Home Front Alice Pitman
The recent BBC2 drama Feud portrayed in all its gory detail the rivalry between Hollywood legends Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. It looked impressive, but somehow lacked sufficient depth to have me truly gripped. The action is centred around the filming of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, the 1962 shocker directed by Robert Aldrich.
I’ve always been Team Bette. A large picture of her hangs in the downstairs loo. (Mr Home Front keeps asking me to move it as he finds her large, round eyes and mocking smile so intimidating that he is often unable to go.)
I was impressed by Susan Sarandon’s portrayal of Bette in Feud, though. She captured not only her feistiness and swagger, but her underlying vulnerability. Mr H F – who edits The Pledge, on Sky News, which includes a number of women with ‘strong personalities’ (as he diplomatically puts it) – identified with Alfred Molina’s perpetually-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown performance as Aldrich caught up between the two warring divas.
Over the Christmas holiday, we made a conscious decision not to indulge in our own festive feuding. It almost held, until the sight of Mr H F stirring the gravy for 35 minutes in a doomed attempt to make it thicken forced my unwanted intervention with the cornflour. He reacted like Danny La Rue being pushed off top billing at the Palladium and stormed off upstairs.
Fortunately, he reappeared before the Aged P and my sister’s family noticed his absence. He sidled up to me in the kitchen and apologised.
‘Hmm,’ I said, smugly pouring Delia-perfect gravy into the jug. Apart from Gravygate, we were very well behaved. Which daughter Betty found
unnerving (‘It’s like you’ve both been brainwashed by a cult. I don’t like it’).
Normal bickering service resurfaced briefly in the new year when, retiring to bed one night, I asked Mr H F to lock up. The following morning, I came down to find the clothes horse and a chair (with a bottle of Waitrose Essential bubble bath on it) had been pushed up against the side door. It looked extremely silly and lacklustre, like the work of a not very capable novice poltergeist.
‘Did you honestly think that would deter burglars?’ I said, unable to hide my irritation: ‘Best give number 33 a miss – they’ve got a clothes horse.’ ‘Oh, ha ha,’ said Mr H F. ‘Why didn’t you just lock the door like a normal person?’ I said.
‘Because he doesn’t know how,’ said Betty. (True, her father has never mastered the knack of turning the key in our cranky side door – I just wanted him to admit it).
While we endeavour to maintain our own version of the Molotov/ribbentrop non-aggression pact (for at least the first half of 2018), our grown-up children have taken to bickering almost the entire time. Their last row was sparked by a discussion about Meghan Markle. Betty, having studied with severe attention to detail every recent article on the actress in that morning’s Mail Online, embarked on a detailed analysis of why she was an unsuitable wife for Prince Harry.
She listed an exhausting number of reasons. But her main gripe seemed to be Markle’s decision to leave her elderly rescue dog, Bogart, behind in Canada in order to embark on her new life as a royal over here.
‘What kind of a person even does that?’ Betty demanded to know.
‘Oh shut up, Betty’ said Fred. ‘You’re not on Loose Women.’
After that, it got so heated that Mr H F and I took Lupin for the longest walk he’d ever had. We only returned when we did because Lupin refused to go any farther. We also got it into our heads that the children may have killed each other in our absence.
Another argument resulted in Betty chucking a glass of wine in Fred’s face (‘She’s insane!’ – ‘He was ranting at me!’). They refused to speak to each other for the rest of the weekend. The evening before their departure – Fred back to Vauxhall, Betty to Goldsmiths (or ‘Momentum Training College’, as she calls it), I suggested a ceasefire.
‘The first to apologise is the bravest,’ I said. ‘The first to forgive is the strongest, and the first to forget is the happiest.’
‘Oh shut up!’ said everyone.