“I really think you must be a changeling.” My mother was not a reader of fairytales; her interest in fiction stopped at detective stories, whose plots she enjoyed as mathematical puzzles. This was a woman who, when pressed for a birthday list, wrote, “Tights, beige, non-run. Talc (Roger & Gallet). Compost bin?” and whose attitude to hair and makeup seemed to be that if it was good enough in 1947, it was good enough now, plus not having to think about it left her more mental energy for planning maths lessons and practising the fiddle.
Meanwhile, it was the era of Biba feather boas, smoky eyes and skin-tight knee-boots. I wanted to be Penelope Tree, with her theatrical heritage and moon eyes framed by star-point eyelashes. The fact that I was a tubby spider with a fat, round body and scrawny limbs looking, in my free NHS glasses, more like John Lennon than Twiggy, was totally irrelevant to the pictures in my head.
Clearly, any attempt to explain my dreams of glamour to her was doomed, but children crave their parents’ approval, so I persevered. After about half an hour, she looked up from balling socks to tell me that the only plausible explanation for our total failure of mutual understanding was a mix-up at birth, supernatural or otherwise.
Now, I have every sympathy with adopted children; but really, is it not better to know you’ve been actively chosen by your parents than to discover they’d rather have had a baby more like them?
Whether she said it to shut me up or because she was on the last pair of socks and wanted to get back to the garden, it seemed to her to have settled things. I took the socks to their allocated drawers and spent the next eight years wondering whether she might be right; and, if so, whether it would be OK for me to choose some other parents? For instance, the exotic couple conveniently next door, with their white Murphy TV and freely available chocolate biscuits?
Chocolate was the final item on the birthday list, and like the others it earned its place on stringent grounds of practicality. Terry’s Bitter was the only chocolate in those days with a high enough cocoa content not to melt in extremes of temperature. It travelled, on the dashboard of the old Rover, to Moscow, Sofia and Lapland, and to this day I never go abroad without a supply of 85%, just in case. My mother kept a bar with her hankies, and consumed a single square at bedtime. We children were allowed a square after Sunday lunch, if we’d been good at Quaker meeting. And that, apart from Christmas and Easter, was all the chocolate we saw.
Then, in my gap year, I went to stay with Aunt Ilse outside Rome. My mother wasn’t fond of her husband’s family habit of speaking in multiple European languages that she couldn’t understand, so I’d rarely seen his sister until then. She and Uncle Elio seemed to have little in common, except that you heard them before you saw them. A stroke had left him with one foot dragging and a stick banging ahead of each step, while she clattered across the tiled floor on sharp heels, in a declamatory cloud of gossip, instruction and hyperbole. When she came into view, a pink-stained cigarette jabbing from a ruffled sleeve, I finally knew where I’d come from.
Framed on the piano was a photo of their daughter. Elio was a conservative judge; possibly to even things out, Ingrid had joined the student communist movement and there she was, waving a placard – wearing an extremely lavish fur coat.
I just about assembled the Italian for, “How come?”
Uncle Elio looked back at me. “Ah well, you see; other communists want everybody to be equally poor. But Italian communists think everybody should be equally rich.”
Beside the photo was a silver bowl of chocolates. Many people remember where they were when Kennedy was shot. I remember my first Belgian pralines: sitting there like fat jewels, not shut away for a special occasion or a weekly ritual, but flaunting their attractions and daring me to resist.
Now that’s what I call glamour.
