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This week it was National Nude Day in the USA, so let me tell you why I don’t eat pâté.
You may not think the two are connected, but we didn’t think carpentry and space exploration were connected until they were. Yes, the latest high-tech material for constructing satellites and moon bases is wood. Nakedness and my visceral rejection of pâté are connected more temporally, the way that Bobby Kennedy’s assassination led to the creation of Scooby Doo.
Indeed, as with anything in life, there’s a whole chain of causality. You can start anywhere. I’ll start with civil engineer Sir James Drake who, while designing a section of England’s M6 motorway, builds light wells into the overpasses. These light wells create, in certain conditions, the optical illusion of an oncoming vehicle. On 26th January 1970, at Keele, this optical illusion causes my grandfather to swerve to avoid a non-existent car. He crashes into the structure, ending his life and the happiest part of my childhood.
In the wake of her dad dying, Mum’s next-door-but-one neighbour shows her the emotional support that my Dad (who I suspect may have been autistic) can’t work out how to achieve. This becomes an affair, though Dad hopes moving us to America for a year might ‘cure’ her. When that doesn’t work (and why should it? the heart is relentless), Dad moves out, Colin moves in, and both he and Mum are, quite often, naked.
The nakedness was a shock. The whole time she was with Dad, she was the comforting ‘mummy’ who picked me and my sister up from Girl’s Brigade in a fluffy coat, sat with us making pasta collages and potato prints, wore sensible shoes (and probably sensible underwear). Suddenly it was wild parties, where they had to prop up our basement bedroom ceiling to stop it collapsing while they danced on it. It was intimate body parts everywhere, and ‘Don’t be silly, it’s completely natural.’
I suspect it had something to do with Mum reading Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape. In my mid-30s, when I used to pour big glasses of red wine into both of us to unstopper her mouth so she’d tell me the truth, she said reading Morris’s description of the female orgasm while commuting to her part-time job in London made her cry on the Tube. She had no idea women could have orgasms. (Oh Dad.) She already knew her marriage was missing something, but this! She was a born experience-seeker, and Morris’s book made her determined to know for herself what the text described. Apparently, this book also extols “the untold benefits of being naked.”1
Before I go further, I want to add that Mum was a magnificent woman. We had a complicated relationship, largely because whereas I wrote fiction, she insisted on living it. Here’s a tiny example, described in my poem ‘Twelfth Man’ (Material, 2008):
A larger example, her relentless, jolly, ‘I’m on holiday’ attitude while we suffered under our stepfather’s patent dislike. I objected to her airbrushed version of our lives, her ‘heaven’ narrative when I felt I was going through hell (I wasn’t, but everything is relative).
I was the teller of uncomfortable truths, and she didn’t appreciate it. It was also clear to me that there was an approval rating for her children, and that on her list of favourites, I was number 4 out of 4. There was Cheeky-but-Charming, Golden Boy, Make-Mummy-Happy and then, glowering in the corner, scribbling misery into my notebook, there was me.
My mother was brilliant, and her brilliance, thanks to an absence of feminism in the 1950s, was underutilised. For too long she accepted the suppression of her need to express herself, and when it finally burst out, it did so as full-flowered exhibitionism. (Which is funny because she was a Junior Exhibitioner at the Royal College of Music; from junior exhibitoner to adult exhibitionist).
I wonder whether, had she taken up the post of X-Ray Crystallographer with Watson and Crick’s DNA research team – which she was offered after the death of Rosalind Franklin – she wouldn’t have needed to draw attention to herself by walking around with her tits out. Or, in only a hip-length shirt and a thong, when my teenage friends were over, turning away and bending from the waist to pick non-existent fluff from the carpet. But instead of becoming the new Rosalind Franklin, she married my dad.
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