The Other Half of Augusta Hope

by Joanna Glen

  Augusta

  My mother had always been fond of knitting, sewing and tapestry, and she tried to interest us in terrible craft projects where you made stuffed owls or knitted blankets for dolls.

  She offered a special service for Stanley Hope Uniforms, which involved embroidering names onto PE bags, pencil cases, aertex shirts, anything really.

  The minute we were born, our names were sewn and embroidered and painted and framed, with creeping flowers twisting and turning on the ascenders and descenders.

  Barbara Cook at number 2 was inspired by my mother’s craft work, and it was this that sent her off to art classes, and this that caused her to start wearing wrap-around Indian skirts, which didn’t go well with her leather slip-on court shoes, flesh-coloured tights and anoraks.

  Helen Dunnett at number 3 (who had a very thin grey whippet) liked to crochet things such as little boys’ ties, babies’ bonnets and holders for toilet rolls – and even a coat for the whippet, in pale green.

  The craft craze must have been contagious because before you knew it, over half of Willow Crescent’s women were crafting away in their spare time, creating rag dolls, candles in the shape of triangular prisms, baby clothes, three-dimensional special-occasion cards – you name it, they made it.

  My mother said her dream was to have a craft room, like my father had a study, but, although he was out of the house six days a week, he never once offered to share.

  His study (the third bedroom) was the only part of the interior of the house of which he was in charge. His desk was immaculate, his dark green files hung in alphabetical order and his cork boards were papered in taut rectangles. He was also in charge of the double garage and the extra single garage and the garden, in which not one thing was out of place.

  It was Barbara Cook who had the idea of the Willow Crescent Craft Fair. Everybody agreed that Number 1 would be the best location for it, not only because of our larger-than-average garden, but, in the event of rain, our immaculate double garage, with the additional single garage for the side shows, which the children would organise.

  ‘We’ve been thinking of a way to raise funds for the farm school where Graham Cook goes,’ said my mother to my father. ‘We all thought a Craft Fair would be a good idea.’

  ‘Lovely,’ said my father. ‘That would give the Cooks a bit of a boost.’

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ said my mother, allowing this burst of good-heartedness to flourish before slipping in the suggested venue.

  ‘I wouldn’t want everyone tramping over the carpets to use our toilet,’ said my father.

  It was some hours later, when my mother and father had undergone several circular arguments and become rather tetchy with each other, and by which time Julia and I had gone to bed, listening out anxiously, in case our parents were about to get divorced, that we heard my father exclaim, ‘I shall damn well build an outside toilet.’

  My father laboured on this outside toilet through the spring and summer, and when it was finished, he painted it, and bought a special red/green lock to show if the toilet was vacant or occupied. My mother made an arrangement of dried flowers for the shelf, and bought one of Helen Dunnett’s crocheted toilet-roll holders – in what Helen called burnt russet.

  After that, my father looked a little lost on Sundays, as if some great purpose had been removed from his life.

  My mother and her friends held committee meetings every five minutes around our kitchen table, and the children started planning side shows like Count the Number of Sweets in the Jar or Guess the Weight of the Cake.

  I offered to sort through the second-hand toys and put prices on them, which, I discovered, my mother would over-write in permanent marker. Amongst them, I found the ugliest rag doll with yellow plaits, a brand-new Peter Rabbit and a drawn-on doll with one arm and one leg, and, in my fury about the wasted time I’d spent pricing the toys, I pulled off her remaining limbs, feeling strange. I put her torso and her separated arm and leg in my bedside drawer, and then I wrote a story where a dead baby was wrapped in cellophane like the un-used Peter Rabbit.

  I asked Julia to read it so somebody would know how terrible I was inside my mind where you don’t always have control of things. She hesitated, breathed deeply and said, ‘Everyone has strange thoughts. And maybe you’ve read too many horrible things about Burundi. But we’ll burn it anyway, shall we, Aug? Because that would also be quite fun, don’t you think?’

  I did think, but now I wish I hadn’t made her read that story.

  I hear her childish voice so clearly, all these years later, that it makes me jump.

  I hear her trying to draw me towards the fun, towards the joy, away from the darkness.

  There’s a pale moth fluttering towards the light of the candle, here, at the front of the caravan, in the dusk, where I’m writing. I bat her away. She has dark squiggles on her wings, like letters written on sepia paper.

  Julia went inside for matches, and we crept to a lovely hidden place behind the shed – I can feel the rough texture of the wooden slats which pulled threads out of our jumpers when we brushed against them and I can see the wire fire basket hung with spider webs. There, in a lovely empty pocket of time, the sort of pocket reserved for brothers and sisters, she and I made a little bonfire in the wire cage, and we stood together, in the warm evening, watching the pages of the story turn into flames.

  My father went hysterical when he found us.

  I said it was all my fault.

  Julia joined in the blame, using a very soft, calm voice at his rage, like a warm shower.

  ‘We’re sorry, Dad, we’re sorry,’ she said, with her little heart-shaped face crinkled with sorry-ness.

  It came to me then, and it comes to me now, that I didn’t feel sorry at all.

  One thing the committee could not talk about, as Barbara Cook was running the Craft Fair, was what Graham Cook would do on the day, as, although nobody said it, they all thought the strange drowning noises he made might put people off buying.

  But one Saturday, Barbara Cook went to visit her sister, so the committee arranged an ad hoc meeting. My father walked in and out of the kitchen, hoping the meeting would soon be over, practically before it had begun.

  ‘Perhaps Barbara’s brother might come over and look after Graham at the Craft Fair,’ said my mother. ‘He’s very good with him.’

  My father shook his head.

  ‘He’s unpredictable,’ he said, as he passed through. ‘We wouldn’t want him running amok in the garden.’

  ‘I would be very happy to look after Graham Cook,’ I said. I knew that Graham was five years older than me, but, in the circumstances, I thought this might still work.

  ‘Oh no, darling, you couldn’t possibly look after Graham Cook,’ said my mother and father, practically in unison, as my father passed through again. ‘You’re only ten.’

  ‘I’m nearly eleven,’ I said.

  ‘If Graham Cook’s angry,’ said Hilary Hawkins, ‘he loses his rag – it’s quite frightening, to be honest.’

  In the end, Barbara Cook told the Craft Committee how much Graham was looking forward to the Craft Fair, and on the day, he sat down at the end of the garden in a shady corner next to the candle stall with his red bus, making drowning noises and putting people off coming near.

  I went to the second-hand toy stall and bought a red plastic bus, and I sat with my red plastic bus right next to Graham with his red plastic bus, so that holding a red plastic bus would seem more of a normal thing to do. I considered whether I should also make some drowning noises and shoot my limbs out, but came to the conclusion that this might cause a bit too much of a commotion.

  Graham Cook and I sat with our red plastic buses in the unexpected sunshine, and he seemed comforted and hardly made any strange noises at all. Julia couldn’t move from her position at the Lucky Dip over by the outside toilet, but she smiled at me in that way she had.

  My father came over to me and, once Barbara Cook was out of earshot, he said under
his breath, ‘For God’s sake get up, Augusta. You’re making a fool of yourself – and people will think you’re a bit …’

  ‘A bit what?’ I said.

  ‘A bit …’ said my father. ‘A bit, you know, not all there. Spasticated.’

  ‘I’m staying right here,’ I said, ‘in solidarity with Graham Cook.’

  Then my father took hold of my upper arm and dragged me upwards with a big tug, which made me feel as if my arm and my shoulder were going to come apart from each other, and in a strange tight voice, quite menacing, he whispered in my ear, ‘Get over to the Lucky Dip and help your sister.’

  Graham Cook moaned and wailed and tried to run away, so Jim Cook had to hold him in an arm lock.

  I shut myself in the outside toilet and cried and cried at the shock of it all, and when I came out, with my red bus, there was a long queue, and Angela Dunnett said, ‘We were about to call the Fire Bwigade. We thought you were locked in.’

  I felt really bad that Angela Dunnett was being so nice to me, and had gone and bought me a cupcake with butter icing from the cake stall to help cheer me up, and I determined that I would never ever again make jokes about the way she said r.

  My friend, Ian, turned up and he bought the ugly ragdoll with the yellow plaits as a joke, and we went behind the outside toilet and had a tug-of-war with her – and all her stuffing fell out of her middle.

  Then I went and stood next to Julia at the Lucky Dip holding the red bus. Julia didn’t ask me why I’d been crying. She just reached for my hand, but when my father came by, his face all tense and contorted, she let it go. He did another loud whisper in my ear which said, ‘Put that damned bus down.’

  Julia bit her lip and she puffed up the sawdust in the Lucky Dip to bring the remaining prizes to the surface.

  All the happiness had seeped out of her face.

  Parfait

  I remember the day I met Víctor, the Spanish priest, out on the road on his bike. We started talking, and I found that things came pouring out of my mouth, things I’d been storing up inside, not knowing what I could do with them.

  I told Víctor that, the week after Melchior Ndadaye was assassinated, my father, Melchior, died too.

  ‘The soldiers came to our colline,’ I said. ‘And my father turned his cheek because he wanted to break the chain.’

  I told him that the next time they came, Wilfred the English missionary stepped in front of our pregnant neighbour, Honorine, so that the soldiers would shoot him instead of her.

  ‘I’ll never forget the way he was smiling, though he was dead,’ I said. ‘He was lying there amongst the daffodils his mother had sent over from England. I felt so bad about what our country had done to her son.’

  Víctor nodded.

  ‘My mother went with the women to the rubbish dump,’ I said, ‘and they made daffodils out of old tin cans to put around his grave.’

  I took a deep breath because I didn’t want to speak about Claude.

  I’d told Claude to run when the soldiers came with flaming torches, but as I counted everyone in, behind the bush by the stream, he wasn’t there. We found his burnt body too late, cowering in the corner of our hut.

  ‘Wilfred’s still got the rope around his ankle,’ I said to Víctor. ‘The one that used to join onto Claude’s ankle. He won’t take it off, and I can’t ask him why because he won’t speak any more. Not a word since Claude died.’

  I told him that my mother wasn’t feeling too good, but she wouldn’t go and see the doctor because all doctors were Tutsi and she didn’t trust them.

  Things went on pouring out of my mouth, and Victor went on nodding.

  He told me some things about his life. How he was setting up a school for deaf and blind children, up the hill, bringing them out of the shadows so that they wouldn’t feel ashamed of themselves any more. He invited me to come and see them, and I shook their hands, and Víctor gave me mango fruit chopped up in porridge in the little kitchen of his house.

  ‘Is Spain really over there?’ I asked him. ‘At the top of Africa and over the sea?’

  I felt light coming into my body at the thought of this country that was real and full of peace and sunshine, and not so very far away.

  ‘It really is over there,’ said Víctor.

  ‘What’s it like?’ I asked him.

  ‘There’s sea pretty much all the way round, and people take picnics to the beach in the summer, and go swimming. We have festivals in the street at Christmas and Easter, when the men wear felt hats, and the women wear spotty dresses and roses in their hair – and we have this dance called flamenco.’

  ‘Did you ever dance flamenco?’ I asked him.

  Víctor nodded.

  ‘I wasn’t always a priest,’ he said, laughing.

  ‘Is it like our dancing?’ I asked.

  ‘It goes something like this,’ said Víctor.

  He got up off the little wooden chair and threw his hands in the air, and he started to dance about, with his hips swaying and his feet stamping.

  ‘The woman dances like this …’ he said, and now he was really laughing, and so was I, and he looked very funny with his big grey beard and his pinky skin, and his baggy trousers, swaying his hips and turning in circles and swishing out his imaginary dress.

  A man called Nelson Mandela came on the radio.

  Víctor stopped dancing and turned the volume up.

  This Nelson Mandela had a voice you didn’t forget – kind of soft but hard underneath – like wool with steel inside it.

  Nelson Mandela had made a suggestion to President Buyoya that the Tutsi and the Hutu could take it in turns to lead the country because this might stop Burundians fighting each other and dying all the time.

  Víctor clapped his hands and said, ‘Yes! Yes!’

  I said, ‘It’s so obvious. Why didn’t anyone think of it before?’

  ‘Because nobody likes to share power,’ said Víctor.

  Augusta

  Power-sharing was proving a trial in Willow Crescent as, a year after the first Craft Fair, the committee prepared, with renewed vigour, for the second.

  Janice Brown brought up the subject of whether the Craft Fair really was the best place for Graham Cook, and Barbara Cook got straight up from the table, and, as she did so, her wrap-around Indian skirt started to unwrap itself, revealing her large white pants and her spongey right buttock.

  A terrible silence fell on the committee meeting, as the front door slammed shut.

  My mother said, ‘Oh dear.’

  Then the others all started saying that when you are on a committee you have to have difficult conversations, and you couldn’t hide from the truth, which was plain to see, that Graham Cook put off buyers from buying.

  Julia and I were sitting there, good and quiet. She was pressing flowers in a wood-framed flower press, and I was leafing through my book of Latin phrases, when out of my mouth came the words, ‘If this Craft Fair is to help Graham Cook, then he might rather you didn’t bother so much about how much money his school got, and you just let him come.’

  Julia raised her hand, the way my mother used to do when my father didn’t brake early enough in the car.

  My mother sat completely still as if someone had pressed pause on her, before Hilary Hawkins said, ‘Nobody ever told me that this was about raising money for Graham Cook’s school.’

  ‘Who got the money last year?’ I said to my mother. ‘Didn’t it go to Graham Cook’s school?’

  Now Julia took my hand in hers, which meant shut up.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said my mother. ‘I’m not the treasurer. The treasurer is Janice Brown.’

  Julia looked at my mother and then at me and then at my mother, and I knew that my mother had lied to my father to get him to agree to hold the Craft Fair in our garden.

  ‘Perhaps we could give a percentage this year,’ said Janice Brown, blushing, and also glowering at me when she thought my mother wasn’t looking – and thus not loving her neighbour a
t all, like it said on the white plastic sacks in which she collected our old clothes to send on to African children.

  After that burst of noise, there was an even bigger silence, and into that silence came the noise of the train. We let the train blast into our silence. We were quite used to it. We didn’t know that Barbara Cook had gone for a walk to compose herself. We didn’t know that she’d got stuck the other side of what everyone in Hedley Green called, with a sigh, the crossing.

  Hedley Green Level Crossing was always in the news – it caused people to give birth to babies in their cars and miss their A level exams, and it was a temptation to school boys, people said, and there were always bunches of dead roses tied to the fence where a boy called Fatty Jenkins had died playing with his friends at the crossing. Except, once he was dead, you were supposed to call him Frank Jenkins, or even Francis, which was the name he was christened.

  His mother had a plaque nailed to the gate, and she would often be seen there, polishing it and watching the trains go by and staring about the place as if there was some small chance that Fatty Jenkins might come walking out of the long grass, after a very long game of hide-and-seek.

  Francis Jenkins, 1980–1992, who died at the crossing and is now with the angels.

  Parfait

  To me, sitting on the colline, trying to think of a way to change our future, the crossing meant the little stretch of water between Africa and Europe.

  It meant peace and hope and the chance of a new life.

  Augusta

  The train passed and the crossing gates came up – and Barbara Cook marched back through the door, her face set, her skirt done up, and she said that she was resigning. My mother said that of course she wasn’t, and they’d all agreed that Graham Cook was most welcome at the Craft Fair, and they went on having their committee meeting as if nothing at all had happened.

  This time, I’d asked to be in charge of second-hand books. Amongst the tatty Enid Blyton paperbacks, I found an old leather book of Victorian children’s poems and rhymes, published in 1900, illustrated with beautiful watercolour plates, and I took this without asking my mother, and I put it under my mattress without telling anyone, even Julia.