The Year Of The Cat

Daydreaming, I sat looking out the kitchen window, as the smell of roast potatoes, turkey, and brussels sprouts filled the crisp and cold winter air feeding the rising damp of our unheated house. The light chill in the air caused some condensation to form on the window glass, so, to pass some time, I playfully traced the shape of a Christmas tree onto it with my index finger.

Hunger pangs had me longing for something to eat, as the glorious aroma of the prepared feast swirled around the humid kitchen, out into the hallway, and snaked its enticing, wispy aromas throughout the house. Christmas dinner was nearly ready, and the men of the house were busy working up an appetite downing some Christmas tipple, then starting up an impromptu singsong that began to echo melodically from the front living room.

“Help me open this, will ye, now, and let some of this steam out,” my grandmother asked, as she struggled with the kitchen’s sashed window. “Then get some knives and forks from the draw and lay the table – there’s a good lad. I’ve me best plastic tablecloth in the bottom draw, so be a love and use that… and mind ye don’t tear it on the corners of the table.”

Pouring some Mackeson stout into a glass, she topped it up with milk, causing the swirling black liquid to turn milky beige. Taking a sip, she smiled at me, then offered my anticipating taste buds a sampler. This was a yearly tradition with her, prior to serving the Christmas meal. For a boy of eleven years, it was a pleasant taste, not too unlike an alcoholic milkshake, so my kitchen loitering had an ulterior motive.

“That’ll give you an appetite,” she declared, before placing the glass back within her own reach. In fond hindsight, the aroma of the cooked food was good enough on its own to stir the stomach juices. The milky Mackeson was just the icing on the cake.

Molly Campbell was the matriarch of an embattled Irish family living in London. Emigrating from their home in Limerick, my family – prior to my birth - had settled across the Irish Sea in one of the most desirable, yet still affordable areas of London, West Hampstead, NW6. Pooling together their resources, the three-storey house with its three kitchens, was ideal for the three generations of the Campbell clan living within its confines. Three floors, three kitchens, and more-often-than-not, three feuding sections of one family, co-habited through some good and some not-so-good times.

The ground floor was taken up by Molly’s middle son, Anthony, his wife Bridie, and their first two children, Michelle and Owen - my younger cousins. On the next two floors was the combination of my grandparents, Christy and Molly, Jimmy - my youngest uncle, my mum, and me. Using just one of the three rooms at the top of the house, the top floor kitchen was never used, unless relatives new to London, needed somewhere to stay for a while. The house never felt crowded, but everyone still managed to tread on each other’s toes at one time or another, leading to bitter feuds, each one creating open fissures of escaping empathy eroding away any remnants of family unity.

“Is that Anthony in there singing?”

“Yes, Mam,” I answered.

Growing up in a household that addressed my grandmother as “Mam,” created conflicting messages as to what I should call my own mother. “Mam” was all I ever heard my grandmother addressed as, or referred to, so I followed suit. However, it had an adverse effect on me, causing me to somehow avoid calling my own mother, “Mum.” This peculiarity continued to the day my mother died. I’m not even sure if I ever called her “Mum.” When in her presence and trying to get her attention, I just spoke louder.

“Listen,” I would say before proceeding. That always seemed the precursor for getting my mum’s attention. It was if I had substituted an adjective with a verb, hoping it would suffice as a noun. I recall my mum leaving me with my grandparents when I was a toddler. They had a falling out and she decided to leave home without me but left me in the loving care of Molly. When she returned to the nest, I recall that I hardly recognised her. I recollect being a little bigger, so it must have been at least six months since I had last seen her. In that passage of time, Molly and Christy as “Mam” and “Dad” were indelibly stamped into my mind. It was like I had become the adopted child of Christy and Molly.

“Won’t be long before that one downstairs shouts up to order him home,” Molly disdainfully commented as she drained the sprouts. “That One” was how Bridie was referred to when not in my grandmother’s presence. Molly was “Mrs. Campbell” to Bridie. “That one” or “Bridestein” was Bridie to Molly. It was a judgmental term born of the resentment harvested from the disapproval of her son’s choice of life partner. No-one is ever good for an Irish mother’s son. The sooner the women who wanted to join the family got used to that fact, the sooner they could escape or face an eternal conflict that threatened to eclipse the one-hundred-years war between the English and the French.

“There… on cue. He’s being summoned,” Molly pointed out as the distant shout of Anthony’s name filled the open spaces of hallways from ground to floor three.

The blank response prompted Bridie to ascend the stairs to Molly’s realm. However, she bypassed the temptation to turn right at the kitchen’s landing – the fortified bastion and realm of the matriarch - and instead, turned left in the direction of the upstairs front room where she would add another feather in her cap of killjoy for breaking up the men’s fun. That was of no importance to Bridie. There was a family downstairs awaiting their father to carve their own turkey and pull on their own Christmas crackers with their own concealed toys, paper hats, and silly jokes to be read aloud. Duty and guilt won the moment and after several muffled complaints later, Bridie with Anthony in tow, descended to the ground-floor dominion of second son and his wife.

“Dinner’s getting cold,” trailed the words down the flight of stairs. “…Again…”

Whistling some unknown tune, Anthony joyfully followed his wife downstairs, where he would entertain his own troops, regaling them with stories of old and encouraging them to sing a song or two with him. Anthony was the quintessential entertainer, always the life of the party, well liked and well loved. I didn’t see it then, but I realised later how that must have been a threat to the stability of their marriage, because throughout his later years, Anthony led a life repressed from having fun - shackled by the scrutiny and surveillance that his own Irish wife curtailed his social life with. Perhaps my grandmother saw in Bridie what my grandmother saw in herself. An insecurity that feared being alone and a jealousy of outside stimulations taking their loved ones away from their grasps – even if it was just temporary. Brought up as an orphan with her sister, Alice, may have created that internal, pathological monster. No doubt, the sense of loneliness fed the resolve to not be a victim of it again – even though, the men always came home. They knew where their beds lay and where they were taken care of. However, I’m not too sure if they tackled their own lack of insensitivities that they were blissfully unaware of. That may have been a factor in how they were monitored. I shouldn’t point fingers. We’re all born with faults. I sometimes wonder if life’s journey is all about trying to fix our faults. Maybe the dead are the only ones without blame, for they have no emotions, no fear, no hatred, and no unmet expectations. All that malarkey is for the living to worry about on their way to meet death’s selection lottery – is it not?

“Where’s your mother?” The agitated question pierced my ears.

“She’s doing her hair,” I replied, knowing that was not entirely true. She was in her bedroom, but the young German lodger living next door was probably in there with her - via the drainpipe joining the outer wall between their bedroom windows. They had rigged a bell on a string leading from his room to hers, so the neighbourhood Spiderman could let her know when he wanted to swing on over on his silky thread. It all seemed a bit too secretive; however, I suspect it was a discreet practice clandestinely performed to escape the disapproval of my grandmother.

I never liked him. He was too strict for my fatherless existence – even kept me locked up in my mother’s bedroom one afternoon, because I wouldn’t do my homework. How I revelled when England beat West Germany in the World Cup Final, two years prior. I was livid that he and my mum decided to take me on holiday somewhere on the south coast of England to stay at a guest house with no television. I remained in our bedroom listening to the game on the radio while my mum and “Him-ler” went for a walk. I almost broke the bedsprings jumping up and down with every goal England scored, and boy, was I waggishly happy to see him when they returned, waving two sets of two fingers up at him. Eventually, he returned to Bremen, leaving my mum heartbroken. That happened not long after he took my mum there to meet his parents. Not sure why they broke up, but I’m certain it was due to his parents disapproving of his relationship with an unwed mother. Anyway, lederhosen were not my thing. My mum brought a pair back from their trip, expecting me to unquestionably like them. For Chrissake, I was eleven years old hanging out with mates that had just begun to crop their hair and wear Doc Martens boots. Yeah, imagine waltzing up to the park to see them, slapping my thighs in a chicken-dance fashion, yelling “Guden Tag, look at my leather lederhosen…” That was never going to happen. Yes, we all have our faults. Mine, at the time, bordered on eleven-year-old narcissism.

“Right, Christopher. Call them all in!”

My grandmother tasked me with corralling the band and the wayward daughter. It was like an Irish Western.

“Go get yer Pa and uncle Jim from the prairie, boy, and tell yer momma to git on in here and to stop messin’ around in the barn with that outsider.”

My grandmother knew what was happening under her own roof. Whether she approved or not, she certainly didn’t want my grandfather to find out. They’d been through it all before just over eleven years prior. That time, it was an American sailor who abandoned my mother for some other expectant woman that he whisked off to California to live their lives there – denying any responsibility for me.

“Dad… Mam says the food’s ready.”

My grandfather flashed an acknowledging smile as he continued to pluck at his banjo. My uncle Jimmy was idly tinkling with the keys on the piano stuffed into an already overcrowded front room. In the corner next to the window sat the black and white telly, broadcasting a traditional Christmas movie to its yearly captive audience. Most of the year, programming was non-existent during the day, but at Christmas, there were specials and films, and the boring Christmas church services that filled in the blanks.

“Sing us a song, Christopher,” my grandad requested. “Can you sing harmony?”

“Yes,” I unthinkingly replied. I had no idea what harmony was then, but I wanted a singsong, so my grandad started on a Christmas Carol before stopping midway after I chimed in.

“That’s not harmony,” he chided me. “That’s the melody. You can’t sing harmony…”

I shrugged my shoulders then with head bowed, turned, and ran back to the kitchen. It would be many years later that my voice could sing harmony. Then, after hiring the services of a top voice coach, I trained in classical opera while fronting a rock band. I wish my grandfather could have witnessed the transformation of my music abilities, but he had been long gone by then. It may have been a light-hearted rebuke; however, I made sure my future self would learn to sing perfect harmony on cue.

“They comin’?” My grandmother annoyingly asked.

Once again, I shrugged my shoulders.

“I told them,” I replied, my duty performed, as if my vocal dinner gong obligation had been released from my crestfallen shoulders.

“Right!” My grandmother’s annoyed tone of voice shouted. “Feckin eejits!”

Placing the turkey on the table next to the open window, she grabbed my hand and led me back to the front room. The moment she entered through the door, all music stopped.

“Did you not hear Christopher?” The rhetorical question emphasised its sharpened point. “The food’s getting’ cold… Out… now, with yees.”

Gently guiding me from behind, we all descended the few steps to the kitchen landing. As we passed my mother’s room, my grandmother loudly shouted, “JOY! Dinner’s ready. Stop what yer doin’ and join your son.”

Without waiting for an answer, she continued to usher me toward the kitchen, then as we opened the kitchen door, the most curious scene acted out before us. The turkey had somehow reincarnated itself and using its reanimated state, it wiggled as it squeezed itself through the narrow opening of the window, seemingly attempting to fly the coup. Frozen in disbelief, we were joined by my mother shoving us all through the portal, as the turkey disappeared over the window ledge. Rushing to the window, we all silently witnessed the apparent dead bird wiggling itself once again, over the edge of the sloped roof below, before dropping out of our view. Not quite comprehending what had happened, we innocently waited in stunned apprehension for it to take wingless flight toward bird heaven, but instead, we were presented with a reality that stood out to be stranger than any fiction. Within moments, the turkey reappeared, scurrying along the garden path, being dragged by a cat straddling the oversized, cooked bird. Within moments, the cat’s powerful grip of the breast portion of the turkey, hauled it over the fence to disappear for good, presumably on its way to some neighbourhood cat Christmas party, where unseen kittens anxiously awaited their own feeding time.

“Feck!” My grandmother exclaimed in a typical Irish expletive.

“We still have the ham,” Christy pointed out. “Unless the dog’s eaten it.”

My grandfather making light of the moment, had us in stitches, all re-enacting the wiggling of the cooked turkey, as we fantasised about it trying to fly.

“Sure, he might be back,” my grandfather optimistically mentioned, pointing to the excess feathers my grandmother had plucked and left scattered in the open bin. “He left his clothes here…”

Christy’s funny quip had been inspired by a Tommy Cooper joke that went as follows:

A poacher hunting in the woods, shoots and kills a chicken, then decides to take it down to the nearest lake to pluck it. However, just as he finished de-feathering the dead bird, a game warden came along. In a panic, the poacher threw the chicken into the lake and sat down, but instead of sinking, the chicken just floated on top of the water. Seeing this, the game warden asked the poacher what the chicken was doing in the water, to which he replied that it was taking a swim. Not convinced, the game warden spotted the pile of feathers stacked next to the poacher and asked, what the poacher was doing sitting with all the feathers. Thinking quickly, the poacher replied, “I’m looking after its clothes…”

“Christopher,” Molly asked. “Go ask Bridie, if she has any turkey left over, would ye?”

Bridie’s name mentioned in spoken tongue, was a sign of Molly’s desperation; however, I was to be her emissary to the lower realm. But I didn’t mind. Bridie was always good to me and never involved the children in adult feuds. More importantly, she most likely had a Christmas present to give me as well, so quickly grabbing a serving plate, I enthusiastically descended the stairs, like the Dickens character, Oliver - hands outstretched - asking for more.

We would celebrate only three more Christmases with my grandfather. In January 1972, he died at the young age of sixty-seven years from complications related to long-term smoking. By then, the clan had dispersed. Anthony and his, moved back to Limerick. Us, moved around the corner to another house of similar size. We left the Greek Tragedy of Agamemnon Road to move on to our own Greek Odyssey in Ulysses Road. The matrimonial joining of my mother and another American sailor on the cusp of 1976, took us off to live in Kentucky, withering away the remaining glue of our family’s seam. Not long after, my grandmother and uncle Jimmy also moved back to Limerick, presumably to be closer to Anthony again; however, that only reignited the flames of family feud, leading to the eventual boycott of my cousins being allowed to visit their grandmother and the start of my uncle Jimmy waging war on them all.

The two houses in West Hampstead now belong to a different era and to a different class of people who can afford property that has increased 100-fold in value compared to 1968 prices. We were never again to be one unit, remaining scattered elements of a family at war.

The Chinese name their New Years after animals. 1968 was their year of the monkey. However, to all of us on that Christmas day, we would have vehemently argued that it most definitely was, the year of the cat…