Lenny, Clippy
On one of my visits, on one of the last occasions that my stepfather was upright and at home, she pointed at a picture in the magazine I was reading: “Is that a gorilla?” I was extremely angry. I told her this was too much and stormed out of the room. The picture was of Lenny Henry. “Oh, it’s Lenny Henry!” she said as I went out. “Dear old Lenny!”
The next time I visited, I found the magazine again. Lenny Henry’s picture had been neatly cut out. I wondered if she had kept it with her somewhere, to help her learn the difference between Lenny Henry and a gorilla, so that her son would not be angry with her any more.
It was fair to say Mum’s opinions were conservative. She joined UKIP almost as soon as she heard of it, even before Nigel Farage was leader. She may have been converted by the guy who lived at the water mill down the road, who owned an Indian restaurant and had been banned by the EU from importing Bombay Duck, since its name was considered misleading (it is in fact a kind of strong-smelling dried fish). Anyway, she became an activist, went to meetings, delivered leaflets and stuck UKIP’s purple-and-yellow logo to her car’s front side window. Cut out from the magazine, obviously – she couldn’t have afforded a windscreen sticker. Mum was Eurosceptic on the simple and “high” grounds of national sovereignty and freedom. I told her UKIP were crazies. “No, they’re not,” she replied mildly. I suppose she had seen more changes in her life than I had, and understood that not everything that seems immutable is so.
In fact, the intellectual changes of the past fifty years had more or less passed her by. She had been born at the ideological high point of the British Empire, shortly before its collapse. She remained in the world of the Children’s Encyclopedia, the 12-odd thick volumes she had been given by Father Christmas one year, and into which she had stuck her nose as enthusiastically, I guess, as I did into every book.
Sometimes when I visited, I would sit in the white and blue armchair by the fridge and we would start a long conversation, about her or me, our thoughts and loves and doings, and would talk in that way of perfect honesty and sympathy that you can only have with a relative or a very old friend. It was always that one armchair, a small spot of peace in the house. The old-fashioned lamp on top of the fridge next to it; on the other side, the table which she had painted with a chess board, guarded by an angel on one side and a devil on the other. She had painted the bench behind the kitchen table river green, like the rapids of the Lugg after rain, with fish swimming. Then in the fridge, there would be “harbled” eggs, with faces drawn on in pencil, some angry, some happy, some pensive.
At other times I would shut myself in my room with my laptop, just to be alone, driven by a lowering tolerance for company. I felt my room was still mine, though she used it for other things. It was tiny, but by the single bed she had squeezed in the old piano from the London house, now badly out of tune. If you wanted, you could put a glass of water on the arm for the night. Out of piety, I put a drinks coaster on its dark varnish. On the wall were pictures and no longer the defiant newspaper cuttings of my teenage years (Brett Anderson in the NME: “I’m quite fey and camp and there’s nothing I can do about it.”)
The room was private. I could lie there and listen to music on headphones, lie in, even ignore the first few times she would call to wake me in the morning, or sing “ri-ise and shi-ine and give God the glory, glory,” an old, old trigger for unreasoning fury in me. My teenage life was always there, waiting for me, packed in boxes and drawers. The twenty page love letter from the transvestite in a small town in Ontario who lived with butch lesbians and a murderer on the run; along with a smaller letter, folded up and marked “sex”. Letters and photos from my first love at university. Underneath the bed, cardboard boxes that I never dragged out and looked at.
It had taken me a long time to think of South Lodge as home. My real home was the Stone House. But gradually the house had folded its arms around us both, and in the end I would think of it as home intuitively, even after a long nomad existence as an adult, when I moved almost every year.
South Lodge was a world of individual physical objects. Nothing was new or even recent. The frying pans were blackened with soot and had been for as long as I could remember. The washing brush itself was old and never thrown away or replaced. The biscuit tins I’d known since childhood: the round one with a pale eggshell blue lid and pictures of genteel Edwardian ladies, the oblong green one for cheese biscuits. The only things that were not exactly objects were the books. Not that they were thrown away, but they were chosen and bought – second-hand of course – for their contents, whatever the state of their spines or covers. Shabby Penguins from the 1930s snuggled up against old nineteenth-century bird books, scruffy paperback classics, and the occasional Oxford edition in German or Ancient Greek. (She hadn’t learned Greek at school, but she taught herself enough to read the simple prose of the New Testament.) When she got older, Mum collected children’s books again, Little Grey Rabbit, Thomas the Tank Engine, and Beatrix Potter, perhaps for the grandchildren she hoped for, perhaps because she enjoyed them herself and no longer cared about seeming childish.
There was a computer in my room by now too. Oh, the struggles with it! First the lessons on how to click with the mouse, and what icons were, how to start WordPad and write a letter or a poem, and how to save it. Then the explanation of scrolling and windows, which might cover each other or be different sizes, and the little buttons to maximize and minimize. She would press her face close to the screen to make sense of it – by now, her sight was not good – and I would have to explain everything slowly twice. It made me frustrated like nothing else, and I was mean to her. Was it the malign influence of the screen? But it was just as bad when she would call up on the phone, and I would try to guess what was happening by her garbled descriptions. “Has Internet Explorer come up?” “There’s a funny square, and at the top there is a sort of blue thing, and then a row of other things….” “Is there an X? Just tell me if there’s an X!”
