Free Owning Up: The Trilogy by George Melly Page B

a keen bridge player and one evening, when the only guests were another couple eager for a few rubbers, regretted her inability to make up a four. Maud was able to tell him that since her last visit she had in fact learnt to play, as the Griff had told her it was selfish not to. She and her uncle were partners. The stakes were high, and partly from nerves, partly from lack of ability, she played extremely badly. When the beaming guests had departed with their winnings, her uncle poured himself a stiff brandy and soda. After sweeping up his moustache, he turned to her and remarked mildly: ‘Did Edith say it was selfish of you not to learn bridge?’ She blushed crimson and burst into tears.
    Yet she was fond of him and regretted, following his early death, that the life he’d shown her was no longer open to her, the door closed. On the rare occasions when she and Tom were in London together, and inevitably got lost, she would always say: ‘I think we’re somewhere near Uncle Fred’s.’ For the rest of his life, whether on a North Wales by-pass or the outskirts of Nottingham, if ever my father wasn’t sure of the way, he would repeat this sentence to himself.
    In Liverpool, by the time I was old enough to take in people, there were very few relations of my mother’s living there. Off Lark Lane, in a small flat facing Sefton Park, was a sad, freckled cousin called Dodo, a middle-aged spinster whose only companion was a small and harmless dog of puggish origins called Terror. Poor Dodo, like her aunt the Griff, suffered from deep depressions only, in her case, with no one close to turn to. In the middle thirties, shortly after it had become necessary to put down the blind and incontinent Terror, poor Dodo gassed herself.
    Maud’s other Liverpudlian cousins were two unmarried sisters, Winnie and Ethel Mussons. They both had sallow complexions, and high mournful voices tinged by the sing-song Liverpool accent. Ethel, in particular, had been Maud’s great friend and confidante before the war. They had gone to dances together, and always met next morning at Sissons tea-rooms for what my mother called ‘a thorough committee’. They discussed, with appalled relish, the outrages of one ‘Racer’ Marsh, so named because she was considered ‘fast’.
    ‘Did you see?’ Ethel remarked at one ‘committee’ after a dance at the Wellington Rooms. ‘Racer Marsh had shaved under her arms!’
    Sometimes Ethel would ring up my mother, breathless to transmit some piece of scandalous intelligence. When Maud asked her who on earth had told her, Ethel, after a pause, would usually reply, ‘Now I come to think it over – you did.’
    Ethel and Maud went ice-skating together, played lawn-tennis at the Mersey Bowman in Sefton Park, and discussed men endlessly, if innocently; Maud believed until well into her teens that you conceived a baby by kissing, a theory which gave her many moments of anxiety. They were both ‘keen’ on a man called Jimmy Duncan who, for some reason, was considered unsuitable. I asked Uncle Alan why this should have been so. He thought for some time. ‘I can’t imagine,’ he told me eventually, ‘he always struck me as a thoroughly decent feller.’ Perhaps it was simply because he wasn’t Jewish and my grandfather was still alive.
    Maud told me that Jimmy Duncan, when he had friends with him, would sometimes ring her up at home to get her to belch ‘God Save the King’ down the telephone, an unladylike accomplishment of hers which occasionally featured at my request in her after-tea divertissements.
    After the war and her eventual marriage, my mother and Ethel became less close. Towards the end of the thirties, presumably for financial reasons, the Mussons opened a cake shop in Lark Lane. It was called Sugar and Spice and was in competition with the long-established Miss Stephenson’s a few doors up. My mother felt obliged to patronise Sugar and Spice but would furtively slink into Miss