My Animal Life

by Maggie Gee

  How I wish they could all be here now, Mum and Dad, Gees and Churches, the uncles and aunts, shrugging off scarves and coats, fussing and laughing and settling down; in both families, hugs and kisses. The dead are with us: Uncle Arthur palms a two-bob bit and smuggles it into my pocket, Aunty Eve takes both my hands in her ring-carbuncled fingers and offers the scented dust of her cheek, little Grandma Gee comes rocking towards me like a full-bosomed sea-legged sailor, dot and carry, dot and carry, all dimples, raising her hat to release a thin froth of curled white hair, but, suddenly fretful, calls, ‘Pa! Pa! will you hang this up?’ — her small navy head-hugging straw hat with the long pearl hatpin — but he is too busy crowing at my brother John, his beloved eldest grandson, ‘I’ll match you over 100 yards when you’re eighteen, boy! I’ll walk down the aisle at your wedding!’ All back from the grave, all home. Waves of laughter and tears crossing over.

  But before that epiphany, if this was real life, there would be hours or days of preparation, negotiation, tension, not to mention shopping and bed-making and cooking, the rehearsing or erasing of half-forgotten fears and resentments, the burden of hope. Let everything be right, let everything be ready, what shall we tell them and not tell them? Don’t let us down.

  And after the perfect moment of reunion, what then?

  I come from two different families, the Gees and the Churches. My parents’ given names both tell a story. My father’s was Victor Valentine Gee, quite a burdensome, aspirational one, expecting from the child who was born in 1914, the year the Great War broke out, exploits both martial and romantic. Vic was named for Valentine’s Day, the day he was born on, a secret softness he tried to keep from the oikish adolescents he taught. His initials were V V G, which meant Very Very Good when teachers put it on homework; his demands on himself and others were high.

  The Gees were clever and had standards, an end terrace house in Wolverton, Bucks, which meant they were upper working-class, a giant metal roller for the grass leaning against the garden wall, crimson hollyhocks six foot tall, and upstanding moral convictions. Wolverton was a grid of nearly identical red-brick terraced houses with blue slate roofs, a Victorian ‘New Town’ expressly built by the London and Birmingham Railway Company in 1838 to house the men who built the trains. Vic’s father, my grandfather Walt, was a Labour man and trades union leader at ‘The Works’, supposedly a hero for turning down a large cash offer from the bosses to go over to management, a figure in the community, as he let me know one day: ‘They’ll never let me buy my own drinks, in the club,’ he said with a wink. That didn’t sound good to me. ‘Why not?’

  ‘The Club’, the railway works pub-come-social club, was almost opposite number 62 Peel Road, and I associated it with happiness. Going up alone at night, since I was the youngest, to the dark first floor of my grandparents’ Victorian house, creeping into my soft snow-cold feather-bed with its small warm heart, the stone hot water-bottle put there in advance, I would wait shivering until the music across the way began, and the hum of male voices; then the light from the club, getting brighter as night fell, imprinted through the curtain an intricate, impossibly beautiful, longed-for pattern of lace on the wall.

  Why couldn’t Grandpa buy his own drinks? ‘There’s always someone wants to buy me a drink,’ he divulged, and offered me another treacle toffee, a paper bag of which soft dark brown squares he always kept in the pocket of his jacket ‘to keep himself regular’, as Grandma explained, for pleasure in this ascetic family always needed justifying, except for my grandfather’s fondness for drink. At tea (which was also supper) there was a clear rule, no jelly or fruit cake without bread and butter.

  Grandpa was a trim, fit man, with bristling white hair, kept short, and a neat moustache to disguise what might have been a hare lip but was actually damage he did himself as a young man in Cosgrove, the canal-side village where he grew up, by diving from the bridge into too-shallow water. ‘Pa’ (as both my parents called him) wore collarless striped shirts and a buttoned, fitted grey waistcoat, always smart, with a watch and watch-chain, which leads me to his special skill as a watch-maker and mender, with a workshop in the garden which was sacrosanct, next to the outside lavvy with its puzzling neat squares of torn newspaper speared on a hook. He sat in his workshop, visible through the open top of the split ‘stable-door’ he had put on, peering down god-like through his monocle-like watch-glass at the tiny gleaming mechanical galaxies of cog and spring he had opened up. No one dared disturb him there, still less go in and touch the minute spread pieces of metal that in my memory would cover the whole of his work-top like hard glittering fallen petals, infinitely interesting but forbidden. Once or twice he let me look in, but always with a firm, ‘Don’t touch, my duck.’ Did he understand how I longed to, loving as I always did (and still do) the detailed and microscopic? He made three grandfather clocks for his three sons, the wooden cases slightly dull but the faces meticulously scrolled and furled and the hands like the elegant dark outlines of heads of herons.

  Pa was also his chairs; where the rest of the family relaxed in armchairs or on the brown cracked leatherette sofa with its worn velvet cushions, Pa was only ever seen to sit perfectly erect in one of two upright wooden carver chairs he had made, one at the head of the table in the kitchen where we ate, one, with a pale blue-green-silver brocade slip-over cushion sewn by Grandma to soften the back, in the little dark sitting-room, semi-obstructing the door to the hall, an en-garde throne where no one but Grandpa ever dared to sit.

  It was a family of men, one of those families genetically biased towards boys. My father was one of three brothers, three sons, Cecil, Victor and Lloyd, though my grandmother was said to have wanted a girl so much that she kept my father’s blond locks long till he was five years old, thus causing him to be known as ‘Mrs Gee’s Fairy’ — not easy, especially when you secretly know you have a cissy second name, Valentine. Only Lloyd achieved parity between the genders, with a boy and a girl, Martyn and Susan, who (miraculously) always seemed to get on. Cecil had one son, clever Keith, who produced three boys; Vic had me, of course, and I, very late but lucky, gave birth to a girl, but he also had two boys, my brothers John and James, who fathered six boys between them. I grew up very used to men.

  Grandma Gee probably suffered from men, and certainly suffered from Pa, who was difficult. A lean, driving, impatient, intelligent man who had been a sprinter, and still walked, in old age, at a furious pace, despite his doctor warning him to slow down. He did so, on his morning walk, for the few yards of pavement that passed the doctor’s surgery, then sped up to a military clip again, a little deception of which he often boasted. Grandma and Grandpa Gee’s arguments were bad, and my father, who as a boy had always been drawn in on his mother’s side, and still did, as an adult, get enmeshed in Oedipal fights against his father which made us children tremble, later decided that Pa had sometimes been right; perhaps because he saw himself in turn becoming Pa, with a manifestly suffering wife, and with children, my brother and me, who’d been turned against him. The first argument between my parents I remember was when I was six or seven, at Watersfield, when I came home from school for lunch. I think it was about food; why was my father at home? Was Mum’s cooking not up to the occasion? I think she had cooked bubble-and-squeak, fried-up potatoes and cabbage, which was something the Church family ate and was actually one of my early childhood favourites; maybe it wasn’t good enough for Dad, who had very recently become a headmaster, pulling himself up with pure determination by his own boot-straps; maybe he wanted food that spoke of their new bright future. What was terrible was seeing my mother cry at table, and my father saying, ‘I have no respect for tears, Ma always used tears.’

  Ma: Grandma Gee. The frailest of my four grandparents, dying relatively young, in her seventies.

  Charlotte or Lottie Gee née Brown looked small and delicate (though plump, liking peppermint imperials ‘for my digestion’), with a tiny nose, round cheeks, dimples I inherited and bright blue eyes. By the time
I remember her, she had fine pleated pale skin, curled white hair and a chronically bad hip, as well as diabetes and Raynaud’s disease — fingers and toes whose blood-vessels go into spasm with cold, turning whitish-blue, and when the blood-flow suddenly returns, an alarming reddish-purple (she died, in the end, from a heart attack followed by gangrene). She still loved clothes, particularly hats, and elaborately pin-tucked blouses worn with brooches over her big soft bosom, and was prone to tell me things I had never thought about, but liked, such as ‘Yellow suits you.’ Grandma made a pet of me, I think because Pa made a pet of my cousin Susan, the only other girl in my generation of Gees, daughter of Vic’s brother Lloyd. Sue was very slightly younger than me, and much prettier, with the big blue family eyes (mine were green) and a perfect button nose (mine was long and Irish), and lived in Wolverton, thus having the advantage of playing for the home team. Sue had what seemed to me a huge wardrobe of wonderful dresses, because her mother Aunty Hilda, unlike my own beloved mother, was good at buying and making clothes. But Grandma, known to everyone but her grandchildren as Ma, took me into her bed as a treat in the mornings and whispered the unthinkable: ‘Susan isn’t prettier than you.’ I must have asked her, or she wouldn’t have said it. ‘You’ll be very pretty one day.’ This was amazing; I was skinny, with glasses, but perhaps if Grandma said so it was true. (I have a vague uneasy memory of checking what Grandma had said with Grandpa. I really wanted to know: ‘Am I prettier than Susan? Grandma says I am’ — which was not exactly what she had said, but was what I hoped to hear. ‘No, you’re not.’ Serves me right.)

  Grandma made me pretty clothes. I was helped to be a girl by the extended family. My mother’s deficiencies as a dress-maker must have been common knowledge, because everyone made me clothes, some of them remarkable: Grandma knitted me an outfit of multiple pieces in royal blue wool — (is blue royal any more? richer, deeper than sky-blue) — that had a short gathered skirt with buttoned over-the-shoulder straps, a beret, and a bibbed one-piece bathing suit. When I outgrew it she knitted me another bibbed swimsuit I liked even better, orange with a sharp white edge. Best of all, she made me a fluffy white angora bolero, softest, lightest, whitest delight. Aunty Ede, Ma’s sister, who had worked in the cotton-mills in Leeds (was it my father who told me that the three sisters came south from Bradford?) sent a work of art when I had just started junior school, a wonderfully busy cardigan with eight large cats’ faces, four on each side, knitted in relief, with green eyes and embroidered whiskers, and the neck and cuffs edged with knitted piecrust frills in scarlet, drawn in with scarlet threads finished with pom-poms. With what passion I wore it to school and accepted compliments (it must have dazzled, in the austere post-war world of the 1950s), how vividly it shines more than fifty years later from the phantom closets of my childhood. Aunty Elsie, on my mother’s side, posted, about a year later, just before we moved to Watersfield, a dress of great beauty. Indeed the most beautiful dress I had ever seen: filmy white muslin with raised dots of pale blue, pale blue smocking across the bust, white Peter Pan collar decorated with palest blue ‘S’-bending ric-rac braid, one row of it there and two on the hem, and puffed sleeves. Tragedy: it was too small (and my father was cross: I cried and insisted it fitted, as it strained and creaked under the arms, and he blamed Aunt Elsie because she was from my mother’s side). Compensation: Elsie also sent a white satin petticoat, frilled, which was almost as pretty and fitted me perfectly, though I was never allowed to wear it on its own to birthday parties, as I wanted. When I was confirmed, yet another aunt, Bertha, my godmother, made me a white gathered skirt and blouson boat-necked top from a stiff heavy material that proclaimed my fourteen-year-old virtue (would any fourteen-year-old girl now living in Britain accept, sight unseen, a skirt and top sewn by her aunt?) But I wanted to like it, and did: on family windfalls rested my adolescent hopes of femininity and glamour.

  There were reasons why my mother wasn’t, at least while I was young, very good at getting me clothes. For a start, money. There can’t have been much, when Dad was only a teacher and she (because he was a traditional man) wasn’t working. Dad had said, in his very unromantic wartime proposal on the station platform when he was on leave from the Air Force, ‘Two can live as cheaply as one, Aileen’; but three, and then four, and then five, as they added children, could not. All the same, the rest of the family, source of my extravagant gifts, were no richer, and most of them were poorer. It wasn’t just money. Now I see it was because of my mother’s own childhood. A seventh child and third daughter, Mum never had any new clothes of her own, only cast-offs. How was she to know how to make them, or what to buy?

  And so we move to the Churches: my other family, my other side. My mother was Aileen Mary Church, but should have been Eileen. The C of E vicar objected to Eileen (because the name was Irish, thus possibly Popish. Zillah Meakins, Mum’s grandma on her father’s side, seems to have been Irish and probably what was then called a ‘tinker’, a gypsy; the Meakinses were frequently away, and had their children christened in batches.) The amiability with which her father changed tack at the christening when the vicar baulked was said to be down to drink, but it also tells you something about the gap between Gees and Churches, because it is inconceivable that a Gee would have changed the name of their child from Eileen to Aileen on a vicar’s, or anyone’s, say-so — not when they were sober and even less when drunk.

  Gees, I was always hearing, had ‘character’ and ‘backbone’. ‘If you’re going to do a thing, do it right.’ ‘Stick to your guns.’ I see these traits come down into Walt Gee’s grandchildren, ourselves and our Gee cousins: dogged determination, self-belief, drive, competitiveness at sport and life, on the plus side tenacious loyalty and a mission to do something good in the world, on the minus — I see it in myself — a tendency to be sanctimonious, and at our worst, grandiose. Lucky for me then, lucky for my husband and daughter and friends, that my brothers and I are half my mother’s, touched with the redeeming brush, I hope, of the supple, easy-going, anarchic, witty, unashamedly self-interested, sensual, unsentimental, potentially criminal Churches.

  Aileen’s family lived in Stony Stratford, a walk away across the fields from Wolverton, in a smaller terraced house on London Road facing the graveyard, which had two rooms downstairs, the back room where we sat and ate and the front room for best, never used, with a scullery out at the back and an outside loo that was a wooden plank with a round hole in it over darkness, and smelled. They were not, like the Gees, upper working-class; Mum said the Gees were ‘a cut above’. The Churches were lower working-class, and mostly Tories, which went against their own class interest, whereas Gees, being argumentative, were Labour. I imagine the Churches found Labour politicians too smug for their taste.

  When Mum was small, she remembered the family being so poor that her mother had to cut fried eggs in two. She had contracted TB, which flourishes in overcrowded conditions like theirs, but recovered. Grandpa Church, Bill Church, had been in the Indian Army in the First World War, where he was a non-commissioned officer in the mess, and had such a good time — (there is a group photograph in which he is the only man wearing his cap pushed right back on his head, showing thick black curls, and a big unmilitary, sarky, sociable smile) — that he didn’t want to come home. Then Bill worked as a smelter in the steel works, a hellishly thirsty job requiring a lot of beer in the pub on Sunday morning, after which he returned a different man for his lunch, surly and furious, and my mother and Aunty Eve hid under the table.

  But by the time I remember him Grandpa Church was an old man, rheumy-eyed, flushed, immensely genial, small and rather loose-lipped, his longish white hair covered now by a beige flat cap, in a brown cardigan, who did a pensioner’s part-time job in a grocer’s shop, and made jokes about giving us a ride on the bacon-slicer, which, not understanding, I was eager to accept. Grandma Church had been a ‘help’ for Mrs Coe, not far away in the same row of terraced houses, all of which the Coes owned, doing her washing and cleaning,
and must have cleaned for others too. May Church had had seven children (though she lost one, a little boy called Louis, possibly from the TB which my mother survived), making my own mother Aileen, the youngest, that magical thing, the ‘seventh of a seventh of a seventh’, the third-generation child who supposedly has premonitions, ‘the sight’.

  Did she? My mother was reluctant to give up that reputation, rationalist though at bottom she was, saying her premonitions were ‘always bad’. (But I think of her, au fond, as an optimist, a woman who lived in the cheerful, accepting, make-the-most-of-it present, whereas my insistently upbeat father — ‘Never look back’, ‘Don’t talk about death’, and on the telephone later, demanding a ‘Yes’, ‘Are you fit and well?’ — was at bottom more fearful than her, an ingenious, comprehensive worrier.)

  Gees, descendants of the perfectionist craftsman and activist, Pa, and the needlewoman and aspirational homemaker, Ma, who hung framed reproductions of pictures like Watts’s Blind Hope on the sitting-room wall and had a four-shelf bookcase of mostly improving books, became craftsmen or teachers themselves, jobs with a certain rectitude. My elder brother John became head teacher of a comprehensive school, like our father; my younger brother Jim began, and ran, the NHS Counter Fraud Service; I am a moralising writer (though my anarchic side is pure Church). How proud Grandpa and Grandma Gee would have been! Churches, the more numerous offspring of slapdash Bill Church and fey May Davis (of whom it was said, by a possibly jealous sister-in-law, ‘she couldn’t even make a decent cup of tea’), had more dubious skills. One of Mum’s brothers was a bookie’s runner, one did conjuring tricks, all told jokes (Gees couldn’t) and were slightly cynical and made each other laugh, one was photographed smiling in an elegantly laid-back way near the top of a human pyramid, some emigrated, all liked money even if they had none, and some, like Eve and Albert, managed to acquire it. Churches occasionally had illegitimate babies, Gees had lifelong but not always amicable marriages. Churches had a gene, usually suppressed but life-enhancing, for red hair, as expressed in the waves of my beautiful, rebellious and eventually well-off cousin Maureen, and the crimson crest (heightened with henna) of my purple-and-turquoise-wearing, cricket- and claret-loving, scientific, artistic and eccentric second cousin Jane Teather; Mum had some chestnut in her thick dark hair, and my daughter Rosa was a strawberry blonde until she was six. Red meant, well, a bit raffish. Where Gees became trades unionists and in later generations lefties, Churches became Foresters or freemasons, liking the secrecy, the drink and the dinners. Uncle Albert was a Worshipful Master and once, vowing me to secrecy, showed me his gilt and silver regalia, which in my memory (but can this be right?) included an elaborate garter; his wife Aunt Eve, my mother’s sister, wore furs, had enormous gold rings on all her arthritic fingers, collected silver Masonic gifts, and drew in her eyebrows half an inch above the ghost of her real ones. They were snobs, and gossips, though kind and generous, and my father suspected them of patronising him. Churches had charm in bucketfuls, Gees had pride in spades.