Natalie stayed with me for three months. I gave her tutorials on the Welfare State: she did the things I was too depressed to do, such as picking up toys, sorting out clothes, and weeding the garden. Within the week, strangely, the house had the same polished orderly look that characterized Dunbarton. Very boring. Alice slept with my three, Ben had a blanketed-off section of the bathroom, and Natalie and I shared a bedroom. (Oh yes, separate beds. Are you mad? Ros across the road had a divan to spare. She’d found it in a skip. The things people throw out!)
Natalie got thirty-seven pounds forty-three pence from the State, plus various renewal and heating allowances. I managed to extract fifty-five pounds forty-three for my lot. We pooled the money and even occasionally managed a bottle of wine. I don’t think she was happy, but I was. No word came from Harry Harris. The children no longer asked after him. Ben was silent but responsible (as responsible as any male can be: that is to say as long as it suits him but not a moment longer: consider his father!) and Alice clucked around my three making herself useful. I could see panic in her blue eyes, sometimes, when she thought no one was looking. Both children hated their school. They were laughed at on two counts: first for having posh accents, then for living on the Boxover Estate, where the new poor (us) and the problem families (her: she’d walked out of the hostel) were housed. Most children adopt the local accent pretty quickly, as cover, but these two seemed unable to do so. They were somehow unbending: stubborn, like their mother. They found it difficult to admit defeat.
Natalie got herself put on the housing list, though I couldn’t see the reason for it. It seemed to me we were doing pretty well as we were. Only once did she flip. We and a group of others were queueing outside the telephone on the green, with our coins at the ready, and Ros came out of the booth in tears. Ros had a boyfriend at the time they reckoned was supporting her, though he wasn’t; he could only just support himself and his beard. So they’d stopped her benefit. The DHSS don’t mind if men visitors stay until two o’clock or even three, but four’s going a bit far, five smacks of early shift, and anything later means breakfast, and if it’s breakfast there’s hell to pay. They don’t begrudge us a spot of sex – it saves paying the psychiatrists’ bills later – it’s relationships they can’t stand. They reckon the ultimate obscenity is human affection. If a man stays, your benefit stops. We, the abandoned mothers of Britain, don’t deserve love. We had our chance, and we muffed it. I muffed my chance of being kept by Stephen by having this fancy about Alec, this stupid feeling that even as a non-earning citizen (stay-at-home-wife) and mother (forgive me, unpaid child minder for the State) I was entitled to love and be loved.
So I would get confused and upset sometimes, and even with my help Natalie got a lot of things wrong. She should have gone to Welfare in the first place – they’d have presented her case to the DHSS and the Housing Department themselves and then both would have coughed up. And she should never have believed Mary Alice about Housing: clerks in one department have no idea what goes on in another, and sometimes not even their own. Regulations change every week. If you don’t hear what you want to hear you must go from clerk to clerk and department to department until you do. Of course Welfare’s in Street, DHSS in Glastonbury, and Housing in Shepton, and Appeals in Bridgwater – that’s a forty mile round trip from Eddon Gurney, and none of us has a car, have we? And there’s only one bus a day, if you’re lucky, so you have to hitch, and you can’t hitch with children. And that, if you ask me, is why one in five women on supplementary benefit ends up in mental homes. Driven mad by the State.
‘Driven mad’. It’s just a phrase these days but I think it’s a real enough concept. Women do get driven mad. Men drive women mad. Anxiety about how to keep a home going for the children drives women mad. Unrequited love drives women mad. Working out how to get from A to B when you have no money and there are no buses drives women mad. (Don’t ask me what drives men mad. Let them look after themselves. They run society, don’t they, not to mention the hospitals and the drug industry? They are the psychiatrists. How many women shrinks in here? Four? To twenty-eight men?) Okay, okay, feminism sends women mad. Funny joke. Point taken. I have to take it, don’t I, because I want to get out of here.
As I say, it was Natalie’s turn to flip when we were waiting in the queue for the telephone one Monday morning. I’d been explaining to her how I meant to get through to Tania Rostavitz, the only welfare officer at Gurney who has a clue. That is, by saying I was her sister Anna. I just happen to know, from reading the holiday postcards in her office, that Tania has a sister Anna. Claim a personal relationship – otherwise the switchboard just leaves you hanging on the end of the line, until your money runs out and the pips go and you give up. Saves them all kinds of trouble, doesn’t it!
Anyway, Ros came out of the box in tears – you should see Ros: she’s so romantic looking: really beautiful with misty black hair and big eyes; she looks like a Hardy heroine, and here she was, stuck with the kids in a council house, arguing with the State as to whether or not this fat, awful little creep with the beard was a full-time or a part-time lover – oh yes, we get reduced by our circumstances! A lovely brimming saucepan of hope and emotion simmered down and down until it’s a sort of greasy sludge – if you’ll forgive a metaphor from the kitchen. And Natalie suddenly for no apparent reason shrieked and started banging on the telephone box and shouting ‘I can’t live like this. I won’t!’ and ran back and sat in the garden all afternoon. Just sat. She wouldn’t go inside the house. She said it frightened her.
The only upshot was, of course, she and I had to join the telephone queue again the next day and by then Tania had gone on holiday (they’re always on holiday or on courses or being transferred to head office) and there were even more delays. But she had to get through somehow. For some reason of their own the DHSS had given a special clothing allowance to Ben but not to Alice. Something to do with him sleeping on the bathroom floor and her having a proper bed. But by then anyway Alice was sleeping on the sofa. And when we wrote them letters all we ever got was one of those forms with reasons for disallowance on them, and the section ticked ‘child over requisite age’ which was crazy, since Ben was older than Alice anyway. Once their computer starts doing that kind of thing, you have to get through in person. It’s full time work being on social security. They really make you earn your living.
But look, it was cosy. I reckon we could have gone on like that forever. But fate started intervening, working itself up towards the fire on the float. Just little straws in the wind. Natalie actually getting a job and then the odd matter of the old leather bucket. It quite frightens me how things keep turning up, and taking a hand in events. You get the feeling that not just people, but material objects, are part of the general conspiracy to toss you up in the air and land you where you least expect.