Georgina Hammick
Georgina Hammick (b.1939) was born in Hampshire, educated in Kenya and England and later attended the Academie Julian in Paris as well as the Salisbury School of Art. She is the author of People for Lunch, Spoilt and Green Man Running.
I think I left my wireless in the drawing room, his mother said. Could you get it? I’d be grateful.
His mother and he were in the kitchen. He took a big breath. He said, You can’t use that word any more, I’m sorry, we’ve decided.
What word are you talking about? his mother said. She took a tray of cheese tartlets from the oven and put them on the table. His mother is a cook. She cooks for her family when they’re at home and she cooks professionally: for other women’s freezers and other women’s lunch and dinner parties. She also supplies, on a regular basis, her local delicatessen with pâtés and terrines and tarts and quiches. Blast, these look a bit burnt to me, his mother said. Do they look burnt to you? What word can’t I use?
“Drawing room”, he said. It’s an anachronism, it’s irrelevant. It’s snobbish. It has associations with mindless West End theatre. It’s embarrassing.
His mother said nothing for a minute. She looked thoughtful; she looked thoughtfully at her feet. Then she said, Who are “we”? “We” who have decided?
My sisters and I, he told her. Your children. All of them.
I see, his mother said. First I’ve heard of this, I have to say.
The point is, he said, our friends, the ones we bring here, find it offensive – or a joke. And so do we. It is offensive, and ridiculous, to continue to use a word that means nothing to ninety-nine per cent of the population, that ninety-nine per cent of the population does not use.
Hang on a minute, his mother said, I just want to get this straight. You’re at university, and most of the people you bring here, from whatever background, are students too. Are you saying that this doesn’t make you an elite of some kind? Are you telling me that the words you use in your essays are the words ninety-nine per cent of the population uses? Don’t look at me like that, his mother said. If you want to know, I don’t feel that strongly about “drawing room”; it’s what your father called it, it’s the habit of a lifetime, but you can break habits. I have wondered about it. The room in question is rather small for a drawing room. What word would you like me to use instead? “Lounge”?
There were other words, he told his mother.
Are there? his mother said. What’s wrong with “lounge”? I bet “lounge” is what ninety-nine per cent of the population uses. But if you don’t like it, if its airport and hotel connotations bother you, how about “front room”? Will that do?
The room his mother calls the “drawing room” is at the back of the house and looks on to the back garden. It looks on to a square of lawn with three apple trees on it, two mixed borders either side and, beyond the lawn and divided from it by a box hedge, the vegetable garden: peasticks and bean poles and a rusty fruit cage and a potting shed. A cottage garden, his mother has always described it as.
I can’t call it the “morning room”, his mother murmured, more to herself than to him, because we tend to use it mostly in the evenings. I can’t call it the “music room” because none of us plays an instrument, and because all those gramophones – those CD and tape-deck affairs – are in your bedrooms. To call it the “smoking room”, though when you’re at home accurate, would be tantamount to encouraging a health-wrecking practice I deplore.
His mother was mocking him. She was, as usual, refusing to address the issue, a serious and important one. She was declining to engage with the argument. He said so.
Address the issue? Engage with the argument? His mother turned the phrases over and weighed them in invisible scales. Engage with the argument. Is that an expression ninety-nine per cent of the pop …? Well, no matter. Where was I? I know, in the “parlour”. I like “parlour”, I rather go for “parlour”. It’s an old word. It conjures up monks in monasteries having a chinwag, it conjures up people in ruffs having a tête-à-tête. Then there’s the ice-cream side of it, of course – oh, and massage, and nail buffing and leg waxing … Which reminds me …
Oh for God’s sake, he said.
I like “parlour”, his mother said. I think I like “parlour” best. But on the other hand – parlare, parlatorium – a bit too elitist, don’t you think? On the whole?
Look, he said, there are other names for rooms, ordinary ones, not jokey or archaic or patronising, that you haven’t mentioned yet, that you seem to be deliberately avoiding.
If you mean “sitting room”, his mother said, I did think of it, it did occur to me, and then I thought, No, too safe, a compromise choice, with a whiff of amontillado about it.
It’s less offensive than “drawing room”. And it’s more exact – people do tend to sit in rooms.
Probably it is for you, his mother said. You and your siblings and friends are great sitters. Great loungers and withdrawers too, I might say. But I don’t have that much time for sitting. In the room that for the moment shall be nameless I tend to stand.
His mother was standing as she said this. She was standing by the stove, lifting the lid from the saucepan, giving the soup a stir. He was sitting on a chair at the table, lounging perhaps. He sat up. He stood up.
You haven’t got an ashtray, his mother said, here, use this. By the way, his mother said, did I ever tell you about the misprint your father found in the local paper once? In an estate agent’s advertisement? “Five bed, two bath, kitchen, dining room, shitting room”? Or perhaps it wasn’t a misprint, who can say? This soup doesn’t taste of anything much, his mother said, come and try it. Come and tell me what you think it needs.
He took the spoon from his mother’s hand and tasted her soup. It’s okay, he said, it’s fine, could do with more salt. The name you’re avoiding, he said, the name we use, as you must have noticed, that we want you to use, is “living room”. A room for living in. The room where people live. Graham Greene wrote a play about it. No, he said (for he could see his mother was about to interrupt him), there are no jokes to be made. I defy you to be satirical about this one. “Living room” is accurate. And it’s classless, it embraces all. The pathetic thing is (and he banged his fist on the table) it’d be impossible to have this argument anywhere else but here! It’d be meaningless anywhere but in Little England. Christ, what a shower!
Nineteen fifty-three, was it? his mother said, or nineteen fifty-four? The year I saw The Living Room. Dorothy Tutin was made a star overnight – don’t think that sort of thing happens any more, does it? I’d seen her in Much Ado at the Phoenix, but … Look, it’s accuracy I want to quiz you about, his mother said. Pass me that colander, would you. No not that one, the red one. Think for a moment – where are we having this conversation? If we can be said to live anywhere, it’s the kitchen – except for your grandfather, poor man, who lives in the lavatory. No, we live in the kitchen and we make occasional forays – withdraw, if you like – into –
You’re so clever, he said, you think everything can be reduced to a clever, silly, word game.
No, his mother said, no I don’t, I just want to understand your motives, which I suspect are suspect.
Our motives, our motive, is clear, he said. There’s nothing eccentric about it. We’re egalitarians and we want to live in an egalitarian world. Drawing rooms – withdrawing rooms, as no doubt you’d prefer – have no place in that world. They have nothing to do with the real world as it is now. They have to do with privilege and power. They have to do with tribalism in the worst sense.
His mother took a bunch of parsley from a jam jar on the windowsill. Do come and see what these sparrows are up to! she said. Damn, you’re too late, she said. She put the parsley on a chopping board. Then she took five soup bowls off the dresser and put them in the bottom oven. She straightened up.
He said, Look, doesn’t it embarrass you when you say “drawing room” to Mrs Todd, for example? Doesn’t it make you feel uncomfortable? Doesn’t it? It does us, I can tell you.
His mother looked astonished. She said, You astonish me. Why ever should it? It doesn’t embarrass her. I’ll tell you how it works. I say to her, Oh Mrs Todd, the children were down at the weekend, and you know what that means, so I think the drawing room could do with some special attention … or she’ll say to me, Thought I might do the lounge through today, Mrs Symonds – kids home Sunday, were they? Point is, we have our own language, a language we feel comfortable in, and we stick to it. Both of us. Not just me. Don’t think it’s just me. But we understand each other. We do. And – though you may not believe this – we’re fond of each other. We’ve got a lot in common. We’re both working women, we’re both widows. We’ve been seeing each other twice a week now for what? – fifteen years. I know a lot about her life, I know all about our Malcolm and our Cheryl and our Diane and our Diane’s baby Gary – who’s teething at the moment incidentally – and she knows even more about my life. I remember her birthday, and she – unlike some I could mention – always remembers mine. I went to see her when she was in hospital, and she came to see me when I was. She came on the bus the day after my op, and then later in the week she got Malcolm to drive her over after work. Malcolm’s pick-up is very unreliable, you know. He spends all his Sundays working on it, but even so it invariably fails its MOT. If it isn’t the gear box it’s the brakes, and if it isn’t the brakes it’s the exhaust … I’m very much afraid Malcolm was sold a pup.
If you’re such good friends, he said, if you know everything there is to know about Mrs Todd’s life, how come you don’t call her by her first name? How come she doesn’t call you by your first name?
Ah, you can’t catch me there, his mother said. The answer is because she doesn’t want it. I asked her once. She’d been here about a year, and I said, Mrs Todd, don’t you think we’ve known each other long enough to call each other by our Christian names? Mine’s Elizabeth, as I expect you know. And she said, Think I’d rather leave things the way they are, if it’s all the same to you, Mrs Symonds. So we did. I did feel crushed at the time, I did feel a bit snubbed, but I don’t think she meant to snub me. I really don’t think she did.
About “living room”, he said.
Oh that, his mother said. If that’s what you’re set on, I’ll give it a try. But if you want to bring Mrs Todd into line, I fear you’ve got problems – she’s a “lounge” person, definitely. “Definitely” is another of her words. She says “definitely” very often when I’d say “yes”. Do you find your microwave has made life easier, Mrs Todd? I’ll ask her, and she’ll say, Oh definitely, definitely. It definitely do, definitely. Mrs Todd is a very definite person. If you think you can get her to turn her lounge into a living room, well, good luck.
I never said I wanted her to alter anything, he said. You’re putting words into my mouth. I never said that. Of course she can keep her lounge. We want you to get rid of your drawing room, which is quite different. He hesitated. He said, We won’t bring our friends here unless you do.
Can I have that in writing? his mother said. Joke, she said, when she saw his frown. Could you pass me that baking tray please. Actually, Kit, I don’t like your tone. Dictatorship and blackmail seem to be the names of your game. Why? Couldn’t you wait for evolution to do the job? You won’t have to wait long. “Nurseries” – in houses large enough to have a nursery – are mostly “playrooms” now. “Studies” have turned themselves into “telly rooms”. “Drawing rooms” are dying even as we speak. By the time my generation is under the sod, the only “drawing rooms” left will be in palaces and stately homes. Truly, you won’t have to wait long.
If you want to make yourself useful, you could lay the table, his mother said.
What I don’t understand, his mother said, is why you have to be so heavy about all this. If your friends don’t like the vocabulary I use, couldn’t you make a joke of it? Couldn’t you just tell them your mother is an eccentric old bat? That sort of confession would improve your street cred no end, I should’ve thought.
There isn’t any point in going on with this, he said. There isn’t any point in trying to have a serious discussion with you. You’re the personification of the English disease, the English upper class disease, of superciliousness. Everything you’ve said this morning, and the way you’ve said it, is offensive, but you can’t even see it, you can’t even hear it. If you knew the way you sound to ordinary people! “Our Malcolm” and “our Joanne” – mocking and superior, that’s how you sound.
Diane, his mother said, Diane, not Joanne. I wasn’t mocking, I assure you, I was borrowing. I was repeating. And who’s calling who ordinary? No one’s that ordinary. In my experience most people, when you get to know them, are extraordinary. Look, if you’re not going to lay the table, d’you think you could stop hovering and sit down?
I didn’t mean “ordinary”, he said, I meant “other”. Other people. You mentioned palaces and stately homes a minute ago, he said. What you don’t seem to understand is that this place is a palace to some of the friends I bring here. In fact that’s exactly what Julie said the first time she came down. She walked in the door and said, God, it’s a palace! You never told me your mother lived in a fucking palace, Kit.
I don’t get this, his mother said. First it’s “drawing room”, then it’s the way I talk, now it’s this house. You keep moving the goal posts. Are you saying people shouldn’t be allowed to live in five-bedroomed houses, in five-and-a-half- – if you count the box room – bedroomed houses in case other people, who live in two-bedroomed houses or flats, might think of them as palaces? Is that what you’re saying? I happen to know that Julie liked this house. She came down early one morning that first visit – you were still in bed – and had breakfast with me. She said, I really love this place, Elizabeth – it’s magic. I’m going to live in a place like this one day. We went round the garden and she knew the names of everything. Monkshood! she said, my dad won’t have monkshood in the garden … I was fond of Julie. She was a very nice girl. I was sorry when you gave her the push.
Martin found you frightening, he said. D’you remember Martin?
That’s okay, I found Martin frightening, his mother said.
When I say “frightening” I mean “posh”, he said. I met Martin in the pub the other night and he seemed a bit down and fed up with life – well, with his job really – and I asked him if he’d like to get away to the country this weekend. He wanted to know if you were going to be there. I said probably you would, it was your house. And he said, Well, think I’ll give it a miss then. No offence, but your mother and her “drawing rooms” and “wirelesses” and “gramophones” are a bit posh for me. He pronounced it “poshe”.
Well that hurts certainly. Yes it does, his mother said. Could you come here a minute, I can’t read this without my specs, does it say two ounces or four?
Martin spent a lot of his childhood in care, you know, he said. Four ounces, he said. He was shunted from council home to council home. From the age of seven, that is. Before that he lived in a one-room flat with his parents. They ate in it and slept in it and his parents screwed in it. A lot of pain went on in that living room. His father beat his mother up in it – night after night after night. Dreadful, bloody beatings. If Martin tried to stop him he got beaten up too.
That is very dreadful, his mother said. Poor child. Poor Martin. I didn’t know that. I am very sorry indeed about that.
So you can probably see why “drawing rooms” and such would put him off, he said. Piss him off. I mean, what the fuck have they got to do with his life, or with anything he knows about? Like fucking nothing.
Yes I do see, his mother said. I understand now why he’s on the defensive. What I don’t understand is, why, if you’re so fond of him, you didn’t warn me about all this before he came down here. It would have saved me asking him all sorts of tactless questions about his life and family, and him having to skate round them – which is what he did do.
How patronising can you be! he said. Martin doesn’t need explaining, or explaining away, by me or anyone. He is himself, he is a valuable human being.
His mother took her mixing bowl and egg whisk to the sink and ran the tap over them. She turned the tap off, twisting it hard. Remind me to get something done about this washer, she said. She said, Why do I get the feeling that, for you, only one sort of person, from one sort of background, is a valuable human being? Why do I get the impression that, in your view, a person has to have been brought up in an obviously deprived environment to know anything about pain?
I haven’t said that, he said.
So much so that I feel I’ve failed you, that you’d have preferred to have had Martin’s childhood, that kind of misery being the only passport – as you would see it – to full membership of the human race.
You’re silent, his mother said. She tapped him on the shoulder. Hey, look at me.
He looked out of the window.
Let me remind you of your father’s childhood, his mother said. It was a very comfortable, green-belt childhood. There was a cook, Inez I think, and a maid. Two maids. There was a nanny until your father went away to school. There was a big garden with a shrubbery one end to play in – though he had to play by himself most of the time, of course, being an only child. There was all that. There were also your grandparents who hated each other. They slept at different ends of the house, but in the evenings when your grandfather came home from his office they sat together in the drawing room in their own special chairs and tormented each other. Your grandmother had the edge, she was the cleverer. She was frustrated. Nowadays, I suppose, she’d have been a career woman, and perhaps not married. From all the evidence she despised men. While this ritual was going on, while they goaded and persecuted each other, your father was made to sit in a corner and play with his Meccano or read a book. He was not allowed to interrupt and he was not allowed to leave the room. At six-forty-five on the dot your grandmother would take a key from the bunch on the thin leather belt she always wore and unlock the drinks cupboard, and the serious whisky drinking – and the serious torturing – would begin.
I know about that, he said, you’ve told me about that.
There was no blood, his mother said, there were no visible bruises, just –
I’ve got the point, he said, you’ve made your point.
When your father was dying I thought about the nightmare he’d had to endure while he was growing up. I wondered if it might have been responsible in some way for his illness, if the stress of it had made him vulnerable, damaged his immune system. D’you think that’s possible?
Could be, he said. Could be. I don’t know.
I wish you’d known him, his mother said. That’s the worst of it, your never knowing him, or rather being too young to remember him. That photograph on my dressing table, the one of you aged eighteen months or so with Daddy. You’re looking up at him and you’re hugging his knees. Now I remember that occasion – I took the photograph. I remember the way you ran, well, staggered up the garden – you were a very late walker, you know, very slow to get yourself off your bottom – and threw yourself at him. You nearly toppled him. And then I pressed the button. I remember that afternoon very well. I remember your father telling me there was no point in taking any photographs, the light was too poor … well, I remember it all. I remember how tired your father was. He was already ill but we didn’t know. I remember that you had a tantrum about ten minutes before I took the photograph. You lay on the grass and kicked and screamed. But you don’t remember. You don’t remember him, and you don’t remember you – or any of it. It’s just a photograph to you.
Cass and Anna remember him, he said, they say they do. They’ve told me things.
He did his dying in the drawing room – as it was then called – his mother said. He wanted to be downstairs so he could see into the garden – walk into it to begin with. When he was given his death sentence, at Christmas, he set himself some targets. The start of the cricket season – on telly – was one. The peonies and irises out was another. We had wonderful irises in those days, the proper rhizomatous sort, the tall bearded ones, a huge bed of them your father made. He was passionate about his irises, quite boring about them. Irises are tricky things, they like being by themselves, they don’t like being moved, they have to have full sun, you’re supposed to divide them every three years immediately after flowering – it’s quite a performance. It takes patience to grow good irises, and your father was not a patient man. He was a quick-tempered man. I was quite jealous of his irises and all the patient attention they got. Every weekend spent in the garden – or the bloody potting shed. Graham Greene has got a lot to answer for, if you ask me.
He had not known about the irises. He said, Did he see them? Were they out in time?
Some of them were out, the ordinary white flags, and the blue ones. The red peonies were out, the officinalis, but the pale ones weren’t – you know, the Chinese ones. The ones he liked best weren’t.
I don’t think I knew he died in the living room, he said. I don’t think you ever told me that.
He didn’t die in it, his mother said. About three weeks before he died we moved him upstairs. It had become impossible to look after him properly downstairs, and it was too noisy. Small children – you were only two and obstreperous – kept bursting in. When they carried him upstairs, which was difficult because he was in agony, I waited at the top, on the landing; and when he saw me he said, Next time I go down these stairs, folks, it’ll be feet first. He said it to make me laugh, to make the doctor and the nurse – who’d made a sort of chair for him out of their hands – laugh. It was brave to make that joke, but it was cruel too, because three weeks later when he did go down the stairs, in his coffin, I kept remembering him coming up, I kept hearing him say, Feet first.
If I don’t talk about it much, his mother said, it’s because I don’t like thinking about it. I prefer to remember your father before he got that bloody disease. He was a different person before he got it. I don’t mean just because he looked different – obviously if someone loses six stone in a short time he’s going to seem different, he’s going to feel unfamiliar – I suppose because we tend to think of a person’s shape as being part of their personality, of being them – but that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem I discovered was the gap there is between the living and the dying. An enormous, unbridgeable gap.
We’re all dying though, aren’t we, he said. From the moment we’re born you could say we’re dying.
Don’t give me that, his mother said, don’t give me that claptrap. Could you move your elbow please, I’m trying to lay the table. I want to give you a knife and fork.
Sit down, he said, stop working and sit down and talk to me. Just for five minutes. You never sit down and talk. You never tell me anything. You never tell me anything about you.
It’s lunch time, his mother said, we can’t talk now. Grandpa will be starving. Could you go and tell him it’s ready and give him a hand down the stairs. I fear we’re going to have to have a lift put in, you know, or –
What is lunch? he said. What are we having? Fish fingers and peas? he said hopefully, beefburgers and beans, sausage and chips?
I wish you hadn’t mentioned sausages, his mother said, why did you have to mention sausages? Okay, I’ll tell you, his mother said (as though he’d asked her to, which he hadn’t, he hadn’t said a word), why not? I’ll tell you. When your father was dying, before he got to the point of not wanting anything to eat at all, the only thing he wanted was sausages. I’d put my head round the door and ask him, What d’you fancy for lunch today, darling? and he’d say, Bangers and mash. Then I’d go away and cook him something quite other – something I thought would be nourishing and easy to digest, that would slip down. I’d bring in the tray – he’d be sitting with his back to me, shoulders stooped, head supported by a hand, looking out at the garden – and he’d say, without turning his head because turning and twisting were very painful for him, Doesn’t smell like bangers. And I’d say, You just wait and see. I’d put the tray down on a chair, and tuck a napkin under his chin and adjust the invalid table and wheel it up over his knees, and put the plate on it and whip the cover off and say, There! Doesn’t that look delicious? And he’d stare down at the plate. I asked for bangers, he’d say eventually. I was expecting bangers.
I don’t think I let him have bangers more than twice in the whole of that five months, the whole time he was dying, his mother said. I don’t know why I didn’t give him what he asked for. I’ve tried to work out why I didn’t.
He said nothing for a minute. Then he said, You thought they’d be hard for him to digest, you thought they’d make him uncomfortable.
Did I? his mother said. What would a bit of discomfort have mattered? He was dying, for God’s sake! He wanted bangers.
Say something! his mother said. I’ve shocked you, haven’t I? I can tell.
No. No, you haven’t, he said. Look, I’d better go and get Grandpa, I’d better go and find the girls.
Could you bring me my wireless at the same time? his mother said, I want to hear the news. I’m not sure where I left it, downstairs I think, in the – in some room or other.