‘There smites nothing so sharp, nor smelleth so sour As shame.’ Langland, Piers Plowman
My granny had no patience with books and writers. None at all. A miner’s widow, she had a glass eye (a coal explosion in her own grate), a clay pipe (mostly unlit) and a habit of saying out loud what you hoped she wouldn’t. ‘Away and work’, was a favourite bon mot for oblivious glass-screen TV announcers; ‘Is that smell you?’ a witticism directed at doorstepping Mormons; ‘I’ve got my eye on you’ whilst removing the aforementioned glass appendage, the perfect remark to drain the blood from the faces of small children – you know the kind of thing. Years after she died in a house fire, my mother, unwell herself, told me in the manner of it being a last confession how much she had loved her mother, yet how embarrassed by her she had been. Not just embarrassed, marked. The worst, it seemed, needed to emerge.
As a teenager, maybe eighteen or nineteen, she had taken her mother on a very rare, very special Big Night Out. The dazzling first showing of Gone with the Wind was the occasion in question, and women for miles had come in their fanciest duds to sit in the dark and watch it. The local fleapit had been done up and paper hankies and specially drafted-in boxes of Milk Tray were available in the foyer. This was glamour indeed, and my mother was enthralled with all of it before the movie even started. By the time a daring onscreen clinch reduced the cinema to sex-tingled silence, she was rapt almost beyond recall. At the pitch of the silence, however, a man sitting next to my mother, possibly despite his best efforts, possibly from a surfeit of unaccustomed chocolate, broke wind. My granny jumped to her feet, grey bun outlined in the projection beam, roaring, ‘It wasny me, it was him.’ She roared it repeatedly, pointing. By the time they were asked to leave, my mother already had and my granny had started a fight with two usherettes. ‘All those people,’ my mother sighed. Forty-five years later, she still blushed at the memory, the loss of fragile, teenage dignity. ‘She wasny what you’d call graceful.’
Twenty years later still, I have no idea what either my mother or grandmother would have made of my being a writer, and that’s probably a damn good thing. I don’t know what I make of it either. I do know it works best when I’m alone and it’s when I haul myself in front of ‘all those people’ too that things seem more fraught. From the very first surreal radio interview, where I expected to be asked questions about the book I had just written and was instead asked by a ferociously chirpy Angela Rippon what I’d be doing to celebrate National Foot Week, this has been the case. It honestly never seems like me.
Book in hand, I have been introduced in Leeds as ‘an up-and-coming comedienne from Billy Connolly country’. I have been heckled in Haworth as the organizer of a lesbian ‘happening’ about which I knew nothing, and had my invitation to a feminist conference in Motherwell rescinded on the grounds of being found out as ‘not feminist enough’. I have been thrown out of Amman University for being unable to truthfully promise I would not use the word ‘thighs’ during my session on the platform, yet dismissed as roundly as if I had won the Bad Sex Award by the all-too-audible snoring of a blue-rinsed lady as I read what I had hoped would be a pretty in-your-face fellatio story. I have been offered, free, a ‘cheerier ending’ for that story about ECT I just narrated, and one rather timid-looking chap waited for over an hour in a queue to tell me, as I signed his book, that he only wanted to say how much he hated my stuff and, while he was at it, my fucking earrings as well. I have been booked into a posh, would-be chic hotel with such vile green lighting I got a headache almost at once, and off-loaded into a dimly-lit warren where the wallpaper peeled down the wall, where the holes in the skirting looked too big to have been made even by Scottie dogs, where the locks didn’t work and the phone was disconnected and the local knocking-shop activity seemed set to begin at any second. I have even been asked if I minded not being paid.
Only once, though, at a reading in Edinburgh, have things almost come to a head. In the heart of a stillness I deliberately, and, I thought, dramatically, created, the bloke in the front row (at least I think it was the bloke in the front row) executed the loudest arse-raspberry I ever hope to hear. Maybe it was blood, maybe the poetry of repeated history suggesting itself. Whichever, in the space of a split-second, I found a horribly persuasive understanding with my long-dead Granny McBride. Some notion of personal dignity seemed to be at stake: the old lady’s words were forming on my lips. In the same split-second, however, I recalled my son, aged ten, was watching from the back row of the audience. The sudden recollection of my mother’s forty-five-year-long blush made the choice: there was nothing else for it. I struck a pose of transcendental deafness, unfocused my eyes, and carried, if not sublimely then at least determinedly, freshly, on.
Grace, you see. It’s worth striving for.
I think my mother would have been proud.