16. Mum and Dad's Golden Wedding





Hawaii, 25th March 1985

Mum writes that it’s snowing over there so I’m glad to still be in Hawaii. Big family reunion planned in Malvern on June 29th, three days after Mum and Dad’s Golden Wedding Anniversary. Elizabeth will be over from Nigeria – she's+ decided to do one more three-year tour at least. Also my cousin Moira is coming down from Edinburgh. Haven’t seen her since I was in my late teens – we used to play golf together! And the big surprise is that my mother’s older sister, Aunty Lena, is coming over from South Africa. I haven’t seen her since Granny Henderson died when I was about eight or nine. I expect my father’s two surviving brothers will be there and some of my cousins on my father’s side, folk I haven’t seen since Grandma Deeks' funeral.



It’s strange how when you are growing up you are so conscious of differences between yourself and your parents and then gradually, as you age, you start seeing all the similarities and accept the reality of their impact on your behaviour, attitudes and personality. My late teens were devoted intellectually to rejecting most of what my father believed in, and yet all that childhood religious indoctrination leaves its mark. Selfishness was the number one sin in my father’s catechism. Self-denial was in and self-indulgence, any indulgence, was out. Dad’s still like that. Never buys himself anything. I can’t think of a time when he went out and bought something for himself simply because he wanted it. He’s a marketer’s nightmare. Mind you we never had any money so I don’t suppose the opportunity would have arisen much. And when I was a child there wasn’t much to buy anyway what with post-war rationing so I was easily discouraged from clamouring for “things”. Even now I am a reluctant shopper although I do like to indulge those I love rather than give every spare penny to War on Want or the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or some other deserving cause. I am trying to psych myself up to buying an expensive camera in the duty free on the way to England!

 



Malvern, Sunday 21st April 1985

Church. Yes, well, church. The things I put myself through out of love for my parents. What a lot of dreadful mumbo-jumbo it all is and how totally my mind rejects it. How can intelligent people believe that stuff? Each time I go to church merely confirms my atheism. But so many echoes from my past. I remembered this morning how as a kid I liked to put the hymn numbers up on the boards before the service. And I remembered how, as a teenager, I liked going to church in Kilburn because of some of the choirgirls, especially Brenda Scroggins who I had a crush on. Now there seem to be only choirboys (don’t fancy them) and old spinsters and widows.

This trip is full of echoes of the past, noticing all the old habits, familiar things, Mum-Dad behaviours and tensions. Mum and Dad rarely buy new things so everything in the house here is familiar – the carved oak dining-room furniture, the arm chairs and leather pouf in the lounge, the Scottish landscape pictures, the silver napkin ring engraved with ‘J’ that dates back to my christening, the carving knife and fork with the bone handles, the yellow and blue oven dish I bought my mother when I was at school in Wells (Denbyware, still in perfect condition). Even the meals my mother cooks are familiar. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding to welcome me last Tuesday (the cabbage boiled to translucent), followed by my favourite childhood dessert, apple dunfillin. Flapjacks for ‘elevenses’, and homemade scones and fruit cake with afternoon tea. I even ate the rice pudding yesterday, something I steadfastly refused to do as a child, redolent as it was of boarding school meals.

Malvern, Tuesday 25th June 1985

Arrived here yesterday lunchtime and spent most of the rest of the day listening to my Mum and her sister gossip about the old days. It is twenty-five years since they have seen each other so they have plenty to catch up on. Lena and her late husband my Uncle Bert, a South African doctor, were medical missionaries in Nigeria, the Southern Sudan and Zululand back in the 1930s so Aunty Lena has lots of amazing stories about pioneering days, starting a hospital in a sweet potato patch, stitching up people bitten by crocodiles. And of course my mother likes to try and match, if not top, Lena’s stories with some of her own African tales – bit of sibling rivalry there after all these years! Lena is the older sister, over eighty now, and a tough old bird, still with a broad Edinburgh accent – talks about gurrles (girls).

Malvern, Tuesday July 2nd 1985

Am writing this in Mum's garden shed. A sacred place.

Wednesday the 26th was the anniversary day although the big get together wasn’t until Saturday. Most people arrived in time for a mid-day service at St. Mathias. My part was a reading, 1 Corinthians 13 - Faith, Hope, Charity, but the greatest of these is Charity - and Elizabeth did a little talk. A very emotional occasion, sweet, touching, and the priest gave Mum and Dad a special blessing.

Reading from 1 Corinthians 13 reminded me that my first love of the English language came from hearing the authorised version of the bible in church, although, in line with common practice now, ‘love’ has been substituted for ‘charity’. I still think the language is grand. I found I could read that passage about love without any particularly Christian connotations, and read it with conviction. That worries me in a way. Do apostate children of the manse search for a spiritual commitment to something equally radical and all-consuming – to Marxism or Communism or Environmentalism? Having deliberately abandoned my religious faith as a teenager, have I merely transferred all my spiritual inclinations into sentimentalising romantic love, substituting ‘Love is God’ for ‘God is Love’, and then expected, as the corollary, to find or create some ineffable perfectibility in myself. A recipe for disaster, I think. Likely to create hopelessly unrealistic expectations in any relationship. How complex it is to try and unravel ‘love’, embedded as ideas of love are in one’s upbringing and education, in religion, literature and art, in the romantic and the erotic, to say nothing of the ubiquitous media and commercial images of love and sexuality.

 

It was a lovely service. After the service we had organised wine at the back of the church and the golden wedding cake was cut up. Everyone said how 'nice' the service was (that dreadful word) and complimented me on my reading and Elizabeth on her excellent address. Elizabeth's a very good speaker. I think if she ever comes back here she ought to go into the church as a preacher or something. We should have taped the service but didn’t think of it.
 

After that we came back to the house, about fifty people in all. Fortunately it was a fine day so we had tables set out in the garden. There was a fair showing of uncles, aunts and cousins. There were various friends, some from a long time back including Brenda Scroggins and her mother. It's twenty-seven years since I saw Brenda. That was at her wedding. She was eighteen then, the same age as me, and married before I’d even left school. Still looks great, really good, well-presented; she always looked after herself. It’s funny – I was talking to Ruth about it later – how you revert to the behaviour at the time you knew a person. I knew Brenda from the age of twelve when we moved to London. At sixteen she left school and went to work in a bank in the West End and met and married Jimmy, a Scotsman from the Pentland Hills, who also worked there. After all these years, she and I hit it off so well as we chatted about the subsequent trajectories of our lives. It was touching that, after such a long time, we could rekindle the closeness that had once existed between us. I never went out with Brenda as a girlfriend, although she did go with Elizabeth and I to a youth camp in North Devon one summer. I remember, snob that I was, suddenly being aware how working-class London her accent was (not any more – like Twiggy she has developed a more classless voice now). I spent all my time at the camp ignoring her so that I could play cricket with the other boys. Stupid me! When I was away at school Brenda and I used to write to each other. I had a big crush on her; she was a delicate and pretty girl with a touching innocence about her. I’ve no idea what sort of intellectual capacity she has but she was the first person I ever became aware of as ‘a girl’ - a feminine girl rather than just a girl girl. It was nice to establish some continuity with such a long time ago. Moving around as I have, there’s no continuity in lots of the pieces of my life, other than through family. So it was good to be with someone who knew what a sensitive scruffy little intellectual brat I was at thirteen and fourteen. A sweet time. I’ll probably go and meet up with her in Birmingham. We can talk more about old times and I can catch up on what’s going on in her emotional life.
 

Brenda and her Mum with Elizabeth

It was a great day and we were pleased for Mum and Dad that it went off so well. Now everyone’s dispersing. Elizabeth leaves tonight, Aunty Lena is off with cousin Moira to Scotland tomorrow and I go back to London. I did offer to stay on a bit with Dad if Mum wanted to go up to Scotland with her big sister and favourite niece, but she and Lena don’t seem to get on too well. They are always trying to score points off each other as to who remembers things correctly. I’ve never seen my mother bossed around and put in her place the way her big sister does. Amusing. But they have had good times together, even if they squabble like kids occasionally. They went into the centre of Worcester yesterday, toured the Royal Worcester porcelain works, treated themselves to big ice creams and then went for afternoon tea in a café by the Cathedral.

So that’s family, strange if lovable creature that it is. In 1846 Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in a love letter to Robert Browning that she doubted that family know us best:

'they know us on the side we offer to them... a bare profile... or the head turned round to the ear - yes! - they do not, except by the merest chance, look into our eyes. They know us in a conventional way... so partial a knowledge.

... if I sought to have a man or a woman revealed to me in his or her innermost nature, I would not go to the family of the person in question - though I should learn there best, of course, about personal habits, and the social bearing of him and her. George Sand delights me in one of her late works, where she says that the souls of blood relations seldom touch except at one or two points. Perfectly true...'