Tom was very active within the community in Kirkby and eventually became a justice of the peace. Word got around about this, and coupled with the fact that his daughters’ clothes looked so clean and neat all the time, the family was marked out as ‘well off’ and the house was burgled several times. Through the trade union at English Electric, Tom received a scholarship to Oxford University in his thirties, where he read economics and history. He clubbed together with a couple of fellow students to buy a beaten-up old Ford Anglia – ‘a tatty black box on wheels’, as my mum remembers it – which they used for a week at a time each, enabling him to drive back to Kirkby from the south to see Terry and his daughters once every three weekends during term time. His degree eventually led to his job with the Co-op in Nottingham, in Personnel. The way my nan told it, by the early seventies everything was going well for her and Tom: their money worries had finally begun to dissipate, they’d bought their first house and their own car, and, after a brief, regretted move from Liverpool to Pinner, on the edge of London, they were in a new city where they felt comfortable. But Tom worked too hard and smoked too much. One weekend in 1973, upon returning home from buying a new lawnmower, he vanished behind the sofa in the living room, never to get back up. He had suffered a brain haemorrhage. He was forty-six. My nan was forty-three.
In the first photograph my mum possesses of my nan and me, from two and a half years after this, I am bawling my eyes out, and my nan is laughing hysterically. Perhaps at just a couple of months old I am already feeling the pressure of being the next Tom: the knowledge that I am never going to be able to live up even close to his strong sense of social justice or his calm and methodical ability to repair electrical appliances. My nan’s face displays the pure joy she almost always felt around young children. She had been one of sixteen brothers and sisters in Liverpool, living in extreme Catholic poverty. When her dad ate bacon at the table, my nan and her siblings watched him hungrily from the floor, occasionally being treated to a little of the rind. Until she was fourteen, neither of her parents worked. Shoes were shared between her and the ten of her siblings who also lived beyond infanthood, as there was not nearly enough money for everyone to have their own pair. The only chocolate to enter the house was consumed by her dad – a Cadbury’s halfpenny bar, which he slowly and methodically ate in front of his children once a week. My nan developed less than positive feelings about large Catholic families and decided she would not make the same mistakes. She would not have sixteen children; she would have three. In her family, even if there wasn’t money, there would be room for plentiful love for children and grandchildren. Every bit of her pension that she could save for birthdays and Christmas, she did, and her presents were always carefully considered. The only time she came even close to not getting it quite right for me was when she bought me a six-pack of Stella a year after I’d told her I’d stopped drinking it. This miniscule error of judgement was vast by her standards, so carefully did she mentally note down all her family’s enthusiasms and loves. Nobody was a better listener or adviser. My cousins and I competed jealously over which of our houses she would come to on Christmas Day. My nan seemed incapable of making the decision herself, as it meant letting someone down, so stood aside and let our parents hash out the details. I cannot recall a single instance when I visited her house and there was no chocolate waiting for me in a cupboard or drawer.
My nan brought with her from Liverpool a plentiful supply of catchphrases, which became assimilated into our everyday speech. If something was on the floor it was on the ‘dog shelf’, if something left a bad taste in your mouth or irritated you it ‘gave you the pip’, if you felt the cold too easily you were ‘nesh’, if a partner was behaving badly you should tell them to ‘sling their hook’, if someone was looking nice they were ‘all dolled up’, if you were fed up you were ‘browned off’, if you were pleased but a little too much so you were ‘like a dog with two tails’. One of my nan’s catchphrases when speaking to me alone was ‘I told you
