Still Standing: The Savage Years by Paul O'Grady Read Free Book Online

masquerading as a sausage roll. ‘That was some punch you gave that bloke.’
    ‘Serves him right,’ Hush replied, daintily picking bits of pastry off his skirt. ‘And it’s about time Phyllis here got hisfinger out and started booking us into decent venues, that’s if there are any in this godforsaken hole.’
    ‘I’ve got you the Stone Chair and the Gemini Club tomorrow night,’ Phil protested. ‘You’ll like them, and the money’s good.’
    ‘Just as well,’ Hush said, shoving the last of the crisps in his mouth. ‘Now get your foot down, wench, and let’s get home. This girdle is killing me.’

CHAPTER 2

    HOME WAS A one-bedroom flat we shared with Phil and Henry, his sparky little cockatiel, in a small village called Slaithwaite (pronounced either ‘Sloughit’ or ‘Slathwaite’ by the locals) that lay in the Colne Valley five miles outside of Huddersfield. It’s a place that has frequently been used as a location for the TV shows Where the Heart Is and on occasions Last of the Summer Wine , and for the likes of Hush and me who had got used to living in London Slaithwaite seemed a grim little backwater inhabited by suspicious people who twitched their net curtains and kept allotments. Add to this very few amenities (I recall a corner shop) and a limited transport service and you had a couple of square pegs who were very much in the wrong hole.
    Many years later, after I’d fallen in love with Yorkshire and bought a flat in the village of Saltaire, I revisited Slaithwaite and was amazed to find a revitalized and extremely picturesque village, not at all how I remembered it. A lot of the buildings had been cleaned up and stripped of their dirty grey overcoats to reveal a soft buttery-yellow stone underneath, and the canal had been cleared out and reopened, as had the railway station. It was a different place with lots of interesting shops and good cafés and a butcher’s called E. andR. Grange that sold homemade pork pies and pasties the likes of which could only have been conjured up by angels in the kitchens of heaven.
    Back in 1980, Hush and I didn’t see it through such rose-tinted glasses. The house we lived in had been split into two flats and we lived in the top-floor one. The flat below was unoccupied apart from the mice, which was just as well as the noise we made on our return home each night from work would’ve driven any tenant insane.
    As our flat only had one single bed, occupied by Phil, we bought lilos from Huddersfield Market to sleep on. They were a bit narrow and made you sweat, squeaking like the plague of mice downstairs when you turned over, but they were certainly preferable to sleeping on the bare floorboards of our loft-conversion bedroom with the sloping ceiling. The three of us shared it with an assortment of wigs on polystyrene heads and costumes reeking of stale cigarette smoke.
    Henry would fly up to our eyrie each morning and use our heads as landing pads, pulling our hair and chattering away. Hush didn’t like birds very much and wasn’t amused by the antics of this flying alarm clock, burying his head under the duvet to get away from him.
    Downstairs in the kitchen Phil always had a box or two of Batchelors marrowfat dried peas soaking in a bucket together with a sodium tablet, which he would transform the next day into a grey-green lumpy mass of ‘Yorkshire caviar’, the humble but delicious mush of peas served with mint sauce and vinegar. It gave us terrible flatulence and made our attic bedroom sound like the Yorkshire Brass Band Championships.
    Even though we didn’t have a lot of money we always ateat least one good meal a day. Phil was an excellent cook, as was Hush, and both of them were capable of knocking up a three-course meal on a budget of a couple of quid. Between them they’d dish out Desperate Dan-sized portions of shepherd’s pies, stews and my favourite, corned beef hash swimming in a lake of velvety onion gravy and accompanied by the