Notes to my Mother-in-Law

by Phyllida Law

  My uncle Charlie announced one New Year’s Eve that he was a virgin. You should have heard the aunts. They shrieked. He wasn’t a proper uncle or they would have known. Not quite sure how he got to be uncled. Anyway, he was a private in World War I and in his first week at the front he dropped his rifle in the mud and ruined it. His commanding officer shouted a lot and he was ordered to steal one from the next dug-out, which he did. And then he sat about for so long in the mud that the seat of his trousers rotted, so he stuck a tin biscuit lid inside them for protection. ‘I always took it out on fine days,’ he said, ‘in case it caught the sun and a sniper took aim.’

  Father said that the Cameron Highlanders were ordered to muddy their spats because they were a dazzling white target for the Hun. Within 24 hours the order was countermanded by the Big Chief Cameron of Lochiel who presumably didn’t want his Highlanders to look slovenly when dead.

  But I digress. Poor young Charlie came a cropper on his first bombardment. It was what he called a whizz-bang bomb, which sounds rather fun but wasn’t. You had to judge the direction it was coming from and he ran the wrong way.

  I think he lost his crown jewels, the whole arrangement. His voice stayed deep enough but it hardly compensates.

  Glad you liked the pudding. We made it with ‘foozle’. This was my granny’s favourite. You boil a tin of Carnation milk—not condensed, Carnation. I think for about ten minutes or so. At least until the label comes off. Then it whizzes up into a dropping-cream consistency.

  I remember watching horrified as Granny poured it over her salad. I dared not utter. She ate it with relish and declared it delicious. I think she had it with

  her pudding as well. We all used to leave the disgusting cooking sherry at the bottom of the trifle Flora made and Granny would polish it off. She never would have done so had she known it was the demon alcohol. She always poured every dreg in bottle or glass into the rose-bowl on the dining table.

  Someone who shall be nameless has put bubble gum on the dresser and lifted the veneer.

  Bit of an atmosphere downstairs.

  Ta-ra!

  Darling, I can’t believe you heard them! It was two hedgehogs. Dad put out a tin plate of bread and milk when he saw the first one. I told him milk was bad for them but he didn’t believe me. Nor would the hedgehogs. When the second one turned up there was an ugly scene, followed by vigorous sex on the tin plate. Imagine. All those prickles. How do they manage? We were agog. I do hope it was a successful union.

  Now it’s raining and Dad has given them his golf umbrella.

  This will make you shriek. Mrs Wilson made little portions of chicken chasseur in plastic pots neatly sealed with clingfilm and put them in the deep freeze for Mr Wilson whilst she was away in ’orspital for her cataract operation.

  Mr Wilson just put them in the oven as they were and ate the lot—pots and all. He’s rather ill.

  Not sure what it is, Gran. I think the chasseur bit is a cream sauce of some sort. Not your scene, I know.

  Well, it’s tragic downstairs. Boot is to go to the vet tomorrow. She will get an injection and he says she will just slip away. Em will take her, she wants to. Oh dear.

  The banging you heard this evening was Dad removing the cat flap and boarding the hole up against the draught. He waited tactfully till Soph had gone out, which was quite funny as she scoured all Boot’s dishes and hid them behind the shed while he was out. She is to plant them up, she says.

  There will be a short ceremony in the garden at a later date. You will be advised.

  It seems there is a new deaf-aid on the market. I keep seeing it. It’s like an Alice band so you wear it on your head with these wee muff things that sit on your ears. Very practical. You’d be surprised how many young people are wearing them. You are not alone. I shall do a bit of research and report back, because I think they might be the very thing.

  Darling, please don’t worry. I’m sure it’s just the bruising. Nursie said it was very severe. You were X-rayed upside down and sideways so they would be bound to see if the joint was loose. It’s a big thing, like a light bulb and I think it’s made of stainless steel.

  Your specs are looking as good as new. The optician says they were all squinty and he thinks you’ve been taking them off by one leg. He says lift them off carefully in the middle on the bridge of your nose, or with both hands. Do you see what he means? He didn’t charge by the way. Nice man. Says he’ll come round to see you and maybe devise a padding for the specs so they won’t clank about on your hearing-aid.

  Talking of which! I told Dad about the new deaf-aid on the market and he tells me it’s a thing called a Walkman which plays music into your ears. He and the girls were hysterical. Trust me to get it wrong!

  It’s a ‘Zimmer’, darling. A ‘zither’ is a musical instrument. Could come in useful for airing things, Dad says. Give it a go. It’s a help to get to the loo at least, and awfully useful for getting out of bed if I leave it just beside you, pointing in the right direction. You can really lean on it. I do see that your mattress is a bit squashy and difficult to lift off. I wonder if we could put a board under it? My old drawing board might do. We’ll try it.

  Your black eye has gone a lovely yellow colour now with a tasteful purple swelling near your nose. Can you see? I expect it will slip downwards shortly since you are sitting up so much more. Very attractive. Mother always keeps 2 cotton-wool pads soaked in witch hazel on the top shelf of the fridge and recommends old cold teabags and slices of cucumber, but I don’t think we can cope with such frippery. You hate the smell of witch hazel too, I seem to remember.

  What made you think of Xmas? Good grief. Don’t worry for the moment. I suspect we’ll spend it at home this year anyway. I’d love to go up for New Year and you might be ready for the Dashing White Sergeant by then. You and Uncle Arthur. Can’t you see it?

  Actually, he used to be a bit of a lounge lizard. All those medals he keeps were for ballroom dancing, in particular the foxtrot, the two-step and the tango. (What is the two-step, by the way?) He would gallantly take me on to the floor at New Year celebrations and I’d be clamped firmly to his chest and his down below bits, which made me shriek and I always got calamine lotion over his suit. My back was covered in acne and Mother would try and cover it up, as my dance frock was a ghastly floral creation with a bathing-costume top made of stretchy elastic. Uncle Arthur would plonk his hot hand on my back and leave a full imprint. Oh, the shame!

  Nor could I ever remember the moves in the eightsome reel, so Uncle Arthur would yank me around and everyone else would shout insults. Isn’t growing up ghastly?

  I loved New Year in Glasgow when I was home from school, especially when old Mrs Keith came. She was a tiny little person, terribly crippled by

  arthritis, and we adored her. She sat by the fire in the sitting room for all her meals and we would beg to be allowed to serve her. Best was to take in her tiny glass of sloe gin, which she held in her little paws so gently to sip, and under her skirts were huge black-patent pumps with a flat grosgrain-ribbon bow. Her wee feet were so bumpy and bent her shoes had to be big as boats. She was out of Dickens, really. I have very dim memories of old Mr Keith who was a little hunchback of a sweet soul with a huge red nose like Mr Punch. He used to keep a warehouse by the docks in Greenock or Paisley or somewhere, and they always had donkeys, parakeets, monkeys and other strange animals sent from abroad. I can’t tell you why. I seem to think they were in quarantine. Mother said some bizarre foreign bird arrived at the warehouse and started to moult, and of course being winter by the docks, it would be damp and cold so little Mrs Keith knitted it a sort of woollen body stocking. She made herself little woollen mittens and turned heels and all such. Bad for the arthritis is knitting I’m told, so beware.

  Mending our patchwork quilt would be all right tho’, wouldn’t it? Hint. Hint.

  Well, we went to Scotland for New Year. Of course we did. We took the patchwork with us. Our journey was meticulously planned. We rose ear
ly and Gran took no tea. The glove compartment was closely packed with egg sandwiches, Maynard’s wine gums, several bananas, one orange and any milk left in the fridge.

  Forton was our favoured stop on the M6. We ignored the bridge café and drove straight to the petrol station, which had a loo with a ramp easily negotiable on a zimmer frame. When Gran was comfortably returned to the car, she would give me some of her pension to buy my coffee, chocolate raisins and liquorice allsorts for pudding.

  In our first years together things had been very different. We went by sleeper on the Royal Scot, smuggling Boot, then a kitten, into our carriage where she slept on my face. In later years she was weighed on the platform and given a ticket. Mostly she travelled with us in the car and threw up, howling, at Stafford.

  The train was a triumph. The ferry crossing was a nightmare. To Gran, it was sheer insanity to travel on water. Long years before, her first sweetheart had gone to Canada to seek his fortune and sent her a ticket so that she could join him. She refused. She couldn’t face the ocean crossing. Her father went instead. I got the impression that he did rather well, but when he was travelling home, in steerage, the weather was fierce. He caught bronchitis, kept it, and died.

  So started Gran’s long life in service, often in and around London for I know she saw Zeppelins during World War 1. They came over on moonlit nights and seemed so low she felt she could put out her hand and touch them.

  Then she was a cook in a country hotel where she fell in love with the waiter—there was only one. Every Friday she cooked an omelette for a gentleman who called on his motorbike. It was T. E. Lawrence. She called him Mr Ross. ‘He loved my omelettes,’ she said.

  On that very first ferry crossing, it was only the rumour of a school of dolphins that persuaded Gran to open her eyes, squeezed tight shut against drowning. By a rare miracle the water was satin smooth. She didn’t see the dolphins. She saw the hills.

  And then she saw the cottage. Her old rose, ‘New Dawn’, was overwhelming the tiny porch, creeping under the gutters and shifting the slates.

  Everything enchanted her, even the weather—even the outside loo. We all spent too long in there, with the door open wide to the view: a local seal spent early mornings perched on a flat rock, like a slice of melon.

  Milk was delivered daily in a can by the gate and smelt of cows. Gran liked to fetch the Sunday Post herself from the tiny post office next door and chat to Mrs Gardener, the postmaster’s wife, who played the violin on Burns night with her back to the audience.

  And then there was Gertie Mackay who sat at her door on a lobster pot and waylaid Gran on her way to the village tea rooms and fresh pancakes. They shared stories about their life in service. In Gertie’s day it had been customary to clean the house mercilessly for Hogmanay. ‘Seven washing waters and vinegar in the final rinse,’ said Gertie.

  The kids would fill pails with mussels and winkles from the shore and Dad would catch buckets of mackerel, bringing them home on a string for Gran to gut and fry. Once he got a fish hook embedded in his hand and fainted. ‘He doesn’t get that from me,’ she said.

  For serious shopping we went to ‘town’, stocking up on essentials like potato scones, mutton pies and ‘squashed-fly cemeteries’, a particularly appealing fruit slice. In summer there was rhubarb ice-cream, and in winter the best fish and chips on the coast. ‘Town’ was Dunoon, voted the ‘top resort in Scotland’.

  A decent whisky and top snacks were always kept for first-footers at Hogmanay but this time we didn’t go to the fireworks. Not in the dark on a zimmer frame. Some years before we had set out for the party on a frosty night when the sky was crusty with stars but no moon. We had just waltzed down the path to the little gate, from which steps led to the road, when I ran back to fetch a decent torch and Gran, launching herself into the darkness, fell onto the road and broke her thigh. That was when the young Indian doctor had to cut her out of her double bloomers.

  I was only too pleased to use Gran as an excuse to go to bed with lights out before the dreaded midnight hour when ships hooted at each other on the Clyde.

  New Year’s Eve supper had been classic. Mother had made a creamy rice mould for one pudding, decorated with grated pistachio nuts. With a mouthful of ham, Uncle Arthur suddenly shouted: ‘That pudding is moving!’ The pistachios were walking about. Mother had kept them for years and they were full of weevils. Sophie says Mother’s fridge is like a scientist’s laboratory.

  The cold and damp always affected what Gran would call her ‘war wounds’. She used to say she had discovered Scotland too late and quite often came to breakfast saying she had been wandering the hills all night. On one of our early summers we took her up the hill we called ‘Boiled Egg Bump’, since it was perfect for picnics. She just had a bit of difficulty coming down.

  ‘It’s the same on Everest,’ Dad said.

  Lately, and unsurprisingly, the war wounds had troubled Gran more than usual. One doctor thought she might have broken a rib sneezing. But she hadn’t sneezed. On our long, wistful jour-ney home she was quiet and uncomplaining but it was clear that it pained her very much coming out of what she called her ‘stuck sitting’ position.

  I was concerned. Safely upright and on her zimmer frame she said of the pain: ‘It’ll go the way it came.’

  Apologies, darling, for such a late cuppa. I locked myself OUT. My keys were in my jacket pocket and I’d just shoved my coat on over my nightie to go to Mistry’s and get some milk. (The kids made cocoa last night.) Climbed over the back gate with great difficulty. Made a pile of those bricks left over from the front path and that gave me a boost. Hoisted me and milk up and sat astride the gate rather painfully, plucking up courage to throw myself into the yard, having tossed the milk into that lavender bush by the water butt. Slid down the back door ripping nightie on the bolt and hoping against hope that the kitchen door might be open. It wasn’t. Peered in all the windows in the faint hope of help. Sat on the back step and swigged some milk miserably.

  Then I remembered the plot of a rather famous French film called ‘Rififi’ or something, where robbers used an umbrella to catch a key. I just used a sheet of your Daily Mail I found in the dustbin. I pushed this under the door below the keyhole. Then I found, after much fossicking, a peculiarly strong twig, which I pushed into the keyhole, wiggling it about to dislodge the key, which I could just see by leaning against the door and squinting thru the glass. It took ages but, to my joy, the key finally dropped on to the paper, which I tenderly withdrew and, lo!, I unlocked the door and put the kettle on. Rather damp, scratched and torn, with a button off my coat (yes, please), but what a TRIUMPH.

  Do you remember that nice policeman who got into my Volkswagen Beetle with a coat-hanger? He wouldn’t let me watch.

  I don’t know if they cremate cats. I should have asked. Do you think we’d get her ashes in a tiny urn? I’ve kept her flea collars and her bell.

  There was a chap in Ma’s village called Gully Wishart who had so many cats he wore flea collars on his wellingtons.

  We’ll have Boot’s short memorial service soon and plant something. Cat mint? Does it repel or attract? I’ve never known.

  Mrs Wilson has asked to be scattered along the path she takes to the tennis courts. Arnold says his uncle Clem wanted to have his ashes scattered off Blackpool pier, but Auntie Blanche thought they would get blown back all over people so she only took his teeth. Even that was a bit dodgy, she said.

  Wait till you hear this. Mother had Miss Delma-hoy to tea. Do you remember her? She used to be Matron at a big hospital in Glasgow and she has retired to a bungalow across the way next door to Mrs Moffat. It is she who has that fantastic garden, and Mother is desperate to pick her brains. Mrs M says Miss D gardens with a big silver-plated serving spoon and tells stories of the amount of cardboard coffins she had to order and store for World War II. She’s known besides for doing intricate tapestry work called Richelieu, using fine black and gold thread, and she keeps it on a frame like a music sta
nd, covered in muslin when she isn’t working on it, rather like old Queen Mary waiting for her carriage. She used to make stair-carpets, Queen Mary did. I once saw an example displayed at the English Speaking Union in Berkeley Square. Bet she had help.

  Well, anyway, Ma was determined to do things properly so she unpacked the tea-set from the dining-room dresser and washed it tenderly, checking everything for chips in case of GERMS. She even bleached the inside of the teapot with a touch of Domestos. She got a large carton of whipping cream from Ross’s Dairies in Dunoon to serve with fresh scones and this year’s bramble jelly. Perfect. Miss D duly arrived. She always ignores the bell, knocks peremptorily (is that a word?) and walks straight in. Then it transpired that she takes lemon in her tea so there was a bit of a kerfuffle while Ma looked for a lemon and could only find half of a rather old squashed one in the fridge, and then she couldn’t concentrate on anything because she was sure the tea tasted of bleach. Miss D talked all the time, which made it easier. It was only after they had toured the garden and Miss D had departed that Ma found her tea-plate with her napkin delicately covering most of her uneaten scone. Ma had been in such a flap that she had taken the wrong carton out of the fridge and served the warmed scone with cottage cheese instead of Jersey cream.

  Uncle Arthur said the tea was disgusting. Ma says there’s no way she’ll sleep tonight.