HARRY PEARSON
THE BIG TEES
With Mothering Sunday just around the corner, our columnist
Harry Pearson recalls the unique ladies from his childhood whose
presence made this a very ‘interesting’ day indeed!
O
nce, when I was at primary school,
I asked my father what the idea
of Mothering Sunday was. He
replied: “It was invented to make women
feel disappointed, which is why men were
invented, too.”
My father was a cynical bloke, but when it
came to our family’s Mother’s Day routine,
he had a point.
Aside from my own childish efforts to
provide mum with breakfast in bed (“I
don’t know how to use the kettle, so I made
the tea with hot water from the tap…and I
don’t know how to use the toaster so I put
marmalade on biscuits….”) there was the
fact that my grandmother always insisted on
joining us.
And my grandmother never went
anywhere without her best chum, Mrs
Gawthorpe. Mrs Gawthorpe had two
children of her own, but they’d emigrated
to New Zealand. To be honest, you couldn’t
blame them.
As a consequence of this invasion, my
mother would spend the whole of Mothering
Sunday morning in the kitchen. By 8am
it was so filled with steam and smoke it
resembled a foggy night on Eston Nab.
Shadowy figures moved about in the
smog. These were my grandmother and Mrs
Gawthorpe. They had arrived an hour earlier
because they held the old-fashioned British
view that if you wanted vegetables to be
ready for lunchtime you had to begin boiling
them at dawn.
To this day I can’t see a beached jellyfish
without thinking of Mrs Gawthorpe’s
cabbage.
When she arrived, my grandmother
always said: “I better get in that kitchen and
make myself useful”. My grandmother’s idea
of making herself useful was to sit in the
corner drinking Emva Cream and offering
advice. She had perfected the art of backseat
cooking.
58
A young Harry with his mother at Whitby.
“You go ahead, honey, don’t mind me,”
gran would say, “But, if I was doing that, I’d
put it in a bigger dish”.
Mrs Gawthorpe had only one topic of
conversation – her gastric problems. Luckily
she didn’t like to talk about them, except
when other people were eating.
The tale of her latest bout of trouble would
be as long and winding as the intestines that
so often featured in it, but the culmination
was always perfectly timed to coincide
with the moment when everybody had a
mouthful of pudding.
As spoons went into mouths, Mrs
Gawthorpe would wind up her tale. “And
you know what that surgeon said to me?
He said, ‘Mrs Gawthorpe, in 30 years in the
medical profession I have never come across
anything like it.’ It was…” And she would
pause at this point to survey the table, “A
solid wall of densely compacted matter.”
At my grandmother’s insistence, the table
would be cleared after lunch for a game of
whist. My grandmother was a ruthless card
player and such a mistress of mind games
even Sir Alex Ferguson would have wilted
under her assault.
Her most effective psychological gambit
was simplicity itself. She would pick another
player at random, fix them with a gimlet eye
and bark: “Have you shinnied?” Inevitably
this would provoke a back-and-forth of
denial and allegation. “Why would I shinny?
I hate it when people shinny.” “Well, that goes
without saying. Nevertheless, you could have
shinnied by mistake.”
The argument was pretty much
irresolvable because the fact of the matter
was that nobody was quite sure what
shinnying actually involved. My father
believed it was the illegal playing of a trump
card, while I have never been able to shake
the feeling that it was actually a euphemism
for breaking wind.
By the time Mother’s Day was over and
gran and Mrs Gawthorpe had returned
to East Cleveland, mum would be lying
on the bed with a flannel over her face.
“Next Mother’s Day I’m going tell them
I’m at work,” she’d say. My mum was a
schoolteacher, so there was sadly no hope of
her getting away with that.