Dad was away a lot. It wasn’t a priority for the forces to give young fathers time at home. They weren’t feather-bedded. Sometimes he would send postcards, usually of æroplanes, but one he sent me was of a restaurant somewhere abroad. On the back he’d written:
Ate here last night. Funny sort of place. None of the plates matched, none of the cups belonged with their saucers. Saw a beautiful green praying mantis trying to escape by the window, tho’. Right up your street. Love Dad.
He knew I liked everything that crept and crawled.
‘Love’ wasn’t part of Dad’s normal vocabulary, but he seemed to be able to write it down, though he did have to be abroad for the trick to work. As if the very word was in a foreign language, the custom of another country. A body of water had to intervene between us before the risk could be taken, the words ‘love’ and ‘Dad’ brought into startling proximity.
Dad wasn’t away all the time, and my nose was sensitised, even through several closed doors, to the strongly medicated smell of his beloved Wright’s Coal Tar Soap. In the flesh he could sometimes show a muted tenderness. I remember him sitting in my room once, resplendent in his uniform, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Mum asked me, ‘What do you want? Is there anything you want?’ I couldn’t say anything. Five times she asked me, and I wouldn’t speak. I just shook my head. Finally she knelt by the bed and leaned over so that her ear was near my mouth. I could smell her hair. Even so, a whisper was too loud for what I wanted and I wanted to put my hand over my mouth when I made the whisper. ‘I’d like to sit on Daddy’s lap.’ And very gently she picked me up and carried me over to my daddy and lowered me onto his lap. Gingerly he put his arms around me. I stayed there for a minute or two. I could feel a faint bunching in the muscles of his thighs, first one and then the other, as if he was suppressing an impulse to rock me. To dandle his first-born. It was absolute Heaven, to rock on the big warm muscles I didn’t yet know were called quadriceps.
The waiting-room pounce
He was away the first Christmas I was ill, and Mum had a guest, a young Canadian airman. Jim Shaeffer. He had hairy wrists, and he brought presents of an extreme generosity.
I don’t know how to account for Jim Shaeffer’s presence at that Christmas. I assume he was a contact of Dad’s, and there may have been charity involved in the invitation. But was it Mum who was showing charity, by taking a stranger in for the festival, or Jim Shaeffer, persuaded to offer the stricken mother a shoulder to cry on? If it was Jim, he made a good job of it.
I resisted him to some extent, partly because he called Mum ‘Ma’am’ not ‘Mrs Cromer’. It was too close to my own name for her — it seemed to place us in competition. I was sensitised to male presence anyway, in Dad’s absences. If anyone was going to be tall, if anyone was going to make a glass vibrate with the low register of his voice, it was supposed to be Dad.
Mum brought a couple of upright chairs into my room, and she and Jim had a glass of sherry together there. The Christmas tree had been put up in my room for a change. I had wanted an enormous tree, right up to the ceiling, but Mum had pointed out that we didn’t really have many decorations, and a tall tree would just look bare. Better to settle for a smaller tree properly dressed. She was right, and in any case the real pleasure of the tree came from its smell of outdoors.
I expect the sherry in the little glasses had a dusty taste from being opened the Christmas before and not drunk since. Jim hadn’t wrapped the presents he brought. I imagine he’d been told I wasn’t allowed to exert myself, even to the extent of fiddling with paper, but still he’d given thought to presentation. There was a proper grown-up gramophone, covered in snakeskin. This was already a wonderful gift — it would have been generous as a gift to Mum, let alone me — but he had gone one better by putting a further present inside it, so that even the gramophone became a wrapper for something else. He’d filled the inside of the gramophone with sweets. Even better: not ‘sweets’ but candy — thrilling alien sugar treats, when I had had little enough exposure to the British varieties. While the sweetness flooded my mouth, Mum started to unload her tragic troubles on Jim. Though I gazed at the Christmas tree in a sort of trance, I was familiar with what Mum was doing.
It was quite in character for Mum to recruit a stranger to share her griefs, spilling secrets and living off all the sympathy she could cadge. Chatting about her problems was a deeply ingrained habit, even before she had any problems to speak of. When I was a healthy toddler, she hadn’t hesitated to use me as bait.
Later she specialised in the waiting-room pounce, reaching mothers through their little ones. She had a fixation with babies, not entirely because they couldn’t keep her at a distance. Her love for small children wasn’t put on, it was perfectly genuine (and the younger the better), but she knew the strategic value of baby-worship. Mothers with babies couldn’t keep her at bay so easily, and once a tiny finger was curled round one of her own she was there for the duration. Then it would all come out: how lucky they were to have a normal healthy child. The mothers wouldn’t quite have the nerve to grab their babies and run. They were stuck with the long sad story.
She was a classic Heather type, as defined by the system of the great Bach. I know there are other contenders for the title of ‘the great Bach’, but as far as I’m concerned J.S. can’t hold a candle to Dr Edward, the father of modern herbalism. If it came to a choice between the Well-Tempered Preludes and Fugues and the Twelve Healers of 1933, I’m afraid I wouldn’t hesitate. In my book, the ‘Twelve’ are worth ten of the forty-eight.
The Bach guide sums it up perfectly, though Heather wasn’t actually one of the Twelve Healers in the original book. There were sequels which added nuances to the system of remedy and character type. HEATHER: Those who are always seeking the companionship of anyone who may be available, as they find it necessary to discuss their own affairs with others, no matter whom it may be. They are very unhappy if they have to be alone for any length of time.
There’s more up-to-date wording in one of the newer manuals, which lists positive aspects as well as negative. The positive aspects are: A selfless, understanding person. Because of having suffered, is willing to listen and help. Can be absorbed in other’s problems and is unsparing in efforts to assist. That’s Mum on a good day. It’s just that she didn’t have very many good days. The negative description runs: ‘Obsessed’ by ailments, problems and their trivia. Always wanting to tell others about them, and about themselves. Sometimes weepy. Comes close — speaks close into your face — ‘button-holers’. Saps vitality of others, consequently is often avoided. Dislikes being alone. Makes mountains out of molehills. A poor listener — has little interest in problems of others. That’s more like it. That’s the Mum I knew.
She wasn’t obsessed with ailments in the sense of being a hypochondriac — or rather, the element of hypochondria in her wasn’t to do with illness, exactly. It took the form of superstitiousness, which is really only a hypochondria of the spirit. Superstitiousness is entirely self-defeating. In Mum’s case, it did the opposite of what it was supposed to. It sealed in the dread it was devised to seal out.
So for instance she had the wooden outline of a magpie on the kitchen window-sill. It was her insurance policy against bad luck. If she ever saw a single magpie — ‘for sorrow’ — she could interpret it as really being a pair with the one on the window-sill. Two for joy. The old formula, tipping your hat to Mr Magpie. That’s superstition for you.