This was a song which really came into its own when the sun shone and the French windows were thrown open. Day by day the volume dial on the household’s Bush radiogram crept up, in stealthy increments.
When ‘Good Vibrations’ was playing, Mum’s herb-picking became especially adventurous, with the music pulsing and prancing behind her. She would execute a courtly dance among her plantings in search of the right flavours, like a bee spoiled for choice between flowers. She danced a happy bumbling gavotte around the aromatic chequerboard of the herb garden.
Audrey trotted out from the house and joined in, treating the paving stones as a sort of practice court for hopscotch. Sometimes she lost her balance and trod on a planting, which seemed genuinely accidental, though taking a small revenge on anything which attracted Mum’s attention away from her wouldn’t have been out of character. She knew exactly how many times she could get away with saying, ‘Oh dear, I’ve treaded on Mummy’s parsy,’ before she was suspected of systematic trampling. For Audrey in those days, parsley was parsy and there was no other herb, hardly another piece of greenery. From her point of view the vegetable kingdom was made up of the holy trinity, parsley, rose and Christmas tree.
Peter would be exercising rather self-consciously in the sunlight with the chest-expander Dad had given him for his birthday, two wooden handles connected with woven elastic ropes. As his powers increased he was supposed to add more of these ropes, clipping them to rings on the handles. Eventually the chest-expander would have six strings, like a guitar, though currently he was stranded at the banjo stage with four — but still, he was stringing and tuning his teenaged vigour as if it was an actual instrument. He was proud enough of his progress to exercise where he could be seen, shy enough to keep the operative area out of sight by wearing an ærtex shirt rather than a singlet.
Even Gipsy joined in the harmonious mood, an ageing dog these days, sedately romping. By now her hips were more or less on a par with my substandard ones, though of course she made no exorbitant demands on them for balance. They held her up without any trouble, it’s just that they moved rather stiffly and made her unwilling to risk the blithe jumps of her youth. Dogs’ hips don’t last for ever. Mine at least had improved with age, thanks to the visionary butchering of Mr Arden.
Sustained hedon bombardment
Dad, of course, retreated to the greenhouse in protest at the din, but gave the game away by leaving the door open a few inches. The elementary particles of sensation had always seemed to stream right through Dad, or to bounce off him. His pain threshold was high, his pleasure threshold higher still. Perhaps this was only the side of him we saw, but we saw a lot of it. It took mighty waves of positively charged experience to provoke the smallest interior ripple of enjoyment. He preferred to go through life without being obliged to provide emotional commentary.
There must be a benefit, for the species if not for the individual, in the refusal of joy. A hedon is the unit of pleasure, just as a dolor is the unit of pain. The hedon isn’t recognised by any authority, not even one as marginal as a Swedish university research project. Still, it’s logically necessary, even if I just this minute made it up.
Hedon radiation was agitating every molecule of the shed, hedons were pulsing and throbbing like fireflies, tickling the soft palate of anyone within range like inhaled lemonade. Strong California sunshine trapped in grooves of black plastic was converted back into the visible spectrum by the travelling prism, tip down, of the stylus on the family record player. Our English summer was given substance by the American one on the record.
Even Dad couldn’t hold out against the Beach Boys for ever. Sustained hedon bombardment day after day, relentless, was bound to find the chink in the shed, and Dad’s armour. It took its toll. Dad’s resistance was high but he wasn’t quite hedon-proof, much (for some reason) as he might want that.
One day he was watering the garden while Mum was playing the song indoors at the usual volume, and I could see for myself how those good vibrations infiltrated the arm that held the hose. Whenever that peculiar passage came round when an unearthly electronic instrument goes OOOWEEEYOOO OOOWEEEE like an ecstatic banshee, Dad would move the hose in luxurious loops and spirals. Random beds and plantings in the garden got the benefit of a more generous, carefree sprinkling, the moisture subtly ionised by Dad’s grudging pleasure in the song.
There came a day when I caught him whistling bits of the tune. Dad’s was a generation of whistlers. They whistled when they were cheerful and also when they weren’t. They whistled their way into the War, and those who came back were still whistling, when it ended, with a fair approximation of nonchalance.
In later life they whistled as they washed the car, as they tidied the tools in the shed, and on their way to the funerals of their contemporaries, though it was always considered poor form to reproduce much in the way of a tune. And now Dad, despite himself, was whistling a song he wanted to hate. I looked enquiringly at him, hoping he would admit to liking and enjoying something that we all loved, but he didn’t respond. It would be too much of a loss of face to come clean and admit that not all songs with guitars in them were infantile rubbish. That would mean, somehow, that we had won, if he ever admitted he was just as much seduced by this luminous summer anthem as anyone else.
Intolerable coffee please
There was a similar pattern of behaviour on the rare occasions we went to a restaurant for any sort of celebration meal. Dad would start to rally his troops immediately after pudding, and I would ask, ‘Can we have some coffee, please Dad?’
‘No point, John,’ he would say. ‘We’ll have it at home where they know how to make it. Everyone knows the coffee here is intolerable.’
‘Have you tasted it yourself?’
‘I expect so.’ Dad didn’t enjoy telling actual lies, untruths without any blurring at their edges. He didn’t have much of a gift for equivocation, come to that. He was a little better at changing the subject, but I was too fast for him.
‘Try to remember. Have you had the coffee here?’
He looked at the corner of the room. ‘Possibly not.’
‘Then how do you know it’s so bad?’
‘Experience and common sense.’
‘It isn’t experience if you haven’t experienced it, and it can’t be common sense if it’s not sensible.’
‘It seems I must order some intolerable coffee in order to pander to the prejudices of my son.’
‘Yes please, Dad.’
‘Waiter! I’d like a cup of your’ — the next word was mumbled — ‘intolerable coffee, please.’
‘Yes, sir. Right away.’
When it arrived he took a small sip. ‘What’s it like, Dad?’
‘Worst coffee I ever tasted.’
‘Are you going to leave it, then?’
‘Certainly not. Senseless waste. Now put a cork in it, John. Can’t a man have a little peace in which to try not to taste his intolerable cup of coffee?’
When he had finished the cup he made a final pronouncement: ‘Positively the worst cup of coffee I ever drank or even heard of. Do you want some?’
‘Yes please, Dad.’ Of course it was delicious. But he’d already given the game away by the way he relaxed as the coffee got to work on him. His look was almost dreamy.
He wasn’t trying to be difficult. No one enjoys seeing a fixed idea go up in smoke, an axiom torpedoed. I think it gave him physical pain to change his mind.