Brewly, Madly, Cheaply

Demonstrating that to make a proper fruitcake, you have to mix plenty of nuts in early on, though a little alcohol goes a long way...

The year is 1963, and the place is a pub somewhere in Leeds. A forty-six year-old travelling man (Welsh Romany) is giving away a fleet of Italian ice-cream vans and such amazing generosity has caught the eye of a green-eyed brunette. They’ve never met before and at eighteen she’s considerably younger than him, but that doesn’t stop her from turning her back on all she’s known to run away with him that very same night. The man, who cared little for money beyond what satisfied his immediate needs, was my dad, and the woman, who was in fact leaving a mostly unhappy life behind her, was my mum. This was probably the last time they’d ever worry about superfluous cash…

Home for the next year or so was an old-fashioned 1hp (large black horse-powered) bow-topped Romany wagon. While it hardly boasted all mod cons, it did have its own ‘extension’ in the shape of a cart pulled by a small grey Welsh mountain pony. Together with a Welsh Collie, they headed off down to Wales with my mum falling pregnant somewhere along the way.

On the day that I was born my dad was full of pride, and wanted to tell the whole of Wales that he had a daughter. Dramatically, he galloped off on his enormous stallion… oblivious to the midwife yelling behind him “Stop! Wait! Don’t you want to see the baby…?” Apparently not. By the time he returned to base so had we, brought home from the hospital on the back of the wagon of a chain-swallower who, years later, enjoyed a brief spell of fame when he appeared on the talent show ‘Opportunity Knocks’.

My dad was a hard working man, and a hard drinking man too. Back in those days gripe water still contained traces of alcohol, as did the babies that were given it, but probably none more so than me. Coming home after a night on the beer and feeling the need for just one more, my dad would often help himself to a large swig of my gripe water. He had a strong sense of fair play though, and if he did have a beer with him when he came home, he’d be sure to pay me back with a little guzzle. Not surprisingly, I rarely 'griped' and was probably the most contented baby ever born.

It was during my first winter that the wagon was lost to a fire. For some reason inexplicable to me to this day, we then went on to live in a van with no windows until I was around eight months old, when my parents discovered that my sister was on the way. It wasn’t that we had no money, when my mum put her foot down and started to demand a life of luxury (windows… a roof… and other non-essentials...) my dad was happy to oblige.

She wasn’t going to get it all her own way, however. She wanted to settle in Birmingham and my dad wanted to go to Bristol, which, on the toss of a coin, is where we’ve been ever since. Respectable homeowners at last, we took possession of a large Victorian house in the middle of the city’s red-light district, full of sitting tenants who immediately found that their rent had been reduced in a gesture typical of my dad.

I was seven when we lost this house in a property deal that went pear-shaped, but the memories of the tenants will, for better or worse, stay with me for life. They were a mixed bunch, to say the least, but they did have one thing in common; without exception, every one of them was crazy. The place seemed to be a magnet for lunatics, the most notable being Little Bert and Big Bertha.

Bert occupied the top floor, and once reported a leak in the roof to my mum. “No worries now though” he said, “I’ve fixed it.” On investigation, it transpired that his idea of a repair was a piece of pipe which ran from a hole in the ceiling and down to a bucket on the floor. His hobby was making Air-Fix models (cars, boats, etc), although he wasn’t very good at it and strings of glue would adorn his creations like the cobwebs crafted by a clumsy spider. He was tough stuff though. By this time, both my younger sisters had been born, and while our parents were kept occupied making garden gnomes to supplement the family income, we’d be entertaining ourselves attempting to fill poor Bert’s nostrils with plaster of Paris.

Big Bertha lived in the flat beneath Bert, and worked on the buses alongside him in the depot just up the road. The word ‘worked’ is used extremely loosely here, for Big Bertha was notoriously idle. She’d even wash her legs through her tights on the rare occasions she bothered to go near soap and water, but she’s probably best remembered for her novel approach to slimming.

She was truly vast, and it bothered her enough to ask my mum how she managed to keep so trim. She came away with plenty of tips, including the advice that food was less fattening if it was grilled instead of fried. For weeks she spoke of nothing else but how easy to implement these hints had been, and was a puzzled as everyone else as to why she didn’t seem to be getting any thinner. The question was answered when my mum called to find her eating a bacon sandwich. “I’m really getting used to the taste of food cooked this way” enthused Bertha. Polishing off her sandwich, she then proceeded to drink the fat from the grill pan…

Our dodgy lodgers were a happy lot though, largely down to the home-brew my dad had started to make by the gallon when we moved in. My early brushes with alcohol had come to a sorry end at the age of nine months when my mum discovered me staggering round my cot looking faintly inebriated and realised what my dad had been up to, but he seemed determined that everyone else was going to enjoy the party. Every night as he opened up the first bottle, he’d tell everyone “You know, there’s as much pressure in one of these as there is in a lorry tyre.” There was always someone willing to dispute him, until the night one bottle exploded spectacularly, leaving a massive stain on the ceiling.

He hated the idea of being on the ‘pancrack’ (benefits), and refused to claim a penny from the state until well after retirement age. Instead, he kept us all for years by buying and selling scrap metal. Many are the nights I spent in later years pulling copper wire taut for him as he deftly stripped off the plastic outer casing with a Stanley knife, but he was alone in a factory yard on the boiling hot day when his trousers split. Since he never bothered with underwear, he decided his best course of action was to sit up on the roof and do his work there. He’d barely made himself comfortable when the place erupted in a crescendo of screams beneath him, and he realised too late that he was sitting on the edge of a skylight directly above the women’s toilets.

Something about our house must have said ‘eccentrics within’ from the street, because others came from far and wide. On hearing my mum’s astonished gasp one afternoon, we followed her gaze outside to the backyard, where an entire family stood casually watching our telly through the window. Without a word, they turned as one and ambled slowly away again.

Next door, there lived what cheap T.V. documentaries these days would call ‘the neighbours from hell’. Loud music would play through the night into the early hours of the next day, and an evil-looking dog barked constantly from the top of the pile of domestic refuse that sloped upwards from the back door and ran the entire length of the garden.

My mum would complain (unsuccessfully), but she did manage to remain on uneasy speaking terms with them until the day when I overheard her saying to herself just what she thought of them. At five years old, such a big word seemed bound to be complimentary to me, but our relationship with the neighbours deteriorated rapidly when we met up with them in the street later. All smiles, I announced, “My mum says you lot are dead ignorant!” A diplomat in the making.

The sixties came to a close around the time that much of the area where we lived was demolished in aid of Bristol’s disastrous inner ring-road plan. Our old house just escaped the town planners, and still stands today. Beneath the layers of paint on one of the ceilings is a large beer stain, the legacy of the lunatics who once lived there and the daft things they did. They’re often thought of fondly, by a fruitcake who’ll never forget the nuts.