NO ONE WILL NOTICE

 

“No one will notice.”

“Are you sure Dad?”

“Trust me son – no one will ever notice.”

And when you’re ten, and quite a shy, naive ten, you would believe that, wouldn’t you?  Well back then, in 1969, I did. He was my dad – so I believed no one would notice.

I blame Granda Alexander really, God rest him.  He thought he was doing his best.  I remember for months and months that year (that is months before no one was ever going to notice) the regular bulletins he delivered from his chair at the kitchen table of that wee terraced house off Belfast’s Lisburn Road.

“Not long now, Audrey love,” he would wheeze, clicking the walnut lighter to smoke another Embassy Red. Click, click, click – before the temperamental lighter flint finally struck a flame.

“Seventy-two more packets and we’ll have enough coupons for that wee thing from the Embassy catalogue.  All in good time for Christmas.  It’s going to save us a fortune love.”  Perverse as it seems in the twenty-first century, with fines and penalties for smoking in public places, in the 1960s tobacco companies provided incentives in the form of “luxury” catalogue goods encouraging people to smoke more.

“Daddy you’re smoking far too much. You’re awfully generous but listen to that cough.  It’s getting worse all the time,” pleaded my mum, but not too forcefully, as I knew that she too was excited about getting her hands on “that wee thing out of the catalogue.”

“Don’t you worry about me, Audrey. Gunner Alexander, Royal Field Artillery, Regimental Number 261247.  This chest got me through Armentières and the mustard gas of 1914,” coughed Granda, following the cough with a hefty spit into his handkerchief.  He always used a handkerchief because he was a gentleman and a polite soul behind the gruff voice.  He was never so vulgar as to spit in the coal fire or, even, in his by now rarer ventures outdoors, on the road or pavement.  Of course, the handkerchief was always Irish Linen, never cotton, and paper disposable tissues would have been sheer sacrilege.

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“You know him,” mused my granny, “he’s always right,” her soft but firm voice carrying almost absently from the scullery. This was her domain, a narrow galley that extended from the living room with no connecting door, but with an invisible portcullis that she could lower with a glance when not wanting to be disturbed.  This would happen usually on a Saturday when she was making the pot of vegetable soup stretch still further if members of the family called for a bowl at lunchtime.

I loved that house. It was the first home I remembered; my mum, dad and I sharing a bedroom in the second-floor attic.  That was why I went to the Primary School in the next street, and even though we had moved a few years previously to a Housing Trust council estate about 4 miles away I hadn’t switched schools. Although our house was new it wasn’t like my grandparents’ house. Everything seemed thinner, the walls, the smells, the laughter.

My grandparents’ house had soul, unlike our own, and with all the callers it was often standing room only in the living room.  I used to wonder whether it could have been even more congested during World War II, when, as Granny had told me, if there were air raids, the family huddled under the iron-clad “Anderson table”; Government standard issue to protect families from falling debris as an alternative to cramming into the street’s air raid shelters.

“Those cigarettes will be the death of him,” Granny sighed, emerging from the scullery with a hot cup of tea in Granda’s favourite Royal Worcester teacup.  “And look at his fingers with them.  You’d think they had the jaundice.”

And it came to pass – it was December after all – that the “wee thing from the catalogue” arrived at the house off the Lisburn Road.  Embassy sent it recorded delivery and Granny signed for it on a Thursday morning.

“Can I open it Granny please?”  I asked, as soon as I arrived home from school for dinner.  (We always called it dinner; lunch was something packed in tin or Tupperware and tucked under a worker’s elbow each morning.)

“No.  Your granda will want to.  He did all the work for it after all.  And he’s not up yet.  That chest of his.”

“But ….”

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“No.  But if you run round the corner to Tommy Clarke’s with that old shopping bag and get me half a stone of spuds you can read in the front parlour after school.  Now off you go. And get whites or blues, I don’t trust pinks.”

“What’s for dinner?” I asked.  “Oh, I know, it’s Thursday – so it’ll be sausages and champ, but my champ …”

“I know,” she said.  “You like your champ without the scallions.”

Later that afternoon I enjoyed the wide-open spaces of the front parlour.  This room was hardly ever used other than for funerals or maybe at Christmas.  It featured an old upright piano, rarely played since my Mum and her siblings had grown up, its white keys yellowed like my granda’s nicotine-stained fingers.  Pride of place however went to the china cabinet, its contents never used, rearranged rarely, yet dusted religiously. It was always locked and I contented myself with peering through the glass at the eclectic mix of fine bone china and Waterford Crystal cohabiting with snow domes from Morecambe and coasters from Largs. These latter being treasured holiday souvenir gifts from my cousins or me.

I heard the slow thuds of Granda coming down the stairs.  It was nearly four o’clock, his days starting later as his health declined.

“Granda, Granda it’s here!” I shouted, running up the stairs to meet him.

“For Heaven’s sake, son,” he panted.  “You nearly made me spill the pot.”  Only then did I notice that while his left hand clutched the stair banister his right was holding a well-filled enamel chamber pot for emptying in the outside toilet in the back yard of the house.

Two cups of tea later, and with the precision of a bomb disposal expert, Granda finally opened the parcel from Embassy.

“Would you look at that!” exclaimed Mum, by now home from work.

“It’s a smasher all right,” Granda gleamed.  “There it is.  Magic razor and haircutting set.  Save pounds on barber’s fees!  That’s what it says on the box!”

“For goodness’ sake Bob”, cried Granny, “You’re going to have ash all over that new thing.”

With that, she took his cigarette butt and stubbed it out on one of those pushdown ashtrays, it too in walnut matching Granda’s lighter.  The ashtray was multi-functional, serving too as an indicator of Granda’s boredom with any TV programme he was finding tiresome.

Push, whish. Push, whish.

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We, grandchildren, loved playing with it too, but well dare we mess with it during “Dad’s Army” or “The Harry Worth Show”.

I never saw Granda emptying the ashtray.  That chore I knew fell to Granny as part of her early morning ritual.  Raise the roller blinds; shoo away the shoals of silverfish that scuttled around the damp fireplace; empty the ashes; reset the fire using paper sticks in her own form of origami from pages of the “Belfast Telegraph” (though never the previous evening’s).  Once a week she would polish the fireplace, tiles, and brasses.  I always knew on which day she’d carried out the extra jobs as she would put on an old overcoat and headscarf and slip up to the shops on the main road using the back entry to avoid bumping into neighbours in the street.

Later that evening, back in our own house, Mum finally gave into my pleas to cut my hair with the magic razor.

“Right. Get a chair in from the working kitchen, and make sure you spread out some newspaper to save the good carpet,” ordered Mum.

The good carpet.  I hated it.  A chocolate brown shag pile we’d got from a mate of my dad’s called Arnie who was a van driver for Cyril Lord.  We’d got it just before Cyril Lord went bust the year before, a “slight second” according to Arnie, “because,” as he snorted and giggled, “it curls the wrong way.”

“This is the luxury you can afford by Cyril Lord!”

The advertising jingle (written, as I discovered years later, by the same man who composed “For Mash get ‘Smash’”) was irritating enough. The real problem with the new flooring was that, unlike its threadbare Wilton predecessor, it made games of ‘Subbuteo’ football impossible, the green cloth pitch undulating hopelessly on the straggly foundation.

“Sit up straight for goodness’ sake,” chided Mum, “and stay still while I do this.”

I sat still, but not for long. The gentle purr of the magic razor was followed by a strange whirring sound and a faint smell of burning.

“Oh my God!” shrieked Mum. “Jim! Jim! Get down here quick!”

“What’s wrong Mum?” I cried.

But she had dashed out of the room, leaving the magic razor to buzz round the shag pile like a demented mechanical rodent. The carpet surrendered meekly like a splintering Cadbury’s Flake bar, with shards of shag soaring into the air before falling limply to the floor.

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“Did you not put on the guard?” shouted Dad above the shaggy roar as he pushed Mum back into the living room.

“What guard?” screamed Mum.

“The safety guard woman!”

Dispatched to bed early, but with two mugs of Ovaltine, I inspected the damage using my sister’s hand mirror and the mirror of my dressing table. Where once there had been hair there was now a fat furrow of nothingness. I resembled our neighbour’s beagle which seemed always to be afflicted with dog mange.

“It’ll be ok in the morning,” said Dad as he tucked me in, “just you wait and see.”

The next morning I was back on the same chair in the living room. Dad fussed about me with both a comb and brush as he attempted to cover the offending bald patch. Tutting with frustration he headed into the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with a triumphant grin on his face.

“I’ve got it. Sorted. Now sit like a statue son.”

I heard a dull click.

“What are you doing Dad?”

“Sshh. There we go. All done.”

I turned to see Dad replacing the lid on the “Cherry Blossom Light Tan” shoe polish.

“But Dad………?”

“No one will notice”.

“Are you sure Dad?”

“Trust me son – no one will ever notice.”

Of course, in school that Friday everyone noticed. “Shoe-shine boy” and “Cherry Blossom kid” were among the milder taunts at my pathetic disguise. It rained that day and at morning break I could feel waxy droplets trickle down my neck and onto the collar of my shirt.

After school Granny took me up on to the main road to Fred Campbell the local barber. Fred was entirely bald, his pate gleaming with, it seemed, Cherry Blossom polish of the transparent variety.

“See what you can do to fix it, Fred,” whispered Granny.

Fred took to his task with enthusiastic delight. I had always thought that for him this was a profession less of calling and more of anti-hirsute revenge. On this day all he could do was raise the hair on my neck to the same line drawn by the magic razor, leaving me with a rear fringe akin to that of a Cistercian Monk.

On the way back to Granny’s we stopped at Ernie McGrath’s hardware store for some paraffin for her portable heaters.

“A gallon of pink Mrs. J.?” asked chirpy Ernie. “And you’ve got a big strong helper to carry it. You’ve just been to Fred’s son? That’s a fine….”.

I turned away to leave.

“That’s a…..that’s a …that’s a haircut!”

“Granny,” I asked as we left the shop, “can we go home down the back entry?”

“Of course, we can son”, she smiled; she, like me, hoping no one else would notice.

-30-

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~ a short story by Brian Kelly