Goldsmiths - University of London

'So, Mum ...'

'Yes?'

'What made you send me to Peggy Sharpe's?' I've asked her this before of course. (I've been asked a question like it, many times, myself. How did you become an actor? I was sent to Stage School. Were your parents actors then? No they were not.) The answer my mother gives will vary slightly, according to her frame of mind.

'You wanted to go' she says.

'Did I really though? At five and a half?'

'Ah! Bisto!' She gasps, as if she were discovering a rare alpine flower growing between the shelves at Tesco.

'Let me help you ...'

'WAIT. It's got to be Bisto powder. They can keep the granules. Muck. Never touch it.'

Age has done nothing to soften her ideas about which products are acceptable and which are not, which shops are in and which are out. Bisto – The Original, is on the top shelf, in the same packaging that I remember from my childhood.

'I'd better get six.'

'Six? Do you really need that much?

'Yes, I do.'

'But six packets? It seems a lot.'

'Listen, I don't need people telling me how to live my life. It's my panic buying. You never know when there's going to be a shortage. Original Bisto can disappear for months'. She puts her finger to her mouth and drops her volume to a whisper 'I've got a nice little store building up in the cupboard under the stairs.'

'The Black Hole.'

'Exactly.'

'Surely two would be plenty.'

Volume up again, 'YOU NEVER KNOW. They'll all be laughing on the other side of their faces when there's another war, I can tell you.'

When we started shopping together, a couple of years ago, I was surprised that she was drawn to the giant Tesco on the corner of Cromwell Road and Earls Court. It's a fair drive from her home and its halogen brightness seems alien. Now I am beginning to understand its pull. Brown skinned women with gold jewellery and fur lined parkas, clack about in high heels, alongside Phillipino families in clothes a size too large, and big black chauffeurs with blue tooth earpieces. Then, at around lunchtime, vintage South Kensington creeps out. Old girls with ancient hairdos, headscarves like the Queen, and holes in their tights, meander up and down the polished aisles, nail varnish and nicotine stains, lipstick settling into the creases round their mouths, pushing trolleys containing gin bottles, packets of custard creams and cat food. In the nineteen sixties, the Debutantes who hadn't quite made it haunted Bayswater, speaking in tones that could cut glass, sharing bathrooms on the landing, and drinking quietly in bed-sits with gas ovens in the corner. Now it seems they've migrated South. It is a world my mother recognises. In a way, it is a homecoming.

When I was a child, navigating the daily shop without causing offence to the three welsh dairies, two butchers, two greengrocers, a baker and an ironmonger in the small parade opposite our house, was a constant cause for anxiety. Our expeditions were complicated tactical manoeuvres. I was constantly on the lookout for signs of her losing her temper, and didn't feel safe until we were back behind our net curtains, no wrath incurred.

Then, over night, an Antique Oriental Carpet Shop landed, as if from a tale of Arabian Nights. Two young men, with dark moustaches and leather sandals, emerged and sat outside on deck chairs, with a joss stick and a couple of implausibly priced old rugs strewn casually on the pavement in front of them. They could hardly have been eyed with more suspicion by my parents if they had chalked “New lamps for old” on the concrete. In the decade that followed, the grocery shops were steadily replaced by art galleries and Fired Earth. Now, my parents' nearest butcher is at the end of their road. Mr Lidgate, the proprietor, is invited to speak about organic meat on Radio Four, his homemade steak and kidney pie is included in estate agents particulars as one of the major attractions of the area, but my mother would rather starve then venture in. Pottering through Tesco, her quest continues for half a pound of mince to boil grey, then mix with a Bisto sauce and call Bolognese.

'You had real Talent. Any fool could see that,' she says, as she slams four mushrooms into a brown paper bag.

'What is Talent exactly?' I ask. 'I met an actor once who could play the William Tell Overture on his teeth. Was that Talent?'

'It's a gift. Not everyone has it. And those that have, should count themselves very lucky.'

'Don't you think ...' I say tentatively, 'It's not so much, whether this person or that, has it, but what they might want to do with it, that's important? Talent I mean.'

'You loved the theatre.' She hurls a packet of cauliflower florets into the trolley.

'Did I?'

'Yes you did. We took you to Puss in Boots at the London Palladium and the next day you never stopped talking about it.' I sense her editing her manuscript, rewriting History, cutting out, sellotaping over, pencilling arrows in this direction and that.

'So you mistook a crush on Frankie Vaughan for a theatrical vocation?' Now I've over-stepped the mark. My mention of Mr Showbiz, draws a grunt of disgust. I remember how he stepped down from the stage, sat on the lap of a woman in the front row and crooned in her ear. It was not Mum's idea of romance. In fact there aren't many men mum can stomach. Including, I sometimes think, my father.

That Christmas, I was given a box of stage make up, one tin of rose tinted 'dusting powder' and one of Remover, pure grease, this being the only thing that would get the stuff off. Each stick of grease paint was numbered and wrapped in gold paper. Carmine No's.I II & III. I didn't want to open them. They looked like chocolates, too beautiful to eat.

'Now let's go to the booze alley ...'

She totters a few yards ahead, in her black polo necked sweater and trousers, a style adopted in the early sixties and worn ever since, her arms stretched out at an angle, balancing like a toddler.

'Ah! Whisky is on special offer' Arthritic fingers grab two bottles by the neck.

'Now where the heck is the Sicilian red? Do you think me dreadful, choosing the very cheapest I can find?'

'No, not at all'.

'Oh, darling, how sweet of you. '

'Mum, how about this ... half price ... reduced from £9.99 to ...' I do my best to tempt her upmarket, for the sake of her liver

'Er ...' The tantalising decision hangs momentarily, 'No.' She takes a breath. 'No. I'm going to leave that.' The voice lowers again, deeply suspicious, 'I think it's one of those things they're just trying to off load as fast as they can.' She bends to the bottom shelf. 'Ah! Here it is, hiding. I'd better take a couple ...' And as they go, bombs away, two bottles, under three pounds each, joining the six packets of Bisto dust rattling about in the wire cage, she says, 'You were turning into a terrible goody-goody at Norland Place. Studying all the time. I didn't want my butterfly to be turned into a moth. You needed bringing out of yourself.'

'You didn't like grey uniforms.'

'Well there was that, I suppose. Yes.'

One aisle further along, she invites me to admire the photograph on a can of new potatoes in brine. 'Mrs Leach put me onto these years ago. Marvellous. Why don't I get a couple?' Philomena Leach, Jennifer's mother, was, for a time, the school dinner lady.

'Now, Paracetemol ...'

The pharmaceutical aisle represents a philosophical crisis to be wrestled with daily. The Christian Science faith teaches that the world is a manifestation of the Divine imagination, in which Perfection is the natural state. If you know this Truth, illness and pain, will melt away. Evidently today it's not quite working

'Mortal Mind' she whispers, guiltily, as she pops a couple of packets into the trolley.

The Woman Responsible for Teaching Naomi Campbell to Sing, (or rather trying to, before it was recognised that Naomi's Talent lay in a different direction) now makes for the tills. Sunil, the 'checkout captain', with whom we have crossed swords before, is attempting to head us off towards the shortest queue, but mum is having none of it. She prefers the checkout where she can chat to the Indian woman with the thinly plucked eyebrows, there are more important things than speed,

'Hello ladies. Everyone well at home?' Her friend behaves with as much grace as if the store were her own. My mother's face bursts into a smile,

'Oh yes thank you. My husband is much better.'

'And your son?'

'He's just got promotion.'

'You must be very proud.'

'I am'

'You are her favourite you know,' I say, as two tomatoes and a piece of steak the size of an old half crown make their slow progress down the conveyor belt. 'She won't go anywhere else.'

The lady is pleased. 'Nor me' she says ' I don't want to move. They've offered me promotion, to be in charge of staff training, but I like it where I am. I like the people.'

We progress creakily, towards the car park.

'I sent you to Sharpe's because I wanted you to get a taste of what life was really like,' she says.

'Disappointment you mean?'

'Yes. REJECTION. What is the point, I ask you, of wrapping children in cotton wool, shielding them from Real Life? Better to get out there and get on with it. Going lonely home in the rain in Scarborough dragging an oboe in its case.'

Most things come down to the oboe in the end.