This story concerns a man approaching his thirtieth birthday whose mother, a very ordinary fifty-five-year-old housewife, becomes available to him, sexually.
The story is set in the nineteen-seventies in the northeast of England. For reasons of clarity I have made no attempt to reproduce the very distinctive regional accent and dialect; I'm not sure how I would achieve it with any degree of realism within the limitations of the English alphabet.
I hope you enjoy the tale and welcome feedback through voting or comments.
Sylviafan
A Geordie is someone who is born on or near the River Tyne in northeast England; this includes the city of Newcastle and a handful of towns such as Gateshead, Wallsend, Jarrow and South Shields. I read once that the term "Geordie" was coined during the Jacobite rebellion to refer to the inhabitants of Newcastle-upon-Tyne who predominantly favoured the Hanoverian King, George II.
But this story isn't set in 1745, it takes place in 1974. And it's not a history lesson, although I think it's worth me setting off by giving a bit of background about myself and my family. For starters I'm a proper Geordie, born and raised in Gateshead, sprawled over the south bank of the Tyne and facing Newcastle across the river. My dad was a sales rep for an engineering company and he was quite good at it, being full of bullshit. This meant my sister and I were brought up in a three-bedroom nineteen-thirties semi-detached house instead of a back-to-back terrace. And it meant my mum ("me mam" in Geordie-speak) didn't have to go out to work. Of course she was working when she met my dad; she was the office admin assistant in the engineering company my dad worked for.
Dad being dad charmed the pants off her, literally, and got her in the family way. She was only twenty. I think, reading between the lines, that he was reluctant to do the right thing. Years later I heard that his company told him that if he didn't marry her they'd fire him. You could do that in those days. So my older sister, Lucy, was born in nineteen-thirty-nine and the next year dad was conscripted into the army.
He was always a bit cagey about the war years, but he must have come home at some stage because I was born in early 'forty-five when mum was twenty-six. Post-war Britain wasn't a golden age; there was rationing until the mid-fifties and a lot of poverty, especially in the north of England. But we did ok. Dad's job was safe enough as long as he kept selling, which he did, and I look back on my childhood and adolescence with affection. Mum didn't go out to work but she was always busy: cleaning the house, cooking, going down to the shops every day for the perishables -- we didn't have a refrigerator until after I'd left home.
I guess I should try to describe her as she's the focus of this story, so here goes: Joan Agatha Mackenzie, nee Wright, was fifty-five-years-old in 1974 and was tall for her generation, about five feet eight. She was slim when she met dad, and she stayed that way through the war years when food was short. But after the war, when she was no longer working, she put on a few pounds. Nothing like today's excesses but a bit of padding on her hips and a slight bulge over the waistband of her sensible skirts and a bit of a double chin. She's never been desperately pretty but she's ok: a long, rather anxious-looking face with full lips and a retrousse nose that's probably her best feature. Her hair's dark brown and shoulder-length and has quite a bit of grey in it now. Her eyes are dark blue and there are pouches beneath them that a plastic surgeon would sort out in a trice. But that's a million miles from who mum is. She's quiet and calm and a bit mousy and... meek. Yes, meek I suppose. Subservient. She certainly never stood up to dad when he bullied her, which he did quite a lot. And she didn't seem to have any other life than dad and the house and kids. She had few friends, no close ones, and her parents were killed in the war. She had a brother but he'd emigrated to Australia in the 'fifties -- a ten-pound Pom. Which all sounds a bit sadder than it really was. I always thought mum was content with her lot; she never complained. She never said much about herself at all, come to think of it. It was with me, later on, that she opened up.
I'm David, by the way, at least to my parents. Dave to my mates and "Mac" to the guys at work. I'm five-ten, average build, average looks, average everything, really. Facially I suppose I look a bit more like mum than dad, same long face and turned-up nose. "Work" is the Swan-Hunter shipyard at Wallsend. I've been there since leaving school, where I did ok, although I left at sixteen. Lucy's the bright one. She went to University in Durham and then went down to London and became a lawyer. I went into the shipyard because I didn't want to go down the pits, and I did a full trade apprenticeship.
In 1974, just before my thirtieth birthday, I was a senior test engineer in the dockside test organisation and I was very happy with my lot. The pay was good, there was loads of overtime and I was proud to be a part of a yard that had built liners like the Mauretania and the Carpathia and aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy and hundreds of other vessels. I also had a good bunch of mates, plenty of cash for booze and cigarettes, a Ford Cortina Mk3 that was only three years old and had go-faster stripes down the sides and a one-bed flat in Whitley Bay. I didn't own the flat; I should have bought my own place but I'm lazy and I was having a good time and didn't want to be tied down. That applied to girlfriends too. I rarely had one for more than two or three months. Pauline lasted the longest, nearly a year. She ditched me a few weeks before this story starts because I got pissed with the lads one Saturday afternoon and went to the football instead of taking her dancing. Which sort of brings me to the start of this story, eventually. And thank you for your patience, I hope you'll think it was worth it.
It was a cloudy, cool Sunday in early July. Most Sundays, if there was nothing better to do, I drove over to mum and dad's for Sunday lunch, although we called it dinner in those days. With no current girlfriend there tended to be nothing much to do on Sundays lately. The shipyard was going through a quiet patch and most of my mates were married and had a family and their wives kicked off if they went down the pub on their day off and came back three hours later and fell asleep in front of the telly.
I pulled up on the road in front of their house and the first thing I noticed was that dad's car was missing, which was odd because he was always in on Sundays. That's when he mowed the lawns and tended the flower beds and sat in his garden shed reading the Sunday paper. I let myself in and shut the front door behind me and it wasn't right. There was silence: no radio from the kitchen, no clattering of dishes or smells of cooking and no television noise from the living room.
'Anybody in?' I called out, feeling a bit stupid.
'In here, David.' Mum's voice was faint although she was only twenty feet or so away. I went through into the living room, at the back of the house. It doubled as a dining room, with a table against the back wall and double doors that looked out over the garden. Mum was sitting on the chintzy three-seater settee that faced the television, her hands in her lap. She looked at me as though I was a stranger before giving me a faint smile.
'Mum, what's up?' I asked, sitting down next to her.
She took so long to reply that I was about to ask again. 'Your dad's left,' she said finally in a sort of hoarse whisper.
'Left?' I repeated.
'He's left me,' she said, quietly, and a tear rolled down her cheek unchecked and I put my arm around her and hugged her to me.
'When? What happened?' I asked, my mind in a whirl. And haltingly, with much wiping of eyes and nose blowing, she told me.
