24. 1960 and All That

A WIDOW WOMAN Part 24

1960 was becoming a year to remember.

It was the year when fifty-eightish Jane stood before a sulking vicar and whispered “I do” whilst gazing with rapt adoration into the eyes of a children’s librarian, who was actually weeping.

The Reverend Jonah Pyke was sulking for the very good reason that he was officiating at the wedding of a woman he’d fantasised about being married to himself, more times than he cared to remember. A single vicar’s life can become a sterile thing and her image had entered many a nocturnal dream and from time to time shamed him with a lust he couldn’t understand.

And here he was, converting A Mrs Simpson into a Mrs Driscol. And he knew from the look in her eyes, and in the moister eyes of the man standing with her, that of all the people he had joined in wedlock this pair was the most right for each other.

1960 was also the year when Arnold Simpson was born.

Roger, in his guise as a council workman, might have gained a reputation as some kind of Lothario, but he wasn’t like that at all because any oats he sowed were never wild. He loved the first girl he ever loved, the wonderful and radiant Amy Forthright, and he shared everything with her, his heart, his love, his dreams and even his sperm. And so Arnold came along and Roger was delighted. Amy might have been a trifle upset by the attitudes that still persisted from a Victorian past, but she had Roger and he was … Roger.

The Reverend Jonah Pyke was less delighted, though. He had a fondness for the family due largely to his belief that in the fullness of time Jane would become his (though, in all honesty, he never did anything to ensure that other than upset either her or himself when he saw her) and to see the illegitimacy within it he really believed he could see the devil’s work. But he was in some ways a decent man and made sure that his surplice was free from unwanted stains and dollops of his morning breakfast.

So behind the couple taking their marriage vows, second time round for both of them, sat Roger and Amy with a thankfully sleeping Arnold. And right next to them sat Betty with Ian Worsley, a lad she had shared an on and off relationship with since her schooldays and who she had finally agreed to fall in love with. He was happy with the situation, though well aware that talk of his own wedding bells might still be far off. His view of the ocean of life included an idea that it might indeed be teeming with life.

Jonah, white surplice (he’d even ironed it) started his address on the subject of wedded bliss, a topic that life had ill-prepared him to know much about. After all, a man may be told the term “wedded bliss”, might even have some notion of what the two words when uttered separately might mean, but when all is boiled down might have no experience of the circumstances in which the word wedded gets married to the word bliss, and that was his problem.

His father had been a vicar too, had performed marriage services not unlike this one, but he had been a confirmed misogynist whose dislike of the females of the species encompassed his own wife, who had enough sense to leave him in the company of a window cleaner and the brighter lights of blissland. She having done that and leaving the senior Pyke in the lurch, so to speak, he had turned his hatred towards his own sex in the form of his son, whose early life had become distraught, to say the least.

So Jonah was in a state of ignorance married to confusion, and when the service was over he managed to murmur to Jane on her way out of his church and preparing to walk the short distance to her home on the steel council estate where the reception was to be held, “the one that got away…”

He knew what he meant. But Roger, who was walking immediately behind his mother didn’t, and because he’d never liked the vicar (egg stains in particular he found to be offensive, being the sort of lad who enjoyed cleaning out old houses for the council when their tenants had died of some lurgy related to age and decrepitude), he turned and said,

“What did you mean by that, your Reverence?”

He had never called him that before, and Jonah understood the deeper meaning behind the unexpected appellation. It meant that there precious little that was reverend about the Reverend Jonah Pyke, at least not in Roger Simpson’s eyes.

“You’ve no right to talk to me like that,” hissed the vicar, “you who had dragged a b*****d into the world…”

“Roger,” warned Betty.

“Well, the man is a charlatan. Everyone knows that.” whispered her beau Ian Worsley. Ian got on quite well with Roger and usually agreed with most of what Betty’s younger brother said. The trouble most probably was that all whispers were just about audible to all of the party, even those lagging behind in order to avoid them.

“That’s enough, children,” hissed Jane, who was in that confused state between total joy at miracles of wedded union and anger because she, too, had heard the vicar’s reference to the one that got away, knowing he meant her and that it was he she had got away from.

“Sorry mum,” whispered Roger and Betty in the sort of union that a childhood of growing up together had taught them.

The party, not a large one though there were, of course, other guests making a snake of people in posh frocks and smart suits, arrived at 9 Empire Road.

It was 1960. The worst privations of the post war years were coming to an end, but the affordable parties were home-brewed affairs that could be paid for by two people on a budget. And Jane with the help of daughter Betty had prepared a buffet that was tastefully covered with grease-proof paper and arranged on the kitchen table.

She had, of course, arranged for fresh air and the kitchen window had been left open a smidgen so that the kitchen didn’t become stuffy and the sweet stuff under its paper blanket be rendered soft or even melt altogether.

A smidgeon wasn’t quite enough, and the folks next door had a cat…

© Peter Rogerson 14.07.21

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