When Rena Clarke was widowed in 2006 at the age of 83, her six middle-aged children duly stepped up to the plate. Nicky, the richest, installed Rena in a luxury flat and continued to take her to church on Sunday. Another son, Michael, managed her money, while daughters Linda, Norma and Tina took turns with marathon sessions of tidying up and chucking out. But then, in the run-up to Christmas 2014, it all started to go wrong for reasons that remain obscure, even now that Norma, the clever one in the family, has set it all down in this intriguing memoir. It’s something to do with Nicky thinking that the others should make a bigger financial contribution to Rena’s upkeep, and Michael being cross about rising property prices in London. Or maybe it’s the other way round. Because, like all family rows, this ruckus has been generations in the making and its origins lie in another time and place entirely.
Watching someone else’s adult family fall apart on the page is always slightly thrilling, but there’s an added kick here. Because “Nicky” is Nicky Clarke, the celebrity Mayfair hairdresser, as famous for his very tight leather trousers as he is for his way with a blow dry. “Michael” is Michael van Clarke, slightly less tightly trousered, but with an equally starry set of clients at his salon in Marylebone. Rena, meanwhile, is not simply a generic old lady but – there is no nice way to put this – a monstrous narcissist. The moment she arrives in London in 1945 as a Greek war bride, she sets out to please only herself. Never bothering with anything but broken English, by the 60s she has embarked on two long affairs with rich Cypriots, eventually giving birth to a baby girl whom she tricks husband Bill into bringing up as his own. A habitual hitter and screamer, Rena ends up in court for assaulting her lover’s girlfriend with an umbrella. The judge let her off, she explains triumphantly to Norma, because he fancied her and, anyway, the girlfriend looked really rough. Even now, at 97, Rena knows that her looks will always pull her through.
Norma Clarke grew up as Bill and Rena’s second child in a tiny rented flat in the Old Kent Road where there was neither room nor money nor even much appetite for books. These days she is a professor of literature, which means that when she wants to understand her Anglo-Greek family’s spectacular dysfunction she instinctively reaches for Alexander Pope’s translation of The Iliad. By Clarke’s reckoning, her two hairdressing brothers have become Homer’s Achilles and Agamemnon, taking it in turns to throw their weight around before retreating to sulk in their tents. The remaining siblings, along with an assortment of cousins and ancient aunts, make up a tragic chorus, commenting noisily on what has just happened, what is happening now and what will happen next. Flame-haired Rena, meanwhile, shuttles between the rival camps of Mayfair and Marylebone, stirring things up with a well-timed dash of malice while simultaneously calling on her favourite Orthodox saints who are standing-in for the gods of Mount Olympus.
It isn’t all quite so relentlessly high-fallutin’. Clarke specialises in 18th-century literature, which means that she is also an expert in gossip – her beloved Pope was himself a master at dishing it out. She is happy to supply us with discreet details of Nicky’s rise and rise. It starts with him sharing a flat in Norwood with Lulu’s sister in the late 70s and trying to trim the lawn with his scissors.
From there we zoom through to the 90s when Fergie, the Duchess of York, turns up to the opening of his salon and cuts the ribbon in a properly mock-heroic style. There are Rolexes and apartments in Majorca and all manner of swagger involving “designer goods”. Only recently the 61-year-old Nicky announced his impending fatherhood with a picture spread in OK! magazine.
Clarke’s intention here is not to throw shade on her brother but to explore how her siblings’ remarkably diverse destinies are an expression of public history. Born in 1948, her trajectory is that of a bright, working-class child who has been kept healthy by the NHS and educated to her fullest potential by a grammar school and a university place, all paid for by the state. Exactly 10 years her junior, Nicky’s success story is of a clever if unbiddable boy who leaves school at 16 to work his socks off for himself. While Norma was formed in a moment of postwar liberal consensus, Nicky is the product of Thatcherism’s obsession with economic individualism.
In privileging cultural context over personal pathology, Clarke’s memoir belongs in the distinguished tradition of Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman and Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood. Indeed, her mother’s pragmatic avarice starts to make sense only when you factor in the terrible conditions under which she lived as a very young woman in occupied Athens. At one point, Rena tells Norma that she and her sisters preferred being subject to the Germans rather than the British because the former had nicer manners and knew how to treat a lady (the Italians were too like the Greeks to count). It is when the British emerge decisively as the winners that the 22-year-old switches sides to throw in her lot with a handsome Cockney sergeant major who has unlimited access to Jeeps and beer. This is despite the fact that she doesn’t know a word of his language, nor he a word of hers and it pretty much stays that way for the next 60 years. It is here, in history’s cruel convulsions rather than in any individual moral failure, Clarke suggests, that the origins of her family’s catastrophic non-communication are to be found.
