4 Cinderella

Mama is getting used to me now. She has reconciled herself to her new status. Being a mother is not as terrible as she expected it to be and a smile even plays about her lips when she thinks she is unobserved.

Mama is the youngest child of farmers. The lion’s share of the responsibility has always been borne by her mother, who is ambitious and hard-working and comes from a family of tin-miners who have fallen on bad times. Her own father is brutal and ruthless, but my grandmother is his favourite child because she has inherited his character and added to it a particular cunning of her own. The ups and downs of the tin-mining industry have left their mark on her. She has style and good taste, but like her father, she lacks compassion and turns a blind eye to Mama's dreams and wishes. Mama was my grandfather’s darling. She has the same blue eyes and adores him in return. But my grandfather has a weak character and his escape route leads directly to the corner pub where he feels like one of the family. Mama’s attempts to find a life of her own away from the oppression inflicted on her by her mother and grandfather are thwarted by a brutal coup. She is dragged back from the nurses’ training school in humiliation. Mama lacks her mother’s determination and so she fails to put up a convincing fight, though she is long past the age of consent. Her only escape from her Cinderella existence seems to have been the odd treat such as a Baptist crusade to religious hotspots under the supervision of an elder brother. The harassment she suffered as a child and young person remains wholly unarticulated, but casts long shadows over her own life and somehow justifies or at least excuses the irrationality of her later behaviour.

So Mama was really a broken spirit at an age when most young people are on wings of self-fulfilment, her romantic dreams being tantalised by frequent visits to the pseudo world of the movies, dressed in clothes she had copied with skilful stitches from her idols on the screen. She was a strange mixture of refinement and coarseness, so that her judgment was invariably coloured by one or the other, depending on her mood or inclination.

When Mama finally escaped the claws of her greedy, selfish family, it was by eloping at dead of night and marrying my father in a tiny chapel thirty miles away in a ceremony with the marriage conducted secretly and without having the bans publicised. I never saw a marriage certificate, now I think of it. I assume the marriage was legal. I don’t think much attention was paid to that sort of detail during the war that raged in Europe. I would not know where to look for such a document. It certainly was not among my mother’s papers. My parents were both in their mid-thirties at the time. It was certainly the most courageous thing my mother had ever done, for when her ‘duplicity’ was discovered, she was ostracised for disobedience, and she must have known this would be the outcome. Why else would she undertake so drastic an action as flight? The only explanation I have for their not forcing her back and forcing an annulment was that my parents were able to keep their secret safe until my impending arrival made such a step impossible. Presumably even the inventiveness of Mama’s despotic elder brother could not get round that.

Mama’s elder brother Frank, who did not accompany her or cruises or go to university or manipulate the family finances, helped her at that crucial time, of that I am sure, so that Mama and Dada were able to move into the little bungalow in which I would spend my early childhood. Mama never spoke much about that period, except to remark much later that she had been happy with Dada until I came along ten months after their elopement, disrupting the newly found contentment for ever. Her freedom was from then on sacrificed in favour of the compulsion to do the right thing, which had nothing to do with motherly instincts and an awful lot to do with her guilty conscience about rejecting the so-called ‘family values’ imposed upon her by her mother and other members of the tribe.

With me still an infant and my mother resigned to motherhood, Mama is far from identifying with the needs of the small hyperactive bundle she has brought into the world. She says I am a wilful baby, screaming for attention, maliciously wetting my nappy immediately after being changed, demanding food at all times of the day and night and generally making a fuss about nothing. Babies rely on their instincts, but if you are into suffocating those instincts in yourself, it stands to reason that you do not like others to indulge in them. She later blames Aunt Jane for my character, saying I have been ruined by too much attention, as though the care during the weeks she was unable to care for me because she was still in the clinic being treated for something she called phlebitis, which was my fault. So the necessary care and attention I had received were a heinous crime. In return, I am used to the capable and confident ministrations of Aunt Jane and frightened by the dithering insecurity of this stranger I am to address as Mama.

But I am Mama's child, after all. I take after the blue-eyed Irish ancestors – despite her tendency to disown even their memory - and so she has to admit that I must also have some good features, since genes are not just skin deep. At least I do not take after the sickly brood my father’s family is denunciated as by – who else – my maternal grandmother.

However, just by being like my mother to look at, I have unwittingly forged a link back to her family, with whom I feel no empathy whatsoever, apart from affection for Uncle Frank. For reasons deep in her subconscious, my mother does she not consign them all to the devil. They still have a hold over her. Once the relationship with them is salvaged, the seed of independence withers and dies. She again becomes stunted by their domination and Dada makes the mistake of not intervening. He is a pacifist. He always tries to keep the peace between warring factions. The story of Mama's family is like something out of Tolstoy. Sometimes I wonder why my mother did not throw herself in front of a train.

Mama’s regained family has little effect on me, however, and on reflection I remember nothing positive about the relationship. I am now kicking around energetically and able to recognize people, grasp things tightly, turn myself over, and stay awake for longer periods than Mama thinks I should. I feast on any stimulus offered, especially the American pop music on the radio, and I am admired by onlookers for my blue eyes and emerging musicality, which is probably the most positive feature I could have inherited, since any memory of those days with Mama are of her singing  and playing the piano.

I feel the pangs for my twin sister less and less. Though the spherical music in my subconscious mind still plays on, it is evolving into something separate from the pre-birth sounds. Sometimes I hold my breath to see if that will transport me into those spheres my unborn sister inhabits. But that door seems to have closed for ever. I start to accept that I shall not see her in this world.

"Faith has stopped humming," Dada says one day. "She must have forgotten how. Let’s show her how we do it." Dada has a deep bass voice, but after being beaten round the head as a little boy by a sadistic school master his hearing was damaged so severely that he cannot really pitch musical notes. Sometimes he sits at the old piano and tries to match his voice the one-finger tune he is strumming. I still remember that, But his attempts at making music were to no avail. Mama is the singer and musician in our family.

"Rubbish. Children of that age can’t hum,” she scoffs now.

Mama never believes anything she doesn’t want to, though she is secretly quite taken with the idea.

"I think what you probably mistook for humming was quiet whimpering. She likes the sound of her own voice."

Dada nods agreeably.

"I suppose you’re right. Pity, though."

Mama, who has been overjoyed that there was no second baby to bother about, is laced up against what she calls ‘esoteric fantasies’. She puts the whole twin episode down to a faulty diagnosis and never mourns the 'lost' child, since in her view there has never been one.

But, nevertheless, she really isn’t far wrong as far as the humming is concerned. She also indulges in a little 'quiet whimpering' from time to time. She is comforted by the same music. That, at least, we have in common.