As
the family legend goes, my mother was conceived during the Blitz on
Coventry, which would explain a lot. I love the idea of my grandmother,
stern and magnificent in equal measure, casting aside the strictures of
wartime for a little folie à deux. "That'll show the Gerries,"
I can almost hear her saying, as she indulged in a little trademark family
hedonism, ignoring the misery of rationing, darned nylons and blackout
curtains.`
And so my mother was born in
the middle of the Second World War, moving from Coventry to Lancaster then
Durham, gathering another sibling to make four,
and losing her precious, gentle father to asthma, all by the time she was
eight. She always felt like a misfit, skipping school to devour books from
the library or spend afternoons lying on the sofa and listening to the
radio.
The great joy, even in the most
difficult times, was story - telling them, reading them, sharing them. My
grandmother, Barbara, would often tell tales of that other
difficult redhead, Elizabeth I, or weave mansion-and-fur-coat fantasies
about what we could spend our money on 'when Ernie comes up,' talking
about her Premium Bonds.
But I have always seen my mother as
a practical fantasist, a hard-working sybarite. She may have gazed
dreamily to the future, but she worked her way through college by selling
programmes at the local dog track and by spending summer holidays working in
a factory. She may have spent hours weaving intricate tapestries of
character and plot in her head, but she was often doing it as she commuted
several hours a day to her job training teachers, or as she ran our busy
house which was always full of the teenage friends of my brother Grahame
and I. That's why, to this day, whenever we're in a room together and
someone says, 'I'd love to write a book, if only I had the time,' we have
to slip away and giggle behind our hands.
And that's another thing. The woman
has no sense of humour. I mean it. None. All acknowledged forms of
comedy leave her cold: satire, situation, slapstick, it's all the same to
her. She thinks Quantanimo Bay is too good for Frank Skinner. It is
legend in our family. My poor Dad, Bryan, will be heartily laughing away
at The Office, The Royle Family, or You've Been
Framed (which, incidentally, she calls 'that falling down
programme'), and my mother will look on like a slightly bilious Queen
Victoria.
It is a closely guarded secret,
however, that the most juvenile of word plays will make her collapse with
laughter, a little double entendre will have the tears flowing.
We're often in my kitchen or hers, me standing and stirring, she sitting
and sipping, and Bryan or my husband Séan will discover us, helpless and incomprehensible with laughter, mascara running down our faces.
One of the loveliest things we do
together now is to take trips: Barcelona, Cork, Cephalonia, Brittany, we
are the poster girls for EasyJet. I am very aware, though, that while we
may share a baggage allowance (she takes three things, I take
fifty-three), we have very different holidays. I have a holiday of
itineraries, reading lists, must-see exhibitions and must-visit
restaurants, and she has the holiday in her head. I am looking from the
hotel balcony down the Ramblas and thinking what a wonderfully vibrant and
exciting city Barcelona is; she is gazing at the rooftops of the cafe
opposite and seeing George Orwell hiding from a sniper, hearing Franco's
tanks rumbling in the distance. I'm visiting a different country, she's
visiting a different century.
For someone who lives so much in
her head, she manages surprisingly well in the real world. As well as
writing a book a year, she's addicted to teaching. Can there be a school,
prison or church hall left where she hasn't shared her love of writing,
her love of books? Where, over instant coffee and Garibaldis, she hasn't
made a timid housewife or retired colonel or prisoner on remand feel that
those scraps of writing they've hidden in the back of the cupboard for
years could really be a novel if they just worked hard enough? I've been
to talks she's given. She is the Billy Graham of the creative writing
circuit.
I hope you enjoy Wendy's website,
and that you enjoy her books. She certainly loved writing them. And we all
hope she keeps on writing them, as the thought of her fully present in this
century is a rather worrying one.
All good wishes,
Debora
© Debora Robertson 2003
