Hugendubel.info - Die B2B Online-Buchhandlung 

Merkliste
Die Merkliste ist leer.
Bitte warten - die Druckansicht der Seite wird vorbereitet.
Der Druckdialog öffnet sich, sobald die Seite vollständig geladen wurde.
Sollte die Druckvorschau unvollständig sein, bitte schliessen und "Erneut drucken" wählen.

She Left Me the Gun

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
352 Seiten
Englisch
Faber & Fabererschienen am18.03.2013Main
When Emma Brockes was ten years old, her mother said 'One day I will tell you the story of my life and you will be amazed.' Growing up in a tranquil English village, Emma knew very little of her mother's life before her. She knew Paula had grown up in South Africa and had seven siblings. She had been told stories about deadly snakes and hailstones the size of golf balls. There was mention, once, of a trial. But most of the past was a mystery. When her mother dies of cancer, Emma - by then a successful journalist at the Guardian - is free to investigate the untold story. Her search begins in the Colindale library but then takes her to South Africa, to the extended family she has never met and their accounts of a childhood so different to her own. She encounters versions of the life her mother chose to leave behind - and realises what a gift her mother gave her. Part investigation, part travelogue, part elegy, "She Left Me the Gun" is a gripping, funny and clear-eyed account of a writer's search for her mother's story.mehr

Produkt

KlappentextWhen Emma Brockes was ten years old, her mother said 'One day I will tell you the story of my life and you will be amazed.' Growing up in a tranquil English village, Emma knew very little of her mother's life before her. She knew Paula had grown up in South Africa and had seven siblings. She had been told stories about deadly snakes and hailstones the size of golf balls. There was mention, once, of a trial. But most of the past was a mystery. When her mother dies of cancer, Emma - by then a successful journalist at the Guardian - is free to investigate the untold story. Her search begins in the Colindale library but then takes her to South Africa, to the extended family she has never met and their accounts of a childhood so different to her own. She encounters versions of the life her mother chose to leave behind - and realises what a gift her mother gave her. Part investigation, part travelogue, part elegy, "She Left Me the Gun" is a gripping, funny and clear-eyed account of a writer's search for her mother's story.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9780571275830
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2013
Erscheinungsdatum18.03.2013
AuflageMain
Seiten352 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse4756 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.1295887
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe





1
If You Think That´s Aggressive, Then You Really Haven´t Lived


My mother first tried to tell me about her life when I was about ten years old. I was sitting at the table doing homework or a drawing; she was standing at the grill cooking sausages. Every now and then the fat from the meat would catch and a flame leap out.

She had been threatening some kind of revelation for years. One day I will tell you the story of my life,´ she said, and you will be amazed.´

I had looked at her in amazement. The story of her life was she was born, she had me, ten years passed, end of story.

Tell me now,´ I´d said.

I´ll tell you when you´re older.´

A second later, I´d considered saying Am I old enough now?´ but the joke hadn´t seemed worth it. Anything constituting a Life Story would deviate from the norm in ways that could only embarrass me.

I knew, of course, that she had come from South Africa and had left behind a large family: seven half-siblings, eight if you included a boy who´d died, ten if you counted the rumour of twins. You should have been a twin,´ said my mother whenever I did something brilliant, like open my mouth or walk across a room. I hoped you´d be twins, with auburn hair. You could have been. Twins run in the family on both sides.´ And, My stepmother was pregnant with twins, once.´ There were no twins among her siblings.

She always referred to her like this, as my stepmother´, and unlike her siblings, for whom she provided short but vivid character sketches, and even her father, who featured in the odd story, Marjorie was a blank. As for her real mother´s family, all she would say was, Strong women, strong genes,´ and give me one of her looks - a cross between Nobody Knows the Trouble I´ve Seen and Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here - that shut down the possibility of further discussion.

It wasn´t evident from her accent that she came from elsewhere. In fact, years later, a colleague answering my phone at work said afterwards, Your mother has the poshest voice I´ve ever heard.´ I couldn´t hear it, but I could see it written down, in the letters she drafted on the backs of old gas bills. It was there in words like satisfactory´ (great English compliment) and peculiar´ (huge insult). Diana,´ she wrote to her friend Joan in 1997, such a pretty girl, but such a sad life.´ She was imperiously English to her friends and erstwhile family in South Africa, but to me, at home, she was caustic about the English. The worst insult she could muster was, You´re so English.´

I was English. I was more than English, I was from the Home Counties. I played tennis in white clothing. I went to Brownies. I didn´t ride a horse - my mother thought horses an unnecessary complication - but I did everything else commensurate in those parts with being a nice girl. This was important to my mother, although she couldn´t help hinting, now and then, at how tame it all was.

Call that sun?´ she said, when the English sun came out. Call that rain?´ When I got bitten by a red ant at Sports Day, my mother inspected the dot while I started to sniffle. For goodness´ sake. All that fuss over such a tiny little thing.´ Where she came from, any ant worth its salt would kill you.

Among the crimes of the English: coldness, snobbery, boarding schools, tradition´, the royals, hypocrisy, fat ankles, waste and dessert, or pudding´, as they called it, a word she thought redolent of the entire race. The English´, she said, are a people who cook their fruit.´ It was her greatest fear that she and my dad would die in a plane crash and I would wind up in boarding school alone, eating stewed prunes and getting more English by the day.

If I´d had my wits about me I might have said, Oh, right, because white South Africans are so beloved the world over.´ But it didn´t occur to me. It didn´t occur to me until an absurdly late stage that we might, in fact, be separate people.

Above all, she said, the English never talked about anything. Not like us. We talked about everything. We talked a blue streak around the things we didn´t talk about.

My parents met at work in the 1960s, at the law firm where my dad was doing his articles and my mum was a bookkeeper. In the late 1970s, when I was a few years old, we moved out of the city to a village an hour away. Ours was the corner house, opposite the tennis club and a five-minute walk from the station.

It was a gentle kind of place, leafy and green, with the customary features of a nice English village: a closely mown cricket pitch, lots of pubs and antiques shops, a war memorial on the high street and, in the far distance, a line of wooded hills that on autumn days caught the sun and made the village postcard-pretty. It was emphatically not the kind of place where people had Life Stories. Life stages perhaps, incremental steps through increasingly boring sets of circumstances; for example, we used to live in London and now we lived in Buckinghamshire. It was also very safe. There was no police report in our local newspaper, but if there had been, it would have been full of minor acts of vandalism and dustbins blowing over in high winds. There was the occasional parking violation when the bowls club had a tournament, and two men were arrested, once, for doing something in the public toilets the paper struggled to find words for. What about the women and children!´ thundered a Tory councillor, causing my dad to look up mildly from his newspaper at breakfast. What has it got to do with the women and children?´

(When my mother read the newspaper, it was with a pen in one hand, so that when she came across a photo of a pompous-looking public official - if he was smiling - she could absent-mindedly black out one of his teeth. Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand, Ronald Reagan all lost teeth this way. Your mother´s been at the newspaper again,´ my father would sigh.)

She was in many ways a typical resident. She went to yoga in the village hall. She stood in line at the post office. She made friends with the lady on the deli counter in Budgens and had a nice relationship with the lovely family who lived next door to us. Their young boys would come round to look at the fish in our pond. Every year I made her a home-made birthday card that depicted scenes from family life. She tacked them up on the kitchen wall, where they faded with each passing summer. I found them recently, seven in all, a memoir of my mother´s existence in the village. There she is, wonkily drawn in her yoga gear, surrounded by me, my dad, two cats and the fish.

At the same time, it pleased her, I think, to be at a slight angle to the culture; someone who had adopted the role of a Buckinghamshire mum but who had at her disposal various super powers - powers she had decided, on balance, to keep under her hat. (I used to think this an attitude unique to my mother, until I moved to America and realised it is the standard expat consolation: in my case - a British person in New York - looking around and thinking, You people have no idea about the true nature of reality when you don´t know what an Eccles cake is or how to get to Watford.´)

In my mother´s case, it was a question of style. She was very much against the English way of disguising one´s intentions. One never knew what they were thinking, she said - or rather, one always knew what they were thinking but they never came out and said it.

She loved to tell the story of how, soon after moving in, she was sanding the banisters one day when a man came to the door, canvassing for the Conservatives. He just ASSUMED,´ she raged then and for years afterwards, he just ASSUMED I WAS TORY.´ She wasn´t Tory, but she wasn´t consistently liberal, either. She disapproved of people having children out of wedlock. When a child-molester storyline surfaced on TV, she would argue for castration, execution and various other medieval solutions to the problem, while my father and I sat in uncomfortable silence. She was not, by and large, in favour of silence.

Even her gardening was loud. When my parents bought the house, the garden had been a denuded quarter acre which my mother set about Africanising. She planted pampas grass and mint. She let the grass grow wild around the swing by the shed. Along the back fence, she put in fast-growing dogwoods.

It´s to hide your ugly house,´ she said sweetly when our other neighbour complained. After that, whenever my mother was out weeding and found a snail, she would lob it, grenade-like, over the fence into the old lady´s salad patch.

That´s very aggressive,´ said my father, who is English and a lawyer. If he ever threw a snail, it would be by accident.

Ha!´ said my mother, and gave him the look: If You Think That´s Aggressive, Then You Really Haven´t Lived.

When it works, the only child/parent bond is a singular dynamic. Being an only child is a bit like being Spanish: you have your dinner late, you go to bed late and from all the grown-up parties you get dragged to you wind up eating a lot of hors d´oeuvres. Your parents talk to you as if you were an adult, and when they´re not talking to you, you have no one to talk to. So you listen.

By the time I was eight, I knew that olives stuffed with anchovies were not pukey but an acquired taste´. I knew that Mr X who lived down the road was not a blameless old codger but a mean shit´ who didn´t let his wife have the heating on during the day. I knew that Tawny Owl was too scared to drive after dark and...


mehr