Bad Blood (16 page)

My mother's acquired ineptitude fitted this post-war pattern. And she did, as the propaganda said, try to turn herself into a housewife, although she was very bad at it. Quite how bad only became clear once we'd moved to the council house, for vicarage ways were ingrained; she couldn't be expected to make much impression on that Gothic grime and disorder. But in ‘her' brand-new house full of light and hard, washable surfaces (even the window-sills were tiled) she was horribly exposed. According to the people who'd planned these houses, and to the advertisers and the social psychologists, housework was her calling and she simply couldn't do it; she had a kind of genius for travesty when it came to domestic science.

And yet – for all his talk of discipline and efficiency – my father never yelled at her for this blatant shambles. Instead, he accepted it without a murmur and even seemed tenderly gratified. He was her protector, you see: he'd rescued her, and her dependence was perfected by her distaste for her role and her failure to turn number 4 The Arowry into her separate sphere. Many a house-proud Hanmer wife might order her husband not to make a mess ‘on my nice clean floor', but never my mother. True, she would complain about the mud we brought in on our boots, but that was a ritual lament, mopping floors never achieved anything, she knew, although she was sentenced to it. If she guarded her threshold it was against prying eyes.
Women neighbours were never allowed in, nor were their daughters, who were suspected of being fifth columnists, housework spies who'd run home and tell their mothers we didn't clean behind the sofa.

She despised those women who did, all the same. Like having pierced ears, wringing out a floorcloth with conviction was the sign of a coarse-grained nature. She just wished – out loud, quite often – that the housework would do itself. In the same spirit she cursed cooking and as she dumped our plates in front of us on the eating end of the table she would announce that we could take it or leave it, and that she wished we could all live on pills. In the beginning it was mostly stew, shreds of grey, nameless meat and lumps of carrot and turnip floating in salty water, with a surface shimmer of yellow fat. This was what I had at school, too, so there was nothing special about it, except for the spice of her revulsion. But as the days of rationing receded, and you could buy a joint of lamb or even a chicken for Sunday dinner (roasting chickens were rare birds back then) her fear of food grew and grew. All meat had to be made safe by boiling, or by simmering it in a lake of spitting fat in the oven for hours, and even then it was dangerously full of knots of choking gristle and shards and spikes of bone, which she'd warn us against with a shudder. She herself could seldom bear to eat any of this nasty stuff, although occasionally she would daintily dissect a sliver on her plate and observe – which was true – that even the boneless bits were tough and stringy.

You might have mistaken her for an aspiring vegetarian, but in fact the thought that we were eating the very lambs that went bleating to market in Dad's trucks didn't move her at all. She didn't care for farm animals. And if anything, she thought vegetables even more dangerous and difficult to subdue. They
had to be cooked all morning, particularly green ones like sprouts, which got very salty and stuck to the pan as their water boiled away, and came out in a yellow mush. Potatoes got the same treatment and her ritual Sunday lunchtime cry, as she lifted the saucepan lid – ‘They've gone to nothing!' – became a family joke, an immortal line that later converged magically in my mind with the smartest 1950s intellectual slogans.
Gone to nothing
was wonderfully Absurd, a phrase of existentialist and sub-Beckettian power. As for my mother, she should be so lucky was her meaning – if only those wretched roots full of eyes
would
go to nothing! But no, there was a grey sludge left at the bottom of the pan (we never needed to mash our potatoes) which had after all to be spooned resignedly on to our plates.

Dinner on this scale only happened once a week, although since it was a custom that survived into the 1960s, I can still recall my mother's recipe for lumpy gravy. You take the pan of fat in which the meat has been frazzled, add water from the vegetables (and since there's never enough left, top it up with cold from the tap), then add flour, and cook for quite a while, pursuing the lumps into corners with a spoon and crushing them to make more. Then add Gravy Browning so that there's no mistaking them and serve with a sigh.

Luckily no one lives by Sunday dinners alone. The real revelation of the ending of austerity, for us, was ready-made food, the whole rich list of things that needed no cooking at all, which you could eat at any old time. For instance: ham and tongue cut into see-through slices; sandwiches of meat-paste or fish-paste or bananas; canned corned beef, luncheon meat (Spam in civilian clothes), pilchards, sardines, salmon, baked beans and spaghetti; tinned peaches, pears and plums, and fruit salad with mauve ‘cherries', and condensed milk. These goodies
– eked out with cornflakes, puffed wheat, digestive biscuits, cream crackers, crisps and sweets – would constitute our staple diet. We actually called them in leftover language ‘the rations' and they were delivered once a week by the village grocer in his van.

In the matter of food, in fact, market forces were on my mother's side. Beefburgers and tinned rice pudding and processed cheese and even sliced bread itself were all just the kinds of things she wished for, pills under various guises. I have a persistent but suspect memory that she was somehow involved in consumer-testing fish fingers and infallibly foresaw their future role as everyone's ‘rations'. Surely Hanmer couldn't have figured in such a survey? I must be remembering the satisfaction with which she greeted their advent. Fish was to her possibly nature's most nightmare offering – covered in scales and fins, full of bones and very nourishing, so that you were obliged to struggle with it. In fish fingers nature was grandly snubbed and outdone. Their very name mocked the unreasonable design evolution had come up with for fish; and their bland and boneless insides left her nothing to worry about. They didn't need gravy, either.

So food got easier as time went by. Not all our meals aspired to the condition of fish fingers, but there wasn't a lot that could go wrong with (say) baked beans on toast. True, the beans were stewed (with extra water) to be on the safe side. And toast could be tricky (I was quite grown up before I learned that you didn't have to make toast by burning the bread and then scraping off the black bits) but on the whole, even if you allowed for sharp crusts and crumbs that could go down the wrong way, it did solve the problem of what to put in front of us.

The question of what she could bear to swallow was another
matter. It was a lot easier for her to quiet her anxieties on our behalf than to overcome her own revulsion. She didn't starve, but she snacked and picked her way through each day, mostly in private, edging round some secret, shifting system of taboos. Just occasionally she'd develop a compensatory addiction, and binge on something pungent and improbable, like pickled onions, which gave her agonising acid indigestion, or extra-strong peppermints, which ulcerated her throat. She could not simply take food or leave it at all, for it was the sign of a larger, unfocused fear. Her home wasn't her own territory, the daily domestic business of sustaining life made it a battleground, and made her long to get out and away.

But – here was the catch – the world immediately outside the door was also threatening, far too unprocessed, too shapeless, too suggestive of bone and gristle to provide her with any solace. The fields were full of menace: bulls, barbed wire, water, snakes, insects, nettles. The countryside was raw and meaningless, she had no way into it (she'd forgotten how to ride a bike), it was outside, but not
out
, not in the sense she meant when she longed to ‘get out of the house'. Her fear of food, which was a fear of the outside getting in, was a key to her character as a wife. Although she so spectacularly lacked domestic skills, she was nonetheless profoundly domesticated. A sort of virginal vulnerability and a fear of intrusion walled her in.

So family outings were charged with huge meaning as a result. The time for going out was on Saturday afternoon, when my father would be persuaded to stop working for once. He'd do this with great reluctance, however, so that by the time he came home to eat and to wash off the mire and motor oil, and change, we would all have been ready for hours, and my brother and I would have had plenty of opportunity to untidy ourselves
and spoil our good clothes. This meant tears from my mother, who was in any case seething with impatience, and even more delays as we were told off and sometimes smacked by my father, and washed and tidied yet again. Eventually, after we'd waited for Grandma if she was coming – she was never ready until the last minute no matter how long she had – my mother would damp down the fire (a layer of slag, a layer of coal-dust and water from the kettle) and we'd set off in the car.

Sometimes we'd go to the cinema in Wrexham or Shrewsbury, but at others we'd go to Chester to walk on the Roman walls in fine weather, or in the Rows when it rained, or visit the cathedral and straggle along the gloomy side aisles hung with tattered, bloodstained regimental colours, or to the museum to look at Roman remains, Egyptian mummies, stuffed animals, armour, weapons, old costumes . . . It hardly mattered what, for my mother, so long as it was old and redolent of long-ago lives. She loved castles with dungeons and battlements; threadbare tapestries, mullioned windows and portraits fed her hungry imagination so that she forgot for a while her weekday dissatisfactions. Indeed, the most exotic thing about these outings was not the oubliettes or the stuffed lions, but the fact that we could all sit down and eat in a teashop, my mother included. So long as there was oak furniture and a spinning wheel in the corner, she let go her fear of food and even – although she'd sometimes pick through her Welsh Rarebit for bones, out of habit – seem to enjoy it.

Perhaps it was just as strange, if less striking at the time, that we quite often went out to look at beauty spots that were hardly any different from Hanmer: villages with black-and-white cottages, or the lakeside at Ellesmere, or Llangollen's mountains (these, admittedly, on a more grand scale). But this was scenery, the picturesque, food for sentiment, all transformed
by the glamour of distance. My mother felt – and she was surely right – that a landscape is something quite different from the gristle and barbed wire of the actual country. She was a devotee of pastoral prettiness. When all the village children were urged to put on fancy dress for the Coronation Day parade in 1953 she dressed me (with great difficulty, for she couldn't sew) as a very passable shepherdess complete with black laced bodice, floral panniers, a straw hat and a crook tied with ribbons. There I stand in the black-and-white photos of that famously rainy day – along with Valerie, who came in a patriotic red-white-and-blue crêpe-paper crinoline, and Gail in white and gold as a drum majorette – smirking with pleased self-consciousness, my mother's tribute to pastoral romance.

Coronation Day parade, 1953, myself and Gail in the middle

Fancy was her department. She rounded out her role with daydreams: being impractical was not just a negative thing but
a positive attribute. If my father was man the realist, she was truly his other half and complement, she did the work of feminine fantasy. The absent and amorphous aspect of her daily self – ‘miles away,' she'd say innocently, not apologising – gave her in addition the air of a child wife, the daughter of the house. Perhaps this was why my father didn't object more strenuously to Grandma's presence and why it seemed in an odd way appropriate. Grandma may never have lifted a finger, but she did support my mother in the character of perpetual daughter, always about to make her entrance into the world. Marriage had fixed her in this part, perhaps even made her more timorous (witness the bike-riding), but she had begun to mislay her confidence around the time she was sixteen, the year of Grandpa's affair with her friend Marj, when she took Grandma's side and turned away with revulsion from all he represented – from the vices of smoking and drinking, from lust, from bookishness . . .

She'd left school without her School Certificate, lost interest in her studies, taken desultory just-about-genteel jobs (‘sales lady' in Dudleston's, the old-fashioned draper's in Whitchurch), all this long before her marriage. My father's earnestness, his distance from
his
family, his rage for order, his protective gallantry must have seemed a refuge indeed. She was fiercely monogamous, as if she thought there was only ever one other person you could allow into your intimate life: certainly that was her experience and she disapproved of any hint of promiscuity in others, even the sort implied in socialising. If she and my father were displaced people in Hanmer terms, she almost welcomed the isolation in which they lived.