‘Just you mind how you go on the horseway!’
Missis Robbins
Lately I’ve been thinking about my Anti Daisy and her peaceful death. She simply fell asleep in her chair by the fire and never woke up. My mother always said it was not right and that Anti Daisy should have drowned slowly with all her sins floating in front of her and herself weighted down with Grannie’s silver spoons which were meant for me but which she, Anti Daisy, had refused to let me have as I was living through ‘the shaded side of a well-known catastrophe’ at the time and, because of this, she had as she said, cut me out of her will and would have nothing more to do with me, ever. My mother often said too that by rights the annuity which Anti Daisy bought herself with my father’s share of some money should have contributed some pain to her death.
As far as we know Anti Daisy died a painless death.
But why wish pain on anyone.
The other day I received a letter from my mother in England. She had written,
I wish I could find words to tell you how much your father enjoyed your letters, how he looked forward to them and how he spent his time thinking about his replies, making little notes and asking me to remind him to tell you things.
At eighty-seven I wish he could have died in his sleep instead of that terrible road accident. They tell me he died at once but one of the policemen said he died in the ambulance. I hope he didn’t see the tanker coming. He was coming home, there’s half a letter he’d started to write to you, he’d chosen,
‘Die mit Tränen säen, werden mit Freuden ernten —’
I’ll send it later —
I can remember the place where he must have been crossing the road, it’s the place where he always said to us, ‘look both ways’.
Now it’s where heaven will have come down to earth to gather him up. Because of his belief in something beyond this life that’s how he will have seen it. For myself, I am not sure.
My mother is from Vienna. My father, after being in prison for refusing to fight in the Great War of 1914–18 went to Vienna with the Quaker Ambulance and Famine Relief. He brought his Viennese bride into the household from which his own father had earlier turned him out, in front of all the neighbours, because of the disgrace of being in prison.
‘Your mother has such pretty arms,’ my father often said. Without him now she has no one to defend her from the world and from herself. She gives everything away. I under stand this thing about her because I am defenceless in the same way.
My correspondence with my father started when I was three months old. He did most of the writing then. I suppose I always felt somehow that he would live for ever.
He really showed me how to look at the world, how to feel the quality of the air, how to look at people and why they say the things they say and how they are saying them.
Sparks flew from under his boots when we walked into town in the evenings. He liked to look in at the lighted shop windows, he marvelled at the ways in which clothes, bread, bicycles, tools and toys could be made to look so desirable. In one shop cream satin cascaded, it was like a waterfall filling the shop and my father explained how he thought the shop woman would have had to come backwards spreading the material right up to the door, moving backwards out on to the pavement. She would then have had to lock up the shop without going back inside.
Back home he took off his boots and studied the soles of them carefully before placing them beside his chair.
‘What shall I buy you for Christmas?’ I asked my father.
‘A lead pencil with a black point please,’ he replied.
‘What colour?’
‘You choose,’ he said.
‘Red?’
‘Yes, but remember the black point.’
And when he asked me what I wanted, ‘I’d like some foot ball boots,’ I told him.
For the time being I have stopped working in my orchard to come indoors to try to write something from my child hood. It occurs to me that what I am about to write might be disgusting, not amusing and quite untrue. It’s hard now to distinguish between the created and the remembered. I come from a household where people wept over Schubert Lieder one minute and tore up pictures of politicians the next. I’d like to be able to make a living picture from the half remembered by writing something from the inside and something from the outside. For me writing is an act of the will.
In this heat and this stillness all life seems withdrawn. This is the longed-for and needed solitude.
I don’t cry in the loneliness now but there were times when I did.
Between autumn-berried hedgerows I cried in the middle of a road which seemed to be leading nowhere. Brown ploughed fields sloped in all directions, there were no houses, shops, trams and there were no people, only the rooks gathering, unconcerned, in the leafless trees at the side of an empty lifeless barn. The anxious looks and little words of comfort from the other two girls only brought more fear and I screamed till all three of us stood howling there. And then we made our way back through our tears to what was left of our first boarding-school Sunday afternoon.
I didn’t understand then what made me cry. It was only much later that I could put into words something of the shock of discovering the loneliness and uncertainty which is so much a part of living.
The tears of childhood are frequent and children some times know why they are crying but hesitate to explain. So when Edith and Amy said to me later in the cloakroom, ‘Why are you crying again?’, I couldn’t tell them it was because there was something about the changing light at the end of the autumn afternoon which reminded me of the time of day when my father would return, knock the carbide from his lamps on the doorstep and bring his bicycle into the safety of the scullery. How could I tell them of this longing for this particular time when he lifted his enamel plate off the hot saucepan and the smell of his pepper rose in the steam.
‘It’s my father and mother,’ I whispered.
‘Why what’s wrong with them?’ Edith asked.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘they have such dreadful fights.’ I looked at my new wrist watch, ‘It’s just about now that my father comes home drunk and he beats my mother till she’s black all over.’
Edith and Amy gazed at me with reverence. And I was so overcome with this new and interesting picture of my fam ily life, I forgot for the time being this illness, this homesickness.
Later I learned more bitterly for myself this thing called homesickness. But I knew something about it when I was little.
When I lay in bed, long ago at home, I could hear my mother’s voice like a stream running as she talked up and down to my father. And every now and then my father’s voice was like a boulder in the way of the stream, and for a moment the water swirled and paused and waited and then rushed on round the boulder and I heard my mother talking on, up and down.
I thought I heard my mother crying in the night, her long sighs followed my father creaking on bent legs along the hall.
‘What for is Mammy crying?’ I called to him. He crawled flickering across the ceiling crouching doubled on the ward robe where there was a fox.
‘It is nothing,’ he said in his soft voice. ‘Go to sleep. It is nothing, she is homesick that is all.’ Flickering and pran cing he moved up and down the walls big and little and big. The eyes of the fox were amber and full of tears, tiny gold chains fastened its little feet. My hand reached into the soft scented fur touching the slippery silk underneath.
‘Go to sleep,’ my father folded and unfolded. ‘I’m the engine down the mine,’ he said, ‘I’m the shaft I’m the steam laundry now I’m a Yorkshire ham a cheese a Cheshire cheese a pork pie I’m a mouse in the iron and steel works I’m a needle and thread I’m a cartwheel turning in the road turning over and over turning and turning I’m the horse the tired tired horse go to sleep go to sleep —’
I went in the dark after his candle had gone and fetched a cup of water. I took it to my mother.
‘It’s for your homesick,’ I told her. ‘Drink the water for your homesick.’
The tears of grown-up people seemed to come with such pain. Anti Daisy once sat a whole afternoon crying and my mother, not knowing enough English, tried to comfort her.
Anti Mote cried too. The police often called because of her. She stole the boards on which the tram conductors wrote numbers. These boards rested in slots.
‘Very convenient,’ Anti Mote said, ‘for when I am getting off the tram.’ She was brought home too for sunbathing naked in the East Park on cold grey November days. The English policemen wore their cloaks folded and pleated neatly over one shoulder, they had them to wrap round ladies who threw off all their clothes in public.
‘Eat my little Duchess,’ Anti Mote was on her knees beside my chair. She was knitting a wild cardigan. I turned my face away from the mess of egg, slimy brown, splashed over a silver tray.
‘Eat my little Duchess!’ she implored. ‘It is only that I have scramble in mistaken for fryern, that is all. And in mis take I forget the plate!’
About Anti Mote’s tears, she had deep furrows in both cheeks, and when she cried, she cried out of sight and she sounded like a man crying. She was homesick too my father said.
Like my mother Anti Mote was a baroness in her own right. They kept this shared misfortune a secret.
A few days before the move from Flowermead to Mount Pleasant my mother had a party. Her students brought their friends, they came in an old car with shingled heads and pink legs sticking out. They were from the technical college where my mother taught them enough German for their science exams, but she couldn’t resist the poetry from her own language so they read Goethe and listened to Schubert with their scientific abstracts.
‘How do you feel when you marry your ideal,’ they sang, ‘Ever so goosey goosey goosey.’ And they sang ‘The Wed ding of the Painted Doll’. My mother danced twirling her beads, strings of them, she danced kicking her feet out to the sides, heels up, toes down and turned in,
‘It’s a holiday today! Today’s the wedding of the painted doll,’ they sang. Together they all danced across the living room bending their knees and tapping their heads and knees and elbows. My mother had just had all her teeth out because of starving during the war and half starving before the war.
It was the fashion to have all new teeth then and to have the tonsils and the appendix removed. In some families these operations were given as presents at Christmas and birthdays.
In spite of having no teeth I could see by her eyes that my mother was enjoying her party.
They gathered round the piano and sang,
Am Brunnen vor dem Tore, da steht ein Lindenbaum ich träumt’ in seinem Schatten So manchen süssen Traum —
My father sat close by shading his eyes with one hand hiding his quiet tears.
I was learning the alphabet and was writing my own stories and poems in long lines of l’s and f’s and g’s copying from a handwriting copybook into an old Boots diary. I loved the feel of the pencil on the smooth paper and as I filled the pages with the sloping letters I showed them to my father and he kissed them.
During the party Grandpa came in having walked all the way from Birmingham to Sutton Coldfield with hazelnuts in his boots. He reached into one boot and brought out some cracked nuts for the guests. To save expense he had carried a second-hand cot on his back. It was for Vera, the miner’s child who was staying with us. A great many people were unemployed, it was very bad for the miners, their families had nothing to eat. It was the time of the hunger demon strations before the great Hunger March which stretched all the way down to London.
My mother tried to feed Vera with a boiled egg but she didn’t like it and the egg ran out of her mouth which was all square with her crying. My mother stuffed a toffee in with the egg but this only made it worse.
‘Perhaps she’s never had an egg,’ one of the students said. Anti Mote said a little girl she knew wasted her eggs and I felt ashamed.
‘Give her a piece,’ the student suggested.
‘I want a piecey too,’ I said and then my sister wanted one and, in the end, Vera ate several.
As Vera had brought lice with her Grannie tied our heads up in rags dipped in paraffin and sat by us to stop us scratch ing.
Grandpa took my father on one side and told him if he tried to transplant the six cherry trees they would bleed to death.
All the same, on the day of the removal Grandpa walked over with his hazelnuts, his rupture and his shovel arriving at six in the morning and together they dug up the trees bandaging the roots and earth in sacks. I never saw any blood but, because of what Mount Pleasant was like, the trees died.
It was nearly Christmas and we were leaving. It was a world of jugs and basins and china chamber pots, of castor oil and mousetraps and earache and loose teeth and not knowing whether it would be Anti Mote coming into bed or Anti Daisy. And then there was the hot smell of the curling tongs and singed hair. It was a world of burned-out can dles and gas mantles growing dim.
Grandpa always said it was only a matter of time before the horse manure, the great quantities of it, would block and even bury whole streets. Rapidly increasing motor traffic pushed aside the manure and repeatedly he began his conversations in an accusing voice, ‘Do you know just how many people are run over and killed every week down there on the Stratford Road —’
When the removal men had finished my father asked, ‘Where’s Maud?’ My mother and Anti Mote were to go in the van to arrive with the furniture. My sister and I were travelling with my father who drove a motor bike and side-car.
‘She was picking a bunch of flowers off the front-room wallpaper,’ my mother went through the empty house anxiously. But Anti Mote was nowhere to be found.
The removal was then held up by an official from the Tramways Department. A policeman was with him and Anti Mote, penitent but elated. She had for the last time outwitted the conductor on the number seven tram. In Mount Pleasant it was something called trolley buses and Anti Mote was looking forward to them.
‘Don’t you worry Mr Knight,’ Missis Robbins, the neigh bour woman said. She poured his tea for him. She gave us red jelly for our breakfast but she made us eat a piece with it.
‘Just don’t you worry Mr Knight,’ she put his tea cup nearer to him.
‘What for is Daddy crying?’ I asked. Why should my father be crying these fast falling tears? He shaded his eyes with one hand as if to hide his tears. The other hand was clenched on the white table cloth.
Missis Robbins was banging with the iron, she tested it with her spit which flew sizzling across the kitchen. Why should Missis Robbins be telling him not to worry.
‘What for is Daddy crying?’ I asked. These mysterious tears. ‘What for are we leaving Flowermead?’ I asked.
‘Eat your piecey there’s a good girl,’ Missis Robbins said. It was time to go.
‘Just you mind how you go on the horseway!’ Missis Robbins called from her gate and we were on the journey to Mount Pleasant.
In every place, however desolate, there will be some saving quality. Bricks, suddenly warm coloured, and corner stones made noble in an unexpected light from the passing and hesitant sun; perhaps a window catching tree tops in a dis tant park beyond steep roofs and smoking chimneys. Per haps it is simply an undefined atmosphere of previous happi ness caught and held in certain rooms.
To my mother there was nothing which could redeem the ugly house in Mount Pleasant.
‘There is nothing pleasant here at all,’ she said.
Grandpa had chosen the name Flowermead and he came there every few days to dig and plant. There was an apple tree, the six cherry trees, a pear tree, red and black currants, gooseberries, raspberries and roses, lawns and grassy banks and flower beds with Michaelmas daisies, larkspur, corn flowers and Canterbury bells. The garden of the new house was a narrow strip of slag from the coal mine. A smouldering pit mound was at the end of the street. Other pit mounds covered with coarse grass and coltsfoot were beyond, and behind them the high wall of the fever hospital. There was a bone and glue factory near and across the street were the brick kilns. Framed on the sky were the wheels and the shaft of the coal mine. The noise of the cage coming up or going down the shaft and the smell of the bone and glue accompanied every action. The heave and roar of the blast furnaces and the nightly glow across the sky became my night light and my cradle song.
Grandpa couldn’t think of a name for this house so it was called Barclay after the Bank.
In Flowermead there was a water pump bringing strange draughts from a well deep in the earth. My father was pleased with the new house. Water flowed from taps.
‘It’s nearer for me for the Central School,’ he said, ‘and we’re the first people to live in it!’
‘That’s why there are no shelves,’ my mother said.
‘But electricity!’ my father switched the lights on and off.
‘And stairs to clean!’ my mother was unable to accept the shining invitation from the new linoleum.
‘The woodwork’s cheap,’ Anti Daisy came cream cloched with Grannie to see the new house.
‘But look at the grain of the wood,’ my father opened and closed the doors.
‘There’s knot holes,’ Anti Daisy poked her finger through one in the pantry door. But Grandpa had arrived. To save the fare he’d walked with his hazelnuts, and his rupture and carrying two hens in a box.
‘Come upstairs,’ my father said to him, ‘and see the W.C.’
Through the pantry-door knot hole lay another world, there was a lake of quiet milk, blue as dusk and fringed with the long fern fronds of carrot and celery, jewelled water drops hung sparkling in a cabbage and two apples promised a tub full of fruit.
It was Christmas Eve with frost flowers like lace curtains.
‘Guess what I’m giving you for Christmas,’ I said to my father.
‘I hope it’s a lead pencil?’
‘Yes, Yes!’
‘With a black point?’
‘Yes. Now guess what colour it is.’
‘Red?’
‘Yes.’ I couldn’t wait to give him the pencil.
‘I hope I’m getting some football boots,’ I said to him.
‘Nice little girls don’t ever wear football boots,’ Anti Daisy said.
My father suggested that Grannie and Anti Mote should have a little ride in the side-car. There was just room for them both.
‘Come upstairs Grettell,’ Anti Daisy never pronounced my mother’s name properly. She wanted to show my mother the Christmas dolls. They had hair which could be combed, we overheard her telling, and little shoes and socks.
‘I still want the boots,’ I called up after them. My sister and I went out to look at the hens.
We found Grandpa lying across the cold grey slag, his neck was all bulged over his collar and a terrible noise came from him. I didn’t know then that the noise was just his difficult breathing. In terror we rushed up the new stairs. Of course Anti Daisy and my mother had locked themselves in with the presents and wouldn’t come out straight away.
Later we sat in the hearth with the dinner plates put to warm. Grandpa sat in the armchair, his freshly combed white hair looked like a bandage.
‘Whatever made you have an attack out there!’ Anti Daisy came in twitching her dress angrily. ‘Whatever made you have an attack now!’ she said to Grandpa. ‘You fright ened these two children,’ she accused him. ‘D’you hear me?’ she shouted at him. ‘You frightened the children!’
When Anti Daisy had gone back to the kitchen Grandpa shook his head slowly and tears rolled down to his white moustache.
These mysterious tears? I wanted to put my arms round his neck and kiss his wet cheek and tell him, ‘Never mind. Never mind.’ But I was afraid of him and shyly I sat there with my sister watching the old man weeping,
The Black Country was a mixture of coal mines, factories, chain shops and brickworks and little farms in green triangles huddled in the shadows of the slag heaps. Rows and rows of mean little houses gave way suddenly to hawthorn hedges and fields. Here, the air was suddenly fragrant.
Grannie enjoyed her side-car ride but couldn’t understand why they had stopped in a place where there was no view.
‘I seemed to be looking straight into the hedge,’ she said. My father explained that the side-car had come off the motor bike and had come to rest in a ditch. While he was fixing it Anti Mote had disappeared.
‘I expect Maud is walking home,’ he said, ‘it’s not very far.’ His face was white in the dusk when he looked for her up and down the unknown streets. I didn’t know then, as I do now, that it seems that a child, a person, has to look both ways and to look along and follow roads which often seem to be going nowhere.
Anti Mote was a little late for the present giving. The living-room door flew open at last, a breath of cold air came,
‘Guten Tag! Grüss Gott und fröhliche Weihnachten!’ she kissed all the anxious faces. ‘On the trolley buses,’ she announced, ‘they have them too! Very neat and nicely made from metal,’ and from somewhere in her skirt she brought out the conductor’s board from trolley bus eleven.
‘Die mit Tränen säen, werden mit Freuden ernten,’ my father read aloud, ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.’
Grandpa and Grannie said, ‘Amen! Amen!’
There were no football boots for me. I did get them years later on my ninth birthday. That was in June, by the autumn my feet couldn’t squeeze into them.
‘I only had time,’ Anti Mote said, ‘for one Christmas knit ting, it is for you!’ She had knitted the cardigan for me. Unwillingly I put it on. She smiled happily.
‘Is so wide and big,’ she said, ‘both children can wear it at the same time!’