It’s true that, despite all the tales Mum told us about our wonderful, strong grandmother, Frieda was very cold towards Pascale and me. I never questioned her attitude, not even to wonder if all grandmothers were like her. She was just ‘Nanny’ and not very kind or friendly.
Pascale and I shared a bedroom on the ground floor of Frieda’s Victorian house, and during the long summer nights I’d lie in bed listening to high heels snapping at the pavement as women clacked past. We always seemed to be in bed so early in those days. On every fourth or fifth step the heel would scrape along the ground. That sound, like a chicken clucking or a throat clearing, fascinated me. I’d count the footsteps until it happened again, trying to decipher a rhythm, but there was never any pattern to it. I thought that scrape was all part of wearing women’s shoes and looked forward to making the same noise myself when I grew up. I had nothing much to worry about then except foxes under the bed. Outside the window a lamp post shone through two cherry trees, throwing dappled orange shadows that danced on the sage-green curtains. I told Pascale that the spindly, sparsely blossomed cherry tree was hers and the luxurious, blossom-laden one was mine. A hollow victory as she was too young (we were five and three) to know one was better than the other, or else she didn’t mind. Pascale adored me when she was young. She thought I was clever. I also told her six was the highest number in the world, that she could have six as her special number for a treat, and I’d have ten.
The spring Vida turned five I took her to see grandmother Frieda’s house in Woodland Gardens. The cherry trees were still there, their polished brown trunks with thin grey splits slightly taller and thicker, the canopies of branches heaving with pink clusters. I felt as if I’d travelled in time and was in two places at once: inside Nanny’s house in 1959, listening to the high heels on the pavement; and outside in 2004 with my daughter, running around the cherry trees. I’m glad I didn’t know how my life was going to turn out when I was that child lying in bed staring at the curtains. I’d have been terrified of the good things that happened just as much as the bad.
Vida and I played with the drifts of fallen blossom for an hour, tossing them in the air like confetti, piling them into heaps, constructing castles and pathways and tucking them into our hair. That afternoon is one of the happiest memories of my life.
Lucien In those days it was the talk of the neighbours that Kath’s mother wasn’t taking a bit of notice or interest and in fact disliked her two little grandchildren. Kath couldn’t wait to get out of there, she even had to go and ask her mother if it was alright to flush the toilet at night. Eventually her mother asked us to leave her house through a letter from her solicitor. As far as Kath was concerned Nanny was ‘No longer her mother’ and she was ‘A disgusting woman trying to push us out into the street with two young children’.
Knowing Mum and Frieda, how smart they were and how conniving they could be, I suspect they cooked up the solicitor’s-letter ruse between them to give Lucien a nudge towards buying a home.
It’s odd that we weren’t liked by our grandmother though. What was that about?
32 I was in the middle of snatching and wrenching my sister’s hair when I caught Vida’s eye. She looked straight at me, shook her head and mouthed, ‘No, Mummy,’ with a pleading expression. I knew what she was communicating: Now is not the time or place for you to do this. I don’t often disregard my daughter’s advice – she’s much wiser than I am – but I was in too deep. I felt a twinge of guilt, but not enough to stop. I was reminded of the time I caught our cat in the corner of the shower cubicle with a baby rabbit twitching in his mouth. I shouted at him, ‘No, Kazzy!’ He looked back at me with such guilt and apology as he sank his teeth into its flesh. He couldn’t control himself. I knew from right back when I leaned over Mum and grabbed hold of Pascale’s hair – no, I knew before that; I knew when the thought of being kind, turning the other cheek and letting her commandeer Mum’s death slid down to my feet and fury rose up from the tips of my toes – that, like the cat, some baser instinct had kicked in, and there was no turning back.
Steve’s Super Whip
Our father took the hint and we moved out of Frieda’s place and into our own 1930s mock-Tudor semi-detached house in Woodberry Crescent. I was ten years old and that’s when our troubles really began.
Lucien My fortnight holiday ends today. I have done all the shopping and cleaning and looked after the children. I spent £7 on food, one picnic and a day at the pictures with them.
I handed the children back to Kath and left £4 on the mantelpiece. Kath got up at 10.45 and by 12 noon we’d had nothing to eat as per usual.
I have some understanding of Mum’s late mornings and lack of housekeeping. I descended into the same apathy myself during the last year of my own marriage. I couldn’t face the days, but as soon as my husband and I separated, I kept our home clean and tidy again and got up to make Vida breakfast every morning. But why did Mum fall apart just when she’d achieved the dream of owning her own home? Was it that, as the explorer Ranulph Fiennes once remarked, it’s when your goal is in sight, with just a few miles to go, that all the will and stamina which has been motivating you dissolves and you’re most likely to give up?
Lucien 04.09.65 – Saturday. Got up at 9.45 had two Shredded Wheat, shaved and went to the bank. Kath not up yet. Came home, changed sheets and pillows and made children’s beds – swept top floor and dusted. Did my washing. Note: Done my own washing since 1st August 1965 [only a month ago], also ironing. Always done my own mending. [That’s true, all men who’d been in the forces could sew.]
06.10.65 – We had practically no food for the weekend. The children had chips only and nothing else on Saturday.
Mealtimes were not a pleasant experience in our house and nor was the food. Mum said Lucien was mean as he only gave her £4 a week towards housekeeping for all of us. She said he was stashing money away to spend on fancy colognes and new underwear for himself and mocked him for preening in the mirror and wearing aftershave. French and Italian men were thought of as perfumed ponces* by the English from the 1950s to the late 70s for caring about how they looked and smelled. Mum thought that if she bought hardly any food, Lucien would feel guilty seeing his children eat so little and buy some extra for us.
Lucien 10.11.65 – Tonight is the first day since last Friday that Kath brought some shopping home. Three bananas, one loaf of bread, two tins of evaporated milk, two tins of vegetables, a quarter of cheese and three pounds of potatoes. [Food in the 1960s.] I had bread and butter and Marmite and a cup of tea and went to bed.
12.11.65 – I went to Tesco. I spent £2.9.6d and kept the bill. In the afternoon I went shopping again and spent 15 shillings. Kath told the children to tell the teacher their father wouldn’t give them any dinner money. Viviane said she wouldn’t say this, but would say instead that she had forgotten it. Kath was angry with her and wrote all the details of the money she had to borrow on the back of Viviane’s dinner-money envelope for school – I hope it doesn’t embarrass the child.
I’m sure I didn’t show anyone the envelope. I never ate lunch at secondary school anyway. I used to spend the whole week’s lunch money that Mum gave me on Monday morning in the sweet shop and starve for the rest of the week. I was used to living with the sensation of hunger. Instead of eating lunch, my friend Judi and I spent every break loitering outside Steve’s Super Whip, the ice-cream van parked in one of the school playgrounds. There was a joke going round school that he was a travelling sadist who thrashed schoolchildren in the back of the van (Super Whip). Judi and I tried to make friends with Steve, hoping he’d take pity on us and give us a free ice cream. We especially coveted the wafer that was shaped like an open oyster shell, half dipped in chocolate, pumped full of whipped vanilla ice cream and sprinkled with a rainbow of hundreds and thousands – it was the most expensive ice cream on the menu. For a whole year Judi and I didn’t talk to friends, play sports or read during lunch. Instead we fastened ourselves to Steve’s van. Onl
y once did he give us a free ice cream: a cheap blue ice lolly to share between us. I cringed with guilt for years every time Mum said, ‘At least you never had free school meals.’ She didn’t want us to be stigmatised for being poor so she scraped together the money every week, even though we were entitled to free school meals. I never told her that I spent the cash on sweets and my lunchtimes pestering the ice-cream man.
Lucien 27.10.65 – I think Kath hides the butter. She leaves plenty of margarine around. Unfortunately I don’t like margarine, in fact the four of us dislike margarine and since the margarine hasn’t been touched by anyone for the past fortnight, I think I can say that Kath eats butter and hides it. [The wording of this makes me laugh.]
11.12.65 – I got up at 9.50 and prepared the children’s and my breakfast. Kath came down at 10.30 and began creating that I had cooked 3 tomatoes. She said she had bought them herself, that they were special Canary’s and yet she wasn’t getting one. [‘Canary’s’ were big tomatoes from the Canary Islands. The first seeds were planted there in 1885 by an Englishman called Mr Blisse.] Kath said, ‘Why don’t you eat your own food?’ Then Viviane gave her one half of her tomato. I said, ‘OK I’ll try not to touch anything if I know it to be yours.’ After breakfast I started clearing half a shelf to keep my food but Kath intervened saying, ‘Why can’t you keep it in your bedroom?’
From that day on, Lucien kept his food on a separate shelf in the kitchen cupboard and scratched or biroed a large capital ‘A’ onto the labels of all his tins. He also commandeered a corner of the fridge, where he stashed steak, butter and eggs. He ate all his meals at the end of the dining table crouched over his plate, munching in silence with his back turned to us. I didn’t understand why. I thought he wanted to eat nicer food than us and was too mean to buy his children the same quality and quantity that he ate himself. That’s what Mum told us anyway.
We didn’t see much of Lucien after we moved to Woodberry Crescent. He spent hours in an upstairs room studying for his engineering exams. He had no friends, no other relatives and didn’t fit in at Ford, the car company he worked for in Dagenham. He was a simple man and thought that if he made wooden boxes for the blankets to be stored in, eventually got round to mending the leaks and left £4 a week on the mantelpiece for housekeeping, he had the right to dominate his family. He couldn’t grasp that it wasn’t enough just to be born a man any more, that he had to be kind and make compromises to be loved.
Lucien 24.03.67 – I have been in my room all day studying. I’ve had one cup of tea and one apple. When I went down at 6.30 p.m. to have a drink of water I couldn’t get in the kitchenette, Pascale and Kath obstructed the way. I was so distressed at their attitude (even Viviane must have thought they were carrying things too far because she shouted at Pascale, ‘Move your blooming foot out of the way!’) that I did not return downstairs for an hour or so.
I would never have said ‘blooming’ (pronounced ‘bl’min’). Either I said ‘bloody’ and he didn’t want to write that in the diary and make me sound like a delinquent, or he added ‘blooming’ to make his account sound more dramatic. But the other part was true, and I didn’t quite understand why – apart from the fact that he was annoying – we all, especially Mum and Pascale, treated him so cruelly.
* From Withnail and I, 1987, directed by Bruce Robinson, starring Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann
33 Mum programmed me to fight, not to be walked over, never to give in. But even with all her years of training I couldn’t have been as savage and unrelenting as I was with Pascale that night if I hadn’t practised being the bad one in Mum’s kitchen during the past month. I didn’t care how hideous Pascale and I, two women in their fifties scratching and clawing at each other, looked. I wasn’t going to regret for the rest of my life that Vida and I didn’t have any proper time with Mum at the end. That Vida and I weren’t allowed to sit next to her while she was dying, or say anything about Pascale moving from the bed or Mum’s ear being flicked. To be left with the memory that I was too scared to make a fuss so I just sat back and let it happen.
Rude Girls
By the time I was eleven years old the atmosphere at home was so strained I spent as much time as possible outside, chatting with friends on street corners, playing on the swings at the park, walking up and down Muswell Hill Broadway staring in shop windows, and sitting in my friends’ bedrooms while they were downstairs having tea. Pascale was out a lot too. Mum didn’t seem to mind where we were, but Lucien thought we were too young to be roaming the streets.
Lucien 12.03.66 – Pascale said she was going for a walk and when I asked her to tell me whereabouts she replied, ‘Just for a walk.’ When I insisted, she stamped her foot saying it was her business. She is nine years old.
17.04.66 – When Viviane went out this afternoon with a friend, she dolled herself up with scent and lipstick – she is only eleven years old. I said she is much too young. She was shocked when I tried to advise her and adopted a rude attitude – I don’t think I am old-fashioned.
25.02.67 – In Muswell Hill Broadway I met Mrs Kitchen, a neighbour, and she said, ‘The group Viviane goes out with is no good. I know the boys and they’re a bad lot. I saw her at the Wimpy Bar last week. The way your daughter dresses in mini skirts and fancy socks and the rest of it, she’ll end up on drugs and in trouble.’ She told me she attempted to talk to the children but they just looked back at her stupidly in defiance and contempt. [Haha, yes we did.]
20.10.67 – I came home starving but suddenly felt so dejected I only had a cup of tea and a slice of bread. I no longer feel hungry. When I went up to say goodnight to Viviane I found her crying. She told me she was worried about having spots on her face because she always went to bed too late. Kath is out. I must be given custody of the children. It is my belief if they are left in her care they’ll grow up to some form of delinquency. She brings them up to look after Number One, don’t trust anyone, especially your father.
Mrs Kitchen was right in a way and if, ten years later, she’d heard I was playing guitar in a band called the Slits, looking like a cross between a prostitute and a thug, she would have felt very smug. I did go to the Wimpy Bar occasionally, but only to sit with friends. I couldn’t afford to eat there. I hung out with three boys called Dom, Adam and Paul. Dom had a motorbike, which he later had a crash on and died. The boys were very ‘Leader of the Pack’ in my eyes, but in reality they were only thirteen, fourteen and fifteen, still went to school and lived at home with their parents. I never wore scent or lipstick. Lucien must have been painting a dramatic picture to undermine Mum, but he wasn’t all wrong. Pascale and I were fast becoming feral. Mum told us to ignore our father’s comments, said he was mad and an idiot. Pascale, being younger, followed Mum’s lead and treated Lucien with scorn. I was ignorant of the dangers I could encounter on the streets. The worst things that happened to me at the time were seeing a couple of flashers and falling off a gate I was swinging on and splitting my head open. Neither event prompted any reaction from Mum. I agreed with her that Lucien overreacted when we got back late or disappeared for a while – he called the police a couple of times. I thought nine- and eleven-year-old girls hanging around the streets until late in the evening, their whereabouts unknown (we didn’t have a telephone at home), was perfectly normal.
Bad Man
I thought less and less kindly of Lucien as each month passed. He and Mum argued frequently and if I was ever lucky enough to miss a quarrel, she recounted it to me when I got home. Her vivid accounts of Lucien’s cruelty and unreasonableness combined with my own observations of this bullying, out-of-touch and embarrassingly weird-looking father I was lumbered with – his rumbling voice and thick brown hair combed forward into a wavy fringe – all added to my belief that there was an ogre in our midst.
Lucien 13.09.65 – Unless I say hello, the children are gradually being encouraged to ignore their father. I received more affection and respect before I bought the house Kath clamoured for so much. Her attitud
e has changed 100% since. She has got a house now and the devil may care how I pay for it. She is bringing the children up to look upon their father as a bad man. She said twice in front of them, ‘You want to be careful whom you marry, you don’t want to end up with someone like him.’ God knows what she tells them when I’m not around.
21.10.65 – When I come in, it is nothing and no one in sight. Our home and family life is now almost nil. In spite of my sweets, or pocket money, the children act towards me with such indifference that I have to repeat to myself that it isn’t true, it hasn’t happened, I am still their father. It isn’t quite so bad with Viviane, she is eleven and beginning to judge for herself. Although she subscribes little to the few words I say, she also tends not to subscribe entirely to all her mother says either.
05.11.65 – How can I go on seeing two innocent children being indoctrinated with this kind of attitude towards their father, fellow human being and in particular, towards MEN in general? [His capitals.]
17.12.65 – When I returned this evening everybody else was in bed asleep. I looked at the children.
34 I hoisted Pascale up by her hair and dragged her across the bed. She was heavy, but I was so pumped up I had super-strength. Vida raised her pale young arms and tried to hold her aunt’s body off her grandmother’s face. I knew I was putting Vida in a terrible position but I wasn’t thinking about the present, I was thinking of the future. I didn’t have time to explain all that to her. And it’s not as if I didn’t care whether Mum had a nice death, or was squashed by the weight of Pascale, or passed away to the sound of us fighting. It’s more that I thought Mum wasn’t the most important person in the room any more. It sounds terrible, but I decided we were, Vida and me – the people who were going to go on living. I glanced over at Vida and twisted my face into an expression that was supposed to mean, ‘It’s all right, I know what I’m doing,’ but I probably looked like a mad ghoul. I must have lost concentration for a second when I looked at her because that’s when Pascale manoeuvred my thumb into her mouth. I shouldn’t have let that happen, I made a mistake there. I didn’t let go of her though, not even when I felt her teeth sinking through the layers of my skin and into gristle.
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