If I didn’t really get the joke in the new words, I wasn’t offended that it wasn’t funny. Not many jokes are. It’s optional. Most jokes are like the ones in Christmas crackers, and produce only bafflement or groans. But it did bother me a bit that a whole phrase could mean two things. What I could enjoy in a single word I feared as a larger principle. When things meant more than one thing, a process was set in train that would end in them meaning nothing at all. It was the same with the biscuits that Mum dipped in her morning coffee. They came from a tin bearing the words ‘Peek Frean’. ‘What does that mean?’ I asked Mum, once I’d learned to read it. ‘It doesn’t mean anything, John, it’s just the name of the makers.’ Peek Frean seemed more freighted with meaning than a mere name should be, but I couldn’t pin its significance down. Then the name became a series of nonsense shapes and sounds. Peek Frean Peek Frean. The words dissolved in my mind just the way the biscuits lost their texture when Dad dunked them, so that a crisp edge became a gummy flap.
Flakes of metal fur
Dad didn’t spend much time with me, and when we played together there was likely to be a practical lesson involved. His mind was attuned to experiment rather than pure entertainment. He placed a magnet under some cardboard and showed me how the iron filings fell into a fated shape. Then he moved the magnet under the card. I loved the way the flakes of metal fur crawled into new arrangements.
He played me musical glasses. He brought wine glasses into my room on a tray and made them sing at different pitches, by filling them to different levels and rubbing the rim with a wet finger. He taught me to see the agitation of the water in the glass, throbbing in little surges as the note was produced. I couldn’t decide whether the particles in their focused swirl were chasing the finger or trying to run away, but I was fascinated. This was science and music and magic all rolled up in one. Mum came to hear what the eerie noise was, and Dad tried to show her how to make the glasses sing. Even though he gave her precise instructions, she couldn’t produce a note, which annoyed Dad or gave him satisfaction or both.
I knew better than to ask Mum or Dad himself about his being ‘peculiar’. Dad had got married, hadn’t he? — which meant he was cured of his peculiarity. Or if he was still peculiar, then at least he was a peculiar married man. At the time that counted as a sort of happy ending. Marriage being curative in itself, the end of the journey. Marriage didn’t solve everything, but in those days it did at least contain everything. Bachelor and spinster were larval forms of life, and only married people could claim to be grown up.
Mum and Dad never knew anyone divorced, socially. There were no bad marriages in those days, none so bad they couldn’t be endured. None that were talked about as failures or allowed to unravel in public. There wasn’t trial separation and giving-it-another-go and staying-together-for-the-kids, there was only marriage.
Marriage was the rest cure then, for relationships between men and women. Marriage was bed rest for couples. Lie down as man and wife and wait to feel better. If after a while it doesn’t seem to be working, then keep trying for another few years. As long as it takes, in fact.
Later Mum told me that while I was spending those years in bed she had many times considered gassing us both. The way she talked about it, she was almost apologising for her failure of nerve. She didn’t feel she deserved any credit for resisting suicidal temptation. She still thought it would have been better for us both to be dead. Speak for yourself, Mum! But at least I understood then why she was so fascinated by the gas fire. She wasn’t mesmerised by the grille and the colours of its combustion. She wasn’t looking at the fire at all, nor the colours of its fading. What drew her eyes was the stiff little tap in the pipe that came out of the wall.
Looking back on those years, it isn’t Mum I feel sorry for, even if she was playing with thoughts of suicide, but Dad, so little a part of the household. His projects were so peripheral, apart from his moments of glory lighting rockets on Bonfire Night. The pleasures of the house happened in his absence, even when his belongings made them possible, like the Brummell Tie Press, so that we played in the shadow of his outrage if our games were found out.
One day Mum sat on my bed softly crying, and I tried to find words to reassure her. ‘It’s all right, Mummy,’ I told her. ‘I really don’t mind being ill.’ I even think I was telling the truth.
Net profit of joy
Mum was starved of activities that didn’t centre on me. One thing that kept her sane in those years was breeding budgerigars. From knowing nothing about it she rapidly became something of an expert, even an authority. She got the idea from a magazine, I think. The article promised ‘hours of pleasure for a modest outlay’, which turned out to be no more than the truth. Those birds produced a vast net profit of joy. It must have been wonderful for Mum to find a world in which she excelled, and which she didn’t have to share with anyone else, though she chose to share it with me.
If I’d been consulted I would have preferred a pet anaconda or else some baleful insect. I wanted to create a relationship with a very alien creature. Knowing Dad’s unsentimental love of nature I tried to sell him on the idea of a pet scorpion, but he said gently, ‘I’m afraid even I draw the line somewhere.’
It was probably a minor joy of keeping birds for Mum that Granny feared them. Perhaps it was even a major incentive. Granny said birds were dirty, but really she was afraid of them getting tangled in her hair. She would make sure that Mum checked the cages before she came into a room, and she’d disappear if Mum announced that the birds needed to be let out to stretch their wings. Mum didn’t exactly tyrannise the tyrant, but it was a treat for her to have Granny at her mercy in any way. It was something she never got tired of.
Budgies gave us a lot more to talk about, but they also extended Mum’s world without the drastic step of taking her out of the house. As word got round that Laura Cromer knew what she was doing, budgie people would telephone for budgie advice. It was a wonderful change for her to be giving out support and information, after becoming so knowledgeable in such a remarkably short time. The satisfactions of budgie breeding even took the edge off her life-long need for sympathy. When she did find herself in a waiting room full of strangers, she might go down the new and sunlit path of budgie happiness rather than the muddy pot-holed track of tragic children and their illnesses.
I learned a few things myself, from picking up the conversational crumbs from Mum’s bird table. I learned that if budgies got out of their aviary they almost never got back. They starved because they had never learned to find food for themselves. Being fed by man had stunted their instincts, and so an aviary must have both an inner and an outer door — to act as a sort of air-lock. I remember a weekend of banging and frayed tempers which must have been the time that Mum and Dad built just such an air-lock. The intoxicating smell on Dad’s hands, for which I had no name, can only have been sawdust.
Mum liked the blue birds best. They were the best talkers, and they looked heavenly. Literally heavenly, as blue as the blue of Heaven. ‘What’s more,’ she said, ‘they match your eyes exactly. God has not taken your beautiful blue eyes from you …’ Up to that moment I hadn’t known that there were illnesses which could make your eyes change colour.