12, Bath Road

Following my last post, I found myself revisiting my grandmother's house, which I still know so well.

Those grandparent addresses, 12 Bath Road and Fridhemsgatan 11 ("elva"), were the continuities that stuck. We ourselves, like other young families going places, moved house every couple of years, but Mutti and Mormor were more stable.

"Mutti" was our English grandmother, Ruth Peverett née Plowright. She lived in this quiet cul-de-sac street in Eastbourne, a street that I childishly assumed was named after the kind of bath you have before bed-time.

Mutti named her house "Odd Corner", but when you wrote a letter you still had to write "12 Bath Road". "Odd Corner" was optional, it was one of those things I conceived as a touch of extra pleasure to the recipient; as when I wrote " , Esq." to my father.

And I noticed that the shape of the street,  which ended in a blank wall, did indeed resemble a bathtub. Along both sides were small terraced houses. No. 12 was the innermost on one side, apart from a small office, a broker's or something. All the houses looked much the same, but the doors were different colours. Mutti's was black, which I considered very stylish. Though my secret favourite, a little way up the road, was primrose yellow.

*

We come into the hall, a corridor with a staircase at the far end. The doorway into the rest of the ground floor is on the right. Here in the hall was the bust of Beethoven, looking fierce and gloomy, and also the grandfather clock that we used to wind every other morning. As I tour the rooms now, I can see all the objects, one by one, so vividly that it's hard to believe that they aren't still there. But I know they aren't. After all, one of them, a heavy dome of blue Venetian glass, is right here today in my own flat in Swindon (I use it to prop open the bedroom door).

It was a small terraced house, with a cement back garden that contained a stone owl and a hydrangea planted in a bath-tub. To one side, a shed with an outside lavatory.

Sometimes I think I remember the house better than I remember Mutti herself.

But it isn't true. It's just easier to pin down static objects. A person is never static. Here she is, first thing in the morning, kneeling on the mat while she lays the coal fire in the grate. She's scrumpling up pages from an old copy of the Radio Times, or the church magazine. (She also used these resources to make squares of toilet paper.) When she's ready, we light a spill and apply it to the fire lighters at rear left, and rear right.  If the spill is less than half burnt, she stubs it out for next time. We see the warmth long before we feel it, like the sun on a winter morning.

If I ever chance to meet Mutti again (it's a chance I can't quite bring myself to give up on), I feel we won't be strangers, we'll interact as in this memory.

And yet I also know that even while she still lived, we had lost our togetherness. I was in my twenties, she was in a care home. I had already mislaid my Mutti and didn't know how to bring her back when I visited her. The present moment took over from nostalgia: the ceaseless shifting of her foot as she sat in her armchair and we tried to chat, but she now had no life of her own to chat about, and mine felt difficult to share. 12, Bath Road had gone while I was away at university, preoccupied with my own life, things that then seemed more important.



*

The glass dome, now in my flat

*

Repeatedly, if not regularly, new memories of that place and time still come back.

Mutti used to make rice cheese, a meal I adored just as much as the macaroni cheese we had at home. 

Mutti used to fold over the end of the sellotape so you didn't have to pick at it. (A lesson I ignored at the time, but have taken on board fifty years later.)  She pronounced it SEALOTAPE. She also pronounced Marmite as MARMEAT, I suppose on the French model. 

When Annika was born in October 1962, Mutti stayed up in Leicestershire to look after me.

I remember Mutti taking me to evenings of chamber music somewhere just up the road near the town hall (Haydn? Dvořák?). And to the rehearsals of the visiting symphony orchestra at the Congress Theatre: attending them was free.

When I returned from a summer fortnight in Lorraine at the age of fifteen, I stayed with Mutti (Mum and Dad would still have been in Sweden). I was in love. I told Mutti about Christiane Trabuc from Marseilles, at that time the most beautiful girl in existence. Mutti's eyes lit up, she was very encouraging; it was a side of her that I hadn't seen before. It made me certain that Mutti herself had been in love with her handsome French friend Pierre, whose photo hung on the wall above the dining table, along with a painting of a Paris street scene. 

A few years after that (I must have been at uni by now), I took it into my head to pay Mutti a surprise visit at 12 Bath Road; to come and stay with her. I thought it would delight her. Her look of shock when she answered the door, her evident difficulty at adjusting to my plan (I can't remember now if I did stay or not) . . .it remains with me as one of my grievous memories. One of those moments when I stupidly realized that things weren't the same any more, that Mutti was old and anxious and frail, and that the safe haven of my childhood no longer existed. 

The stone owl, now in my sister Annika's garden

But I find I'm repeating a poem I wrote thirty years ago. I've managed to track it down, I'm not recommending it, but it's useful for me so I'll paste it here.


*




Mutti


When I was a child & you were old
Your shadowy friends, the telephone calls
That interrupted our play - & how they'd talk!
But in the darkness of eight o'clock,
As definite as the hall clock,
I had you to myself & knew in sleep
How you put yourself to bed without a thought
Of anything but library books due for return
& the shoes put out to take to the menders.

The breeze in the road that blows the raindrops
Into resembling snow;
A cry of gulls out there,
Of rigging & the shouts of men
Preparing a ship to sail,
Not well imagined, but with a remembered scent
Of the morning wind flapping in flintwalled streets
On the way to church.

I am a little boy, whose feet stop well short of the bed-end, leaving a tranquil space that is draped in a gaily checkered shawl, & here the hot-water bottle makes an isolated hummock, like Glastonbury Tor.

Their origins & purposes obscure, I lay
& stared for a long time at the boxes
On the dresser, glass & pewter, intricate
& utterly placid, before it occurred to me
That it must be morning.

"Is that you dear?
Grannie's still in bed."

I never saw you sleep. I snuggled in beside you
While you read the prayer-book, advancing the bookmark
To another page, then turning to the end
To read a psalm. Later, I watched you dress,
Intrigued by your wrinkled belly and behind,
Folded like whipped cream in a bowl.

Then you fiddled at your dressing-table with an ebony hand-mirror, or tiny jars in silver braziers, half-full of vermillion & turquoise paste. You also powdered your nose, which age had softened and enlarged, so that like other grown-ups you appeared gigantic, even arboreal.

On an awkward knee-high table by the bed was a wireless installed by Tony; it gave constant trouble, you couldn't even tune it, you always said: "I'll ask Tony to fix it." & you pretended you didn't need it. Sacrifice was your commonest key.

In the days before my appetite increased
& yours disappeared,
Sometimes you made porridge in a small unstable saucepan.
Having styled yourself Mutti,
You persuaded me that you were somehow German;
Like your alpine jigsaws & Oberammagau.
& besides, you'd played the violin.
You appeared to inhabit the world of Brahms or Beethoven.

You gave me toast, cut into ranks of soldiers,
& spread with dripping & Marmite, which you mispronounced.

The dripping (later I worked it out) had been carried home triumphantly in a bowl covered in muslin, from a house where you had been asked to "help out", the fruit of a patient, humble request. I've heard you ask for vegetable water, & refuse to budge despite dissuasion, despite embarrassed offers to purchase all kinds of fresh vegetables for you. You had grown accustomed to the borders of service, rejecting thanks & rejecting thanks until our gratitude was swollen & inflamed like a fire to which you had applied the bellows. This odd behaviour was forgiven you.

Inappropriate, 26-inch screen,
Twin-garage gold, you wouldn't wear
Even in August in a garden
Where your dark silver hair & brooch,
Settled on coal-grey,
Defined your later age
& your attenuated ceremonial,
Empty of robust macaroni-stuffing appetite
If not compulsion.

That was when you visited
Cross-country, changing at Heathfield;
I imagine you over-heating
Toting a tiny suitcase
Of olive-black leather
Or some cheap substitute
Not without elegance
The neatness of rationing.

Adolescence's
Quick sympathy, long absences,
Clumsy calls you couldn't manage:
It is autumn, beauty.
& you getting smaller,
Breasting the leaves,
Gasping for air.

With iron face I mourned your destruction
Before it happened. Perhaps you didn't see,
In the long quiet pauses, while you shuffled your feet,
& I timed my visit to end for the train.

An evening alone, & with inordinate effort
I try to recover the rules of a patience
We shared a quarter-century ago.
"Once in a Blue Moon" you said it was called;
But I must misremember, for it comes out every time.

And what was her name?
How fully I enjoyed the lack of confidences,
Your ready recognition
That all was beyond me.