Behind the Scenes at the Museum

by Kate Atkinson

  Frank didn’t know what happened to Bruno, but Betsy was a sad case, she wouldn’t work with any other handler and for a while kept running up to the front-line and back to the kennels racing around looking for Jack. Then after a while she just slunk about, or lay on the ground moping so that everyone tripped over her and cursed her. Eventually a lieutenant took her out and shot her because noone could bear to look into her sad eyes any more.

  Frank led a charmed life once he had the rabbit’s foot and had no more trouble with death until 1942. He came home after the Armistice and married Nell who had already put away her little pearl and garnet ring alongside Percy’s sapphire chips and never really looked at them again until she took them out nearly thirty years later to give to the twins, Daisy and Rose, for their christening presents.

  The wedding was a small church one. Nell wore lilac and Lillian wore grey and Frank was reminded of pale, fluttering moths when he saw them together in their pearl-buttoned gloves and big hats with floating veils. He wished he could marry both of them, not because he loved Lillian (she was too clever, too mocking), but just so he could keep her safe as well. It seemed important to try and keep everyone who was left safe. When he and Nell leant out of the railway carriage window that was steaming them away on their honeymoon (they went to the Lakes, neither of them could face Scarborough somehow) Frank looked at the little wedding-party standing on the platform waving them off (Rachel, Lillian, Tom and Mabel and Percy Sievewright’s mother) and thought he saw his old friend death hovering in the background and was sure for some reason that he’d come for Lillian. Later, of course, he realized it was for Rachel, who dropped dead just as the train had rounded the bend in the track.

  Frank seemed to put the Great War behind him pretty well. He was determined to lead the most undramatic and ordinary life possible where the only problems would be from a teething child or greenfly on the floribunda rose he fancied growing by the front door of the house in Lowther Street. Memories of the war had no place amidst this kind of domestic harmony. There was a moment though, one day not long after Barbara, his first daughter, was born, when Nell had sent him looking for a pin and, rummaging through a drawer in the dresser, he came across the photograph of the foot-ball team. He felt a shiver like iced water going down his spine because when he looked at each member of the team in turn he realized that out of the whole lot there was only one still alive, and that was him. He looked at Percy and almost laughed – it had seemed so tragic when Percy died and now death seemed such a commonplace. Frank threw the photograph away, tearing it into little pieces first, because he knew that every time he looked at the faces of Albert and Jack he would be reminded that they should be alive, not him. When he came back downstairs again and Nell discovered he had forgotten all about the pin, she was irritated with him but tried not to let him see. Finding and keeping a husband had been a fraught business and she didn’t want to have to go through it again.

  Frank and Nell had five children altogether – Clifford, Babs, Bunty, Betty and Ted. When Clifford was born he already had a cousin. Lillian’s son, Edmund, was born in the spring of 1917. Lillian wouldn’t say who the father was, even when Rachel tried, unsuccessfully, to throw her out of the house. For a while Nell feared the baby would be born with thick, black hair and cheekbones like razor-clams. That would have been bad enough, but it seemed so much worse somehow when he turned out to have golden curls like an angel and eyes the colour of forget-me-nots.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1953

  Coronation

  IN HER BIG, WHITE DRESS THE QUEEN LOOKS LIKE A BALLOON that’s about to float up to the roof of Westminster Abbey and bob about up there amongst the gilded arches and roof bosses. To prevent this happening people keep weighing her down with cloaks and robes, orbs and sceptres, until she’s so heavy that bishops and archbishops have to help propel her around. She reminds me of the wind-up Chinese doll that Uncle Ted has brought Patricia back from Hong Kong – both glide over the carpet without revealing their feet and wear an expression of grave serenity. The difference between them is that the wind-up doll doesn’t have any feet, just little castors, while we must suppose the brand-new Queen’s feet really are her means of locomotion across the deep, crimson pile of the carpet. The colour of the Coronation carpet is also a supposition, of course, as the Coronation is taking place, in miniature, in various shades of grey on the little Ferguson set in the corner of the living-room Above the Shop.

  The television set is George’s gift to Bunty, a consolation for having to bring up her family Above the Shop instead of a normal home. We cannot claim to have the first television set in the street, that honour must go to Miss Portello of Hapland, the children’s clothes shop. But we are the runners-up and, more importantly, the winners in the family, for noone on either George or Bunty’s side of the family have yet acquired this most desirable of objects.

  Bunty is torn two ways – she is naturally proud of the television set and must show it off, and what better occasion than a coronation? At the same time she can’t stand having all these people in the house. The sandwiches! The pots of tea! Will it ever stop? She is buttering scones in the kitchen, heaping up a great pile of them like cobblestones. She’s been saving her butter ration for weeks for the Coronation baking, storing it in the fridge, along with what she’s managed to prise out of her mother, Nell, and her sister-in-law Auntie Gladys. She has baked an exotic array of goods, for ‘The good cook knows that nothing will repay her skill so well as attractive cakes, whether nut brown from the oven or daintily decorated,’ – this according to Bunty’s Bible, Perfect Cooking, the ‘Parkinson Gas Stove Cook Book’.

  As well as the scones, she has also produced plates of ham sandwiches (ham courtesy of Walter, the philandering butcher), ‘Coconut Madeleines’, ‘Lamingtons’ and ‘Little Caramel Pastries’ (Very Special!), not to mention ‘Piccaninnies’ (from Australia) and ‘Dago Cakes’ – these last two presumably in honour of all our little Commonwealth friends. They all have the slightly rancid aftertaste of butter that has been stored for too long in Bunty’s brand new Frigidaire (Nothing smaller is big enough!), another consolation prize from George. She has also made sausage rolls and Auntie Gladys has brought an enormous pork-pie and Auntie Babs has brought two fruit flans – big cartwheels, one of overlapping tinned peaches and maraschino cherries, the other of tinned Bartlett pears and grapes. These arouse much excitement and envy. Bunty thinks her sister hasn’t got enough to do if she can spend time making such perfect, flawless circles. She should try having as many children as Bunty has, Bunty thinks, adding one last scone to the pile. Bunty has so many children she doesn’t know what to do.

  ‘It’s like the Black Hole of Calcutta up there,’ she says to George as he passes through the kitchen, looking for more brown ale. ‘And there are too many children,’ she adds, as if there were a quota for such events.

  There are rather a lot of us. I’m one of them, weaving myself in and out of grown-up legs like a dog at an agility trial. Here there and everywhere, I don’t know how I move so fast – one moment I’m standing by the television set, the next I’m hurtling through the passage to the kitchen. If you blinked you’d almost think there were two of me. Perhaps I’m on castors like the Chinese doll – but then I’m very advanced for my age. People are always eyeing me doubtfully and saying to Bunty, ‘She’s very advanced for her age, isn’t she?’ ‘Too clever for her own good, that one,’ Bunty confirms.

  Our own Coronation guest list is not as long as the Queen’s. For a start we have no Commonwealth friends to invite, although Auntie Eliza is reputed to be friendly with a couple from Jamaica – one of the many taboo subjects drawn up on a separate list by George (Auntie Eliza is George’s sister-in-law, married to his brother Bill). We are also, amongst other things, forbidden to talk about Auntie Mabel’s operation, Uncle Tom’s hand and Adrian’s weediness. Uncle Tom isn’t our uncle, he’s Bunty’s and Auntie Babs’ uncle, and has been invited here today because he h
as nowhere else to go – Auntie Mabel is in hospital having her unmentionable operation. (Uncle Tom’s hand is a wooden replica of the one that was blown off long ago.) Adrian is our cousin – Uncle Clifford and Auntie Gladys’ only son – and we’re not sure if he’s weedy or not as we know no other ten-year-old boys to measure him against. He has brought his boxer-dog, Dandy, with him and I think the size of Dandy’s tightly-bunched testicles sticking out from behind his back legs is also a forbidden subject. Dandy is just the right height to knock me over, which he does regularly, causing much hilarity for Gillian and Lucy-Vida.

  Lucy-Vida is our cousin, Auntie Eliza and Uncle Bill’s daughter (Bunty would much rather she didn’t have to invite this side of the family). Auntie Babs has also brought her husband, Uncle Sidney, with her, a mild, cheerful man who we hardly ever see. The Coronation audience are constantly dividing and re-dividing into different parties and factions, the most common of which is that age-old favourite – men and women. Everyone is related in some way (unfortunately) to each other except for Dandy the Dog and Mrs Havis, Nell’s next-door neighbour who has no family (imagine!) of her own.

  Gillian is in her element – a readymade, captive audience ensconced in the living-room. Her only rival is the television set itself so she spends a lot of time trying to obliterate it by dancing in front of it and showing her knickers under her white, smock-bodice frock that is all petticoats and flounces and has come straight out of the window of Hapland. Our cousin, Lucy-Vida, she of the string-hair and long stick-legs, treats Gillian like a pet and whenever she gets too annoying for the grown-ups says things like, ‘Come here, our kid,’ in her thick Doncaster accent. Lucy-Vida is Gillian’s heroine because she goes to dancing-class. She has magic feet that just cannot stop tapping so that her presence is constantly signalled like that of a little blind girl.

  There is a sigh of discontent from the majority of the living-room audience (not from Uncle Ted who has a fondness for little girls, especially when they show their knickers) as Gillian breaks into ‘The Good Ship Lollipop’ (hard to believe, but true. She gives a new meaning to the word ‘cute’). She is the only one in my generation to have inherited the cherub gene – like Ada and Albert before her she has a headful of bubbling blond curls. She does not yet know that the price exacted for this unearthly splendour is, generally speaking, an untimely death. Poor Gillian!

  Lucy-Vida is rewarded with a toffee for ushering Gillian away and teaching her the five basic ballet positions out in the hall. Meanwhile, back at the television set, the young Queen is being ‘Girded with the Sword’ and Patricia is helpfully supplementing Richard Dimbleby’s reverent commentary with snippets from the Daily Graphic Coronation Gift Book for Boys and Girls. We learn that it ‘signifies an act of beautiful symbolism, the power of the State placed at the service of God.’ Her squeaky voice stumbles over the word ‘symbolism’ – she is only seven years old after all, although top of the class in Reading and generally regarded as quite precocious in her learning – but she picks herself up and tells us that ‘the Jewelled Sword’ was made for George IV’s coronation, thus precipitating an argument amongst one section of the grown-ups about George IV’s position in the chronological order of kings – clearly he came after Georges I, II and III, but did anybody come before him? Someone proposes Queen Anne as the bolster between Georges Three and Four, but then a fresh argument brews up as to who exactly George IV was ‘when he was at home’ anyway. Uncle Bill claims he was ‘the fat git that built Brighton’, while Uncle Clifford staunchly maintains that he was ‘the one that lost America’. (They should ask the house ghosts, for whom it’s all just like yesterday.)

  Patricia is brought in to adjudicate – rather a heavy burden for a child of her tender years, I fear – but she is an ardent Royalist and has already committed half of the entire royal family tree to memory, starting with Egbert (827-39). Unfortunately, she has only reached Edward II and cannot help in the matter of the mysterious Georges.

  Other members of the party (Nell, Mrs Havis and Auntie Gladys) are already launched on the remaining Georges (V and VI) and an orgy of nostalgia is occasioned by the appearance of Bunty’s George V – Seventy Glorious Years book and the discovery that Patricia’s Daily Graphic Book, having of necessity been published before today’s Coronation, is actually full of pictures of George VI’s coronation, ‘The old king,’ as everyone fondly calls him as if England is one big fairy-tale country full of goose-girls and wicked queens and ‘old kings’ who suck on pipes and wear slippers embroidered with golden crowns.

  The Georges I to IV contingent are also the Brown Ale contingent – a conspiracy of husbands on the Watneys composed of Uncle Sidney, Uncle Clifford, Uncle Bill and George, and a token bachelor, Uncle Ted.

  Coronation memorabilia begins to pour out of every nook and cranny now – my father’s Edward VIII Coronation jug, an item commemorating an event that never took place thus giving it a curious philosophical value, not to mention Ena Tetley’s George VI Coronation teaspoon, now in Bunty’s possession and which is, of course – technically speaking – stolen property (see Footnote (iii)).

  Patricia, being a school-age child, has the biggest and best trawl of loot and is hauled onto centre-stage to shyly but proudly display her 1) Coronation mug, 2) Coronation coins in a plastic wallet, 3) Coronation medal (identical to the one the new queen will pin to Prince Charles’s little chest later in the day), 4) Coronation toffees in a splendid purple and silver tin, 5) the aforesaid Daily Graphic Coronation Gift Book for Boys and Girls and, last but by no means least, 6) a Union Jack flag. For patriotic reasons, she is dressed in her school uniform – brown and yellow gingham dress, a brown blazer and a brown beret. Like Gillian in her Coronation-white, I am also in my best frock for the event – a lemon taffeta with Peter Pan collar and short puffed sleeves. Lucy-Vida is dressed in one of Auntie Gladys’ weird home-made creations. Whenever Lucy-Vida visits from the wilds of South Yorkshire she appears to be on her way to a fancy-dress party. Auntie Eliza’s flying needle stitches her one and only into a vast array of net and tulle, frills and furbelows so that on the stalks of her thin legs Lucy-Vida looks like an exotic flower blown wildly off course.

  We are all familiar with the fact that Auntie Eliza is ‘common’, about as common as you can get, according to Bunty. We know this has something to do with the fact that her blond hair has coal-black roots and she is wearing immense rhinestone earrings and we suspect it also has to do with the fact that – even on Coronation Day – she is not wearing stockings and her legs are dimpled and mottled and brazenly display their blue-cheese veins. (Not to mention the fact that she is welcomed into the Georges I-to-IV faction where her raucous laughter spills over the men and reconciles them to the existence of women.) Auntie Eliza’s hands seem to be permanently occupied with drinks and cigarettes and if she ever does have a spare one it’s usually to be found grabbing any passing child so that she can deposit a wet and sloppy kiss on its cheek – unusual behaviour in our family, to say the least.

  Auntie Eliza has brought all the little girls a present – home-made, crêpe-paper flower coronets, just like the ones that the Queen’s Maids-of-Honour are wearing. She even leads us in a little Coronation ceremony of our own, with us all lined up on the stairs where she fixes them to our heads with uncomfortable kirby grips. I am strangely moved by this event and the pain of having our scalps lacerated by the grips is lessened by Auntie Eliza’s contribution to the festivities – a sticky paper bag of Barker and Dobson’s Fruit Drops. Poor Adrian looks on glumly, one cheek bulging with a Fruit Drop, unhappy about being exiled from our paper-flower kingdom on account of his sex. ‘Never mind, kid,’ Lucy-Vida says solicitously. ‘I’ll teach you the splits if you like,’ and Adrian cheers up considerably.

  On the whole we rather like Auntie Eliza – even the sober Patricia will sit on Auntie Eliza’s knee and confide some of her less important secrets (her favourite school lesson, her favourite school dinner, what she wants to be when she g
rows up – answers: maths, none, a vet).

  Daisy and Rose play little part in anything – small and perfect, they are a self-contained world. They are dressed identically, they finish each other’s sentences (when they condescend to speak, that is, for they have their own private, secret language), and they look at you with the kind of cool, level gaze that would get them bit-parts in Invaders from Mars. Adrian is too young for the Brown Ale group but not particularly welcomed by the mainly female coterie who worship the ‘old King’ and who’ve now been joined by Auntie Babs and are embarked on a lively homage to the Queen Mother (‘the old queen’, you would suppose, but nobody calls her that). ‘The Queen Mother’ – it’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it? The Queen of the Mothers, the Mother of all Queens. Bunty would like to be a Queen Mother. ‘Queen Bunty, the Queen Mother.’ Then I would be Princess Ruby, which is rather lovely, isn’t it? Certainly a lot livelier than Princess Gillian or Princess Lucy-Vida.

  The Queen Mothers are on sherry, brown and treacly lethal cough mixture. Auntie Babs takes one downstairs to Bunty who is brushing a tray of sausage rolls with milk. ‘Oh, I thought I’d been forgotten about,’ Bunty says archly, taking the sherry and sipping it delicately. ‘You’re missing the Coronation,’ Auntie Babs tells her, and Bunty gives her one of her best looks, the one that says, ‘And who else is going to skivvy around doing all the work?’ without her ever needing to even move her lips.