Once a month she went up to a London hospital and tried every treatment going. She even had gold injections for a while. I hoped her teeth and fingernails might suddenly gleam gold, but there was no external evidence of this treatment whatsoever and I don’t think it helped much internally either. She was in constant severe pain. Sometimes she could hardly get out of her armchair, and her face would screw up in agony, but she never once cried.
Her poor hands were so badly affected that her fingers became claws and she couldn’t sew any more. Many years later, when I had my daughter Emma, Ga struggled desperately, her lips clamped together, and knitted her little dresses and cardigans and tiny woollen buttoned shoes, and crocheted an enormous soft white shawl. I want to cry when I think of all that painful effort.
She had a new hip put in and there was talk of new knees, but there was a limit to what they could do. Her feet swelled with bunions and in her later years she could barely walk.
But neither grandparent died when I was young. Biddy and Harry stayed reasonably healthy too. Biddy had frequent heavy colds like me. (I had just as many colds after my tonsils had been pulled out.) They always went to her chest and made her cough, but this was probably because she smoked so much. Her chic red packets of Du Maurier cigarettes were part of her, like her Max Factor Crème Puff powder and her Coty L’Aimant perfume. She smoked like a chimney, she sucked clove sweets and pear drops and humbugs, she ate Mars bars constantly, childishly chewing along the top, saving the toffee part till last. She wouldn’t walk for more than two minutes in her high heels and determinedly took no exercise whatsoever – and yet she’s still going strong now, in her mid-eighties.
Harry never smoked and didn’t have a sweet tooth. He had odd tastes in food. He’d eat peanuts from the shell, cracking them into newspaper in the evenings as he watched television. He’d construct his own odd little teas of beetroot and St Ivel cheese. He rarely cooked, but he had his own particular specialities, like very good tinned-salmon fishcakes. He ate healthily, if weirdly, and he took masses of exercise, cycling all the way up to London and back every day. He frequently went for long walks and he was also a very active member of the local tennis club. He seemed fit as a fiddle – but his heart started playing up and he died when he was only fifty-seven.
Maybe it was because of all his temper tantrums. When he was in full rant, his face would go an ugly red and the veins would stand out on his forehead. We could never tell when one of these terrifying temper fits would start up. Sometimes they came out of nowhere. Other times Biddy seemed to go out of her way to provoke him.
‘He’s got a terrible inferiority complex, that’s why he gets into these states,’ she said.
She didn’t see why she should try to make a fuss of him and boost his confidence.
‘I’m not going to pretend,’ she said, outraged at the idea. ‘It’s not my way. If I think he’s useless, I’ll say so.’
She did, repeatedly. When she got a job as a book-keeper at Prince Machines and they had a firm’s dance, she insisted that Harry go with her. Surprisingly, he agreed, but the evening wasn’t a success.
‘He just sat there like a lemon, wouldn’t say a word,’ Biddy raged. ‘He wouldn’t even dance with anyone, not even when this woman begged him. I was so embarrassed!’
‘For God’s sake, she was drunk,’ said Harry. ‘And it wasn’t a dance – she wanted me to join in these damn daft party games.’
Biddy had started playing her own private game with a man called Ron who worked at Prince Machines. Surely that was part of the reason for all the rows? Yet they never seemed to argue about him. Ron was almost like part of our family – Uncle Ron to me. When I was old enough to be left on Saturday evenings, Biddy and Harry went out with Uncle Ron. They mostly went to pubs, which was the strangest thing of all, because they were both still teetotal. Maybe they sipped bitter lemons all evening.
We even had a joint holiday together, with Uncle Ron’s wife Grace, who understandably didn’t seem keen on this weird situation.
I plucked up courage recently to ask Biddy if Harry realized what was going on under his nose.
‘I don’t know,’ she said impatiently. ‘We didn’t ever discuss it.’
I always knew about Uncle Ron – and several other uncles – and I certainly wasn’t going to blab to my dad, but I did think it horribly unfair to him. I didn’t like my dad and he could be incredibly alarming and unkind, but I always felt sorry for him. It wasn’t until he got ill that I realized there were not one but two ‘aunties’ lurking in the background, both of whom came to his funeral.
They both told me – separately – how much my dad had loved me and been proud of me. I was astonished. I couldn’t remember him saying anything of the sort to me. In fact several times he’d told me he couldn’t stand me. Perhaps they were just being kind and felt it was the polite thing to say at funerals.
Yet sometimes he acted like he really did love me, even if he never said so. That’s what’s so puzzling about writing a true story. If I was making my story up, I’d invent a consistent father, good or bad. Real people change so. Harry might have been a bad father to me in many ways, but he lived long enough to be a wonderful caring grandfather to Emma, patiently playing with her for hours, never once losing his temper.
Harry could sometimes be gentle and imaginative with me too. He had a passion for the countryside and as soon as we moved to Cumberland House he’d pore over maps and go for bike rides round the Surrey lanes. When I was on holiday from school, he’d take a day off from work and take me for a long country outing. We’d walk the Pilgrim’s Way, stand beside the deep green Silent Pool and struggle up the slippery chalk paths of Box Hill. We’d pick blackberries or hazelnuts, or buy bags of tomatoes to supplement our cheese sandwich picnics.
I was a weedy little girl but I could walk seven or eight miles in my sturdy Clarks sandals. Harry was generally at his best on these occasions. He’d let me chatter and he’d sometimes join in my imaginary games in a desultory fashion. We watched an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped on the television and played we were Davie and Alan wandering through the woods. Well, I played, and Harry trudged along, nodding every now and then. Sometimes he’d tell me the name of his favourite racehorse and I’d gallop along beside him, pretending to be winning my race.
We sometimes took the train to Guildford. Before setting out for the surrounding fields and hills Harry would take me to the big second-hand bookshop at the top of the town. It was a huge dark muddle of a shop with long corridors and sudden steps up and down and a series of connecting rooms, but if you negotiated this labyrinth properly, you found a whole room of children’s books.
Harry had a happy knack of finding me a book I’d like. He was a member of the Westminster Public Library near his office at the Treasury, and he sometimes borrowed a book for me. He brought home Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr, a magical book about two sick children who draw themselves into a nightmare world of their imagination. It had a profound effect on me. I was very careful not to draw anything too scary with my best Venus HB pencil after that, just in case.
He also brought me an adult book, The River by Rumer Godden, about a family of children in India. I was only eight or nine. I found it hard to get into the first few pages, but when I got used to Rumer’s strange style, I adored it. I particularly identified with Harriet, the intense literary child-narrator. Biddy had considered calling me Harriet, as an amalgamation of Harry and her own real first name, Margaret. She’d decided against this idea because she thought Harriet such a plain old-fashioned name. I was a plain old-fashioned child and longed to be called Harriet. I didn’t care for the name Jacqueline at all, especially the way Biddy said it when she was cross with me – ‘Jacqueline!’ Still, the other name under consideration had apparently been Babette, so maybe I got off lightly.
* * *
Two sisters in one of my books have a grandma with very bad arthritis. Can you remember who they are?
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br /> * * *
They’re Ruby and Garnet, the identical twins in Double Act.
Gran’s arthritis got worse. She’d always had funny fingers and a bad hip and a naughty knee. But soon she got so she’d screw up her face when she got up or sat down, and her fingers welled sideways and she couldn’t make them work.
That’s Garnet doing the talking. I found it an interesting challenge swapping from one twin to the other, so that they both get to write their story. Sometimes people don’t realize that there are two illustrators for Double Act. Nick Sharratt does all the Ruby drawings, and Nick’s friend Sue Heap does all the Garnet drawings. They have similar styles. It’s fun flicking through the book quickly, deciding which picture was drawn by Nick and which by Sue.
20
Biddy
BIDDY WAS VERY happy to go out to work. Harry only gave her a meagre amount for housekeeping and she hated being dependent on him. She worked at Roberts the cake shop first. I thoroughly enjoyed all the extra bath buns and currant slices and apple puffs.
Then she got a job as a playground lady in Kingsnympton Juniors, though this was the very school she’d turned down for me. Biddy was strict with me and expected me to know my place and to say please and thank-you. I must never interrupt. I must never say ‘What?’ if I didn’t hear her. I had to rattle through ‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’ I certainly mustn’t say ‘Pardon’ because that was common. ‘Toilet’ was common too. We said ‘lav’ in our family, and we used genteel euphemisms for what we did in the lav. It must have been a terrible trial for Biddy to be surrounded by ordinary, lively, cheeky council estate kids. That job didn’t last long.
She tried taking the newspapers round to all the patients in Kingston Hospital. This was a job she loved, especially going round the men’s wards chatting them all up. She took me with her in the summer holidays. I wasn’t allowed on the wards, but I’d wait outside in the hospital gardens. I’d have a book with me, and I’d take a handful of my favourite paper girls and sit swinging my legs on a bench, carefully fanning my girls out on my lap. Sometimes a nurse or a cleaner would come and have a little chat with me. One elderly lady was especially kind and gave me the odd sweet or two. Biddy had drummed it into me never to take sweets from strangers but I knew the old lady was just being friendly.
These were part-time jobs. Biddy branched out and got a full-time job at Prince Machines when I was eight. She stayed there the longest of all her jobs, probably because of Uncle Ron. Then she worked in an office up in London, behind the scenes in Bentalls department store, and then in the finance office of Kingston Polytechnic. She even worked as a cocktail barmaid for one evening but gave up because she didn’t have a clue what any of the drinks were. Eventually she set herself up in a small way as an antique dealer. She traded in Richmond for years, and then kept a small stall in the local antique centre well into her eighties. Even now she bids over-enthusiastically on eBay.
In the days of my childhood she had no spare cash whatsoever, but she managed to be inventive with her money. We never ate out as a family but Biddy and I had secret treat lunches together. We went to Joe Lyons in Kingston after a Saturday shop. We always had tomato soup, fish and chips, and strawberry mousse. She also took me to Winifred’s, a small café on Kingston Hill that specialized in home-cooked food: steak-and-kidney pies, or sausage and mash, or a roast and three veg. They had proper puddings too, like baked jam roll with custard, much appreciated by the elderly male clientele.
I remember reading a Woman’s Companion one day while we were waiting to be served. I was only eight or nine, but it was one of my favourite journals, a lowbrow story magazine with a pale red cover. I particularly liked the problem page, though there were sometimes words I didn’t understand.
‘Mummy,’ I piped up, ‘what are periods?’
I knew by the embarrassed coughs and rustles all around me that I’d somehow spoken out of turn.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ Biddy hissed – and fair enough, she did.
We had our jaunts up to London to look at the dolls and beg for Mandy photos. We also went to the big C & A clothes shop in Oxford Street to look at the party dresses. I hankered after the flouncy satin dresses – bright pinks and harsh blues and stinging yellows – but Biddy thought these very common. She chose for me a little white dress with delicate stripes and multi-coloured smocking and a lace collar. I still preferred the tarty satin numbers, but I loved my demure pretty frock and called it my rainbow dress.
I didn’t love the trying-on process. Biddy was always in a hurry, and if there was a long queue for the changing room, she pulled off my coat and tugged my dress over my head, leaving me utterly exposed in my vest and knickers. I protested bitterly, scarlet-faced.
‘Don’t be so silly,’ said Biddy. ‘Who on earth would want to look at you?’
She was forever putting me in my place and reminding me not to get above myself. If I got over-excited at a dance or a party and joined in noisily with all the other children, Biddy would seize hold of me and hiss in my ear, ‘Stop showing off!’ Yet this was the same mother who wanted me to turn into Shirley Temple and be the all-singing, all-dancing little trouper at a talent show.
She had no patience with my moans and groans but she could be a very concerned mother at times. When I was seven or eight, I developed a constant cough that wouldn’t go away even when she’d spooned a whole bottle of Veno’s down me. She was always worried about my chest since my bout of bronchitis so she carted me off to the doctor.
He didn’t find anything seriously wrong with me. I think now it was probably a nervous cough, an anxious reaction to the tension at home. The doctor advised Sea Air as if I was a Victorian consumptive.
‘Sea Air!’ said Biddy.
We lived seventy miles from the seaside and we didn’t have a car. But she took it on board valiantly. She somehow managed to find the money to take me on Saturday coach trips to Brighton right the way through the winter. We mooched round the antique shops in The Lanes and had a cup of tea and a bun in a café and walked up and down the pier and shivered in deckchairs while I breathed in the Sea Air. It worked a treat.
You certainly didn’t go to Biddy for tea and sympathy, but she was brilliant at getting things done. She was almost too good when it came to school projects. I remember a nature project when we were told to collect examples of different leaves. This was a simple enough project. I could easily gather up a handful of leaves on my way home from school. But when I casually mentioned it to Biddy, she snapped into action. She dispatched Harry and me to Richmond Park on Sunday morning and instructed us to find at least twenty different samples. We did as we were told. Biddy spread leaves, berries, nuts – goodness knows what else – all over the living-room table. It was our job to identify each example with an inadequate I-Spy spotters’ guide, her job to mount them magnificently on special white board. She labelled them in her exquisitely neat handwriting, then covered the finished work of art with protective cellophane.
My arms ached horribly carrying this confection like a splendid over-sized tray on the half-hour walk to school. The other children claimed – justifiably – that I’d cheated. The teacher seemed under-impressed with Biddy’s showy display. I had enough sense to lie like crazy when I got back home, telling Biddy that I’d been highly praised and given top marks for my project.
She particularly excelled at Christmas presents. She had no truck with Father Christmas, not seeing why he should get the kudos when she’d done all the hard work and spent the money. I didn’t feel at all deprived. I didn’t care for Father Christmas either. I hated having to queue up to have my photo taken with this overly jolly old gent in Bentalls department store at Christmas. Once he’d peered myopically at my short-cropped hair and given me a blue-wrapped present for a boy.
We didn’t go in for stockings at Cumberland House. Biddy organized a special Christmas bumper box stuffed with goodies wrapped in bright tissue paper. There might be a Puffin paperback – Ball
et Shoes or The Secret Garden or The Children Who Lived in a Barn. There would definitely be a shiny sheath of Mandy photos. I’d hold them carefully and very lightly trace her glossy plaits, smiling back at her. There could be crayons or a silver biro, and red and blue notebooks from Woolworths with the times tables and curious weights and measures printed on the back. I never encountered these rods, poles and pecks in my arithmetic lessons, and didn’t want to either. There would be something ‘nobby’ –Biddy’s favourite word of approval for a novelty item like an elephant pencil sharpener or two magnetic Scottie dogs that clung together crazily.
These were all extras. I always had a Main Present too. Hard-up though she was, Biddy never fobbed me off with clothes or necessities like a school satchel or a new eiderdown. My Main Present was a doll, right up until I got to double figures.
They were always very special dolls too. Sometimes I knew about them already. Once I saw a teenage rag doll with a daffodil-yellow ponytail and turquoise jeans in a shop window in Kingston and I ached to possess her. Biddy didn’t think much of rag dolls but she could see just how much I wanted her. We’d go to look at her every week. I went on and on wanting her. Then one Saturday she wasn’t there any more.
‘Oh dear,’ said Biddy, shaking her head – but she could never fool me.
I pretended to be distraught – and probably didn’t fool her either. I waited until I was on my own in the flat, then hauled one of the living-room chairs into my parents’ bedroom, opened Biddy’s wardrobe door, and clambered up. There on the top shelf was a navy parcel, long but soft when I poked. It was the teenage rag doll, safely bought and hidden away.
Jacky Daydream Page 10
