Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [31]
I don’t think we did ourselves many favours when we first arrived in my mother’s new BMW 3-Series with Kraftwerk playing on the stereo. Adjacent to our new home was some outside space, a park that my mother christened ‘Dog Shit Park’. She told the neighbours she’d christened it ‘Dog Shit Park’, but they just slammed the door: ‘We don’t believe in Christ.’ The council wasn’t as stringent with dog fouling in those days. In the mid-eighties most of the dogs didn’t even have collars, as all the punks were wearing them.
Golders Green’s high street was an excellent shopping parade, if you’re kosher. There are shops and bakeries that not only seem to have been there since the beginning of time, but have the same people in them. Grodzinski’s was a coffee shop that had the same collection of old Jewish ladies, in the same seats, sipping the same coffee, every time I walked past. The high street seems to be in some kind of a time warp. Chains of shops would go out of business elsewhere but remain open in Golders Green. I think today there are still a C&A, Wimpy, Cecil Gee, Woolworths and Our Price.
The best thing about Golders Green, and the reason I still go back, is the I. Warman-Freed chemist. Most chemists keep regular business hours. Boots, for example, is usually open from 8.30 a.m. to 6 p.m. So you have to fall ill, or require any form of medication or remedy, between these hours. If you have a cold sore and want to adhere to the advert that tells you to buy Zovirax ‘at the first sign of tingling’, you can’t outside certain times. In fact between 6 p.m. and 8.30 a.m., every ailment known to man must be treated with Nurofen from the petrol station or a visit to Casualty. It’s a wonder this situation is tolerated. Well, there is one group of people who would never tolerate such a state of affairs. Jews. Which is why smack-bang in the middle of Golders Green Road is I. Warman-Freed, the all-night chemist. I don’t know who I. Warman-Freed was, but he certainly understood the neuroses of Jewish people. You know when the Harry Potter books are released and people of all ages queue around the block? Well, the I. Warman-Freed pharmacy counter is like that twenty-four hours a day.
During the week, I lived in Golders Green in what felt like an FBI witness relocation ‘safe house’. On the weekends Lucy and I would stay with our dad in his temporary accommodation. Strangely, it’s from this point on that my memories of my father are much stronger. He was obviously very busy with work prior to the divorce, but now in his ‘weekend dad’ capacity, he made the most of our time together. Being apart from his kids was heartbreaking for him and he desperately wanted to make us feel we had a new home with him as well as in Israel – sorry, Golders Green. Seemingly within minutes of his separation from my mother, there was a new lady in his life.
While my mother was being romanced in plaster of Paris by Steve in scenes not dissimilar to the film Ghost, my father had met a twenty-seven-year-old Floridian sweetheart during his frequent visits to America. I’m not aware of the details; all I remember is that Lucy and I went to visit him in his rented cottage, and there she was, Holly Hughes.
The best way accurately to describe Holly is that she was ‘American’. She had rosy cheeks and wore leggings with baggy T-shirts. She was bubbly