The half-knitted angora bolero
When I was a little girl, my mother had the most beautiful
waist-length hair. Perhaps every small girl thinks her
mother beautiful, but mine truly was, with her Spanish
colouring (courtesy of Sephardic Jewish ancestry) laughing
face, slender figure and buck teeth, which gave a winsome
imperfection to her smile. I even liked the lipstick on her
teeth which later, as a teenager, I found embarrassing or
even disgusting. Her perfume, her small waist, her stocking
seams, her merry femininity were all entrancing to me -- as
they surely were to my father. In our small flat with our
cheerful overweight cocker spaniel my mother ruled the
roost. Her nonsense rhymes, extravagant serial stories,
peculiar but tasty meals (smoked haddock in milk, bananas
and sultanas in custard) and cavalier attitude to
housework, which largely involved dancing madly around with
duster in hand while listening to “Music While You Work” in
the hour before Mrs Dale’s
Diary on the Home
Programme, were fun.
After
my third birthday, things began to change for the worse.
And not only because a horrid boy from the flats lost my
special furry tiger in the grass. We were playing musical
chairs, a spiteful game with built-in misery. My Nanna had
died, bequeathing us not only Desmond the budgerigar but
also nowhere to go for Sunday lunch. Then Aunty Kathleen
died from breast cancer. My father, being a doctor, had
been assigned the job of telling her that she would never
see her children grow up. Even though she hadn’t seen
Kathleen much for years, my mother felt lost without these
two dominant female forces. My father meanwhile responded
in time-honoured male fashion and my mother fell pregnant.
It was a terrible pregnancy with nausea and vomiting
throughout and massive depression. While I was sent off to
my Aunty Barbara, Mum was sent off to a Convalescent Home
(or loony bin). My dad went house-hunting.
The
house he bought was a semi-detached four bedroom Edwardian
villa in Belsize Park, the kind of house he felt fitting
for an aspiring doctor from an affluent German background.
To my mother it was the salt mines of Siberia. She begged,
she pleaded, for a smaller, modern house, nearer the school
so that there wouldn’t have to be a rush in the morning. No
good. My father’s mind was made up.
He would buy
the house, which he felt was a bargain; and … he liked it
to be “in ordnung”, or clean and tidy. The amount of work
that such a house represented to a captive housewife in the
1950s was phenomenal. Books have been written about it,
stressing the isolation, the dreariness, the exhaustion.
The house was a prison, exacting menial labour from its
denizens.
From time to
time my father would go on a domestic spending spree. Light
fittings were a big favourite, but fancy furniture, kitchen
gadgets or carpets might make their way home from John
Lewis. Then they would have to be kept nice, a torment to
my mother.
It
is almost impossible to convey how much she hated
housework. Suffice to say that in the four decades from
when my father died to when she became seriously ill, no
one ever scrubbed the tiled walls or floor of the kitchen.
It was hard to
find cleaning ladies. Ours was Irish and a bully. She drank
tea (“What’s this? Gnats’ piss?”) and complained about how
untidy everything was. My mother only found the courage to
sack her when she broke a treasured ornament. Appliances
were not much cop, either. An inordinate quantity of dust
collected on shelves and window ledges. Where did it all
come from? In the face of the relentless march of small
particles of dust; Mum took evasive action: don’t shake the
curtains, they might release dust clouds; don’t poke under
the beds, you’ll only find dust balls. The day Dad boarded
up both downstairs fireplaces was a happy one for Mum: no
more soot!
Being
so averse to housework instilled shame and deepened
isolation. Already shy, Mum was not keen to ask other,
critically-eyed wives back to ours. She felt it was not
quite right but it was beyond her to fix it. Children were
ok, she got on well with them, little knowing how critical
some of the little madams were. But my father, who was
gregarious and hospitable, insisted on bringing guests home
for supper, putting up foreign connections and all kinds of
relatives on the couch and “showing them London”. There was
one meal that Mum felt confident about making, featuring
salad and hard-boiled eggs followed by roast lamb and a
pudding (the only fun part as far as she was concerned) but
after that she was running on an empty tank. Thereafter
guests would have to make do with toast and scrambled eggs
like the rest of us until inspiration struck for another
meal.
We
took this all for granted. However, when I was four, I made
a request. Unlike my third birthday, I didn’t have a party
that year. My sister had been born a week before. Nor did
we go away, as we had for my second. Hastings,
the ballroom of a hotel, white curtains blowing sunshine in
the sea breeze; a brass band plays Happy Birthday while the
management (in white gloves) leads a confused little girl
in a frothy skirt round the tables to polite
applause. Nothing
happened, as it seemed to me, to celebrate this important
day for me except them asking me for a good name for the
small sister. “Saucepan would be a nice name,” I ventured.
They called her Angela Daphne. So I asked. “Can I have an
angora bolero like the other girls?”
Fluffy
white angora boleros were all the rage. I wanted one, to be
like the others. I was fully aware, since Mum demonstrated
it frequently, how slow progress can be knitting such fine
yarn. Equally, the speed of progress is dictated by
application. Within two years, Mum pointed out that the
half-knitted bolero (to be accurate, the back and one half
of the front, no sleeves) would not fit me even if
completed. Daddy suggested it be given to Angela instead.
Not the response she was hoping for, but she agreed. Two
years later, the bolero was no further forward and Mum was
developing a serious detective novel habit that took
precedence over most other activities. Fifty years after
its inception, we opened the knitting bag and there it
still was, not even grubby. Ridiculously small and
unfinished, but the stitches still held in good tension.
“You could
finish it,” suggested Angi, mischievously.
I looked at her.
“Maybe not,” she said hastily.
I had never really forgiven my mum for not finishing the
angora bolero and not making me like the other girls. It
was surely time to lay it to rest, along with the long
disused knitting needles and old skeins of wool, in a
decent black bin bag.
My
Aunty Barbara