George Melly

OWNING UP: THE TRILOGY

With a New Introduction and Afterword by the Author

Contents

Introduction

Scouse Mouse

Rum, Bum and Concertina

Owning Up

Afterword

Follow Penguin

For Kezzie soon and Django eventually

1

Place of birth: Liverpool Year: 1926. I was born a fortnight late during an August heatwave.

This took place neither in hospital, nor in my parents’ tiny flat in Linnet Lane, but a mile away in my grandfather’s large house, The Grange, on the banks of the Mersey. I was a rickety-looking baby with a wobbling head and didn’t take kindly to my mother’s milk. It turned my stools bright green and I had to be weaned on Cow & Gate. I survived however and the Mellys were delighted. It seems to me odd that they should set such store on an heir in the direct line. There were no large estates to inherit and the money they left was always divided equally between sons and daughters.

Great-aunts Eva and Florence in their black, floor-length dresses came to view me a day or so later and I was carried out of the bedroom by the midwife for their inspection. My mother called for them to come and see her but they refused. According to their Victorian conventions it would have been improper to visit a woman so soon after an ‘interesting event’.

Rather subdued at her breach of etiquette, my mother heard Florence remark to Eva in respect of me: ‘What a good thing he’s a Melly!’

My great-great-grandfather, André Melly, was born in Switzerland in 1802. He could trace his ancestry back to the early sixteenth century when one Jean Colombe had a son called Matthieu who later, for reasons connected with becoming a burger of Geneva, changed his name to ‘Mesley ou Melly’. Family legend held that Jean Colombe was the son or grandson of a Genoese pedlar, in itself not much of a cachet except that he was meant to be a direct descendant of Christopher Columbus. Certainly, to substantiate this rather nebulous claim, the family crest is a pair of doves’ wings while the shield depicts a dove in an azure sky hovering above a ship sailing towards the setting sun. The motto, with no especial relevance, maintains that ‘A Good Name is Better than a Golden Girdle.’

André Melly seems to have been an amiable young man, if a little solemn. In his youth he was touched by the scepticism of Voltaire, and revolutionary enough to have incurred the displeasure, through some remarks overheard at a café table, of the Neapolitan Government. For several years afterwards, when travelling on the Continent, he was closely watched by secret police and put to some inconvenience. He later regained his faith and became a model of propriety.

In the 1820s he emigrated to England and engaged in business, mostly in Manchester and Liverpool. His probity was such that, during the financial crisis of 1825-6, he was able to ride out the storm supported by considerable loans from friends, secured without interest. He eventually married a Miss Grey, whose father was his partner, and became a naturalised citizen through a special Act of Parliament, as was necessary in those days. He suffered from migraines, played the flute adequately and was a keen entomologist; a collection of beetles he assembled and mounted is still in the museum at Geneva. An engraving reveals a marked resemblance to Schubert: curly hair, small round glasses and a stock.

His business, which was to extend to railways, was at first confined solely to cotton. He had dealings with America, but his principal activity was in Egypt, a country which had always excited his interest and was to prove the place of his death. He became, in the 1820s, the Liverpool agent to the Pasha, Mahomet Ali; a lucrative if anxious connection as it was forbidden for strict Muhammadans to insure their goods or to allow anyone else to do so. He was also commissioned to furnish a palace for the Pasha ‘in the English style’, a task he knew better than to interpret literally. His choice of ottomans with gold fringes, huge mirrors and extravagant chandeliers was well received.

In 1850 André himself set off for Egypt with his wife, his two sons, and his only daughter on an enterprise unconnected with commerce. It had long been his ambition to attempt to discover the source of the Nile, visiting its antiquities and adding to his collection of beetles en route. On their way back, on 1 January 1851, he was struck down by a fever from which, at 6.15pm some five days later, having first established the exact time by the angle of the sun, he died, and was buried in the native cemetery in the village of Gagee. His wife and family, after much difficulty and some danger, sadly returned to Cairo and embarked for Liverpool.

André’s daughter, Louisa, never married, but his sons, Charles, the elder, and George, my great-grandfather, both did. Charles, a melancholy philanthropist with an interest in good works in general and an obsessional passion for providing drinking fountains for the working classes, bought a house for his mother and siblings on Mossley Hill, some five miles from the city centre. It was called Riverslea, and the original building was in a restrained and rather charming Regency Gothic, although Charles was to tack on a wing in the heavy Victorian revivalist taste with castellations and a tower. Riverslea stood in its own considerable grounds. Its owner, after increasing bouts of mental illness, eventually took his own life. He left eight children.

When Charles’s brother, George, married in the 1850s, he deserted Riverslea and set himself up in a large and solid Georgian house in Chatham Street within walking distance of his place of business. He was of a very different temperament from his earnest father and his gloomy, if worthy, brother. He became, until his financial interests made it impracticable, the Liberal MP for Stoke-upon-Trent; he was a JP, a keen sportsman and a lively writer of amusing, if mildly snobbish, memoirs, privately printed and handsomely bound. He had seven children. His youngest son, Samuel Heywood Melly, was my grandfather.

By the time I was born the family had divided firmly, and not without a certain tart rivalry, into the Riverslea and Chatham Street Mellys; although the latter were in fact the cadet branch, they considered themselves top dogs. Both Riverslea and Chatham Street were still occupied in 1926 and were to remain so until the middle 1940s.

I don’t know much about my mother’s family. There are no records going back to the fifteenth century. There were rumours, not much aired, of a Polish pedlar, but unlike the Mellys’ Genoese hawker this one was rather too recent to be a source of pride, nor was he believed to be descended from a famous explorer. But while the origins of my maternal grandfather, Albert Edward Isaac, may have been obscure, everything I have heard about him suggests an honourable, intelligent and very lovable man.

Teaching the piano didn’t make him rich, but it provided a living sufficient to support his wife and three children in modest comfort and to employ a cook and a housemaid. His interests were broad. He was very well read – Dickens was a passion with him – and he delivered several lectures (‘The Poetry of Robert Browning’, ‘The Modern Theatre’) to the Liverpool Philomathic Society which were later published as pamphlets. He was also a keen amateur Shakespearean actor, an interest he shared with his wife and more particularly his daughter, and a considerable wit. His photographs show a handsome man with neat but luxuriant moustache. His expression is mild but alert.

My parents married about eighteen months before my birth after facing initial opposition from my father’s family. There were three reasons for this. My mother was eight years older than my father. Her mother, a widow since 191Z, had very little money; and she was Jewish. I don’t know which of these objections was primary. The Chatham Street Mellys were not, so far as I know, particularly anti-Semitic by the standards of the twenties; their tradition was Unitarian and Liberal although, by that time, they had become both Conservative and C. of E. They were on the other hand rich, and the rich tend to favour ‘a good match’. I dare say that at thirty-two they felt my mother was rather old to start a family. At all events they did what they could to break it up.

My father was then in shipping. He worked for Lamport & Holt, a firm of which his Uncle George had been Managing Director. The family arranged for him to be sent ‘on business’ to their office in South America for a year. He wrote to my mother on the voyage out: ‘They are playing our tune – “Swanee”.’

I asked him later what he remembered of South America. He only recalled, with some horror, an abattoir built like a helter-skelter; the cattle walking up a ramp snaking round the outside, to be slaughtered as they entered through a door at the top and dismembered by stages inside until their carcasses were carried out, ready to be frozen, at the base. As the animals, with their foreboding of death, were reluctant to move, they were sprinkled constantly with water and then touched with an electric prod at the base of the ramp, transmitting a visible blue flash along their wet flanks right up to the top. The shock made them push, panic-stricken, forward and upwards to their doom. Although he enjoyed shooting and fishing, my father detested gratuitous cruelty and the image remained with him always; a glimpse of hell in the otherwise even landscape of his life, for he was still training in 1918 and never saw the trenches.

When he returned to Liverpool from South America he remained obstinate in his determination to marry my mother and eventually his family caved in. His Uncle George gave her a rather fine diamond spray as a peace offering. He said it was ‘to bury the hatchet’.

There were no religious objections to their union. My mother’s father had been mildly orthodox but he had died, much mourned, when she was nineteen. His widow and younger son, Alan, eventually became Liberal Jews. The elder son Fred gave up religion altogether, but my mother converted, almost instantly, to the Church of England, possibly because she was a passionate dancer and some of the best dances in Liverpool were held on Friday nights.

Although there was money in the background, my father at twenty-six earned very little. My parents took a tiny flat in Linnet Lane and could afford only one cook-housemaid, an almost unheard of privation for the middle classes in 1926. My mother grew enormous during her pregnancy. When she got into bed my father would say: ‘The Dreadnought is now in dock.’

At the time of his marriage, as my father had shown no aptitude or liking for shipping, my grandfather bought him a partnership in a firm of woolbrokers, founded by his late Uncle Hugh, and registered as ‘Seward & Melly’. Here he was his own boss but, although well liked, he never displayed much enthusiasm for business. He told me once that he would have chosen to manage a country estate but that the family wouldn’t hear of it. Burdened by expectations – he was to inherit a considerable fortune from his mother only a few years before his own early death in 1961 – he did what was expected of him. His last words to me were: ‘Always do what you want to. I never did.’

I was in Liverpool recently, singing for two nights at Kirklands, originally an elegant nineteenth-century bakery, now a wine bar with a music room above it. I stayed, as I usually do, with the painter and poet Adrian Henri and his companion, the poet Carol Ann Duffy. Before my second gig, Adrian having left to recite his poems somewhere in Cumbria, I invited Carol Ann to dine with me in a bistro in Lark Lane in the suburb of Sefton Park and as it was a fine evening in late March, I suggested we took a short bus ride to the gates of Prince’s Park and walked from there. Carol Ann didn’t know this part of Liverpool very well, but I did. It was where I lived until I left to work in London in the late forties.

We caught the bus opposite The Rialto, a ‘Moorish’ cinema built during the twenties and now a furniture store, and moved smoothly up Prince’s Boulevard. There is a statue of a Victorian statesman at each end of the tree-lined yellow gravel walk running up its centre, and I could see the ghosts of the tramlines where the 33 used to rattle and sway from the Pier Head to distant Garston. My maternal grandmother always advised her friends to wait for a 33. It took, in her view, ‘a prettier way’ than either the 1 or the 45 which ran to the Dingle through slums and dilapidated shops closer to the river.

Prince’s Park, an alternative childhood walk to the far larger, almost adjacent Sefton Park, is long and narrow, surrounded by the backs of big houses and mansion blocks, and enclosing a chain of artificial lakes, duck-strewn and the colour of Brown Windsor soup, fenced in by croquet-hoop-like railings. At the entrance to the lakes is a small gravestone commemorating ‘Judy, the children’s friend’, a donkey which died at an advanced age in 1924. My mother, wearing a sailor’s blouse and a wide straw hat, had ridden on Judy as a child. On the edge of the largest of the lakes is a disused boathouse in the style of a Swiss chalet; a mode much favoured at the turn of the century for park-keepers’ lodges and other small municipal buildings connected with recreation. At the end of the lakes the park, shedding its shrubs and marshalled flower beds, widens out into a bare and scruffy valley with trees on the further slope. Carol Ann and I left the park and, crossing Ullet Road, entered the district of Lark Lane itself.

Ullet Road is, I was always being told, a corruption of Owlet Road and, given that Linnet Lane runs off it at right angles to meet Lark Lane, I think this is probably the case. At the other end of Ullet Road is the Dingle where the 33, leaving ‘the prettier way’ behind it, joined up again with the 1 and 45 emerging from the slums to service Aigburth Road. Ahead of us, enclosed within this rectangle, lay my childhood.

Most of the suburb consists of Victorian and Edwardian family houses with quite large gardens, but within it is a smaller, more consistent grid of streets and it was through these we strolled. Built presumably by a firm of speculative architects, the three-storeyed terraces are named after the novels of Sir Walter Scott and display late nineteenth-century romanticism on an absurdly miniature scale. Of red or yellow brick, detailed in local sandstone or ceramic tiling, bulging with bay windows, bristling with useless little towers and pinnacles, they pay homage to the fag-end of the Pre-Raphaelite dream of Medieval England. Crossing Tristram, Waverley and Bertram Roads, walking down Marmion Road, we emerged into Ivanhoe Road where my parents, having given up their flat in Linnet Lane before I had time to become conscious of my surroundings, had rented Number 22.

I pointed it out to Carol Ann, telling her that there used to be a dairy behind the house with its own cows. Born into the age of the great milk combines, she found this hard to believe so we turned the corner. There was the arch into Hogg’s Dairy with the name still painted on a fading sign over the entrance and the cowsheds surrounding the small yard. Furthermore, although the cows are long gone, it is still in use as a piggery. We walked inside and the pigs, with their beady eyes, grunted and strained up at us from their odoriferous pens inside the sheds. A man in his thirties came out of the office built into the side of the deep arch. I asked him about Tommy Hogg who smelt sourly of milk and was something of a ladies’ man, walking out successively with several of our maids. ‘My Uncle Tommy,’ he said. ‘He died two years ago.’

The cows had lodged there only in the winter. It was one of the signs that summer had arrived to watch them, herded by Tommy and his father, lowing their way down busy Aigburth Road to graze in the fields of a small farm which lay between the river and Aigburth Vale. Despite the ‘Picture Houses’, trams and shops, little pockets of rural life persisted then at the ends of cobbled ‘unadopted’ lanes. We said goodbye to Tommy Hogg’s nephew.

Repassing our ‘entry’, the local name for those narrow high-walled alleys skirting the back-yards, we crossed Ivanhoe Road. There was what used to be a fire station on the opposite corner, an elaborate little Ruritanian building. I once dreamt that my mother, screaming silently, gave birth to a child in one of its empty rooms with me present but unable to help. Another thirty yards and we were in Lark Lane itself, the great sandstone gate-posts to Sefton Park visible at the far end.

Lark Lane is a shopping street. Some of the shops I remember are still there, although most have changed their names: a grocer’s, a fishmonger’s, a florist’s, two cake shops, several tobacconists and sweet shops, a saddler’s (gone), a wine merchant’s, an undertaker’s, and a small Gothic police station. Most of the shops delivered. They knew their customers by name, and had pretended to admire them in their prams, and the under-takers measured them up when they died.

As we were still a bit early for dinner, Carol Ann and I went into The Albert, a handsome, chateau-like public house built in the 1880s with a walled bowling green behind it. My father had used The Albert almost every day of his adult life and twice on Sundays. Inside, some disastrous ‘improvements’ have been made in recent years. The old smoke room is now a smart cocktail lounge, the engraved mirrors are gone and so are the bronze horses rearing up on the high mantelpiece over a coal fire, but there is still the barley-sugar Corinthian column in the public, the fine mahogany bar, the elaborate plaster-work ceilings, orange with tobacco smoke. We had a couple of drinks and I thought of my father sitting with his circle: Jack and Maisy Forster, ‘Boy’ Henshaw., Copper and Donald Carmichael, ‘the Major’.

Lark Lane had its quota of unfortunates when I was young: an errand boy with so large a goitre bulging from his neck that he had to lean sideways on his heavy bicycle to keep his balance; an old woman whose feet in their surgical boots were turned inwards so that she had to lift one above the other to move forwards; a huge man, the son of a police sergeant, who was simple and had been, so they said, castrated because he had molested children. Despite this he had alarmed my parents by offering to take my younger brother to ‘see some chickens’, but Bill had sensibly refused and run safely home. There was another simpleton, harmless and much loved. He was small and wore a huge cap. His name was ‘Silly Syd’ and he would stand up in the local cinemas during the ice-cream interval and shout out: ‘Give me a penny, I’m daft.’

Carol Ann told me that Lark Lane was becoming quite fashionable. There was a wine bar nearer the park. The bistro, a word and concept unknown to my parents, stands on a corner with big windows along both sides. It was a junk-shop in the fifties and before that a record shop. I had bought many of my first jazz 78s there in the holidays from Stowe and on leave from the Navy.

You ‘come-to’ as a child as if from a major operation. Pink blurs loom up, solidify into faces, become recognisable. Objects materialise. Continuity establishes itself.

Early memory is fragmentary: a boxful of unsorted snaps, many of them of people and places whose significance is lost; a few film clips of random lengths shown in no particular order. Nor is it possible to distinguish in retrospect between what you can really remember and what you were told later, and anyway many early memories are false.

I am sitting beside my mother in an open car. She is driving along a seaside promenade festooned with fairy lights at night. Everything is in shades of milky blue: the sea, the pier, the boarding houses. I am very happy. I smile up at my glamorous mother. The only flaw is that my mother never drove a car.

A real one. A maid, a friend of my nanny’s, is hanging up sheets in a small garden on the side of a house opposite ours in Ivanhoe Road. A blue sky full of little clouds, blossom on a stunted soot-black tree, the sheets very white, the arms of the maid red from the suds, the whole composition cramped and angular, without depth. Why this image chosen from so many which have been forgotten? Why a white horse galloping across a green hillside in North Wales lit by brilliant sunshine under a dark sky? Early memory has no discrimination. When everything is equal, without associations, without any meaning beyond itself, there is no measure available, no scale. My mother drives her car; the maid hangs up the washing (wooden pegs bought from gypsies who came to the door); the white horse gallops under the dark sky.

I was a discontented baby. My mother, to amuse me later, would recreate her nights in that small bedroom in the flat in Linnet Lane. A whimper leading to a prolonged wail. Her leap from the bed before my father could wake up. Her walking the floor, rocking me in her arms, crooning one of two songs: Paul Robeson’s ‘Curly-headed babby’ or Harrow’s ‘Forty Years On’. My subsidence into silence and careful replacement in my cot. Her return to bed. The approach of sleep. A whimper leading to a prolonged wail…

On my afternoon walk I would scream in my pram and could only be quietened by her drawing an umbrella along the railings. By the time we moved to Ivanhoe Road my parents could afford and had room for a nanny, and anyway I was beyond the screaming stage.

We spent my early summer holidays in Llandudno or Colwyn Bay, those adjacent Victorian seaside resorts on the coast of North Wales. My maternal grandmother was often with us. My nanny, Bella, always. My father would spend a fortnight there and commute at weekends for the rest of the month. Sometimes his parents visited us in their chauffeur-driven car. Still an only child I exercised an iron will, insisting on a rigid and rather extravagant routine: a visit to the pier to feed the seagulls, to watch them banking down out of the salt air, beady-eyed and sharp-billed, to grab the biscuits. The biscuits came from a special kiosk. There was a notice in its window: ‘the biscuits the birds like’. The birds were selective in their tastes; the biscuits they liked were rather expensive. Soon it was time for Punch and Judy, for which I early developed a passion which has never left me.

The Professor was called Codman. He was a Liverpudlian who during the winter months performed on the steps of St George’s Hall in the city centre, and in consequence Punch and his victims all affected a strong, if squeaky, Liverpool accent and always will have in my ears. I soon knew most of the script by heart, deriving deep satisfaction from the thwack of Punch’s stick, and his raucous pleasure in his own wickedness. I didn’t mind the crocodile, accepting that Punch could believe, until the very moment his nose was between its jaws, that it was a domestic cat, but when the ghost appeared to drag him gibbering down to” hell, I demanded, panic-stricken, to be taken away.

The afternoons, while less crippling financially, were given over to equally obsessional activities. My projects were either the removal of innumerable stones from one part of the beach to another or the filling of a bucket from a rock pool and emptying it at a given point above the tideline. The first exercise was called ‘Stones’, the second ‘Bucket-a-boat’. I was prepared to spend several hours alone engrossed in these monotonous tasks, but preferred to enlist an adult working under my direction. Few were amenable for long with the exception of my patient, if rarely available, grandfather dressed, as always, in a grey homberg hat the same colour as his full moustache and wearing a three-piece dark suit of antique cut with a watch-chain across the waistcoat, and a starched butterfly collar – his bare feet and rolled up trousers the only concession he was prepared to make to the sartorial licence of the seaside. While we worked he would whistle tunelessly through his false teeth, an habitual mannerism which used to drive my mother mad with irritation. He smelt, deliciously, of Turkish cigarettes.

There were other entertainments. The pier itself with its salt-corroded penny-in-the-slot machines. There was ‘The Haunted House’ and ‘The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots’. Of these I preferred the latter: two doors slowly opening on the facade of a castle, the executioner bringing down his axe, the Queen’s head tumbling into the basket, the doors banging shut. I was mystified as to how the head rejoined the trunk in time for the next penny. There was also a ‘What the Butler Saw’ machine. I enjoyed turning the handle very fast so that the fly-stained sepia image of a massive-thighed Edwardian lady was forced to remove her voluminous clothing at breakneck speed.

There was a concert party which, until I was old enough to understand the jokes, my parents enjoyed rather more than I did. What they liked was it being so hopeless. There was a sketch one year, an exchange between the ‘light’ and ‘low’ comedians about a family called ‘The Biggers’. It described how the little Bigger had grown bigger than the bigger Bigger and so on. ‘I see’, said the ‘low’ comedian at the conclusion of this rigmarole, ‘there’s been a bit of bother at the Biggers.’ My parents laughed so much at this that a young man, sitting alone in a deck chair in the row ahead of them, turned indignantly round and told them it wasn’t kind to laugh at him just because he had red hair.

Sometimes I was put on a donkey but I didn’t enjoy it much especially when the donkey man would run with it jogging me up and down on its fat, yet bony, back. Nor did I appreciate being taught to feed a pony in a small enclosed field in front of our boarding house. My maternal grandmother, who was fond of animals, insisted I did this, balancing the lump of sugar on the palm of my hand, bending back my fingers to avoid them being nibbled. I can still feel the pony’s wet, warm, snuffling breath and see its dilating hairy nostrils. Often I would drop the sugar and she’d make me start again. She believed, unlike my mother, in discipline or at any rate didn’t lack the courage to apply it. My mother feared unpopularity, however short-lived, even from a child. ‘When did you last punish George?’ my grandmother asked her once. She couldn’t remember.

They were happy holidays. I was the centre of attention, my every word repeated later to others in my hearing as though a miracle of wit or perception, every pose recorded by my mother’s Brownie: the birds were fed on the biscuits they preferred, the stones were shifted, the water transported, and Punch was dragged squeaking and whacking his way along the road to perdition on the pebbly beach against the grey horizon.

As to why Llandudno comes back to me in such sharp focus from a time when Liverpool still seems fragmentary and vague I have, although it is apparently a common experience, no explanation. Perhaps the frame of the holiday, its yearly repetition clarified by growing terms of reference, developed and printed it in the dark-room of memory.