Atlantic £12.99 pp232
Brian Thompson’s parents would have given Strindberg pause for thought. Bert and Peggy Thompson were united only in their loathing of each other. He was one of those working-class Tories who see Commies or poofs wherever they look, and she employed sarcasm to protect herself from the contempt she inspired in almost everyone. A martinet and a nyphomaniac: pipe-smoking dad and skittish mum; he the moustachioed Clark Gable, she the flighty Vivien Leigh; the pair of them madder in their different ways than Lewis Carroll’s hatter.
They were a deeply unattractive couple. Yet their very awfulness has compelled their elder son to write a book in their “honour” that is funny and terrifying by turns. I use the word “honour” in quotes to serious purpose, because Keeping Mum is a celebration of human inadequacy, of people so blinkered that they couldn’t begin to contemplate their own failures and misjudgments.
Bert and Peggy invariably chose the cruellest options available to them. Their marriage was a prolonged dance of death, at its most contented when they were separated. Bert became a flight lieutenant in the RAF, and Peggy gave herself to any number of the American servicemen stationed near Cambridge. His war effort might be considered the more substantial, but there can be no doubt that she made many a lonely Yank a little bit happier in the dark days and nights of the 1940s.
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Thompson’s title is apt. In those years of Bert’s absence, the very young Brian was housekeeper and householder, with Peggy rarely stirring from her bed. She would appear in the early hours of the morning, cigarette in hand — fresh, or not so fresh, from some escapade with a GI. She had found contentment of a kind, but it was never to be satisfactory. There are those who cannot deal with happiness, and Peggy, dancing the night away, was one of them.
The adolescent Brian found solace elsewhere, first with his Auntie Elsie in New Malden in Surrey, and then with his paternal grandparents, Jockie and Queenie, in their ramshackle house in London’s Lambeth Walk. Here was love, casually and happily demonstrated. Their arguments didn’t end in broken cutlery and black eyes. Here was a glimpse of the reasonable world, eccentric as it was, and a conviviality Brian was unused to. His recollections of these felicitous interludes in a disordered childhood are especially poignant. Jockie and Queenie were both of the opinion that Peggy was mad, and Brian was almost convinced of this for a time. He soon learnt that the mothers of his fellow pupils at the grammar school weren’t in the habit of mooching about the house in dressing-gowns all day long, but took pains to care for their children, cook them meals, listen to them and help solve their problems. For Brian, roles were startlingly reversed.
Thompson accounts for his childhood with a restraint that highlights the increasing oddity of his situation. At home, Peggy was in a perpetual bad temper, dogged by a lasting sense of disappointment. She knew that she deserved better than marriage to a man who was completely insensitive to her finer feelings, but the knowledge neither changed her fate nor brought her happiness. Keeping Mum is full of surprises, the most convincing of which is the author’s indebtedness to Bert and Peggy’s magisterial lack of parental responsibility. He still cannot believe in the existence, 12 years after his own birth, of his brother, Neil. Did they forget their mutual antipathy for an hour or so?
Brian was one of those rare children who loved going to school. He enjoyed reading and writing, seeing these disciplines as a means of escape, perhaps, from the strange domestic prison he returned to each evening. With his father’s belated support, he managed to achieve 10 O-levels, and thereby win dad’s reluctant approval. The memoir ends with Bert glowing, as best he could, with pride and mum at her most belligerently sarcastic. Their hatred is intact, while Brian’s future looks brighter. He has re-created them with as much sympathy and respect as they deserve, and with a hard-earned generosity that must have caused him both pain and pleasure.
Keeping Mum is a magnificent study of malevolence, of a husband and wife for whom hatred is more potent than love.
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