Home Front
‘Good news!’ I told the Aged P over the phone. ‘The care home say I can now visit you.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. But there are conditions.’
She couldn’t hear me, and so I adopted my bossy elocution-teacher voice and loudly repeated, ‘THERE ARE CONDITIONS. It has to be in the care-home garden, the weather has to be sunny and it can only be for half an hour.’
As two of her most hated things are gardens and sunshine, she said, ‘Well, bugger that!’
‘I know. It’s not ideal.’
‘It is NOT.’
After a sad pause, I said, ‘So don’t you want to meet, then?’
‘I don’t see the point – do you?’
We grumbled about government guidelines and wondered if we should go on our own gentle Home Counties protest march, demanding the restoration of our ancient liberties and the right to make up our own minds about the risks. I pictured my banner, quoting Tony Hancock: ‘Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?’
If the care-home lockdown lasts much longer, the Aged P says she is up for it: ‘Steal a wheelchair and kidnap me. I mean it. I want to enjoy what’s left of my life.’
The Aged P spent her 95th birthday isolated from her family. The care-home staff made a fuss, though, bringing a special cake and balloons into her room and singing happy birthday.
A big bouquet of flowers arrived from my sister, along with a spider plant in the post from a mystery person and a bottle of gin from my niece Natasha. ‘Isn’t she a darling?!’ said the Aged P.
‘You’re going to have to up your game,’ I told daughter Betty.
I sent her Dorothy L Sayers’s Gaudy Night. She hadn’t read it for years and had lost her old copy. ‘It contains THE most erotic scene in any book!’ she likes to enthuse. ‘You know the part I mean, of course?’
‘Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane in the punt?’
‘Yes! And not even a kiss!’
The Aged P has no appetite for explicit displays of lust in film or literature. Hence my teenage agony when I was watching the long sex scene in Don’t Look Now with her. ‘There’s no need for all these heaving limbs!’ she suddenly pronounced. A few moments later, eyes agleam with Mary Whitehouse fervour, she turned to me: ‘Don’t you find all this quite unnecessary?’
(By the way, did you know Donald Sutherland’s curly-haired perm was, in fact, a wig?)
During the lockdown, I’ve caught up with novels I’ve owned for years but never got round to reading. I’ve nearly finished We, the Accused by Ernest Raymond – a popular pre-war novelist, almost completely forgotten now. Loosely based on the Crippen case, it tells the story of mild-mannered Mr Presset who poisons his overbearing wife, Elinor, after falling for a much younger woman.
One passage looks very prescient. It describes a flu outbreak starting in Egyptian bazaars, killing millions worldwide: ‘Majestic as it was terrible, the great pandemic came like a conquering army, passing through frontier defences as if they were not there … with unerring skill, it found the weakest places, occupied them, and radiated its destruction from there.’
There is no lockdown for the Pressets, though. He hopes his sickly wife will die from the disease – but she recovers. I rather liked irascible Elinor and was disappointed that he poisons her less than halfway through the novel. Presset and his mistress are so dreary and self-pitying together that I longed for the police to hurry up and catch them.
Meanwhile, when not working from home, Mr Home Front has taken to making adjustments to his poems. He’d put them in a drawer for ages after a friend whose judgement he values said they read as though he had been looking up words in Roget’s Thesaurus. ‘Had you?’ ‘A bit,’ he confessed. ‘Well, I’m sure Larkin wasn’t averse to the occasional peep in the thesaurus,’ I said, defensive on his behalf – I love Mr HF’S poems.
We are all sensitive creatures. The other day when Betty said my songs were ‘a bit samey’, I sulked. It isn’t something Betty can help. She has always found my singing irritating. Even as a baby, she would burst into tears if I crooned Beatles songs over her cot.
This must be genetic: the Aged P used to writhe in agony whenever her mother sang Bless This House at social gatherings in 1930s Bradford. ‘Everyone else loved her voice, but I couldn’t bear it – I had to leave the room and sit on the stairs.’
And I confess to twitching faintly when the Aged P sings.
‘You must know the song I mean!’ she’ll say in reference to some pre-war gem. Before I can say anything, she’ll sing the entire song in a voice recalling Jeanette Macdonald and Hilda Ogden.
Still, after three months’ lockdown, I am starting to miss being serenaded by the Aged P. I long for Cheek to Cheek all the way through, complete with swaying arms and winsome expression. Nothing would thrill me half as much.