwaite had her ‘plaques’, plaster sculptures which crowded the walls from their hooks – pirate ships, glades with Gypsy caravans, lagoons with Venetian gondolas and the heads of flamenco dancers. She gave me one for my room, of a pirate buccaneer with a beard who leered down at me, and I loved it passionately.

They all were happy to feed me my preferred dinner of a chip butty and a cup of sweet tea before sending me back through the door to the gloomy spaces of the landing. I hated going back across that threshold.

The Back Flat was slightly awkward and not where I belonged, but it was cosy. The Other Side, our house and my bedroom, felt dark and cold after my mother had gone out, and I was ashamed that I had to have a potty under the bed as I was too frightened to put my head outside the covers, let alone cross the landing and go down the long creaking corridor to the toilet.

As an only child adrift in this great pile of a house, I loved to hear stories of my mother’s Bootle sardine-can childhood. If on a rainy day I could coax her to bring down that box, I would rummage through the treasure trove of photographs, pulling out this one or that, pleading with her to fill in the soundtrack, to conjure the atmosphere to go with these fading images. Life at Uncle Charlie’s sounded so safe, cocooned against the poverty and violence outside.

There everyone was bundled in together around the warm fire, with the sound and smell of the horses steaming and stamping in the yard outside. Charlie Clarke’s own large family ruled the roost. ‘Nana and I just mucked in, sleeping together in a small bed and sharing a room with the cousins.’

‘Was it really, really cosy?’ I’d ask hopefully.

‘Yes I suppose it was, but very cramped and noisy. From dawn to dusk you could hear wagons clattering about in the coalyard and horses clopping in and out, and people shouting and joshing. There was always a great pot of Scouse on the stove, and it seemed to go with the endless chatter around the table: the craic.’

My mother soaked it up, as I would soak up her tales in turn: the gossip, banter and stories of her Irish family roots, friends and neighbours, in which everyone was either a saint or a sinner. Words and thoughts came tumbling out of her, her cousins would later tell me, as she was lifted onto that table to entertain, to relate the story of some small triumph or disaster to make everyone laugh or cry. She made the stories crackle with life; she could just get people, their voices and little tics. It was a gift and she was going to make it work for her. She was going to be somebody; her mother Rebecca knew it, and was quietly determined. Audrey had absorbed this into her being, understanding that she was special, and one day her life would be somewhere else far from those dirty streets.

This was where our history started; I never heard any of the Irish past from further back, except that I was told that my grandparents – Rebecca, my nana, and Len, my grandfather – had arrived here from Ireland just before Audrey, my mother, was born. She would describe the dockyard slums, built around courts, dirt-floored yards where there was a toilet and a tap shared by several families.

‘Nana was a real lady, and an angel,’ my mother always said, but I knew she had married a bad man, my grandfather, Len Miller. The family story was that he was a man with some plausible charm, which soon wore thin, revealing him as a charlatan and an operator. Nana quietly managed to get by, keeping house and her pride and doting on her small daughter.

Mum, Bootle, 1932.

Then Len disappeared, leaving them destitute. Without his income they were homeless and had to move in down the road with Uncle Charlie. Nana took on a coster barrow to sell fruit and vegetables. We had driven past that bleak stretch of road down by the docks, and my mother had pointed out to me where Nana had stood with her barrow all day and in all weathers.

‘But every night Nana twisted the rags round my hair with her poor sore fingers that were chapped from the cold, and in the morning, when they were unwound, my ringlets would tumble down past my shoulders. People would stop me in the street to exclaim at my hair.’

‘What did they say?’ I asked, wishing my own brown mop was long glossy red-gold ringlets.

‘They’d say, “Look at that colour, true auburn, and the shine to it. The glory of it,” they’d say.’

‘Tell me again about the parades?’ These were the kinds of questions she liked me to ask her: invitations to tell a story from those years when they were still happy and full of hope.

‘In the spring I’d be put in a dress made from lace tablecloths with a crown of flowers, and I’d ride just like a princess on top of Uncle Charlie’s coal wagon at the head of the May Day Parade.’

‘And where would you go?’ I’d ask, staring at the little black and white picture of the small Queen who stared back at me. She was my age, grinning at me, but from this other sooty and shadowy world.

‘We’d trundle down through the park, where I’d sit grandly on a special throne, with crowds all around watching me being crowned as Queen of May.’

‘Did they all cheer?’

‘I expect they did. Then in the summer it was the Orange Day Parade and I would be the Good King Billy, wearing a big floppy hat with an enormous feather. Uncle Charlie’s horse carried me all round the streets of Bootle.’

I loved this bit, and would ask: ‘And what was it that they shouted at you?’

‘The Protestants all cheered us, but the Catholics yelled at us, like they did in the playground, “Proddy dogs!” And me and my friends shouted back, “Cat licks!”’

I’d peer at the photos of Mummy in her finery and imagine being there, and yelling ‘Cat licks!’ too.

Her happiest moments of all were on stage, in her fairy wings and ballet dress made by Auntie Sadie, her godmother and her mother’s younger best friend. The two women were very different. Rebecca, my nana, was quiet and modest, whereas Sadie had the same high spirits as Audrey.

‘People would think I was Sadie’s little girl, as the two of us would be laughing and skipping along the road while my mother walked quietly behind us. “No, I’d say, she’s my fairy godmother!”’

Sadie was a waitress in a big department store. The wealthy merchant patrons were often generous with their tips, and she liked to spoil her little god-daughter. One day Sadie treated Rebecca and Audrey to an outing in the nearby resort of Southport. Despite being just a few miles from Liverpool, Audrey felt they had travelled far away from the grimy streets of Bootle. ‘I had a postcard which I pinned by my bed with its view of that magical place and on it was printed SOUTHPORT, RIVIERA OF THE NORTH WEST. Riviera! I dreamt of a life there, sitting sipping tea beneath those trees around the bandstand, an orchestra playing, then in the evening stepping out of a shiny car to disappear into one of the grand hotels.’

It was only as I got older that she told me how much their lives had changed when, one cold winter night, a cousin had burst into the kitchen at Uncle Charlie’s. Had they heard the news? ‘Len Miller’s been seen back in Liverpool, and he’s looking for Rebecca and the girl.’

‘I was thrilled at first. I’d been so small when my father left and I’d invented a whole life for him, telling the other children about his heroic deeds in some distant country. I think I started to think it was all real. So, when I first saw him standing there, I couldn’t believe that this hunched, weasly little man, smelling of drink, was really my own daddy.’

Worse still, he’d come to claim her. Her life would not be the same again, and I was already living with many of the consequences.

IT WAS HARD FOR ME to imagine a daddy who was horrible. One door from the first-floor landing of our house was often closed, and this was the room where my own father lay very ill; the days when he felt better were fewer and fewer.

When we first moved to this house we would both go down to the workshop he had set up in the cellar, and I longed for him to get well enough to do this again. The workshop had a delicious smell of wood and glue, and here he would build miraculous things such as record players and cocktail cabinets. He would lift me onto the workbench and let me ‘help’. I’d hold the frame down as he carefully glued onto it the wooden bas-relief shape of a puppy that he had carved specially for me. Leading from the carpentry workshop was a darkroom, pitch-black except for a red glow, and here we would develop the pictures he had taken. If the chemical smell was too strong I’d bury my head in his jumper, and he’d hug me so I could breathe in his lovely clean soapy smell. He worked quietly and intently, but every now and then he would peer at me through the darkness and say, ‘Where is she, where’s my little helper?’

‘Here I am!’ I could just make him out in the gloom. He’d lift the negatives up, choosing which to print – me, smiling just for him, freckled and happy. He would squint at each one and say, ‘Yes, here she is! And here she is again, even prettier! How ever will we choose?’

These images, and the cine films he made, became an alternative version of my childhood and fixed forever my memories of him. They would capture these years in such shimmering colour and light that they seemed to obliterate the reality of it altogether.

Gradually these days of making things from wood, or being absorbed in his darkroom with its clicking enlargers and splicing tables, became less frequent; his days of playing with me were also coming to an end, his energy draining from him till he became silent and solitary in his room. I would be told to let him rest. I would sit outside his door on the floor, with my book, feeling in some way that I was guarding him against danger, although I understood that really the danger was inside him. Sometimes I was allowed to go in and lie quietly on his bed. If he was asleep I would lie very still and watch him breathing, looking not ill but just tired.

Me, 1961.

The landing felt like a scary place, as across from Daddy’s door was Nana’s room, and from behind it came sounds of moaning and yelling. Nana was always either in bed or in her deep armchair, shaking and confused from her worsening Parkinson’s. Often I was sent in by my mother to clear the ghost people that were upsetting her. Nana would wave and shout at these people that I couldn’t see, but after I’d shooed them out and told her that they were now ‘all gone’ she would lie back with a sigh of relief. It was my special job and I did it as thoroughly as I could. But she’d then doze off and wake to find the ‘people’ had come back to torment her, and so the cycle would begin again. It was a house of sickness, and no wonder my mother wanted to get away from it whenever she could.

4
The Riviera of the North West

THE BEST PART OF THE DAY was spent sitting in the gorgeousness of Marshall and Snelgrove’s restaurant with my mother, eating a banana split while the orchestra played, the violin mingling with the soft buzz of adult chatter. Elegant model girls in their gowns approached each table, delicately holding placards with the price, always in guineas, and they would do a pretty twirl to show off the dress to all its advantage.

Auntie Ava would often be with us, and she and Mummy would talk to them about the ‘cut’ of the gown and discuss the style and colour. I loved the words they used. ‘Would you say that was fuchsia or mauve?’ ‘The silk mohair has a lovely sheen, and don’t you love the dear little sweetheart neckline?’ The model smilingly chatted with them, as they fingered the delicious fabrics.

I’m not sure when it was that I first heard one or two of these young women described as Mummy’s ‘girls’. Was it overheard, or was it ever whispered to me gently, some kindly hand on my arm somewhere out of the softness, across the plush dreaminess of the afternoon?

What did it mean, that in some curious way these beautiful creatures, along with a girl who worked in the make-up department, were connected with my mother? This fed the slight unreality that I sometimes sensed my mother floated in, and me with her; but in the respectable elegance of Marshall’s restaurant the willowy young women simply appeared to be queenly creatures.

But then I would slip off away from them to explore, and feel that exhilarating thrill of freedom and excitement with the huge department store as my territory.

I’d begun to have dreams, that would recur for the rest of my life, of discovering a door in a house that I’ve lived in for some time, a house that has become my home, and yet there is a door I’ve never noticed before, until quite suddenly it opens into a new world that is all mine: it may be a glittering ballroom with great doors onto a maze of walled gardens with fountains where people greet me as if they know me, or a palm house with an intricate webbing of glass and cast-iron tracery soaring above me with all kinds of strange plants thronged with colourful birds and people gathered in its secret corners. My excitement was always intense at these discoveries and it began then, during my forays into these old shops and hotels off Lord Street, as if from them there arose ghosts from a different age.

I began to see that the immediate world beyond that unhappy house, Southport itself, was full of promise. What had been such a wonderland for Audrey, as a child, became one for me now, and Marshall and Snelgrove department store and the Prince of Wales Hotel were its great pleasure palaces, full of endless possibilities for exploring. In my own head this was who I was: ‘an explorer’.

Some of my forays and adventures would take place while my mother was with Auntie Ava, her only friend. Ava was, by common agreement, the most beautiful woman in Southport. She looked and dressed like a nineteen forties movie star, and still wore in the more casual decade of the 1960s what my mother called ‘picture hats’, with a wide brim to frame her chocolate eyes and moon-pale skin. She spent a lot of time in bed, and was seen by people as a little ‘odd’. She could be funny, and even astute, but she had an air of childlike naivety and seemed to be incapable of doing the simplest of things. It was therefore hard to judge whether she was unaware of, or chose to ignore, my mother’s unusual lifestyle.

Ava’s husband, Anthony, with his cravats and immaculate blazers had the suave looks of a matinee idol. He didn’t go to work and loathed my mother, for taking Ava away from him for so much of the day. He also feared that Ava’s friendship could affect their own reputation, which he cared about enormously.

Anthony and Ava sat every summer’s day on a kind of stage set outside their house. They’d had the brick wall in their front garden specially lowered so that the whole town could see them there, on their elaborate patio adorned with beautiful furniture and parasols, dressed as if for Ascot, but simply taking afternoon tea brought out by the housekeeper. Buses went past and people pointed; they were famous locally for their gracious, old-fashioned appearance and general eccentricity.

Perhaps it was Ava’s oddness that inured her, or maybe attracted her, as a fellow outsider, to my mother’s outcast status. For Audrey was increasingly ostracized by the town and this exclusion soon extended to Ava for being my mother’s close friend.

During the times when my mother was in Southport their routine was always the same. Ava would spend the morning getting ready for Audrey to collect her at eleven for morning coffee at Marshall’s. After my own treat of an ice cream or teacake, I would be sent off to play. I had several favourite routines. One was to visit the make-up counters where the attractive ladies would let me try on perfume and put lipstick on me. Another trick was to goad the lift man; he seemed to dislike children, and would be mean and pompous if I rode up and down between floors with no purpose. My favourite pastime of all was to visit the manager.

This involved getting past his fierce secretary who sat behind a desk outside his office clacking away at a big black typewriter which pinged occasionally. I would stand politely before her, asking ‘Could I please, please say hello to the manager?’ Sometimes she would just say no, and that he was very busy, but sometimes she would say that she would ask him, although she expected he was very busy. Usually the answer came back that I could go in, but just for two minutes, as he was really very busy. The manager, Mr Naylor, sat in a wood-panelled office behind a large desk. The routine was always the same.

‘And what can I do for you today, young lady?’ he would ask.

‘Please can you make a swan for me?’ I would beg.

He would then take a packet of cigarettes from his drawer, pull out the silver paper, and twist it into a delicate swan shape which he would present to me with a flourish. The charm lay in my knowing that this busy man had set aside a few minutes of his day for me, and also in the lovely masculine smell of tobacco that filled his office and could be revisited later by sniffing my swan.

When she was not with Ava my mother was always out. The housekeepers in the Back Flat were more and more responsible for my welfare and the house the other side of the door became quieter and quieter.

My mother was not at home most nights, but where does she go? There are whispers and murmurs that have now become familiar to me, like a soft insistent mantra. ‘There’s a new crowd arrived at the Prince’ is one. Another is ‘Peter Cooper is in town’, which always gives me a thrill in the pit of my stomach.

Peter Cooper sweeps into our hallway like a tornado, his black eyes shining from under a big Russian hat.

He shouts, ‘My little Aud,’ and sweeps my mother up in his arms and whirls her round and round.

I shout, ‘My turn!’ and he does the same for me, spinning me till I’m dizzy.

‘You look like a Russian Cossack in that hat, a wicked marauding Cossack,’ she tells him, and he does a Russian dance right there in our hallway, his arms folded and his legs flying out.

Peter Cooper in a Russian hat.

‘Then bring your Cossack his vodka and caviar,’ he roars.

She gets him a drink and tells him that she’s missed him, and that she can feel herself coming back to life. Then she says ‘OK! It’s Showtime!’ Which is something she says when fun things are about to happen.

I know that she will now be busy arranging parties and dates for him and his friends and, if I’m lucky, I’ll go with her and be able to watch all the excitement.

Peter Cooper is the King of Southport. He grew up, like my mother, around the Liverpool dockyards, and had invented a way of welding ships underwater and made an instant fortune. He now lives on a Californian beach with his millions and a beautiful wife, but can never bear to be away from his mates or his home town for long. It is always one big party from the day he arrives in town until the day he leaves and my mum’s job is to make that party happen. To me he fills the sky. Huge, restless, raven haired, with his booming voice and wicked laugh he is the pirate-buccaneer plaque on my bedroom wall come to life. Sitting on a bar stool, in a charming mood I can imagine him as James Bond twirling his cocktail stick, and now I can add ‘wild Cossack’ to my Peter Cooper fantasy list.

My father is upstairs, very sick, and I hear half-whispered conversations between him and my mum. His voice is so weak now. She sounds kind and gentle, but firm.

She is telling him she is going out. He doesn’t ask where, or who with.

‘When do you think you’ll be back?’

‘Not too late,’ she promises, but it isn’t true. She will be late.

‘I’ll see you in the morning. You sleep now’ – and she kisses him.

‘Tell Sally to come in.’

I’ve been waiting for this, listening at the door. She comes out and says that I can go in and sit with him.

‘Quietly, mind. Don’t tire him out with too much chatter.’ So I sit on the edge of the bed, and try to talk in a soft voice and tell him about things that are cheerful.

I show him the things I’ve made for him: drawings, or stories and poems I’ve written, as he likes that. After a while, his head falls back onto the pillow and he looks exhausted.

‘Shall I tuck you in?’ I love to kiss him, and do this as if he was the child. Sometimes when I leave him I want to cry, but I don’t let him see this. When I’m called away, I go through to the Back Flat for my tea, and wait for the housekeeper to tell me when to go to bed.

During the day I can sometimes go out with my mother and if Peter Cooper is in town, or there is an important crowd at the Prince, we go there. Aside from those two palaces to our kingdom, Marshall and Snelgrove department store, and ‘the Prince’, there was a third, the Kingsway Casino. But ‘the Kingsway’ was barred to children, which only made it more tantalizing as I peered in past the bouncers to the huge chandeliers and forbidden sumptuous spaces beyond. Inside I would see my mother deep in conversation with someone, doing ‘business’ as she called it, and I knew I had to wait patiently or next time I might be left at home.

‘The Prince’ was a grand hotel that seemed to me like the centre of the world. Through the great doors with their uniformed footmen was a blazing coal fire and, at Christmas, a swan carved of ice. Ava and Anthony stayed there every year when their housekeeper was on holiday, and Audrey and I would visit for lavish teas. And the rest of the year my mother was a constant visitor to the lounge and bar areas where she was often ‘talking business’.

If she had to take me with her, I would be told to go and ‘explore’.

‘Scoot and skidaddle, go away and have fun,’ she’d say, sending me off with a blown kiss, and I would run away to lose myself for hours. Through one set of double doors off the thickly carpeted corridors was a grand ballroom with a glass dome and a sweeping staircase leading up to a balcony. My mother had showed me this room and told me about her New Year’s Eve surprise:

‘They wheeled me in right here to the middle of the ballroom dance floor. I was crouching down in the trolley with a tablecloth over it, so they couldn’t see me. There was a huge iced cake on top that I could stand up in.’

She demonstrated, crouching down. ‘Then they started the countdown: ten – doing! Nine – doing! Eight – doing!’

I joined in with her. On the last chime she leapt up, showing me how on the final chime of midnight, she would burst forth in a sequined costume.

‘Happy New Year!’

‘And were all the people at the party terribly amazed?’

‘Astonished! They couldn’t see that the cake had a crêpe-paper top. And then I would throw streamers and the band would play.’

Alone in the ballroom’s splendour I would reenact this moment of breaking through the crêpe-paper ceiling, covered in glitter, my arms aloft, to loud applause, as the orchestra struck up ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and I threw streamers towards the cheering crowd.

My other playground was the ladies’ cloakroom, with dressing tables and tall mirrors with hinged flaps that you could stand in the middle of. If you wrapped the mirrored flaps around yourself, you would see hundreds of little girls just like me trapped in glass rooms. I would wave to them and longed to reach them, but they only waved back.

By early evening the Rolls-Royces and Jags would be three deep in the car park and the Prince bar would be in full swing, alive with laughter and gossip. I longed to go into that rich fug of brandy fumes, expensive scent and smoke. Mink coats, silky, gleaming and cool to the touch, were flung carelessly across the sofas under the jealous stares of women who had yet to be given one. My own mother’s mink was one of the loveliest, with a dark soft glow to the fur a high collar around her long neck and buttons studded with diamonds.

‘Just feel that,’ she would say dreamily, in a moment of rare satisfaction, shaking her head at the deliciousness of it.

There were brief moments, longed for, and longingly remembered, when the town drew the world to it, and these moments saved my mother’s life. Royal Birkdale Golf Club was nearby, and brought big international players, wealthy golfers, dukes and earls, to town for the weeks of the tournament. The Prince Hotel would host lavish dinners in the ballroom, and even the prime minister, Harold Wilson, came to watch the golf. My mother had some dealings with all this that were secret, and that I didn’t understand, but they added to the excited buzz of the place in an indefinable way.

The less glamorous side to our life was ‘the shops’ – my mother’s shops. I wasn’t sure how many there were, or what went on in them. I think they all looked the same: seedy rooms on back streets with blacked-out windows covered with a mesh grille. I would usually be told to wait in the car, but sometimes I would go in and sit on a stool while she talked to whoever worked there. There was a Formica counter where an old man sat smoking, and the walls were usually covered with the pinned-up racing pages of the newspaper. One shop had a row of horseshoes over the door, and my mother explained, ‘See, they must always be that way up, like a U, to hold all our luck inside and not let any of it out.’

But I imagined all our luck in there, and worried that someone might one day turn them upside down. The shops were never full – usually there were just one or two other men, shuffling about – and if a race was on there was a speaker that droned out the crackling commentary …

It was a strangely soporific chant, like drowsy wasps buzzing, trapped against the window on a hot day. It was supposed to be exciting, but instead it seemed to me like the most dull sound in the world, the essence of boredom.

It was only as I became a little older that I realized that the shops were in some way connected with things that had happened in my mother’s childhood. Little by little it came out, as I asked my innocent questions and gazed at those old photographs. What was so bad about the small squinting man beside her and her mother? If that was really her daddy, why did she hate him so much?

5
Bookie’s Runner

IN A CERTAIN MOOD, my mother would forget that I was a child and, spellbound by her own story, she would let slip the secrets of her early life. Forgetting her audience, she would begin to relive it and I would see it all come back, flickering in her eyes: the dirty windowpanes, light slicing through the smoke from the fire, and her father edgy, his muscles twitching like a hair trigger.

‘The girl has to go into the pubs; the other children do it, the job needs it, the money’s got to be made.’ They were both devastated by what he was suggesting Audrey now had to do.

I didn’t understand why my mother might sometimes tell people about this time of her life as if it was another amusing anecdote about her rackety past. ‘Of course, I was a bookie’s runner, as a child. While you were playing nicely in the park, I was going round the pubs taking bets and dodging the police.’

It wouldn’t be told to a lady, but to someone like Peter Cooper or one of his crowd; then she could make it sound like a rather racy thing to have done, although I knew that it had sickened her. Her father was something called a ‘turf accountant’. This was his new ‘business’, an illegal enterprise which he announced to the family on his return, and my mother, aged only nine or ten, was to work for him.

‘He could see I was perfect for the job, and if the police came into the pubs and asked what I was doing I’d to say my ma had sent me to fetch my father.’

‘Could he have gone to prison?’ I’d ask, urging her to give me as many gory details as possible.

‘Yes, the police were always after us. We’d come running back from the pubs with all the bets, and hide under this big tarpaulin he had in the back yard. We had to put them in the “clock bag”, a leather bag that had a clock set to the time, so when the bag was sealed it showed the bets had been put in before the race started. Sometimes the other bookies, the McGanns, would come after us or tip off the police, and there would be a terrific kerfuffle.’

At night the pubs were warm and steamy, the floors sticky underfoot with spilt beer and a crunch of sawdust and cigarette butts. The public bar heaved with men – all men, except for her, the one small girl, weaving her way through it all, taking the punts. Sometimes a gentlemanly arm would help her, parting the throng of leery bodies, propping each other up, so she could pass. Mouths opened near her face, a gaping pink wetness with missing teeth, rasping their demands for this bet or that. So it went on until at last she would be pushing through those swing doors and out onto the street. It would take a moment to collect herself, and then she would run.

She shuddered. ‘They would be drunk, and saying terrible, disgusting things to me, and touching me.’ She hinted at something worse.

I believed that the rest of the story had something to do with the little coat. In the top of my mother’s wardrobe, next to the box of photographs, were a few tantalizing treasures, and among them was a tiny, precious coat with a fur collar. It was wrapped in tissue paper and kept beside my mother’s first pink satin ballet shoes. I longed to know about this carefully preserved memento, but, just like her account of what took place around the pubs, she would always stop before the end. It was only ever a tale half told.

The worst part of her life in the pubs had been returning with the betting results and dealing with men who may have lost all the money they had. Their drunken self-pity would turn to anger and the bookie’s daughter was an easy target. ‘I couldn’t tell my mother what some of them did to me. It would have hurt her so much to know what went on.’

‘What went on? And what happened to Sadie doll?’

My mother had told me about the doll with the china face and eyes that opened and shut. She’d come on a boat all the way from America, and no one in the street or the whole of Bootle had seen anything like her, or the clothes that Sadie doll had, her little coat with frog buttons and fur cuffs. But when I asked where she was now, my mother would say, ‘Oh, she got broken.’

Slowly, over the years, the story would be told, of how her mother, Rebecca, had pleaded with Len not to send Audrey into the pubs again, but then she would say the wrong thing and he’d lash out, pulling out his thick leather belt.

Rebecca Miller, ‘Nana’.

Loop by loop, burnt into Audrey’s memory, that belt and the slow intention of it. The air filling with horror and Audrey escaping, hiding in the bedroom, but she could still hear that awful sound; it went on and on … and then there was silence.

It was only when I was older that I heard how the Sadie doll lay on the floor after one of these violent outbursts from her father, the doll’s pretty pink cheek smashed, and Audrey couldn’t look at it. Her mother had to hide the doll and the coat so that Audrey would stop crying.

Audrey tried to tell her father that she couldn’t do the job any more, and the abuse he had turned on her mother now rained down on her. She saw her mother change during these years, and begin to lose hope. The little doll’s coat was always kept, as a memory of their past life. There were no more dancing classes or days out now; life became a grim round of humiliation and fear.

Then war broke out and saved her. In 1939, Liverpool’s dockyards were a prime target for the German bombers and soon they came. Rebecca and Sadie felt that evacuation could only be better for Audrey than the life she would be leaving behind, and so, aged thirteen, she joined the thousands of Merseyside children taken to Lime Street station to escape the bombing.

‘What was it like, being sent away?’ I peered at the gloomy house and imagined the small girl in the pictures being sent off on a train, a label pinned to her coat, leaving her mother to live with complete strangers.

‘As the train crowded with children pulled out of Lime Street station, some of the little ones were screaming for their mothers. I saw one mother being sick on the platform, but mine managed to stand tall as she waved me off. I was already missing her, and terrified that we didn’t know where we were going. I’d never been away from her before. Then, once we were out of Liverpool, I started to recognize the names of the stations – Freshfield, Formby … – and I knew that we must be headed for Southport I felt much better then.

‘When we arrived we all walked in a long crocodile to the Southport Evacuee Centre. There was a hall where a lady made all of us children line up till a nurse came and tugged a comb through our hair. It was full of disinfectant, which smelt horrible. We waited for ages, until someone came and took me over to meet this smartly dressed man. He was introduced to us as Mr Grimshaw, and he took me and two other girls and drove us away in a big comfortable car, all sitting on the leather back seat. Mr Grimshaw asked us all sorts of questions about our families and homes. The other two girls didn’t say much, so I did my best, answering politely, and thought that I’d made a good impression. Soon we turned into a wide leafy street with large houses surrounded by gardens.’

There was a house we sometimes drove past, and which my mother would point out to me. ‘There it is, that big house there behind the hedges.’

I’d peer at the plain red-brick villa and try to imagine arriving there to live with strangers.

‘Did it seem enormous?’ I’d ask.

‘Yes, it seemed like a palace; it had a large front door and the entrance hall opened out to a grand staircase. It was so warm, with soft thick carpets which seemed to muffle the sound so everything felt cocooned.’

‘And what happened then?’

‘From a slightly open door off the hall, I could hear the sounds of the radio, and from there Mrs Grimshaw came out to greet us. Through the door we could see right into the sitting room and there a boy and girl, only a little younger than me, were playing a game around the sofa. There was a delicious smell of cooking from the kitchen. It was the kind of family that I had always dreamt of belonging to, and now here it was and I was going to become a part of it.’

‘And then what?’ I knew, but I wanted to hear it all again.

‘The three of us were shown up to a cold attic room, and at dinnertime our meal was brought up to us on a tray by a housekeeper. Mrs Grimshaw came up to say goodnight. Downstairs we knew that the family were all eating together and I was just looking forward to the next day and meeting them properly.’

It was only after a few days that Audrey realized this was how things would always be. She had still barely spoken to the Grimshaw children, and it was the housekeeper who dealt with the evacuees. Now when I looked out of the car window at the house it appeared like a prison as I imagined the lonely girl in the attic, hearing the sounds of family life going on downstairs but never allowed to join in.

It wasn’t long before her mother and Sadie visited from Liverpool to take her out for the day. They were sorry to hear how the Grimshaws were treating her, but she realized that they weren’t surprised. After the Princess fantasy that they had spun around her she had believed she was special, and it was only now that she understood how people like this – with their big house and grand furniture – might actually see a girl like her: she was a slum child, suspected of having bad ways as well as lice or diseases. The Grimshaws sent her to a different school from their own children, and kept her away from them at home in case of contamination. And Audrey woke up to the fact that this was what her future looked like, and she would eventually be returning to that world.

She only coped with that isolation in the Grimshaws’ attic by planning her brilliant escape when she had got away from her father and built a new life.

The sequence of photographs in my mother’s chocolate box, which provided such vivid glimpses of her childhood, had nothing to offer for those bleak early-evacuee years of the war. There was no doting mother and godmother to record her changing during this time from the impish child to a young woman. Those two years were strangely blank. The only thing she told me was that her first period had been upsetting and humiliating, as Mrs Grimshaw handed her sanitary towels to use, without telling her what to do with them afterwards. She had tried to smuggle them out of the house to find somewhere to get rid of them, a situation that left her dreading every month that followed.

As Audrey turned fifteen she finally saw her first chance and grabbed onto it. ‘I met Jean at a Saturday dancing class and noticed her straight away. She had these wide blue eyes and soft blonde hair, and she appeared to float as she danced. It was almost as if she knew that her life was going to be easy and happy, and she could just drift into that wonderful future that was waiting for her.’

I knew Mummy’s friend, who became my Auntie Jean, was pretty and clever; she later travelled the world playing international bridge tournaments, and the friendship had lasted years with Christmas cards always exchanged. Back then Jean had loved Audrey’s reckless spirit and energy, and Audrey was fascinated by Jean’s gentle manners. A boy at school had called Audrey ‘a bog-Irish minx’ and now, when she looked in the mirror at her dark red hair and her lively, shrewd face, she doubted for the first time that she was really as beautiful as Sadie and her mother had told her she was.

She found herself envying Jean’s soft angelic features as much as the lavish bedroom, with its swagged curtains, in the big villa. Jean’s parents were as kind as she was, and made Audrey feel welcome. Later she told me that this had opened her eyes to something she thought was really important: that it was much easier to be good and kind if you had everything, and she advised me to ‘make friends with girls who are rich and beautiful, as they won’t be jealous or mean. They can afford to be nice.’

This was simply a pragmatic idea, not something fed by envy and self-doubt, which weren’t generally part of her nature. There was a natural confidence that would bubble back up in her as soon as life offered her a break. If any door opened an inch she would immediately push it as hard as she could, and once open she would dash through it, certain of something marvellous on the other side. Now a door opened, as she told Jean’s parents about the Grimshaw’s unfriendliness and the illegal work that her father had forced her into and they offered to help. They took Audrey in to live with them until she was on her feet, and Jean’s father, who worked in newspapers, found her a job helping on the local paper, the Southport Visitor. She was taken on to answer the phone and make tea, but stayed after work each night, teaching herself to type.

Mum, dressed for success.

‘I’d seen the Hollywood film His Girl Friday, with Rosalind Russell as the glamorous newspaper reporter. So I pinned up a picture of her sitting at her typewriter, wearing a sexy pinstripe suit, to inspire me to work harder.’ ‘Always dress for the role you aspire to, remember that!’ was one of her tips.

She had also read about the Hollywood gossip columns of Hedda Hopper, a society journalist famous for her extraordinary hats. She would sometimes balance silly things on her head to make me laugh – a colander with a saucepan on top, or my teddy – and sing a song, ‘A Hat for Hedda Hopper’, and do a comical dance.

My mother went to the cinema once or twice a week if she could, and not only did she know every star, but their private lives and paths to success that she had pored over in her favourite Picturegoer magazine. It depicted the unimaginably glamorous lives of the actors who had left Britain for Hollywood, such as Vivien Leigh, who had scooped the lead role of the century as the Irish American Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind.

The Civil War epic was the biggest film of that era, and Scarlett was my mother’s heroine, who brushed aside any setbacks with a ‘fiddle-de-dee’. The image of Scarlett kneeling amongst the war-ravaged ruins of her plantation home, holding up a handful of soil and passionately declaring, ‘As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again,’ became Audrey’s talisman: a girl who did whatever she had to do to get what she needed.

At sixteen Audrey now believed she might escape the Liverpool slums for ever and find a way of bringing her mother to the safety of Southport. She longed to be a part of Jean’s social set, but knew she was still an outsider from a different class. She might copy their voices and manners, but it was not enough. Jean and her friends had all been to the same private school, and went together to smart dances and parties to which Audrey wasn’t invited. The new job then gave her an idea. Inspired by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper and the magazines she loved, she worked hard to learn how to write in their style. Her schooling had been poor, and writing didn’t come easily to her, until she learnt to say something out loud and then get it down. She also studied the language of the gossip magazines and copied their sentence structure and at last was able to offer the editor of the Southport Visitor his own social column. She handed him her sample draft, called ‘Talk of Many Things with Audrey Miller’, which she had decorated with little drawings copied from magazine adverts of champagne bottles and bubbles, and high-heeled shoes.

Now she had an open invitation to the elegant dances at Royal Birkdale Golf Club that Jean and her friends went to. She borrowed Jean’s pretty and more ladylike clothes, and was now given a warm welcome at 21st-birthday parties, where she would describe their ‘charming home and wonderful hospitality’. There was always an added smattering of gossip: ‘Those-in-the-know are whispering about a wedding between a certain Miss Bailey and a Mr Howard; there was definitely romance in the air on this occasion. Those watching the dancing were heard to comment, “Oh yes, it’s love all right!”’

Other weeks the local news was clearly thin on the ground: ‘Have you heard? Party girl Ida Hughes may be settling down at last, having purchased a sewing machine – “Hey, need anything special running up, girls?”’

This was how she could become the girl that her mother and godmother had dreamt she would be. Suddenly she had invitations to every event in town and, with some cast-off evening dresses of Jean’s and notebook in hand she could go anywhere.

6
Goodbyes

AUNTIE GRACE was standing in the hallway with a hankie, trying not to cry. She and Uncle Phil had come to take me to the cinema to see Flipper, a film about a dolphin, as my birthday treat. I’d been to the Marshall and Snelgrove salon to have a birthday hairdo, a shampoo and set, and had spent the morning happily side by side with my mother under the hairdryers, reading the grown-up magazines. This was supposed to be a special evening, but it now felt at risk of being spoilt.

Grace had just been in to see my father, and was coming out of his room when my mother appeared from her adjoining bedroom.

‘What on earth?’ Grace said sharply. She looked my mother up and down in disgust.

Audrey was wearing a lovely costume. It had long blue feathers coming out of a sparkly swimsuit to make a tail, and a glittering headdress of even more feathers. I thought she looked wonderful, but Auntie Grace didn’t.

‘It’s a fancy-dress gala, over at the Sands Club,’ said my mother.

‘And what do you think you are supposed to be?’ said Grace.

‘We’re going as Two Lovebirds in a Gilded Cage. My friend Tony made the costumes, aren’t they marvellous?’ She did a twirl, making Grace even crosser.

Grace was my father’s aunt. A tall, stiff woman with a plain but kindly face, she had lived all her life with her brother, Uncle Phil, in a small house in nearby Crosby. I was the only child in their quiet, modest lives, and they tried to love and protect me as best they could. Their house had tall pampas grasses in a jar on the stairs and horse brasses round the fire. On Sundays my mother would drop me off there, and we had lunch in the bare dining room, or on cold days by the living-room fire on a little table. They always gave me my favourite pink and yellow cake with some tinned peaches.

Phil was a trim man with military bearing, and he had his hobbies, which were music and motoring. He loved classical music, and went regularly to the Liverpool Philharmonic, and to his local Gramophone Society, carrying his much-loved gramophone records in a special case with a tweedy cover. After lunch he would play these records for me. It was quite boring, but they were both always so pleased to see me, and there was such a cosy feeling about these visits, that I looked forward to them all week.

Outside our house on my birthday night was a big van, into which my mother disappeared with a wave, but before it could drive off Grace marched up to the passenger seat and that was when there were ‘words’. I had been told to get into the car, where Uncle Phil and I now sat, straining to catch the sound of the angry voices.

Grace.

Grace stomped back to the car and got in; I’d never seen her so cross.

‘As per usual, off gallivanting with one of her chaps. Two Lovebirds in a Gilded Cage – that takes the biscuit. They’ve got it in there, great big thing with a swing inside it, and wheels.’

‘What are the swing and wheels for?’ I was dying to know.

‘Something about her sitting on the swing, and the whole contraption gets wheeled into the party. I’ve never seen anything so ridiculous in all my life,’ Grace said with awful contempt, although I could see that Uncle Phil was quite interested.

‘Please can I go and look?’ I begged.

I was dying to see the cage on wheels, but was told to stay in the car. Grace said crossly that my mother had told her that she was ‘overreacting’.

She told Phil, in a voice that meant I wasn’t to hear, ‘She said that Tony, the other “lovebird”, is the window dresser at Marshall and Snelgrove department store, so there obviously wasn’t going to be any funny business. As if that made it all right. I suppose she meant he was, you know, one of those!’

Uncle Phil nodded, but he wasn’t a man to get involved. I couldn’t resist.

‘One of what?’ I pleaded.

‘Never mind, Sally, it’s not very nice,’ she said quickly.

In the car she was still whispering but I could hear from the back ‘every single night’ and ‘where does she go to’ and ‘leaving Sally with total strangers’ and ‘what poor Neil is suffering’.

I’d seen nothing wrong with my mother going out each night until I realized how upset and angry Grace was, and that my mother’s absence wasn’t what was expected of a woman with a small child and dying husband.

A sense of unease now hung over the birthday outing, and my excitement of being at the Odeon Cinema at night couldn’t quite overcome it. I can remember standing for the National Anthem and doing the Brownies’ honour salute, which I had learnt from another girl and would do, even though I wasn’t allowed to be a Brownie. I remember the lights dimming and the interval with the usherettes and ice cream and the thrill of being out at night-time mingling with some other anxious feeling I couldn’t name.

When we went back to the house it felt darker than usual. Grace led me up the stairs to my room and waited while I put on my nightie and dressing gown, then tucked me in. I asked if I could show Daddy my present she had given me, a painting you could make by filling in the numbered shapes on the black velvet with thick glowing paints. It added up to a picture of a rose, and she told me that ‘a red rose means I love you’. Now she said that I’d better not go into Daddy’s room, but I could do the painting for him and he could keep it next to his bed.

I had been into his room when he was very ill, so didn’t understand why I couldn’t go in now. The next day I carefully painted the rose for him, and that night I sat on his bed and gave it to him. He told me that if there was ever a time when he wasn’t there, I should remember that his love for me was always with me. Even if I couldn’t see it, I could wrap it around me like a big invisible cloak and it would always keep me warm. He said that it would be there for the rest of my life.

I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD when the afternoon came. I was picked up from school by the mother of a distant cousin, Tracey, which was unusual.

On most mornings I would be collected by a kindly taxi driver my mother had found called Mr Moore, who would then wait by the school gates to drive me home again at the end of the day. Today there was no Mr Moore, only Tracey and her mother.

For me at the time it was just another horrid school day: unremarkable in that I found so many of them miserable. At the age of four I had been put into a small private nursery and primary school called Saxenholme, which was run from a Victorian house rather like the one we lived in, and just as gloomy. I wore something called a ‘jibbah’ with a big shield on the front, almost as big as me. I dreaded going, and had a daily nervous tummy ache. Even when we were going to make things out of colourful felt, like a flower-basket pin cushion for Mummy, I would look forward to the event, hoping it would cheer me up and asking her surreptitiously, ‘Mummy, do you ever use pins?’ to which she replied that she did, but when the day came I soon realized that I felt just as unhappy, and things would seem even worse. Then I knew that if I mentioned my tummy ache I could get out of going to school at all. Mr Moore would be standing by his car, dressed smartly in his suit and tie, at half past eight prompt. The housekeeper would appear on the steps and tell him that I was unwell, and, to my enormous relief, he would drive away without me.

If only it had been Mr Moore who was waiting for me on this afternoon three years later. By now I was at the main schoolhouse, having moved when I was five. It had stained glass that made a pattern on the floors, and a smell of beeswax, chalk and horrible lunches. I dreaded lunch, particularly cheese pie or chocolate sponge, which made me sick. You were allowed to ask for a ‘dolly’s helping’ which I would plead for to the dinner ladies, but the cheesy mush that smelt of vomit was still piled on my plate. I would be left alone in the dining room afterwards with the cold heap in front of me and a teacher looking in to see if I had eaten it yet.

At playtime we went into a back garden that smelt of privet and mulching horse-chestnut leaves. The girls made dens under the trees and, when no one would let me in, I made a broom of twigs and went around saying that I was a sweeper of dens, and offering to sweep for them. No one seemed to want a sweeper and there was a feeling of panic and being unable to breathe, and I would long for the bell to ring so that the lonely feeling could end.

The head teacher, Mrs Jane, was kind and pretty. She would tell us to pull our shoulders back and called us her ‘Saxenholme Smarties’. These days she also argued a lot with my mother, who would not let me go swimming in case my hair got wet. Mrs Jane had even offered to dry my hair herself in her study with her own hairdryer. This happened once, but after that my mother got her way by just not sending me to school on swimming days.

Mrs Jane saw my misery and also tried to help me find a friend. One was a girl called Lydia Holroyd whose father had died and all her hair had fallen out. There was one heartbreaking afternoon when her mother picked us up and took me home with them. Lydia seemed very upset that her mother had made a pudding called junket that she hated and when some of it fell onto the carpeted floor her mother scraped it up back into the bowl, slapped her and made her eat it, although it was now covered in fluff and Lydia was crying. Afterwards at school she wouldn’t look at me, and we never talked to each other again.

There was another girl who also didn’t have a friend. Janet Bailey’s father had been blinded during the war and Janet was terribly shy, and was also losing her sight, although my mother thought this was strange as her father’s disability was a war wound. She wore very thick glasses and hardly spoke, but if I gave her ‘lines’ to say, she would say them, and then I could reply and we could play. The awful sad feeling I had at school began to wear off. I dreaded it a little less knowing that I would have my own friend at playtime. But this relief was to be short-lived.

ON THAT PARTICULAR Tuesday I left the old building under swirling skies and scanned the roadside for Mr Moore. He was nowhere to be seen. Instead beyond the rattling fence stood a vaguely familiar Hillman Minx with its doors wide open like traps. It was Tracey and her mother. Why they should be waiting was a mystery, when Tracey was clearly not interested in having me to her house, or even playing with me. She had always stuck to her best friend Debbie Underwood, the most popular girl in class. Since starting school I’d had a strange feeling towards Debbie Underwood. I wanted to be her, but also hated her. Not only did everyone want to be her friend, but she looked like a sunflower with her yellow hair and coltishly long legs. She had a brother, and nice parents, and once told me that she always spent the summer in Appleby.

Summers were my worst time, and although I hated school I dreaded the holidays more, as I would be stuck in the gloomy house while everyone else went away. Visions of Debbie would rise before me. Even the lovely name, Appleby, conjured images of orchards, their trees laden with rosy apples and the long grass studded with daisies. Here golden, long-legged children ran happily in the evening sunshine, a dog at their heels, as they made their way home for a jolly tea.

But on this day everyone, including Tracey, was being kind to me. And there was something suspicious about Tracey’s mummy putting so much Matey bubble bath into our night-time bath; even Tracey seemed to find it surprising, and was quickly shushed when she asked about so many special treats.

It was my mother’s arrival the next morning that made me realize something was very wrong. It was time for school, but instead of leaving we all went to sit down in the living room where she said she had something sad to tell me: my daddy had died.

Everyone seemed to be looking at me. Only minutes before I had stolen an aniseed ball that I found on top of a cupboard in Tracey’s room and popped into my mouth. Now there was an awkward feeling of not knowing what to do with it, or how to spit it out. I remember the taste changing from nice to nasty, as my insides began to fall away. Since then, anything flavoured with aniseed has made me feel sick.

We travelled to school in a convoy. The stained glass in the hall looked weird, the patterns it made on the wall, and the usual everyday sounds of school seemed echoey and far away. Nothing looked as it had the day before. My mother went to see Mrs Jane. At morning assembly Mrs Jane announced that my father had passed away and we would all say a little prayer. I felt faint and as if I wasn’t there.

No one took me to the funeral. I had a terrified feeling that I didn’t know where Daddy was, or even when he had died. I realized I hadn’t seen him for a while, and I felt that during that time he had drifted away because I wasn’t there to help him. But surely something so enormous, the end of the world, that changed things for ever, must have been marked by some moment in particular? Instead there were just days that didn’t feel right, and then he had vanished from the house. His room was empty, but that wasn’t when he died. I hadn’t said goodbye. Why hadn’t they told me? How had something so earth-shattering happened without my knowing?

Soon after, my mother started saying we would get out of ‘this bloody town’. She wrote letters to slight acquaintances, wartime friends, people met in a London nightclub, sent to barely legible addresses from the backs of envelopes. There was no plan, but a vague sense that these ‘contacts’ could become points on a map that we only had to join to build a yellow brick road to Oz.

But my father was not in Oz. Surely he was somewhere here? I had terrible bad dreams about where his body had gone. One I had over and over involved a room with a high window in an internal wall, and another room the other side of the window where he is lying; but the window is too high and there is nothing to stand on, so I can’t look. A rag-and-bone cart arrives in the street, like the one in Steptoe and Son, and some men go to the room and take him away, but I can’t get to him. I run out to see the cart moving off down the street with his broken body thrown on top of a heap of bodies, like plague victims from the Black Death. I try to run after it but I can’t keep up and feel panic and desperation.

One good memory I had that I would replay in my mind, even though it made me want to howl, was of him peeling grapes for me. They were in a bowl with ice cream, but I hadn’t wanted to eat them as I didn’t like the skin. So he peeled them with his thin weak hands, using his little bit of strength to make me something to eat. I had wanted him to stop and rest. I kept picturing his sad, kind face as he peeled those grapes.

Some of my mother’s letters to ‘contacts’, which it seemed she may as well have stuffed into bottles and thrown out to sea, had actually begun to drift ashore. Replies came back. Not yet a yellow brick road’s worth, but we at least had a safe first stop: my mother’s godmother, Auntie Sadie, in New York. She had played a large part in the early drama of Audrey’s life and seemed to her a good starting point for a new chapter.

For me it would mean leaving my father behind. The night after hearing he was dead I had watched the news on television, waiting for them to get to the part about him. When he wasn’t mentioned I wondered if he would appear the next night, or the next.

By now I felt I would probably hear no more.

One morning we simply marched our baggage past his bare, still room and down the hall.

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