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

ubiquitous mushy peas. Occasionally a good-hearted neighbour would leave us a lettuce or cabbage from his allotment on the front step. One night, arriving home late from a booking, we came across a parcel on the step that looked suspiciously like a human head wrapped in newspaper, which turned out to be nothing more sinister than a snowy-white cauliflower enveloped in a copy of the previous day’s Huddersfield Daily Examiner .
    Our bathroom was probably the most garish in Yorkshire. The walls were covered in a metallic bronze paper tastefully adorned with a pattern of Toulouse-Lautrec images set at odd angles. Strangely enough, considering the bedroom floor was bare, the floor in here was covered in a thick beige shagpile dotted with islands of tatty bath and pedestal mats in a shade of salmon pink that clashed beautifully with the deep scarlet bathroom suite. I doubted if this look was fashionable even way back in the late sixties when the makeover obviously took place but I was grateful that, unlike any other bathroom I’d experienced so far in life, this one was warm and had plenty of hot water on tap.
    I’d lie in this bath with a fag and a cup of tea and through the top of the sash window where the glass was clear I could observe the comings and goings of our neighbours, busy in their allotments at the top of the slope. I’d wonder if it was difficult to grow a cabbage and if one day I’d end up proudly tending to an allotment myself. The prospect didn’t appeal tome. Reflecting on the future and what it might hold was an activity we rarely indulged in, living as we did a day-to-day, hand-to-mouth existence. Our only care was if we were working that night and for how much. We never turned work down, no matter how poorly paid it was, our philosophy being that it was better to be out working for something than sitting at home earning nothing.
    Each night and some afternoons we’d pile into the van and Phil would drive us the length and breadth of the north of England to play in venues, some of which were very pleasant. The others … well, as I said, we couldn’t afford to be fussy. In one club up on the moors in the middle of nowhere, we got ready and did our quick changes in a freezing caravan at the back of the building, and then had to run across a muddy field and through a fire door to get to the dance floor in the pouring rain. In a working men’s club near Bridlington, where we walked on and off the stage to the sound of our own feet, the tape was turned off during one of Hush’s big numbers to enable a member of the committee to announce that ‘Bingo will be commencing ten minutes after this lot have finished, so make sure you’ve got your books in.’
    In spite of these setbacks and many others like them, I was enjoying myself. There was a sense of recklessness that came with this new lifestyle and I liked the peripatetic existence, travelling around the country visiting previously unexplored territory. I had very little responsibility and for once I was my own boss, not earning a lot, granted, but enough to get by on. I was in a Peter Pan frame of mind, a strangely liberating experience that led me to believe that I could be and do exactly what I liked in this new-found Yorkshire Neverland, answerable to no one, with the exception perhaps of my own personal Captain Hook: my mother.
    Her immediate reaction when I rang her up to tell her that I was moving to live in Yorkshire was, not surprisingly, suspicion.
    ‘You’re leaving your precious London to go and live in some Yorkshire backwater surrounded by sheep?’ she shrieked, highly sceptical at this latest bit of news. ‘Well, it doesn’t take a Philadelphia lawyer to work out why.’
    ‘Why’s that then?’ Here it comes.
    ‘There’s only one reason why you’d pack up and scarper to somewhere like Yorkshire,’ she said with the triumphant finality of Hercule Poirot revealing who dun it at the conclusion of a case. ‘And that’s because