Page 12 of Things We Never Said
Snapshot #3
110 format, colour, faded. Slightly out of focus. A woman in a pinafore, wearing oversized, lightly tinted glasses, is raising a stemmed glass and smiling broadly. Behind her can be seen a number of yellow Formica wall cabinets and a white electric cooker.
Sean’s childhood had been pretty loveless, but he had never been aware of the fact until he met Catherine’s mother.
Sean’s father was a retired RAF officer with a gammy leg, his mother a non-tactile woman whose moods were even less predictable than the British weather.
His frigid childhood had seemed entirely normal to him, as had his father’s heavy-handed discipline and his mother’s almost-constant criticism. And being sent, like his brother before him, to boarding school, had seemed no less than inevitable.
Similarly, his exposure to those to whom his father referred as ‘the working classes’ had been limited almost entirely to what could be seen on television. So he had grown up with his parents’ prejudices reinforced by occasional glimpses ofCoronation Streetand Alf Garnett. It all looked pretty sordid, to be honest.
At college, he’d met people from all over, and his perception had started to change. But what he still hadn’t imagined, until the day he went to Catherine’s house, was – when etiquette and social expectation were cast aside – how relaxed a household could feel. How welcoming. How fun. How loving.
And as he had sat feeling ‘gob-smacked’, eating chips on Wendy’s tatty sofa, he had understood for the first time ever that being born a Patrick (something his mother constantly insisted was akin to winning life’s great lottery) had its downsides as well.
Cassette #3
Hello Sean.
So here, as you can see, is one of the few remaining photos of Mum.
She’s almost certainly waiting for a batch of those McCain oven chips to be ready. They had only just been invented, as far as I recall, or perhaps we had only just discovered them, but either way, Mum was conducting her own clinical trial to see what would happen if you fed your kids nothing but oven chips and brown sauce. The answer, surprisingly, was ‘nothing out of the ordinary’. The human body is surprisingly resilient. Then again, look at me now. Could all of this perhaps be the result of all those chips way back when?
I was so ashamed about taking you to our house, because I could tell that you were posh.
You had that lovely West Country accent, but you spoke differently from anyone I knew. Back then, I would have said you ‘spoke different’, of course.
Mum used to call you Sean Leadbetter, after Margo and Jerry inThe Good Life. I don’t think you ever knew that.
So, yes, I was terrified. But you begged me to show you where I lived and as we only had that weekend, I took the risk. And amazingly, you loved it there.
It wasn’t till I got to see a photo of where your parents lived that I realised just how much of a shock our council estate must have been.
We had that old sofa plonked in the middle of the front garden and when we got there Mum was sitting on it, still in her dressing gown, smoking.
Indoors, that horrible Dennis Shelley, her boyfriend of the moment, was watching telly in his underpants.
But Mum gave you a hug and asked if you were hungry, and when you said yes, she told you to stick some chips in the oven. That was another thing you didn’t know existed: oven chips.
So we sat and ate chips and drank cans of Stella in front of the telly and then I took you upstairs. I remember you were shocked that I was allowed upstairs with a boy and I remember wondering what sort of rules posh families had to operate by, because Mum had never stopped me doing anything, really.
You laughed at my ABBA poster and I introduced you to Barney, my teddy bear. I put the radio on and we sat side by side in that tiny room – I was just gagging for you to kiss me.
Eventually, I realised that you weren’t going to do it and I worked out that was probably because of some other posh rule I didn’t know about. And so I grabbed you and snogged the face off of you – as we used to say back then. You didn’t, you’ll remember, resist.
Now, I know you probably remember all of this, but it does me good to remind myself of it. It cheers me up to record it for infinity. That’s not the word, is it? Infinity. Definitely not right. Ugh. Sometimes words just vanish and no amount of hunting can track them down. Oh, I know: prosperity. That’s what I meant. No, posterity! Record it for all posterity.
Anyway, once you’d left, Mum said, ‘He’s a bit la-di-da, isn’t he?’
I told her that you weren’t la-di-da at all.
‘Well, I hope you didn’t shag him,’ Mum said.
I told her that of course I hadn’t.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Because boys like that want a bit of rough for the weekend. But he’ll end up marrying some posh bird from London. You mark my words.’
I suppose she was telling me that I was a ‘bit of rough’, but I didn’t even think about it at the time. I just worried in case she was right.
