You’ve got to laugh

AFEW years ago, at Christmas, I rang an old friend who I’d known for more than 50 years. We had been best friends and neighbours in Ruislip, near London, when we were eight. She wasn’t feeling well, and suddenly started telling me the most shocking things about her mother.

I remember that my mother had never approved of Pamela’s mother, and I had thought her rather odd. She would often get up and come downstairs wearing a pale silky green dressing gown and bright red lipstick in the late morning. Why? Where was she going? Where had she been? Lipstick was for going out danc- ing, I thought, which is when my mother wore it. No wonder my mother disapproved.

And then one night, coming home late in the car, my mother spotted a couple very close together, clutching each other. “That’s Cleonie Saunders,” she said to my father, with great contempt, “the kurve (prostitute). And I’ll bet you that was Mr Thompson from the carpet shop. I’ll bet you anything.”

My mother knew a lot. She knew that Pamela’s mother was sleeping with half the high street, but she didn’t know that Cleonie was worse than a kurve. She was a child beater, who often locked Pamela in the cellar or upstairs with the blackout blinds down. We never guessed. Now, half a century later, I had found out. Looking back, I also realised that all our parents were going through various shades of hell: dreary, struggling or collapsing marriages.

More or less, whatever my mother knew, I knew, because she would tell me, or she’d tell everyone else loudly, so that I’d hear, because she wasn’t very good at containing herself, which is why my father called her Blabbermouth. As a child I was hardly bothered by these grownup goings on. I had better things to think about – my friends, my dog, my pet mice and riding.

My parents bothered me more as a teenager, when I grew rather snooty and thought them a horribly vulgar pair. I didn’t want to hear them laughing loudly and crudely at things to do with sex and bottoms, or using Yiddish words beginning with “schm ...,” which to me sounded distasteful and squelchy.

And they were not serious enough about being Jewish. They ate bacon and eggs, and shellfish. They did not pray properly. My mother prayed in occasional snatches and my father never prayed at all. They told vulgar jokes. They often farted loudly and then laughed, and they shouted. It was a dreadful embarrassment going out with them in public. No one else’s parents, as far as I could see, behaved like that. I wanted to feel clean, polite and superior, so I turned to God for a while, then I went to art school and thought my parents even more crude and hopelessly unsophisticated.

I only began to understand them once I had my own daughter, and now I am even more of a grown-up, I can see more clearly why my mother was such a screamer and my father a sulker. Because even when nothing much dramatic was happening in Ruislip, suburban life was a struggle for both of them, particularly my mother.

My father would be thinking of nothing but “the business,” which made him anxious, which made him sulky. He would return from work, demand silence and speak only in grunts to my mother, who, probably like many other housewives in the 1950s, had been left at home with no outlet for her considerable talents and energy, other than flower-arranging classes, art classes and bridge. And gardening and cooking and looking after the dog, and me, and him, and mainly stuck in the bloody kitchen for the whole of her life.

So she screamed rather a lot and worried even more, mainly about me. Did the neighbours feed me properly on the rare times that she wasn’t home? No. Were they feeding me drek (rubbish)? Yes. Was I eating enough? She was concerned about the whole eating process. I must stuff my food in and be sure it came out properly. Was everything in working order? Had I been to the lavatory that morning? Had I washed my hands? Had I washed my bum? I thought nothing of these questions at the time. I knew nothing different. I just answered: yes, yes, yes.

My mother asked me the same questions almost every day, until I was 27. Then I read Portnoy’s Complaint, and told a friend that my mother, like Portnoy’s, hung about outside the bathroom asking questions. He fell on the ground laughing. Luckily it was soft grass at a wedding. The next morning my mother rang with her usual questions, but I refused to answer. “Don’t ask me that again,” I said. “I’m 27 and I’m not answering it any more.” So she didn’t.

I rather admired her for that, considering the great difficulty she always had repressing herself. Repression came naturally to my father, but for a loud, excitable woman, life in Ruislip was pretty stifling and there was no way out. It was heavenly for children. We had the fields, woods, the lido and the river Pinn for our huge play area, and despite my mother’s anxiety and a mad Tarzan rumoured to be roaming the woods, we were allowed out at 8pm or 9pm by ourselves. We had freedom, but the grown-ups didn’t.

My mother had little education, and in those days wives didn’t often have careers. You couldn’t just swan off, leave your husband, take the children, get a job or live in sin. If you did that you’d have to leave your children behind. Husbands went to work, came home and expected their dinners to be ready. I don’t think my father was particularly odd for his time. He was uncommunicative and critical, hadn’t a clue about positive reinforcement, and neither was he nor my mother much cop at expressing affection and declaring love for their child, as today’s parents are meant to do. You just had to assume that they felt it.

My father’s mother taught him little about expressing affection. She spent a lot of time in bed, and rarely lifted a finger to look after her seven children, so my mother told me. She didn’t even give them any breakfast, but sent them off with a penny to buy a bun on the way to school, and then they were bullied all the way up the road until they got there, on a more or less empty stomach. Luckily my father had a big brother, Phil, to look after him, but still his childhood was not easy.

But what really shocked my mother about Grandma Nathanson was her lack of food provision. Such behaviour in Christians she was used to. It was almost the norm. But for a Jewish mother to fail in this area was unspeakable.

Her own mother, my maternal grandma, was good at food, but fairly poor at social integration. She wasn’t at all keen on Christians, and was inconsolable when her son, my Uncle Cyril, married one. This was a tragedy of enormous proportions to her.

But despite these family miseries, we still managed to have a jolly time, and my father turned into a man who told fabulous jokes with perfect timing, and could afford holidays in the south of France. Every year we drove