Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  It wasn’t a long journey, only about forty minutes, and seemed even shorter because we knew the stations off by heart. We caught the first glimpse of the sea at Burgh-by-Sands and excitement grew until at last the tower of the church opposite Silloth Green came into view. The crowds exploded on to the platform at once, one mad panic of arrival, children shouting and running, eager to get to the sea, with buckets and spades. We had to catch a bus next to get to our caravan which involved quite a wait. My mother sat on our case and my father went off to get us ice-creams at Mr Brown’s. We adored these cornets of swirly soft ice-cream and so did our mother, but since she thought they were messy things to eat she often denied herself one in order to keep her blouse spotless – a lick from ours would suffice. But on this, our first proper holiday, she’d agreed to have a cornet and my father was delighted, such willingness to be self-indulgent was a good sign and augured well for the coming week.

  In my mind’s eye I had seen what our caravan would be like. I’d seen it in picture-books. It would be a Romany caravan, colourfully painted, intricately carved, with cunning little windows and giant wheels, and there would be a chestnut horse between the shafts who would pull it along the seashore with us sitting up in front of the door and my father holding the reins… The bus we’d caught in Silloth stopped at a field gate just before Allonby. We were deposited there with our case and two bags of food. I stared. This must be a mistake. There were forty caravans parked in rows. None of them was of the Romany variety. There was not a horse in sight. The caravans were like tin boxes, ugly, squat shapes painted dirty cream or blue. No carvings, no big wheels. The field was muddy and as we walked to our caravan, called (heartbreakingly) Sea Rhapsody, we could smell the latrines. My father attempted cheerfulness but was as usual defeated by my mother’s inability to pretend. ‘Is this it?’ she said. ‘Is this what we’ve paid all that money for?’ She could hardly bear to open the door and look inside our home for the next seven days. Inside there were two lots of bunks, either side of an excruciatingly narrow gangway, and the most makeshift of kitchen arrangements at the end. We couldn’t all get into the caravan at once and it was clear that, if we wanted to, those first in would have to crawl into the bottom bunks. My mother didn’t weep, but her rage was worse than any tears – her face was quite contorted and the tension unbearable. My father bundled us out and took us off to the sea at once, mumbling to my furious mother that he’d leave her to settle in.

  Everything then depended on the weather. Miraculously, the sun shone the next day, diluting some of my mother’s bitterness, and we were out of the awful caravan from eight in the morning till ten at night. My father dug for worms and then sat fishing, and my sister and I made sandcastles and paddled and wanted to swim, but our mother said it was too cold, we should give the water time to warm up (though whether the Solway Firth ever warms up is doubtful). She sat on a rug and rested, her back against the wooden supports dividing the beach into sections and breaking the force of the high winter tides. This was her holiday, the first in ten years, and a large part of it was spent reminiscing about other holidays at Silloth and Allonby when she was a child. She said how wonderful holidays with her father had been. I asked which caravan they’d stayed in and she was scornful. They had not stayed in a caravan, her father had rented a whole house, they had stayed in comfort, they had had their meals made for them, it hadn’t been like this at all. I turned this over in my mind as I went looking for shells (hard to find and only ordinary varieties). It was dawning on me that my mother considered she had come down in the world and the caravan was part of this unpleasant realization, the corned beef sandwiches we were eating for our dinner another. When I returned to where she was still sitting, her face raised to the sun, her eyes closed, I thought she looked so sad in spite of the luck of a lovely day. She did say ‘this is pleasant’ quite often but I wasn’t sure if this constituted happiness.

  We only went into the caravan to sleep and my sister and I slept straight away. My father went to the pub and then I suppose he came back and slept straight away too, the bunk situation and our proximity being what they were. For five whole days the sun blazed down, a record, and we lived on Allonby’s wide and empty beach, our only company the horses from the stables exercising in the shallow waves at the edge of the sea, and the other caravanners off to livelier Silloth. My mother tanned beautifully. Off came her stockings and her cardigan, though she never ventured into any kind of bathing costume – she said she was too old. Old women shouldn’t degrade themselves by what she called baring their flesh (she was forty-five). My father took his shirt off and went red and put it back on again and my mother said she should think so, but she smiled. This real holiday was doing her good. It had been worth it, wretched caravan or not. But on the sixth day, the day before we were to leave, we woke to grey skies and a stinging cold wind scudding straight towards us off the sea. ‘I knew it couldn’t last,’ my mother said, triumphantly, but she was quite philosophical about this change in the weather. We put jumpers on and took raincoats and went into Silloth to the funfair and had a ride on the donkeys, even though by then it was raining. It had been a successful holiday, whatever the final day was like.

  We had two others in the next decade before I left home. Three years and much saving later we had another caravan, this time parked in a field the other side of Silloth, at Skinburness. Another tin box, though bigger and better equipped and with a curtain between the bunks. But this time we had no luck. It poured with rain the entire week. The whole holiday – ‘so-called holiday’ as my mother put it – was a disaster and argument raged the entire time between my parents as to whether we should give up and go home. My father was forever expecting the sun to come out, so he wanted to hang on, whereas my mother knew it wouldn’t and wanted to cut her losses. We stayed. We marched along the sea wall to the shelter and delights of a storm-battered Silloth and got soaked both going and coming back and there was nowhere to dry our clothes. My mother then stayed in the caravan moping while we got changed and went back to Silloth – another soaking – to the cinema, then cowered in a café before braving another return home. ‘Never again,’ my mother vowed, ‘no more caravans.’ So after that she turned to trying to get lodgings in various holiday resorts. The Cumberland News had loads of adverts – ‘AYR. Board. Good Food. Homely’ and ‘BLACKPOOL. Central, Board 12/6. H and C’. (H and C was greatly prized, meaning hot and cold running water in your room.) She wrote off to boarding-houses in Keswick, Morecambe, Rothesay and many other places, but they were either fully booked for the week my father had to take his holiday, or else too expensive. In the end we went – where else? – to Silloth.

  But at least we were not in a caravan; we were in lodgings, right opposite the Green. I didn’t want to go at all. I was by then fifteen, and Silloth had no appeal, I couldn’t bear the thought of it. Every day I stalked off by myself, endlessly walking the sea wall to Grune Point, the wild little peninsula on the marshland past Skinburness. The weather was blustery but it didn’t rain and an evening meal was provided at the boarding-house and my mother was reasonably content. She was having a rest and said that was all that mattered, she hadn’t expected anything else. My father was quite happy, as he always was at Silloth, though in my mother’s opinion he rather overdid the odd pint on the grounds that he was on holiday. But then she couldn’t bear alcohol of any kind. She regarded drinking as evil. We were all enrolled in the Rechabites, we children, and their philosophy, if it could be called that, was hers: never touch a drop. Pubs, she thought, were by definition wicked places and she was afraid of them. I was afraid of them too, especially the Horse and Farrier, the pub at the end of our road in Raffles. At closing-time men would spill out roaring and laughing, hordes of them, staggering home by clinging on to hedges. We slept at the front of the house and the noise on weekend nights was terrifying. It sounded as if hundreds, not dozens, of men were hurtling past our house and they sounded violent and out of control. My father would stand at th
e window worrying about his hedge and shout at those being punched into it in some fight, but his protests weren’t even heard, the passing of the inebriated just had to be tolerated.

  It was only at Christmas and New Year that my mother sanctioned drink in our house: a bottle of sherry and a bottle of port, for visitors only, to wish them the season’s greetings in the accepted manner. I liked the sherry and port glasses she produced. They’d been her mother’s. The sherry glasses were fluted, on long stems, and the port glasses had ruby-red flowers painted on them. Sherry or port was only ever offered in minute quantities, with thick slabs of cake or several fingers of shortbread, never on its own. But when our relations came, the Marshallsays and the Wallaces, sherry and port were spurned. They brought their own whisky, as a present, and opened it and drank it in significant quantities. Nan didn’t have any – she preferred Dubonnet, she said, to eyes raised mockingly to the ceiling behind her back – but Jean did. She was annoyed at my mother’s quite unconcealed look of disapproval. ‘A tot of whisky never harmed anyone, Lily,’ she would say, but my mother didn’t deign to reply. To her whisky was not just wicked, it was an unfeminine drink and that was that. If Jean was going to drink whisky, she wished she would do it somewhere other than in our house.

  Though the drinking would begin at our house on these occasions, it would be quickly adjourned to a hotel bar where there was more room (as well as more drink). We had so little space and squashing six adults and sometimes six children into a room twelve feet by ten and giving everyone a seat was tricky. It was even worse if the Wallaces stayed overnight, which they usually did because they couldn’t afford an hotel like the Marshallsays. Then, they were given my parents’ bed and my parents slept downstairs on the settee, and we children slept end to end, feet to heads, in one double bed. As we grew older and bigger this proved impossible and my mother would agonize over sleeping arrangements for days, trying to work out the best way to make everyone comfortable – there was certainly no jollity about it, no we’ll-all-muck-in-together-somehow. Even without relations staying, there was a lot of agonizing going on after Gordon came back from doing his National Service. If he was given back the second bedroom, where would my sister and I go? At fourteen and eleven we were too old to return to our bed-in-the-wall in our parents’ room. My mother was distraught thinking about it. She wrote to the council, asking to be moved to a house with three bedrooms, and preferably one off the Raffles estate which was becoming rougher all the time. Nothing happened. She scanned the Cumberland News every week, looking for swaps: families on council estates wanting to exchange their houses for bigger or smaller ones (which was allowed by the council if you could find someone agreeable). Then she put her own advert in – ‘Exchange two-bedroomed house Orton Road for three-bedroomed-parlour-type, any estate considered’. The Orton Road bit was to denote we lived at the better end of Raffles, since its garden-city image had vanished. There was some response but people lost interest when they discovered we had an outside lavatory and no proper bathroom. Our house was not desirable even though it was in immaculate condition, regularly painted and papered by my father and kept spotlessly clean by my mother. What were we to do?

  I had a solution I thought very obvious and neat. My grandfather was a widower now and still living in his privately owned three-bedroomed-and-parlour house in Richardson Street. He only used one room. We should move him into our council house and take over his. Simple, surely. No, not simple. My mother told me not to be so silly, you couldn’t just uproot old people just for your own convenience. And, anyway, our house was not ours and Grandad’s was his. It wouldn’t be fair. In any case, she didn’t like his house. It was too big, too cold, too ugly, too old-fashioned. My turn to say she was silly: it had three bedrooms and a parlour, didn’t it? Well, then, that was enough, the space it would give us. Nothing else mattered to me. But at that moment a swap did come up: a three-bedroomed-parlour-type council house with – oh, joy – a proper bathroom and indoor lavatory on the Longsowerby estate, the oldest and best of Carlisle’s council estates. It overlooked the cemetery. My father didn’t like the idea of this at all, but my mother found it a major attraction. She thought the cemetery a lovely place, more like a park, and it was true, it was like a park. It had been built in 1855 and had beautiful old trees lining its avenues which led from the main gates to the two chapels. These avenues were tarmac’d and straight but there were also narrower gravel paths connecting up with them, some following semi-circular patterns. The whole cemetery was magnificently maintained and in the summer a show place for bedding plants – hundreds and hundreds of geraniums and dahlias and other violently coloured flowers laid out with regimental precision.

  But the state of this house when we moved in was appalling. My mother wept when she saw it and was perfectly justified. It was filthy, absolutely infested with every kind of dirt and bug. Every room needed to be stripped and cleaned and painted, every surface scrubbed and disinfected. For once, I helped. I scraped walls, scraped paint, even scrubbed the floors and the black-leaded range, though this proved a waste of labour. Grandad was paying for it to be taken out and a modern fireplace put in. He was becoming more generous in his old age and, on his own initiative, hearing my mother express her loathing of this range, he bought something called an Osborne All-Tile fireplace (price £10 15s. od.), complete with a heavy steel grate and coloured vitreous enamel front to match. How we loved it. I could hardly wait to get home to see this wonderful artefact replace the old range, caring only that what seemed black and dirty, and hell to clean and maintain, had given way to what seemed light, bright and labour-free by comparison.

  The house took many months to transform. My father could only do the decorating after work and on Sundays – he was doing overtime to pay for the paper and paint – so progress was slow. He’d come home around seven o’clock after his twelve-hour day and have his supper, then climb a ladder and start stripping the staircase and he’d be so exhausted he’d have to come down to be sick – it was too much. My mother was left day after day in all the mess and if there was one thing she could not stand it was disorder, the horror of nothing looking tidy or attractive. She was depressed but then so was I, and it was her life that depressed me most and the fear that in spite of my efforts my life, too, would be like hers. It wasn’t a new realization. I’d seen ages ago her life was drudgery of one kind or another, but I was more frightened by it than I had ever been. Why go on for this, my mother’s existence, the existence of those women I saw around me? She talked often of how hard her mother’s life had been, without giving any details, but I couldn’t see hers was any easier. When she said, in exasperation, and these were exasperating times, ‘What a life!’ I would burst out with, ‘Why did you choose it, then?’, she’d say she didn’t choose it, it happened. This would lead to my refusal to accept this. I’d say she shouldn’t have got married because it was getting married which had surely led to the life she had. The worst moment, after I’d asked her why she got married, was when she said she had wanted children, that was why. It was such a rotten bargain to have made. Children, in exchange for what? Giving up work she loved, condemning herself to drudgery. Never once did she say it had been worth it, that she had three children and nothing else mattered.

  I knew I could never make the same deal. I wasn’t even sure I could make the same deal, a different one only on the surface, that Nan had made. Nan didn’t have my mother’s hard life. She now had her pleasant house, her car (well, Jack’s), her lovely clothes and jewellery, but I had begun to see her life was dreary too, if soft and easy, and it was repellent to me. Nan did virtually nothing. She still had her char (devoted to her, of course) to clean her already clean house, a house with only two adults in it most of the time and so the work was light. She got up about ten, after lolling in bed having her breakfast, brought to her on a tray by Jack before he left for work, and then she had a bath. Then she dressed and did her face. This took up a huge slice of time – doing her face was a
lengthy ritual involving the use of many creams and lotions and powders – really, quite exhausting. She looked terrific, always. The char left at lunchtime and Nan had a snack, then her famous forty winks before taking her Pekinese dog for a walk of all of a hundred yards. After that, the highlight of the day… shopping. For clothes, for herself. People told her she looked like a mannequin, to her delighted gratification. ‘I should have been a mannequin,’ she’d murmur, smiling, and I’d say, rudely, ‘What for? What a stupid, useless thing to be. Just a clothes-horse, horrible.’

  No, I didn’t want Nan’s life, even if it was obviously preferable to Jean’s or my mother’s – except for one aspect of it. Nan loved Jack and was loved by him and I had a new interest in the whole business of love. Ask Nan why she married and the answer was that she’d fallen passionately in love with Jack. So much more cheering to a fifteen-year-old, that answer. And she was quite willing to go on about the passion too. Nothing she liked better than to describe the ‘bliss’ of being in love, the ‘ecstasy’ of being in Jack’s arms… ‘Oh!’ she’d shudder. ‘Oh! It’s heaven, wonderful. You wait.’ Then she’d add the bit she shouldn’t have done. ‘Your mother doesn’t think so, mind,’ she’d say, with such a heavy significance I’d feel embarrassed, without quite knowing why, and defensive on my mother’s behalf. But I didn’t doubt the truth of what she said either about herself or her sister. I could see the evidence of Nan’s and Jack’s passion. They were quite old to me but they touched each other all the time – kisses, cuddles, arm-strokings – and sometimes Jack would come home for lunch and say to Nan why didn’t she have her forty winks upstairs with him, it would be more comfortable, and she would at first demur and say what about the children, and he’d say the children could go out into the garden and play, and she’d disappear with him, giggling, and reappear an hour later looking flushed. It was reassuring, really, to know at least one woman had married for passion and had stayed passionate after so many years. I didn’t know (and neither did Nan) that Jack spread his passion around. He had many affairs, one of them with his young secretary with whom Nan was very friendly, but it wasn’t until later that these became common knowledge and even then he argued they didn’t make any difference to his passion for Nan.