homework by helen simpson

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By Helen Simpson

“I can’t do it,” George groaned, and brought his forehead to rest on the block of lined paper in front of him.

“Can’t do what?” I asked, looking up from peeling the carrots for the evening meal. I work from home, so I’m around when George gets in from school. He sits at the kitchen table, and I bring him some milk in his Manchester United mug and a plate with a teatime snack. This might be a slice of toast and honey with a peeled satsuma from which I have removed any stray threads of pith, or perhaps an apple, cored and cut into fine slices, with a few cubes of Cheddar.

Quite often I’m not able to stop what I’m doing, and then I have to stay put. I call out from my desk to say hello when I hear the front door. He calls hello back and makes his way to the television. I’d rather catch up on work in the evening, but I don’t always have a choice.

“Can’t do what?” I repeated. “I’m sure you can.”

“You don’t know . Everybody says it’s really hard. And now I’ve got to give it in for tomorrow.”

“Why do you do this? Why do you leave it to the last minute?”

That’s another wonderful thing about George—you can tell him off and he won’t immediately go into orbit like some I could mention. He’s not a great one for flying off the handle.

“It’s just so hard,” he moaned.

“Now, come on,” I said, drying my hands and patting his nice strong shoulder. “Sit up and tell me what it is. You never know, I might be able to help.”

“It’s Mr. Mottram,” he said, heaving himself up from his slump. “It’s English, so it should be all right, but he still wants to make it hard. We’ve got to do three sides of paper out of our own heads.”

George is already taller than me and can lift me off the ground. One or two of his friends have had their growth spurts, so that I find myself deferring to the sudden height and booming voice of a boy whom last year I knew as a clear-skinned little pipsqueak.

“What is it, this terrible task he’s set you?”

“ ‘Write About an Event That Changed Your Life,’ ” George said with mournful sarcasm. “ That’s what it is.”

“Three pages is a lot.” Then a thought occurred to me. “You’ve had all the Easter holidays to do this, haven’t you? And you just didn’t let on about it. Now it’s your first week back and the chickens have come home to roost.”

“I know,” he said, spreading his hands palms upward in front of him. “There’s no excuse.”

“What have your friends done?”

“Dylan’s written about when he went to a football match with his uncle, Crystal Palace versus Queens Park Rangers, and realized Crystal Palace was the team he wanted to follow for the rest of his life.”

“I can’t see how he filled three sides of paper with that.”

“He said it only took up one page even in big writing,” George said. “Now he’s got to, you know, pad it out. He’s going to describe all the Crystal Palace matches he’s been to since then, one at a time.”

Serves Mr. Mottram right, I thought; I don’t know what he can be expecting from a class of thirteen-year-olds. They can’t know what a life-changing event is at their age. How can they know if what happened to them last year will have changed them in twenty years’ time? They won’t know till they get there.

“I shouldn’t really help you,” I said. “I should leave you to get on with it. But if I do . . .”

“Yes?” George said, propped up on his elbows, eying me with wary optimism.

“ If I help you, you’ve got to understand it’s only this once.”

“Course,” he said with a beaming smile of relief. “You know I’m not like that, Mum.”

“Yes.” I smiled back. “I do know. I trust you.”

“ ’Cause you can,” he said, shrugging.

“All right then, let’s think.”

I sat down at the kitchen table and watched him assume a thoughtful expression. He furrowed his brow and chewed at the end of his Biro, then caught my eye and started to giggle.

“I’d rather write about anything else in the world,” he complained.

“Just think,” I said. “In fifty years’ time you might really want to write about the Event That Changed Your Life. In your old age you might find you’re desperate to set down your memories. Look at Grandma.”

My mother had recently filled half a red Silvine exercise book with startlingly deadpan revelations. Her father had, at the age of fourteen, rejected a future as a farm laborer and walked down from Wakefield to London to find work; at first he slept wrapped in old newspaper on benches along the Embankment. That was before he went to fight in France. His father had been, among other things, a prizefighter at country fairs, more or less on the wrong side of the law all his life.

“No,” George said, shaking his head firmly. “ Boring .”

“You might find it interesting when you get older,” I persisted. “I never knew that her mother, your great-grandmother, was found as a newborn baby wrapped in a flour sack on the church steps early one Sunday morning. That accounts for a lot.”

I’m glad I wasn’t born at a time when you had to stay with the father of your children even if he broke your jaw.

“Where was I born?” asked George, who knew perfectly well.

“Willesden General,” I said. “Then I kept you beside me in a basket all the time for months and months. You were a lovely mild baby, like a dewdrop.”

George smiled a gratified smile. “But I did cry sometimes,” he prompted.

“Yes, but when you cried it just made me laugh,” I said. “You didn’t wail in a high-pitched way; no, it was more like the roar of a lion, and then only when you wanted milk. When you were hungry, you just roared!”

He smirked at this and gave an illustrative growl.

Following his birth, I’d had an urge to find out more about my family tree. After a while I gave up. It had branches and twigs and leaves in every corner of the British Isles. There were shipwrights and ropemakers in Northumberland, laborers in Lincolnshire, watchmen and peddlers and blacksmiths from Ipswich and Barnstaple and Carlisle. The further back I went, the further afield they spread out. It seemed pointless. George was from all over the place.

“Life-changing events,” I said, returning to the business in hand. “Let’s think of some examples.”

“If you win the lottery,” George suggested.

“Or lose all your money,” I said. “Go bankrupt like Dad’s dad. Skip the country like my uncle Colin.”

“Yes,” George said, pen poised, looking less hopeful.

“What would change the life of a thirteen-year-old, though? That’s the question,” I reminded myself. “The death of a parent, certainly, but I don’t want you writing about that because it might bring bad luck.”

“Jacob’s mother died,” George commented. “He doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“No,” I said. “Poor Jacob. What did she die of?”

“He says cancer. But Ranjit told me it wasn’t that, it was a bottle of tablets.” George shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“No,” I said again. Jacob would get by till middle age, probably, when he would step onto this death as onto the tines of a garden fork, and the solid shaft of the handle would rear up and hit him in the face.

“So, not death,” I said. “Because that’s the obvious one. No, it’ll have to be your parents’ divorce.”

“But you’re not divorced.”

“Well, we are in this story.”

“He’ll think it’s really true,” George said, looking worried.

“So?” I said. “It’ll fill three sides of paper. Let’s have the mum leaving the dad for a change, rather than the other way around. And you have to move from your family house to a flat, and your new bedroom is tiny and you have to share it with your little brother, who drives you mad.”

“I haven’t got a little brother.”

“Mr. Mottram doesn’t know that.”

My siblings are scattered far and wide. Sharon runs a bed-and-breakfast up by Hadrian’s Wall. Valerie has an alpha-male job in the City, just like her husband, and they live in a big house in Wimbledon. Keith has had various irons in the fire over the years, but now he’s teaching English as a foreign language in China. Very modern Britain, our family.

George looked at me warily. I could see that he was torn between his natural fantasy-hating honesty and a desire to have someone else do his homework.

“Is it allowed?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s English, isn’t it? Don’t they call this bit creative writing? Well, you’re just being creative.”

“Ha,” George said.

“Inventive,” I added. “It’s a good thing. Listen, you want to watch the match tonight, don’t you? Chelsea versus Liverpool, isn’t it?”

“In which case you’d better get this homework finished before dinner. Which I’m doing specially for seven o’clock, because I know you like all that warmup chat beforehand.”

“Thanks, Mum.”

I couldn’t resist giving him a hug, the roaring dewdrop baby who had grown into this broad-shouldered boy. Last week I’d been making flapjacks while he stood by to lick the spoon, and I mentioned that I’d always liked the picture of the lion on the Golden Syrup tin. “Out of the strong came forth sweetness,” he read aloud, peering at the green-and-gold picture. “That’s what’s written underneath it.” I never knew that before.

“Have you got your pen ready? I’m not going to write this for you, you know; I’m only going to give you ideas.”

“O.K.,” he agreed. He was in no position to object.

“Your parents had been having arguments for years. You remember the slammed doors and bitter words from when you were little,” I began.

George started to write.

“You tried to blot it out, but you couldn’t help feeling upset inside. It got into your dreams. You could put a bad dream in, George; that would take up a few lines.”

“What about?”

“Oh, an earthquake perhaps,” I said. “I was always dreaming about earthquakes and floods and fires when I was your age. Or you’re in a house and it falls down around you and you try to run, but the ground opens up in front of you.”

“To pad it out a bit?” George said.

“If you like. Then there’s the divorce, which is a relief after all the fighting.”

“Why did Auntie Sharon get divorced?”

“I don’t know,” I said, tutting. “They seemed quite happy to start with, but then Mike turned into a bear with a sore head when she had the twins. Some people find domestic life more of a trial than others.”

“Dad loves domestic,” George commented. “On Fridays when he gets back home, he says, ‘Ah, domestic bliss.’ ”

“Yes, well,” I said with a stunted smile.

“Auntie Sharon lives in the nicest place, and she’s got three dogs, but Auntie Valerie’s got the best job,” George said. “Her family goes on the best holidays, and they’ve got an Audi and a BMW. I want a BMW when I get a job. That’s the first thing I’ll buy.”

“Oh, really.” I sniffed. “The only time they all manage to get together as a family is when they go on some expensive safari thousands of miles away.”

“Just because they’ve got good jobs,” George said, “you shouldn’t be jealous.”

“I’m not jealous!” I declared. “How could I be jealous of anyone working those ridiculous hours? They’ve sold their souls.”

“Oh, Mum,” George said reprovingly.

“Anyway, after the divorce you have to move house and change schools.”

“Because you do. Money. Jobs. And you go and live with your father and your little brother, and you visit your mother at weekends. You might even ask if you can go and live with your grandma for a while.”

“Why?” George said again, large-eyed, even more down in the mouth.

“For a break,” I said absently.

Grow up in certain homes and it’s like being out on a cold, choppy sea in an open dinghy with two angry fishermen in charge. Or sometimes just a single fisherman, who is, what’s more, drunk. Whereas with a grandparent life for a child can be less dangerous, more like being afloat on a reservoir.

“What happens next?”

“The mum wants a new start. She wants to see the world! Everybody else has.”

“But, Mum, Mr. Mottram will think it’s really you.”

“When you think about it,” I mused, “it’s none of Mr. Mottram’s business. He should only be interested in it as a piece of writing. Is it a good piece of writing? Is it convincing?”

“What if he asks me?” George muttered.

“He won’t. He’s an English teacher, isn’t he, not a psychotherapist. So if he did ask you he’d just be being nosy.”

George shrugged helplessly.

When I went to live with my grandmother for a while, she had enough to eat but not quite enough to keep warm. She was over seventy, but she had kept on one of her old cleaning jobs—Mrs. Blincoe—mainly for the sake of being in a house with central heating. I’d go along to help with the floors; then, while she polished and dusted, I’d puzzle over the Latin homework that held my enfranchisement. She never considered this work demeaning, and in fact looked down on Mrs. Blincoe as an unfeminine woman, a cold woman who had made her husband lonely and who did not grieve when he died but said, “Now I’m free to do what I want to do,” and went off round the world on various package holidays. The cheerful bearded sailor on her packet of Players was as close as my grandmother ever got to the sea. She cooked with a cigarette in her mouth; quite often ash would fall into the gravy, and she would stir it in as extra seasoning.

“Listen, you’re doing ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ aren’t you?” I continued. “Do you think Shakespeare got asked whether he’d ever grown donkey’s ears?”

George smiled briefly.

“Right. So you see your mum at weekends, and one weekend she tells you she wants to go to Peru and asks if she can borrow your Duke of Edinburgh rucksack. She promises she’ll send you postcards. It’s just something she’s got to do to move forward in her life.”

George scribbled away, not happy with where the story line was going but incapable of coming up with an alternative. I felt powerful, like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat.

“I still don’t think it’s allowed,” he said.

“Of course it’s allowed,” I said. “You’ve got to have things happening, see, or it’s not a story. Think of the films you like. Car chases. Explosions. Sharks.”

“Can the mum be swimming in the China Sea and then a shark comes up?” George asked hopefully, trying to enter into the creative spirit.

“Probably not,” I said dryly. “That might be a step too far for Mr. Mottram, don’t you think?”

“But you said—”

“Yes, but we’ve got to make it believable. It’s like a game, isn’t it? He shouldn’t be able to tell what’s real and what’s made up.”

“I’d like to go to Japan,” George said. “They’ve got the new Nintendo Wii there, and I could get it way ahead of everybody else. Plus, you don’t have to have injections to go there.”

“Next,” I said. “I think the dad meets someone else, don’t you? At first he’s just been going to work and coming back and cooking nasty teas. You’ve had to help—buying a loaf of bread on the way home from school, that sort of thing, and doing the washing up without being asked.”

“Isn’t there a dishwasher in the new place?”

“It’s broken. And nobody gets round to finding someone to mend it, and, anyway, you’re all out all day. Maybe your little brother can be in because he’s ill, though. Chicken pox.”

“My little brother can’t be left on his own,” George objected. “If he’s seven or eight or something. That’s against the law.”

“O.K., you’ve got an older sister instead.”

“ She can cook,” he said with satisfaction. The meals were worrying him.

“No, she can’t,” I said. “She just eats crisps and bananas. No, it’s the dad that has to do it after work, unless you start teaching yourself from a cookbook.”

George looked up from his pad suspiciously. I was always trying to get him interested in cutting up broccoli florets or making omelettes.

“The dad should do it,” he protested. “I’m a kid, it’s not my job. Kids should be looked after by their parents.”

“You’re thirteen, George!” I said. I was about to bring up the walk from Wakefield, but then I stopped myself. “Oh well, it’s your story. The dad does the cooking, but it’s always pasta.”

“Cool,” George said, grinning.

“And the pasta is always soggy.” I scowled. “Feel free to carry on.”

“No, no,” he said. “After you.”

“He’s been trying to cook, but he’s no good at it. Then he meets, let’s see, Miranda. You know she’s not nasty or anything, but she’s got nothing to do with you. And he starts including her in on everything.”

“She’s always there when he’s around, watching television with you, in between you on the sofa.”

“What, even when football’s on?”

“Yes. She pretends to like it. She says she’s a Chelsea supporter.”

“Chelsea,” George said grimly.

“One weekend your mum tells you she’s off backpacking in three days’ time, first stop Thailand,” I continued. “We need to wind this up, George. She promises she’ll send postcards. You could have them arriving a bit later on with little messages—you know, ate fried tortoise, went bungee jumping, that sort of thing. You could stick them on the fridge so Miranda can see them.”

“Maybe she can cook.”

“Not likely,” I said. “She’s not interested in food. She doesn’t see why she should, anyway. Why should she? Then it’s the last straw. You’ve just had another of these postcards; the mum’s got as far as Australia. And your dad announces that your holiday this year is camping in Wales—there’s no money for anything else. He can stretch to walking boots for you and your sister, but that’s it.”

“Wales,” George said, with leaden emphasis.

“I think you can leave it somewhere there,” I said airily. “It’s April now—people are planning their summer holidays. Mr. Mottram will buy that.”

“But how do I finish it off?”

“You don’t have to really; you don’t have to solve everything. It’s not a police procedural. But you’re right, you do need something.”

“I know,” I said. “Pull in your love of football. All these months since the divorce you’ve turned to football to help you forget. This year you’ve been following the Champions’ League with a passion. Is your team doing all right in it? Manchester United?”

“Last night’s game was amazing , Mum,” George said earnestly. “Rooney scored this goal in the ninety-first minute, and I couldn’t believe it.” He shook his head in wonder. “It was unbelievable.”

“Was he happy?”

“He did this full-body dive all the way along the grass, then he lay with his head on his arms, and they all bundled in on top of him. We were playing at home, though—it might not be so good in the away match.”

“You can put all that in, just like you’ve told it to me.” I’d been struck by a thought. “Now, what does the Man U crowd chant when it wants the team to win? You know, like Tottenham’s is ‘Come on, you Spu-urs.’ ”

“ united ! united !” George chanted automatically.

“There you are,” I said. “That’s your last paragraph. You explain how football has got you through your parents’ divorce. You describe Rooney’s great goal in the ninety-first minute. How your team means so much to you. Then you write how you joined in with the TV crowd shouting, “ united ! united !” And you round it off with the words ‘Ironic, really.’ ”

“Ha,” said George, who wasn’t slow on the uptake, even if the pilot light of his imagination had yet to flare into action. He smiled reluctantly and started to write this down.

I looked at his fair head bent over the writing pad. The time for advice was almost gone. Beware heat without warmth. When a man loses his temper, people say, That’s the Irish in him, or the Scottish, or the Viking. Don’t listen to them. Dirty players or terriers are what they call footballers with that anger-stoked edge, but strength without sweetness is no use at all.

“Ironic because?” I asked.

“The mum and the dad. They’re not united.”

“There you are.”

I glanced at the kitchen clock.

“I’ve got to get on,” I said. “I’ve got my own work to do.”

“That’s all right,” he said, smiling up at me. “You go. I can do it now.” ♦

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Everything But the Fiction - The New Yorker Fiction Blog

Thursday, june 21, 2007, helen simpson's "homework".

Just as boy George opens in Helen Simpson's "Homework," I'll start this comment by groaning and bringing my my forehead to rest on the screen before me: "I can't do it." I can't bring myself to trash this story. Afterall, in my last two comments I bitched and moaned about female lit representation. And I have a soft spot for motherhood. But come on, Simpson, help me out here! So I will trash as nicelLY as possible, making sure to tie the bag tightLY. For starters, "Homework" contains some pretty horrifying adverbs, the worst of all being "reprovingLY" (I started to count them reluctantLY, but it was tediousLY hard to do by hand). Adverbs to weak verbs are what steroids are to failing athletes. And then there are speaker attributions like "George commented" and "I declared" when "said" would've sufficed. On more than one occasion I stopped rolling my eyes at Simpson's prose and started cussing the editors, the ones who lord over the tower--have they lost touch? The story felt cobbled together, with backstory tacked on as transparentLY as badLY sewn seams. So much deliberate exposition in a story should be outlawed--or at the very least, EDITED. Was "Homework" assigned to Simpson as homework by the NYer, for which she stayed up late to dust off an old idea and hack out a story? Did the editors use Epoxy and finish the story over Simpson's head as her narrator does over George? The rabbits pulled out of this story's hat were stuffed animals, with foam sticking out in places. And what's up with baby-robot-thirteen-year-old George's character who shouts "United! United!" in small caps? And what's up with that Sweet n' Low ending? To vagueLY quote the narrator, three double-sided pages became a lot of, uh, reading homework. I'm not going to continue with more bad metaphors, references, puns, because then I'll just be accused of being a Mad Hat(t)er or of just not getting British sensibilities. The Brits are good people. And so are mothers and teens and English teachers and NYer contributers and editors. So I'll sign off with two of the story's redeeming qualities (which I hunted down for the purpose of bitchlessness): -The question of why the mother is so enthusiasticalLY involved in her son's assignment adds suspense, making one wonder what is, if any, the ulterior motive in narrative she concocts. Is it her dress rehearsal for breaking bad news to George? Is it her own unfulfilled literary aspirations? Is she just plain crazy? (At the same time, Simpson could have put George to better use by having him challenge the mother with something more compelling than childish fantasy). -(Though I did not like that the following lion image is referenced to three times)...The detail of the lion image on the Golden Syrup tin, under which is written: "Out of the strong came forth sweetness."

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Clifford Garstang

Writing, Reading, Editing

>The New Yorker: "Homework" by Helen Simpson

June 25, 2007: “ Homework ” by Helen Simpson

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Related posts, >the new yorker: "roy spivey" by miranda july, >the new yorker: "good people" by david foster wallace, >the new yorker: "see the other side" by tatyana tolstaya.

>I enjoyed it, too. 🙂

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PERPETUAL FOLLY

Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool that repeats his folly. Proverbs 26:11

Friday, June 22, 2007

The new yorker: "homework" by helen simpson.

I enjoyed it, too. :)

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Helen Simpson

• Non-Fiction
• Short Stories
• Translation
• Bristol, England
• Jonathan Cape Ltd

Helen Simpson was born in Bristol and grew up in London.

She read English at Oxford University, where she wrote a thesis on Restoration farce, then worked for five years as a staff writer at Vogue before becoming a freelance-writer, contributing articles to newspapers and magazines and publishing two cookery books.Her first collection of short stories, Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories (1990), won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and a Somerset Maugham Award and she was chosen as one of Granta magazine's 20 'Best of Young British Novelists 2' in 1993. Further short story collections include Dear George (1995); Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000), a collection of loosely linked stories about modern women and motherhood, which won the Hawthornden Prize in 2001; and Constitutional (2005).

She also wrote the libretto for the jazz opera, Good Friday, 1663 , screened on Channel 4 television, and the lyrics for Kate and Mike Westbrook's jazz suite Bar Utopia . Helen Simpson lives in London and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.  Her latest story collection is In-Flight Entertainment (2010). In 2012, a new selection of her short stories was published, including stories from all five previous collections, entitled A Bunch of Fives .

Critical perspective

Reading any of the collections of short stories published by helen simpson to date is like being swallowed up by a literary tidal wave and thrown into a sea of both bubbling, sensual urgency and witty, sometimes bitter poignancy..

Her language is rich, inventive and luxurious, she uses words you are not even sure are in the dictionary: 'wealthy frondescence'; 'marble flittermice'; 'cerubimical lass'; 'he mousled and tousled me': frisky dogs in the park are described as “curvetting and cantering, arabesques of pink tongues airing in their broadly smiling jaws”. Her stories are littered with adages and truisms ‘better late than never’; ‘while the cat’s away…;’ ‘enough is enough’, ‘there are two sides to every coin’, that often show up the inanity or insensitivity of those who utter them.

She also has a joyful ear for modern slang and shamelessly tosses before us words like 'cool' (in the sense of fashionable or admirable rather than cold), “I went completely ballistic” (in the sense of I was very annoyed); 'overkill', 'poleaxed', 'partying', 'hands-on' and 'rubbish' (used as an adjective, as in 'painted fingernails mean a rubbish mother'); ‘love handles’ (to describe the flabs of flesh that develop on the buttocks in middle age). She has an ear for colloquialisms and the patterns of everyday speech, particularly in the dialogue of the young – ‘You’re in denial…why don’t you try the juice cure’, replies the victim’s rapacious, vacuous girlfriend to the news that her older lover might be dying of lung cancer; ‘You are like so irritating’ snaps an exam-stressed teenager at her parents; ‘Oh, gross!’ whispers a young girl at the sight of a mother breastfeeding her baby. She revels ironically in the psycho-babble of the self-help guru. ‘Just do it…Organise yourself…Lighten up…’ warbles the life coach who emerges from a computer and ‘I’m a zeitgeisty sort of person and I’ve found I have this unerring instinct for homing in on what the next best thing will be’ our Carbon Coach assures us, both of them condemning themselves in clichés as untrustworthy and fly-by-night.        Simpson has an admirable way of condensing ideas into phrases that are short but breathtakingly dense in meaning and is particularly skilled in her use of simile. An over excited child is described as laughing 'hearty as a Tudor despot', another 'leaning on the bars of her cot like farmer Giles'. A visitor’s smile 'slid from her face like an omelette from a pan' when she saw a fellow guest she disliked; a nervous witness in court has eyes that are 'swivelling like whelks on a pin'; an exhausted mother lies 'like a flattened boxer in the ring trying to rise while the count is made'; a nursing mother has ‘huge brown nipples on breasts like wheels of Camembert” and talking to a ninety-year-old woman ‘was like mackerel fishing, the short wait and then the flash of silver’ as the memories emerged. In her first collection of stories Four Bare Legs in a Bed (1990) she skilfully transports us from modern Britain through a seventeenth century country village, via fourth century Lycia and the gelid coast of Norway, to a strange neo-medieval state of the future whose extremes smack of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale . One of her main themes in this collection are the ups and downs (but mainly the downs) of marriage and relationships, recounted with tragic-comic irony in the splendid opening story, after which the collection is named, where a young wife escapes to her dreams every night to sleep with a succession of acquaintances, including her husband’s squash partner. In ‘What are Neighbours for’ we see humour worthy of Alan Bennett at his best when Mrs Brumfitt, 'deeply dissatisfied' with her husband 'for the way he refused to eat spiced foods or go out and about', is invited to a multi-ethnic tea party by her career-obsessed doctor-neighbour who is sizing the guests up as future baby sitters. Simpson lures us into one of her many guffaw-inducing moments when she describes how the narrator had spied Mr Brumfitt the day before 'perched up a ladder fixing the new plastic down-pipe while his wife yelled at him “You poxy old devil”. Or perhaps it had been “You foxy old devil”'. More mirth can be found in another central theme: childbirth. In ‘An Interesting Condition’ Simpson regales us with a wonderful cast of perplexed but comic mothers-to-be in an antenatal class, one of whom proposes to wear a mask (no, not a surgical mask, a papier maché Venetian carnival mask) to avoid the embarrassment of being seen by students and doctors during the birth! In ‘Labour’, Simpson experiments with the five act play form, the Dramatis Personae including, with hilarious results, the prospective mother, the midwives, the uterus, the cervix etc. In her second collection Dear George (1995), the themes of imminent childbirth and whether or not it is a good thing to have children are still uppermost in the author’s preoccupations. In ‘When in Rome’ we see the triumph of a girl who finds she is not pregnant, in ‘To her Unruly Boyfriend’ we see Simpson experimenting playfully with a sort of inverted modern version of Marvell’s To his coy mistress , where a young woman tries to persuade her reluctant lover to have a child with her. In ‘Last Orders’ we meet an overdue mother like 'a bulbous bottle, unreliably stoppered' ruminating on what motherhood will be like as she shuffles down to the Indian restaurant with her husband and friend 'creeping along to keep her company, one on either side, like the ceremonial escort of an ancient monarch'. In ‘Heavy Weather’, childbirth has happened twice over to Frances and she is suffering the marital stress, the exhaustion, loneliness and social exclusion of her role. The responsibilities of wife- and motherhood press on her even in fleeting moments of rest: 'like Holland she lay, aware of a heavy ocean at her seawall, it’s weight poised to race across the low country'. Simpson’s sharp eye for dialogue and social interaction come out again in the second book in marvellously comic stories like ‘Creative Writing’ and ‘Let nothing you dismay’, where few who have read it can forget the scene of the socially inept boyfriend who nervously grabs a handful of snuff-coloured, potpourri rose petals and thrusts them into his mouth, 'imagining them to be some sort of posh crisps'. Simpson’s taste for the comic ‘sting in the tail ending’ seen in the title story of the collection Dear George is reminiscent of Roald Dahl, as is the sinister quality of ‘The Gourmet’ where we meet an elderly bon vivant trying to seduce a young girl with his culinary arts, where the cheerful, ebullient sensuality of the language belies the evidently paedophilic intentions of the entertainer: 'have you ever salivated wolfishly over some delicate noisette of milk-fed lamb?' In her third collection of stories Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000) the author returns to the theme of having children – how it exhausts, bores and ruins relationships between friends and partners to the point in ‘Café Society’, where it is almost impossible to have any semblance of conversation if you have a child in tow. Despite the utter desperation of some of Simpson’s mothers ('she was shot to hell'), and the lack of empathy and selfishness of their partners, the author is still adept at describing those fleeting, intimate moments that make motherhood worthwhile: the heroine’s son 'climbed into bed and curled into her…gazed into her eyes and heaved a happy sigh. They lay looking at each other, breathing in each other’s sleepy scent; his eyes were guileless, unguarded and intent, and he gave a little occasional beatific smile'. Essentially, she seems to say, the rewards are numerous, and the climate (as at the end of ‘Heavy Weather’) can change at any moment from bad to good as much as from good to bad. Her outlook is, despite everything, optimistic and in the end, as she herself says, it’s only for five years. Motherhood is not the only subject to come under Simpson’s scrutiny in Hey Yeah… In ‘Wurstigkeit’ we see her love for evoking an almost fairy-tale environment as she describes the clandestine visit of two businesswomen to a secret 'cavern of temptation' - a women’s clothes shop so exclusive that you need a password to get in. If the role of mother is not to be admired, that of the career woman is no better, and even if women can now 'make it to the top', sexism still abounds. We reflect on this as the successful businesswoman Nicola Beaumont sits through the bone-crushing boredom and chauvinistic dialogue of a 'mega-Burns Night' for a group of bankers she works with. Simpson is firmly planted in her age by her use of language and her ambivalent attitude - held by many twenty-first century women - to childrearing and careers, but none of her stories are more rooted in the late 1990s than ‘Millennium Blues’. Here Simpson shows her impatience with the trite end of the world prophesies that were so common in that epoch (there will be 'a tidal wave of computer crashes…it’ll be the El Nino of I.T….half these guys I see haven’t even started to address the Y2K problem', 'we’re talking global economic meltdown') by creating her own tongue-in-cheek mayhem of biblical proportions as a an air traffic controller has a heart attack, causing an air crash in south-west London where 'fire consumes the sky and falls to earth in flaming comets and limbs and molten fragments of fuselage, where for two days and nights it will devour flesh and grass and much else besides in a terrible and unnatural firestorm'.

In her next collection of stories Constitutional (2005), her children having (presumably) grown, she focuses on the ritual carried out daily by millions of women – the school run. The drive to school is a ‘daily struggle’ but it affords the mother ‘more time alone with her young son than with anybody else, certainly far more than with her husband, thirty times more, unless you counted the hours asleep’. Sometimes the two of them talk, other times they sit in companionable silence – Simpson treasures these precious moments – is it any wonder, she seems to be saying, that children become bonded to their mothers? Having been through the rigours of life with a young baby, the author is compassionate to the over worked and over-stressed Czech child minder who struggles with a hysterical child in ‘The Year’s Midnight’.

In this collection in general however, as several critics have noticed, Simpson becomes a little darker in her subject matter. In ‘The Phlebotomist’s Love Life’ Simpson, like many writers at that time, fuelled no doubt by the conflict in Iraq, takes a stance against war as the narrator, a woman who works taking blood samples in a hospital, polls her patients to see if they are for or against the hostilities.  A number of her stories, notably ‘Every third thought’, ‘If I’m spared’ and ‘Constitutional’ deal with the subject of illness, cancer and senile dementia in particular. The usual gender conflict is still present, but seems to have been overtaken by an interest in intergenerational conflict – in ‘The Tree’ for example a busy, selfish, social-climbing middle-aged son is forced to intervene when his aged mother is tricked by tree surgeons. It is perhaps in ‘Constitutional’, the story after which the collection is named, that we see Simpson at her best: a woman in her forties, a number-conscious Biology teacher who has recently found she is pregnant and lost a friend in her nineties takes a stream of consciousness breaktime walk around Hampstead Heath. Her thoughts range from delight in her natural surroundings, her disgust for the physical decay of old age, her family, her grandfather’s senility, her perplexity at being pregnant, the loss of her friend and her horror of death.  Although little more than twenty pages long, it is rich in ideas as well as language and seems to encompass all that is important. The narrator is eager not to be late back into the classroom so she times herself as she goes: as a result, the story moves forward quickly, but this belies its complexity.

Like so many of Simpson’s stories it both merits and benefits from re-reading. Particularly moving are her tragicomic descriptions of her grandfather’s – once a man with a passion for cryptic crosswords – lapse into senile dementia. Simpson’s wonderfully evocative pen sketches of his despair ‘he kicked my terrified grandmother out of bed because, he said, his parents would be furious at finding him in bed with a stranger’, ‘muttering troubled words to himself he would take the kettle …and put it in the airing cupboard…or grab a favourite needlepoint cushion…and craftily smuggle it into the microwave…He got up to fry eggs in the middle of the night…’, ‘I want to go home’, he wept. ‘But you are home,’ howled my grandmother. ‘And who the hell are you?, he demanded, glaring at her with unfeigned dismay’. The comedy of the unorthodox behaviour is turned into something moving and tragic by the care with which Simpson chooses those exquisite words ‘smuggle’, ‘howl’, ‘glaring’.

In the collection In-Flight Entertainment (2010) the subject matter darkens further.  Environmental issues come to the forefront in the title story ‘In-flight Entertainment’ where a man dies of a heart attack on a transatlantic flight and an environmental expert shockingly reveals and that his ambition is to belong to the ‘other mile high club’ by dying in an aeroplane and ‘Squirrel’ where a young girl berates her parents for destroying the planet ‘My children will fry thanks to your mini-breaks’. In ‘The Tipping Point’  an older man loses his lover because she cannot bear his indifference to environmental issues, in ‘Geography Boy’ a young students declares ‘the end of the world is really nigh’ and in ‘Ahead of the Pack’ a Carbon Coach explains how photo albums will have to be edited because ‘In ten years’ time we’ll be casting around for scapegoats. Children will be accusing parents, and wise parents will have disappeared all visual evidence of Dad’s gap year in South America and Mum on Ayers Rock…’. The feeling of unease about the future of the world reaches a peak in the angst-inducing ‘Diary of an Interesting Year’ where we are taken forward to 2040 to a near dystopian Britain after the Collapse, or the Big Meltdown: it rains continuously, the government is on the verge of collapse, the country is in ruins, the air is dirty and people have to wear masks, rivers and streams are toxic, there are no hospitals, sewage systems have broken down, mosquitoes and rats have taken over and cholera is rife. Soon legality breaks down altogether and the narrator faces the consequences…it is a sobering story told in simple, stark prose but not without the occasional poetic highlight when the narrator notes in her diary: ‘Rare dry afternoon. Black lace clouds over yellow sky. Brown grass, frowsty grey mould, fungal frills’.

The usual Simpsonian gender conflict issues are present in ‘Up at the Villa, ‘In the driver’s seat’ and ‘Channel 17’ and we see further intergenerational conflict in ‘Up at the Villa’ and ‘Squirrel’ and, to a certain extent in ‘Homework’ where we also however observe the same kind of mother-child complicity that we saw in  Simpson’s previous collection as a mother helps her teenage son to do his homework. The more witty, playful Simpson from the earlier collections comes out again in ‘The Festival of the Immortals’ where two elderly ladies who were friends during the war meet up again at a literary festival. The descriptions of the women (Viv is for example ‘Eager, impulsive, slapdash…Rule-breaking. Artless’) are rewarding in themselves, but the festival just happens to include, not contemporary writers, but writers from the past! One of the women, whose daughter is the Festival Artistic Director describes how Virginia Woolf ‘kept the whole marquee in stitches’, Alexander Pope roared up in a sports car, Jane Austen could be ‘sarcastic in interviews’ and Shakespeare has been persuaded to be flown in by helicopter to do a masterclass in the Sonnet!

The book ends with ‘Charm for a Friend with a Lump’ a strangely personal and haunting piece where the narrator makes a promise to a friend with cancer. She is choosing plants to put in her garden and valiantly vows that she will enjoy these plants with her friend ‘In my spell we are dreaming our way forward through the year into the green and white of May, and on into the deep green lily-ponds of June…’ Against this lyrical dreamlike description however the author makes sudden declarations whose honest simplicity sums up both her deep affection and distress  - ‘you are my persona grata’ or ‘I can’t spare you. You’re indispensable!’

A Bunch of Fives: Selected Stories (2012) is a collection of five of the best of the five story collections already published by Simpson. It offers an excellent sample of her work to new readers and would be a perfect gift to any short-story lover not yet familiar with her work. The collection also contains an Introduction by the Author in which Simpson ‘interviews’ herself and gives interesting insights into her work.

Amanda Thursfield, 2013

Bibliography

Related links:.

• http://www.helensimpsonwriter.com

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