by Patrick Gale
She had resented him at first. He was so sweet-looking, of course, so exotic, it had been as though the family had acquired a macaw or a tiger cub. For a week or two he seemed to be all anyone could talk about, even when they were talking to her. Even if he wasn’t with her, people talked to her about him. The only Boat Person in Pendeen, probably the only one in Penwith, Jim was famous for a while until people forgot or got used to the idea.
And then he was male, of course. Until he arrived, she had not given much thought to being a girl. She was Dad’s precious child and that was all that mattered, the catcher of his occasional indiscreet comments, the sharer of his burdens, sharpener of his pencils, deliverer of his letters. But the rude intrusion of a son defined her anew as a daughter. The polarity of the household changed. Loyalties within the family were subtly but noticeably reassigned. Whereas before she had felt herself united with Dad who, being often absentminded, needed protection from her mother’s practical efficiency, now the extra attention her mother paid her awoke her to a corresponding reduction on Dad’s part as he became more and more taken up with his son, this sweet, diminutive reflection of himself. Redefined as daughter it seemed she was to start tagging along with her mother with a smaller version of her apron and brush, perhaps. The boys could be hopeless and messy and male but women could only be useful and tidy and resourceful. Carrie might have rebelled and started throwing the sort of door-slamming, come-back-here-my-girl tantrums that were commonplace in Shell’s and Jazz’s interaction with their families and had often left Carrie feeling such a dormouse by comparison. But then, with what she was beginning to realize might have been some sly instinct to survive in a hostile world, Jim reached out to her. Quite suddenly it began to be her name he called when he was upset, her hand he reached for when something frightened him. To be needed, admired even, was novel, as was the enjoyment of a family relationship in which adults played no part. She found she could make room for him after all.
She woke when Dad nudged her so as not to miss the great bridge over the Tamar into Plymouth. They stared out at the cloudy-grey expanse of Plymouth’s tight terraces then he left Jim in her care while he went off in search of cups of tea. Shell and Jazz were tucking into hot bacon rolls from the buffet car. They said they were delicious, even though they smelled like armpits. Then they looked on in fascination when Dad returned and unpacked breakfast from a Tupperware box: marmalade sandwiches, banana sandwiches, all on the dense, homemade bread whose crusts Jazz and Shell always left when they came to tea. The tangerines were cheap ones, so tart they made Jim pull a face.
After breakfast she went for a walk along the train, leaving Dad deep in conversation with the vicar of St Just, who was a prime mover in organizing the march. She saw lots of people she knew, so the walk took a while because they asked questions. Carrie was shy. If it hadn’t been rude, she would far rather have ignored everybody. As it was, she knew her mother despaired of her because even her answers to adults she knew tended towards the minimal. ‘Yes, thank you.’ ‘No, thank you.’ ‘They’re very well, thank you.’ When people, especially men, spoke to her and asked her things, she felt as though they were taking a part of her. She knew they were friendly, she knew this was simply what people did and that it was her fault and she must grow out of it and stop being silly, but when some man said, ‘And what’s your name, my lovely?’ and, not content with her answering that, asked more questions like, ‘How old are you?’ or ‘What’s your favourite band at the moment?’ or the dreaded, ‘And what are you going to be when you grow up?’ she felt as though they were rummaging through her, their questions like bristly hands in a clean chest of drawers.
The girls lingered long enough near both Shell’s and Jazz’s fathers for money to be handed over for sweets, which shocked Carrie deeply, although she smiled politely and said thank you. They stopped to inspect Pendeen Silver Band’s uniforms, and to compare them with the band players from Camborne and Redruth who were joining in out of solidarity. They admired the mine’s banners, which Carrie confirmed had indeed been brought into the church to be blessed by the bishop on a recent visit. Then they reached the buffet and bought chocolate. Carrie was still full from breakfast but knew better than to refuse and be thought a goody-goody.
Then they all squeezed inside one of the less dirty loos to play with some lipstick and blusher and even mascara, which the girls had stolen (more shock to be concealed) on a recent trip to Woollies. The train was going fast now they had passed Exeter, so it was extremely hard to keep one’s hand steady enough for the effect not to be ghoulish or comic. Carrie’s hand slipped with the lipstick so that she ended up with a lopsided smile and she thought the blusher made her look as though someone had punched her. When the others had enjoyed a good laugh, she quietly took a wodge of lavatory paper and rubbed hard to scrub it off. Shell and Jazz were too intent to notice.
She had disliked games like this since they had ceased to feel like games. They were no longer dressing up or painting their faces for the fun of it, as when they had once bicycled all around the village wearing high heels and hats borrowed from Mum’s Oxfam collection box. Recently there was a purpose behind it all. There was no great mystery; she knew it had to do with Boys, as was squirting on testers in Boots and hanging around the benches on Causewayhead at tedious length with no apparent end in view. She knew, yet it left her feeling they were following a set of rules nobody had thought to explain to her. It was like maths. When she was off sick once she had missed two crucial maths lessons in which somehow everything to do with fractions was explained in patient, never-to-be-repeated detail so that she had been floundering on the subject ever since.
She relished the heady, polarized girliness of it, the sense that they were never further from boys, never so exclusively a gang unto themselves, than when observing these rites – if only a way might have been found for her to participate in parallel, as it were. What she needed was a make-up equivalent to servicing Barbie’s beach buggy. Mum was no help and Dad certainly wasn’t; no one she knew could help her. She couldn’t decide if the prospect of being excluded and left behind once it was finally noticed that she failed to pass would be a relief or a sadness to her. The uncertainty made her tense and queasy.
At last a guard knocking on the door and demanding they make way for others set her free to return to Dad, leaving the girls, who were all fired up now and possibly set on mischief, to explore the train further. She found Dad wandering the carriages too. He wasn’t looking for her, not being a worrier like her mother, but simply using the need to give Jim a little walk as an excuse to go among his parishioners, doing his job.
Just as she now knew her mother wasn’t beautiful, so she had recently begun to understand that people weren’t always glad to see their priest, that the smiles and friendliness with which they greeted him were often a little tight with good behaviour. She loved the rare days, and the precious weeks, of holidays, when he left his dog collar and black shirts at home and dressed like anybody else, like just a man, because it completely changed the way people behaved around him and dispelled a tension. It was interesting because he was nothing like some of the other priests in the area, who disapproved of things like rock music and alcohol, or even the idea of women becoming priests too. He was mild rather than disapproving and, if he changed people’s behaviour, her own included, it was always by displaying disappointment rather than anger.
Jim greeted her with a shout of her name. Perhaps at only three he was already learning that going anywhere with his father meant meeting lots of strangers and having to stand around quietly while they talked. He was showing no signs of shyness, he was boisterous if anything, so she offered to walk him back to their table. Anyone likely to want to meet him had met him already on his journey up the train, so on the way back just a few people called out things like, ‘Back already?’ and ‘Dad got bored, has he?’ which she could answer with just a smile or a yes.
Back at their seats she gave him some diluted ju
ice to drink then read to him quietly until it was plain he was far more interested in the novelty of watching trees and hills apparently flying past the window. Then she dug in her rucksack for her book. It was an Enid Blyton mystery from the library – her guilty pleasure. She sensed Dad’s disappointment when he saw her packing it. And perhaps it was a bit young for her now but at least it was a book. She had yet to reach the point where reading didn’t feel like school. Both her parents were readers rather than television watchers. The television – laughably old and small – lived in the kitchen, but apart from children’s hour, Doctor Who and the news, it was rarely on. The rule that she had to say what she wanted to watch before turning it on, which stopped her watching it just to pass the time, the way normal people did. If she wanted to enjoy being by the fire and with her parents, she had to do as they almost always did and reach for a book, or at least have one to hand in case a studious silence descended. Her mother was busy during daylight hours, always doing something useful: cooking, cleaning, shopping, mending things. And now that Granny had died, Granny who always used to do the darning, she was quite often busy even at the fireside, mending holes in socks and jerseys or knitting. So for her a book, invariably a novel from St Just Library, represented true leisure. Even when reading, she was never quite still. Her fingers often flicked and picked at the page corners as though seeking occupation or her feet flexed and rubbed against each other, walking invisible paths rather than lie idle.
By contrast Dad was never without a book, even when he was working. There was a little red one, a holy one, always in his pocket. He let her look at it once but it was all thees and thous and she couldn’t make sense of it. He said it was his best friend but a best friend whose appeal nobody else quite understood. But he always had other books. He had several on the go at the same time. Some upstairs, some down, even some in the car. As he said, you never knew and it was as well to be prepared. He read novels too, but he read history more and books about people’s lives. And God books. His reading, she could see, was a direct reflection of how he was interested in everything, prepared to give everyone a fair hearing. Whenever some parishioner lent him a book, however unsuited to his tastes, he made an effort to read it. He had even spent a few evenings recently sighing heavily over a footballer’s life story because an enthusiast in the congregation had pressed it on him and he felt it was an enthusiasm he ought to try to understand.
Carrie knew she would never be like him. She found most schoolwork hard. She enjoyed RE, because it was easy as she had been to Sunday School all her life and knew her Bible so well. But it was woodwork she loved.
She couldn’t say why carpentry appealed so but it wasn’t only because she was good at it. She had been inspired to take it up when a cabinetmaker spent a couple of days in the house replacing some worm-eaten timbers in the staircase. Sent to him to offer coffee and biscuits, she had been transfixed by his skill and slightly formal politeness, by the shiny condition of his old, hessian-wrapped tools which he let her handle and introduced to her one by one once he saw how interested she was, and by the delicious smells of wood shavings and varnish. She was the only girl in the carpentry class but she found she rather liked that. Without a band of girls around, the boys were transformed, approachable and no-nonsense. She had what Mr Ferris, their teacher, called a true eye: when she drew a straight line, it was straight; when she marked the centre of a piece of wood then measured it up, her mark was at the centre. Their first project had been interminable and boring – a model dugout canoe, designed to teach them how to use chisels and spokeshaves – but this term they were each making a small bookcase, with proper mortise and tenon joints. When it was finished, she was going to give hers to Jim to start a little library in.
‘Book,’ he said, nudging in on her thoughts and effortlessly eclipsing Enid Blyton’s emphatic sentences. ‘Book!’
When Dad returned, he was obviously pleased to find her reading to Jim, drawing his attention to the pictures and pointing to each word as she said it. Sitting across from them, since Shell and Jazz were showing no signs of returning, he took out his little red volume.
She was glad the girls had found someone else to amuse them when they arrived at Paddington. She was the only one of them who had been to London before and was worried they thought she would therefore know everything about everything when all she remembered about the visit was a big park, a building with a dome and going to the airport to collect baby Jim. They waved to her from the platform but by the time Jim’s pushchair had been retrieved and Jim strapped into it beneath a cosy blanket and a waterproof layer that snapped on around the edges, they were nowhere to be seen.
Through contacts in the union, Dad suggested, a fleet of proper red buses – double-decker ones – had been laid on and were lined up in a nearby street. With a cheer from the excited passengers, these finally set off for St Paul’s Cathedral. Dad made sure she had the seat by the window. With Jim unwrapped again and dozing on his lap, he kept leaning across her to point things out and she suspected he was as excited to be there as she was.
It was a nasty day – cold and drizzly – and Postman’s Park, where they assembled, was neither as eccentric nor exotic as the name had made her imagine it. It was a sunless space, near a postal sorting office, Dad said, and nothing like the other London park she had visited, with its giant, unfamiliar trees. But once the stewards and policemen gave the word and the band started playing and the banners were unfurled and they began to file out onto the streets, the buzz of it all warmed her.
Shell and Jazz found her again and they walked three abreast, arm in arm, laughing and pointing and calling out. There were several other parents with pushchairs, and they walked with Dad as if making a point. The Buggy Alliance, he called them, and Shell misheard and thought he had said Bugger Alliance which was very funny because he was a vicar.
She had thought they would be only the five hundred from off the train but there were far more marchers than that.
‘It’s all the Exiles,’ Jazz said knowledgeably.
‘What’s an exile?’ Carrie asked, thinking of Israelites.
‘She means students,’ Shell explained. ‘It’s a posh name for students.’
Just then the band struck up ‘Trelawny’ and everyone sang along, self-consciously at first, because people were watching from the pavements and taking photographs. A double-decker crawled by in the other direction and when people waved from the upper storey, the girls waved back. Then they burst out laughing again because they simultaneously forgot the words to the song and had to dum-ti-dum it. A couple of very serious men in suits in front turned back to glare at them. Soon after Jazz’s father came to claim her.
‘Come along, Jasmine,’ he said. ‘I hear you’re being undignified. Trafalgar Square’s up ahead.’
And so their little group fractured again as each girl rejoined her father and Carrie relieved Dad in pushing the buggy. As they entered Trafalgar Square Dad started to point things out to her again. He was distracted for a minute by a creepy-looking man with a big, bald head who stepped off the pavement to greet him. Dad gestured towards her and Jim, pointing them out to the man, but something made her prefer to stay where she was than go over politely to say hello.
‘Who was that?’ she asked, when Dad hurried back to her.
‘A former parishioner, from Portsmouth, I think,’ he said. ‘But actually I’ve no idea. You know how hopeless I am with names and faces.’ Then they followed the band down Whitehall towards the Houses of Parliament.
‘Look!’ Shell yelled back at her. ‘TV cameras!’ and her father smacked the back of her head. Carrie knew they shouldn’t wave as they passed the camera. It was a solemn occasion, a bit like church, but she didn’t know what to do instead so pretended Jim’s waterproof covering was coming adrift so as to look busy.
And then, all too soon it seemed to her, the march was over. A handful of carefully chosen representatives, Jazz’s father among them, was actually going insid
e Parliament to lobby MPs who, after all, wouldn’t have seen the march. The rest of them had a free afternoon in London before the Trelawny Train for home left at seven-thirty. And the police and stewards were keen for the marchers to disperse quickly now to free up the traffic jam that had built up behind them. Shell’s father was taking Shell and Jazz to Madame Tussauds, which sounded fun and Shell said it had blood and murderers and Michael Jackson. With his tight, talking-to-a-vicar manner, he asked if Dad and she wanted to come too but Dad surprised her by saying they had other plans, when so far as she knew they had no plans at all.
‘Isn’t it any good?’ she asked him once the others had gone on their way.
He pulled a bit of a face and said, ‘Not very,’ so she knew it was either a bit like Enid Blyton or too expensive or possibly a bit of both. ‘And we didn’t come all this way to see waxworks,’ he added.
So they agreed to choose one thing each and one for Jim. For Dad they went around Westminster Abbey. It was expensive and there were lots of tourists. Her favourite thing was all the wood carving in the choir stalls and the special carved seats called misericords, which Dad explained meant mercy because they had a little shelf that discreetly supported monks having to stand for long services in the middle of the night. Before they left, Dad suggested they go into one of the less crowded side chapels to pray that the march and the meeting with the MPs was a success.
She was worried people would stare at them or that he’d expect her to pray out loud, or that he would. But all he did was sit them in a quiet row near a pretty altar.
‘Let’s just think for a bit,’ he said, ‘about why we came today, and all the people we know whose lives will be turned upside down if Geevor closes and they have to find work somewhere else. Not just the miners, but their wives and girlfriends and children like Jasmine and Michelle.’
(She smiled at that because no one called Shell that any more than they called Carrie Caroline, but she hid her smile by kissing Jim’s head.)
