The atmosphere had definitely changed, but subtly at first. The moment of transition was symbolised for Mrs Webber in the spa’s conservatory – a glass attachment to the theatre, depleted by war and the terrible winter but still a gracious and heartwarming place to be as the summer sun streamed in. It was here that Cynthia Webber, strolling through on her own (Simon was at his books) and looking at plant labels and descriptions, was cut by Mrs Phipps and Mrs Forrest. She had seen them coming from the next room and prepared herself (for she was far from unobservant, and had seen how things were going) for a frosty nod or a distant ‘Good morning’. In fact the two ladies, faces set firmly ahead, their steps proceeding to the tea room, ignored her entirely and did not even look away but stared straight through her. Mrs Webber did not enjoy the experience but she joked about it to herself. When that evening she told Simon he said ‘Vicious old cows’ and ‘It’s time we moved on.’ She did not disagree with him.
* * *
It was two mornings after this, at breakfast, that the next change began. Mrs Hocking brought in the post when it was nearly nine and Simon had already gone on a long walk ‘to think things over’ he said, and was heard to say. The Webber package included a bulky, official-looking envelope which Mrs Webber opened. It was addressed to Simon, but she knew what it must be.
‘Oh good,’ she said brightly (she hardly ever spoke now at meals, and never initiated a conversation). ‘It’s Simon’s passport.’
There was immediate silence, and Mrs Forrest got up. She had been feeling guilty about the brutal cutting of her fellow guest, because she was not a vicious woman.
‘Oh, what a good likeness,’ she said, looking at the first page of the stiff blue booklet with the royal arms on the cover.
‘Yes, a friend took it, and we insisted the main thing was the likeness. Travelling in Europe is pretty problematic still, and Simon still isn’t sure where he wants to go. Ah – they’ve got everything right: “Webber, Simon Marius, born 11th March 1928.”’ She looked up at her fellow lodgers. ‘All absolutely correct. Simon will be pleased.’
Mrs Forrest retreated, feeling somehow ashamed. Later, when she knew Cynthia (as she now again called her) had gone out she talked the matter through with Major Catchpole and Miss Rumbold.
‘It’s the fact that it’s a passport.’ she said. ‘A ration book or a driving licence wouldn’t be at all the same. There wouldn’t be a photograph for a start, and they’re easily forged or transferred. But a passport. Everyone knows they don’t make mistakes with those. It’s as clear as clear he is her son.’
‘They’re very careful about passports,’ agreed Miss Rumbold, ‘as they have to be. All those Poles staying on after the war, and all those displaced persons coming from central Europe. The riff-raff of the world wants to come here. The authorities need to be careful, and they are.’
Miss Rumbold’s radicalism, if it ever existed, did not run to showing the hand of friendship to foreigners. She even distrusted the Welsh.
‘And when it comes down to it, the “evidence” was very thin,’ conceded Major Catchpole, who had always exercised a restraining influence. ‘The woman could have had a migraine, and the boy was getting her aspirins.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Forrest. ‘I’ve been very foolish.’
‘Not at all, not at all. But I think on the whole Mrs Phipps would have done better to hold her tongue. But we should have thought that older women with lovers—’
‘Let’s say men friends.’
‘—with men friends half their age and less are not frequent, not in this country. I believe such … liaisons were common in France between the wars, and very probably are still common today. We do things differently here.’
And so opinion swung round. Mrs Forrest was crucial, since she had been the first one Mrs Phipps confided in. Everyone agreed it was a storm in a teacup. Mrs Phipps, however, was wistful about the change and said she was never going to be quite sure.
The change in atmosphere did not alter the decision of Mrs Webber, who had not at all liked the days of ostracism after her weeks of pre-eminence. She went to Mrs Hocking and said they would be leaving the next day, though they had paid up to the end of the week.
‘I have no idea what silly story was put around,’ she told the temporary manager, ‘and I don’t want to know. But I do know that for nearly a week we couldn’t get a civil word out of anyone. I’m not used to such foolishness, and the fact that they’ve had second thoughts does not change my mind one little bit. I’m not used to mixing with people so feeble-minded that they alter with every change of wind. Ah – my ration book—’ and indeed Mrs Hocking was handing it to her with a wistful expression, clearly wondering when next she was going to be able to let the suite. ‘Please don’t think I have anything to complain about with you. You may put any story about you like.’
So the next day, while Simon was stacking the suitcases in the car, the story was going round that Cynthia’s father-in-law, who had never recovered from his son’s death, was very poorly indeed, and they were anxious to see him one more time before …
On their way down towards Derby, where they had booked two single rooms, there was for a time silence in the car.
‘I was not deceived for one moment by the little party waving us fond farewells,’ eventually said Cynthia, knowing Simon was thinking of the same things. ‘One or two of the wavers must have been the ones that started it all off.’
‘Of course they did. I couldn’t stand the atmosphere at the place, whether they were with us or against us.’
‘They were a poor lot,’ agreed Cynthia. ‘Sheep led by donkeys. With hindsight we were bound to find the company unsuitable: narrow people with attitudes stuck in the Victorian age gravitate to little one-horse towns like Pixton.’
‘They certainly could be vicious though,’ said Simon.
‘Ignorance is always vicious. And narrow. I certainly didn’t go through the business of getting rid of your father to be treated by them as a scarlet woman.’
Simon laughed.
‘They never even made up their minds, though – never took a line and stuck to it. One minute we were mother and son, next minute a middle-aged woman and her much younger lover.’
Cynthia put her arms around him and laughed merrily.
‘Typically provincial,’ she said. ‘It never occurred to them that we could be both.’
MOTHER DEAR
Our mother bore six children at a time when large families were rare, and in a small town where they were commented on with pursed lips, or accompanied by a salacious leer. I say ‘my mother bore’ not because we arrived from her womb (though, unlikely though that seemed to us, we did) but because our father played no part in our early lives that we can easily recall: he was always ‘at work’ or ‘down the allotment’, whence came shrivelled greens and carrots, gnarled turnips and potatoes scarred by spade marks. Our mother was our life, and I suppose that, just as a dog on a lead has his owner on a lead as well, we were hers.
She was not, I emphasise, a motherly person; nor, I imagine, did she participate joyfully in the process by which our existences were set in train. She was dour and hard, the sergeant-major of the house. I never remember her embracing me or kissing me, or any of the other five, for she had no favourites. We were her life because she organised us: as soon as we were capable of doing anything around the house we were taught it and then kept at it. Kept at it, in fact, all the hours we were home from school. Teaching these home duties was done by slaps or worse on the bare legs, or cuffs around the head. Threats kept us at our tasks, and the threats were always carried out if our efforts fell short of her expectations in any way. Our hours at school were our times of pleasure. During our hours at home we were worked as hard as any mill child or young chimney sweep in the nineteenth century.
If my mother had been a literary person one could say she had modelled herself on Mrs Joe Gargery. Hair drawn sharply back into a bun, hard features, her ruling us by her feared
hand – certainly she could be said to have brought us up by hand. In fact she never read – not book nor even newspaper, which our father would often doze over. Her joy was in organising, and she spent all her spare time doing that.
Our only pleasure at home was sometimes listening to the wireless. Not while we were working: that would mean our minds were not on the menial tasks she had ordered us to do. But later just before we went to bed, she might put on the Home Service, and we might hear part of a play, the news, or a light concert. I formed my love of operetta then. It enchanted me because everybody seemed so happy. If my mother had not been tone deaf she would have turned it off as a bad influence.
And she would have been wise to do so. It was a bad influence from her point of view. It confirmed for me what I had sensed from school, that there was another way, that other families were not organised into a monstrous regiment of children, that happiness in other families, while not constant, was at least possible.
I said this to Annie, my elder sister.
‘We’re not like other families,’ I said.
‘I know.’
‘They have fun. They have mothers who love them.’
‘I know they do.’
‘What should we do about it?’
‘I don’t know.’
That was not a very satisfactory conversation, but I remember it because it brought the subject out into the open for the first time. Of course we had had conversations – at night before bed, on the way to school – in which we said how much we hated Mother. But this one aired the possibility that something might be done about it. We considered complaining to the social services or the police, but we knew nothing about the former, not even where its offices were, and we thought we might simply be taken ‘into care’, which sounded vaguely threatening, like the devil you don’t know. We occasionally saw a policeman or woman on the beat, but the thought of going up to him or her and complaining that our mother worked us like slaves every hour of the day, every minute we were home, was too daunting to give serious consideration to: he (or she) would probably laugh at us, and ridicule is something children hate. Or if they did see there was a problem, they would most likely call and talk it over with Mother. The consequences didn’t bear thinking about.
‘I don’t see there’s any alternative,’ said Annie one day. ‘We’ll just have to kill her.’
I thought, then nodded, and said nothing more. The idea incubated, took on strange forms, ballooned, but the main thing was, it was there, and the next few weeks saw a great deal of discussion, vague plans.
The plan which Annie and I discussed most often was one in which all of us children had some part in the killing, so that no one of us (we thought) could be convicted of the crime of murder. For example, Mother was to be poisoned, and one child was to procure the poison, another to procure the strong drink it was to be administered in, another to put the poison in the drink, another to lure her to taste it. As a discussion topic it was admirable. We realised quite soon that we could not go into a chemist’s and ask for poison over the counter, let alone one unknown to Western science (something I felt was ideal). We then talked about a break-in at the pharmacy (break-in had a nice sound involving physical action rather than a special skill) but the plan fell through when we started to talk about what it was we were trying to get hold of. We had no idea what was a poison and what was not. We might just choose a drug that would give her diarrhoea, which would be funny but wouldn’t do anything to change the situation.
‘We could push her over a cliff, or out of a high window,’ said Annie. That would have been fine if we had not lived in a small town in Lincolnshire – county of low-lying fens. There was a distinct lack of high-rise buildings as well.
We had got no further than deciding we would say our mother had gone to help her sister in Middlesbrough, who was suffering from an inoperable (we used the word fatal, and had to explain that to the little ones) cancer, when it happened. I say, ‘it happened’ because that’s how it felt. We had, after all the discussions, no plan, and it may have been that it was that that caused the welling up in me of a sense of frustration, of impotence, of a mother-directed rage.
It was about seven o’clock on an autumn evening. Our father had eaten his ‘tea’, and after a snooze had gone down to the British Legion Club, which he always did on Friday nights. He asked me to put his tools away in the garden shed, and told my little brother Martin he could put the piles of weeds that were dotted around the flower beds in the back garden on to the compost heap. Martin was – is – the best of us, the most sensible, the most brain-alive. If he had been older he would either have thought up a plan for Mother’s murder or slapped down our plotting as sheer childish delusions.
It was when he was coming back from the compost heap that it happened. He had filthy hands, and not only that: he had slipped, fallen, and his short trousers were brown with leaf mould. Mother appeared at the kitchen door. Probably she had been looking through the kitchen window, awaiting disaster.
‘Just look at you! Filthy child!’ She grabbed from the window ledge where it always lay a little bundle of twigs with which she always beat our bare legs to relieve her feelings. ‘I’ll teach you to get yourself all over muck.’
She grabbed him to her. He sobbed and worked himself out of her grasp, leaving his pullover in her hands. ‘You just wait, you little monkey,’ she yelled, and started after him.
But she never reached him. I was collecting up Dad’s garden tools and I had just taken from off the path a heavy spade. I was a strong fourteen-year-old – made strong not by athletics or team games but by slavery around the house. I raised the spade and brought it down with all the force at my command on Mother’s head. She fell forward to the ground, then rolled over, her eyes looking vengefully at me. She repeated her last words:
‘You just wait, you little—’
Then she died.
I felt nothing as I looked down on her. Not grief, not guilt, not even exhilaration. Annie as usual chimed in with my reactions. She appeared at the front door and after a moment, seeing the stillness of the body, she said: ‘Go and get a blanket and cover her up.’
I fetched a blanket from the top shelf of the wardrobe in our bedroom. We wrapped her in it and pulled her to a dark corner down the side of the house that had never been a home. Then we talked about what we should do when Dad came home (always, in the days and weeks ahead, we talked about our next move, never looked further into the future).
The result of this discussion was that when Dad came home we told him that we’d had a telegram from Auntie Kath in Middlesbrough, and Mother had gone by train to nurse her through cancer. Our father thought for a bit, and then said ‘Oh aye?’ and settled down to read the front pages of the daily newspaper.
Before he went to bed, he said: ‘It’s funny, your mother never had a good word to say about your Auntie Kath.’
Annie, who was proving a tower of strength, said: ‘But it’s cancer. That makes it different, doesn’t it?’
Our father thought. ‘Aye, ’appen,’ he said.
That night at 2 a.m., in total silence, Annie and I buried our mother in a patch of earth at the bottom of the garden which my father had tried to turn into a vegetable patch but had given up when the soil proved too poor and too often waterlogged. With her we buried a small suitcase which our mother always kept packed with emergency things for if any of us suddenly had to go to hospital. We added two dresses of hers, a cardigan, blouse and skirt, and a great deal of unattractive underwear. The parental bedroom was at the front of the house and Dad slept on, as did the scattered neighbours. By three o’clock Annie and I were in the two undersized beds we called ours in the bedroom we shared.
Next morning Annie cooked for our dad his usual fried breakfast. ‘I’ll have to help with the cooking,’ he said, ‘while your mum’s away.’ He never did cook more than about once a month, but he did pull his weight by doing all the heavy shopping, the bill paying, and his usual gardenin
g, avoiding almost all the costs of vegetables. The rest of the running of the house went like clockwork. It always had, but we did what we’d always done with much less frequency, and with a much lighter heart.
The younger children were a bit of a problem at first. We enjoined on Martin that he was to say nothing to any of them about what he’d seen. The young ones told everyone that Mummie was away, nursing Auntie, and then they forgot about her in the blessedly free and contented atmosphere that was evolving in the house.
The first problem that emerged was what to say about our mother’s absence. Dad didn’t mention her for days after she ‘left’, but as the days stretched to weeks I decided we had to make the first moves. ‘I thought we’d have heard from Mum by now,’ I said one night when the little ones were in bed.
‘Never a great one with her pen or pencil,’ said Father.
‘She could telephone Mrs Cowper down the road,’ I said, mentioning the only household nearby to be on the phone.
‘They were never great friends,’ said Dad. And that was true. Our mother had no female friends, and certainly no male ones either. It was Dad who made the next move.
‘I begin to doubt your mother’s coming home at all,’ he said one day. ‘’Appen she likes being free of us.’
That was a turning point. Henceforth Mother’s return was an ‘if’ rather than a ‘when’. We heard from friends at school that down the British Legion our father had speculated about whether she’d ‘found a new bloke’. We sniggered at the unlikelihood of it, but not while Dad was around. Soon we became a different family unit, one with a dad, an acting mum in Annie, and a cooperating family coping with all the duties of the household. We were a happy home. One of Dad’s ‘sayings’, things he came out with regularly, was ‘I don’t think your Mum knew how to be happy.’ Now we did. Her death had released us.
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