Pictures in an Exhibition

Our friend Ian invited us to his club. Months ago.

He had taken a photograph of my father at his hundredth birthday party, and entered it as part of his contribution for the club’s photographic exhibition. He hoped it might be chosen.

It was.

Seldom do we go into town just for the fun of it. Indeed, Shaun can hardly be dragged to London at all.

Dress code: Business. “That’s quite a short skirt.” He smiled, eyebrows raised, at my favourite silk-and-linen shift dress, as I put my foot on a chair to buckle my sandal.

“Only if I’m riding a bicycle,” I said.

“But we are riding bicycles.”

It’s moot point, whether bicycling along the Embankment to Westminster is less or more scary now you’re far more likely to get knocked down by speeding lycra than you ever were pedalling gently along the pavement dodging pedestrians, as I used to when we lived in Parson’s Green and I was working at the National Theatre.

Because of threatened rail strikes, we aimed for half an hour early. Excellent tea – made with pyramid teabags and real leaves, boiling water and full cream milk – in the sun in deckchairs in St James’s Park. Or rather, Shaun in the shade because he was in a suit.

(“Perhaps you shouldn’t sit in a deck chair in that skirt, either.” Tricky one. The perfect length, standing up, is not quite so perfect, sitting down. As I discovered presenting a tv programme for Channel 5 in my lovely smart silk-and-linen shorts-suit. On a bicycle is better, really, because you whizz past fast enough not to notice.)

It was a glorious evening. And venue. Swagged windows up to the sky, almost. Parasols and potted roses on balconies overlooking the Mall, almost.

And what of the exhibit we’d been invited to see?

It flooded back to me. The hundred friends and pupils at my father’s surprise party. His astonished delight that anyone cared enough to see him. The bunting and balloons over the drive welcoming him back from church. The roast beef and hundred tiny Yorkshire puddings I had decided, in an insane moment, were the iconic Sunday lunch of his childhood. The deeply yellow yolk-and-double-cream custard over the blackberry-and-apple crumble. The Toy Symphony we entertained him with, and laughed enough to cry as we played, crammed into in the drawing room.

The hundred candles, arranged, lit, and extinguished by him, singer’s lungs still impressive, on his cake.

But most of all – ah, most of all by a very long way – my dear, dear father himself. 

Whom I haven’t yet had leisure to mourn, there has been such a tangled web around our ears since he said goodbye and left to join my mother where there are no tangled webs at all.

And I wanted to cry.

“I wanted to cry,” I told Ian over my moist, fragrant crab followed by succulent pink lamb, in the vast and elegant dining room.

“Then my picture has succeeded,” Ian said. “If it moved you.”

Children in a photograph

On my desk is a picture of four children. Four children and a dog. 

They are so gorgeous, so iconic, so much of-their-era that they look like something out of a Ladybird book. But real, living and breathing small people, in black-and-white, rather than coloured Ladybird pictures.

They are in a sparse wood, on a hillside by what appears to be a river. But the picture is sepia, and slightly stained (was it one of our cats?), so it’s hard to be sure. Beyond the few trees, beyond the slope of the hill are what could be distant, welcoming buildings. Perhaps the school where their parents teach? (Or perhaps just… something spilt on the photograph?)

The group seems to fall naturally into two, slightly distinct. On the far left the dog is sitting very upright, a black Labrador with a smart white tie, alert and staring into the middle distance. The oldest boy, as dark-haired as the others are fair and perhaps seven or eight years of age, looks straight out towards the camera and the dog, which (when you look closely, you can see) he holds tightly on a long, thick round lead. I believe the lead is plaited leather. (I have a similar myself, though rather shorter and for a much larger dog.) The boy’s mouth is slightly open, in a confident and open smile. He is good-looking. One gets the impression he has slightly separated himself from the others.

Whose little group, by contrast, is dominated by the other boy. I’d guess he is six. Unlike his older brother – who, with his shirt open at the collar, lies along the grass with his legs behind him – this blond boy sits, slightly more formal with tie and jumper, legs straight out in front and an impressive-looking boat on his knees. In his hands he holds something, perhaps taken from the boat, and is showing it to his sisters and obviously teaching them about it. He too is smiling, enjoying the imparting of knowledge.

On the far right sits one of the two girls, aged around five, in a dark short-sleeved gingham smocked dress, bunched knee socks and Startrite sandals, smiling enthusiastically and leaning over the smallest one to see what her brother is showing them. She has long fair hair like dark sand, scooped into a pony tail, and seems keen to be included.

Finally, in the middle is the baby, hardly more than a toddler. Hair in bubbles and blonde as the snow. She too is in a very pretty short-sleeved smocked dress but hers is pale, cream, almost white. When my own daughter wore the same she looked as like this little girl as a crab is to an apple.

She is the only one not smiling. 

She gazes intently at what is being shown to her. 

Thus, the oldest is concerned with his dog. The next, with instructing his sisters. The third, wanting to be part of the group.

Only the youngest is focused. On the object itself. On no one else. Only on her involvement with it, and her interest in it.

It is almost as if, over half a century ago as this must surely be, each is telling future generations what to expect. What he or she is interested in.

I dreamt I was one of four. I had a childhood with them, and we grew, and the years grew up between us and sent us on our ways. I went to university where I fell in love; we married and had children.

My parents came to live with us and loved us and we them. My mother died and then my father, and they left us with love and kind memories; the valuing of beauty and music; and a deep respect for truth and goodness.

And an old sepia photograph of beautiful children. Which one of our cats may have peed on.

Sounds II

And then there were clocks.

I would lie in my bed, as a child, listening to the city clocks on the hour.

Which is slightly surprising. The school where I was brought up, where my father was head master, is in West Road, a good ten minutes through his college and now my daughter’s, over the Cam to the Market Place. (Or rather more often, five minutes by bicycle over Garret Hostel Bridge and past our other daughter’s college. And now I think of it, past our youngest daughter’s college too, come this Michaelmas. Perhaps I should explain that I am the dunce in my family, having not finished my eduction in the city I love.)

And yet I distinctly remember hearing the clocks strike more-or-less together, ten minutes away through the wind though they be. Perhaps one of them was our own grandfather clock, downstairs in the hall.

Which strikes (so to speak) me as the more remarkable, now we have a number of chiming and striking clocks in our own house, and getting them to coordinate is the culmination of many years’ work, still ongoing.

We have a friend, a physicist, fascinated by pendula and all things horological, who comes round at least once a week and often several times, on his magnificent grocer’s bicycle with its enormous basket, and synchronises our clocks. 

One of which, for instance, was bought, defunct, by Serena in a car boot sale for a song and indeed its own song: it has not so much a striking (this is getting silly) face, as deep and resonant Westminster chimes to vibrate to the very bottom of your soul. When Shaun introduced me to the the Carpenters’ music he said Karen Carpenter had “a voice to fall in love with”, and Alexander said of Serena’s clock that with those sounds in your life, nothing else could really go very wrong.

I took it to our local clock-and-watch-menders, and they told me the cost of restoring it was so many times more than the worth of the clock itself that the only answer (short of buying another) was to find an amateur clock-mad enthusiast.

Which is where our friend Doctor Clock, the self-styled Clock Psychiatrist, comes in. To our hallway. On his striking (as it were) bicycle. Usually several times a week. For several years now.

And it is paying off.

Time (sorry about this) was, when the clocks – a good five or six of them – were only in sync on Sunday, just after I’d wound and set them, perhaps together for the next hour or so.

By Tuesday or Wednesday they would be so out of step that our musician son Ben, who has turned his potato-cellar bedroom under the kitchen into a very impressive recording studio, would be hard pushed to find more than a minute or two chime-and-strike-and-cuckoo-free in any hour, to record in.

But the other day, a Saturday no less, in other words at the very end of the clock-winding-and-setting week, I heard several of them chiming and striking the hour mostly within remarkable seconds of each other and all in the same half-minute or so.

(And, to answer your immediate objection, I believe they were all on approximately the same hour.)

I sent Dr Clk an immediate text and he was as excited as I was.

More to the point, it took me straight back to my childhood, lying in bed and listening to the city clocks marking the hour more-or-less together.

You’d think such an insistent telling of time passing might make you feel less, not more, secure. It had the opposite effect on me.

Yet more proof, if proof were needed, that sound is more important to me than madeleines.

Possibly because I’m not over-fond of madeleines.

(Ooh, and there goes one of them now, for nine o’clock! Followed by an ominous silence from all the others. Oh well, can’t win ’em all.)

Sounds I

Cut grass in high summer. Your mother’s scent as she kisses you goodnight. Proust’s aunt’s madeleine dipped in hot tea.

This is what our childhood is concocted of. The sense that tugs most agonisingly at our memories. Or so we are told.

Perhaps because, when we first catch the smell of something, we can’t always remember what the specific something is. Sometimes it is only the general era it brings back, and our happiness when we smelt whatever it was then which we can’t quite put a finger on.

Perhaps that is why we consider smell the most visceral, most nostalgic of memories. 

Because we’ve all had the sensation of recognising a smell, or even a taste, and knowing there is something distinct and familiar, say in a complex dish, without being able to pin down what it is. The annoyance when the person who cooked it says, “Coriander, of course,” which you knew that you knew all along.

True, we can do this with music, too. You know it’s a favourite of yours… but is it The Trout or The Archduke: two sides of the same record you were given for your fifteenth birthday? Or is it, in fact, neither but something by Mozart or even Rossini…

By and large though – music aside – sounds are more recognisable. And so more consciously remembered.

My mother lay on my bed next to me. Only one bird was up, and singing solo into the darkling dawn. Just one bird. Had it woken too soon, when none of the others thought it a time to sing? Would it soon realise its mistake and pipe down again?

Wait, my mother said. Wait, and listen.

It seemed agonisingly long… but she was right. A second voice eventually joined in. Two birds in the lightening very early day. Quarrelling, arguing back and forth, tree to tree, in song. Presumably vying with each other, though I doubt I knew this then, for dominance or territory or a mate. Or just who could sing the louder.

How many minutes was it before the sky flamed alive with sound? Vibrant, throbbing and thrilling, song upon song, cascading through the trees into our garden and the open window of my bedroom. The welkin ringing with it, at full throttle long before breakfast, to last all day and into the sloping light of the afternoon as my mother carried a tea-tray onto the last and diminishing patch of sunlit lawn, before supper and sleep for the birds and me both, long before my father had finished work and my parents had sat down to eat their own.

The Dawn Chorus, my mother said.

Is it my imagination? Or has the world truly burst into long-forgotten song since lockdown?

More, far more birdsong outside my window in the mornings, waking me now, when it’s barely light, before four o’clock. A robin cocking its head and commenting on our mid-morning coffee. A wren chuckling from the branches overhead at teatime.

And blackbirds darting low over the lawn as the sky recedes, and singing long into the late evening. 

They mean far more than madeleines to me, these sweet songs from my childhood. 

Rescue

Living in a school, we had access to luxuries that my parents’ income alone could never have provided.

We lived, it felt to me, like millionaires.

A tennis court.

A swimming pool.

And staff. My goodness! Although my mother, a brilliant and extremely influential maths teacher, proudly advertised her occupation as “Housewife” on her passport, she hardly had to lift a finger. The school provided us with a full-time cleaner six days a week, Miss Halifax (her title a great mystery to me as she had a son, Peter, my Saturday playmate); a sewing lady, Miss Cartwright, on Tuesday afternoons; our clothes sent to the laundry every week and coming back ironed and beautifully packed as if new; not one but two Danish Girls (au pairs to you and me)… though what they were for other than sunbathing, I know not.

And unlimited – but unlimited – school food. I could have friends (most of whom, by my teens, were undergraduates) round for supper every night of the week. I could invite ten home for Sunday lunch on the after-church spontaneousness of the moment. My father told of the occasion when he came down for breakfast to find a dozen people in evening dress eating bacon-and-egg round his table… and he didn’t know a single one. Given that one was my sister and another I myself, we now know whence I inherited my “writer’s licence” with anecdotes which all my family accuses me of.

(Or else he had taken the family face-blindness, which I have also inherited, to a new level.)

And oh! the swimming pool…

From April to September, every morning before breakfast, I swam with my father. Often we were joined by Ruth, mother to (still) my best friend Helen, whose father was Master to the college over the road from the school.

It was so much part of my life that when I left home to go to university, and the Hilary Term of my First Year was the hottest summer since records began (any weather announcement always being the most whatever-it-is since r b, so it must have been: see anecdotes, licence with, above) I found myself completely at a loss.

Where were we supposed to swim? Where did everyone else go? How was I to cool off? Can people actually live without being able to plunge into cold water at a moment’s notice throughout the summer months?

I felt as others might if deprived of a bathroom.

Eventually someone told me of a pool somewhere beyond Port Meadow and I bicycled there a couple of times and jumped in… but it was far too far, and I was hot again by the time I got back.

I was used to a pool in the grounds.

So as soon as Shaun had a living and became the Parson of Parson’s Green and we had our own lovely, large Victorian vicarage and garden in the centre of London, the first thing I did was scrape all our savings together (someone had generously given us a thousand pounds a few years earlier, when Shaun was between posts and couldn’t sign on for several weeks because clergy are paid monthly, and I had invested it in British Gas shares and doubled it) and I bought us a swimming pool kit.

(The most money we’d ever spent on anything. Surely not, the pool company said. Don’t you own your house? Hah, I wish! Surely you’ve bought a car? Nope: never.)

And when we moved here, to the house we’re in now, we did the same. Very dear friends invited us skiing: a once-in-a-lifetime stay with them. But we had designated the Easter holidays for pool-digging-and-building, and with considerable regret turned it down.

And I still swim in it every morning, before breakfast.

Latterly, in lockdown, along with so many others, through the winter too. I have now broken (very thin) ice to swim; and like my father, swum in the snow. (Though unlike him, I did it a second time.)

Once, based on misinformation from my sister, I dived in headfirst in my rubber ring, and spent a happy and bemused few moments watching all the legs and bubbles in the floating blue… until my father fished me out and everyone made an incomprehensible fuss and asked if I was all right

This morning, another memory came back: an afternoon when I proudly boasted to a grown-up that I’d saved at least ten lives. I had been picking out drowning beetles and other creatures, and freeing them. Something I still do most mornings. Not least because I keep bees, am allergic to their sting and if I swim into a live bee can end up in an ambulance. 

This morning, a pretty little yellow butterfly had just landed on the water and was busy drowning. I fished her out as gently as I could and laid her on the lawn amid the falling rose petals. I wasn’t at all sure she would survive.

And suddenly, like a wave crashing over me, it hit: an intense, powerful and painful longing. For my parents. For their love and protection. For them to pull me from the waters swirling so wildly about me, and hold me safely in their arms, and not let anyone hurt me any more…

The trick with life – with mental health, surely – is to anchor.

For instance: positive memories to diurnal activities.

Every morning, I swim.

And many mornings in recent years, my swim has been troubled by painful memories. Someone who once swam with me and then hurt me, very badly. Someone else who stole a lot of money from me one summer, when I was swimming a lot.

From now on I will invite my thoughts to dwell on my father instead. On his love and support sustaining me. His humour cheering me. His faith, strengthening me.

(And his yanking me out of the water by my ankle when I was head down like a duck dibbing with no thought whatsoever of saving myself.)

So that every morning, when I swim, his spirit will surely swim with me.

And when I went back, a few more petals had fallen and the butterfly had flown away.

Tears

It’s an occupational hazard. I listen to the Today Programme.

I often muse that it would be better for me to revert to my teens, and start the day with Radio 3. (Although even as a teenager, I listened to Thought for the Day. Nerd that I must have been.) But if I do that for any length of time, some junior researcher will inevitably ring me and ask what I think about the latest whatever it is, and I will find myself saying, What war? Or even (joy of joys), What Brexit? (Do you remember the beginning of the pandemic, when we were all so relieved there was no wall-to-wall Brexit any more? Honest to goodness, if I’d known that would happen I wouldn’t have voted for it.)

And then I’ll have to ring Serena, our eldest, and ask her the news. And what my opinion on it is, which is always quicker – and more to the point, surer – than asking myself what my opinion is. (As she thinks I should have done before voting Brexit.) Which is all very well, but by the time I’ve done that they’ve found someone else for the programme and besides, they might as well pay Serena instead of me, for her to tell the nation instead of telling me. Which would be a jolly good idea in the first place. Except that she doesn’t want to do the silly work she’s watched her mother do.

Pointless someone checking me for dementia, in my late teens: I spent three happy years at Oxford with no idea who the Prime Minister was. I think I still don’t know. Who it was then, I mean. Though it would be a lot more useful not to know who it is now.

(And Shaun can name them all, in order, with dates, from Walpole to the present day. I know because he once performed this embarrassing feat in a houseparty after-dinner quiz. Which is surely worse.)

Often I have to turn it off. I can’t bear any more Cost of Living Crisis, for instance. More often, I probably should turn it off. I know it’s not good for me.

Often too, I listen to the programme on my telephone, slightly time-lagged, so I can skip backwards or forwards and particularly skip the sport and business news.

(I didn’t know anyone listened to either of these until a friend of Shaun’s came to stay, shortly after we were married, and when the sports news came on at breakfast I naturally turned the radio off to spare us both, and he asked if he could listen to it. With remarkable sang froid and exquisite manners I turned it back on instead of staring at him as if he’d asked me to throw a bucket of iced water over him. And then blow me down if a few years ago another friend didn’t go and tell me he listens to the business news. But he has made a few billion so fair enough, I suppose: must come at a cost.)

And this morning, near the end of the programme (I didn’t know how near because it was a bit time-lagged, but I knew there wasn’t long to go) instead of telling us yet again the trains are about to stop running and the sun is about to stop shining and we’ll soon have to sleep in overcoats as we won’t be able to heat our bedrooms (eh? I’ve never heated my bedroom in my life) they suddenly stopped making us miserable and decided to revisit genius. 

On account of its being Sir Paul Father-to-the-Vegan-Sausages’s eightieth birthday.

And, as I so often do these days at the most trivial and inconsequential of prompts, I started weeping. 

Was it because my mind went back to being thirteen and staying in Anna’s house in St John’s Wood, when we had just discovered the Beatles and played She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah over and over again on her gramophone, while we danced, just the two of us, in our tiny mini-skirts and kingfisher eye-shadow and innocence as wide as the sea?

Was it because Shaun is away and I long to be kissing, for lips that I’m missing, and love that is sent every day?

But why should either of these make me cry?

(Or was it because, underneath it all, every memory goes back to my mother eventually?)

They never play clips for more than a few seconds on the Today Programme. Even when it’s beautiful ’cello music at the end of the programme and you wish they’d played that for three hours instead of any news. 

But it went on. And on. And I longed for it to continue because… well… obviously. And I longed for it to end so I could stop weeping. It didn’t. Not for minutes.

And I wept more and more.

(As I often do these days…)

On Being the Youngest

Until my sister left home for Teachers’ Training College – presumably when she was eighteen and I fourteen – we shared a bedroom. My brothers, being older, had a room each.

I went back a few years ago and the room had been cut in half, but in those days it had two windows, facing East over our garden, low enough for the sun to wake me as it danced through the trees and played on my face. Something I love still: I always sleep facing East for preference, with the windows as wide open as possible, summer and winter, as my father did.

(My daughter Serena has asked me many times why we don’t simply sleep outside. I’m not quite sure what the answer is… except perhaps that it’s more conventional in the West to make love in private. And reading by the light of the moon could be restrictive.)

We had a gas fire in our bedroom, and on cold winter mornings would hug as close to it as we could to get dressed. My mother was reduced to drawing a line down the middle of the hearth so my sister and I could each stay in our own space. I tell you this to put what follows in context… My best friend Henrietta once told me that she and her two brothers (one now a composer of incomprehensible music, the other a well-known comic actor, while I believe Henrietta herself looks after Her Majesty’s art collection) never argued. Yes, you heard correctly. Never a cross word between the three of them. If that is as incomprehensible to you as it was to me, your childhood has something in common with mine.

One afternoon my sister and I must have been making such a row that my father couldn’t work, for he came in and asked what it was all about.

I, being only five or so, sat tongue-tied. My more articulate sister explained… perhaps what my offence was, but I honestly can’t remember.

And my next memory must be inaccurate. My father can’t actually have said this, but what for decades I remembered his saying was, “Well, Anne’s the youngest so she must be right,” and the dispute was thus decided in my favour.

And for several dozen years, I considered this extremely unfair. Even at the time, I did.

Only now am I revisiting this memory and wondering whether it should be reinterpreted. What had my father, a just and decent man, observed?

I hated my school years, from eleven to sixteen. If I say I was always in trouble, you will think I am exaggerating. Our terrifying hockey teacher, Miss Thorburn, who clearly disliked me even more than I disliked school, complained that the establishment needed two Lost Property cupboards: one for the other five hundred girls, and another just for me. I still can’t understand why this was such a sin. I lost stuff. So? I soon learnt never to wear a coat, gloves or a scarf to school: it was so much easier to go cold than be shouted at yet again. 

The worst disgrace the school could inflict was to be seated outside the Headmistress’s office, in public view. Eventually you would be called in and she would ask what you’d done and you would tell her. That was it. So presumably the intended force of the punishment – especially as this won you a reprieve from the lesson that had got you into trouble in the first place – was the humiliation.

Most pupils probably never experienced this in all their seven years. I sat there about once a week. (And to this day am virtually immune to embarrassment. Perhaps I always was.)

At the end of every term my dear kind father would invite me into his study, read me my report, give me sixpence and say, “Never mind dear. Everyone has to have one bad school report in life.” Had he genuinely forgotten all the others?

Being the child of teachers myself, I assumed it was my fault. Of course I did. All my life.

Until… well, until about ten years ago.

I was at a Gaudy Dinner in Brasenose College, where two others from my class are also members. (Not much choice of college for women, when we were educated.)

They were discussing what they enjoyed about school, I eventually chipped in and said I pretty much loathed it all, and they both said, spontaneously and in unison, “Well of course you did. All the teachers bullied you.”

(Oh, but no! Miss Dix, our English teacher, was always kind to me: I don’t think she told me off once. Which is presumably why I read English.)

You might have propped my jaw up with a broom handle.

Over the next few stunned minutes, days, years, I reconsidered the narrative I’d always believed. I was incorrigible. I exasperated my poor teachers morning, noon and night. But if my classmates could see, from their desks the other side of the room, what was going on… If it was that obvious to others…

And it suddenly made total sense. Not necessarily why I was picked on; but that I was, for sure.

The accusation most often levelled at me during my school years was that I was “lazy.” I didn’t really understand this, but it was repeated so often it must be true.

And yet when I was eleven or twelve, on my parents’ long teachers’ family summer holiday, I took The Complete Works of Shakespeare, a book I had bought for myself, in tiny print on India paper, and I started at the beginning and I simply read and read. Hours every day.

Lazy?

Or out of step?

And bullied.

And when I’m asked if I had a happy childhood, I usually say, “Ye-es… I… did… But as a teenager” I then immediately add enthusiastically, “I was deliriously happy.”

This has always puzzled me slightly. My parents were wonderful, kind, nurturing people. They gave me everything I needed. And much of what I wanted. (Except a pony: I don’t know why. And a parrot: fair enough. And the school I asked for… though they did eventually let me go to a different one, after O Levels, when I point blank refused to attend that one any more.)

Why don’t I reply, with huge enthusiasm and certainty, “Yes! I had a very happy childhood!”

At the back of my mind are shadowy figures, bigger than I and more powerful. I compared notes with Shaun, the oldest of four as I was the youngest. It’s normal, he said.

Just children. Being children.

By my mid-teens, however, I was the only one left at home…

And happier than the long midsummer days stretching into the pale and partying moonlit nights.

(Perhaps it was because you moved schools, Shaun said.)

First Memories

My first memory of my mother – probably, indeed, my first genuine memory at all (I have others going further back, but I suspect they were formed later, from my aunt’s black-and-white jerky cine footage of my very young childhood) – is not very edifying. 

We had bannisters going round and up and up and round, as is the way of bannisters, hugging a stairwell reaching up three floors.

They weren’t nearly as grand as this, but it’s the best I can manage before teatime.

And at the bottom, in the hallway of the head master’s quarters within the main body of the school which formed my adored childhood-and-teenage-home and some of my fondest years, there was the most tempting chessboard of maroon and black tiles, each about five inches square, you ever saw in your life. (Last time I looked a few years ago, I believe it was still there.)

It was made for target practice. 

I’m afraid our tiles were square, and looked not much like this, either… but see caption above. (These are about the right colour, though.)

Nothing else can have been in the mind of the designer, except for a four-year-old to try and hit them, smack bang in the middle of some designated tile.

So I leant over the top rung, and aimed… 

Splat.

Hmm. Not quite on the right square.

I tried again.

Even less successful.

Young as I was, I was also ambitious. And persistent. And knew that, if I wanted to perfect a skill, I must try and try and try again. 

Soon I was entering mid-season form, as Wodehouse would say, and showing no sign of running out of spittle.

My mother was standing in the hall itself, talking to another adult: possibly a parent or prospective parent of a boy at the school, as she often was. 

Alas: adults and children often have conflicting agendas. I cared nothing for the impression created in the eye of the visitor. My mother cared nothing for improving my aim.

Some parents would have run upstairs, grabbed me by the arm, told me I was disgusting and asked what I was about. At that time, plenty would probably have boxed my ears or smacked my bottom or sent me to bed with no tea.

How did my mother vent her ire, and impress deep into my young soul that this behaviour was never, ever to be repeated again if I was to live another day under my parents’ protection?

“That’s not very nice,” was her quiet, gentle and devastating verdict. “I don’t think we want that.”

Humiliated beyond measure, I never spat on the tiles again…

At my mother’s funeral my very dear friend, schoolmate and close neighbour throughout our formative years until university, Anne Willcocks (whose father David was colleague to my father at that time, and co-undergraduate before that when he was Organ Scholar to my father’s Choral Scholarship) said,

“Your mother was terrifying.”

“Terrifying?” I said, amazed. “My mother? My mother?!” (I had long been in awe of Anne’s mother – she was so scarily efficient – and thirteen years old before I realised how kind and considerate she was too… when I broke a jug in her kitchen.)

“You can’t mean my mother, surely? She was the kindest person in the world.”

“Precisely,” Anne said. “We’d be in your family drawing room, you, me and Helen, with a bunch of undergraduates, acting out charades or playing music at three am, O Levels the next day probably, and your mother would come in… and instead of shouting at us and asking furiously what on Earth we thought we were doing and packing us off home with our tails between our legs, she would simply ask, very sweetly, ‘Do you think your mother wants you to be here?’”

“It was the most crushing thing ever. It would have been so much easier if she’d just told us off.”

Life Story (in 400 words)

Recently, the Today Programme invited Life Stories in 400 words, for those near the end…

Six inches of water. “Won’t I drown?” We never had baths that deep in the Rectory. My parents and I were staying at the University Arms in Cambridge. I had come for my Voice Trial. I sang Hark the Herald in the Chapel. Still my favourite. Two months later I joined King’s Choir, aged eight. Christmas Eve 1928, Mr Anderson from the BBC recorded Nine Lessons and Carols for the wireless. From 2010 I was the only person still alive from that first broadcast service. Mishal interviewed me for the Today Programme. She was lovely. I kept a photograph of us together on the sofa.

From King’s I went to Marlborough on a clergy bursary. Franc and I shared a study: two Classicists; clergy sons; Christians. I love Franc still. After parsing Greek we argued into the night. He would fight: I could not. Turn the other cheek: what else could He have meant?

Franc chose Oxford. I, King’s, to sing again, where I met my dear, dear Mary: Maths scholar at Girton, all alone from Australia. My family disapproved: a rough colonial! She rode my horse Tiny, seventeen hands two, who grazed in college.

My Tribunal was in autumn 1939. I was given a desk job. With Franc in danger? I couldn’t bear it. My father, still deeply ashamed of my pacifism, marched into the War Office: they agreed the Medical Corps. Mishal interviewed me again, for D-Day. I showed her my only weapon: my yellowed Red Cross armband.

Mary and I married on a weekend’s leave. Franc too. He was killed in action in 1944, his son born posthumously.

I taught Classics at Bryanston and built the Greek Theatre, using Mary’s calculations. We had four children. I was appointed Head of the Choir School back at my dear King’s. Mary and I ran it together. Pupils in their seventies still say we were parents to them: a kind school, ahead of its time.

In 2009 we moved in with my daughter Anne. My dearest, my Mary, my own soul, died. We buried her in a cruel winter. I cried out in my sleep in my grief.

I joined her two years ago, just before lockdown. No funeral. Just four of Anne’s family, at Mary’s grave, singing one of my father’s compositions. Named after me. David.

My grandson Ben wrote a love song: Anthem for Mary and David. They played it on the Today Programme.

The Party

I waited… and waited… and waited. 

When was someone going to email me? Or drop a leaflet through the door? Or ring the bell and asked if I’d throw together a dish of classic Coronation Chicken? Or did I feel like taking on the notorious Platinum Pudding? Upon which I would sigh very slightly, and do my best to look busy and a bit martyrish, and say I’d do my best to find the time.

After all, Shaun and I had a made a considerable sacrifice to be in the country, pulling out of a long-half-planned trip to Malawi so as not to miss this momentous moment in history. When was it all going to come together, this fabulous celebration after two years’ deprivation (for those of us who don’t live in No 10)?

Around the beginning of May, the penny dropped.

No one was organising our Platinum Jubilee Street Party!

I couldn’t believe it. But then I remembered no one had organised a Diamond Jubilee Party in our street either, and we’d gone to the street of a neighbour, and did believe it.

Nothing else for it. I emailed the three couples we’ve known for a while and the newcomer Russian couple we met recently (there aren’t many privately-inhabited houses in our street: eight, ten and twelve are given over to a Care Home; and one to thirteen were bought up by a developer years ago who has souped them up, made them very smart indeed and left them empty).

Yes! almost all of them said.

Then we must form a Crescent Committee, I said, and drink some wine. So we did. Along with Katie from one of the flats, whom none of us knew but who had responded to a thingy I put through the door. 

Which, surely, is what you get from a street party! After all, given how few of us live here, we could easily have had a party in a garden – somebody asked me, Why hadn’t we? – but that Would Not Be The Point At All.

Turns out, there’s nothing to this organising a street party business. 

You have a drink together. Somebody says, shall we have some music? Someone else says, I know a piper. I say, I sing in a choir. I also say, what happens if loads of people turn up without food. Everyone says, we take the hit: corner-shop Sainsbury’s at the top of the street, after all, says Katie. I can do a 1950s playlist, says Phil. I’ll bring a pianist, I say. The Russians drink the wine and smile and approve it all.

And that’s about it.

The Council is very enthusiastic and helpful and closes off the street and drops off some notices, and Bob’s your uncle.

Apart from the bunting, which involved rather a lot of getting up ladders, and then lorries driving through and ripping it up again, and then getting up ladders again, and more tall vehicles, and dropping a weight tied to string from our balconettes and tying string and Shaun looping it up with the long pole that props up the washing line and all that palaver.

The most stressful bit of the whole thing was when Phil discovered, with only two days to go, that there had been a run on clotted cream and there was a national shortage and I was the only one available to nip to Waitrose and break my solemn vow taken many years ago never to go shopping in a car again.

And it was FAB!

The huge urn (once rescued from a school skip) kept the Earl Grey steamingly hot. The table glistened with homemade cakes. The sun shone. 

We became aware of the distant piper turning into our street, his kilt swinging to his step.

We sang madrigals and part-songs in the lowering sun. 

The spit-roast pork was done to perfection.

This is the meat. (Our scales weigh up to 20lbs and have never been outnumbered before)

This is Cú Chulainn – aka Yorick – doing his Quality Control Check, on account of its being a public event

The Care Home provided a stunning platter of Royalist fruit.

And we could have fed thrice the number of people.

And the most delicious realisation, at around 9 o’clock when Shaun and I had brought all our tables and chairs back into our garden and put the left-overs in the fridge and poured a last glass of wine and I had kicked my shoes off, was this:

That party was exactly what my parents would have done.

The eclectic music. The generous catering. The glorious mix of unlikely people. A thought which gave me more pleasure and pride than all the rest.