The Monster
My grandparents’ house was a 1920’s semi with an impressive, curved bay window at the front, stained glass in the door and a small kitchen at the back of the house, added on as an afterthought, as if cooking and feeding a family weren’t the hugely involving occupation that it actually was. It seemed a dark house to me and I was always grateful that when I was inside it there were lots of people crammed in to make a noise. I felt that it would have been a desolate space when it was empty, somewhere I might’ve held my breath and trod very carefully. We were not so close to my father’s family because my father was not close to anyone and only maintained relationships due to the work that my mother put in, hosting Sunday lunches and Christmases for his four siblings and his five children, two of which were hers. In addition to my mother’s efforts there would be a bi-annual tea at my grandparents’ house. By the time I, and then my sister, came along, my father’s second family, my grandparents were elderly. Or rather, my grandmother, some sixteen years older than her husband, my father’s step-father, was elderly. She seemed to find movement difficult, or an inconvenience, so the work of hosting fell to my grandad. He was more than up to the task.
The food was always the same, plentiful and traditional. These teas were when I got to eat two things that I did not get to eat on any other occasions that I can remember. Firstly, pickled onions. A pickled onion with cheese is one of life’s greatest pleasures. To a child raised on a bland palette, the spicy heat of the onion cutting through the creamy mustiness of the cheddar made my eyes water. My father would always say how much he liked pickled onions as he and I made a beeline for them as soon as tea was served. But for some reason they never found their way into our own home. The second treat was a sherry trifle. Trifle has all the elements of any great pudding, that is to say, cream, custard, sponge and fruit, with the added indulgence of alcohol. Why we do not eat trifle so much as a nation, I cannot understand. I was a greedy child and I am a greedy adult. I think because I was raised by my mother who is a born puritan, I took any opportunity as a child to fill my boots. The temptation that trifle presented was why it never made an appearance on our kitchen table. Anything with that much cream would have been considered downright sinful by my mother who worshipped at the alter of Rosemary Conley and aimed to cut every type of fat out of her own diet and that of her household. Small amounts of sugar were allowed as a treat. A few squares of chocolate on Friday, sometimes even milk chocolate! Otherwise, indulgence was restricted to Rich Tea biscuits which my mother bought religiously because ‘nobody likes them very much, so they will last’. I think of my mother saying this with great conviction and I think that nothing sums up her character more than her attitude towards biscuits – it is advisable not to have what you really want or what you really enjoy because you might lose your mind. Instead, there was safety and therefore comfort, in the bland snap of a Rich Tea biscuit. Because yes, sometimes, she would snap them in half so as to pace her already measured pleasure. Nothing divides our characters more than this attitude to pleasure. Whether I am as I am as an act of rebellion is hard to say but it certainly explains the residual guilt I often feel after any form of pleasure. If the world was ending soon, I’d be shovelling huge, dense mouthfuls of trifle in my mouth, delirious with the thought that I’d die before the guilt set in.
Despite my gluttony, these family teas exist in my memory as quite glamourous affairs. Indeed, there is undoubtable glamour in trifle; not a beige, steaming pile to be obliterated by gloopy custard, as we traditionally know the English pudding but an exquisite feast of blood red fruit suspended in shiny jelly, layered elegantly and aesthetically with sponge, cold, set custard and then pillowy, velvety whipped cream on top, perhaps with a scattering of flaked almonds for the truly sophisticated consumer. All served in a trifle dish which, still today, I consider as a particularly curvaceous and beautiful piece. I keep the sherry trifle alive but my own children are less enamoured, seeming not to understand a pudding if it does not consist of chocolate in some form. But I’ve said too much about trifle because the food was only part of the experience of these gatherings. They were a chance to see relatives who I did not know well, in their natural habitat. My father had two brothers and two sisters, all of whom were quite different from him. For a start, my uncles and one aunt smoked cigarettes as if they were their life source. My father has always been strongly risk-averse and could never inhale smoke into his lungs, or do anything at all that was bad for his physical health. In this way, and perhaps only in this way, he and my mother were aligned. But my father’s siblings would stand around in the tiny kitchen, blowing their smoke out of the back door and chatting their chat which was full of a dry humour that seemed effortless and cool, with none of the intensity that flavoured my father’s talking. My aunt is still the most glamourous and amusing woman I know. She quit the cigarettes before they killed her but unfortunately they got the better of my father’s older brother, killing him before he reached sixty.
Whilst the grown-ups were engaged with their talk, we children would run from the front sitting room, where my mother and other aunt would sit with my granny, to the dining room where we would stop and stare briefly at the food laid out on the enormous, oval, mahogany table, to the kitchen and back again, in the frenetic way of a pack of children. We rarely ventured upstairs. Upstairs was unnaturally silent. Because all the doors were shut, the landing was in darkness. Occasionally, my Aunt Judith would take my baby cousin Rose upstairs to change her nappy, or try and get her to sleep in one of the bedrooms that I’d never seen inside. As in all large families, there is nearly always an unspoken command of ‘don’t wake the baby’ that may have explained why we rowdy cousins didn’t bound upstairs to continue our games. As soon as one of us so much as stepped foot on the staircase in the hall, we became cowed and whispering, as if crossing a boundary to an unknown territory where we were suddenly unsure of the rules of play. But there was an occasion, I think I must have been about six or seven, when we became more daring. The consequences of this risk-taking were, I recall, absolutely terrifying.
My grandmother always had a lodger. This was very common, I think, after the second world war and for some decades afterwards. Not that people don’t have lodgers today but back then, particularly amongst the working class, a spare room was seen as wasted potential. The idea of not putting somebody in there and charging money was a frivolous oversight. Lodgers, as I recall, were always men. Looking back, it seems perfectly reasonable that we children would be stopped from taking our noise on a rampage upstairs when there was a paying guest trying to enjoy some peace and quiet in their own room. At the time, however, these men were an ominous presence. We never saw them. We were told, sometimes, that they were at home but we never saw them come or go. We never heard anything from the room at the top of the stairs that they stayed in. One lodger, for some undisclosed reason, or undisclosed to we children, my grandmother thoroughly disliked. Women of a certain age speak their minds because my other granny was exactly the same; if they feel dislike towards someone, they speak it; not to their victim’s face but in the course of gossip, never fearing that this might come across as ungenerous or unkind. My granny would say that her current lodger was a monster. She said it with a dramatic, lip-curling disgust. To me, as an anxious child, I took this description very literally. Upstairs in the house where we played, resided a monster. But fortunately, the monster was contained in his own realm and we never saw him. As a concept, he was so separate from the family that it seemed he was not really a living, breathing presence but more, as my grandmother put it, a creature from a fairy tale.
Until, one day, he was real. In a game that must have made me so giddy as to forget, temporarily, the dangers that lurked high up in the house, I ran towards the top of the stairs, laughing so that laughter took over my whole body. My cousin Jess running after me, shrieking as well, neither of us really aware that we were edging further and further up the staircase. Suddenly, and I registered it on Jess’s face before anything else, the door of the lodger’s room opened and standing up there above me and looking right at me, was the monster. I suppose he was just going to the bathroom, or perhaps he wondered what the commotion was but in my mind he was absolutely furious at me, specifically me, for ruining his peace. On seeing him I screamed and continued to scream, as I fled down the stairs. The grown-ups were seated around the table as I burst into the dining room, screaming in terror, “It’s the monster, I’ve seen the monster!” My grandmother held her arms open to me and I buried my head in her lap as she stroked my hair and made soothing sounds.
“Stupid man!” I remember her saying, as my face remained hidden from everyone as I sobbed into her lap. I remember the comfort of being able to bury my face. It seemed possible to have these strong emotions, in front of all these grown-ups, if my face and my slowly surfacing shame, were not visible, and in turn, if I could not see them looking at me. When I finally calmed down, I lifted my head out of granny’s shelter. My mother looked flushed and smiled her embarrassed smile; not directly at me but into the middle of the table. When I recount this now, I think of all the times I was told, as a child, that I was too sensitive, or that I needed to calm down, to count to ten. I learned, before I learned much else, that displaying emotions was distasteful. Still, if I find myself talking on a subject that I’m passionate about, I catch myself gesticulating and talking fast and I am flooded with the heat of shame, that I have let myself slip out of myself and that the people I’m talking to will be silently wondering how to move away from this unacceptable display of feeling. Nearly always, my response to shame, is to put food into my mouth.
