They shared a Victoria sponge, copious cups of tea into which they dunked usually a whole packet of digestives each Thursday morning and I must have been off school poorly, because I remember her saying, like yesterday, ‘One man went off to war and a different one came back.’
And Eileen had said, ‘My Fred went off whistling hymns and he came back whistling ‘em an’ all. He learnt to cuss. That were all difference war made to him.’
Mabel said, lowering her voice but not quite enough, ‘Our Enid spent the war reading.’ Then added, ‘Mind you she’s spent peace doing it an’ all…’
I remember worrying, hearing that, whether it was a strange or a wrong thing to do. Wicked even. She had lowered her voice…
And Mum, who had never worked when Dad was mining, taking a job at the primary school. A part-time dinner lady. She came home tired.
Enid opened the clip holding the too-tight bun of her greying hair and it fell grateful onto the water, spreading weightless.
She lay right back, hair drowning and inviting the heat to find her temples and neck and ears.
What a shock I would deliver if I ever went in to school with it down.
She floated her head back to Easter 1946 and the shell of her father finally finally returned to them.
His eyes, the skin and bone of him. Hollowed.
‘He’s a gourd,’ said Mabel and Enid had had to look the word up. The horrors of war had barely touched Pendlebury. Rationing and worrying. Patrick was an emotional sink-hole. Into which had fallen, most noticeably, a desire to speak.
‘We shall have to be very patient,’ her mother said. A lot.
Enid shampooed.
My mother, faced with this silent broken stranger, spoke to the vicar, the doctor, her old teachers, Eileen, other wives of returning heroes and elicited bottomless sympathy and not one thing practical. He wouldn’t go with them to church; but when the young vicar, Father Kirkby, came round and suggested the two of them go for a pint father roared, ‘No!’ and Enid only ever saw the vicar at church after that. Mum, en route for Desperation turned to The Army. A Sergeant behind a desk at Eccles barracks listened and when she mentioned Burma, nodded and her heart rose. For the first time since her husband had returned. There was a society, at the British Legion, of ex-servicemen. ‘Take him there.’
‘Oh no, he won’t go out.’
‘Right,’ said the man. ‘Right. Leave this with me, me ducks.’
A week later a man came to the door. Ted. A slight man with a bad limp. He introduced himself, told them he didn’t know Pat, but perhaps he knew part of him.
‘Don’t you introduce us,’ he said, ‘I’ll just pop through and see if he fancies a chat, should I?’
Behind even the plaster-board walls she and her mother heard hardly a thing. Ted surely did all the talking that first time but he came back once a week and six weeks later, the first week he missed, Pat was distressed. Missed him. How thrilled his women had been at that distress.
Ted got him out.
First to his, Ted’s, allotment, and then, with Mabel, to The Legion. Mabel asked Ted one night what they spoke of so quietly and he patted her arm with his thin claw and said, ‘There’s things women have no need to learn.’ He must have sensed it not being a satisfactory answer, because he added, quieter, ‘Men can be cruel shits. All right?’
The Legion led, slowly but marvellously, to a first night out without Ted. At the Miners Club. Enid left at home, reading.
Unable to concentrate I was so thrilled, I remember.
And that, The Miner’s Club, became once a week, regular, in his slow healing. In his re-assembly.
Rinse out the shampoo. The real heat, the distracting heat, is out of this bath now. It’s always been a grand boiler. Why do I so love this heat? And the record is almost finished. I listen to the staff at work. Hear their talk of juggling money to get new appliances – and now they talk of and expect, ‘built-in obsolescence’. And I lounge in my Friday bath and feel childishly grateful. And, how awful – I feel pity. Pompous private Enid.
What was I thinking of? Dad. Recovering himself.
From turning 14, and the tightening of their belts with his being unfit for work, Enid had taken a Saturday job. To help the finances. A good feeling, she recalled.
She squeezed at her hair and readied the shower attachment.
Helping a greengrocer do the markets. And bring the left-overs home. Sunday veg. Sometimes fruit. I liked the market, enjoyed the hard work and the early hours – earlier than teaching even – and I liked that he, Mr. Skipton, said, ‘Call me Joe, Enid, it’s my name.’ I liked that he obviously appreciated the help, and that he liked me. And it was a pleasure to feel useful. The two pounds her parents said she could keep, but she shared it with them.
Once University got mentioned she gave Mabel all of it.
OK.
You are done, miss. Now, nothing compares to a warmed deep towel and a softer bath-robe.
Oh, but that reminds me!
Enid stood, the tiniest glance in the mirror, and wrapped her pink steaming self in the towel.
Neville Chamberlain.
Chamberlain wore studded, winged, collars. And Patrick had one. For Christmas midnight mass and ‘family occasions’. He hated it, it pinched his throat and he wasn’t about to spend precious brass on another – and – the wearing of it meant a scrubbing. Standing in the copper, Mabel bruising his miner’s nakedness with a stiff-haired brush and carbolic. And the ritual ended with her towelling him dry. ‘Cos you do it softer than a man.’ And, Enid realised much later, his arousal and their love-making and through the walls her mother saying, ‘It’s only the sex as’ll get you to a christening!’ And they would laugh and I would listen and it was their laughter I cherished most then, and remember best now.
She dried herself.
And that laughter became rarer as Chamberlain appeased and father wrestled with the paradox that as regards Adolf, he agreed with Churchill.
‘That strike-breaking Tory bastard, sorry Mabel, Enid.’
‘Pains me to share the steam off – never you mind – but to share my opinion with a Tory …’ He would trail off, horrified.
War. That ever-growing elephant in our tiny living-room. I buried my worries in books, and prayed Adolf wouldn’t close the Library. Worth my Dad fighting to keep that open.
Pull the plug. My bathrobe, Dad’s armchair.
She would settle with her radio after deciding, yet again, there was nothing on the television. Think about the marking, but leave it for Saturday.
Creature of habit. Ritual.
Our Saturdays was always the rag and bone man on his cart, shouting something I never understood, and neither did mother. She called them ‘gypsies’ – in her lowered voice – and cried when they came to the door, babes-in-arms to trade a sprig of lavender for any coins she could spare. Mother would hang the lavender from the mantlepiece till it stopped smelling nice.
And now I recall Fridays was the ‘pop’ man. Horse, cart and crates of fizzy weekend delight. Dandelion and Burdock and throat assaulting ginger beer. Father forbad us to even try ‘American Cream Soda’. He said it was the same as the horse’s poo, left for the flies and the boys on the estate to giggle over.
One or two of these essays show promise. Promise in the sense of hope. Not a certainty. Not a vow.
Something troubles me here. She laid her red marking pencil aside, took off her spectacles, stood and headed for the kitchen to refill her coffee; I begin to question some of the shibboleths of Grammar. This coffee is stale. Make some fresh. Twenty more essays to mark. I teach, I have been teaching, the Absolutes of Grammar. The Rules. Carved in stones. For thirty years. But a couple of these essays, in wilfully (or perhaps instinctively) ignoring some of those rules; well, one or two of these students have found an originality. An individuality. A voice. Their voice. A truth.
On Sunday morning Enid nodded to her fellow parishioners of St. Augustine’s. Still thinking. An
d the doubt still un-resolved.
As she took her prayer-book and hymnal and found her usual spot she found herself arguing all writing, her own included, needed, axiomatically, to be a personal voice. Not to conform to a rigidity of Grammar.
Is that true?
I fear it is. I fear enough of it is.
Not all writing, no. Letters, non-fiction. But expressive writing, yes.
But, Good God (Sorry, Lord), but here’s the rub; this is heretical to my drilling – and I do drill – the recognition of assonance, alliteration, simile, metaphor, adverbial clauses, conjunctions etc etc ad infinitum (for each particle of Grammar has a title, a way of identifying it); and my drilling it into those malleable minds – the vicar was coming forward to begin the service – is only for them, my students (‘suffer the little children’) to come as close as I can guarantee to their passing examination at English Language ‘O’ level. To claim that monolith, that mainstay of employment hope. Wasn’t that now, in far too large part, my job? My duty?
Yes, Lord. I am listening. Paying attention.
Is it the elegance in this centuries-old language that so engulfs the faithful? For look. All our heads bow.
But the most interesting essays were the ones where the voice broke free. Disinterested in, unencumbered by process.
Yes, let us pray.
Once a decision is accepted, then a wall of detail – The Great Wall of Detail, is before you.
But it’s detail and that’s all it is.
Life only begins again when the decision becomes flesh.
I like that the church, the service, the ritual allows my mind to stroll. In an incensed space.
How often have I wondered why I don’t have incense at home? What is that? What is that in me? Separation? Home. Work.
Church.
Across the nave a youngish woman with a perhaps five-year-old girl had taken Enid’s attention.
Possibly, even probably, because the vicar had – again – chosen verses from Ezekiel as the text for his sermon. Enid had read Ezekiel and had appreciated it only a very little, on both occasions. I assume these two are mother and daughter. They could be sisters, she could be an auntie, a baby-minder, neighbours even, but something in the familiarity between their bodies, the easy hand-holding and in the child’s demonstration of her impatience with this place allows me to settle on mother/daughter. Hypothetical, but let me further imagine that the child has only this mother.
Now.
Imagine then, five years previously, a young family, here for the christening of this daughter, this then cherished miracle. Who represents so precisely, so perfectly what their love-making looks like. Not hard to picture the shared doting, the shared wonder, the shared delight. And now he, the father, had left. Not died, left. A separation. Divorced. Enid swept those irrelevant details aside as she concentrated on how the child must have changed in the mother’s eyes. She, the daughter, let’s christen her Marla, could not be held in the same affection she had once been. Because she was no longer a shared wonder. She could not, had not bound the family together, so, yes, while she was ever a wonder, now, for the mother, she had to be a solo wonder. She could be shared with her grandparents, the mother’s friends, this congregation even, but not with her maker.
Unless one counted God as her maker, which, in His house, in this instant, Enid didn’t.
Enid did not doubt, watching them two pews ahead, the mother’s love; tender and patient. She considered only an inherent anguish wedged now within that love.
As the vicar developed some theological point an Everest over the child’s head Enid wondered why the mother, had come here. Enid had not seen her before and she settled into a trawl of possible options.
To be, to feel, blessed.
To show the child Something. New.
To sing. To share. Take Communion. Literally.
To bore the babe so thoroughly she would never dream of repeating the experience.
(Because perhaps the parents had once been married in this same spot, by the vicar, one glorious hope-drenched day? Was this the first time the mother had returned here? To lay some ghost?)
To kill a few lonely Sunday hours. To win a bet?
To take the blood and the bread one last time before renouncing religion for ever?
She was an alcoholic and the wine was free?
Now her brain was fizzing nonsense Enid veered inwards to ask why she was thinking this. What was it?
Her own childless state. Envy? Pity?
No, no. My time has passed. Those vile flushes, o how I hated and resented them and their passage through me, their unpredictability, their will of their own, their mocking of this barren body. No, surely not that. I knew years ago I would not have children, have a family, a man, a partner, not since that night. I knew and I accepted it. Sadly, yes, but I did. I no longer asked. Looked. Was no longer prepared to be open. To all that.
So why am I asking now? Thinking this now?
Heavens but it is something in that young mother’s haircut, something about her skin, her shoulders – what? There’s something flamboyant in her hair. In the way it bounces when her head moves. And I am ever Vanya’s Sonya – plain and what good that I know that? Accept it?
I know that my life is teaching. Has been teaching. Teaching and my own writing and o vicar, do stop droning on and let us sing that passage in the creed I so love – ‘And on the third day he rose again, according to the scriptures,’ – and go.
Out.
Into fresh distractions. I feel so weepy. Suddenly trapped. That daughter, that child, is free to be bored out of her mind and I am not. Because of years. My years. And the handcuffs of Form. Formality. Those years I have worn at standstill since becoming what I am. Myself. A teacher. O thank you God. Amen, vicar. Ten more minutes.
As Canon Kirkby descended his pulpit, slow as his years, so the mother and child rose and left. The child skipping free. People tutted. Demonstrating and sharing disapproval. And perhaps now thinking things a good deal worse than I did – but, essentially, because those two have escaped.
It was rude, yes. And it was not form. But was it wrong? No, I can’t say that.
The early evening radio played Saint-Saens and Enid read the small print of the Observer travel section. With her red marking pencil. Just doodling. Evening-dreaming.
She dressed.
Clean ironed blouse. Fresh. Cameo brooch. Tweed suit two. Brogues. Glance at the weather forecast. Lightest jacket, then. Breakfast.
Thoughts of the bureaucratic forms that needed to be written (had to be written, nothing need be done) for the government ghouls. Oh! Turning Education into shopping. God! And using us, the darned teachers, to do their research for them. On our time!
You could say, if you were in that frame of mind, Enid, getting colleagues to condemn themselves out of their own mouths. Only one thing truly truly counted in Education. The number of students in a class. Teacher-pupil ratio. And they were rising. Wrong, frankly. Wrong.
Teaching itself, set aside the planning of each lesson, is difficult enough, time and energy consuming enough (come try it, Baker, do!), without any of this extra nonsense. Inset days! I do see why people swear. It’s release.
Don’t forget the handkerchief.
There had been a questionnaire in one of the glossy sections of the weekend papers asking what was one’s most embarrassing moment. Enid had shaken cold, instant goose-pimples at the memory of her one handkerchief-less morning and a sudden abundance of what the Germans call nasalschleim. She flushed even now, alone in her home, fifteen years after the event and pocketed a tube of lavender mints. Five minutes to the bus. Brief case, marking, keys, money. Out.
And that had not been her most embarrassing moment, not by a sordid long chalk.
Close the gate.
The 21 bus was Monday morning Manchester suburbs quiet, busy but private.
I always sit downstairs, on the left-hand side if I can, by the window for choice, looking at th
e same things I’ve seen almost all my life. Why never upstairs?
Here is my mental list of things I’ve never done, I’ll never do. Learn to lip-read. Go to Laos. Ski. Swim. Have sex or children. Speak Czech.
I have lived all my life in these streets, apart from University.
That enchanted poisoned island. That o so very mixed bag.
I don’t believe these thoughts are indicative of a crisis – but I do believe that that woman in front of me is reading one of my books! ‘Women Without Men.’ My first!
The one about Mum. Mum, raising me as a single woman in the war. Fictionalised. Partly. Enough.
O My God. I flush.
O the temptation to lean forward and ask, ‘Are you enjoying that?’
I could. I could do that. Say I’ve read it, too (true enough). No photo of me on the cover, thank heavens. And it’s not even in my name.
She flicked that page over quickly. She is enjoying it?
I remember Paul Theroux once, one of his travel books and he was depressed if I recall correctly to be back in drab cold London from South America I believe a train journey book and he saw a woman on a commuter train reading one of his books and he soared. I know that feeling! I soar. Well now, there’s something off my list. Soaring. No. not true. When the publisher, Gerard, ‘my publisher’, wrote to say he would ‘love to participate’ in publishing that very book, I was airborne then, too. He wished to ‘make me an offer.’ What a joy-drenched phrase. I read it a thousand times.
The bus turned right, west, at Swinton Town Hall (where they wed) and only four stops now to school. I hope she gets off, I hope she closes the book happily, slips it into her bag. That would be just a lovely treat, so it would.
I spent four pounds more on a bottle of Chablis that evening. The evening of Gerard's letter. Drowning my Pride. And a loneliness, too.
Because although Dad would have been thrilled for me, I didn’t tell him. Fool that I was. Am.
And the second book, a straight novel (that woman is not even looking out of the windows – she’s nowhere near her stop) had spurted forward.
The Solider's Home: a moving war-time drama Page 13
