Semi-Detached by Griff Rhys Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

from Daddy, there’s a kiss from Helen and a
kiss from William.’ And the old dear raised a withered hand to stroke my
bulging baby cheeks and wipe a tear from her eye. ‘Ahh, Griffith Bach’ (meant
this time — my father only used it as a prelude to some expression of severe
disappointment). My brother looked on with undisguised disgust.
    It had
not been puritanism that influenced my uncle’s protection of his women-folk, it
was snobbery. My mother is convinced he believed that Elwyn had married beneath
himself, and in turn she disapproved of Ieaun and his playboy ways. Her
deepest distrust was reserved for Joan, his wife. ‘When we first went there
with William and they came down to the car, Elwyn passed the baby to Joan, who
said, “Don’t give it to me.”‘
    Joan
was admittedly a pretty stupid woman, but the pair were dead sophisticated for
Glamorgan. They had a Bentley and a sequence of houses decorated in
excruciating South of France taste, with lurid patterned wallpapers and
gold-encrusted bibelots.. They modelled themselves on the Duke and Duchess of
Windsor, even down to their smelly, noisy, asthmatic pug dogs: all pretty
glamorous for a consultant anaesthetist from Cardiff. My uncle came across as a
Welsh cross between Rex Harrison and Bertie Wooster. He was a squadron leader
during the war, and was the only man I ever met who actually said ‘what?’ at
the end of his sentences.
    There
was a picture of him when he was in his twenties, stood on the top of a cliff,
in a trench coat and plus fours, next to alow sports car, wearing an
outrageous jumper. He was the polar opposite of my father. Naturally I found
him rather interesting.
    My
mother can still work herself up into a fit over the indignities of their
visits to our humble dwellings. ‘I didn’t think you lived in anything like
this,’ was Joan’s comment on first seeing their house in Epping. Ieaun was
driving in the car, quite possibly his Bentley, and turned on us children. ‘We’ll
have to stop this car unless you lot can be quiet.’
    ‘But
you used to say that all the time,’ I countered.
    My
mother snorted. ‘You were perfectly quiet at the time.’ She giggled. William
had been turned out of his bed to accommodate the visiting potentate and stood
in front of him and said, ‘When are you going home? We’re fed up with having
you here.’
    What my
mother resented was their concentration on luxury when she and my father were
struggling to bring up their children. All their lives Ieaun and Joan danced
attendance on a rich old aunt called Dolly, at the races, at Claridges and in
the South of France. Dolly had married aFrench banker. She had become
estranged from her own daughter and gave Joan a dress allowance and paid for
her to come up to London once a month to have her hair and nails done. My mother
liked Dolly ‘Oh, she was a lot of fun.’ A measure of her wealth was that she
always booked two seats in the theatre — one for her mink.
    Ieaun
and Joan never got the money. The French inheritance laws intervened. I felt
my mother was quietly satisfied. She had never forgiven Ieaun’s silly
assumptions about the superiority of surgeons over physicians. It had led to a
row the night before my father’s funeral. Ieaun, already getting woolly-minded
with the onset of Alzheimer’s, had claimed that Elwyn probably did not
understand, during his final illness, what was happening to him.
    It
still caused my mother to flare up fourteen years after the event, with Ieaun
long dead too. ‘What nonsense you speak,’ she had told him. ‘Of course he knew
He was a Fellow.’ She resented the way that Aunty Megs had tried to shush her,
as if she were some junior even then. But she could also pity Ieaun now For
Mummy, her family was everything, and his lack of children left Ieaun to die
lonely and forgotten, whereas she sees her children every week, would do every
day if she could.
    My
father obviously felt oppressed by his brother and would