Perhaps I would have written it sooner if I had thought I could trust the Magic Slate, but after I was six or seven concealment became my habit. My thoughts remained in my head, multiplying, buzzing like bluebottles in a box.
If you stand at the end of our yard at Bankbottom, and look uphill, you can see the place where they’re building the flats. They are two story, with pebble dash on the outside. They are a novelty, and novelty is suspect; few people in Hadfield have thought of living without stairs. There are council houses at the upper end of the settlement, built for people from Manchester who had been displaced by the war. “She comes from the council houses, you know,” is the phrase used; which means, roughly, lock up your spoons. I guess the council houses have superior sanitation—indoor lavatories, hot water, baths perhaps—and the Hadfield people are always anxious to sneer at anyone who they think might be going soft.
My mother lights up with indignation when she speaks of the new flats, and her incandescent hair glows around her head. “It’s scandalous! It’s ridiculous! They’re moving them in before the light fittings have been put up! No curtain rails between the lot of them.”
I take Evelyn down to the end of the yard. I lead her in a game called Talking About the New Flats. We put our hands on our hips. We stare furiously over the wall (the very wall where Tibby used to run, Tibby the Protestant cat). We shout, “It’s scandalous. It’s ridiculous! No curtain rails between the lot of them!”
Evelyn tires of the game. She wants to play Ballet School. I stay on, shouting. I wonder if, really, my mother would like one of the flats. But no Catholics can get them; that is generally known.
A few weeks on, a little girl comes to our yard and says she is from the flats and wants to play. Her name is Heather. She is pretty and respectable, but what sort of name is that? A little boy comes. He is weedy and small. He begs to play with us. How can we refuse him? Evelyn asks passionately; his age is six and three quarters! His age does not impress me. I walk away. He runs after me and cries, and says if he can play with us he will do anything, we can hide and he will permanently seek. He will give us a penny if he can play with us: threepence. The more he raises the sum the more disdainful I appear. In the end I turn my back and walk away. Two women are standing on their back doorsteps and marvel at my hard sectarian heart. I say to Evelyn, over my shoulder, You play with him, if you want! I don’t play with boys.
Boys are what I have to fight at school. If you can’t join them, beat them. I am out of the babies’ class and released from the stinking stone pen beside the latrines, out into the broad playground under the dripping trees. I come home and say, “Grandad, a big boy hit me.” He says, “Lovie, now I’ll teach you how to fight.” He teaches fair tactics, nothing low. But when the next fight comes, I walk away with a different result. It’s too easy! Punch to solar plexus, big boy folds. His head is within range. “As you please now,” Grandad says: “Keep it easy, no need to make a fist. Try a big slap across the chops.” I do it. Tears spring from the eyes of the big boy. He reels, clutching his diaphragm, away from the railings. Oh Miss, she hit me, she hit me!
I am amazed: less by my performance, than by his; his alarming wails, his bawls. I don’t want to do this again unless I have to, I decide. In only a year I will have to go to confession and learn to examine my conscience. What I am experiencing is the beginning of compunction; but is it the awakening of a sense of sin, or is it the beginning of femininity? Do boys have compunction? I don’t think so. Knight errants? They have compunction for all the weak and oppressed. Shame is somewhere among my feelings about this incident. I don’t know who it belongs to: to me, or the boy I’ve beaten, or some ghostly, fading boy I still carry inside.
Later, when I am a big girl, ten years old, a true bully arises in our own class. He is a short boy with shorn hair, and his name is Gary, which is a bully name if ever you heard one. He is broad, white, muscled, compact, and made of rubber. He takes my beret and throws it in the ditch. I declare I will make war on him. You can’t bash Gary C.! the little girls say. I go after him, pale with fury, spitting with wrath. He stands his ground. I strike out. My fists sink into his torso and bounce back. The feeling is curiously soothing. I need have no conscience about him. He’s made of some substance denser than flesh. I suppose he hits me back, but it doesn’t hurt. By now, ten, I am disconnecting from my body. It has no capabilities and no capacities, except to be in the way, to be where it’s not wanted. Gary’s like a creature the knight meets in a forest, you lop its head off and it regrows. He’s a monster. My breath comes hard, my heart hammers. I’m trapped in a joke with no space between the setup and the punch line. Thud, thud, thud. “Have you heard this one?” Thud, thud, thud. “Two monsters are having a boxing match.”
For a while, at six, I cling to the prospect of a man’s life. I play with the cleverest girl in the class, whose name is Jacqueline. Naturally she takes the name Jack, and I am Bill. The game is called Men, and the good thing is that even when we aren’t actually playing it we can use these secret names. But Jacqueline tells me, “You don’t talk like us,” and stops bothering with me. Of course I don’t talk like them; they are a race of varlets, base knaves, and curs. I begin bothering with the Italian children, and the ones who at home speak refugees’ languages, a flax-blond Ukrainian child and a huddle of darned and desolate Poles. I try to interest another girl in the game of Men. She is a shy, speechless child called Margaret, whose face is permanently scarlet from some inner humiliation. As her name she selects “Walter.” It is what her father is called. I can’t explain why this is no good. “Walter,” it proves, never does anything manly. The whole excitement is confined to “Walter comes home for his tea.” So the game of Men is left off.
It is time for me to take up skipping instead. I don’t want to but I have to try. I’d rather turn the rope and say the rhyme than skip. In hopscotch, another game, I should have the advantage because I have such beautiful stones to skim. One day before I was born (so my mother says) my grandmother took against the marble washstand, blaming it for being old-fashioned. She ordered it out of the house and said to my grandad, “Smash it up, George!” Pieces of marble are still embedded in the dirt of the backyard. I dig them up and they make hopscotches that are heavy in the hand, white as a rock of sugar and smooth as ice. Where do they go, these wonderful stones? I suppose I give them away, so that people will leave me alone. The game is better than skipping, but I find that when I try to stand on one leg, the pressure of my thoughts pushes me over.
Evelyn and I get a football and kick it at the coal sheds. She would like to be Manchester United, but I explain that Protestants can only be Manchester City. She wins, all the same; the days of playing Ballet School, without me, have left her fleetfooted. But what does it profit her? She has to go to Brownies. She has to get her Darning Badge. She can’t darn. She weeps in frustration just thinking about it. Evelyn has a party for her sixth birthday. There are two guests, her and me. We get overexcited and knock over our fizzy drinks: or rather, I do. Our drink is called Cyd-Apple: related to cider, but for those of a small age. I think about the glass I lost, and feel aggrieved. Later in life I drink cider, but the dry, still taste is musty, as if the glass had been kept in a cupboard for twenty years.
Overexcited is bad, fidget is bad; obedient is good. Mr. and Mrs. Aldous have a television set. I go down to watch the children’s serial. It is The Secret Garden. The curtains are pulled, so the black-and-white picture stands out more; we lie on the rug, chins on our hands, like children in picture books, like illustrations of ourselves. We don’t fidget at all, but I live in terror that Mr. Aldous will come home before the end of the episode, will grow in from the street with his nodular, fibrous arms. At the end of many weeks I have saved up the entire story. I go home and announce it to my mother: The Secret Garden, here is that story. It spools out and out of my mouth, narrative, dialogue, and commentary. She looks stunned. We are in the kitchen, but not the kitchen at Bankbottom. This is
Brosscroft, another house entirely.
After the disappointment over the flats, my mother says, “I’m getting us a house!” She goes to the bank for her savings. We go uphill to Brosscroft. My mother says, This is the house I have got.
There are steps up to the massive front door. Inside everything is painted in dark green. The kitchen has bare stone flags. There are gas mantles on the wall.
When I go there again, it is the day we move in. I am moving in with my mother and father and brother Ian, my younger brother being still unborn. It takes five minutes to run down the hill to Bankbottom, but still, it is a change and I am not sure I am prepared for it. The house is no longer dark green. The front room has striped wallpaper, gray and white with a pinstripe of what we call maroon. The color of the paintwork, my mother says, is French beige. There is a huge old-fashioned range in the front room, but my mother says she’ll soon get that knocked out. As in my grandmother’s house, we will only heat one room. Hot water is got by boiling kettles. But the lavatory is our own, and is not exactly outside either; it is just off a drafty stone-flagged room called “the Glass Place,” behind the kitchen. There is a private yard with a patch of grass, and high walls up which the storshions will grow. Beyond the yard is a garden. It is huge, my mother says, with the fields beyond it. When it is cleared we will be able to understand its dimensions. At the moment, the tangled bushes are head-high, when your head’s as high as mine. I can’t even see to the end of it.
The night we move in, the big square kitchen is a patch of light, yellow light against the chaos outside. There is chill in the air, and my mother is busy at the table, putting together a first meal. Henry, she says, the knife! It is the black-handled knife, the bread knife, with its hair-thin blade. It has been left behind at Bankbottom; and that is my knife, she says.
It is true. It is the knife I am used to seeing in her hand. Henry strides out, into the blue twilight, in his black-and-white tweed coat. My mother goes to the new stove, and then peers into the dark cupboard where the gas meter is kept. The gas is turned off, she says, I will have to—No! I say. I stop her hand. I beg her. No, no, don’t do it. Don’t turn on the gas before my daddy comes back. Gas, sue, sue, gas, hiss, hiss, bang. I am begging and beseeching. I can’t tell her my reason. Please no, wait for him, let him do it, please: it’s for men. I am in the first killing crisis of my life and unable to explain how to avert it. She looks at me, a long, considering look: “All right,” she says. I am as astonished as she was, when I recited the entire Secret Garden at a stroke. All right? I take a breath. I can hardly believe any adult will take notice of me, I can scarcely believe our lives are to be saved.
I am slightly afraid that, anyway, the house will blow up; in that case, we will all explode together. But when Henry comes back, cheerful and chilled, the knife under his jacket, alles in Ordnung. Man switches on gas. No one sued. No one dead. No mysterious escapes, no invisible presences.
Mum pins an Elvis picture on the kitchen wall. Elvis is in his army uniform. Every day I see his fat-lipped sloe-eyed dumbness. It’s not what you do, I think; you should like your husband best. I know it’s all wrong, all gone wrong: and going worse, day by day.
I am beside myself with interest in the baby, Ian. I tap on the side of his pram a certain rhythm, like rudimentary code, child to child: dot-dot-dot-dot? He turns his blue eyes on me, and taps back: dash dash. Lying on his back, he kicks out the rhythm with his heels. “This baby has almost kicked his pram through,” my mother says in horror, “with the pounding of his great powerful feet.” When he tries to walk, I support him like an old comrade with a battlefield casualty, propping him under his armpits when he sags. His knees point outward, his legs bow under the power of his body, and I bounce him back on course by the straps of his romper suit: Frog, March to the Frying Pan! I sing. I don’t know why. I have heard of it as a song, and it seems apt. I don’t have any ill will toward him: only the opposite. He becomes my occupation, my hobby, my cause. I have heard of children who are jealous: I am sure that is not me. People laugh that if he falls on me he will kill me. I am a tiny doll creature with red smiling lips, stick limbs, and fair hair: an innocent abroad, a dumb broad, a feather on the breath of God.
When I am six years old I am put to bed in my parents’ room at Brosscroft. So far only one bedroom of the house is habitable. The baby’s cot stands against the window wall, the double bed occupies the center of the room, my small cream-painted bed is nearest the door. I lie under a tartan rug and my fingers twist and plait its fringe; plait, untwist, plait again: the wool is rough against my fingertips. I will myself into dreaming; I think about Red Indians and about Jesus, because Jesus is a thing I am exhorted to think about and I try, I do try. I think about my teepee, my tomahawk, my stocky bay horse who is standing even now, a striped blanket thrown over his back, ready to gallop me over the plains, into the red and dusty west. Then I think about how, downstairs perhaps even at this moment, my mother is putting on her coat and picking up her bag.
I believe she will leave in the night, abandon me. We should never have come to this house; we should have stayed as we were, with Grandma and Grandad down at Bankbottom. Everything has gone wrong, so wrong that I don’t know how to express it or understand it; I know that anyone who can flee disaster should do so, leaving the weak, the old, and the babies behind in the wreckage. My mother is smart and fit and I think she will run, and take her chance on another life, a better life elsewhere: some princess place, where her real family lives. With her ready smiles and her glowing sunset head, she does not belong here, in these enclosing shadows: in these rooms that have filled silently with unseen, hostile observers.
My father puts the baby to bed; this hour, when he is upstairs with the baby and me, seems like the time she would run. I think that, although it will almost kill me, I can bear it if I know the moment she goes, if I hear the front door close after her. But I can’t bear it if I go downstairs in the morning to a cold and empty kitchen—warmed only by Elvis, his fat face glowing like the rising sun.
So I lie awake, listening, long after my father has crept downstairs, listening by the glow of the nightlight to the sounds of the house. In the morning I am too tired to get up, but I must go to school or else I will be sued. My arms and legs ache with a singing pain. The doctor says it is growing pains. One day I find I cannot breathe. The doctor says if I didn’t think about breathing I’d be able to do it. Frankly, he’s sick of being asked what’s wrong with me. He calls me Little Miss Neverwell. I am angry. I don’t like being given a name. It’s too much like power over me.
Persons shouldn’t name you. Rumpelstiltskin.
Jack comes to visit us. He comes for his tea. These teas seem to be separate extra meals, in the big kitchen when the lights are on and the wild gardens fade into a dark bloom. We cook strange, frivolous dishes: dip eggs suddenly into bubbling fat, so that they fizz up like sea creatures, puff into pearls with translucent whitish legs. Is Jack coming today? I ask. Oh good. I am looking for someone to marry. It’s a business I want to get settled up. I hope Jack might do, though it is a pity he is not my relative. He is just someone we know.
Down at Bankbottom, they are talking about the latest novelty from Rome: the pope says you can marry your second cousin! That means, people say, that Ilary could marry … if she wanted, of course … then they turn up various names of people I haven’t heard of. I wish I had heard of them: I am keen for intelligence of these candidates; I am, I already know, the kind of person who would marry back into my own family, to keep us all together, to guarantee me a supply of familiar people, great-uncles needing Cheshire cheese, great-aunts with hats discussing in low voices while wielding their spoons over bowls of tinned peaches. I have a great-uncle who was in a military prison, “our Joe he is red-hot Labour,” my grandmother says; I have a great-aunt who for money sold her long golden hair. Why are they great-uncles and great-aunts? Where is the next generation? Where are their children? Never born, or dead as babies
. Poverty, my mother says, pneumonia. I write down, “pneumonia.” I don’t know it is an illness, I think it is a cold wind that blows.
One day Jack comes for his tea and doesn’t go home again. “Is he never going home?” I say. Night falls, on this new dispensation; it falls and falls on me. In subsequent weeks I become enraged, and am thrown into the Glass Place. Jack and my mother sit in the kitchen. I jump at the kitchen window and make faces at them. They draw the curtains and laugh. I try to crash the back door, but they have bolted it.
I stamp and rage, outside in the cold. Rumpelstiltskin is my name.
You should not judge your parents. Mostly—this is the condition of parents—they were doing the best they could. They were addled and penniless and couldn’t afford lawyers, they were every man’s hand against them, they were—when you do the arithmetic—pathetically young. They couldn’t see the wood for the trees or the way through the week from Monday to Friday. They were in love or they were enraged, they were betrayed or bitterly, bitterly disappointed, and just like our own generation they clutched at any chance to make it right, to make a change, to get a second chance: they beat off the fetters of logic and they gathered themselves up in weakness and despair and they spat in the eye of fate. This is what parents do. They believe love conquers all, or why would they have children, why would they have you? You should not judge your parents.