by Nina Stibbe
Obviously telling Lady Briggs about the Owner’s Wife leaving and so forth had been a mistake. And, though I wasn’t a believer in honesty being the best policy, I went downstairs and straight away told the others around the table what an idiot I was.
‘Lady Briggs was very upset to hear about the Owner’s Wife and all that,’ I said.
‘We’re trying to keep it from as many of the patients as we can,’ said Eileen.
‘I know, I’m sorry, I thought she’d be fine about it,’ I said.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Eileen and she smiled.
‘The owner won’t want her knowing,’ said Matron, ‘you should’ve kept your mouth shut, Lizzie.’
Apart from Matron, I must say, there was a very compassionate attitude to mistake-making at Paradise Lodge, especially the tangible, funny kind you’d imagine might be frowned upon in a semi-medical setting, but they really weren’t. The nurses and seniors were mostly very understanding and actually found mistakes quite amusing—however inconvenient. And when an amusing mistake was made, everyone would laugh and then queue up to tell us about their own. Like the time Nurse Gwen had called the bingo numbers too fast and caused two funny turns and an accident.
Apart from almost giving Lady Briggs a heart attack, my biggest mistake at that time concerned the dentures. I have heard people—over the years—tell this same tale, so it’s obviously an easy mistake to make and I don’t feel too embarrassed about it.
I’d collected all the teeth in the little initialled plastic pots and taken them on a tray to be cleaned. Except for Mr Simmons and Miss Tyler, who had their own teeth and cleaned them with a brush and Euthymol.
When I got to the sluice I ran a big sink full of water and dropped the teeth carefully into the water, so as to avoid chipping them, and put in one quarter of a Steradent tablet, gave them a good stir with the end of the broom and left them to soak overnight. As instructed.
It took a very long time in the morning to reunite teeth and patient and though nothing else got done, not a single person didn’t find it amusing and charming. Nurse Hilary wet herself and had to go and change. The funny thing was seeing the patients trying to speak with the wrong teeth in. It really was a revelation how unique each human mouth is, shape-wise. Like a fingerprint.
Mr Simmons turned out to be very good at matching the pairs of dentures by aligning the bite and matching the colour and wear and tear of the bite surfaces on actual teeth and guessing whose they were. ‘Who’s got a huge jaw?’ he’d say and we’d shout, ‘Miss Steptoe!’ And he’d start there.
I made other mistakes too. A couple that were quite upsetting (and not funny, as such). I once wiped a lady’s bottom too soon and, as I did, I said, ‘Shit!’ which was awful and upsetting for both of us. But the worst, by miles, was when I told Miss Mills that Zebedee the stripe-less zebra—she’d seen him in 1926 at Paignton Zoo and so loved remembering—hadn’t been a stripe-less zebra at all, only a white horse with its mane cut all stubby. It was a swizz. Miss Mills had fallen silent when I’d said it and took a long while to recover.
It was strange, the teeth mix-up seeming so bad at the time—all the patients having to try each other’s teeth like Cinderella, with Mr Simmons peering into their mouths and saying, ‘Say “Isle of Wight”,’ and then wrenching them out again and popping in another set to try—being nothing but fun and everyone laughing until they wet themselves. And the thoughtless clever-clogs comment about the stripe-less zebra being heartbreaking. I’d stamped on a magical memory and I still think of it now.
And there was the time I hadn’t known what ‘carnal’ meant.
8. A Dog Named Sue
My mother felt lonely. It was quite common for women to feel lonely after having a baby, especially one they’d had deliberately after breaking an agreement (spoken or unspoken). Being a mother was an extremely lonely thing to be in those days when you had to do it a certain way or be judged. And so, as soon as I’d got my feet under the table at Paradise Lodge, I would invite my mother up for lunch. Even on the days I should have been at school, and even though my mother was as keen as anything that I attend and succeed, I’d sometimes ring her from Lady Briggs’ secret telephone and ask if she fancied a walk up. And she always did.
She’d wheel Danny up in his pushchair in time for the staff’s after-lunch lunch break, it being the perfect distance for Danny to nod off after his lunch and for her to use up 300 or so calories. That was another thing about motherhood that was difficult for women (like my mother), it being all about gaining weight, eating, feeding, having a hungry dependent and feeling hungry yourself, and then dashing about desperate to burn off a few ounces of the fat you’d gained in pregnancy by not taking stimulants.
The first time she came up to Paradise Lodge she ran all the way. Not that she liked running but she’d forced herself to run by pretending that someone evil was chasing her and if she let him catch her, she’d die and Danny would be alone in the lane and in the world. She arrived exhausted (but glad to be alive) and spent the next half-hour encouraging everyone to try ‘running away from a murderer’ and other calorie-burning strategies. My colleagues around the kitchen table—all calorie counters—thrilled at this kind of talk.
Eileen was addicted to butterscotch-flavour Ayds, the hunger-suppressing candy that you were supposed to eat between meals (to stop you wanting meals), and she recommended these to everyone, but not the Limmits calorie-controlled diet (which she believed to cause water retention). And Hilary swore by Energen starch-reduced rolls with St Ivel low-cal cottage cheese with chives.
My mother—who had dashed over a mile, uphill, to burn 300 calories and admitted to preferring thinness to chubbiness—suddenly said, ‘I’ve a bloody good mind to stay fat forever just to annoy my mother and Nancy Mitford.’
And a cheer went up.
She kept touching the biscuit plate but not taking one and I bet myself 50p she wouldn’t, and she didn’t. ‘I don’t see why I should starve myself and smoke and go back to taking speed just to look nice in a bikini?’
The staff laughed.
‘I mean,’ she said, ‘who the hell am I staying thin for?’
‘All the men you might fancy,’ Sally-Anne mumbled.
‘Exactly,’ said my mother, ‘and they can sod off.’ And with that she lit a fag and pushed away the biscuit plate.
I could tell Miranda was pleased my mother had shown up. Probably thinking her eccentricity cancelled out her mother’s racial prejudice. But she was wrong. The staff liked her and the patients quickly picked up on her being a Benson of the Knighton Bensons. Many had had dealings with her father, who was a saint, a good cricketer and an all-round good egg. In fact, my mother brought them alive with talk of old Leicestershire and all the folk she knew from her former posh life and would often recite bits of poetry with them, including a favourite of hers about a bloke who asks God for immortality but forgets to ask for eternal youth to go with it and ends up getting more and more decrepit but unable to die. It seemed a bit near the knuckle, to be honest, but the patients loved it—its author being an old Laureate.
Around this time my mother brought an adorable collie puppy home from a farm with an unwanted litter—not the usual kind of farm collie, who might have wanted to do the right thing (like rounding up sheep or warning its owner of danger), but a collie mixed with less well-behaved breeds, such as Labrador and corgi.
To start with the puppy was called ‘Sue’ because the previous owner had called her Sue from birth. She’d named all the puppies after her siblings. Sue knew her name already and came to the call, but my mother wanted to change it—she’d known two really mean Sues and a rotten Susan. She told the previous owner she was going to change the puppy’s name. The previous owner advised against it. She told my mother that she’d soon forget the two mean Sues and the rotten Susan but my mother doubted it—they really were exceptionally mean, the two Sues.
The previous owner said it might be just about OK to switch to a clo
se-sounding name, like Susu or Lou. I suggested we try Suzy with a ‘z’—us knowing a dear Suzy. Our mother considered all the options and held Sue’s pretty little face, saying Sue, Suzy, Blue and Lou.
At home later with Sue, away from the previous owner and her draconian rules about name-changing and puppy-recall, we relayed all this to Mr Holt and my mother said, ‘I mean, really, she’s our dog now and it’s not up to the previous owner to tell us what we can and can’t call her.’
‘Naming’s half the fun,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ she said, ‘and this dog just isn’t a Suzy or a Sue. I’m going to call her Jeanette.’
I’d had a feeling it was going to be Jeanette because Danny would have been Jeanette if he’d been a girl. It came from a Virginia Woolf story, or maybe a song, but anyway, she loved it. Sadly, though, Jeanette didn’t catch on for Sue—it was too long and Sue was already Sue. As hard as we tried, we couldn’t call her Jeanette. I kept calling her Sue, Mr Holt and my sister kept calling her Sue, Jack kept calling her Sue, and in the end my mother gave up and officially named her Susan Penhaligon—after the actress from Bouquet of Barbed Wire (but who she’d first seen playing Juliet in Romeo and Juliet at the Connaught Theatre while on holiday on the South Coast in the 1960s). Sue for short.
You might think Mr Holt would have been cross about the extra expense of a dog but people in those days—even sensible ones—didn’t see dogs like that. Dogs weren’t seen as an expense.
Sue was very naughty indeed, she chewed Mr Holt’s slippers and woke him up at night licking his cheeks and one time swallowed a sock and had to be rushed in the Snowdrop van to Mr Brownloe—who was like a vet, only unqualified due to dropping out of vet school for ethical reasons, and very cheap (if not free). Both of the qualified vets in the area were to be avoided because our mother had had sex with them in 1973—before she’d got together with Mr Holt and had stopped being lonely in that way.
Mr Brownloe gave Sue a soda tablet and jiggled her stomach and said it would either fetch the sock up or send it down, or she might just die. Mr Holt was so worried about Sue he lost a whole night’s sleep waiting for the sock to come up or go down (it did the latter). And although he was really tired in the morning (and accidentally buttered both sides of his toast) it showed how much he loved Sue, and that on its own made my mother cry with joy at the knowledge that they were in it together. Sue slept all the next day and never ate another sock.
A thing I’d noticed, over the years, was that however much people (men) said they didn’t want a baby or a puppy, if/when it came to it, they usually fell in love with it quite soon (around the time it could catch a ball or laugh). And it struck me as a very handy way to go about things. It meant they got all the babies and puppies they might want but with none of the infinite, yawning responsibility that comes with wanting one. And this reluctance giving them the option of saying, quite reasonably, ‘You wanted the fucking thing!’ whenever they didn’t want to help.
My mother was great fun and adventurous when it came to getting puppies and getting pregnant, but she could be stern and serious at times too. For instance, the day she got the letter from Miss Pitt informing her I’d finally been chucked out of the ‘O’ Level group. I’d been keeping my eye out for correspondence from school, as I was keen to keep Miss Pitt and my mother very much apart, but a letter had snuck through in the second post.
According to my colleagues, the van roared over the cattle grid and screeched to a halt at the back door. My mother stomped into the kitchen and asked for me. I was at the age when the sudden arrival of a parent—or any adult—could be quite terrifying. Especially if you’d heard they were in a hurry to find you and were foaming at the mouth.
I came into the kitchen and saw her standing there. She read the letter out, in front of a few others, and asked me what it meant ‘in essence’. I thought of peppermint essence, as I always did when she said essence—which she did a lot.
I said it seemed to be saying—in essence—that I’d been entered to study for the less academic examinations, the so-called CSEs. And again she asked the actual meaning of this.
‘It means,’ I said, knowing she’d wail at what I was about to say, ‘I shan’t study Shakespeare but a challenging modern alternative instead.’
She did wail, like a cartoon. ‘You cannot NOT study William Shakespeare,’ she said, ‘you know Hamlet backwards, you’ve seen a nude Twelfth fucking Night with me playing Malvolio in a body-stocking.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘but let’s talk about it later.’
‘You called your first guinea pig Queen Mab,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said, ‘you called it that, I called it Rosie.’
‘But soft what light through yonder window breaks…’ she said, looking at me. ‘Lizzie! But soft what light through yonder window fucking breaks?’
‘It is the east and Juliet is the west?’ I struggled.
‘Juliet is the SUN!’
The other nurses all looked agog. Miranda sniggered but the owner appeared suddenly in the doorway and said, ‘Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon.’
And before you could say ‘exit pursued by a bear’ (and before I could warn her about the ‘letter of commitment’ she’d apparently sent) I was on the way to school, moving at speed in the Snowdrop van, with her ranting.
‘I don’t need this, Lizzie, just when I’m trying to get Danny off the breast.’ And she gestured to her front.
In no time at all, we were standing in Miss Pitt’s office. My mother, with Danny chewing on an Afro comb on her hip. Me, in full nurse’s uniform and hat. Pitt, seated, looked calm compared to my denim-clad mother who, I now noticed, had damp coin-sized stains on her bra area. The room stank of Barleycup but my mother’s smell (cigarette smoke and Je Reviens) did its best to mask it.
‘I want an explanation,’ my mother was saying, ‘Lizzie is bright.’
It sounded strong until she rambled, ‘We are a Shakespeare family, Lizzie’s seen Midsummer Night’s Dream in the round at Wicksteed Park with Joss Ackland and Ronnie Corbett.’
‘That’s most commendable, Mrs Vogel, but Lizzie fails to attend school on a regular basis and I’m afraid that is the criterion.’
‘Well, she will attend from now on,’ she turned to me, ‘won’t you, Lizzie?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Well, let’s see how it goes between now and the summer holidays.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘I seem to recall we’ve been here before,’ said Pitt, ‘but I shall keep an open mind since it seems to mean so much to you.’
My mother drove back from the school like a maniac and yelled at me. She’d been so keen to yell at me she’d forgotten to leave me at school.
‘A modern alternative to Shakespeare! No, Lizzie, you cannot study a modern fucking alternative.’ She banged the steering wheel with the heels of her hands and went on, ‘Why have you fucked up? I trusted you, I had faith in you—why have you done this?’
I wanted to tell her I hadn’t fucked up. I wanted to remind her that secondary school was pure hell, it was dog eat dog, and I could barely survive, let alone thrive, in that atmosphere and that my reason for not attending was that I was at WORK, earning money for coffee and shampoo and other essentials that we couldn’t afford because she had fucked up. She had been expelled from a good boarding school because she was combative with the house mistresses, secretly met boys in the town for sexual shenanigans and—as a last straw—threw fruit out of a dormitory window (wasting food in the 1950s was about as evil as you could get without murdering someone). Had she worked harder and achieved dazzling results she might have been able to demand the chance to go to university—like her brothers—instead of being married off like a brood mare.
We bounced along the curving lanes between school and Paradise in silence for a while and I thought hard about my situation and how it had come to the point where I was probably on my way to fucking up.
I first bega
n to not want to go to school around the time Danny was born. School suddenly seeming ridiculous and pointless if it just came down to this—conning a bloke, shitting a football and ending up with a gorgeous baby who needed every second and every ounce of you, all day, every day, and sometimes kicked his blanket off and had the coldest little feet and sometimes did a hiccup so strong he’d sick his milk up. And I skived off school a bit to be with them, partly to make sure everything was all right, but mainly because doing anything else seemed, as I say, ridiculous.
My mother didn’t notice—the way a baby-less mother might have—probably because it was so nice having a teenager around. Danny would wake and I’d say, ‘I’ll go.’
I became expert at baby care quite quickly. I taught myself how to smoke without removing the cigarette from my mouth, for changing Danny’s nappy—like my mother had for doing yoga.
‘You’re an endurance athlete, Lizzie,’ my mother would say when I’d produce Danny all bathed and changed and chewing a crust. And it was like that. It was important work and I felt needed.
And then, when she went back to work the first time—after having him—and would go off in the van at seven with a flask of econo, a packet of Ryvita and Danny in a tot-box, and the others would traipse off to school and the house would be empty and warm, I’d make toast under our tiny grill and have to shuffle the slices around to get an even toasting. And I’d spread it with Blue Band and the tiniest scrape of Rose’s lime marmalade.
On my first day home alone I ate my way through a loaf of Sunblest and had to search all the nooks and pockets in the house to scrape together the change to replace it. I knew our opposite neighbour, Mrs Goodchild (my mother’s ex-friend who’d seen her wee in the sink), would be able to see me going about my business in the kitchen, so I kept the strip lights off and stayed low. I had the whole week off.
Being alone was a strange new thing after fifteen years of jostling and barging, and silence was a mysterious luxury. I can’t say I enjoyed it as such—I was lonely, and I didn’t know myself in solitude—but school was worse somehow and every minute I wasn’t there made it harder to go back.
