Читать книгу Notes to my Mother-in-Law and How Many Camels Are There in Holland?: Two-book Bundle - Phyllida Law, Phyllida Law - Страница 5

The Jesuits say, ‘Give me a boy for his first seven years and I’ll give you the man.’ What if you gave them a girl? Discuss.

My mother Meg was given me till the age of seven, at which point war broke out. The second one. I can remember where she sat to tell me I was to be an ‘evacuee’. I was to leave home and stay in the country away from something called ‘Air Raid’. ‘Life is made up of moments’, and that was one of them.

My evacuee school was a dozen pupils in a dining room. It was made clear that I did not belong. I was a wee Glasgow ‘keelie’ who caught fleas, lost her gas mask and thought Adam and Eve lived in Kirkintilloch. I responded by becoming shy, secretive and anxious to please – and a telltale too.

I was moved to another school as the only boarder. Looking back I feel bereft, seeing an isolated little person. But I loved it. I loved the school room. It was entirely mine of an evening, a large room lined with bookshelves amongst which I found an ancient medical dictionary. Reading avidly I discovered that, amongst other things, I was suffering from a sexually transmitted disease. My friend Isobel Hebblethwaite said I had caught it from a loo seat and would probably die young. I thought I’d better not tell my mother, who in any case wasn’t there, and I wouldn’t tell Miss Jenny, my teacher, as I didn’t think sex was one of her subjects. I decided simply to devote my life to the healing of the human race. A Scottish Mother Teresa. With a stethoscope.

After my book-lined classroom I was sent to a fully-furnished boarding school with 40-minute lessons, dinner bells, hockey, lacrosse and ‘don’t run in the corridors’. Mother became a treat. She was like Christmas, turning up at half term bringing gifts: treacle toffee, sox and my first bra (a Kestos, all buttons and elastic, which she waved at me amongst a cloud of classmates). Such embarrassments aside, the agony of her going was difficult to endure with dignity.

I’m not sure boarding school was brilliant preparation for motherhood. I have even envied baby chimpanzees hooked so conveniently on their mother’s hip. We all learn from example, don’t we? What’s more, they get a comprehensive sex education. My mother, daughter of the Manse, had none. Grannie first advised her daughters that on marrying they should buy nighties that buttoned down the front. I fared better with my medical dictionary, snogging at the back of a touring bus, and the Jean Anouilh play about Orpheus and Eurydice (Point of Departure).

Flying in the face of reason, we got married on the morning of a matinée day when we were both in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We thought we’d better practise birth control for a bit, so we bought an odd little swivelling metallic calendar from an advert in The Spectator. It didn’t work. So we had Emma.

I told my mother I couldn’t bring up this tiny creature as I had no opinions or convictions of any sort. She said I had. She said I’d soon find out. I was a weather vane in a gale-force wind. What was a mother? What was a father? We made it up as we went along, cherry-picking from our past.

Emma was an elegant, independent baby with a gift for getting out of her cot. Sophie the Second didn’t bother. She studied us from a distance with her enormous black eyes and now and again let out a deep, drunken giggle. We used to bribe Em to make her laugh. She took her duties as the eldest very seriously. I still feel guilty about saying to her, unthinkingly, ‘We are going to have another baby.’ Another? Instead of me? The English language is a minefield. So is parenthood, isn’t it?

I soothed Em as a baby with Rose Hip Syrup, endlessly advertised for babies, and vitamin C. It’s the syrup that’s the culprit. It produced brown dots of decay on Em’s front teeth and the dentist said he would give her implants when she was seventeen. I remember shaking helplessly for days, cleaning, wiping and weeping. It was fine. And no one advertises Rose Hip Syrup any more.

Sophie got eczema and a vicious diet. We would take fruit and small brown sandwiches for any celebration instead of sweeties. Other children were impressed.

Bringing up children was in some way easier when the world was younger and you could leave your baby in its pram outside the butcher’s. Outside. You could keep an eye on it through the window whilst it ate lumps of the bread you had just bought next door, and offered it to passersby.

There was nothing electronic anywhere, although I think the butcher had a calculator. My husband was apprenticed to the village butcher when he was a little lad. Indeed he was brought up by his village, and it became a very vivid strand in our lives. Tea with Grannie Annie meant washing your hands, sitting up straight at the table, being handed bread and butter first, and speaking only when spoken to. Then, after cake, you said, ‘Please may I be excused?’ and went wild in her cottage garden. My mother Meg was another country. She was a loch and hills, fishing, splashing and ‘Spag Bol’.

That’s the easy bit over, isn’t it? Then you come to school. I don’t ever want to go through that again, though I distantly do with my grand- children. It would have been easier for me to understand my daughters’ lives if they could have followed in my footsteps.

There were two objections. How could you send your children away? Evacuate them aged seven? My poor mother. And then there was the money. We had none. That put the tin lid on it and made our path simpler, I suppose. They went to the wonderfully walkable local, which looked like a detention centre for the criminally insane. It was brilliant.

And there were boys. Bliss. It wasn’t long before we came up against what Alan Bennett calls, in his play Forty Years On, ‘the problem of your body’. A schoolmaster instructing his pupils on ‘down there’ says, ‘It isn’t pretty but it’s there for a purpose.’

I think I drew pictures. My husband was blunt and I did the diagrams. I think we laughed. I hope we laughed. I mean, sex is ridiculous behaviour from adults who tell you not to pick your nose. And it has to be repeated endlessly, doesn’t it?

Emma, aged eight, once asked Alec Guinness about the details and he gave her a calm and accurate response. Very helpful, though I felt a bit faint. Sophie, then aged five, listened gravely, fixing him with her headlamp eyes. Unblinking. We never knew she had whites to them until we took her up in an aeroplane.

My grandson Walter, whilst at school, did a picture of a lighthouse which his teacher took to be quite another thing. She was not amused. Such a pity. A good laugh with a teacher on this difficult subject would be very valuable. I think she missed a trick.

Love – that over-used four-letter word – was another stumbler. My ma always said your heart had to be broken ten times before it was any use to you as a heart. I think that’s a bit severe. Five times?

Sophie was once ditched by her beloved in a letter sent to her on holiday. Her grief was terrible to behold. He wrote that it was impossible to continue with their relationship as she was far too young. She was eleven. He was fourteen. I thought she would never recover.

Emma, in hopeless love, drank a whole bottle of sherry and took a flight to New York. I must say the sherry was a bit of a surprise. It became an emotional telephone exchange, and ‘children’ just go, with little or no warning, and the house is left silent and littered with ‘unconsidered trifles’.

And then, of course, people die. They will do it. In clumps sometimes. I don’t think I ever managed my daughters’ grief when their father died very well at all. I was too busy with mine, keeping it to myself. Trying not to impose it on others. I must have seemed cold and distant.

And my past has been rather a disappointment. I’ve never had an affair. I probably thought about it, but I failed.

I made the girls promise not to tell me if their father ever admitted to any such thing. I have an uneasy feeling that I am quite boring. I think that’s why I took to acting. I enjoy being somebody else. I remember an unexpected visit from the Canadian branch of my husband’s family. We all sat down to a large, hastily assembled afternoon tea. The visitors questioned me closely about my hobbies. They were anxious to know, reasonably enough, what sort of girl their relative had acquired. Did I play bridge? Chess? Golf? Did I watch any sport?

No. No. And no.

My husband finally asked, ‘What are your interests, Phylli?’

I threw a meringue at him.

And another thing. I can’t make choices. It’s very irritating. My husband used to say it. The girls now say it. ‘Do what you want, Ma.’ I have no idea what that is. I have simply forgotten how to access it, if I ever knew. I think I can source the problem to my adored elder brother. I just wanted to be where he was, do what he did. So did my daughters, who shared his last hours with him in intensive care. I was on stage.

Their dad died young too, of course. There was no growing old with either of them. I feel to blame. Like Orpheus. I must have turned to look back. They are not there. Just having your life’s love sitting at peace in the same room is the best of life. I’d even let him do the Times crossword.

But I can’t forgive him for leaving before his grandchildren arrived. I find that particularly painful. Like four knives in the heart. He was such great casting for a granddad. He would have taught them all fishing and how to skin a rabbit. They would learn how to make bacon and tomato ‘sclunge’ and fry cheese on a tin plate. They’d learn long words like obdurate and antimacassar. Monty Python would be required viewing and they’d know where he hid the chocolate.

He had an original mind and he looked for it in other people, especially his daughters. I envied them, as I improvised my form of motherhood. I seemed to have very little to go on. I only hope it was enough. I’ll ask …