The Generation Game (2 page)

Mother gives the poor chap a cheery wave and a dazzling smile that makes it quite clear his assistance is no longer required and makes for Westminster Bridge, in her Jackie Kennedy sunglasses
and killer stilettos, clutching me to her breast, like a fragile parcel she has to post. She hails a black cab all too easily and bundles me into the back of it while the cabbie deals with all our
worldly belongings: a Harrod’s bag full of nappies and, more importantly, my mother’s vanity case.

Inside the Cab we are bumped and swayed along the London streets at unbelievable velocity. It is not as comfortable as my little tank. Or indeed my mother’s womb where I was safe and
happy, swimming about in her amniotic fluid sucking my thumb, listening to the drum beat of her heart, not a care in the world.

At last we come to rest at Paddington Station. My short life as a Londoner is almost over.

Some time later, I lie in my mother’s awkward arms on the train, hot and fidgety. We have a carriage to ourselves. She is feeding me from a bottle. I preferred it when she fed me with her
own milk which tasted of grapes and hospital food, each time slightly different. It is all the same out of these bottles and I keep leaving pools of curdled cream on her shoulder as she pats me
rather too vigorously on the back (‘Come on, give me a good one, pleeeasse,’). I have the hiccups and tummy ache. Doesn’t she know I am too young to be on the bottle?
Doesn’t she know that breast is best? My mother tuts, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. Maybe she is a hay fever sufferer. I know so little about her. This is the first time we have been on
our own together.

Over her shoulder the world whizzes past the window so fast it hurts my little eyes, spins my tiny head. Maybe I am drunk. Maybe she’s given me too much gripe water to try and staunch the
crying. She could probably do with a gin and tonic herself.

After a fitful sleep the train jolts me awake as we pull into a hazy greyness otherwise known as Reading. Heavy doors bang and crash but we stay where we are, trapped together in our carriage.
Mother’s green-lidded eyes are closed but it is unlikely that she is sleeping as her fingers appear to be playing an invisible piano. The journey continues as does the winding and the
curdling and the sniffing.

We do not get off at Swindon either, a new town with new hope. We carry on, via Bristol, heading south through Somerset and into Devon until we reach the coast. Sandy beaches, coves, and palm
trees. The English Riviera. Torquay.

‘Our new home, Philippa.’

My mother sighs – whether from relief or regret is anyone’s guess – before lugging me and the bags out of the carriage and onto the platform, where she stands for a moment
looking wistfully back up the track. Then she turns her face to the sun and lets the warm breeze brush over her. She sighs again, taking in this new air. Air that will thankfully make me sleepy
over the weeks to come.

‘Right then, Philippa, let’s go.’

I don’t know where we are going. Of course, I don’t. It could be to one of the hotels on the cliffs or to one of the painted Victorian villas overlooking the Bay. Our lives are all
set out before us and we could do anything. I could be destined to attend the Girl’s Grammar. To have tennis lessons. Elocution lessons. Cello lessons. I could be part of a happy
family…

Unfortunately it is 1965 and my mother is unmarried.

So my first home turns out to be two rooms above a garage. Nothing flash – not Rolls or Daimler or Jaguar. No. The cars in the showroom below aren’t even new. There isn’t a
showroom to speak of. Just a ‘Lot’ out the front, full of second-hand cars run by a bloke called Bernie from Wolverhampton. ‘Sheila and me came on our holidays here in 1960 and
fell in love,’ he informs my mother, with a misty sheen to his eyes as he holds open our shabby front door to show us into our home. ‘We’ve never looked back.’

Advice we should all take on board.

(Too late, too late, I’ve started so I’ll finish.)

My second birthday. Mother (otherwise known as Helena) has baked me a cake in her Baby Belling oven in the kitchenette of our flat above Bernie’s Motors. The cake is big
and chocolate and covered with spiky mint icing. It feels lovely when I smear it all over my highchair. I spend a lot of time in my highchair. Three times a day I am strapped into it for
approximately one hour. Less if I manage to eat all my vegetables without throwing them at Andy, our kitten. I am not clever enough yet to hide them in my pockets but before the year is out I will
cotton onto this trick. But so will my mother as she is the one who has to laboriously wash all of our clothes in the sink.

Today, as a concession to my birthday, I am allowed to forgo my greens and am presented with a slab of cake. For all her airs and graces my mother lets me eat like a savage. She doesn’t
allow me to use cutlery as this has previously resulted in minor injuries to both myself and Andy. I put my face into the cake. It is very sticky.

Mother is not particularly house-proud but she shrieks when she sees me. Gripping her cigarette tightly between her red lips, she hoiks me out, depositing me at arms’ length into the sink.
The rubber shower attachment makes light work of my face. It is unpleasant. The water keeps going hot and cold. ‘The boiler’s on the blink again,’ my mother wails, as if she was
back in London. Not that she’d have spoken like a Cockney in Dulwich Village. For that is where she grew up, the posh bit south of the Thames. As for my father (I use this term in the vaguest
of senses), I’m not sure where he came from. But I do know he was a dandy in a sharp suit and should probably have been avoided at all costs.

My mother is a sucker for a fancy dresser and let this man take her to the pictures to see
Goldfinger
. They enjoyed it so much they went again the next night. And for several more nights.
With each subsequent screening she let his gold fingers travel a little further until
Bingo!
she is pregnant (despite her posing as a married woman to get herself fitted with the
aforementioned, new-fangled and ineffective coil). Not the best move considering she was only eighteen and my grandfather was a judge with a reputation to keep. And not helped by the fact that my
grandmother was recently diagnosed with an unmentionable cancer. Before Helena made up her mind whether to tell my father, it was too late. He was gone. A one way ticket to Peru.

So that is why we left the capital and all the possibilities it held in the Swinging Sixties. That is why we ended up in two rooms above Bernie’s Motors in Torquay.

Torquay was the only place my mother knew outside London. She had spent a fortnight’s holiday there as a child. She and her parents had stayed in the Palace Hotel. The judge spent his days
sampling the local golf courses. My grandmother Elizabeth and little Helena spent their days doing all the things holiday-makers do: sandcastles and gritty ice creams, a show at the Princess
Theatre, a coach trip to Widecombe-in-the-moor. My mother fell in love at the age of eight. This time with a place, rather than a man.

But now it is my birthday.
I
am the centre of her attention. Once I am cleaned up, she sings me Happy Birthday in a husky voice (for by this time she is smoking at least forty Consulate a
day.) I clap my hands and smile a toothy smile. She laughs and flashes the camera in my face. I wish she wouldn’t do that. It always makes me cry. And that is usually enough to set her off.
For Mother, tears are always waiting around the next corner.

A warm and windy day. Mother and I are going to the beach. She has bought me a windmill and stuck it to my pram – a Silver Cross chariot that is her pride and joy. But
despite its size I am too big for it. Mother insists on using it even though my knees are approaching my chin. I should be encouraged to walk. I wouldn’t mind having reins but Mother says I
am not a pet poodle. A Bull Mastiff, perhaps. Old ladies make comments like: ‘What a bonny girl,’. Or: ‘Isn’t she a strapping maid?’ Mother says I’m big for my
age. But really I am overweight. Mother still feeds me countless bottles of milk even though I have a fine set of teeth and should long since have been on a trainer cup. Mother is clueless. She
hasn’t read Dr Spock. She doesn’t have a mother of her own to talk to. The only contact she has with the outside world is the old ladies on the street. And Bernie.

Bernie has taken to coming upstairs of an evening. Mother puts me to bed at some ridiculously early hour. Six o’clock! Practically the afternoon. Now it is summer, it stays light forever.
I have to entertain myself in my cot until sleep eventually takes over. My favourite pastime is chewing the pink (lead) paint off the bars of my prison. I also listen to the birds. I can
distinguish between a seagull, a blue tit and a wood pigeon though of course I don’t have the words for them yet. But I do know what they look like as Mother has pointed them out to me on
occasions when she is feeling educationally inclined. There are seagulls everywhere in Torquay. I’ve seen them attacking pensioners on the prom, those who are a little slapdash with their
chips. I once had an ice cream whipped right out of my hand. I watched my mother throw her handbag at the gull in question and I was so shocked at this act of solidarity that I didn’t make a
sound.

Today the seagulls are more interested in a trawler at large in the Bay so they leave us alone. We find a patch of red sand for ourselves and Mother spreads out a tartan rug for our picnic.
Hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, cheese rolls, apples. Standard picnic fare for 1967. I am wearing a tight-fitting bathing suit. It cuts into the top of my white legs and pinches me under the arms. I am
lathered in sun cream (‘because of your skin, Philippa’) and crowned with a cricket hat picked up in a jumble.

Helena is modelling a bikini. Her smooth skin is as brown as strongly brewed Typhoo from afternoons sitting out in the sun at the back of Bernie’s Lot while I play with a washing-up bowl
of water and a wooden spoon. Not a stretch mark to be seen on her flat stomach. You’d never know she had a baby if it weren’t for the evidence sitting next to her on the rug. Though
even that could be disputed – we hardly look like mother and daughter.

‘Fancy a dip, Philippa?’ She grabs my hand and steers me down the beach, in and out of clustered families, all on tartan rugs, eating the same food as us.

The water is warm but it stings my legs. A wave almost bowls me over but Helena reaches out and catches me in the nick of time. She is a good mother. She loves me.

Bed time again. If I could count beyond the fingers of one hand, I could work out from the bells of St Bartholomew’s that it is seven o’clock. But I am too busy
concentrating on the safety pin of my nappy to worry about practising my counting. Surely I should be toilet trained by now? Despite my concentration, I can make out Bernie’s voice. And
Helena’s fake giggles. I imagine Bernie as a bird. A fat preening wood pigeon. I do not like Bernie. He has a red face and smells wet. Like my nappies in the morning. I want to wear knickers
like a big girl.

Success! I have finally opened the safety pin. I pull off the (dry) nappy and throw it over the side onto the floor. I am naked! What a glorious feeling! It makes me want to bounce up and down
but my joy is cut short when something pricks my foot. The safety (!) pin has punctured my skin. My screams hurt my ears but nothing hurts as much as my little foot.

The door is flung open and Mother is suddenly here, leaning over the cot, her mouth open but nothing coming out of it though tears are spouting from the corners of her eyes. Another face appears
beside her. I don’t want to look at that great big face but it is even worse further down where a hairy stomach presses itself against the bars. One of Bernie’s nylon shirt buttons has
popped open. So I look back up at his face which is redder than usual, his Bobby Charlton comb-over out to one side as if he is standing in a wind tunnel. His mouth is moving too, like
Mother’s, but I can’t hear what either of them is saying. I must be deaf. But my mother has now started to wail so loudly that she stops me in my tracks.

‘Pick her up, Helena,’ Bernie urges.

My mother is inert so Bernie bends forward with some difficulty and scoops me out. I can hear his heavy breathing as if he has been running the hundred yard dash – though it’s
unlikely Bernie ever runs anywhere.

‘What’s the matter little one?’ he coos (fat pigeon), wrapping an abandoned towel around me.

I rub my nose on his orange shirt, leaving a number eleven on his shoulder. I feel better for that but my mother has spotted a drop of blood on the cot sheet and the shiny pin lying next to it
and for once puts two and two together correctly.

Bernie realises what is going on too. He isn’t a hotshot-car-wheeler-dealer for nothing.

‘Isn’t it about time she was out of nappies, Hell?’ Bernie dares to ask.

My mother doesn’t say yes, I suppose you’re onto something there, Bernie. Instead she makes a lunge and wrestles me out of his beefy arms.

‘Don’t ever tell me how to look after my own child!’ she shrieks at him.

‘Alright, Hell, calm down, I was only saying. Our Terry and Toni were out of ’em at two and a half. Just the odd wet night but Sheila put a rubber sheet on the mattresses —
’

‘Don’t talk to me about ruddy Sheila,’ Mother snaps.

‘I was only saying.’

‘Well, don’t.’

Bernie leaves soon after that. He tries to hold my mother but she won’t have it. Bernie realises he isn’t going to get anywhere tonight and disappears back to Sheila.

For once I wish Mother had listened to Bernie. He was only looking out for me. But anyway, I never wear a nappy again. It saves Helena heaps of washing and gallons of Milton. The next day she
proudly takes me shopping and buys me a pack of knickers – one for every day of the week (which helps my counting no end). And she doesn’t even have to bother with a rubber sheet
– which is one in the eye for ruddy Sheila.

‘This isn’t a boarding school,’ Mother tells me as she puts me to bed. (She knows all about boarding schools having been incarcerated in one in the middle of Wales for nearly a
decade.) ‘You’re not destined to be one of life’s bed-wetters.’