by Jenny Eclair
As for the uniform, Annabel found it hard work – it was too big, the green tartan kilt itched, her shirt constantly came untucked and she struggled to do up the tiny buttons on the green cardigan. Then there was the hat, a dark green beret in winter and a straw boater with a green ribbon trim in summer. School was an endless stream of things she wasn’t allowed to forget or she’d get in trouble. By the end of her first year Annabel was writing herself daily reminders in the back of her jotter in what Miss Langton described as ‘a very neat hand’, and from then on, making lists was a habit she would never grow out of.
What she hated about school was the lonely feeling in the pit of her stomach when she thought about Mummy and Lance at home together without her.
She imagined them by the fire, eating crumpets. It seemed like the baby was never off her mother’s knee; he was crawling now and putting wooden blocks on top of each other and Mummy would call him ‘a very clever boy’, which seemed ridiculous when Annabel was the one sitting at her desk, sucking intently at the end of one of her plaits and doing very hard sums. Plait-sucking had taken over from thumb-sucking, but nobody seemed to notice at school and at home she did it in secret, mostly in bed where she had to have the side light on so that she didn’t have nightmares.
Recurring nightmares plagued her childhood: she was alone in a dark forest and, like Red Riding Hood, she had a basket over her arm. However, unlike Red Riding Hood, she was wearing her school uniform, sometimes with the boater, sometimes with the beret. In the dream she got very hungry, but when she looked in the basket it was empty and the next thing she knew she was awake in a wet bed and had to tiptoe to the bathroom to fetch a towel to cover the wetness. The only person who knew was Mrs Phelan, and she promised not to tell – she simply checked Annabel’s sheets and changed them if necessary. ‘What does it matter?’ she said to Annabel. ‘With a baby in the house there’s always plenty of washing to do, an extra sheet is neither here nor there.’
Mrs Phelan was very fond of Annabel. ‘Poor little mite,’ she said to Mr Phelan, ‘stuck at the top of the house in that dingy little bedroom.’ But Mr Phelan said it wasn’t any of her business and in any case, all men want a son, someone to carry on the family name.
When Annabel was seven and in the green class at Lawn House, ‘a terrible thing happened’, which was ‘most upsetting’. Her grandmother, the American lady, died. She fell off a horse in a place called Sacramento, suffered something called a catastrophic brain bleed and never regained consciousness.
Annabel gathered all the information about her grandmother’s death from listening in on her mother’s weepy telephone conversations. She then repeated what she could remember to Rabbit and anyone who would listen in the school playground. She told the story so often that a not-very-nice girl called Elaine Shawcross accused her of being a show-off, which Annabel has to admit was a tiny bit true.
Natasha was in pieces, even Baby Lance couldn’t cheer her up. After two days of listening to her wailing, ‘My mother, my mother, no, Mummy, no,’ Hugo told her to get out of bed and buck her ideas up.
So she did – she booked flights to America for herself and Lance. Hugo couldn’t go because he had work and Annabel couldn’t go because she had school, but Lance had neither school nor work so he went with her. Benedict was going too. Natasha had twisted his arm, she told Hugo. Even though she was still very sad, Annabel heard Mummy humming as she packed her suitcase.
Annabel was horribly jealous. It was so unfair, Lance was going to go on a plane before her and he was only two.
The night before her mother, uncle and brother flew to her grandmother’s funeral, Annabel was allowed to stay up and eat supper in the dining room with her parents. Mrs Phelan prepared a roast chicken with all the trimmings because, as she whispered to Annabel in the kitchen, ‘Americans only eat hamburgers.’
As Hugo carved, Natasha explained to Annabel that she, Benedict and Lance would be staying in a hotel so as not to intrude on Bobby Alessandro’s grief.
‘Who is Bobby Alessandro?’ Annabel asked, and her mother replied, ‘My mother’s husband,’ and Hugo chipped in bitterly, ‘The one with all the money.’ Then Natasha started crying again and left the table.
Annabel would have liked to eat her mother’s abandoned potatoes but didn’t dare – her father was always telling her she ate too much – and the realisation that she was going to be left alone with him made her cry too.
‘Jesus H. Christ!’ growled Hugo. ‘Bloody hysterical women, what’s the matter with you all?’ and Annabel sobbed very quietly all the way through her pudding.
The night before her mother, uncle and brother were due to return from Sacramento, Annabel dreamt that the plane carrying them home burst into flames and crashed into the sea. She was woken up by her own screaming; her bed was sodden and her father was standing at the foot of it.
Hugo turned the light on and sniffed the air suspiciously. Annabel’s little box room had started smelling because the bed had been wet on too many occasions to dry out properly. Hugo, livid, stripped the bed and made her inspect the yellow ring of stale urine that now permanently stained the mattress.
‘How old are you? Are you a baby?’ And he fetched a rubber sheet from the nursery and told her she must lie on that – no sheets, no blankets, no clean dry pyjamas, nothing but the clammy rubber sheet, because she needed to learn a lesson and if she didn’t learn that lesson he would have her put in nappies. ‘Do you understand me, Annabel?’
By the time Annabel got home from school the next day her mother and Lance were home safe and sound. Natasha was very quiet about her time in Sacramento, merely saying that the weather was very good and that sadly she hadn’t had time to do any shopping, apart from some duty-free purchases at the airport.
She had however managed to bring home a bag of Alessandro’s Finest Walnuts.
Hugo sneered at the brightly coloured bag on the table and muttered, ‘As long as that’s not all we’re going to get,’ at which point Natasha said she was very tired and if everyone would excuse her she would like to go to bed, which was funny because it was only half past six and even Annabel normally stayed up till seven thirty.
Several weeks later Annabel woke up, mercifully dry, to the sound of banging and shouting from her parents’ bedroom. Annabel’s wristwatch, which had illuminated hands, told her it was quarter past midnight. Maybe they had decided to move the furniture around? Creeping onto the landing but not daring to venture any further, she leant over the banister and between the bangs and yelps she heard her father shouting, ‘A fucking bag of walnuts, Natasha! And Benedict gets fucking Kittiwake.’
In the morning Mummy was wearing sunglasses, which made Baby Lance laugh and laugh, but Annabel didn’t join in. She was only seven but she knew that sunglasses indoors was a very bad sign indeed and she was extra careful about going to school without making a fuss or forgetting anything.
33
Best Friends
London, 1971–1974
Annabel was eight before she secured her first proper best friend. For months she had been trying out potential candidates, slyly stealing her hand into Laura McKinnon’s when they walked in a crocodile to the park, only to be rebuffed when Laura refused to share her hymn book with Annabel in assembly the next day.
It was a slow and painful process; did she have bad breath like Gail Coombe, who had trouble with her adenoids and wore something called ‘grommets’ in her ears? Maybe she was a bit boring like Susan Meeks, who nobody minded, but no one actually liked?
Annabel was beginning to despair when, on a never-to-be-forgotten Wednesday afternoon, Miss Mills the art teacher, who was cardboard-thin and wore her hair in a bun, told the girls about the ‘exciting project’ she had lined up for them today.
Annabel squirmed with pleasure and got that funny feeling near where her wee-wee hole was at the idea of this exciting project. She loved Miss Mills and even though Lydia Golding was the best at art, Annabel often got stars for her
work. Gold stars were the best, then red, then green – Annabel didn’t count green stars, as they were usually handed out to girls who weren’t very good but had ‘tried hard and improved’.
The previous week Annabel got a red star for her picture of fruit in a bowl, which Miss Mills said was ‘a very confident attempt at a still life’.
‘This week we are doing portraits,’ Miss Mills said now, and some of the girls flapped their hands together in that silent clapping way which was all the rage that term. Miss Mills asked the class to pair up, explaining they were to sit opposite each other and concentrate very hard and use paint not pencil. ‘I want you to be bold,’ said Miss Mills, ‘so put your smocks on and choose a partner.’
Annabel hated this bit: the moment when some girls immediately paired up, reaching and squealing for each other as if to be partnered with anyone else would be a fate worse than death. She hesitated, not sure whether to wait to be chosen or to choose someone she didn’t like but who would be grateful to be picked.
Fortunately for Annabel, a couple of pupils were absent due to illness that week and as a result a friendship reshuffle was required. Miss Mills took charge of the situation. ‘Susan, you go with Gail, and Annabel, I want you to partner Clare.’
And just like that Annabel found herself teamed with probably the most popular girl in the class: the badge-wearing book monitor, Clare Holbrook.
For a second Clare looked a bit put out, but she was a cheerful girl and decided what with Wendy Thomas being poorly, then at least Annabel Berrington was better than smelly Gail Coombe who made piggy noises when she breathed.
Annabel couldn’t believe her luck. In her opinion, Clare Holbrook was not only the most popular but also the prettiest girl in the class; she had golden hair like a princess, a heart-shaped face and lips that were the most lip-shaped that Annabel had ever seen.
Miss Mills said something about not worrying about the portraits looking exactly like their subjects; what she wanted was for the girls to ‘capture the essence of their sitter’.
Whatever that might mean, thought Annabel, taking a deep breath and carefully loading up her brush with yellow paint. Clare wore her thick blond hair in high-up bunches which brushed her shoulders, and she was a robust, pink-cheeked child whom her parents referred to as ‘the milkmaid’ because there was something particularly wholesome and English about her, something that conjured up a cream tea under a willow tree.
At the end of the class, Annabel was awarded a gold star for her portrait of Clare. Miss Mills said she had done an excellent job on the bunches and captured something of Clare’s ‘lively and mischievous spirit’. At this point, the whole class burst into spontaneous applause and while Clare simpered with pleasure at being the centre of attention, it was all Annabel could do not to punch the air and yell ‘At last!’
Poor Wendy Thomas – by the time she got over a particularly nasty case of impetigo, Clare and Annabel were inseparable, forever whispering into each other’s ears and giggling together in the girls’ toilets. And if Annabel was upset by Clare’s muddy, sour-faced portrait of a plain-looking girl with lank beige hair and a horrible nose, she never said anything.
It wasn’t long before Clare invited Annabel for tea. ‘Who are these people?’ enquired Hugo at breakfast. Natasha mumbled something in reply about Mrs Holbrook working in the BBC costume department and Mr Holbrook being a radio drama producer.
‘Well, they sound awful,’ Hugo responded, dabbing at his moustache with a linen napkin. ‘I don’t approve of working mothers, but as long as you don’t get any ideas, darling, and if Mrs Phelan doesn’t mind picking her up, then I’m sure she’ll be fine.’ It was only after her father stood up, casually swiping one of Lance’s toast soldiers and leaving the room, that Annabel realised she had been holding her breath: Yes, her father said yes.
After school the following Tuesday, Clare’s au pair Magda took them back to a tall thin house off King Street in Hammersmith, where Clare lived with her older brother and sister and three moulting cats who left ginger hairs all over a burgundy velvet sofa.
Annabel had never been in a house like the Holbrooks’ before. For starters, it was very untidy, with books and papers and half-eaten plates of food all over the place. Both Mr and Mrs Holbrook smoked and Clare picked a semi-crushed cigarette out of an ashtray, put it between her lips and started strutting around pretending to be a model on the catwalk while Annabel shrieked with laughter on the hairy sofa. Clare was the funniest best friend in the world.
They were allowed to have spaghetti hoops on little tables in front of the television for tea and for pudding they had Mini Rolls: ‘Magda doesn’t cook,’ Clare informed Annabel. ‘She’s a bloody waste of space, but what can you do?’
Annabel was thrilled – she’d been at Clare’s less than two hours and already they’d done pretend smoking and actual swearing. But best of all was going into her new friend’s big sister’s bedroom and trying on her clothes and playing with her make-up.
Camilla was training to be an actress at the LAMDA, explained Clare; she was seventeen, while Christopher, her brother, was thirteen and away at school. ‘Good bloody riddance,’ said Clare, licking around the wrapper of her Mini Roll.
After the dressing-up and the make-up, they listened to records on the record player in the living room. On the wall above the fireplace was a big painting of striped lines in singing colours. ‘It’s modern art,’ Clare shouted. ‘It’s the latest thing,’ and together they danced to Camilla’s Rolling Stones LP.
When Mrs Phelan came to pick her up, the old woman went all tight-lipped at the sight of the make-up on Annabel’s face and as soon as they got round the corner she spat on her hanky and wiped it all off.
‘Your father would have a canary,’ she snapped. ‘Now listen, young lady – if you ever want to go back to that place again, you’d better watch it.’
For the remainder of their time at Lawn House, the two girls were inseparable. Annabel even risked inviting Clare back to Claverley Avenue and was shocked to see Clare morph into a quieter, duller version of herself, asking politely if she should take her shoes off in the house (yes, of course), shaking Natasha’s hand and saying, ‘Very pleased to meet you, Mrs Berrington.’ At teatime she washed her hands and sat nicely at the kitchen table, while Mrs Phelan bombarded her with questions about Camilla and her showbusiness lifestyle and whether or not her parents minded about the sort of company she might be keeping.
Clare adopted a very adult tone with Mrs Phelan. ‘Camilla is very dedicated to her art, Mrs Phelan – there’s actually quite a lot to being an actress these days, it’s not just showing off, and you have to be quite clever, what with learning lines and all that.’
Sometimes Annabel and Clare made up plays and one day, when they were ten, Clare made up a play about a man and a woman booking the same hotel room during a thunderstorm and deciding after a big argument that thanks to ‘adverse weather conditions’ (which was an actual phrase that Clare had heard on the television news), they should share the same bed.
Annabel was a great deal more embarrassed about stripping down and getting into bed with Clare than Clare was, and she froze up rather when Clare insisted that the man she was playing was a doctor and needed to examine the woman. They then attempted some French kissing, which was something Clare had seen her sister doing on the sofa when she was meant to be babysitting. Apparently it was also called ‘necking’ and Camilla did it with an older boy who secretly came round to the house on his motorbike and wore a leather jacket.
Clare referred to him as the ‘Filthy Herbert’ and told Annabel that she was going to ‘Filthy Herbert’ her before sliding her tongue into her mouth. The only time Annabel had tasted anything remotely similar was when she had gone on holiday to France and her father made her try snails.
After that they each inspected what lay hidden inside the other’s knickers: ‘It will get hairy down there,’ said Clare in her best doctor’s voice, ‘in a few years’
time. As hairy as a cat down there.’ When Annabel refused to believe her, Doctor Clare reverted back to real-life Clare and explained she had seen her sister and her mother in the bath. ‘We’re not a locked-door kind of family,’ she confessed. ‘My parents think society is far too uptight about nudity.’ She then tried to explain what her father’s willy looked like – ‘sort of like a massive uncooked sausage’ – before they both got dressed and embarked on a noisy game of Kerplunk.
At going-home time, when her au pair, aka ‘the nicotine fiend’, came to pick her up, Clare once again morphed back into polite mode and insisted on knocking on the drawing room door and simpering, ‘Thank you very much for having me, Mrs Berrington!’ before skipping off down the path with fag-ash Magda.
Annabel loved Clare with all her might and all her main but she didn’t want to play the ‘pant-inspection’ game again; she preferred Monopoly.
34
Big School and Bras
When Annabel was eleven, Hugo decided she needed to go away for the duration of her senior school education.
‘London day schools are all very well,’ he explained to Natasha, ‘but there’s a lot of new money around and the fees alone aren’t keeping the riff-raff out – there are a lot of scholarship girls who are being given places merely because they’re clever, regardless of where they come from, which is what I call the thin end of the wedge.’
In Hugo’s opinion, Annabel was in danger of ‘getting in with the wrong type’ and a good old-fashioned girls’ boarding school in the English countryside would ensure that her future social group was more carefully vetted.
It was 1974; just a year since women had been allowed on the Stock Exchange floor for the first time and Clare’s sister had joined the chorus of Hair in the West End. ‘Fully starkers at the end,’ Clare shrieked proudly. ‘Tits, fanny, the lot.’
Annabel told her mother the exciting news, leaving out the ‘tits and fanny’ bit, but nonetheless Natasha spoke to Hugo about it and he declared that Clare was no longer welcome in the house – the family wasn’t respectable. And that was that. ‘I will brook no argument,’ Hugo kept repeating.
