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  But the closest we got to affection was when I wriggled into my parents’ bed and my father wearily told me to put my feet in the toaster, which meant I could slip my freezing toes between his legs. In fact, there were so few cuddles and kisses that I remember being surprised when he once unexpectedly lifted me onto his knee as he chatted to friends.

  He wasn’t there to cook and clean for us, put plasters on scabbed knees or dry tears. Dad’s job was to provide, and all of us knew there was a line that couldn’t be crossed because his temper was finite. Most of the time he wanted a quiet life, but push him too far and he would snap. When he did, I’d leg it up to my bedroom. Thankfully it was so tiny I could sit against the chimneybreast and wedge my legs against the door when he chased after me, so he could not get in.

  Not that my mother worried too much about his temper.

  ‘So you think you’re the big man, do you, Sammy Newton?’ she’d cry. ‘Well, I’m sick and tired of waiting for you to mend that bathroom shelf, and if you think you’re not going to creosote the fence then you’ll have to think again!’

  My father’s inability to properly finish household tasks was a constant source of conflict but my parents’ making-up was always swift. Most importantly, even Mum knew there were times when she had to keep quiet.

  ‘If I hit my head on that cupboard one more time then I’ll surely end up in a home for the bloody insane!’ she exclaimed one day, as Dad sat at the kitchen table, smoking a Player’s and carefully filling in his books with all that day’s Brooke Bond orders.

  The blue Formica cupboard had been the subject of my mother’s wrath for months. Without a word, Dad got up, walked over to the cupboard and lifted it off the wall. China and all. ‘It won’t get in your way now, will it?’ he said, as he sat back down. Not another word was said for at least half an hour.

  It was the longest period of silence that kitchen had ever known.

  Dad grew up just off the Falls Road in Belfast and moved to England as a young man, working first as a bus conductor before talking his way into a job as a sausage salesman. Disciplined and hard-working, he then got a job at Brooke Bond that paid enough for him to get a mortgage on our three-bed terraced house. But that was Sam. Other people might live in council houses but he made sure to buy his own. To everyone around him, he was a leader, a go-getter and not a man you crossed.

  Everything about the way Dad looked – from his good wool Crombie coat to his well-cut suits and wool-lined silk scarf – told you that he had aspirations. Austin Reed was his favourite shop – another world from the places he visited on his rounds. Instead of packets of caster sugar and tins of oxtail soup, there were soft silk ties rolled and displayed like jewels on a table. In place of the smell of doughnuts and newsprint, the scent of starch and polish filled the air.

  We’d go there occasionally if Dad took us out on a Saturday afternoon to give Mum some peace. Perching myself on a big leather club chair, I’d wait for him to come out of the changing room wearing a Harris Tweed jacket or woollen Argyle sweater, looking as much a movie star as Gary Cooper himself.

  Dad didn’t buy a lot at Austin Reed so what he did was precious, and nothing got more attention than his brogues. He always noticed if someone had scuffed their heels driving or hadn’t cleaned their shoes. So a couple of times a week, after Mum had cleared the dinner that she’d kept warm on a plate over a pan of boiling water until he got home from work, Dad would lay old newspapers on the kitchen floor and polish his shoes so bright the leather shone.

  My mother was just as immaculate. Five years older than my father, she hadn’t had Michael until her mid-thirties and must have been considered geriatric for a first-time mother in the 1950s. She was in her forties by the time I was born in 1960 but looked ten years younger and her exact age was an eternal mystery. She never discussed it and there was only one response when we tried to find out.

  ‘I’m old enough,’ she’d say, with a smile.

  With fiery red hair, green eyes and pale Irish skin covered with a mass of freckles, she wore pencil skirts and jackets nipped in at the waist. She was one of eight children brought up on a farm in the countryside of Northern Ireland. Her father worked the land by day, then played the violin and read poetry at night so the love of learning was in Mum’s blood. She aspired to something more, just like Dad, and while he moved us up in the world through hard work, her job was to ensure that one day we’d make the most of it ourselves through education.

  When Tish once told her that she’d come third in a class of thirty-seven, my mother narrowed her eyes and asked who got first and second place.

  ‘Look at the mess of that page!’ she’d exclaim, as she peered over our shoulders when we sat huddled around the kitchen table doing homework. ‘You can’t be showing that to the teacher, now, can you?’

  Leaning down, she’d rip out the pages we’d been patiently working on in our exercise books.

  ‘I want you to start again and write more neatly,’ she’d say. ‘I’ll sit down with you, shall I? Just to keep an eye. Do you want a biscuit to keep you going?’

  As far as my mother was concerned, education was the way her English children were going to get on in life. There was only one other golden rule.

  ‘Never marry an Irishman,’ she’d say solemnly to Tish and me, before handing us another custard cream.

  Player’s No. 6

  ‘Would you look at her? Doesn’t she look grand?’

  Dad, Mum and her friend Sadie McInerney are staring at me as I stand in the kitchen. There’s just the three of us but at any minute Dick Froome, the grocer, or Bill Green, the fruit and veg man, may pop in for a cup of tea when they deliver Mum’s shopping, maybe followed by Vic Kray, the insurance man, or the postman, who looks like Val Doonican’s long-lost twin.

  Our house is endlessly filled with people coming and going and the tiny kitchen, with its red Formica table and white butler sink, is where Mum holds court. Endlessly refilling the teapot and making visitors laugh until they almost cry, she offers them whatever she’s baked that morning: soda bread warm from the oven, Victoria sponge dripping with jam or flapjacks oozing butter; scones dotted with sultanas, rock buns, or coffee and walnut cake. My mother’s baking skills combined with her sharp sense of humour mean that a stream of friends, shopkeepers and acquaintances drop in, and the only time our house is quiet is when everyone is asleep.

  ‘Jayzus, Sammy,’ says Sadie. ‘She looks a treat. You’ve really outdone yourselves this year.’

  With jet-black wavy hair and beautiful deep blue eyes, Sadie looks like an Irish Elizabeth Taylor. Her nails are polished in frosty pink and the diamond ring that her husband Don bought her sparkles on her left hand. She is the most glamorous woman I know.

  I bask in Sadie’s approval as my parents’ faces crinkle with smiles, and Mum leans down to shower me with kisses. It’s the annual church youth club competition tomorrow and it’s always a big event in our house. All of us dress up each year and I love it because it’s one of the rare times that Mum and Dad do something together. Thinking up ideas, laughing some off and bringing others to life, we have all inherited Dad’s love of painting and drawing, except Tish – even if she did win the Clements art competition by accident one year.

  Give us cereal packets and we’ll glue them together to make the Leaning Tower of Pisa. A cardboard vegetable box will be recycled into facemasks, or the inside of loo rolls stuck together to make musical instruments. My childhood is an endless battle to avoid getting light-headed from too many glue fumes.

  Last year I was dressed in a matching gold jumper and tights, with my face also painted gold and two pounds of fresh carrots strung together to make a garland that balanced precariously on the top of my head. I was 24-carrot gold and romped home with first prize. But, just like Sadie and my mother, I think that this year’s fancy-dress costume might be the best – even if Patch is staring up at me dolefully from his basket in the corner.

  I’m wearing a bottle g
reen jumper and woolly tights; my arms and legs are sticking through holes that have been cut in a huge cardboard box. Half of it is painted the same bottle green as my clothes and the other half is turquoise. On the front is a black-and-gold emblem that Dad has carefully painted.

  Around my head is another crown. But this year it’s not made of carrots. Instead, Mum has sewn together about thirty of Dad’s fag boxes to create my crowning glory. I’m dressed as a packet of cigarettes: a packet of Player’s No. 6, to be precise.

  Needless to say, I win first prize again.

  Heinz Beanz

  ‘Would you look at your man across the road?’ my mother exclaims, as she stares out of the bedroom window at Big Hack’s husband Morris, who is cleaning his car.

  It was never explained to me why Mum nicknamed our neighbour ‘Big Hack’ although I knew that the man she called Forbus Moonery got his moniker because he spent so much time in the garden at night. Everyone went by an alternative name, though – including us. Michael was Ptang Ptang Biscuit Barrel while I was Skinny Malinkey.

  ‘And on a Sunday too!’ Mum says, as she looks down at Morris. ‘Some people have no shame.’

  Everything had a time and place for my mother. She cleaned on Mondays and Thursdays, washed on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and ironed on Wednesdays and Fridays. Each morning she’d go off to the local shops to buy bread, milk and meat while on Friday mornings she’d go to Dick Froome’s to order the following week’s groceries, and visit Bill Green to let him know what fruit and veg she wanted. On Saturdays we were woken by the sound of Dad and her dragging carpets out into the garden where my father beat them with a wooden brush.

  Food also followed a familiar rhythm. On Sundays we had a roast followed by jam roly-poly, Spotted Dick or treacle tart, which we ate at a table that squabbled for space with the sofa and chairs crowded around the television in the living room. The rest of the week we sat at the kitchen table. Mondays was bubble and squeak served with leftover cold meat, Tuesday might well be shepherd’s pie if there was still enough left of Sunday’s joint, and the sun never set on a Friday without fish being served. The other days were interspersed with liver and bacon, sausages and colcannon mash, mince and potatoes or chops. Crowded around the table, my siblings and I kept an eagle eye on each other: no one could have more than their fair share, everyone must wait until seconds were served to make sure they were divided equally, and if you left a scrap of anything on your plate too long then someone was sure to spear it with their fork.

  ‘Here she comes!’ Mum says, her eyes widening in amusement.

  Big Hack has come outside wearing a housecoat.

  ‘Look at that auld nylon number! Have they nothing better to do on a Sunday than clean a car?’

  There was no cleaning and certainly no car washing on Sundays for my parents. After mass, we’d come home and Mum would serve lunch before leaving us to do the washing-up – one clearing, one washing, two drying and one putting away – while my parents settled down together in the living room, Dad with his Sunday Press and Mum with a book of Seamus Heaney’s poetry, a novel by Edna O’Brien or leaning her head back to rest her eyes for a ‘few wee moments’.

  ‘Wheesht stop, will you?’ she would cry, if we were playing too loudly.

  Those quiet Sunday afternoons were the only moments when my mother’s boundless energy was finally stilled. Otherwise she lived her life in a whirl of children, cleaning, cooking, washing and chatting. Always chatting.

  She looks down at me now as she tears her gaze from the window and holds out her hand. ‘How about a nice cup of tea, Mary?’ she says.

  But I know as we descend the stairs that Mum won’t be able to forget what she’s just seen.

  ‘Why she dresses those girls up like a couple of dogs’ dinners and then walks around looking like a tramp I’ll never know,’ she mutters to herself, as we go into the kitchen.

  Last night we went to Mrs Cutler’s to get baked beans. It’s the only place nearby that stays open late and we mostly go during the summer to buy the ice lollies that Mrs Cutler makes by freezing orange squash in plastic lolly containers: the proper ones are too expensive.

  Mrs Cutler’s shop is housed in the converted front room of her two-up-two-down next to Parkgate School, and the TV is always on, the theme tune to Crossroads playing when you open the front door. As soon as she hears it go, Mrs Cutler bustles in. Tall and skinny with legs like knitting needles, she always wears a blue tabard pinny.

  There are no shelves at Mrs Cutler’s. Instead a random assortment of cupboards and a bookcase jostle for space with a chest freezer where ice cream and bread nestle in packaging that’s crystallized white after months of waiting to be bought.

  I knew exactly what my mother was thinking last night as Mrs Cutler leaned inside the freezer to unearth some fish fingers for another customer.

  ‘Did you see those scissor legs?’ she’d said to me, as we left. ‘That one has legs up to her armpits. But don’t be telling that to everyone now, will you, Mary?’

  Bush record player

  Our home is a semi at the end of a row of terraced houses on Windsor Road in North Watford. Dad and Michael crazy-paved the front garden one summer to make a parking space for the car and there’s a wooden porch with red tiles that Mum paints every now and again. At the side of the house a gate leads to the back garden where the outdoor loo, coal bunker and a tortoise named Best are housed.

  Upstairs are three bedrooms: the big one at the front where Mum and Dad sleep, a middle bedroom, which belongs to my brothers, and off it a box room that’s mine and Tish’s. Our room is so small there’s only enough space for a bunk bed and a curtain to one side of the fireplace behind which a clothes rail is hidden; so cold that we wake up to find ice inside the windowpanes in winter. The sole source of heating in the house is an electric fire downstairs, and on cold winter nights we stand in front of it for as long as possible before racing upstairs and diving between frozen sheets. Tish was once so reluctant to leave the fire that her Littlewoods nightie melted.

  Downstairs there are also three rooms. The kitchen at the back of the house is filled with Formica cupboards and the endless smell of soda bread. Go into the hall and you’ll see the stairs with the living room on the left where we eat and watch TV. To the right is the Front Room.

  Unlike all the other rooms in our house, which are filled with noise and an assortment of satchels, apple cores and comics, the Front Room is quiet and neat. There are two swivel chairs covered with a big flower print that Dad was given as a bonus for being the best salesman and a wall papered in bright orange. A brown furry rug covers the needle-cord carpet, and the Bush record player that Aunty Cathy gave us sits on a small table. The Front Room is the best in the house and we rarely go into it, except to play records. At all other times an almost sepulchral hush hangs over it.

  It’s never been explained to me why we’re not allowed in there but I don’t question why seven people live in two rooms, leaving one permanently empty. I can only think it’s kept for best just in case the priest drops by unexpectedly.

  Statue of the Virgin Mary

  Religion was so ingrained in my mother that she once went to the cinema and absentmindedly genuflected as she walked down the aisle to her seat. Growing up a Catholic, she was taught to pray each night, attend church every Sunday and regard the local priest as God’s earth-bound embodiment. Her family was appalled when she married a Protestant from the wrong side of Belfast and never quite forgave my dad for whisking Mum to a new life in England.

  My dad took the boat over the Irish Sea and moved into a men’s hostel in Watford where he met Don McInerney and Harry McCann, fellow countrymen who’d also come over to look for a better life. Soon my mother and Don’s wife Sadie had joined them while Harry met his wife Sheila when she got on the bus he drove. Between them these three couples produced eleven children, who were our Irish family in England.

  My father duly attended his catechism classes and converted t
o Catholicism before marrying my mother. But it was she who ensured that the Church was the constant backdrop to our family life, from the rosaries she hung over our beds to the miniature font filled with holy water that was attached to the wall by the front door. Statues of the Holy Virgin Mary and St Therese of the Roses lined a shelf in Mum’s bedroom, and a crucifix of Jesus with a drooping head sat on her dresser. The iconography of her faith was all around us.

  When Lawrence was born two years after me during a snowstorm, Mum couldn’t wait for the pavements to clear for her youngest son to be inducted into his faith. Fearing that his original sin was still clinging to him, she asked the priest who came to our house to baptize my new brother, and Joe stood holding a candle beside Mum’s bed to signify the Holy Spirit and light. In so many ways, her faith was the glue that bound us together, from the prayers of thanks and contrition that we said together each night before Coronation Street to the friendships we made with other Catholic families who attended St Helen’s.

  My mother wasn’t one to engage in spiritual oneupmanship. She didn’t bring the priest his lunch wrapped in a tea-towel or spend more time than she had to at church jumble sales in an effort to curry favour. Even so, she had strict ideas about the rules of her religion and the behaviour expected. The Rosary and the Apostles Creed were always said with a ramrod straight back, bowed head and body as still as a statue.

  ‘Did you see that one?’ She’d tut as we left church. ‘Bouncing around like a jack-in-the-box. You’d think it was a nightclub and not God’s holy church.’