Personal History

The Past Conditional

What Mother would have wanted.

December 25, 2006

I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him. That’s what I say when the question is put. I once asked my brother, who has taught philosophy at Oxford, Geneva, and the Sorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my own. He replied with a single word: “Soppy.”

The person to begin with is my maternal grandmother, Nellie Louisa Scoltock, née Machin, who was a schoolteacher in Shropshire until she married my grandfather Bert Scoltock. Not Bertram, not Albert, just Bert: so christened, so called, so buried. He was a headmaster with a certain mechanical dash to him: a motorcycle-and-sidecar man, then the owner of a Lanchester, then, in retirement, the driver of a rather pompously sportif Triumph Roadster, with a three-person bench seat in front and two bucket seats when the top was down. By the time I knew my grandparents, they had retired and come south to be near their daughter. My grandmother went to the Women’s Institute: she pickled and bottled; she plucked and roasted the chickens and geese my grandfather raised. She was petite, outwardly unopinionated, with the thickened knuckles of old age; she needed soap to get her wedding ring off. Their wardrobe was full of home-knitted cardigans, Grandpa’s tending to feature more masculine cable-stitch. They were of that generation advised by dentists to have all their teeth out in one go. This was a normal rite of passage then: from being rickety-gnashered to fully porcelained in one leap, to all that buccal sliding and clacking, to social embarrassment and the foaming glass on the bedside table.

The change from teeth to dentures struck my brother and me as both grave and ribald. But my grandmother’s life had contained another enormous change, never alluded to in her presence. Nellie Louisa Machin had been brought up a Methodist. (The Scoltocks were Church of England.) At some point in her young adulthood, my grandmother had lost her faith and, in the smooth narration of family lore, found another: Socialism. I have no idea how strong or weak her religious faith had been, or what her family’s politics were; all I know is that she once stood for the local council as a Socialist and was defeated. By the time I knew her, in the nineteen-fifties, she had long since progressed to being a Communist. She must have been one of the few old-age pensioners in suburban Buckinghamshire who took the Daily Worker and—so my brother and I insisted to each other—fiddled the housekeeping money to send donations to the newspaper’s Fighting Fund.

In the late fifties, the Sino-Soviet Schism took place, and Communists were obliged to choose between Moscow and Peking. For most of the European faithful, this was not a difficult decision; nor was it for the Daily Worker, which received money, as well as directives, from Moscow. My grandmother, who had never been abroad in her life, who lived in genteel bungalowdom, decided for undisclosed reasons to throw in her lot with the Chinese. I welcomed her decision with self-interested enthusiasm: her newspaper was now supplemented by a monthly prayer book called China Reconstructs, posted directly from the distant continent, and she saved me the stamps from the biscuity envelopes. These stamps tended to celebrate industrial achievement—bridges and hydroelectric dams being much in evidence—or show various breeds of peaceful dove in mid-flight.

My brother did not compete for such offerings, because some years previously there had been a Stamp-Collecting Schism in our home. He had decided to specialize in the British Empire. I, to assert my difference, had announced that I would therefore specialize in a category that I named, with what seemed like logic to me, Rest of the World. The category was defined solely in terms of what my brother didn’t collect. I can no longer remember if this move was aggressive, defensive, or merely pragmatic. All I know is that it led to some occasionally baffling exchanges in the school stamp club, among philatelists only recently out of short trousers: “So, Barnesy, what do you collect?” “Rest of the World.”

My grandfather was a Brylcreem man, and the antimacassar on his Parker Knoll armchair—a high-backed number with wings for him to snooze against—was not merely decorative. His hair had whitened sooner than my grandmother’s; he had a clipped military mustache, a metal-stemmed pipe, and a tobacco pouch that distended his cardigan pocket. He also wore a chunky hearing aid, another aspect of the adult world—or, rather, the world on the farther side of adulthood—which my brother and I liked to mock. “Beg pardon?” we would shout satirically at each other, cupping our hands to our ears. Both of us used to wait and hope for the prized moment when my grandmother’s stomach would rumble loudly enough for Grandpa to be roused from his deafness with the inquiry “Telephone, Ma?” Then they would both go back to their newspapers. Grandpa, in his male armchair, his deaf-aid occasionally whistling, his pipe making a hubble-bubble noise as he sucked on it, would shake his head over the Daily Express, which described to him a world where truth and justice were constantly imperilled by the Communist Threat. In a softer, female armchair—in the red corner—Grandma would tut-tut away over her Daily Worker, which described to her a world where truth and justice, in their updated versions, were constantly imperilled by Capitalism and Imperialism.

Grandpa, by this time, had reduced his religious observance to watching “Songs of Praise” on television. He gardened; he grew his own tobacco and dried it in the garage loft, where he also stored dahlia tubers and old copies of the Daily Express, bound with hairy string. He favored my brother, taught him how to sharpen a chisel, and left him his chest of carpentry tools. I can’t remember him teaching (or leaving) me anything, though I was once allowed to watch while he killed a chicken in his garden shed. He took the bird under his arm, stroked it into calmness, then laid its neck on some kind of wringing machine screwed to the wall, and brought the handle down, while holding the bird’s body ever more tightly to control its final convulsions.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/12/25/061225fa_fact

NewYorker.com

Home

Back

Firstpaper