Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Dad made conversation perfectly smoothly, but Mum was really quite put out by Dorrie’s class back-sliding. ‘She’s just stopped making an effort, that’s what it comes down to,’ she said later. Dorrie had thrown out her fish-knives and gone native.

Peter and I fell in love with the whole set-up immediately. We had arrived late and very much hoped for a hot meal. ‘I’ve not got a lot in the larder, ducks,’ said Dorrie, ‘but I’ll see what I can do.’ What she could do was make fried-egg sandwiches. When the plate was put before her Mum just stared at it. Of course Peter and I ate like pigs and chirped out, ‘Can we have these at Trees, Mum?’

All through our stay Dad kept trying to offer help. ‘Let me give you a hand with all that, Dorrie,’ he would call out. ‘This is all really very good of you, you know!’ and Dorrie had yelled back, ‘Nonsense, Dennis, you stay right where you are — you’re on holiday, remember!’

At breakfast the next day Mum, who hadn’t slept well, tried her best to find Dorrie’s fatal weakness. She cast a critical eye over the room’s décor, but though the colours were brash and the patterns clashed, the house was spotless. The tea was also scolding hot, just the way Mum liked it, and served in green Beryl Ware, the only crockery Mum was really at home with.

Dorrie made an entrance carrying a large oval ceramic dish with many fried sunny-side-up eggs arranged at its centre, surrounded by many slices of lean back bacon. ‘Toast coming right up, love,’ she said. ‘Won’t be a jiff.’

Mum muttered, ‘I wonder if she can cook anything except fried eggs,’ and it’s true that we ate so many eggs that week it’s a wonder any of us had a bowel movement ever again. Mum cheered up when she saw that Dorrie had forgotten to warm the plates, whispering, ‘By the time it all gets here your eggs will either be cold or hard or both. You know how you both hate that! Really she’s hopeless! She hasn’t a clue! I’m sorry about this, boys.’

Dorrie came sailing in with the toast and butter, saying that she would just nip out for the plates. While she was out of the room Mum said to us, ‘Everything is going to be cold by the time you get it. The only trouble with staying with friends is that you can’t complain when things go wrong. Never mind — if you really can’t face it we can get some food in the town later on.’ In the event we ate so quickly that the temperature hardly mattered. The butter spread like a dream. By the time Dorrie produced home-made marmalade Mum was thoroughly out of sorts.

I could never decide whether Dad’s interventions in her moods were mean-spirited or just badly timed. Now he said, ‘Isn’t it good to be staying with friends, m’dear?’

When Dorrie came in to tidy up the breakfast things she asked if we were having lunch in Looe or would prefer to eat in the house. Peter and I yelled out ‘Here!’ but were smartly over-ruled.

Even in town we kept on singing Dorrie’s praises. We weren’t consciously rebelling against Mum’s way of doing things, but I doubt if that made it easier for Mum to bear. When we were offered ice creams or a funfair ride, we would ask, ‘When can we go back to Dorrie’s?’ The guest-house was supposed to be a basic lodgings, a base from which to explore the sights and sounds of Looe, but as far as we were concerned it was the sights and sounds of Looe. It was good that Audrey was too young to defend her preferences, and could be trotted off unprotesting to the beach.

Positively indecent

I suppose Dorrie played up to us, offering a performance of rustic joviality, but she put her heart into it, and her daughter Celia made a fine supporting player. Celia had put in a brief appearance on our first night in Cornwall, but long enough for me to realise that she had nothing in common with the shy girl I remembered from Bourne End, who hid behind her hair. She had blossomed, and her clothes hadn’t quite kept pace.

‘Cee-li-aaaah,’ Dorrie had barked out in her saloon-bar voice, ‘I want to see you wearing different trousers tomorrow. You’re looking positively indecent.’ She looked at Peter and me and rolled her eyes. ‘That girl!’ she said, completely unembarrassed, as she bustled off to put the kettle on. Celia was an unalterably genteel, Bourne End sort of name, but Dorrie made it sound almost obscene by the way she dragged out the syllables.

The following morning, when Celia made her entrance, there was nothing amiss with her grey flannel slacks, but a hole had mysteriously appeared in the back seam by the time she got up from the table.

‘Cee-li-aaaah!’ Dorrie called after her, ‘Do something about that hole in your bum, or you’ll be giving these nice boys the wrong idea!’ Mum didn’t know where to look, although when she was pushing me around in Bourne End and saw a botty or a boozzie that was a little out of the ordinary, she’d be sure to nudge me so we could share a little laugh. Now, though, she said, ‘I’ll just go out and get a breath of fresh air,’ a polite reproach wasted on Dorrie, whose sensibilities had been blunted by years of shameless biscuit-dunking.

Celia galumphed up the stairs and came down a few minutes later wearing a gleaming pair of tight-fitting white trousers. She twirled in front of us. Again there was a hole in the rear, though a much smaller one.

‘I thought I’d fixed that,’ said Dorrie, ‘but my stitches don’t hold.’ Then she said straight out to Celia, ‘When I see a hole like that in your bum, it makes me want to stick my finger up it! Know what I mean, boys?’

Peter and I were deeply glad that Mum was out of the house, inhaling the moral breeze. We also decided to spend as much time nattering with Dorrie as we possibly could. She was very happy to oblige. At the end of a meal she would say with a wink, while she was clearing the table, ‘We’ll have coffee later , boys,’ the italics perfectly audible. Having coffee later meant having a natter with Dorrie while we drank it. She would also light up a succession of cigarettes. The nattering was continuous, though there were little pauses in the flow when I think Dorrie was fighting the urge to offer us one of her smokes.

A boy-friend in the wood-work

It was no part of Mum’s holiday plans for her sons to spend their time revelling in the smutty talk of a sea-side landlady. She became tearful, though Peter and I were unsympathetic. Couldn’t she wait to cry till we got home? Dad wasn’t indulgent either, telling her to buck up, m’dear, buck up and enjoy the rest of the holiday — but then he too was crying inside when Dorrie served up the bill the night before we left.

It turned out that the hospitality of old friends didn’t come cheap. Dad said, ‘I feel such a chump for helping her clear the table — I should have charged the ghastly old bird by the cup and plate!’

We travelled home in the Vauxhall in an atmosphere of rancid gloom. Audrey made a great fuss, while Mum and Dad argued about who should give up which pleasure, to pay the high price of staying with old friends. Mum was considering giving up her own occasional cigarettes, but it seemed a futile gesture if Dad was still puffing away. Mum had only ever smoked her way through a shed.

In the car, Dad said, ‘It’s pretty obvious that there was a boy-friend somewhere in the wood-work. Thank God she didn’t show show him to us — at least we were spared that. Shows the woman hasn’t lost her senses completely.’

Mum shuddered. ‘I hardly dare think what such a creature must be like. But I can imagine the state of his finger-nails.’

Dad had more or less cheered up by the time we were in mid-Devon. ‘Do you think that woman does much reading, m’dear?’