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‘Who are we? Where are we going? Has public provision been a success?’ These are the kind of ‘weighty, unanswerable’ questions, Jeremy Harding asks himself as he mooches around west London housing estates in search of the mother who gave him up for adoption 50-odd years ago. The questions in Jonathan Maitland’s head are more personal, and considerably more promising as opening lines for a narrative. Was his mother genuinely mistaken when she announced, via the local paper and without preparing her family, that she had inoperable cancer? Or was she brazenly faking to win public sympathy prior to opening England’s first all-gay hotel? Why had the old people’s homes she had previously run been closed down? How could she afford to drive a new red Mercedes and send Maitland’s stepfather off to Harrods to buy suits by the dozen? Had she ever contemplated, or even possibly committed, murder?
Harding knew from the age of five that he had been adopted. His personal myth of origin was one of social elevation. The unmarried Irish girl who surrendered him was one of the poor. His adoptive mother Maureen and her husband Colin were of the mostly idle, fairly rich. Colin did rather well out of playing contract bridge for money with the slightly richer (Lord Lucan among them). Maureen ran a flower shop in Knightsbridge for a while, but spent most of her life getting drunk in a ladylike way (‘How can I cook the lunch without a little pick-me-up?’).
When Harding began to make enquiries about his biological parents he uncovered the hidden story of his adoptive ones. Maureen adored My Fair Lady: it turned out that her posh manners had been as hard worked-for as Eliza Doolittle’s. The woman who had acted as go-between in setting up Harding’s adoption, and who was referred to on the official record as Maureen’s ‘ex-char-woman’, was the best friend of her youth. They both grew up on a housing estate in Surrey. Maureen had caught the eye of a millionaire businessman, who had married her and paid for her to have lessons in elocution and deportment, before she left him for Colin. When Harding was little she used to describe scenes from her supposedly aristocratic childhood to him — a voyage to Egypt, skiing in Chamonix, a horse and carriage with dalmatians running along behind it — all, he belatedly realised, borrowed or stolen.
That discovery, with its implicit message about the mutability of social position, is the most significant outcome of Harding’s quest. He does trace his birth-mother, but their reunion is bathetic. The tone of his book is wistful, its atmosphere uneasy — he refers repeatedly (and with only tenuous justifications) to the 10 Rillington Place murders and to that most sinister of fantasies, The Tale of Mr Tod. As he narrates his frustrating progress from library to public record office he repeatedly allows the past to penetrate the present, so that his younger self walks ghost-like alongside him. Mother Country is pensive, finely written, highly serious.
Maitland’s book, by contrast, has the hurly-burly energy of a hair-raising story told by someone for whom words flow easily precisely because he doesn’t care too much about fine writing. His earliest memory is of his mother charging her car at some railings outside the Hilton. Later ones are no better: when she wasn’t trying, or pretending to try, to kill herself she was turning her children out on the street. As a student he found his anecdotes about his awful upbringing were popular, but when he began to write about his mother he found himself on the trail of a story which shocked him. She wasn’t, it turned out, just the kind of flamboyant, badly behaved character who could be contained in a joke. During the writing of this book he was working on a series about unscrupulous builders conning elderly people out of their lifesavings. Simultaneously he was unearthing evidence that his mother was also a swindler of the helpless aged: at least one old man in her care was bullied into lending her large sums of money before signing a new will naming her as his sole heir.
Different questions, different aims. Jeremy Harding, ever striving for weightiness, records his anxiety about writing about himself and his parents, about ‘turning up a few meagre pieces of the past … that couldn’t be matched with any larger picture’. Maitland has no such ambition and therefore so such inhibition. An investigative journalist, he knows that his mother’s outrageous character and dodgy career add up to a good story, and although he has moments of shame about serving up his own kin to a public greedy for sensation, nothing is going to stop him telling it. But, far apart as these two books are both in intention and in style, the conclusions to be drawn from each of them are similar: that mid-20th-century Britain was by no means the rigidly stratified, convention-bound, culturally homogeneous society that those who reminisce nostalgically about it now fondly imagine.
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