15. A TALE OF TWO MOTHERS

Wallace comes to terms with his changed understanding of who he is.

“I think I must have known,” said Maureen to cousin Wallace next day. It was a school holiday, half term before the last month of the year rolled on towards Christmas, and it was her day off work. “Right at the beginning, when you were born. I was there, you know, but I was only five and it didn’t seem at all peculiar to me back then that the lady in the bed who was falling asleep was the one who’d had the baby in the cot when the other lady was talking to it and saying she was mummy. And my mum didn’t say anything either, and what with one thing and another, the odd bombing raid because the war was at its peak, and diving into air-raid shelters was an everyday norm, another odd thing didn’t seem all that important.”

“Nobody told me,” sighed Wallace, “and I ought to have known.”

“Maybe they were waiting for you to be old enough to understand the bigger picture,” suggested Maureen.

“But my teacher was my mum!” he almost exploded. “that wasn’t right!”

“Well, she knew she had a boy called Pratchett in one of her classes but that was all,” Maureen said. “Nobody told her who that boy was! You see, right from the word go she wanted to have complete separation from you. It was her way of keeping her sanity, I think, because the most natural thing in the world is for a mother to love her child. After all, she had carried you for nine months in the most stressful circumstances, and they, your two mums if I can call them that, agreed right at the beginning that she would play no part in your life so that things could be as normal as possible for you.”

“Normal! Do you call that normal?” he shouted.

“Shush, Wallace. We’re in public and folk are looking!”

They were on their way to the park and there weren’t so many people around, though one or two had heard his voice and looked round to see what the trouble might be. Trees had lost most of their leaves and there was a chill in the air, so they had wrapped up warmly.

“Well,” he said, “I don't know who I am any more.”

“Yes you do, silly,” she laughed playfully, “you’re the same Wallace Pratchett who you were yesterday and the day before and even the day before that, and I love you...”

He was thirteen going on fourteen and that was the first time any girl had ever said anything like that to him, about love. But it was his cousin Maureen and besides being his cousin she was just about a grown up. No, she actually was indistinguishable from a grown up. She had a job, earned money, and if she wanted to could probably get married and have children of her own.

She saw his confusion, and sighed. “I always have loved you,” she explained, “when you were a tiny baby needing his nappy changed...”

He’d forgotten that he’d been a baby, and he blushed.

“You didn’t..?” he asked.

“Oh, lots of times,” she giggled, “but I was only a small girl myself and didn’t really understand what I was looking at when I saw your bare bottom!”

“Oh.”

“But I mean that I love you in the same way as people love babies,” she explained. “Babies need someone to care for them, and you had your mum to do that, the mum who brought you up and put ointment on your nappy rash and cooked your dinners day after day over all those years. The mum who tucked you into bed every night even when she knew her husband was dying, and didn’t trouble you with the grief of it until he was dead. That mum.”

“But what about Miss Hawkesbury?” he asked, using her teacher name rather than a personal parental one.

“She was strong, too. She wanted you, I know she did, but decided to keep distant from you for your sake. Why, she didn’t even know which school you went to! She had no idea where you lived after the vicar died even though not knowing troubled her. And when a boy called Wallace Pratchett turned up in one of her classes she wondered for a moment, then dismissed the thought like she had every day since your birth, telling herself that the world is full of Wallace Pratchetts!”

“I see.”

“So everyone’s been strong for you, Wallace. Everyone’s sacrificed something so that you could have a normal childhood and the ironic thing was Uncle Jack had to die and turn your happy normal family into a widow and her boy. But they’d been married, and that made all the difference to the attitudes of the bigots who like to call single mothers names. And when my mum and me moved out...”

“It was good, Maureen,” he had the grace to say, “I mean, not that you were gone, but that we were being normal. Dad, that is your Uncle Jack, always worried about what we got up to even though every single thing was totally and completely innocent. But that didn’t stop him worrying. I know that. He seemed to think that we’re all born evil!”

“Maybe because he had something that troubled him in his own past. But he’s long gone and none of that matters any more.”

“He was okay before he fell ill,” sighed Wallace.

“So what are you going to do?” she asked.

“Me? Nothing, I suppose, just carry on as normal.”

“And at school?”

“I’ll be leaving when I’m fifteen. I can cope until then even though at the moment I don;’t want to see an English teacher ever again!”

“And that girlfriend of yours. Will you tell her?”

“Girlfriend?” he spluttered, opening his eyes wide. He didn’t have a girlfriend, though there was one lass he’d dearly have loved to call girlfriend.

“Everyone knows! There aren’t any secrets in this neck of the woods!”

“But...”

“But nothing! I suppose the name Penny Ashton doesn’t mean anything to you? You know, the girl with a pretty face and long hair? The one who tells everyone that she’s in love with Wallace Pratchett? Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of her!”

“She won’t want to have anything to do with me now!”

“She won’t? Why not?”

“She saw my mums kissing in the park and thinks they’re … you know, that sort of women. It’s horrible!”

“But they weren’t having a good old slobbery kiss, were they?”

He shook his head. “I wasn’t there. I didn’t see, and knowing mum it would just be a peck on the cheek, but Angela thinks...”

“Then you’ll have to put her right,” said Maureen firmly, “though it wouldn’t really matter if they were in the middle of a steamy, torrid love affair, would it? They’d still be the same people. Two widows in a world that’s beginning to discover that people can be individuals. And rock ‘n’ roll! Skiffle!”

“Mum says rock ‘n’ roll’s disgusting,” muttered Wallace, “she says it’s filthy and anarchic!”

“And you?”

“I don’t know anything about music.”

“Then you’ve got to learn. There’s a skiffle group on tonight, at the Palace, and you’re coming along with me to see it. I insist, so no buts. We’re going to have some half-term fun!”

“But I...”

“And you can bring your Penny.”

“She won’t...”

“But she will. I told her,” grinned Maureen.

© Peter Rogerson 11.06.19