Free Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn Page B

woman who witnessed a violent disfigurement, was the subject of This Is Your Life and conga-d with the Queen in the same brief span of her life? Or do I look like all the other women out walking their dogs along the edge of the cliffs on the coast path – thick-thighed, unhurried (nothing to hurry home for), of indeterminate age and sex until they come within polite ‘afternoon’-ing distance?
    In all these years, only one of them – mail-order trail boots, duvet jacket, lovat tweed headgear, a classic example of the breed – has given me any reason to believe that she might beanything other than she seemed. ‘They try to mount her and she doesn’t like it,’ she said when she saw my miniature Pinscher worrying the business end of her Sheltie. ‘Not unless they buy her a drink first.’ Said with the kind of pale smile that contains an entire history.
    At the beginning, I held out against being the shapeless ragbag I am when I go out these days. I wore obviously unsuitable things on purpose, as a way of billboarding the fact that I didn’t want to join the club. Being slapped around by the weather a few times quickly brought me to my senses.
    Now when I think of my clothes I tend to think of them in the terms in which, in his published diary, Alan Bennett says his mother thought of hers:
    My other shoes
    My warm boots
    That fuzzy blue coat I have
    My coat with round buttons
    I made a note of that at around the same time I made the following note, which seemed a perfect encapsulation of the person I was trying to get away from.
    She is the kind who feels a protective tenderness toward her own beginnings. It is part of her strategy in a world of displacement to make every effort to restore and preserve, keep things together for their value as remembering objects, a way of fastening herself to a life. (Unattributed)
    There was a time when I couldn’t let anything go. I used to have three or four sizes in everything because I never knew what I was going to fit into; I had to rent rooms in the flat of the woman downstairs to store the overflow in.
    Now I enjoy living in this temporary way: unanchored; unburdened, often not even able to call the clothes I stand up in my own.
    *
    Some days the cliff path is buzzed by military planes from thebase along the coast. They scream in over the fields, follow the line of the cliffs for a couple of miles, then wheel away over the Channel, leaving behind a low rumble followed by silence, and the dog pressed against my leg, cowering, and the wind thrumming and the sheep unconcernedly cropping round tough plants with pink and mauve and yellow flowers which are called campion, ragged robin, thrift, sedum and veronica, but which is which I don’t know.
    From above, and at speed, and thrown at a panoramic angle, it all must appear pleasingly unified and inevitable – the picture elements, although discrete, psychologically understood as composing one continuous picture.
    *
    Everything in Kiln Cottage – books and furniture, cutlery, crockery, all the household bits and pieces – was from the people who had been there before.
    This was Mr and Mrs E, Staff’s parents.
    Staff was a London show-business lawyer whom I felt I liked, although I knew him only vaguely. He belonged to that group of people, and it was a large one, whom I had only ever met when either one or both of us was three sheets to the wind; half-seas over, at some party or other.
    Staff was born at Kiln Cottage. He grew up here and his parents lived here until their deaths.
    Through the clusters of pictures in the downstairs rooms it’s possible to trace his development from toothy schoolboy to public schoolboy to his Moroccan-sandal and tie-dye phase. The pictures stop some years short of his present bi-continental, sherbing-and-jogging, prinked and polka-dotted urbanity.
    Mr and Mrs Ε had three children, whose faces are now all as familiar to me as my own from their pictures. Susie (‘Sookie’), the younger