Carol Clewlow - Not Married, Not Bothered

single mothers

students

gays

lesbians

blacks

any teacher, vicar, lawyer, film or theatre director deemed by her morning newspaper to be ‘trendy’

anyone with a good word to say for the sixties

criminals (unless they’re actually members of the Tory Party)

and last, but definitely not least, anyone receiving Unemployment Benefit.

‘Scroungers,’ is my mother’s rallying cry as she waves her paper in the air. ‘On the dole. Lying in bed all day. Leading the Life of Riley.’

According to The Guinness Book of Records , the world’s most prolific bridesmaid is believed to be one Euphrenia LaFayette of Big Flat, Arkansas. A combination of a large family and lack of good bridesmaid material in her mountain home is said to have led to Ms LaFayette being called on no less than sixty-three times. Interviewed by the Arkansas Sentinel upon her retirement at the age of forty-four, Miss LaFayette said, ‘Ah been up that damn aisle in every kinda dress, n’ carried every damn kinda posy. I’ve had every damn kinda contraption on ma head too, and dang me, if a gal caaaint get tired o’ that sorta thang.’

Ms LaFayette has never married.

I lied.

There is no Most Prolific Bridesmaid category in The Guinness Book of Records . Which is a pity.

I could have been a contender.

When I told Cass about Mad Magda deciding to marry herself and asking me to be one of her bridesmaids, she said, ‘Well, it’s not like you don’t have the experience.’

It’s a weird thing when you think about it that once upon a time the best way to bless the bridal pair, to wish them good luck in their marriage, was to have them met upon the church steps by a raggedy, smutty-faced boy chimney sweep complete with pneumoconiosis and brushes. You can still find the scene depicted on wedding cards, although it’s harder to lay your hands on the real thing these days, boy chimney sweeps having gone the way of so many of our great traditions – children down the mines, nimble-fingered seamstresses working by candlelight, blind and starving match-girls on every street corner. However, whereas we now balk at sticking young boys up chimneys, we show no such compunction at grabbing some innocent young female, thrusting her into a bad dress and bonnet, and pushing her, posy in hand, up the aisle behind the bridal party.

I know. I was that bridesmaid.

Look, the way I see it is this. Some people are born bridesmaids (particularly if they’re cursed with blonde ringlets); some people achieve bridesmaidhood; others, thanks to what can only be termed sheer dereliction of duty on the part of their sisters, have the bridesmaid thing thrust upon them. (Cassie, are you listening?)

Because if that whole ‘Three times a bridesmaid, never a bride’ thing *really is the ancient curse that Archie alleged all those years ago at Cass and Fergie’s wedding, then all I can say is my fate as a spinster was sealed early on. Six times – and this before the age of ten – I was forced into taffeta and tulle, to my mind a human rights abuse of the first order. In part this was due to Cassie cleverly throwing up on her frock within sight of the altar on her first booking (you’re pretty much finished on the bridesmaid circuit after that). But mainly it was due to all those Buffies and Madges and Snowies.

There’s a picture on the mantelpiece in my mother’s front room. More than a picture, an icon. Because the fact is that she looks wonderful in that photograph. They should have used it for a recruitment poster.

‘They did. How many times must I tell you?’

There’s not a ruck or a tuck or wrinkle in that uniform. The cap sits squarely on her head as she gazes straight-backed and grave into the camera. She sheds a tear over that picture sometimes and, trust me, my mother sheds a tear over very little.

‘All this will go when I go,’ she says, dabbing at her eyes pitifully with one of her customised floral Kleenex. ‘You two’ll just throw it away.’

‘Never, Mother, never.’

‘We’ll hang it on the wall.’

‘Light a candle beneath it.’

‘We’ll have one of those dippy little finger bowl things underneath so we can flick holy water on our foreheads as we pass.’

‘Oh, you.’ But there’s real pain in her voice.

It’s one of the few occasions when I feel genuinely sorry for my mother. For herein lies the source of my mother’s madness, the reason for all that lunacy. My mother, you see, never got over the war.

One night, helping her to the car from some wartime reunion night at the Conservative Club, Tommy on one side, me on the other, she clutched at his arm as he lowered her into the front seat.

‘They don’t understand, do they?’ she said. Her eyes were full of tears but, more than that, a terrible yearning sorrow. ‘I was twenty years old, Tommy. I was in Cairo …’

‘It’s alright, Babs, it’s alright,’ he said very gently, and in that moment I did understand, not just all that madness, but also her relationship with Tommy, and what this too might be about, this secret that belonged only to themselves and others of their ilk: what it had been like to be plucked from a small country town, not even full grown, and dropped down into a foreign, utterly exotic place – in my mother’s case Egypt; for Tommy, India. All this with that added ingredient of war. That what? Frisson? No, no, so much more that that. Something we’ve never known, please God will never know. Something that, for all the books and the films, we still can’t really imagine.

Ask my mother about the war, and you won’t hear anything about those bit part players like Hitler and Churchill. Instead you’ll get, ‘Did I ever tell you about the night Madge and I got caught by the curfew and had to climb in through the window after we’d been out all night at the Deck Club?’ Or, ‘Did I tell you how Buffy and I hired a truck and went out dressed as sheikhs to the Pyramids?’ Or, ‘Did I tell you about the night Snowy got drunk on arak and almost threw up over Larry Adler?’

Oh, yes. Many times. So many times, Mother.

As a child, I measured out my life with those visits from the Madges and Buffies and Snowies.

Upstairs in her bedroom, revelling in her round National Health glasses and her straight coarse blunt-cut hair from which slides and flowers and Alice bands would slip as if deliberately, Cassie would sit bent over her book, point-blank refusing to come down and join the party. Thus it would always be just me standing outside the lounge door waiting to be paraded on the rug in preparation for yet another outing as bridesmaid. Through the crack I’d hear the plop of the sherry cork, the sound of all that merciless, melancholy Chalet School laughter.

‘There we are, look … in that funny little place we found that day near the Continental Hotel. There’s you, Buffy, and you, Madge. And is that Snowy?’ A blood-red fingernail would stab the page of the photograph album in something I recognised even then as resentment.

They look so damned happy in those pictures, those young women, that’s the thing. All that leaning in, all that loving and laughter. They make war look such fun . Which is not their fault. The best of times in the worst of times among those elegant potted plants and wicker chairs in the pictures. Blame the table tops full of glasses if you must blame something, or the rakish nature of uniform. Blame Carpe Diem written in the wreathes of cigarette smoke over every table.

Our father is in those photographs. George Gordon, leaning forward, laughing. Battledress most rakishly unbuttoned of all. The man who betrayed our mother, double-crossed her with the oil-stained overalls that became his uniform after the war, that would replace the dashing airforce blue in which he had wooed her.