Owning Up: The Trilogy Read Online Free PDF Page B

by lethargy. My mother used to say, and he didn’t contradict her: ‘Tom’s motto is never do today what you can put off until tomorrow week.’
    She on the contrary was intensely ambitious and, I believe, very highly sexed. In neither direction was she fulfilled. Her ambitions were displaced; it was her children to whom she looked in order to realise them. Her sexuality was inhibited by her fear of the opinion of others. Only once, she told me later, was she nearly unfaithful to my father. In Chester at a dance (Tom must have been away fishing) a young man tried to persuade her to spend the night in an hotel. She was tempted to accept but finally refused on the grounds that she would have been forced to return home next morning in her evening dress. She sublimated her libido by a series of what she called ‘affairs’ with young homosexuals, revelling in their confidences and delighting in their company. This suited my father very well as there were comparatively few plays, and certainly no ballets, that he wished to see.
    Every evening when my father was at The Albert I would be taken down to spend an hour with my mother in the lounge. She would put on a very elaborate performance for my benefit, reading a certain amount, The Jungle Books were my favourite, imitating music-hall and cabaret artistes, and speaking of her early life in a rather indiscreet and grown-up way which widened its scope rapidly as I grew older and proved myself a precocious pupil at her knee.
    I especially liked her to ‘do’ accents. Her Liverpool was perfect, her cockney adequate, if stagey, and she could manage a fair approximation of Welsh, Lancashire, Scottish and Irish. It amused her to imitate a woman called Alice Delysia, who performed mono-logues in English with a French accent, but what impressed me most was when she recreated an American colonel she had met during the war. ‘Lady,’ she’d say with a broad twang, ‘do you mind if I spit in the fire?’ and she would then swing round to face the grate and pretend to expectorate. For a long time afterwards I was convinced that all Americans indulged in this inexplicable custom. In fact, despite her ear for accents, my mother had never been abroad except once, as a child, to the Isle of Man. She claimed, although a strong swimmer, to be afraid of the sea, but I believe it was more a question of insularity.
    ‘Everyone says I’d adore New York,’ she told me, ‘and that New York would adore me, but…’ Everyone in this case was a few of her more cosmopolitan friends. She did however go to London once a year and, on her return, loaded with toys from Hamleys, would paint it in glowing colours. ‘I did five shows in four days,’ she’d tell us, ‘and had supper twice at the Savoy with Rex Evans.’ Rex Evans was a night-club owner of the period, a plump and bespectacled man who performed sophisticated songs at the piano. He stood high in her pantheon. My father was delighted that Rex Evans should take my mother to the Savoy. He himself was rather intimidated by London and would never go there if he could avoid it. As to the Savoy, he would have considered that a waste of money, as in some ways, and especially when it came to eating out, he was almost comically mean.
    There was another aspect of those evenings I spent with my mother about which I had mixed feelings, and that was her recitation of several late-Victorian poems recalled from her childhood which she would send up in such a way that I soon realized that I was meant to be amused by their pathos, but which nevertheless moved me to furtive tears. One told of a cockney orphan girl returning to her sick little brother with some flowers presented her by ‘a bang-up lady’ who had learnt of his plight. ‘Flowers in ‘eaven? I suppose so,’ she replies in answer to his loaded question. Predictably, in the final verse, he is in a position to find out the answer to this theological conundrum.
    Starving waifs watching a