This week, I spent some time with a couple I've known for ages, but haven't seen in a while. I shall call them Mr & Mrs Bacon, because their surname is a type of food.
Mr Bacon is a barely educated bloke who's never read so much as a newspaper. He and Mrs Bacon had their first child before Mrs Bacon had finished high school. They struggled quite a bit before the resource boom, but now Mr Bacon makes good money and Mrs Bacon runs a tight ship at home and is quite handy with managing the finances and all the other home-maker-y type stuff. They live on a small block of land outside of town and are both fantastic people, who have an amazing ability to tell stories about the most mundane and boring day-to-day things, but make them seem like epic tales that have you hanging on the edge of your seat or rolling on the floor with laughter.
I heard many stories about the shenanigans that go on around mining sites and gas fields and scandalous gossip from the local area, but the best story they told me was regarding the lady who lives on the block of land next door. Apparently, she has a reputation for having bedded all the single men in the district and a good chunk of the married men as well. Whenever she comes over for a neighbourly chat, and her and Mr Bacon are alone -- for whatever reason -- she starts asking him when he'll come over to her place for a little nudge nudge, wink wink. Mrs Bacon thinks she's harmless, and that the whole thing is a bit of a laugh. Mr Bacon is fed up with it, and wants to ban her from coming over.
Looking back at it, it really isn't such a great story is it? But I'll be damned if it wasn't the most hilarious thing I'd heard in ages when it came out of their mouths. It reminds just how much of a good story really is in the telling of it.
2 comments :
Ha yes I think you're right. The telling of a story is a big part of it. This kind of dovetails with a book I'm reading at the moment, about Fred and Rosemary West, the serial killer/'sex fiends' who got caught in the early '90s. The book is quite extraordinary. It's written in the voice of maybe one of them, or someone who knew them, or a neighbour having a cup of tea and just 'filling you in on everything that happened.' It's in a register that is informal and with surprising syntax (though nothing like that sample from that book on my blog). It's very readable, if a little circular and repetitive, but I'm feeling that's deliberate. It's *brilliantly* written. Anyway, the point is that Fred West and Rose, they both grew up in households that were abusive, both physically and sexually. Lots of incest, and then later with Rose, sex work etc. It sounds to me like the Cheltenham-Gloucester region in the 1950s onwards was really different to what I'd imagined. In the working classes, incest was common it sounds. God this is a very long-winded way of coming to the point that there were women and families, where people knew you could 'get sex.' It's an extraordinary idea. The idea of the 'village harlot' who will put out for everyone who wants it, it still exists? How do people treat her? How do the women treat her?
It's fascinating to me...
So this is a story where the power, for me, is in the concept, not the telling. But thanks for sharing, I'm so glad you've got your blog now Alex and can tell us more about your life. I love it!
The idea of the 'village harlot' who will put out for everyone who wants it, it still exists? How do people treat her? How do the women treat her?
We used to refer to them as town bikes. Most of the women I've known like that had social problems in one form or another. Some of them had what they now call fetal alcohol syndrome, or had been abused as kids, and there was often a generational element. I went to school with a girl whose mum was a bike with a drinking problem. She was horribly teased and bullied and excluded because of it, and ultimately, she went the same way. If I put on my bullshit psychologist cap for a second, maybe it's that, when the only time anyone's nice to you is when they want sex, maybe that just becomes, I dunno, what you do … ? Last I heard of that girl, she and her sister and her mum were living and sleeping with the same bloke who was also basically pimping them as well. Boys in those families often go off the rails early too.
I have stories from within my own family too, but I'm not ready to drag all them out at this point.
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