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Authors: George Melly
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always wriggled.’
Despite what I feel to be dubious in his character, I much regret we never made it up. Apart from the laughter he gave me, he was extremely kind and generous to me during my childhood. He was the first to take Bill and me to restaurants; my father considered it an absurd extravagance. We went to The State, a grand establishment by Liverpool standards with art nouveau stained-glass windows, a string quartet and the rich smell of roasts and stews. The speciality was ‘chicken on the griller’, a delicacy I misinterpreted, genuinely the first time, as ‘chicken on the gorilla’, a sinister form of cuisine that I was eager to sample. Having scored a hit with this notion, I didn’t hesitate to repeat it on every possible occasion. This I believe to be a universal vice in children and an extremely tiresome one. My subsequent malapropism, ‘suggestive biscuits’ for ‘Digestive biscuits’, was equally successful and I was guilty of looking on any lunch table as an excuse for reviving it long after I was aware of its inaccuracy.
If Fred was a bachelor from choice and the need to support his mother, Alan remained one from temperament. Several girls, according to my mother, were ‘keen’ on him but eventually turned elsewhere for lack of encouragement. There was one in particular whorprobably remained a spinster her whole life for Alan’s sake. She was one of the ‘Mother’ brigade, but a woman of spirit and dry wit, usually encountered riding a large bicycle down Lark Lane with a shopping basket on the front and a back pedal brake. Her devotion to Alan was so obvious as to arouse Fred’s mockery. He maintained every Christmas that she was crocheting a little net bag to support Alan’s ‘arrangements’.
‘Arrangements’ was the Griff’s word for the sexual organs. I was first aware of it when she took me, as quite a small boy, to the Walker Art Gallery. We stopped in front of a Cranach. She looked at it with some distaste. ‘You can’t tell me, George,’ she said, ‘that ladies’ and gentlemen’s arrangements are pretty.’ I had, at that time, no firm view on the subject, but at least I was more aware than most of my contemporaries as to what adult arrangements looked like.
This was because Maud and Tom had somewhere absorbed the theory that it was healthier for children to be exposed to their parents’ nakedness from the start. This was comparatively unusual thinking for the time and was especially odd in that they were not particularly ‘advanced’ in any other direction. Nevertheless we were encouraged to accompany them to the bathroom to watch my father shave and my mother in the bath, or my father in the bath and my mother on the lavatory. I am unable to analyse the effect of this on my sexual development, nor to decide what they imagined it might be. All it gave me during my childhood was something, like the French letter in my father’s ‘mess-box’, to swank about to my school friends.
As the Griff was one of twelve children she must have had a lot of relations and so, though on a lesser scale, had her husband. Nevertheless, although it is always said to be a Jewish characteristic, neither she nor my mother and uncles were at all obsessed by the structure of the family, and those I met or heard about existed in familial isolation. I didn’t even know in most cases from which side they came. It was on the contrary the Mellys who were concerned with who was whose second cousin twice removed.
Of the Griff’s childhood I knew nothing except that she had developed a precocious taste for wine, and that whenever she had asked hopefully what there was to drink for luncheon, her mother had always answered: ‘Water, Edith.’ Of her finishing school in Germany she was equally vague. She would sometimes recite a piece of doggerel about a miller’s three sons, all she retained of what was once presumably a fair knowledge of the language, and the only other thing she chose to
Despite what I feel to be dubious in his character, I much regret we never made it up. Apart from the laughter he gave me, he was extremely kind and generous to me during my childhood. He was the first to take Bill and me to restaurants; my father considered it an absurd extravagance. We went to The State, a grand establishment by Liverpool standards with art nouveau stained-glass windows, a string quartet and the rich smell of roasts and stews. The speciality was ‘chicken on the griller’, a delicacy I misinterpreted, genuinely the first time, as ‘chicken on the gorilla’, a sinister form of cuisine that I was eager to sample. Having scored a hit with this notion, I didn’t hesitate to repeat it on every possible occasion. This I believe to be a universal vice in children and an extremely tiresome one. My subsequent malapropism, ‘suggestive biscuits’ for ‘Digestive biscuits’, was equally successful and I was guilty of looking on any lunch table as an excuse for reviving it long after I was aware of its inaccuracy.
If Fred was a bachelor from choice and the need to support his mother, Alan remained one from temperament. Several girls, according to my mother, were ‘keen’ on him but eventually turned elsewhere for lack of encouragement. There was one in particular whorprobably remained a spinster her whole life for Alan’s sake. She was one of the ‘Mother’ brigade, but a woman of spirit and dry wit, usually encountered riding a large bicycle down Lark Lane with a shopping basket on the front and a back pedal brake. Her devotion to Alan was so obvious as to arouse Fred’s mockery. He maintained every Christmas that she was crocheting a little net bag to support Alan’s ‘arrangements’.
‘Arrangements’ was the Griff’s word for the sexual organs. I was first aware of it when she took me, as quite a small boy, to the Walker Art Gallery. We stopped in front of a Cranach. She looked at it with some distaste. ‘You can’t tell me, George,’ she said, ‘that ladies’ and gentlemen’s arrangements are pretty.’ I had, at that time, no firm view on the subject, but at least I was more aware than most of my contemporaries as to what adult arrangements looked like.
This was because Maud and Tom had somewhere absorbed the theory that it was healthier for children to be exposed to their parents’ nakedness from the start. This was comparatively unusual thinking for the time and was especially odd in that they were not particularly ‘advanced’ in any other direction. Nevertheless we were encouraged to accompany them to the bathroom to watch my father shave and my mother in the bath, or my father in the bath and my mother on the lavatory. I am unable to analyse the effect of this on my sexual development, nor to decide what they imagined it might be. All it gave me during my childhood was something, like the French letter in my father’s ‘mess-box’, to swank about to my school friends.
As the Griff was one of twelve children she must have had a lot of relations and so, though on a lesser scale, had her husband. Nevertheless, although it is always said to be a Jewish characteristic, neither she nor my mother and uncles were at all obsessed by the structure of the family, and those I met or heard about existed in familial isolation. I didn’t even know in most cases from which side they came. It was on the contrary the Mellys who were concerned with who was whose second cousin twice removed.
Of the Griff’s childhood I knew nothing except that she had developed a precocious taste for wine, and that whenever she had asked hopefully what there was to drink for luncheon, her mother had always answered: ‘Water, Edith.’ Of her finishing school in Germany she was equally vague. She would sometimes recite a piece of doggerel about a miller’s three sons, all she retained of what was once presumably a fair knowledge of the language, and the only other thing she chose to
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