Cathy Simpson

The Martyr’s Tale

I look at my reflection in the mirror above the hand basins. The lighting is harsh and makes everyone look rough at the best of times. This is not the best of times. I look dreadful; red eyes and nose and fading red hair. I look like a sad Rudolf, and the red paper hat, which matches my new sweater - just, finishes off the look. I remove the hat and go into the restaurant and get a coffee. Thank goodness I was sane enough to pick up my handbag as I left.

The restaurant is deserted apart from a shabby man sitting on table in the corner and a rowdy family by the window. I take my coffee to a table overlooking the children’s playground and turn my back on the room. Why am I sitting here alone at 3pm on Christmas Day? A tear runs down my cheek and plops into the coffee, which is probably pretty horrid anyway. I relive my private nightmare. 

Christmas started badly, I suppose. My mother-in law arrived two days ago, bringing as usual a bag of rotting fruit and the out-of-date food which comprises her diet. Don’t feel sad for her – she’s not poor - just mean. Thanks to a lifetime of such economies she has half a million in the bank and is immune to all types of food poisoning as well as hyperthermia. Work as usual on Christmas Eve for me with no prospect of an early finish. I am glued to my post until 6pm. When I get in I find that M-I-L has thoughtfully placed every dish she has used today directly into a bowl of cold water. Unfortunately she didn’t finish the porridge I had left her and it is a nasty mess in the water.

My husband is doing the crossword in the conservatory and ignoring his mother who is glued to a soap rerun on UK Gold. Music blasts down the stairs from the children, home from university, with a term’s supply of laundry, in hiding from their Grandmother. I proceed to knock up a three-course meal – minestrone soup, homemade pizza and a ginger Yule log. The log and the soup were made before I went out so I suppose that I am exaggerating a bit.

Over the meal M-I-L proceeds to grill the children about their studies, friends, social life and use of cannabis. She finds them monosyllabic; which is probably just as well. She tells me the soup is under seasoned, the pizza has anchovies on and she really can’t eat them and the Yule log is too creamy for her. My husband is still mentally wrestling with his crossword, but at least eats without comment. Meal over, the kids escape quickly and M-I-L returns to her post by the TV. My husband has to be persuaded to make some effort to keep her company. I clear the table, wash the dishes and start preparations for the next day. Christmas traditions were developed by women who not only stayed at home all day but had servants as well. They are sustained by glossy women’s magazines in search of sales.

By 11.30 I have finished and just have the Christmas cake to do. In the interests of speed I cut different sized triangles out of the green marzipan and call it “Christmas Trees of the World”. Eat your heart out, Delia. But then she always spends Christmas in the Caribbean, wise woman. M-I-L has gone to bed with a hot chocolate and grumbles that she has not seen me. The smell of her rotting fruit makes me feel sick. I stir husband from his Glen Morangie-induced stupor and we fill the stockings and lay out the presents. I throw myself into bed. I would really like a drink, but apart from a glass of wine with my meal I haven’t had time and god knows what the Christmas cake would have looked like if I had. Maybe I’d I have piped obscenities on it.

Next morning, and for this I do have to be thankful, the children lie in. I thought for years we’d always be up at 4am. M-I-L gets everyone up at 8.30 and I make coffee all round for us, with boiled water and the juice of a rotting lemon for M-I-L. (Maybe that’s why she’s always sour?)

The present opening ceremony progresses. M-I-L smoothes out wrapping paper for next year, sorting out ribbon rosettes and carrier bags. She doesn’t open her own presents properly, just undoes the sellotape at one end, peeks in and then recycles it. One year she gave me back what I’d given her the previous year. I didn’t remember but my daughter did! She gets round this now by labelling the parcel with its contents and sender. They are all stacked up in the landing cupboard, like her own private Harrods.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a wife never has to buy another card or present for his mother. I drove twenty miles and got a parking ticket getting her a new dressing gown. I have placed a chocolate in the pocket with a note saying happy Christmas Mum. She will miss it when she recycles it and it will bring delight to the new recipient. She says it’s a bit bulky and she prefers pink. I have also got a book for her – it’s a signed edition by her favourite author and just out. (Another journey but no parking ticket!) She says she doesn’t think she’s read it.

She gives me a red sweater, not really my colour. There is a tiny darn, her very own work she tells me. She got it at the woollen mill sale. There is also a grubby mark on the front. I put it on, really to show her how to behave when you are given a gift, and also because it won’t matter if I dribble Turkey fat on it.

Meanwhile M-I-L would like some porridge for breakfast and none of that Ready Brek stuff. I make it and ask her if she wouldn’t mind having it on her lap as the table is set for lunch. She does mind and prophesies terminal indigestion. She ate an indigestible meal far too late last night and this will finish it off.

I seek refuge in the kitchen. My brother-in-law and his wife are coming for lunch. They really get on my nerves, even on a good day! This doesn’t look like a good day. Brother-in-law makes sarcastic comments permanently. It’s a form of bullying and M-I-L thinks the sun shines out of him, from a place where the sun doesn’t normally shine. She cannot spend Christmas with them as she feels it is too much work for his poor wife. He and his wife are very materialistic and their conversation is a catalogue of purchases peppered with words like Rolex, Gucci, Armani and Waterford. Their twins have very sensibly escaped to Australia on a gap year. My sister-in-law appears to have taken a vow never to soil her manicured hands, as she will not offer any form of assistance. I suppose if you don’t work you have time to have jewels stuck on your nails.

The others arrive. Brother-in-law makes a sarcastic comment about the tree and Sister-in-law has a sweater for me (admittedly clean and undarned), which is a size 16. I have never been a size 16; this year I have successfully dieted down from a size 14 to a size 12. I thank her but am just glad that it came from Marks and Spencer and I can change it, but the point she’s made, oh so successfully, is I am trunky to her twiggy. They give M-I-L a silver thimble. She is thrilled and later I hear her on the phone telling a friend she got “A silver thimble and just bits of things!!”

I  pour the drinks and give them out, Brother-in-law mutters about the measure (too small). I have a sparkling mineral water. M-I-L has Hetty MacDonald’s Boxing Day  party tomorrow. So tonight while the rest of the family slump in front of the TV I will have to drive the 50 mile round trip to take her home.

I juggle conversation, sprouts and turkey and by 1.30pm I gather them round the table. Prawn Cocktail for starters made especially for M-I-L. We pull crackers and I swap my hat with my husband so it matches the Christmas sweater and we read mottos out. It seems just two minutes since the children couldn’t read them without help but found them really funny. “Can’t stand cheap crackers “says Brother- in –Law who seems baffled by his toenail cutters.

“You should ask Hetty for her recipe for prawn cocktail” says M-I-L  “It's really tasty”

Sister-in-law says she thinks, ”Retro food is rather boring,” pokes about in her glass and eats nothing; she’s so thin she should be wrinkled, but she isn’t.

I clear the plates and bring on the turkey. I am well and truly fed up. Brother in law is telling his mother about his new boat. His mother appears to be making notes to tell Hetty tomorrow. I pick up the knife to carve, for some reason my husband has never mastered this art.

 “Don’t you think it would have been better to cook the stuffing in the bird, it looks better and makes the turkey tastier“ says M-I-L. As criticisms go it is mild for her. But for me it is the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’ s back.

I have a choice. I can stab her with the carving knife. It's sharp. I sharpened it just now. I imagine how it would feel. I expect initially I would feel resistance from her clothes and skin and then it would slide in swiftly. I’m left-handed so it would easily find her hollow heart. It would quickly and cleanly stop her talking forever.

Or I can walk away.

I watch Bad Girls on television so I don’t think I’d like prison. Also she just isn’t worth sacrificing my best white tablecloth for and the police get sick of domestics at Christmas. I can see why the murder rate rises at this time of year. So I take the second option, I quietly place the knife on the table, walk through the kitchen, pick up my handbag and go outside. Now I feel faintly foolish. What will I do on Christmas Day? I can hardly go crying on my friends’ shoulders. My car is parked in so I take my husband’s. It’s old but a sporty model and goes faster than mine; it also, unlike mine, has a tank full of petrol.

I drive to the motorway and its so quiet I put my foot down and go really fast. Bit like back in the Sixties when people actually drove on them for fun. Momentarily I feel young and carefree. As I pull into the service station I wonder how long it’ll be before they notice that I have not just stepped out for some gravy but I will be gone some time.  Reality hits me and I burst into tears.

So here I am. Shall I have to return and sheepishly apologise and accept their reproaches? If this were a novel that shabby old man would turn out to be young millionaire in disguise, desperate for my size 12 body. Or the rowdy family would implore me to travel urgently with them to Antigua as they’ve heard I’m a wonderful cook.

I’ll have another coffee and decide what to do!!

Cheers!!

The Honeymoon

I removed my bracelet length white gloves and poured tea from the china pot for my husband. I felt very grown up. I was wearing my going away outfit. A navy blue Poly Peck maxi coat accessorised with white plastic knee high boots, a white plastic shoulder bag and long white chiffon scarf. My long hair was tied with a blue velvet ribbon. I think my mother would have preferred me to wear a hat.  White was not my favourite choice of colour to accessorise the coat I had found for £5 in Arnott’s sale in Aberdeen. My original choice was red plastic- but alas I got stuck in the red boots in the shoe shop as the zip became jammed when called on to strain over my abnormally ample calf. The manager had to be called and used a pair of pliers to free me. Mortified, I grabbed my own footwear and hotfooted it out onto Union Street. My new husband was wearing what? Well it could have been his only suit (green mohair) or he may have rejected it as the pockets and turn-ups were full of confetti. In which case it would have been a tweed jacket, shirt, tie and what was called then, slacks. If it was the latter outfit he is still wearing it but in a slightly more recent incarnation. Mercifully the suit has long since been disposed of.

Today honeymooners seem to jet off to distant locations like the Seychelles or Kenya. Domestic destinations were then the norm. A couple from Market Drayton told me they set off for London, missed the train and spent their honeymoon in Stafford. Another friend had an embarrassing encounter when her knicker elastic snapped at Hanley bus station. My new husband was a helicopter student at Ternhill. Due to a mixture of poor weather and the rotational power cuts resulting from the 1972 miner’s strike his course was extended by a week. He had to be back at Ternhill for Monday morning. So it would have been a 24-hour honeymoon, except that the clocks went forward that weekend, reducing it to a 23 hour one.

We had left Durham and stopped for the night at Leeming Bar Motel on the A1 certainly not the most romantic of venues, even then. The next morning we set off for Shropshire and came along the A53 to Market Drayton. Strangely, and without any sense of premonition, right past the house where we have lived longer than anywhere else in our lives.

Market Drayton seemed quaint and pretty after the cold solidity of Aberdeen and Durham. We parked the car in St. Mary’s Street outside the Church. Nowhere was open apart from the tearoom and so to kill time we walked the deserted streets of Drayton looking in the shop windows. How exciting those shops seemed; I remember a wonderful hardware shop with patterned pans and a china shop selling Royal Doulton dinner services, one of which matched a coffee set we’d received as a wedding present. I resolved to have the dinner service. I never achieved that particular ambition and now it seems strange that it was so important at the time.

 We decided to have afternoon tea. Exactly where this café was is now a subject for dispute. I firmly believe it to be where the dentist now is and my husband insists that it was opposite the Crown on the corner of Queen Street. We were able to linger over the pot of tea, which was about all we could afford with the cash in our pockets. Prior to the invention of  debit cards and cash machines, if you needed money you went into the bank and wrote a cheque. You had to take out all the money you needed for the weekend on a Friday. Come to think of it there wasn’t much in the bank anyway.

The problem of where I was to stay presented itself. I was not allowed to stay in the officer’s mess. Even as a married woman it was thought that my presence might corrupt the students. As a student my husband was not allowed to live out. So we went in our red mini clubman with the plastic wood trim to Calverhall. Fortunately when the pub opened the landlord said he had a room free. Apart from the odd travelling salesman I was the only guest at the Old Jack that week. How eagerly I offered to sign the register, although apparently they didn’t usually bother.

After I had had breakfast each morning I sat in the sun and read. Over the week followed each road in turn from the crossroads to find a suitable reading spot. One morning I attracted the attention of a nasty Jack Russell that ran out into the road and nipped my calf hard. It didn’t draw blood presumably because his little jaws couldn’t manage such a meaty leg. In the afternoon I sat in my room and crocheted a tablemat or wrote a few more thank you letters. My mother and mother-in–law had very thoughtfully opened wedding presents in our absence and sent me written descriptions so that I could do this promptly.   In the evening we visited local pubs with friends. One day I walked to Whitchurch for something to do. Several cars stopped on the country road and offered me a lift but I explained I was walking from choice. One man said he wished that his wife would walk to Whitchurch for something to do.  Once there I had a glass of orange squash at a café and retraced my steps.

            We went for a romantic anniversary meal at the Old Jack many years later and my husband complained, very unromantically, that he had spent more on two coffees than on bed and breakfast for a week. So much has changed in the intervening years for us and for Drayton. We still have the coffee set and the crochet mats in a cupboard; last used at some long forgotten celebration. The only constant is each other so if the tearoom was on the corner of Queen Street please don’t tell me.