IT’S SUNDAY LUNCHTIME in Southam Street, London W10. In truth the word ‘lunch’ belonged at the posher end of Ladbroke Grove. To us this was dinnertime. If we ate anything in the evening, it was for our tea.
My father Steve had already applied silver armbands to the over-long sleeves of his newly ironed, double-cuffed shirt, polished his shoes, Brylcreemed his hair, fixed his tie, donned his suit and set off for the pub. It was like obeying a call to prayer; as if a siren had sounded at 12 noon to summon thousands of working-class men to the Sunday ritual of a lunchtime drink.
They didn’t have far to go. There was a boozer on every corner, and in the corner of every boozer, a piano. (Or, in the rhyming slang that was as common in west London as it was in the East End, every battle cruiser had a joanna.) On the corner of Southam Street was the Earl of Warwick, in the next street, the Derby Arms and on Middle Row, a five-minute walk away, the Lads of the Village, which was Steve’s destination. As a pub pianist, he was well known in the haunts of North Kensington. His wife, my mother Lily, like almost all the women, stayed at home to cook the Sunday roast, which had to be on the table at 2pm when, with a bit of luck, her husband would return.
Steve had already failed to return once. In 1953 he had gone off with the wife of his best friend, only to return six months later having fathered a half-brother I’ve never met. It would only be a matter of time before he left for good. His sole legacy to my older sister Linda and me would be his honky-tonk piano and a love of music that was deeply embedded in our DNA. For now, the piano was out of bounds. He kept the keyboard locked to prevent us from experimenting with it.
Linda and I, aged ten and seven respectively, would be contemplating the endless, enervating day that lay ahead. Sunday was a day of rituals. For some this may have included a church service but ours was not a churchgoing community. There were many more pubs than churches and my mother, while a firm believer, never worshipped in the conventional way.
Her relationship with God seemed more personal and intimate. When the gas meter required feeding, for instance, and she’d managed to unearth a shilling from somewhere, she would lift her face towards the heavens, which lay somewhere above our fly-infested ceiling, and, her eyes tightly shut, whisper a prayer of thanks.
Inside the meter was a wheel that could be seen turning, indicating the speed at which your shilling pieces were being devoured. By around 1.30 on Sundays, that wheel would be spinning like a top as Lily roasted the meat, over-boiled the veg and baked the bread pudding ahead of the 2pm deadline.
The enormous wireless, hired from Radio Rentals, would be tuned to the BBC Light Programme as, I suspect, was almost every other radio in the country. There was no alternative to the BBC in 1957. Commercial radio was years away and while the names of overseas stations such as Luxembourg and Hilversum were optimistically printed on to some tuning dials, getting any reception through the maze of atmospheric noise was difficult.
Our radio didn’t offer even the remote hope of such exotic alternatives. The Radio Rentals engineer had installed it high up, its wires running into a brown Bakelite casing fixed to the kitchen door frame at eye level. This provided us with a switch and three numbers. The choice was 1 for the Light Programme, 2 for the Home Service, which broadcast mainly news and current affairs, and 3 for the classical music offered by the Third Programme.
At that particular time on a Sunday most of the nation was tuned to Two-Way Family Favourites on the Light Programme. There were four or five families in every house in Southam Street, some packed into single rooms, others, like us, progressing to two or three rooms split between landings. From every radio came the same opening theme tune: the lush strings of the Andre Kostelanetz Orchestra playing ‘With a Song in My Heart’. It seeped out of every cracked window and from under every misaligned door.
As the men returned from the pub at closing time the mean air of Kensal Town would be scented with the smell of roasting meat. Steve rarely returned with a song in his heart and when he did it soon gave way to the beer in his belly. He would become morose and occasionally violent.
For my mother those two hours on a Sunday lunchtime listening to Family Favourites provided a serene interlude.
The programme, like its forerunner, Forces Favourites, was a request show devised to connect those serving with the forces in West Germany and across the Commonwealth with their families back in the UK. But because it was one of the few radio programmes devoted exclusively to playing actual records, as opposed to broadcasting renditions of popular songs played in a studio by one of the BBC’s in-house orchestras, it attracted massive audiences from all walks of life, at its peak reaching 26 million.
Jean Metcalfe hosted the show from London, with links to a variety of announcers based at BFPO (British Forces Posted Overseas) stations in Germany and farther-flung locations. One of them was her husband, Cliff Michelmore, whom she’d ‘met’ through the programme when he co-presented it from Hamburg (apparently, he used to say it had been ‘love at first hearing’), though at the time it was considered unseemly for that secret to be shared with listeners. The announcers would take turns to read out dedications and requests from soldiers to their families at home and from families to the soldiers stationed abroad. The highlight of the show was when the ‘Bumper Bundle’ (the song that had been requested in more letters than any other) was revealed.
In 1957, the Bumper Bundle was, more often than not, ‘True Love’ by Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, released the previous year. In my mind’s eye, when this comes on the radio I am playing with some toys on the kitchen lino and look up at my pretty Scouse mother as she rushes in from the gas cooker on the landing and sinks her tiny frame into a battered chair, dishcloth in hand and a faraway look in her eye, to listen to Bing and Grace croon her favourite tune.
Still a young woman, Lily generally keeps her chestnut hair pinned, clipped and gripped beneath a turban, as it is now. The turban is only discarded when she gets dolled up for ‘the pictures’, her weekly escape alone to the Odeon or the Royalty to see Cary Grant, Doris Day or Gary Cooper. It is as if the glamour on the screen demands an equivalent dress code on the part of the audience.
Grace Kelly is her favourite film star, as she never fails to remind my sister and me when ‘True Love’ begins to play and we are shushed into silence. I, too, am keen to listen. I like the wistful melody of Cole Porter’s song and the harmony near the end, which appears to be Grace’s only contribution.
Nevertheless she shared the credits with Bing, and thus, I discovered when I was a bit older and obsessed with the ‘hit parade’, added a number 4 hit in the UK charts and a gold record to her already impressive CV in the year she married Prince Rainier of Monaco and became a princess.
The film in which the record featured, High Society, starring Bing and Grace alongside Frank Sinatra, had also been released in 1956. Lily told us she loved that film so much she’d stayed in the cinema to watch it a second time. Having paid the admission charge, picturegoers could, and often did, remain in the warm, dark comfort of the cinema for as many screenings as they liked.
‘For you and I have a guardian angel on high with nothing to do,’ Bing and Grace sang. A guardian angel for Lily would certainly not have been under-occupied. Her hard life was soon to become much harder as her health deteriorated and she struggled to cope without her feckless husband.
‘True Love’ would go on to be covered by a disparate collection of artists – among them Richard Chamberlain, Frank Sinatra’s daughter Nancy, Shakin’ Stevens and Elton John and Kiki Dee. There was even a blues version by George Harrison. But for me none carries the poignancy brought to the song by Bing and Grace in my childhood.
As the last notes of ‘True Love’ faded on a Sunday dinnertime, Lily would return to reality. The meal would be eaten in silence and the rest of the day would be passed in a kind of stupor. We had no television to watch. Lily had taught us card games such as kings, rummy and whist, but in working-class households, at least, irrespective of their level of religious observance, playing cards was banned on Sunday. It wasn’t so many years since ‘noisy jazz’ had been forbidden on the Sabbath even on Two-Way Family Favourites. We were condemned to silence as Steve, stretched out on the old mock leather armchair which nobody else was allowed to occupy, snored his way through the endless afternoon.