Cross My Heart and Hope to Die

by Sheila Radley

  ‘What were you dreaming about, Janet?’

  ‘I forget.’

  ‘Don’t you ever have nightmares, Dad?’ I once asked.

  ‘Not me,’ he said, ‘mine are all daymares.’ And he laughed so I thought he was joking, but now I’m not so sure.

  ‘Don’t waste time brooding over anything that happened in the past,’ he told me when I was a teenager. ‘And don’t think you’ll always be stuck with things as they are, either. Your life’s going to be different, our Janet. You’ve got prospects for the future. You can do anything you put your mind to, and you must make the most of your chances.’ And then he’d talk about the time when I’d have finished my education, and I could leave our isolated little house in the middle of sugar-beet country and get a well-paid job in a town where there were people to make friends with and no end of interesting things to do, where there would be hot water on tap and telephones and public transport, and I’d at last be able to join the twentieth century.

  I don’t know why my nightmares about being chased by Andy Crackjaw went on for so long after I left the village school. So long after that now, nearly nineteen as I sit here writing this down to get it out of my system, I can’t even remember whether Andy ever did chase me all the way home or whether my dreams were just the result of his classroom threats: ‘Get you at playtime!’ ‘Get you after school!’

  It wasn’t my fault either, it was old Miss Griggs’s. She was the head teacher, very strict and old-fashioned, with stiff white whiskers on her chin and hands as hard as bread boards. If you played her up she’d set about slapping, not on your palms but on the soft inside of your wrists. It hurt. Even the big boys, the elevens, sometimes cried.

  I didn’t get slapped more than once. It wasn’t that I liked her, or wanted to be her favourite, but I didn’t see any point in asking to get hurt so I kept quiet in the hope that I wouldn’t be noticed.

  The village school was gloomy, with high church-shaped windows you couldn’t see out of, and the days there went on for ever. From the time we were nine it was all spelling and sums and eleven-plus tests until we were sick of it. School bored me just as much as it bored the others, but I’d discovered that I liked reading. I passed the time by reading the books that came on the library van and the others passed it by playing up the teacher, seeing how far they could go before she lost her temper. Most days it was no distance at all.

  Miss Griggs liked me just because I kept quiet. But she didn’t need to make it public, she didn’t need to shout at the others and slap them and then turn to me and say sweetly, ‘Now Janet, how are you getting on?’ No wonder they took it out on me at playtime.

  Andy Crackjaw was always the worst. He lived next door to us, with no other families within a mile, and he tormented me just to prove to the rest of the school that we weren’t friends.

  ‘Don’t you dare tell on me,’ he used to say in the playground while everybody crowded round to watch him give my arm a Chinese burn, ‘else I’ll really get you!’

  I yelped, but quietly so as not to draw the teacher’s attention, and made my promise.

  If anyone had warned me when I was nine that I should still be at school when I was seventeen, I’d have run away from home. Except that I loved my home and family too much to think of leaving.

  Home was marvellous when I was at the village school. Later, when I went to a town school and found out how other people lived, I was ashamed that our house at Longmire End was so primitive. But then, before I was eleven, it was the only way of life I knew.

  We were a happy family, just the three of us. Mum often used to snap and grumble, and bang the pots and pans about to relieve her feelings, but she and Dad hardly ever quarrelled. Not like the Crackjaws next door. Mr Crackjaw isn’t at home much, he’s either working on the farm or drinking at the White Horse in the village, but whenever we see or hear him come wobbling home on his bike we know that a row’s about to start. They’re always arguing and shouting and swearing, we can hear them at it through our shared wall.

  Mum says that Gladys used to be one of the prettiest girls in the village, but she has to be joking. Mrs Crackjaw looks a hag, with her scrawny face and straggling hair and her front teeth missing. Still, it can’t be much of a life for her, with dirty old Ziggy and all those kids to look after. Andy’s the eldest, a few months younger than me, and then there’s a girl and two more boys, and after that I gave up trying to keep count.

  Mum and Mrs Crackjaw are quite friendly, which is just as well because the only other people living in Longmire End are the Vernons up at the farm, and all we get out of Mrs Vernon is a gracious wave as she zooms past in their big car. So Mum and Mrs Crackjaw are glad to have each other for company, though they don’t go into each other’s houses. They usually meet down by the gate, at the pump where we get our water. I used to think it was coincidence that they met there so often, but then I realized that Mrs Crackjaw would go out as soon as she saw Mum, fetching a bucket of water whether she needed it or not for the sake of having a chat.

  Mrs Crackjaw has always been a clumsy woman, forever tripping over things or walking into doors, bumping and bruising herself. ‘She’s fallen downstairs,’ Mum said sharply, hustling me indoors, when I once asked why the side of our neighbour’s face had turned such a peculiar colour. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t more careful, until the day I happened to be at the pump with Mum when Mrs Crackjaw came hobbling towards us with one hand clutching her hip.

  ‘Oh, Bet,’ she said, in a snuffly voice, ‘I’m black and blue, black and blue.’

  Mum made a clucking noise that wasn’t entirely sympathetic. ‘You’ll have to take more water with it, Glad,’ she said. It was what Mum said about Ziggy whenever she saw him toppling off his bike on his way back from the White Horse, so I realized then that Mr Crackjaw wasn’t the only one in that family who drank.

  I often wished I weren’t an only child, but living next to the Crackjaws must have put Mum off, with all those bristle-headed boys popping up like peas. ‘If there’s more to come, they’ll come,’ I once overheard Mrs Crackjaw say; I couldn’t tell from her voice whether she was vexed or just resigned, but it certainly sounded as though she believed it. Their name isn’t really Crackjaw of course, it’s some fantastic Polish concoction, all ‘k’s’and ‘y’s’and ‘z’s’. No one ever tries to pronounce it except old Miss Griggs at school. I’ve sometimes collected Mrs Crackjaw’s family allowance from the post office when she hasn’t been feeling well, and her signature practically covers the page. She has to copy it from the cover of the allowance book to be sure of spelling it right.

  When Dad and I were at home we didn’t see much of the Crackjaws. We heard them all right, but we preferred to keep ourselves to ourselves. Andy would sometimes pull faces at me if we happened to meet at weekends or in the holidays, but he was usually going off to meet his gang and took no notice of me.

  There was one occasion, though, not long before we both left the village school, when he started being nice to me.

  ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Spirkett’s Wood. It’s a secret. I’ll show you on the way home.’

  But I ran off on my own as usual. I’d had enough of Andy’s Chinese burns. Lynn Baxter and Susan Freeman went with him instead, and they came back to school next day with the giggles.

  ‘You ought to have gone, Janet, you’d have liked it.’

  ‘Not interested.’

  They fell about laughing. ‘She don’t know what it was! She don’t know what it’s for!’

  ‘Don’t want to know. Don’t care.’

  They kept prancing about the playground, taunting me, but I pretended not to mind. Then Andy ran up and kicked my ankles, so I knew that things were now back to normal and on the whole that was how I preferred it.

  I couldn’t ever tell Dad about Andy. Partly because I’d promised not to and I knew that if I did tell, Andy would find out and make things
worse for me. And partly because I knew that Dad wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, anyway.

  Dad was tall and thin and pale, with wavy ginger hair and a modest chin, always very soft-spoken and gentle. He never ever smacked me, no matter what I did. There was none of the ‘you-wait-till-I-tell-your-Dad’routine from Mum that Mrs Crackjaw went through with her lot. Generally she didn’t tell Ziggy, but when she did the Crackjaw kids were really for it, we could hear their howls through the wall even though we turned the telly up full blast. In our house, though, if I deserved a smacking I got it from Mum on the spot. Dad wasn’t even much good at telling me off, so it wasn’t likely that he’d have had any influence over Andy.

  Not that I often gave him cause to be cross with me, I loved and admired him too much. I was always Dad’s girl. It may sound silly to say so, but it’s the truth. I used to spend all my time with him when he was at home.

  ‘Bloddy kid, always somewheres around,’ grumbled Mr Crackjaw in his thick foreign voice when I followed Dad into the rubbishy next-door garden to take some carrots Mum had promised Mrs Crackjaw.

  ‘Just ignore him,’ said Dad afterwards. ‘You’re my girl and you can come with me whenever you want.’

  Dad was a wonderful person to be with. He never went to the White Horse but spent his evenings and weekends pottering about usefully at home, telling me what he was doing and showing me how it was done. He made a swing for me and a hutch for the rabbit and a kitchen cupboard for Mum, and a toboggan for me and hutches for all the baby rabbits and a kitchen cupboard for Gran Thacker because she grumbled that he didn’t look after her. That wasn’t true, he was always doing things for her, but she liked to keep him on the run.

  Dad was a good cook too. He was once a cook in the Merchant Navy. ‘He’s got real pastry hands,’ said Mum grudgingly. Her own hands are broad and red and heavy, and her pastry’s so tough Dad could use it to mend the roof. She’s never liked cooking, and she was only too glad to let us get on with the week’s baking on Sunday mornings, but you could tell from the way she grumbled that it made her feel redundant. She always reckoned that Dad was extravagant with fats when he was cooking, and complained that we didn’t do the washing-up properly afterwards. Well, I did sometimes skimp over the washing-up, but it’s difficult not to when you have to heat every drop of water first. A kettleful of hot water goes nowhere.

  Dad wasn’t just a handy carpenter and a good cook. He used to make up stories to tell me every evening, giving each character a different voice and making me laugh so much that Mum would finally snap at him to give over or she’d never get me to bed. I used to sit on his knee and watch his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he spoke, and admire his long pale eyelashes and his green eyes and orange hair.

  There was even a time when I was convinced that I’d grow up to look like him because I loved him so much. Just my luck to take after Mum’s side of the family instead, straight dark hair and brown eyes and round cheeks, a plain healthy everyday country girl, and still dressed like one even at seventeen. We were allowed to wear our own clothes in the sixth form, but I stuck to my uniform skirt and blouse and cardigan. Actually I hadn’t got much else to wear except my best skirt and my jeans and one or other of Mum’s shapeless hand-knitted jumpers. It wasn’t that I didn’t like clothes. I desperately wanted a pair of knee-length fashion boots, and a red cowl-neck sweater, and a long list of other things. But I knew that until I could leave school and earn some money of my own I’d just have to go on wanting.

  Chapter Two

  Dad was thrilled when I passed the eleven-plus and went to Breckham Market girls’grammar school. Mum was pleased too, but with reservations; she was afraid that grammar school might put ideas into my head. They bought my uniform and games equipment and a satchel and a second-hand bike, and I rode down to the village every morning and left the bike at the shop while I went to Breckham Market on the bus.

  I thought I would probably like the new school, once I made some friends and stopped losing my way in the long corridors. The best thing of all was not having Andy Crackjaw there. But Mum was right, it certainly put ideas into my head. Before, I’d never stopped to think whether we were rich or poor. Well, obviously we were poorer than the Vernons up at the farm, but people like that are so different that you don’t make comparisons. Most of us in the village lived in more or less the same way, but at the grammar school nearly all the others were town girls, and I soon realized that they were living in a different century.

  Of course I envied them. And I hadn’t the sense to realize that it wasn’t a good idea to go home and say, ‘Why haven’t we got a bathroom?’ and ‘Why can’t we have a car?’

  Mum was furious. ‘I knew how it would be, spend good money and deny ourselves to send her to grammar school, and she turns out a snob. If this is what education does for her she can leave as soon as she’s old enough and work for her living, same as we had to.’

  But Dad knew it was no use shouting at me. That evening he sat down and took out his biro, borrowed a sheet from my rough notebook, and gave me a lesson in home economics. On one side of the paper he wrote down his weekly bring-home pay, and on the other side he wrote down our expenses. Half of them I’d never heard or thought of: rent and rates and coal and electricity and shoe repairs and television licence, not to mention food, and my school clothes and dinner money. He told me to have a go at balancing our budget myself. I just couldn’t do it, there wasn’t enough money to go round.

  ‘That’s your answer, then,’ said Dad. ‘We couldn’t manage as it is if your mother didn’t grow our veg and keep the hens and rabbits, and go out to work as well. We can’t afford anything else.’

  When Mum found out what he was doing she let rip even more. I must have been about twelve at the time and from the way she carried on you’d have thought he’d been telling me the facts of life.

  ‘You’ve no business to let her know what you earn, Vincent Thacker! It’s not right, at her age.’

  ‘She’s a sensible girl,’ said Dad. ‘If I hadn’t told her she’d think she was hard done by. Now she’ll know better.’

  Naturally I had a few bright ideas, such as why didn’t Dad get a better-paid job? Mum exploded again, I’d never seen her so mad with the pair of us. Dad sighed, but patiently.

  ‘Think about it, our Janet. What well-paid job could I get round here?’

  I thought hard about what other children’s fathers did for a living, but the fact is that there’s not much choice of jobs in the village. Some do farm work, like Mr Crackjaw, but Dad said their wages were no better than his. Some men drive lorries, but Dad couldn’t drive. As long as we stayed in the village, it looked as though he would be stuck with his job at the shop.

  ‘Couldn’t Gran Thacker pay you more?’

  Mum snorted. ‘That’ll be the day.’

  ‘Mother pays me the regulation wage. And this is her house, she lets us have it cheap because it isn’t modernized. We’re lucky to pay so little rent.’

  ‘Well, couldn’t we move to Breckham Market? You could get a good job there.’

  ‘Not without any qualifications, I couldn’t. Besides, if we lived in town we’d have to pay so much rent that we’d be worse off than we are here.’

  I’d almost run out of helpful suggestions. There didn’t seem to be any way round the problem, not while they were keeping me at school. But at that stage I was still finding the grammar school bewildering: I hadn’t got used to changing for PE and doing my homework on time, and I dreaded maths lessons. ‘I’ll leave school when I’m fifteen,’ I said willingly. ‘Once I’m earning we’ll be all right for money.’

  ‘Oo-oh – sometimes you talk real daft,’ Mum snapped, and she started banging plates about to demonstrate her aggravation.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ I asked Dad.

  ‘What good will it do?’ he said. ‘Use your sense, Janet. If you leave at fifteen with no qualifications you’ll be stuck here, same as we are. Education is your
way out. You’re one of the lucky ones, you’ve got the chance of a lifetime. You must stay at school as long as you can, pass all your exams, go on to college. If you better yourself, you’ll be able to get a really good job. People with college degrees can get a thousand a year as soon as they start earning.’

  Mum stopped slapping the crockery. ‘Never!’ she said, thunderstruck.

  ‘It’s right, I’ve seen adverts in the paper.’

  ‘Well there must be a catch in it,’ Mum declared. ‘Who’d pay a fortune like that to beginners?’

  I was awed into doing some mental arithmetic. A thousand a year … that was twenty pounds a week! Nearly twice Dad’s wage, for a start. If my staying at school would make us rich like that I was all for it.

  ‘In that case,’ I said generously, ‘I don’t mind putting up with things a bit longer. If you don’t mind, that is,’ I added, but it was too late. I’d seen their faces as they glanced at each other and for the first time I realized that they weren’t just my Dad and Mum, they were two separate people and they weren’t very happy either.

  ‘Oh, we don’t mind. We’re used to putting up with things,’ Mum said, and her voice was as raw as a nettle. ‘We haven’t had much choice in our lives.’ Dad didn’t say anything, but he looked shrunken and bleak although the room was warm. I felt suffocatingly embarrassed.

  ‘Can I have scrambled egg for breakfast in the morning, Mum?’

  ‘No, you can’t,’ she snapped, ‘you’ll have a boiled egg as usual and like it.’ And things seemed back to normal, but it must have been then that I started to grow up.

  There isn’t any regular work for women in or near the village. We’re fourteen miles from Breckham Market, and the earliest bus, the one I took to school, is too late for the factories. So Mum’s work has always been outdoors, casual field work, on and off according to the season.

  She used to take me with her on the back of her bike when I was still too young for school. I can remember helping her pick strawberries and currants in summer, and getting told off for eating too many, and in autumn I used to huddle under a hedge while she lifted potatoes in wind and rain. Mum always grumbled that her back would break in the fields and at the end of every job she swore she’d never go again, but apart from needing the money she enjoyed the company of the other women. Despite her grumbles she always looked forward to the start of each season, setting off in her outsize jeans and sweater, wellies and a woolly hat, with a bag containing her plastic mac, sandwiches and thermos hanging from the handlebars of her old bike.