Barry Walsh - The Pimlico Kid

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 smiles. ‘She ran … when I went up the stairs after her, she speeded up! By the time she reached the top of the stairs, she was running and I could see her little white socks!’ She bent double laughing and lifted her pinny to dab her eyes.

Dad was angry and embarrassed about the incident but he said nothing because this was the one subject about which he knew he’d always get a fight. In any case, he’s far more tolerant than either Mum or Sister Phillipa, and doesn’t mind which church we go to, as long as we go. He’s also pretty good about going himself, even after a late night at the Queen Anne.

On Sundays, if there is a working alarm clock in the house, it doesn’t go off until 9.30am. This gives him time for a lie-in and a cooked breakfast before he goes to eleven o’clock mass, when I suspect he asks forgiveness for his volatile wife.

John and I are playing knockout. The game involves kicking the plastic football at a goal on the primary school wall and, with one touch, returning it on target, a sort of football squash. The rules are enforced as much by what we hear as what we see. The goal is an oblong of cement render surrounded by glazed bricks. Hitting its crumbling surface makes the flat sound of goal ; striking both render and brick is post and the ping of ball on brick, means a miss. Neither of us is trying to win but simply to keep the game going in satisfying thuds that eventually bring Mrs Johnson to the front door of her prefab.

‘Boys, I hope this wretched game will be over soon, the Archers is starting shortly.’

Plump Mrs Johnson is Akela for the local cub pack. Her loud voice is ideal for conducting games for excited small boys in the church hall but she has trouble speaking quietly, even when she’s standing close. At Sunday Service, hymns don’t really get going until she joins in.

‘OK, Mrs Johnson.’

‘Thank you, Billy.’ She gives me smile and goes back indoors.

John kicks the ball extra hard against the wall. ‘OK Mithith Johnthon.’ He points to the sign on the nearby lamppost. ‘This is a bloody Play Street!’

In Play Streets, kids have priority and passing cars have to slow to walking pace. No one knows this better than John. When motorists toot him to get out of the way, he goes into slow motion, or kneels down in the road to do up a shoelace. If they toot again, he puts his hands on his hips and tells them that kids have rights here.

He’s a natural resister, who meets requests or orders with silence or slow, sullen acceptance. His standard answer to challenges from other kids, no matter how big they are, is ‘gonna make me?’ He prefers to leave me to do the talking when adults ask questions but he’s quick to attack goody-goodness. Grown-ups like me. Kids prefer John.