Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

One particular song sums up that summer for me. Memory chooses a slice to sum up the whole, but it’s no great feat of compression in this case since the record was hardly ever off the turntable. ‘Good Vibrations’ by the Beach Boys, as radiant and bouncy a song as ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ was strange and riddling.

The record wasn’t newly released or even newly bought. It was bought with a Christmas present, but not in a hurry. Peter and I had consulted extensively about it. Mum and Dad had actually given him a book token, in an attempt to enlarge his rather basic library ( Jane’s Fighting Ships and the Observer Book of Aeroplanes ). I didn’t think presents should have strings attached, so I had taken the educational sting from Christmas by agreeing to swap the reproachful token for cash. It was no sacrifice. There were always books I wanted to buy.

I did find it funny that it was Jane who catalogued the fighting ships — it seemed so much more a job for Tarzan. But maybe he was busy picking nits off Cheeta’s fur or gathering fruit for lunch.

Soon, of course, with the benefits of his paper round accruing (and lucrative pub work looming), Peter would be standing casually at the counter of a record shop to ask for a single, positively willing the assistant to ask if he had just had a birthday, just so that he could answer ‘No’ in a faintly baffled tone, as a way of signalling that he was now a man of the world — emancipated from the yearly cycle of presents, rising above the grudging shillings of pocket money, able to plonk down eight-and-sixpence from his earnings as a matter of course, with only a trifling acceleration of the heartbeat at the rash committing of cash to an object that was perishable both in terms of material and its vulnerability to fashion. Those cash-flush days were only just round the corner, but for now expenditure still needed to be carefully monitored, and ‘Good Vibrations’ had proved a solid investment, vindicating the long period of consultation.

Posh, spinsterly and shrewd

Mum and Dad were predictably incompatible in their tastes for entertainment. Mum favoured light comic songs and routines — her top favourite being Joyce Grenfell, sly, posh, spinsterly and shrewd, because her observations were ‘so true’.

Dad on the other hand admired Eartha Kitt, who was sexual and predatory — she even called Father Christmas ‘Santa baby’, for Heaven’s sake, as if he was no more than a sugar daddy in fur-trimmed pyjamas — yet somehow blatantly for sale herself. No better than she should be, and out for what she could get.

I wonder, though, if Mum had her priorities right. Eartha Kitt was no real threat. If she had turned up in Dad’s office he wouldn’t have known what to say. He would have looked at his shoes, not her cleavage. Joyce Grenfell, though, could be much more dangerous in her quiet way.

I don’t think Mum ever knew that Grenfell was a niece of Nancy Astor’s (not to mention a fellow Christian Scientist) and had a cottage on the Cliveden estate. It would have given her the willies to think that Joyce Grenfell might have sat near her in the CRX cafeteria one day, inconspicuous in a little tweed hat and fawn coat, on the alert for intonations and mannerisms. Mum’s admiration for the truthfulness of Joyce Grenfell’s would have turned to panic. She would hardly have dared to listen to her on the radio for fear of hearing herself transformed in a monologue. It would have been hellish to be on the sharp end of that truthfulness.

When from time to time Dad threatened to buy Mum a record of Eartha Kitt’s for Christmas he was teasing, exaggerating for comic effect an insensitivity to her tastes which was perfectly sincere. Like all the men of the era he took something like pride in being a hopeless shopper, clueless and mildly resentful when confronted with a lingerie department, a perfume counter or a high-class confectioner’s. Why should he be expected to know what size his wife was, what she liked to smell of, whether she favoured the hard centres or the soft, chocolate plain or milky? These were feminine mysteries and husbands found them baffling on principle. A man who understood his wife’s needs would be regarded with something like suspicion. Something must have gone rather badly wrong to produce this morbid state of communication.

Dad despised florists not in his capacity as a male but as a gardener. If Mum wanted to be bought flowers by her husband, she had married the wrong man. In any case, buying her flowers would always have been a perilous enterprise. That whole area was hedged about with superstitions which the most innocent bouquet-giver was sure to trespass onto, let alone Dad. It was unlucky to give lilies, those deathly blooms, or a bunch which mixed red and white flowers. Once when a neighbour gave her just such a bunch for her birthday — carnations — Mum hardly waited to say Thank You before frantically segregating them by colour in different vases so that the bad luck drained away, muttering ‘blood and bandages’ the whole time. Apparently those were the ominous associations of the ill-starred mixture, though I was mystified by the fuss kicked up. If there’s blood, don’t you want to have bandages handy?

In the case of ‘Good Vibrations’ Mum overcame her prejudices, while Dad remained stubbornly attached to his. He violently disapproved of everything about the record, from the barbarous phrase ‘Beach Boys’ down. It was obvious to him that ‘beach boys’ were no more than loafers and layabouts. What they needed was jobs. I know Peter could imagine no better job than being in the Beach Boys, but he couldn’t quite find the words to say so.

This was a song which really came into its own when the sun shone and the French windows were thrown open. Day by day the volume dial on the household’s Bush radiogram crept up, in stealthy increments.

When ‘Good Vibrations’ was playing, Mum’s herb-picking became especially adventurous, with the music pulsing and prancing behind her. She would execute a courtly dance among her plantings in search of the right flavours, like a bee spoiled for choice between flowers. She danced a happy bumbling gavotte around the aromatic chequerboard of the herb garden.

Audrey trotted out from the house and joined in, treating the paving stones as a sort of practice court for hopscotch. Sometimes she lost her balance and trod on a planting, which seemed genuinely accidental, though taking a small revenge on anything which attracted Mum’s attention away from her wouldn’t have been out of character. She knew exactly how many times she could get away with saying, ‘Oh dear, I’ve treaded on Mummy’s parsy,’ before she was suspected of systematic trampling. For Audrey in those days, parsley was parsy and there was no other herb, hardly another piece of greenery. From her point of view the vegetable kingdom was made up of the holy trinity, parsley, rose and Christmas tree.

Peter would be exercising rather self-consciously in the sunlight with the chest-expander Dad had given him for his birthday, two wooden handles connected with woven elastic ropes. As his powers increased he was supposed to add more of these ropes, clipping them to rings on the handles. Eventually the chest-expander would have six strings, like a guitar, though currently he was stranded at the banjo stage with four — but still, he was stringing and tuning his teenaged vigour as if it was an actual instrument. He was proud enough of his progress to exercise where he could be seen, shy enough to keep the operative area out of sight by wearing an ærtex shirt rather than a singlet.

Even Gipsy joined in the harmonious mood, an ageing dog these days, sedately romping. By now her hips were more or less on a par with my substandard ones, though of course she made no exorbitant demands on them for balance. They held her up without any trouble, it’s just that they moved rather stiffly and made her unwilling to risk the blithe jumps of her youth. Dogs’ hips don’t last for ever. Mine at least had improved with age, thanks to the visionary butchering of Mr Arden.