by Emily Dean
People often say that when you have children you cease to be the picture; you recede into the background until you eventually become the frame. But my parents always remained the fabulously bold Jackson Pollock at the heart of our existence, with Rach and me as striking, unplanned daubs of paint on their canvas.
Even as a child, I realised that my father’s desire for solitude and lack of interest in routine weren’t qualities that combined easily with family life. He was brought up in material comfort, the descendant of a wealthy New Zealand timber tycoon. This meant that Rach and I had been left money in trust by a wealthy great-aunt, most of which was siphoned off for ‘childhood expenses’ – (the usual kind like Harrods’ after-dinner mints, tax bills and Chablis). We would get updates about well-heeled cousins going to medical school and military college, conscious that we were viewed as the wayward curiosities, adding a sprinkle of glamour to their quiet, comfortable realm.
My father’s privileged start in life meant he lacked the dogged ambition he observed in his friends, with their scholarships and hard-won firsts from Oxford. He preferred to bounce through life on eloquence and old-fashioned flattery. He would have once been the beating heart of a nineteenth-century literary salon, or a favoured court member at the Palace of Versailles: a cultural asset due to his intellect, wit and colossal knowledge. But his low tolerance for what he called ‘flabby minds’ often saw him wandering into civilian life with the heavy weaponry of the intellectual combat ring. Drinks with our neighbours would be cut short after a political argument with a dentist whose views he called ‘sonorous clichés that fall like tropical rain’. He once loudly described the paintings on someone’s walls as ‘the sort of bland and bloodless canvasses one sees propped up against a Hyde Park railing.’
Rach and I collected these incidents, to taunt him. We would follow him around at parties, noting the remarks in a Hello Kitty notebook. We had also taken to documenting his honeyed words to attractive women, which were listed under the heading ‘DAD’S CHATTER UPS!!’ ‘You are so beautiful, my heart threatened to leap out of its ribcage,’ he said to one friend’s wife. My mother simply giggled at these flirtatious moves. ‘Another one for your book, girls!’ she would say, enjoying the female collusion, like an elder sister indulging the clumsy romantic escapades of a brother.
That was how my mother dealt with potentially threatening moments – by turning them into entertaining anecdotes. Even her absurdly peripatetic childhood, which Dickens would have rejected as too poignantly hard-luck to get past a second draft, was served up in dinner-party-friendly morsels. She had lurched from one extraordinary adventure to another, bouncing from her native Wales to Turkey and the Sudan as my grandmother followed the next husband or lover, and then back again to England where she was shunted between friends, eventually living on her own at fifteen. It was a chaos she’d tried to escape by pushing my father into settling down, only to find herself thrust into a world of different but equally complex challenges.
The immaculate manners and superb social skills she’d acquired allowed her to infiltrate the middle classes so convincingly that no one really had any idea of the world she’d left behind. She glossed over her working-class origins and her history, immersing herself in cookery books to become literate in the French Provençal cuisine my father’s friends served, and ploughing diligently through the literary tomes discussed at our salons.
But there was a high tax payable on entering this world – the sacrifice of her longing for suburban calm, to love and be loved. I sensed it when the other mums moaned about pregnancy and she reflected wistfully, ‘I didn’t want it to ever end!’ I saw it when she calmed somebody’s crying baby in five seconds flat, when she swooped in to console sad children, necklaces clinking, arms outstretched with hugs and affirmations. I felt it when we were sick and she stayed up to stroke our heads long into the night. All Daytime Mum ever wanted was that life. But Nighttime Mum had other ideas. She was the free-spirited maverick who simply couldn’t plan her life around being at the school gates at a certain time; the rebellious consequence-dodger who ran up huge bills at Harrods food hall; the decadent enabler who loaned out our beds to people conducting extra-marital affairs.
I have never forgotten her telling me one day in Holly Village that all she had ever wanted was to sit at the head of a huge pine kitchen table with ‘lots of children running around, and plates of lasagne and music and love.’ She looked sad when she said it. It didn’t sound to me then especially like the life she’d ended up with. She was less a matriarch, more a stage manager, trying desperately to control a troupe of constantly roving players.
I wonder now whether that longing for kinship was what drew her to the world of the theatres where she understudied. It was a role that played to her greatest strengths: boosting everyone’s egos, providing laughter and bonhomie. They were the same qualities she brought to our own band of four when she directed our ambience, averted crises and ensured we all stuck to the comforting script of our parts. My mother was the convivial show runner, my father the indulged and unreliable star turn and I was the noisy cameo, always fighting for more stage time.
Rach’s designated role was that of unconditionally adored, graceful heroine. As our family journeyed through gasoline alley throwing lit matches, she walked behind, smothering each blaze before it spread out of control. Rach was the player whose unassuming presence can make you forget their fundamental importance to the team’s survival. There was a twist to the adoration we all felt for her, though. She was simultaneously up on a pedestal but perceived to be fragile, at risk of under-appreciation. If I got a good school report or a compliment there was often a whispered suggestion that we ‘play it down’.
It was an issue that rose up awkwardly when my mother enrolled us in a local children’s drama school called Anna Scher’s. Before long I began to be offered TV work. My mother started to panic about how to sell it to Rach. ‘Say it’s because you’re small and can play young,’ she suggested when I was offered a part in a BBC adaptation of Day of the Triffids. ‘Tell her they needed a brunette,’ she whispered when I got cast in detective drama The Professionals.
After a while the offers of work began to fall through at the last minute. A role as Meryl Streep’s daughter in the movie The French Lieutenant’s Woman and a lead in Swallows and Amazons never materialised. My mother told me it was the ‘up and down nature of the business’. It was only years later, when we were adults, that Rach confessed that my mother had turned the parts down. ‘It was this weird thing we all kept from you. Like I gave a shit anyway,’ she said.
I asked my mother about it after Rach’s confession. She told me she was worried about me becoming spoilt (‘At least I would have been rich and spoilt,’ I sighed to my friends.) It took me a long time to consider whether it might have been tough for her to finally get that longed-for agent phone call and hear the words, ‘Can I speak to the eight-year-old, please?’
In hindsight, the incident feels like a neat illustration of our family dynamic: Rach as adored but vulnerable, me as disruptive threat to the natural order. It also reflected the slightly preferential status I felt had been awarded to Rach, her sitting up front in a roomy Business Class seat while I shouted to be thrown a friggin’ bone back in Economy.
As this awareness first dawned on me, during those years in Holly Village, I began to form a close bond with my father.
I asked if I could visit him at his BBC office after school, hoping to infiltrate his world and establish firm rights in his domain. My first ambassadorial visit took place when I was about nine. I carefully selected my outfit the night before – smart tasselled loafers, pink purse slung over my shoulder, vanilla lip balm to imitate the polished sheen of his glamorous female colleagues.
Once my mother had left he introduced me to a producer called Anita. She had a glossy blonde bob and soft pastel jumper. She looked like those mums you saw on TV adverts who held up kitchen towels next to gleaming hobs. Anita congratulate
d me on a poem I had written about the Great Plague. ‘Your dad was so proud – it was wonderful!’ she said. I could work with Anita.
We surfed the corridors, the three of us, as I watched my father return respectful nods from newsreaders and presenters like a heavy-weight champion high fiving en route to the ring. His florid language and low tolerance for the basic tasks of everyday life didn’t seem curious here. Everyone thought he was great.
I sat at his typewriter bashing out a letter on BBC notepaper. ‘Dear Rach, I am at Dad’s office, it is FUN!’ It was a cruel tactic, like the Bullseye presenter telling contestants, ‘Look what you could have won.’
My dad had his feet up on his desk and was making a phone call. ‘Hello you old swine, how’s the Hitler doc coming along?’ Younger male producers popped in and asked his advice about documentaries, furiously making notes. He worried that TV journalism was becoming cynical and crass and often talked about ‘dangerous sensationalism. You can’t just pick out the eccentric fruit, you have a responsibility to describe the entire orchard.’ Anita deferred softly as the men’s voices got more animated, and ambitious colleagues plundered his brain for the better word or the game-changing editorial choice. This was his kingdom, and here, sitting alongside him, I realised we could exist in contentment, without reminders of the estate-car-driving dog families.
I loved resting my head on my father’s shoulder as we watched TV in Holly Village, interrogating him about movie stars he had once interviewed. He often told me about Grace Kelly, whom he called ‘the melancholy princess.’ ‘What she gave up,’ he would say, ‘was, in the end, too great a sacrifice for what she gained.’ He delivered this line with the impressive solemnity of a voiceover, refashioning all the Disney princess movies I had ever seen into cautionary tales about anti-feminist life choices.
The fact that my mother was dutifully preparing gammon steak the way he liked it in the kitchen, and had just agreed to change her vote in the general election to suit his beliefs, was an inconvenient truth we both decided to gloss over.
The allegiance I formed with my father could never really compete with my loyalty to the true Northern Star of my life. It was always my sister who governed my universe. She was my safe touchstone, my docking point, the lighthouse that led the way home. When I was crying, or had fallen over at school and grazed my knees, it was her name I called. ‘I want Rach!’ I would wail if a classmate bullied me or a teacher told me off. We fastened to each other, and forged an unshakable connection.
As we sat together on the sofa in Holly Village, watching Scooby Doo cartoons while Treacle hopped up to headbutt our chins, I increasingly felt a glow of something that had always eluded us until now – the attachment of home. But for me there was still one crucial tail-wagging element missing.
I had recently heard our plumber talking to my mum, his hand rummaging in the toilet bowl as he reflected on his marriage problems. ‘I mean, if it was up to me we’d have split up. But she says we have to stay together because of the Alsatian.’
My parents found this slightly questionable logic hilarious and ‘because of the Alsatian’ swiftly entered our family lexicon to refer to absurdly unconvincing excuses. But secretly, I didn’t think it was ridiculous at all. Dogs were non-negotiable glue, the full stop on a life that announced to the world: ‘We are normal, nothing to see here.’ You couldn’t just get on a plane without warning if you had a dog, leaving behind debts. Dogs forced you to stay.
Chapter Three
I was nine years old when I experienced the ache of first love. But our relationship was complicated – it always is when you fall for somebody who is Kennel Club-registered.
Ralph was the golden-haired, exuberant but well-mannered dog of my fantasies. Well-adjusted, entirely lacking in issues, he read rooms shrewdly enough to give you space but expressed infinite gratitude the minute you rattled his lead or suggested cuddle time. He even had the manners to greet guests with a classy, child-appropriate tail wag rather than an awkwardly x-rated genital examination. He smelt of grassy comfort and possessed that quality always attributed to charismatic leaders, of making you feel like the most important person in the room. But he didn’t belong to me. He belonged to Lucy Simpson, the poster girl for the way the others lived. She was in my class at primary school, and I wanted her life.
Lucy wore candy-coloured espadrilles picked up on the annual family holiday to Greece and was always sitting in class, sharpened pencil poised, as I raced in with excuses about flat tyres. At home in the evenings she gently tucked her chair into her desk after completing her spelling exercises before reading an Enid Blyton chapter and then responsibly turning out her lamp. She had her hair trimmed in a practical cut by a friendly local barber rather than a creative visionary at Vidal Sassoon who hissed, ‘Oh God, the children,’ on your entrance.
I would wistfully compare her sensible playground outfits with our clothing, the kind worn by junior Royals on balcony waves. Lucy’s cords with ghostly hemlines reflected the money-conscious strategies of the dog families. My patent shoes and gold-buttoned coats were bought from a shop called Rowe’s of Bond Street, who often sent us stern letters about dishonoured cheques. ‘But JFK Jr wore a Rowe’s coat at his father’s funeral!’ my mother reasoned, when I pleaded to wear Marks & Spencer like Lucy Simpson.
Lucy was the dazzling model pupil at our local school, which nestled between the blue-plaque houses of AE Housman and Charles Dickens. The school had a slightly unorthodox drama teacher who cast us as the singing corpses of sailors in a production of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. ‘I SHOT dead the bloody albatross!’ ‘They say I hanged my MOTHER!’ we sang falteringly, above discordant violins.
But it was the next show, in which we had roles as radiation-stricken nuclear holocaust survivors, that saw the dog-family parents shuffling out in horror. My father dismissed their response as ‘provincial squeamishness’, a missile he often lobbed at people who owned a lawnmower. ‘Wonderfully experimental,’ my mother agreed.
The Simpsons wouldn’t have called a play about a nuclear holocaust ‘wonderfully experimental’. The Simpsons had an estate car. But most of all they had Ralph, who leapt up with Pavlovian reliability to the bay window of their Edwardian semi every day to greet their bank manager father. They had a freezer stacked with Tupperware boxes, and a copy of the Radio Times laid neatly on the coffee table with a red ring drawn around The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. The Simpsons had their lights on timer switches when they went on holiday because ‘my dad believes in “better safe than sorry”,’ Lucy informed me one day as we ascended the beige-carpeted stairs to do something called ‘homework’. Better safe than sorry. To me, Mr Simpson’s gloriously profound maxim had more life-changing power than Martin Luther King’s, ‘The time is always right to do what is right.’
Lucy Simpson was the heroic ring bearer to my covetous Gollum. I sat in my dark lair yearning for the estate car her parents drove and Ralph’s lead hanging on the kitchen hook: my very own ‘precious’ symbols. She accepted our friendship with an uncomplicated cheeriness, happy to be entertained by my noisy stories and flattered by my desire to infiltrate her domestic realm. She shook her head good-naturedly at my extrovert displays, using parentally friendly rebukes like ‘bloody bonkers!’ and ‘that’s a bit crackers!’
Mr Simpson sent postcards when he went away on business trips. They were propped up neatly on the mantelpiece and stuck to a standard theme. ‘Lovely food. Missing you!’ From the front they looked no different to the ones my father occasionally sent from his documentary-making trips. A hulking Edinburgh Castle or an Eiffel Tower. But when you turned my father’s over, things deviated slightly from Mr Simpson’s script.
Dear Em and Rach,
Venice is all your dreams of gracious living in
blindingly lovely circumstances come suddenly true.
But what a dark history of plague and blood-stained
suffering between all the good bits. I guess that’s
logic by building this metropolitan masterpiece on a
god-forsaken marsh. If so, it was worth every lira.
All love, Dad
Occasionally the worlds of the opposing postcards collided when we hung out with the Simpsons en famille. I took these visits as my chance to clarify to my parents the goals they should be working towards, like a life coach using envy as a motivating principle. But my family was a tough crowd, baffled by my obsession with this organised household. Rach was unimpressed by their shiny kitchen gadgets, my father examined their bookshelves critically and my mother always requested an ashtray on arrival and encouraged them to open more wine, polluting their pristine atmosphere with our signature decadence.
A sense of unease descended upon me during these visits. I feared the moment when my father would start talking about capitalism, bringing his intellectual weight into friendly chatter about holidays and school fetes. My mother would elegantly swerve the conversation away from polemics, delving into her box of anecdotes and steering the chat into less perilous terrain. But it was much easier to navigate dog families like the Simpsons as a solo explorer. I learned how to shape-shift and blend in, observing the way they behaved and adopting the vernacular of the children, swapping profanities for ‘absolute wally’ and ‘that’s your hard cheddar.’ I made sure I was the first one up in the mornings, to suggest that for me, an early family breakfast was the most natural thing in the world.