Attack of the Earworms

The placard that hung above our heads on the bedroom wall urged us:

Any educationist can tell you what happens when you tell someone NOT to do something: the NOT is edited out automatically by a special bit of the human brain that evolved there a long time ago, possibly in response to the Ten Commandments, most likely even earlier. So the transmuted message was what reached us throughout our formative years; by the time we left home it had had many years to sink in.

Luckily for my sister and me, the message hung behind our beds, so that we only glimpsed it in passing; but it probably gripped my mother’s attention as she did all that cleaning and dusting stuff that used to happen in the olden days, and she was by nature a worrier to start with. Far into the night we could hear through the wall my mother’s voice worrying incessantly. About what? We couldn’t hear the words, only the tone. And in the pauses which were signalled by a questioning rise in tone we could hear a reassuring response that my father had become able to make even while deeply asleep.

These two voices are so deeply lodged in my memory that they have become earworms, liable to stir and emerge from their burrows in times of stress, and when they emerge they come not simply as tones of voice but with actual words. 

on the way up Ben Macdui

There was a day, for instance, the last day of my holiday, when I felt a need to knock off Ben Macdui before returning to the flat lands of Oxford. From Glenclova Hostel I cycled the 60 or so miles to Inverey, where the hostel was listed as having food, so I didn’t stop in Braemar to pick up provisions. It turned out that in practice Inverey Hostel had no food and no warden, and by then it was too late to go back to Braemar.

Rummaging in the saddlebag I found a wee cache of dried apple flakes and some glucose tablets; that would have to do. Some apple flakes in hot water (pumped up from the well, beautiful water, no chlorine) for supper and off to bed.

Ben Macdui summit cairn

This was the first time I’d been in the Cairngorms so I started up the track to Derry Lodge, carried on part way through the Lairig Ghru, up by the March Burn, over the summit plateau of Macdui (4295ft) in thick mist (aarrgh, was that the dreaded Fear Liath Mòr (Big Grey Man) up ahead at the top? no, only the summit cairn, phew), down the other side, past Loch Etchachan, down Glen Derry. It’s a reasonably long walk, and a fair climb to the top of Macdui, and I was really pretty hungry in spite of chewing the remainder of the apple flakes en route, but still it was a surprise when I fell over on the way down Glen Derry. A glucose tablet, and the legs started whirring again, but not for long, down again, another glucose.

Presently the attack of the earworms started. It began with my mother’s voice, “Oh dear, you’ll never manage,” which triggered another topple to the peat and another glucose; oh dearie me, I found myself thinking, I’ll never manage, I’m going to just lie here and rot away, and turn into whitening bones … In came my father’s voice, “You can do it, get up, you’ll be all right,” and up I got and carried on … until here came the song of the mother worm again, “Oh dear …”

Oxford

The alternating worms kept up their songs until the glucose and the father worm got me back to Inverey, on to the bike, along to Braemar, where the hostel had great wads of food, for by this time rationing was easing. I got bacon and bread and kippers and a tin of spaghetti, and fried them all together in a massive great pan, a potent nosh to remember on the long train journey back down to the flat lands and spires of Oxford.

Not far away, in Abingdon, lived my sister Joan; in the more than 80 years that I knew her, I never fathomed what made her tick, but I have clear memories of her expertise at coping with the minutiae of daily living. Back when we shared the bedroom of

W O R R Y

I T   M A Y   H A P P E N

our school uniform consisted of white blouse, navy tunic, long black stockings and sensible shoes; under the blouse was a device known as a liberty bodice, whose job was to hold up the stockings via four suspenders: it gave the enclosed body liberty in contrast to the full whale-boned corset which preceded it, and in due course it would be overtaken by the suspender-belt, which was what was left of a liberty bodice if you cut it in half and took away the top bit; for the liberty-bodice was a substantial garment with shoulder-straps, which went over the vest and descended to the bum, and on its lower rim were the suspenders that held up the long black stockings; over this lot went the knickers - vast, navy school knickers with a pocket for your hankie during gym. Putting all this on early in the freezing morning was neither easy nor quick, and especially slow was the careful fastening of the stockings to the suspenders so that the seams would not become grotesquely twisted.

liberty bodice

So, faced with this routine challenge, which continued for six school years, Joan evolved a time-and-stress-saving strategy: having once got the stockings suspended at exactly the right position and height, she thereafter left the whole lot fastened, crawling neatly out of the apparatus at the end of the school day, and leaping aboard it with scarcely credible agility in the morning; during the night it hung on a coat-hanger from a hook in the door, its off-white body and dangling dark legs a startling vision in the moonlight for a sister sharing the bedroom and half-waking from the fantasy of a dream.

Abingdon

After school and university, came our first jobs: Joan was living in Abingdon and working at Harwell; I was in Oxford, proof-reading at the OUP and had a bedsit on the Iffley Road. When I first went there, the landlady, Ivy, showed me my room, lined with a wallpaper whose pattern was huge, dark, ominous leaves, and told me “I call this my Autumn Room, it’s where my husband went mad.” Joan’s first digs were with a family who drew the curtains when the sun shone “because it puts the fire out”, and threw a wobbly if she happened to lay down her knife and fork crossing one another (no reason given, possibly because too horrific to speak about).

On a Sunday my landlady would cook a wondrous lunch of roast beef and yorkshire pud, splendid, but far too huge for me with a stomach shrunk by a decade of rationing. It seemed a brilliant idea to share it with another shrunken stomach, and accordingly Joan cycled across from Abingdon one Sunday, and we split the massive Sunday lunch before going out on our bikes. But this upset Ivy who raged that she’d cooked it for me, not for my sister. It was a time when you absolutely did not argue with the diktat, no matter how grotesque, of your landlady - you might as well argue with a spitting cobra; so next Sunday Joan cycled across and crouched outside the window of my room while I passed out half the fodder. We totally escaped detection.

Eventually I moved to a different bedsit, where the landlady believed that her dead uncle came in the night and told her which horse to back on the morrow. “Hark!” she would cry, “I can hear him tap-tap-tapping at the window, he’ll have the winner for the 2.15”, and she would hurry to open the window while I crept away upstairs. She had a stomach ulcer, and during the day she puked into a bucket which she kept to show me as soon as I got in the door after work. I stayed out later and later, pacing the streets and admiring the amazing Oxford architecture, while the mother earworm lamented.

Presently I moved again, to live with Torquil and Sheila and their small daughter, all of whom were sane. Torquil had been a prisoner-of war for several years; when asked how bad that had been he was dismissive: "it wasn't very nice, but nothing like as bad as Eton". Torquil’s mother was an aristocrat, who disapproved of his marriage to a commoner (and of him giving house-room to common lodgers) and would pay surprise visits to express that disapproval. When her car was observed approaching, the warning cry went up “Lady Muck!” whereupon everyone had to lie on the floor underneath the windows, invisible to a person peering in from outside, until she gave up and went away.  

Oor Wullie

During these years our mother would send the Sunday Post down to Joan every week. This hugely popular folk-Scots production featured in its middle pages the cartoon adventures of Oor Wullie and The Broons, whose speech was broad Central Belt. Joan took it to Harwell, where there was a considerable contingent of Welshmen who were glad to engage with another non-English culture and got Joan to read aloud and explain the speech-bubbles of the characters. I pictured the cluster of Welshmen in one of the most hi-tech ambiences of the time, listening to Joan’s best native accent “Jings, whit a rammy in Peasy’s Alley” and her translation of jings and rammy.

Joan got engaged (“oh dear”) and our parents travelled down for the wedding. On the eve of which my mother got hold of her and spent many hours urging her to cancel it (“it’s not too late to change your mind”); it was an obvious effort for Joan to make it, pale and shaking, through the proceedings the next day, but luckily my mother was neutralised by the bridegroom’s mother, who gripped her arm and poured into her ear the long, long saga of all her only son’s childhood ailments.

the ascendancy

The flat lands were pleasant enough, if you liked that sort of thing, and they suited Joan. But they were ruled by the ascendancy, fine people in their way but used to a degree of inequality that one hardly saw at all in the north. I had long since become thirled to a starker landscape, and the need to return to it became stronger with the years. So I left Oxford and during the long train journey north, two men got in, somewhere around the Borders, and fell into conversation (not done in England), and what they discussed with one another was Theology (not a thing you would speak about in England).

a starker landscape

Yes, here was a culture I could understand. In the early light of dawn, bare, steep hillsides rolled past outside the window, and clouds wheeched briskly across the sky, growing dark from time to time with a blatter of rain. It would be cold out there.

This was where I needed to be.