My Animal Life(24)

1977. And now their lives changed and expanded. Though my father had left his job two years earlier, this was the point when they started to live like the retired professional people with a good pension that they actually were. My mother registered to do a Humanities degree at the Open University. They marched round and knocked on the door of another couple their age, the Bishops, who also lived on Barratt Road: ‘We want to be friends.’ According to my mother, my father actually said those very words, unconsciously ticking off one of her conditions. Silver-haired John Bishop and his wife were just right, as friends; he was, I think, a retired tax officer, something not too different from a retired head teacher, and like Dad, he painted. They had the same size house, the same kind of car (Mum and Dad had by now pulled back from their belligerent, armour-plated Landrover into a pearly-green Golf, or rather a succession of Golfs, bought new, by my father’s rigid theory, changed every year), the same kind of mildly Germanic walking shoes and not-quite-country-coloured quilted rain-jackets. The same voices, within the same unthreatening range of accents, not posher than us, just right. And John Bishop painted and drew just well enough to be a worthy friend for Vic, but not too well, so as make him jealous.

Now they had friends. For the first time, they entertained.

(And here I must make a digression in order to explain what this meant. For throughout my childhood, the only people who came to the house in Billingshurst when my father was home were the following:-

Family. Rarely, because they nearly all lived north of us, and besides, there were eggshells they had to step lightly across. But the extended Gee family was, like my father, loyal.

Once, as a duty, the newly arrived head of Billingshurst Junior School, Mr Shaw, and his lean and racy wife Jackie (‘She’s like a yappy little dog,’ said my Mum, unused to female competition, and ‘He’s vain,’ said my Dad, having noticed, correctly, how my primary head teacher used his blue flashing eyes and surprised upright gingerish brows to command attention).

The woodwork teacher from my father’s school, Dougie Henderson, and his beautiful, soft-fleshed wife Margaret, who by their sheer physical dark-eyed charm and aura of perpetual laughter — were they Jewish or Italian, somewhere? More likely Scots, for Dad always had a soft spot for Scots — won my father over, made him feel safe (though both Mum and I were in love with the dark-jawed, dark-eyed, incredibly relaxed and soigné, slightly chubby Dougie Henderson; could men really be warm and tender and funny?)

Lastly, once a year, ‘the Louis’, Roger and Christiane Louis, always called ‘Monsieur and Madame Louis’ by us, the French teachers who came to Sussex with the French school with whom my father’s school did foreign exchanges. My mother put roses from the garden in the bedroom, but Monsieur Louis removed them with a charming apology, saying, ‘My wife says they are too smelly,’ which made my mother, in secret, laugh almost as much as the time Madame Louis, conversing at tea, referred to Margot Fonteyn: ‘she ees a very great Ballot-woman. I theenk,’ which might have been all right had my eyes not met my mother’s, whereupon she summoned me from the room ‘to help in the kitchen’, where we both collapsed, weeping and knocking our heads on the rose-pink Formica worktop in an attempt to muffle our laughter.

Oh, and the vicar, the Reverend Evan-Hopkins, once called for tea. The Rev Ev, as we called him, lacked the common touch. When told about the camping holiday we planned in Switzerland, the poor man said, in the fluting tones he could not help, ‘Everything on your backs, I think you’re marvellous.’ The Rev Ev was unfeasibly tall and weedy, his admiration for our peasant frames probably sincere, but it stung my father, after the vicar was gone, to cynical laughter. Thenceforth ‘Everything on your backs’ was Dad’s catchphrase for the vicar.

I make that seven people in total. Some of those once, twice at most. Many of the events marked by tension, social anxiety, and afterwards the ‘bloomin’ inquest’ in which my mother thought my father specialised. No wonder I began adult life as a social cripple, exhausted by gatherings of more than five people, terrified of parties, where, if I actually got through the door, I gabbled nonsense. Only in my last decade have I realised that I enjoy entertaining. Thus I follow the parental pattern, only slightly younger than Mum and Dad were when they first blossomed.

Now I see that this, too, was all about class. Having left the close communities of Bucks where everyone was roughly the same, where no one could feel out of place because every street and house was alike, my parents were lost. You can leave the working-class, through sheer energy and drive, but never quite arrive anywhere else. Arrivistes! We lived in limbo, ‘new build’.)