Bad Blood (21 page)

Did she regret her marriage? I certainly did and hoped she did, and so did Grandma, who said so under her breath often. But my mother believed that marriage made you one. Like those ceremonies in the movies where a cowboy and an Indian
slashed their wrists and bled into each other, it created a bond as ineluctable and intimate as biology. This infuriated Grandma, who hated my father all the more for alienating my mother's loyalty and daring to tie her to a red-skinned Hanmer tribe. She had a whole list of grievances against my father, and used his name ‘Eric' as though it was a swear word. Eric had a dirty job and a loud voice. Eric was always making a song and dance about money. And worst of all, Eric couldn't seem to grasp what a privilege it was to chauffeur us to Chester or Shrewsbury.

But although my mother would acknowledge these shortcomings and would join in when Grandma abused men in general for being beastly and deceiving, she would still make an exception for my father. Stubbornly she stopped short of denouncing him as a monster. Worse, she continued to sleep with him and not only because there were no spare bedrooms or attics in the council house. She could at least have stayed up half the night, Grandma felt, to make sure he was sound asleep before joining him in bed, but no.

Grandma had to content herself with more minor signs of betrayal. And Mrs Smith was an ally. That private, perfumed little box of dressing-up clothes was reminiscent of the room over the shop in South Wales where Grandma and her sister Katie took hours getting ready. This was their mother's territory all over again. Mrs Smith might be venal, but her insinuating voice still held an echo of the dead woman with hair the colour of a sovereign. It was my mother's need to feel mothered that drew her back to be fussed over and flattered by Mrs Smith, as much as any fear of losing caste.

For it seemed that nobody inside our family wanted to be mother, everyone was a daughter in perpetuity. You could have children of your own and still stay a mother's girl, as Grandma's example daily demonstrated. My mother, too, carried on the
tradition, although she could hardly remember her grandmother, the mythic maternal figure at the start of the line. She was insecure in her girlishness, however, as Grandma and Katie never were, shamed and tired out by her own incompetence as a homemaker. Grandma – who added considerably to her domestic burdens by demanding a lot of fetching and carrying and toasting of teacakes at unsocial hours – fed her discontent by reminiscing about the rosy days of her own youth, all hair-brushing and treats. Grandma's example, though, suggested no remedy except dressing up to go to the pictures. (We had no television yet and in any case 1950s TV was brisk and serviceable, you couldn't dream the day away on a diet of soaps and old movies.) Grandma had revamped her marriage in order to support the style of life she preferred. She took a new vow to hate Grandpa in sickness and in health, blackmailed him for an income and refused to touch him with a bargepole, as she often proudly recalled. But my mother, since she loved my father, cast about for some other expedient that would enable her to wear the clothes from Mrs Smith and to pay for them.

This was how she hit on the idea of getting a job – which she described, suppressing Mrs Smith, as a means of getting out of the house. It's a measure of my father's pride in her as superior and ‘different' that he didn't oppose her plan, although perhaps he foresaw all along that it couldn't come to anything. Received opinion was certainly against it. Women who were neither working class nor qualified professionals (we'd heard of women doctors and lawyers, but never seen one) were supposed to stay at home, or do good works if they felt restless. But my mother was no longer securely middle class enough to take on voluntary work, she wanted the money. There
were
ladylike jobs that were just possible: you could be a receptionist, or the kind of secretary who didn't type. Such positions,
however, could not be found in Hanmer; she would have to commute to Whitchurch or even further afield and to do that she would have to learn to drive. The logical first step, then, was to buy L plates and take lessons with my father . . .

But after each lesson the verdict was more discouraging. It turned out she was too nervy, too highly strung, to pass the test. My father was a lot kinder than he was to me about my failure to learn to ride a bike. My mother, he said – and she agreed – wasn't down-to-earth enough to drive. So the job receded into the realm of unreality and there did its work as one of her repertoire of daydreams; and the clothes from Mrs Smith stayed hidden at the back of the wardrobe for long weeks and months at a time, before being slyly smuggled into the light of day. And we went on visiting Mrs Smith. In fact, the whole idea of my mother going out to work – or rather, its failure – confirmed my parents in their separate worlds, his the outside world of reality, hers the castles in the air and council-house frustrations. Not driving became another sign of her sensitivity. Like not cleaning and not cooking, it showed (in a mysterious way) that she was meant for better things, a life that wasn't confined to home – and that in turn was part of her impractical charm as a wife.

She did, however, sometimes talk with bitterness about my father's sister, Auntie Binnie, who'd started to drive during the war when there were no tests and who was surely just as nervy. It was well known that Auntie Binnie could only drive to places she'd driven to before, along roads she knew by heart – although it was never explained how she had driven anywhere for the first time. And she couldn't park anywhere smaller than a farmyard. Nevertheless, she had a licence and my mother sometimes felt that, but for an accident of timing, she too could have driven Binnie-fashion and worn her smart suit to work.

It was not to be. What would domestic life have been like if she had deserted us? Who would have cut off Grandma's crusts, and given the kitchen floor a lick and a promise? Not me, certainly; I was a dunce at domestic science. But we'd have managed somehow, a bit more mayhem wouldn't have mattered; we'd have lived on sliced ham and sponge cake, and scorched our own fish fingers. And in terms of the household's psychic economy it would have been a blessing. My mother's timidity and her dread of confrontation meant that it was horribly easy to defy and bully her and so we did, Grandma, my brother Clive and I. Although, since Grandma had the excuse of her age and diabetes, and Clive was still only small, I was her chief tormentor. When I wasn't at school or at Watsons' farm, I wandered off and went missing, driving her frantic with worry; when I was forced to take Clive with me he came back the worse for wear (once I made him touch the Hunts' new electric fence); and in the house I sulked, whined and nagged, and threw temper tantrums when I couldn't get my maths homework to come out right. I shouted at her, I may even have hit her. And when my father came home she told on me.

He'd be late back himself often, smelling of cold and cowshit, and full of unfinished Business he'd yell about down the phone to Uncle Albert – One Damn Thing After Another, Fed Up to the Back Teeth – before going into the kitchen to wash his hands at the sink. My mother would follow and, while she warmed up his take-it-or-leave-it tea, she'd weep and recount my offences. I'd worried her sick, she couldn't cope with me and she
couldn't stand rows
. It was always this last line that did the trick. Rows meant the old vicarage misery, he was honour bound to save her from its clutches. What had I to say for myself? I'd pretend to be doing my homework, but he wanted a Straight Answer to a Straight Question, and when I lied and
wouldn't look him in the eye he'd lose his temper. By now it's a set routine, there is no way back. I'll shake, snivel and look guilty, he'll shout that he's going to Teach me a Lesson I won't Forget in a Hurry – this too is code, school isn't the Real World – and put me across his knee and smack me until I say I'm sorry, I won't do it again.

This is where my mother wrings her hands and pleads with him not to hit me too hard, and I howl and writhe with humiliation. It's all happening in the open-plan living-room, with Clive and Grandma looking on. Clive is smug but frightened, Grandma trembles with excitement, she loves rows and loves to see Eric reveal himself in his true Hanmer colours. I promise not to do it again. But I will. I'll slouch upstairs to rest my swollen eyes with reading and make resolutions to lie better. I'll read and read, while Clive twitches in his sleep across the room, and my mother and father murmur together in bed. May they rot in hell, I'll say to myself. Grandma will visit in the small hours, to hiss that all men are brutes. But it's my mother who has taught me the lesson that divides me from the daughter line. I won't be like her, there are too many children in our house.

One red-eyed night when I was poring over the romance my name came from,
Lorna Doone
, it was suddenly not myself but my mother I saw in the fey and queenly little girl who's so out of place in dark Doone Glen, and my father in the character of honest John Ridd, the farm boy who grows up to be her stout-hearted yeoman lover, and who tells the story his way. It's a stirring tale: John rescues Lorna from the anarchy of her clan (we're in the wild West Country in the years of the Monmouth Rebellion and Judge Jeffreys's Bloody Assizes, the Doones are outlaws on nobody's side but their own) and discovers that she's not a Doone at all by blood, although she's
still a lady and above him: ‘She drew herself up with an air of pride . . . and turned away as if to enter some grand coach or palace; while I was so amazed, and grieved, in my raw simplicity . . .' But the author is only teasing. Despite dazzling the court in London Lorna is constant to John. He is knighted for services to the Crown and, after a marvellous scene where snarling Carver Doone shoots Lorna in church at her wedding (if he can't have her nobody will), John worsts the forces of darkness in single combat and our couple settle down to a happy ending at Plover's Barrow farm.

I can see now why I was so struck by Lorna Doone's likeness to my mother. It's because her Victorian creator, R. D. Blackmore, an Oxford man who had previously only ‘translated from the classics without attracting very much attention' (as one biographer puts it), had dealt with the difficult but best-selling business of how to have his heroine marry ‘down' without being suspected of lust for honest John (who is over six feet tall and the local wrestling champion) by making Lorna skittishly chaste and childlike throughout. Blackmore had hit on a deviant formula for romance, where heroines – like Jane Eyre twenty years earlier – usually married the master. If the hero is not socially powerful then his masculine mystique comes into full focus, although the Victorian heroine mustn't know where to look.
Lorna Doone
innocently anticipates Lawrence. This John, like Lady Chatterley's lover, is a great believer in the natural order of things between the sexes and also speaks with a bit of a burr when he remembers to. For instance:

I know that up the country, women are allowed to reap . . . But in our part, women do what seems their proper business, following well behind the men, out of harm of the swinging-hook, and stooping with their breasts and arms up they catch
the swathes of corn, where the reapers cast them, and tucking them together tightly with a wisp laid under them, this they fetch around and twist, with a knee to keep it close . . .

Although this is just an aside on country customs, it suggests the sort of preaching about proper positions Mellors goes in for. Blackmore's heroine wouldn't be seen dead in a cornfield – after all, we are dealing in symbols: John Ridd's charm for Lorna resides in the firm authority underlying his deference. She can stay a young girl for ever. It wasn't at all a perfect allegory of my father's relations with my mother, since John Ridd has cosy Plover's Barrow and
his
mother to mother his child bride when he gets her home. But you can't have everything.

Grandpa about to give my mother away, 1942

What I like to think is that Grandpa had been inwardly seething like Carver Doone at their wedding, marching his daughter to church and handing her over to this honest John,
and that's why the name popped into his head when I was born. Like Carver, he'd have wickedly despised my father's John Riddish combination of conscious virtue, modesty and manly prowess. Eric was a natural for the role of responsible adult when he came back from the army after the war: Grandpa was eager for him to take it on, too, since it mainly meant my father trying to balance the vicarage books out of his own pocket. Grandpa could still clutch the skirts of his clerical dignity round him and appeal to his higher Authority. After his death, my father had not even this shadow of a rival for the part of patriarch and, young as he was (thirty-three in 1952), his army training predisposed him to take it very seriously. On the Home Front everything conspired to make him a martinet.