on one side, me on the other, she clutched at his arm as he lowered her into the front seat.
‘They don’t understand, do they?’ she said. Her eyes were full of tears but, more than that, a terrible yearning sorrow. ‘I was twenty years old, Tommy. I was in Cairo …’
‘It’s alright, Babs, it’s alright,’ he said very gently, and in that moment I did understand, not just all that madness, but also her relationship with Tommy, and what this too might be about, this secret that belonged only to themselves and others of their ilk: what it had been like to be plucked from a small country town, not even full grown, and dropped down into a foreign, utterly exotic place – in my mother’s case Egypt; for Tommy, India. All this with that added ingredient of war. That what? Frisson? No, no, so much more that that. Something we’ve never known, please God will never know. Something that, for all the books and the films, we still can’t really imagine.
Ask my mother about the war, and you won’t hear anything about those bit part players like Hitler and Churchill. Instead you’ll get, ‘Did I ever tell you about the night Madge and I got caught by the curfew and had to climb in through the window after we’d been out all night at the Deck Club?’ Or, ‘Did I tell you how Buffy and I hired a truck and went out dressed as sheikhs to the Pyramids?’ Or, ‘Did I tell you about the night Snowy got drunk on arak and almost threw up over Larry Adler?’
Oh, yes. Many times. So many times, Mother.
As a child, I measured out my life with those visits from the Madges and Buffies and Snowies.
Upstairs in her bedroom, revelling in her round National Health glasses and her straight coarse blunt-cut hair from which slides and flowers and Alice bands would slip as if deliberately, Cassie would sit bent over her book, point-blank refusing to come down and join the party. Thus it would always be just me standing outside the lounge door waiting to be paraded on the rug in preparation for yet another outing as bridesmaid. Through the crack I’d hear the plop of the sherry cork, the sound of all that merciless, melancholy Chalet School laughter.
‘There we are, look … in that funny little place we found that day near the Continental Hotel. There’s you, Buffy, and you, Madge. And is that Snowy?’ A blood-red fingernail would stab the page of the photograph album in something I recognised even then as resentment.
They look so damned happy in those pictures, those young women, that’s the thing. All that leaning in, all that loving and laughter. They make war look such fun. Which is not their fault. The best of times in the worst of times among those elegant potted plants and wicker chairs in the pictures. Blame the table tops full of glasses if you must blame something, or the rakish nature of uniform. Blame Carpe Diem written in the wreathes of cigarette smoke over every table.
Our father is in those photographs. George Gordon, leaning forward, laughing. Battledress most rakishly unbuttoned of all. The man who betrayed our mother, double-crossed her with the oil-stained overalls that became his uniform after the war, that would replace the dashing airforce blue in which he had wooed her.
‘How many times must I tell you not to wear those bloody things around the house?’ she would rage at him. ‘You only do it to annoy me,’ which probably was the truth of it.
I asked my father once, in a blaze of teenage bravery, ‘Why did you marry her?’
He didn’t raise his head from beneath the bonnet. He said, ‘I was mad about her.’
As always he tried to make a joke of it. ‘Must have had a touch of the sun,’ he said, ‘desert fever,’ only then he turned serious. He raised his eyes, gave me a hard look across the engine. ‘It doesn’t do to be too romantic, Riley,’ he said.
According to my mother – this told with relish when he was alive – my father pursued her against her will, even after the war was over and they returned home from Cairo.
‘What could I do?’ she liked to simper. ‘Eventually I relented.’*
To say that our father disappointed our mother is to indulge again in that appalling habit of understatement. All their married life she made it clear that she despised him. Even the way she looked at him said she’d been fooled, deluded, cheated.
‘Oh … George,’ she’d say, this so often that as a child I thought this was his name. Oh … George. Always accompanied by a disgusted click of the tongue and a contemptuously raised eyebrow. Or sometimes a derisive snort and the stab of a bitter red fingernail on the photo album for those Buffies and Madges and Snowies.
They used to say in our home town that George Gordon could mend an engine with a piece of string and a six-inch nail. Old-timers I bump into in the street still sometimes repeat it, a fine thing, I always thought, to have chiselled on your tombstone. Not so my mother. She hated our father’s business. Each month on bill day the air would be full of her fury. It swirled around, mingling with the blue of her cigarette smoke as she sat there poring over the invoice books on the kitchen table. Over at the sink my father would be Swarfegaing his hands calmly, running them under the tap like some grease monkey Pilate.
‘How much?’ my mother would ask, her pen poised on the bill head.
‘Oh, I don’t know … charge her a tenner,’ whereupon a howl of wrath would rise up to the ceiling.
‘No … no … no. How much …? How much …? How much did it cost you to do the bloody job for her?’ And it was so often a her because there’s no question that my father could be a soft touch when it came to elderly single women, convincing my mother that it was the spinsters of our town who were ruining my father’s business.
‘Bloody old maids, they pull the wool over your eyes,’ she’d yell at him. ‘Well, they’re not doing the same to me, I can tell you.’
As far as she was concerned, the entire Spinster World was engaged in some sort of conspiracy.*
‘See … see …?’ she would scream, thrusting the local paper at him, folded at the wills page where the horrible truth was revealed – that yet another of my father’s ‘impoverished’ customers whose car he had mended for next to nothing had bequeathed her small fortune to a cat’s home or some charity rescuing pit ponies. Worse still, though, was when Olive Jepson died and left the lot to the Communist Party.
It’s a tribute to Olive Jepson that the mere mention of the word ‘spinster’ will bring her instantly to mind. She remains for me the Ur, my über-spinster, which I guess is what she also was for my father.
He liked to take me to see Olive Jepson. I figure now there were a number of reasons for this, not all of which I want to go into. Once, in the summer, as I sat on her lawn drinking lemonade, I saw my father clash closed the bonnet of the Austin-Healey, and walk up beside her where she sat sipping gin and tonic in her deck chair. As he got to her, he reached his hand down and she reached up hers, and for a moment their two hands were clasped in the air in the sort of strong, firm comradely grasp that I knew, even then, was unimaginable between him and my mother.
Olive was the town’s librarian. She drove a large green growling Austin-Healey, and in the summer did her gardening in a checked bikini no bigger than a brace of pocket handkerchiefs.
‘Honest to God … sixty if she’s a day …’ my mother would say with a sniff, and ‘mutton dressed as lamb,’ this last said too loudly once as Olive pulled weeds up in her front garden. Unabashed, Olive raised herself and gave a long mocking baaaaaaa over the hedge, something for which my mother never forgave her.
Olive was secretary of the local Communist Party, a small outfit, probably with scarcely more than a dozen members. She’d been in Spain with the International Brigade, where, rumour had it, her fiancé had been killed.
‘Actually he ran off with another comrade.’
I was fifteen when she told me this. It was the