It meant we must scramble through a fence. Through a gap there. I knew it was illicit. I knew no would be said: but then what, this afternoon, did I care for no? Under the wire, through the snag of it, the gap already widened by the hands of forerunners, some of whom must have worn double-thickness woollen double-knit mittens to muffle the scratch against their flesh. Once through the wire, Tabby went, ‘Whoop!’
Then soon she was bouncing, dancing in the realm of the dead cars. They were above our head to the height of three. Her hands reached out to slap at their rusting door-sills and wings. If there had been glass in their windows, it was strewn now at our feet. Scrapes of car paint showed, fawn, banana, a degraded scarlet. I was giddy, and punched my fingers at metal; it crumbled, I was through it. For that moment only I may have laughed; but I do not think so.
She led me on the paths to the heart of the wrecks. We play here, she said, and towed me on. We stopped for a plum each. We laughed. ‘Are you too young to write a letter?’ she asked. I did not answer. ‘Have you heard of penfriends? I have one already.’
All around us, the scrapyard showed its bones. The wrecks stood clear now, stack on stack, against a declining yellow light. When I looked up they seemed to foreshorten, these carcasses, and bear down on me; gaping windows where faces once looked out, engine cavities where the air was blue, treadless tyres, wheel arches gaping, boots unsprung and empty of bags, unravelling springs where seats had been; and some wrecks were warped, reduced as if by fire, bl***kened. We walked, sombre, cheeks bulging, down the paths between. When we had penetrated many rows in, by blind corners, by the swerves enforced on us by the squishy corrosion of the sliding piles, I wanted to ask, why do you play here and who do you mean by we, can I be one of your friends or will you forget me, and also can we go now please?
Tabby ducked out of sight, around some rotting heap. I heard her giggle. ‘Got you!’ I said. ‘Yes!’ She ducked, shying away, but my plum stone hit her square on the temple, and as it touched her flesh I tasted the seducing poison which, if you crack a plum stone, your tongue can feel. Then Tabby broke into a trot, and I chased her: when she skidded to a halt, her flat brown sandals making brakes for her, I stopped too, and glanced up, and saw we had come to a place where I could hardly see the sky. Have a plum, she said. She held the bag out. I am lost, she said. We are, we are, lost. I’m afraid to say.
What came next I cannot, you understand, describe in clock-time. I have never been lost since, not utterly lost, without the sanctuary of sense; without the reasonable hope that I will and can and deserve to be saved. But for that next buried hour, which seemed like a day, and a day with fading light, we ran like rabbits: pile to pile, scrap to scrap, the wrecks towering, as we went deeper, for twenty feet above our heads. I could not blame her. I did not. But I did not see how I could help us either.
If it had been the moors, some ancestral virtue would have propelled me, I felt, towards the metalled road, towards a stream bed or cloud that would have conveyed me, soaked and beaten, towards the A57, towards the sanctuary of some stranger’s car; and the wet inner breath of that vehicle would have felt to me, whoever owned it, like the wet protective breathing of the belly of the whale. But here, there was nothing alive. There was nothing I could do, for there was nothing natural. The metal stretched, friable, bl***k, against evening light. We shall have to live on plums for ever, I thought. For I had the sense to realise that the only incursion here would be from the wreckers’ ball. No flesh would be salvaged here; there would be no rescue team. When Tabby reached for my hand, her fingertips were cold as ball-bearings. Once, she heard people calling. Men’s voices. She said she did. I heard only distant, formless shouts. They are calling our names, she said. Uncle Jacob, Daddy Jack. They are calling for us.
She began to move, for the first time, in a purposive direction. ‘Uncle Jacob!’ she called. In her eyes was that shifty light of unconviction that I had seen on my mother’s face – could it be only this morning? ‘Uncle Jacob!’ She paused in her calling, respectful, so I could call in my turn. But I did not call. I would not, or I could not? A scalding pair of tears popped into my eyes. To know that I lived, I touched the knotted mass of hair, the secret above my nape: my fingers rubbed and nibbed it, round and round. If I survived, it would have to be combed out, with torture. This seemed to militate against life; and then I felt, for the first time and not the last, that death at least is straightforward. Tabby called, ‘Uncle Jacob!’ She stopped, her breath tight and short, and held out to me the last plum stone, the kernel, sucked clear of flesh.
I took it without disgust from her hand. Tabby’s troubled eyes looked at it. It sat in my palm, a shrivelled brain from some small animal. Tabby leaned forward. She was still breathing hard. The edge of her littlest nail picked at the convolutions. She put her hand against her ribs. She said, ‘It is like the map of the world.’
There was an interval of praying. I will not disguise it. It was she who raised the prospect. ‘I know a prayer,’ she said. I waited. ‘Little Jesus, meek and mild…’
I said, ‘What’s the good of praying to a baby?’
She threw her head back. Her nostrils flared. Prayers began to run out of her.
‘Now I lay me down to sleep,
–I pray the Lord my soul to keep’
Stop, I said.
‘If I should die before I wake–’
My fist, before I even knew it, clipped her across the mouth.
After a time, she raised her hand there. A fingertip trembled against the corner of her lip, the crushed flesh like velvet. She crept her lip downwards, so that for a moment the inner membrane showed, dark and bruised. There was no blood.
I said, ‘Aren’t you going to cry?’
She said, ‘Are you?’
I couldn’t say, I never cry. It was not true. She knew it. She said softly, it is all right if you want to cry. You’re a Catholic, aren’t you? Don’t you know a Catholic prayer?
Hail Mary, I said. She said, teach it me. And I could see why: because night was falling: because the sun lay in angry streaks across farther peaks of the junkyard. ‘Don’t you have a watch?’ she whispered. ‘I have one it is Timex, but it is at home, in my bedroom.’ I said, I have a watch it is Westclox, but I am not allowed to wind it, it is only to be wound by Jack. I wanted to say, and often he is tired, it is late, my watch is winding down, it is stopping but I dare not ask, and when next day it’s stopped there’s bellowing, only I can do a bleeding thing in this bleeding house. (Door slam.)
There is a certain prayer which never fails. It is to St Bernard; or by him, I was never quite clear. Remember oh most loving Virgin Mary, that it is a thing unheard of that anyone ever beseeched thy aid, craved thy intercession or implored thy help and was left forsaken. I thought that I had it, close enough – they might not be the exact words but could a few errors matter, when you were kicking at the very gate of the Immaculate herself? I was ready to implore, ready to crave: and this prayer, I knew, was the best and most powerful prayer ever invented. It was a clear declaration that heaven must help you, or go to hell! It was a taunt, a challenge, to Holy Mary, Mother of God. Get it fixed! Do it now! It is a thing unheard of! But just as I was about to begin, I realised I must not say it after all. Because if it didn’t work…
The strength seemed to drain away then, from my arms and legs. I sat down, in the deep shadows of the wrecks, when all the indications were that we should keep climbing. I wasn’t about to take a bet on St Bernard’s prayer, and live my whole life knowing it was useless. My life might be long, it might be very long. I must have thought there were worse circumstances, in which I’d need to deal this final card from my sleeve.
‘Climb!’ said Tabby. I climbed. I knew – did she? – that the rust might crumble beneath us and drop us into the heart of the wrecks. Climb, she said, and I did: each step tested, so that I learned the resistance of rotting metal, the play and the give beneath my feet, the pathetic cough and wheeze of it, its abandonment
and mineral despair. Tabby climbed. Her feet scurried, light, skipping, the soles of her sandals skittering and scratching like rats. And then, like stout Cortez, she stopped, pointed, and stared. ‘The woodpiles!’ I gazed upwards into her face. She swayed and teetered, six feet above me. Evening breeze whipped her skirt around her stick legs ‘The woodpiles!’ Her face opened like a flower.
What she said meant nothing to me, but I understood the message. We are out! she cried. Her arm beckoned me. Come on, come on! She was shouting down to me, but I was crying too hard to hear. I worked myself up beside her: crab arms, crab legs, two steps sideways for every step forward. She reached down and scooped at my arm, catching at my clothes, pulling, hauling me up beside her. I shook myself free. I pulled out the stretched sleeve of my cardigan, eased the shape into the wool, and slid it back past my wrist. I saw the light on the still body of water, and the small muddy path that had brought us there.
‘Well, you girls,’ Jacob said, ‘don’t you know we came calling? Didn’t you hear us?’
Well, suppose I did, I thought, Suppose she was right. I can just hear myself, can’t you, bawling, here, Daddy Jack, here I am! Come and save me, Daddy Jack!
It was seven o’clock. They had been composing sandwiches and Jacob had been for ice cream and wafers. Though missed, we had never been a crisis. The main point was that we should be there for the right food at the right time.
The little boys slept on the way home, and I suppose so did I. The next day, next week, next months are lost to me. It startles me now that I can’t imagine how I said goodbye to Tabby, and that I can’t even remember at what point in the evening she melted away, her crayons in her satchel and her memories in her head. Somehow, with good fortune on our side for once, my family must have rolled home; and it would be another few years before we ventured so far again.
The fear of being lost comes low these days on the scale of fears I have to live with. I try not to think about my soul, lost or not (though it must be thirty years since my last confession), and I don’t generally have to resort to that covert shuffle whereby some women turn the map upside down to count off the road junctions. They say that females can’t read maps and never know where they are, but in the year 2000 the Ordnance Survey appointed its first woman director, so I suppose that particular slander loses its force. I married a man who casts a professional eye on the lie of the land, and would prefer me to direct with reference to tumuli, stream beds and ancient monuments. But a finger tracing the major routes is enough for me, and I just say nervously, “We are about two miles from our turn-off or maybe, of course, we are not.’ Because they are always tearing up the contour lines, ploughing under the map, playing hell with the cartography that last year you were sold as le dernier cri.
As for the moorland landscape, I know now that I have left it far behind. Even those pinching little boys in the back seat share my appreciation of wild-flower verges and lush arable acres. It is possible, I imagine, to build a home on firm ground, a home with long views. I don’t know what became of Jacob and his family: did I hear they went home to Africa? Of Tabby, I never heard again. But in recent years, since Jack has been wandering in the country of the dead, I see again his brown skin, his roving caramel eyes, his fretting rage against power and its abuses: and I think perhaps that he was lost all his life, and looking for a house of justice, a place of safety to take him in.
In the short term, though, we continued to live in one of those houses where there was never any money, and doors were slammed hard. One day the glass did spring out of the kitchen cupboard, at the mere touch of my fingertips. At once I threw up my hands, to protect my eyes. Between my fingers, for some years, you could see the delicate scars, like the ghosts of lace gloves, that the cuts left behind.
Learning To Talk
When I was a child I went to school in a Derbyshire mill village, the same school where my mother and my grandmother had learned not very much and nursed their chilblains through Pennine winters. They left it to go into the cotton mill, but I was born in happier times, and when I was eleven my family moved house and I became a day girl at a Cheshire convent. I had certain playground skills, of insult and assault, and a good knowledge of the catechism, but I had never learned any history or geography, or even English grammar. And above all, I hadn’t learned to talk proper.
The distance between the two schools was only six or seven miles, but the social gulf was oceanwide. In Cheshire, people didn’t live in rows of stone terraces, but behind pebble-dash or mock-Tudor façades. They cultivated lawns and flowering trees, and kept bird tables. They had family cars, known as ‘little runabouts’. At dinner time they had their lunch, and at teatime they had their dinner. They cleaned themselves up in things called bahthrums.
It was 1963. People were very snobbish, though perhaps not more than they are now. Later, by the time I went to London, certain provincial accents had become acceptable and even smart, but those of my part of the north-west were not among them. The late sixties were an age of equality and people were not supposed to worry about their accents, but they did worry, and tried to adapt their voices – otherwise they found themselves treated with a conscious cheeriness, as if they were black, or bereaved, or slightly deformed. When I started at my new school I didn’t know that I would become a source of mirth. Groups of girls would approach me with idiot questions, their object being to get me to pronounce certain words, shibboleths; then they would prance off, hooting and giggling.
By the time I was thirteen I had modified my accent to a degree, and my voice itself had brought me a certain notoriety. I was afraid of almost everything, except speaking in public. I had never experienced the sick numbing distress of stage fright, and also, I liked arguing. I might have done well as a shop steward in some particularly noisy factory, but you were not offered these opportunities at our annual Careers Evening. People thought I ought to be a lawyer. So I was sent to Miss Webster, to learn to talk properly.
Miss Webster was not just an elocution teacher; she was also a shopkeeper. Her shop, a few minutes’ walk from school, was called Gwen & Marjorie. It sold wool and baby clothes. Miss Webster was Gwen. Marjorie was a stout woman; she moved slowly between the hanks, behind a glass counter. She wore a big cardigan, perhaps of her own composition. In wire racks the knitting-pattern models circulated, their perfect teeth always on display: svelte ladies in lacy-knit boleros, and clean-jawed gents in cable-stitch sweaters. Miss Webster had a plate by the front door, displaying her professional qualifications. At four o’clock the front door was left ajar, so that her pupils from the two local schools could pass without disturbing Marjorie down the corridor at the back of the shop and into the living room where the elocution was performed.
This room overlooked a square of garden, in which a few shrubs withered gently; a scudding, northern late-afternoon sky rushed overhead, and the gas fire flickered and popped. Children – there would be six or seven, all at different stages of their own lessons – would perch on the arms of chairs, and blow their noses, and the convent girls would have to find a corner to stack up their schoolbags and their velour hats. There were no boys. If they didn’t talk proper, they had, I suppose, other ways of getting on in life.
Miss Webster was a little sparrow-like woman with a frizz of white hair, prominent shin bones and upswept glasses. It is almost true that you can never be too rich or too thin, but Miss Webster was too thin, and I thought so even though I was thin myself, and even though in those years it was becoming fashionable to look like an habitue of the Capulets’ monument. She had only one lung, she used to tell people, and her voice was correspondingly unimpressive. Her accent was precariously genteel, Mancunian with icing. She had been an actress in northern repertory companies. When? How long ago? ‘I was playing Lady Macbeth at Oldham when Dora Bryan was sweeping the stage.’
It was Miss Webster’s business to teach us to recite poetry and passages from Shakespeare: to teach us about metre and verse forms, and the mechanics
of breathing and articulation; and to enter us for examinations, so that we could get certificates. Most of her pupils had been with her since they were seven or eight, progressing with painful slowness through the various grades. As I was a beginner I was summoned with some of the tots for my first lesson; gloomily Brobdingnagian in my ribbed tights, I read out a little verse about leprechauns which she gave me for a trial run. She said I had better come back with the big girls. There were thirteen-year-olds and thirteen-year-olds, she said, and how could she know in advance which kind I would be? I fancied that as I closed my recitation a perceptible crack appeared in one of the blue glass vases on a shelf above the fireplace. I sat on the floor with my arms around my knees, waiting to be released. Miss Webster handed me a diagram of the respiratory tract: not of hers, of course, but of a more ideal one. Gwen and Marjorie’s pet entered the room, a Yorkshire terrier which ran about among our legs and satchels. There was a little pink bow in its topknot, which I transferred mentally to Miss Webster’s own head. She and the dog seemed alike: crushable, yappy, not very bright.
Miss Webster, at least, knew how one ought to sound. The weekly exercises were rhymes, incorporating every tricky vowel. Each one of them was a baited trap, laid by the governors of Miss Webster’s professional body to ensnare every kind of regional accent:
Father’s car is a Jaguar,
And Pa drives rather fast,
Castles, farms and draughty barns,
We go charging past…
My brothers and I had often been baffled, when we were first translated to Cheshire. ‘What do they mean,’ asked the youngest, now at a Church of England school, ‘when they talk about the Kingdom, the par and the glory?’ And for years I thought you could win a point at tennis with a well-executed parsing shot.