Something else happened around the time of the move—I began to be very aware that I was happiest when I was out and close to the fields at the back of the house, or running in the woods, or on the farm where my mother went to work. That yearning to be out in the woods and fields, in the fresh air and on the land, began to grow as soon as my legs were strong enough to take me on long walks with my father, the dog at heel as we tramped across the countryside and through the forest, where he stopped to show me a rabbit burrow, a badger’s sett, or a nest, or to break open the prickly shell of a chestnut, holding it out for me to inspect. We would collect wild strawberries in summer and Kentish cob nuts in autumn, and of course we’d bring home wood for the fire. The land had begun to define my young life as it had done for my parents; she had begun to wrap her arms around me. Arms I can feel to this day.
When the due date for my new sibling approached, Nanny and Grandad Winspear came to stay. Something I witnessed at that time piqued my curiosity about what had happened to Grandad in the war—his war, the one where he was so hurt he learned to scream. I could already distinguish that it was not the same as my mother’s war. On the first night of their stay, I woke early, listening for my grandfather’s footfall on the stairs, a signal that he, too, was up and about. I heard him go downstairs, so I slipped out of bed, put on my red dressing gown with Bambi embroidered on the pocket, and crept downstairs after him. Instead of running to him, I sat on the short staircase that led into the kitchen from the dining room and peered through the bannister. Maybe I wanted to surprise him, in the way that children do—planning to leap out and shout as if playing hide and seek.
At night Dad would bank up the stove and close the dampers to control the heat, before filling two large pans with water and setting them on the stove so we would have hot water in the morning. The first person downstairs would open up the fire’s dampers to bring the water to the boil. I watched as my grandfather decanted hot water into a bowl and then added copious amounts of salt. He placed the bowl on the floor in front of a chair, sat down and rolled up his pajama trousers. He lifted his feet into the bowl and leaned over to rub hot salty water into his shins. At that point Dad came downstairs and stopped to kiss me good morning. He smiled and made a comment about spying again, and then went to Grandad. I watched as my father put an arm around Grandad’s shoulders and asked, “All right, Dad?” My grandfather nodded as Dad knelt at his feet and began massaging his legs, which I could now see were lined with deep purple scars. Every now and again he would tease out something from the flesh, and later my heavily pregnant mother did her best to explain that Grandad had splinters of metal from the war, shards that had remained in his leg after a shell exploded nearby. Oh, I must have posed some difficult questions for my poor parents. I tried to take in the answers, but it was a few more years before I came to understand what had happened to Grandad in the Great War. My grandfather was still removing tiny shards of shrapnel from his legs until the day he died in 1966 at the age of seventy-seven. Those tiny painful splinters had been inside him since 1916.
My father was at work when my mother went into labor. My grandmother took me along to the shop to be looked after by Phyllis Cooke until after the baby was born. In the meantime, Fred Cooke was phoning around the farms to try to find Dr. Wood, who was out on his rounds. The midwife was located, but for a home birth the doctor was supposed to be there. In the country, only the first child was born in hospital, with subsequent births taking place at home. Fortunately, my mother hadn’t learned that this was only the second baby the doctor had delivered. It was said he’d come to the area following a career as a navy doctor, and there was a rumor that the first child he’d delivered had died at birth, though he was not at fault.
I remember Mrs. Cooke asking me what I would like for my lunch, and I remember replying that I’d like a soft-boiled egg with toast “fingers” and a cup of milky tea. She mentioned the exact nature of my lunch order to my mother later, because it had amused her no end, this little girl who knew what she wanted and communicated her requirements as if she were an adult in child’s clothing. I can see how I must have appeared to Mrs. Cooke, and perhaps to other neighbors on our street—I recently told my husband that I felt more mature as a child than I do now. “You should write about that,” he said.
The doctor was located in time for my brother’s birth in the afternoon, while Fred Cooke had gone out once more in his big grey whale of a van to see if he could find out where my father was working and bring him back to the house. With the baby born, my grandmother came to the shop to take me home. And then my heart was broken.
Straightaway I went to my room to dress in my nurse’s uniform and to grab the little black bag that held my stethoscope and various bits and pieces I would need to look after the new baby. This was of utmost importance, because from the moment I’d been told I would have a baby brother or sister, I was also informed that the new baby would be my job—that I had to look after him or her and I had to always make sure the baby was safe and protected. My mother had been serious when she gave me these instructions and it was clear that this was no joking matter. The expected little boy or girl would be my most important task, forever, and I had my marching orders. Now the job had finally entered the world. I ran along the landing and knocked on the door of my parents’ bedroom—I was never allowed to just barge in. There was no answer, so I knocked again. Then the midwife came to the door. I can still see her as I write, with her cap perched on grey hair tightly curled. Her navy blue uniform was pressed, her white apron starched, and as if some of the starch had splashed against her mouth, her lips were tight across her teeth as she spoke down to me. “Go away. Go away now, little girl. Your mother has a new baby and she doesn’t want you in here.” Then she shut the door in my face. Tears smarted in my eyes and my nose began to itch, but hadn’t Mum always told me that big girls don’t cry? Big girls don’t cry. Big girls don’t cry. I walked toward the stairs trying not to let the tears come and began to go down to find my grandmother, but then my little legs gave way and I slumped down and sobbed.
I don’t quite know what happened next, apart from the fact that once I’d started crying I could not stop. My grandmother must have found out that the crabby midwife had upset me, and I suspect that by the time Fred Cooke had located my father, who was working in a grand house miles away, she must have communicated the story to him. In time I heard Dad’s footfall along the side of the house and voices downstairs as he spoke to my grandmother. I heard him make his way through the dining room and the sitting room, and I looked up expecting to see him at the foot of the staircase. Instead his hand holding a brown paper package with a very distinct shape appeared, as if it were a character entering stage left. Dad was standing in such a way that I could not see him, and could only see his arm, hand and the gift. Then he emerged, made his way up the staircase, sat and pulled me to him. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dried my tears.
“Come on, let’s go and give this a try.”
Of course, I knew what it was—the shape was a giveaway. I ripped off the brown paper and gasped when I saw the bright red garden spade with a wooden handle. This was no plastic toy—this was a serious child’s version of a well-known brand of professional-grade gardening tools. I loved working in the garden with my father and my new spade was perfect. Dad took me by the hand and led me out into the garden, showing me where I should begin to dig a furrow for us to put in the potatoes later. Only when I was hard at work, releasing the pent up hurt and pain of rejection, did my father leave me to greet his newborn son. Later he came to get me, helped me wash my hands and then took me to their bedroom, where my mother held out the tiny baby. The midwife had been dispatched—my mother let me know later that she had told her to leave the house. In fact, knowing my mother, upon hearing of the upset she might even have told her to sod off and never come back.
Now we were four. Our family complete. Years later, my mother told me
that she thought I worried too much about my brother. “I saw it in your eyes the day he was born, my girl. You looked at him, your little brow furrowed—I knew then you’d always worry about that boy.” I thought that was a bit rich seeing as she was the poster child of worriers and had reminded me that he was my job from the moment she held him out for me to look at, a strange little thing with jaundiced yellow skin. But I put everything into my job. Work was always a serious matter in our house, probably because we never had enough money—and not enough money was definitely a cause for worry. Not enough money . . . worry . . . not enough money . . . worry. It was, as they say, a vicious cycle, one we chased around and around like a dog after its tail.
10
The Rhythm of Life
My brother was a fractious baby, always crying—no, wailing—in his pram. He woke through the night, cried through the day and he would not sleep. I remember once two older boys from the neighborhood—the Pemble boy and the Saunders boy—came around with their bodge to see if they needed to rescue someone, because they’d heard screaming. Maybe my baby brother screamed because he felt he should be rescued, having intuited something untoward about this fey family he’d just been born into. It might have been a spiritual “I’ve made a grave error of choice” moment. The boys careened along the path with the bodge, a blanket for the victim/patient/deceased on board, and they were crestfallen when I said, “Oh, it’s only my brother,” their chance to be heroes thwarted. They left the house dragging the forlorn bodge behind them, as if it had lost some of its magic.
A bodge, by the way, is what kids called a sort of home-made go-cart in my part of the world. Boys were always scouring rubbish dumps for discarded old prams so they could tear off the wheels and suspension to make a bodge, tying planks of wood to the frame so they had something to sit on. One summer when my brother was about four or five years old and we were working in the blackcurrant fields, he lost control of his home-made bodge and went flying downhill along a tractor track, straight into a massive clump of stinging nettles. It was an easy enough accident and heaven knows he wasn’t the first, because there was only a loop of string to control the front wheels on a bodge. I was standing at the end of my row, waiting for the trailer to come along and the farmer to weigh fruit from the morning’s picking. Mum had walked to another part of the field to talk to a friend and I was left watching our trays—and I had a good few trays of my own ready for the farmer. Women had started to gather, chatting as they picked any stray leaves out of their trays of fruit, when John came hurtling down that hill, the sound of wheels clattering over bumps on the track drawing everyone’s attention. Women and children looked up and there was a collective gasp as he landed in the nettles. The woman in the next row turned to me and said, “It’s that brother of yours again. Better get him some dock leaves.” But I was already on the job, pushing my tally card into the side of my top tray so the farmer could find it, before running to tear off leaves of broad-leaf dock to rub against the big white welts that were coming up all over my little brother’s legs and arms and down the side of his face. He bit his lip and shed not one tear—and those nettles could really hurt.
But during John’s babyhood, before she returned to work on the farm, on those rare days when he napped in the afternoon my mother would tell me her stories, or we’d do the housework together. I think I might have been the only four-year-old with her own set of dusters and child-size furniture polish. I wonder who had the bright idea of buying me that present. Can you imagine how such a gift would be received now, with its suggestion that a little girl should learn to look after the home? It’s fair to say I also had a tool bag and train set, and could rewire a plug by the time I was eight, though there was that one incident when I managed to jettison myself across the room, so strong was the voltage that shot up my arm. “What the blimmin’ hell do you think you’re doing, my girl?” said my father, rushing into the room. I thought I knew exactly how to do the wiring, having leaned over his shoulder and watched carefully when he put a plug on the new wireless set. I’d stripped back the red and black rubber, and put each wire where it belonged, but I missed the bit about keeping the metal part of the red wire away from the metal part of the black wire. It was a lesson learned and it’s possibly why I now approach all electrical work wearing rubber gloves—even changing a lightbulb.
Despite these non-girly experiences, there’s that very vivid memory of Mum teaching me how to apply lavender wax to the dining room table and then polish it to a shine. The truth was that Mum hated housework, and would often stop what she was doing halfway through the job, perhaps for a cup of coffee and a cigarette, or a cup of tea, or just to have a “quick glance” at the paper. Sometimes we would settle in for Watch with Mother on the TV. It had all my favorite characters, though what I really liked was being allowed to watch television with Dad after we had our tea, because I would sit next to him on the settee, his arm around my shoulder as we paid attention to whatever was on the black-and-white screen.
I came to understand that what you called each meal revealed your station in life. Dinner was something my family had at lunchtime and tea was our evening meal. Posh people had supper in the evening, whereas “supper” in our house was that cup of cocoa and slice of toast before we went to bed. Out working in the fields, one of the women would shout out “lunch” at about half past ten in the morning, and we’d stop for a cup of tea and a biscuit. There would be another shout at half past twelve—“dinner!”—and we’d stop for our sandwiches. A cup of tea is only a cup of tea, and had nothing to do with our real tea, which was a cooked meal of meat and two veg with gravy.
After our tea, Dad would turn on the television to watch the news, and even as a child I really loved watching the news. A man named Tim Brinton was the newscaster—I remember Mum sitting down on her armchair and asking, “So what’s old Brinton got to say for himself tonight?” My parents would talk about what was happening in the world as each news item was revealed, though it seemed that little would affect our tiny corner, and certainly not a man named Profumo, who was involved with a woman named Christine Keeler (“Little tart,” said Mum). There was also that new president in America, whom my parents really liked. I can still see the look on Dad’s face as the words “News Flash” came on the screen, and someone said that President John Kennedy of the United States had been shot. I also remember Dad saying “silly bugger” when that same man got himself into a pickle about a place called Cuba.
The seriousness of the news was always alleviated if it was followed by a Western. Dad loved Westerns, so I loved them too, snuggling in beside him to watch Jess Harper in Laramie. Jess Harper was my first crush, then there was Gil Favor in Rawhide, and even Mum said he was a heartthrob.
It’s hard to believe now, when there are so many means of being entertained by a story on a screen, that there were only two channels available in Britain then, and following the afternoon children’s programming and sometimes a bit of sport, there was nothing until the evening news, just a blurred image on the screen called the “test card.” I still have a habit of asking “What’s on the other side?” instead of “What’s on another channel?” Our black-and-white Sobell TV was often temperamental. If the screen “went funny”—lots of squiggly lines where the picture should be—the solution was to whack it on the top with the flat of your hand. A good thump or two always brought the picture back, especially if it was Mum doing the thumping. If it didn’t right itself, she would complain about needing a new “tube” and the television repair man would have to come out and fiddle with all the wires and bulbs in the back of the TV set to find which one had gone.
This was usually the point at which Dad would tell us it was a pity he’d lost touch with his mate George—“Georgie”—because Georgie was a genius with a television or a wireless. He’d have that thing working in no time and he wouldn’t charge us either. According to Dad, the amazing Georgie could also turn an articulated lorry, what Ame
ricans might call an “eighteen-wheeler,” around in a space the size of a matchbox, if he had to. I loved how my dad referred to Georgie’s lorry as the “arctic” adding a middle “c” to the usual “artic” abbreviation for a lorry where the cab is hitched onto the load at the back. Dad’s pronunciation made it sound as if it came from a very cold place.
Georgie and his arctic were elevated to god-like status in our house. I could see him in my mind’s eye every time Dad mentioned his name—Georgie, god of the open road, waving at us from the cab as he drove past looking for a narrow street to turn that arctic around and show us what he was made of. Georgie was Dad’s mate in Germany, when they were in the Royal Engineers, and Dad looked up to Georgie, so we knew he was one of those blokes who could do anything, when he wasn’t walking on water. I remember him coming to the house once, with his German wife, Inga—“Auntie Inga”—whom he’d met when stationed there. They had two boys, and I remember the eldest, Luther, being so very kind to me. Perhaps those gentle boys had been taught kindness before anything else, because Mum told me that Auntie Inga had suffered in the war when Hamburg was bombed, and she had been scared when, as a little girl before the war, she had been chosen from all the children in Germany to present flowers to Adolf Hitler when he made a famous speech. The “honor” came as an order that her parents could not refuse, and as a child she had no say in the matter. The story about Auntie Inga fascinated me, because if I knew one thing, it was that Hitler had been a very dangerous bloke.
This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing Page 9
