Clarice, Queen of the Sun Inn

Growing up on a dairy farm in Lancashire, the only terraced houses I was familiar with were on Coronation Street - until I was nineteen and got a job fifty miles away in a rundown northern mill town, and then I bought a Coronation Street house of my own. On the first night, alone, in my new ‘two-up, two-down’ there was a knock on the door.

‘I’m Clarice, from next door’ said a lady with a white perm, ‘and my man’s Bob,’ and she handed me a bottle of home-brew with a handwritten label: ‘Parsnip’.

Clarice was in her late sixties. Before I met her, my friends were all my own age, and I had never contemplated friendship with someone fifty years my senior.

Immediately Clarice took me under her wing. She started taking me down to her local, the Sun Inn, where she had her own spot at the end of the bar next to a man with an ill-fitting prosthetic face and another man with a false leg that he removed after several pints. Clarice, it seemed, baked meat and potato pies for half the pub regulars – the widowers, the very elderly and others who were semi-housebound - and would dish them out in battered cooking tins wrapped in tea towels.

Clarice was loud, outspoken and funny. She was five feet ten and never went out without her lipstick and her eyebrows.

Clarice was the Queen of the Sun Inn.

This was the early eighties, and one evening there was a meeting of the National Front in the back room of the Sun Inn. One skinhead in tight jeans and bovver boots swaggered past to peer through the window into the street. ‘Ah, are you looking for your mummy?’ said Clarice. ‘Is she coming for you?’ And she smiled at him insincerely until he sloped off.

Soon I was spending every Sunday evening in Clarice and Bob’s front room watching Agatha Christie tv dramas, while drinking gin and tonic and eating roast chicken sandwiches as the heat from the gas fire prickled our shins.

Everything seemed exotic at Clarice’s. Even the gas fire, because there had been no gas in my home village and until recently, we’d had to rely on open fires. Gin and tonic was also new to me – before this, I had drunk gin sweetened with orange cordial.

In Clarice’s over-furnished front room, surrounded by years of ornaments, cards and clutter, we would squeeze onto her sofa among her knitting bags and patterns, with her Siamese cat – Pinkie (‘Mr Pinkerton’ on a Sunday) - lying along the backrest. Sometimes, Clarice would put on a record, close her eyes, sink onto the sofa and sigh with delight at the sound of Mario Lanza singing ‘My Heart Stood Still.’ This was exotic too, especially as I thought the singer was someone called Marie O’ Lanza. I mean, I already knew there was a male singer called Val, so why not?

Clarice loved people and their stories. She’d wait until Bob dozed off in his armchair before telling me what she’d got up to with her lover during the Second World War. She had been married to a different man back then, an invalid with heart disease who had taken to his bed in the living room, soon after their only child was born. Clarice had been attached to the Canadian Army Pay Corp for the duration of the war in a town forty miles away where her lover happened to have a shop. They would spend all week together as man and wife before returning the forty miles to their legal spouses at the weekend.

As we drank gin, she would root in the side-pocket of her handbag and take out a photograph of her lover – who looked like Ernest Hemingway in a great coat – and weep over it. She would tell me that even after her husband died, she could not marry her lover because his wife was a Catholic who would not agree to a divorce. When her lover died suddenly of a heart attack, Clarice could not go to the funeral for fear of the reception from his wife and family. As she recounted this bit, she would extract a hankie from the sleeve of her jumper and wipe her eyes.

Then she would show me another photograph taken at the same time – this one of herself, blowing a kiss towards the camera (or to her lover, who had taken it) as she posed in a velvet-collared, hound’s tooth suit nipped in at the waist. Studying that picture always cheered her up a bit, and she would declare: ‘If I had my time again, Cath, I’d do everything twice as fast, twice as often and twice as reg’lar.’

She approved of the pencil skirts and high heels I wore for my office job and that I religiously curled my hair with heated rollers and never left the house without full make up. ‘There’s no point in having your stall set out and your blinds down, Cath.’

I got a boyfriend who had a sports car, and she approved of him too - despite my telling her that I knew he was not to be trusted. She would hover behind her net curtains as he drew up in his gold car, which was as long as her house, and watch him as he straightened his designer jacket and did up one of the buttons before knocking on my door.

Life was for living, said Clarice. Enjoy things while they lasted, she said, because nothing lasted forever. She knew that much.

‘Think on, Cath,’ she’d say, as Bob went to fetch the Gordon’s bottle. ‘Twice as fast, twice as often and twice as reg’lar.’ And I’d clink my glass of gin against hers to raise a toast to my best friend, my neighbour, confidante, surrogate mother and mentor. To Clarice, Queen of the Sun Inn.