During all the years she did this, I never heard her complain once. In fact she only ever laughed about the crazy episodes her and her colleagues came across while the rest of us were in the land of nod. Like the Christmas Eve that Mr Jolly died whilst on the loo: she thought this was hilarious and seeing as it was she and her pals who had to get his trousers back up around his bottom and hump him back to his bed, they felt a little laughter was the least they were allowed.
After Dad passed away Mum was forced to take on the one remaining role she’d been spared thus far.
Never the greatest at maths; my mum now had to handle the family accounts.
I remember distinctly her sitting us down and telling us the score. She told us she’d sold Dad’s car for eighty pounds and that was it.
‘That was what?’ we wondered.
‘That was it,’ she repeated, ‘that’s what we, as a family, are now worth.’
Our house was rented from the council and we didn’t own anything else. Mum had resisting selling Dad’s car before he died as a mark of respect and so the neighbours wouldn’t talk, but now he was gone, so was the Vauxhall.
‘OK, fine,’ we thought nonchalantly. We didn’t really understand what a big deal it was to have so little money and as far as we were concerned things had always been alright anyway. Until Dad became bedridden we’d always had days out and a week away in the summer and nice Christmas presents and sweets at the weekend.
My mum went back to work immediately, although probably as a magician rather than a nurse, as a few years later we had a family bank account with some proper ‘rainy day’ money in it, added to which somehow she’d managed to buy our house! Alright, it was only a couple of thousand pounds, but nevertheless.
Maybe there was something Dad hadn’t been telling us. Mum was a fox with the finances.
*I asked my mum for this recipe on countless occasions for the book. She kept fobbing me off for weeks until I informed her the deadline was imminent and it was now or never, at which point she merely replied: ‘Time and patience!’
10 Little and Large (I don’t care, I loved them)
9 Abbott and Costello (Saturday mornings, there was little else on television)
8 Bodie and Doyle (the kings of cool)
7 Pixie and Dixie (left-field, and nowhere near as predictable as Tom & Jerry)
6 Ernie and Bert (I wanted to be Ernie but fear I will end up becoming Bert)
5 Morecambe and Wise (of course)
4 Zig and Zag (…more later)
3 Lennon and McCartney (they wrote the only songs I really know)
2 Tom and Max (my cousins, both international rugby players and top boys all round)
1 Mum and Dad (a loving but lethal combination)
Dad never once hit me—he didn’t have to, I was scared enough of him as it was, not all the time, just when he wanted me to be. Is that what good parenting is all about? Scaring your kids half to death at precisely the right point for precisely the right amount of time—selective scaremongering at will, if you like? Is this how parents get their kids to behave? With the threat, tacit or otherwise, of physical violence? It definitely worked in our house.
In Dad’s case the simple raising of his voice or the odd glare in my direction was enough to instil the fear of God into me—I don’t know what I feared, I just did. I wasn’t scared of my mum at all but I didn’t have to be, she had figured out the genius and infallible Mum and Dad combo threat. How about this…
Mum (If I had done something wrong sometime in the afternoon):
‘You mark my words (another one of those phrases I’ve never really understood) your father is going to want to hear about this when he gets home.’
My goodness me, those words still send shivers down my spine even today. The Mum and Dad dreaded combo—just the threat of the man who never hit me was enough to make me conform.
I remember waiting and listening when Dad arrived home after such an episode to see if Mum would carry out her threat and tell him. More often than not it looked like she hadn’t, as the evening would continue as normal, first around the dinner table and then another relatively uneventful family night around the telly. With each passing minute I would become slightly more relaxed about the fact that I was probably in the clear. The thing was, though, I never knew for sure, not even the next day, whether I was definitely off the hook or not. This was the master stroke.
Had Mum told Dad? Had Mum told Dad and Dad had decided to let it go? Had Mum told Dad so he knew what had happened and then Dad told Mum that he would pretend he didn’t know what had happened; making her look more compassionate in the process?
Whatever the scenario, it worked like a dream. I remember Mum would often sit there for the rest of the night and every time I glanced her way she would give me one of those motherly knowing looks, the count-yourselflucky look. She would then also go on to benefit from several days of me loving her even more for not grassing me up to the big guy.
Our dinner, or tea as we referred to it, was often prefixed with the phrase, ‘Your tea’s on the table!’
And it would be, literally. We would join the dinner table at the last possible minute where we would remain for not a second longer than it took to wolf our food down. We were not a family who sat and chatted, at least not over tea, not much over anything to be honest. My poor mum would make a proper full-on meal every night and we would all reward her by sitting down for no more than seven or eight minutes before leaving her as quickly as we’d arrived with the ingratitude of a huge heap of dirty plates and pans to wash up. No wonder she’s never been that impressed when I cook her a meal!
I don’t know when Mum and Dad did their chatting—if they ever chatted at all. I’m guessing they did, but maybe not—my sister and I were pretty much around all day, every day, and I can never remember them having any private time whatsoever to speak of. I never heard them argue, that’s for sure—not the once. Maybe there wasn’t that much to discuss or argue about. We were a simple family unit with simple family needs. Maybe they really were the happiest couple in the world or maybe Dad did have a secret life and thought the less he said about anything the better.
When it came to ‘S-E-X’, for example, the mere suggestion of any of our family talking to each other about such a subject would have caused us all to flee the house screaming. Most families that I knew were the same.
All of my friends and I, without exception, had absolutely no formal training in the science or art of anything to do with what goes on between a boy and a girl down below from any of our parents. Now, I really loved Mum and Dad, but come on guys, you have to tell your kids about the thrills, the spills and ultimately the pills that surround the desires of the flesh.
I didn’t get the information from my parents, I didn’t get it from my elder sister or brother and I didn’t get even get it from school—well,