A Word in Your Ear - Spring 2007

A Word in your ear

Mothers & Daughters

When our children were small we had the good fortune to live in an upside down house in a small village in South Durham. The small estate, built on the site of a gloomy obsolete orphanage, was near the village green and backed onto fields leading to a bluebell wood. Great for children.

The house was upside down because the sitting room (or ‘lounge’ as it was called in the brochure) was upstairs, reached by an open pine staircase and contained by a wrought iron half wall. It overlooked the dining room which soared right to the roof and was the core of the house.

The upstairs sitting room had this narrow balcony overlooking the field farmers field of grazing cows. Once everyone in our row was on their balcony viewing the birth of calf being born in the open while the other cows in the her stood around protecting them our intrusive gaze. The farmer, when called to rescue the calf came with his tractor and studiously ignored what he obviously thought were nosy newcomers.

In that upside down house you could watch children play, inside and out, from a safe distance. Through the wrought iron sitting room railing the children could look down into the dining room, on meals being consumed, parties in progress. In those days we had quite few parties as it was like making your own theatre and saved on babysitters. (I have now more or less recovered from that madness and prefer eating out with one or two friends).

At one of these parties one of the guests was a charismatic young woman in her twenties who, as a consequence of childhood polio, had a disability that required a wheelchair. A couple of men carried her in and she held court in her chair in the dining room She was blonde, beautiful, intelligent and articulate and I remember one point in that evening when we able-bodied women were deserted, up in the sitting room, looking down on all the men sitting at the feet of this lovely creature, drinking in every word.

One favourite guest was an academic colleague who, if the company was right, could be persuaded to go and get his guitar from his boot and sing songs like Blue Moon, and When Somebody Thinks You’re Wonderful. This was quite a concession because at his regular gigs he played rock and roll in a band called The Krak of Dorn (I think that’s what they called it)

Then there was the party where one man laughed so much he broke one of my antique dining chairs and stayed laughing among the wreckage on the floor.

At my daughter’s eighth birthday where her school-friends came dressed as cowboys and Indians and fought running battles shrieking round the house, upstairs and downstairs many times. One girl, dressed as a cowboy and the daughter of a judge, had hysterics because she did not win a game. ‘I must,’ she wept. ‘I must win.’

Yes, that upside down house was a great one for parties. But no matter how `hard I try I just can’t remember what food we ate. I’m sure we ate quite well but for me the food was secondary to the company.

This all came to mind I am at present in the London kitchen of my daughter, in another great party house, although this one is the right way up, not upside down. This enormous sky-lit kitchen has recently been re-designed around Debora’s focus on, and delight in food and cooking, and particularly her professional role as a food journalist and writer. At her parties, the food is memorable, even historic. To sit and watch her cook is great theatre. To eat her scrambled eggs on toast for breakfast is to participate in a poem.

A far cry, you might say, from the eight-year old Indian Princess haring around in a house, or peering through the wrought iron at my dinner parties. where food was only a secondary concern .

But I like to think my parties in my upside-down house inspired her to love company and get satisfaction entertaining people but, because of her particular genius, giving food its rightful place at the centre of things.

Afterthought:
Talking of mothers and daughters, we are near the day that we call round here ‘Mothering Sunday’. I like that term so much better than ‘Mother’s Day’. Mothering is a process, not just a role. We learn how to mother by instinct but also being mothered ourselves. For good or ill, the quality of that mothering sets a pattern for generations.

My novel ’Family Ties’ (Headline Book Publishing) features a sequence of four mothers and daughters. Kate, the great-grandmother in the story, owes a lot to my perception through my life of my own extraordinary mother, a woman of great depth and sometimes acerbic wit. (‘Great dress, pity about the hem!’) When my sister first read the novel I asked, in some trepidation, of her view on it. She said it was ‘Spooky’. I don’t know whether for her this was a good or bad thing, but I left it at that. I hope she meant that my story benevolently haunted by the sense of family we inherited from our mother and have passed on to our daughters and sons.