Dear Fatty (22 page)

Of course, my entire year in the States was spent longing for your visits and you did come to see me as often as you could, whenever your ship was in a port nearby, like Puerto Rico, I think, one time. On your first visit, you came to spend Christmas with me, do you remember? You arrived on 19 December and my diary reports that I woke up with ‘butterflies in my heart’.
(Well
I was still a teenager after all.) On 20 December you took me out for supper to a restaurant on West 48th Street called ‘A La Fourchette’, which I think is French for ‘don’t make any hasty decisions’, and you asked me to marry you. I was overjoyed. I wanted so much to be Mrs Smyth. Mrs Dawn Smyth, wife of David Smyth. Lovely.

We spent Christmas in snowy Ann Arbor with Uncle Mike and Auntie Pat. It was so cold that our tears froze on our faces and we could pick them off. I loved the little solitaire diamond on my left hand. I looked and looked at it. I looked at it in the mirror, I looked at it flopping off the side of the sofa in repose, I looked at it when my fingers were linked with yours. Yep, it looked right. It looked really almost … well, nearly married. We spoke to our families on the phone on Christmas Day, and told them we were engaged. They were a bit surprised but they seemed pleased for us. We spent the holiday making snow angels and kissing a lot. It was very romantic. Except for one evening when Auntie Pat read our tarot cards and told us we wouldn’t end up together. Party-pooper …

When you went back to work, I went back to school and showed off my ring to my American chums, who were utterly baffled and couldn’t work out why anyone would want to be married at 19 years old. No matter – I skipped along, continuing my American adventure, studying hard and playing hard. By this time I was included in the goings-on of an off-off-Broadway theatre company whose home was at the Church of the Heavenly Rest, close to the school. The school secretary, Molly Grose, was part of it and asked me to come along and help out. So, for the best part of a year, I was tea girl, lighting assistant, runner and
general
factotum for this company. It was not amateur, it was professional. The actors weren’t paid much, but they were good actors doing good work, serious plays and musicals alike. The hours were long but I loved being part of it and I had a proper apprenticeship, watching and learning how a play comes together, and being part of a backstage team.

Sometimes, when I was in New York, I would be overcome with powerful, aching homesickness. My lovely friend Liz was good at noticing this and would quickly jump in with suggestions of a game of squash, or a swim, to have something physical to take my mind off it. One time we went swimming at a gym I hadn’t been to before. It was so typical of New York. The journey on the street offers a viewpoint that is impressive with all the grandeur of those mighty grey imposing buildings, but what you see outside belies the veritable hive of seething activity on the inside of every building. Like a honeycomb, each gigantic building holds thousands of other, smaller cells, where masses of people are doing masses of things. They are working and playing and shagging and sleeping and typing and getting their teeth fixed and getting their psyches fixed and getting hair plugs and cooking and eating and flower arranging and reading and … and everything people do. All manner of human stuff going on inside one mammoth skyscraper. Liz and I walked into the elevator and went up to something like the 34th floor. Out we trotted into the reception of the gym. We played squash, thwacking the ball about and sweating, more than 30 floors up from the earth. Then we went swimming. The pool was built to the very edges of the building, so that, in effect, the windows formed a see-through wall on two sides of the pool. I jumped in and swam underwater
to
the edge. Here I was, underwater with my hands on the glass, looking down on Manhattan from 34 floors up in the sky. For me that was a revelation. My brain couldn’t make sense of it, couldn’t understand it in any elemental way whatsoever, but my soul utterly devoured the moment, and the sense-memory is for ever etched on my mind. My world at that point was strange and wonderful and I wanted it to stay that way – I was determined to be open to many more of these inspiring moments.

I ran out of money when I was in New York. I didn’t want to ask you for any, or my parents who really didn’t have any, so I had to come up with a plan. I decided to utilise the misguided American impression of a young Englishwoman travelling abroad. Friends of the families I stayed with often used to say that well-spoken young Englishwomen reminded them of Mary Poppins. So, I put an ad up on the staffroom noticeboard and sent word about that I would be willing to do some childcare at the weekends or babysitting in the evenings. The wording indicated that I was of the English-nanny variety by offering: ‘English nanny available for weekend childcare or babysitting.’ Not subtle. The response was amazing, and some weeks I would babysit
every
night. This was fine by me – it meant playing, watching TV, having free food, reading stories and getting paid. Just what I needed to survive beyond my meagre allowance. I looked after kids called Chandler Bigelow III, and Zorro, and Clymer, and Nancy. They were very different to English kids, more relaxed and proper little city dwellers. I earned tons of lolly and that meant I could complete my American trip by spending the last few months in LA, where I stayed with a crazy nurse on the ocean in Santa Monica.

Just before I went there, though, was graduation day in New York, which was a big deal at Spence. All the girls had to attend, looking like virgins, in big white dresses. A quick call to Auntie May resulted in a simple V-neck (not too low!) cotton frock by return of post, thank God. Some of the girls had spent thousands on theirs. I suspect mine was made from whatever was on the floor of Auntie May’s cutting table, but it did the trick and we sat for our photo, pretty maids all in a row.

At the end of that summer I returned home. I had missed my mum and dad very much and couldn’t wait to see them. They came to collect me at the airport and I was shocked by my dad’s appearance. He looked haggard and drawn. I knew he had been through the mill a bit since he’d had a nervous breakdown the year before. They were living in Saltash and I knew his business wasn’t going very well. He was also sporting a huge beard and moustache, which totally wrong-footed me. I had never seen him look so different. I’m so glad you met him, David. It was very important to me later, that you knew him and he knew you. I think my family were a bit concerned about our future together, especially my brother, who unlike me, blinded by pure love, knew that you and I were basically too incompatible. He knew me as a bit wild and he could see that you were much more strait-laced, so he worried. My dad, however, never expressed any specific doubts to me but did say that I should always follow my gut instincts and he advised me to take things slowly, which, of course, I didn’t. He liked you well enough though. I think he knew I was safe with you, which was true. I
was
safe. You would never be cruel to me or intentionally hurt me in any way. Safe isn’t
it
, though, for the long run, is it? Not for you, or me.

I remember after Dad died, when I went to college in London and lived in a cramped room in a flat in Kensal Green, you left the navy. We wanted to be together more. We couldn’t bear the separation that navy life was always going to mean. I was bereft after my dad’s death and you were incredibly comforting. Then you landed that job with Lipton’s as a new young tea-taster with great future potential for rising up through the company. A proper company man. I think the headquarters were in Chertsey or somewhere and you were living in digs out there, so at last we were close by. Then they sent you to Calcutta. Of course they did. Duh. Tea comes from India.

So I went to college and started to work out who I was, a sort of leftie hippy, and you went to work and discovered that you were a company man with right-wing tendencies. I was red and you were blue. It was doomed really. A hopeless mixture. In love and doomed.

I’VE OFTEN TOLD
you how fabulous the big beaches are in Cornwall. Not to say the little ones don’t also have their rock-pooly charms, but the big ones that stretch as far as the eye can see, like Polzeath or Watergate Bay, are awesome, with the spray hurtling off the massive crashing waves, and the sheer vastness of it all making you feel so small. I love it when I take very deep breaths till my lungs are bursting with salty, thick-as-clotted-cream air and I feel like I am half Dawn and half Cornwall. You must come and walk on the beach with me and we’ll take the dogs. The north coast is, of course, the wilder, with its strong Atlantic attack dragging along high winds and huge rolling waves for surfers. I spent quite a lot of my youth gazing out at the beautiful surfers, so distant they looked like toys tossed about in the swell. Even up close though, when they finally strode back up the beach, surfers are immensely attractive. Even the ugliest of fellows is quite dreamy when a summer of sun and salt have scrubbed him up.

Anyway, anyway, anyway, a friend of mine, a young surfer in Newlyn, told me that he had an unfortunate incident last summer, when his cousin from Milton Keynes came to visit. The cousin hadn’t been out in the sun at all and certainly not on the beach, so he was as white as a milk bottle and rather shy and unconfident in his brand new Speedo swimming trunks. My friend told him that he needed to strut up and down the beach to
attract
the attentions of young ladies, and that it would really help if he were to put a potato in his Speedos, that this would undoubtedly rouse their interest. The cousin thought this was a
bit
strange. I think I would have concurred with that: I’ve never heard of that technique before. It must be a modern thing, among the youth. Anyway, anyway, anyway, the cousin
did
want to attract young ladies so he apparently slipped a potato, a King Edward I think, not a new one, that would be silly, into his Speedos and off he went to the beach. It was a little bit cumbersome, as I’m sure you can imagine, but eventually he got the hang of it, and started parading up and down for all the pretty ladies to see. However, not one of them seemed at all interested and when the cousin returned to my friend, he said, ‘Sorry, mate, but this potato down the Speedos idea isn’t working, the girls aren’t remotely interested, in fact they seem repulsed.’ To which my friend was forced to retort, ‘I think you’ll find it will work much better, mate, if you put the potato down the FRONT of your Speedos.’ Can you believe that?

WHEN I WAS
about eight, I bought you a present from an antique shop. It was a brass wall plaque. The man in the shop said it was original (yes, originally someone else’s). But anyway, it had a picture of an ancient granny in a rocking chair doing her knitting, and below that was a verse I still remember:

Who is the one who ne’er finds fault,

Who never seeks to blame?

To whom you go when troubles come,

Whose love remains the same?

– Your mother.

How ridiculously sentimental. How archaic and cheesy. How revolting. How true.

Something I’ve always admired about you, Mum, is your ferocious independence. Only recently have you allowed any of us to properly do things for you. Perhaps retirement has given you permission to be more vulnerable? I don’t know, but I certainly do remember all the remarkable things you have managed to pull off on your own. I remember once returning home to Stoke in Plymouth to find a giant wardrobe in a different room. How had you moved it alone? Impossible. I think you’ve always regarded difficult and seemingly insurmountable problems as challenges, daring you to solve them. And you usually do, somehow.

One day, about 12 or so years ago, you were due to arrive at our house in Berkshire because you had signed up to start a reflexology course you’d booked and paid for in London the next morning. When you arrived, I was surprised to see there were no side windows in your car. Someone had vandalised it the night before, and you hadn’t had an opportunity to get the windows replaced before your extremely windy journey up to us, on the motorway. You said that you had cleared the seat of shards of glass as best you could and sat on a newspaper for extra safety for the duration of the drive, intending to get the windows replaced when you reached ours.

Once you’d had a cuppa and a chance to thaw out, you voiced a concern to me, and I could tell by the serious tone of voice that what you were about to say was difficult for you. I soon found out why. You told me you thought a splinter of glass might have, somehow, found its way into your fanny. You said you felt pain there, that you’d tried to find it, but you couldn’t see well enough to know how serious it was. You were worried, that if, indeed, it
was
serious, we ought to call the doc. If not, you could just apply some antiseptic cream and be done with it. You wanted to make it to your course first thing in the morning and you didn’t want any stupid shard of glass up your wazoo to prevent you going … stuff and nonsense … So, you explained, quite matter-of-factly, ‘I’m sorry, Moo, to have to ask you, you are the only one I
can
ask, but could you please have a quick peek and see if it’s anything to worry about? C’mon, let’s get it over with. No fussing. We’re all animals after all … come on.’ Throughout this whole exchange I fixed a wide, understanding smile on my face so as to appear sympathetic to your plight. Indeed, I genuinely
was
sympathetic, right up to the moment I realised what you were asking me. I kept smiling compassionately though, because I knew how very embarrassed you were, and I didn’t want to embarrass you further by showing my true feelings and screaming out loud in shuddering horror. The walk upstairs to the bathroom behind you took at least five years. You were quite spry, but I was slowly climbing the steps to the guillotine, smiling ever more weakly all the while. Once in the bathroom with the door safely locked, you whipped down your tights and pants in a trice, and quick as a flash, which it actually
was
, chattering all the time, as normally as a normal chatty thing, you bent over. What took place next was an exercise in the utmost trust, willing, intimacy, fear and pure love. I didn’t in a million years imagine that I would
ever
be required to furtle around in my own mother’s ladygarden and I can’t say that I enjoyed it, Mum, but d’you know what? – to my surprise I didn’t mind it either. There was something very civilised about it, about realising that all women are the same, really, gynaecologically. I thought I might be queasy or squeamish (y’know, a bit like you’re feeling right now), but NO. I found it comforting that I could be of use in such a practical way. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t recommend it as a hobby, but it dawned on me that, after all, I’d been there before, hadn’t I? – and it was all strangely familiar and perfunctory. Easy, really. We found the splinter, didn’t we? Removed it, dabbed on the cream and now you are a fully qualified reflexologist. Done and dusted.