She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me (2 page)

If You Think That's Aggressive, Then You Really Haven't Lived

MY MOTHER FIRST TRIED
to tell me about her life when I was about ten years old. I was sitting at the table doing homework or a drawing; she was standing at the grill, cooking sausages. Every now and then the fat from the meat would catch and a flame would leap out.

She had been threatening some kind of revelation for years. “One day I will tell you the story of my life,” she said, “and you will be amazed.”

I had looked at her in amazement. The story of her life was she was born, she had me, ten years passed, end of story.

“Tell me now,” I'd said.

“I'll tell you when you're older.”

A second later, I'd considered saying, “Am I old enough now?” but the joke hadn't seemed worth it. Anything constituting a Life Story would deviate from the norm in ways that could only embarrass me.

I knew, of course, that she had come from South Africa and had left behind a large family: seven half-siblings, eight if you included a boy who'd died, ten if you counted the rumor of twins. “You should have been a twin,” said my mother whenever I did something brilliant, like open my mouth or walk across a room. “I hoped you'd be twins, with auburn hair. You could have been. Twins run in the family on both sides.” And, “My stepmother was pregnant with twins, once.” There were no twins among her siblings.

She always referred to her like this, as “my stepmother,” and unlike her siblings, for whom she provided short but vivid character sketches, and even her father, who featured in the odd story, Marjorie was a blank. As for her real mother's family, all she would say was “Strong women, strong genes,” and give me one of her looks—a cross between Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen and Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here—which shut down the possibility of further discussion.

It wasn't evident from her accent that she came from elsewhere. In fact, years later, a colleague answering my phone at work said afterward, “Your mother has the poshest voice I've ever heard.” I couldn't hear it, but I could see it written down, in the letters she drafted on the backs of old gas bills. It was there in words like “satisfactory” (great English compliment) and “peculiar” (huge insult). “Diana,” she wrote to her friend Joan in 1997, “such a pretty girl, but such a sad life.” She was imperiously English to her friends and erstwhile family in South Africa, but to me, at home, she was caustic about the English. The worst insult she could muster was “You're so English.”

I was English. I was more than English, I was from the Home Counties. I played tennis in white clothing. I went to Brownies. I didn't ride a horse—my mother thought horses an unnecessary complication—but I did everything else commensurate in those parts with being a nice girl. This was important to my mother, although she couldn't help hinting, now and then, at how tame it all was.

“Call that sun?” she said, when the English sun came out. “Call that rain?” When I got bitten by a red ant on sports day, my mother inspected the dot while I started to sniffle. “For goodness' sake. All that fuss over such a tiny little thing.” Where she came from, any ant worth its salt would kill you.

Among the crimes of the English: coldness, snobbery, boarding schools, “tradition,” the royals, hypocrisy, fat ankles, waste, and dessert, or “pudding,” as they called it, a word she thought redolent of the entire race. “The English,” she said, “are a people who cook their fruit.” It was her greatest fear that she and my dad would die in a plane crash and I would wind up in boarding school alone, eating stewed prunes and getting more English by the day.

If I'd had my wits about me I might have said, “Oh, right, because white South Africans are so beloved the world over.” But it didn't occur to me. It didn't occur to me until an absurdly late stage that we might, in fact, be separate people.

Above all, she said, the English never talked about anything. Not like us. We talked about everything. We talked a blue streak around the things we didn't talk about.

•   •   •

MY PARENTS MET
at work in the 1960s, at the law firm where my dad was doing his articles and my mum was a bookkeeper. In the late 1970s, when I was a few years old, we moved out of the city to a village an hour away. Ours was the corner house, opposite the tennis club and a five-minute walk from the station.

It was a gentle kind of place, leafy and green, with the customary features of a nice English village: a closely mown cricket pitch, lots of pubs and antiques shops, a war memorial on the high street, and, in the far distance, a line of wooded hills that on autumn days caught the sun and made the village postcard-pretty. It was emphatically not the kind of place where people had Life Stories. Life
stages,
perhaps, incremental steps through increasingly boring sets of circumstances; for example, we used to live in London and now we lived in Buckinghamshire. It was also very safe. There was no police report in our local newspaper, but if there had been, it would have been full of minor acts of vandalism and dustbins blowing over in high winds. There was the occasional parking violation when the bowls club had a tournament, and two men were arrested, once, for doing something in the public toilets the paper struggled to find words for. “What about the women and children!” thundered a Tory councilor, causing my dad to look up mildly from his newspaper at breakfast. “What has it got to do with the women and children?”

(When my mother read the newspaper, it was with a pen in one hand, so that when she came across a photo of a pompous-looking public official—if he was smiling—she could absentmindedly black out one of his teeth. Helmut Kohl, Francois Mitterrand, Ronald Reagan all lost teeth this way. “Your mother's been at the newspaper again,” my father would sigh.) She was in many ways a typical resident. She went to yoga in the village hall. She stood in line at the post office. She made friends with the lady on the deli counter in Budgen's and had a nice relationship with the lovely family that lived next door to us. Their young boys would come around to look at the fish in our pond. Every year I made her a homemade birthday card that depicted scenes from family life. She tacked them up on the kitchen wall, where they faded with each passing summer. I found them recently, seven in all, a memoir of my mother's existence in the village. There she is, wonkily drawn in her yoga gear, surrounded by me, my dad, two cats, and the fish.

At the same time, it pleased her, I think, to be at a slight angle to the culture; someone who had adopted the role of a Buckinghamshire mum but who had at her disposal various superpowers—powers she had decided, on balance, to keep under her hat. (I used to think this an attitude unique to my mother, until I moved to America and realized it is the standard expat consolation: in my case—a British person in New York—looking around and thinking, “You people have no idea about the true nature of reality when you don't know what an Eccles cake is or how to get to Watford.”)

In my mother's case, it was a question of style. She was very much against the English way of disguising one's intentions. One never knew what they were thinking, she said—or rather, one always knew what they were thinking but they never came out and said it. She loved to tell the story of how, soon after moving in, she was sanding the banisters one day when a man came to the door, canvassing for the Conservatives. “He just ASSUMED,” she raged then and for years afterwards. “He just ASSUMED I WAS TORY.” She wasn't Tory, but she wasn't consistently liberal, either. She disapproved of people having children out of wedlock. When a child molester story line surfaced on TV, she would argue for castration, execution, and various other medieval solutions to the problem, while my dad and I sat in uncomfortable silence. She was not, by and large, in favor of silence.

Even her gardening was loud. When my parents bought the house, the garden had been a denuded quarter acre that my mother set about Africanizing. She planted pampas grass and mint. She let the grass grow wild around the swing by the shed. Along the back fence, she put in fast-growing dogwoods.

“It's to hide your ugly house,” she said sweetly when our other neighbor complained. After that, whenever my mother was out weeding and found a snail, she would lob it, grenadelike, over the fence into the old lady's salad patch.

“That's very aggressive,” said my father, who is English and a lawyer. If he ever threw a snail, it would be by accident.

“Ha!” said my mother, and gave him the look: If You Think That's Aggressive, Then You Really Haven't Lived.

•   •   •

WHEN IT WORKS,
the only child–parent bond is a singular dynamic. Being an only child is a bit like being Spanish: you have your dinner late, you go to bed late, and, with all the grown-up parties you get dragged to, you wind up eating a lot of hors d'oeuvres. Your parents talk to you as if you were an adult, and when they're not talking to you, you have no one to talk to. So you listen.

By the time I was eight, I knew that olives stuffed with anchovies were not pukey but “an acquired taste.” I knew that Mr. X who lived down the road was not a blameless old codger but a “mean shit” who didn't let his wife have the heating on during the day. I knew that Tawny Owl was too scared to drive after dark and that this rendered her useless, not only as a leader within the Girl Guide movement but as a human being generally. Later, I knew which of my friends' parents had appealed against their children's twelve-plus results and with what success, and I knew, from a particularly fruitful session at the bathroom door, what my own results were before being officially told. When a classmate was off sick from school for the fourth day running, my mother and I speculated that she and her family were actually in Hawaii, in crisis talks over the marriage. We blamed the dad. “He's decidedly odd,” said my mother, “don't you think?”

My mother would never admit to being homesick for South Africa, but she was, occasionally, nostalgic for London. She would, she said, have liked me to have grown up in a more mixed environment. There was only one black person in the village when I was growing up, a man who worked in the library and who was not only black but “gay to boot.”

“Shame,” she said when we passed him in the street. She never lowered her voice when she made these assessments. “Shame,” she would say when she saw someone fat, and smile at them broadly in pity. “It must be glandular.”

“How do you know he's gay?” I asked. My mother gave me the look: Woman of the World in a Town Full of Hicks.

“It's the way he walks,” she said. “Among other things.”

•   •   •

I KNEW A FEW DETAILS
from her childhood. My mother loved to tell stories, and there were some dazzling set pieces I begged her to tell me again and again. She had grown up in a series of small towns and remote villages, “out in the bundu” of what was then Zululand, now KwaZulu-Natal, so that most of her stories involved near-deadly encounters with the wildlife and weather. There were hailstones the size of golf balls. There was lightning to strike you dead as you were crossing a field. Those snakes that weren't hanging from trees waiting to drop down her back were fighting scorpions for the deeds to the toe end of her slippers.

She told me about her auntie Johanna, cracking eggs into a bowl one day and releasing with the final egg a mass of tiny black snakes into the yellow mixture. A cobra had laid its eggs in the henhouse. She told me about her brother Mike and the practical jokes he had played on her. From the earliest age, just as I knew the rules about lying and stealing, I knew what a bad idea it was to leave a dead snake in someone's bed as a joke, because its partner might come looking for it. Some snakes, she said, mate for life.

As a consequence, if I ever went to Africa, I said, it would be on condition I could wear a balaclava, dungarees, Wellington boots, and some kind of protective headgear. I pictured myself walking down a jungle path dressed in something halfway between a beekeeper's outfit and what you might wear while welding metal.

“You couldn't,” she said. “You'd be too hot.”

“I still would, though.”

“It wouldn't be
practical.
”

We didn't go. Instead, every year or so, my dad and I watched as my mother raised the possibility and then talked herself out of it. There were the politics, she said; this was the mid-1980s, when every night on the news we watched footage of government Casspirs going into the townships. There were family politics, too. If we stayed with one, it would upset the others. If we stayed in a hotel, it would upset them all. You have no idea, she said, how a family that size operates.

Anyway, she said, if we went anywhere long-haul, she would rather go to Australia. We didn't go to Australia. Although the money was there and my dad was willing, I got the impression we didn't go because, at some level of my mother's thinking, going to Australia meant flying over Africa. It is quite an achievement, in a village in England, to feel that evasive action is being taken to avoid the southern hemisphere, but that's how it was.

Instead we went to France and Spain. We went to Cornwall at half-term. I went on school trips to Somerset and to Brownie camp in Liverpool. “I'll be glad when you're back,” said my mother, face clenched, seeing me off at the coach. I thought the scene demanded tears and began, experimentally, to sniffle. “For goodness' sake,” said my mother, relaxing into irritation. “It's enough now.”

•   •   •

AMONG HER STORIES,
there was one that made me vaguely uncomfortable. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but I see now what it was: the threat of withheld information. It came with one of her looks, the one I didn't like: a kind of sideways swipe of the eyes, like windows on a desktop hastily minimizing.