Semi-Detached (4 page)

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.