There were reasons why my mother wasn’t, at least while I was young, very good at getting me clothes. For a start, money. There can’t have been much, when Dad was only a teacher and she (because he was a traditional man) wasn’t working. Dad had said, in his very unromantic wartime proposal on the station platform when he was on leave from the Air Force, ‘Two can live as cheaply as one, Aileen’; but three, and then four, and then five, as they added children, could not. All the same, the rest of the family, source of my extravagant gifts, were no richer, and most of them were poorer. It wasn’t just money. Now I see it was because of my mother’s own childhood. A seventh child and third daughter, Mum never had any new clothes of her own, only cast-offs. How was she to know how to make them, or what to buy?
And so we move to the Churches: my other family, my other side. My mother was Aileen Mary Church, but should have been Eileen. The C of E vicar objected to Eileen (because the name was Irish, thus possibly Popish. Zillah Meakins, Mum’s grandma on her father’s side, seems to have been Irish and probably what was then called a ‘tinker’, a gypsy; the Meakinses were frequently away, and had their children christened in batches.) The amiability with which her father changed tack at the christening when the vicar baulked was said to be down to drink, but it also tells you something about the gap between Gees and Churches, because it is inconceivable that a Gee would have changed the name of their child from Eileen to Aileen on a vicar’s, or anyone’s, say-so — not when they were sober and even less when drunk.
Gees, I was always hearing, had ‘character’ and ‘backbone’. ‘If you’re going to do a thing, do it right.’ ‘Stick to your guns.’ I see these traits come down into Walt Gee’s grandchildren, ourselves and our Gee cousins: dogged determination, self-belief, drive, competitiveness at sport and life, on the plus side tenacious loyalty and a mission to do something good in the world, on the minus — I see it in myself — a tendency to be sanctimonious, and at our worst, grandiose. Lucky for me then, lucky for my husband and daughter and friends, that my brothers and I are half my mother’s, touched with the redeeming brush, I hope, of the supple, easy-going, anarchic, witty, unashamedly self-interested, sensual, unsentimental, potentially criminal Churches.
Aileen’s family lived in Stony Stratford, a walk away across the fields from Wolverton, in a smaller terraced house on London Road facing the graveyard, which had two rooms downstairs, the back room where we sat and ate and the front room for best, never used, with a scullery out at the back and an outside loo that was a wooden plank with a round hole in it over darkness, and smelled. They were not, like the Gees, upper working-class; Mum said the Gees were ‘a cut above’. The Churches were lower working-class, and mostly Tories, which went against their own class interest, whereas Gees, being argumentative, were Labour. I imagine the Churches found Labour politicians too smug for their taste.
When Mum was small, she remembered the family being so poor that her mother had to cut fried eggs in two. She had contracted TB, which flourishes in overcrowded conditions like theirs, but recovered. Grandpa Church, Bill Church, had been in the Indian Army in the First World War, where he was a non-commissioned officer in the mess, and had such a good time — (there is a group photograph in which he is the only man wearing his cap pushed right back on his head, showing thick black curls, and a big unmilitary, sarky, sociable smile) — that he didn’t want to come home. Then Bill worked as a smelter in the steel works, a hellishly thirsty job requiring a lot of beer in the pub on Sunday morning, after which he returned a different man for his lunch, surly and furious, and my mother and Aunty Eve hid under the table.
But by the time I remember him Grandpa Church was an old man, rheumy-eyed, flushed, immensely genial, small and rather loose-lipped, his longish white hair covered now by a beige flat cap, in a brown cardigan, who did a pensioner’s part-time job in a grocer’s shop, and made jokes about giving us a ride on the bacon-slicer, which, not understanding, I was eager to accept. Grandma Church had been a ‘help’ for Mrs Coe, not far away in the same row of terraced houses, all of which the Coes owned, doing her washing and cleaning, and must have cleaned for others too. May Church had had seven children (though she lost one, a little boy called Louis, possibly from the TB which my mother survived), making my own mother Aileen, the youngest, that magical thing, the ‘seventh of a seventh of a seventh’, the third-generation child who supposedly has premonitions, ‘the sight’.
Did she? My mother was reluctant to give up that reputation, rationalist though at bottom she was, saying her premonitions were ‘always bad’. (But I think of her, au fond, as an optimist, a woman who lived in the cheerful, accepting, make-the-most-of-it present, whereas my insistently upbeat father — ‘Never look back’, ‘Don’t talk about death’, and on the telephone later, demanding a ‘Yes’, ‘Are you fit and well?’ — was at bottom more fearful than her, an ingenious, comprehensive worrier.)
Gees, descendants of the perfectionist craftsman and activist, Pa, and the needlewoman and aspirational homemaker, Ma, who hung framed reproductions of pictures like Watts’s Blind Hope on the sitting-room wall and had a four-shelf bookcase of mostly improving books, became craftsmen or teachers themselves, jobs with a certain rectitude. My elder brother John became head teacher of a comprehensive school, like our father; my younger brother Jim began, and ran, the NHS Counter Fraud Service; I am a moralising writer (though my anarchic side is pure Church). How proud Grandpa and Grandma Gee would have been! Churches, the more numerous offspring of slapdash Bill Church and fey May Davis (of whom it was said, by a possibly jealous sister-in-law, ‘she couldn’t even make a decent cup of tea’), had more dubious skills. One of Mum’s brothers was a bookie’s runner, one did conjuring tricks, all told jokes (Gees couldn’t) and were slightly cynical and made each other laugh, one was photographed smiling in an elegantly laid-back way near the top of a human pyramid, some emigrated, all liked money even if they had none, and some, like Eve and Albert, managed to acquire it. Churches occasionally had illegitimate babies, Gees had lifelong but not always amicable marriages. Churches had a gene, usually suppressed but life-enhancing, for red hair, as expressed in the waves of my beautiful, rebellious and eventually well-off cousin Maureen, and the crimson crest (heightened with henna) of my purple-and-turquoise-wearing, cricket- and claret-loving, scientific, artistic and eccentric second cousin Jane Teather; Mum had some chestnut in her thick dark hair, and my daughter Rosa was a strawberry blonde until she was six. Red meant, well, a bit raffish. Where Gees became trades unionists and in later generations lefties, Churches became Foresters or freemasons, liking the secrecy, the drink and the dinners. Uncle Albert was a Worshipful Master and once, vowing me to secrecy, showed me his gilt and silver regalia, which in my memory (but can this be right?) included an elaborate garter; his wife Aunt Eve, my mother’s sister, wore furs, had enormous gold rings on all her arthritic fingers, collected silver Masonic gifts, and drew in her eyebrows half an inch above the ghost of her real ones. They were snobs, and gossips, though kind and generous, and my father suspected them of patronising him. Churches had charm in bucketfuls, Gees had pride in spades.