It is Saturday and my grandparents are coming to visit the family in the parental house for their now once-in-a-blue-moon weekend visit. We live five minutes walk from the bus stop where they catch their back to their home village seven miles away so it seems normal for them to invite themselves to afternoon tea as a rest point after being in the town to book their latest Scottish coach tour holiday together.
Grandma came to the town with her shopping trolley most Tuesdays for the market which would finish early after lunch. Gran and her shopping trolley would take the ten minute walk to the parental house and time her visit for just after dad leaving for work because the two of them did not get on poorly. Even with dad not there, there were ritual conflicts. Mother made mince pies for Gran's visit and when asked told the truth about when they were made. Always she strove to make the mince pies fresh. This often prompted a polite refusal from Gran who said to Mother 'Fresh pastries give me indigestion'. We never found out how old the pastries had to be for them to be acceptable to Gran. With the consistent offer and intermittent refusal of hospitality that was as as it was between them they did not listen well to each other but it was usually more Mother's fault for not listening than it was Gran's for not being clear. The way out of the impasse was to reduce the lengths of the visits. After just a cup of tea Mother, my sister and I would walk gran to her bus and I would walk on to Primary School whilst my Mother and my younger sister went back to the parental house.
The following scene happened around 1970, some time after dad went from working a five and half day week to a five day week, after dad got Saturday morning off. This extra time off happened not that long after he bought the first black and white television for the parental house in 1968. We watched quite a lot of programmes, but for all that we watched television did not yet seem to be habit forming to us. The weekend routines were never slack. Between the television and dad's extra time off the weekend routines got tightened into a very narrow routine behaviour. Dad turns the television on for us to overhear whilst we are having our breakfast and because it is his set and at the weekends broadcasting starts early dad and whatever is on he wants his value for money out of the set and the license fee he pays for it. He has a cup of tea and nothing else for his breakfast, after his tea with television set still on he has a strip wash at the kitchen sink and changes into clean clothes, fit to go to the pub in. We can do nothing when the door between the living room and kitchen is closed because dad is washing himself. However small the house is he values-and gets-his privacy. The one time I opened the door when I should not have I saw the three foot long stitching scar that went diagonally with cross stitch scars across one side of his back where in 1953 or so he was in hospital to have a lung with Tuberculosis removed to save the second lung. When the door from the living room into the kitchen opens we can place our breakfast dishes ready to be washed, Mother is already out paying for the newspapers for the week with the local newsagents and then going next door to get the shopping list from the neighbour and will soon be back. Dad appears with brylcreem on his hair puts a coat on and announces that he is leaving for the pub.
With one less person in the house Mother prepares to go shopping, taking me and my sister with her. We are back for between twelve and one when we have lunch and she has the time to sort out the shopping she has bought, not just for herself but on behalf of Stan the next door neighbour who could shop for himself but likes being mildly sociably useless. After that Then Mother takes us to the allotment, to mind us try to get some work done on the allot- ment for herself and keep us out of dad's way because he will be drunk. He returns from the pub well stewed after half past two. The television has been off since he went out the front door to the pub. He turns it on so that he can lightly sleep to it and he sets the channel to ITV sport. He always prefers ITV over the BBC. The BBC always sounds unaccountably snooty and pompous to him. If the sport repeated itself a lot then he did not mind that. He was paying it little attention in the first place, it could have been dreaming for him for difference it would have made to him, not that the rest of us felt that sanguine about sport. Mother would leave the allotment after three in the afternoon to be back at the parental house for half past, any good mood we were in for being out in the open air slowly dissipates the nearer we got to the house. We have to be a tight team when get to the house to make tea and collectively avoid recognising dad's weekly hangover. Since he would not recognise it then neither can we.
Mother starts preparing everything for the Saturday night fry in the kitchen. Apart from being a necessary thing to do, it gives here a little space from seeing dad drunk and with a hangover, the distance of just one room away is enough to reduce sense of helplessness for her. It is assumed that for being in the room with him I too young to feel a similar sense of helplessness in the face of dad not recognising his own wrecked state. I set the table and put either margarine or butter on the pan loaf bread that Mother bought that morning. I liked to cut the bread diagonally and overlap it piece by piece, rather than cut into oblongs. In an attempt at humour the family would call this 'artistic'. Dad had butter on his bread, we had margarine on ours. Finally there was tomato sauce, brown sauce, salt and ground white pepper to be put out.
During this time dad wakes up and turns the television up to screen out the noise of the meal being prepared behind his chair. On weekdays he would appear in the house when the meal was ready and never have to witness the preparations for the meal and if did he would be sober because he was appearing from work. As the pace quickens and noise from the kitchen increases then we know to get in our places for the meal, Mother is nearly ready to plate the meal in the kitchen and present it to each of us. Getting in our places means me going first and climb into the corner between the finance bureau and the table. My seat is a piano stool used for storing sowing materials. My knees are tight against the supporting column of the table. Next to me dad sits in his straight backed chair looking slightly glassy eyed and unsteady. My sister sits next to him and Mother sits down last after serving everybody else their plate except her own at about four o'clock.When dad gets to the table what he has omitted to do because he still quite drunk is turn the sound down on the television which from my point of view is now broadcasting the wrestling from behind his head. Only Mother is free enough to go to and turn the sound down on the television but she is now face to face with dad being drunk and with a hangover and fears his complaint that 'I was watching that' if she turned the sound down. Since we can't hear ourselves talk and are stuck with a moody and awkward dad at the table we eat partly to have something other than him to focus on. With his steak and chips and butter on his bread, not margarine, dad has the best meal and is in the worst state of any of us to appreciate what is put in front of him. Woe betide me or my sister if there was even a crumb or bit of sauce left on our plates at the end of the meal. This routine went on through thick and thin for greater part of twenty years.
Every Saturday for twenty years except this one dad kept to a routine without thinking about what he was doing. Every week he insisted on being presented with a meal of steak and chips because as head of the house he had a right to it. His meal was better than ours and his insistence on it was his idea of a status game against us. His choice of meal proved his superiority over us, as much as what he did with the meal. Being drunk and not admitting to it, he was presented with his food but was in no state fit enough to eat it. So half way through us eating our food whilst he toyed with his he would disrupt us eating and take himself to his armchair and his meal to the foot stool in front of him. Since there was now no noise from family to screen out he would turn the volume on the television down to a level that he could pretend to sleep to. That we would all have been better off if he had gone to bed and slept off his hangover properly was self evident to everybody except him, and he stayed up because there was television sport on that he dare not miss. If he had gone up to rest the three of us, Mother my sister and myself could have a quieter more enjoyable meal. But the combined effect of television sport and alcohol was too much for him to resist and so the routine held.Later the cat would sidle up to him and attempt to sniff the steak on the plate that was on the footstool between dad and the television. Dad would then say to Mother 'Take my steak away I will have it in a sandwich later' but later he would bring the steak back to the living room and feed it to the cat in plain sight of all of us, as if he 'd said nŠ¾thing to Mother.
This Saturday is different because Gran and Grandad are arriving at some point for their appointment with a cup of tea and a seat before walking up to the bus stop for the bus. This was after their afternoon spent at the travel agents in the town booking their latest Scottish bus tour holiday. Mother has made the tea before sitting down to eat she but does not know when they are arriving. The television is on too loud for comfort but like us she is using the food to avoid believing that there is anything wrong with the out of joint picture that the household presents. And then they appeared, they had knocked at the front door and Mother had let them in and sat them down and got them their tea before dad could make his awkward escape from his seat and create any further fuss.
Gran and Grandad did not watch the wrestling at home, or any other televised sport for that matter. They liked BBC news and not much else. Most of the time their television set was off and they put a pleated cover made from heavy cloth over it. We would have had no use for such a cover. If dad was about then the television would never be off at all. The cloth would never get the use it was meant for. They endured the obvious tension in the room when they could see Mother and only from the side. They could not see us for us all being at the table. Who we were seemed to be filtered through the grunts and groans and the voice of 'whispering' Kent Walton coming from the television wrestling ring which seemed to speak for us all.
Dad tried to make conversation from the table, from where he was trapped because they had arrived too soon for him to make his usual exit to our discomfort without it being seen to be awkward to Gran and Grandad. To do his had to shout over the sound of the television for Gran and Grandad to hear him properly. He could see neither Gran and Grandad nor the television screen. The obvious conversation to have was about the wrestling since it so impinged on everybody's awareness. So they talked or rather shouted about which wrestler might win and why. Dad finished the conversation by shouting 'It is all rigged you know...', as if he were trying to be clever. They made some small comment back that I forget now.
We all knew that he was referring to the wrestling 'being rigged', but which bit of it was the bit that was rigged? Was it the fact that the wrestler who came to the ring second always got the bigger build up and always won the match? Was it that the referee could always be assured to miss the major illegal move which the camera would deliberately catch for the viewer? Was it that this illegal move would be what most assured victory in the end? We all knew that if we muted the sound and looked closely enough at what we saw on the screen then we would see where the wrestlers were trying to not hurt themselves or each other whist making he action seem spontaneous. Finally we knew that the main point of television wrestling was to show men in their trunks and leotards being tactile by sort-of agreement to an audience who were perpetually scared to be seen as less than fully dressed and even more scared of negotiating tactility with each other.
But what was it that was most rigged? The wrestling? The advertising? Family life? Dad's weekly hangover? Words going unspoken? And where was the joy in being made aware of you own taboos? Gran and Grandad put their cups and saucers down on a nearby straight backed chair and got up to catch their bus. Mother stood up to see them off at the front door but did not follow them up to the bus stop after seeing them out of the front door.
Find Chapter 13 here
Find the introduction and chapter guide here.
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