Purple Prose (5 page)

As I discovered from the fragments of family history I extracted from Dad and his brother Laurie, our family's maiden aunts each had a story, characteristic of so many of the surplus two million.

The four girls had three brothers, the birth order being: Jack, Olive, Len, Violet, Bob, Gladys and finally Lily.

By the time war was declared in 1914, their mother was worn out by childbearing and suffered bouts of pneumonia. Jack and Len had joined the army, and Olive, as the second child and oldest
girl had, some years earlier, taken on the burden of caring for her ailing mother, her father and her younger siblings. Even so she had been walking out for three years with Raymond, the son of the local undertaker. Olive and Raymond got engaged the day he left for the front.

Violet had been working in a local draper's shop, but at the beginning of 1914 had got a job on the glove counter in Selfridges. There she found an admirer, the rather dashing younger son of a Knight of the Realm. Her own father was outraged by this inappropriate connection, and Edward's family would not have welcomed a shopgirl in their midst, had they known of the liaison. Vi moved out of home to live with two other sales girls somewhere in the West End, and Edward kept her well hidden, but promised that when the war was over and she was twenty-one they would marry.

Gladys, aged seventeen, and Lily almost sixteen, were both bright and rather serious girls, who helped at home and had done well at school. They wrote letters to and knitted socks for their brothers Jack and Len who were also in the army, and Bob who followed them in 1916. Gladys took some classes in shorthand and typing at the local workers club and Lily soon followed.

They were working-class people. Their father, a bricklayer, had high hopes of developing his business into a building company with the help of his sons, but that was put on hold when the boys were called up. Money was short and the family struggled to pay the fees for Gladys and Lily's secretarial training. Olive was tied to the home and Vi had moved out.

One evening in August 1916, Olive answered the front door to find Raymond's father on the doorstep. He had come to tell her that his son, her fiancé, had been killed weeks earlier on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. A devastated Olive retired to her room and locked the door for several days, emerging only to go outside to the privy. Her younger sisters stepped in to care for their mother and left trays of food outside Olive's door. A week
later she came out in her best clothes to attend the small chapel service for Raymond and two other local men who had also died at the Somme, and whose bodies could not be returned. That done Olive put her overall on again and returned to her domestic role. Uncomplaining, hardworking, heartbroken all her life, she rarely spoke of her loss nor recovered from her grief. She spent the rest of her life looking after her parents and her sisters; always the one who ran the home and made it possible for the others to live their lives free of domestic responsibilities. In family photographs, except those taken at weddings and funerals, Olive is always wearing an overall, or an apron, just as she was the first day I saw her in 1949 when she would have been in her late fifties.

Vi, meanwhile, was having a good war. In Selfridges she met a photographer who was looking for models for postcard portraits, a contemporary, somewhat less sophisticated, version of the postcards of the Professional Beauties that had been so popular before the turn of the century. In those days the professional beauties were usually the mistresses of important and powerful men, one of the most admired being the actress Lily Langtry, mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales, the Earl of Shrewsbury, and Prince Louis of Battenberg. The postcards were perfectly respectable, mainly sepia or tinted head-and-shoulders shots, nothing at all suggestive, but Vi's family was shocked when she arrived flaunting her postcards. They curbed their disapproval, however, when she handed over all the money she had earned from them, to pay the outstanding bills.

The war had brought social change. When Edward was home on leave he and Vi went out on the town, dining and dancing at the Ritz and the Café Royal. Although she was still at Selfridges, she had graduated from gloves to ladies wear and had a faultless sense of style and fashion. Edward showered her with gifts and promises.

When the war ended, the prospects of marriage for Gladys and Lily were remote. According to Alice, their sister-in-law, both girls were rather plain – although I take her opinions with a pinch of salt. Gladys, who loved children and badly wanted her own, had
to accept that her dream of a husband and family was likely to remain just a dream. There were simply not enough men to go round, and many of those who had returned from the war were severely disabled, or traumatised or both. Both girls were serious and hardworking and Gladys found a position in an accountancy practice where she later became the secretary to the senior partner, and to his successor when he retired. She remained with the practice all her working life, and retired in her late fifties, despite urgings by her employers to stay on for as long as she wished.

Lily had proved excellent at maths and had begun work in a bank. But as her father and brothers began to develop the building business they recognised her head for figures and for business generally, and made her a partner. She managed the office and the accounts until she too retired in her late fifties. The inky fingers that I had noticed on that first visit were a mark of her devotion to the business, which often had her working all week in the office and on weekends at the dining-room table. I never discovered whether or not the two younger sisters had men or women friends or lovers. They seem to have lived quiet, respectable, perhaps dull, but satisfying lives. Their brothers, unlike many of their contemporaries, were mindful of their sisters' situation. All three were married and eventually had homes of their own, and urged their father to remake his will in favour of their sisters. Thus they were assured of a roof over their heads for the rest of their lives. Olive, Gladys and Lily never lived anywhere else. Only Vi had broken loose and taken a risk on a different life.

Vi had expected that the end of the war would mean the start of a new life. She had met a few of Edward's friends, and expected to move fairly easily into his wider social circle. But the prospect of his family still loomed large. The war was long over and she was well into her twenties but Edward still prevaricated. It was difficult, he told her; his parents needed more time. Even so Vi remained convinced that she had a foothold on a ladder that would ensure her a place in London's high society. Perhaps Edward's original
intentions had been good, or perhaps he had been lying to her from the start, but early in 1922 a friend pointed out a notice in the social pages of
The Times
announcing Edward's engagement to the daughter of a baronet. Vi's world collapsed around her.

Alice, my grandmother, a strict devotee of the Baptist chapel, always disliked the aunts, especially Vi whom she described as ‘fast', and whenever her name was mentioned Nana pursed her lips in self-righteous disapproval, straightened her shoulders and sighed as if in despair. Nana had been a domestic servant – a ‘tweenie' – before she married Len; so came from a slightly lower level of working class than her sisters-in-law. She insisted that Vi must have known that she would only have been introduced to those of Edward's friends who, like him, were involved with ‘loose women'. His father was on the King's staff at Buckingham Palace, his mother the daughter of an even more distinguished family. He was never going to marry her.

‘Vi made a fool of herself, running after him,' Nana told me, ‘it was always a fool's errand. She never saw him again and she had to go back home with her tail between her legs.'

Vi did go home, but only for a few weeks, before she returned to Selfridges, and her shared flat off the Bayswater Road. I am not sure that I believe Nana's summing up; she loathed Vi, and would have wanted it all to end in the worst possible way. But Vi was determined, strong-minded, and usually got her way. So while she obviously didn't get her way with Edward, I prefer to imagine that being familiar with some of his haunts she may have confronted him somewhere, in public, and perhaps slapped his face or thrown a drink over him. I really want that for her.

Vi stayed on at Selfridges and in her shared flat, and seems to have had a few male escorts, two of them married. Only when she retired from Selfridges and moved back home to live with her sisters did she achieve respectability in Nana's eyes. It was then that Vi's world began to shrink, not simply to fit the confines of the family home, but increasingly the four walls of that extraordinary
purple room, stuffed with Edward's gifts, and the trappings of the comparatively glamorous West End life she had left behind.

I was in my mid-thirties, divorced and living alone with my two sons, when I learned the stories of the maiden aunts. I had a sickening sense of disappointment that I had not allowed myself to know them better and was ashamed that I had dismissed them in the same way that the surplus women were dismissed, discounted and diminished because, in my youthful self-importance, their lives were of no interest to me. But life has a way of teaching us what we need to know and my maiden aunts, in their characteristically quiet way, have made an important contribution to my life. It was the recognition of that squandered opportunity to know Olive, Violet, Gladys and Lily that made me curious about the hidden lives of older women. I began to read stories of those lives, which then and now still fascinate me, and in my late fifties I began to write about them.

Today when I remember the aunts I recall that photograph of them proudly lined up on the doorstep to see us off, each one clad in the uniform of her life. Olive, the housekeeper, in her overall; Gladys and Lily in formal crepe day dresses, with neatly curled hair; and Vi, in her purple satin nightwear – waiting to retreat to the daily celebration of her past in the lush eccentricity of her purple room.

Early in my mother's first pregnancy, her language began to change.

She would have been in her early twenties then. No one knew how or why it happened, no one knew where these new words had come from. It's not that we are a posh family. We have always been a rough-around-the-edges people, sleeves rolled up and hands dirty. For some generations, our trade has been the killing of animals: we have been abattoir workers and butchers and chicken slaughterers and, in our spare time, we have kept greyhounds under our houses and, when needs be, we have dispatched them ourselves. Even our favourite ones. We are not churchgoers, but still this change in my mother's language would have come as a shock to her family. My mother left school early. She had never been one for introspection but by all reports she was mild-mannered and gentle as a girl. She didn't speak that way when she married my father, everyone agreed.

Language has always fascinated me – the one we are born with and the ones we develop that reflect the people we become – and I love the idea of acquiring a new way of speaking, but there's a thickness in my brain that won't allow it. I'm dense at it, frankly. I've taken classes in Japanese and Indonesian and Italian and Spanish and Mandarin twice, and I've even lived in Bejing for a time, and I've failed at them all. Not one foreign word lodges safe in my head, not one single stress or construction. (This is not a familial trait: my sister is a gifted teacher and translator of Japanese.) This business of my mother's change in language all happened before I
was born so I am not a witness, but I well know the halting, inch-wise progress of a new vocabulary.

At the beginning of her transformation, my mother's new words would have come out reluctantly, occasionally, in the smallest glimmers of a novel tongue. In these early stages, no one would have noticed her confidence increasing, her rapier skill sharpening, the girl turning into a woman who was not to be messed with. Neither my grandmother Muriel (in domestic service since she was fourteen,
yes Ma'am, no Ma'am
) nor my grandfather Bob (who learnt the skills of customer service in the butcher's shop) spoke that way. My mother's brother, my Uncle John, is the kindest and sweetest man I know and has stayed out of trouble from the day he got back from Vietnam. I've never heard him use one word of it. I doubt that any of this strange tongue has ever passed my father's lips, before he met my mother, or since they divorced. Not one of us bears any resemblance to her in this regard but here's the truth: my mother had quite a mouth on her.

Even among her fellow Queenslanders who could curse for England, my mother, Margaret, was gifted. She was the princess of profanity, the conquistador of the cuss. There was a balladry in the way she spoke. There was a rhythm and a meter, a weight and a measure. My mother had quite the ear for alliteration. If she was weeding the front garden and a poor struggling plant refused to yield, she would chant:
come on, you fucking futile floral fuckhead
. She showed a flair rarely seen in print and even rarer in speech. This was especially evident at the track. I can see her now, standing with her weight on one leg and her hands on her hips in front of losing dogs and bookies offering odds she deemed unfair and trainers whose dogs failed to perform as expected. She is moving her mouth as if she's chewing gum but she isn't, and she's calling them
you hopeless long-nosed brainless cunt
. At the football, she threw about the odd
you pathetic pencil-dicked waste of human skin
, even to inanimate objects like broken
seats and wedged doors and fucked public phones, even to players she had never seen naked, even to female supporters of opposing teams (in particular, Collingwood). The vast majority of females are literally dickless so this curse was somewhat redundant, but she wasn't caught up in details and logic. And umpires! Don't get me started on those
motherfucking white maggots
. My mother was a performance poet at full flight, intent on capturing the spirit of the thing – but even in her small quiet moments there was rarely an
arse
-less sentence or a
prick
-free phrase or a clause missing its
bloody, fucking
adjectives.