“I don’t offer
you these for tuppence,” my granpa would shout, holding up a cabbage in both
hands, “I don’t offer ‘em for a penny, not even a ha’penny. No, I’ll give ‘em
away for a farthin’.”
Those
were the first words I can remember. Even before I had learned to walk, my
eldest sister used to dump me in an orange box on the pavement next to Granpa’s
pitch just to be sure I could start my apprenticeship early.
“Only
stakin’ ‘is claim,” Granpa used to tell the customers as he pointed at me in
the wooden box. In truth, the first word I ever spoke was “Granpa,” the second “farthing,”
and I could repeat his whole sales patter word for word by my third birthday.
Not that any of my family could be that certain of the exact day on which I was
born, on account of the fact that my old man had spent the night in jail and my
mother had died even before I drew breath.
Granpa
thought it could well have been a Saturday, felt it most likely the month had
been January, was confident the year was 1900, and knew it was in the reign of
Queen Victoria. So we settled on Saturday, 20 January 1900.
I
never knew my mother because, as I explained, she died on the day I was born. “Childbirth,”
our local priest called it, but I didn’t really understand what he was on about
until several years later when I came up against the problem again. Father O’Malley
never stopped telling me that she was a saint if ever he’d seen one. My father
who couldn’t have been described as a saint by anyone worked on the docks by
day, lived in the pub at night and came home in the early morning because it
was the only place he could fall asleep without being disturbed.
