thrown to the winds, if there was never any reserve there in the first place? Well, I was the one to ask. I had lived for twelve years in a reservation of reserve. There were things I understood. As, for example, that there would have been no erotic pay-off whatsoever in cutting out the faces of the women on my father’s side and attaching them to the bodies of the toerags who flashed the lot for
Span.
This is not to say that they were in any way toeraggy themselves, onlythat they were already uninhibited rompers. For this to work, it had to be the refined, sensitive oval faces of my mother’s side - faces utterly dear to me — that I desecrated.
Yes, I am saying what it looks as though I’m saying. Much like a sweet little girl playing with her cut-out dolls — except that a sweet little girl will mix and match on the dining-room table or on a sunlit lawn in the company of other ambrosial chits her own age, whereas I was stewing it alone and malodorous in the lavatory — I changed the outfits worn by the women I revered, got them to open their legs and show me the tops of their stockings, the lace on their pants, turned them round and bent them over, enticed them into peignoirs and babydoll pyjamas, cut them into French maids, naughty nurses, leggy belles from St Trinian’s, cowgirls who couldn’t stay on a horse or keep their tushes in their chaparejos.
And I did this even to my little Polish grandmother?
Especially
to my little Polish grandmother.
Scissoring with the utmost care, I cut around the contours of her face, freeing her from the gross contingencies of Piccadilly or Cheetham Hill, then slowly, lovingly, I separated her head from her body. Now she was mine to love as only I knew how to love her. Up on to six-inch high heels I hoiked her, fishnetted, frilly-knickered, fingering a cane; out of an upper-storey window I leaned her, a wanton housewife in a scant pinny, shaking out a feather duster and jiggling her introverted-nippled breasts; down on a scarlet bed I laid her, wearing her peasant scarf as always, God-fearing, inconsolably blue-eyed, sixty-five years of age, but in her ‘best’ at last — a gossamer négligé of ankle length, through which, with the help of my magnifying glass, I could just make out where the snatch should have been.
Trying to find some saving grace in all this, I can only thank the Almighty in whom my grandmother placed her trust that split-beaver shots were not around when I was twelve.
I repeat, too, that I never co-opted a single page of
Health and Efficiency
to my cause. I come from a culture which attaches a near religious significance to the family and sanctifies the old: I wasn’t going to have a grandmother of mine kriching after a volleyball on some beach in Scandinavia.
FOUR
Exceptionally, strict observance of the prescribed method of service may be waived where the umpire is notified, before play begins, that compliance is prevented by physical disability.
7.7
The Rules
IN FAIRNESS TO them, the Akiva ping-pong players, on whose mercies my father had thrown me, could have given me a much harder time of it than they did.
They could have left me standing there for the whole evening, for example, the way I was left standing on the touchline at St Onan’s, instead of just for the first hour. I wouldn’t have complained. I wasn’t in any position to complain. What rights did I have? It was their table. They were grown men, some of them, sort of. And I was wearing a school blazer enjoining me to take a firm hold of myself, a comic strip bat in my hand.
As it turned out, it was the bat that broke the ice.
When I say they were grown men, some of them, sort of, I mean to render not so much the uncertainties of an unusually apprehensive twelve-year-old, as the approximateness of the company itself. If I were to encounter them again as they were then, myself as I am now, I think I would still be struck by how sort of they were. And it was the
Span.
This is not to say that they were in any way toeraggy themselves, onlythat they were already uninhibited rompers. For this to work, it had to be the refined, sensitive oval faces of my mother’s side - faces utterly dear to me — that I desecrated.
Yes, I am saying what it looks as though I’m saying. Much like a sweet little girl playing with her cut-out dolls — except that a sweet little girl will mix and match on the dining-room table or on a sunlit lawn in the company of other ambrosial chits her own age, whereas I was stewing it alone and malodorous in the lavatory — I changed the outfits worn by the women I revered, got them to open their legs and show me the tops of their stockings, the lace on their pants, turned them round and bent them over, enticed them into peignoirs and babydoll pyjamas, cut them into French maids, naughty nurses, leggy belles from St Trinian’s, cowgirls who couldn’t stay on a horse or keep their tushes in their chaparejos.
And I did this even to my little Polish grandmother?
Especially
to my little Polish grandmother.
Scissoring with the utmost care, I cut around the contours of her face, freeing her from the gross contingencies of Piccadilly or Cheetham Hill, then slowly, lovingly, I separated her head from her body. Now she was mine to love as only I knew how to love her. Up on to six-inch high heels I hoiked her, fishnetted, frilly-knickered, fingering a cane; out of an upper-storey window I leaned her, a wanton housewife in a scant pinny, shaking out a feather duster and jiggling her introverted-nippled breasts; down on a scarlet bed I laid her, wearing her peasant scarf as always, God-fearing, inconsolably blue-eyed, sixty-five years of age, but in her ‘best’ at last — a gossamer négligé of ankle length, through which, with the help of my magnifying glass, I could just make out where the snatch should have been.
Trying to find some saving grace in all this, I can only thank the Almighty in whom my grandmother placed her trust that split-beaver shots were not around when I was twelve.
I repeat, too, that I never co-opted a single page of
Health and Efficiency
to my cause. I come from a culture which attaches a near religious significance to the family and sanctifies the old: I wasn’t going to have a grandmother of mine kriching after a volleyball on some beach in Scandinavia.
FOUR
Exceptionally, strict observance of the prescribed method of service may be waived where the umpire is notified, before play begins, that compliance is prevented by physical disability.
7.7
The Rules
IN FAIRNESS TO them, the Akiva ping-pong players, on whose mercies my father had thrown me, could have given me a much harder time of it than they did.
They could have left me standing there for the whole evening, for example, the way I was left standing on the touchline at St Onan’s, instead of just for the first hour. I wouldn’t have complained. I wasn’t in any position to complain. What rights did I have? It was their table. They were grown men, some of them, sort of. And I was wearing a school blazer enjoining me to take a firm hold of myself, a comic strip bat in my hand.
As it turned out, it was the bat that broke the ice.
When I say they were grown men, some of them, sort of, I mean to render not so much the uncertainties of an unusually apprehensive twelve-year-old, as the approximateness of the company itself. If I were to encounter them again as they were then, myself as I am now, I think I would still be struck by how sort of they were. And it was the
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