Bowling's mother
A large, fair, capable woman who is never described anywhere but in her own kitchen. She read the Sunday murders, believed almost everything a boy wanted to do was dangerous, and died without ever learning that her world had ended.
To keep the meals, the laundry and the children running exactly as they always have. Her son's word for the household is not clockwork, which sounds mechanical, but a natural process: breakfast would be on the table tomorrow the way the sun would rise.
The book
At a glance
- Bowling's mother; the corn merchant's wife
- Never given; "Mother" throughout
- Large and fair, with yellow hair; a black dress and, except on Sundays, an apron
- Bed at nine, up at five, all her life
- The News of the World on Sundays and Hilda's Home Companion in the week
- 1916 or 1917, of an undiagnosed internal growth; the doctor called it "benevolent"
- Part II, chapters 2 to 8
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeBowling's mother is fat for as long as he can remember her, and he says it is from her that he inherits whatever it is that makes people fat. She was largish and a little taller than her husband, fairer-haired, inclined to black dresses, and, except on Sundays, never out of an apron. When he thinks of her he sees her at the kitchen table with her forearms floury, rolling out a lump of dough.
The kitchen is one of the most closely observed rooms in the book: huge, dark and low, with a beam across the ceiling, a stone floor, cellars underneath, a vast stone sink with an iron pump instead of a tap, a dresser going up to the ceiling, and a range that burned half a ton a month. Bowling watched her work there the way you watch anyone who really understands a job, and says that when she was cooking, all her movements were precise and firm and she was plainly in a world where she belonged.
Outside it she barely existed. She read more easily than her husband and read novelettes as well as newspapers, and she was, her son says, unbelievably ignorant: she could not have said whether Ireland was east or west of England and probably could not have named the Prime Minister at any point before 1914, and had no wish to know either. She never went into the loft, very seldom into the shop, would not have known where anything was kept, and never said grace, which had to be said by someone male. She would not tolerate a woman in to help with the housework, on the firm belief that a hired woman always sweeps the dirt under the dresser.
After Joe ran away she got smaller and older than her years, went in more for neck of mutton and began using margarine, which she had never allowed into the house. She died while her son was at an officers' training school at Colchester. What everyone had taken for indigestion was an internal growth, and a chill on the stomach finished it. He got a week's urgent leave and arrived too late.
How the book draws them
- How he remembers herFat for as long as her son can remember, largish, and a little taller than her husband, with yellow hair a good deal fairer than his, a beaming face and an enormous bosom. Vast and overflowing is his phrase for her. Except on Sundays he never remembers her without an apron, and she was inclined to black dresses.
- Rolling pastryBowling compares her at the board to a priestess celebrating a sacred rite, and says that in her own mind that is exactly what she was. Thick pink strong forearms mottled with flour, and egg-whisks and mincers and rolling-pins doing precisely what they were meant to do.
- The catalogue of dangersEverything a boy wanted to do was dangerous: swimming, climbing, sliding, snowballing, catapults, and fishing. Every animal had its method of attacking you — horses bit, bats got into your hair, swans broke your leg, and all snakes stung. When he quoted the penny encyclopedia to say snakes bite, she told him not to answer back.
- The poisonsRaw potatoes were deadly poison, and mushrooms unless bought at the greengrocer's. Nearly everything in the shop was poisonous, which was the reason for the wooden gate across the passage. Against all this, raw onions cured almost anything, and a lump of sulphur sat year after year undissolved in the dog's water bowl.
- Murders in the afternoonShe thought of the world outside Lower Binfield chiefly as a place where murders were committed, and could not understand how people could be so wicked. The shop shutters dated from the Jack the Ripper scare, and she felt safe behind them because she had always had a dreadful feeling that he was hiding in the town.
- Hilda's Home CompanionBetween four and six she sat in the yellow armchair with her feet on the fender and a pot of strong tea stewing on the hob, working steadily through the serial, the household hints, the advertisements and the answers to correspondents. It usually lasted her the week. Sometimes she dozed off and woke at a quarter to six in a stew because tea would be late. Tea was never late.
- What she would not cookRiver fish. She refused to allow that anything but trout and salmon was edible and called the dace her son brought home nasty muddy things. Ferrets she would not have in the house either — nasty smelly things.
- The last visitShe came to see him at the hospital camp near Eastbourne, thinner and yellower, and talked in the old rambling way about her cousin, the boys who had gone, her indigestion, and what a lovely corpse his father made. He says it was like a ghost talking. He had known her as something vast and protecting, a bit like a ship's figure-head, and she was a little old woman in a black dress.