A Life Like Other People's by Alan Bennett

Author:Alan Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2009-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Jordy and Ossie

‘Yes, girls! It’s all real!’

At some point, in deference I imagine to Grandma’s sensibilities (‘Nay, Myra’), this caption has been scratched out. Or perhaps it is an act of prudent censorship before Aunty’s marriage a year or two later. This takes her back into the RAF as her husband is a regular aircraftman, and henceforth her life is spent shuttling between bases in Singapore and Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur.

Stan, Myra’s husband, is ten years younger than she is, though to my adolescent eyes there doesn’t seem much difference between them. Shortly after they are married we go to Grandma’s for Christmas high tea. Meals at Gilpin Place are at the customary hour, dinner at noon, high tea around six, with a cup of tea and ‘something to finish off with’ around nine. Christmas, though, was harder to accommodate to this routine, though not at our house, where ‘Dad has to watch his stomach and it doesn’t do for him to wait’, so with us the turkey would go in the night before, the smell of Christmas morning that of the turkey already cooked and waiting to be put on the table prompt at twelve.

This particular Christmas arrangements at Grandma’s are in chaos. Our arrival is always deliberately timed to avoid the King’s Speech, as both Myra and Kathleen are fervent patriots. A (literally) standing joke at Christmas is how to avoid being in the room when Aunty Kath jumps to her feet at the first note of the National Anthem – a reverent stance, head bowed, hands clasped, which Dad has been imitating at home for weeks beforehand.

The King’s Speech is always a bit of a cliffhanger on account of his stutter, the conversation afterwards generally on the lines of ‘How well he does, considering…’ Having sidestepped all that, we arrive this year around four to find Grandma and Aunty Kath still clearing up after Christmas dinner, which has had to be put back because the newlyweds have been so late getting up. They have now retired upstairs again ‘for a nap’ so that high tea at six seems unlikely. It is scheduled for seven, but seven comes and then eight and still the middle-aged lovers have not come down. Aunt Eveline has gone through her entire repertoire twice, starting with ‘Glamorous Night’ and ending with ‘Bless This House’. Dad dutifully accompanies her, with Mam urging him in view of his duodenal to ‘have a biting-on’, i.e. a snack.

I am thirteen or fourteen at this time but the significance of this elongated siesta is lost on me, as I keep asking why someone can’t just go upstairs and wake them up.

‘Nay, Alan,’ Dad says with withering contempt, though had I shown any awareness of what was going on that would probably have earned his contempt too, sex with Dad always a difficult area. My brother presumably knows, but he has the sense to say nothing. Grandma is embarrassed by the whole business and it’s only Aunty Kathleen,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.