Parker In No Man's Land

Some Unmarried Mothers
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30431-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

'A man, now, well sure enough, one of those you can forget; but a child is forever.' Kate Byrne For No Man's Land, first published in 1972, Tony Parker persuaded six young unmarried mothers to talk frankly about their lives, their hopes and their problems. As ever Parker didn't impose himself upon the text: the women speak as and for themselves. As such No Man's Land is a precious sociological portrait of a Britain in which many believed that motherhood and marriage were subject to an umbilical linkage. 'Tony Parker is himself unique: Britain's most expert interviewer, mouthpiece of the inarticulate, and counsel for the defence of whose whom society has shunned or abandoned.' Anthony Storr, Sunday Times

Tony Parker was born in Stockport on June 25 1923, the son of a bookseller. His mother died when he was 4. He began to write poems and plays in his late teens. Called up to military service early in the Second World War he declared himself a conscientious objector and, in lieu, was sent to work at a coal-mine in the North East, where he observed conditions and met people who influenced him hugely. After the war he began to work as a publisher's representative and, voluntarily, as a prison visitor - the latter another important stimulus to his subsequent writings. After Parker happened to make the acquaintance of a BBC radio producer and imparted his growing interest in the lives, opinions and self-perceptions of the prisoners he had met, he was given the opportunity to record an interview with a particular convict for broadcast on the BBC. The text of the interview was printed in the Listener, and spotted by the publishers Hutchinson as promising material for a book. This duly emerged as The Courage of His Convictions (1962), for which Parker and the career criminal 'Robert Allerton' (a pseudonym) were jointly credited as authors. Over the next 30 years Parker would publish 18 discrete works, most of them 'oral histories' based on discreetly edited but essentially verbatim interview transcripts. He died in 1996 (though one further work, a study of his great American counterpart Studs Terkel, appeared posthumously.)

Autoren/Hrsg.

Parker, Tony

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

FRANCESCA LAWTON

A lady is one who does what she ought, when she ought—and whether she wants to or not.

‘The little one he sleeps now, Madame, so I go to my aunt tonight. The coffee-tray I leave on this table, yes?’

‘Thank you, Lisette. Are you coming back?’

‘Madame?’

‘Tonight, I mean? Erm—revenez-vous ce soir?’

‘Ah oui, Madame, certainement, je serai de revenir avant minuit.’

‘Bien. Merci, bonsoir Lisette.’

Quietly the small plump au-pair girl slid the frosted-glass door of the sitting-room closed behind her. A few moments later the distant sound of the shutting of the flat door as she went out.

The tall young woman remained motionless, statuesque in the white linen caftan with its gold chain-link belt. Leaning with one shoulder against the wall at the end of the wide sweep of the fourth-floor balcony window, she looked out with delphinium-blue eyes at the pink and grey of the sunsetting sky, down at its reflection in the dulling water of the lake in the park below. Almond-shaped eyes in the smooth complexioned Botticellian face, the ash-blonde hair framing it falling loosely down on her shoulders. Occasionally, unhurriedly, she drew at the oval cigarette held lightly but firmly between the tips of long fingers.

Francesca Lawton always waited before she began to talk, always paused until the right moment; often for long, as though listening for some kind of signal inside her head to indicate that the correct time had come for unlocking words from their cage. She was twenty-two.

*

—The summer evenings after these long hot days are nice, aren’t they? I like it from here when hardly anyone’s left in the park. There’s a, I think it’s a mallard on the lake; she’s got five or six chicks. Comes out when it’s quiet, I’ve seen boys sometimes throwing stones…. A girl in jeans sitting on a bench under the willow over there reading a book. I wonder what it is … do you ever wonder what people are reading, if it’s something you’ve read yourself? Gives you a guide as to what kind of person they are, they say. You were looking at those books weren’t you, the other night, in my book-case. The Sun King, Nureyev’s book, Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet … after you’d gone I thought what a misleading impression they could have given you. You didn’t see the stacks of paper-backs, westerns and detective-stories, out of sight in the cupboard underneath. Then I thought no, not really misleading, I don’t hide them deliberately; I prefer the hardcover books to be on the shelves, they look nicer. As long as you know the others are there…. I’m not what you might call an intellectual, more a person made up of bits and pieces, some of this and some of that. I suppose it’s because I’m on the cusp. Astrology. But I don’t believe in it, really. My birthdate makes me sometimes Sagittarian, sometimes a Capricornian; Sagittarians are supposed to be sociable, Capricornians are very shy—so that’s true, contradictions, sometimes I’m one, sometimes the other. Coffee? White, two sugars, isn’t it?

She moved slowly across the room, poured it out from the stainless-steel electric percolator, added cream from a small Georgian-design silver jug.

—I made a silly mistake last time, I can’t think why. I told you we always stayed on holidays when I was little at a private hotel near St. David’s Head owned by a Mrs. Patterson, didn’t I? When I was talking to my mother on the ’phone last week I was telling her I’d been thinking about my early childhood and trying to remember the times we’d spent at Mrs. Patterson’s, how we used to go scrambling over the rocks looking for sea-anemones in the little pools to tease with twigs. She said ‘Fran, what are you talking about? We never stayed with Mrs. Patterson, she was just a woman we once met there. The woman who owned the hotel was called Mrs. Carlisle.’

But I haven’t the faintest recollection of Mrs. Carlisle—who she was or what she looked like or anything, even though we must have stayed with her every year. Yet Mrs. Patterson, who she says we met just once, I’d recognise her immediately if I saw her now. Strange, isn’t it? All this time I’d thought she was the woman who owned that hotel; it’s not until we start prodding and poking about in my memory … it’s frightening a bit, I wonder how much else I’ve got wrong.

She said—my mother I mean—‘Anyway, why are you wasting time on a long-distance ’phone-call gossiping about someone we’ve never seen before or since? Haven’t you anything else to think about, I do hope you’re going to start taking an interest in things outside again soon, weren’t you going to join that amateur-dramatic society or something? You’ve got that girl to look after Simon now, surely you can begin going out a bit and doing something, can’t you?’

Doing things is always the solution to problems as far as mother’s concerned. Perhaps that’s a bit unfair to her I suppose. It’s just that we’re … values are different, aren’t they, in different places to different people? Up north where she lives what matters is what you’ve got, and how much you’ve got of it. I suppose that’s true here in the south too, if you really get down to it. It still clings to me, I suppose, surrounding myself with things. Those antique swords on the wall, that Persian shield, this big flat in a new block in one of the best residential areas; my car, my computerised washing-machine, the au pair, my clothes….

She stirred her coffee leisurely with a thin-stemmed gem-handled spoon, replaced it untasted on the table and lay back in the cushioned depths of the green velvet upholstered armchair. Sharply, suddenly, she shook her head.

—An effort to project myself from the present into the past. Where were we last time, where did we stop? Yes, that’s right: when I was nine and went to boarding school. I’d say it was a very good school. The preparatory school before that, I told you that one was a nice school didn’t I, well this was a good school. I suppose the difference is ‘nice’ means it’s all right but they don’t try to do much, and ‘good’ is when they pay more attention to your education.

It wasn’t easy to get into—I don’t mean academically because that didn’t matter so much: what did matter was who you were, if your parents could afford the fees and who they knew. You had to be well-connected, as they say in the north—that meant monied-industrial, rather than aristocratic, though there were a few daughters of minor landed gentry in it too. If you got a daughter into Oakdale School, you really were somebody. Actually in fact I rather liked the idea of going because it had horses. That was the main attraction to me, I was very fond of horses; my father was a member of the local hunt, I often went riding. So to be going away to a school where they made a feature of the horses and the stables they had, at least according to the prospectus—well, that was something to be thrilled about; I never recollect any thoughts about not wanting to go away from home, no.

Somehow when I got there, the horses seem to disappear—in my memory, I mean. Perhaps they were important for a term or two, but I lost interest. ‘Ruby’, ‘Musket’, Sherbet’ … there must have been eight or nine, those are the only ones whose names I can remember though; old and barrel-shaped and dopey most of them, but thoroughly staid and reliable of course, and always beautifully kept. A phase most little girls go through, isn’t it? It can’t have lasted long in my case, I remember so little about them; I should think after the first year I hardly took any interest in the horses at all.

What was I interested in? Nothing much I suppose, would be the honest answer. What was I like? Oh, just ordinary. There were about sixty or seventy girls there, I was no different from any of the rest. Yes I suppose I must have been different, but I didn’t feel it, I wasn’t aware of it. There were three school ‘Houses’—Markham, Dean and Grange. I was in Grange, that’s the one that sticks in my mind for some reason. But then it might be like Mrs. Patterson, mightn’t it? If I asked my mother she’d probably say ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Fran, you know perfectly well it was Markham.’ She can remember more about me than I can, most parents are the same I should think. Anyway, three houses and I was in Grange, let’s say; and it had ten or twelve dormitories, each quite small with only five or six girls in it. An old manor house, a country seat of some sort of lord or other, I’ve forgotten his name. It couldn’t have been Lord Oakdale because the school wasn’t named after a founder or anything like that. Its badge naturally was an acorn; one of the mistresses had composed the school song which was about mighty trees growing from tiny seeds, as you can imagine. It’d only been in existence I should think fifty years or less; but you got the feeling as soon as you went it’d been there for centuries. I don’t remember much else about it, specially.

Oh yes, I know, the dormitories had got names like Howard, Norfolk, Maitland, Mowbray. And I was in … gracious, which one was I in? Wait a minute, I remember now, yes of course: you didn’t stay in one...