Read Online Untold Stories by Alan Bennett - Free Book Online Page B

sausages-on-sticks, food that nowadays would come under the generic term of nibbles. Now sausages were not unknown in our house: my father had been a butcher after all, we took them in our stride. But a sausage had only to be hoisted onto a stick to become for my mother an emblem of impossible sophistication.
    With these notions it’s hardly surprising they never made the social round or lived the kind of model life my mother used to read about in magazines. They put it down, as they did most of their imagined shortcomings, to their not having been educated, education to them a passport to everything they lacked: self-confidence, social ease and above all the ability to be like other people. Every family has a secret and the secret is that it’s not like other families. My mother imagined that every family in the kingdom except us sat down together to a cooked breakfast, that when the man of the house had gone off to work and the children to school there was an ordered programme of washing, cleaning, baking and other housewifely tasks,interspersed with coffee mornings and (higher up the social scale) cocktail parties. What my parents never really understood was that most families just rubbed along anyhow.
    A kind of yearning underlay both their lives. Before they moved to the village, my father’s dream was of a smallholding (always referred to as such). He saw himself keeping hens, a goat, and growing his own potatoes; an idyll of self-sufficiency.
    I was in Holland not long ago, where along every railway line and on any spare bit of urban land were hundreds of neat plots, which were not allotments so much as enclosed gardens, each with a hut, a pavilion almost, outside which the largely elderly owners were sunbathing (some of them virtually naked). Dad would never have gone in for that, but I think, though less cheek by jowl, this was just what he meant by a smallholding. It was a dream, of course, of a generation older than his, a vision of the soldiers who survived the First World War, with Surrey, Essex and Kent full of rundown chicken farms, the sad relics of those days.
    Dad had no social ambitions, such aspirations as he did have confined to playing his violin better. He read a good deal, though there was never a bookshelf in the living room and all the books in the house were kept in my room, Mam’s view being that books not so much furnished a room as untidied it. What books they had of their own were kept in the sideboard, most of them even at this late stage in their lives to do with self-improvement: How to Improve Your Memory Power, In Tune with the Infinite, Relax Your Way to Health! After Dad died my brother and I went to collect his belongings from the hospital – his bus pass, a few toffees he’d had in his pocket, and in his wallet a cutting from a newspaper: ‘Cure Bronchitis in a Week! Deep Breathing the Only Answer’.
    â€˜We’re neither of us anything in the mixing line. We were when we were first married, but you lose the knack.’
    â€˜Anyway, I don’t see what God has to do with mixing. Too much God and it puts the tin hat on it.’
    This is an exchange from Say Something Happened , a TV play of mineabout an oldish couple visited by a young social worker who is worried by their isolation. It never got to the social worker stage with Mam and Dad, but certainly they kept to themselves more and more as they got older and as Mam’s depressions became more frequent. Besides, everything was social. They stopped going to church because all too often they got roped in after the service to take part in a discussion group.
    â€˜It was a talk on the Third World,’ Dad wrote to me. ‘Well, your Mam and me don’t even know where the Third World is. Next week it’s Buddhism. We’re going to give it a miss.’
    Small talk, Buddhism, sausages-on-sticks, like the second name he did not want Gordon to have, they were for other people, not