Free Owning Up: The Trilogy by George Melly Page A

in ritual Masonic murders, there was no reason why Lulu, back in Birmingham, mightn’t revert to knocking things off the shelf.
    But this was only speculation. What I knew for a fact was that Lulu was extremely mean. She would give us sixpence where other relatives would hand over half-a-crown and, considering I was her godson, her birthday presents were so meagre that I was even more reluctant than usual to write her a thank-you letter. My mother, rather beadily, told me that it was ‘worth keeping in her good books’ as I might well be mentioned in her will. I eventually blew it on my nineteenth birthday when she sent me a packet of Gold Flake. I was stationed in Malvern in a naval camp, and I wrote to her a postcard pointing out that as Malvern was quite near Birmingham she could have hitch-hiked over and saved herself the stamp. Naturally enough I never heard from her again and, when she died, no lawyer wrote to advise me to get in touch if I wished to hear something to my advantage.
    My mother was a little more forthcoming about her relations, but only when they had amused her in some way.
    There were three Jewish Irish cousins, elderly women as poor as synagogue mice who lived in London, and whom she liked to imitate. When she visited them, one of them would always press a pound in her hand and cut short protestations by saying: ‘Now don’t annoy me’, in her strong Dublin brogue. They were upset when she failed to marry Jack Eliot Cohen, a match they supported on the grounds that ‘it will please your Uncle Lou’. Uncle Lou was another, Liverpool-based, brother of the Griff’s but I learnt nothing more about him, except that he had been married to a lady called Auntie Reb who had provided enormous Edwardian teas for Maud and her brothers, and was always worried that there wasn’t enough to satisfy ‘the de-ah children’.
    When Maud became engaged to my father they went to London, and she took him to visit the Irish cousins. They had forgiven her for failing to please her Uncle Lou, but feigned indignation on Tom’s behalf for having to meet them.
    ‘What will your fiance think of you?’ they cried. ‘Bringing him to meet all your relations!’
    There was also a rich first cousin of Maud’s, a girl called Joan Harvey-Samuel who later married a military man and who spent her entire life complaining about everything. She had her own lady’s maid whose shortcomings were a constant irritant to her. She would begin most of the conversations she had with my mother in their teens with the phrase ‘that dreadful maid Rose!’
    With all these I became, at one remove, familiar. They would figure briefly in my mother’s entertainments for me in the lounge at Ivanhoe Road after tea. They would pop up like characters in a radio comedy series, recognised and loved for their catchphrases: ‘Now don’t annoy me’, ‘the de-ah children’, ‘that dreadful maid Rose’.
    More substantial were her tales of her Uncle Fred Harvey-Samuel, the barrister who had lived in Wimpole Street and who was so concerned that the Griff, if she was determined to work in a station lavatory, should only be employed at a main-line terminus. Even the Griff occasionally mentioned him because he had ‘passed out first in all England’, a feat which put him on a level with the signed artist’s proofs. He sounded an impressive, if somewhat intimidating, figure offering Maud, a nervous young provincial girl with her hair only just up, a temporary glimpse into the great world of London with liveried servants and a carriage at the door.
    Maud told me of smart dinner parties where the sweets were enormous architectural confections which, despite her sweet tooth, she felt obliged to refuse in favour of milk pudding in case the insertion of an ill-judged spoon should cause the whole trembling edifice to topple off the plate and on to the carpet. She was, I gathered, in some awe of her Uncle Fred as he could be witheringly sarcastic.
    He was