Seasons are long in childhood, and winters never-ending. Time seemed real and didn’t race by before you’d lived it. There was no central heating, and no fire lit in the daytime to escape the freezing temperature outside. Life was lived inside the house, and once in, that’s where you stayed. By six o’clock we were huddled round the fire in a coal-black sitting room, telling ghost stories and watching the wood crackle over the scrunched-up newspaper, toasting crumpets at the end of a long devil’s fork. My legs were covered in scars and scald marks from ambitiously hot, stone water bottles, kicked round the bed in a vain attempt at warming every spot. In the morning, I dreaded leaving my bed, plucking up the courage to take off my pyjamas and button the white liberty bodice to my navy-blue pleated school skirt. Times were austere. Doors were closed to keep the heat in, lights were switched off as you left a room, left-over food became tomorrow’s supper. The war had made people careful and waste of any sort was discouraged. Ration books were being phased out, but temperance was not.
My parents were of the generation who washed every nook and cranny of their bodies with a boiled flannel (I suspect my father’s boiling was a little lacklustre in comparison with my mother’s) and viewed a daily bath as an indulgence. They were mistrustful and frightened by any new addition to the house. Everything was used until it rotted. The interloper – a new tin-opener, fountain pen, sofa – had to pay its dues, because what they liked, what they felt comfortable with, were the desks, chairs, beds, tables, lamps and animals which they had built up some sort of relationship with. Some of this unspoken philosophy must have ingratiated itself into my psyche, because I remember the intense feeling of loneliness that a contemporary sofa from Tulley’s gave me many years later. It replaced the one the five of us had sat on for years, at varying heights. Having no springs at one end, we went down in size like a picture of the story of evolution, except the other way round. I felt jealous on the old sofa’s behalf, irritated by the chipper complacency of the new one’s boastful springs, infuriated by its obvious lack of respect for any kind of proper history.
It was such a different time then, when anything new was cause for celebration. I knew nobody who lived any differently. One night we sat, my father, brothers and I, patiently waiting for Mum to give us a twirl in the new dress she had bought. Her eyes shone with excitement as she sashayed into the room. ‘The Sack’ by Christian Dior was the newest design from Paris, the most up-to-the-minute creation available, and anything more monstrously unflattering to a woman with the slightest hint of a curve you would be hard pressed to find. How they found the money to pay for it I’ll never know, but what I do know is that it was a momentous occasion. We sat with our mouths open, unable to rally even a squeak.
‘You hate it,’ she said, her sad little voice breaking the heavy silence as she walked back out of the room, crushed by our reaction.
‘No darling, it’s just that you’ve got such a lovely figure and …’ Dad called after her – too late, she’d gone. It hung, this sack-materialed, sack-coloured, shapeless sack, in her cupboard, in coventry, for the rest of its useless life. This story would mean nothing today, when buying a new dress is as common as buying a sprout, but back then it was something important, something to get excited about.
I was now a member of the Brownie fraternity, which I hated – the colour of the uniform, the lack of humour in Brown Owl, the prissy girls. But I had one great friend, Susan, a fellow pixie, whose parents owned a sweet shop quite close to where we lived which, tome, was the absolute pinnacle of luck and privileged living. Upstairs they had fluffy carpets and matching suites, but downstairs, and this was the best thing of all, we were allowed to ‘play shops’ with real money, real tills and real customers, making me the envy of lesser Brownies the length and breadth of Surrey. Whenever I stayed the night, her mother brought us treats in bed, which I’ve never forgotten. I was used to one Jamboree bag on a Friday night, so this was heaven, shameful in its opulence. Our individual trays were covered in sweets. The flying saucers, Spanish wood, dinosaur eggs, sherbet pips, aniseed balls, black jacks, bubble gum, fruit salads and gobstoppers were stacked on top of each other like a pyramid, and by their side was a tall glass of Tizer with a scoop of vanilla ice cream plopped in carelessly, so it fizzed like an experiment in a Jerry Lewis film. We woke in the morning with lipstick etched to our mouths, gum stuck to our hair and ice cream matted in our eyebrows, the discarded wrappers slung to the floor with abandon. This was decadence on a grand scale, but what struck me more than the excess was the casualness with which our teeth were ignored. Being brainwashed daily at home on the importance of brushed teeth (although, curiously, too much washing was considered rather suburban), I crept into my friend’s bathroom with my toothbrush at the ready, but her mother waylaid me at every turn. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that, leave it to the morning,’ she said. Naturally, this small act of insurrection made it all the more exciting, but there was a slight frisson of malevolence, as though she got her kicks from imagining our teeth dropping out one by one by the time we were twelve.
One freezing night, while walking me home, Susan’s mother told me a secret that my mother had sworn her to keep. Warning me not to ‘tell on her’, Susan’s mum revealed that when I arrived home there would be a television. This was enormous news, as we were probably the only family in the northern hemisphere not to own one. The struggle to persuade Dad that there was any benefit at all in having a box we all stared at had been up-hill all the way. He had been violently opposed to the idea, fearing that ghost stories by the fireside would be replaced, that playing and reading would become obsolete, that talking to people’s preoccupied profiles would become the norm.
As I walked up the drive, the imposing house was in silhouette. Drawing closer, through a chink in the sitting-room curtains, I could just make out a flickering screen and a keyed-up mother awaiting my return. It was all so thrilling, even more so than when Dad took us on outings in our new (to us) Humber Hawk. A drive to the country would involve many games of I spy, sing-alongs and the search for that ghastly and thankfully rare deviant, the man with a beard and no moustache. Fabian referred to those people as ‘a thousand lashes’, a term that mystified me until he explained that that was what he would like to give them.
Although these outings were fun, television was a much safer alternative. Mervyn was a terrible driver, being far more occupied with the shape of the noses he passed on the way than what was happening on the road. Picking me up from school one afternoon in our former beloved Land Rover, he forgot to shut my door properly and, being lost in thought, or having spotted a particularly feeble chin, he failed to notice I’d fallen out. He arrived home with the nagging sensation that he’d forgotten something. Luckily for both of us, someone had rescued me half a mile down the road. The next thing I remember is lying in my parents’ bed, three knitted brows peering down at me, a long, thin torch searching each eyeball, a hankie daubed with smelling salts latched to my nose, and my wrist being picked up and dropped on the sheet like a dead haddock. The doctor spoke with abnormal slowness into my face. His breath smelt of mints.
‘What – is – your – name?’ he said.
‘Clare,’ I replied.
‘Good, good!’ he said. ‘Where – do – you – live – Clare?’
‘At – home,’ I answered.
‘Is she going to be all right?’ Maeve asked in a voice of just the right speed. Mervyn stared down at me, his head bowed low with shame, my mother’s eyes fixed on him with unconcealed fury.
‘Yes, she’ll be fine. She’s just mildly concussed,’ the doctor answered.
I had never seen my mother so angry.
That winter I walked to school in the dark and I walked home in the dark. Racing into the sitting room, I stumbled over chairs and sofas, feeling my way in a drawn-curtained, unlit room, to locate the television. I switched it on and waited for the endless warming-up of the twelve-inch black and white Ferguson to show me Bill and Ben, Andy Pandy and The Woodentops.
One day my school was given the afternoon off to watch Mervyn demonstrate some simple ways of drawing on a live children’s BBC television programme. Maeve came to collect me, and we walked arm-in-arm through the dense and impenetrable pea-soup that made it impossible to see a foot in front of us, our mouths covered by woollen scarves to prevent the smog seeping into our lungs, while the tips of trilby-hatted men’s cigarettes lit the way. Sick with nerves, we built a fire and sat silently in the coal-black sitting room, waiting, it seemed forever, for Dad to talk to us through a minute screen that he occupied with a calm authority.
Like most children, what I liked was routine. It made me feel secure and my life followed a pattern that suited me. After school and tea, a meal in itself, Mum and I trooped off to the music room where I curled up on her lap and waited for Listen With Mother to begin. After it was finished the wireless was turned off and she began to play the piano, as I warmed up for my dances à la Isadora Duncan. The music shifted swiftly, from tranquil to threatening, from urgent back to melodious as I invented scenes and situations for my imaginary characters to inhabit. I became trance-like and oblivious to my mother, as I spun and twirled to the rhythm of her energetic, willing, but slightly leaden piano.
This dance class of one was followed by our dual singing from Walter Crane’s The Baby’s Opera, A Book of Old Rhymes With New Dresses propped on the black upright brought home from China. I stood behind her as she put on a bravura performance, somehow managing to appear engrossed in the stagnant repetition of the day before, and the days before that. ‘Oranges and Lemons’, ‘Lavender’s Blue’, ‘Ding Dong Bell’, ‘Old King Cole’, ‘Ring a Ring a Roses’, ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’, ‘I Saw Three Ships’ and ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ – these songs, and the marching up and down the chilly room like a soldier, are engraved on my memory. Limpet-like, they stay with me.
Bath times were also an occasion to let rip, but then it was my mother who sang to me, and I joined in the chorus. As neither of us had a voice to write home about, our enjoyment was unfettered by vanity. A strict rotation of songs had been arrived at; beginning with ‘Daisy Daisy’, ‘How Much is That Doggy in the Window?’ and ‘Mama’s Little Baby Loves Shortenin’, Shortenin”, she limbered up for her penultimate offering – her particular favourite, ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love’. It infused the steamy bathroom with husky-voiced emotion, as every word was relished to the hilt. Finally, the denouement, the unchanging and softly sung finale – ‘When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother, what will I be? Will I be pretty? Will I be rich? Here’s what she said to me. Que sera sera. Whatever will be, will be. The future’s not ours to see. Que sera sera. What will be, will be.’
I was enormously interested in being pretty, and just as disinterested in being rich, and as Maeve sat on the lavatory seat to mix the hot and cold water from the rusty taps into a heavy saucepan, and then sloshed it in torrents over my head a dozen times until my hair squeaked, we pondered this question. As I looked up at her for the answer it was always in the affirmative. ‘Not just pretty, darling. Beautiful.’