Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  I did. I loved the High School in a way that made my love of all school from the beginning seem a feeble thing. But I realized quite quickly that I lagged behind. I didn’t know things other girls did. Who was Dickens? The teacher asked how many girls were familiar with the work of Charles Dickens. Several put their hands up. Dickens, it seemed, was an author and these girls had read Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. I’d been taking books out of the library at the rate of six a week by then for four years, but I had not hit on any Dickens. I went straight to the D shelf after school and got cracking. But there were other gaps harder to do anything about. French. Two girls could speak some French. Their parents had taught them. And geography. Some girls had a, to me, amazing knowledge of the world just through having globes and atlases at home. So I wasn’t the cleverest. At the end of the first year I was only sixth in the English exam, though I was top in History, and around tenth, in a class of forty, in everything else. ‘Not as good as your mam was,’ my father commented, only to be told by my mother not to be so daft. This was the High School, not the Higher Grade, and I was doing very well. She’d been to an Open Day, a newfangled idea she greatly approved of, and had been so pleased at the evidence of how I was getting on. I answered most in the classes she sat in on and was the liveliest. She saw how eager and determined I was and appreciated that was how I differed from her younger self: she’d been clever, she’d loved school, she’d worked hard but she had had no determination, no ambition. It scared her slightly to see me striving so hard and for what? She couldn’t see any end to it. All she could see were problems looming, a gulf emerging which would grow wider and wider. There had been no such gulf between herself and her mother, even if she had been educated far above her own mother’s level. They had still wanted, and thought important, the same things: homes, husbands, children. In short, families. What was I, so keen, so expectant, going to think important? What was I going to become if not a wife and mother?

  I startled her, in my first term at the High School, by saying I wanted to become a Member of Parliament. What a noble calling, I thought, knowing nothing whatsoever about it. I was carried away with having been elected to the School Council (easy enough because no one else wanted to be, in our form). Off I trotted – ‘I will be late home. I have a Council Meeting, I am afraid’ – and was heavily disillusioned almost immediately. Junior representatives were kept firmly in their place and, even though I was prepared to be bold and push my opinions forward, I only had to open my mouth for the headmistress to hold up a silencing palm, as though she were a traffic warden and I a particularly noisy car. It might be called a school council but it was the headmistress’s and she made it plain it was only an indulgence on her part. She was happy enough to allow discussions on whether to have liquid instead of solid soap in the cloakrooms, but when it was suggested packed lunches would be preferable to the deeply unpopular school dinners, there was a sharp veto and that was that. Girls, we were told – all written up in the minutes – could not stand up to a busy day of mental and physical activity without a cooked meal. Girls couldn’t wear shorts for games either, another constantly suggested change, because ‘shorts are ugly at the waist’. I pondered that one for a long time and finally, when towards the end of the meeting I was allowed to speak, I asked how shorts and skirts differed at the waist. Didn’t they have the same waistband? ‘What a foolish remark,’ the headmistress said. ‘Any other business?’ I decided I didn’t want to be an MP, to my mother’s relief.

  Already I was worrying about what I would be. School was clearly understood to be only a stepping-stone to work. At the end everyone had to have a job. Gordon, who was seventeen to my eleven, had already had a job for three years and I didn’t want to work in a chemist’s shop as he did. So what would I be? I tried to analyse what I was good at. History and English and Art and that was about it. What sort of job could I get being good at those? Then I tried to think what I liked best. Same answer. Reading, that was what I liked best. Was there a job called A Reader? I had a brilliant English teacher, Miss Wynne, who was helping me to be A Reader. She gave me a list of all the authors a well-read person should have read. It was a long, long list, full of suggested titles for each author, and she told me it would take years for me to get through it. It was exactly what I needed and wanted but it irritated my mother, she saw it as creating that very gulf she dreaded. The more I read, the further away I grew. She never had read much and now she read not at all, claiming she had neither the time nor the energy (a claim I believed until I realized it was not time or energy she lacked but the interest). My father didn’t read, though his claim was once to have read an Edgar Wallace. There were only the usual books in the house, usual to a working-class family, where there was neither money to buy books, in the pre-paperback era, nor space to stock them. The Bible, prayer books, hymn books, a Home Doctor, a cookery book, and some children’s books bought for me. I was lucky there. Nan bought me Beatrix Potter books and I had Grimm’s and Hans Andersen’s fairy tales, and some Alison Uttley stories, so I had had a good start, good enough to launch me until I discovered the library and then Miss Wynne’s list.

  But I could never discuss anything I’d read at home. Trying to talk about the contents of books was showing off and there was no need for it. My reading was seen as a weapon I used against my family, a way of absenting myself from their company. ‘All she does is that damned reading,’ my father complained, and it was true. It made me strange to them. I even took to going to bed at six o’clock to have peace to read. I had to get into bed to do it because for most of the year the bedroom was freezing cold, but I didn’t mind – light nights, dark nights, cold nights, warm nights, it was the same to me. It made no difference, I was in bed with my books. Downstairs, in the one small living-room, the wireless blared away, meals were eaten, everyone talked, but upstairs it was quiet. My family, especially my father, hated my retreat. When he objected, when he shouted at me to come down this minute, I’d shout back, asking what was wrong with going to read upstairs. He never had any answer but ‘Do what I say, or else.’

  I just stayed where I was, feeling triumphant.

  XI

  Even though I was so happy at the High School I was greatly preoccupied then with the subject of death. My mother seemed to me almost to like death. She was always talking about people about to die, or having died, always attending funerals and not looking too miserable about it. ‘Your mam likes a nice funeral,’ my father would smirk and she’d be furious with him, but for once I felt he was right.

  I had never been to one but as my grandmother Agnes’s was reckoned to be imminent I lived in hopes. What I hadn’t been prepared for was visiting her, with my mother, in the geriatric ward of the City General Hospital. I’d never visited anyone in hospital except for my mother on that one occasion and I was a little nervous at the memory of it, but I was given no choice. My grandmother wanted to see me in the full glory of my High School uniform, a treat which could not be denied. I hated entering the hospital – it all came back to me how frightening hospitals were – but this dislike was nothing compared with the terrified revulsion I felt as my mother and I walked into the geriatric ward. It was a Nightingale-style ward, rows of beds on either side of a long aisle, with windows so high up nobody could ever look through them and they had to be opened by a cumbersome method of pulling strings. The noise was incessant, wailings and screechings, howls and sudden piercing screams, and the constant calling of names. My grandmother was in the bed next but one to the end of the ward. She was huddled under the sheet, her crippled hands on top of it, her head to one side at an odd angle, eyes closed and mouth open revealing a sludgy-looking cavern without teeth, her thin white strands of hair falling over her yellow-looking face. She was crying softly, a high-pitched keening sound, constant and curiously rhythmic. My heart started to thud, my stomach to churn, but it was the woman in the very end bed who grabbed my attention. This old woman wasn’t lying still at all. She was halfway out of
her bed, struggling to get fully upright, her nightdress rucked up to expose thin lard-white legs and her hands clawing at the wall. These hands flailed at the wall again and again and each time left marks, dirty brown marks, and then they went under the nightdress and emerged to smear more brown on the wall… I hardly realized she was plastering the wall with her own excrement, but my mother did. ‘Stay here,’ she said, pushing me to the far side of my grandmother’s bed. ‘Don’t move.’ I stayed, trembling, while she ran off and came back with a nurse who roared at the demented woman, yanked her nightdress down, lifted her up bodily and carted her off. ‘Poor, poor soul,’ my mother murmured.

  I never for one moment thought ‘poor soul’. I was still staring at the brown streaks on the wall and gagging at what I had at last worked out it was. I couldn’t speak a word during the whole of the visit, not even when begged by my mother to tell my grandmother about my beloved school. I was dumb with fright and I couldn’t understand how my mother could act so normally, as though she’d already forgotten what had just happened. When finally we left the ward I felt dizzy. My steps slowed, even though I longed to run and escape, and looking down at me my mother saw I was colourless and about to faint. She sat me on a stair and put my head between my legs and soon I felt well enough to go down the staircase and out into the fresh air. ‘I don’t know why you should faint,’ my mother said, puzzled. ‘It isn’t as if you’d been hurt.’ But when we got home and my father heard the saga, he said my mother should never have taken me to that damned place. It made him feel sick, it made him feel faint. ‘Someone has to go,’ my mother said.

  It was another unmistakable sign to me that I wasn’t going to be able to emulate my mother. I wasn’t fit to do women’s work. My mother blossomed in these situations – she was so calm, so gentle, so capable and kind and cheering. But I panicked, I felt faint, I was useless. The tradition of being a carer, with what it implied, would not be carried on by me. I was hardly my mother’s daughter at all, although I still prayed to become like her. But praying was just on the edge of ceasing. Throughout my childhood I’d said my prayers on my knees at bedtime. When I was very young, my mother knelt with me, gently placing my hands together, fingertip to fingertip, precisely so, palms as flat against each other as I could make them. I liked pushing them together, feeling my prayers would be pushed to heaven by the very pressure I was exerting. I loved praying. I did it with great intensity. I loved the very words of Gentle Jesus / meek and mild. I was in love with Jesus and pleased my mother with my devotion. I made up my own prayers after Gentle Jesus had been said and talked to Jesus (rather than God) with great passion, explaining and justifying at length whatever rigmarole I came out with. Even my mother’s patience was tried and she’d urge me to stop now. Jesus had other prayers to hear.

  I liked a bit of martyrdom too. My mother would suggest that as there was ice on the inside as well as the outside of the unheated bedroom window, Jesus wouldn’t mind if I said my prayers lying in bed, but I would insist on doing the praying properly, knees stuck to the shockingly, searingly cold lino. A touch of shivering was very satisfactory, I felt. I was trying hard to be worthy of Jesus (and my mother). This was proof of my intentions. Yet another was my decision to become a missionary. At seven, this had seemed my destiny. I told my mother and asked if she would like that. I watched her carefully, knowing it was a trick question. But she was up to it. ‘If Jesus decides he wants you to be a missionary then I do too,’ she said, ‘but He won’t decide until you’re grown up, so I don’t have to think about it yet and neither do you.’ I was glad because I didn’t really want to go to darkest Africa and hoped Jesus would pick me for something else, so I didn’t have to renege on my promise.

  The prayers went on until I was nearing twelve. Then, one night, having got to the stage of mumbling Gentle Jesus, and certainly no longer on my knees, I suddenly started thinking about the meek and mild bit. If Jesus was so meek and mild how come He had all this power? Meek and mild began to seem code for feeble and useless. It was awkward that I’d begun to question religion in general because I was still a stalwart church-goer and was soon to start confirmation classes. When I did, the curate at St Barnabas’s gave me a booklet, My Confirmation Day at Home and in Church. It told me that ‘on first waking from sleep’ I should remind myself that ‘when I go to bed tonight, if I live to the end of the day, I shall have been confirmed’. It had never occurred to me that I might not live to the end of the day. Was confirmation life-threatening, then? Then the booklet instructed me ‘Do not let your thoughts be taken up with what you are going to wear.’ Good heavens, that was surely the whole point of it – the yummy white dress – the romantic veil – the delicious white lace gloves… It was better than being ‘dressed for Easter’. I knew I should not agree to being confirmed. It was a cheat. I was only doing it because my mother expected and wanted me to.

  I had a new white dress, sure enough, but it didn’t prove worth selling my soul for. It was badly made and the material was a cheap rayon which creased instantly it was put on. But I paraded up the church aisle with everyone else and went through the whole ritual. The service seemed mumbo-jumbo, but afterwards my mother was so pleased. I was safely in the Church, my rebellious instincts curbed before any real harm was done. Except they weren’t. Hardly was I confirmed than the real questioning began. ‘Look,’ I would say to my mother as we walked back from church on Sunday evenings, ‘if Adam and Eve were the first man and woman on earth, where did they come from?’ She said God made both of them and put them on earth. ‘Then who made God?’ She struggled valiantly to explain God was not actually a person. ‘How do you know?’ Then I’d switch to speculating about infinity and the solar system and wondering where heaven was. ‘How do you know there is a heaven?’ I’d say. ‘Nobody can know, nobody comes back after they’ve died and says so.’ It was a series of really quite short steps from this kind of simplistic challenging before I made the big jump to declaring that confirmed or not I no longer believed in God.

  My mother said she’d pray for me, pray I’d come back into the fold where God would be waiting for me and would welcome me. A life without a belief in God was to her insupportable – she needed to believe some supreme authority was ordaining everything, that her fate was meant. It gave her such comfort to believe this. ‘Ours not to reason why’ was a motto of great appeal. She couldn’t see how I was going to be able to cope without a religious faith – it was what had got her and her mother through their hardest days. They believed, and it made their lives tolerable, and afterwards they would get their reward in heaven where they would meet and have the wonderful time they hadn’t had on earth. It was her turn now to ask me awkward questions: if I didn’t believe in God how did I account for the start of the world? I had a smart answer, learned parrot-fashion from something I’d read: we have finite minds and therefore cannot comprehend the infinite. My mind couldn’t grasp the true scientific explanation, just as my eyes couldn’t see round corners, but that didn’t mean there was nothing round them. I was content, for once, to admit ignorance, even to claim it as adequate and definitely better than any faith in heaven and angels.

  But it wasn’t anything like adequate at first. I missed the security of believing in God. God was such a neat solution to all the problems that scared me. I’d lie in bed, imagining myself looking down from the ceiling at my own body, then further away in the sky looking at our house, then out in space looking at the world turning, then… Then what? My heart would thud when I got to that bit and I’d rapidly bring myself back from space, from the sky, from the ceiling and into my own body again as quickly as possible. No God, so no answers, no life after death. I wished I could see a dead body just to be sure they were nothing. My chance came at last with the death of Florrie, my mother’s cousin. I knew I couldn’t ask to see her body in any spirit of scientific inquiry so, looking suitably sentimental, I said I’d like to say goodbye to her. My mother should have seen through this straightaway. I was noto
riously squeamish and sensitive. Why should I want to see a dead body? It was enough, surely, with my record, to make me faint. And I’d never felt a thing for Florrie, a miserable little woman who lived on her own in a tiny house in Denton Holme. Visiting Florrie was part of the weekly torture of visiting my grandparents – half an hour with them, fifteen minutes with Florrie, then home for Sunday dinner. Florrie never said much. We just sat there and were looked at. My mother always referred to ‘poor’ Florrie, and when I asked why she was to be pitied I was told she had no one. My mother’s greatest sympathy was always reserved for women living alone who had no family – it horrified her, the mere thought.

  Florrie died suddenly and wasn’t found for a whole twenty-four hours. It was my mother who found her. She’d had a heart attack and fallen on the bedroom floor and lay there until my mother called in on her regular Wednesday afternoon visit. ‘What an awful death,’ my mother kept saying, ‘awful, awful, no warning at all.’ This didn’t seem at all awful to me, but I had the sense to keep quiet. I went upstairs with my mother to see Florrie in her coffin. They were very narrow, twisting stairs and I wondered how they would get the coffin down. The curtains were drawn in Florrie’s bedroom and it was quite hard to see anything clearly but there was no missing the coffin. My mother beckoned me to the bed. ‘There you are,’ she whispered. ‘Poor Florrie. Isn’t she lovely? Doesn’t she look at peace?’ I looked, relieved to find I didn’t feel like fainting, that I had none of the familiar physical symptoms of fear. Florrie didn’t look lovely or at peace, whatever that was. She didn’t look anything to me, she didn’t even look asleep. I put out a finger and was about to touch her cheek but my mother stopped me, scandalized, and hissed, ‘You don’t touch!’ I stared at Florrie a bit longer, feeling suitably chastened. Her face was puffy. Her fingers were lumpy-looking, arranged in an awkward-looking clasp. The nails seemed black, the skin of her hands mottled. My mother took a green pottery rabbit from the mantelpiece and gave it to me as something to remember Florrie by. It was hideous, and anyway I had her dead body to remember her by, quite memorable enough.