Perhaps because of distaste for my sprouting groin, Mum made over responsibility for bathing me to Dad, who almost seemed to enjoy it. He was always drily complimenting me on the excellence of my equipment, which was nice the first time — I so rarely seemed to meet his standards — and rather awkward after that. No teenager wants to be told more than once that he is in possession of a magnificent beast, does he? Not more than a few times anyway, and not by a parent.
Wiping my bottom was a grey area that became a battlefield. In theory this was a job which fell to Dad before he set off for work (I was a reliable morning defæcator), but he soon learned to get an early start so as to leave bog duty to Mum. There was no obvious willpower in the man, yet it was remarkably difficult to get him to do anything he didn’t want to do. He didn’t seem to have any personal preference until the air around him thickened with an implied course of conduct, and then he generally voted against it.
It’s odd, but I don’t remember seeing Granny at all during the period of my operations and rehabilitations, but then hospital visiting wouldn’t have been her style. She didn’t go in for sustained nurture but spectacular interventions. Not for her the weeding and the watering of some humble patch of garden. She would rather just happen to be passing when a hundred-year cactus bursts into the ecstasy of flower, charmingly disowning any credit but letting people come to their own conclusions.
Now and then the trolley which carried the ward telephone would bear down on me, with Granny’s precise diction ready to pounce from the receiver, so I had occasional bulletins about her activities. During this period, rather to her surprise, she had made friends with a neighbour in Tangmere. Mere friendship was rather a come-down for someone whose preferred style of relationship was the slow-burning feud. She found a strange sort of nourishment in antagonism, and there was active disappointment for her in soft emotions and smooth dealings.
The mutual benefit of the friendship was that Granny had money but no car, the neighbour a car and no money. All of this may also be part of the explanation for Granny’s absence from my bedside, that she and her neighbour were busy motoring to country towns and staying in what Granny never wavered from calling Otels.
At the end of such conversations Granny would say, ‘That’s all my news, John, and I won’t embarrass you by asking you for yours. How could you have any, marooned as you are? And I’m sure the food is terrible. Make sure your mother brings you something better. She has no talent as a maker of salads, as you will undoubtedly know. If she has forgotten how to make the salad dressing I showed her, tell her to telephone me. She has only to ask.’
It’s only now that I realise that there is a simpler explanation for absence than either a preference for other styles of charitable act or else her Otel commitments. Ridiculously simple, once the Granular mystique has worn away and you’ve given the thought permission to occur. Granny hated hospitals, and so she stayed away.
What do people hate about hospitals? The smell. The lighting. Bad tea in the canteen. The fact that death comes calling.
So when people say they ‘hate’ hospitals, it only means they fear them. Normally Granny embraced hatred with a certain amount of affection, and left the fearing to other people. But during the year-plus of my operations and rehabilitations, it was fear which drove her in any direction but mine, far more reliably than her neighbour’s car.
Despite everything I remember the sense of a warm breeze moving through the house, which was partly summer, of course, but also corresponded to a break in the family weather, a climate in which lightning hardly ever flashed but clouds were slow to clear. Tensions never seemed to come to a proper rolling boil, but it was rare for them to stop simmering altogether for the duration of a radiant interlude. It was our nature as a family to seethe rather than explode, and even when we did explode there was no actual violence and very little damage to property. Admittedly Audrey showed signs of being a wild card, who would not play by the established rules that were good or bad enough for everyone else.
Dad had a new job with BOAC, I had a new hip and a crutch whose misadventures seemed to tickle everybody, Peter had a paper round and Audrey hadn’t yet devised a hiding place beyond Mum’s power to find.
I felt proprietorial about the conservatory-greenhouse (although of course I couldn’t say so) and I liked to be parked by it. I was already planning what Dad should grow there, apart from the Drosophyllum lusitanicum in whose interest the whole long-distance hypnosis experiment had been conducted.
Love in the key of exasperation
My next project would be to persuade Dad to experiment, in the new greenhouse, with another of Menage’s tips, Musa ensete — the Abyssinian banana. If we sowed it in spring next year it would reach nearly four foot by early autumn, needing to be transplanted first into a seven-inch and then a twelve-inch pot. By the end of the second year it would be pressing outwards against the panes of the conservatory, and Menage’s advice was to get rid of it and start again from scratch. It would be interesting to see whether Dad could be so casual about the fate of the cuckoo in his greenhouse — a plant which would have by then more or less the status of a family member. Then we’d see how good a job he made of rejecting the claims of a vegetable child.
Mum fussed over me endlessly, which I tried whole-heartedly to hate. What do fully-fledged chicks feel when the mother bird regurgitates food down their throats, long after they’ve learned to feed themselves? Love, I expect, love in the key of exasperation.
She was good at the job. She was more than competent. She wasn’t like some of the professionals I had experienced over the years, who had secretly hated the job, or parts of it, and had passed that hatred on. With Mum it was just the reverse. She liked it too much. It would fit her personality and her character (Heather) in the Bach herbal system, for there to be one child who never outgrew the need for her. Then she would never need to outgrow her own need. Audrey wasn’t the answer to her prayers after all, was in fact showing signs of being a right little madam, while Peter (with that paper round and pub work in prospect) was almost out of her orbit already.
I wanted Mum’s life to have meaning — of course I did — as long as its meaning wasn’t that she had a tragically stricken son who couldn’t manage without her. Unfortunately that was the meaning she had her heart set on.
She was always on my side, but whose side was I on? Not hers. I couldn’t afford to be. She was a helper who was also an obstacle. Mum wasn’t the alternative to an ‘institution’, she was an institution in her own right, a one-woman hospice-hermitage yawning to receive me.
Bare observation
I spent a lot of time viewing Mum through the wrong end of a mental telescope, practising the Buddhist vision — bare observation, indifferent to the agreed meanings of things — taught by theSatipatthana Sutta. What was Mum? Mum was a fathom-long carcass (closer to the fathom mark, in fact, than I would ever be), fat, tears, grease, saliva, etc. More to the point, Mum was the champion of the Relaxator, the Bernina — the sewing-machine — and Sqezy (I was troubled and thrilled by the manufacturer’s licence to drop the mandatory u after q), booster of the Kenwood, the Rayburn, Kia-Ora, Yeast-Vite and Nescaff, compulsive denigrator of Kit-e-Kat and Kit-Kat. The layman’s term for this spiritual enterprise is ‘hardening the heart’.
When his family spilled out into the garden which was his exclusive province for much of the year, Dad tended to retreat into the shed. Mum’s main reason for being in the garden was to pick herbs. She had white paving stones laid in the back plot just outside the kitchen door, in the form of a chess board. Her herbs grew in the black squares, and she could walk on the white squares when she wanted to pick them.