By now it is December. We go to England and spend Christmas with my paternal grandmother in London. This involves touching down upon the String Trio on Boxing Day. Even the String Trio stop dead in their tracks when my dad and I sing ‘The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came’ in two parts, unaccompanied. Then I sing ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’ all by myself. In the car I sing ‘Hey Down, Hoe Down’.
‘She amazing,’ says the Uncle Fiddle Anorak to my dad. ‘Say, Jon, you do realize that she’s unusual?’
‘Can she sight-read?’ say the String Trio in some alarm and agitation, jumping up and down in the back. Sight-read! Poor old Stella, give her a break. She can’t so much as read Peter and Jane Book la. She can’t read page one of The Blue Pirate.
‘No she can’t,’ says Dad.
‘Pity,’ says Aunt Sally. ‘You’d get her a place in the choir school like a shot with that voice, Jonathan. But she would have to pass the entrance exam.’
‘Can she do middle C?’ says Sheila, always the most persistently murderous of the String Trio, but the aunt continues, oblivious.
‘She’d get her fees paid in toto,’ she says with a sigh. ‘They are rather demanding academically,’ she says. ‘Unfortunately.’
When we get back to Ireland I go to see a specialist in Dublin. He puts a patch over my left eye and sends me home with lots of phonetic exercises, but I still don’t learn to read. When I go back to school the Dragon Lady lays off. Unbeknown to me, some adult negotiations have taken place between the head and the Dragon Lady and my parents. I believe the teachers’ union may have been involved as well. The Dragon Lady hates me more than ever but she has found subtler ways of transmitting this. She has certainly transmitted it to the class because I have become Number One Class Pariah. The Untouchable. Not even Joyce O’Dowd likes to be paired with me.
At break I play on my own in a grassy corner of the playground. I teach myself to turn somersaults, then I teach myself to do the same thing backwards – forwards, backwards – it’s all the same to dafty Stella, who writes her name from right to left. When the bell goes I have leaves and twigs in my beautiful Rapunzel hair. My luck is in that week. A young supply teacher does PE with us and we do forward rolls on the mat.
She says, ‘Can anyone do a backward roll?’
I can and I do. Stella can do backward rolls! Then she gets us to do headstands. I’m the best in the class by a mile. She claps her hands for attention. ‘Everyone watch Stella,’ she says. ‘Well done, Stella.’ Suddenly, I am assimilated.
‘Stella can do headstands. Stella can do backward rolls,’ the children tell the Dragon Lady when we return to the classroom in our knickers and slip-on gym shoes to reclaim our folded clothes.
I go home in triumph but my success has come too late. The parents have decided to ship out back to England where the Precious Girl won’t be harassed and troubled by the likes of the Dragon Lady. Plans have been afoot during the visit over Christmas – estate agents consulted, houses considered for purchase and we move to a pretty cottage in the Cotswolds, right on the village green but with a stone wall and farmland behind it, where patient cows munch and stare. Some of the cows have red hair.
I go to a new school with no desks and no exercise books. The teacher has no special table and no blackboard. She is very advanced. We sit at little café tables and chat. We do almost no work at all. I feel instantly at home. I am very good at chatting. This time the teacher likes my chat lines about the Deutschmark and the Oktober Revolution and the Well-Tempered Clavier and the Scottish Impressionists. She does not seem to notice that I cannot tell the time, or that when I add 103 and 64 it becomes 130 plus 46, or that my answer, either way, is always wrong.
I am now, on the whole, among members of my own social class, though the village does have a council estate and one of my favourites, Michelle – a pushy little brain-box with beautiful handwriting and blonde hair and the latest in child fashion – lives there. Her mother is our dinner lady. The children in my village school are in the main the children of lawyers, antique dealers and furniture restorers, bankers, civil servants, artists, potters and academics. Not one of them milks cows. Some of them dig potatoes, but only for fun in their kitchen gardens. The farmer, the only person who does milk cows, has a daughter who is not in my school at all. She gets driven to a private school in Oxford, which is attended by Sheila and Fiona.
Nobody hears us read before assembly. Almost nobody hears us read at all. There isn’t assembly except in the afternoons, once a week, on Fridays. There certainly is no knitting – knitting is for Celtic peasants; knitting for Filipino sweatshops. We accomplish something like one and a half lines of writing a week. We do this on scrap paper and afterwards we crumple it up and then we throw it at each other or we lose it. We do lots of cooking and trips and treats. We do drama and singing. We blow whistles and little trumpets in The Toy Symphony in the village hall.
And, once a week, we do Sex Education. In the hall we watch a film of people playing tennis without their clothes on. Mixed doubles. We all giggle because their boobs and willies bounce up and down with every thwack. Then we watch a video of puberty speeded up. Hips thicken and boobs swell; testicles drop and clumps of hair sprout like mustard and cress, all to a count of five. ‘The main difference between Tessa and Harry,’ says the voice-over, ‘is between the legs.’ We all giggle like anything – especially me and Michelle.
Afterwards the teacher calls us in for a private chat. She says she understands that we giggled because we were embarrassed, but sex is nothing to get embarrassed about. We try hard not to giggle until she’s let us go. Then we chortle and skip and roll about on the grass.
‘Well, I was laughing because it was funny,’ Michelle says. ‘I wasn’t embarrassed.’
Three-quarters of the children have been taught to read by their mothers. Then there is me, though my mother, God knows, has tried. Then there are some of the children from the council estate who don’t have clued-up mothers. Some of the mothers can’t read either. The two best readers in the class, not counting Michelle, have recently come respectively from the British Council school in Abu Dhabi and from a primary school in New Zealand; both can spell and punctuate, both can do fractions, both are streets ahead; both have their work frequently pinned up in the school entrance hall to show what can be achieved by café society methods. The quarter of the class who can’t read are delicately said to ‘lack coping skills’. Nobody says we can’t read.
I have abandoned the eye patch on coming to England but I am drawn out of class once a week, because my parents agitate, and I am taught by a special teacher. I accomplish very little with the teacher, but the good news is that my school has a gym club and that I have a shiny, mint-green leotard which is soon covered in badges, all sewn onto the fabric by my mother with the finest little stitches. I walk on my hands on the horse and on the bar. Parents gasp when I turn cartwheels across the green, my orange hair flying.
I sign up for piano lessons when the idea is mooted. Two of my friends have done likewise. They are the two friends that my parents call the Tart and the Princess behind my back. The Tart is Michelle. The Princess is Sarah. Dad buys a piano at once, in consultation with my paternal grandmother, and the Tart and the Princess have their lessons at my house. This is an inducement to encourage me to play – and to integrate. My mother has always tried to ensure that my social life runs smooth. She is always at the school gate at home time, ready to welcome potential visitors and to give me a leg-up in the popularity stakes.
‘Your mother always has double-choc chip cookies,’ says the Princess admiringly, who has a sweet tooth. ‘Your mother is the nicest mother of all the mothers in our school.’
The Tart makes rapid strides and is much beloved of the piano teacher, who is a sweet young man. It is open house now for Michelle, who visits all the time but spends most of it at the piano doing her practice. Sarah and I are pretty well useless. We don’t practise much, but the teacher puts us in for Preliminary
Grade, thinking this will be a spur.
I make my mother sit through every minute of my practice. She has to sit alongside me on the same stool or else I screech and fuss. She has never played the piano before, though she learns along with me. Learn-along-with-Stella is her watchword in all things. The piano is my enemy but I must conquer it. I can’t read the music. I can’t remember about the crosses and the wiggles denoting sharps and flats, but I grit my teeth and rush at it like a cat crossing a busy road. Mum, who secretly practises but only when I am out so as not to intimidate me with her budding proficiency, can already play her way through little Bach and Telemann minuets. She sits besides me anticipating that I will play F natural where I need to play F sharp.
‘F sharp,’ she says, trying to sound casual, just before I get there.
I stop and stamp and sigh. ‘I know,’ I say. ‘I know.’ And I toss my orange hair. ‘Don’t tell me!’
I start all over again. She says nothing. She sits on her hands, willing me in silence to get it right. I play F natural instead of sharp. Of course. Dwang. Dwoing. I thump my hands down on the piano. I slam down the lid.
Tentatively, over tea, Mum says, ‘Wouldn’t you like to give it up, my sweetheart?’
‘No!’ I scream. I stamp. The piano is torture. I fail the Preliminary Grade, of course. The Princess, like a traitor, scrapes through. The Tart gets a distinction. The piano sits there lifeless. Mum doesn’t dare to play it for fear of appearing one up on me. Dad, who was made to play it in childhood, hates it and seldom does. Ultimately it is removed to Michelle’s house – a present from the Green to the Close.
The year I turn eleven is a good one. It is a miracle year for me. Not only do I sing female solo lead in the school production of Oliver, but – Miracle Number One – I teach myself to read. I do this very suddenly. Instead of miming what others do; that is, holding the book still and moving my eyes along the rows – my eyes that invariably jump and scramble and reverse – I open my eyes very wide and fix them rigidly on a spot on the wall and stare unblinking till they water. I move the book to and fro in front of this fixed spot, to and fro like the roller of an old-fashioned typewriter, zoom, ting, zoom, ting.
Before I know it, I am reading. I am reading Rosie’s Walk. I am reading all the Monster books. By the end of the day I have a hideous headache, but the next day, in the same way, I read Are You My Mother? My eyeballs ache. They feel like giant marbles about to roll from out of my head and clunk onto the floor. I feel the pain in my optic nerves like the severed stalks of flowers inside my head, but I carry on. I read aloud on an endless monotone. ‘“The-kitten-and-the-hen-were-not-his-mother-the-dog-and-the-cow-were-not-his-mother-did-he-have-a-mother? I-did-have-a-mother-said-the-baby-bird.”’
That night I vomit the paracetamol my mother gives me to ease the pain. I whimper in the dark. I cannot bear the light. The next day, in the same fashion, I read Mr Rabbit and the Lovely Present. I read The Sign on Rosie’s Door, which was given to me three years earlier as a leaving present when I departed from the Dragon Lady’s class. (Now what shall we give to the non-reading Stella? Why, we’ll give her a book. Of course.) That night I groan feebly. I can speak only in whispers. The bone of the eye socket above my right eye pulses and burns like fire. By the next day I have developed a nervous tic, a rapid eye blink from fatigue.
Over the next five days I read two books without pictures. They have chapters. I read The Diddakoi. I read The Railway Children. The following week I read Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes. I read The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. I read Sweet Valley High. Am I the only ten-year-old dyslexic who reads The Magic Toyshop in one day? After eleven days I have stopped talking the words out loud. After thirteen days I have stopped zapping the book to and fro. For a while my lips move silently. Then they stop.
All this while the saintly parents have said nothing. They have watched in silent terror, hoping that I will not stop. When I fall silent for long enough, Dad addresses me with a careful casualness.
‘You’ve gone very quiet, Mrs Mouse,’ he says. It is a Sunday evening.
‘That’s just because the words can talk inside my head,’ I say to him.
Mummy makes us a specially nice dinner, which we eat by candlelight. Dad has a little place in London where he goes on Mondays to work, but I skip school that Monday and go with him. We have Big Treat Day, during which he buys me a new leotard and special acrobat’s shoes. He buys me new boots and a very grown-up swagger coat. He buys me a stash of new clothes for my Sindy Doll, and then he takes me for tea at Fortnum & Mason, which is like being inside a brilliant kaleidoscope. He waits forever outside the Ladies’ Room while I play at the marble washbasins and smile at the hundred glowing, literate Stellas in the glass, all of them wearing the same beautiful new coat. In Hatchards he buys me a hardback edition of The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner with engraved illustrations by Gustave Doré. Finally he puts me on the train which Mummy is due to meet at the other end.
‘Your mother can say you had verrucas,’ he says. ‘Get her to knit you a pair of verruca socks.’ Then he kisses me and waves me off. I laugh and laugh as I collapse into my seat, because there has been a plague of verrucas at my school. They are no longer outlandish excuses; no longer original. And everybody knows that you do not knit verruca socks. They are made of rubber, like old bathing caps, and they do not come in pairs.
Miracle Number Two. I take to playing the cello. My grandmother (paternal) comes to stay. One day we drive out to fetch the String Trio. She is taking the four of us to a chamber music concert in the Holywell Music Room. She and I get on well. As we drive she tells me a story, talking all the way. She tells me about my Aunt Rosie and the cello. It’s a story I have never heard before. My grandmother had six children. The first is the Uncle Fiddle Anorak, and the second is my dad. The third is Aunt Rosie, the first girl. There are three of each, three boys, three girls. After the two boy brain-boxes, Aunt Rosie came as a bit of a surprise.
‘She was always very good at PE and flirting,’ Grandma says. I think perhaps I will be good at flirting one day, but in the event this proves not to be quite the case. Aunt Rosie is beautiful and has had three husbands, but it is probably not her beauty that has attracted them, though it certainly has not been a hindrance. It is something to do with her smell and I do not mean her perfume. I mean that there is a mysterious chemical that certain women give off. Must be – though none of us is aware of it. It exists to give men the come-on.
Grandma is a firm, decisive sort of person; she possesses a quiet, upper-class confidence. She resolved, she tells me, to make all her children play two musical instruments, the piano and one other. The Fiddle Anorak does piano and violin; my dad does piano and flute; Rosie does piano and cello. But very quickly, in the face of Rosie’s musical limitations, Grandma drops her standards and insists only on the cello. Aunt Rosie throws herself around and contrives to fall off chairs during her practice. She pokes the bow in Grandma’s eye. She spikes the end pin through the floor. She cracks the back putting her foot through it in rage – an assault that necessitates a horrendously expensive and skilled repair that mercifully, for Aunt Rosie, takes almost two months.
After a year Aunt Rosie has just about grasped that the outer two strings are C and A, and the inner two are G and D. After eighteen months she can struggle her way through to the end of three little tunes: ‘Michael Row Your Boat Ashore, Alleluiah’ and ‘Marco Polo Sailed for a Day, Caught Six Fish, Went Home for his Pay’. Grandma is laughing at herself through this story. She sings the songs aloud for me through her laughter. I am laughing too – perhaps with relief that Aunt Rosie should so remind me of myself. Perhaps I am not, after all, an inept, orange-haired changeling displaced into a family of high-flyers.
The last tune Aunt Rosie played was ‘Grandpa’s Birthday, Let’s Play Bridge. Grandpa’s Birthday, Beer’s in the Fridge’.
‘She could only play it,’ Grandma says, ‘because it had no sharps, you see.’
‘And then,’ Grandma says, ‘one day, I learnt my lesson. Your daddy, who was always rather too full of good ideas – he took it into his head to bury Rosie’s cello. In an unmarked grave, of course.’ I gasp and giggle and bite my lower lip. ‘He came to me at nightfall,’ Grandma says, ‘after I’d searched high and low for hours. “I’ve buried the bloody thing,” he said, “and I’ll only tell you where it is if you promise, in writing, that Rosie won’t ever have to play it again.”’ She pauses. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I refused, of course. I wasn’t going to be held to ransom like that by a cocky sixteen-year-old boy. I lectured him on how valuable it was and I demanded to see Rosie. “Rosie hasn’t a clue where it is,” he said, “so you leave her out of this, you witch.” I’m afraid to say, Stella dear, that your daddy was always a very impertinent boy.’ This, as it’s intended to, causes me to giggle with pride.
‘Actually, it was true that Rosie had no idea,’ Grandma goes on. ‘Only it took me ages to believe them both. All this time I must say I was worried sick about the instrument.’
Grandma had then called her husband and tried to make him get my dad to say where the cello was buried, but my grandfather had just laughed at her and had clapped my dad on the shoulder and told him, ‘Well done, boy. I should have thought of that myself.’
‘They were always thick as thieves, those two,’ Grandma says, with feeling. ‘Your dear Grandpa and your dad.’ I sit in a glow listening to her. I know that this is true. My dad adored his father, while Grandma, whom Mum and I love to bits, almost invariably gets on his nerves.
The Travelling Hornplayer Page 10
