Carol Clewlow - Not Married, Not Bothered

All of this would be fine was it not for the fact that, in clear contradiction of her own eminently comfortable lifestyle, she still feels the need occasionally to harass her spinsterdaughter

‘Hey, I’ve not noticed you’re in that much of a hurry to get hitched again, Mother.’

‘I’m not talking about getting married, Addy. No one has to get married these days.’ (Babs likes to think of herself as excessively modern.) ‘There just never seems to be anyone in your life, that’s all.’

‘Well, thank you for mentioning it. I don’t believe I’d noticed that, Mother.’

A strict diet of booze and fags plus the odd lettuce leaf pushed in a desultory way around her plate at what passes for meal times ensures that my mother’s size 8 figure never gets any bigger. Despite this unhealthy life-style she gets a clean bill of health every time she goes to the doctor (and while we’re on the subject, why do you go to the doctor, Mother; is it because he’s young and good-looking, you shameless hussy?). Given half a chance, she’d still do that Cleopatra thing of hopping forty paces through a public street. Robbed of the opportunity, she contents herself putting in a full day’s shopping at Marks & Spencer on a pair of heels that would provide training for a stilt walker.

Like Cleopatra, my mother believes with passion and spirit that age cannot wither her, an opinion most often expressed when she stands before her hall mirror patting her washboard stomach and uttering the now familiar words: ‘Haven’t put on a pound since I was sixteen,’ this always followed by a critical stare in the direction of whichever daughter has the misfortune to be caught in the mirror next to her, and the rider, ‘Darling … do I dream it … or are you a size 14?’ (Or 16 in Cassie’s case.)

I have learnt over the years that all my mother’s snips and snides are prefaced by the word ‘darling’. As in:

‘Darling … do you have to buy such clumpy shoes?’

‘Darling … is that a motorbike jacket you’re wearing?’

And now, of course: ‘Darling, all I’m saying is, do you really think your hair suits you that short?’ (The italics in all cases, I promise you, are my mother’s.)

As regards my hair, I’ve always worn it long. I’ve had every style known to man or beast (perms, pleats, plaits, highlights, low-lights, etc., etc.) but still it’s never risen much above my shoulders. Thus the day I came in with it ice white and shorn, my mother fell back against the sink like she was having a heart attack.

‘Oh, what have you done… what have you done?’ she moaned, clutching her chest.

‘I’ve had an arm amputated. I’ve shot the Prime Minister. Oh no. I’ve just remembered. I’ve only had my hair cut, Mother.’

She continued keening for a while. ‘Oh, your hair … your beautiful hair.’ But in the way of these things, grief soon turned to anger.

‘It was your saving grace, Adeline, you know that, don’t you?’

‘Oh, and I thought it was my crowning glory.’

Please note here my mother’s use of the name Adeline to address me, she being the only person on the planet to do so, and this on account of it being the one she gave me – a fancy French name, according to my dictionary of first names, although not in this instance, since I was named after an Adeline from Bromsgrove whose bridesmaid I later became and who had the bed next to my mother’s in the barracks in Cairo. *

The name was and is entirely unsuitable, one I would have had to wear like a bolt through my neck was it not for my father, God bless him. In a move that my mother would forever regret, she deputed him to register my birth, something that allowed him to pull one of only two known flankers over her in the history of their time together (the other was when he died to get away from her).

Afterwards he would claim that the middle name he gave me was that of a close friend killed in the war. He’d even take the trouble to look suitably mournful when he said it. Once, though, bending beneath a bonnet in his ramshackle old tin-roofed garage on one of our long evenings together, me standing beside him handing him his spanners, he told me he’d named me after his favourite car, a Riley Sprite he’d owned in the halcyon days of his youth, which translated means those days before he met my mother.

‘Lovely thing, she was. Four cylinder push-rod-operated overhead-valve engine.’

I assume he was talking about the Riley.

Thus I am Adeline Riley Gordon, but to all and sundry ever since (except, natch, my mother), Riley , not least because my father, keen to compound his crime and irritate my mother whenever possible – the revenge, raison d’être and principal calling of his married life – referred to me as that from Day One, firmly instructing my sister Cassie, three at the time, to follow his example.

In all this I count myself lucky. Not just because Riley suits me infinitely better than Adeline ever could (or, the horror … the horror … the appalling ‘Addy’), but because if I’d had the misfortune to be born a generation later, God knows, I might have had to put Golf or Mondeo or Fiesta at the top of my O level paper.

Anyway, I like Riley. It suits me. It has a jaunty, freedom-loving air that I like to think entirely encapsulates what I am. I think, I hope that, like Beatrice, a star danced when I was born.

‘Not from where I was looking it didn’t.’

Yes, thank you, Mother.

Anyway, I’m more than happy, just like Beatrice, to pay for my state by leading apes in hell when I die, this being the mythological punishment for spinsters, but one that holds no fears for me, coming of age as I did at a time and in a place where men were still getting used to the upright position. Confronted by the word ‘clitoris’, there’s still a few would guess at one of the lesser known Greek islands.

All in all I’d say the only downside, if downside there be to my name, is the jokes it provokes. Or rather, The Joke. Because there is only one. I’ve heard it a thousand times but, trust me, that’s not something that ever spoils the enjoyment of the joker.

‘Ri-l-ey …’ he’ll say, and I’ll watch as that geeky smile dawns and behind the skin of his face those old wheels and cogs start turning. ‘I suppose you live the life of Riley, then?’

And if you want know what all this Spinster’s Alphabet stuff is about I’d say it’s just that.

Because as a matter of fact, I think I do. *

*Answers in reverse order: Yes, No and How could we know?

*Author’s note: Cass was 29 and I was 26 by the time our father passed peacefully and gratefully away from our mother.

*Among many others. See B for Bridesmaids.

*As will be clear by now, the aim of this book is ever to inform. Thus you may be interested to know whence comes the term Life of Riley. It first appeared in a popular song performed by one Pat Rooney in 1880s America, ‘Are You the O’Reilly’, which describes all the things said O’Reilly would do if he was rich. Another song, ‘The Best in the House is None Too Good For Reilly’, shortened the name to the one we know and introduced the notion of R (e) iley as a carefree soul. The actual words the ‘Life of Riley’ appear in a third and later song, ‘My Name is Kelly’.

Faith and my name is Kelly Michael Kelly,

But I’m living the life of Reilly just the same.

With ‘My Name is Kelly’ the metamorphosis was complete. Reilly had become the idle, ne’er do well of popular fiction, and in particular of my mother’s morning newspaper for whom the phrase is indispensable, especially when applied to that vast amorphous body of people whose sole unifying feature is that they’re all somehow not just getting something for nothing but something due, by rights, to readers of said paper. This body includes but is by no means confined to: