Laurie Graham - Mr Starlight

‘I always look after her,’ he said. ‘But why did he have to come back and upset everything?’

I said, ‘You know Dad. He probably won’t stay long.’

‘Yes he will,’ he said. ‘He told Mam he’s going to build her an air raid shelter.’

But Sel didn’t know Gypsy Boff as well as I did. By the next time I came home on leave he was history. Mam had volunteered him for the Miller Street Home Guard but he only lasted a week or two and then he’d disappeared for the duration.

I said, ‘I suppose he was too brainy for the Home Guard?’

But Mam wouldn’t be drawn on the subject. ‘People lose touch when there’s a war on,’ she said. ‘As you’ll find out.’

I reckon he must have had a woman somewhere. Some lonely widow who was glad to have his ration book. We did see him again after the war, though, so whatever else had transpired, the Luftwaffe hadn’t flattened him.

I didn’t have a bad war, compared with some. I saw some terrible sights but at least I came home. There were quite a few I’d known at Bright Street who didn’t make it, and then there was Mr Grimley from next door. He was believed to have copped it when they bombed the cannon factory in Armoury Road. They never found anything of him. He just never came home again.

I was demobbed early in 1946 and not long after I arrived home Sel got called up to do his National Service. He had to report to a recruitment station in Acocks Green.

Mam said, ‘This government seems determined to rob me of a son.’

I said, ‘They’ll never take Sel. One look at him and they’ll send him home.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘He’s a fine-looking boy.’

He was tall and well-built, but there was that soft girlie side to him too. I couldn’t see him clambering up and over a cargo net. He didn’t have the musculature for it. I couldn’t see him getting stuck in to bayonet practice. And neither could he. ‘I’m not letting them cut my hair,’ he said. ‘I’m going to tell them I’m a pacifist.’ So he went off to Acocks Green, whistling and smelling of talc and expecting to be back in five minutes, but he was gone all day and when he did turn up he looked like a bulldog chewing on a wasp. ‘Fat lot you know,’ he said. ‘I’ve only gone and got into the RAF.’

Now, there was a lot of competition for the air force. Nobody just walked, especially not a boy who didn’t have the right attitude.

I said, ‘You can’t have done. You’ve misunderstood.’

‘No I haven’t,’ he said. ‘They asked for anybody who’d passed their School Certificate and there was only me and one other, so they said we were both in. Now what am I going to do? I don’t want to fly aeroplanes. I want to work on my singing career.’

Mam said, ‘Go back and tell them you’re musical. Tell them you’re willing to serve in a concert party.’

I said, ‘This is National Service, Mam, not Take Your Pick .’

‘Then he can be a bandsman,’ she said, ‘like you. I’ll write to them.’

I said, ‘He can’t play anything.’

She said, ‘He can play the triangle. You don’t need to be Paderewski to be an air force bandsman.’

He said, ‘But I don’t want to be a bandsman. I’m going to be a singer.’

Dilys said, ‘The RAF does have a nice uniform, Sel. Anyway, perhaps it won’t come to it.’

But it did come to it. Well, it did and it didn’t. He got his papers to go to RAF Padgate for basic training. He left on the Friday while I was at work and by Tuesday night he was back home, medically exempt due to ‘Weak Back and Nervous Temperament’ and whistling again. He walked straight back into his job in the payroll office at the ice cream factory, Uncle Teilo got us some club bookings and we all settled down again.

Sel practised his singing in front of the dressing-table mirror and I kept up to date with the hit parade. A song didn’t have to be aired many times before I had it committed to memory, and we were known around the circuit for offering a good mix of old and new. I began trying my hand at composition too and, although I didn’t receive a lot of encouragement, I’d say many of my early efforts have stood the test of time: ‘Gnat on the Windscreen of Life’, ‘Knee Deep in Love’, which I wrote for Renée when we started courting, ‘You Pulled the Chain on Me’, written after she called things off.

Renée had a look of Rita Hayworth about her and she was my first experience with the fair sex. Mam didn’t like her, but Mam never got along with other ladies. She’d chat for hours with Mr Edkins next door, laughing and joking, but the minute Mrs E poked her head out she ’d turn frosty. And she was the same with any girl I looked at. ‘Too full of herself,’ she’d say. Or, ‘All kid gloves and no drawers.’

Me and Renée had to do what courting we could in the back row of the Gaumont, so after six months I asked her to marry me, in the hope of moving things along in the bedroom department. After we got engaged Mam had to allow her in the house, begrudging as she was. It looked like being a long haul, saving up for our bits and pieces, but at least we could be in out of the cold. At least we didn’t always have to have fish and chips and a cuddle in the bus shelter. We even had full-scale relations, just the once, when Mam was getting over pleurisy and went to stay at Aunty Gwenny’s.

But then Sel had to open his mouth and ruin everything. ‘Mam,’ he said. ‘I reckon there’s a spring gone in the front-room couch.’

‘Why?’ she said. ‘Have you been going in there, wearing it out?’

‘Not me,’ he said. ‘But Cled did, and when he lay on top of Renée it didn’t half make a noise.’

It was all very well for him. He hadn’t matured to that degree yet. His idea of having a good time with a girl was meeting Vera Muddimer for the Shoppers’ Lunch in Lewis’s. He thought it was highly amusing when Mam said I’d have to move out if I was going to treat the place as a knocking shop. But I couldn’t move out. We didn’t have enough in our savings account, and after that Renée wouldn’t show her face in Ninevah Street. ‘I’ve got needs, Cled,’ she said. ‘So you’ll have to decide. Is it me or your mam?’

I said, ‘If you’ll just be patient. Another twelve months and we’ll be set up.’

But she suddenly got it into her head to leave Greely’s and be a bus conductress, five pounds a week, free uniform and half-price travel. And then, well, the writing was on the wall. A bus conductress has men hopping on and off all day long. It was really no job for an engaged person who was having second thoughts.

After Sel had recuperated from his suit poisoning Uncle Teilo was keen to get us bookings for our comeback season, but His Numps wouldn’t apply himself to it. ‘Time to move on,’ he said.

Uncle Teilo said, ‘Oh yes? Where to? Has Norman Hewitt been talking to you?’ Norman was another big fixer in Birmingham. Sel just laughed.

I said, ‘Well, I think I should be kept in the picture.’

‘Look, Cled,’ he said. ‘We’ve been a good team, but we’ve got different plans. I’m a pro and you’re playing for pin money. And you can’t say I didn’t warn you.’ It was that business with the lady in white.

I said, ‘You don’t have to go to America to branch out, you know. We could travel further afield, do some private functions. Sutton. Lichfield. We could get a little motor.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m going to America. I’ve outgrown this place.’

I said, ‘Please yourself. I’ll go solo. You’re not the only one with a following, you know. I’ll always find a welcome at the Birmingham Welsh.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘In that case you won’t get your knickers in a knot if I go my own way, under new management.’