Issue No. 2: THE LION, THE BITCH AND THE WARDROBE

When I was six years old I saw a lion in my bedroom.

It was breakfast time on a school day, about half past seven. It was a fine spring

morning and the sun was shining brightly through my bedroom window. I got up, got

half dressed (prior to my morning wash) and was making my way downstairs to the kitchen, where Mam was making breakfast for my brother and me. I happened to glance back into the bedroom through the stair railings and there it was – a huge lion in full mane.

I was so shocked that I lost both the power of movement and speech. I stood transfixed as the lion gazed majestically and disdainfully around my bedroom. It sniffed at my ruffled bedclothes, bent to look under the bed and then (rather rudely I thought later) nudged open my wardrobe door and looked into it. It then turned around, away from me, and stared intently out of my bedroom window into the back garden and beyond. I somehow managed to sit down on the stairs but was still unable to cry out to Mam.

The surveying of the lie of the land outside my house went on for about three or four minutes and then the lion turned away from the window and saw me sitting on the stairs. It just stared at me with its big yellow eyes. It seemed that its massive head was growing even bigger. I soon realised it wasn’t, it was that the lion was getting closer and moving towards me, very slowly.  

I could not make a single muscle in my small body move. I was petrified with fear. Then the lion moved to the bottom of my bed, near the open bedroom door and crouched down ready to leap. It wiggled its backside just like our cat, Toots. At this point all my senses returned and I catapulted forward, screaming ‘Mam!’ ‘Mam!’ taking the stairs two at a time.

I burst into the kitchen. Before Mam could ask, I shouted out ‘There’s a lion in my bedroom and it chased me down the stairs!’ This last bit was a fib, as I had not actually seen it do that. Mam was unphased. ‘Right. Sit down and eat your toast.’

‘What about the lion?’ I urged, looking fearfully back up the stairs. ‘He can have his later, if he likes’ she retorted, straight faced. The lion didn’t bother. I never saw him again; although for years to come I would run down the stairs full tilt as soon as I left the bedroom, taking the steps two at a time and never looking back.

I was not the only person in the family with a powerful imagination. I lived twenty years with my mother and the myths she created. I accepted most of them at the time, swallowed them whole, and it was only long afterwards that I thought about and questioned them.

Some were stories about her, things that she did or were done to her. Others were about the family, including me. I’m sure that some of these stories contained a large element of truth but, like most families’ tales, became exaggerated and more glamorous in the telling and re-telling. Other stories were less plausible. Most of Mam’s tales had those dual elements of a core of truth and obvious embellishment. They reminded me of the story of the impoverished Tyneside family in the 1930s who were so hungry that they walked three miles in each direction to a posh suburb, just so that they could lick the steam off a butcher’s window.

I remember a very early anecdote of Mam’s. She said that, when she was little and growing up in Newcastle, her Mam had bought some sausages cheaply at the local butcher’s. When she fried them for tea, they started to jump around in the pan because, Mam said, they had maggots in them. I always believed that story implicitly.

When I was a teenager, Mam went to the dentist and had all her teeth removed. She said that this had to be done because of ‘bad seeds’ in a tomato she had eaten. I believed her at the time. She said that she’d had gas and, when she woke up, her concerned doctor was in the surgery with the dentist because they were frightened she wouldn’t come round. I had no reason to doubt her. Just a few years later, she had a heart attack and swore she must have also had an earlier one in the dentist’s chair. How could I disagree? Later still, she claimed that the dentist had worked in a concentration camp during the war; he had a German name. I was sceptical about this, but not wholly so. Later still, she insisted that it was a miracle that her teeth had all come out in one go – ‘on strips’ – top row and bottom row, as if they were stuck to two pieces of sellotape. All the dentist had to do was tug them free and pull the strips, and out they all came together. Interestingly, she told this story as part of the wider tale about the heart attack and waking up with the doctor in attendance. She saw no contradiction within the story. It was an exaggeration too ridiculous to be believed but this did not deter her from constantly repeating it over the years.

There was the story of how she had saved a child who had fallen into the big fire in our back field on ‘Bonfire Night’, the 5^th of November. This story was true. However, no tale of my Mam’s was without elaboration. We had a long back garden sloping gently uphill away from the house to the back field. Separating garden from field was a fence about four feet high with barbed wire on top. According to Mam, she had heard the screams from the bonfire and had bounded out of the house, raced up the back garden with increasing speed and leapt over the back fence like an Olympic hurdler. I had read about people lifting cars and pianos in extreme situations, but Mam was only four feet ten tall and even I couldn’t vault that fence when I was an athletic six footer. But….maybe…?

I suppose that these tales of Mam’s can be ‘topped’ by one my wife told me about her childhood.

A neighbour of theirs, a young married woman, lived alone as her husband was away at sea. She took in a lodger, a young black man. Within a year, she had given birth to a black baby. This was the late 1950s; tongues wagged.

To counter the rumours she had a scientific explanation for this occurrence –Jaffa oranges. She maintained that both the conception and the colour of the baby were down to eating too many of the new oranges suddenly available in post-war Britain. The older women smiled knowingly and, no doubt, looked forward to the homecoming of her husband and how he would weigh the evidence. However, a substantial number of others believed her story. The sale of Jaffa oranges at the local greengrocer’s dipped alarmingly.

The Bitch and The Wardrobe

One of Mam’s grander tales, at least in its main parts, was true. I know because I was there.

I was about seven years old and, one Saturday afternoon, Mam said (in a loud voice) that she was taking me to the pictures. She’d never done that before. In fact, I’d never been to the cinema that I could recall. I was excited. Mam had the local paper from the previous night and made great show of asking my brother, Tom (aged fourteen) what films he thought were good. She made me get washed, put on clean clothes and an overcoat, and she too dressed for a winter afternoon. All the preparations for going out were done with an unusual amount of noise and fuss – even for Mam!

All of this time my brother was uncharacteristically solicitous, keen to help and reminding us of the time in case we were late for the show. As we were leaving, he was in the kitchen, behind a closed door.

"We're off, take care!" shouted Mam, opening the front door and then bizarrely, with us still on the inside, she clashed it shut.

She clapped a hand over my mouth. "Shush!" she commanded in a harsh whisper. "Be quiet! Come with me. No noise!" With that, she led me, tippy-toeing, up the stairs and into her bedroom. She left the bedroom door ajar. "Quick, get into the wardrobe", she ordered. The wardrobe was (to me) a huge wooden, free-standing affair, full of Mam's clothes and shoes. She pushed me into it then stepped in too. She closed the door from the inside.

It was black inside and smelled of - well, clothes - and mothballs. Mostly mothballs. Mam was big on mothballs and you could encounter them in all the wardrobes, cupboards and drawers. I never saw a moth in the house but I guess it was a bit like hanging up garlic to ward off vampires. "I've never seen a vampire round here." "No, not since I hung the garlic up!"

We were in the wardrobe for what seemed like hours (Mam would later say it was hours) and she would occasionally open the wardrobe door and stick her head out, straining to hear - what?

I was trapped between two heavy coats and was trying not to stand on Mam's tiny court shoes (size 3). After a while I whispered "When are we going to the pictures?"

"Shush!" she replied.

"We'll miss the start", I said....and she clipped me round the ear.

After more precious time had elapsed it finally dawned on my dim and naive brain that we were never going to go to the pictures. But why?

"I want a wee!" Another clip and "Shush".

Then we both heard it. Loud voices from downstairs.

"When are they coming back?" I heard someone ask.

"Not for ages", I heard Tom reply.

"Great!" another said.....a girl's voice.

Suddenly I was grabbed by the collar and tugged out of the wardrobe by Mam. "Shhh", she said, rather needlessly, as the excitement gripped me and chased both words from my mouth and thoughts of the toilet from my brain.

We crept out of the bedroom and inched down the stairs, avoiding the creaky bits. We stopped outside of the kitchen door, now ajar. We could hear voices, Tom's, another boy's and two girls - vaguely familiar.

"A bit of luck her going to the pictures", said the other boy.

"Yes, and she never offered to take me. Bitch!" said Tom, to a chorus of giggles.

"I know what they're up to", Mam whispered to me, seething angrily through clenched teeth. "I know what he's been planning for weeks. He must think I'm stupid. I'll fix him!"

With that she leapt down the last stair and crashed into the kitchen, throwing the door wide open. I followed behind her, genuinely not knowing what to expect.

The scene was a tableau. Tom was sitting at the kitchen table with one of the Williams sisters, Iris, on his knee. His mate, Jimmy Riddell (honestly!) was on the other chair, with Maureen, the other Williams girl, on his knee. However, that wasn't the surprising part. The surprise was that the kitchen was a fug of cheap tobacco smoke (Capstan, Senior Service and Woodbine).

I'll not bore you with the subsequent exchanges. The denouement (or double denouement) wasn't anything to do with the sexual larks that may have or were about to happen, but rather that Tom had broken one of Mam's golden rules - no smoking in the house.

Mam was a woman capable of little subtlety and believed in simple (if extreme) solutions to life's problems. In this case her logic was "I'll show him that smoking is no fun. I'll make him as sick as a dog!" So, she commanded Tom to smoke the packet of ten Woodbines one after the other and stood over him with arms folded and assumed a grim, knowing air, absolutely sure of the outcome.

What she hadn't reckoned on was that Tom was a secret yet experienced smoker and you could see (and smell) his triumph as he lit one fag after another and puffed perfect rings, other geometric shapes and even likenesses of Elvis and Buddy Holly into the kitchen air (I made this last bit up for dramatic effect).

At the end of his performance, Mam erupted, thumping him, throwing out Jimmy and the girls and chucking the remaining ciggies away in a whirlwind of shouting, cuffing and slapping. The pictures would never have been as exciting as this.

However, later that night, and in quiet moments when I've recalled this memory decades afterwards, I've always wondered about one thing........why did we have to hide in the wardrobe?