She was an enigma but history is littered with physically exquisite female sadists. Father never denied her radiant beauty and my recollections are still captive to the faultless structure of her face, her ivory skin, amber-flecked ebony hair and huge violet eyes blazing with self-righteous anger or unblinking candour. She aged so gradually she defied time.

Father's judgement on the marriage still disturbs me: 'she was the stuff of delirium but I never understood her. She undercut my decency and self esteem'.

Talent and beauty light no stars in the gutter.

They were married in 1923. In those bigoted days marriage was a domestic lobster pot. When the stock market crashed in 1929 (we kids knew nothing of this) she started to beat the hell out of us but by then we were already wallowing in a domestic cesspit.
Mother had graduated with honours in pianoforte and was a gifted church organist but marriage destroyed her brilliant prospects and the diaries hint at domestic turmoil from the outset. I open on a date that involves me - October 14th 1939. The phoney war was six weeks old. Mother often let her guard down when she thought she was alone. A subtle thing; she didn't talk to herself but expressed herself like an actress in a silent movie. Ahead of war my sisters were bundled off to our grandparents in Clifton. Father, mother and I stayed put in our end-of-terrace lodging house amid the Dickensian squalor of South East London. After the general evacuation a smoky stillness settled over the square, isolating the house, and mother took to lurking on the stairs peering and listening for movements overhead. A day came when, unaware that I was in the landing lavatory listening for German bombers, she triumphantly shouted: 'that's done for Parnell - his whores have flown!'

Phoney war days were melancholic with winter setting in. Father had promised we were set to quit London for a new house in the heart of rural Kent and though the prospect cheered him, mother stayed surly and remote. She knew he was holding back a lifetime of secrets and suspected he was playing a wicked game of bluff, full of treachery, and that somehow he'd come into wealth again.
But he dare not confide in her - thus their alienation was complete.

I was dressed to go with dad for my first sight of 'his palace'. Mother was fretting in the next room, her movements like rats under floor boards. Recent family days had been, as father would say, rather trying. He was a master of understatement.

This is a page from Milk and Honey by Gerald Moore, available for purchase from Lazarus Press.

Choose a page:-

  [an error occurred while processing this directive]