The first part of the Eleven Plus seems suspiciously easy. Absent is to A x x x as P x x x x x x is to Here and the composition is really quite enjoyable: Write about one of the following:
(A) A busy street scene
or
(B) A visit to the swimming-baths
or
(C) What you would do if you had Aladdin’s
lamp for the day.
And I choose to have Aladdin’s lamp, long a favourite daydream, and am lulled into thinking that everything is going to be all right. Two weeks later I sit the arithmetic paper and I’m reeling with horror when I leave the jail-like depths of Fishergate School into which we have been herded to take the scholarship exam. My brain cells feel as if they’ve been on the rack all morning, tortured by questions like How many stamps ½ in. by ¾ in. will cover a sheet of paper 6 in. by 8 in.? and A grocer mixes 4 lbs. of tea @ 3s. 6d. per lb. He sells the mixture @ 5s. per lb. What is his profit? Who am I to know the answer to these questions?
‘How was it?’ Patricia asks, meeting me at the bottom of Fishergate School steps, but I’m far too distressed to speak. We walk along by the Ouse; it’s so cold that the river has been frozen for a week and great broken slabs of ice are now cruising downstream. ‘This is the coldest winter since 1947,’ Patricia says dreamily. ‘I’ve never seen the river frozen like this. It used to freeze nearly every winter in the olden days, did you know that?’ Of course I don’t know that – I know nothing. ‘Why olden?’ I ask, deciding to take a first step towards improving my knowledge. ‘Why not just old? Or Olde?’
‘Dunno,’ she says with a shrug, and then, as we stand watching the frozen river and contemplating the olden days, a curious feeling rises up inside me, a feeling of something long forgotten. It has something to do with the cold and the ice and something to do with the water too. I try to concentrate on the feeling, to bring it to life, but as soon as I do it evaporates from my brain. It’s the same feeling I have sometimes when I’m woken from sleepwalking and I know that there’s something incredibly important which I’ve lost and have been looking for – something that’s been torn out of me, leaving a hole inside – and that thing, whatever it is, has been tantalizingly within reach as if it were just around the corner, behind a door, or in a cupboard somewhere. Then I grow fully awake and have no idea at all what it is that I’ve been looking for.
‘Are you all right, Ruby?’ Patricia asks, but we are diverted by the approach of a pair of swans, balanced forlornly on their own private iceberg. We can hear the river crackling and cracking and watch as our steamy breath billows into the air. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’ I ask after a while.
‘Truanting. Do you think those swans are all right?’
‘Well, I would change places with them anytime,’ I respond gloomily. ‘At least the rest of their lives doesn’t depend on whether they can do mental arithmetic.’
‘And they can fly away if they want to,’ Patricia nods sadly.
‘And they have each other,’ I add as the swans glide past us on their ice-float, their magnificent wings ruffled to protect them from the numbing cold. A shiver goes through me from top to bottom. ‘The water looks so cold.’
‘It is,’ Patricia says with feeling and then she gives me a funny, sideways look and says, ‘Ruby?’
‘Mmm?’
‘Do you remember—’ and then she shakes her head and says, ‘Nothing, it doesn’t matter, come on – I’ll wait with you at the bus-stop if you like,’ and she turns her collar up against the wind.
My birthday is marked by a party, grudgingly given by Bunty to comfort me for the distress of the arithmetic paper. The party is not an unqualified success – a girl called Vanessa is violently sick after eating too many sardine sandwiches and someone knocks over a table-lamp during a vigorous Twisting session. The birthday cake is a great success though – a precedent-breaking, shop-bought one – Bunty always makes our birthday cakes, their defects smothered by buttercream and stuck with candles like martyred hedgehogs, but this year she’s rebelled. Unlike Bunty’s cakes, the one from Terry’s bakery is exquisite – crisp, swan-white icing that’s been sculpted into scrolls and waves and plumes of snow before being decorated with dainty pink sugar-roses. But was it worth George rushing out last minute on Saturday to buy it, uttering language that made even Patricia flinch? Was it worth Bunty being ‘not very well’ again and screaming at Patricia, ‘You’re not my child!’ to which Patricia replies, ‘Thank God,’ and walks out of the house just before she’s due to orchestrate me and my party guests in our first game of Charades. I hear her coming in much later that night, stomping up the stairs, causing Rags to bark and Nell to shout out in her sleep. I have left a slice of birthday cake for Patricia on her pillow, contrary to Bunty’s strict instructions that she is never to be fed again.
I think if it were left up to Bunty, none of us would ever eat again. ‘I’m cooked out,’ she announces wearily, wrestling with a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie tin. A further downturn in her condition is signalled by her languishing, Elizabeth Barrett-like, on the shaved moquette of the living-room settee. She says she’s ‘had enough’ but she doesn’t say what of. George perhaps. This depression is counterbalanced by an unusual buoyancy on Patricia’s part, due, she tells me, to the Bohemian joys of sex which she and Howard are discovering together. This new hobby causes her to forget to revise for her mock O Levels and she fails them all dismally.
Bunty rallies a little for Shrove Tuesday – a day of ‘feasting and merry-making’ according to the Ye Olde England calendar. Not in our house, not at any rate after Bunty throws the fifth pancake at the kitchen wall instead of tossing it nicely back into the pan. It sticks on the wall for a few seconds and then slowly unpeels itself into a sticky blob on the floor like an extra from a science fiction film (Killer Pancakes!). It seems awfully symbolic somehow, especially as it was George’s pancake. ‘Well,’ Patricia says with Bunty’s smile stuck across her face, ‘I was almost full anyway, weren’t you, Ruby?’
‘Just about,’ I murmur and we slink out of the kitchen quickly before the frying pan whizzes through the air towards George’s head.
An appropriate air of contrition is in the air on Ash Wednesday, but we know it won’t last. Lent also marks the beginning of Nell’s decline, taking to her bed permanently after the pancake fiasco and not even rising for Easter Monday. Somewhere in the middle of this, on Mothering Sunday, Bunty displays a blatant lack of mothering by locking Patricia out of the house, so that she’s unable to creep in as usual at three in the morning. Patricia, not to be outdone, stands down below in the quiet suburban night-air, screaming, ‘Bloody bourgeois pigs – come the revolution, you’ll be first against the wall, Bunty Lennox!’ which, not surprisingly, creates quite a stir in the neighbourhood. I think Patricia’s enjoying herself and almost looks annoyed when I throw my front-door key down to her.
I myself undergo a traumatic visit to Mr Jeffrey’s, the dentist, the day before Good Friday, resulting in the loss of three much cherished baby-teeth which I have been hanging onto as long as possible. Perhaps I do not want to leave my childhood behind. (On the other hand, perhaps I do.) Patricia very kindly exchanges the teeth for three sixpences and takes me to meet Howard in the Acropolis Coffee House. It is hard to believe that this awkward gawky person, peppered with acne, is responsible for the Bacchanalian heights which Patricia reports to me most Sunday mornings as I lie in my innocent bed listening to Easy Beat.
Easter weekend is marked by a flurry of family visitors to say goodbye to Nell who has just about ‘had enough’ of life by now. This premature wake also produces a flurry of Easter eggs. Auntie Gladys, Uncle Clifford and Adrian come as well as Auntie Babs (on her own, thank goodness) and Uncle Ted. Adrian is entirely grown up now (twenty) but is still living at home. He’s just started on a hairdressing apprenticeship and is very handy around the house – setting the table for tea and picking up the teapot and saying, ‘Shall I be mother?’ to Bunty so that
she looks shocked as noone has ever offered before to swap this role with her (you can see she’s tempted). Uncle Ted, standing behind Adrian, winks at George and puts his hand on his hip and takes a few mincing steps. George gives a great guffaw of laughter but when Uncle Clifford says, ‘What’s the joke?’ shakes his head helplessly. Adrian has brought his dog with him – a timid wire-haired terrier that Rags tries to dismember.
Uncle Ted announces to the company that he has finally become engaged to his long-standing girlfriend, Sandra, and George says, ‘Knocked up?’ and all the women shout ‘George!’ disapprovingly at him. Bunty, getting down to the nitty-gritty, asks who the bridesmaids will be, while Auntie Babs looks smug because the twins are in great demand as bridesmaids. Even I would have to admit that they would probably grace a wedding a bit better than me and Patricia, for we are clumsy, slouching sorts of girls compared with Daisy and Rose. They are too busy, revising for their O-Level exams, to come and say goodbye to their grandmother. They are fifteen-going-on-sixteen and I haven’t seen them for a long time. Patricia is sixteen-going-on-seventeen and a few of her Favourite Things are Howard, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Beatles, who have rapidly taken over from Elvis in our fickle affections. (All his smouldering six-by-six, glossy, black-and-white photographs have come down off her wall and been replaced by the cheerful grins of the Fab Four. Poor Elvis.) Patricia manages to be rude to everyone – two aunties, two uncles, a cousin and even a dog, within the space of fifteen minutes (as I recall, something to do with her proposal to join the Communist Party) and I gain to the sum of three extra Easter eggs because everyone is so disgusted that they give me her eggs. But what profiteth it a girl if she gains three Easter eggs and loses her sister?
George and Uncles Ted and Clifford gather round the kitchen table with a bottle of whisky that Ted has brought and engage in an animated tri-partite discussion on a) whether or not George should build a patio at the back, b) the sight of our new neighbour, Mrs Roper, breast-feeding her baby in the conservatory next door, which elicits cries all round of ‘Bloody Hell!’ said half in admiration and half in disgust and c) the best route to Scotch Corner.
I scurry upstairs to seek refuge from this grown-up talk but up in Nell’s bedroom an even worse scene is waiting for me. Bunty, Auntie Gladys and a captive Nell are spectating at a morbid women-only striptease show with Auntie Babs as the main attraction. She moves like a statue on a revolving dais and, turning to her audience, she peels back her navy blue cardigan and white blouse to reveal – on one side a pendulous, matronly breast, and on the other side – nothing, just a pucker of skin and scar tissue. Bunty and Auntie Gladys suck in air quickly, making mouths like stricken fish and Nell moans softly. I leave the room quickly. I haven’t even learnt about getting breasts yet, let alone about losing them. I sit on the stairs pushing chocolate buttons from my Easter egg into the empty sockets in my mouth until eventually boredom propels me to go and find Patricia and secretly give her back the Easter eggs which are rightly hers.
Our new neighbours are Mr Roper, Mrs Roper and their children, Christine, Kenneth and the baby-David. Mr Roper – Clive – is an ex-RAF squadron leader who now has some kind of executive job with British Rail – exactly the kind of man my mother dreams about. And indeed, for several weeks after the Ropers move in at New Year, when Bunty is in her torpid phase, she lets fall a hail of remarks of the ‘Why can’t you be more like Clive Roper?’ variety. These remarks stop with the upturn in Bunty’s condition, somewhere around Whit, when she no longer needs George to be more like Mr Roper because she is toying with the original model.
My friendship with Christine Roper is based solely on proximity – there is no escape from her. She’s a year older than me and a particularly bossy girl, in some ways she is more like Gillian than Gillian was, except that she is very plain and Gillian was pretty (although it’s only now that she’s dead that I’m willing to say that). Kenneth, my junior by two years, is like a distillation of all the little boys that ever were, a kind of demonstration model – from the sagging socks to the half-sucked gobstopper in his pocket. He’s annoying but harmless. Less so the baby-David, who dribbles from every orifice and is always red in the face from either screaming or doing his ‘big jobs’ to use Mrs Roper’s inelegant phraseology. Mrs Roper (Harriet) isn’t really my mother’s sort. She’s more like a squadron-leader than her husband – a big, raw-boned woman with an air of certainty about her – very loud and very English. You expect her to rummage around in her extremely untidy house and produce a lacrosse stick or a riding crop rather than the unprepossessing baby-David – or his accessory, a swollen breast, pumping with blue veins like a 3-D delta map.
I am both repelled and fascinated by this sight. I have never seen anyone breastfeeding before Mrs Roper (we aren’t that kind of family). It also makes an unfortunate contrast to Auntie Babs’ chest, now entirely shorn, as she lies looking paler than the sheet on her bed in St James’ in Leeds where Bunty and I go on a cheap-day return one Saturday while Patricia stays at home to fast for India.
This was shortly after I witnessed, for the first time, Bunty and Mr Roper together. Bunty and I were in the Co-op mobile shop, lurking amongst the tinned milk puddings, trying to decide between rice and semolina, when Mr Roper bounded on board, looking for washing-powder – a new man ahead of his time. ‘Well, hel-lo there!’ he said to my mother. He was smartly dressed in cavalry-twill trousers, a dogtooth-check sports jacket and a cravat. Bunty handed over her purse to me so I could pay for our purchases and she could remain ensnared by Mr Roper at the back of the van. While I chanted our divvy number to the driver I could see, reflected in the windscreen, the vision of Mr Roper presenting, with a flourish, the red plastic tulip that was being given away with every packet of Daz.
I was there and, believe me, the woman who took that tulip off Mr Roper was not my mother; that woman was a giggling confection of girlishness – charming, playful, spirited, sort of Debbie Reynolds before Eddie Fisher left her.
I fear for my mother. She is entering murky, uncharted deep space where the meteorites shower unexpectedly down and the Rings of Saturn, as we know, are Deadly.
A little while after this, at the end of June, a miracle happens – George and Bunty receive a letter telling them that I will be going to Queen Anne Grammar School. Phew, as Uncle Ted would say. Patricia, on the other hand, has some grisly results in her O Levels. This is because she walked out of most of them early. (When asked why by a furious Bunty, she just shrugs and says, ‘Dunno.’)
As a substitute for the summer holiday that we’re not getting this year because of Nell’s imminent death, Patricia takes me and Kathleen to see the film instead. Patricia is not a Cliff Richard fan, she has recently come into the house holding aloft a little orange-and-white striped Decca forty-five. ‘The Rolling Stones!’ she says, a wild gleam in her eye. Subterfuge has been necessary to prevent Christine finding out about this event; she is trying to make herself a human wedge between me and Kathleen, and I keep expecting her to pop up between us and spoil things. No need, Howard does a good job of that, snorting with hilarity at Cliff, Una, Melvyn and the gang. ‘Puerile!’ he comments very loudly and then proceeds to do some bizarre biological things with Patricia while we munch our way haplessly through a box of peppermint creams. Because of them we have to sit in the back row and do not get a very good view of the screen.
Nell expires not long after this. Her last words to me were, ‘Mind your boots, Lily!’ (see Footnote (viii)) as she lay like a shadow in her bed. Her very last words of all (reported by Patricia, who by sheer chance was the only one in the room with her when she died) also lacked a certain lucidity, ‘Shall I help put Percy’s tea on now, Mrs Sievewright?’ We go and visit Nell in the funeral parlour. She is poor company. The funeral parlour is not what I had expected. I had hoped for something more frightening, more mystical like St Wilfred’s – darkness, incense, organ music – instead of the well-lit tableau in front of us with its l
emon walls, maroon curtains and the jardinières of plastic flowers that look as if they might have been given away with Daz. Kathleen, along for the ride, views it all suspiciously. ‘No candles?’ she whispers, astonished. Who will light poor Nell’s journey into darkness?
Patricia has a bad cold and her eyes are red but I don’t think it’s Nell she’s crying for. Our grandmother looks much the same dead as she had done in the last weeks of life, her skin a bit more yellow perhaps and an uncanny resemblance to Christine Roper’s tortoise. I feel very sorry for her but also very guilty that I’m not wracked by grief the way we were when the Pets died.
The viewing is a leisurely affair, front row, no peppermint creams. ‘Had enough?’ Bunty asks after a while and we agree that we have. As we’re leaving, Bunty turns to look back and after a slight pause says, ‘That was my mother,’ and the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, just like June Allyson’s in The Glenn Miller Story on television the previous Sunday afternoon, because I knew, with the certainty of premonition, that one day I will say exactly the same thing.
The summer rolls on, vast oceans of nothing, punctuated by days playing with Christine. Mrs Roper is always asking us to look after the baby-David and we spend a good deal of time trying to lose him. A favourite game is Hide-and-Seek with him, where we Hide him somewhere – under a hedge in the garden or in the Ropers’ potting-shed, and then go off to Seek something else – Rags, perhaps, or the tortoise. On one memorable occasion (signalled as ‘Trafalgar Day’ on my calendar), we completely forgot where we had left him. If it hadn’t been for Rags, the baby-David might be in the airing-cupboard to this day.