Carol Clewlow - Not Married, Not Bothered

Born in a merry hour, surely?

No, sure, my lord, my mother cried …

‘Damn right. What a time I had of it with you … You were bloody hours coming.’

Oh, why not? She’s like Banquo’s ghost, after all. Don’t invite her to the feast and she’ll show up anyway.

Might as well start where all spinsters start.

Folks …

My mother.

Once in the back garden my brother-in-law, Fergie, put his arm comfortingly around his wife’s shoulder. He cast his eyes up into the soft sweet Somerset night.

‘Ah yes …’ he said. ‘Somewhere up there the mother ship is circling and it’s looking for Babs Gordon.’

Because our mother is barmy Our mother is bonkers. Our mother is barking, dippy, daft as a brush. Our mother is Madame Defarge at the foot of the guillotine, but in the words of the late great Freddie Mercury, only knitting on that one solitary needle.

Not that the comparison with the revolutionary Ms Defarge would at all suit our mother, she being one of those old-fashioned, unreconstructed Thatcherites doing such a stirling job holding back the party. (Oh thank you, thank you, thank you mother.)

And yet, and yet … if only this was the end of it.

If only the gods in their wisdom, in their compassion, had given Cassie and me a straightforwardly mad hang-em-and-flog-em Fascist for a mother. For instead Babs Gordon oscillates . Babs Gordon is a human fan, swinging eternally left to right, and for no discernible reason, blowing out the first vacuous, entirely illogical and idiosyncratic opinion that drops into her lovable Carmen-curled head. And while you, in your folly, might think it adds a certain piquancy, a certain frisson to life to walk up your mother’s front path of a morning never knowing, when the door opens, whether you’ll be confronted by Mother Theresa or the winner of the Genghis Khan Most Promising Newcomer Award, trust me, it doesn’t.

Shall we, for instance, be sympathetic to single mothers this fine morning?

‘Well, of course, I am. I’ve been one myself haven’t I?’ *

Or shall we, by contrast, be taking a stronger line?

‘It’s all taxpayers’ money. You and me, we’re paying for them. You know that, don’t you?’

Or – I know – asylum seekers. An oldie but goldie. Shall we be extending the hand of friendship today?

‘I mean, I feel so sorry for them. Imagine having to shop with vouchers .’

Or shall we be in favour of putting them up against the wall and shooting them?

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Adeline, I really resent the way you do that.’

‘Do what?’

‘You know.’

‘What?’

‘Make me out to be some sort of … oh, I don’t know …’

‘Burbling, featherbrained, six-short-of-a-box reactionary old swinger?’

I lied.

Regrettably this is not something I’ve ever managed to say to my mother.

Meanwhile please note the reference to shopping in her sympathetic response to asylum seekers. To say that shopping plays a big part in Babs Gordon’s life is to indulge in the deplorable British habit of understatement. Shopping is Babs Gordon’s faith, her hope, the nearest, viz. the voucher argument, she’ll ever come to charity. Brought up as a wishy-washy Baptist, Babs Gordon thereafter converted to shopping. A card-carrying member of the Royal Society of Shoppers (Visa, Mastercard, Debenhams, John Lewis, but in particular M & S), at least once a month she drives the thirty miles to our nearest out-of-town Marks, a massive thing the size of the British Museum, there to walk the aisles in the same spirit, a dutiful tourist looking at all the exhibits and making her way through women’s wear, footwear, underwear, handbags and shoes, home furnishings and, of course, menswear, the last for which she heads expressly just so she can flutter her eyelashes like some sixteen-year-old virgin, and say with that deceptively careless, entirely self-satisfied and proprietorial air: ‘I’ll just slip in. See if I can get anything for Tommy.’

A word now about Tommy.

What is Tommy to my mother?

In other circumstances you might call Tommy my mother’s lover. But I don’t believe it. Not for one minute. And if you think this is the response of an anally retentive spinster daughter, well, frankly I don’t give a toss. Suffice it to say on the matter of sex, I wish my mother was having it, I wish I was having it, I wish you were having it, I wish we were all having it, I’m that generous. Still I’d lay a pound to a penny that my mother is not and never has been en flagrante with Tommy. Or with anyone else. Including our father. For while I recognise that the existence of Cass and myself would indicate some form of interchange between our mother and our father (I think we can safely rule out any of that early test tube stuff with the sperm of actors and vicars), I have every confidence that, at least on my mother’s part, we represent entirely token copulations.

Not that Babs does not like men. No, no. Our Babs adores men, a fact she is given to asserting frequently in her cups at parties.

‘I’ve always got on so much better with men.’ That’s one of her particular favourites, accompanied by those eternally fluttering lashes and that familiar hand laid deprecatingly upon bosom.

In short, there’s a word for what my mother is but I don’t intend to use it. Let’s just settle for flirt, a quaint old-fashioned term that would thrill my mother to her skinny marrow should she overhear it being used to describe her. For were you to venture, machete in hand, through the impenetrable jungle that is my mother’s mind, you would find there a scary image, the one she bears of herself, a Mata Hari figure, a femme fatale , condemned (hand fluttering upon bosom again) to wreak havoc and confusion in the hearts of men. As for Tommy, well, I guess the best thing to call him is her consort, the man she goes bowling with, on chaste single-room coach-tour holidays to the Swiss Alps, the Scottish Highlands and the Dutch Bulb Fields, as well as to all and every event at the Conservative Club, where Tommy is bar steward and chairman of the entertainments committee. And the fact that this entirely sexless relationship unquestionably suits Tommy down to his last buffed-up blazer button is not something my mother feels a need to take on board. And strange as it may seem, neither do I. It is one of only a handful of things for which I feel a need to defend my mother, and this because I am, at heart, a sixties person and therefore a fully paid-up member of the Whatever Is Your Bag/Whatever Turns You On Party. Furthermore, if it is the case that in an age and a world different from the one into which he was born, Tommy might otherwise be more merrily engaged flicking a towel at the firm buttocks of a handsome young pool boy … well … that’s his business. And long may the pair of them, my mother and he, ignore it.

This is a small town and with a small-town mentality. Despite, or possibly because of, this, as far as their friends and neighbours are concerned, Babs and Tommy are respectably à deux , occupying their own remarkably similar, chintzy, cushiony, squeaky-clean homes, each with matching pine block freshner down the toilet, pink seat cover and frilly Kleenex holder.

It’s been this way since our father died the best part of thirty years ago when the funeral baked meats, metaphorically at least, began to coldly furnish forth the marriage table.

‘Don’t go there,’ has been Cass’s advice from the first, counsel I followed reluctantly at first but, as time passed, increasingly easily.

To all intents and purposes, Tommy is now part of the family, not least thanks to thirty years of Christmas Days spent together. In essence, he still looks the way he looked at our father’s funeral, like some old-fashioned stiff-upper-lipped colonel with a stick beneath his armpit. His back is still ramrod straight, or at least it would be was it not for the shaking that has begun to afflict him and that may or may not be the onset of Parkinson’s. This shaking gives him the air of a man trying to control his anger but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact he’s an astonishingly peaceable man, miraculously so bearing in mind he spends so much time with my flighty, wildly irritating mother.