by Tim Pears
Alice was also popular because, unlike other teachers, she bore no grudges against rude or unruly pupils. In reality she simply didn’t recognize insolent behaviour, never having displayed it herself, and it soon disappeared from her classroom. The only punishment she doled out was to mock silly or lazy children, but in such a teasing manner that, just like Harry Singh, they weren’t sure whether they were being belittled or flirted with by their chemistry teacher, and quickly mended their ways so as not to fall out of favour.
Evenings Alice spent marking books and preparing lessons, and weekends in the company of Laura and of Natalie, her friend from university and now a lodger in the house. It was a time when people were waking up as if from a dream and realizing that they were surrounded by American airbases; there was one ten miles west of town. Planes came crashing out of nowhere over the tops of houses, to send dogs scurrying inside yelping and induce catatonic trances in old people. Children would look up to see them fly so low that they could make out every metal plate and rivet in the undercarriage, and the image would stay with them for ever.
‘They’re our allies,’ Simon tried to explain. ‘They’re our friends.’
Alice and Natalie went out on Saturdays with food, clothes and encouragement to a small group of women camping outside the base, and they joined in demonstrations that to Natalie’s frustration were based on the principles of passive resistance.
Natalie wore a crew-cut and men’s clothes, and she accompanied Alice wherever she could, like a bodyguard, although it wasn’t as often as she would have liked because she was busy too. The women’s refuge was oversubscribed with battered women and their anxious children. The refuge, a four-storey terraced town house, was both a closely guarded secret and open twenty-four hours a day to any woman suffering domestic violence. Natalie often spent the night on a sofa in the office when one of the women’s husbands was looking for her, because Natalie was the best qualified to meet force with force. She was already running a self-defence class in the community hall off Factory Road.
‘This woman who came in last night, married nineteen years,’ Natalie told Alice and Laura one evening after supper, ‘she’s lovely-looking, forty-odd, could be younger. Her husband’s beaten her once a week, every week, since two years into their marriage. He’d sit her down and review the week’s events, pointing out what she’d done wrong – a meal five minutes late on the table, the car not filled up with petrol, shit like that, and there’s always something, right, if you look for it? And then he’d punch her. Always in a different place, and just enough to bring up some good bruising, but hidden, you know?’
‘Who would do something like that?’ Alice asked.
‘And he always told her: “I’ll never touch your face, your beautiful face.” It’d be her thigh, and then her shoulder, or her back, wherever. But that’s not so strange. What was weird was that he made their son watch. And he’d say: “You see what your mother’s done? Now she’s got to be punished.” Of course, the boy, he’s come to accept it as normal. The husband would ask the boy where his mother should be hit this week.’
‘Jesus,’ said Alice. Laura listened intently, but in silence; Laura knew men could go berserk.
‘What made her come to you now?’ Alice asked.
‘They’ve got a daughter, too. The woman’s always made sure she’d been sent to bed before these sessions. Last week the girl had her first period. A couple of days ago they were watching telly and the man switched it off, sat down by the girl, and started reviewing the week’s events: “You were late back from school on Tuesday. Overslept on Thursday.” He winked at the boy as he said it.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ said Alice.
‘And did he?’ Laura asked.
‘No. Not this time. But the woman says she was sitting across on the settee, shaking. Just shaking. He finished by saying: “Well, don’t be a bad girl, now, because bad girls get punished,” and then he grinned, and switched the TV on again. So the woman came out yesterday, with her daughter. She wants to move, to start up somewhere else where no one knows them, but she doesn’t know how. She said she took it all those years for the children; well, for the girl. Is there any more tea in that pot, Laura?’
‘Sure.’
‘I get scared, sometimes, that if one of these guys finds us and comes in for his wife, if he gives us any shit, I might just lose it. I mean you hear these stories, these women tell you these things and they’re just so beaten down, you know, just so terrified and empty. I think I might find it hard to stop if I got started.’
Natalie shook her head and gulped down some more tea. Laura wondered whether she’d ever tell Natalie about her beating; she wondered whether Alice had already mentioned it.
‘I can’t imagine Harry ever doing something like that,’ Alice said.
‘Come on, Alice, don’t be so naïve. You wouldn’t believe some of the things that go on in the Asian community.’
‘You can’t tar all men with the same brush, Nat.’
‘All men are potential batterers, Alice, that flash friend of yours included. The least you could do would be to learn some self-defence. If you’re strong, you can’t be a victim; you can only be a victim if you’re weak and afraid.’
‘I’m surprised you’ve not given up on me yet,’ Alice laughed. ‘You are persistent, Nat.’
Despite her failure in Oxford, Natalie still attempted impromptu sessions on quiet evenings in the house on the hill, which Alice was still unable to take seriously. The idea of bending back the little fingers of someone pretending to strangle her, stamping on their shin, or grabbing their scrotum only made her giggle nervously, especially when the assailant was a woman. Laura paid more attention to Natalie’s instruction, but when Simon volunteered to play a mugger and grab Laura in a bear-hug, Alice, watching, fell on the floor at the sight of her roly-poly, Billy Bunter brother smothering Laura, who struggled in vain to find something she could get hold of to hurt. Natalie had to halt the exercise, with a martial arts shriek of her own that stunned them, to save Laura from fainting.
‘You stupid walrus,’ Alice cried, tears streaming down her face. ‘You great big bully, Simon.’
‘But I wasn’t doing anything,’ Simon protested.
‘He’s just so big,’ Laura gasped, getting her breath back. ‘He’s just so fat.’
‘He’s soft, Laura,’ Natalie told her. ‘He’s easy. You’ve got to mean it.’
‘Er, right, OK, I suppose I better be going now,’ Simon suggested.
‘It’s like being squeezed by an enormous octopus,’ Laura explained.
‘I told you I was taught by an ex-commando,’ Natalie said. ‘A couple of us used to stay behind, and he showed us his real tricks. If Simon wasn’t a friend I’d show you; I’d drop him in two seconds.’
‘Well, I’ll leave you girls to it, then,’ said Simon, retreating through the door.
‘The bigger they are, Laura,’ Natalie concluded, not wasting any more advice on Alice, ‘the harder they fall. When you get rid of fear, nothing can hurt you.’
‘I’m sorry, Nat,’ said Alice, who’d recovered somewhat. She came over and put an arm round Natalie’s shoulder. ‘I’m just no good at defending myself, so I’ll simply have to keep you close by to protect me, won’t I?’
Natalie softened, and returned her friend’s embrace. ‘I’ll have to be there, then, sister, won’t I?’
‘Me too, Natalie,’ Laura joined in. ‘Alice’ll be all right; no one’s going to hurt her. I’m the one who’ll need your protection.’
‘You too, then,’ Natalie agreed. ‘I’ll look after you both, you useless bloody women,’ she said, as Laura hugged her as well.
Laura was twenty-three years old. She worked as hard as her mother had but made sure she was no put-upon slave. She combined work with leisure, and liked to go walking alone in the country: she spent hours poring over maps plotting complicated routes along foot- and bridle-paths whose focal point was a trout farm, a cheese-maker, a breed
er of rare pigs or an organic vegetable grower, from whom she could order direct. Or else she carried baskets with her and paused to pick blackberries, mushrooms, hazelnuts and sloes, and came home with scratched hands and stained fingers.
She became a doyenne of jumble sales and charity shops, though, unlike James, Laura dived into them in search of not clothes but Kilner jars, in which she preserved plums and pears, apricots and blackcurrants she’d gathered at pick-your-own farms. She stored them on free-standing shelves; on sunny winter days they refracted a syrupy light around her ordered kitchen.
Natalie wanted to chaperone her friend when she went out with Harry Singh, but Alice declined the offer. Natalie would, though, have approved if she’d been able to overhear their conversations, in which Alice patiently explained to Harry the changing role of women in modern society, and made clear to him her own independence. She stated so categorically that men were no longer hunters and women submissive prey, they were equal in every way, a woman was free to make advances without being considered a hussy and a tart, that he was too daunted to make any of his own; he assumed she was telling him that she would make the first move when she was ready.
It was the summer of 1983. Having completed her first year of teaching, Alice enjoyed the long vacation.
‘This is why she took the job,’ Simon told Charles at breakfast while Alice was sleeping in three floors above. ‘She’s not so stupid after all.’
‘She’s recharging her batteries,’ Laura told him. ‘If they didn’t have long holidays they’d get burned out, facing thirty little hooligans every day.’
‘I face three hundred of them,’ Charles objected. ‘They’re getting worse by the year. But some are going to have to take extended holidays before long.’
Charles was in an ebullient mood at that time. The Conservatives had just won another general election. Zoe had been right: following the Falklands victory the contest was portrayed as one between a war leader and a pacifist, and although more people voted against the Prime Minister than the last time, they didn’t quite trust a conchie either, and so voted for a third party, the Liberal–Social Democrat Alliance, thus splitting the opposition vote. And now the Prime Minister was looking around for new adversaries, with a glint in her eye.
Simon was still unable to take her seriously. She had struck up a special relationship with the American President: ‘They’re a great double-act,’ Simon told Alice. ‘He tells the jokes, she’s the straight man. It’s a difficult role – look at Ernie Wise, look at Margaret Dumont. She’s very good.’
In the town, however, local elections had followed a pattern opposite to the national one. As if by some compensatory reflex a Labour majority had been elected, and so on a local level a parallel political culture developed: while income tax was being slashed, rates – particularly for businesses – remained high, and the revenue was spent in ways that delighted some and enraged others, further polarizing wards, streets and households.
The council provided a second house for the women’s refuge, and Natalie shuttled between them to provide the security of her karate and a listening ear for further horrendous stories. It extended street lighting, and placed skips at various points around the town for the recycling of glass and paper. It initiated a park-and-ride system for shoppers and commuters and restricted parking within the centre to discourage cars, giving Robert reason to curse as he tinkered with his resuscitated wrecks in the back yard – he was already furious at the recent imposition of compulsory seat belts. At the same time, bicycle lanes were marked out on some of the roads, which made James’ progress around the town even faster.
Zoe, meanwhile, came to an arrangement with the council whereby pensioners and the increasing numbers of unemployed people could, on production of a Recreation Card, get into afternoon screenings at the cinema for £1, just as they could to the council’s own sports centres, tennis courts and swimming pool. That last tempered Robert’s bile: he got hold of a card for himself – although he certainly wasn’t unemployed – and used it for his daily clocking up of fifty lengths of the pool.
It was the year that young people on Job Creation schemes planted 4,500 daffodil bulbs all along the bank beside the Wotton Link Road, which Robert passed test-driving one of his reconditioned cars from the house to the swimming pool, and which brightened up the journey for commuters and schoolchildren. Schools were also encouraged to plant flowers: a similar Community Programme scheme employed mostly ex-pupils to plant beds of roses around the concrete classrooms of Alice’s comprehensive.
‘What an extraordinary waste of money,’ Simon opined.
‘Don’t talk drivel, man!’ his father responded instinctively. ‘Unemployment’s a curse, an indignity. Every man should have the right to labour.’
‘But, Father, we all know they’re not real jobs,’ Simon persisted.
‘That’s true,’ Charles agreed. ‘But then again, Simon,’ he said, appearing to remember that he’d changed his views recently, ‘they have to do something about the figures. People are sheep, but they’ll only stand so much before bleating turns to something worse.’
‘I suppose so, Father,’ Simon accepted.
As housekeeper, Laura got into the habit of hiding the Echo when it was delivered in the afternoon, before Charles came home from work: in contrast to his pleasure at breakfast, checking his share prices and reading the Prime Minister’s speeches in the Financial Times, the local paper made his blood boil.
‘This ruddy council!’ he raged one Tuesday. ‘They’ve declared the town a nuclear-free zone! What the hell sort of piffle is that?’ he stormed, ripping the paper to shreds on his way to his study.
Alice, as it happened, spotted the headline on a hoarding outside the Singhs’ store, and bought her own copy; she and Natalie had spent the Sunday before at a demonstration against Cruise missiles. As if specifically to antagonize her father, Alice cut out the offending article and stuck it on the wall in the downstairs lavatory. Charles was halfway through his business there the next morning when he spotted it, pulled it off the wall and tore it up all over again. So Laura started placing the newspaper underneath the Radio Times in the drawing-room instead of on the table in the hall.
On some things central and local government came into direct conflict. Council-house tenants were encouraged to buy their homes, well below market prices. Far from flooding the market, as might have been expected, they only helped to stimulate it; Harry Singh was amassing his first million so fast he barely had time to count it. On the other hand, local authorities were prohibited from spending the proceeds from such sales on further council-house building. Like the revenue from North Sea oil, at its height at that time, the money seemed instead to disappear into thin air.
‘They’re using it to subsidize these tax cuts, of course,’ Zoe suggested at lunch that Sunday in the house on the hill – to which Alice had invited Harry, for the first time, hoping Charles would have forgotten his last visit. ‘To cushion the blow artificially,’ Zoe continued. ‘When the oil money runs out, and the changes they’re planning hit the welfare state, they’ll have taxes so low it’ll be unthinkable to hike them back up to reasonable levels.’
‘I’m sure we’re all most impressed by your grasp of economics,’ Charles needled his favourite adversary. ‘I hadn’t fully realized running a cinema was quite the complex operation it clearly must be.’
‘You can be as facetious as you like, Daddy,’ Alice told him. ‘But people are worried. The mood in the staffroom at school was like being under siege, waiting to see if the next pay offer was as low as we suspected it would be. The holidays came just in time.’
‘Teachers have had it easy for years, Alice, we all know that,’ Simon told her.
‘Most teachers are bloody idiots,’ Robert made his contribution.
‘The voice of reason speaks,’ said Laura.
Robert glared at her. Natalie glared back at him on Laura’s behalf, while Laura got up to clear the table and serve desse
rt.
‘Frankly, I don’t know what you’re worried about,’ Simon addressed Alice. ‘You can always make up your income with some evening work: there are hundreds of adult education classes nowadays, everything from macramé to bridge for beginners.’
‘I do wish you wouldn’t belittle us, Simon,’ Alice told him, as she went to help Laura fetch things from the kitchen.
‘I’m not,’ Simon exclaimed. ‘I’ve been looking through the brochures myself, for a meditation course. It’s the latest management thing in the States. And the fees are very reasonable too, you know, they’re all subsidized.’
‘I don’t think they had you in mind, somehow,’ Natalie pointed out. ‘They’re subsidized so that working people, housewives, the unemployed, can improve and educate themselves.’
‘With all due respect,’ Harry, who’d been politely silent till then, suddenly spoke, ‘if they could, the loony left would subsidize breathing.’
‘Hear, hear,’ Charles concurred.
‘My cousin Kapil has just started a football team,’ Harry continued. ‘He applied to the council for a grant on the grounds that it was a multicultural venture, and they gave him two hundred pounds for a complete kit.’
‘You’ve got to admire his enterprise,’ Simon remarked.
‘I don’t see what’s so strange about it,’ Zoe said. ‘It sounds rather enlightened to me.’
‘Well, for one thing,’ Harry informed her, ‘my cousin’s the only non-white in the whole set-up. Even if he is the manager.’
Another of the council’s initiatives that summer was to organize four Sunday events they called Fun in the Park, held on the hill below the house. Each one had its own theme – sport, international, music – and that day there was one devoted to health, so after lunch Zoe, Simon and Natalie accompanied Harry and Alice on a visit. Robert declined, while Laura said she’d like to but she had things she needed to prepare for the week ahead.
