Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I thought of making my eighteenth birthday the occasion for an extraordinary appeal to Granny — except that she didn’t really recognise the pressure of the calendar. It was actually better to steer clear of landmarks such as birthdays and Christmas, and to give her a stronger sense of her own arbitrary grace. The scratching of the pen in her chequebook made a red-letter day all by itself.

Birthdays had always seemed a bit hollow to me also, if only because mine was always overshadowed by Christmas. Then the last days of 1967 showed me a further deterioration of the festival. Mum was determined to mark the occasion, not with a present but with an attempt to pass on a legacy: her own ancient injuries.

On my big day Mum sat me down and told me something she’d been told in a similarly formal manner. By ‘sat me down’ I mean formally commandeered the wheelchair and manœuvred me into the sitting room. It’s to her credit that she let the birthday unfold a little way before she took centre stage and made her announcement. She could have pinned me down in the bed at first light and passed on the trauma tidings — trauma for her, no more than casual interest for me. I chose the womb, and the womb has its own attachments, which aren’t mine.

Before she said anything she offered me a drink. That was standard practice for birthdays — it was family custom, enlightened or corrupt as you choose to look at it, to allow us, when we had passed a minimum age, a drink and a smoke on birthdays. One drink and one cigarette. And not just your own birthday, but any birthday in the family, so Peter too would be given his own ration, invited to splice the mainbrace. This, though, was different.

Live coal burning her tongue

Mum took ages to get going. How hard is it to say ‘Happy Birthday, John’? Not hard. There was miles of ‘I don’t know quite how to say this’ and ‘I’ve never found it an easy thing to talk about’ before she started to come out with anything significant at all.

‘Your grandfather Ivo, my father’ — and already there was a sort of gulp invading those phrases — ‘went out to East Africa in the 1920s to make his fortune coffee farming. That was where the money was to be made.’ This much I knew. Families have histories. People seem to enjoy being ruled by them. Grandpa’s people weren’t rich, he had married above himself in that way, and this was his chance to equalise things. ‘Then while he was away, your grandmother my mother’ — these tags of kinship received a much harsher intonation — ‘had a … love affair with one of the local squires. A great love affair.’ I think Mum had left space for a mocking laugh for this point in her speech, but it didn’t quite come off. The bitterness in her voice was too stark to be laughed away.

This was certainly new. Not exactly what I wanted for my birthday, but still, a surprise. Not to be sniffed at, though hardly riveting. As she moved towards the parts of the story she found unbearable, she fought to control herself, leaving big pauses and looking right past me. She was making some sort of impersonation of female pluck, as we know it from films of the 1940s. Greer Garson, Celia Johnson — and now Laura Cromer, refusing the easy release of tears. ‘When her husband returned, my mother was pregnant.

‘Pregnant with me.

‘These things happen, of course — they always have. But they tend to be hushed up.

‘No hushing-up was done in this case.

‘In the Father column on my birth certificate my mother put the truth. She had the name of her lover entered, not the name of the man she was married to. She wasn’t going to give the world the satisfaction of making her lie. And she wasn’t going to spare me the shame that bothered her so little. Luckily’ — and here there was a laugh that did more or less come off — ‘Ivo had lost his shirt in East Africa. His hair was still dark, she told me, but his moustache had turned white.’ Many families have these tales of follicles blasted by shock, fate’s lightning earthed by the roots of the hair.

‘Anyway, after his little adventure in the coffee business he didn’t have a bean. He was in no position to dictate terms. He depended on his wife’s financial resources. He wasn’t a hero. I suppose he wasn’t a fool. He must have thought — better a cuckold than a bankrupt.

‘Better to have a bastard being brought up in your house, even one that everyone knows about, than debts that everyone knows about. Mummy’s people cut her allowance to the bone for some years, they never quite cut her off.

‘They punished her. They said she had made her bed and must lie in it, but they didn’t disown her. Perhaps they even noticed that there was someone else involved who had to lie in a bed she hadn’t chosen. That was me.

‘They have provided for me in their way, but I was never made welcome. I never felt I was part of the family, and I didn’t know why until I came of age. Then my mother was kind enough to tell me. And now I’m telling you. Now you know what my family is like.’

This was all fairly interesting, but it didn’t shake me to the core or even blight my birthday. Mum had even cheated a bit. Granny had spoiled her twenty-first birthday, not her eighteenth. From anyone else’s point of view, this was all ancient history, a grate of cold ashes, fully raked over, but it was still a live coal in Mum’s mouth, burning her tongue, and she couldn’t wait another three years to spit it out. She accepted me as an adult ahead of schedule, even if it was only to load me down with the family secrets.

I couldn’t feel particularly upset. If I had chosen Mum’s womb, hadn’t she chosen Granny’s? We both had a chance to read the fine print, between lives. There’s plenty of time. I asked, out of politeness really, ‘Did you ever see your real father?’

‘Sometimes. In church. Obviously he’d always known who I was. I only knew about him when my mother told me the story. After that I could feel him not looking at me. If you mean did we ever have a conversation about it, then no. Nothing more than Hello and How are you? I called him Uncle Arthur.’ She looked at me a little flatly. Neither of us had touched our drink. ‘I expect you need some time to take this all in.’

I didn’t think I did. I’d already taken it in, more or less. I had disappointed Mum with the evenness of my reaction. She had dropped her bombshell on the appointed day, and it had been something of a dud. The trauma fizzled, though I managed not to say, ‘Is that all?’ When Dad came in she said, ‘I’ve just been telling John about “Uncle Arthur”,’ and he only said, ‘Oh yes?’, as if this might be someone from her sewing circle. Dad was very good at letting things pass without comment, letting them more or less blow through him, and for once I followed his lead.

I don’t even remember what Mum gave me for my birthday that year — her real present was that conversation. She was issuing a sort of certificate of damage. It was official, now, that she had never had a chance of happiness, but I honestly didn’t see what it all had to do with me.

There was poignance, of course, in Mum’s status. The child of a great love, not greatly loved herself. Much was explained about her — her unending quest to be accepted by her own mother, her eagerness to get married, properly married in church and to acquire the respectability of a wife, since she had been cheated of it as a daughter. I understood better now the way Granny seemed to glide on warm and lofty currents, while Mum was always frantically flapping the middle air.

The period of impoverishment, coinciding with her early life, had obviously left its mark. It was like the period of starvation in the womb when a mother is deprived of nutrients, leaving her fœtus underdeveloped. Granny hung on to her sense of entitlement, but absolutely failed to pass it on.