Free Owning Up: The Trilogy by George Melly

remember was a visit to a famous sculpture, the nude torso of Venus, which was exhibited revolving slowly on a podium under a flesh-coloured spotlight in a dark room hung with black velvet.
    I remained in ignorance as to how she came to meet my grandfather or the setting for their courtship. Of their early days together in Ivanhoe Road she told me only that she had ‘draped her own mantelpiece’, an accomplishment apparently denied to the majority of her contemporaries, but that was all.
    Of her eleven siblings I met only one, her sister Lily, who was married and lived in Monte Carlo. She was a small, vivacious woman who always referred to herself as ‘Naughty Little Auntie Lily’, wore strong scent and seemed to me, on the one occasion she visited Liverpool during my childhood, the epitome of Continental sophistication. I suspect I first heard of her from my mother whilst walking past a particular house in Alexandra Drive, a long curving street of large late-Victorian houses which links Sandringham Drive to Ivanhoe Road with its more modest terraces. The house was of cream stucco in the style of an Italianate villa and with a glass porch supported on slender but ornate iron columns. The words ‘Monte Carlo’ have always projected this house like a magic-lantern slide on my mind’s eye, while similar architecture – in the Holland Park area of London for example – has the same effect in reverse.
    During the German breakthrough in 1940 Lily and her husband were trapped in Vichy France. Her husband too was Jewish and they were by then quite old. We heard after the war that they had died of malnutrition.
    Lily, who loved comfort, had stayed at the Adelphi during her visit. The Griff put up very few people as the only route to her spare-room was through the ‘boys’ room’ with its distinctive smell of cleaning fluid and shoe polish. Both Fred and Alan were very particular about their appearance. Nevertheless there was an annual visit from her middle-aged niece, Cis Pollack, who was married to one of the Clifton Pollacks and whose son Phil was to become housemaster there in his turn. No one could call Cis beautiful; she resembled an elderly Harpo Marx. But she was one of those rare people whose inner qualities are immediately discernible. Children were drawn to her as to a toyshop window. She had a great sense of fun and adored teasing my grandmother whom she always called ‘Auntie’. She was involved with a charity for East End Jewish girls and was constantly being asked to their weddings. At one of these, she told us, the father-in-law of her erstwhile protegee stood up and asked: ‘Who’ll swap a bitta fat for a roast potater?’ Cis lived to a great age, dying at her son’s house in Clifton; a move she effected with some reluctance as she was devoted to her own little house in Cricklewood. When I was doing a gig in Bristol during the seventies I visited her only a week or two before she died. She was in bed, very frail, and wandering in her mind, but the sweetness, almost saint-like in its charisma, was as powerful as ever.
    The Griff’s only other regular guest was another niece, Lulu Davis, who lived with her sister Emmy in Birmingham, or Warwickshire as the Griff would have it. Lulu was my godmother and allegedly well off. I thought of her as rather dashing, but this may have been connected with her name. One of Uncle Fred’s pieces on the ukelele was a song of the twenties called ‘Don’t bring Lulu’. It was about a man who is giving a party. His friends are welcome to turn up with any companion of their choice – ‘Rose with the turned-up nose’, ‘Peg with the wooden leg’ – but the eponymous heroine is barred. She ‘knocks things off the shelf. She ‘always wants to do just what we don’t want her to’ and generally creates havoc. Lulu Davis certainly appeared conventional enough in her behaviour, but for a child a song is as real as a person. After all, if Uncle Fred could take part