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inhabited my childhood, the Wedgewood, the quaintsy Hummels.
    Finally Mother came downstairs with her dying girl. She was a stunningly pretty little thing, in her mid teens I imagine, a perfect, frail, pressed lily of a face, though with a silk scarf tight about her head; to hide hair loss I quickly supposed. I smiled sympathetically, but having embraced my mother the girl hurried out without sparing a glance for the rest of us. It’s something I’ve noticed frequently about the walking wounded. They don’t really want to be seen by the rest of us at the Crawley household. They’re embarrassed they’ve had to go looking for unorthodox help like this. All the stronger Mother’s pull must be to get them past the ogre of Grandfather at the door.
    Hardly noticing me, Mother flopped onto the sofa and rubbed her fingers in her eyes. She seemed exhausted. Iannounced that after a brilliant interview I’d got a really promising job. She took her fingers from her eyes, focused on me and beamed. ‘Oh how wonderful, George. You must tell me all about it.’
    ‘Let’s go out to lunch,’ I said, ‘Just us two. Celebrate.’
    ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that, Dad and Mavis . . .’
    ‘Oh come on, you can leave Grandad and Mavis for once.’
    She stood up smiling, smoothed down her dress, little girlish, looked around her, saw the other two imprisoned in their perennial sloth, television, newspaper, never a useful item in their hands, never an interesting comment to make, doing nothing but sapping away at her marvellous energy. She looked at them. They didn’t offer. They didn’t say, ‘Go ahead, Jenny dear.’ She hesitated, then said: ‘Oh well, perhaps I could fix them a couple of pork pies and a little egg salad. I think there are some salady things in the fridge. Hang on.’
    I went into the kitchen and watched her working rapidly with plates, tomatoes, lettuce, boiled eggs. I noticed that there was something very different between the way she did these things and the way Shirley did them. Difficult to pin it down though. Unless it was simply that Mother lacked Shirley’s style, the way she has of turning a plate into a picture. Mother tended to fumble. There were cuts on her fingers. A tomato came out not in slices but rough fruity chunks. She wiped her hands on a torn dishtowel (showing Beefeaters) and we set out.
    Perhaps this lunch was the happiest moment I ever had with my mother. We ate in a Greek place on Acton High Street near the railway bridge. Not ideal but what do you want in Acton in the late seventies. She was pleased as a child to be treated, perhaps more pleased, since children always think everything is due to them. She said: ‘I’m so very glad you’ve got what you wanted, George. It’s so important not to be frustrated and cooped up in life.’ ‘Kind of business that’s going to go like a bomb,’ I said, ‘with the way labour costs are shaping up right at the moment. People just have to be efficient.’ She said: ‘Oh, this is lovely,’ and she beamed.
    Coming back from paying, though, I caught her frowning.‘Don’t worry, it wasn’t that expensive,’ I laughed. ‘I’ve got the money,’ for it would have been like her to have spoilt things fretting about how much cash I had. But she said she was thinking of that pretty young girl with leukaemia who was almost certainly going to die.
    Then leaving the restaurant an odd thing happened. I opened the door for her and she stepped out directly and really rather carelessly into the path of an older, patently working-class man dashing for the bus with three or four Co-op carrier bags swinging wildly from his hands; one of the bags slammed into her leg and, half turning, the man stumbled and almost fell. ‘Fuckin’ idiot!’ he screamed, scrambling on for the bus. ‘Fuckin’ idiot your-fuckin’-self,’ I roared after him. ‘Why don’t you watch where you’re fuckin’-well going?’
    No sooner were these words out than I realised what a