The Penis in the Pâté

Causality, the naked truth

My mum, around 1970, looking like she’s about to be naughty

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This week it was National Nude Day in the USA, so let me tell you why I don’t eat pâté.

You may not think the two are connected, but we didn’t think carpentry and space exploration were connected until they were. Yes, the latest high-tech material for constructing satellites and moon bases is wood. Nakedness and my visceral rejection of pâté are connected more temporally, the way that Bobby Kennedy’s assassination led to the creation of Scooby Doo.

Indeed, as with anything in life, there’s a whole chain of causality. You can start anywhere. I’ll start with civil engineer Sir James Drake who, while designing a section of England’s M6 motorway, builds light wells into the overpasses. These light wells create, in certain conditions, the optical illusion of an oncoming vehicle. On 26th January 1970, at Keele, this optical illusion causes my grandfather to swerve to avoid a non-existent car. He crashes into the structure, ending his life and the happiest part of my childhood.

In the wake of her dad dying, Mum’s next-door-but-one neighbour shows her the emotional support that my Dad (who I suspect may have been autistic) can’t work out how to achieve. This becomes an affair, though Dad hopes moving us to America for a year might ‘cure’ her. When that doesn’t work (and why should it? the heart is relentless), Dad moves out, Colin moves in, and both he and Mum are, quite often, naked.

The nakedness was a shock. The whole time she was with Dad, she was the comforting ‘mummy’ who picked me and my sister up from Girl’s Brigade in a fluffy coat, sat with us making pasta collages and potato prints, wore sensible shoes (and probably sensible underwear). Suddenly it was wild parties, where they had to prop up our basement bedroom ceiling to stop it collapsing while they danced on it. It was intimate body parts everywhere, and ‘Don’t be silly, it’s completely natural.’

I suspect it had something to do with Mum reading Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape. In my mid-30s, when I used to pour big glasses of red wine into both of us to unstopper her mouth so she’d tell me the truth, she said reading Morris’s description of the female orgasm while commuting to her part-time job in London made her cry on the Tube. She had no idea women could have orgasms. (Oh Dad.) She already knew her marriage was missing something, but this! She was a born experience-seeker, and Morris’s book made her determined to know for herself what the text described. Apparently, this book also extols “the untold benefits of being naked.”¹

Before I go further, I want to add that Mum was a magnificent woman. We had a complicated relationship, largely because whereas I wrote fiction, she insisted on living it. Here’s a tiny example, described in my poem ‘Twelfth Man’ (Material, 2008):

A larger example, her relentless, jolly, ‘I’m on holiday’ attitude while we suffered under our stepfather’s patent dislike.  I objected to her airbrushed version of our lives, her ‘heaven’ narrative when I felt I was going through hell (I wasn’t, but everything is relative).

I was the teller of uncomfortable truths, and she didn’t appreciate it. It was also clear to me that there was an approval rating for her children, and that on her list of favourites,  I was number 4 out of 4. There was Cheeky-but-Charming, Golden Boy, Make-Mummy-Happy and then, glowering in the corner, scribbling misery into my notebook, there was me.

My mother was brilliant, and her brilliance, thanks to an absence of feminism in the 1950s, was underutilised. For too long she accepted the suppression of her need to express herself, and when it finally burst out, it did so as full-flowered exhibitionism. (Which is funny because she was a Junior Exhibitioner at the Royal College of Music; from junior exhibitoner to adult exhibitionist). 

I wonder whether, had she taken up the post of X-Ray Crystallographer with Watson and Crick’s DNA research team  – which she was offered after the death of Rosalind Franklin –  she wouldn’t have needed to draw attention to herself by walking around with her tits out. Or, in only a hip-length shirt and a thong, when my teenage friends were over, turning away and bending from the waist to pick non-existent fluff from the carpet. But instead of becoming the new Rosalind Franklin, she married my dad.

In the explosion of freedom that followed their breakup, she was generally braless and often topless. Her sartorial proclivities only softened a little with age. When she died unexpectedly in her mid-sixties, her underwear drawer was 100% thongs.

She knew she couldn’t be naked in public (no one wants to get arrested, and she was a schoolteacher), but making her own clothes gave her the flexibility to get near as dammit. Her favourite party dresses had backless top halves that were split to the waist at the front, and skirt sections that were split to the waist at the sides. These were generally in sparkling lurex, and she didn’t mind if her halter-tops were “gappy”.

Her favourite tops, she crocheted from gold or silver lame thread, with holes just the right size to let her nipples poke through. The crocheted tops were such a memorable expression of her personality that I mentioned them in her eulogy, which was met with the warm laughter of recognition. There were a thousand reasons to remember Mum, but one of them was undoubtedly her nipples.

But for all the ways she dressed it up, nudity was Mum’s preference. Yet, rather like England’s climate, and definitely because of it, her nudity wasn’t predictable. Hence a fun story from when I was 15.

My 17-year-old boyfriend Max was fairly new, but I’d already introduced him to Mum, since we’d bumped into her in town together. So when I brought him home, I didn’t feel the need for a formal introduction. It was June, and I could hear the tennis on in the living room, so I suggested he go in and take a seat while I made tea. A few minutes later, I enter with the teapot and mugs on a tray and there is my new boyfriend, sitting next to my mother on the sofa, rigid with fear. My mother is watching Wimbledon while knitting, and she is completely topless.

She is happily chatting to him about the match, apparently oblivious to his discomfort. His eyes are glued to Bjorn Borg’s headband, and cannot venture anywhere else in case he gets even a peripheral view of his girlfriend’s mother’s tits.

We had to pretend it was fine. I guess for Mum it was fine. But it was not fine for me, or for Max. Yet, for politeness’ sake (how English), we sat there full of awkwardness and simply drank our tea as quickly as we could so we could make an excuse to leave. Despite it being, as my mum pointed out, a very exciting match.

I don’t know how you get to be that comfortable with your body. On some level, it’s admirable. On another level, constantly exposing your offspring and their friends to your nakedness, well past their puberties and without their consent, feels questionable. Certainly, it caused me embarrassment. Did it scar me? Not really. We tell these tales to her grandchildren and laugh about it.

But being raised by nudists has left me one long-lasting legacy: a singular meat-based aversion. A little story I trot out whenever someone offers me pâté. Yes, finally, having regaled you with anecdotes about my mother’s body, we get around to my stepfather’s — which, on the whole, I’d rather not think about — and the tale of the title.

Our VW camper looked like this. Image by Tristan MIMET from Pixabay

It was our first holiday as a ‘remade’ broken family. I would have been eight or nine. My Dad (ever the good sport in defeat) had sold Colin the VW Camper Van he’d bought for family transport in a misguided last-ditch (and too late) attempt to save his marriage. My new parents (since my Mum was a whole new person too) were driving us to the South of France. It was lunchtime, and they pulled off the road to a secluded and shady spot by a river. They took off their clothes and went for a swim. It was hot, so they didn’t get dressed again.

At the back of the VW camper, there was a little ‘flap’ that you could make into a temporary table. Mum covered it with a cloth, and laid out a selection of picnic food. The ‘table’ was at groin height. We kids were hungry, but she told us to wait. Colin would serve himself first. Still in the buff.

We watched as he advanced along the table. Watched as his penis dragged along the surface while he cut himself some bread. Dragged further along the surface as he leaned across for the brie. Dragged further along the surface and into the pâté. Where it sat for a time, perfectly at home, this pâté-coloured dollop of flesh, while we nudged each other and whispered, our minds filling with horror.

When Colin had filled his melamine plate, it was our turn. But suddenly, no one was hungry. When we did, half-heartedly, collect some food, urged by our mother, unable to tell her why not, you can bet it wasn’t pâté. What about the pâté? Mum asked. Don’t any of you want any pâté? No, Mum, we don’t. But none of us said a word. And no, Mum, I still don’t. I still don’t want some pâté. Because pâté makes me think of my stepfather’s penis.

What would it take, do you think, for me to like pâté?

A time machine, I reckon. Maybe I’d love a bit of pâté if the Civil Engineer Sir James Drake had allowed the space under motorway bridges to stay a bit dark.

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1. As I’m writing this, I’m wondering whether that copy of The Naked Ape was a present from my future stepfather. She had that job in the first couple of years of the 70s, so the timing is right.

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Since last week, I have:

• Completed my historical novel’s ‘Dramatis Personae’, aka character list, and received feedback on Draft 2 from my agent. There are two writing tasks for Draft 3, and one “help it to publication” task. This is the stuff I am the most rubbish at. Does anyone know any big-name authors/celebs who might blurb the natural successor to The Marlowe Papers? DM me!

• Emailed nearly every person I had a meaningful chat with at the Marlowe Society of America conference last week, which I always mean to do, and usually get paralysed about until it is just way too late, so this is a big win; well done me!

• Managed to have my ‘Stage 2’ redundancy meeting without being completely overwhelmed by emotion: another win, frankly, as feeling powerless and devalued is not my forte.

Over to you!

1. Were your parents nudists?

2. Were your parents influenced into unusual behaviour by a book?

3. Is there anything you won’t eat because it has terrible (personal) associations?

4. Any other reaction you’d like to share? I love to hear from you.