One day, aged 12, I forgot my packed lunch for school, so I walked home at lunchtime. But as I put my hand on the garden gate, I stopped. Instead of walking down the path, I veered off to the public phone box. I called Mum to check if the coast was clear of her current lover. It wasn’t.
I hung around for 10 minutes and then headed home. When I arrived, there was “Fergus” in the garden. He was looking at the bedding plants, as if he’d casually dropped by, instead of just getting out of bed with her.
I knew Fergus better by his nickname of Ten Pence because that was the coin Mum required to make assignations with him from a phonebox while I waited outside.
From the age of 10, I had been my mother’s trusted confidant. I was the daughter who knew my mother’s long list of lovers, which included Fergus, an electrician, a wrestler, a couple of property developers, a fur dealer, a couple of journalists (different papers), and a Norwegian. The list goes on.
She’s in her 80s now and still there’s light in her eye when she goes into a pub and scopes for an attractive man to target, regardless of his age or her ability to focus. Mum is fearless when it comes to her own pleasures and like someone obsessed with dangerous sports or gambling; her passionate hobby is romance and sex. But not with my dad.
The fact that she was married was irrelevant. Dad provided the roof over our heads and it was one she didn’t want to lose in an age when to be divorced was to be an outcast. I’m not sure if Dad knew and if so, to what extent. When he came home from work I was told not to speak until he’d eaten and watched the news. I had nothing to say. I never remember a conversation with him or a kind word. Now I understand why; living with Mum must have been like hanging on to a comet that scorched all in its path.
As a child I felt privileged to be privy to the secrets of Mum’s high-octane romances: the dates, the dressing up, the exciting rendezvous in country pubs and returning home with alibis intact.
In her mid-30s, she was like a bird of paradise on our drab street, with her platinum blond hair, startling blue eyes, full lips and an hour-glass figure which she moved like Marilyn Monroe. Her sleek looks, and ability to flirt and make men laugh, saw them fall like ninepins at her high-heeled feet. Even when she went to the ice-cream van, she’d come back with a cornet twice the size of the one she’d paid for.
I first met Fergus when I about seven. Mum, my brother and I went to a field with our untrained puppy. Dog walking, Mum later said, was her daily escape from our road full of stay-at-home mums or, as she described them, “ditchwater dull domesticated slaves”. She sneered at their weight and dress sense, saying “any woman over nine stone should be muzzled”.
Unlike her men. Fergus was built like an ox, with dark eyes that lingered on Mum and then, with disappointment, took in me and my brother. I thought he looked like Tarzan.
Mum didn’t take her eyes off him, telling us: “We’re going to have the best-trained dog in the city!” The puppy was hauled in the air on a chain and after, never put a paw out of place.
Week after week my brother and I trailed after them. We were sent off to play and I didn’t see any further improvements in the puppy’s behaviour – but I did in Mum’s. She was happier at home with romance outside of it.
When I was 10 and the dog, like Mum, could take down a man in 10 paces, Mum told me she was in love with Fergus but he was married, too, and it had to be a secret and could I keep it? I could, and did. Their relationship lasted 20 years, like a shadow-marriage, without, Mum said, “shopping, washing and cooking”.
When I was 11, Dad had an affair and when he left home she went to pieces. In her eyes he’d abandoned her to a life of penniless ruin. He returned two weeks later with a new TV and a vacuum cleaner. Mum went straight back out and if Fergus wasn’t available for any reason, other men were.
Mum’s part-time job gave her unlimited access to a pool of well-off men who fell under her easy-to-please charms. She’d finish at 1pm, be wined, dined, bedded and home by 5pm. She was a seamless liar with boundless energy for her extramarital hobby.
I was bookish, quiet and shy. I didn’t rebel as a teenager; how could I out-dazzle my mother? She told me to be an air hostess and marry a pilot and that if she’d had her way she’d have been a “gangster’s moll”.
A year after I left university, I was pregnant with the first of my three children. Mum screamed when I told her, telling me my life was over. But living away from her and having children made me re-evaluate my upbringing.
Mum first visited my two-week-old colicky son when my husband was away. She drank brandy during the day, chain-smoked and took a sleeping tablet at night. She said my life was “bloody boring” and that I should put the baby on the bottle because I looked like a cow in the field breast-feeding.
When he cried at night, she said to “slap his bottom” to put a stop to waking, and in between feeds, park him at the end of the garden and leave him for three hours. She departed two days later saying I had a look on my face like “a bowel movement”.
I plummeted into depression, with such bad anxiety attacks I thought my heart would stop. A lovely woman I met nearby saved me. She was older, with two small children, a great sense of humour and endless kindness.
When I talked about Mum, a look of horror came over her face. She didn’t say anything but my depression slowly receded. I made other female friends, often like me, with tricky relationships with parents. I no longer felt alone. Mum and Dad visited infrequently and bickered viciously. She drank, smoked and looked terminally bored. Dad was mute. I was glad to live far away.
I also understood Mum’s craving for something outside of four walls and small children. I began to slowly carve a career. I grew apart from my husband and by the time I was in my 30s our marriage was over. Mum told me not to contemplate divorce but take lovers. I chose to be a single parent.
Dad finally left Mum when he retired but is still not happy. His partner is a dead ringer for Mum.
Until recently, Mum still went out for a drink when I visited. In a pub she got up to go out for a cigarette in the rain. A big guy tucking into pie and chips, said: “You’ll catch your death in the cold.”
“You’ll be dead before me the size of you eating all that,” she snapped back.
You could have heard a pin drop. Then the laughter started. Another time, I was at the bar buying drinks and turned to see her at the only table full of men. They were German. Bent double and toothless, she was full-on flirtatious. One man turned to me and I mentioned something about politics. Mum touched my leg and hissed: “For God’s sake, men don’t want to hear anything intelligent, drop it.” And I did. She’s like a tsunami.
She tells me to enjoy every minute of my life and that I could do with a lover. Or two. Or I’ll get boring and fat.
I went to knock on her door last week, then hesitated. There was loud male laughter inside.
