Brenda Blethyn's "Mixed Fancies" - A Review

Brenda by Petr Novák, Wikipedia

If you’re lucky enough to know any nice people over 60 who grew up in large, loving families of limited means, ask them about whether anything dangerous happened to them as kids.  Indiana Jones will look like a lightweight by comparison.  

From my own family, where my father was the eldest of 12, there was the time time my seven-year-old Aunt Judy fell out of the hay mow and broke her other arm.  (The first one was already broken by an encounter with a cow as I recall). Or when Margie burned her back sitting on the stove, or Tommy got his fingertip chopped off in the fan blade, or Maryanne almost died of whooping cough. As a variation, you can ask your sources about the temperature of their house in winter (Freezing!) or the foods they regarded as treats.  (Fat drippings will play a part). 

            And so on to our subject for today, Brenda Blethyn’s 2006 memoir Mixed Fancies. I pulled it out of my mailbox when I got home from work last Friday. By midnight I had just about finished it.

Brenda (I feel on a first name basis with her now), as you surely must know, is a celebrated British actress. She was born “Brenda Bottle” to her 42-year-old mother in 1946, the tail ender in a family of nine children.  In her early years the Bottle family lived in rented accommodations in Ramsgate, a seaside community in Kent in southern England. Their home was of a sort that would now be commonplace only in the third world: one cold water tap, outhouse in the garden  – with no door on it  – three rooms badly heated.  (The poverty of post-war Britain never fails to shock me – it wasn’t that long ago and the Bottle story is hardly unique).

Brenda presents the perils and privations of her childhood with honesty but without any sense of grievance.  She didn’t know enough about sex at eight years old to understand what the pedophile she encountered in the alley was doing. The “clouts” that her mother administered were part of the picture, as was Mum’s alcoholism.  Brenda seems to have accepted these things like so much bad weather, and no more to be lamented than bad weather.  She doesn’t remember the time she fell into the fire as a toddler, though she was told that she had.  She does remember the time she and her brother, having been left home alone, almost burned the place down trying to make it cozy for their parents. 

There were offsets to the hard times: treats of movies (where her mother had the bright idea of bringing the wet laundry in the winter so it could be dried on the radiators in the dark theater), and boxes of “mixed fancies.” That is, little cakes, 12 to a two-shilling box ­. (Brenda didn’t care for the one with the coconut, but the cream horn was coveted by all the children). And yes, meat drippings.

It wasn’t til Brenda was 14 that the family achieved indoor plumbing.  Around that same time her teachers, recognizing her intelligence, recommended further academic education.  Her parents deemed a secretarial course more practical, however, and so a secretary she became.  She married Alan Blethyn and soon divorced him, but no hard feelings.  It was during that short marriage that she was recruited as a reluctant substitute for a play being put on by her work-place drama troop…

The stories are told in rapid succession and in episodic fashion, which is why I had such trouble putting the book down. It’s clear that the genetic combination of Mum and Dad was a happy one. The children were good looking and sturdy despite their toothbrush free existence  ­– lots of family photos are included. And in the end, they loved one another and love and gratitude are the dominant themes.

 Brenda is currently famous as the star of the British TV detective series Vera.  It is because of Vera that you are reading this review.  It’s where I became a Brenda fan, watching every episode at least three times, then chasing down her film appearances (she’s excellent in everything), and now reading her memoir. Because it was published back in darkest 2006, Mixed Fancies omits the great success of Vera, which debuted in 2011, but you just got the highlights on that here, so probably not to worry – or maybe she’ll decide to write a sequel. It would be worth reading, especially as it’s not every actress who gets a career-defining part in her 60s.

The thing that makes any story compelling is the arc of the characters. When a likeable character makes a big swing upwards, as it did in Brenda’s case, it’s a lot of fun to go along for the ride.  Mixed Fancies never going to be taught alongside Hamlet or Middlemarch but that wasn’t the point. If you want to know how Brenda Blethyn got the way she is, here you go.  Even if you’re not so curious about that, the book is so full event and charm and good humor that you’d have to be the kind of person who doesn’t like ice cream, or maybe cream horns, not to enjoy it.