Poorly, elderly parents abound. I was convinced the other week that there was a great quote from the writer Lucy Ellman about the death of one’s parents. It was sad, it was witty, it was pithy. It was up there with ‘they tuck you up, your mum and dad’ (that was what Philip Larkin said, wasn’t it?).
So I searched the internet. Nothing, though I did find that quote about men menstruating through shedding each other’s blood in warfare. I think it’s a pretty meaningless statement, but it’s clever and it’s clearly struck a chord with a few people.
I started flicking through the three Lucy Ellman novels I have on my bookshelves. Nothing. So I started reading Sweet Desserts
I still couldn’t find the quote. (The fearsome Dr Bowler*, the imaginary English teacher on my shoulder, is now piercing me with her steely brown eyes – can brown eyes be steely, Giles? Can they? Mmm? – until I spit out the subsequent and missing syllables QUO-TAY-SHUN!).
Sweet Desserts a cracking book. Two sisters, raised in American academia find themselves transported to Oxford after their mum dies. Art and and the art of found objects run through the book, and the text is cut up with gobbets from instruction manuals, adverts (okay, okay AD-VERT-ISE-MENTS, sheesh, Dr Bowler, calm down), recipes and lonely hearts columns. It’s funny and bittersweet and there’s more casual sex than I recalled.
Immediately afterwards, he got off me, turned on the light, opened a carton of yoghurt he’d brought with him, and a thriller. I went back to sleep slowly, feeling envious of the yoghurt.
It’s weird reading a book again for the first time since 1988. It was another age, a pre-lapsarian, pre-internet age. There were books and there were fixed telephones and answering machines and typewriters and Tippex. There were letters. People wrote letters.
The book is also so old, it has an approving quote (AY-SHUN) from Clive James on the front cover. And one from Fay Weldon on the back. I’m slightly surprised it has a barcode on it.
I finished the book, still longing for the quotation about the death of a parent, and I read the blurb on the back:
Suzy Schwarz has learnt one or two things about life: other people know how you should live your life better than you do; sisters can destroy your sanity and self-esteem; lust calls for careful timing because it rarely coincides with that of your partner; and, most heartbreaking of all, parents die on you, leaving you grieving. The only thing that provides constant solace when times are bad (and they usually are) is food.
So – it was not pithy, not witty, and it was probably not even written by Lucy Ellman. But a handful of words on the back of a book lodged in my mind for 23 years.
*Dr Bowler deserves a place in history for one of the most memorable moments in my Sixth Form. We were doing Donne, I think. Or maybe Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’, perhaps.
I complained the poem was illogical.
“Giles,” said Dr Bowler, “I want you to do something for me.”
Nervous titters round the classroom. It was the mid-80s. Think The Cure. Think The Smiths. Think The History Boys, with a smattering of elegant, mysterious girls peppering our environment because being 17 at a boys’ school isn’t torture enough as it is.
“Yes?” I asked anxiously.
She replied, “The next time you try seducing someone, try using logic – and see how far you get.”
Lucy Ellman could have written that.
I can just hear Dr Bowler saying that…. I do think having a highly intelligent feminist teaching English at a boys’ school was an inspired move. I remember one English lesson where she presented us with a poem and invited us to speculate on the gender of the poet. Chris Masters came up with the classic opinion that it was ‘too good to have been written by a woman’ – maybe he was just being provocative, but I have my doubts. Anyway, you can imagine Dr Bowler’s satisfaction in pointing out that it was by Adrienne Rich – not only female but lesbian.
Oh, and it wasn’t easy for all of us arriving from girls’ schools to be outnumbered ten to one by these tall, hairy, hormonal creatures who veered between putting us down and pestering us to go out with them. We were just as insecure as you were….
(Hi Giles, spotted you in the Guardian the other week and thought I’d check out your blog.)
Hi Bethan! How wonderful to hear from you. Very spookily I am right now writing a script set in Bristol in the mid 1980s… and then I saw this. Hope you are well. Will drop you a line. Dr Bowler was one of a kind, an amazing teacher and very kind to me when it mattered most. G.