\u201cWhere\u2019s me Gran?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s out\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s at the club.\u201d<\/p>\n
This didn\u2019t make sense. It was Saturday afternoon. Gran never went to the club on an afternoon. My Uncle Con was in on his own. He was listening to his Frank Sinatra records.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe won\u2019t be that long. Come in and wait.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d I said. \u201cI\u2019ll go down the club and wait outside for her.\u201d I didn\u2019t like Frank Sinatra. Swanky Frank, us kids called him. Uncle Con would bang the sides of his leatherette armchair in complex rhythms, or drum impressively on his plate with his cutlery, depending on whether he was being Nelson Riddle or Billy May.<\/p>\n
The club was a spanking new building. It has just been built. There were bricks at the bottom but the rest of it was rectangular sheets of frosted yellow glass with plate glass windows to match. It was the Sixties. But the sign looked like something from an earlier time. CIU, it said. It\u2019s affiliated, my Gran had told me, explaining nothing.<\/p>\n
I sat on the low wall, and then decided I looked too obtrusive. Someone would come along and tell me to get off home. I started to walk back and forth, peering in to this citadel of adulthood. Children were not allowed in the club.<\/p>\n
Women weren\u2019t really all that allowed in it either I knew. So it was very odd that my grandmother was in there anytime other than a Thursday evening \u2013 which was Ladies Night, organised by the Ladies Committee, of which her friend Mrs Mac was a leading light \u2013 or a Saturday evening when husbands and wives went in together and sat next to one another all evening without saying much.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t matter. After the bingo, which everyone called Housie-Housie, there would be a turn on. \u201cQuality turns, you know,\u201d my Gran would say as she got ready to go, taking her rollers out, patting her buoyed-up hair under her hairnet, taking off her pinny and\u00a0 pulling on a pale blue cardigan or a powder pink one which always looked as if it belonged to someone else.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of them go on to be famous after they\u2019ve been on at our club, you know.\u201d<\/p>\n
And when the turn went off \u00a0\u2013 it might be a comedian or even a juggler, but most likely a singer \u2013 \u00a0to take a break mid-act there would be pie and peas. Pork pie with marrowfat peas that had been soaked overnight and were sometimes a dayglo green depending on whether someone had put in too many of those bicarb tablets.<\/p>\n
But that was Saturday night, not afternoon. What was she doing in the club now? I walked back and forth, and eventually emboldened , press my nose against the window.<\/p>\n
There were green leatherette banquettes all round the room with stark formica tables before them. Round them sat rheumy-eyed old men in ones and twos, dark pints before them. And there in the middle of the room, at a little round table, sat my Gran with Mrs Mac, pouring the last from a stubby brown bottle of Mackeson.<\/p>\n
Then she saw me, and came out.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve come to see you.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI won\u2019t be long. I\u2019ll just finish up.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCan\u2019t I come in?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, you can\u2019t. You\u2019d need to be signed in.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell you sign me in\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not allowed. I\u2019m only an associate. Anyway you\u2019re not old enough. Just wait a minute and I\u2019ll be out.\u201d<\/p>\n
I had been in before. At Christmas the club put on a Kiddies\u2019 Party. Sausage rolls and fairy cakes on plates with doyleys. And jelly in a ribbed paper bowl with a rim like an upside down cowboy hat. A beery Santa giving out big presents in thin wrapping paper that tore easier than the stuff the real Father Christmas used on the day. But while you were in there you got a glimpse of the hidden adult world with its huge utilitarian urinal troughs, its beer mats that flaked when you soaked them in the spilled beer and Mrs Mac tiddly from drinking seasonal Snowballs, each with a cherry on a stick.<\/p>\n
\u201cCan I have your cherry?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cGo on then you little monkey.\u201d<\/p>\n
But that was Christmas. Not now. The club had reverted to its sacred purpose, a place where grown-ups stopped being Dads and Grans and uncles and became boasters or bickerers or daft jokers, liberated by the booze. Not a place for children.<\/p>\n
Cargo Fleet, Grandad\u2019s club, had been different. But then it was a works club. Grandad had been a steelworker and a union man who collected a penny a week for his workmates to finance the union hospital down London for people who\u2019d been injured on the job. He and my Dad would drink on the balcony, up rickety green-painted wooden stairs while we kids sat below on the edge of the cricket field with our lemonade and crisps that came in bags containing little blue-wrapped paper twists of salt.<\/p>\n
Sometimes he would sneak me upstairs and give me a sip of his beer. It tasted of malted-milk biscuits, treacle and dark chocolate and yet it was so bitter. Below the teams readied themselves in their cricket whites, their shoes blanco-ed with stiff white starchy paint. They had days for kids too, sports days with relays, sprints, sack and wheelbarrow races and stalls to throw wet sponges at the committee members – anything you could put on for free. But Grandad had died when he was 72, which was old then.<\/p>\n
Gran\u2019s club was different. Except it wasn\u2019t really Gran\u2019s. It was a working men\u2019s club. She was, like me, an interloper. My Uncle Jim belonged there. Every Sunday lunchtime we would see him walk past Gran\u2019s house, on the far side of the road, on his way down to the club. A couple of hours later he would return, still on the opposite side, waving, but never coming in. \u201cThere goes Jimmy Riddle, off for his Sunday dinner,\u201d his mother would say. Riddle was his wife\u2019s maiden name. He was his own man in the club.<\/p>\n
When I got to be 17 I went in once. I had a pint of beer and a pickled egg from the tall jar on the bar. \u201cYou can\u2019t sit there, it\u2019s so-and-so\u2019s seat,\u201d said one old gadgee in a collarless shirt with a muffler at the neck. My Gran ushered me silently elsewhere.<\/p>\n
\u201cShall we go in there?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the billiards room. Women don\u2019t go in there.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe inner sanctum,\u201d I laughed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not a laughing matter. They have all the say, the men. Look there\u2019s Mrs Mac.\u201d<\/p>\n
We went across.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou remember our Paul?\u201d she said to her friend. \u201cI thought I\u2019d bring him in for a drink before he goes off to university,\u201d she added with quiet pride. \u201cCheers,\u201d she said lifting her port and lemon.<\/p>\n
\u201cCheers,\u201d I said and went off to university, and never came back.<\/p>\n