told the story as if Dad were Burt Lancaster seeing off the Clantons in the Gunfight at the OK Corral.
When he left the navy, Dad didn’t go back to Ireland because he’d met Mum when on shore leave during the war. She had left Cumberland looking for excitement in the Capital but found only long days in a munitions factory. When the war ended, they decided to stay in London because even bomb-blasted Pimlico gave them more than they could hope for in Ireland or Cumberland, so they stayed and made it home. As a result, even though John and I are Londoners, we have no relatives living nearby, unlike our Cockney friends, who have loads of cousins and two homes: their own and their Nan’s.
Dad wears a cap to work and on Sundays he sports a trilby that he tugs down over his right eye: the ‘Connemara side’. On the days he doesn’t go to work, he’s bursting with energy. This is often expressed in a shouted ‘hup’ as, with a flip of his heels behind him, he accelerates to complete short trips, like crossing roads or climbing steps – or, sometimes, to end tricky conversations with Mum.
When we were little, he used to wait till we were walking ahead of him before tearing past us, shouting ‘zing’ and jogging backwards, challenging us to catch him. Then he’d turn and run in slow motion until we overtook him. ‘God, if these boys haven’t wings on their feet,’ he’d complain, before shaking our hands to congratulate us on another fine victory.
Most evenings, a whistled Joseph Locke song and the slap of the rolled up Evening Star announces his arrival. He has a key but he prefers to rap the knocker. When one of us opens the door, he crouches like a boxer and lunges to lift and clinch, and to administer a rub of his day-old beard and fill our nostrils with the smell of sand and cement from his clothes.
He’s a ganger for a group of men who lay concrete on building sites: tamping it down with a big beam of wood to even out floors, or pouring it into shuttering for walls and pillars. The more concrete a gang lays, the more it earns. It’s heavy work and he often falls asleep in the easy chair after his dinner. This is when Mum looks at him most tenderly and insists that we keep quiet. While he dozes, she picks bits of hardened concrete from his shirt but leaves those that are clinging temptingly to the small hairs of his cheekbones.
Dad gets a bit ‘soft’ in drink and regularly throws his pennies in the air for the kids to scramble after when he leaves the Queen Anne on Sunday afternoons. This infuriates Mum because she will walk to Victoria rather than take the bus to save fewer coppers than she sees bouncing around on the pavement.
‘If we all treated money the way your father does, there’d be little food on the table; what with giving money to tramps and buying drinks when it isn’t his turn, anyone would think we were made of money.’
Money isn’t something that worries Dad who’s convinced that it’s only a matter of time before we win the Football Pools. Every week, he slides the coupon into the Littlewoods envelope and insists that we all kiss it for luck: Mum, me, John and then him. Mum does so grudgingly because she believes that you get richer only by working hard and saving. His belief that we’ll win the Pools and chucking money to kids provides more fun than going on about how much things cost, but if Mum’s right, and she usually is, it’s probably a good thing she’s different to Dad.
Looking after what money we do have is Mum’s preserve. At the back of the kitchen cabinet, she keeps three tea caddies: one for the rent; one holds shillings for the gas meter; and the third is for ‘clothes, holidays and Christmas’. This one gets raided most, usually by Dad, who puts back what he owes on payday – Thursday in the building trade. This is when Mum gets her housekeeping and Dad is extra cheerful because he’s had a couple of pints on the way home.
In a weekly ritual, they sit at the kitchen table and he hands her the brown envelope. She teases out the white ribbon and pulls it through her fingers to examine the pay details. He gives her a nod – ‘job done’ for another week – and she puts most of the money into the tins. Then she hands him a pound and some change and drops the rest in her purse.
‘Thrift’ is Mum’s favourite word. We rarely have the pleasure of using a new bar of Pears soap because, rather than waste the old sliver, we have to press it into the depression on the new one.
Our clothes are bought to ‘grow into’. I once had to wear pyjamas with eight-inch turn-ups. ‘Bound to shrink,’ she said when I protested. This was embarrassing enough at home, but humiliating during a stay in hospital, when the turn-ups rolled down during the night and, on pulling back the sheets in the morning, the nurses joked about their little ‘double amputee’.
Mum makes us all feel lazy because she’s forever ‘doing’. Even when listening to the wireless or watching telly, she sews, knits or does other thrifty things, like cutting old washing-up gloves into rubber bands. This requires the big light to be on in the front room and stops us watching telly in the dark to make it feel more like the pictures.
When we were small, Dad’s stories made us the envy of our friends. And we’d get him to tell, again and again, while Mum closed her eyes, how he killed a shark with a knife when swimming close to his ship in South Africa. And, for years, we thought he knew Italian because while shaving on Sundays he renders in beautiful gibberish the arias sung by his favourite opera singer, Gigli. Dad’s a fine light tenor, like John McCormack. In the Queen Anne, they’re always asking him to sing his Irish songs and on the rare occasions that Mum drinks too, he makes her cry by singing, ‘I’ll take you home again … Maureen’.
Mum says that exaggerating and inventing are the same as fibbing, even if it does make people laugh. He defends himself with, ‘A bit of colour, Maureen. Where’s the harm? Just a little salt and pepper on the meal?’
Aunt Winnie once stopped coming to see us after Mum told her that her breath smelled of cigarettes. Mum eventually apologized for upsetting her, but not for what she had said. ‘There you are Maureen,’ said Dad, with a wink at us, ‘the truth is not something to be trotted out on just any old occasion.’
Although Mum isn’t quite as shapely as Madge Smith, she’s prettier, and her eyes are as blue as Josie’s. She has a mole on her cheek that she darkens with a brown pencil. I tell her it makes her look like Elizabeth Taylor. It doesn’t really, but I do think that to be beautiful, women have to look something like Mum.
Before she goes out, or when someone knocks at the door, she smoothes invisible creases at the sides of her skirt and flicks real or imagined strands of hair from her forehead with her little finger. When she gets wolf whistled outside building sites, she pretends to disapprove, but she’s betrayed by her freshly flattered look, and can’t resist pushing up the back of her hair with the palm of her hand.
Mum and Dad don’t act as if they’re in love, not like Rooksy’s parents, who hold hands in the street. However, they seem happy enough and never have screaming fights like some of our friends’ parents.
Their rows usually involve the subject of John and me having been christened Catholics, something that Mum, a relaxed Methodist, says she’ll always regret. Life isn’t made easier by the nuns of St Vincent de Paul who haven’t given up trying to get us to go back to Westminster Cathedral, even though we’ve only ever been to a Church of England school. Their disapproval of ‘mixed marriages’ infuriates Mum. ‘Anyone would think that your father had married a black woman.’
Sister Phillipa, a tall nun made taller by her sailing-ship wimple, once said to me, ‘Your father knows best which church you should go to.’ After I told Mum, she tore into Dad as if Sister Phillipa were his sister. When Sister Phillipa made the mistake of calling in to see Dad on the following Saturday, Mum answered the door, potato peeler in hand. After apologizing that her husband (she didn’t like Sister Phillipa referring to Dad by his name, Dan) wasn’t in, she laid into her about trying to influence her sons with Roman Catholic mumbo jumbo. The affronted nun left muttering about returning when Dad was home, when she might be received with better manners. That’s when Mum followed her up the stairs shouting ‘and another thing’.
She came back in, teeth gritted, and we waited for another stern warning about talking to nuns. Instead her face crumpled into