Owning Up: The Trilogy Read Online Free PDF

some racing binoculars in a leather case, his crested hair brushes and a bottle of Bay Rum, a lotion he was later to blame for his bald patch. His use of Bay Rum with its spicy smell was untypical, imposed by a legacy of several crates left to him by a deceased acquaintance. He never used aftershaves or deodorants even after they became acceptable. He rated them on a level with carrying a pocket comb, one of his few serious taboos. There was a single picture in his dressing-room. It contained three stages of a cock fight, the cocks a collage of real feathers with only their beaks and claws drawn in. Along the walls of the bedroom floor were spidery etchings of harbours and shipping.
    The top floor, under the fanciful eaves, contained the two maids’ bedrooms, mysterious, seldom visited territory with fluff under the iron bedsteads and worn parquet-patterned linoleum. There was awashbasin but no bath so I presume they used the one downstairs, but when and how often I could not say. The curtains were thin, the wallpaper dingy.
    I can seldom remember fresh flowers in the house. Owing to the Depression, my parents felt increasingly badly off, but in the hall there was an earthenware jug with Cape Gooseberries and Honesty.
    It would be absurd not to admit to the obsessive spirit in my remembering so minutely the contents and decoration of an unremarkable terrace house some fifty years ago, but I have always tended to understand people initially through the objects they accumulate and the manner in which they display or conceal them.
    My father’s discretion is for me implicit in the way he stored his rods and guns – the proof of his frustrated desire for a country life – in the chest in the hall, while the French letter he concealed in his ‘mess-box’ was indicative of his low sexual drive. Similarly my mother’s thwarted theatrical ambitions, only partially alleviated by her involvement in amateur dramatics, were more openly expressed by the display of the signed photographs of past and present members of the Liverpool rep on the top of the piano ‘off a ship’, but these conclusions are of course retrospective.
    It is impossible for an adult to paint with the naivety of a child; the huge parents with their great heads and stick-like limbs, the neat formalised house, far too small to contain them, the grinning sun smiling down. It is equally beyond me to recreate how I saw my parents when I was very young, but there are two tableaux which do so for me.
    The nursery at breakfast time: Bella and I seated in front of a different dish every day: fish cakes, grilled tomatoes on fried bread, kedgeree, eggs in various forms. My father liked to eat with me before he left for the office, standing in front of the window with a bowl of Grapenuts, and staring abstractedly into Ivanhoe Road. He usually said little but some mornings there would be the sound of intermittent muffled hooting from the tugs on the Mersey a mile or so away. His response to this was always identical. Joining the words together he would observe, ‘It’s foggy on the river.’
    I have the impression that this response was not his originally, but something he remembered from his own Edwardian childhood. His life was much ruled by such formal responses. Many snatches of verse, the choruses of music-hall and popular songs, repetitive physical gestures (rubbing the skin between the base of the left thumb and forefinger with the thumb of the opposite hand), seemed to act as runes against the dangerous chaos of life. Potentially clever, it was as if he had deliberately trained himself to aim low. It made him an easy companion. His lack of competitiveness prevented any tension between us as I grew older. He was genuinely pleased at anything his children achieved but, on the negative side, offered us no incentive. ‘As long as they’re happy’ was his reaction to whatever we did or didn’t do. Good-looking, and with an easy charm and a quiet wit, he was ruled