Mother’s pride: One man looks back at his showbiz obsessed mum

Ask my sister and she’d say our mother weighed about seven stone but I would say nearer six, including handbag and pearls, although we agree on height: five foot, on tiptoe. As a physical presence, she was no more than a whisper. Perhaps that’s why we called her The Princess, a creature more real in the imagination than in the northern market town where we lived.

On December 18, her birthday, I shall take a few minutes to remember her. I shall remember, with a smile, how she once chased me down the hall waving a breadknife. She wasn’t one of these cake-baking mothers with flour-dusted pinnies, nor was she a tall sophisticate, fragrantly snipping sweet-peas from the garden.

Lena Marie Rose – and what a name for a Princess – was an eccentric.

She was so slight that when she sat down, she could cross her right leg over her left, and then tuck her right foot behind her calf. If startled, she would try to rise on plaited legs and stand there, swaying.

She was brought up among the bright lights and doubledeckers of Manchester and, best of all, the Palace Theatre where she spent her young years in a delicious daze from which she never really entirely recovered.

Years later, legs reef-knotted, she would drift back to shows she had seen 30 or 40 years before.

Big brown eyes glazed, mesmerised by her memories, she would recreate those days of glamour.

We – brother Brian, sister Annie, and I – wallowed in the warmth of it. Who should have been our stars, such as Elvis and Cliff, seemed like faded also-rans alongside Josie Collins and Jack Buchanan.

I could never raise much interest in Dirk Bogarde’s sexuality but I can tell you that Noel Coward was – as my mum put it – very fond of his mother.

Curled up in the chair by the fire, her voice would take on a dreamlike quality.

“We all waited outside the stage door for Carl Brisson. It was such a cold night, and when he came out the girl next to me shouted: ‘Wrap up, Carl.’ He was so handsome.He looked around and smiled at us all. ‘All zese beeowtful girls waiting for me,’ he said, and we all cheered.”

You will all know, I assume, that Carl Brisson was a Danish ex-boxer who had become a stage star.

His hit song? Cocktails For Two? Did he have a sister? He did. Tilly by name.

What did his sister do? Tilly Brisson was a dancer.

See? I could do Mastermind on my mother’s teenage years.

On mine, nothing. As she pushed the Hoover Junior around the house, she broke into a little dance.

“Dance, dance, dance little lady,” she sang.

Even the scandals of her youth were livelier than anything even Elvis could offer.

Aghast, she had followed the divorce case when saucy little Jessie Matthews’s love letters to Sonnie Hale were read out: “I am lying here, waiting for you to possess me. The dear little boobs which you love so much are waiting for you also.”

The discarded wife was Evelyn Laye, who, years later, saw Jessie and told a friend, with some satisfaction: “The dear little boobs have become apple dumplings.”

When Jim Dunne came along, with a box of chocolates marked “Sweets for the Sweet”, she probably thought the quotation from Shakespeare was the title of a song from “No, No Nanette” but it won her heart.

Living in a dream meant she never quite mastered the business of running a house. I never knew what to expect coming home from school.

On wash day, it wasn’t uncommon to find up to her knees in a warm river.

Or I’d find all the furniture piled up in the middle of the room with the Princess perched on the top attempting to clean the lampshade.

She was a little forgetful.

We once lost the kettle for three days before it turned up in a hat box in her wardrobe.

She never had a complete pair of spectacles.

There was always one arm missing, which she countered by holding her head at an odd angle to balance the crippled remains.

With her huge brown eyes, slim figure and fine features, she was a lovely-looking woman.

There was still a little stardust in her life.

Wilf Harris used to loiter on her shopping run in the hope of getting her to chat, possibly with a view to replacing his wife, who had run off with a neighbour.

Perhaps he saw her as José Collins, the Maid of the Mountains, and himself as the dashing lead, Harry Welchman.

Unless stage star Harry Welchman also had a dripping nose which threatened to extinguish his pipe, this seems unlikely.

Certainly, her hours spent at the Palace Theatre had given her a gift for drama.

Occasionally, if there was nothing on television and my father was away, she would announce she was leaving us.

She would pack a small case, put on her hat and stand in the door waving goodbye.

Then she’d go, closing the door behind her. When she heard the cries of despair, she’d pop back.

All three of us grew up with a robust sense of humour and a fear of departure lounges.

Push her too far – our principal entertainment – and she’d grab whatever was at hand before coming after us.

That’s why I wasn’t too worried when she came after me with the bread-knife. The carving knife would’ve been different.

But the dreams lived on.

When my 18-year-old sister – slim, trim and very pretty like mum – was picked to play the lead in the local am-dram production, it was as though she’d been selected to be one of Cochran’s Young Ladies.

And you know how glamorous that was.

On the opening night, a florist’s van pulled up outside.

The driver got out with a bouquet of flowers so big they must have stripped Holland bare.

Inside the house, the Princess practically burst into flames.

She said: “This is what they do on the first night. Your beau always sends you flowers!”

With half-a-century of theatrical expectations reaching boiling point, the Princess raced to the door. She was so blinded by excitement that she tripped over her pom-pom slippers and went flying. The flowers were, of course, for next-door.

In 1966, we were all called to her bedside. She died at 8pm on Mother’s Day. Like a true theatrical, she could always time an exit.

Did we love her? Don’t be silly – we adored her.