Table of Contents
Dedication
Introduction
My Mother Dreams of Lovelace Watkins
Talking to My Mother on the Intercom
Visit to the Psychotherapist
The Importance of Tea – and Rabbits
The Gorge
Mother
Authors Biogs
Verso Page
Contents
Introduction by Anne Caldwell
My Mother Dreams of Lovelace Watkins by Nell Farrell
Talking to My Mother on the Intercom by River Wolton
Visit to the Psychotherapist by Anne Caldwell
The Importance of Tea – and Rabbits by Char March
The Gorge by Suzanne Batty
Mother by Clare Shaw
Dedication
To my mum, Pat, for saying, when I showed her this piece: I’m not sure if I’m good or bad, but I loved it anyway
To Jenny Wolton, with love and thanks for lessons in rule-breaking and style
Alice Caldwell
To Ma (Joyce Motley) for all our brilliant times together, and for everything she’s taught me
To Niamh and to my mother with gratitude
Introduction
This collection of six stories is a celebration of love. The pieces of writing are like windows on a rambling house, populated by many different mothers and daughters: some you may recognise, some you may find illuminating and new to you. There are acts of rebellion and acts of tenderness. The daughters in this book are bold, sensitive, questioning and often concerned with finding common ground with their mothers or finding a new way of communicating.
What does it mean to be a daughter? How do the relationships with our mothers develop? These are two very complex questions. Louise Guinness, editor of The Vintage Book of Fathers, writes that ‘each generation finds fault with the methods their parents used to bring them up, each generation determines not to make the same mistakes.’ This is true of my own relationship with my mother, but getting older and becoming a mother myself has led to me to discover the values that I share with her.
What links the authors of this book is that we are primarily poets, exploring our lives in prose together for the first time. This is reflected in the luminous language and its sensory richness. Many of the stories explore the body, either our own, our daughters’ or our mothers’ physical selves.
As we grow up, do we turn into our mothers or turn away from them? This book shows that there is no straightforward answer and that the truth is complex. There were tears and laughter as we wrote together and shared our work. We hope you enjoy the results.
Anne Caldwell
My Mother Dreams of Lovelace Watkins
Nell Farrell
You are standing in the kitchen peeling potatoes. If you were making chips I’d know exactly what would happen next. It is one of the few things we do in the same way.
Your hands are different to mine, larger, plumper, every fingernail bitten to its sore, embedded quick. I have tiny hands, am smaller than you altogether, have inherited your own mother’s restless, bustling energy around the house. But in the making of chips, we are as one. We peel thickly, rather than paring and then we slice the potato into rounds. We cut each round along its vertical plane into robust chips, half an inch thick and two to three inches long, depending on the potatoes. Then we soak them in a bowl of cold water.
When the fat in the chip pan is almost smoking, we empty our thick-cut, robust chips onto a clean tea towel and pat them dry. Then we fry them, in an old-fashioned chip pan, with a basket, until they are golden brown and crisp on the outside, fluffy on the inside.
The chips I learned to make by watching you are possibly the most perfect things I ever create. There is nothing else in my life of which I feel so confident and proud; nothing which so unequivocally delights others.
But on this particular occasion you aren’t making chips and I am not learning anything about perfection.
I have just walked in the front door from school and I can see you, along the passageway, in front of the sink. The wallpaper is patterned with avocado green and mustard yellow geometric shapes. I have cut up and sellotaped a leftover roll of it around my school textbooks to protect them.
You have your back to me.
‘What’s Dad having for his tea?’
It’s almost always the first thing I ask on getting home from school. There is a list of comfortable responses:
Steak and chips
Pork ribs
Lentil soup
Sausage and onion
Ham hock and mushy peas
Smoked haddock in milk with a poached egg
Today’s response is: ‘A nice tin of sliced roast beef in gravy with mashed potatoes.’
You continue with your task, finish peeling the potatoes, put two pans of water on to boil. Into one you put the potatoes, with plenty of salt. When the other pan comes to the boil, you lower a large oval tin into it, so that the pre-cooked slices of roast beef immersed in gravy inside can heat through. It is, I suppose, an early 1970s convenience food. There is a picture on the tin of its moist brown contents. You are quiet, focused on your task. A spectator could easily imagine you are preparing your beloved spouse’s favourite meal.
I am in the kitchen watching you. I leave the room and then come back. I go upstairs, try to start my homework, come back down again, pace around. Because there is something we both know. My dad hates sliced roast beef in gravy.
Every time you have cooked it for him it has ended up in the bin. A couple of times he has thrown it at the wall. Sometimes, as he has raged in the background, you have tried to persuade him that he loves sliced roast beef in gravy. You’ve reminded him of the times (entirely invented, or lost in the mists of your unimaginable courtship) when he has eaten and enjoyed it. On other occasions you have been cavalier, telling him you have had no time or (even more incendiary) that he does not give you enough housekeeping to always buy him just what he likes to eat.
You take the tin out of the boiling water and, wrapping one corner in a tea-towel, you open it with the tin-opener. You put some mashed potato on the plate. You spoon out the meat and gravy. You put the plate down in front of my dad.
In the aftermath you act as if something unreasonable and upsetting has occurred. Which, of course it has. But you believe that it has only happened to you.
*
The economics of our household are baroque and patriarchal, modelled on the Vatican perhaps. Money is very short anyway, but there is my dad’s money and there is money for the rest of us. Every Friday morning before leaving for work he writes my mum a cheque for her ‘housekeeping’. When I’m not at school I go with her into Eastwood. We go to the National Westminster Bank – a palace of shiny wooden counters, queues and boredom – and cash the cheque.
Then, with money in her purse, we wander along Eastwood’s main shopping street, calling at the butchers, the bakers, the Co-op and Fine Fare as my mum buys all the food – my dad’s individually prepared ‘Head of the Household’ suppers and the Birds Eye beefburgers, fish fingers and Findus crispy pancakes the other three of us eat. The money often runs out before the end of the week and she borrows from our piggy banks or from my nan.
One year my brother wins some money with a premium bond and he uses it to buy us both shoes. Meanwhile, there is a payment going monthly to Sanders Menswear shop in Eastwood because my dad’s job means he has to wear suits. And there are pound notes going into his pocket to spend at the Football Club bar which is the one place where I think he is happy. One of the way
s my grandparents help us out – in a situation of which they clearly and openly disapprove – is by buying me and my brother clothes. The winter I am fourteen some kind of re-drawing of the lines happens and the purse is clamped shut. It becomes clear that my dad is going to have to buy our coats that winter – and even clearer that the only way I will get a coat is to find one in Sanders Menswear. Thank God for duffel coats.
One Friday, before a bank holiday – one of those times when everything closes down and people have to buy in all their food for the next few days – we have been to Fine Fare and there is a tin of sliced roast beef in gravy at the bottom of my mum’s shopping bag. We have more or less finished. We don’t seem to be going to the butcher’s. I can feel my heart rate increase, my breathing become shallow. My anxiety fills me up, pushes the words out: ‘Are we not going to get some pork or steak or something for Dad’s tea? You know he doesn’t like…’
She ignores me, keeps walking.
*
My mum is the driver in our family. Anywhere we go in a car my mum is at the wheel, driving my grandpa’s Ford Zodiac – or later his Ford Zephyr – beautiful blue cars with dazzlingly lovely names, borrowed for the occasion. Eventually we get our own car – another of the times my grandparents don’t put their hands in their pockets to bail us out. My mum gets a part-time job in an insurance office, above a barber’s shop with a proper red and white stripy pole. She types and does shorthand. I get her to show me her notebook – squiggles and lines and circles; magic writing that I can make no sense of. It is always something boring like Dear Sir, with regard to your letter of the 14th, made beautiful and mysterious by this code she knows. From what she earns, she saves up and buys a second-hand black Morris Minor.
Sometimes on our trips into Eastwood, after the bank and the shops, the car takes a sharp right-hand turn and heads down Victoria Street, the steep terraced row where DH Lawrence was born. But we aren’t making a literary pilgrimage.
We pull into a courtyard and park the car, walk through double doors into a darkened dusty barroom which smells of beer and cigarette ash. A working men’s social club with a betting shop in the courtyard. My daddy’s club my mum says, in her working-class princess way.
My grandpa, Walter Timmins, part-owner of the Victoria Club, is a short fat man; bespectacled with brilliantined hair and a smart three-piece suit, elasticated bangles holding up his shirt sleeves like a bookie in a thirties gangster movie. His father, Eli Timmins, was a miner, but Walter has made a bit of money from various businesses and been helped along the way by a win on the football pools.
This is where my dad works. My clever, handsome dad, who sings Latin hymns in the bath and teaches me verses from ‘The Lady of Shalott’. Who doesn’t like me reading comics or saying Yeah. Who gets angry if we run out of salt or HP Sauce. Who drinks too much. Who has a degree in English and History from Glasgow University and has been a teacher in Scotland. But who doesn’t have a teaching certificate so can’t teach in England. Who is so clever he went to university when he was sixteen but had to have a job as well to help his family support him.
My dad is putting his qualifications and his lightning-quick maths to good use calculating odds and taking bets, in grudging and rebellious servitude to his father-in-law. Sometimes he helps out behind the bar; helps Marion, the landlady, wife of Joe; raven-haired like Snow White in the Disney film, making my mum hiss like the Wicked Queen and rattle her bag of poisoned apples. Your father’s fancy woman. I have absolutely no idea if it’s true, but the jealousy and tension are palpable.
When we leave – out of the gloomy room, back through the double doors, out into the courtyard – it’s like coming out of the cinema after watching a sad film. That same feeling of surprise that it’s still daylight; that same, slight melancholy you can’t shake off.
*
The longest drive my mum and I ever took together was to a convent in Leek, Staffordshire. We were going to visit Sister Jacinta. My mum loved Sister Jacinta. She was not alone in this. We all loved her. Every single child at the Priory Roman Catholic primary school, Hilltop, Eastwood; every mother who ever dropped her children off or helped out in the kitchen or on playground duty; every father who was ever dragged to parents’ evening.
She was that irresistible combination of fun and no-nonsense. She hitched up the skirt of her habit and kicked a ball around the playground. She raced us on Sports Day. She took my brother on at marbles one playtime and showed no mercy, relieving him of every single one – ‘skint’ him – and wouldn’t give them back even when he cried.
She was fresh-faced, sweet and sharp in equal measure. She could teach just about anyone to read. She was the first person I ever saw fill a kettle by its spout – everyone I knew took the lid off. It had never occurred to me that there was another way of doing it. There was something slightly transgressive about it, especially coming from a nun.
When she was moved to the Leek convent there was universal heartbreak. A petition was sent to the Bishop, but to no avail. Her gifts were needed elsewhere. My mum was determined that we would go and visit her. I think Sister Jacinta knew a lot about how unhappy my mum was sometimes. She was one of those people who always got it right; who listened, said the right things, left people wanting more of her.
I don’t remember anything about our visit. I don’t remember if it was a nice convent, if the other nuns were friendly, if they gave us cake. I don’t remember if my mum and I chatted in the car. We both liked to chat but I’m not sure it’s a thing we did much of together. All I remember is that the journey seemed to take forever. It felt like travelling to a different country.
*
It is 1973, a Monday evening. I have the house to myself. The peace is miraculous. I am playing records in the front room. We’ve been here ten years now and the lounge has just been redecorated. I love being in it, just gazing around at how new and shiny everything is – the carpet with its blocky pattern of green and red and gold and orange; the chandelier we bought in Woolworths; the Baxi Bermuda gas fire, all silvery stainless steel; the brown mock leather sofa with wooden arms and, most of all, the new stereo. The old blue Dansette record player now lives up in my bedroom but tonight I am cruising my mum’s records, playing them on the glassy new contraption whose speakers occupy opposite ends of the unit like twins. I do like some of her music – the Beatles, the Walker Brothers.
My mother dreams of Lovelace Watkins. His frilly-shirted, big-voiced, tight-trousered presence is taking over the house. If I don’t take care when walking through the front room I will trip over the glossy, purple-covered double album, Lovelace Watkins Live at the Talk of the Town, lying open on the floor with all the photos facing outwards. My mum plays it non-stop. She is going to see him at the Commodore Ballroom. She talks about him constantly; gets giddy when he’s on the television. A person could very easily become confused about who the teenage girl is in this house.
I am not a fan of Lovelace Watkins – his booming voice, his overblown songs. I am beginning to sense there is a soundtrack to ending up stuck in Eastwood. His music and a lot of the other music my mum likes features on it – Tom Jones, Elvis, the Supremes, the Jackson Five, Stevie Wonder, Ike and Tina Turner.
But something is about to happen.
I pick up one of my mum’s singles. Atlantic label, 1973. Fantastic colours – dark turquoise and orange. Killing Me Softly with His Song by Roberta Flack. Today, for the first time, I turn it over and listen to the B side.
The needle drops, the introduction begins – strings, piano, a slow, sad, lush beat.
And then – a song unlike anything I have ever heard before, a beautiful bruise of a song:
Nobody feels any pain, tonight as I stand inside of the rain.
Everybody knows, Baby’s got new clothes.
Lately I’ve shown my ribbons and my bows
And my problems…
And I take just like a woman
And I make love, just like a woman
And I ache, just like a woman
I break up like a little girl.
I can’t quite work out what’s happening, but it hooks me like a good story should. There is something so mysterious and adult and sexy going on:
The Queen Mary is my friend
I believe I’ll go and see her again
Ain’t nobody has to guess,
That baby won’t be blessed
Till she finds out she’s just like all the rest
With her problems, her amphetamines and her pearls…
There is something I want very badly in this song – a worldliness that smells of somewhere else. I play it over and over. At some point, maybe in lifting the needle to set it down again or maybe even in lifting the record off to check exactly what it’s called, I notice the songwriting credit, a tiny bracketed word off to the left underneath the song title – Dylan.
A few days later I gather up my accumulated babysitting money and head for Woolworths in Eastwood, palace of all things wonderful and exotic to find out more. I buy Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits.
*
When I started at my Catholic Girls’ Grammar school in Nottingham, two bus-rides away from Eastwood, one of the first things I learnt was that I talked funny.
‘Miss Arnold – just listen to how she says singing!’
I quickly learned to moderate my accent; not hugely, just enough to not get laughed at. Since then I have brushed up against Hull, Liverpool and now Sheffield accents, the cross-pollination leaving me with a kind of generic ‘northern’ accent. But my mum has a proper Eastwood accent. It’s almost impossible to imitate. Most people don’t even realise there is one – just listen to all the cod Yorkshire that clatters through any DH Lawrence dramatisation. An Eastwood accent is an unmistakeable sound. It is actually a recognised and ancient dialect – East Midlands English – with its mouth-filling, chewy vowels and its poetic and essential vocabulary, stretching all the way back to when we were part of the ancient kingdom of Mercia. My mum, a big fan of anxiety and drama, has often just had a right tatar and is frequently wittled to death. The back garden is often snided out with ants in the summer, just as Skegness is snided out with people. Children say scraightin’ instead of crying and we have a brilliant phrase for gathering up our last few pennies to pay for something or pulling a meal together out of nothing – scrattin’ up. We pride ourselves on not being nesh or mardy, though stubborn little girls are often manny.
Some Girls' Mothers Page 1