Notes from a Foreign Country

'The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.' So said L.P. Hartley in The Go-Between, and how right he was! I'm currently mining the past – my past, and my mother's – for nuggets of authenticity to use in 'The Cat In The Bag'. As I said in my last blog, this is another 'alternative perspective' novella, adding a fourth narrative to The Summer House: A Trilogy by Alice Thomas Ellis. The original does not reference any specific date but seems to me to be set in the 1950s. I was born towards the end of that decade, and since the early 1960s were much the same (the Sixties didn't begin to 'swing' until around halfway through) I decided I could legitimately incorporate some of my earliest experiences into the narrative.

I have memories going back to the age of eighteen months, so lots to draw on – I can remember Bissell cleaners, full calf-length summer skirts (to cling to!), Housewives' Choice and Listen With Mother on the radio, broken biscuits bought cheap at the market, whistling kettles, paraffin heaters, Start-rite shoes, and the taste of whisky in sugared water (routinely given to babies and toddlers who wouldn't sleep). Less fondly, I remember blazing rows, a window patched with brown paper where my father's fist had smashed it, my mother cutting off all her long hair, my own screaming tantrums and obsessive handwashing, and most perniciously of all, the heady mixture of power and guilt that arose from knowing myself to be a bone of contention between my parents. As an adult, I came to understand these distressing scenarios from my mother's perspective: unmarried, bravely living with a man whose wife refused to divorce him and to whom she'd just presented an unwanted baby, she was trapped between a rock and a hard place. It was only thanks to the support of her family that she was able to keep going.

All this is fertile soil in which to plant the story of my character, Cynthia - second wife of a serial adulterer and stepmother to Margaret, the bride-to-be whose impending nuptials form the backdrop to the three 'Summerhouse' narratives. In Alice Thomas Ellis' stories, Cynthia is universally despised. Dismissed by her predecessor Monica (Margaret's mother) as 'a nice little thing' but 'someone you could pour into a jug', she's already been pigeon-holed by Monica's glamorous friend Lili as 'colourless, dowdy, poor and tedious.' When she finally actually meets Cynthia, Lili finds her 'a dreadful housewife ... skinny and hairy and gummy ... a good wash wouldn't do her any harm'. Mother to Jennifer and Christopher, who look, according to their half-sister 'as though they already knew that life was no laughing matter', Cynthia is, in her stepdaughter's eyes, 'a desperately tiresome female' to whom she 'always felt constrained to be pleasant ... merely because she was so uninspiring' - though tellingly, she admits that her mother 'had insisted when my father left that she should keep the house, and all its contents, and continue to receive a major part of his income ... my stepmother and her children could clearly have benefitted from some of it.'

What all this basically boils down to is that Cynthia is poor, unsophisticated and arguably working class – hopelessly out of her depth amongst a cast of confident, well-heeled upper middle class women. This too is something I can relate to. My father was also paying alimony to his first family, and I can remember my mother tearfully re-tracing her steps from East Dulwich to Peckham with myself and my sister in tow, in search of a dropped ten shilling note that constituted half the week's budget. I also remember finding visits to my father's middle-class relatives overwhelming, their parquet-floored houses enormous and their accents unintelligible!

So there's a lot from both my own story and my mother's that I can use to flesh out Cynthia and her children, and create a fresh perspective on the run-up to Margaret's wedding. Of course there are significant differences, I can't run all the way with it - little Jennifer is not me, Cynthia is not my mother, and her husband Derek is not, I must emphasise, my father (if you've read 'The Summerhouse Trilogy', you'll know why I stress this); but my trips down memory lane have given me a handle on their story and enabled me to immerse myself in it with relative ease. Progress is slow but steady, and most importantly, enjoyable!