Will Self - My Idea of Fun

My mother's caravan park capped it all. Besides the bungalow cum B & B there were twenty or so fibreglass sheds for holidaymakers. But their wheels were bound to the turf by weeds and nettles, and their quaint fifties’ aerodynamicism only served to underscore the hard truth that they — and by implication we as well — were going nowhere.

On this not-quite-Beachy head my mother made her stand. My father was grey enough but he had no eminence and my upbringing was left in my mother's more than competent hands.

It's difficult to talk about the woman with any objectivity, especially as she's still alive. Perhaps when she's dead the Mummy smell will disperse, like mustard gas from a trench-scarred battlefield, and I will be able to see her, and smell her, for what she really was. But not now. Now I can only think of her as an assisting adept, a distaff manipulator. It was she who set it up between me and The Fat Controller. I have long suspected that they may have been lovers at some time or other. I admit, it does sound preposterous. The technical problems would be well nigh insurmountable, for a start. The Fat Controller is just too fat to have penetrative sex in the normal way. Either his penis would have to be fantastically long and flexible, or he would need a series of finely calibrated, servo-mechanised clamps. These to be positioned in the deep furrows between his belly and his pubis, so as to lever the flab interfaces apart when the crucial moment came. I digress — but not entirely. This matter of the potential relationship between The Fat Controller and my mother is of some importance in what follows, and were I intent on constructing a defence for myself its actuality might well be at the core.

But I am blocked from further investigations, for The Fat Controller has thrown up some kind of numinous barrier or force field around his nether regions, and I cannot — with the best will in the world — get inside his trousers. So the above is only speculation.

Mother hailed from a Yorkshire family, the Hepplewhites. But although their name sounds authentically white rose, the truth is that they were fringe people. There was more than a dash of Romany blood in the Hepplewhites, Irish too. When my mother was a child the family lived in an extended, clannish sort of ménage which my grandfather, Old Sidney Hepplewhite, had established in a gaggle of dilapidated farm buildings outside Leeds.

The Hepplewhites lived by costermongering, car and caravan trading, scrap-metal dealing and worse. They were reluctant to go to law, preferring to settle their disputes themselves. They were the sort of family who nowadays would have their children placed automatically on the ‘at risk’ register. Their lifestyle might have been affected on purpose, to inflame the suspicions of social workers. According to my mother, Old Sidney always carried a double-barrelled shot-gun, dangling from the poacher's hook inside his jacket, just in case a dispute should arise.

She wasn't embroidering. When I finally met Old Sidney, some five years ago, he still carried a gun. He threatened me with it when, wandering around Erith Marsh, I came upon his raggle-taggle encampment. I like to think that he had no idea that I was his kin when he drew the bead, but I cannot be sure.

At any rate, the shot-gun wasn't required when Mum married Dad. They met when my father was doing national service, mustering mattocks or somesuch in a depot outside Halifax. My mother must have seen something in Wharton senior, some potential. Clearly he was from a better class and perhaps that was sufficient. Mum is an expert, like so many English people, not only at detecting class origins in others, but also at obscuring her own. The Fat Controller has told me that she took to shopping at Worth and Harrods with a vengeance once my father was earning, and that her natural sense of style was a big contributor to their social success as a young couple on the make. She could mix a gin and ‘it’ or a dry Martini with consummate ease. But by the time I was conscious of such things, she had relapsed into a petit-bourgeois backwater. Her accent swung haphazardly between the broad vowels of the Dales and the clipped intervals of received pronunciation. Her once cultivated taste had collapsed back into itself, becoming notably deadened and bland.

Now, of course, she's gone the other way again. She sits sipping her ‘lap’ while chows and spaniels chew the laces of her Church's walking shoes and waxed rainwear steams on the leathern settle. I wonder if there will be any end to my mother's rollercoaster ride at the English social funfair.

She didn't wean me until I was three. So, what with my capacity for eidetic images, it's no wonder that her breast still has such significance for me. Indeed, I can see it clearly, right down to the precise accumulation of nodes on the surface of her oval brown aureoles. Oh Mummy, Mummy! That was real sex — everything else, everything that has followed, has just been afterplay. I can see you now, still young, with your S-bend figure and dirigible breasts, blood seeping into your complexion like runny jam into rice pudding. You must have been perpetually in a lather; the way you toyed with me, raised me up, so that my first intimations of the fleshly have remained for ever fused to your nylon armature.

At night I would be found by you, crying softly, slumped in the laundry basket, having walked in my sleep the length of the bungalow to find the cottony warmth of the airing cupboard. One of the slick cones of your brassière would be clutched in my chubby paw. It was as if by chafing it — I could somehow chafe you.

I can remember that and I can also remember you giving me my first words, teasing them in to me. It was at a time in childhood when the fictive world was still interleaved with the real world, and like an opium dreamer I moved between them. Mummy took me on her knee. She licked a looped fold of handkerchief and smeared away the chocolate stains from my mouth with an adamant digit. Then, with the same pointer, she thrust me on to the Island of Sodor. I wandered over the green page and marvelled at the way the blue steel slashed it cleanly apart. The engine people zipped this way and that, buffeting the coaches. They were apple-cheeked, their pink-fleshed humanoid faces tore out of the metal of their boilers as if they were some early form of bio-engineering.

‘Now, who's that then?’ said Mummy. ‘You know that engine's name, now don't you?’

‘Gor-on,’ said I, all gum and lip, palate as yet unfused.

‘And the little green engine, what's his name?’

‘Perthy.’

‘And what about that man? The big, fat man, who tells all the engines what to do. What's his name, Ian?’

‘Fa’ Co-ro-ro! Fa’ Co-ro-ro! Fa’ Co-ro-ro!’ I exulted in the syllables. I trilled and screamed them.

Mummy had bought the bungalow along with the caravan park. It was an L-shaped structure that had grown up over the years in a series of extensions. Mummy added the fourth and last. The long length of the bungalow was bounded by the forty-foot sun porch, roofed with green corrugated iron. While Father picked at his provincial free-sheets, Mummy squelched up and down the linoleum drumming up business on the telephone. She had one with an especially long flex. Or else she would stalk between the caravans, hunting the tradesmen who were meant to be toshing the place up, making it lickety-spick for the next load of work-pummelled urbanites who came to Cliff Top for their week or two of ozone and salted air.

Like all children whose parents are employed in the tourist industry, my life was divided into the ‘on’ and the ‘off’ season. The off season belonged to school and rain hammering on the corrugated roof of the sun porch, while the on season to belonged to the holidaymakers and their children. My mother had many regulars who came back year after year, and I was always accepted by them. It was a friendly atmosphere for a young child, with little to disturb it. As an only child I had my mother's undivided attention, the full force of her complacent love. And then there were also the aunts.