Tyrone Temple – the Life and Times of Mrs. Joan Clarke

My parents married late in life.  Although my mother had remained unmarried up to that point, my father had been a widower.

With his first wife, he had raised a family.  Their five children had all left the nest before the first Mrs. Roger Temple died.

A year or two later he met my mother, they fell in love, and history was made.

By a strange quirk of fate, I entered the world on my parent’s first wedding anniversary.  No siblings followed in the succeeding years.

I have only vague memories of my dad; he died when I was four.

Shortly before my eighth birthday, a visitor called.  Mother gave me the choice of playing in the garden or my room – I chose the garden.

The garden at Ozleworth is a fair size, and I ran down to a favourite spot where I could do as I pleased without kicking up the lawn or disturbing the rhododendrons and such.

A climbing frame and swing, which had once been closer to the conservatory, was now down there, as were various balls, bats, toy guns, and bikes.  Invariably my dogs would have followed me.

I remained at play for some time before hunger took me back to the house.

‘You don’t remember me’, said the visitor smiling.  She was of an age similar to my mum’s.

She was my aunt Marilyn, my mum’s elder sister.  She had called to break the news that their younger sister Joan had died.

Until that time, I had assumed that mother and I were the only family we had.  I was aware that my father had another family before my birth, but I assumed they had followed their parents to the grave; they did not visit, for instance; and mother seldom spoke of them.

The idea of a living relative and hints that there may be more was something new and exciting for me.  I became curious, which mother found tiresome and perhaps painful, for although she would usually reply in a bright and breezy manner, she would occasionally pause with a look of mild irritation in her eye.

Eventually she sent me to my room with a plate of sandwiches and a beaker of juice.

A few days later mother travelled down to Bristol for Joan’s funeral.  She returned in a sombre mood shortly before my bedtime.

I was already in my pyjamas.  Mrs. Cooper who had came up from the village to sit with me, told me to kiss mother good night and ushered me off to bed.

‘Let him stay and have a quiet mug of chocolate while you and I have a tipple or tea’, mother said.

I curled up on the sofa while the two women busied themselves in the kitchen, mother making tea, and Mrs. Cooper popping a pizza in the oven.

The tea they drank was “Granny Cooper’s recipe”, granny Cooper being Mrs. Cooper’s mother-in-law, who had laced liberally her tea with gin.

They brought the tea and chocolate in on a tray and settled themselves in armchairs close to the fire, where, at first, they spoke in murmurs.

If I remained quiet, it was likely that they would forget I was there, enabling me to remain up beyond my bedtime.  Once I had drank my chocolate, I feigned sleep.

They must have glanced my way or came over before they slipped out to get their pizza, but they soon returned with their trays and continued their gossip in slightly louder tones.

Aunt Joan had been younger than mum by five years.  She had always been wild.  She had brothers closer her age and had been a tomboy up to the time she started secondary school, where she fell in with a new crowd and became a Mod.

According to mum, Aunt Joan became a ‘right mare’.  Because she was the youngest of the daughters, she had been too often allowed her own way.  It was reckoned that because the daughters had only been spanked or slapped by their parents rather than flogged, belted or battered into next week, like most children of the day, the girls had been spoilt – particularly Joan, who, according to her grandmother, had been ‘born with a smirk on her face’.

Despite the prevailing permissive attitudes, Joan had to marry; and her future husband had to get over a black eye from her dad, and a hiding from his own dad into the bargain.

Although being humble factory workers, mother found her new in-laws rather nice, honest, hardworking people who deserved their son as much as her own parents deserved her wayward sister.  However, their father, who was ‘no better than he ought to be’, was embarrassed slightly by the connection.

Mum’s brother-in-law insisted to the family that he was a ‘market trader’; however, granddad insisted his son-in-law was just a ‘barrow boy – and not even jumped-up at that’.

Despite the irony, for a short while, granddad turned his back on his wayward daughter completely when she decided to stand by her man following his arrest for possession of drugs.

Clarke, for that was his name, was a shady character.  He could get all manner of goods ‘wholesale’ or otherwise.  Granddad refused Christmas and birthday presents from him for ‘fear of arrest for receiving or dealing in stolen goods’.

Granddad often made the idle threat of calling social services to remove his grandchildren from the bosom of their parents.  It came as little surprise to him to learn that as teenagers his grandchildren were more ‘off the rails’ than their own parents had ever been.  Two of the young Clarkes’ ended up in borstal; and at least one of the daughters, the second eldest, embraced enthusiastically the loose morals of the age.

Mrs. Cooper rose to make herself more comfortable.  She felt slightly unsteady on her feet.

‘Stay the night’, mother suggested, ‘you go and refresh yourself, and I’ll put him to bed and make us another pot of tea’.

Mother approached the sofa to stir me from my feigned sleep, and so ended the tale of the life and times of Aunt Joan Clarke. 

The Battle of the School tie

I do not wear ties.  I find it more comfortable to wear an open neck shirt.  I think there may have been a couple of occasions in my youth when my mum insisted I wear a tie, but in general, the clothing accessory was never an essential for my daily wardrobe.

I am now cringing at the memory of having worn in early youth a faux bow on a thin piece of elastic that was pulled over the head and worn around the neck.  I could not have been more than four or five years of age. 

However, when I achieved secondary school age a tie formed part of my daily uniform.  Although it was in no way an essential item of clothing unlike shoes or trousers, for instance, it was deemed by the school as a necessity to be worn on all occasions - physical exercise and sport excepted.

I may have taken to wearing ties, perhaps, if one’s teachers had not been insistent upon wearing it knotted at the collar with one’s top button fastened.  I would bite off a button or two from the top of my shirts and leave my tie at home.

A tie would be presented to me each morning during form registration and a battle of wills would commence.  Their position was that a tie was part of the school uniform and must be worn by all pupils as it made the individual and the body of students look smart and orderly.  The school tie, it was claimed, helped to maintain a smart, orderly and disciplined uniformed identity.

My position, with the greatest respect, was that I found wearing a tie restrictive and uncomfortable.  My schooldays were far from the best days of my life (my days away from school were far better).  I attended with a reluctance just to keep my mother happy.  My teachers were aware fully of the torments I suffered. 

By my presence daily, they could see how willing I was to attend.  I was happy to attend school tieless and participate in the lessons; or I would be less than happy to attend school, forced to wear a tie and sit idle in either classroom or hall. 

Wearing a tie, I would do no work, remaining idle and possibly ignorant; without a tie, my behaviour improves immediately and I become an active and productive participant. 

As a compromise, as long as I could wear an open necked shirt, with time, the wearing of a tie could become a daily delight.

The compromise was accepted.  The battle of the school tie was settled without bloodshed and a moral victory for both parties.  Time may be a great healer; however, it never made the wearing of a tie a daily delight for me.

It may be a form of post-traumatic stress or it may be just an old man being silly but on occasions, usually in the warmer months but not exclusively, I still get flashbacks of that conflict whenever I see office workers with their top button fastened and tie knotted at the collar.

I have not worn a tie since my long gone schooldays and I hope I am never called upon to do so.

How Greta Garbo helped me to be left alone

I had a stressful and sometimes traumatic childhood.  I was bullied until I left school.  School was something of an ordeal for me and I could not wait to leave. 

Home life was less than ideal and perhaps I should have left home to search for gold on the pavements of London, but I presumed that in larger cities my life experiences to date would increase exponentially.  To move to a smaller town was likewise out of the question for the same reasons ironically. 

So I decided to brave it out on my native heath.

As a child, I was somewhat nervous.  As well as other speech impediments, particularly sounding as if every uttered syllable was soaked in saliva and showering whoever and whatever was within spitting distance when I spoke, I developed a stammer due to all the taunts and ridicule I endured.  It was a rather frustrating period in one’s life.

My secondary school arranged for me to receive speech therapy, which took care of my speech impediments.  My nervous stammer remained which worsened the more frustrated and nervous I became.

One continued with one’s breathing exercises and trying to remain calm if provoked.  One was advised to walk away rather than stand one’s ground if dragged into disputes with one’s peers.  One should rise above them and not react to their intelligence insulting taunts and jeers.  Excellent advice, easier said than done.

When travelling down to Dorset or up to London by car, I had to endure my stepbrother’s musical tastes.  He had a penchant for classical music and opera.  On such occasions, I would amuse myself by gazing out of the back window and into the following car, trying hard not to blink or smile. 

It became a favourite pastime of mine.  I would think of Greta Garbo at the end of Queen Christina, and away I would gaze.  Sometimes I would call to mind the various poems and speeches contained in the Bell’s Elocution that I used as part of my speech therapy, and mouth them silently or quietly.

I thought I was just killing time with an amusing game of blink with the driver of whatever vehicle happened to be behind our car during otherwise tiresome journeys.  However, I discovered that hours of gazing dreamily into the eyes of the general public brought with it some benefits.  I developed a look of general indifference that I could change into one of extreme ennui in a nano-second.  A look of ‘dumb insolence’ as one teacher expressed it.

One day I found myself in a position from which I could not walk away.  The big bad wolves were huffing and puffing, chest beating and giving it large.  I followed parental advice as much as I could and bit my tongue rather than choke on the words I would be unable to get out.  I took deep, slow breaths and struggled to keep calm.  My eyes I cast downwards.  Cicero’s In Catiline came to mind.  I raised my head and eyes slowly and gave my tormentors the full silent, silver screen goddess treatment.  Eventually I had enough of all the huffing and puffing, and very calmly cracked a quip with such insouciance that my tongue suddenly struck confusion and fear into the hearts of the big bad wolves that they withdrew to lick their wounds.

From then on, slowly life began to become less traumatic.