The Round Earth's Imagined Corners - 2

My mother didn't go to my brother's funeral, but nor had she gone to my father's. Nowadays we would say that she was in denial, and that may well have been the case but I prefer to see her absences as an expression of anger. There were no pictures of my father or later on of my brother about the house. Once dead, they might never have existed and only on very rare occasions did my mother refer to my father and then in a manner that was hardly tender. Firstly, she could have had anyone she wanted but had finally relented and married him; and secondly, he had left her with only just enough to live on - this was her bitterest complaint. What she never said - and this was very much to her credit -was that he had left her with me. Even so, my childhood was haunted by the shadowy presence of what my mother called ' the trustees' and she used them as a veiled threat. Sometimes when we clashed she would say that she was going to tell the trustees and maybe they would send me away to a borstal. I imagined a roomful of stern men dressed in black issuing a unanimous condemnation of my behaviour. While I was frightened by her threat I was also excited by the prospect and so when finally I was sent away to board at a small private school I was the only child to arrive there dry eyed.

Now I bear witness to all this in a more detached way and I feel a certain compassion for my mother and her generation. She was born in 1900 and so must have been deeply affected by the First World War, yet she never spoke about it, never referred to it. Then came the Second War and she never spoke about that either. Yet I have a vivid memory of a particular Sundy morning. Sunlight fills our living room and there's a bright coal fire in the grate - offstage, a smell of roasted meat and cabbage. The radio is switched on and I am playing with my soldiers behind the sofa. A commentator is talking in a hushed whisper and then, quite suddenly, a gun begins to fire. Boom - Boom - Boom and then my parents slowly enter the room and take up their places by the mantlepiece. They don't see me - they're so wrapped up in each other. They look very very sad. Then the bugle starts to intone its serpentine melody of grief. What they hide every day now lies open for me to see and I feel afraid.