Chapter 11 High Noone

Mum

By Peter Noone

Mum All I can say is give the children all the information they need. The old saying is of course wrong. The truth is that more information equals less confusion.

As a young boy in Manchester, I was very unhappy. My Mum and Dad left me and my big sister at a prison called a nursery school where hideous but well meaning spinsters pretended to love me. My Mum should have told me she was a workaholic and I would have been fine. Instead, I felt abandoned, and all the pictures of me as a young lad show me sulking or looking very unhappy. This is in direct contrast to all the later pictures of me as a happy smiling young lad. Until I got all the information I was... er... bewildered. How could they dump me with these horrid nurses and go off on their bikes to have fun?

My Mum was intent on “making it”. She was the brightest woman around, and everyone knew it. Even my Dad. She was a Renaissance woman. She couldn’t cook, but she could knit, and was a mathematical genie. At night when she came home on her bike from work, she would knit these fabulous cardigans which she would sell for huge sums of money so we could move into a house that we could not afford.

Cooking was a challenge for her, because she had never tried it. She had six sisters and she had told them she was the smart one and they had to do the cooking. One Christmas however she got a pressure cooker. She was bewildered. Which one of her sisters had finally got the nerve to send her a piece of equipment that she couldn’t work? So as not to appear unable to work this mysterious looking pot, she dutifully read the instructions, filled it with water, and put it on the stove and left for work on her bike. It was only about 4 hours later that the explosion rocked the neighbourhood, and everyone came to see what the Noone’s were really doings with their comptometers and business books. My sister Denise and I were happy to show all our locals the unusual sight of a chicken embedded into our kitchen ceiling, and were all deliriously happy to point out to each other, that this chicken was the work of a woman who had no right to have children anyway, as she had a job, which left them alone all day, to do witchcraft with the already dead poultry.

This was my mothers’ last try at domesticity. She was, she reminded us “The brains of the family”, and along with Dad we agreed, if only to keep her out of the kitchen. She went into the kitchen again when she was pregnant with my sister Suzanne in the early ’60s, and came out with a broken ankle, which I still believe was one of her greatest dramatic moments. This is not to say that she didn’t stay up into the dawn washing ironing and knitting, because she did, and me and my sister were the best-dressed children at our school, and the thinnest. On our way home from school we always stopped off at one of our hundred or so relatives for a jam butty and a cup of tea, and when Dad got home he did the cooking. Mum was usually doing some work on her comptometer, or knitting her “Fairisle” cardigans. Dads’ speciality was cheese on toast, or beans on toast. Later his speciality became just toast.

Mum was making 11 pounds 14 shillings a week. Funny how you remember stuff like that isn’t it? She was also making some money from her knitting, and soon it was decided (without my permission) that both Mum and Dad would go back to university. Mum went off to Cambridge. Dad went to Edinburgh. I went to my room. I sulked and sulked. I was living with my Grand mother and Grandfather, and although they were really wonderful, they never blew up chickens, and my Auntie Mary (my dad’s sister) lived there too, and she was quite mad. She didn’t work. Everyone worked. Every one of my friends Mums had a job, mostly in the kitchen or talking to other Mums as they hung up hundreds of pairs of knickers and socks on the washing lines of our street. Even our trips to my grandparent’s cottage in Wales left me sulking, and nothing could get me out of this gloom. Auntie Mary although quite batty, was a great musician, and one night after Tommy (Granddad) finished the choir practice, she played me “My very good friend the milkman” by Fats Waller. That was it. I learned the words. I even made a few of them up.

My very good friend the milkman says, if we both shared the same address, that it would make his burden less, and he suggests that you should marry me. I was a singer. Not like the other kids in the choir and the old ladies who pretended they knew all the words in Latin. No. I could do the “leg thing” as well. The leg thing I was later to learn is the real root of rock and roll. If my mad Auntie Mary had not spotted me doing the “leg thing” and wet her pants, then I may never have become a singer. Gone was “La baccarole” and Night of love and night of stars in the beautiful pure soprano voice at the family knees ups. Now it was “Hey our Peter is going to do the leg thing”. Even Phil the fluter’s ball (not to be confused with Phil the fluters balls) was given the bit of business necessary to get all my Auntie’s shrieking with laughter and saying things like “Oh bejasus Olive I’ve wet me pants again” and “Isn’t he a funny little bastard”. “He’s as daft as “is dad”. Yes my dad had a reputation for being a bit daft, because he was and is the King of repartee. He was also in a brass band. Him, Lawrence his older brother, and Hugh Gibe, who was the BeeGees dad, and played trumpet. He had dated my Mum, and my dad had dated his wife, but they had luckily found each other and deprived me of that vibrato.

I thought these three blokes were the coolest people on the planet, and I can still see them in their military uniforms, playing that most beautiful of all English sounds, the brass band in the rain.

Music was everywhere. Tommy was I Irish from Galway, and Nanny Noone was one of the most beautiful singers ever created. Before TV came along and destroyed these types of evenings, we would all “Have a go” at a song or two, and most of my musical knowledge came from the evenings in their parlour as we sang everything that was in the charts, and all the stuff that Tommy knew, which was everything. Music Hall songs, Irish Lullabies, Scottish folk songs, hymns, and the early lighter rock and roll songs like Fats Waller, the Ink Spots, and a lot of light Opera from Gilbert And Sullivan who we all adored, thinking them to be so politically incorrect and naughty.

More on my Mum soon. There is lots. Of her.

Chapter 11 High Noone

Mum

—Peter Noone

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