The Pantry Household: Mr Nancy Rawlings
(I urge you to read Part The First, here , before proceeding)
Relations
being what they were between my parents I am unsure how it was managed that I
was born in 1959, in the lengthening shadows of the world wars and a full ten
years after they were married. My
father, Tasker Pantry, located the midwife at the scene of another imminent
birth where she greeted him loudly down the stairs past an equally distressed and anxious man:
‘I have a naked woman to attend to up here Mr Pantry, I cannot help you at the
moment. Is your wife still walking
around?’
Flushing deepest puce at this intelligence Tasker
could scarcely articulate my mother Nancy’s predicament. Riding home as fast as his bicycle wheels
would carry him he found me already safe in her arms, just under one hour after
the first contractions of the labour had begun.
Recalling these events later he regretted he had not avoided the
mortification of his errand for want of reflecting beforehand that my mother had
never needed assistance from anyone in anything she ever did.
In 1945 Tasker had
almost died of dehydration from unloading cargo in the hot
sun of the South
China Sea. The war had already ended and
his illness had secured him an early release from service with the merchant navy. He returned to England at the age of 20, relieved and
optimistic that he would not end up like his father Edmund Pantry who had lain
for three days with a permanent leg injury among the dead and dying on the
battlefield of the Somme
– living out his days in mostly silent shell-shock. Meanwhile, Nancy Rawlings had made plans
for Tasker. The Rawlings family home had
been bombed to smithereens. Nancy’s parents and her only sibling, a
sister, had all been killed. Tasker’s
duty was clear to everyone, or so he discovered on his return from The Far
East. ‘You’re all I have in the world now, Tasker’ said Nancy in the nasal, Cockney
twang she had inherited and which she would attempt to disguise, to interesting
effect, whenever in the company of those she wished to impress.
The Rawlings
and the Pantrys were close friends. Both families had moved to Harrow from
Shoreditch, part of the exodus out of the East End of London that accompanied the
progress of the Metropolitan railway line.
According to my Aunt Edith Pantry, Nancy and Tasker had been ‘childhood
sweethearts’ from the age of five. The
inevitability of their alliance did not fully strike Tasker until he was
24years old and the wedding presents had already begun to arrive. By then he had qualified as a teacher and so
began his retreat into the world of literature where, not altogether unlike
Edmund, he lived out his days. He and
Nancy eventually moved to Bedfield, Surrey, a respectable town in the commuter belt.
Nancy and
Tasker had an understanding: my mother had dominion over the home – the whole
of our lives, in fact - bar my father’s ‘library’, a garage that he had
converted for the purpose. He made and
drank wine and beer in there and read poetry – activities my mother disapproved
of as identifiable subversion but did not interfere with, knowing that there
were borders in my father’s personality which even she could not cross.
As her only
child, I was naturally the focus of my mother’s formidable attention. At this remove I have a better appreciation of
the ambitions she had for me, though I have not realised them quite as she
intended. Most pertinent to this blog, I,
in turn, made an intense study of Nancy herself and came to realise the wisdom
of working around rather than through other people. The true success of one’s mastery of this
skill may be measured by the extent to which one manages to secure one’s own
preferred outcomes in a given situation, while leaving one’s quarry under the
impression that they are their own.
‘Cecil,
this navy blazer will match your twill trousers.’ So spake Nancy, for instance, during a Saturday
morning shopping excursion for the purpose of ‘smartening’ me for an ‘At Home’
at the Brewitts the next day. I was
15. I might have set up in ferocious
opposition to the blazer, which was my instinct, but this would only
have strengthened Nancy’s resolve. Tom Brewitt was my own age and, to my
mother’s not-secret envy, a pupil at the minor public school, St Crispin’s, while
I attended Bedfield Comprehensive where my father was by then Head of English.
The owners of a haberdashery, the Brewitts were people of consequence in my
mother’s estimation - a fact which I turned to my advantage with ease. Loud, public school-style jackets were fashionable
at the time. ‘Couldn’t I have this one Mother? It's like the St Crispin school
blazer’ – I pointed to a maroon and chocolate striped affair that I fancied. As a pebble dropped in a pond, the effect of my
words rippled across the surface of my mother’s face. ‘I was just admiring it myself’ she said.
At 18, I
had my mother’s cooperation in most things of importance to me. By then I was also on first name terms with
my parents, an audacious assertion of equality which she chose to interpret as
an eccentric expression of maturity befitting a talented and able son. From his close understanding of the necessity
that had birthed it, my father was lost in admiration of my ability with Nancy.
The irony was that I owned the result which in justice should have
accrued to Tasker himself, whose deference to his wife was unsettled by occasional
outbursts of furious insubordination. In
honour of his dignity he would not give up his belief that it was necessary to
demonstrate at least some manly, if futile, resistance. But how inverted a notion of the reality were
the letters arriving at 27, Tuscany Close (a Wimpey Home) –
addressed to the fiction ‘Mrs Tasker Pantry’!
