When family life was private, not famous, it could be hilarious

In a room with chocolate-warm walls and a flickering fire, I sit looking at a couple of dozen family pictures. I may be looking at them, but often it feels like they’re watching me.

This isn’t incipient paranoia; it’s more a harmless fantasy. What might they be thinking?

‘That room needs modernising’.

‘What’s that opened magazine he’s turned sideways that the silly sod keeps tapping at all the time?’

‘My God, its me. So I did get old after all’.

‘I wonder who won the war’.

‘There’s a rakish young man down there staring at me. I’m not sure I care for it’.

There’s one of my Dad in 1946, with the Cheung family in Hong Kong. After the war, they did a lot of business. My Dad was a major-league Sinatra fan. He had pretty good taste on the whole. We both loved an early Sinatra track, ‘Laura’.

Laura is the face in the misty light/footsteps that you hear down the hall

The flow of love on a summer’s night/that you never quite recall

And you see Laura

on a train that is passing through

Her eyes – how familiar they seem

She gave her very first kiss to you/that was Laura…but she’s only a dream.

The mystery of missed opportunity and idealised admiration woven through those lyrics will never leave me. They come from when the world was young and hopeful. Today, our world is old and naïve.

My mum’s grandmother is up there. She died (“on the throne” as we say in the North) in the early months of the Second World War – and thus, not with a great deal of dignity. After her husband (my great grandfather James Mountain, a portraitist) died young in the 1890s, Mary had a beau with whom she fell passionately in love. Nobody knows the bloke’s name, but he was a professional soldier. He took part in the Boer War, and was killed in action some time around 1900.

I might be vague about the date 115 years later, but Mary wasn’t: it was indelibly printed into her brain’s hard drive until she died. And sadly, this led to complications.

Every year on that date, Mary would dress up in her Sunday best promenading kit, pick out a fine ‘gamp’ (a branch of the family made and sold umbrellas), don the sort of Edwardian headgear that was more Halmahera Cuckooshrike nest than hat, and discreetly leave the family home in Smedley Lane, Cheetham Hill.

From there she would walk up the lane, past St Luke’s Church, and take a bus from Cheetham Hill Road to a somewhat seedy old inn on the road to Bury called The Halfway House. This was the starting point for what, each year, turned into a pub-crawl – during the course of which she would get inconceivably blotto.

Mary made a point of being the only one who knew the date, so the other occupants of the household (who bizarrely, never got round to recording it) wouldn’t know she was off on her personal Wakeathon until it was too late. Eventually, Find Grandma became a family game that didn’t cease until late 1939, when she died straining at stool.

Come closing time after lunch, my great grandmother would stagger – along with the retinue she had thus far garnered – and find another hostelry where the landlord turned a visually challenged eye to the licensing laws. Then later – the pubs opened again at 5.30pm – she would flit from one bar to another, leaving a bemused but entertained clientele in her wake.

I use the word ‘entertained’ advisedly: by this time Granny Mountain was doing her infamous Folies Bergère impression on any available table wherever she went.

As the youngest of four daughters adopted by Great Aunt Lizzie at Number 50 Smedley Lane, my Mum would arrive home from High School around 5 o’clock to be told that her grandmother had gone missing – and the prognosis was dire. Lizzie’s husband Frank, my mum, and her two elder sisters Myra and Phyllis were despatched on the annual random hunt to Find Grandma.

None of this is invention. I was given chapter and verse on it from my aunts – and also Great Uncle Frank – when I was a kid. In those far off pre-war days, arriving back home at 2 am with a singing Granny in tow was very much frowned upon in the haut bourgeois enclaves of Cottonopolis. But as it happened just once a year, like Christmas it somehow became a harmless local tradition.

The planet is covered in anecdotes like this one. There’s nothing unusual in any of it it: eccentricity is a given in all families.

My point is this: back then, the State did not see such rare occurrences as any of its business. Ironically, the State in 2015 sees interference in family matters as its raison d’etre….and yet is devoid of strategies for dealing with how the odd and occasional has turned into the regular daily norm.

Once upon a time, a family’s desire to keep its issues private was too easily dismissed as Hyacinth Bucket hypocrisy – if you like, as a risible attempt to conform. I disagree: I think such is nothing more or less than a family’s entirely natural desire to deal with its own affairs in its own way.

Privacy is a quintessential aspiration for every social animal: indeed, the idea of Orwell’s 1984 was based on it. Today, we live in a perverted culture wherein fame – for any reason and at all costs – is the aspiration: and thus any family infected with it is doomed to live in the public eye. Is nobody able to see how predictably dysfunctional the kids from such households are?

I could join up further dots and suggest that 1960s hippie sexual values gave way to 1980s feminism and then 1990s State nannyism to create the blamestorming culture of responsibility avoidance and celebrity obsession under which we struggle today. But I don’t see the point: intelligent readers are fully aware of what I’m on about.