At My Mother's Knee by Paul O'Grady Read Free Book Online Page A

leave her mountain eyrie to
come back downstairs and rinse her face in the bathroom sink.
    'I'm going to tell Father Lennon about you,' she'd sniff
piously, popping her teeth in. 'You'll roast in hell for what
you've done to your poor mother. What do you want for your
tea?'
    A frequent threat she made – and as a teenager I'd pray she'd
carry it out but I knew she never would – was to cry, 'I'm off,'
as in 'Right, that's it, I'm off,' usually to the Isle of Man . She'd
done it many years before when she was a teenager herself and
was working as a tweeny for the Mulligans, a wealthy family in the prosperous district of Oxton. A tweeny was a maid of all
work, a slavey who toiled day and night above and below
stairs; between floors, hence the abbreviation 'tweeny'.
    She'd heard that girls were earning good money and enjoying
a better lifestyle working as chambermaids in the many
boarding houses on the Isle of Man. To add to that, the weekly turnover of punters meant the prospect of generous tips. Oh
yes, there were chamber pots of gold under every bed in every
boarding house, waiting to be claimed by a girl who didn't
mind a bit of hard work in the Isle of Man. A girl could have
a bit of fun as well, being by the seaside with its many
interesting diversions.
    Only a labour camp could be worse than life in the watchful
employ of the parsimonious Mrs Mulligan. The hours were
long and the work physically exhausting. Mrs Mulligan was a
tight-fisted tyrant who expected miracles for the pittance of
a wage she paid and treated her staff like galley slaves. She
gave my mother a length of cheap material as a Christmas
present so that she could make herself a new afternoon dress
for her duties in the parlour as she'd noticed that the one she
was wearing was looking a little 'frayed at the edges'. I'm
surprised that it wasn't hanging off her back in rags judging by
the amount of work she was expected to do. Her day started
at 6 a.m. and finished when the last member of the Mulligan
household had gone to bed.
    After a year of this misery my mother finally rebelled and
persuaded her friend Nora, the cook , who was equally
disgruntled with life serving the Mulligans, to go with her to
the promised land that was the Isle of Man. Together they
escaped out of the kitchen window, leaving their miserable
employer high and dry in the middle of a dinner party upstairs.
Afterwards my mother always wondered what had happened
when Madam rang the bell for the main course to be served
and then, when nobody answered, excused herself to her waiting
guests and went in search of 'that wretched Savage', only
to find that the bird had flown the coop.
    Once or twice, for our annual holiday we graced a boarding
house in my mother's old stamping ground in Douglas, Isle of Man, that went by the predictable title of Seaview. A big brass
gong hanging in the hall was rung punctually at mealtimes and it had 'a very nice class of residents'. One of the chambermaids,
a sexy Cornish girl named Grace who always managed
to look like she'd just fallen out of bed, gave me a box of pastel
crayons and a sketchbook and taught me how to use them. I
drew endless pictures of the little castle on the rock that sat out
in the bay and then hung listlessly around the landings, hoping
to bump into the lovely Grace so that I could show her my
etchings. A patient girl, she would sit on the stairs sucking on
the end of her pencil, pretending to be deep in concentration as
she cast an approving eye over my attempts to capture the
delights of the Isle of Man as seen from the bay window of
Seaview's television lounge. If she was in the mood she'd let me
put my hand inside her blouse and have a feel.
    'Only a little one, mind,' she would purr, teasingly unbuttoning
her blouse. 'I don't want you getting me pregnant
now, do I?'
    Since I didn't relish the responsibility of becoming a father at
the tender age of nine I made sure that I didn't linger longer
than recommended. I hope my dad gave