Christina’s in the afternoon, since my mum and dad both work on a Saturday. Christina’s mum doesn’t mind us popping in and out. She spends most of the day asleep, either invisibly, upstairs, or stretched out on the settee with the gas fire on, even in summer. She works nights, which makes me a bit frightened of her. Her face always looks puffy when she wakes, and her Glaswegian accent means that Christina has to translate her into Yorkshire for me.
Christina has a little sister, Elaine, who is enormously fat and spends most of the day in front of the telly, watching odd things like racing. We can’t persuade her outside very often. Once we cajoled her into Christina’s abandoned dolly pram which we had decided to use as a go-cart, and pushed her off on the slightly downhill alley at the back of Christina’s house. Elaine, her girth jammed into the tiny chassis, couldn’t move as the pram gathered speed, and she hit her head as it smashed into a brick wall. Christina’s mum was woken by the wailing and gave us both the same fierce talking to, despite my status as a guest. Christina and I were secretly a bit chuffed about this, since Elaine wasn’t badly hurt, and the incident enhanced the image we’re keen on as tomboys and scamps. In the books and comics we read and telly we watch and occasional film we see, tomboys and scamps are the only admirable characters, apart from actual boys.
On wet days we shut ourselves in the bathroom and make cosmetics from talcum powder, bubble bath and unused Christmas-present cologne. We anoint ourselves and Elaine with the resulting paste, which always turns out a disappointing grey in spite of its many pastel ingredients. Or we do gymnastics on the bed until injured or commanded to stop. After tea at Christina’s, prepared in zombie fashion by her newly wakened mum, I go home to my mum and dad, who are frying once-a-week steak and chips for their own tea, and establish myself, alone, on the settee. There, with the remaining sweets in their mangled bag, I watch It’s Lallie. The perfect end to a perfect day.
It starts with the brassy theme music, sung by Lallie in a different outfit each week – usually some kind of sparkly catsuit. During the song she does some of her most famous impressions, with the help of glasses and hats – Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, Frank Spencer – and finishes by tap-dancing down a set of stairs, singing, ‘But most of all, I’ve gotta be me!’ The impressions aren’t my favourite part, since I don’t really know any of the people she’s pretending to be, although I can admire the quick way Lallie switches between voices and expressions. I prefer the sketches she does with her guest stars, which are take-offs of famous films, always ending with a song and dance. Most of all, though, I like the glue of the show. Each week, after the theme song, we come upon Lallie in her bedroom – a huge bedroom, stuffed with exotic toys and gadgets, part of the mansion she’s supposed to live in which we never see. She lives in this mansion alone, except for a comical butler called Marmaduke, who I adore. He is always trying to escape Lallie’s complicated practical jokes, which inevitably end in him wiping some form of cream cake from his face to the unsympathetic farting of a trombone. My dad has told me that Marmaduke is played by an actor who once played a policeman in a famous series.
For me, Marmaduke and Lallie’s household lives on in my head long after the programme has finished. It is beyond exciting to see an eleven-year-old girl (Lallie is an important year older than me) on the telly, living a life free of adult interference. For the rest of the week I am Lallie, living in my mansion with my butler and having adventures stolen from Enid Blyton and the comics I read, decorated with bits of the lifestyle my parents’ newspapers call jet set. The stories meander, never reaching a conclusion or even a climax. It is the setting, the bright colours and glorious detail, that transfix me.
I wish I looked more like Lallie. I’m pleased that we both have freckles, but her hair is wiry and dark, and mine straight and fair. At the very least I can dress like her, and have nagged my mum into buying