The Coming of Age, September, Part 3.

22nd September. I return to Harriet’s to help out until the weekend when Russell will be at home all day. Jake already looks more human. He is indeed an Infant Phenomenon. I spend another five days cooking and gazing at him.

24th September Alex rings up to find out how Harriet and Jake are. We have had a long walk with proud mother showing off baby to the neighbours I report. He is also ringing to tell me about Jools. He knows I am very fond of Jools and long to be kept abreast of his exploits. Jools has regained his Herbie Frog jacket. One of Sue’s neighbours who works at the same factory remembered seeing Jools in it and offered it back to him at a price. Jools is now known through the factory as Herbie Frog, a men’s garment manufacturer with whom the factory workers had previously been unacquainted.

26th September. the house feels neglected and I feel lonely. There are several calls from my mother asking where I am and complaining about having to speak to the answerphone. I did tell her I was going to Harriet’s.

Luckily I have the Saturday dining group to look forward to. It is at Val’s.

27th September. Saturday Dining Group. Poppy has been to Italy with her new man. She is radiant when she comes back.

‘In Italy I can drink the wine,’ she says ‘and I feel so much better.’

‘How was it with Nigel?’ we ask.

‘Gerald. Oh, he has gone back to his mother.’

We are all stunned.

‘He was very boring,’ she said. ‘He went on about sheep all the time. When he wasn’t talking about sheep, he was trying to find somebody or other’s tomb. We kept having to ferret around dusty churches and back streets looking for the tombs of Tasso or Ariosto.’

We pass the wine bottle over but she shakes her head.

‘I can’t drink it in this country. I can only drink gin here. Have you got any? You know, he drove for miles everyday to get an English paper –he wanted to look up the price of his investments, or perhaps it was sheep but he wouldn’t make a teeny little detour to Milan so that we could look at the shops. They are so stylish there. I told him that some of the clothes were bound to be made of wool, but it didn’t make any difference. He was adamant. I think I’ve had a narrow escape. But I have learnt something. I shall never buy the Financial Times. It’s so boring.’

‘What about Nigel?’ Val asks.

‘Who? Oh him,’ says Poppy. ‘That was just a working relationship. I decided it wouldn’t go any further when he refused to spend a few pounds on some leather-covered chests of drawers. They would have been perfect for my scheme, but he was too mean. I can’t bear mean men.’

Everything happens so fast in Poppy’s life. Men come and go like swifts snatching mosquitoes. Here are Val and I, more than half way through the year and I can see us sitting in the bar again around New Year, still wishing our lives would change.

Val mutters to me ‘Those chests costs thousands I’ve seen them in magazines and things.’

Julia’s man seems to be quite content to let their relationship go on in its attenuated quiet way. Julia seems very relieved. At one point she was worried that he would want to move in with her.

‘I don’t think I could be doing with a man about the place again,’ she says.

Poppy, to my surprise, agrees but Val doesn’t.

‘You have to work so hard keeping your social life going, when you are on your own,’ says Val. ‘You are either asking people round or making an effort to go out to the cinema, concerts and things. If you want to go for a drink, you have to find someone to go with. It’s very tiring. Or you sit on your own at home and you feel lonely. You never just sit companionably with someone in an evening.’

Val has been divorced for 15 years now and still feels lonely. I thought I would be over it soon, but obviously I have a few years to go. After being the hub of a household for over thirty years, it still feels peculiar to be on my own.

My friend Jean once said ‘Well, statistically, most women end up on their own anyway. You’ve just done it a bit earlier that’s all.’ Jean is given to making bracing remarks like this. I blame Christian Science. She said to me on one occasion, when I was talking about my mother, ‘I don’t why she bothers. I would just put a plastic bag on my head if I were her.’ I think Jean has her plastic bag all ready by her bed.

I ring up mother to discuss my next visit.
‘I’m taking that stuff that’s good for your memory.’ she said.

‘Ooh,’ I said, very interested because my memory isn’t what it was either, ‘What’s that?’

There is a pause.

‘I’ve forgotten what it’s called.’

‘It’s not working then, is it?’ I say. Another lifeline sinks under the waves.

‘I keep forgetting to take it. I am sure it would work. It says so in the paper.’

She reads that daily paper which in between stories about social security scroungers and illegal immigrants who get £600 a week benefit, fills the pages with health matters. Daily there are long articles about the need to drink red wine regularly, have sex ditto, take ginseng, glucosamine, eat spinach and do yoga or kick boxing as the only way to perfect fitness. Some issues later there will be long articles about the dangers of alcohol, sex, ginseng, yoga and kickboxing. No wonder the over fifties in this country are confused. I say over fifties because the articles are obviously aimed at older people because they don’t go on about ‘washboard stomachs’ like the magazines for younger women that I see in the hairdressers do.

I used to have a flat stomach, it was positively concave, but in those days nobody thought it important.

When I was young, I was very thin, really quite skeletal. Sarah Jessica Parker in her latest manifestation had nothing on me. I could out Callista Callista and make Victoria Beckham look plump. But did any one want to photograph me? Or admire my collarbones and long to be just like me? No they did not.

In those far off days, the ideal girl was small and curvy; ‘well-stacked’ was a phrase often used. Jane Russell, Betty Grable, Betty Hutton were the pinups of the day and I bore no resemblance to any of them in any particular.

I could not even spend those humiliating teenage years wearing baggy clothes. Figure hugging sweaters and swirling skirts and high heels were all you could get. ‘Slacks’ were reserved for golf courses and the sort of women mother made dark comments about.

I went off to an international work camp in Finland at the age of 21 – and you know what that meant, nude saunas. They weren’t mixed of course, not in those days. The chaps had the log hut one day and we girls had it on another day and I don’t think they ever even peeped at us as we all pinkly ran out of the sauna to jump in the adjacent lake. But even being nude in front of other girls was embarrassing. One well-endowed Finn observed me long and closely and said ‘You are so thin – it is horrible.’

After I had two children I was still skinny. No one wanted to make videos of me showing off my waist and flat tummy and stretching about like Cindy Crawford though. All I got was ‘You look awful. Are you sure you are eating enough?’

How different my life might have been if I was young now. I could flaunt that rib cage and those skinny upper arms and everyone would fall about in admiration. I might even have appeared in Hello magazine.

Now I am a size 16, which is apparently so gross that most shops don’t even stock clothes that size. After half a century of being a 34 A bra size I am now a 36 DD. I would have died for this when I was a teenager. But the differentials between waist, bust and hips seem to have disappeared somewhere along the line. The hourglass curves, which were every girl’s dream in the early fifties, are still a dream.

Like life really. You spend a lot of your youth waiting for it, then you are looking back at memories that seem like dreams. Where was the bit in between where I was actually at my peak?