If Dad had been a heavy drinker, Mum might have tried to curb his excesses by accompanying him to the pub, having a drink herself by his side, forcing herself to have just enough fun to kill the adventure for him. She applied the same technique in a different area. ‘It was Mum that came up with the idea of your red ball, JJ,’ she said. ‘I thought he could have some fun without risking his career.’ Her voice went very quiet. ‘We didn’t know it was one of the last days you’d be running around the garden.’
‘It’s all right, Mummy,’ I said. ‘At least I got my ball back.’
Mum’s stratagem of letting Dad break the rules in a setting that was comparatively tame seemed to do the trick. Perhaps he was just playing with her by hinting that he had some dramatic misbehaviour planned. Dad played his part in the celebrations as scripted, though weather conditions were uncertain until almost the last minute. When Group Captain Wykeham-Barnes, the commanding officer of RAF Wattisham, near Ipswich, made a reconnaissance over the route in mid-afternoon it looked unpromising. Cloud was so thick over Biggin Hill that he couldn’t see the ground from 900 feet, but moments later, from near Crystal Palace, visibility was almost unlimited. He could actually see the procession moving through the West End.
He telephoned Air Vice-Marshal Lord Bandon, stationed on the roof of Buckingham Palace, who gave the go-ahead but vetoed the tightly packed ‘arrowhead’ formations which were to have been used for the first time. The seven wings of aircraft (twenty-four in each, arranged in six ‘bunches’ of four) flew in line astern instead, with thirty-second intervals between the wings. They reached a speed of 340 mph — the round trip from Wattisham only took fifty minutes. Dad played his part in the Queen’s special day, and didn’t spoil it by saying, ‘Hang the weather, let’s give the arrowheads a go anyway. Let’s give that pretty girl the bunch of flowers she deserves on her big day. Isn’t she a smasher?’
My childhood ego, undiminished in illness, perhaps even subtly inflated, took a little bit of a battering from having the incident brought down to earth. What had seemed a mystical episode in the family saga was only part of Mum’s campaign to keep Dad in check. Operation Killjoy. It turned out that I had only a bit part in my own big scene.
My imaginary photograph of the cryptic event slipped down from the mantelpiece, and I lost track of it somewhere out of sight over by the fire-surround.
Silent Perambulator
Just by virtue of lying there, under doctor’s orders, I made my visitors unearth any scrap of their pasts that might entertain me. Granny, for instance, taught me by rote an advertisement for patent medicine dating from her childhood, or even earlier.
Learning by heart is a discredited technique, I know, but I loved it. There’s something rewarding about the process of learning first and understanding later, even if my first real experience of it was If you want a really fine unsophisticated family pill, try Dr Rumboldt’s liver-encouraging, kidney-persuading Silent Perambulator, twenty-seven in a box. This pill is as thorough as a fine-toothed comb and as gentle as a pet lamb. It don’t go messing about but attends strictly to business and is as certain for the middle of the night as an alarm clock … Memorised formulas work on the mind from within, as if they were pills themselves, slow-acting pills which do their work over time.
I wanted to understand things. I wanted family history. I asked Mum how she and Dad met. It was an idea I found exciting, that there had been a time when these people whose job was to make me and love me didn’t even know it! Her answer was distinctly vague. ‘Oh, at some dance or other. I don’t remember exactly.’ Disappointing. ‘He was based near your Granny’s house. RAF Tangmere.’
‘And when did you know you were going to get married and have children?’ When did your mission to make John become clear to you?
‘Oh, when he asked me, I suppose.’ I had absorbed the prevailing ideas about love and marriage, not yet realising that the coming child does the choosing, and I wanted something a bit more full-blooded. I needed more details, and reluctantly she provided them. ‘We were on a train. He was eating a sandwich. He said, “How about it?” and I said, “How about what?” He said, “Getting hitched.” I said, “That’s no way to ask such a question! Aren’t you going to go down on one knee, at least?” He said, “Don’t see why I should — there’s a lot of muck down there. Take it or leave it. Either you want to or you don’t. Just don’t expect me to ask again.” I said, “At least put down your sandwich,” and he said, “I’ve almost finished. Hang on a mo.” And he finished eating his sandwich, and then he shook the crumbs off the greaseproof paper and folded it up neatly. So I can’t say I wasn’t warned. He was never lovey-dovey. And he’s always been tidy — I’ll say that for him. There aren’t many men who are.’
The London Derrière
The high point of Mum’s marriage, to hear Mum talk about it, had been the wedding itself. I suppose it marked the point when she passed out of Granny’s direct power. That was something, that was quite a lot. And if Dad wasn’t lovey-dovey, then neither was Granny.
Her bouquet was yellow roses. She pointed them out on my wallpaper. ‘They were always my favourite flowers. I had a favourite tune, too, and I wanted it played at my wedding, so I asked the organist, but I was shy about saying its name. I was being so silly. I thought the name was rude! So I asked if I could write it down instead of saying it, the name of the tune. What I wrote down was “The London Derrière”. Derrière is French for botty, you see, JJ. I knew that much. But the tune isn’t really called that, only I never knew. I had never seen it written down, I was going by ear. It’s really called “The Londonderry Air”, and it has another name as well. It’s called “Danny Boy”. It’s Irish, and the tune just pulls at my heart, do you know how that feels? But then a marvellous thing happened. It turned out that someone had loved the tune as much as I did, and he’d turned it into a proper hymn, so we could have it at the wedding. Not just the tune on the organ but everyone singing along. Shall I sing it for you, JJ?’
‘Oh yes, please!’ Mum wasn’t confident about her voice, so it was a treat to be sung to.
She opened her mouth and sang,
The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended,
The darkness falls at Thy behest …
By the time she had finished, her eyes were shining with tears. ‘Your Granny said it was a bad song for a wedding, but I told her it was my wedding and I didn’t care what she thought. I was very brave then, wasn’t I, JJ?’
In my mature judgement (if that’s what I have now) Granny was bang on the money. It takes some kind of Anglican genius to turn the Celtic keening of the original — ‘Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling / From glen to glen, and down the mountain side…’ — into such a desperate trudge, so unsuitable for a wedding as to be positively ominous, making the marriage-bed sound as welcoming as a warm grave. Asking for trouble, really. But yes, it was brave of Mum to stand up to Granny on this point or any other.
The pink limit
I decided to ask Granny about the wedding. I was beginning to feel like a sort of human Dead Letter Office, where unsent messages between these incompatible women could be safely left, picked up at the addressee’s risk, but I was also free to follow my own curiosity. I was building up a more complete picture by putting different versions together. ‘Did you go to Mummy’s wedding, Granny?’