Not Married, Not Bothered - Carol Clewlow

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…’ I said, jabbing a finger down on the dictionary, open like a Bible. ‘Once spinsters were just ordinary working girls.’

      ‘Still are,’ Danny said, diving a hand into his pocket. ‘Here’s your gas bill, Spinning Jenny. They stuck it through my door by mistake.’

      From all this you will deduce that Danny is my neighbour. He’s also my workmate, both of us being employed – me as reporter, he as a photographer – on our weekly newspaper. More importantly, however, he’s my Obligatory Gay Male Friend and I am his …

      ‘What am I to you, Danny?’

      ‘My help in ages past, my hope for years to come …’

      Danny comes from good Methodist stock and sometimes the past comes back to haunt him.

      Gay men and spinsters will always be natural allies, according to Danny.

      ‘Gay men look at spinsters and know that’s pretty much where they’re going to be.’ He lays a hand on his heart. ‘Take me, for instance. Without you, I would never have known how truly rich and fulfilling life could be for the single person in their twilight years.’

      Yes. Thank you, Danny.

      Still, you can pretty much bet that any single woman of uncertain years these days will have a friend like Danny. Not that my years are remotely uncertain.

      I was born at the turn of the decade, the year of Korea, the year they gave the Nobel Prize to Bertrand Russell, principally for his book on marriage (with three of his own he’d been able to research it closely), the year George Bernard Shaw died, who wrote, among other things, ‘All great truths begin as blasphemies’ (something to bear in mind, dear Reader). Also the year in which Peggy shcroft played Beatrice and to much acclaim at Stratford. Beatrice, that great spinster heroine, a woman with serious attitude, not curst like Kate, who also I love, but zot half as much as Beatrice, who was just so much more damn merry about the whole thing.

      Born in a merry hour, surely?

      No, sure, my lord, my mother cried …

      ‘Damn right. What a time I had of it with you … You were bloody hours coming.’

      Oh, why not? She’s like Banquo’s ghost, after all. Don’t invite her to the feast and she’ll show up anyway.

      Might as well start where all spinsters start.

      Folks …

      My mother.

      Once in the back garden my brother-in-law, Fergie, put his arm comfortingly around his wife’s shoulder. He cast his eyes up into the soft sweet Somerset night.

      ‘Ah yes …’ he said. ‘Somewhere up there the mother ship is circling and it’s looking for Babs Gordon.’

      Because our mother is barmy Our mother is bonkers. Our mother is barking, dippy, daft as a brush. Our mother is Madame Defarge at the foot of the guillotine, but in the words of the late great Freddie Mercury, only knitting on that one solitary needle.

      Not that the comparison with the revolutionary Ms Defarge would at all suit our mother, she being one of those old-fashioned, unreconstructed Thatcherites doing such a stirling job holding back the party. (Oh thank you, thank you, thank you mother.)

      And yet, and yet … if only this was the end of it.

      If only the gods in their wisdom, in their compassion, had given Cassie and me a straightforwardly mad hang-em-and-flog-em Fascist for a mother. For instead Babs Gordon oscillates. Babs Gordon is a human fan, swinging eternally left to right, and for no discernible reason, blowing out the first vacuous, entirely illogical and idiosyncratic opinion that drops into her lovable Carmen-curled head. And while you, in your folly, might think it adds a certain piquancy, a certain frisson to life to walk up your mother’s front path of a morning never knowing, when the door opens, whether you’ll be confronted by Mother Theresa or the winner of the Genghis Khan Most Promising Newcomer Award, trust me, it doesn’t.

      Shall we, for instance, be sympathetic to single mothers this fine morning?

      Or shall we, by contrast, be taking a stronger line?

      ‘It’s all taxpayers’ money. You and me, we’re paying for them. You know that, don’t you?’

      Or – I know – asylum seekers. An oldie but goldie. Shall we be extending the hand of friendship today?

      ‘I mean, I feel so sorry for them. Imagine having to shop with vouchers.’

      Or shall we be in favour of putting them up against the wall and shooting them?

      ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Adeline, I really resent the way you do that.’

      ‘Do what?’

      ‘You know.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Make me out to be some sort of … oh, I don’t know …’

      ‘Burbling, featherbrained, six-short-of-a-box reactionary old swinger?’

      I lied.

      Regrettably this is not something I’ve ever managed to say to my mother.

      Meanwhile please note the reference to shopping in her sympathetic response to asylum seekers. To say that shopping plays a big part in Babs Gordon’s life is to indulge in the deplorable British habit of understatement. Shopping is Babs Gordon’s faith, her hope, the nearest, viz. the voucher argument, she’ll ever come to charity. Brought up as a wishy-washy Baptist, Babs Gordon thereafter converted to shopping. A card-carrying member of the Royal Society of Shoppers (Visa, Mastercard, Debenhams, John Lewis, but in particular M & S), at least once a month she drives the thirty miles to our nearest out-of-town Marks, a massive thing the size of the British Museum, there to walk the aisles in the same spirit, a dutiful tourist looking at all the exhibits and making her way through women’s wear, footwear, underwear, handbags and shoes, home furnishings and, of course, menswear, the last for which she heads expressly just so she can flutter her eyelashes like some sixteen-year-old virgin, and say with that deceptively careless, entirely self-satisfied and proprietorial air: ‘I’ll just slip in. See if I can get anything for Tommy.’

      A word now about Tommy.

      What is Tommy to my mother?

      In other circumstances you might call Tommy my mother’s lover. But I don’t believe it. Not for one minute. And if you think this is the response of an anally retentive spinster daughter, well, frankly I don’t give a toss. Suffice it to say on the matter of sex, I wish my mother was having it, I wish I was having it, I wish you were having it, I wish we were all having it, I’m that generous. Still I’d lay a pound to a penny that my mother is not and never has been en flagrante with Tommy. Or with anyone else. Including our father. For while I recognise that the existence of Cass and myself would indicate some form of interchange between our mother and our father (I think we can safely rule out any of that early test tube stuff with the sperm of actors and vicars), I have every confidence that, at least on my mother’s part, we represent entirely token copulations.

      Not that Babs does not like men. No, no. Our Babs adores men, a fact she is given to asserting frequently in her cups at parties.

      ‘I’ve always got on so much better with men.’ That’s one of her particular favourites, accompanied by those eternally fluttering lashes and that familiar hand laid deprecatingly upon bosom.

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