Peter had had a few Boy-Scoutish qualms about his rôle in the experiment. ‘Aren’t we being a little …?’ he asked, and I cheerfully supplied the missing word as ‘sneaky’.
It was all very well for him to have high standards, he could wipe his own bottom. I depended on paid strangers or close kin for humiliating tasks and had no prospect of equal dealing, so all I was doing was evening up the odds. Isn’t the Boy Scout motto ‘Be prepared’ anyway? I was prepared to be sneaky. I can claim Homer in my corner, as well as Baden-Powell. All very well for Achilles to be heroic — he’s invulnerable as long as he does what his Mamma says and wears his riding hat and his special shoes. Odysseus has to be sneaky to get by.
There was only one detail of the scheme which caused me a little guilt. Dad and I knew perfectly well that the ‘sun-lounge’ wouldn’t help Mum tan, since window glass filters out the short-wave radiation responsible. We were more or less conspiring against her, he and I. We would have needed to fit Vita glass (very expensive) to lend real assistance to her sun-damage project, though this was the heyday of the suntan, its traumatic effects on the dermis unknown or unpublicised, and I can’t pretend we were actually looking out for her welfare. I didn’t know why Dad got a kick out of putting one over on Mum, but I knew it was so, and that a hint about the screening effects of window glass would give him a final nudge towards the project.
There was no need to mention any of this to the lady of the house. Her happy moods weren’t so common that we could risk spoiling them. She pulsated with contentment as she lay there out of the wind on the lounger, basking in placebo sunshine.
Of course we none of us said ‘sun-lounger’. Mum’s love of brand names had raised this item above the common ruck of loungers. This was the Relaxator.
Mum not only went around recommending products but advertised their disgrace if they failed to perform, denouncing them from her kitchen pulpit. Unable to live up to her mother’s religion of the Top Man, she made do with the cult of the household name and the Which? Best Buy. Top Thing was a better bet than Top Person — but if a well-known or much-recommended purchase let her down it was a devastating blow, a sort of compound treason-fraud-sacrilege. When a washing-machine got the shakes just out of guarantee (though multiply lauded and endorsed), this was an assault on the integrity of the entire market-place. Hers was a world-view in which trailing threads were always likely to unravel the flimsy gestalt, and any little snag could ladder the sheer stocking of her self-belief.
Examples: Kit-Kat (chocolate-covered snack) was on her blacklist because she could never get the wafer fingers to snap as crisply as they did on the advert, despite the foil wrapper which undertook to keep them fresh. Kit-e-Kat (cat food) was condemned because it intensified the vileness of feline breath.
When we were slumming it by watching ITV and Kit-e-Kat was advertised during commercial breaks, with a voice asking cheerily, ‘Is your cat a Kit-e-Kat?’ we would all answer in mock-Cockney accents, ‘Then it mustn’t ’arf stink!’ This was our Bourne End saturnalia — sneering at the common people from our precarious upper rung. The only ITV programme which commanded our full respect, though it was always turned on ‘for John’, was the Saturday-night wrestling. It was the squirming aspect which spoke to me, I think, not the throwing about — I can’t answer for anyone else. I found it utterly thrilling, and was amazed it was allowed in any way at all. I kept quiet but Mum felt free to comment, saying, for instance, ‘Amazing to think that all these wrestling positions have names!’ One evening a wrestler was pinned on his back with his hands immobilised, so all he could do was push up with his pelvis in the hope of unseating his opponent, busy pushing down in the same style. Mum just said, ‘Gosh, Dennis, anybody would think those two were mating!’
The ruddy crutch
It was strange to be home at Trees with my newly adjusted disability (Granny had drummed into us the vulgarity of adorning your house name with inverted commas). The spaces were deeply familiar but had to be negotiated in a new way. As I moved around the house I had new problems of balance to contend with. I could now make reasonable progress, for instance, advancing towards the kitchen sink or the basin in the bathroom, but I needed somewhere to stow my crutch and cane while I used the facilities once I had reached them. No question of putting them on the floor, obviously, so I would lean them against the sink or the basin. Usually the cane stayed put but the crutch, being top-heavy, invariably fell with a scrape and a crash. Then the cry would go up, ‘The ruddy crutch!!’ Humorous, mock-exasperated. Or rather, expressing true exasperation beneath the mockery of it.
Audrey would repeat the phrase in fun, copying those around her. She must have been six at the time, seven at the most. Mum and Dad seemed disproportionately irritated by the jarring noise, while Audrey’s laugh was genuine and delighted, which should have taken the sting out of it. Yet her repetition, though perfectly innocent, was the one I found most wounding. There was joy in it, and the joy that was in it made it so much worse — but I knew better than to ask her not to say it. Audrey’s wilfulness was already highly developed, and it was wisest not to alert her to her power to hurt, in case she explored it at her leisure.
When the crutch fell, after the family hubbub had died down, I’d either have to lever it up somehow with the cane or ask for help. Peter would help me very willingly, and Audrey would return the crutch to my possession with exaggerated graciousness, as if it was a prize at the village fête, and she the Lady Mayoress doing the honours.
No one thought of doing anything silly, like attaching a simple bracket to the basin and the sink, some little retaining hook for the crutch to lean against.
It strikes me now how ridiculously easy such a gadget would have been to make. It would hardly test anyone’s do-it-yourself skills, but of course do-it-myself isn’t an option. Even Peter could have had a shot at it, if he had dared to swim against the tide. All he would have needed was a wire coathanger, bent so that one end curled round the base of one of the taps, the other run to the front of the basin and formed into a hook — into which I could tuck the crutch and still have it handy. Professor Branestawm would have been proud of Peter for such a useful bit of bodging, and so would I. But everyone seemed to prefer waiting for the crash and then raising an outcry. The whole family was oddly attached to my status as a nuisance.
In the kitchen I liked to perch on a stool if given a choice, a privileged position bought with much effort. Perching was always my attitude relative to furniture, I was only pretending to sit out of politeness. I’d need help to get up there, but it was worth it. Perching was my great delight. Of course I had to leave the crutch somewhere, and someone would knock against it, and then the senseless cry would go up, as if in some way it was all my fault. The ruddy crutch. The ruddy family. The ruddy business of being alive.
My sprouting groin
A tube of Immac, procured with much labour from a chemist in Bourne End, had delayed the moment when physical maturity had to be acknowledged, but there was only so much a depilatory could be expected to do. The caustic smell, moreover, was hateful, and I certainly didn’t dare use it lower down, though my almost luxuriant pubic hair gave the lie to the Mummy’s-little-darling idea, on which tender relations with Mum depended, at least as much as my ghost of a moustache.