Peggy
SOMETIMES, MY BUS JOURNEY coincides with school chucking out time.
Now, I know a lot of oldies don’t like being on the bus at the same time as schoolkids. You remember Eileen from number 18? Terrible dress sense, drove her husband to an early grave with her moaning? She always complains if she ends up on the bus with a load of youths, says they’re too noisy and disrespectful, not giving up their seats for her. But I love it. Nothing makes me happier than a bus full of youngsters, with their big voices and teenage swagger, brown and black and white skin all together in one sweaty, hormonal tin can on wheels. I sit in my seat behind the wheelchair spot and I watch them like I’m at the cinema. I love listening to their gossip, the schoolyard banter and insults, the tales of heartache and love.
Do you remember what it felt like to be that age? Because I do, better than I remember what it felt like to be forty or fifty. Everything felt so huge, back then. There were no small emotions, no little pleasures or irritations – everything was either the biggest triumph or the end of the bleedin’ world. I’m not sure if I’ve ever told you this, but I kept a diary all through my teenage years. I’d mostly fill it with sketches and doodles, but I also used to write these terrible poems about how hard it was being me, how no one understood me. Honestly, you’d have laughed if you read them, love. Thankfully, my father threw them all out when I left home, so you were spared.
You know, it’s funny, I forget there was ever a time when we weren’t in each other’s lives. I assume you were there by my side when I was born, there when I started school or wrote my first awful poems. I wonder what you’d have thought of me if we’d met earlier? Because I wasn’t always like that cocky nineteen-year-old you first laid eyes on, believe you me. By then I’d been through enough battles that I was already pretty tough, or at least I liked to think I was. But, back when I was younger, I was much shyer and more nervous. I used to sit at the back of the class, head down, sketching in my maths book when I should have been doing arithmetic. The teachers all said I was stupid, but I wasn’t; I just had no interest in algebra or Shakespeare’s sonnets. All I wanted to do was draw.
Of course, it drove my parents mad, especially my father. And when I told him I wanted to go to art college, well, you should have seen how he went off. People like us don’t go to art school, he’d shouted, loud enough that the neighbours banged on the wall. You’ll go to secretarial college like your sisters and then you’ll damn well get married!
Well, he got his way in the end, didn’t he?
Do you remember my father’s reaction when he found out I was pregnant? I knew this would happen if you went off to that art school, he’d screamed, like one of those fire and brimstone preachers. Twenty-one, unmarried and pregnant. You’ve brought shame on our family.
I can laugh about it now, love, but at the time I thought he was going to murder me. Remember when I walked up the aisle, his face was so purple he looked like he was going to explode? And my mother, holding her hankie like she was at a bloody funeral. Thankfully you caught my eye and made me smile, otherwise I’m not sure how I’d have got through it.
I find I’ve been thinking about those early days more and more lately. I’ll be on the bus, minding my own business, when suddenly I’ll see or hear something that takes me right back, fifty or sixty years. It’s the strangest thing, all these memories floating up again. I suppose that’s what happens when you get to our age, isn’t it? And I’m not complaining, mind. The other day, watching all the school kids messing around on the 88, I could remember so clearly what it felt like to be their age, all the fear and the hopes and the longings.
They say youth is wasted on the young, but I’m not sure I agree. I think if you gave me those big emotions now – those feelings of triumph and disaster – I wouldn’t know what to do with them. No, these days, finding a fresh copy of Metro on the bus is about as much excitement as I can handle.