The monks disappeared after supper just as they done after lunch, and once again I found myself alone in the corridor, but this time no one was waiting for me, so I made my way back across the lawn. Although I felt tired, it was such a gorgeous evening, the evening sun making everything yellowish, that I decided to go and sit for a few minutes in the rose garden.
It was mostly in shade then, for the sun was low and the walls cast great slabs of shadow across the paving and the beds, but one corner still held the sun and I went to sit there and enjoyed the dry, earthy smell of the evening and the sweetness of the roses, and recalled my childhood front garden.
It was a dull garden with its rectangle of neatly clipped grass surrounded by thick, high laurel hedges, but the flower beds outside the sitting-room window were full of roses in the summer.
My father was very proud of his roses and to please him I always smelled them and said how lovely they were. One Sunday afternoon he picked for me the yellow rose I had admired and put it in my bedroom as a surprise. He must have loved me very much.
He was my god on earth, my father. I was so proud of him. I thought his being a doctor was heroic. I still have this feeling about doctors to this day. He was a tall, potentially gangly man but somehow looked magnificent in his well-cut suits or Harris tweed jackets and grey flannels. He had an air about him, something strong, clever, wise. That’s what I thought. I was always aware that his patients adored him and certainly he appeared to enjoy them more than his own family, who for some reason or another were a disappointment or an irritation to him. Often, I heard him making cutting remarks to Mother, who was frivolous and irresponsible, and he berated Duncan for being a fool of a son because he was hyperactive and a ragamuffin. However, this did not prevent him from spending what spare time he had playing with Duncan rather than me. I was simply permitted to watch the creation of complicated and ingenious Meccano cranes and pulleys, engines and bridges. Father and Duncan would kneel on the floor together, dead to rest of the world, as they worked on their inventions. And if I watched it had to be in silence; I was not allowed to distract them. There was the fabulous electric train set, too. I loved it, especially the stations and the little people with their suitcases and the guards with whistles and men with trolleys. There were horses and carts and railway bridges to cross. And the trains going underneath and round and about, with signals waving up and down. I was not allowed to touch but just to stand and watch. Yet occasionally I would dare to kneel beside them, longing for the very rare moment when father allowed me to ‘have a go’ working the trains. The excitement and the honour given to me was overwhelming, and my trains ran too fast and came off the rails and then I was sent away
So I found solace with my dolls. Here I created for myself the perfect family, the kind of family I wanted. I had three dolls and one I dressed as a boy – Johnnie; the girls were named Marguerite and Susan. I even had a husband, Roy, a sailor in the navy, who came home for holidays now and again. When I took my ‘family’ in the pram across the park, I would talk constantly to my children and husband, and sometimes Roy would be allowed to help push the pram, which meant I had to walk to one side and guide the pram with one hand only. More and more I withdrew into this private world where I could give and receive boundless love, and where I was needed and important. Loved. It compensated for the real world.
No doubt I was loved, but no one had much time for me. Mother preferred her friends and Father was too busy and very strict and I lived in fear of his disapproval. Poor Duncan had many beatings for his untidiness and clumsiness, and once I was once beaten with the back of a hairbrush.
I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to plait my hair. I hadn’t done it on my own before and was getting in a real muddle, so I called Mother to come and help me, but she was in a hurry to go out somewhere and was annoyed, saying she really didn’t have the time to spare. Nevertheless, she did begin to brush out my knots and mess, but so roughly and with such impatience that it really tugged and pulled at my scalp. It hurt me and I shouted out, ‘Stop it, will you?’ And Father overheard.
I was called to come at once to my room, where I was told to remove my knickers and to bend over. He beat me with the back of my hairbrush and I wet myself; the urine ran down my legs and into my socks. I never once hit Dan or Fleur. Not once.
But there were happy memories. On one occasion, Father took me with him in the car on his rounds and we went to visit an old lady who had an enormous lump on her face.
‘She has a tumour on her face,’ he said, ‘so don’t stare at it. Just talk to her nicely. She is very ill.’ I went with him up the steep stairs of the cottage and into the darkened room, and stood beside him. In a great double bed with its brass bedstead, propped up against crumpled pillows, lay a shrivelled old lady, almost lost amongst the bedclothes. But she welcomed us with a smile and tapped the side of the bed with a frail hand, which hung limply from her wrist. Father sat on the side of the bed, but I stood, half hiding behind him, and stared hard at the top of the grey, wispy head in my struggle to keep my eyes off the horrible bulge in her face, so scared that I might have to go near her or even kiss her. She whispered something to Father and pointed towards her dressing table and Father carried back a box to her. She lifted her head with difficulty as she struggled to open it and in the end Father had to do it for her. Out of it she took a coral necklace, which she held out to me. Father nodded that I should take it and then said I was to go downstairs and wait for him in the garden.
I sat in long dry grass under an apple tree and tried to fit the necklace round my neck but it was too difficult and so I twisted it round my wrist and ran my fingers up and down the gritty pieces of dark pink coral and watched wasps swarming the juicy pulp of the fallen apples. Years later I gave the necklace to Fleur, and it is still in her box with all the other jewellery and ‘precious ‘stones that we collected together.
Mother was short and plumpish, with bright hazel eyes and a wickedly infectious laugh. She was intelligent, witty, vivacious and much too busy having a good time, playing tennis, bridge or going to tea parties. She didn’t mean to be a bad wife and mother. But running a house was of no interest to her and although we had a cook and several housemaids, she was disorganised and untidy and the meals were often late because she had failed to give any instructions. Sometimes she forgot meals altogether. Behind the cushion in the morning room was years’ worth of darning and mending. In desperation Father would sometimes sew on his own buttons. There were many arguments behind closed doors. And then ‘Aunt’ Prue offered to do some darning and mending. It was all a joke, of course; Mother was incorrigible, wasn’t she? Father became increasingly irritated and bad tempered; he only ever laughed when ‘Aunt’ Pru was around. In the end, he sent Mother packing and married Pru.
At the time, I could find no fault with Mother. I loved her very much and quite accepted that she was ‘far too busy’ or ‘exhausted’ to do either this or that, and therefore I went out of my way to avoid troubling her.
My make-believe world was everything. I made up endless stories and little plays, which I so enjoyed acting out with my few friends. I especially remember one occasion when I arranged for a group of children, three girls and a boy, who was to play the role of prince, to come to my house after school. We would rehearse in the front garden so as not to get in the way and I asked them to bring their own tea in the form of sandwiches, because Mother was sure to be too busy to provide anything for them, and in any case I dreaded the huffing and puffing irritation of Mother whenever I asked her for anything. But when Mother saw us, and the children’s jam sandwiches, curled and dry after a day at school, she looked momentarily ashamed and then turned her shame onto me.
‘Fancy asking them to bring sandwiches! Really, Rose! What will their mothers think? You should have asked them to tea. Don’t ever do anything like this again.’ Then she disappeared and still didn’t produce any tea for us, so it was just as well they had their sandwiches, dried up or not.
Yet later, some other time, not bedtime, because she never seemed to be around then, Mother said suddenly, kneeling on the floor and looking at me sadly, ‘You don’t have much of a life, do you?’ and I hadn’t understood at all. But a few days later she took me to see Sixty Glorious Years at the local cinema and that was one of the greatest moments of my childhood. I went home and dressed up in a long dress and put a veil over my head and looked in the mirror. Honestly, I’m telling you, I saw Queen Victoria looking back at me. ‘Mummy, Mummy! Look! I look exactly the same, don’t I?’
‘Oh yes! Exactly!’
Dreaming again! But the gnats were worrying and I shook my head suddenly, shaking the memories away at the same time. I didn’t want to think, and this sitting about with nothing to do was giving me time to think and the memories left me unsettled. I was detached from them and without any feelings, as if I was recalling some vague dream or story from a long-forgotten book. Sometime after the accident someone had said how angry I must feel, but I didn’t. I had no energy for anger. But perhaps one day there would be an almighty explosion. Maybe I would explode or implode or something-plode. Something. Sometime.
I used to be only too capable of losing my temper and I do remember with great satisfaction the morning when I threw my cooked breakfast of fried bread and tomatoes on the floor in front of Mother and some guests who were staying, because she had promised me fried egg and had laughed secretly with her friends when I showed my disappointment. It was wonderful that rush of blind temper, so sudden, so uncontrolled. Where did it come from? I even surprised myself as I saw the red, oozing tomatoes squashed into the dining-room carpet and I can see their stupid, stunned faces even now. Mother didn’t laugh then. I had power. I was powerful. I was someone to be reckoned with. My punishment was to go back to bed and miss breakfast altogether. But boy, was it worth it! How often I longed to do something like that again. Did it cross my mind that I would do something at the monastery? Of course not.