When I was a child we used to play with toys called Magic Slates. There was a coloured cardboard frame, like a picture frame, which held a rectangle of carbon paper covered by a sheet of clear plastic. You had a writing implement like a short knitting needle, with which you inscribed the plastic sheet. Behind the clear panel, your secret writing appeared; then you pulled up a cardboard tab, swished up the ‘slate’, and the marks vanished.
The magic slate was a favourite toy of mine. I could write anything I liked, but if someone loomed into view I could disappear it in an instant. I wrote many thoughts and observations, and letters from an imaginary me to an imaginary someone. I believed I was doing it in perfect safety. But one day the light caught the surface at a certain angle, and when I held the slate away from me and turned it I saw that the pen left marks in the plastic sheet, like the tracks of writing on water. It would have been possible, with some labour and diligence, to discover the words even after they had been erased. After that I left aside the magic slate. I didn’t dare to risk it. Even now I have a horror of someone standing behind my desk and looking over my shoulder as the words appear on the screen. There is a place, a gap, a hiatus, between the hatching words, flinching and raw, and those that are ready to take their place in the world, words that are ready to stand up and fight.
If people ask my advice about writing I say, don’t show your work before you’re ready. They understand this, and are glad to be given permission to be cautious. I should add, don’t do your work before you’re ready. Just because you have an idea for a story doesn’t mean you’re ready to write it. You may have to creep towards it, dwell with it, grow up with it: perhaps for half your lifetime. That piece of advice—to delay, hold off—is harder to accept. The obvious question is this: how can you tell when the moment has come? I have hesitated for such a long time before beginning this narrative. For a long time I felt as if someone else were writing my life. I seemed able to create or interpret characters in fiction, but not able to create or interpret myself. About the time I reached mid-life, I began to understand why this was. The book of me was indeed being written by other people: by my parents, by the child I once was, and by my own unborn children, stretching out their ghost fingers to grab the pen. I began this writing in an attempt to seize the copyright in myself.
Perhaps I would have written it sooner if I had thought I could trust the magic slate, but after I was six or seven concealment became my habit. My thoughts remained in my head, multiplying, buzzing like bluebottles in a box.
If you stand at the end of our yard at Bankbottom, and look uphill, you can see the place where they’re building the flats. They are two-storey, with pebble-dash on the outside. They are a novelty, and novelty is suspect; few people in Hadfield have thought of living without stairs. There are council houses at the upper end of the settlement, built for people from Manchester who had been displaced by the war. ‘She comes from the council houses, you know,’ is the phrase used; which means, roughly, lock up your spoons. I guess the council houses have superior sanitation—indoor lavatories, hot water, baths perhaps—and the Hadfield people are always anxious to sneer at anyone who they think might be going soft.
My mother lights up with indignation when she speaks of the new flats, and her incandescent hair glows around her head. ‘It’s scandalous! It’s ridiculous! They’re moving them in before the light fittings have been put up! No curtain rails between the lot of them.’
I take Evelyn down to the end of the yard. I lead her in a game, called ‘Talking About the New Flats’. We put our hands on our hips. We stare furiously over the wall (the very wall where Tibby used to run, Tibby the Protestant cat). We shout, ‘It’s scandalous. It’s ridiculous! No curtains rails between the lot of them!’
Evelyn tires of the game. She wants to play ballet school. I stay on, shouting. I wonder if, really, my mother would like one of the flats. But no Catholics can get them; that is generally known.
A few weeks on, a little girl comes to our yard and says she is from the flats and wants to play. Her name is Heather. She is pretty and respectable, but what sort of name is that? A little boy comes. He is weedy and small. He begs to play with us. How can we refuse him, Evelyn asks passionately; his age is six and three-quarters! His age does not impress me. I walk away. He runs after me and cries, and says if he can play with us he will do anything, we can hide and he will permanently seek. He will give us a penny if he can play with us: threepence. The more he raises the sum the more disdainful I appear. In the end I turn my back and walk away. Two women are standing on their back doorsteps and marvel at my hard sectarian heart. I say to Evelyn, over my shoulder, You play with him, if you want! I don’t play with boys.
Boys are what I have to fight at school. If you can’t join them, beat them. I am out of the babies’ class and released from the stinking stone pen beside the latrines, out into the broad playground under the dripping trees. I come home and say, ‘Grandad, a big boy hit me.’ He says, ‘Lovie, now I’ll teach you how to fight.’ He teaches fair tactics, nothing low. But when the next fight comes, I walk away with a different result. It’s too easy! Punch to solar plexus, big boy folds. His head is within range. ‘As you please now,’ Grandad says, ‘keep it easy, no need to make a fist. Try a big slap across the chops.’ I do it. Tears spring from the eyes of the big boy. He reels, clutching his diaphragm, away from the railings. Oh Miss, she hit me, she hit me!
I am amazed: less by my performance, than by his; his alarming wails, his bawls. I don’t want to do this again unless I have to, I decide. In only a year I will have to go to confession and learn to examine my conscience. What I am experiencing is the beginning of compunction; but is it the awakening of a sense of sin, or is it the beginning of femininity? Do boys have compunction? I don’t think so. Knights errant? They have compunction for all the weak and oppressed. Shame, is somewhere among my feelings about this incident. I don’t know who it belongs to: to me, or the boy I’ve beaten, or some ghostly, fading boy I still carry inside.
Later, when I am a big girl, ten years old, a true bully arises in our own class. He is a short boy with shorn hair, and his name is Gary, which is a bully name if ever you heard one. He is broad, white, muscled, compact, and made of rubber. He takes my beret and throws it in the ditch. I declare I will make war on him. You can’t bash Gary C! the little girls say. I go after him, pale with fury, spitting with wrath. He stands his ground. I strike out. My fists sink into his torso and bounce back. The feeling is curiously soothing. I need have no conscience about him. He’s made of some substance denser than flesh. I suppose he hits me back, but it doesn’t hurt. By now, ten, I am disconnecting from my body. It has no capabilities and no capacities, except to be in the way, to be where it’s not wanted. Gary’s like a creature the knight meets in a forest, you lop its head off and it regrows. He’s a monster. My breath comes hard, my heart hammers. I’m trapped in a joke with no space between the set-up and the punchline. Thud, thud, thud. ‘Have you heard this one?’ Thud, thud, thud. ‘Two monsters are having a boxing match.’
For a while, at six, I cling to the prospect of a man’s life. I play with the cleverest girl in the class, whose name is Jacqueline. Naturally she takes the name Jack, and I am Bill. The game is called ‘Men’ and the good thing is that even when we aren’t actually playing it we can use these secret names. But Jacqueline tells me, ‘You don’t talk like us’ and stops bothering with me. Of course I don’t talk like them; they are a race of varlets, base knaves and curs. I begin bothering with the Italian children, and the ones who at home speak refugees’ languages, a flax-blonde Ukrainian child and a huddle of darned and desolate Poles. I try to interest another girl in the game of Men. She is a shy, speechless child called Margaret, whose face is permanently scarlet from some inner humiliation. As her name she selects ‘Walter’. It is what her father is called. I can’t explain why this is no good. ‘Walter’, it proves, never does anything manly. The whole excitement is confined to ‘Walter comes home for his tea’. So the game of Men is left off.
It is time for me to take up skipping instead. I don’t want to but I have to try. I’d rather turn the rope and say the rhyme than skip. In hopscotch, another game, I should have the advantage because I have such beautiful stones to skim. One day before I was born (so my mother says) my grandmother took against the marble washstand, blaming it for being old-fashioned. She ordered it out of the house and said to my grandad, ‘Smash it up, George!’ Pieces of marble are still embedded in the dirt of the backyard. I dig them up and they make hopscotches that are heavy in the hand, white as a rock of sugar and smooth as ice. Where do they go, these wonderful stones? I suppose I give them away, so that people will leave me alone. The game is better than skipping, but I find that when I try to stand on one leg, the pressure of my thoughts pushes me over.
Evelyn and I get a football and kick it at the coalsheds. She would like to be Manchester United, but I explain that Protestants can only be Manchester City. She wins, all the same; the days of playing ballet school, without me, have left her fleet-footed. But what does it profit her? She has to go to Brownies. She has to get her Darning Badge. She can’t darn. She weeps in frustration just thinking about it. Evelyn has a party for her sixth birthday. There are two guests, her and me. We get overexcited and knock over our fizzy drinks: or rather, I do. Our drink is called Cyd-Apple: related to cider, but for those of a small age. I think about the glass I lost, and feel aggrieved. Later in life I drink cider, but the dry, still taste is musty, as if the glass had been kept in a cupboard for twenty years.
Overexcited is bad, fidget is bad; obedient is good. Mr and Mrs Aldous have a television set. I go down to watch the children’s serial. It is The Secret Garden. The curtains are pulled, so the black-and-white picture stands out more; we lie on the rug, chins on our hands, like children in picture books, like illustrations of ourselves. We don’t fidget at all, but I live in terror that Mr Aldous will come home before the end of the episode, will grow in from the street with his nodular, fibrous arms. At the end of many weeks I have saved up the entire story. I go home and announce it to my mother: The Secret Garden, here is that story. It spools out and out of my mouth, narrative, dialogue and commentary. She looks stunned. We are in the kitchen, but not the kitchen at Bankbottom. This is Brosscroft, another house entirely.
After the disappointment over the flats, my mother says, ‘I’m getting us a house!’ She goes to the bank for her savings. We go uphill to Brosscroft. My mother says, this is the house I have got.
There are steps up to the massive front door. Inside everything is painted in dark green. The kitchen has bare stone flags. There are gas mantles on the wall.
When I go there again, it is the day we move in. I am moving in with my mother and father and brother Ian, my younger brother being still unborn. It takes five minutes to run down the hill to Bankbottom, but still, it is a change and I am not sure I am prepared for it. The house is no longer dark-green. The front room has striped wallpaper, grey and white with a pinstripe of what we call maroon. The colour of the paintwork, my mother says, is French Beige. There is a huge old-fashioned range in the front room, but my mother says she’ll soon get that knocked out. As in my grandmother’s house, we will only heat one room. Hot water is got by boiling kettles. But the lavatory is our own and is not exactly outside either; it is just off a draughty stone-flagged room called ‘the Glass Place’, behind the kitchen. There is a private yard with a patch of grass, and high walls up which the storshions will grow. Beyond the yard is a garden. It is huge, my mother says, with the fields beyond it. When it is cleared we will be able to understand its dimensions. At the moment, the tangled bushes are head-high, when your head’s as high as mine. I can’t even see to the end of it.
The night we move in, the big square kitchen is a patch of light, yellow light against the chaos outside. There is chill in the air, and my mother is busy at the table, putting together a first meal. Henry, she says, the knife! It is the black-handled knife, the bread-knife, with its hair-thin blade. It has been left behind at Bankbottom; and that is my knife, she says.
It is true. It is the knife I am used to seeing in her hand. Henry strides out, into the blue twilight, in his black-and-white tweed coat. My mother goes to the new stove, and then peers into the dark cupboard where the gas meter is kept. The gas is turned off, she says, I will have to—No! I say. I stop her hand. I beg her. No, no, don’t do it. Don’t turn on the gas before my daddy comes back. Gas, sue, sue, gas, hiss, hiss, bang. I am begging and beseeching. I can’t tell her my reason. Please no, wait for him, let him do it, please: it’s for men. I am in the first killing crisis of my life and unable to explain how to avert it. She looks at me, a long considering look: ‘All right,’ she says. I am as astonished as she was, when I recited the entire Secret Garden at a stroke. All right? I take a breath. I can hardly believe any adult will take notice of me, I can scarcely believe our lives are to be saved.
I am slightly afraid that, anyway, the house will blow up; in that case, we will all explode together. But when Henry comes back, cheerful and chilled, the knife under his jacket, alles in Ordnung. Man switches on gas. No one sued. No one dead. No mysterious escapes, no invisible presences.
Mum pins an Elvis picture on the kitchen wall. Elvis is in his army uniform. Every day I see his fat-lipped sloe-eyed dumbness. It’s not what you do, I think; you should like your husband best. I know it’s all wrong, all gone wrong: and going worse, day by day.
I am beside myself with interest in the baby, Ian. I tap on the side of his pram a certain rhythm, like rudimentary code, child to child: dot-dot-dot-dot? He turns his blue eyes on me, and taps back: dash dash. Lying on his back, he kicks out the rhythm with his heels. ‘This baby has almost kicked his pram through,’ my mother says in horror, ‘with the pounding of his great powerful feet.’ When he tries to walk, I support him like an old comrade with a battlefield casualty, propping him under his armpits when he sags. His knees point outwards, his legs bow under the power of his body, and I bounce him back on course by the straps of his romper suit: ‘Frog, March to the Frying Pan!’ I sing. I don’t know why. I have heard of it as a song, and it seems apt. I don’t have any ill will towards him: only the opposite. He becomes my occupation, my hobby, my cause. I have heard of children who are jealous, I am sure that is not me. People laugh that if he falls on me he will kill me. I am a tiny doll creature with red smiling lips, stick limbs, and fair hair: an innocent abroad, a dumb broad, a feather on the breath of God.
When I am six years old I am put to bed in my parents’ room at Brosscroft. So far only one bedroom of the house is habitable. The baby’s cot stands against the window wall, the double bed occupies the centre of the room, my small cream-painted bed is nearest the door. I lie under a tartan rug and my fingers twist and plait its fringe; plait, untwist, plait again: the wool is rough against my fingertips. I will myself into dreaming; I think about Red Indians and about Jesus, because Jesus is a thing I am exhorted to think about and I try, I do try. I think about my tepee, my tomahawk, my stocky bay horse who is standing even now, a striped blanket thrown over his back, ready to gallop me over the plains, into the red and dusty West. Then I think about how, downstairs perhaps even at this moment, my mother is putting on her coat and picking up her bag.
I believe she will leave in the night, abandon me. We should never have come to this house; we should have stayed as we were, with Grandma and Grandad down at Bankbottom. Everything has gone wrong, so wrong that I don’t know how to express it or understand it; I know that anyone who can flee disaster should do so, leaving the weak, the old and the babies behind in the wreckage. My mother is smart and fit and I think she will run, and take her chance on another life, a better life elsewhere: some princess place, where her real family lives. With her ready smiles and her glowing sunset head, she does not belong here, in these enclosing shadows: in these rooms that have filled silently with unseen, hostile observers.
My father puts the baby to bed; this hour, when he is upstairs with the baby and me, seems like the time she would run. I think that, although it will almost kill me, I can bear it if I know the moment she goes, if I hear the front door close after her. But I can’t bear it if I go downstairs in the morning to a cold and empty kitchen—warmed only by Elvis, his fat face glowing like the rising sun.
So I lie awake, listening, long after my father has crept downstairs, listening by the glow of the night-light to the sounds of the house. In the morning I am too tired to get up, but I must go to school or else I will be sued. My arms and legs ache with a singing pain. The doctor says it is growing pains. One day I find I cannot breathe. The doctor says if I didn’t think about breathing I’d be able to do it. Frankly, he’s sick of being asked what’s wrong with me. He calls me Little Miss Neverwell. I am angry. I don’t like being given a name. It’s too much like power over me.
Persons shouldn’t name you. Rumpelstiltskin.
Jack comes to visit us. He comes for his tea. These teas seem to be separate extra meals, in the big kitchen when the lights are on and the wild gardens fade into a dark bloom. We cook strange, frivolous dishes: dip eggs suddenly into bubbling fat, so that they fizz up like sea creatures, puff into pearls with translucent whitish legs. Is Jack coming today? I ask. Oh good. I am looking for someone to marry. It’s a business I want to get settled up. I hope Jack might do, though it is a pity he is not my relative. He is just someone we know.
Down at Bankbottom, they are talking about the latest novelty from Rome: the Pope says you can marry your second cousin! That means, people say, that Ilary could marry…if she wanted, of course…then they turn up various names of people I haven’t heard of. I wish I had heard of them: I am keen for intelligence of these candidates; I am, I already know, the kind of person who would marry back into my own family, to keep us all together, to guarantee me a supply of familiar people, great-uncles needing Cheshire cheese, great-aunts with hats discussing in low voices while wielding their spoons over bowls of tinned peaches. I have a great-uncle who was in a military prison, ‘our Joe he is red-hot Labour,’ my grandmother says; I have a great-aunt who for money sold her long golden hair. Why are they great-uncles and great-aunts? Where is the next generation? Where are their children? Never born, or dead as babies. Poverty, my mother says, pneumonia. I write down, ‘pneumonia’. I don’t know it is an illness, I think it is a cold wind that blows.
One day Jack comes for his tea and doesn’t go home again. ‘Is he never going home?’ I say. Night falls, on this new dispensation; it falls and falls on me. In subsequent weeks I become enraged, and am thrown into the Glass Place. Jack and my mother sit in the kitchen. I jump at the kitchen window and make faces at them. They draw the curtains and laugh. I try to crash the back door, but they have bolted it.
I stamp and rage, outside in the cold. Rumpelstiltskin is my name.
You should not judge your parents. Mostly—this is the condition of parents—they were doing the best they could. They were addled and penniless and couldn’t afford lawyers, they were every man’s hand against them, they were—when you do the arithmetic—pathetically young. They couldn’t see the wood for the trees or the way through the week from Monday to Friday. They were in love or they were enraged, they were betrayed or bitterly, bitterly disappointed, and just like our own generation they clutched at any chance to make it right, to make a change, to get a second chance: they beat off the fetters of logic and they gathered themselves up in weakness and despair and they spat in the eye of fate. This is what parents do. They believe love conquers all, or why would they have children, why would they have you? You should not judge your parents.
When you are six, seven, you do not know this. I feel that I myself have been judged: that I have committed an unnamed offence: that I have been sentenced, and that some unspecified penalty will be exacted, at short notice. Sued, gas, sued, hiss, dead.
This is the worst time in my life: days of despair. I am back on the pier at Blackpool, with the screaming gulls and the wind, looking down into the boiling sea. Words swirl over my head, words of loathing and contempt. A great hand lifts me; it is the hand of the law. And here is my punishment, coming now, coming now; I feel the rush of air against my face. The law picks me up into the wind, the law lets me go; I fall through space, and on the rocks my head smashes open like an egg. The sea drinks my yellow blood.
On a Saturday morning at Brosscroft I come down early and to my surprise Grandad is there. He is in the stone-shelved pantry, where the air is cold even in August. His tools are laid out there, because he’s been helping fix up the house, but now he is wiping them and slotting them away in their canvas cradles. ‘What are you doing, Grandad?’ I say.
He says, ‘Sweetheart, I am packing these up, and going home.’
I walk away, my heart sinking.
In the kitchen my mother grabs me. ‘What did he say to you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What?’ She is burning, her cheeks flushed, her hair a conflagration. ‘Nothing? You mean he didn’t speak to you?’
I see some furious new row in the making. I answer, without spirit, taking refuge in the literal: like the stupid messenger, bringing the bad news twice. ‘He said what he was doing. He said, sweetheart, I am packing these up, and going home.’
Grandad walks away, down to Bankbottom, his spine unyielding, his neck stiff. Somewhere in the house a door slams. Glass trembles in its frames. Cupboards creak, the new mirror in the front room rattles its chain against its nail. The stairhead is lightless, the dead centre of the house. I think I see someone turning the corner, down the corridor to the bedroom where my father Henry now sleeps in a single bed. The walls are yellow in that room and the curtains half drawn.
What happens now? We are talked about in the street. Some rules have been broken. A darkness closes about our house. The air becomes jaundiced and clotted, and hangs in gaseous clouds over the rooms. I see them so thickly that I think I am going to bump my head on them.
Now the two boys sleep in the main bedroom, the largest in my cream bed and the smallest in his cot. I am moved into my father’s room, which is the yellow room down the passage. There is no natural light in the passage, only an overhead bulb that, by casting shadows, seems to thicken the murk rather than disperse it. I never walk but run between the stairhead and my bed. Our two puppies cry in the night. They are frightened. The man who comes to paint the stairhead is frightened, but I am not supposed to overhear about that.
The door key is missing. The house is turned over for it. Every surface is checked and every drawer. The floor is crawled with padding hands and sensitive knees. All visitors—but there are not many—have their brains trounced about it and their movements thoroughly interrogated. Some two days pass, and the key returns, placed on top of the china cabinet, dead centre.
My mother stops going out to the shops. Only my godmother comes and goes between our house and Bankbottom. The children at school question me about our living arrangements, who sleeps in what bed. I don’t understand why they want to know but I don’t tell them anything. I hate going to school. Often I am ill with my growing pains and the breathing I am not supposed to think about and the high fever that is the same as I had in Blackpool, and raging headaches that leave me hollow-eyed. When I go back to school after a few days nobody seems to know me and behind my own back I have gone up a class. The new teacher is called Miss Porter. I don’t understand how she writes down the arithmetic. I’ve missed something. I put up my hand and say I don’t understand. She stares at me in incredulity. Don’t understand? Don’t understand? What broil or civil mutiny is this? Why don’t I just copy from the child next to me, like all the other little sillies? ‘You don’t understand?’ she repeats, her eyes popping with indignation. There is an outbreak of screeching giggles and adenoidal snorting.
Miss Porter is gone very soon. My ignorance remains.
Summer comes: my grandparents take me on a day trip to Blackpool. Along the promenade there are glass-walled shelters, with benches; it is in these that visitors spend most of their summers, shrinking from the wind and rain. I have no sooner set my foot on the pavements of the town than I begin to shiver and burn. My eyes close against the light and I feel as if their surfaces have been scrubbed with sand. I spend the long afternoon of a rare sunny day, stretched full length on one of the benches with my head on my grandmother’s lap; my new straw basket, with its bright daisy pattern, lies useless by my side. When I get home it is discovered that I am incubating measles. A year or two later, we will go to Blackpool en famille, in Jack’s car. That evening I will return to Brosscroft semi-conscious, the stars spinning over my head as they lift me, limp, from the back seat, and carry me up the steps to the house.
We will have our days out in Southport after that, the car deep in the sand dunes, morosely cooking chips over a primus stove.
After Miss Porter went, a person new to the school took over the class. Let us call her Mrs Stevens; she was a ginger creature with bristling hair and prominent shinbones. She was also a Protestant. This was a peculiar thing, a Protestant teacher. Someone else had to teach us catechism, which occupied the first hour of the day. It was a soft and sweet subject; on the blackboard you drew an M on top of a W, which made the shape of the wings of an angel, and was to remind you that an angel was a Mind and a Will.
What came next was much cruder. At ten o’clock Mrs Stevens charged in, bristling. She swung from her fist a big tartan shopping bag; though the tartan was, I suppose, unknown to any clan. On that first day, we were unprepared for the whirlwind that was to tear us up. Mrs Stevens didn’t know our names. She didn’t know our provenance. She didn’t know the thing that we held in reverence, which was called Where We Are Up To. Our squared books were given out as usual. They kept our sums running carefully down the page, the faint blue lines squaring off the hundreds, the tens and the units. But Mrs Stevens didn’t agree with columns. We had to work the sums horizontally, just as they were printed in our textbook. At the sight of vertical jotting, however surreptitious, she shot down the aisle and slapped you.
Mrs Stevens wrote on the board ‘Problems’; and after it, a short story without a climax or moral. A man goes into a shop and buys fruit, a man fills a bucket, a man takes a train to a station to a distance of fifteen miles. A woman never did anything, you observed at once; and it wasn’t a story; it wasn’t a joke: it was—breathe it!—a sum. The knowledge penetrated the classroom in a low despairing hiss, spreading from the mites at the back to the one at the front. ‘No talking!’ cried Mrs Stevens. People began to cry. They began to knuckle their little heads. She didn’t even print, but did Real Writing, which is what we called it when you joined the letters: and we weren’t up to joining up! When it came to the part of the day called Reading, she expected us to follow when one child read out loud, and take up where he left off. Previously, we had thought of reading as a private activity, perhaps shared with the teacher, perhaps sweated over alone. But now it was to be communal. Communal was not much use, when some of us were up to ‘Far & Wide Reader Green Book Four’, while others were still mastering Letters up to D.
My first opinion of Mrs Stevens was that she was insane. My grandfather had told me that an ancestor of his had once walked the whole night, over the Derbyshire moors, with a man he later discovered to be an escaped lunatic. When I found that Mrs Stevens, who like me went home for her dinner, was in the habit of wending down Woolley Bridge Road at ten minutes past one, I would join her, and say, ‘Miss, can I carry your bag?’ I was interested by the way she had to force herself to smile. No anatomical operations seemed mechanical to me. I was interested by the way her shin bones went before the rest of her legs, the calf muscle flapping behind.
I suppose that, if there’d been anyone around to see, carrying her bag might have seemed sycophantic. So far as I was concerned, it was a diagnostic ploy. It had no bearing on the way she treated me, once we got back to the schoolroom: shouting and hitting. But on those journeys, she didn’t talk to me; I talked to her. ‘Oh yes?’ she would say, and, ‘Oh have you?’ These minimal responses seemed correct, from her thin lips. I don’t know what I told her. My thoughts on God? How to spell Worcester? God and strange spellings were my preoccupations, around that time.
There are plenty of teachers, I am sure, who pretend to like children and don’t. Mrs Stevens didn’t even pretend. My mother, who was interested in my progress, took a periodical called Child Education. Sometimes, for my benefit, she pinned up dull little pictures out of it, monochrome beside the flagrant bronze of Elvis. Mrs Stevens also had access to this magazine, and while we sat dumbfounded she read us articles out of it, about tadpoles and caterpillars. This was called Nature Study. It was good enough for grubs like us; outside, the rain hissed down on moorland and street, and small drenched things scuttled for cover, on two legs or four.
In those days—which to people born after the nineteen fifties must seem impossibly deprived and frightening, like the days of the Holy Inquisition—children were forbidden from speaking for most of the hours of the school day, unless they were asked a direct question, and thus required and indeed commanded to speak. Mrs Stevens introduced a further disability: if our hands were not employed in some specific, authorised activity, we were to sit with our arms folded behind our backs. This posture—which is as near as you can get to a natural strait-jacket—drove me to an extreme of tearful frustration. It shackled my brain and bound my hands, separated my Mind from my Will. I came home and said, she ought not to be able to do it. But no one can have been listening; they were listening to something else, at the time.
Soon I no longer carried her bag or walked with her down the road to school. Instead I followed her, a shadow, watching her faded ginger head bob above the collar of her coat that pretended to be fur: like a head on a platter. At first we children had talked about her, in amazed and pitiful tones; then we stopped talking. We were drawn, as a group, as a class, into a shamed secrecy, observing how she liked to drag up the boys’ short trousers to slap the tops of their thighs, and pull up the girls’ skirts; there was a buzz in the air which was not innocent. She would threaten us with a ‘twankey,’ which I thought must be some Protestant word; I understood what she meant, though. Once she shouted at a child to ‘bend over,’ in front of the class, and I noted how his spine became wood, and he was incapable of obeying or not obeying. She shouted the command again, then slapped him anyway.
Children were beaten, in our village, sometimes grotesquely. I was hardly out of the babies’ class when on a Monday morning a little girl with a face the colour of paper whispered to me, ‘On Sat’day our dad beat our Ann till she bled.’ And I knew our Ann, who was, like her younger sister, a child so pallid and frail that you wouldn’t think there was any blood inside her. I felt my man’s spirit aroused, my ardour clenching inside my chest like a fist within a mailed glove. Saddle my charger: I’ll canter up their street and decapitate him. My sword arm twitched, and I pictured one lazy, scything stroke, myself hardly breaking sweat; then the head, bouncing downhill over the cobbles. I sat shivering, my eyes closed, behind my table; I was six and the lesson was sums, the day sunny. In Hadfield, as everywhere in the history of the world, violence without justification or apology was meted out by big people to small. But there were rules. Strangers didn’t hit you, only your family. Protestants didn’t hit you, they had no authority over you; that was (in my mind) an established fact of life. I saw that the situation was impossible, and that, if necessary, Mrs Stevens would have to be slain.
As soon as I thought this, my fear became extreme. I trembled when she spoke to me; but what made me even more queasy than my own fear was the fear she inspired in others. I don’t know if there is a case on record of a child of seven murdering a schoolteacher, but I think there ought to be, and in a way I would respect myself much more if I had done the deed; I was determined, already, to distinguish myself in my generation. But picture my situation. I am seven and becoming realistic. I know I cannot act alone. As long as a year ago, I had given up the possibility of forming a band of gallant knights, or even mustering a company of men-at-arms, to lie in wait behind the hedgerows, to swoop down between the black trees above the church.
I am seven, only seven. Fever hits me again, knocking me out of the saddle. I rise from bed each time more etiolated, my eyes paler. My hair is growing again, but I know it is always under threat when the thermometer begins to creep up the scale. To console me for being an invalid, I get ‘Alice’ to read. I read both her adventures but I prefer The Looking Glass. It is easy to imagine myself passing through a mirror, every cell of my body thinning, stretching, becoming transparent, forming and re-forming in some other dimension.
The three households are still divided, 56 and 58 Bankbottom against 20 Brosscroft. I come and go, eating my morning toast at Brosscroft, having my midday dinner at Bankbottom with Grandma, and at the end of the school day, swaying and fatigued, climbing the hill to have my tea in the Brosscroft kitchen, listening out for the front door, for the sound of my father Henry sliding in, for the squeak of the handbrake as Jack’s car pulls up on the hill outside. No one quarrels, no one cries—only me; no words are exchanged; the situation remains unspoken, indefinite. My godmother brings the meat and the loaves, because my mother no longer goes to the butcher or the baker; she makes do with the Brosscroft corner shop, where the proprietor is kind. She no longer goes to Mass on Sunday, or indeed anywhere at all. In the evening she and Jack occupy the big kitchen, my father the front room; but mostly the men seem to time their comings and goings to miss each other. At the weekend Jack goes out and hacks savagely at the undergrowth of the garden, till he has hacked it down and the view is plain, from the Glass Place at the back of the kitchen to the crumbling back fence, to the fields beyond, and beyond the fields the rising ground of the moors. When the weather is wet, he strips off wallpaper and burns away layers of paint. He works in a fury, his sallow muscular body dripping with sweat.
But the spirits gather thickly in the half-finished house, falling from their places in the glass-fronted cupboards to the right of the fireplace, waking and stretching from their sooty slumbers behind the demolished range. They discharge from the burnt walls in puffs, they are scraped into slivers as the old wallpaper peels away, and lie curled on the floors, mocking the bristle brush. Our daily life is hushed, driven into corners. We move in a rush between the house’s safe areas, and the ones less safe, where, as you enter a room, you get the impression that someone is waiting for you. The dogs, who are no longer puppies, squeal with fear in the night. My mother comes down to them, shivering in her nightdress, and sees their hackles raised, their thin forms shrinking against the dawn light. One night, I hear my mother and Jack, discussing. I am lurking in the cold Glass Place, coming in from the lavatory. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘so? So what do you think it is?’ Her voice rises, in an equal blend of challenge, fear and scorn. ‘What do you think it is? Ghosts?’
She has spoken my thoughts: which I thought were unspeakable. The hairs rise on the back of my neck. I do not know the word ‘horripilation’. But imagine how pleased I would be, if I did.
Outside the house, what passes for life goes on. I am seven, I have reached the age of reason. Like every other little Catholic body, I must take the sacraments, penance and Holy Communion. No problem! I am great in theology.
I had begun practising as a parish priest at five years old. I used to walk with measured tread the length of the backyard, my eyes cast down, my hands folded over my heart, and I would tap sadly at Annie Connor’s back door, and say, Mrs Connor, now, I’ve come for your confession. I believe there’s something you’re very sorry for, and I’m just here now to forgive you.
‘Oh come in Father,’ she would say. ‘Would you like a chocolate biscuit?’ Then, rolling her eyes in penitence, ‘Oh, Father, I have been swearing!’
‘Now that’s very well, Mrs Connor,’ I would say, ‘but didn’t you say the same last month?’
‘I did, I did,’ she would admit. ‘But Father, don’t be too hard, for I’ve a lot to make me swear.’
The doctrine of transubstantiation caused me no headache. I was not surprised to find that a round wafer was the body of Jesus Christ. I’d been saying for years that things like this occurred, if people would only notice. Spaniel and cow fused their nature, so did man and plant: look at Mr Aldous, his milky stalks for arms. Girl could change to boy: though this had not happened to me, and I knew now it never would.
When the day of Holy Communion came, I was amazed at how the body of Christ pasted itself to my front teeth and furred my hard palate. It was like eating smog. St Catherine of Siena said that when she took the host into her mouth she could feel the bones of Jesus crunching between her teeth. She must have been a very imaginative sort of nun.
It was a good thing I’d been studying for the priesthood. Otherwise, it was a great deal to take in at one go: the knowledge of the black soul wiped clean at confession, but then dirtying itself, by the mere accident of thought, by the time you were five minutes down the road from church. ‘Mrs Connor,’ I’d say, ‘can you think of another sin?’
But then my great-aunt would reach out and grip my hands, and we’d be jumping and singing:
Oh I met with Napper Tandy and he took me by the hand,
He said how is Old Ireland, and how does old Ireland stand?
It’s the most distressful countree, that ever yet was seen.
They’re hanging men and women for the wearing of the green.
For a long time, I thought Napper Tandy was something like a great-uncle. I thought he might show his face one day, creaking up from the bus stop and wanting a sandwich.
Once I’d got the other side of the sacraments, I found that trying to be good wore me out and frayed my temper. It involved scrupulous vigilance, over your thoughts as well as your conduct, and it went on for all the hours that you were awake and struck in again if you woke in the night. I was spiritually ambitious: sure route to failure, but I didn’t know it then. I wanted an unspotted soul, a soul edged with light, like a clean but open window. It must be achieved, I thought, in calm, in stillness: as if the window opened over a blue lake, with white gulls gliding. It must be achieved among quiet people, whose speech was rare and thoughtful, whose every action was considered. I missed my grandad’s methodical ways, and wished he would bring them back to Brosscroft, where the phantoms flapped and churned the air. For each task—turning mattresses, making pickles, mending a shoe—he would put on the appropriate apron, black or white canvas. He hummed as he worked, a civil hiss under his breath. He had retired from the railways, got his gold watch. It was an honourable retirement, and as an amateur pursuit he stoked the Co-op boiler; I visited him, in the shadowy underground cavern that housed it, stinking like hell’s antechamber. You reached it by turning off the ordinary street and descending surprisingly few steps; but you had to know it was there, for only his authorised assistants could find the door. I didn’t take hellfire seriously. I had some idea what would be the extent of the devil’s coal bill.
Sometimes, of an evening, he patrolled down the road to amuse himself with the boiler at the Conservative Club, to cast an eye over its workings. He was a man in excellent standing, and as he strolled about the streets—which, unlike the rest of the family, he did freely—he met other elderly men who, breaking their own stately pace, would tip their caps to him and say, ‘How dost, Judd?’ Then they might cross the road, and speak of boilers they had stoked, engines that had run sweetly: machine-guns that had never jammed, thanks to the oiled ministrations of Sergeant Foster. Their voices summoned the pliant squeak of leather, the click of metal peg into its greased groove, and the dense smell of alien soil.
In a bar somewhere in the near east, Judd Foster sat down with a man called Kemal Ataturk, who told him what he meant to do for his native country. In Jerusalem, he was requested to join an ancient lodge of Freemasons: which he refused, rather shocked. He sailed into St Paul’s Bay on a Sunday morning; peals of bells rang out over the waters, and as he looked up he saw the faithful hurrying to Mass, down the steep hills between the white houses. It is a sight, he said, I shall never forget. In the zoo at Cairo, he saw the rhinoceros.
Now he went about the house at Bankbottom, subdued and orderly, and as he worked it was Catholic hymns he sang to himself: ‘Mother of Christ, star of the sea, pray for the wanderer, pray for me.’ In my earlier childhood, I assisted him (as he was a convert) by carrying about a big wooden crucifix that I’d found in a bedroom cupboard. ‘I’m just practising, Grandad,’ I’d say. ‘For when I’m an altar boy and I’ve to carry this at Corpus Christi.’
In his religion there was Harvest Festival. Someone had told me that it was pagan. Pagans and heathens were a dubious thing altogether, condemned to a state called limbo when they passed away, together with all the little babies who died before they were baptised, of pneumonia and other causes: that cold wind that blows, that blows away salvation. It was not fair but life was not fair. Life is not bloody fair: so Jack says. Jack shouts: he feels ill used by fate. When he visited us at first, he used to stand in the kitchen at Brosscroft and play his mouth organ, leg kicking in time to the beat. He didn’t regard Elvis, smirking behind him on the wall. Jack is a Protestant, or at least not a Catholic; this doesn’t seem to bother my mother. In the army, he says, you had to give your religion. You couldn’t say, none: if you did, they put you down as C of E.
He tells me a story while my mother combs out the tangles in my hair. His voice shakes, he is nervous. Like me, like the dogs, he is always listening, straining to catch a footstep overhead, a sound at the door. The whites of his eyes are yellowish, round the mild caramel of his pupils; he has had jaundice, my mother says. One day, when I am standing outside the front door to have my photograph taken, in my white dress for one of the Feasts of the Church, a Protestant boy across the road points and jeers at me. Jack flies across the street as if he were launched off a springboard. He is snarling, his arm drawn back, the thick edge of his hand like a hatchet. The boy backs off, holds up his hands; he runs. Jack recrosses the road, scowling, purposive; I omit to thank him. So that, I think, is what it would be like if I were Jack’s little girl.
Once a year, at school and church, we had Mission Sunday, when we sang about Africans and Indians. We called them Black Babies, and collected money for them. If you did well enough with fund-raising, you were allowed to own one. You could name it: I named my baby ‘Corinne’, a choice found perverse and, I suspect, scrubbed out from the forms immediately I turned my back. Clare Boylan has written a novel about a Black Baby who returns in later life to look up her owner. So I won’t write another: only say that during the week before Mission Sunday we sang special hymns, their tunes undistinguished but their words thrilling. ‘For the infant wives and widows, Babies hurried to their graves…’ How old did you need to be, to qualify as an infant wife? How did widowhood follow? And were the ‘babies hurried to their graves’ the wives themselves, or their children?
The fact is, I might have got the words wrong; I may be producing some travesty of what was on the hymn sheet. At eight, I give up hearing. Whenever anyone speaks to me I say, ‘What?’ While, irritated, they are repeating themselves, I gather myself, and recall to order the scattered pieces of my attention. Words are a blur to me; a moth’s wing, flitting about the lamp of meaning. My own thoughts go at a different speed from that of human conversation, about two and a half times as fast, so I am always scrambling backwards through people’s speech, to work out which bit of which question I am supposed to be answering. I continue my habit of covert looking, out of the corner of my eye, and take up the art of sensing through the tips of my fingers. The chess pieces now hop to my command. Henry and I sit by lamplight, in the front room of the house at Brosscroft. Babies upstairs are snorting in their sleep, my mother and Jack have gone
—where? Gone dancing? I don’t know. My long father sits folded into his chair, pushing wearily at a pawn; till on one inspired night, I ‘castle’ him, shuttling my king across two squares and bringing my rook into powerful, threatening play, grabbing the game’s advantage; and he leans forward, fascinated, and says, did you know you were allowed to do that? The truth is between yes and no. I am eight and not such a fool as I appear. I am hardly incapable of studying the game, studying it sneakily, to confound my own daddy; though I’d prefer he thinks the move has come to me out of the blue, and I smile with dazzled surprise, as my rook, sprung from its corner, moving like a tank across country, picks off his best defenders. It is important not to try to win; to be casual; to be easy. In the same way, carelessly, he leaves his library books for me to read: his yellow-jacketed Gollancz. I read Arthur Koestler, Reflections On Hanging. I learn from it; I incorporate it into my dreams. I dream I have murdered someone. It is better to know about the penalty, than not.
Everybody laughs at me, because I can’t hear, because I say, ‘what?’ My mother puts money on a horse called Mr What. It wins the Grand National.
In the days when I was still seven, after the first confession, the first communion, I walked to school down Woolley Bridge Road, with the sooty hedgerow on my left and the wall on my right, and beyond that wall the canning factory, where the slurries of unimaginable meats were processed into tins. My Guardian Angel followed, half a step behind, always and invisibly at my left shoulder. And God walked with me, I thought he did. You would imagine that I asked Him show Himself and put an end to the events at Brosscroft: the slammings of doors in the night, the great gusts of wind that roared through the rooms. But my idea of God was different. He was not a magician and should not be treated in that way; should not be asked to alter things and fix things, like some plumber or carpenter, like my grandad with his tools rolled in their canvas cradles. I had come to my own understanding of grace, the seeping channel between persons and God: the slow, green and silted canal, between a person and the god inside them. Every sense is graceful, an agent of grace: touch, smell, taste. The grace of music is not for a child who says, ‘What?’ My mother never plays the piano now, my father seldom; Jack is never seen to sit down to it, no doubt because he’s C of E. And I can’t carry a tune; I’m told brutally about this. I can’t sing fa soh la tee doh without singing flat. You can pray for grace, but it is a thing that creeps in unexpectedly, like a draught. It is a thing you can’t plan for. By not asking for it, you get it. For one year, I carried this knowledge, and carried a simple space for God inside me: a jagged space surrounded by light, a waiting space cut out of my solar plexus. I subsisted in this watchful waiting, a readiness. But what came wasn’t God at all.
Sometimes you come to a thing you can’t write. You’ve written everything you can think of, to stop the story getting here. You know that, technically, your prose isn’t up to it. You say then, very well: at least I know my limitations. So choose simple words; go slowly. But then you are aware that readers—any kind readers who’ve stayed with you—are bracing themselves for some revelation of sexual abuse. That’s the usual horror. Mine is more diffuse. It wrapped a strangling hand around my life, and I don’t know how, or what it was.
I am seven, and I am in the yard at Brosscroft; I am playing near the house, near the back door. Something makes me look up: some shift of the light. My eyes are drawn to a spot beyond the yard, beyond its gate, in the long garden. It is, let us say, some fifty yards away, among coarse grass, weeds and bracken. I can’t see anything, not exactly see: except the faintest movement, a ripple, a disturbance of the air. I can sense a spiral, a lazy buzzing swirl, like flies; but it is not flies. There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But its motion, its insolent shift, makes my stomach heave. I can sense—at the periphery, the limit of all my senses—the dimensions of the creature. It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, fifteen inches. The air stirs around it, invisibly. I am cold, and rinsed by nausea. I cannot move. I am shaking; as if pinned to the moment, I cannot wrench my gaze away. I am looking at a space occupied by nothing. It has no edges, no mass, no dimension, no shape except the formless; it moves. I beg it, stay away, stay away. Within the space of a thought it is inside me, and has set up a sick resonance within my bones and in all the cavities of my body.
I pluck my eyes away. It is like plucking them out of my head. Grace runs away from me, runs out of my body like liquid from a corpse. I move from the spot. My body weighs heavy, my feet have to be hauled up from the ground as if they were sticking in gore. I walk out of the sunlight, through the Glass Place, into the enclosed dimness of the cold kitchen. I say, Mum, I want to come in now, can I do some drawing?
I see myself through her eyes: sweat running from me, my cheeks fallen in, my chest heaving to control the thick taste of blood and sick that’s in my mouth.
I pray, let her not look at me.
‘Yes,’ she says, sweetly, her back turned. ‘Of course you can.’
It is the best yes I have ever heard. It is the best yes I have ever heard in the course of my life. If I had been sent out again, into the secret garden, I think I would have died: I think my heart would have stopped.
When I grow up I laugh at this. I say, I’m like Aunt Ada Doom, I saw something nasty in the woodshed. I say that, like Aunt Ada, I was never the same afterwards, I was always doomy after that: and what was it anyway? I don’t know. Something intangible had come for me, to try its luck: some formless, borderless evil, that came to try to make me despair. When I’m on my own, and I think about it privately, then I scarcely laugh at all.
Annie Connor dies. Not so suddenly; her chest heaves and wheezes, she takes to her bed. Though I see them at dinner time, my grandad and grandma and Aunt Annie, I would not dream of failing to call on them as I come home from school, to have a cup of tea and a bun. One afternoon I am taken up the stairs at no. 58, and as soon as I see Annie I know by the leaden, pooled blood in the veins of her face that she is dying.
I toil up the hill to Brosscroft. My mother sometimes watches for me. Just as I can’t hear a straight sentence, I can’t walk a straight line: she knows that the merest dot in the distance is me, if it is weaving around the pavement.
My mother’s eyes scour my face. She doesn’t want to be tempted down the hill to Bankbottom, if this is a false alarm; old aunts cough and wheeze, it’s what they do. ‘Do you think she is dying?’ my mother says.
She looks into my eyes: as on the night when I told her not to switch on the gas. For the second time, she credits me with sense. She shoots down the hill. I am not with her, so I don’t know what happens. But I know a kind of peace is made, between the households—or, less of a war.
It is a Saturday morning. My mother comes into my bedroom. I have my own room now, at the back of the house, papered by Jack in pink and white. My mother says, ‘Auntie Annie has gone to live with Jesus.’
I turn my face away and cry. She means it for the best, but I think it was unnecessary to phrase it like that, as if I were a six year old. Adults want you to know things, then unknow them. But knowledge doesn’t go backwards. I would have understood a simple ‘dead’, and I can’t unsee her livid, mottled face. In a way, I tell myself, it is good to have seen a dying person, and recognised her state.
I turn to the back of my catechism and find a prayer which claims it never fails. I pray it. I want my Aunt Annie and I pray that she may come back.
I know God won’t deliver. He won’t deliver on that sort of prayer and what I’m doing by praying it is blaspheming: kicking his godly and his god-awful shins. He didn’t help me in the secret garden, and I think he couldn’t anyway; I think that whatever I saw that day was more powerful than any bewhiskered prayer-book God, simpering in a white robe: his holy palms held apart, as if he were sizing up a plank. Why didn’t he try, though? He could have done something. He could have showed willing. I wanted him to manifest, and own me, take charge. But he never turned up, in the secret garden; the old bugger never got out of bed. Now, a graceless being, abandoned, I pray silly stuff to spite Him. You have these so-called prayers that always work; on the other hand, you know that the past can’t be recalled. Time doesn’t flow backwards; all the scientists say so.
Soon afterwards, leaving school at twelve o’clock, I hurtle straight downhill, down the carriage drive and across the road. It is a main road, and the carriage drive comes out on a straight run between two deep bends. But there is little traffic, none of it fast: who would need to speed towards Hadfield?
I escape by inches. I look back, to the long black car that has squealed to a halt; I shudder once, and bolt for home.
Big girls have turned back; they are screaming. They pounce on me, as I try to zigzag past them; I want to run up the road to Bankbottom, but they won’t let me. I go rigid; they half lift me and drag me back towards the scene of the incident, my heels scraping the ground. The driver has put his window down, and is leaning out of it. He is a man with a bald dome, sleek wings of hair at the sides of his head. My own head is ducked by a big girl’s palm, and my face is thrust towards his; he wants to see me, they want to exhibit me. He is shaking. Did you not see me, he says? He is not angry, but guilty, aghast; he is a stranger. His fingers are curling around the wheel to control their quiver. Did you not see me? I pity him. There is cold sweat on his forehead, like the sweat of death.
I am tugging to be away. My child compeers are gathered—well, trust them to be in on a drama! Others are pouring down the drive, so are teachers and nuns. Two big girls have me by the wrists, and are trying to persuade me back up the drive to the school. In silence I pull away from them, teeth clenched. I pull, they pull, till I am in danger of being divided, like the child in the judgement of Solomon. They are fifteen years old, with great brawny arms, with the woody scent of motherhood rushing from their pores and enveloping me. I make a plot, I devise a ploy; I allow myself to be drawn forward, sweetly, then I spring into the air and hurl myself backwards to the length of my arms. Their grips yield: I run. All I want to is run: to 56 Bankbottom, to my grandma. Inside I’m howling with rage. I’m alive, what’s the problem? What’s new? I live and die by inches.
My grandma is giving me beans on toast. She sinks on one knee to toast the bread before the fire. I love this meal; but today it dries in my throat. I cannot swallow. Her puzzled face swims after me as I creep back to school for the afternoon.
Next day—it takes time for the news to reach her—comes the rant from Mrs Stevens. I am shouted at and held up as an example of a person nearly dead, nearly dead by my own ignorant self-willed dashing. And what do they say at home, what do they have to say about it all, hm, hm? I sit in a sullen, snarling silence. My ‘best friend’ Bernadette raises her hand and says, ‘Miss, she’s not told ’em.’
Not told ’em? What? Not carried home to my grandmother the news that I am just a foot or eighteen inches from being ground into the tarmacadam, my arms fluttering and my neck snapped like a pigeon’s? A long ‘aw-hh’ from the class is shouted down by Mrs Stevens. Now I am accused of being a deceiver, as well as nearly dead. My ‘best friend’ whispers that I’ll have to tell it in confession: it’s worse than a lie, she says. And before the week is out, a distant relative, seldom seen, turns up at Bankbottom with a highly-coloured account of the occasion: the screech of tyres, the burnt rubber on the road, the cry of nuns, the pre-emptive tolling of church bells.
This is a child’s life. You have no rights, over your life or death. Every event that happens to you is appropriated by others, who think they know better than you do what is going on in your head. So don’t speak, even under threat, especially under threat; don’t feed them information they can use against you. In the court of public opinion you’re sentenced: toll the dead bell.
I have my own courtroom, my own trial. A noose for Mrs Stevens. A noose for my distant relative. A noose for my ‘best friend’. A noose for Mother Malachy, headmistress of my school, who stood at the gate, gloating over the drama, and propelled those great girls down the drive to tear me apart. But grace for the driver. Grace for the great girls. Grace for me, running; grace for my sealed lips; for my grandma, kneeling before the fire. Except there’s no point in praying for grace or asking for it any more, since God is obviously looking but not looking in my direction.
Now that Grandad was retired, he had more time for testing me on spellings. First every day he oversaw my dinner, indulging me—take that piece of the loaf, it is what you prefer. Let’s see you eat this cake; this kind of cake is what we call a Savoy. My sad and nauseous days gave him the more excuse for ingenuity, carving an apple into slices and laying it out on a plate, tempting and sugared.
But a day came when he felt his age, and mine too, and then he led me up the steep stair to the garret, a room whistling with cold. There were white planks underfoot, and standing in the middle of the room, under the skylight, was a rabbit hutch. And in it were books.
Their pages were crisp and sallow, nibbled at the edges by time, or perhaps by rabbits. Their covers, once green, burgundy and navy blue, now inclined to the condition of black, so ancient and tarry that I thought it would come off on my fingers: not that I gave a bugger, excuse me Father for swearing. I wanted books like a vampire wants blood. My daddy Henry took me to the Hadfield library, where there was one bookcase for children, and I had read it upside down and inside out. I had read the books so hard that when I gave them back the print was faint and grey with exhaustion, and I thought that one day the librarian would notice how I had been depleting them and tear my ticket up.
My own bedroom at Brosscroft was a room where the sun shone, the only room in the house in which you were safe to put anything down without it being sucked into phantom-land. Such books as we had were dumped there. Some had come to Jack in the course of his life: a set of yarns called Out with Romany, country lore and country life. Looking into it made me ask, was Hadfield the country, or the town? It seemed to occupy some no man’s land, some place not well-defined in any book. There were very few streets, but very few trees. There was moorland, dappled with snow in April; there were no birds, except for the sparrows and starlings, which women fed with the crumbs ground from the heels of loaves.
I read Romany; I learned to love the hedgehog, and the ways of sneaky fox. I read the horrible, foxed, mouldy volume of Tennyson, someone’s Sunday School prize: Mariana in the moated grange. I read Steps to Literature: Book Five. It was a small book, its pages yellow and decaying, its greasy cover stamped with the word ‘Specimen’. Look inside: the subtitle was ‘Readings on Europe’. It was a book of extracts. I read them all.
In a certain village in La Mancha, there lived not long ago one of those old-fashioned gentlemen…
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles…
Once she did hold the gorgeous East in fee…
I have sat for hours at my window inhaling the sweetness of the garden, and musing on the chequered fortunes of those whose history is dimly shadowed out in the elegant memorials around…
I am mad about this book. Like Washington Irving at the Alhambra, I issue forth at midnight to get it. I wake up before dawn to read its single scene from Julius Caesar: the scene where Antony pitches the mob against Brutus. The scene is prefaced by an extract from Plutarch, so I am keyed in on the storyline. I like the story, all of it: the violence, the polemic. I wish I had written it myself. Brutus, of course, was in the right. Antony had the best use of words. Beware words; beware the slick. ‘If you have tears…’ Beware the sentimental crowd.
So this, I think, is the complete works of Shakespeare, a thing which I have heard people mention. In my opinion, it deserves all the applause people heap on it. I learn the death of Caesar by heart. I murmur it, in times of stress, as the pious murmur the rosary. One day, my breath held, hurrying, I go down into the yellow room, my old bedroom shared with my father. I look in the drawer of the little cabinet beside his bed. There I find my book of tales of King Arthur, which has been missing for as long as I can remember. I am overjoyed. I fall back into the stories. I now like the ones I used to miss out. I like the Grail. I imagine how the knight lies rigid in his bed while the chalice, half hidden in its veils and airy wrappings, glides slowly across his field of vision. In the back bedroom of my grandmother’s house at Bankbottom—my mother’s old bedroom, an empty room where I am allowed to play—I have sometimes seen similar shadows, objects that are unnameable, that float and are not solid, objects through which the wall behind them can be glimpsed. They seem to me domestic things, plates and cups, bowls: as if they were echoes or shadows of the objects in daily use in the kitchen below. In time I realise that anything in this room can become translucent. I spend a great deal of time there, mostly alone, pursuing no particular game, just being. Sometimes my friend Evelyn comes to play. We peddle backwards on an old child’s bicycle that leans by the wall. My grandmother labours up the stairs with our favourite meal of banana sandwiches. The room, when Evelyn is in it, is entirely solid.
Winter: it is dark by half past four, and the curtains are drawn in the front room at Brosscroft. The evening is silent; Jack has gone to night school, my father Henry is somewhere else, at the jazz club or the library. By the light of the low-slumbering fire the brothers are undressed, and taken upstairs to bed. Their clothes come off in three effortful tugs, from their shoes and socks upwards. It is my task to pick up after them, to strip vest from teeshirt and turn the arms of their jerseys the right way out: then uncrease and smooth them, spread them out to life size, as if I were making little boys from wool. I shake out their tiny socks from their scattered shoes, line up the four shoes in pairs, then put everything tidily away in a deep drawer by the fireside. Sometimes when they have gone, I sit gently on their rocking horse, which is really a springing horse, which bounces on a metal frame; I am too old for this toy, and the thought that I might be seen riding it brings a blush to my cheeks.
I am nine; knight errantry is behind me, and my progress is complete, from hero to zero. I am going to become a woman, though I cannot imagine of what sort. A little girl, flat-chested, can’t imagine her body will ever change. One days she becomes conscious of the brushing of her blouse against her skin. She puts her fingers there—I do—and feels enraged at the thought of what is to come. The whole process is beyond control. You have no choice in it. My body is getting the better of me, though people seem to feel I am responsible for what it does. My small blood vessels are unstable; I blush if anyone speaks to me, if anyone looks at me. I can’t help this, but it seems to drive my mother and Jack into a frenzy of irritation.
I listen; above I hear ponderous footsteps, I know the boys are not in bed yet. Cautiously, I let out my breath; I let the horse spring beneath me; I trot it for a quarter of a mile. My fingers brush its reins and bridle, most unconvincingly rendered in painted metal. I raise my eyes, and they rest on the drawn curtains of our front room at no. 20 Brosscroft. Against a background of silver grey, the curtains have a repeating design of—windows.
They are Mediterranean windows, with gay blinds and plants spilling from pots and wrought-iron baskets. I appraise them; my cold northern soul flips in my chest. I want to live behind those windows and to be warm. There are two patterns of window, one rectangular and one arched, and I can’t choose between them; the rectangle is more elegant, the arch more enticing. At 20 Brosscroft, firelight gutters, draughts suck at the flames, the Glass Place rattles, the garden yields up its dead secrets. But at the Alhambra, as Steps to Literature assures me, ‘the garden beneath my window is gently lighted up, the orange and citron trees are tipped with silver, the fountains sparkle in the moonbeams, and even the blush of the rose is faintly visible.’ I imagine my life behind those windows, the texture of my life: I carry the sun inside me as I move through the shaded, scent-drenched rooms.
Many years later, I asked my mother if she remembered the Brosscroft curtains, the curtains with the window design. I used to imagine, I said, that I vanished into their texture and lived there, within the warp and weft of their design, that I lived behind their shutters and balconies, that I owned those window boxes and those pots with the spilling scarlet flowers. My mother turned away, so that I couldn’t see her face. She whispered, and I, oh so did I.
Those were cold years for her. Love doesn’t light the meagre fire in the grate or fill the children’s bellies. And childhood was a sort of gulag for me; I was cut off, adrift. Conditions changed from year to year; sometimes I moved to another camp, where I waited to see if the regime would be better or worse, more or less survivable, and where I scrambled quickly to learn the rules. It wasn’t particularly anyone’s fault. Few people acted with malice towards me. It was just that I was unsuited to being a child.
At ten, I developed catastrophic hay fever. I sneezed and shook for a whole summer long, my weeping eyes were blind and sealed to slits. Between my eyelids I saw flashes of scarlet, the petals of flowers: geraniums.
When the day of the Eleven Plus results came, I was at home as usual, sick. I had no expectation that I would earn a grammar school place, and no particular hope of it. It seemed out of my hands—as it had been for grandad, whose parents couldn’t afford the uniform: as it had been for my mother, whose teachers had simply forgotten to enter her for the exam.
Just after four o’clock Bernadette came to the door. I went to open it. She stood squarely on the front step and looked me up and down. ‘Ye’ve passed,’ she said, unsmiling.
I fell back into the house, my hands across my heart. And you?
Soberly, she nodded. Perhaps she was in shock.
‘Give Bernadette some orange juice,’ my mother said.
I went into the dim pantry with the deep stone shelves. The ghosts rolled under them, sucking their teeth in envy and malice. My hand trembled, the neck of the bottle knocked against the rim of the glass. Passed. Who would have thought it? Passed. So I can have a life, I thought.
Within a few weeks we were moving house: myself, not my father, my mother, Jack, the two little brothers and the one dog that was left. By the end of the summer we would be gone. We would be gone to another town. We would have a semi-detached house. It would have a lawn. It would have a rockery; it would have an apple tree, and ‘even the blush of the rose is faintly visible’. We would have new carpets and another name. We would be gone so fast that by September, when the new school year began, we would be a scorched trail on the air.
My childhood ended so, in the autumn of 1963; the past and the future equally obscured by the smoke from my mother’s burning boats.