‘Mummy, Bill keeps hitting me over the head with the ball,’ Mary would complain.

‘Oh, sweetie,’ Mummy would reply, ‘just tell him you love him and it will be all right.’ This oft-repeated advice never had much effect on the children and their power struggles but, somehow, it sank into Mary’s mind and, much to her later, adult chagrin, became her first response in the face of adversity. Just tell those police officers that love is the answer and everything will be all right. Mary fought this philosophy but failed to rid herself of it entirely.

Mr and Mrs Rose were disappointed by the 1970s and felt threatened and bewildered by the new social unrest, preferring their own more peaceful and flowering approach to life. During her adolescence Mary flirted heavily with punk. Her spiked hair and the safety-pin she had put through her nose drove her mother, a paisley kaftan sort of woman, to distraction. Frequenting run-down clubs where she would thrash around to loud reggae and the Sex Pistols while she learned .to swear seriously, Mary rebelled, as all teenagers must, but in a curiously sociable way. The press and older people saw her crowd as profoundly anti-social but Mary knew better. Her ripped-up black clothes made her immedi¬ately recognisable to an enormous group of peers and never before had strangers met her with such enthusiasm. The London scene made adolescent angst fun, and Mary felt at home in the midst of Britain’s bleak post-industrial decline. She was used to decay, in fact she celebrated it, unlike her parents who remained appalled. They continued to live in the sturdy terraced house just off Balham High Street, round the corner from the block of flats Hitler had chosen to live in should he win the war. 

Eventually the safety-pin was replaced by a gold nose-stud and after taking her degree in Fine Arts at Camberwell Col¬lege of Art, Mary began to mellow into adulthood, becoming more like her mother than ever before. In the early days of their relationship, she and Finn spent many Sunday after¬noons stoned and staring at the sky on Clapham Common before taking the bus down Balham High Street for Sunday dinner with her parents and their collection of Doors albums.

Painting brought Mary little income although she occa¬sionally made a sale. She worked as a waitress whenever desperate for money — jobs like that were easy to find in London. Becoming a squatter while still a punk, she lived in a huge derelict detached house behind Kennington Park with fifteen other skinny kids in black clothing. Her squatting gradually became more sophisticated as she learned which properties were tenable, what to avoid, the arts of electrics and plumbing and how to manipulate the authorities. She remained transient throughout her student days, sometimes sleeping in the studio at the college. But by the time she was twenty-three she felt a need for stability and, after finding a house she knew she would be safe in, settled down to build a home not unlike that of her parents. She filled the kitchen with pots, pans and plants, hung her paintings in the corridors and began the long process of furnishing her house with junk, the detritus of a sociable, active life. Mary had been in the little house on Glasshouse Walk for over six years and was still well aware of how comfortable it was.

Finn met Mary when he first came to London and was squatting due to a chronic lack of money and a burning desire to live dangerously. He left Canada in a rocket-ship fuelled by fermented boredom and landed in London determined to die young or have a good time, or both. On arrival he took up petty thieving, scooting around the city by dodging bus and Underground fares, and shoplifting. He met Mary at an Art College party where they were both too drunk to go home by themselves so they slept in the studio instead. In the morning they woke up with woolly mouths, their clothing stuck to their bodies. Mary showed Finn some of her paintings and he vowed he would win her heart or return to Canada a broken man.

At first Mary thought Finn was a charming American, abrupt, brash and good-looking. When he told her he was a Canadian her mind registered a blank, only having heard of Canada as a place for Royal visits. She continued to think of him as American until he was able to re-educate her. Finn found being mistaken for an American humiliating and frustrating. It made him want to shout, ‘But I’m not brash, abrupt, and good-looking like an American.’ Even though he was tall and healthy and, like an American, had been to high school, watched ‘Gilligan’s Island’ and eaten potato chips and french fries, American was the one American thing he was not. These contradictions, plus the blithe insistence and ignorance of most English people, confused Finn from time to time. He felt he needed some kind of an identity, a thing he could not find in the Land of No Self-image from whence he had come.

So Finn decided he was Irish-Canadian and searched his memory for signs of this heritage from his childhood. He could remember his mother humming Irish songs while she did the washing-up, the violent arguments his father had with the Protestant relations during their summertime visits, and the potato bread his mother made on Sunday mornings after Mass. He knew there was more but felt this was enough.

From squatting and shoplifting he moved on to housing politics, became involved with the co-operative movement and, eventually, settled down in a North London housing co-op with a job in the local authority’s housing department. The jet propulsion was running out. Finn found himself wishing Mary Rose wanted to have babies.