Therapy

drama school and tried to make it as an actor. That was when I met him. He played all the comic parts in the Dormobile troupe’s repertory, and wrote the scripts for their fairy-tale adaptations. He discovered in due course that he was better at writing than acting. We kept in touch after the troupe left Yorkshire. That summer I went up to Edinburgh, where they were doing a show in the Festival — the Fringe, of course — and distributed fliers and programmes, without telling my parents what I was up to. Then, much against their wishes, I applied for my first teaching job in London, knowing Tubby was based there. The Dormobile company had gone bust, and he was scraping a living as a temporary office worker, writing jokes for stand-up comedians in his spare time. We started to go steady. Eventually I had to bring him home one weekend to meet the family. I knew it would be sticky, and it was.
    My father had a living in an inner suburb of Leeds which had been going down in the world for decades. The church was huge, neogothic, blackened redbrick. I can’t remember it ever being full. It had been built on the top of a hill by the wealthy manufacturers and merchants who originally lived in the big stone villas that surrounded it, overlooking their factories and warehouses and the streets of terraced workers’ cottages at the bottom of the hill. There were still a few professional middle-class owner-occupiers when my father took over the parish, but most of the big houses were converted into flats or occupied by extended Asian families in the nineteen-fifties. My father was an earnest, well-meaning man, who read the Guardian when it was still called the Manchester Guardian , and did his best to make the Church responsive to the needs of the inner city, but the inner city never seemed to be very interested apart from weddings and christenings and funerals. My mother supported him loyally, scrimping and saving to bring up her children in a respectable middle-class style on my father’s inadequate stipend. There were four of us, two boys and two girls. I was the second oldest. We all went to local singlesex grammar schools, but we grew up in a kind of cultural bubble, insulated from the lives of our peers. We had no television, partly because Father disapproved of it, but also because we couldn’t afford it. Going to the cinema was such a rare treat that the intensity of the experience used to upset me, and I rather dreaded the prospect as a child. We had a gramophone, but only classical records. We all learned to play musical instruments, though none of us had any real talent, and sometimes the whole family would sit down together and stumble through a piece of chamber music, making a noise that started the neighbourhood dogs howling. We were teetotal — again, as much from economy as principle. And we were very argumentative. The main family recreation was scoring points off each other in conversation, especially at meals.
    Tubby was completely flummoxed by this. He wasn’t used to family meals in any case. He very rarely sat down at the same table with his mother and father and brother, except for Sunday lunch and other high days and holidays. When he lived at home, he and his father and his brother would eat separately, at different times from each other, and from Mrs Passmore. When they came in in the evening, from work or school, she would ask them what they wanted, and then she would cook it and wait on them at table, as if she was running a café, while they ate with a newspaper or a book propped up against the salt cellar. I couldn’t believe it when I first visited his home.
    He found our domestic life equally bizarre, “as archaic as the Forsyte Saga,” he said to me once: sitting down en famille two or three times a day, with grace before and after meals, cloth napkins which you had to replace in your own special napkin-ring at the end of each meal so as to save laundry, and proper cutlery, however worn and tarnished, soup spoons for soup and fish knives and forks for fish, and so on. Our food was pretty horrible, and there was never enough of it when it was nice, but it was served with due ceremony and decorum. Poor Tubby was completely adrift that first weekend. He started eating before everyone else was served, he used his dessert spoon for his soup and his soup spoon for dessert and committed all kinds of other faux pas that had my younger brother and sister sniggering up their sleeves. But what