Goodness (2 page)

Walking Wounded

My mother led a strange life. At home, in Gorst Road, she was little more than a slave. Even Aunt Mavis used to demand things of her, would say: ‘I’m the modern woman, aren’t I? Bringing home the bread, the least I can expect is to have my bed made for me.’ She blinked, gormless and vapid.

Mother bowed to it. She did everything, shopped, cooked, washed up, cleaned, mended, gardened, darned, scrubbed, laundered, ironed. She was always tired, her skin always rough with work. And it occurs to me that apart from the brief interlude of her marriage, of Africa, she had been doing more or less the same thing in the same house since her early teens when her own mother died. For all of which she received no pay and less thanks, not a person who didn’t take her for granted.

Yet the curious thing was that at our church, the local Methodists, Mother was a figure of considerable importance: a taker of meetings, reader of lessons, organiser of conferences and outings; a woman of quick decision, easy authority and loud, strong singing voice. We sang, ‘He who would valiant be,’ and she was booming and triumphant. For Father had been valiant. We sang, ‘For all the saints, who from their labours rest,’ and she had tears in her eyes, thinking of the saint my father had been, the rest he had deserved.

She was much loved, even revered. People came to her with their problems. They came with the most intimate problems, the most serious, even legal problems. For them she was both comfort and oracle. People came and wept with her, prayed with her, told everything. I always found, and to this day still do find, this fact extraordinary. I myself was unable to
talk to my mother about anything: about religion, about my own wilderness of doubt, about my dead father, about Grandfather’s unpleasantness, about Aunt Mavis’s queerness, most of all about puberty (Peggy’s an explosion, physical and behavioural, my own slower, more furtive and guilty, later bold and deceitful). I was unable to talk to her about anything, and she in turn made no attempt to tackle anything intimate with me, nor with Peggy, who, through her friends at school, became my chief source of the vital information one inevitably grubs around for at that age.

I remember looking in Mother’s handbag. I was supposed to be getting change for collection. She wasn’t going to church for some reason. She had problems with her hips sometimes. Bouts of something or other. And ferreting for her purse amidst a mess of hankies, keys and scraps of paper, breathing the forever memorable, blown-nose and old-leather smell of her bag, I came across a tampon, a cylinder wrapped in ricepaper. I said: ‘What’s this, Mum?’ At once she was flustered. I latched on immediately. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Put it away.’ ‘But what is it, Mum?’

You would have thought, looking back, here was her opportunity to give young George his lesson, to guide him towards some mature understanding of the female body. But no, she says: ‘It’s a cigar.’ I couldn’t swear, but this may be the only straight lie my mother ever told me. ‘For Grandfather.’

I looked at the long tube in its flimsy paper cover. It looked the right shape for a cigar, the big ones they advertised with organ music on the box. I said: ‘But you don’t like Grandad to smoke.’ ‘For his birthday,’ she wriggled. ‘It’s next Friday you know.’ She found a painful smile. ‘We can waive a rule for his birthday, can’t we? Bless his dear heart.’

And I swallowed it. The extraordinary thing being that she then went out and actually bought a cigar for the old man’s birthday. Odd, no, to think of my mother being so cunning, so resourceful in her prudishness? For what? To save my innocence? In a world where the worst is anyway chalked on every wall. In a family where, that very evening, Peggy
had already told me everything, mocking my innocence, even showing me quite graphically (using a ‘Q’ tip) how you fitted them in.

Yet almost everybody in the church brought their problems to this woman, their confessions. They came to her after service in the hall where we had coffee and she would go off with them to the vestry, leaving Peggy and I to kick our heels in the yard amongst stacks of coal and tiles from the roof they’d had to remove because they were dangerous. They came to her at home in Gorst Road, sometimes late in the evening and she took them to her room. ‘Here comes another of the walking wounded,’ Grandfather would announce when the bell ding-donged in the middle of the
Man from Uncle, Harry Worth’s Half Hour
. ‘Out with the bandages. Call the nurse. Or is it to be last rites?’ And when one Saturday afternoon a black came, he said with his extraordinary flair for insensitivity: ‘Don’t you think we should frisk him? Don’t want any trouble.’

But despite his prejudices and scorn Grandfather never actually prevented anybody from coming in. Even the most dishevelled of tramps (for Mother was famous for giving tea to vagrants in the kitchen – ‘Four sugars, ma’am’); even, as the sixties progressed, the occasional Indian (if Grandfather despised blacks, he truly loathed Indians). And this was another thing with my mother, that however much derision she attracted, and probably still attracts, she generally gets her way; and even if she doesn’t answer back, she has a quiet authority in her passivity, a power really, something terribly persuasive about her softly focusing brown eyes. Charisma. It was her ‘ministry’.

‘My ministry,’ I heard her explaining when she turned down Eddie Foulkes who owned the Hallmarks Plastics factory on Bowes Road and always put a tenner in the collection plate. I was on hands and knees on threadbare carpet in the dark light at the top of the stairs. They were by the porch below. She had prayed about it and the Lord had told her no.

Grandfather was furious when I told him and there was
the most almighty row. She was putting her prayer rubbish before the welfare of her bloody family. Wasn’t it enough that her husband had been killed by a bunch of nignogs? Wasn’t it enough that she lived on the social, that we couldn’t afford decent clothes? Mother said Eddie had been divorced, she could never marry a man who had broken a solemn vow to someone else. Otherwise what did promises mean? Grandfather was livid. He spat. Peggy said everybody got divorced and she couldn’t, see the problem, especially seeing as they liked each other. Eddie was fab. Mother didn’t cry; Mother only cried when she was afraid for your soul. ‘Maybe if I stayed at home and did nothin’ all day I’d ‘ave more of a chance of getting married,’ Mavis said.

It was a nasty scene and partly my fault, since I had hoped the others would be able to change her mind and we could move into Eddie’s big house over in Ealing. Also I honestly believed it would be the best thing for my mother. Grandfather raved on and on. I seem to remember it was on this occasion that he hit her. When the whole thing got too painful I went out the back and kicked a ball against the wall. I decided that after I had escaped my family and was in control of my life, I would never be gratuitously mean or violent, as Grandfather was, but then nor would I ever put up with anybody or any situation that made life unbearable, as Mother did. I would be honest and reasonable, generous where generosity was due, and I would always always choose the road that led to a happy, healthy, normal life.

Wasn’t that a fair stab at a moral code? For a fourteen-year-old. And one I honestly do believe I’ve stuck to.

Although only a month or so ago, when she found my scrapbook, Shirley said: ‘You are aware you’re not human, aren’t you? You are aware of that? Because I know what you’re thinking.’

‘Only too human,’ I replied, ‘to go by what’s in those papers.’

But Shirley had become one of the walking wounded herself by this time.

A Certain Grace

Aunt Mavis finally found her Mr Right. Bob Hare was about ten years her younger, unemployed, slim to the point of frail and a Mormon. When he spoke it was with the extreme and unfriendly caution of somebody who is not expecting a fair trial. Oh, God,’ Grandad announced after his first visit, ‘a turd on two legs. And I thought I’d seen it all.’

Bob spent his days proselytising on doorsteps in Shepherd’s Bush and Holland Park. Although timid, he was obviously grimly determined, constantly summoning up all his courage to get a foot in the door and jabber out his lines: the Book of Mormon, the moral decay of our society, the only road to salvation, the importance of the family, what have you. Naturally the reaction he was most at home with was rebuff. He drew the dole and rent relief, which disgusted my grandfather, and was unhealthily pale and sickly-looking in a pinched, persecuted way. If he had any attraction at all it was that haunted and haunting, thin-boned, soft-eyed passion you often find in black-and-white photos of refugees and general strikers. Mother saw red, though she was careful to call him ‘Poor dear Bob’. Aunt Mavis was having none of it and after only a couple of months married him without telling any of us, so that late one Saturday afternoon, there she was, tubby in tight slacks, gathering her clobber together and setting off for a bedsit in Haringey.

Where very soon she miscarried. Not once but twice. This much I learnt from Peggy who had overheard a conversation between Mother and Grandfather. Mother, who blamed herself terribly for this injudicious marriage and visited regularly, asked me to come with her to cheer Mavis up, telling me only
that she was depressed. I refused. My mother insisted. Why should I? I asked. Had Mavis ever come to see me? Perhaps I was just annoyed that at sixteen or seventeen, or whatever I now was, I still wasn’t to be let in on the serious and intimate information in the family, I was being treated like a child, my opinion wasn’t required. I told her I wouldn’t go unless Mavis asked me herself. Mother said this attitude was unchristian of me and selfish. I pointed out that no one else was being asked to go, not Peggy, not Grandfather. ‘We can go into town afterwards,’ she pleaded, ‘perhaps treat you to something you want to see.’ For it was and still is so important to Mother that an appearance of family solidarity be kept up.

We took two long London bus-rides through depressing streets, the new estates that were already slums. There was a terraced house, four flights of uncarpeted stairs, a dingy yellow door where a rag did for a doormat and a note said: ‘Bell don’t work. Knock.’

I blame my mother really for never finding out more about Mavis and what was wrong with her. I mean, it’s one thing being good and generous to all and sundry, but my own feeling is that we have certain strategic responsibilities to the members of our family that are far more important. Mavis was obviously not quite right in the head. One knew that if only from the way people instinctively treated her with condescension, not unkindly, but with indulgence rather, the way you treat animals, half-wits, tiny babies. Yet my mother never enquired into what might lie behind this. I have no memory of any doctor ever being invited to pronounce on her odd facial features or retarded mental development. She was just accepted from the start for what she was, dumb, childish, ugly. And while it’s all very well saying we’re all God’s creatures whatever’s the matter with us, I do believe that Mother failed in her duty here.

Bob was out to see the social security people. Mavis was in bed, eating sweets, smoking. Fishing for a piece of toffee stuck to her teeth, she talked about her miscarriages quite openly in my presence, despite initial frowns and signs of
discouragement from my mother. Mother asked had the doctors said anything about why, and Mavis laughed and said, nothing that made any sense. She blew out smoke through one nostril and then the other. She and Bob were determined she said. They had mostly got married for the kids. He was mad about them.

I wanted to go because of the smell, the unpleasantness, and then the embarrassing inanity of my aunt’s twitter. She was showing some baby clothes she had bought now. She was sure it was going to be a boy. She giggled. When it finally decided to turn up. I remember her big pear-shaped body heaving from one side of the bed to another to pick things up off the floor; she let out grunts, her cigarette flecking the blankets with ash. I was desperate to go, I get quite frantic sometimes when I find myself in unpleasant situations, I simply can’t bear it, I feel I will die of unpleasantness; but Mother of course felt duty bound to wash the dishes, hoover the carpet, save the unsaveable. I offered to help, to speed things up, but was told to keep Mavis company, drink my tea.

I stood by the bed with my hands in my pockets. I didn’t want any tea and I had spent my whole childhood in the same house as Mavis without ever talking to her. Was it likely we would find anything to say to each other now? I told her we were going into town afterwards to see the Queen’s stamp collection. I told her Peggy had got herself a dog but then never bothered to look after it, she was so busy playing the drums in a rock group all the time. Grandfather loathed the thing. I told her I was going to university in a year or two so as to be able to leave home. Mavis licked a thumb. I asked her if she liked being married, and she said it was all right and stopping work was the best thing that could ever have happened to her, not having to get up so early and have your hands ruined by those hot machines. ‘Which reminds me,’ she said. ‘Where’s me lipstick?’

Bob came back. He stood frail and knotty-haired in the doorway watching my mother down on her knees having a go at crud on the carpet. The room was quite big, maybe
fifteen by fifteen, but it had everything, kitchenette, bed, table, chairs, sofa, so it was cluttered, with just the one orange-curtained window and a busy road behind to rattle it.

‘No need to do that,’ he said brusquely. ‘I’d have done that.’

When he got closer to us you couldn’t not be aware he’d been drinking. He looked belligerent, ready to snap.

‘We clean the place every day,’ he insisted. His eyes were pink.

Preparing to leave, Mother made a whole pantomine of signs with her eyes for him to come outside and have a word about Mavis. A rock would have understood, but Bob’s strained face merely filled with puzzlement. I was tugging at Mother’s coat cuff to be gone. Mavis was propped up in bed staring chinlessly. How old must she have been? Thirty-six? Thirty-eight? Mother made her signs again. Perhaps half understanding, Bob said: ‘We’re okay. We don’t need help from no one.’ He was tense.

‘Cheerie bye,’ Mother called past him to her sister. At the corner of the stairs we heard raised voices above us. Shouting. Mother hesitated one short second in mid step, then quickened her pace.

With what relief I let myself out into the street and took a breath of fresh air! I had hurried on ahead. For life, as I have so often insisted to Shirley of late, should have a certain grace, shouldn’t it? A certain grace. Please. Otherwise I do believe one might as well be dead.