A Writer Taking Risks

Dinner Parties in the 1960s

I published a short story collection entitled Kaleidoscope: Stories from the Frontier.

My introduction shows to the story is a glimpse of my own life at the time. My narrator here is the write Ruthie.

‘I realised recently the degree to which my mind and imagination is a storehouse of experiences of my whole life – perceptions, sensual reactions, pleasures and pains. These elements are like the tiny bits of glitter in a kaleidoscope – each bit existing in its own right. Each time I shake my kaleidoscope I make a unique pattern, a unique story, reflecting of elements my life in different times and different places.

After much thought I have come to the conclusion that all memory is best transmuted through fiction and all fiction is embedded in memoir. My Kaleidoscope collection here echoes these ideas and, I hope, reflects the intimate literary relationship between memoir, fiction and the short story,’

I thought you might like to read ‘Masculinity’, a short story in my Kaliedoscope short story collection. It is rather a long piece but do read as much as you wish. I hope it will give you the flavour of my meaning which, I realise now, comments on shifts in regional identity and the nature of class in more recent times. W. xxx

Prithee, peace: / I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none.
Shakespeare: Macbeth

Masculinity: A Dinner Party.

‘What will you feed them, Ruthie?’ my mother asked.

‘Coq au Vin,’ my A-level French comes into its own. She always liked it when I put on my French accent.

‘What?’ she said.

‘That’s chicken, Mam, stewed with garlic and half a bottle of red wine.’

She wrinkled her nose.

I remembered then a Christmas in our poorest times when my mother used her scant resources to buy a chicken in a tin. It tasted of slimy rubber, but it was a real treat.

‘Who’s coming, then?’ she said now.

I named a couple from the cricket club – Richard’s friends, of course - and a man from my college course. And his wife, whom I’d never met. For some reason, with Mam there, I felt defensive about this invitation to a pure outsider.

‘You don’t know her?’ She raised her strongly marked brows. ‘Won’t you be embarrassed?’

‘Her husband is going to bring his guitar,’ I offered lamely.

I knew that what she really meant was that she was embarrassed at the thought of strangers in my house and - what’s worse - a man with a guitar. The life she had led meant that Mam’s default emotion was embarrassment. (Perhaps I’ve inherited that trait. It’s not all bad. Hypersensitivity in social situations can be quite useful for a writer.)

I was aware that the thought of inviting strangers to eat in one’s house was distasteful to her. She never invited anyone to tea – not dinner of course – unless they shared her blood. Even that had its embarrassing moments. Once, when I was about 11 years old, my uncle, her youngest brother, came from Birmingham to stay with us. He brought with him – as rent I suppose - an uncooked chicken. Once he saw the condition of the house he left, taking the chicken with him.

I do tend to think a lot, to mull over things, and it seems to me now that my major task in growing up was refining and developing the notion that I wasn’t her. And now it was I who had decided to have a dinner party in my new house.

I have to tell you that house was quite something: it was brand new – with all the rooms on the ground floor with an upstairs lounge which had a balcony overlooking a farmer’s field. We once saw a cow give birth in that field, with four other cows standing around like anxious midwives. When the scowling farmer came bustling across the field on his tractor, we were forced to retreat from our balcony. I was embarrassed. Of course.

Anyway, pleased with my new house, I decided that I would have this dinner party. I was not alone in this. It was the late 60s after all, and one expression of our social mobility was this dinner party thing. The glossy magazines on my glass coffee table seemed to assume that everyone had dinner parties. There was some kind of cosmic assumption regarding the sophistication of sitting around a table eating interesting food and discussing issues of the day. There were plenty of those of course, not least the wisdom of joining in the EEC and the wonderful news that it is was at last legal now to be an active homosexual which we were learning to call gay. In those days I did meet people who had a friend of a friend who actually was gay, and had been for years, legal or not. I also met a man who had in recent years been entrapped by police in a London lavatory and was obliged to undergo chemical castration to save himself time in prison.

I admit I was glad that Mam wasn’t in the room, as, powered by this intensity of the new age, we pondered over the virtues of Margaret Drabble versus John Fowles, of John le Carré versus Sylvia Plath. Even as we were talking I was thinking that Mam would have blushed to hear the pretentious conversation about E. P. Thompson's new study The Making of the English Working Class.

It wasn’t all serious stuff. We had all been to the pictures to see all seen The Hard Day’s Night and my husband Richard’s new Beatles LP, ‘Please, Please Me’, playing on the record player upstairs in the lounge. On that first night and at later parties there was usually a lot of laughter and trivial talk about golf and football and our guests made it their business to enjoy themselves.

Richard – always comfortable in any company, and a good talker in his chosen fields – enjoyed himself well enough. But after this first party as he leaned on the state-of-the-art cooker and watched me stacking the dishes in the sink, he made comments about the individuals who had sat around our table, describing them in words such as ‘affected and pretentious’. So that night I went to bed feeling I embarrassed and defensive not just for our guests but for myself.

You can put that down to my lifelong habit of thinking too much. I have dealt with the full weight of all this thinking by writing a lot of my thoughts down. I had started this ‘writing down’ when I was eight years old, so there was a good deal of this thought-spillage between the pages of my storybooks which lived under the bed. As I grew up, I gained this reputation for of ‘thinking too much’ among my acquaintances of the opposite sex. When I was in my late teens one boy actually stopped mid-kiss and told me that I thought too much. Later on, a boyfriend accused me thinking too much - making that an excuse for ending the relationship.

Luckily Richard proved to be more self-confident and bolder than those bays. For him the thinking seemed to generate a lasting degree of charm. However, I don’t know that he counted it as very important. We never discussed it. On the afternoon of the dinner party, he had been out playing golf - the new enthusiasm that was nudging aside the focus on football in his affections. As for me I had dropped the children off at my mother’s. She had borrowed a new jigsaw and a Meccano set from a neighbour.

As I jointed the chicken and set it to simmer, I was reflecting on the fact that we inherited a world full of substantial myths regarding the nature of masculinity. Male bonding was still being remodelled, reinforced by stories - many of them dissolved into popular fiction - from the War, from Vietnam and this new mysterious Cold War. I had been reading some interesting articles that played around with the possibility that the roots of this world-view of fictional male bonding - this unspoken love between men - was intimately associated with heroism.

Over the simmering chicken I thought further that this male bonding had, of course, been part of the indigenous culture in my own home territory for more than a century. In this mining area some men’s most intimate relationship, albeit unspoken, was that with a close workmate. Like that of soldiers in war zones such friendship was distilled while working together in a life-threatening situation. Although it was observable it was never articulated. As well as working long shifts shoulder to shoulder many pitmen would spend their leisure time together with their friend – on street corners, in the Club, at the Match, or on the Allotment. They even had a special word for such a friend. Marra. Marrah? Even now I’m not sure how you spell it.

Their wives would live in a quite separate arena. My mother had grown up within that culture, albeit outside it. Being a single mother with four children, she was never part of any such group of wives. Ferociously independent, she was a great role model for me and lives on in the character many of the powerful women in my novels.

Back at my first dinner party the wives and partners were sitting alternately around the table. Man. Woman. Man. Woman. The conversation moved on to the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper Album and then onto the virtues of Gary Sobers in the recent Cricket Cup. Richard enjoyed this part of the conversation, and the men were murmuring and nodding their agreement to the points he was making. He knew his stuff, being a good cricketer and a leading member of the club, just down the road. The wives sat back and let the men get on with it, quite comfortable in their roles. I sat quiet and polished off my tiramisu.

The big drama at that first dinner party was when my college friend – a big man – wriggled in his seat and broke our fragile antique dining chair. This chair had cost me all of £2. Like much of my furniture – still around in my house after all this time – it came from a local auction house full of throwaways from people who were buying bright modern teak furniture on hire purchase or ordering items from the newly opened Habitat.

That night we all peered for a moment at the demolished chair and then rose from the table amid a combination of hilarity and embarrassment. Then, while Richard led our guests up the open staircase to the lounge, I went to the kitchen to pour boiling water onto my new large cafetière. My college friend dashed out to get his guitar from the boot of his Corvette. Upstairs, after drinking his coffee he settled down to play his simplified version of tracks from the Twist and Shout EP. He sang ‘She Saw me Standing There’ - a particular favourite of mine. He had a sweet voice for such a big man and, being from Liverpool, he had the right intonation. In a final flourish he moved onto some Irish rebel songs. So, at my dinner party there was just music and laughter and no more serious conversation.

The next day Mam asked me how my dinner party had gone. I tried to describe the event to her. But as I spoke it all seemed both silly and trivial. We were both embarrassed. So, I told her a story about a little girl who turned up at school with bruises and how I had to make a written statement for a very charismatic woman from social services. It was good to share opinions and ideas with her on this issue, in which we were both very interested.

So, in those years we had a few dinner parties but none of them were as interesting and strange as that first one. There came a time when my young daughter – dying to join in – walked around before dinner with canapés that she’d made herself*. She was to become a much better cook than me and well-known expert in the art of entertaining. She was never to share that disabling trait of embarrassment which I shared with Mam.

I was not sorry when the dinner parties faded away. This fading coincided with the time I started writing seriously, which mopped up all my time outside going to school to work, playing games with my children and trying to keep Richard contented. And of course, I couldn’t escape the need to keep that rather super house up to some kind of scratch.

In many ways they were the best of times. I would write my stories early in the morning or late at night. During my college holidays I would still write after I had taken the children to museums and art galleries while Richard was watching cricket or football. The compulsion to write and make my stories began to underpin and stabilise my life. My first published novel emerged fully grown from that period.

There comes this time, some years later, when we are invited to dinner at the house of this woman from Richard’s factory. I don’t know her. But then I don’t know anyone from his work, except his secretary - a tall, beautiful, witty and wise woman some years older than me. His life and mine are never normally allowed to collide. But here we are, visiting the house of this woman from the factory who has stepped out of role sufficiently to invite Richard and myself to her house for dinner.

I can’t quite understand why. I do know he gets on well with women, from his easy manner with women we casually meet in our domestic lives – women such as shop assistants and receptionists. He is much better at all that than me. I am normally embarrassed at these encounters. I eventually work out that his easy manner is due to the fact that in his work life he has grown from boyhood to manhood surrounded by cheerfully working women.

I feel a little challenged by this invitation. I decide to wear this little dress I bought in Newcastle. It’s silky and black, close-fitting to the dropped waist, before flaring out in colourful panels to just below the knee. It goes well with my new patent black sling-backs.

I’m coming down the stairs from the upstairs lounge and Richard is looking at me. ‘Oh! You’re not wearing that dress, are you?’ His voice is casual cool with no malice it.

I am hurt. I keep my voice even. ‘It’s either this or the black skirt and blouse that I use for college.’

He looks me up and down again. ‘Well, I suppose it’ll have to do.’ He injects a note of kindness into his voice which means that further protest on my part would seem petty. He is very clever.

In the car – a blue Jaguar, not new but recently acquired – I ask him about the woman who is invited us. ‘Who is she?’

‘I’ve told you. A woman I know from work.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Greta Taylor.’

Like I say, Richard keeps work and our home life strictly separate. Having worked there since he was 16, he loves the factory he feels confident in his place there. As a young man he moved up from working on the lines to senior management in a decade or so. His sense of order and his love of rules and protocols are part and partial of his success. He has pride in his part in the success of the factory which is rapidly replacing mining as a core industry in the district. He is proud of the part he has played in that success; it is built into his DNA.

‘What does Greta do then?’ I ask.

‘She’s a line leader,’ he says. ’Brilliant at her job.’

‘Have you known her long?’ I am embarrassed at the naiveté of my question.

He’s silent, concentrating on his driving. This Greta lives in the village eight miles away and he is busy leaning forward to read the road signs. I bet he’s known this woman forever. I definitely think that they must be friends for this to happen. He does socialise with people from work but it’s mostly men. Although he’s no longer a worker himself he goes to the workingmen’s club on Wednesdays and Fridays nights to meet them and gossip about the factory. He goes to football on Saturdays. He is comfortable sharing gossip about work and football after many years worked alongside them in the years before he became a boss. I have always been proud about that in Richard. He is no stereotypical boss looking down on the men and women who work with him. He is very special in that.

He still hasn’t answered my question about this Greta.

We pull up outside a neat Wimpey house, just off the main road into the village. There is a green Ford on the drive beside the neat square lawn. I am nervous. Richard rings the bell. The lights go on in the hall and then light streams onto the path as the door is opened by a tall slim woman whose fair hair is done up in a bouffant style, balanced by long marcasite earrings. Her make-up is perfect and she’s wearing what a cute cocktail dress showing a lot of cleavage. She smiles up into Richard’s face. ‘So, you made it, Rich?’

‘It’s not that you live in Mongolia!’ Richard tone is friendly and warm.

She leads the way into a long sitting-room and he follows. I follow him.

We are in a long narrow room which runs from the front of the house to the back. On a table at the far end of the room three tall candles flicker over a white tablecloth and glittering silver cutlery.

The man standing before the stone fireplace is taller than Richard and very muscular. As he holds out a hand to shake hands with Richard the muscles on his arm bulge against his checked shirt. He grips Richard’s hand placing his other hand on Richards another arm. ‘You must be Richard. I’m Roy. How’re you doing?’

‘Can’t complain, says Richard.

Roy turns to me. ‘And you must be?’

‘This is Ruth,’ says Richard.

‘Hello Ruth!’ My hand is swallowed in his.

 ‘I’m Greta’s better half.’ He nods towards Greta, who smiles very warmly at me. I have the feeling she is curious. Well, I’m curious about her. Even in these few minutes I can see that she and Richard are easy together. Richard is never embarrassed. He’s very easy with women – in the shop, on the phone, in the bar at the cricket club. He smiles and charms them, knows their names and uses them. Like I say I put all that down to the fact that most workers in the factory are women and he has worked alongside them since he himself was a boy.

Without asking for my preference Roy pours sweet sherry for me and single malt for Richard. We sit down around the coffee table. Greta mentions something about work to Richard and they both laugh. Then she vanishes into the kitchen, and we can hear the rustle and clash of dishes and pans.

The men are talking about a rugby game and going into Roy’s successful history as a rugby player. Richard touches on his own experiences as a footballer. ‘I like my football, but I’ve got to admit that you lads look all look strong and fit.’

Roy laughs. ‘Like bull terriers as opposed to whippets, you mean?’

Richard grins not taking any offence. He’s always so comfortable in his own shoes.

Roy goes on to talk about his training schedules which, he says, require discipline and are quite punishing. Then he starts to talk about equality. ‘Take the Greeks, right? You can see it from the statues, can’t you? And what they write. They had this high regard for physical excellence. They knew what it meant to have a perfect body.’ He takes a sip of his whiskey. ‘There was this bloke who gave me this article to read. It talks there about how the perfect relationship is only possible between equals. And how the Greeks nailed that. So, if equality can only be between equals it must be between men, mustn’t it?’ He winks. ‘The thing between men and women can’t compare with that can it?’

I have to say this man’s irritating me. I move on to think about that now first dinner party and the broken chair and my Liverpool friend playing the guitar. That was good, I think now- really, really good.

‘Ruth! Ruth!’ Richard’s voice is peremptory. I lift my head. Richard looks at Roy. ‘She’s off in her dreamland again.’ They both look at me, then each other, and they smile.

Greta, bringing out serving dishes to the table, grins across at us. ‘Dinners up! It’s your favourite, Richard. I know you like a proper dinner, none of this foreign stuff. This is roast lamb and new potatoes and garden peas. Roy here grew them himself.’

‘Not the lamb, like,’ says Roy, grinning as he watches Richard sit down and then sits down himself. ‘Just the veg.’

I pull out my own chair, sit down and watch Greta serve the lamb. She serves Richard first.

Later, as we are driving home, I say to Richard, ‘I didn’t know you liked lamb that much.’

‘You never asked,’ he says.

The purr of the car fills the space between us.

I have to say it. ‘You know, neither of them asked me a single thing about myself?’

‘Didn’t they? Can’t say I noticed. He seems like a nice enough lad. Nice to meet him, like.’

‘What did he do for a living? He never talked about that.’

‘Something to do with transport. Removals I think.’

‘So, all those muscles will come in handy I suppose.’

He stays silent.

I hold my satin bag tight on my knee. ‘Do you think we should ask them back? To dinner?’

I can feel him shrug. ‘Don’t know about that, Ruth. Your friends might be just a bit Fancy-Dan for them.’

‘Oh, Richard I don’t think so. I…’

He pulls the car up onto the drive and turns to me, making the Jag’s leather creak. ‘Your problem, pet,’ he says, ‘is that you think too much.’

Photograph courtesy of Brooklyn Magazine (2012)