My mother especially wanted it. She was filled with dread that Gordon’s firm would move him south and she’d lose Paul (which eventually happened) and then her life would be empty again. She told me of how, lately, if she wasn’t looking after Paul, she’d taken to going for walks in parks on her own. My father, retired now and in spite of his gardening at a bit of a loss himself, said he’d go with her. He was the one after all who loved walks, but she told him she didn’t want his company, she wanted an activity for herself. So she went on the bus to the city’s various parks and walked about, then sat on a bench and felt stupid. She was as restless and frustrated at sixty-five as a teenager of fifteen, half-despising the church organizations to which she belonged, the bring-and-buy sales she helped at, the refreshment trolley at the Infirmary she helped to run. ‘I’ve done nothing with my life,’ she’d frequently say, and when I replied she’d reared three healthy and successful children she was dismissive.
It was such a relief to get away, back to our own lives. Sometimes, many times, I wished guiltily that I was much further away from my mother’s unhappiness so that the feeling I was failing her might not be so strong. It might fade if thousands of miles and several oceans and a few mountain ranges were between us. The chance came in 1967. Hunter was to have a sabbatical year after writing a biography of the Beatles. We were going to go off and spend it in the Mediterranean and live like the Swiss Family Robinson. Breaking this news to my mother was hard. She saw this year as a further reminder that for her such opportunities had never been offered, that I was a different species, one with all the luck to whom hardship was quite unknown, one of a new generation of women for whom being a wife and mother meant something she’d never known.
XVII
We decided, stupidly, to go to the Maltese islands for our year in the Mediterranean, a woefully feeble decision made partly because we were so hopeless at foreign languages and wanted to go somewhere English-speaking. Gozo looked interesting and it was near enough to a hospital. This was important because both children had had accidents which left me terrified to be stuck in some part of the world where treatment wasn’t near and immediate. Brought up under the permanent cloud of my mother’s pessimism I was always expecting the worst.
The worst hadn’t nearly befallen us, nothing like the worst, but the small taste of disaster we’d had seemed to justify my mother’s dark forebodings – ‘you never know the minute’, as she put it. When Caitlin was two she swallowed a whole bottle of baby aspirins, and at the Royal Free casualty department they decided that to be on the safe side she had to have her stomach pumped out: I said I wanted to stay with Caitlin, whatever was done. They said no, it was better, they found, if mothers weren’t present. I insisted and they shrugged and said I’d regret it. I went with the solemn but quite calm Caitlin into a room where I was to have one last try to get her to drink some vile-tasting concoction which would make her sick and avert the need for the evil stomach pump. She sat on a table, fat little legs swinging, great dark eyes looking up at me with absolute trust, and slowly shook her head. ‘Make her,’ a nurse urged. Make her? How did I do that? I’d talked and talked, offered bribes, explained why the liquid had to be drunk, and what would happen when it was, begged and pleaded when persuasion failed. But I couldn’t make her, short of using brute force. My own stomach contracted with fear when the nurses, two of them, clicked their tongues with impatience and produced the stomach pump. I might as well have been my mother after all, utterly powerless, utterly craven and obedient, except that I was there with my child. I held Caitlin tightly, talking to her, smoothing her beautiful black hair over and over, while the tube was pushed between her pretty little teeth and down, cruelly down, into her tummy and she wriggled and became frantic and gripped me tightly in turn, and panic and fear and pain transformed her tranquil expression. The saline solution was poured down, the tube withdrawn, and she vomited and vomited. ‘That’s the way,’ a nurse said.
It wasn’t the way but I didn’t know what would have been. ‘She’ll be all right now,’ they said, but they were wrong. She didn’t ‘bounce back’ as they said she would. All night she sobbed, all the next day she was like a zombie, and for weeks and weeks we only had to pass within a hundred yards of the Royal Free for her to start to tremble. And I wondered if I’d been wrong to insist on staying with her – maybe she now thought of me as one of her torturers. ‘These mothers,’ I’d heard one nurse say, in a tone of exasperation, ‘think they always know best.’ They would have loved my mother, only too willing to accept she didn’t.
Jake’s accident was just as frightening, more so because of the blood. When he was eighteen months old he’d almost cut his thumb off, falling on a sharp-edged tin box. Hunter was at home and we rushed off once more this time to the Whittington, Jake screaming, blood spurting everywhere, his thumb hanging off. Now it was Hunter who insisted he was staying with his son and he did, sitting talking to him while the thumb was stitched back on. Told of this accident, my mother said – after the obligatory ‘you never know the minute’ – ‘and you’re going to take that child abroad? Is it safe? What if anything happens?’
So it was Gozo, English-speaking, near an excellent hospital (though actually a long way from the farmhouse we rented, but fortunately we never needed to go there). Before we left England, we bought my parents a bungalow. My mother moved out of her council house, with its small dark rooms, its freezing kitchen, into this brightly painted bungalow with its big windows, the first home she’d owned. But the move was more than just a matter of exchanging one house for another, it was heavily symbolic. She felt she was moving into a different world, to a position she’d always wanted. The bungalow was quite near Longsowerby council estate, but it was on a pleasantly landscaped private estate and in status it was far removed. It meant leaving the garden and starting all over again. My father wondered if the roses and shrubs he’d planted and nurtured belonged to the council because they owned the soil but he decided to take the risk. He dug up his favourites and transported them at dead of night to his new garden.
We left my mother content for a while, happily setting her new home, one that was actually hers, to rights. And she had a telephone now, a wonderful new toy, so she could speak regularly to Gordon (in Twyford, meaning the beloved grandchild Paul had been taken from her) and to Pauline, married (a lovely white wedding, making up for my own disgraceful affair), living in Cornwall with two children. If we had to go abroad for a year it was a good time to go and my mother’s letters reflected the pleasure she was getting from the change of address. There was suddenly so much to do and homemaking activities had always been her favourite. She wrote one week, I wrote the next, my own letters full of descriptions of the Arab-style old house in which we lived, of how we spent half of every day on the beach, of what an adventure it was shopping in the markets. What I had hoped would happen had happened: the weight of my mother’s dissatisfaction with her life had lifted from me and in any case she wasn’t quite so dissatisfied. It was easy to pretend, to take her letters at face value, and think of her as a contented 67-year-old woman fully occupied with her new home and her church, blessed with three children and five grandchildren. I couldn’t see her face, I couldn’t catch the nuances in her voice.
We arrived in Gozo at the end of March and my parents came out to stay in the middle of May. I had never actually thought they would come when I wrote so gaily inviting them, but my mother never hesitated – this was the chance she’d always wanted, the chance to do something she thought of as bold. My father was appalled. What had got into her? It would mean getting on an aeroplane, it would mean getting to an airport in the first place, quite daunting enough. He said he couldn’t leave his garden, it would be folly, not in May, not with his sweet peas just sown. My mother said very well, she would go on her own. Out of the question, at her age, he would have to accompany her. He was being forced into it, anything could happen. My mother was in an ecstasy of anticipation. She had practice packing
s of her suitcase, wrapping each item in it in tissue paper, arranging everything so beautifully, so cunningly, that the result was a visual poem. She loved telling her sisters, Nan and Jean, that she was going abroad, flying to Malta. Neither of them had ever flown and though Nan had been to Paris, Jean had never left Britain. ‘I can hardly believe it,’ my mother wrote, ‘to think, at my age, I’m going in an aeroplane. It’s marvellous.’
In retrospect, I’m not sure this trip was marvellous. It was the knowing she was going on such an adventure that was marvellous, not the experience of it, not for her. My father was the one who found it truly marvellous. He came off the plane raving about the sunrise over Mont Blanc and was into his specially bought white Marks & Spencer trousers and his Panama hat in a flash. He played on the beach with the children, admitting it was perhaps just a little superior to Silloth, and the water warmer, no question, and when he discovered every shop was a bar and every bar open all day he was converted to abroad immediately. But my mother? She didn’t care for Ramla beach too much. Too hot, too uncomfortable with no wind-breaks to lean against. She didn’t care for our farmhouse, too dark, too many insects, no proper furniture. She loved the children but being with them all day she found tiring – they were so wild, allowed to do whatever they wanted in her opinion, and what they mostly wanted was to run around shrieking. They didn’t take to sitting quietly, her preferred occupation for children. The shops horrified her, especially the butcher’s. Her father would have had a fit, she said, at how the meat was hung and she didn’t recognize any of the cuts.
The truth was she felt uneasy most of the time and half this uneasiness was due to the literal discomfort of her clothes. She felt overdressed and too fat, and it wasn’t surprising. She still wore her vest, if a fine cotton one, in a temperature of 90 degrees and her corset and her long knickers (though they were silk as a concession to the heats) and her full-length slip and her stockings – she wouldn’t remove those because of her legs being what she called ‘unsightly’, and they were the most uncomfortable garments of all. Nothing would persuade her that on the beach, where there was rarely any other family except our own, it was surely permissible to uncase her poor legs from this torture-by-nylon. No. She hated her legs, they were full of horrible veins; she wasn’t going ‘to make an exhibition of myself’. So she perspired away, relieved when it grew a little cooler some days, when a breeze wafted in from the sea. Often we’d be swimming and I’d look back and there was this rigid little figure, so correctly dressed, hunched under a beach umbrella, and it seemed ridiculous that she should be imprisoned in those clothes, clothes belonging to another era. I hoped I would never wear a vest or a corset, or long knickers, or stockings even, when I was no longer young and slim and happy to wear virtually nothing except a bikini and shorts.
Next door to us – except next door wasn’t actually next door – lived a retired gentleman who was very kind to my mother. A little further away lived two other male friends who were also kind to her. They were homosexuals who had escaped Britain’s absurd laws before these were abolished. My mother thought them charming and had no idea what had brought them to Gozo in the first place, but my father muttered on about nancy boys and that they were not nice at all, especially with children around. My mother ignored him, as we did (though it was cowardly of us not to attack his prejudice) and enjoyed the refined teas ‘the boys’ invited her to. ‘They make their own cakes,’ she exclaimed, and to my father, ‘Catch you making cakes, Arthur.’ She missed entirely the significance of his ‘Aye, catch me in an apron playing mother.’
It was a weird set up, my mother commented, living on this rocky island in the middle of nowhere, swimming the day away, lolling in the sun. It was like playing, she thought, but could not decide on the exact nature of the game. Living? And if mere living was a game, was it enviable? Did she wish that at thirty she, too, had been playing this way? The funny thing was that no, she didn’t. Roots and routine were her watchwords, not this floating about without serious intent. She told me that she shut her eyes when we were on the beach sometimes and tried to see herself at thirty, my age then, and she couldn’t believe the contrast, but she said this without her usual tone of envy, more in a tone of a curious doubt, doubt that what seemed to be true was indeed true, that things were what they appeared to be.
One of the biggest puzzles for her was her son-in-law. Hunter was no Arthur. He didn’t fit in with her idea of The Husband at all. He wasn’t domineering, he didn’t expect to be waited upon, nor for his wish to be law within his house. He never pulled any kind of rank and sometimes she thought he should. She remonstrated with me and with the children – ‘That is your husband you’re speaking to’ and ‘That is your father talking to you’, she’d say. But since Hunter didn’t seem to care about imposing what she saw as his rightful authority, there wasn’t much to be done about it. ‘You’d never know who was boss in this house,’ she’d occasionally say, and I’d be quick to laugh and announce there was no boss, that the idea of the husband as boss came from him being the wage-earner and now women, the wives, were wage-earners too, both had power.
She didn’t want to leave our unruly household and go home, though. When, on the morning of departure, it looked as though the ferry might not run and my parents would miss their plane, she said she was glad. My father wasn’t, though he was the one who’d had the best holiday. But the ferry did run and they began the long journey home. ‘Grand’, was my father’s verdict on abroad before he left, ‘champion’. My mother was annoyed that she couldn’t improve on his two-word summary even though she’d kept a diary. Every detail of what she had done, where she had been, whom she had met, was written down together with names and prices and weather reports, and yet none of it conveyed the excitement she had felt, nor was there a hint of disillusionment. ‘That’s it,’ she said as they left, ‘we’ll never go abroad again, never.’ She wanted the Gozo trip to have been the start of adventures not the beginning and end. To travel, whether she liked it or not, was to see and she’d only just begun to open her eyes. The gates, she felt, were clanging shut just after they had so miraculously swung open and all she’d managed was a glimpse of a different life. The fact that she wasn’t sure she had liked it was irrelevant.
After five months on Gozo we packed up and moved to the Algarve, no longer interested in sticking to an English-speaking country and realizing how silly we were being not to live somewhere more interesting. The Algarve was definitely more interesting but my parents could not be persuaded to come to sample its winter sunshine. My sister and her husband and their two small sons came and stayed, which pleased my mother. Pauline had been very ill and needed to recuperate and it not only relieved my mother to think of her enjoying some winter sunshine but it was evidence, too, of the sort of sisterly solidarity she wanted to have proved still existed, as it had done in hard times between herself and Jean and Nan. It was almost a year until I saw my mother again and during that time she’d had some serious eye disease which had meant having her eyelid stitched up for weeks. The accompanying pain was borne with great fortitude but when I next saw her she seemed suddenly much older, and quite frail, and my father was already turning into the carer, which she appreciated but didn’t like at all.
The eye healed and she came to stay in the summer of 1969, looking more like her old self. I was by then a housewife and mother of some experience and I saw her judging me. She wasn’t in the least censorious but she noticed things and I noticed her noticing. My standards were not hers. Hers were her mother’s (and whose those were nobody can tell). I didn’t dust much for a start. My mother was a great duster, but then in her house there was plenty to dust (and she’d never got used to there being only half the dust there had once been now that she had no dirty coal fire). She’d ask me where my duster bag was and I’d say I didn’t have one. Her dusters were the standard yellow fleecy sort, washed after each ferocious bout of dusting, then pegged on the clothes-line and finally folded and put in a bag h
anging behind a cupboard door. I’d offer her a damp cloth, pointing out that the shelves and other surfaces we had were pinewood and better wiped than dusted. I didn’t have any ornaments or photo frames or knick-knacks either. But, as my mother said, there were hundreds of books, all crying out for a good dusting. It was true. Books are filthy things. I said I’d dust those I took from the shelves, as they were used, but that wasn’t good enough for my mother, who laboriously dusted every one for me. There was dust under the beds too, but I was happy only to vacuum it up at irregular intervals – I wasn’t going to go in for a weekly moving-of-the-beds and meticulous cleaning. Doors were another black mark – literally. I didn’t very often clean grubby fingerprints off them – and as for skirting-boards I didn’t notice they needed attention. My house still looked perfectly clean to me however low my standards. I was never going to become a slave to it – if the housework could be done and enjoyed, with the help of every machine available, in a quarter of the time it had taken my mother, then I wasn’t going to look for extra jobs and wipe out the advantage I’d gained.
What my mother was always trying to work out was why, when we were clearly a prospering young couple, we chose to live as we did. Why did we eat in the kitchen? Why didn’t we have a dining-room and an oak or a walnut table, something upon which a shine could be put? Why did we have those flimsy Habitat chairs with metal frames and bright yellow soft cushions that gave no support and that thing called a day-bed which was just a wooden frame and mattress? Why did we have sanded floorboards, so cold, when we could have had a good Wilton or Axminster? Her point was, we were doing well for ourselves but nobody would ever know it. She saw these choices, which were no more significant than a matter of taste and fashion, as perverse. She wanted me to have the ideal house she’d never had and always craved. Our old battered house in a typical London street didn’t appeal to her. She wanted to see me in leafy Surrey in a detached double-fronted modern house with a drive and a rose garden.
Hidden Lives Page 25
