Coronation Chicken. Nigel Barley
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here that Jack did basic fieldwork, pencilled in gross markers, major fault lines to be fine drawn later, running across the mental map he was quietly sketching of the extraordinary world he lived in. Now he relied on Tom to be his listening post and his ears would be twirling like tape recorders.
‘Eadie,’ said Mum stirring in derationed but still precious sugar. ‘I was ever so sorry about you losing your Bill that year. Who'd have thought it? A big strapping lad like your husband, dying of shock when they bombed the dairies. But you're still a young woman. You and Bill never had time to get children. Are you sure you won't marry again? You won't go short on offers. A woman needs a man for the allotment.’
‘Oh no.’ Eadie shook her head and pouted. ‘I couldn’t go through that again, the shame and everything. When they took him to the hospital, you see, he was wearing one of my old vests.’
There was a silence. Mum slurped tea and digested the remark. The fear of being found without underwear or with grubby undies haunted her everyday nightmares.
‘There’s no shame in that,’ she lied. ‘But you remember that Eva Moody’s husband, when he passed on? That was a different kettle of fish altogether.’
Eadie was stung, a gleam came into her eye. Her voice dropped to a shocked whisper. ‘She had him buried by the Co-op. The Co-op! Like she was buying a three-piece suite! They did a good job, mind, with all the cold meats thrown in free.’
‘Yes, Eadie.’ Mum nodded with relish. ‘But the real point is she got a divi on her own husband's funeral. It's not decent. It's...It's like cannibalism. Disgusting.’
‘Disgusting!’
They sighed happily and stirred their tea. They could talk for hours about the things that left them speechless.
***
The first thing Jack always noticed about Granny's room was the net curtains. Being upstairs, there was no need for them. No one, after all, could look in. But, of course, they were there so that she could look out from behind a veil, like that harem lady. They cut down the amount of light but that too was part of being inside and shielded from the nakedness of public exposure. When Jack had asked her about the gloom, she replied. ‘I likes to retain me mystery.’
The bed was the centre of everything, large and broken-backed with a multiplicity of sheets and blankets and a patchwork quilt, all built up like the layers of wallpaper on the wall. The springs creaked and zithered to the touch and actually getting into it and under the covers was like unwrapping a corseted Edwardian lady. Round about lay various objects of need, a tortoiseshell hairbrush and mirror, hairpins nesting like biddies in a hairnet, a candlestick and matches 'just in case.’ The four brass knobs at head and foot were removable, unscrewing to provide a hiding place for concealed savings and small treasures. Underfoot was a green mat with flowery swirls.
‘That's a magic carpet, Jack. You be careful how you tread on that. You could end up in Baghdad.’ Baghdad, Persia - it was always on the radio news as part of The Baghdad Pact or perhaps The Bag Dad Packed.
‘Come off it, gran. It's got a label on the back says 'Axminster.' Nothing from a British factory could possibly be magic.
The radio was a large, two-handled box covered in simulated snakeskin with knobs of clearest plastic and a handle on top that offered a false sense of portability. Previously housed in some vampy boudoir, it had been snapped up by Granny Scoggins at the Boy Scout jumble sale to stand on a chair by the bed and was turned on most of the time. If you twisted the dial, there were other voices, largely Frogs gabbling like turkeys or phlegmish Dutch. Its dial was a map of a discarded world, Hilversum, Toulouse, Nice. From London, begowned or dinner-suited announcers spoke out with the hand-etched, imperial authority of the BBC voice, direct from the front room of the nation. He had seen their picture in the paper. To wear a dinner jacket on the radio was a kind of seriousness or perhaps merely showed that its intellectual level was that of dinner-party chatter, or a pep talk to the troops.
The Light Programme laid down the bare bones of the day - Mrs. Dale's Diary, Music While You Work, Workers' Playtime, Listen With Mother, Woman's Hour, Children's Hour, In Town Tonight, the collective public space in which England lived. Entertainment harked back to the works canteen concert, itself drawing on the older tradition of the music hall. They even had performers of blessed innocence who made a living out of doing farmyard impressions of geese and chickens over the hot machinery. On the whole it was a cosy enough space, full of Mothers' Union concern and Brains Trust wisdom with a belief in the inevitability of progress. The most vicious coercion existed but invisibly, concealed in the unshakeable smugness of its own self-image, and phrased itself in action in gentle terms of doing things to you 'for your own good.’ The British way was quite obviously the best and only way. When the radio broke down, Granny took it to be mended by the Italian – somehow left over from the war - at the end of the street who stroked women's hands as he handed change, considering herself safe, at her great age, from his advances. She returned appalled, pointed to a small metal plaque on the back.
‘Of course, the radio doesn't work,’ she said, with the outrage of one shabbily deceived. ‘Turns out it's not even English made. It’s foreign.’
Yet the only escape for the young was to foreign-made Radio Luxembourg, like a party held in a house where parents had forbidden it. On a good night, it was possible to decrypt the sounds of anti-authoritarian jollity with constant delicate retuning like a radio-operator in the Resistance. On a bad night, pop music echoed full of hiss and the rhythmic risings and fallings of some dank sea cave, cross-cut with slicing atmospherics. They didn't want you to listen at all of course and most said it was deliberately jammed, for Radio Luxembourg offered a tackily glamorous world more unsettling than the BBC and with all the unimaginable possibilities of a broadcast from outer space, a world without rationing and beyond petty regulation where you could do things just because they sounded like fun. At regular intervals, Horace Bachelor told you how to win the pools from K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M - though no one seemed to ask why he bothered with pennies made from the wireless if he knew this great secret - and the Irish Hospitals Sweepstake beckoned with still-forbidden casino pleasures. There were advertisements and jingles and – best of all - no National Anthem at the end to send you gloomily to sleep and assure bad dreams.
Underneath the bed, under its dangling gills, was the chamber pot into which granny eased herself at night, white, hugely handled and inside was Hitler's face, scowling up, much stained. Mr Churchill, they told her rather huffily, was unavailable in this form though she had looked far and wide.
Like Queen Mary, granny had clearly never been properly young. The few pictures on the mantlepiece showed an uneasy girl mostly at banner-waving political demonstrations - Support the Miners, Second Front Now - looking off beyond the camera, someone yet to reach the age they had been designed for. She had spent the interim waiting for the Revolution that had been announced and was inevitably to come and fallen prey to grandad whom Jack had never met, dead before he was born.
The Queen Mother was the nation's official mother, the new Queen its sweetheart. There was an awkward and unnecessary duplication with Princess Margaret that promised trouble - in fairy stories, after all, sisters were always wicked sisters. But Granny Scoggins was a natural grandmother, giving her the same sort of official status, and in recognition her name had become a title. Even Dad, who called her 'Mum' to her face, referred to her as 'Granny Scoggins.’
Granny Scoggins's great pride was her penmanship. She had taught herself to read and write and developed a pernickety, 19th-century hand of finest copperplate that had qualified her to write up the Co-op accounts every year. She wrote regularly to the Prime Minister to offer advice and rebuke and always received a gracious answer of studied incomprehension from a civil servant called Hodge that began, ‘The Prime Minister has instructed me to write to you and express his thanks for your recent communication...’ She was a confirmed comparer of marriage dates and birth dates among the upper classes and wrote off to point out any discrepancy to the families of those involved. Experience had gradually led her to see the value of remaining anonymous and in old age she developed a considerable correspondence, one-way and unsigned, with some of the finest houses in the land. Mum had tried to throttle back on these activities