Mantrapped. Fay Weldon

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       On the anger of mothers

      Later on in our lives, whenever I could wrench my socialist mother out of the council houses and flats where she was determined to live to be at one with the people, I would house her in what (to me) were more suitable surroundings. Instead of being harassed by the guard dogs of her neighbours, alarmed by the noise of domestic violence through thin walls, and distressed by the backbiting of neighbours, I would deliver her into rose-covered cottages and pretty houses where she would have a garden and neighbours to appreciate her wit and style. She was very wise in everything other than her own life. Here she could enjoy her guilt to the full and feel free to exclaim in horror every time I took a glass of wine (such a waste of money, save it and give it to the poor, if you don’t need it yourself) or served anything other than plain food. (Such a waste of time: you should be reading and writing: nothing nicer than cabbage, fast cooked, with pepper and butter: it only takes five minutes.) I did not doubt my love for her or hers for me.

      But there was a time when she was really fed up with me, and my sister Jane too. Mama had tried to escape us; she had put a pin in a map and fled to St Ives: she had given us twenty years of her life and that was enough. Or so she thought. But we would not let it rest at that.

      She’d launched us into the world as bright girls with student grants, and then gone off to leave us to our own devices. (My annual grant was £167, over £3 a week, which my mother saw as great wealth. She gasped in admiration at the generosity of governments. The whole family, grandmother included, had managed on far less from time to time.) We were well-brought up, sensible, clever, friendly girls, but not good at thinking for ourselves. Our mother had done that for us. I’d been reared in an all-female household, gone to an all-girls school, and had scarcely talked to a man in my life, let alone ‘dated’. I had no idea how to conduct myself. Soon enough I was pregnant. Jane had at least the grace to marry Guido Morris, a man respectable in the world of the arts—a member of the St Ives set, his work now in the Tate—albeit penniless and irresponsible with several families to his name already and twenty-five years her senior. The father of my child was a penniless orphan, once a boy bandsman in the army, now a singer of folk songs in the Mandrake Club in Soho. I think Jane and I both assumed our mother would save us from disaster, and when she did not we resented this backsliding on her part. Not that I can remember Jane and I ever discussing our mother. She was too much part of us to be seen as a separate entity.

      Other girls at least managed to fall in love with possible partners. Jane and I courted disaster. Perhaps we felt the need to fill the space in our mother’s life, to compensate for the exhiliration we had felt in at last leaving home. At any rate we felt obliged to bring her our babies back, for her to look after, to fill the vacuum we had left behind us.

      Mama had no visible means of support, either, at the time. She had run an advertising agency in New Zealand in the war, but had hated every minute of it, and had turned down all suitors out of pride and the determination that she would never, never rely on the support of a man again. So now, since she had to eat, she wove reed baskets on the moors outside St Ives. She’d pluck the reeds, weave the baskets, walk to Penzance, sell the baskets, buy the week’s food with it, and commune with nature to her heart’s content. Larks and sunsets bought her real delight.

      Old Meg she was a gypsy, And lived upon the moors: Her bed it was the brown heath turf, And her house was out of doors.

      But still we trusted her to look after us when it came to the crunch, and she did. (You thought you could do this to us, mother: but we are your problem not our own! Look after us!) She left the moors and joined us in London, and then moved us all to Saffron Walden, a place chosen because she liked the sound of the name, and we would be amongst strangers, without witnesses to our disgrace, where she hoped our delinquencies would go unnoticed, but of course they were not. On the contrary. To have relied upon the anonymity of London would have been more sensible. My poor mother. She would wake early in a state of anxiety, brood for an hour or two, come to an unnecessarily complex solution to a simple problem by breakfast time, and put it into action by lunchtime. Her solution this time had been that I was to change my name by dead poll to that of the baby’s father, tell my friends and colleagues I had married, and then give up my job, move out of London where I was not known, and start my life afresh. That it was ten times more difficult to earn a living in the country than in the city, that I could have stayed where I was in the Foreign Office and fought my way up to higher grades and better wages (they could only fire you for immorality, I later found, if you were unmarried and had three babies by more than two different fathers), and was far too talkative and indiscreet to start again anywhere with a secret past, and was not likely to forswear my friends, did not occur to her. It did occur to me but she had a powerful personality and I assumed she knew best. I did as she suggested. I was horrified to be then sent a wedding present to my new Saffron Walden address by my Foreign Office colleagues: surely this was taking gifts on false pretences? I ought to return it at once with apologies for misleading them. But my mother was against it. I must stick by the story, she said. Say the marriage had been called off, anything. I imagine w hat I did do was simply put off writing the thank-you note until the time to do so decently had passed and I was so pregnant nothing seemed to matter other than what was going on inside my own body. But I cannot remember. It remains on my conscience. A bad patch. A bad girl. How terrible children can be. Bad behaviour is not a one way street. And certainly, if the mother leaves early, the children linger longer. But we had no such overview at the time, of course not. Those were the pre-Freudian days.

      March 1954, and there I was with a baby, the dramas of pregnancy and childbirth over, with the reality of a small child to face. Guido came to claim Jane and her new baby Christopher, and installed them in a cottage in deepest Sussex and brought marrow bones home every weekend. ‘Lots of nourishment in these, my dear. I am going to theological college so must be away most of the time. They don’t know I’m married, so don’t tell them.’’ My friend Belinda, who had come to join Jane and me in our sibling pregnancies, was rescued by the father of her child, who very soon married her. I remained unmarried and unrescued, and, dreams of self-sufficiency over, let alone the hope of running a little cake shop (mother’s idea, but no customers came), commuted to London every day, by train, to Fleet Street, where I answered readers’ questions on Hire Purchase problems for the Daily Mirror. My stepmother had sent me a cheque for £200 from my father’s estate, and I had spent £100 on a typewriter and used it to write job applications. Now I worked and earned СКАЧАТЬ