This Much Is True

Mummy appreciated literature, but she especially loved going to the ballet and the theatre. She insisted that she and my father continued to go to the theatre in Oxford every week as they had done in London, and they had permanent seats at the New Theatre Oxford (now the Apollo).

When I was five, my parents took me to my first pantomime, which was Aladdin. Of course I loved it, but I was very frightened of the wicked wizard, Abanazar. I had nightmares every night for a week. Finally, my parents decided to take me backstage to meet the actor, so that I would see for myself that he was only pretending. That’s the magic word — pretending. It is the beginning of imagination.

Mummy also adored music. Her favourite singers were Conchita Supervía, the Spanish mezzo-soprano, and Gracie Fields. My mother insisted on having a piano, and she and I used to sing music-hall songs together. We often sang ‘Sally’, Mummy sitting at our Blüthner baby grand piano in the drawing room, tears rolling down her cheeks. I used to ask her, ‘Mummy, why are you crying?’ and she’d say, ‘I can’t help it. It’s so beautiful.’ And now I’m exactly the same: I weep uncontrollably at a piece of music, an operatic aria, even a military band marching past. She filled my memories. Filled my heart. And she always will.

I loved Daddy, no question; he was a dear, dear man and it’s from him that I get my love of words, but we never understood each other. Mummy flooded me. She was fun to be with and so we were always in cahoots, in that sense.

Every morning when I wasn’t at school — weekends, or holidays — when Daddy was up and going off to work, I’d go to my parent’s bedroom and climb into Mummy’s bed. They had two beds pushed together. Mummy always slept naked and I liked hugging her generous adipose tissue. We talked about everything. It was during one of our bedroom talks that she told me she had not been in love with Daddy when they married. We had unlikely conversations: politics, people in synagogue and what they were wearing, what furniture Mummy wanted to buy, or about the tenants in her houses. I loved hearing about life in London before the war, and her days as a sales girl in Madame Flora. I had no filter with her. We talked about school and the people that I went to school with and what they were doing. There was no subject that was taboo; we were completely open with each other and we would often just lie in helpless giggles. Mummy had big plans. She was always talking about moving out of ‘the hovel’ and building our ‘family home’ — what the bathrooms were going to be like and what the size of the kitchen would be.

The time she spoke of most, though, was when her parents moved to Underhill Road, in Dulwich. They had previously lived in Camberwell, which was considered a lower-class area at the time — Dulwich was a step up. From the beginning, Mummy instilled in me who were the people to be friends with and who were ‘common’ (and so to be avoided). My ear became attuned early to the minute gradations of class, indicated by a thickening and mangling of the vowels, a dropping of the consonants. She also talked often about who, amongst our acquaintances and Daddy’s patients, she considered to be ‘the best people’. She had that concept in her mind, which I think a lot of poor people have — that there actually is such a thing as the best people, but by that she didn’t mean the socially important. She actually meant the sort that I would call the best people: the thinkers, the philosophers, the historians — because the life of the mind was very important to my mother.

At the same time Mummy enjoyed making money. It allowed her to indulge her passion for fine things. She always wore the original 4711 Eau de Cologne. She often wore a cape instead of a coat and I remember my embarrassment sometimes when she came to school. As a child, you want your parents to fit in with everyone else’s parents — Mummy never did. Now, of course, I’m very proud of her individuality. She liked to wear Cuban heels, duster coats, and in the days when fur coats were politically acceptable (not that she would have cared), she had minks, ermines and a glorious leopard-skin coat, all made for her by one of my father’s patients, Sam Dimdore, a furrier from London who had also settled in Oxford during the war and had a shop in High Street. His wife Lil made the best cheesecake I’d ever tasted. She had multiple sclerosis and was a sad figure, always seated in the back of the dark shop. Later, their son, Mervyn, contracted the same disease. I knew early of tragedy.