Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  The naughty child knew that if he could just endure the lecture, stand still, wipe the smirk off his face, look abashed, even squeeze out a tear, then the raging parent would fall prey to exasperation soon enough. A mournful walk across the garden, head down, and then as soon as you were safely round the bamboos, run! As long as my brother didn’t seek retribution, the matter was forgotten, the woods closed around again, and it was straight back to the camp for a few moments kicking dirt while the shame evaporated and someone suggested something else, like ‘an explore’.

  The barn has gone. The piggeries have gone. There is a new housing estate where ‘the staff’ lived. Sheltered by the nursing home, some of the huge firs have survived, but the whole place looks suburban and containable now. What had seemed a continent was little more than an extended back garden, even then, though we still managed to get lost easily enough.

  Once, somebody had been given a tent for her birthday, and this warranted a proper trip. We took sandwiches. My mother probably helped make them: Marmite, that black line of salt on the smear of butter, or sandwich spread, a vinegary dice of vegetables in mayonnaise, or Shipham’s fish paste — in several different colours but one basic fishy flavour, out of unscrapable jars (you couldn’t get the bit out from under the shoulder) with the green screw tops and the pink plastic sealing ring that needed plunking open. When we were all packed up and laden with bags for our ‘expedition’, she probably waved us goodbye, imagining, as any mother might, that we would come back in a few minutes to borrow the kitchen table and turn it into a boat. But we trudged off, dragging some really tiny ones along with us, out beyond the barn in the woods, beyond the piggery, up the hill on the other side where the sprouts grew, past ‘Aunty Edith’s’ house, with the goldfish in the front garden and the budgie in the kitchen, and off through the fields, out on to the heath that crowned the downland area. Here we pitched camp for the night.

  The weather changed. The sky grew cloudy There was a considerable argument in favour of going back, but, logically, that was quite impossible. First, the youngest children wouldn’t walk and seemed to have given themselves over to lying on their backs and crying. Secondly, my sister had put on her Wellingtons and disturbed a bumble bee, which had stung her. And thirdly, it was now quite dark and we had no idea where ‘home’ was. The solution, forcefully outlined by my brother, was to sit in the tent, shut up crying all the time and wait until morning, morning being but a few moments away, since it was already night. In the meantime a delegation was sent across to knock on the door of a nearby farm cottage and beg, as travellers did, for bread and water. The owner of the cottage was naturally startled to open his door to two eight-year-old children ‘just staying the night’ across the field.

  We were equally surprised about half an hour later to see a phalanx of parents pounding up the hill, waving sticks like a village mob in a vampire film. It is an image as vivid in my memory as the opening credits of Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men. The dark shapes of the adults and the flashes of their torches, bobbing towards us, against the clouds of a late-summer night. As they approached, the entire tent burst into tears. And then, instead of the expected wrath, they scooped us up and hugged us. How can that image sit so fixed in my consciousness? It is utterly fuzzy at the edges —no real ‘before’ or ‘afterwards’, but like a Mivvi bar, ever more concentrated at the centre, frozen into a gooey sweet jam of pure recollected emotion.

  2. Weston-super-Mare

  My mother was eighty on a Sunday in 2004. It was a convenient day. We could organize a celebration at my house in Suffolk. About forty people had been invited. They were mainly old and respectable and many seemed peculiarly anxious to remind me that they had seen me last at my mother’s seventieth birthday My sister’s children were all, I noticed, suddenly quite large. My son was nineteen. Was he? I had renovated these barns. I had moved into them. There had been television programmes. We had taken holidays. But the headlong rush must have stopped somewhere. ‘Ten years ago.

  If we noticed we were getting older on a daily basis we would do nothing but squat in the dust and fret.

  ‘It’s mainly a state of mind, a girl once told me. ‘You know, there are some societies where people don’t age at all, because they eat the right things.’

  ‘Really? I find that hard to believe.’

  ‘Yes, their hair doesn’t go grey either. They just stay with black hair, because they are in tune with their environment and they all live to the age of over a hundred.’

  And this was a nurse talking. She seemed happily entranced by what was, by anybody’s experience, preposterous twaddle.

  ‘Look at me. I am grey I am old,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘But that’s because you have actually allowed yourself to age.’

  I nodded. I was only talking to her in the first place because she was a sexy, smiley nursey. And she must have been in her early twenties. Was she? I couldn’t really tell any more. The nineteen-year-old peering out of my flaccid fifty-year-old body didn’t want to.

  I got no reassurance from all the game old biddies at all. Most of them had lost their husbands, or the ones still trailing along dropped hints about how happy they were to have survived their scare, or took me aside, like the old GP and family friend, who wanted to seriously tell me how he had only just survived the same thing that carried my father off — prostate cancer. He wanted me to make sure that I was ready for it, to ensure that I got all the tests, because the cancer was genetic and I should be taking the greatest care now.

  Now what? Now I was getting old, he meant. Which test did he mean? Would my doctor do this thing? Could I ask? But I was whisked away to serve up some meringue.

  How could all these old men face their passage from the world with such equanimity! ‘Gosh! That’s great, I’ve got another five years at least.’ Five years! My God, didn’t they understand, the last ten years had passed in an out-of-focus whiz? My mother was eighty.

  It is quite difficult to write about your mum. I can’t be judgemental. I was, still am, a Mummy’s boy If I look at the few photographs that seem to survive from my early childhood then there she is — young, beautiful, with handsome Welsh features and long black hair, usually tied in a bun. (A catch for my dad, I should think.) But I also see what she is now: trusting, enthusiastic, loving, laughing, simple — good.

  There is one Madonna-like, black-and-white snap of her, cradling my sister, where she gazes at her baby with such intensity. It can be no surprise that she submerged herself and her life in her family My feelings for her now are some sort of refined version of the great blob of emotion that I felt for her then: a blob because it has no definition. I only know that at a young age I hated to be separated from her. To pick out moments from that blob is impossible. There are only memory snapshots, like the horror when she cut off her long hair. (My father was mortified, and we children were no help. Like all under-tens we were as conservative as the Pope.) Her girlish enthusiasm, driving up the hill to Singleton one summer day, with the car full of all of us, and suddenly skittish, squealing at the little Morris as it laboured up the last of the steep bit through the beeches, banging the wheel, ‘Come on, come on, you can do it, you can do it!’ Or the silliness of her yodelling ‘coooee!’ when she walked into somebody’s unlocked house, a tone which even we knew she had picked up from her new posh friends. But how can I forget my mother coming in to say goodnight on a summer night? Perhaps it was one of those annoying evenings when we had to go to bed ages before it got dark and they were ‘going out’. The rustle of her silky dress and the waft of scent when she leaned down to kiss me, and later waking in the black, as the headlights flashed across the ceiling and I knew they were home, and making some noise so that maybe she would come in and whisper about going to sleep now.

  My mother became severely ill when I was six. This was a rarity. You weren’t allowed to properly become ill in our family ‘Disturbing the doctor’ was a sin. Any attempted days off school resulted in
a thermometer bunged in your mouth and an expert finger probing underneath the chin for swollen glands. The only suffering ever experienced was apparently by the hard-working medical staff (Ever since I have apologetically claimed to be ‘perfectly all right, Doctor’, while exaggeratedly feigning fatal symptoms.) This applied to everybody except my father. Ill, he staged a performance worthy of a seamstress in an Italian opera, with a strictly enforced silence and tinkling upstairs bells.

  But if the doctor did come out, then we were suddenly encompassed by the fraternity. We got a glimpse of my father’s real world. The doctors openly banded together to discuss our symptoms and their diagnoses.

  Years later, after I had passed beyond the green baize door, my wife developed complications in labour and I found out what it was like to be outside the brotherhood. Then nurses came and went, machines were fixed up, housemen were summoned and I was pushed to one side, a useless and unacknowledged passenger. I wanted to stand and say, ‘Look, you don’t understand. My father was a consultant. I can be included. I want to be talked to in measured tones and serious semi-whispers. I want to stand and nod at the foot of the bed. I want all the adult confidentiality of the initiated. I can take it. I am from a medical background. You can’t just bustle past me as if I were some fractious child.’

  I was somewhat too young to be consulted on the kidney problems that my mother suffered. She had to go to hospital in London. My brother was shipped out to stay with my maternal grandmother in South Wales, and my sister and I got to go to Battersea funfair. I can remember the stalls in the half-light of the coloured bulbs, and one in particular that recurs in dreams still: a basin of water covered with small, floating red and blue miniature beach balls. Each had a number. I was given a net and had to fish one out to see if I had a prize. Why that memory should stick I have no idea. I didn’t win anything.

  It is a matter of family record that my brother went away a normally sized little boy and came back from Granny and Grandpa’s fat. (They were so called to distinguish them from ‘Nain’, my father’s mother, whose origins were in North Wales and who thus merited the full Welsh catalogue.) They owned a greengrocer’s in Ferndale, near the top of the Rhondda valley, and William was allowed to roam the shop.

  Evan had been a miner. His father, Grandpa Pegum, came from Pegum, and his real name was Griffith Jones. ‘I was a Jones before I was married’ is one of the catch phrases of my mother’s routine. He and Evan ran a successful tobacconist’s in Bargoed, and as I write that I can see Grandpa’s wedge-shaped, arthritic hands at the end of his life, the blue fingers stained with yellow. But they lost the shop in an economic depression. Evan went down the mine, not to dig, but in some supervisory capacity. He came back up to start a greengrocer’s with Louisa in Ferndale.

  I must have been to the grocer’s myself, but not when I was old enough to notice. Recently, when I was working on the first series of Restoration, they told me we were going up into the valleys to visit a pit village where a chapel had been restored. ‘My mother comes from up there somewhere,’ I started, and then the name of the place escaped me. ‘Green, wood something …’ I went on. ‘It will come to me.’ I looked down at the script. It was written at the top of the location call sheet: ‘Ferndale’.

  The next day we stood on what had once been a slag heap, looking down on an untidy grey huddle of streets, and then dropped into the village, with its busy main road, where small boys on bicycles played chicken with construction lorries. It was lined with shops: butchers’, tiny grocers’, tea shops and a video rental palace.

  ‘They’re building a motorway through the valley,’ I was told. ‘When it’s finished, then people will be able to get to the big supermarket and- all these shops will go.’

  The chapel, facing on to the bend, where my mother won a shilling for singing in a local Eistedfodd, had been restored for a local charity. And we were there to film it. But the rest of the village was remarkably unaltered, unlike a suburb in the South-east of England. Decay takes its own time.

  I went into number eleven. It was a charity shop. I asked if they knew about the Joneses who lived there forty years before. The old ladies who ran the place looked at me blankly. It was a stupid question. My father had been ‘Jones ten’ at school. It was one of the reasons why the Welsh middle classes appended extra barrels to their names (Rees-Mogg, Parry-Williams, Rhys Jones). But Mrs Williams was summoned from out the back.

  ‘Yes,’ she said with that positive tone that old ladies use when they find something too obvious. ‘Evan Jones and Louisa wasn’t it? It was a fruiterer’s.’

  ‘A froo-tar-rers,’ she said. The word had an authentic, valley tang. She seemed completely matter-of-fact about it. ‘If you ask across the road in the “caffy”, they were here then.’

  So I crossed to the fish and chip shop, where the family led me to their mother, sat at a table up the back, listlessly drinking ‘coffy’ and smoking a fag. She raised a quizzical eyebrow above a smackingly red, lipsticky mouth. ‘Oh yes. There was Gwynneth, the daughter, wasn’t there?’

  In a fever of off-the-cuff ancestral research I got my mother on the mobile phone and induced them to talk to each other. I was surprised by everything. Surprised to find everybody still there, surprised that we were joined now by Megan, who had worked at the fruiterer’s and remembered looking after my brother (and presumably stuffed him with ice cream and cake). I was surprised when it finally occurred to me that this old girl must have been a young girl then. Gosh, younger than my mother still, in fact. But the old lady in the back of the caffy, Megan and my mother really had nothing much to say to each other, other than to point out that the Italian family had arrived in Ferndale a few years before grandparents Evan and Louisa had left for Weston-super-Mare, and their retirement by the sea. They seemed unmoved. What had been surprising to me — that people stay in one place for forty years — was utterly unsurprising to them.

  Weston-super-Mare was a dreary exile. I would have been happy to be fed sweetmeats and get fat in my grandfather’s fruiterer’s. Instead I was only ever sent once or twice a year to the limbo where they had elected to wait to die. The bungalow, although new, was a gloomy mausoleum inside. The net curtains were never drawn. A pallid light illuminated the heavy brown furniture, the piano, the polished mahogany table and the Welsh clock that ticked and whirred heavily in the gloom. It was prison. Granny seemed to have become a little old woman at the earliest possibility. Grandpa was struggling towards drawing his last agonizing breath, his lungs filled with coal dust and cigarette smoke. He must have been a strong man once, but he was bent with arthritis by then. And he struggled to get in and out of cars. ‘Dew, dew, fucky!’

  ‘Grandpa! Children!’

  But movement clearly hurt, so he didn’t move much. Days were often spent just sitting in the gloom, visited by other decrepit old people like Aunty Betty, with her fizz of grey curls and currant eyes, and Uncle Jan, whose idea of amusing children was to let them look at his pocket watch. Most of the games we played in Midhurst have gone from my memory. I was too engrossed. But the few ‘holidays’ when my parents dumped us at Granny’s, by contrast, are lodged in a yellow jelly made of furniture polish: the laborious preparation, of tea; the clink of cutlery against a plate; the shuffling feet in the corridor; the endless, inert waiting. It was the antithesis of life. I have been left with a horror and impatience for the petty rituals of home ever since. Nobody goes off to change their shoes ‘for going out’ when I’m around. We were by the seaside, but we only went to the front on special days, and anyway, when we got there, the water had inevitably gone into retirement too, disappearing miles out into the Bristol Channel, way beyond the end of the mile-long pier. So we had to sit and wait for that as well. Most days we were pushed into the deadly boring strip of garden for the morning, as long as we behaved quietly, with the shed smelling of creosote, the hybrid roses in the yellow clay soil, the cement paviours along the side of the house where snails faced lingering, fizzy death fro
m my grandfather’s salt attacks. Our main entertainment was running down to the embankment at the bottom of the garden and waving madly at the trains. Sometimes the passengers could be induced to wave back.

  Driving to Weston-super-Mare in September 2005, I found myself wondering whether anything would have survived to fire up any memories. Had the approaches been as slatternly then as they are now? There were so many signposts and safety instructions winking in the sharp autumn light, I feared that the Weston-super-Mare I had known had probably been swept away by a quango.

  ‘We have to find the floral clock,’ I told Jo. ‘That, Timothy White’s and the trains are all I remember about the centre of the town, and I presume the others have gone.’

  It had been that dull. The floral clock was considered a form of light entertainment. The big minute hand would judder its way through the rockery plants and a bird would pop out with a wheezy ‘cuckoo’. If we arrived ten minutes early Granny and Grandpa seemed perfectly happy to sit and wait expectantly for the hour.

  To give it its due, the centre seemed a glamorous destination then, if only by comparison with the bungalow I remembered a Lubitsch-like prosperity: dark, shiny shop fronts, window displays and discreet red and dark green liveries.

  Now we parked in a cleared lot. It was one of many A single Regency building stood marooned in the asphalt with a boxer dog roaming its fenced roof. It sported a big sign:

  ‘Biker-Friendly’.

  The old lady in the car next door decided that the floral clock had’ probably gone. ‘Weston’s not what it was, no, it’s not.’ I liked her Somerset emphasis. It wasn’t. After a foul seventies shopping development — ‘Multi Value’ — and a set of flats that tried to define the word ‘block’, we walked past another empty lot facing directly out on to the promenade.

  But not all of it. ‘Look up there!’ In front of us was a neat populated hillside closing off the bay ‘I don’t remember that elegance at all.’ But I did suddenly remember the Winter Gardens, where we used to go for tea, just past the pier.