It must have been clear to everyone she met, as it was to me, that Granny had very particular reasons for being born, and for every link in the chain of decisions that followed on from there. Of course I can’t reconstruct her beginnings. The place Granny chose to be born is three wombs distant from me, and each womb is a wall of metaphysical brick which no mundane thought can penetrate. Each birth is an absolute new beginning (on the level of the organism, if not the cosmos). That’s the whole beauty and virtue of the system.
Granny was always a vivid figure to me, though not in the oppressive way that she was to Mum. I stood up to her sometimes. I knew no better.
In superficial terms, Mum made a very odd choice of womb. In a way she never managed to get free of the womb she had chosen. She was like the baby bird that can’t peck its way out of the egg.
I remember Granny squashing Mum flat one day just by re-hanging the washing while she was out. Granny went out into the garden and calmly unpegged every item, putting it back up the way it should be, without argument or mercy. Mum came and told me about it. She almost cried.
For one of my bed birthdays Granny gave me a doll. I’d said I wanted one, and of course what I wanted was a doll in a pretty dress, with lovely long hair and eyes that opened and shut, framed by long dark lashes. At the time this was not what boys were supposed to want, and my birthday wish was greeted with a certain amount of discomfort.
Granny made herself busy, and fulfilled my wish in a way that was more than half a thwarting. I got my doll, but it wasn’t at all what I had in mind. It was a little soldier in a tartan kilt. Thinking about it now, I realise that this was an unusual plaything for the period, perhaps even a specially ordered object, certainly not something that you would find on a shelf in the newsagents. Granny had gone to the top man, or to some toymakers par excellence, to secure what she wanted me to want.
I sort of liked it. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t cuddle it very much. I went through the motions, rather. No one had the vision to give me the ordinary thing that I wanted, without substituting their own version of what I should have asked for. It’s funny, really, that family members should stamp on the only faint manifestation of interest in the female body I ever had. Question of bad timing, I suppose.
What I wanted was a female doll I would call Mandy. Mandy would wet the bed. She would share my shame over that lonely malady, over which I cried so often. The boy doll didn’t do that. Dolls of the period were rather unstimulating in general. I also wanted my doll to do a tuppenny, and I wanted to watch her do it. I was ahead of my time. The market wasn’t ready for defæcating dollies.
Educational dud
Another reason, the most secret reason, for wanting Mandy instead of Hamish was to get a chance to see the hole where a man put his taily. The boy doll, being tailyless, having hardly so much as a bump beneath his kilt, was an utter dud from the educational point of view.
Granny’s manner with me in conversation was formal but not condescending. ‘Laura always suffered from the fidgets,’ she said. ‘I’m glad to see that you are different.’ Laura was Mum, and I wasn’t different at all, I liked nothing better than a good fidget, but it seemed a bit of a waste when there was someone in the room.
Talking to Granny was very different from talking to Mum. It may have been true that I could wrap Mum round my little finger, but Granny was not to be moulded, by me or by anyone else. She lived by her rules, and expected everyone else to abide by them too.
At home she kept bees and grew strawberries. I said that I loved strawberries, quite innocently, with no idea that I was asking for trouble. ‘John,’ Granny said, ‘you should love your parents, but you can only like your food.’
I was enjoying our conversation, and decided I’d have a go at getting round Granny. ‘Granny?’ I asked. ‘Can you like food lots and lots?’
She hesitated. ‘Well,’ she said, drawing the word out to three times its normal length. ‘I suppose one could.’
‘But if you can like strawberries lots and lots, it’s almost the same as loving them, isn’t it?’
‘Almost. But not quite – and remember, a miss is as good as a mile.’ This was one of the most serviceable proverbs in the adult armoury. Granny wasn’t going to any great trouble to keep me in line.
‘But if it’s almost the same as loving it, why can’t you just say you love it?’ This was where I played my little trump card. ‘You always say don’t ever waste anything, and I’m only trying to do what you say. I’m being careful with words. Look! “I-like-straw-be-reez-lots-and-lots.” That’s wasteful compared to saying, “I love straw’bries.”’
There was some shameless cheating going on here. To make my case stronger I dragged an extra syllable out of ‘strawberry’ in the wasteful example and contracted it back to two in the economical one. Eight syllables as against four. Surely I had her on the run?
It’s true that she was very much taken aback. But then she said, ‘Rules are rules. There are lines that need to be drawn.’ When I asked, ‘Why?’ she snapped back, ‘They just must.’ In fact the rules had changed. It was no longer legitimate to argue back, no longer a good thing to stick to your guns and use logic. Now the game had to stop, just when I was starting to enjoy it. For form’s sake I protested, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to dodge the strongest rebuff available to the adult brain and tongue: ‘You just can’t, and that’s an end of it!’ Logic was out of the window, logic had its back to the wall and so did I.
Even so, I admired adults like Granny for their ability to impose arbitrary limits, to say ‘so far and no further’ without having to give a reason. I decided to stop being a child as soon as possible, so that I could do the same, being reasonable when it suited me and jamming on the brakes when it didn’t.
I’m cheating even now, as much as I did then when I squashed and stretched ‘strawberries’ to suit the case I was making. When I had the argument about syllables with Granny, I didn’t actually know the word ‘syllable’. Miss Collins hadn’t got to them yet. Instead I made do with the term ‘word-bits’.
I had asked Mum what the right name was for word-bits, but she said words were made up of letters. That was all there was to it. I said there must be another word. For instance, I explained, Mum has one wordbit, Granny has two and cauliflower four. The number of letters in a word was something different.
Mum couldn’t think of the word. Her education had been extremely patchy, and her younger brother – Roy – was the one who had been designated as clever. Mum would never be able to earn Granny’s respect by using her brain, and I think she just stopped trying. Now she became flustered at her inability to retrieve the desired term. Perhaps I should have noticed with sorrow that she didn’t feel able to hold her own mentally with a five-year-old boy, but I was too frustrated by not getting an answer to my question.
Any fool can mind a child
The way my mother had been brought up by Granny could just as accurately be described as a keeping down. When Mum was little, Granny hired domestic help, at a time she could hardly afford it. There was a curious patch of no-money in the family history. Mum had coincided with it. Some nights Granny would crawl upstairs to bed on her hands and knees, not just because the house was old and the stairs were steep, but because she had starved herself to feed everyone else, and she was too dizzy to stand up. Only much later did Mum realise there was something perverse about Granny’s domestic arrangements, and when she did it really wounded her. Bad enough to be raised by a father who barely seemed able to see her, having eyes only for her younger brother. It was worse that her mother paid someone to come in and look after the children, freeing Granny herself to concentrate on the more important business of cleaning the house. Mum grew up in a household where there might just as well have been a motto in cross-stitch over the fireplace, reading HOUSEWORK IS A SERIOUS ENTERPRISE, and a companion piece on the opposite wall declaring ANY FOOL CAN MIND A CHILD.
Dad must have been away at the time of ‘word-b
its’, but when he came back he told me the word I was looking for was ‘syllable’. It was great to have it confirmed that words had bits, and the bits had names. Proper names. And ‘syllable’ itself had three syllables, which was an extra pleasure for some reason.
Dad and Granny had a strange sort of relationship, a pact of mutual invisibility. For the most part they just walked past each other. They didn’t approve of each other, but they couldn’t seem to be bothered, either of them, to hide the fact or else to spell it out.
Granny cast a strange spell over the household, magnetising assent without lowering herself to ask for it. She didn’t hold with drinks at mealtimes. By drinks I mean ‘fluids’, she wasn’t talking specifically about alcohol. Sherry before a meal was permitted, as long as it was dry and not sweet. Granny’s was a theory about digestion: don’t dilute the gastric juices. Let them do their work. So when she came to stay everyone meekly went without.
Granny rarely cooked, but when she did it was a bit of a performance. I remember one evening when she made scrambled egg. There was a definite overtone of masterclass, despite the humbleness of the dish, and spectators seemed to be welcome.
I imagine Granny made sure that her visits coincided with the times that Dad wasn’t there, but this was one occasion when they overlapped. I have no idea how the sleeping arrangements were worked out, in that small house. Only one possibility seems thinkable, either practically or in psychological terms, and that would have been for Mum and Dad to hang by their heels from the rafters like roosting bats, while Granny took possession of the marital bed.
I know Dad and Granny were both there because I was allowed to witness the ceremony (almost the sacrament) of scrambling, and my expedition to the kitchen took a lot of planning. First Dad moved the armchair from my room to a spot in the kitchen with a suitable view. Then Mum carried me. It wasn’t a long trip, but had its hazards even so. Dad was much the stronger, of course, but he hadn’t had much practice and he lacked the necessary sense of my vulnerability. I was so immobile that I had become a little statue of myself, though I was as sensitised to pain as a violin strung with stretched filaments of nerve instead of catgut. It wasn’t just that banging my feet against the doorframe would have me jangling with agony. Even the fear of an impact would set off the same detonation in my joints. I trusted Mum to make the transfer, and she didn’t let me down.
Mum’s carrying was reliable but her lap wasn’t a suitable place for me to sit. It was too bony. Not that I really sat – my posture was closer to leaning, but even with the padding of a cushion Mum’s lap offered no comfort. That was where Dad excelled. Of course I was magnetised to his lap in any case, but I think this really was a medical necessity rather than a preference. Mum padded Dad’s lap with a single strategic cushion and then I could lean there perfectly happy while Granny got to work.
Officially Peter had recently grown out of his high chair, but on this special occasion he was wedged back into it, so that he had a sort of tennis umpire’s vantage-point.
I wouldn’t have thought there was a special implement needed for scrambling eggs, but apparently there was. ‘Don’t you have a spirtle, Laura?’ asked Granny. She made it sound like something absolutely basic, like a cooker or a bath. A spirtle turned out to be a spoon without a blade – no more than a rounded stick – used in Scotland for the proper agitation of porridge. Granny made do with a wooden spoon held upside down, so that what entered the egg mixture was indeed nothing more than a round stick, a cooking dowel.
Glossy suspension
Granny had laid the table before she started (no drinking glasses of course, our internal juices must be at their keenest), which gave us the impression that eating was imminent, but there has never been anything less like fast food than that pan of scrambled eggs. She set the flame on the stove at its lowest, and stirred indefatigably. Nothing seemed to happen, and it kept on not happening for a very long time. No curds were forming at all, as far as I could see from my perch, in the glossy suspension she stirred so constantly. Her activity seemed designed in fact to protect the contents of the pan from any changes that might be brought about by cooking. Yet the long-delayed transformation of the texture must have happened all at once, spreading in a yellow instant from a million specks of ovonucleation. Suddenly the eggs were scrambled, and yet scrambled seemed too casual a word. Granny took the pan off the heat, and ground pepper onto a saucer, then tipped it into the pan. I was relieved that we had a pepper-mill if not a spirtle, since she regarded that as essential – almost as if there was no point cooking eggs without it. Dad himself was a pepper mill fiend who ground thick specks densely over everything. His plate at mealtimes had the look of something unearthed at Pompeii.
I realise now just how rare an item was the table-top totem of a pepper-mill in a ’fifties kitchen or dining room. Mum behaved as if ours was a loaded weapon, never so much as touching it if she had the choice. Granny treated ours with grudging respect – no doubt hers was an heirloom that lived in a monogrammed case on a bed of velvet, like the pistol which it must have resembled in Mum’s mind.
It can’t have been easy for Dad and Granny to ignore this node of affinity in the matter of their shared addiction to the dried berries of Piper nigrum, but they rose to the challenge.
I was puzzled that the pepper had to be ground onto a saucer and only then scattered on food. When I asked Granny why this was, she explained that over time the steam rising from hot food would corrode the mechanism, as if it was something everyone should know from an early age. It was high time I learned.
The moistly solid savoury cream she now spooned reverently onto plates was barely palpable to the tongue. It melted there. It was barely particulate. We ate it in wondering silence. Part of Granny’s success was to have made us wait so long that she led us to a contemplative state on the far side of hunger. It was as if we’d been starved to death and then brought back from the grave for a light meal.
For once Dad ate what was put in front of him without taking his own turn with the pepper grinder. It occurs to me now that he didn’t like spicy foods or strong flavours. He liked roast meat – the ritual joint that needed a family to justify it – accompanied by potatoes and runner beans, the only green vegetable whose claims to edibility he accepted, and served with redcurrant jelly, a condiment he honoured with its own acronym (‘pass the RCJ, will you, m’dear?’). Really what Dad liked was bland food that he could grind pepper over until it almost disappeared. His pepper habit wasn’t to do with taste, it was to do with showing the food (and the cook) who was boss. Granny’s scrambled eggs, though, he ate without insisting on the usual black top-dressing.
In the kitchen Dad was essentially helpless. According to Mum, he couldn’t even boil an egg. The only time he had tried it he boiled it in milk, thinking that was how you would make it turn white inside. I wonder, though, if he wasn’t just making a point. He had more than enough scientific knowledge to avoid such a mistake, but there were other factors involved. It was almost a matter of principle in those days for men to be as incompetent in the kitchen as they were supposed to be competent everywhere else. And perhaps Mum was making the same sort of general statement about men and women, and their proper spheres of competence, when she so consistently fumbled the shaking-out of her match flame – she who, with her nurse’s training, could flick the recalcitrant mercury back to the bottom of a thermometer with two brisk movements of her wrist.
Family trigonometry
I suppose Mum’s ultimate priority, if she had been able to formulate it, would have been to set me against Granny. Granny meant money, though she also meant somehow being above money, and Mum had conflicting feelings on these important topics. Her ideal solution would be to set me against Granny at a mathematically precise angle: just enough to send the message that we couldn’t be bought, but not enough for us actually to be written out of The Will. There was some vengeful family trigonometry Mum would have liked to get exactly right, but she wasn’t quite con
fident enough to make the shot.
In the meantime she was short of allies, and the best one would certainly have been Dad – if she hadn’t been running her own campaign against him. She kept on asking me which of them I loved more. I didn’t know the word ‘comparison’, and hadn’t yet picked up the skill of refusing to answer a question. The best I could do was to say, an orange is a norange (I loved ‘noranges’, the word more than the fruit) and an apple is a napple. The rules that govern ‘a’ and ‘an’ were easy to learn – I picked them up from Granny. Oranges used to be noranges, apples used to be napples, until the ‘n’ popped across the gap and never came back.
Oranges were oranges and apples were apples, and how could you say which was better? Better didn’t come into it. I loved Mummy with all my heart and I loved Daddy with all my heart, and when I said ‘Mum’ or ‘Mummy’ I always inwardly intoned, ‘The best Mummy in the world.’ Wasn’t that enough for her?
It was not. She wanted a definite answer, one way or the other. Day after day she worked on me. I was to take sides. There must be schism. She said I should think it over, and not forget all the things she had done, the things she was still doing for me. Dad was away most of the time – I should remember that when I gave my answer. Then she would leave my bedroom with her head held high, leaving me to sadness and guilt. I was not to be allowed to love in peace.
Later Mum would make an entrance and come over to ‘hug’ me, being careful to let me feel mostly her aura rather than her body. She would have put on fresh scent while she was out of the room. I loved Intimate, which Dad had been trained to buy her for birthdays, not anticipating that it would be used as an instrument of brain-washing against him. I would reel from the beauty of the smell. Then while she had me spellbound she would drip the words ‘Who do you really love most, me or Daddy?’ into my ears and I’d rouse myself out of my trance to say, ‘The same!’
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