by Michel Faber
People ask me nowadays how I felt, being the son of a bluestocking. I never gave it a thought. My mother’s vigorous advocacy of the rights of women seemed natural, a part of her personality, like a dislike of tapioca pudding or a fondness for snow. And, because I was always known as a child or a boy or a poppet or Snookums or Angel or simply Henry, I did not perceive myself to be under attack when Mama or Aunt Primrose railed against those appalling creatures, men.
I must make clear, too, that Mama was not a spiteful person, and her quarrel with the masculine world was based on indignation rather than hatred. She liked to collide violently with males who annoyed her, push them over if she could, and move on. She and Aunt Primrose worked as a kind of music hall duo, Mama getting by on charm and disarming honesty, while Aunt Primrose supplied the sardonic touch. My father was – if you’ll excuse what’s definitely not meant as a pun – the straight man. When we lived abroad, I never had the sense of our family being troublemakers. In Australia, everybody seemed to be arguing all the time, and enjoying it. Only when we re-settled in England did I get the impression that disagreement could be a scandal. And this took a while for me to learn. At first, I relished the fact that all sorts of funny new people were wont to make an appearance at our home, blustering in surprise and mortification at the things my parents said and did. But, in the months leading up to June 21st, 1908, the mood of these visits became increasingly sour, and I began, little by little, to sense that my family was caught up in a long and bitter war, and that there might be casualties.
I remember one such occasion unusually clearly. Aunt Primrose had invited a wealthy woman called Felicity to dinner, and Felicity had brought her husband Mr Brown along. Aunt Primrose was involved with a number of charitable organisations and was always on the lookout for patrons; she probably had her eye on Felicity as a potential opening into the fortune Mr Brown had made with his shoe factories.
The after-dinner phase of the evening got off to a convivial start. Mr Brown and my father smoked cigars and discussed Art, a subject on which Mr Brown, a self-made Mancunian, was earnestly attempting to broaden his horizons. The two men drifted in and out of the parlour, exchanging the occasional pleasantry with the three women, who were talking of the future of the world, the reformation of society, and ladies’ shoes. I had half-hidden myself behind the dining-room table, and pretended to read storybooks, revelling in the late hour. Eventually, with the aid of good red wine, my mother began to reminisce about the childhood experiences that had made her what she was today.
‘When I was a little girl,’ she said, ‘my father took me on an outing with him, to Lambeth. We had our own carriage, and I was very excited to be seeing the big wide world.’
‘The fabled towers of Lambeth,’ murmured Aunt Primrose, with a smirk.
‘I’d never been across the Thames,’ my mother continued. ‘It seemed as exotic as America. My father had some business to attend to there. I saw his …’ And then she smiled and shook her head, as she always did when she brushed up against something in her past that must remain a secret.
‘His what, I’m sorry?’ said Felicity Brown.
‘There was a lot of traffic,’ said my mother, ignoring the question, ‘and our coachman took detours through the poorer streets. The houses were all jumbled together and falling apart, with people’s underclothes and bedsheets hung in plain view. I could scarcely believe it. I’d seen poor people before – hawkers and knife-sharpeners and so on – and I knew they wore shabby clothes and smelt sour. But I thought they went home to picturesque little cottages.’
‘Like gingerbread houses,’ suggested Felicity Brown.
‘Exactly. The truth filled me with awe. I had my face poking out of the window of the coach, staring like a puppy. We passed through a horrible street, the worst. There was a little girl playing with a bucket. She was barefoot, almost naked, dressed in a ragged, filthy shirt.’
My mother tipped back her head and squinted, as though peering through a telescope into a long-ago that still existed.
‘I thought she looked exactly like me: a mirror image. Perhaps I was wrong; I hadn’t seen many children my own age. But I was gripped by a powerful sense that this grubby urchin was someone I might have been, had I been born in that street. Then she picked up a piece of … of dog foul, and flung it at me. Her aim was very good, I must say. She hit me right between the eyes.’
Aunt Primrose snorted with laughter, and Felicity Brown, confused, allowed herself a muted chuckle.
‘I think I was destined to be a socialist from that moment on,’ concluded my mother.
‘Nonsense,’ said Aunt Primrose. ‘Someone else might have experienced exactly the same thing, and decided forever afterwards to grind the poor under her heel. As revenge.’
‘Revenge is ugly,’ my mother declared. ‘It makes me think of military men with small eyes and epaulettes.’
Aunt Primrose, who was not averse to a bit of revenge when it was carried off with aplomb, didn’t let Mama get away with this pious stance. ‘You once told me you eat spicy food as revenge for the blandness of what you were fed as a child.’
My mother stuck her tongue out at Aunt Primrose, an action that had never seemed particularly rude in Australia, but to which Felicity Brown reacted with a small, startled jerk of her head, as though someone had just vomited.
‘All right then,’ said my mother, ‘let’s all get revenge for boiled mutton, mashed potatoes and milk pudding. They deserve it. They caused me much more misery than a turd in the face.’
I knew that the word turd was forbidden in polite company, and that the fact that my mother had just tossed it into the conversation meant that things were perhaps getting out of hand. This impression was confirmed when Mr Brown joined us, just at the point when Mama was railing against heartless politicians and exploitative factory owners. Mrs Brown struggled manfully – womanfully? – to smooth the waters my mother was stirring up. Then Mr Brown – who, by this time, had drunk quite a lot of wine – became irritable, defending the right of factory owners to operate competitively in a competitive market. To which my mother retorted that competition was a typically male obsession, which we would all be better off without, in the better world to come. Mr Brown challenged her to explain how this better world would be created, and my mother, egged on by Primrose (who had evidently given up on her daydreams of seducing the Browns into sponsorship) held forth on politics. The Labour Party, she said, had fielded only two successful candidates in its debut election, but only six years later, they got twenty-nine MPs in, which they were sure to increase to a hundred next time round. This made Mr Brown lose his temper.
‘Wake up, woman!’ he exclaimed. ‘The Labour Party will never get anywhere! It’s a simple principle of Evolution! A half-educated ape climbs one rung of the ladder and joins the Labour Party; then he climbs a few rungs higher and sees the broader picture …’
‘You mean, sees how many poor folk are being whipped and starved to produce his bananas?’
‘Bananas grow on trees, I believe. And your “poor folk” are rendered less poor when we pay them good money to pick the bananas off.’
‘Sounds like paradise, Mr Brown, with a threepenny bonus,’ hissed my mother, her face flushed with excitement. ‘Oh, the bounty of Mother Nature! Everything falling off the trees! Your watch-chain from the watch-chain tree, your waistcoat from the waistcoat tree, your carriage from the carriage-patch. Tell me when the next shoe crop is ripe, Mr Brown, and we’ll go shoe-gathering together!’
The silence that followed this exchange was very unpleasant, but Aunt Primrose had a special knack for breaking such silences with just the right remark.
‘I don’t care for bananas,’ she said, with a naughty twinkle in her eye. ‘Peeling them is always more pleasurable than consuming them.’
Mr Brown folded his arms across his chest. His wife glanced somewhat forlornly towards the hallway, where her overcoat hung on a wrought-iron stand.
‘You ladies
can be as cynical as you like,’ said Mr Brown. ‘I can’t compete with your witty talk. But I understand human nature, and the plain fact is that as soon as a man attains the basic comforts, he no longer fancies marching in a mob of sweaty ruffians, waving banners in the street.’
‘Oh, come now: which of us is being cynical?’
‘Realistic.’
‘Realistic for whom?’
‘The human race.’
‘Oh? And who decides who’s in that?’
My mother was so wound up she might have prolonged the dispute deep into the night, but suddenly my father spoke.
‘Well, Mr Brown,’ he said calmly, ‘I’m a man, and I’ve attained the basic comforts, but next Sunday I shall be marching in the street, holding up my end of a banner.’
I don’t recall what was said after that, if anything. I don’t recall by what magical means the Browns were whisked out of our house, never to return. I only recall the fierce affection with which Mama embraced Papa. Her clutching hands went white against his back. Their cheeks were squashed together. I thought he would surely collapse from lack of breath. But they stood together like that for what seemed like half an hour. Then Aunt Primrose yawned, said ‘Well done, Gilbert,’ and curled up to sleep on the sofa.
I know your curiosity is aroused now. I know you want to know about the march. Perhaps you’ve read about it in history books. And here I am – ‘living history’, as they say – and I suppose you’re mindful that I’m ninety-two years old, and I may not have much longer to tell my story. But forgive me: I want to spend a little longer on my parents, and Aunt Primrose, and the way things were for us during that strange season when we settled in England.
Nowadays, I suppose they’d call it culture shock. I missed everything about where I had come from. I missed breathing the air. I missed the tree-lined, leaf-strewn roads of Mount Macedon, which we would travel along when returning to Melbourne from Aunt Primrose’s brother’s house. I missed the balmy afternoons picnicking in the Botanic Gardens. I missed the smell of eucalyptus. Apples and pears tasted all wrong, and the London drinking-water had scum on it, which Mama assured me was not dirt, but lime. The magnificent clear Victorian skies – that is, Victoria the place, not Victoria the English queen – had been foolishly swapped for the damp, smutty atmosphere of a polluted metropolis. There was nowhere to play in Bloomsbury and (here was another bombshell) I must cease talking to strangers. Imagine that! In Australia, if I played too long in the uncultivated outskirts of our neighbourhood, and the sun set on me, a stranger was liable to escort me home. In London, a stranger was liable (if I believed my mother’s warnings) to pull me into a dark alley, strip me naked, and sell my clothes in Petticoat Lane. Another anxiety to be added to the list of this country’s demerits!
I complained about these things to my mother one afternoon, intimating that we may have made a mistake, and that it might be a good idea to climb aboard a boat at our soonest convenience and sail for home.
My mother motioned for me to climb into her lap instead. She cradled me against her bosom, which was big and soft, even though she was not a big woman. She stroked me so tenderly I could sense she was about to cause me pain.
‘Life can’t always be as we wish,’ she said.
‘Why not?’ I said.
‘Things happen.’
‘Us coming here didn’t happen. We didded it. You didded it.’
‘Did, darling. We did it.’
She stroked my hair, smoothing it over my ears. I shrugged irritably, pretending to be ticklish.
‘Is our house in Australia still there?’
‘Of course it’s still there, angel. Houses don’t just fall down.’
‘Well, why can’t we go back there?’
‘Because … because we left.’ She could tell from the way I squirmed that I found this answer highly unsatisfactory. It was a Mad Hatter answer, a March Hare answer. Mama couldn’t expect to read me the Alice books a hundred times and get away with such nonsense.
‘A house only manages to be a home for a while,’ she said at last. ‘Being a home isn’t easy. Houses get tired.’
I punched her breast, as hard as I could, in frustration. The violence of it shocked us both. She hugged me tighter to her.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Listen. I’m going to tell you something I haven’t told anyone except Poss and your father. You must promise never to tell a soul.’
I didn’t promise. I suppose she took my silence as a promise. And now I’m breaking that silence, by telling you, because I can’t see that it matters anymore. Everyone in this story passed away long ago, and soon I’ll be history too. But then, we’re all history, aren’t we? History is all of us, end to end, until … well, the end. Which is exactly the sort of half-sensical platitude I suspected my mother of trying to pacify me with when I punched her.
‘The truth is,’ she said, ‘that it isn’t true what I told you, that I was born in a tiny village in the countryside. I was born in London. In a house only a few miles from here. I lived there until I was seven. Then I was … I was removed. My governess took me away. I thought we would come back. But we didn’t come back.’
‘Why didn’t your Mama and Papa stop her?’
‘My Mama wasn’t alive by then. And my Papa … I don’t know. I don’t know. Home wasn’t home anymore. Please try to understand. Home isn’t a house. Home is a feeling of being safe somewhere, and I didn’t feel safe with my father. So my governess and I went out into the world, looking …’ She left a long pause, not breathing, as though the rest of the sentence was already on her tongue, poised to roll off. Then she laid her cheek against the top of my head and sighed. ‘Looking.’
‘She was against the law, wasn’t she, your governess?’ I said.
Mama chuckled softly. ‘I’m sure she was.’
‘The police should have arrested her.’
‘That thought did occur to me, eventually. When I was about fourteen. Poor Miss Sugar … I gave her such lectures about morality! There she’d be, serving me my breakfast, and there I’d be, with my nose in my uncle’s battered old Bible, sulking.’
Somehow, with my body, I must have let my mother know that I was comprehending none of this. At once, she put aside her grown-up musings, and found a morsel I could digest, a bon-bon for a little boy.
‘Police have better things to do, angel,’ she said, ‘than to arrest defenceless women. They have robbers and murderers to catch.’
That satisfied me for a while. It was only days later, when my mother and Aunt Primrose were discussing the imminent release of one of their suffragette friends from Holloway Prison, that I remembered that policemen could, and did, arrest defenceless females. Evidently there were not enough robbers and murderers to keep them busy.
Only with hindsight does it seem surprising that my mother never got arrested herself. She, like the semi-mythical Miss Sugar, was against the law in various ways. For instance, she would scandalise me terribly sometimes, when we went out together, by stealing books from bookshops. Her technique, while not exactly brazen, lacked the stealthy finesse of a talented shoplifter. She would simply stuff the book inside her coat – using me as cover, it now occurs to me – and saunter out of the shop. Then she would walk straight to the nearest drain-hole and slip the book through, helping it on its way with her toe if it got stuck. The books were always about women and ‘the female question’. Mama relished the sound they made when they hit the sewer-water below.
My mother also regularly volunteered to go out on the streets to sell Votes For Women, a penny newspaper, and she walked defiantly on the footpath with it, which meant she could be charged with ‘obstruction’. Looking back on it, you’d think that a woman selling a newspaper in traffic would cause a damn sight more obstruction than if she did it on the footpath, but there you are: that was how the Powers That Be decided it. It was all cat-and-mouse stuff, of course. But my mother refused to be a mouse. ‘I will not walk in the gutter,’ she said, when cou
nselled by her more law-fearing friends to do so. ‘I will not.’ And she never did – except, of course, when disposing of books with titles like The Natural Destiny of the Female.
I hope I’m not giving the impression that my mother got her way in everything, nor that people in Authority always turned a blind eye to her transgressions. She had her share of mishaps. But whenever she was thwarted, she would look at her tormentor – policeman, petty official, shopkeeper, whatever – as if he were a pitiable madman, whose mission was to prevent people doing something unobjectionably innocent like drinking tea or trimming their toenails. Aunt Primrose, by contrast, was more easily grieved, despite her cool exterior. The droll self-assurance she displayed in public was apt to break down in private, and I would often run into the house, flushed with childish enthusiasm for something-or-other, only to find Aunt Primrose curled up in an armchair, furiously sucking on a cigarette, tears trickling down her cheeks. Or, if the Government had just behaved with exceptional malice or cowardice, I would hear her yelling ‘How could they! How could they!’ and so on. ‘Don’t let them get to you, Poss,’ my Mama would say, laying her arm over her friend’s shoulder. ‘Never let them get to you.’
Only twice did I see Mama reduced to tears by frustration. The first time was over what seemed to me a trifle. Newly returned to England, exploring Regent Street with me, she went into a department store and asked if they stocked a particular brand of perfume. The shopwalker told her that they did not. My mother insisted: it’s a very renowned manufacturer, she said. I have never heard of it, madam, said the shopwalker. That’s impossible, said my mother: what about the soaps and bathwater? The shopwalker apologised and said he had never heard of this particular brand; perhaps it was something exclusively available in Australia? (He could tell from her accent that she had spent some years in the colonies.) At this point my mother’s lip started to tremble, and when the shopwalker, in an attempt to pacify her, offered to sell her a bottle of Pears’ lavender water, she uttered a strange choking sound, and fled out of the store. I had never seen her behave so childishly in Australia; it was one of the first incidents I took as proof that we should never have crossed the ocean.