Low life | 18 June 2011

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.