With the exception of Mary, and possibly Sarah too, the CRX kids were too low to be able to hear the Earlies. Wendy would pass boiled sweets round after her parents visited, and then when our mouths were full she announced proudly that she’d left her bum dirty earlier on and wiped the sweets against it. How would she possibly hear the Earlies? Her ears were sealed with wicked wax.
I told Mum about my plans and she looked thoughtful. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t be better suited to Sarah?’ she asked. She wasn’t seriously weighing up Sarah as a marriage prospect. It was more that she and Sarah’s mum had struck up a friendship of their own. Sarah’s mum would come to visit driving a Volkswagen. I knew about this extraordinary car, because sometimes on her visits Sarah and I would be pushed to the end of that quarter-mile corridor to sample the delights of the WVS canteen, staffed by Mrs Carpenter of the Squashy Thumbs.
The squashy thumbs
Her thumbs really were squashy, and she always invited us to play with them. She would reach across a big red hand to us. Our fingers left little dimpled marks on her thumbs. They stayed visible for quite a while. I enjoyed the game so much it never occurred to me to ask why it happened. I only thought it must be nice to have a bit of plasticine always with you. Possibly she suffered from a circulation disorder, causing some sort of œdema. At the time it seemed almost appropriate that someone who worked in a canteen should take on some of the characteristics of dough, and I thought that the only ill people in hospitals were the patients. I hardly understood that grown-ups could be ill too. Didn’t children have the monopoly?
After that we would be pushed to the entrance. Sarah’s mum would give a kiss to Sarah and a peck to me, and we would watch her driving off in her car, which looked so funny it made me laugh. ‘It’s known as a Beetle and the engine’s in the back and the boot is in the front,’ Sarah said proudly, which made me start laughing all over again. We were too poor for a car, but I prayed that when we did get one it would be a Beetle because it was wonderful in every way. Sarah’s mum gave me a ride in it once, but it was so uncomfortable I nearly clicked my back and never wanted to go in one again. I reversed the current of my prayers, pleading for any other car than a Beetle and hoping that God would ignore my previous intercession.
As their friendship developed, sometimes at weekends Sarah’s mum would pick my mum up at the station and bring her to CRX in the Beetle. Mum had nothing against Mary — no one could — but it had to be admitted that her parents, stranded as they were in Rutland, couldn’t offer to give Mum useful lifts. That was how I explained her preference for Sarah as a prospective daughter-in-law.
I knew my mum liked Sarah’s mum Jacquetta, not because she had plenty of money, I don’t think, but because she had so much confidence. Sarah’s dad had been in the Foreign Office and Jacquetta was used to all sorts of people. She just naturally felt at home in any company, and that was something Mum admired and envied. Sarah’s mum was posh in a way Mum could never be, posh without effort. Even Granny’s sense of status had a strenuous edge to it, while true posh, as I came to see, was almost blithe.
Without regular contact with her own mother, Mum’s snobbery was becoming somehow anæmic. I hadn’t yet noticed it, but in those years there was a Granny-shaped hole in my life. She wrote letters from time to time, which sometimes enclosed postal orders, but the postman brought me my only contact with her.
If I had been more on the ball I would have realised that the two of them weren’t on speaking terms. Granny and Mum hadn’t fallen out at the time of my misdiagnosis being revealed, but soon after. In a crisis family tension took second place, but it didn’t go away. In fact the quarrel had been about something apparently trivial, but had taken a surprising turn. Granny had been going too far for most of her life. This time it was Mum who had trespassed into an area that was off limits, and Granny was slow to forgive. So slow that it seemed likely she would die first.
Guttersnipe in the making
Mum liked to talk about Jacquetta, and so did I. Jacquetta had given Mum her visiting card, which she proudly showed me. The address was ‘1, Melmott Court, Cookham’. As a trainee snob, I pounced on this. I thought I had found a flaw in Mum’s value system. I thought I had her cornered.
Of course, while I was in Mum’s company I had to revert to my old choice of words, pre-eminently ‘lavatory’ rather than ‘toilet’. I had to hide the fact that her apprentice snob was also a guttersnipe in the making. According to Mum, ‘toilet’ was roughly the commonest word in the world. Still’s Disease was quite enough to be getting on with, thank you, without her son being infected with vulgar word choice. I was rapidly developing a habitual hesitation, almost a complex about what to call the room with the personal plumbing, rather a draw-back in a life where I must ask for help, more often than most people, to be taken there. I had reached a stage where every term sounded wrong.
Now I had a chance to return the favour of embarrassment. ‘Mum?’ I said, nice as pie. ‘Didn’t you tell me that decent people never live in numbered houses? Except of course in London, where there are so many houses that the GPO insists?’
If I’d hoped to rattle Mum I was disappointed. ‘Quite true, JJ,’ she said calmly, ‘but if your address ends in Court it’s perfectly all right.’ It turned out that there was a whole intricate cult of addresses, seething with rules and exceptions. She felt about addresses roughly what traditional Japanese feel about tea, or their ancestors. ‘It’s the same with addresses which end in Park, and also Mansions.’
‘How about Palace, Mum? Would that be a proper address?’
Mum put her head on one side. ‘I think so.’ On balance she was inclined to let an address ending in ‘Palace’ scrape into the paddock of privilege.
‘But we live in Bathford, nr Bath, Somerset, and we have a number, don’t we?’
‘Well, yes we do. But we’re in married quarters, you see, and with so many servicemen the RAF had to give numbers. That’s quite all right. It isn’t ideal, of course, and the neighbours — for instance Doreen Parsons, bless her! — are very suburban, but you can’t always have everything, John. We won’t live there for ever, you know, JJ,’ she added. ‘Things will change, you’ll see.’ And at least our street number was a single digit. Apparently that made a difference.
There were other subtleties. It was perfectly all right to have numbers if you were serving in the forces, or if you were in a nursing or medical college, or if you’d just left university and were quite poor, as long as you bucked up and got a proper address as soon as you possibly could.
It turned out that absolutely everybody who lived in America had numbers, but it was a big place and often your house number would be more than a thousand which in some strange way made it all right. There were upper people in America too, though it wasn’t at all easy to tell them from the others.
Even at the time I sensed that Mum would have found a way of keeping Jacquetta Morrison among the poshest of the poshies even if her card had read, ‘The Abandoned Railway Carriage, behind The Pigsty’. I hadn’t been able to put even the slightest dent in her dreams.