Untold Stories (7 page)

In my television play
Afternoon Off
a husband is visiting his wife in hospital.

MRS BEEVERS
: I bet the house is upside down.

MR BEEVERS
: Nay, it never is. I did the kitchen floor this morning.

MRS BEEVERS
: Which bucket did you use?

MR BEEVERS
: The red one.

MRS BEEVERS
: That's the outside bucket! I shall have it all to do again.

Men, they make work.

Left to himself Dad, like the hapless Mr Beevers, would violate these taboos and use the first thing that came to hand to clean the hearth or wash the floor.

‘It's all nowt,' he'd mutter, but when Mam was around he knew it saved time and temper to observe her order of things.

Latterly disposable cloths and kitchen rolls had tended to blur these ancient distinctions but the basic structure remained, perhaps the firmest part of the framework of her world.

When she became depressed the breakdown of this order was one of its first symptoms. She became incapable of cleaning the house herself, and stood by while Dad took over her duties. But however much he washed and tidied, the place was still ‘upside down', dust and dirt an unstemmable tide, the house besieged by filth and chaos, its (imagined) squalor a talking point among the neighbours. So now when she came home from the hospital bright and better her first comment was how spotless the place looked. And not merely the house. She was taken up by the freshness of everything. It was as if the whole world and her existence in it had been rinsed clean.

But it did not last.

‘I don't know what I've done wrong.'

‘You've done nothing wrong.'

‘Then why are you shouting at me?'

‘I'm shouting at you to try and get it into your head.'

‘They'll hear.'

‘Who? There's nobody here.'

‘Then what's that little car doing?'

‘Having a nice time. Leading a normal life. Doing what we used to do.'

In the eight years between the onset of my mother's first depression and my father's death in 1974 there were half a dozen episodes, all of which ended up being what Dad called ‘hospital dos' and in half of which she had ECT, other times just antidepressant drugs.

In no case was her recovery quite as dramatic as that first time. Perhaps it was that we were getting used to the sequence, but certainly with each successive visitation it became clear that in her case this wasn't an illness that was ever altogether going to go away, the likelihood of another attack there even in her most cheerful moments.

Still, there were long periods of remission, months, years even, when she was her old cheerful self, though Dad was now always on the lookout for any tell-tale signs and ready to head her off from any experience that might upset her. One night we were watching Jeremy Sandford's TV play
Edna, the Inebriate Woman
. Its elaborate depiction of irrational behaviour had nothing to do with Mam's depressive condition, and the connection never occurred to me, but while she was out of the room Dad quietly switched the television off.

‘Oh, are we not watching that?' Mam said, coming back.

‘Well,' said Dad, ‘it was too far-fetched. You can't believe half the stuff that's on.'

Always there was the shame at the nature of the illness, something Mam was able to overcome or at least ignore when she was well but which became a burden whenever her spirits began to fall, the guilt attendant upon the depression one of the signals that it was returning. Self-consciousness, if not shame, was in such a small community understandable, but the longer my parents lived in the village the more I became aware that my mother was not alone in her condition. Several middle-aged women were similarly afflicted in different degrees, one stumping silently round the village every
afternoon, another flitting anxiously into a friendly neighbour's, sometimes in tears, and both suffering from what was still called ‘nerves' – a condition that goes largely unnoticed in cities as it cannot do in smaller communities.

‘I haven't seen Mrs Bennett about? Is she alright?'

Except that after a while people learned not to ask. And while there were support groups for some identifiable disabilities like MS or muscular dystrophy, there were none for depression. As how could there be? Anyone suffering from it would be incapable of attending.

Insofar as I too kept it quiet when she was poorly, I shared in the shame, though it would have been callous to behave otherwise, as even when she was well Mam was always concerned with ‘what folks would say' about every department of our lives. But once she was in hospital there could be no deception as Dad would be seen driving off on the dot of one and arriving back at six, day after day after day.

When Mam was ill the first time I used to wish that they both had had the education they always longed for, feeling, snobbishly perhaps, that mental affliction was more appropriate to, sat more suitably on, someone educated or higher up the social scale. It's a foolish assumption besides being statistically unfounded, which I'm sure I knew at the time though I felt it nevertheless. Education might at least have given them more insight into their predicament and diminished some of the self-consciousness they felt and which I felt too, though only in the village; among my own friends I made no secret of it. Still, if nothing else my mother's depression and the omissions and evasions that attended it made me appreciate more the shame that must have attached to my grandfather's drowning and how it was the episode had gone unspoken of for so long.

My father wore a suit every day of his life. He had two, ‘my suit' and ‘my other suit', ‘my suit' being the one he wore every day, ‘my other suit' his
best. On the rare occasions when he invested in a new suit the suits moved up a place, ‘my other suit' becoming ‘my suit', the new suit becoming ‘my other suit', with the old one just used for painting in or working in the shop. They were three-piece suits, generally navy, and he always wore black shoes and a collar and tie. This makes him seem formal or dressed like an accountant but he didn't give that impression because he never managed to be smart, his waistcoat (‘weskit' as he pronounced it) generally unbuttoned and showing his braces, his sleeves rolled up, and when he was still butchering the suit would smell of meat, with the trousers and particularly the turn-ups greasy from the floor. He never had an overcoat, just a series of fawn or dark green gabardine raincoats, and he always wore a dark green trilby hat.

About clothes Dad must always have been conservative. There are photographs of him as a young man, sitting on the sands in a deck-chair in the 1920s, and he is in his three-piece suit, with dicky-bow and fly-collar and even a bowler hat, his only concession to the holiday spirit bare feet. Retirement, which often sanctions some sartorial indulgence, didn't alter this state of affairs, the regime of suit and other suit maintained as before. Or almost.

After he had learned to drive my parents would sometimes collect me off the train at Lancaster. Meeting them there one day in 1970, I came across the bridge to see my mother waiting at the barrier with a stranger, someone got up in a grey check sports coat, two-tone cardigan, brown trousers and what I suppose would be called loafers. I was deeply shocked. It was Dad in leisurewear, the only relic of the man he had always been his green trilby hat.

‘What do you think of your Dad's new get-up?' Mam enquired as we were driving home. Not much was the truth of it but I didn't let on, and as Dad didn't say much either I took it to have been Mam's idea, confirmed when the experiment turned out to be short-lived; the sports coat and brown trousers soon demoted to the status of gardening clothes, and we were back on the regime of ‘my suit' and ‘my other suit'.

Dad's brief excursion into leisurewear wasn't an isolated occurrence
but part of a process (Mam would have liked it to have been a programme) called ‘branching out'. The aim of ‘branching out' was to be more like other people, or like what Mam imagined other people to be, an idea she derived in the first instance from women's magazines and latterly from television. The world of coffee mornings, flower arrangement, fork lunches and having people round for drinks was never one my parents had been part of. Now that Mam was well again and Dad could drive, Mam's modest social ambitions, long dormant, started to revive and she began to entertain the possibility of ‘being a bit more like other folks'. The possibility was all it was, though, and much to Dad's relief, all that it remained.

‘It's your Dad,' Mam would complain. ‘He won't mix. I'd like to, only he won't.'

And there was no sense in explaining to her that these occasions she read about in
Homes and Gardens
were not all that they were cracked up to be, or if it came to the point she'd be nonplussed in company. Other people did it, why couldn't we?

Drink would have helped but both my parents were teetotallers, though more from taste than conviction. Indeed alcohol had, for Mam at least, a certain romance, partly again to be put down to the cocktail parties she had read about in women's magazines. She had never been to, still less given, a cocktail party, which explains why she could never get the pronunciation of the actual word right, invariably laying the stress on the final syllable, cock
tail
. What a cock
tail
was I am sure she had no idea. Russell Harty used to tell how when he was at Oxford he had invited Vivien Leigh round for drinks and she had asked for pink gin. Only having the plain stuff Russell sent a friend out to the nearest off-licence for a bottle of the pink variety. Mam would not have understood there was a joke here, and had she ever got round to giving a cocktail party she would probably have tried to buy a bottle of cocktails.

The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.

They did, however, gather that sherry was a generally acceptable drink, so once they were settled down in the village they invested in a bottle, as a first move in the ‘branching out' campaign.

‘Your Dad and me are going to start to mix,' Mam wrote. ‘We've got some sherry in and we've got some peanuts too.'

Never having tasted the mysterious beverage, though, they lacked any notion of when it was appropriate and treated it as a round-the-clock facility. Thus the vicar, calling with the Free Will offering envelope, was startled to be offered a sweet sherry at 10 o'clock in the morning. They, of course, stuck to tea; or, when they were trying to fit in, Ribena.

‘Well,' said Mam resignedly, ‘it doesn't do for us. Our Kathleen used to put it in the trifle and it always rifted up on me.'

On another occasion when they had actually been asked out to drinks and gone in great trepidation Mam rang up in some excitement.

‘Your Dad and me have found an alcoholic drink that we really like. It's called bitter lemon.'

Nor was it merely the drink at cocktail parties my mother found mysterious, but the food that was on offer there too – cocktail snacks, bits of cheese and pineapple, sausages-on-sticks, food that nowadays would come under the generic term of nibbles. Now sausages were not unknown in our house: my father had been a butcher after all, we took them in our stride. But a sausage had only to be hoisted onto a stick to become for my mother an emblem of impossible sophistication.

With these notions it's hardly surprising they never made the social round or lived the kind of model life my mother used to read about in magazines. They put it down, as they did most of their imagined shortcomings, to their not having been educated, education to them a passport to everything they lacked: self-confidence, social ease and above all the ability to be like other people. Every family has a secret and the secret is that it's not like other families. My mother imagined that every family in the kingdom except us sat down together to a cooked breakfast, that when the man of the house had gone off to work and the children to school there was an ordered programme of washing, cleaning, baking and other housewifely tasks,
interspersed with coffee mornings and (higher up the social scale) cocktail parties. What my parents never really understood was that most families just rubbed along anyhow.

A kind of yearning underlay both their lives. Before they moved to the village, my father's dream was of a smallholding (always referred to as such). He saw himself keeping hens, a goat, and growing his own potatoes; an idyll of self-sufficiency.

I was in Holland not long ago, where along every railway line and on any spare bit of urban land were hundreds of neat plots, which were not allotments so much as enclosed gardens, each with a hut, a pavilion almost, outside which the largely elderly owners were sunbathing (some of them virtually naked). Dad would never have gone in for that, but I think, though less cheek by jowl, this was just what he meant by a smallholding. It was a dream, of course, of a generation older than his, a vision of the soldiers who survived the First World War, with Surrey, Essex and Kent full of rundown chicken farms, the sad relics of those days.