After I’d migrated from Essex to Devon during the last recession but one to look for casual work, the first woman I ‘went out’ with in any formal sense was my boy’s mother. She lived at her mother and father’s tied cottage and for a while I more or less lived there as well.
Her father was a cowman, and the sweet, lovely smell of liquid cow manure permeated the house when he was there. The mother was, in her words, a ‘scrubber’ and she scrubbed for a Mrs P and a Mrs R to the point of total exhaustion. My boy’s mother was then still at school.
The family spoke with a rich south Devon accent laced with dialect words; words such as ‘crams’ (nonsense), ‘orts’ (leftovers), ‘smitch’ (smoke) and ‘evil’ (fork). A girl was always a ‘maid’ or a ‘party’. If she had large breasts, she was a ‘party with gurt lasers’. My boy’s mother used to address me as ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and described that which belonged to me as ‘thine’. Instead of asking me what I was talking about, she’d say, ‘What be telling about?’ If she thought something, in the sense that she believed it, she ‘allowed’ it. As someone who for years previously had found the image of Tess Durbeyfield pressing her cheek against the warm side of one of the milkers at Talbothay’s dairy extraordinarily potent, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
In the evenings we gathered around the television set, exactly like they do in the comedy series The Royle Family, enjoying desultory conversation, smoking endless cigarettes, and watching any old rubbish. Tea was often sandwiches, crisps and chocolate bars eaten on our laps. The sandwiches were often spam or processed cheese on margarine and soft supermarket white sliced bread, a combination which I particularly liked then, and still like now. I walked 20 miles a day behind a dustcart then. Sandwiches, crisps and chocolate bars were a staple and I never tired of them. And as I sat there next to my boy’s mother in the tiny living room, her hand and an ashtray in my lap, I would marvel at how easily and wholeheartedly this Devonshire family had taken this deracinated ‘furrener’ with his harsh accent into its bosom.
This routine persisted for several years then circumstances changed and I was no longer the prospective son-in-law. But their generosity and friendship continued and I have been invited to every family celebration or birthday tea for over 20 years.
Last Sunday, for example, I went to my boy’s half-sister’s 16th birthday tea. The extended family was present, plus one or two neighbours. I’d guess that not one of the wage earners present — all labourers of one kind or another — earned more than £15,000 a year. But they would have been astonished to hear of such a ludicrously snobbish calculation. For the gatherings of my boy’s mother’s family are utterly free from any kind of social anxiety, comparison, or competition, or notions of enlarging the mind, or getting on in the world. There is absolutely none. And if there were any, it would be treated as a joke. It’s wonderful. Although I hadn’t seen them all for some while, I relaxed in my chair like a demobbed soldier back from the war.
The company around the table was ever-changing. But at one point there was the birthday girl, her first cousin, also aged 16, stunningly beautiful, the gazelle offspring of a family of heifers, and the girls’ grandfather, the cowman (now retired).
The retired cowman was showing us all the tablets he had to take for his diabetes and one thing and another. He emptied his pill box on the table among the bowls of crisps and plates of cold pasties. ‘Fucking job,’ he said, surveying the multicoloured assortment. (In Devon a ‘job’ can be an onerous imposition, or an event, whether happy or sad, as well as a piece of work.) ‘And look at ee!’ he said, singling out an enormous red and white capsule with a square ended forefinger. ‘I don’t know whether to swallow ee or stick ee up my ass.’
His young granddaughters slapped their slender hands across their pretty mouths and fell giggling against each other. At family gatherings such as this, and especially in front of the young girls, he invariably gets on the subject of his ‘ass’, and a demonstration of its vocal power generally follows.
He looked proudly at his granddaughters, who were still helpless with laughter. Even up to a year ago he wouldn’t have enjoyed such an extravagant response. But these were maids no longer: they were young parties. Then he looked at me and winked happily, like an old flirt who has scored a bull’s-eye.
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