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Eliot Cohens were the reverse of upset at this: not in this instance because of my mother’s race – their name alone would dispel this as grounds for disapproval – but because she had no dowry.
    When Maud eventually became engaged to my father she received, as was then the custom, many congratulatory flowers. Reading out the accompanying cards to the Griff she came to Mrs Eliot Cohen’s contribution: ‘We are delighted and relieved’, she read. The Griff exploded with indignation until Maud told her that she had added the ‘and relieved’.
    She was adept at teasing the Griff by such means. It never failed. On another occasion she was reading out a pamphlet in connection with an appeal for the Liverpool Foot Hospital, an organisation on whose committee she served. ‘And thanks are due to Mrs Tom Melly,’ she improvised, ‘for allowing her feet to be photographed.’ ‘You didn’t!’ shouted the Griff indignantly. My mother’s feet had always been a disaster area of twisted joints and bunions.
    Serving on charitable committees was very much an obligation for the middle classes between the wars. My father, despite his indolence, was chairman of the Foot Hospital committee, although probably only to please my mother; his own feet were rather elegant. My mother did several days’ voluntary work a week for ‘The Personal Service’, a forerunner of the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, in which Tom was also involved, and Alan, as I said, was very active in this direction. Fred however did very little – his cynicism dismissed charity as beside the point – but he did join the Masons. I was very curious about the Masons even when I was quite young. He showed me his trowel and apron, but refused to tell me what they actually got up to, although sometimes I heard him in the ‘boys’ room’ reciting the ritual for his next step up the Masonic ladder.
    My curiosity was intensified to an unhealthy degree after I had bought a pamphlet on the subject from a rosy-cheeked, beshawled old Catholic woman who came to the door. The cover showed some hooded figures about to commit a ritual murder; the whole text accused the organisation of every kind of wickedness and blasphemy. With an early taste for Gothic horrors, I was even more fascinated. Was it possible that Uncle Fred with his jokes and ukelele was involved in such things? I did not dare ask him, but I showed the pamphlet to my father. He dismissed it out of hand but added that he found the Masons both ridiculous and dubious in their support for each other in business.
    Fred tried to interest Alan in the Masons but I don’t think he succeeded. I should guess Alan would have been discouraged by the amount of learning by heart involved.
    That Alan and Fred, both over thirty by the time I was born, should share and continue to share the same bedroom for many years, may seem odd today. It was less so then. Alan was a bachelor, but Fred, on the contrary, was a great one for the girls. My mother frequently told me that she could remember him and his friend Cyril Banner, while still in their teens, going out to parade along the prom at Llandudno in the hope of picking up ‘a bit of fluff’. Fred was, I discovered later, highly sexed and perfectly prepared to indulge himself, but he had no intention of marrying until he was good and ready, and living at home was no doubt a useful alibi. I suspect he was mostly drawn to shopgirls, barmaids and waitresses although once, during the thirties, he had had a serious mistress, a rather glamorous blonde divorcée with a child, who gave my grandmother some alarm. It didn’t last, however, and he returned to more casual promiscuity. During the late fifties his sexual philosophy led to us quarrelling so severely that he cut me out of his will. Separated from my first wife, I resisted his instructions to divorce her before she ‘takes every penny you’ve got’. ‘Always wriggle,’ he told me, ‘that’s what kept me out of trouble. I