NOW LET’S RAISE A TOAST TO MELVYN’S MUM
Back In The Day Melvyn Bragg Sceptre £25 ★★★★★
When Melvyn Bragg’s mother Ethel turned 90, and was just beginning to suffer from Alzheimer’s, he threw a birthday party for her. It was a poignant affair: the famous literary son returning from Hampstead to take the working-class mum who ‘hated show’ to a posh hotel in the Lake
District near where he had grown up.
In the middle of the lunch he stood up – feeling, he now admits, rather nervous – to say a few words about her in tribute. Two sentences in, he notices her glaring at him. Four sentences later, he watches her turn to her best friend and say, loud enough for him to hear: ‘I always wanted a girl.’
‘I proposed the toast,’ Bragg tells us in Back In The Day, ‘and sat down.’
With its frankness, black humour and eye for the telling moments of family life, this vignette captures much of what makes this memoir so wonderfully rich, endearing and unusual.
From its jacket, Back In The Day looks rather like standard fare: successful senior figure recounts poorbut-happy life in mid-century provinces before talent carries them off to London. True, there are plenty of sepiatoned anecdotes about rationing, skiffle and sexual innocence here, but Bragg has worked hard to give a balanced, honest picture.
Wigton, his home town, may have a strong, co-operative spirit, but it is also full of petty snobberies and gossip.
The families are close, but it’s God help you if you get pregnant, because the good Christian folk certainly won’t. Even the clever lack opportunities, the skiffle bands sound ropey and the dances have punch-ups. The sex is as you might imagine, but depicted with great comic timing and just enough decency.
The smoky, damp and introverted world in which livestock are still sold in the town centre, and horses are only slowly ceding to motor cars, is brought to life with subtle skill. Wigton’s streets become soot-streaked theatre for a huge cast of town characters for whom the author shows a convincing, rather than patronising, affection; Thornton Wilder’s Our Town relocated to postwar Cumbria.
The best writers in this style make their characters individual enough to be interesting, but sufficiently recognisable as small-town types to raise a smile of recognition in the reader. Bragg has tried it before in his novels; this is by far his best performance, and one that shows him to be, as his father Stan would have said, first class.
Stan, a publican, and Ethel are at the heart of the book, more so than even the precocious Melvyn himself. Their now 82-year-old son brings all his generosity and empathy to bear on them, seeing what might appear as ‘provincial’ attitudes as expressions of hidden virtues. Stan’s world might be narrow but, deprived of chances in the wider world, he applies his intelligence to serving his community; Ethel’s service to the town is a way of asserting her identity after her illegitimate birth.
All of this honesty and understanding mean than when Bragg does shift to eulogy mode, we believe him. ‘If you think this seems too idealised, then you would be wrong,’ he writes of the self-sufficiency of workingclass families in the 1940s and 1950s. ‘The houses of small means and hard work were the foundational pillars of a society that took the working class for granted and valued it not. There were tens of thousands of working-class women… who made a sufficiency out of slim pickings, who thrived where today we would starve, made plain life undull.’
There are many passages where he precisely sets out the habits and attitudes with which his parents’ generation tried to build the new Jerusalem. They put locality and community before party politics, action before words, and side before self. If any of our current political leaders wants to create a vision that actually makes people want to vote, they could do worse than prescribe this to their MPs as required summer reading.
RESPECT: