Home to the tall, cold house in London, my ruptured disc and I, this place of my childhood where Hollywood stars lit cigarettes with survivors of Russian oppression, where refugees and royalty passed each other on the stairs. Or used to. As a child, my father’s friends and my mother’s politics built a world of artists and argument. My father was Scottish aristocracy, a Tory voting, Maggie loving, patron of the arts. My mother was a member of the Labour Party who liked to pretend to be in touch with the real world while keeping a horse in the country. Why they married is a mystery I’ve lately been unravelling, they seemed so ill-disposed to suit each other. They had parallel lives, joined by artistic intellect, separated by their need to live exactly as they chose; she in the tall, cold house in London giving refuge to the lost and the lonely, he in a small, low-beamed cottage in Sussex. Both homes were part of vast estates he’d inherited and bought, a fact she bore with something close to shame. He wanted a wife who enjoyed tea with the Queen. I’m not sure what she wanted, not him, anyway. He’d come up to town occasionally and they’d meet like their guests on the stairs, one coming down for a Cinzano before supper, the other rushing up to get changed for a meeting. She was an architect, he was a writer. Her drawings dominated the dining room table where we never ate while in the kitchen where we did, my father in bow tie and three-piece suit, would crouch at the end with his tea or drink, about to go out, never staying. We had a housekeeper who made marmalade and hated everyone except for my father and us and a fat, funny artist who lived downstairs and painted and never sold. There was the woman from Czechoslovakia in the basement flat. Amongst these ever-moving feet I found my place in Lego, my cat, my teddy. A house of parallel realities; the need and the glamour upstairs and in the basement flat, something else. But in 1995, I only knew that I was cold and my back was broken. The surgeon said it was lucky I was young, he wouldn’t fuse the vertebrae, L4 and L5 would remain as independent as my parents. He removed the floating bits of disc and sowed me up and sent me to lie on the sofa and stare at the paintings that hung on the dining room walls; Inveraray castle where my grandmother had grown up, the 8th Duke of Argyll bearing down over snapshots of us.
Discussion about this post
No posts
A silver lining just for you to reflect the light back in.
Do you still have the poem about the jacket with the silver lining?