THE LONGER SHE stayed in England, the more Hungarian Mother succeeded in sounding. This inversion of the normal order of phonetics would have fascinated Professor Higgins. After twenty years, the girl who had spoken almost pristine English became as impenetrable to listen to as any lugubrious Language School novice.
Gender gave her particular problems. She never seemed able to grasp it. Just as her hand appeared to close over it, it slipped away like a bright-eyed hooded snake, laughing. Time and again did I hear Mother on the telephone, complaining of some delinquency committed by Father or myself.
‘That Woodrow, she is impossible to live with. She has spent all my housekeeping money on her horrible cigars. And that child. He thinks it is very funny.’
This was Father’s fault really – not the cigars but Mother’s English, or lack of it. When my brother and I first noticed a decline in Mother’s enunciation of certain words, we set her exercises. ‘Say, “The rain in Hungary stays mainly in the Pushta plain.”’ ‘No, it doesn’t,’ said Mother stoutly. We replied that she had missed the point. It was not a lesson in climate or geography.
But facts have a way of asserting themselves. ‘Petronella says that it is always raining on the Pushta,’ complained Mother to Father at dinner. ‘Why does she say that?’ ‘Because she is trying to give me electrocution.’
Father was astonished.
‘Why do you want to electrocute your mother, horrible child?’
I explained. Sometimes with Father, explanations were a mistake. He rose to his feet and waved his fork in the air like a sceptre. ‘Your mother will never take elocution lessons,’ he declared with an Olympian air, ‘I absolutely forbid it.’
‘Why, Voodrow, don’t you want me to speak proper English?’
‘Of course not, you would lose half your charm.’
What wild, purple-tinged misunderstandings arose as a result. Mysticism, with its marvellous power to make common things strange to us, covered Mother like a raiment. Veil after veil descended on her conversation, so that listeners were treated to a mad and antique dance in which they could but helplessly follow.
Of numerous examples just one will suffice. At a party in Newmarket one evening in the 1970s, some dowager had come cringing up to Mother with the usual irritating questions, posed with mock solicitude, about the health of her family. ‘And do tell me Veruschka, how is your dear mother?’
Mother replied with accuracy of intent but not alas of execution. She had meant to say, ‘She is in Wiltshire.’
Only it came out as, ‘She is in wheelchair.’
‘Oh, how simply dreadful,’ replied the woman, patting Mother’s hand. ‘How did it happen?’
‘It didn’t happen. She decided to do it herself.’
‘How, er, sad for her. She must be suffering terribly.’
By this time Mother had become agitated and confused.
‘Of course she isn’t suffering. She’s having a lovely time.’
‘But it’s such a terrible place to be.’
‘No it isn’t.’
‘Oh well, I suppose she has someone to push her.’
‘Why would she want someone to push her? Are you crazy?’
Exasperated, hopeless, Mother got up.
It is true that life mimics farce and pays no strict obeisance to what the human race calls coincidence. Mother found out later that at the same party, in another room, an extraordinarily similar conversation had taken place between a tremulous and elderly male guest and the fiery French wife of the host, David Montagu, then Chairman of Rothman’s. It went thus:
Male guest: ‘Do tell me how your mother is.’
Mrs Montagu: ‘Well she is in a wheelchair.’ Only the man misheard it as ‘She is in Wiltshire.’
At once he beamed. ‘How lovely for her. She must be having a glorious time.’
Mrs Montagu was taken aback. ‘No she isn’t. She hates it. Except when someone pushes her in the park.’
For some reason the man assumed the old lady was participating in carriage-driving competitions. ‘You mean she takes part in races? How splendid. I wish I was in her position.’
Poor Mrs Montagu was quite distraite.
Father and I later dubbed this episode A Tale of Two Wiltshires.
There were malapropisms and there were Motherisms. Malaprop had nothing on Mother. A Motherism was the mishearing of a word based on one’s not really knowing what it meant in the first place. Sometimes conversation with Mother was like Russian roulette: you never knew whether she would come out firing blanks or a complete blinder.
There was the incident of the rubber bands. One morning Father asked Mother if she could buy him some rubber bands. She returned later with three men carrying a monstrous rubber plant. They couldn’t fit it through the front door, so it had to be left on the street until the dustbin man took it away.
My own involvement in such mises en scène ranged from the minimal to full-blown participation. When I was fourteen, Mother decided that Father had a girlfriend. She became very angry when he denied this. ‘Why do you think he has a girlfriend?’ I asked Mother. ‘Because he is on the telephone at funny times.’
‘But can you hear what he says to the person he’s talking to?’
‘No. But we are going to do something about that.’
My face paled and my spirits felt as macerated as the body of an ancient ascetic. I had no idea what, but I suspected it would be fraught with danger. The following Saturday, Mother shooed me into her car, which she drove wildly down London’s South Audley Street before stopping in front of a shop. I read the name on the front. It said, The Counter Spy Shop.
‘Why are we here?’
‘Because they sell bugs. We are going to bug your Father.’
‘Is that legal?’
‘I don’t care.’
What the man in the shop thought of Mother and me is a mystery. We must have been most unlike his usual clients, silent-stepped Saudi princes or muscled security men. But we bought the damned thing – it wasn’t cheap, I think it cost near on two hundred pounds – and took it home. The trouble was, Mother had not a clue how to assemble it. The receiver of the telephone had to be unscrewed and a device inserted. Then a wire had to run from a tape recorder to the back of a telephone in another room.
In the end we managed to do it. But I cannot say that the results were edifying in any sense. Mother always seemed to bug the wrong conversations – that is, long exercises in dullness about stocks and shares, irate calls to newspaper night editors pertaining to a dangling participle. Mother had high hopes from the dangling participle until I explained to her what it actually was. Out of sheer boredom she gave it up.
But things never gave up Mother. It was five or six months later that the British bureaucratic sytem made one of its periodical errors, a small thing perhaps to the poor minion who filled in the forms, but for those members of the population who were affected by it it was to have fantastical repercussions. Mother was called up for Jury Service.
Puzzled as she was by many institutions of her adopted country, she was aware of what this task entailed. The notion of spending two weeks in a windowless, malodorous room in the Old Bailey did not enthral her in the slightest. But even Father couldn’t get her out of this one. She went.
I believe that the first thing Mother was called upon to do was introduce herself to the eleven other jurors. She claimed that a number of them understood English even less than she did. Montaigne described those who sought to make themselves perfect by the worship of truth. British jurors, declared Mother in her darkly dramatic way, were most imperfect and worshipped nothing but duplicity. How a just verdict was ever reached was baffling. She claimed that some of them boasted of being ‘in the rap’. Not that Mother’s critique of the judiciary was destined to become an essay to rival Montaigne’s own pensées. The first case featured a poor wretch who was accused of stealing. What had been stolen Mother could not quite fathom. She thought it might have been a handbag, but then again the syllables were run together so fast that it might have been a ham sandwich.
Presently the accused was asked to speak. After he had finished his appeal of innocence to these mortal representatives of Athene, the judge inquired of the jury if they had understood. There was a lugubrious silence. Then Mother put up her hand. ‘Your worship,’ she began haltingly. ‘I have not understood anything that she said.’ The judge looked bewildered. ‘But there is no woman in this case.’ ‘I know,’ said Mother, ‘and I don’t understand anything she says.’
Once it had been established that Mother was, in today’s argot, somewhat genderly challenged, the judge went on, ‘So you can’t understand what the defendant has been saying?’
‘No.’
‘How long have you been in England?’
One suspects that at that moment the judge wondered where in the British Isles Mother had been. Then she interpolated once more. ‘I cannot understand a Cockney accent.’
The scales of British justice showed their fabled flexibility. Or at least one of them was burdened down by a dead weight it had never encountered before – Mother.
‘Madam,’ said the judge, ‘I excuse you from jury service – for ever.’