*
Recently my mum said to me: ‘Well, you were more or less never in the house after about the age of fourteen.’
I was classically dumbfounded – my jaw dropped, my mouth gaped. Exchanges like this aren’t uncommon. My mum has a knack of sounding as if she’s been given a different script to everyone else in the play. Eventually I managed to ask her where I was then, since as far as I could recall I was either in my bedroom doing my homework like the good Catholic grammar school girl I was, or refereeing her and my dad.
She shrugged and said vaguely, ‘Well, you just weren’t there…I never felt like I saw you…’
Maybe she is more of a poet than I give her credit for. I think she is remembering and attempting to evoke a feeling of distance between us – which is something I couldn’t argue with. I can see it taking shape, wandering around the empty house that night – despising Lovelace Watkins, falling in love with what I saw as a very different kind of song.
Soul music. Amongst all the many other things it is, it is working-class music par excellence. The things that matter when you aren’t rich or powerful – work, money, dancing, love, sex, food and clothes – all parcelled up with brass and beat and sass; rhyme and rhythm and heartbreak. All that vital uplift and anguish. I wanted none of it. For me as a teenage girl in the 1970s there was a definite split – soul music was sentimental and ‘low-brow’. Dylan was cerebral. It was that crude for me – it was secondary modern versus grammar school. It was factory versus university.
Bob Dylan, schooled in the blues, lover of black music, wouldn’t recognise the dichotomy. Nor would Roberta Flack, raised on Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke but a classically trained pianist, observing no boundaries in her work between jazz, soul and folk. Short on resources though and with a definite sense of how difficult it was all likely to be, hitching my star to the cerebral bandwagon seemed like a way to roll out of Eastwood. Some of the wheels rattled loose along the way, including, mercifully, those fitted by a progressive rock fan boyfriend. But Dylan and me stayed firmly, irrevocably and joyously attached.
*
One of the most important journeys I ever made was unaccompanied. When I was seventeen I packed a couple of bags and trudged up the hill to my grandparents’ house. In the bags were clothes of course, but also and most importantly, all the books I needed to study for my ‘A’ levels. Wuthering Heights, Les Femmes Savantes, Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan; Kafka’s stories, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems, Marguerite Duras’s Moderato Cantabile; all of us taking up residence at 320 Nottingham Road with my nan and grandpa for the duration of my revision and exams.
This was my master-plan for getting the grades I needed to go to university. Our house was not to be trusted at exam times, as I had learned definitively the night before one of my German ‘O’ level papers, when the arguing went on deep into the night. I was making sure I had peace and quiet and nowhere was as peaceful for me as my nan’s house.
Books in foreign languages might be making their first appearance as I unpacked my bags in the upstairs front bedroom, but it was from my nan’s bookcase that I had first taken down Little Women, Jane Eyre, Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales and A Tale of Two Cities. The flyleaf of the Dickens was lovingly inscribed I know of two bright eyes by a man she didn’t marry. If my grandpa was materially aspirational, it was my glamorous ex-barmaid grandma, along with my dad – ironically enough, given their embittered relationship – who showed me that working-class families could love books. As well as stories, she and I would leaf through her two–volume World’s Greatest Paintings, with its glossy full-colour reproductions. Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World and Millais’s Boyhood of Raleigh were her favourites.
When I told her my plan there was no question, no hesitation. When I told my mum and dad no obstacles were put in my way. No one pretended there wasn’t a problem; no one pretended we weren’t a mess.
I moved in. I revised peacefully every evening after school. At ten o’clock every night my grandpa made us both a mug of Ovaltine and I took mine upstairs where I sat safe and quiet in the spare room double bed, reading thrillers by Ngaio Marsh and Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving trilogy until I fell asleep.
I did my ‘A’ levels. I got 3 A’s. I got away.
*
When I left I took two boxes with me. One was a cardboard box full of the food and basic crockery the University information booklet insisted were vital paraphernalia for living in ‘a student house’. The other was a turquoise, plastic-coated box with a carrying handle, a hinged lid and a lock. It contained my record collection. Inside it by then, alongside Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, were other records of his: Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks and Desire. Keeping them company were records by musicians I had learned were massive Dylan fans – Greetings from Asbury Park New Jersey, The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle and Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen, Horses by Patti Smith.
Can’t Buy a Thrill by Steely Dan was in there, borrowed from a really cool girl at school on the strength of my growing confidence in my own musical taste and A Salty Dog by Procol Harum now that I had discovered the delights of second-hand record shops in Nottingham. There was also a collection of the progressive and heavy rock records I listened to with my boyfriend – Yes, Camel, Atomic Rooster, King Crimson, Wishbone Ash, Focus, Lindisfarne, Genesis.
Nothing that had any discernible relationship with my mum’s record collection in the downstairs front room of the house I had just left.
These records somehow gave me an entrée into the bafflingly middle-class world I found myself in. They were looked at, exclaimed over, played and shared around. They gained me enough kudos to survive. What wasn’t shared around was the food in my other box. It took me two days to realise that what was considered ‘food’ in Eastwood literally had no place in this new household.
Around me, young women of my own age or a year or two older, unpacked granary loaves, and bags of Granola. They fried up onions and garlic and green peppers, made wholemeal pizza dough, and quiches. They used pepper that didn’t look like fine white dust. They ate yogurt because they liked it, not because they were on a diet. I watched, astonished, entranced and learned very quickly. My box, containing the three tins of baked beans, three tins of Heinz spaghetti and three tins of Plumrose hot dog sausages that my mum and I had bought together in Fine Fare ‘to last you till you’ve settled in and know where the shops are’ stayed in my locker in the kitchen. I took them home, undisturbed, at the end of my first term.
My collection of Dylan records grew. Each place I lived had a particular album associated with it. That first year in the student house it was Highway 61 Revisited, my vinyl copy of which still bears the stamp John Sheridan Secondhand Books & Records, Anlaby Road, Hull. In the house on Hutt Street, where I moved to in my second year with some of the (by now much less scary) girls from my student house, I would listen to Street Legal over and over in my tiny room overlooking the street.
I fell in love and moved in with a boy whose very posh mother had always refused to let him eat chips. He introduced me to David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen. Our flat echoed to the sounds of Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde which we both adored. When he came with me on my year in France, we had no record player in our tiny studio apartment, but the poster from Dylan’s Live at Budokan album adorns the wall in every photo we took.
*
Many years after leaving Eastwood, at some point in the early 1990s, I shared an office with a dancer who needed to have music playing while she worked. I was on my way to the kitchen to make us a cup of tea, when the sheer gorgeousness of a voice and a song stopped me halfway across the floor. My heart was pounding. It was if he’d sung that opening line directly to me. I swivelled on my heels: ‘Who is this?’
It was Otis Redding singing ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)’.
And that was the point at which I picked up and began to unravel that thread hanging just outside my fi
eld of vision almost all my life. I became a woman who loved soul music; which in time came to feel like a rapprochement with my mum. Something we had in common that I could celebrate and thank her for. Soul music and perfect chips. And two of the first CDs I bought when starting to build up a collection of soul records came from Woolworths in Eastwood.
*
One evening a few weeks ago, I found myself, alone in the house, sitting at my dining room table, crying; sobbing with my head in my hands. The image of myself at fourteen in my mum’s sitting room, listening to ‘Just Like a Woman’ had been in my head and was suddenly overwhelming; like opening up a tomb and breathing in the sad air preserved there.
In that memory I am centre stage in the quiet empty house in a way I never was when anyone else was there.
I found myself wondering what I would have been wearing. I couldn’t immediately remember, couldn’t get a hold on what I would have changed into after school. But what did come to mind in trying to locate an outfit for that evening was fourteen…aah…I would have been thin.
Just as I can’t ever remember my dad not drinking, I can’t remember my mum not being on a diet. I had been dieting too and lost a stone in weight. I was doing much better on my diet than my mum was. I was much, much more disciplined. Not an alarmingly low weight really but my periods had stopped.
So the body moving about the empty quiet room is thinner than it healthily ought to be. Maybe I am wearing my long skirt, dark blue cotton patterned with tiny white flowers; and my long-sleeved pale blue embroidered t-shirt underneath my white, puff-sleeved cheesecloth smock; everything topped off with several strings of love beads. That would seem right somehow for Roberta Flack opening her mouth to sing me Dylan’s beautiful words. It would make it abundantly clear how very far away I am from being any kind of soul girl. I am a hippy chick. I am not my mother’s daughter. Lovelace Watkins is tacky and dumb. I am a brainy, thin girl.
Pat can eat one potato more than a pig.
This is what my dad says when he sees her eating. I don’t ever want anyone to say that to me.
So I move as far across to the other side of the room from soul music and my mum as I can. And in the process I forget things too, of course, and make my story less complex and less true. I forget how much I loved the Supremes and Diana Ross and Jackson Five records in my mum’s collection. Forget that I played ‘Baby Love’, ‘Floy Joy’, ‘Love Child’, ‘Touch Me in the Morning’ and ‘I’m Still Waiting’ on the Dansette in my bedroom.
I put Roberta and ‘Just Like a Woman’ on my iPod and listened really carefully again to the words.
Nobody feels any pain
The house I grew up in was full of anger and sadness and disappointment.
I remember two cardboard boxes at the back of my mum’s wardrobe. One held her wedding photos, not a single one of which was displayed anywhere in our house or in my grandparents’ house. There she is in her blue dress, one hand holding down her veil in the late July wind, seven months before I was born; walking the planks laid over building work into the church porch. And in the other box was her ‘conversion kit’ – the little booklets given to her by the priest, one to explain each of the seven sacraments. I asked her once why she never did become a Catholic, given that she must have had to promise to convert in order to marry my dad. ‘I never felt good enough,’ she said.
I remember the little glass animals arranged across her chest of drawers in the bedroom, glossy and brightly coloured like boiled sweets. She must have been collecting them since she was a little girl. I loved them, loved rearranging them, making up stories about them – a pig, a panda, an ostrich, a stork, a fish. But there was one, a tiny blue and yellow bird that always made me feel sad and incredibly protective.
Nobody has to guess
Baby can’t be blessed
Till she sees finally she’s just like all the rest
With her problems, her amphetamines and her pearls
…She aches just like a woman
And she breaks just like a little girl
I remember her sitting on the settee one evening almost comatose with misery after a big row with my dad. She couldn’t speak or move or even cry any more. She just sat there, staring into space and then she fell asleep.
Oh I must end it
Can’t you see it’s time for us to quit
If we meet again, introduced as friends
Please don’t let on that you knew me when
I was hungry and it was your world
She fed me and she shaped me – at least as much as I have deliberately and consciously shaped myself. I start to see and accept all the ways we are alike. I know she is the source of my chattiness, my enthusiasm, the central importance of pop music in my life. If I had been brought up just by my dad, as I sometimes wished, listening to them shouting at each other, trying to come up with some kind of solution, I would probably still have been a poet but I wouldn’t have had such a brilliant record collection.
Talking to My Mother on the Intercom
River Wolton
Her body is completely different from my mother’s. She has plump freckled arms, a generous lap. She wears a gold wrist-watch that’s warm and smooth on the side next to her skin. She smiles and laughs. She sings. She’s always been here.
She gets down onto the floor to play, even though it hurts her knees. She pours out red and blue paint for me to splash onto paper. When my nose runs, she pulls out her hankie,
Let’s have a big blow. One. Two. Three.
When it’s hair-washing time I lie down on the draining board and tip my head back into the sink. She runs the water hot and cold until it’s just right, and scoops it over my scalp, keeping the shampoo bubbles out of my eyes. She rubs my dripping head in a towel and combs out my hair.
Ow! Ow! Ow!
It’s a bird’s nest! What have you got in there?
She can tell when I’m getting tired. I lift my arms up and she pulls everything over my head. Jumper. Shirt. Vest.
Skin a rabbit! We shout.
She lifts me and Adam into the bath. When I’m ready to get out I stand up in the water as it gurgles down the plughole. She wraps a big towel around me while my teeth start to chatter.
Rub-a-dub-dub. Three men in a tub.
She’s always telling us that we’re too skinny, that we need feeding up.
I know that she comes from Kent. She has a mother, a father, a day off. She shouldn’t eat too many sweets. Her name is Sally.
I don’t realise that she’s paid to look after me. To wake in the night if I wake. To dilute my morning juice, to pour milk onto my Weetabix, to remind me to put on a coat.
When we go out to the park she wears a blue uniform. Adam sits in the big white pram. When I get tired I sit beside him and she pushes us up the hills.
You two are so heavy, you must’ve grown.
At the playground I run to the swings.
Point your feet out, then tuck them back under.
Higher and higher. Into the gasping sky. Slowing down is difficult. The seat wobbles, the chains jangle. I want to get off. The toe of my shoe drags along the ground. It catches. I let go, fall, reach for the earth but I’m still moving. The gravel tears into my skin. My hands are scored with lines of blood that burn and itch. I shake them and blow on them to try and stop the hurt.
Ohdearohdear, what have we done?
She brushes the grit from my hands and knees, washes them in metallic water from the playground tap. Will the skin grow back? Will she get into trouble?
Children will be children, Mrs Wolton.
She’s found the best defence against my mother’s perfectionism. She is relentlessly cheerful.
*
In the first year of my life my mother builds a house. In her late thirties, recently qualified as an architect, she finds a four-storey Georgian terrace to renovate and, pregnant with my brother, climbs ladders and directs the sub-contractors. She bats away the anxieties of my father, twenty-five yea
rs her senior. She transforms the house into an immaculate showcase of sixties’ design: perspex and open-plan. Three bathrooms and two additional loos with sliding doors, slate counters and bright orange tiles. Her office is beside her bedroom so she can work while we’re at home. There’s a lift for groceries, an industrial vacuum-cleaner system, a dishwasher, an intercom connecting every floor. The staircase to the nursery floor is made from open slats of highly polished cedar. Charging down in our socks, we frequently slip, tumbling into the wall. A nanny or au pair lives in the attic. After Sally, there’s Pening from the Philippines, Christina from Austria, Carol from Detroit. The house is my mother’s exoskeleton. We hide under the beds when she yells at the cleaning lady for jamming the waste disposal unit or shouts at my friend Sophie for breaking a lamp. For a big house, there are few hiding places.
Some Girls' Mothers Page 2