I hand out my tips like elaborate, generous gifts from one life to another. But by middle age, people don’t want gifts. Their houses are already loaded with stuff, they know about holidays, teeth, and lemons (pancakes with lemon and sugar. My tip is, avoid them: a double hex on your dentine.)
In my family—meaning me, Nick, my daughter—the most annoying advice is given when someone has just started on the recommended course of action. ‘Why don’t you dry the glasses/put your shoes on/bring a coat?’ ‘I’m doing it, I’m doing it!’ the wretched advisee cries.
Of course, sometimes people ask for advice. That’s when it’s important to hold back, because they are vulnerable, and may take it. But can I hold back? It is so tempting.
So flattering when someone consults you. The belief that life’s actually taught you something. Suddenly you feel useful, which doesn’t often happen to a writer. Yet other people’s lives are just that, other. Most useless of all to advise on people’s lovers. Of course Y is trouble, or Z is appalling, but don’t advise Y to give Z up. They will get married, and never call you.
The problem is, I myself long for advice. I seek it, eagerly, from everyone. I want to learn lessons from other people’s lives. It’s part of my essential optimism. I really believe I can make most things better, if only I can find out enough about them. When pregnant, I brooded over pregnancy books; as a young mother, baby books; though adolescence books always seemed a pale shadow of the storm and glory we were going through. I read all the health pages in newspapers; I study New Scientist for new ‘work’ on anything touching the human condition which I can pass on to my husband or daughter (she defends herself with ribald humour. ‘Oh God, Mum, don’t tell me you’ve found more “work”. My mother thinks there is work on everything,’ Rosa tells her friends, when I try to educate them on, say, the effects of black chocolate on cholesterol. ‘Work! Work!,’ she shrieks, and she is laughing so much she chokes on her milk chocolate).
But her grandmother, like me, was a fund of useful tips. ‘Never leave washing-up until the morning,’ Mum said (and ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning.’) And ‘This won’t buy the baby a new bonnet.’ ‘Always do the bed, it makes the room look tidy.’ ‘Don’t forget to tie a knot in your cotton.’ ‘Tie a knot in your hanky to remember something.’ ‘Don’t trust people who show the whites of their eyes under the iris.’ (Did this mean my mother distrusted the blind?) ‘You don’t want to be mutton dressed up as lamb.’ ‘Don’t drink from the bottle, it looks bad.’ (She had a point, since we were driving through respectable streets, it was before midday, and I was swigging British sherry, but she was leaving my father, temporarily, and the pressure was getting to me.)
‘Come to the breast-screening van!’ she bade me. ‘I take any screening I can get. It’s all on the NHS, it’s great!’ It was a common feeling among the generation who saw the Health Service’s miraculous beginnings. I went with Mum, in my mid-twenties, to the breast-screening van in the windy gravel car-park. There my breasts were compressed between two hard metal plates, which were squeezed together till I felt like screaming. Later I discovered that in women under fifty the risk of having cancer is outweighed by the chance of cancer started by the X-ray.
Never give advice. No one will thank you.
And yet, in my sex life, and my love life, I needed advice, and my mother couldn’t give it. This is no criticism; she was unequipped. She only ever slept with one man, my father, and she felt completely at sea in the sixties. (Just as the young were; we were making it up. We felt we were free in an enormous playground, and when we spotted people crying in the corners, it seemed like an error on their part; and when we were the hurt ones, we felt at fault, for the new rules, surely, should benefit us all.)
Why, then, did some of us have bad dreams?
Mum’s dissatisfaction with her own marriage meant she did not want to foist the same thing on her daughter. Instead she struggled to understand the tortuous comings and goings in my emotional life. It couldn’t be good that I was having a relationship with a married man, could it? Or with more than one man at once? And yet she was reluctant to judge. If he loved me, this might be better than the narrow logic of her own life. Did it make me happy? she asked. I gave her some simplified version of the truth. She only wanted me to be happy, she said. If I loved X, she would too. She never asked me—as my teens sprinted into my twenties, then my late twenties, and I lived on my own; turned thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two—whether I wanted to get married, or have children. And to give him his due, nor did my father. Once I was an adult, they left me alone to make my own mistakes, which I did.