Old Rage, page 4
I could tell that receiving this letter had turned Tom’s life upside down. He was obviously well liked in the pub and I suspect after all these years most of the younger residents did not know about his childhood. He had certainly told no one about this new chain of events. He told me that he had replied to the letter, confirming that they had his mother’s name right, and that he almost certainly was their grandfather’s son. Tom thought, indeed hoped, that would be the end of it.
But the previous week he had received another letter. The grandchildren were planning a party for their father, Tom’s half-brother, a celebration for his eightieth birthday, and would like him to come over, all expenses paid. I grasped his hand as he told me, and my heart sank when he said, ‘What would you do, Sheila?’
My first thought was that of course he should go. The bastards owe him something. It sounds as though Joe’s descendants have had a good life, while Tom and Eileen’s lives were a poverty-stricken struggle. Maybe he would enjoy the adventure of going on an aeroplane for the first time, and a whole new country. He has never been outside Cornwall. The young relatives who made the effort to trace him would probably treat him lovingly. A new generation, not blighted by those bigoted, cruel values of old, would welcome him into their family. What an adventure. That would be my reaction as an endlessly curious woman.
Then I saw the fear in his eyes. It could go horribly wrong. He has a version of his childhood that he has accepted as the truth, the one his mother gave him. What if he discovered that Joe wanted her to take his son out to the US and she, like him now, was afraid to go? What if the grandchildren thought it would be a jolly party jape to bring over their father’s brother but, having maybe had charmed lives themselves, would not understand the sort of unworldly man Tom is? What would these presumably relatively rich Americans make of an old fish-poacher wearing clothes from the charity shop? He had never been to a big lavish party in his life. He was seventy-four. His bitterly hard young life is long forgotten, and his routine, which revolves around catching the odd illicit salmon, and holding court from his seat in the pub, is comfortably set. The wounds of his childhood are buried deep and I saw the danger of digging them up. We talked for a long time and had a good few jars. I helped him weigh up all the options, but told him it had to be his decision.
I held him in my arms as I said goodbye, and he whispered, ‘I don’t need to go there. Tonight has been the best night of my life – meeting you.’
It broke my heart.
That his life should be so low on loveliness that meeting me was a high spot. That the opportunity for betterment in his damaged existence came too late.
Tom has led a good life. He can look back in pride at his survival and defeat of prejudice, at his loving care of his mother. He doesn’t, because he is not aware that they are a reason for pride. Maybe that is why meeting me was important to him. I am probably the only person who has ever told him he is special and, like Eileen said of his father – fine.
December 2016
I had to go to France to join my neighbours in fighting the destructive building directive. I girded my loins and marched up to the mairie to confront the mayor. He once attended one of our parties in the barn, and left in the small hours having supped deep of our local wine, so I hoped he might have a soft spot for our beautiful hameau. True to form he was sweetness and light.
I don’t trust him an inch.
2017
January 2017
My first job of 2017 is an odd fish. It is about a supposed meeting between Salvador Dalí and Alice Cooper in which I play the intriguing Gala Dalí, muse of her husband and several other artists. It is a bizarre script but with David Suchet made up to look surprisingly like Dalí, and Noel Fielding, in a rare acting performance, having no trouble getting under the skin of Alice Cooper, it is great fun. The directors are artists and completely taken up with the suitably surrealistic appearance of the film, so we are left to our own devices as to the interpretation of the roles.
The three of us have worked well together, taking it all very seriously, whilst not being altogether au fait with what is going on. My favourite moment was when David, for some reason half-naked standing in a boxing ring, asked me to help him decide what sort of chicken voice the script required he should use. ‘What do you think, Sheila – should it be “squawk, squawk”, or “cluck cluck cluck”?’
I reminded him that the last time we worked together had been an erudite programme for the RSC analysing the syntax of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
February 2017
My work and play are proving varied and fun this year. I have visited several towns in my role as patron of DigiSmart, a method of learning to read and write in schools for children who are falling behind. So, lots of exciting engaging with kids.
I was thrilled to take part in my very favourite TV quiz programme, Would I Lie to You? Just as I find when I appear on Just a Minute, I was lost in admiration for the other team members, most of whom were comedy players. David Mitchell, Lee Mack and Rob Brydon in the chair have a superb rapport. No one tries to dominate, they feed each other generously and their personalities, whether just for the screen or maybe in reality, are perfect foils to each other – square Mitchell, smooth Brydon and slightly mad Mack seem to relish their differences. I forgot that I was being paid to entertain rather than enjoy myself.
I have also taken to attending stand-up comedy shows in the Leicester Square Theatre, usually with one of my grown-up grandchildren. One of my favourites is Bridget Christie, who talks about family life, and children, and politics, with a dangerous edge of hysteria. Her husband, Stewart Lee, is regarded by other stand-ups as the Master. He doesn’t appear very much on the television as his material is probably too esoteric. His rage consumes himself and the audience, and I find it very cathartic. He sometimes lapses into a fantasy world of his own, in what seems an unplanned way, but it is probably meticulously prepared.
One evening I did not enjoy. I am a great admirer of Russell Brand. He too has an edge of mad recklessness. He is his own person, with seemingly no regard to what is acceptable. He shocks and angers many people, which I find laudable, but when I went to see him at the Apollo in Hammersmith it was too much for me. I did something I rarely do: I left at the interval. Not as a demonstration of disapproval, but just because I personally could not take it. And was disturbed by those who could.
We were told before the event that there would be audience participation. That used to be in a song sheet, with everyone joining together singing silly songs. In Brand’s case it was asking the audience, amongst other loaded questions, what was their most embarrassing sexual experience. The audience roared their approval at someone recounting in detail an occasion when his mother slipped on the ‘results’ of his ‘sneaky wank in the bedroom’. The audience were shrieking with delight as the stories topped each other in excess, culminating in a girl with a lovely face like the Mona Lisa graphically describing her first experience of anal sex, which involved defecation. In answer to the question ‘What are you most proud of?’ a young girl in glasses told us, ‘People say I give good head’, and bowed courteously in response to her standing ovation.
The mob – for that to me is what they had become – demonstrated the power of a personality like Brand to stir people into extreme behaviour, in a highly charged atmosphere. I suspect a lot of that audience woke up the next day disbelieving what they had said and done, as they prepared to go to work in the office. I’m sure the racist Bernard Manning had a similar hold over a crowd. As did Billy Graham, with perhaps better motives, at his religious rallies. And that American who made his disciples drink poison. And Hitler at the Nuremberg Rallies. Now, of course, Brand means no harm. In actual fact, he did no harm that night – perhaps it was liberating for those young women to declare their sexuality proudly in public. But this old bird found it ugly and hoped they wouldn’t regret it when they sobered up and, maybe later in life, learned to equate sex more with love.
Even Brand seemed a bit concerned about the excesses that he had stirred up, saying as we left for the interval, ‘Be kind to our perverts.’ My grandson Jack told me he was much more restrained in the second half so it may be the demon that possessed him was exorcised over a nice cup of tea in the interval break.
October 2017
Decided to buy myself some silk bed linen. Felt in need of a bit of a treat.
I am slightly obsessive about beds. I blame the war. Of course I do. In the air-raid shelter I was on a narrow bunk with no mattress, and all hell going on outside. When I was evacuated, in my billet, I slept on an ancient cracked leatherette couch and the toilet was down the garden, a wooden seat with a hole in the middle over the entrance to Pluto’s underworld. You even had to pass a savage dog to get to it. No wonder I wet the bed.
The night before I sat my exam for a scholarship to grammar school, there was a particularly noisy air raid, and when we heard the German bombers retreating my worried mother decided that, to prepare my brain, we should leave the shelter and try to sleep in the house. As Dad was on ARP duty, tending to the wounded and clearing up the debris from the raid, she said I could even sleep in their bed with her.
My parents’ bedroom was a sacred place to which I was not allowed access, maybe because they might have to explain to me what went on there – something they never could bring themselves to do, preferring to leave it to hygiene lessons at school. Of course, I crept in when they were at work. It was the height of luxury to me. There was an unused silver-backed hairbrush and mirror, a cut-glass powder jar and a mysterious ivory object which, I discovered years later, was a glove-stretcher, all set out neatly on a lace mat on the large ornate dressing table, and presumably all inherited from someone. My mother had made what she called a ‘dusty-pink’ satinette eiderdown for the super-comfortable bed. On that night she had to shake off some plaster dislodged from the ceiling by a nearby landmine before we could nestle under it. Not usually given to physical expressions of love, she gently stroked my forehead, hoping to quell all fears of the coming ordeal the next day which would allow me to ‘better myself’.
Later, in theatrical digs, I have shared beds with fleas, bedbugs and the occasional cockroach.
One of the first things John, who had a similar bad bed history, did when we fell in love was to buy a beautiful brass bed that had belonged to the handsome matinee idol Ivor Novello, who by all accounts had as much fun in it as we did. I sleep in it to this day. Now under silk sheets. Bliss. I would like to end my life in its sensuous embrace, as did John.
November 2017
I was in France gathering black figs from the garden when the phone rang.
‘Mum, I’m afraid I have some bad news.’
It was Ellie Jane, my eldest daughter.
‘What? Tell me?’ My whole being cringes with fear.
‘Okay. I have breast cancer. Sorry.’
No one dead, then. That’s good. Then – foolishly, frantically, ‘Oh dear. Well, darling, they have made enormous headway since I had it. It’s a nuisance, but they can deal with it nowadays.’
Nuisance? Deal with it? They? I’m talking nonsense.
‘Unfortunately it’s rather an aggressive one. Grade three. But don’t worry, I’ll be all right.’
‘Of course you will. I’ll get the next flight to London.’
I put the phone down and went into the newly installed downstairs toilet and vomited into its pristine lavatory. Then, clinging to the table, I said out loud, quite calmly, ‘Okay, so, yes, now I want to die.’
I genuinely meant it. How could I go on without my beloved eldest daughter? How obscene if she, at fifty, should die, and I who had already lived for eighty-four years should continue. A child dying before her parent is unnatural. Not to be endured. Not by me.
Back in England I have watched as Ellie Jane is swallowed into the vortex of endless tests, scans and agonising waiting for results. It is a rare type of cancer that necessitates drastic treatment. I am desperate to ‘kiss and make it better’, make it go away, but I don’t know how.
When your daughter is married with children, you are demoted to the nana of her primary family. My instinct with problems is always to charge in fighting, but now I realise I have to take a ringside seat and watch and support. Her immediate family is shocked and frightened but coping as people always seem to. Her partner, Matt, a highly successful producer, has put all his work on hold and never leaves her side during the gruelling treatment. A marked contrast to my dear husband, who coped with my cancer by denying it was happening and not getting involved. From the day John’s mother deserted him when he was seven, that was how he dealt with people threatening to leave him. I understood completely, but it was lonely. Something my daughter certainly isn’t. She has myriad friends who shower her with love. At one point she had to be reminded that the chemotherapy ward at the Marsden was not designed to hold parties. But sometimes we all need a mum and I try to be there when she does.
She has to give herself injections. Having nursed several people, it is a skill I have acquired. She sat on a stool in the bathroom like a little girl, frightened, white, silent. I showed her what to do. She did it. I cuddled her.
My child.
‘Well done, you did it, clever girl, clever girl.’
The rest of the time I sit in the corner making notes at doctors’ meetings, bring cakes into the chemo ward, search the web for the latest research and sort out wigs and headgear for the inevitable hair loss. Ellie Jane somehow continues to work, however ill she is. The dedication and love she feels towards the disadvantaged kids she supports with her special brand of drama therapy made her determined not to let them down. I could not be more proud of the way she has dealt with the torture of chemotherapy, radiotherapy and the prospect of two operations. I do my best not to show my horror at the chemical bombardment on her beautiful body, but when I get home, alone, I howl with grief. I am racked with anguish that this is happening to my daughter and I am powerless.
Throughout the treatment she is unfailingly cheerful. Certainly, in front of me. Never for one moment do I see a sign of fear. Any bad news about the progress of the treatment is kept from me. I always get any information after it has been mulled over with her sisters. ‘We didn’t want to worry you.’
My three daughters are in constant contact with one another, something that pleases me because I know they will be there for one another when I’m gone. They came together as a family very suddenly. When I married John, he had a little girl, Abigail, and I had Ellie Jane. They were both thrilled to go from being only children to having a sister, and very soon along came another one, Joanna. As a threesome they have supported one another through some fairly hairy times and do so now they are women with children of their own. I just wish they would still let me support them a bit more. Maybe it would be different were I the sort of woman who looks after her grandchildren on a regular basis while their parents work, as many do, but the irregular nature of my job makes that impossible, and, let’s face it, after a large chunk of my life being dominated by mothering because of the big age difference in my children, I am not that keen to go back to it in old age. I have no right to expect them to need me only when it is convenient for me. I can’t have it both ways. So, instead, I seem to have turned into the person that they look after: ‘Don’t tell Mum, it will only upset her.’ ‘Mum, I’m a grown woman’ is the usual rejoinder to any advice I might venture to offer.
I’m not sure when the role of mother changes from being in control to taking a back seat. As a self-reliant, proactive person, it is not a situation I relish. It coincides with being ignored by waiters and bartenders, and not being expected to join the cast and crew for a drink after a day’s shooting. Anyway, my anxiety, despite my efforts to conceal it, is not helpful to Ellie Jane during her treatment, and she is better able to discuss her worries with friends and her sisters. They have more in common. Looking back, I realise I was exactly the same with my mother.
When my father died in 1965, I moved my mother from her mobile home in Sussex to a tiny flat near me in Hammersmith. She yearned to be an intimate part of my life and Ellie Jane’s upbringing, but there was a yawning gap between her disciplined approach and my Swinging Sixties lifestyle. How Ellie Jane was ‘turned out’, with clean white socks and shiny shoes, was a top priority. It was way down my list of things to cope with when bringing up my wayward daughter. Ironically, with my grandchildren, I have turned into my mother. I insist on good table manners, especially in restaurants, and putting away books and toys at bedtime – rules happily abided by when I have them on my own, but when my daughters are there I have to bite my lip till it bleeds. My mother did not speak the same language as my colourful friends, and despite, or maybe because of, having been a barmaid was wary of alcoholic excess – and there was a lot of that about. Having weathered two world wars, losing a fiancé in the first and enduring bombing and separation from her children (my sister away touring the world with ENSA and I evacuated) in the second, as well as dealing with an erratic and somewhat unstable husband, she was a sober presence. I seldom remember her laughing.
The gap of understanding between my mother and me was, I think, bigger than happens nowadays. I was a snotty grammar-school-educated girl, as my parents had strived for me to be, by then earning reasonable money and living in some style; she left school at fourteen, her education coming from library books and the radio, ending up living in a mobile home on a caravan site, which she seemed to like. I look back with huge regret that I did not make more effort to find out how she really felt about life. You just didn’t have those sorts of conversations with your parents in those days. When my father was alive, she could seldom get a word in edgeways anyway. Her only utterance usually was a wry ‘Oh, Rick’ as Daddy held the floor. She was always busy doing something, and no fan of idle chit-chat. Maybe most daughters never do know their mothers as anything other than a mother.
