My Animal Life

by Maggie Gee

  Not for long. She had cared for him tenderly, if not ungrudgingly, maybe as his grieving mother never could, over the last five years when he was blind and had Parkinson’s disease. Life gave him a second chance at being helpless and receiving love, fulfilling the infant need that was thwarted by the precipitate arrival of his brother. Till death us do part: he needed, and Mum supplied.

  No one is fixed and nothing is forever. One day, when I had a family of my own, as my father and I walked up the garden path, single file, Dad going ahead, he was nearly at the door and he said ‘Sorry’ to me. ‘Sorry for the things I did wrong. Whatever I did wrong. When you were younger. I know I did.’ I was taken by surprise, and mortified later that all I managed was instinctively to comfort him, as my mother had shown me men should be comforted: ‘Never mind, Dad, it’s all right.’

  Which was not, perhaps, enough; I was genuinely grateful, but part of me felt ambushed, as if I should at least have had a chance to say, ‘Yes, you did wrong.’ But now I see that his apology was difficult, and brave. And that all those family wars were just something he could not avoid. Raging did not make him happier, though it made us less happy; my father could do no other. He struck out when words weren’t sufficient to express the hurt or injustice he felt, the outraged unfairness; why didn’t we love him enough, why didn’t we support him, why did we undermine and defy him?

  With a different wife, not a seventh of a seventh of a seventh with her damaged sense of self coming down through three generations, with a woman who stood up to him openly, rather than deferring, as Mum did, until she had no more ground to concede, all the while subverting his children with her charm and sweetness, and isolating him — could Dad have been different? Maybe. As it was, Victor couldn’t win.

  Scissors, paper, stone: that elemental children’s game. The Gees were scissors who cut through things, and obdurate stone which resisted. The charming Churches were paper, having the last word in secret, enfolding and circumventing, camouflaging, wrapping things up for a party, making life fun.

  And in later life, when the two elder children had gone, when the mortgage was paid off and the head teacher’s inflation-linked pension finally arrived and made their life comfortable, Aileen solved the great puzzle of clothes, those coded rags that claim status or artistry or beauty, saying ‘I am here, look at me.’ For herself, she bought layers of gypsy-like colour that made her look not unlike my dark-haired, long-tressed great-grandmother Zillah Meakins, reds and purples, waistcoats and scarves, and grew her hair, still thick and wavy in her seventies, down to her shoulders. For her children and grandchildren, by a sudden miraculous sleight of hand, she also provided clothes, doing in old age what she couldn’t manage as a young mother. She started knitting, with flamboyance, imagination, and steadily increasing skill, Ziggy Stardust tank-tops of her own design for myself and my younger brother, mixing black with silver and gold and crimson. One extravagant top, a kind of evening waistcoat, gold-buttoned, she dreamed up entirely from gleaming metallic thread, with elaborate Fair Isle patterns on the front woven from silver and gold, a pale shining wisp that clung lightly to my waist and breasts, like nothing else, un-sensible, fabulously sinuous, charm itself. As if all those years there had been orchids of gilded sartorial sensuousness rooting themselves in the dark deep down in Mum’s psyche, waiting only for the sunlight of money and time to break free. I wore that shimmering garment to parties for years, and now it belongs to my twenty-two-year-old daughter, Rosa, who wears, unmistakably, also, the witty, rebellious, unputdownable, charming smile of the Churches; tells jokes and does imitations like a Church, and, mostly, lets things go.

  So which side won?

  Alas, neither side won. In struggles between two families, no one can win. I just wish they had learned to get on. After all, the two strains continue now, intertwined. I adored my mother, but my father’s determination and eye for detail hold me in their pinions still, never leaving me alone; holding me up, driving me on.

  My animal luck (ii)

  I am born:

  and make my father jealous

  I began early, long and white and premature and so sleepy that my parents feared I was ‘not quite right’: did nothing but drink milk. They worked my arms and legs in swimming motions, trying to reassure themselves. My mother Aileen looks thin and dark and fierce in the photographs, for she was not well after I was born, but she clutches me to her, and her eyes are bright. She said that this thirty-third year of her life was her happiest; she loved her son John but now she wanted a daughter.

  That morning Mum had walked with my father into Poole, by the sea, to pick up an orange roll of stair-carpet for Tatnam Road, because the in-laws were expected. November 2nd: blowing leaves, squalling seagulls. My parents-to-be marched back through the wind carrying the roll of carpet, taking one end each, her bump sticking out from her thinness, stopping every now and again for John, aged three and a half, to catch up. Tea was cucumber sandwiches, and I arrived in a hurry two hours later. That rush birth was good for my mother but left a little mark on me. One of my only two recurrent dreams is of knowing I have to shoot down a long narrow tunnel to save my life and get into the light, and in the dream I can never do it, there is a half-formed dream thought that death would be better, but in a refusal of death, I wake up. Maybe one day when death becomes physically real I will be brave enough to dream my way through this dark tunnel and find whatever life is at the other end.

  I was born in 1948

  Loving life as I do, I would like to have another one, to go on trying to understand. But my rational mind thinks, with regret, that there must be an infinite variety of souls or selfhoods, as there is an endless serendipity of currents on the sea; why should one soul be reused? (And another voice, holding to belief, says, ‘Nothing in the world disappears. Mass becomes energy, heat becomes light, bones are made from stardust, ash feeds the roses.’ Why should the tiny detailed net of tensile electrical connectivity that is a single consciousness be lost?)

  The first voice answers, we have to make room. There has to be space for the not-yet-born, for becoming, or the system would be dead and closed. Our ‘once-ness’ makes us, and the world, and love, more precious.

  It will just be hard to say goodbye, one day. Harder than the headlong fearful rush down the dark tunnel that brought me — a six-pound mewling animal, skinny, half-blinded by the light, shining with womb-grease, mother-naked, sucking up air as I woke — into this radiant, temporary room.

  I was born in 1948, three years after the end of the war, during which my father Victor (always Vic) had been a meteorologist in the Air Force, posted in India and Iceland. He had said to my mother, as fathers say when they are in love, ‘I want a little girl just like you.’ What he got, in fact, was a reverse image; I was as pale as my mother was dark and vibrant; I had lint-white fine hair and she had thick black waves; her skin was olive, mine, as a child, transparent. (But thirty-eight years later, by the long-distance mathematics of genes, my own daughter would be born, blonde like me but with curls, lips, cheeks, eyes like my mother’s: the ‘little girl just like you’.)

  There was still rationing, I think until I was about four or five years old, because I remember red stamps in a grey book, and picking up orange juice from a Nissen hut. And the excitement of Grandpa Church, my mother’s father, producing a pineapple as a present, when I was at infants’ school. I recorded this in my diary, and the teacher unwisely wrote in pencil, ‘Where did he get it?’ I reflected on my grandfather’s life and added, ‘He got it down the pub,’ which made my mother indignant.

  That is the age when everything you know, you know without doubt, even when it is completely wrong. ‘Idiot’ was pronounced ‘eye-dot’, because that was the way I first read it to myself. I told my father, with great conviction, that Uncle Stan had come to visit my mother, indeed I still seem to remember seeing dark-haired, skinny, smiling Uncle Stan, husband of my mother’s beautiful sister Alice, coming to the back door of our Victorian
semi in Bromsgrove, and being welcomed with a shout of pleasure from my mother. But Uncle Stan had never been to Bromsgrove, and did not look as I described him either, so my story about the ‘uncle’ put my father in a jealous rage. I had ‘too much imagination’, of course, and everything I clearly imagined, I believed to be true.

  At night this produced both excitements and horrors. Like many children and few adults, I ‘saw’ things on the darkness, clear and vivid, with my eyes open; to science it’s a known phenomenon, ‘eidetic imagery’. They were real and bright as day; historical pageants, in which I was somehow a part, having lived before (as I believed until I was well into my teens), turreted Disneyesque castles outlined against technicolour cloudscapes, heroic adventures my brother and I marched away on. Sometimes however the visions went wrong. I would see the chain-link fences that were everywhere then, around institutions like schools, grey links of metal in rounded-off diamonds supported by rusting struts, and one night my room was so chokingly full of it, marching down on me from every wall, that I called my mother in a panic.

  She must have been tired, or my father was in a bad mood, because the one who arrived, with her back to the lit-up landing, black against the light, was the other mother I clearly knew also existed, not my loving, gentle mother but her doppelgänger, angry and slightly hoarse. I told her about the chain mail, which she could not see although it was everywhere. She tried to be kind, and was kind, looking round the world she could see for any evidence of fencing, and finally came up with some dark braid dangling from the edge of the round papyrus lampshade above my bed. I thought, ‘This is hopeless,’ and then I was kind. Because I saw that she needed to go, and she could not help me; and in any case, she had come, and the landing light made my room less frightening, more finite, and me less afraid, so I pretended the braid was the only problem, and she fetched some scissors and cut the ends off, then went away leaving the landing light on and the door half-open and myself only half-alone, and at least half-comforted. Because as long as love tries, it is love, though we all live in different worlds. If love is the urge behind the act, then surely there are no objective failures? And to think you are loved enough — to list, sometimes, the names of those who have loved you and who you love, without drawing up more demanding accounts of profit and loss — is for me the beginning of happiness.

  I am in print

  instead of Jane

  Print arrived, as an extension of myself, when I was seven or eight. For today’s children with their keyboards and computers and printers, there’s nothing magic about it. But print, in the 1950s, was something removed from the sphere of childhood, something professional and grownup. To me it became an obsessive excitement.

  Children like me learned to write in pencil, with unsatisfying slowness. I was hard on myself about writing; I liked to write my name in all my books, but then only months later would go back and be appalled by the crippled ‘M’ like a collapsing mountain range, the big straggly ‘A’ with its tepee-like overgrowth at the top, the ‘R’ like a rudimentary bird, the ‘g’ in ‘Margaret’ a sudden lower-case, humble and loopy, scraping the bottom of the barrel of my name, the uneven capital letters of ‘GEE’ in a drunken final dance, with ‘E’s like broken forks. I rubbed out and rewrote so many times that the frontispieces of my books were worn bare.

  Why was I so harsh? It’s true that, in different ways, both my parents were perfectionists, a trait which imprints itself without fail on the children in letters of fire. But I remember my mother protesting at the time and saying, ‘That writing was very good for your age, leave it alone.’ I refused to stop rubbing, worrying a blurry grey hole in the page. More likely this habit went back to my first day at the Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, infants’ school, when a teacher whose name I don’t remember gave us all strips of pale cardboard with our names on to copy into books, and instead I wrote down, triumphant, the name as my mother had taught it me, big, in capitals, MARGARET MARY GEE: which was roundly rejected by my teacher, who told me, ‘We don’t write in capitals now we are at school,’ took my paper away and made me do it again like the cardboard strip, correctly. I went home ashamed and infused with scorn for myself and my mother, though of course, as any parent will know, big letters are easier to write with their straight lines and right-angles. But they weren’t on the teacher’s card.

  This was the start of a troubled relationship to writing by hand that lasted until I was in my mid-teens. Too deferential on that first day, too critical later of my own first tries, I became in time a guerrilla warrior of handwriting. We seemed always to be moving schools (I went to three different primary schools as my family moved from Worcestershire to Sussex) and at each fresh school, I had the secret advantage of knowing, as the new teacher did not, what I had been taught before. The first time I moved, to tiny Watersfield village school where all the juniors sat in one room, divided by age into rows, I said, with perfect honesty, that I had been taught at Bromsgrove to write in loops, and found to my surprise I was allowed to keep them, in the face of Roman-nosed Mr Norris’s preferred italics. In any case it didn’t really matter how I wrote, since I could not in any respect learn to handle the new school’s white china ink-pots, full of made-up lumpy ink, that slotted into holes in the rows of desks, nor the stained wooden dip-pens with their tortured and twisted metal beaks, some crossed, which spluttered and creaked on our exercise books. I was ink all over: hands, face, books, skirt.

  Came the day of the visitor from somewhere outside in a mackintosh — maybe London? I was only six — and the whole school gathered together to watch an inspiring slide-show, on a hanging screen, about Typhoo tea. We saw pictures of glowing green India, and women in beautifully patterned pinks and reds, their heads protected by scarves, picking ‘only the finest tips’ from the rows of tea-plants. We were told a little about the women’s lives, and a lot about the life-story of the tea, how it shrank black and dry and arrived at last in silver-paper packets cased in small neat cardboard boxes, to be decanted into the metal caddies on all our mothers’ kitchen-shelves. (British kitchens, like Indian tea-picking jobs, then belonged only to the mothers.) The opening of this window on the world by the rain-coated visitor from London presaged a great excitement: the Typhoo Tea Handwriting Competition.

  The assembled school was instructed by Mr Norris to write the story of a day in the life of a tea-picker, for possible ‘national prizes’. Alight with the happiness of ignorant invention, I wrote a five-page, semi-illegible saga of the life of a woman to whom I gave the well-known Indian name of Iris. Mr Norris saw past the ink-storm and was delighted; he read out my essay to the whole school, all twenty or so of us, that is, including the ‘top class’, a row by the window of six giant boys with big legs in short trousers who looked at me sourly. Three stories were submitted for the overall Typhoo prize, including mine, which I hoped was the best. All three stories came back unplaced in the overall competition, but with consolation ‘school’ prizes; big-legged Roy from the ‘top class’ was, I think, first, Margaret Gee third. Typhoo clearly took the handwriting aspect of the competition more seriously than Mr Norris; they must have been puzzled by my submission with its shambling, no-longer-tutored, ink-spurting loops.

  At my next berth, Billingshurst County Primary, which also taught italic, I hung on grimly to my loops, swearing that this was what Watersfield had taught me; and at Horsham High School I was one of the only loop-writers in my year. But then around fifteen, when all pressure was past, I decided, like every adolescent, to design my own signature, and at the same time to revamp my handwriting. Italics were suddenly the only stylish choice; loops now seemed slow and fusty. I have been an italic writer ever since, and, too late for the Typhoo Tea prize, am legible and neat.

  But quite early into this story of manual strain and difficulty, print erupted, objective, grownup, an amazement.

  Machines in the 1950s tended to be clunky and cabinet-sized, of public interest. They arrived in town centres or on railway stations
, to be admired and inspected. Our most regular journeys as a family were back from Bromsgrove, or later Billingshurst, to Wolverton, and on one such journey, changing as we did in London but also from time to time at stations like Crewe, all four of us were impressed by a giant crimson machine on the station platform. What it ejected (primed with money and the right manipulations of a heavy-duty handle on the right, a thing like the massive hand of a clock which could be pointed, creaking, to various letters) was slim strips of soft metal, like gardeners’ plant labels, aluminium or more likely lead, I think now, on which anything you chose could be printed in relief, standing up in glorious regularity, part of the public world, indubitable, beyond the reach of carping by teachers, safe from my own desperate efforts with erasers, definitely true: MARGARET GEE.

  It was, like the advent of the typewriter early in the twentieth century and the computer and printer of the last two decades, part of the second phase of the Gutenberg revolution, in which print became commonplace, democratic. In the first, fifteenth-century, phase, the invention of print took writing and reading beyond the constraints of the careful caste of monks who copied books by hand. But printing was still laborious, controlled by the small number of printing-presses and the beliefs and tastes of those who owned them. Books remained relatively few, expensive and respected. Now in the twenty-first century the meaning of print has changed: it has lost perhaps half its authority for that half of the world who have it at their fingertips. Few people with a printer in their bedroom and advertising copy spewing through their letter-boxes will believe something just because it is printed.