'My mother is such a bloody rambling fool.' wrote Philip Larkin in 1965, 'that half the time I doubt her sanity. Two things she said today, for instance, were that she had "thought of getting a job in Woolworth's" and that she wanted to win the football pools so that she could "give cocktail parties".' Eva Larkin was 79 at the time so that to see herself presiding over the Pick'n' Mix counter was a little unrealistic and her chances of winning the football pools were remote as she didn't go in for them. Still, mothers do get ideas about cocktail parties, or mine did anyway, who'd never had a cocktail in her life and couldn't even pronounce the word, always laying the emphasis (maybe out of prudery) on the tail rather than the cock. I always assumed she got these longings from women's magazines or off the television and maybe Mrs Larkin did too, though 'she never got used to the television' - which in view of her son's distrust of it is hardly surprising.

LRB 25 March 1993 | PDF Download