I was put on a trolley and given a ride to the operating theatre. I’d hoped Rosalind might be allowed to go with me, but she was left behind on my bed. I tried to imagine she was running after me, jumping up onto the trolley, swinging her legs and laughing. Then we were in this new eerie room full of alien beings in masks and gowns. One of them held me down while another put an evil-smelling rubber mask over my face. I struggled and they told me to calm down like a good sensible girl and start counting, one, two, three . . . It seemed the maddest time in the world to start an arithmetic lesson but I obediently mumbled, ‘Four, five, six . . .’
And then I was asleep, and when I woke up, I was back in my bed with Rosalind tucked up beside me, and a raw pain at the back of my throat.
They let each child have ice cream for the first meal after their operation. Ice cream was an enormous treat then. You had ice cream with jelly at birthday parties and you might be allowed an ice-cream cone once or twice on your summer holiday, but that was your lot. The hospital ice cream was meagre, a slither of Wall’s vanilla, but I swallowed it down eagerly, in spite of the pain.
I had a little parcel from home too. Biddy might not be allowed to see me but she sent me a Margaret Tarrant card every morning, and there was a present too, a little book of Toy Tales with big printing and lots of pictures. It was a bit babyish when I could cope with hundreds of pages of Adventures with Rosalind, but I knew it was the thought that counted. I was surprised that none of the other children got presents or cards or letters. Everyone thought it must be my birthday. They said I was very lucky and my mum and dad must love me very much.
* * *
I don’t think any of my fictional girls has to have her tonsils out in my books. However, there are a few hospital scenes, some very dramatic and sad. There are also more routine visits. Which of my characters ends up in hospital with a broken arm?
* * *
I wonder if you picked Mandy from Bad Girls? She does hurt her arm and end up in hospital, but it’s just a bad sprain. But Em in Clean Break breaks her arm running after her beloved stepfather.
‘Em, darling! It’s all right, I’m here. Does your arm hurt really badly?’ said Dad. ‘The nurse has just come, pet, they’re ready to plaster you up.’
I clung to Dad, scared that it might be very painful. It did hurt when they gently but firmly straightened my arm out.
‘There we go. We’ll have you right as rain in no time,’ said the young doctor, smiling at me. ‘There’s no complications. It’s a nice clean break.’
I winced at those two words.
People often ask me if any of the characters in my books are real. Mostly I make it all up, but just occasionally it’s fun to write about someone I really know. I’ve always said I don’t put myself in my books but the novelist Jenna Williams in Clean Break is very similar to me. Nick’s drawn her looking exactly like me too – apart from one tiny detail. I wonder if anyone can spot what it is?
15
Pretend Friends
JUNIOR SCHOOL WAS very different from the Infants. I was still at Latchmere, in an adjacent but identical red-brick building, the classrooms built round a quadrangle of grass. They were mostly the same children in my class but somehow I wasn’t the same. I wasn’t little Jacky-no-friends, the odd girl. I was suddenly inexplicably popular, with the girls, with the boys, even with the teachers.
I wasn’t the new girl any more. She was a girl called Cherry, an exotic name in those days of Susans and Elizabeths and Janes. She was nicknamed Cherry Blossom Boot Polish and mildly teased. We became friendly because she lived a few streets away and we walked to school together.
I was sad to miss out on my imaginary conversations on the way to school, but it was companionable having Cherry to walk back home with. We’d take our time. We’d run up the old air-raid shelter in Park Road and slide right down. We’d climb little trees on the bombsite and walk along the planks crossing the trenches where new houses were being built. We’d visit the sweetshop on the way home and buy sherbet fountains and gob stoppers and my favourite flying saucers, cheap pastel papery sweets that exploded in your mouth into sharp lemony powder.
I’d occasionally go home with Cherry. Her mother was sometimes out, as she worked as a hospital almoner. They had a big piano in the living room. The whole family was musical. Cherry played the recorder and the violin. Her parents were keen amateur Gilbert and Sullivan performers.
‘Gilbert and Sullivan!’ said Biddy, sniffing.
She had a job now too, but it was just part time in a cake shop. Cherry’s mum tried to be friendly with my mum, but Biddy wasn’t having any. She felt they put on airs and considered themselves a cut above us. I wasn’t allowed to invite Cherry back. I wasn’t allowed to have anyone in to play, not unless Biddy was there. She didn’t get home till quarter to six now, but I had a key to let myself in.
Lots of the children in my class had similar keys. They wore them on strings round their necks under their vests. People called them latchkey kids. I thought I was a latchkey kid but Biddy soon put me right.
‘You’re not a latchkey kid! As if I’d let you go out with a grubby piece of string round your neck! You have a proper real leather shoulder purse for your key!’
I had to wear the purse slung across my chest. It banged against my hip when I ran and it was always a worry when I had to take it off for PT but I had to put up with it.
I didn’t mind letting myself in at all, though there was always an anxious moment reaching and trying to turn the key in the stiff lock, jiggling it this way and that before it would turn. But then I was in and the flat was mine. It wasn’t empty. It was full of my imaginary friends.
I wasn’t allowed to cook anything on the stove in case I burned myself, but I could help myself to bread and jam or chocolate biscuits or a hunk of cheese and a tomato – sometimes all three snacks if I was particularly starving. Then I was free to play with my friends. Sometimes they were book friends. I had a new favourite book now, Nancy and Plum by Betty MacDonald. Nancy was a shy, dreamy girl of ten with long red plaits, Plum was a bold, adventurous little girl of eight with stubby fair plaits. They were orphans, badly treated by horrible Mrs Monday, but they ran away and were eventually adopted by a gentle kindly farmer and his wife.
I read Nancy and Plum over and over again. I loved the parts where they imagined elaborate dolls for their Christmas presents or discussed their favourite books with the library lady. Nancy and Plum became my secret best friends and we played together all over the flat. Whenever I went on a bus or a coach ride, Nancy and Plum came too. They weren’t cramped up on the bus with me, they ran along outside, jumping over hedges, running across roofs, leaping over rivers, always keeping up with me.
When Nancy and Plum were having a well-earned rest, I’d play with some of my own characters. I didn’t always make them up entirely. I had a gift book of poetry called A Book of the Seasons with Eve Garnett illustrations. I thought her wispy-haired, delicate little children quite wonderful. I’d trace them carefully, talking to each child, giving her a name, encouraging her to talk back to me. There were three children standing in a country churchyard who were my particular favourites, especially the biggest girl with long hair, but I also loved a little girl with untidy short hair and a checked frock and plimsolls, sitting in a gutter by the gasworks.
Eve Garnett drew her children in so many different settings. I loved the drawings of children in window seats. This seemed a delightful idea, though I’d have got vertigo if I’d tried to perch on a seat in our living-room window, looking down on the very busy main road outside. I loved the Garnett bedrooms too, especially the little truckle beds with patchwork quilts. I copied these quilts for my own pictures and carefully coloured in each tiny patch.
I’d sometimes play with my dolls, my big dolls or my little doll’s house dolls – but perhaps the best games of all were with my paper dolls. I don’t mean the conventional dolls you buy in a book, with dresses with little white tags for
you to cut out. I had several books like that: Woolworths sold several sorts – Baby Peggy and Little Betsy and Dolly Dimples. I scissored my fingers raw snipping out their little frocks and hats and dinky handbags and tiny toy teddies, but once every little outfit was cut out, white tags intact, I didn’t really fancy playing with them. I could dress them up in each natty outfit, but if I tried to walk them along the carpet or skate them across the kitchen lino, their clothes fell off all over the place. Besides, they all seemed too young and sweet and simpering for any of my games.
My favourite paper dolls came out of fashion books. In those days many women made their own clothes, not just my grandma. Every department store had a big haberdashery and material department, with a table where you could consult fashion pattern catalogues – Style, Butterick, Simplicity and Vogue. At the end of every season each big hefty book was replaced with an updated version but you could buy the old catalogues for sixpence. Vogue cost a shilling because their designs were more stylish, but I didn’t like them because their ladies weren’t drawn very realistically, and they looked too posh and haughty.
I loved the Style fashion books. Their ladies were wonderfully drawn and individualized, with elaborate hairstyles and intelligent expressions. They were usually drawn separately, with their arms and legs well-displayed. It was highly irritating finding a perfect paper lady with half her arm hidden behind a paper friend. She’d have to suffer a terrible amputation when I cut her out.
I cut out incredibly carefully, snipping out any white space showing through a bent elbow, gently guiding my sharp scissors around each long curl, every outspread finger, both elegant high heels.
I’d invent their personalities as I cut out each lady. It was such an absorbing ritual I was lost to the world. I remember one day in the summer holidays, when Biddy was out at work and Harry was off work for some reason, sitting at the living-room table with his horse-racing form books and his Sporting Life, working out which bets he was going to put on. He seemed as absorbed in his world as I was in mine. I forgot all about him until he suddenly shouted, ‘For Christ’s sake, do you have to keep snip-snip-snipping?’
I jumped so violently I nearly snipped straight through my finger. I cut out my paper ladies in my bedroom after that, even when I was alone in the flat. I spread each lady out on my carpet. I cut out girls too, especially the ones with long hair, though plaits were an exceptionally fiddly job. I seldom paired them up as mothers and daughters. They were simply big girls and little girls, living in orphanages or hostels or my own kind of invented commune. There would be a couple of men too, but they were usually rather silly-looking specimens in striped pyjamas. No one sewed men’s suits from scratch, not even my grandma, so you only got nightclothes and the occasional comical underwear. I certainly didn’t want any grinning goofy fools in white underpants down to their knees and socks with suspenders hanging round my ladies.
I didn’t bother with the boys either, though there were more of them in short trousers. I did have a soft spot for the babies though, and cut out the prettiest. Then I could spend hours at a time whispering my games. My favourite of all my paper girls was a bold, long-haired lady called Carola, in a lacy black bra and a half-slip. She was a naughty girl and got up to all sorts of adventures. I’d carry her everywhere with me, tucking her carefully inside my book.
* * *
Which of my characters has paper girls with special flower names?
* * *
It’s April in Dustbin Baby.
I carefully cut out long lanky models with skinny arms and legs, my tongue sticking out as I rounded each spiky wrist and bony ankle, occasionally performing unwitting amputations as I went.
Sylvia found me an old exercise book and a stick of Pritt but I didn’t want to make a scrapbook. I wanted to keep my paper girls free. They weren’t called Naomi and Kate and Elle and Natasha. They were my girls now, so I called them Rose and Violet and Daffodil and Bluebell.
I seem overly fond of the name Bluebell. It’s also the name of Tracy Beaker’s doll and Dixie’s toy budgerigar. Sorry I keep repeating myself!
16
Mandy
I WAS TAKEN to the cinema regularly. I didn’t go to the children’s Saturday morning pictures – Biddy thought that was too rowdy. I watched proper adult films, though the very first time I went I disgraced myself. This was at the Odeon in Surbiton, when I was three and still living at Fassett Road. All five of us – Biddy, Harry, Ga, Gongon and me – went to see some slapstick comedy. I didn’t do a lot of laughing.
I thought it was all really happening before my very eyes (remember, we didn’t have television in those days). I found it very worrying that these silly men were sometimes so big that their whole heads filled the screen. I couldn’t work out where the rest of their bodies were. I knew I didn’t want these giants coming anywhere near me. Then they shrank back small again. They were running away, pursued by even scarier men with hatchets. They dodged in and out of traffic in a demented fashion, then ran into a tall block of flats, going up and down lifts, charging along corridors, through rooms to the windows. They climbed right outside, wobbling on the edge. The camera switched so you saw things from their point of view, looking down down down, the cars below like little ants. The audience laughed. I screamed.
I had to be carted out of the cinema by Biddy and Harry, still screaming. They were cross because they’d wasted two one-and-ninepenny tickets.
‘Why did you have to make such a fuss?’ said Biddy.
‘The man was going to fall!’ I wailed.
‘It wasn’t real,’ said Harry.
It took me a while to grasp this, which was odd seeing as I lived in my own imaginary world so much. However, I grew to love going to the cinema, though I never liked slapstick comedy, and I still hate it whenever there’s a mad chase in any film.
We saw Genevieve together, and all three of us found that very funny indeed. Biddy said she thought Kay Kendall was beautiful. I thought this strange, because Kay Kendall had short dark hair. I didn’t think you could possibly be beautiful unless you had blonde fairy-princess hair way past your shoulders.
Harry quite liked musicals but Biddy couldn’t stand anything with singing, so Harry and I went to see Carousel and South Pacific together. I thought both films wondrously tragic. I don’t think I understood a lot of the story but I loved all the romantic parts and all the special songs.
When Harry was in a very good mood, he’d sing as he got dressed in the morning – silly songs like ‘Mairzie Doats an Doazie Doats’ and ‘She Wears Red Feathers and a Hooly-Hooly Skirt’, and occasionally a rude Colonel Bogey song about Hitler. But now he’d la-la-la the Carousel roundabout theme tune while whirling around himself, or he’d prance about in his vest and pants singing, ‘I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair.’
I can’t remember who took me to see Mandy. It was such an intense experience that the cinema could have crumbled around me and I wouldn’t have noticed. I was in that film, suffering alongside Mandy. She was a little deaf girl who was sent away to a special boarding school to try to learn how to speak. There was a big sub-plot about her quarrelling parents and the developing relationship between Mandy’s mother and the head teacher of the school, but that didn’t interest me. I just watched Mandy, this small sad little girl with big soulful eyes and dark wispy plaits. I cried when she cried. When she mouthed ‘Man-dee’ at the end of the film, I whispered it with her.
I wanted to be Mandy’s friend in the film and make her plasticine necklaces and play ball with her and comfort her when she couldn’t sleep at night. I was old enough now to understand that the film wasn’t real. Mandy was played by a child actress, Mandy Miller. I thought she was wonderfully gifted. Biddy showed me a photo in the Sunday Mirror of the real Mandy at the premiere of her film, and I realized she was much more glamorous in real life. She still had the spindly plaits, but instead of the pleated skirt and tartan windcheater she wore in the film, she was wearing a sophistica
ted silk party frock with puffed sleeves and a broderie anglaise collar and velvet ribbon at the neck and waist. She was even wearing white gloves.
I had a third Mandy in my head from then on, not the deaf child in the film, not the real actress. I had my Mandy, an imaginary friend with big eyes and dark plaits, and we were inseparable for years.
Biddy took me to see every Mandy Miller film that came out, though I wasn’t allowed to see Background because it had an over-twelve rating, probably because it was about divorce. People thought so differently about divorce in those days. They frequently whispered the word. It was considered shameful, barely socially acceptable. It was the reason why so many incompatible couples stayed together. They didn’t want to go through the public disgrace of a divorce. I thought this odd even then. In fact I used to pray my own parents would divorce because there were so many screaming fights now. Sometimes I was caught up in a quarrel too, both of them yelling at me, appealing to me, while I begged not to have to take sides. Sometimes I simply listened from my bedroom while they argued endlessly, whipping each other with cruel words, then slapping and shoving, hurting and hating.
Perhaps this was another reason why Mandy’s films meant so much to me. She was in one or two child-centred fun films like Raising a Riot (about a family living in a windmill), but most of Mandy’s films were about unhappy, anxious children living tense lives. My favourite Mandy film was Dance Little Lady, a colourful melodrama about a beautiful ballet dancer, her unscrupulous impresario husband and their only daughter, played by Mandy. The ballet dancer has a fall and can’t work, the impresario loses interest in her, they fight bitterly – but they both love their little girl, a budding ballet dancer herself. Mandy does a proper dance in the film, her hair tied back with a satin ribbon, wearing an amazing cream, pink and turquoise beribboned tutu with white fishnet tights and pink ballet shoes.