The Coming of Age July. Part 1

5th July. The phone rings. I listen to the answerphone and Antipodean tones fill the room. It is Alice and Letitia’s Nanny. No calls from Sarah for a fortnight now but a message from her nanny. I leave her to talk to the answerphone. There is no need for me to worry.

‘Alice would like to have a chat with you as I’m trying to improve her talking skills’

I do not respond to this message as my talking skills are severely taxed by telephone calls to my grandchildren. I can never think of a thing to say and find myself sounding like my own mother. ‘ Have you been a good girl then?’ seems to be the limit of my conversation.

Later: Sarah rings. She drops her voice as she tells me that Alice aged three, is reported, by her teachers, to be unlikely to get into a top primary school because she doesn’t speak confidently to grown ups. Could she come and stay with me? I have never found she has any problems speaking. On the contrary.

I now make sense of the nanny’s phone call. I can’t have her yet I say, I am just off to see mother.

Ring Harriet to ask how she is but mainly to share my worries about Alice. Poor Alice is going to be stigmatised as a failure at age three. They should leave London, I say, and come and live here and go to the local school like you both did.

7th July. Fran is walking out of her gate, festooned with shawls and scarves and looking deeply meaningful. I decide not to ask her if she caught a cold after being soaked by Phil Mitchell last week. Fran tells me she has decided to change her name to Gerda. This is to coincide with a life change.

‘I didn’t find the change of life any problem’ I said, ‘not with HRT. Wouldn’t HRT be simpler for your friends than changing your name?’

Fran disapproves of HRT but anyway, that is not what she meant and she is nowhere near that age yet.

‘It can happen any time,’ I say, brightly. ‘You never know. One day you feel perfectly all right and the next you turn bright red and have a panic attack in the supermarket.’

Fran adds further gravitas to her demeanour, giving her the look of a gypsy fortune teller who has just seen the St Valentine’s Day Massacre in her crystal ball.

‘Why Gerda?’ I say, ‘Why not Sibyl?’ (That would seem appropriate for a fortune teller.) ‘Did you have a Norwegian grandmother?’

‘No,’ she says, crossly. ‘I wanted a strong name to go with me as I enter my new life.’

‘Well, girder does sound distinctly robust. What is this new life?’

‘I’ve got a job with the Council in the Housing Department. I feel I can really really help people, help make a difference to their lives. You know, give homes to unmarried mothers or teenagers sleeping rough. Get to know them. Help them with their problems…’

Her voice dips and swells and her eyes fill with tears.

‘It sounds interesting, Fran er Gerda, er, is it er Gerda already? You’ll be able to use your Counselling skills and be paid. Will you be based here?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘In Newtown.’

Newtown is where my son Alex’s best mate Jools works, where they all fight and have never heard of counselling. I think of Fran, now to be Gerda, with her dripping draperies and disapproval of chain store clothes, violence, flights to Malaga and triple beefburgers.

‘You will be wonderful.’

‘Do you really think so?’

‘Absolutely.’

Her face lights up. I feel quite sorry for her. Though she is lucky to get a proper job at her age.

8th July. Too late to duck back into my gate. Mavis is coming down the road. I greet her warmly and try to remember not to ask her howshe is. This is such a habit though that I fail instantly.
Mavis is constipated and thinks she has read that this is a symptom of Legionnaires disease. Mavis has been to the doctor and he has been very unsympathetic she says. He suggested she eat lots of roughage.

'But I already eat bran and plenty of fruit.'

'You should eat raw brassicas' I say, 'That is known to prevent cancer of the colon.'

Mavis looks anxious. 'I haven't got cancer of the colon. Have I?'

What have I done?

9th July.
It is time to visit Mother again. I ring up to arrange dates. ‘I’m glad you’re coming,’ she says. ‘I’m a bit worried.’

My heart sinks. Does she want to change her doctor, solicitor, financial adviser or cleaner yet again?

‘I can’t tell you over the phone’ she says. ‘You never know who might be listening.’

10th July.
I am going to give up reading the Sunday papers. They make me feel gloomy and inadequate. Features and reviews seem to be written entirely by smart-arsed young women none of whom seem to live a normal married life or know what deep feelings are. They even seem to have parents who have strings of failed marriages behind them. One is actually proud that she recovered after 48 hours when her husband and the father of her children walked out on her and had a new partner in something like four months. When I go back to my old home in Midlands suburbia, many of my old school friends are still married to the boys they took up with in the 6th form. When I moved away down south I thought they were all rather dull but now I am envious of their settled companionship and shared histories.

I am a failure by everyone’s standards with a broken marriage that still feels like a large stone sitting in my ribcage.

I shall miss the Lonely Hearts ads though. What about last week’s ‘The airhostess could not believe I was not 51! I am an athletic, inventive male.’? Visions of the more awkward positions outlined in the Kama Sutra pass through my mind. But perhaps this is one of those special lonely hearts obliquities like GSOH or fun-loving. Who would admit to not having a sense of humour? On the other hand, saying you are fun-loving seems to be tantamount to agreeing to jump straight into those awkward positions in Kama Sutra. There is also ‘Scorpio male seeks curvaceous, tactile female’. So much promise, every Sunday.

14th July.
The Reverend Mr Scuffling has a letter in the local paper this week asking for more support for the Pageant. I am overcome with guilt and think I really ought to offer myself but as I read on I discover that it is animals he is short of. I cannot provide an animal so am released from feelings of guilt. He is lacking a lead cat to be healed in the magic spring. There are plenty of dog owners willing to immerse their dogs in the spring, but he wants some other animals as well to add verisimilitude to the spectacle.

15th July.
The journey to Mother’s is as trying as ever. Today it is very hot. Every junction seems to have road works. Well, it is the holiday season after all. As soon as I get to the county boundary, the pace of traffic drops to about 30 miles an hour. When the cars in front reach a village or a sign that says 50 mph, they slow to about 20. All the cars, much newer than mine, are driven by very small elderly men in flat caps. I practise patience and higher thought.

I am reminded of something told me by a friend who had a friend who was a doctor in this county. He would write on the patients’ notes, providing they weren’t actually cataleptic, NFTP. Normal for this place.

Eventually I get to mother’s. I hope there are some teabags. She doesn’t drink tea herself and can’t think why I should want to.

I am wearing my new linen trousers purchased at great expense from Fay’s Boutique.

‘Why are you wearing those? They look just like pyjamas.’

I rapidly lose the will to live. I am a pensioner myself and a grandmother almost three times over and I feel about five years old. Will I ever grow up? Is it too late? Am I destined to go from childhood to second childhood without ever feeling like a proper adult?

‘Tom’ (this is Toyboy) ‘is coming tomorrow. He insisted on coming because he knew you’d be here. I can’t think why.’

‘Oh,’ I say, for lack of anything better.

A new walk-in bath has been installed at a cost of thousands. It completely fills her small bathroom. Mother is too nervous to use it though and is still being bathed in the communal bathroom by the carers. I make a mental note never to buy one of those baths. The thought of sitting there while it fills, the water gradually creeping up round you, seems too unpleasant for words. Sitting there while it empties seems, if possible, even worse.

I ask her if she has been to the town in her newest battery car.

‘Oh, that. I think there’s something wrong with it. I’ll have to get something else.’

I ask her what’s been worrying her but she can’t remember. Then she does remember.

‘Flies keep coming in,’ she says. ‘I don’t know how to stop them.’

I tell her about Harriet’s baby and the scan.

‘It wasn’t like that in my day,’ she says. ‘I hardly slept last night. There was a fly.’

Tom comes at half past four and I make some tea for us. I even find some biscuits that do not look too old. We make light conversation about this and that and Tom says he is going to stay with a friend in France next week. We talk about France and its pleasures. Mother sulks. She has never been abroad and can’t think why anybody else would want to. She makes it obvious that it is time for Tom to go.

‘Come and see me to the door,’ he says. I go, thinking he wishes to say something to me about Mother. Perhaps they are going to get married?

At the door Tom puts aside his Zimmer frame and leans on the doorjamb while clasping me in his arms. He gives me a smacking great kiss on the lips and says ‘It’s been lovely seeing you.’ He then kisses me again and I feel a bit desperate. If one of the carers comes by and then makes some jocular remark to Mother, I shall be in big trouble.

He is huge, much taller than I am and I am not a midget, and 22 stones. At least I thought I am not in much danger, he probably hasn’t even seen his thingy for years, what with emphysema, the 22 stones and everything. It has probably stopped working long ago. Then I realise that it hasn’t.

Mother calls out and unknowingly rescues me, ‘What are you doing with the door open. You’ll let the flies in.’

‘I don’t know why he wanted to see you,’ she says. ‘I told him you were married.’

What is she going to say next? I freeze. Is this going to be the visit when Mother puts me through the third degree about Martin? Why doesn’t he come and see her? Why does he never answer the phone? A direct question would need a direct lie I think and I know I am not very good at them.

Mother’s interrogation technique when I was young was so successful - Did I read in bed after she had told me not to? Had I picked an apple off the tree? Was it me who broke the saucer?- that she never needed a verbal answer. My guilty face told all. Today she just says ‘Switch the TV on. I’ve missed half the quiz.’

I lie awake half the night worrying. Did anyone see Toyboy kissing me? What shall I say if she asks about Martin?

The next morning it is time for me to leave. Mother tells me she has loved having me and says I must come again soon. Now I feel guilty on top of everything else.

As usual when I arrive home I feel this desperate need to ring up all my children and repeat what their grandmother has said. In addition I tell them she has sent them her love and asked about them and the children. She hasn’t but I feel she ought to have done so I do it for her. Harriet is lying down and I can’t really moan to Russell.

Alex is sympathetic. Luckily he doesn’t say ‘Cool’ as I ramble on. That is an adjective he reserves for Martin. Mother is called ‘sad’.

‘She’s not sad at all,’ I say. ‘Just bad tempered. I am the one who is sad.’

Sarah is the least sympathetic.

‘I don’t know why you bother to go’ she says briskly. ‘I wouldn’t if she talked to me like that’.

She wouldn’t either, or feel the slightest twinge of guilt about it. I feel like a wimp so I decide to ring Val and tell her all about Toyboy’s full frontal kissing. She tells me about Poppy’s new man.

It is so lovely to be home I do not even flinch at the sound of rhythmic thumping from next door. Is Phil Mitchell engaged in DIY or congress with Tripletmother. It goes on too long, unless he is superman, for nooky; he must be putting up more shelves.