Class conscious - Andrew Martin recalls his mother's permed hair
Published 04 April 2005
Mother was a creature of the Fifties, with permed hair and a skirt guard on her bike
I don't know much about my mother. She died when I was ten years old (I think), which would make the year 1972. Class-wise, I suppose she was like my father, namely upper working or lower middle. She drove the family Morris Minor long before my father could; she liked Jim Reeves, the Seekers and a piece of music called "The Gay Gordons", which was possibly a Scottish country dance . . . Or could the Gay Gordons have been a group? It seems a strange thought now, but it would have been perfectly possible in the far-distant days of my mother.
She never worked during my lifetime, but may once have been a typist. She was certainly the only one in the family who could work the large Imperial typewriter kept under a chequered cover in the living room. She was quiet, and had a strong sense of propriety. I have a memory of her watching Mick Jagger on television and being bemused. She was a creature of the Fifties, with a skirt guard on her bicycle, permed hair and headscarves. She hardly ever told me off, but when she did reprimand me, it was for being "vulgar" in some way.
Once, when I was being bullied by some lads at school she said, "Just bash 'em," and it was amazing to hear this exhortation to violence from her lips. She always made tea in the correct, slow way: warming the pot and using the strainer as she poured, and it would come out the perfect strength. So when she died, one of my first thoughts was: now I'm always going to have to drink Dad's tea, and it's too strong.
When I won a place at Oxford University, I oversaw a letter somebody had sent to my father. "Wouldn't his mother have been proud," the correspondent had written. Would she? I suppose so, but she died before the question of what I might become or turn out like ever arose. I lived with her entirely in the present tense. She never attempted to steer me in any particular direction, and that first fork in the social road, the Eleven-Plus, seemed long away. This is why I now choose not to know too much about her. I don't want my dad to reveal suddenly: "She was hoping against hope that you'd go into medicine" or "She used to worry that you were too clever for your own good/dim/ thin/fat/timid/ big-headed/swotty/lazy."
The middle-class mothers of today, by contrast, live in the future with their children. It is as if, uncertain of their role, not knowing whether they ought to be at home or working, they give up on the complexities of the present and try to perfect the future. Let their sons and daughters address the question of marital power balance and domestic management. Meanwhile, they will be made beautiful, glamorous and academically brilliant, and be encouraged to enjoy to the full extra-curricular activities such as might one day lead to great wealth, or at least a scholarship to a private school. There will also be a series of litmus tests to check for genius, because a terrible scenario of the following kind dominates the middle-class mother's life:
Aged 29, her strapping son, bumbling along in a middling sort of office job, sends down an unreturnable 150mph serve in the opening game of a friendly tennis doubles. In the awed silence that follows, one of the other players asks: "Have you taken lessons at tennis?" "Oh no," replies the strapping lad, "games were always seen as a bit of a joke in our family."
Trying to mould certain children can be like attempting all those famously impossible things: shovelling smoke, knitting fog. And then there is always the risk that even the apparently pliable ones will suddenly snap and end up running vegetarian cafes in small coastal towns. It's a difficult, dangerous, often thankless task, and panic, fear and despair are never far away. But one virtuous quality sustains the whole enterprise: a modest optimism; an assumption that there actually will be a future.
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