Till We Meet Again

  Aunt Rose had said as they left her house for the dance that the best way to avoid being a wallflower was to look boys in the eye and smile. Also, they shouldn’t sit down, but dance together if no one asked them. That way it would look as if they had only come for the dancing and boys didn’t matter much to them.

  They did as Aunt Rose said, and they were astounded that so many boys did come and dance with them. Susan wondered if Beth remembered the two boys who grabbed them for the last dance and walked them home. They were brothers, both skinny and spotty, but as Beth said at the time, they were nice enough to practise on.

  ‘She’ll have forgotten all about you long ago,’ Susan whispered hopefully to herself. ‘She was always prettier, cleverer and more outgoing than you. Her life’s got to be too full to look back at anything.’

  Susan didn’t want to look back either. She’d learned many years ago that it was better to live only in the present, for thinking about the past only brought pain with it. But the present wasn’t a good thing to think about either. Not when Beth might suddenly recognize her, and Susan would be forced to try to explain how she had come to this. She had to make her mind go blank.

  Imagining the sea was her tried and tested way of blanking out all thought. A shingle beach empty of people, huge green grey waves crashing on to it. She pictured herself standing with bare feet on the wet shingle, running backwards each time a wave crashed in. Sometimes it caught her feet, and when it did, she got the sensation of being sucked back towards the sea along with the ebbing wave.

  Yet this time, instead of seeing nothing but the water, with the frothy white crests on the waves, and hearing the sound of moving shingle, she saw herself. Not as she was now, a worn woman of forty-four, with a flabby body and lack-lustre hair, but as she was in the early summer of 1967. Almost sixteen, her birthday only a week away, she was plump even then, but she had shiny brown hair, clear skin and sparkling eyes.

  She was on holiday with her parents at Lyme Regis in Dorset. It was, for all of them, their first real holiday in years, and it was also, although none of them admitted it openly, a celebration of her grandmother’s death.

  Susan had no memory of a time when life wasn’t dominated by the old lady, for she had come to live with Susan’s parents, Margaret and Charles, at their house in Luddington when Susan was just a baby. Her earliest memories of Granny were of seeing her sitting in a high-backed chair in the kitchen, with a shawl around her shoulders, complaining. Cold, heat, food, her medicine, bad legs or stomach troubles – anything could start off a litany of grouses. Susan couldn’t remember ever hearing her laugh.

  Her brother Martin used to claim Granny was a demon, her purpose in life to create misery. He used to stand behind her chair where she couldn’t see him and mimic her pursed lips and disapproving wagging finger. But Martin was lucky enough to be away at Nottingham University when Granny became senile.

  Susan was about nine when it started to get really bad. She had to take her turn watching that Granny didn’t burn herself on the stove, let the bath run over, or wander down to the river at the bottom of the garden and fall in.

  It was as though an ever-thickening dark cloud had come down on their house. All family outings stopped, her mother became increasingly harassed and edgy, her father seemed to withdraw to his office or study, and Susan often felt very alone and even neglected. Having other children round to play was out of the question, as her parents seemed fearful of anyone else finding out that Granny was slowly becoming barmy.

  If it hadn’t been for her father taking her out shooting at weekends, Susan wouldn’t really have had anything in her life except school and helping with the chores. She wasn’t all that keen on shooting, it seemed cruel to kill birds and rabbits, but she was a surprisingly good shot, and she liked hearing her father boast about it to friends he met while they were out shooting.

  That was probably why Beth became so important to her in the next few years. Writing to her and thinking about her filled the void left when her mother no longer had time to take her out, play board games with her, and teach her to sew and cook. When the other girls at school left her out of things because she never invited them to her house, she could tell herself they’d all be green with envy if they had a friend like Beth.

  But Granny’s dementia accelerated very quickly, and soon she was unable to remember anything. She took to wandering around at night shouting, throwing food on the floor and talking gibberish. Then finally she became doubly incontinent too. Father seemed to stay longer and longer at the office during the week and he stopped taking Susan shooting with him at the weekends because he said her mother needed her help. By the time she was thirteen she was doing all the shopping, the cleaning and the ironing. She hated Granny for making all their lives so miserable.

  Susan could appreciate now that her grandmother was actually suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. But back in the Sixties, if it even had a name, no one used it, or had any real understanding of the problems that went with it, or even appreciated it was a disease. People suffering from it were either whisked away to a mental asylum, or hidden away by their families because of the stigma attached to it.

  Without any explanation from anyone, as a young girl, Susan felt nothing but disgust and irritation that one old lady could create so much havoc. She could remember gagging at the smell in the house when she came in from school, feeling revolted when Granny spat out the food her mother spooned into her mouth, and wondering why her mother didn’t agree to put her into a home as her father so often pleaded with her to do.

  Martin seldom came home any more, he said he had better things to do than spend weekends in a lunatic asylum. He had always been nasty to Susan, her whole childhood had been overshadowed by his bullying, but she remembered being very shocked that he should say something so cruel to their mother. After all, she couldn’t help how Granny was. Yet all the same she agreed with Martin in some respects, she would have given anything to have been packed off to boarding school so she could escape too.

  From fourteen onwards Susan had no time to go to the library, for walks or bike rides; as soon as she got in from school there were too many other jobs to do and all weekend there were more. Sometimes she was even kept home from school when her mother felt she couldn’t face yet another day on her own with Granny.

  She remembered how one afternoon she was sitting with Granny while her mother quickly had a bath. The old lady was rocking backwards and forwards in her chair, making terrifying noises, and Susan wondered how she could possibly get away to see Beth that summer. She wished she felt able to admit in her letters just what was going on at home, but both her parents were adamant it was something not to be spoken of.

  Yet her mother did seem to understand how much Susan needed her friendship with Beth, and for the last two summers she managed to persuade Father to get a nurse in to help for a few hours each day so that Susan was free to go out. This was quite an achievement because Father didn’t like parting with money, but Mother stood up to him for once and insisted Susan must have a break from chores so that she could go back to school in September refreshed for the year ahead.

  But then in February 1967 Granny died, and almost overnight, the gloom, anxiety and bad smells were blown away. Susan could remember helping her father carry two armchairs and a mattress Granny had soiled out into the garden, to burn them. They stood around the bonfire that cold, windy afternoon, laughing as Susan’s mother brought armfuls of clothes out to add to it.

  ‘We shouldn’t be so cheerful,’ her mother had said reprovingly at one point, although she too smiled as she said it. ‘She couldn’t help the way she became.’

  Susan could picture that afternoon as clearly as if she were looking at a photograph. Margaret, her mother, was short and plump, with grey hair. She wasn’t exactly lined, but her skin was going soft, like an apple that had been kept too long. She was wearing navy-blue slacks and a hand-knitted Arran sweater with a blue and white spotted scarf around
her neck. Susan had remarked in the morning how nice her mother looked without the overall she always used to wear. Margaret had laughed and said no one would ever get her back into one of those again, and she might even get her hair permed too now she had some time to herself.

  Charles, Susan’s father, was very distinguished-looking, six feet tall, slender, with keen dark eyes and bushy black eyebrows, his hair still thick and dark even though he was fifty-eight. He had a boyish look that day, eagerly poking at the bonfire, soaking the old clothes in paraffin before hurling them on.

  It was often said by relatives that Susan was a replica of her mother at the same age. Susan could see it for herself when she looked at the girl in the wedding photograph standing on the sideboard. She had long dark hair, girlish dimples and plump lips then. But as Margaret had been forty when Susan was born, and was already greying and plump, it was hard for Susan to equate that pretty girl with her mother.

  Her parents had married at the start of the war in 1939, Charles dashing in his Army Captain’s uniform. Martin was born early in 1941. Susan had often wondered about the ten-year gap between her and her brother’s birth. But she never asked about it.

  All through that spring and early summer of 1967, everything was wonderful. She could remember writing to Beth and asking her to come and stay with them at their house instead of at her aunt’s, and how great it was not to have to creep around for fear of waking Granny, and that they were able to go out to the pictures and for walks as a family.

  But she never told Beth about the transformation of their lives. How Mother would turn the wireless up loud to hear Round the Horn on Sundays, and how the house would resound with Father’s laughter. Or how sometimes Mother would tickle him and they’d chase each other down the garden like children. She thought Beth wouldn’t be able to understand that, not when she didn’t know how grim it had been before.

  Everything was topsy-turvy for a while because her mother wanted to spring-clean and redecorate. Furniture was piled up on the landing and the smell of disinfectant, polish and paint permeated the whole house. Father brought fish and chips home for supper, and they often ate it while watching television, something they’d never done before.

  It was during those months that Susan began to notice how attractive their house was, or maybe it was just because Mother kept saying jokingly that she was going to restore it ‘to its previous elegance’. Of course Susan had always known it was very old and must have been built for someone grand, by the carved oak staircase and the wooden panelling in the hall. But she had always wished they lived in one of the pretty Tudor thatched cottages in the village, or even in one of the modern bungalows and houses on the road into Luddington, for people often said The Rookery was creepy, because of the way it was hidden behind trees.

  Suddenly she found herself looking at it then with new eyes, admiring the mellow red brick, the lattice windows, the tall chimneys. It was great to be able to run down the garden and watch boats coming through the lock, to see early-morning mist rising over the weir. She could hardly wait for Beth to come and stay because she had a feeling she would find it all magical.

  The house had never seemed that big while Granny was alive, for all the four main bedrooms were in use, and the two attic rooms were full of junk. But now, as the wheelchair, old trunks and pieces of furniture Granny had brought to the house with her were disposed of, suddenly there was space and airiness.

  ‘I never wanted all her clutter here,’ Mother said one day as she added a couple of ugly chairs to an already large pile of furniture in the front garden which was due to be collected for a jumble sale. ‘But she insisted, even though they were all worthless. My goodness, it’s good to see the back of it all.’

  Downstairs there were three reception rooms, plus the kitchen. The drawing room had French windows opening out on to the garden which sloped down to the river Avon and the lock. Susan had always loved the garden, the many fruit trees and flowering shrubs, the winding paths she played hopscotch on, the little pond always full of frogs.

  She could see the drawing room so clearly in her mind’s eye as it was on sunny afternoons: flowery chintz-covered settees and armchairs, the pink and green patterned carpet with a cream fringe which had to be brushed straight. Her mother’s collection of Worcester porcelain figurines was displayed in the glass cabinet, and an embroidered screen stood in front of the empty fireplace during the summer.

  They seldom used the dining room, and the furniture there had come from Father’s family. Susan used to run her fingers along the lovely rosewood table, examine the pie-crust effect around its edge, admire the vast china cabinet and the graceful chairs, and wonder at their value because Father said they were antique.

  The third room was Father’s study. It was lined with books and there was a huge oak desk under the window. Susan did her homework in there until they had central heating installed in 1964. Her mother used to light a fire in the big stone fireplace just before she got home from school, as she always said it was a nice quiet place where Susan could concentrate on her work. What her mother never realized was that Susan mostly just sat in Father’s leather armchair and stared into the fire, glad to be in warm isolation, well away from Granny.

  Susan found herself smiling. It was so long ago now, and so much had happened since, but that was a good memory. Like all the ones in the four months after Granny’s death.

  It seemed to her, looking back, that that was when she broke out of the gloom she’d been wrapped in for so long, looked around her and saw how much she had. Not only did she live in a lovely home in a pretty village, but her parents were good to her and shared things. Suddenly her mind was alight with possibilities. During the last summer she and Beth had spent together they’d talked of sharing a flat in London one day. That seemed possible now. Susan was going to go to secretarial college, learn to dance, find a boyfriend. She would overcome her shyness, she would be somebody.

  A year earlier, when things were very bad at home with Granny, Susan had overheard a conversation between two teachers, and realized to her horror that the girl they spoke of as being ‘plain, lumpy and dull as ditchwater’ was in fact her. Yet after Granny’s death, the jollity and sense of liberation at home gave her new hope. Her parents often spoke of the dark cloud they’d been under, and how they all needed to make radical changes, so Susan made up her mind she was never going to be labelled as ‘dull as ditchwater’ ever again.

  Then they went on holiday in June. Susan had just sat her GCE’s, and her parents let her take a week off school. Fortunately Martin couldn’t come too – he was twenty-six then, with a job and a flat in London. Even leaving home hadn’t made him any nicer to Susan. But of course in those days she thought all brothers were like that to their sisters.

  They stayed in a hotel right on the sea front in Lyme Regis, with sea-view rooms. The weather was cold, windy and wet, but that didn’t spoil it: the hotel was warm and comfortable, and they’d put on their rain coats and go for long walks, despite the weather.

  Mother did complain about the rain one day, and Father laughed at her. ‘It could be very much worse,’ he said, giving her a cuddle. ‘We could have Granny with us.’

  Then, on the last day, the sun came out and they spent all day on the beach. Father went searching for fossils along the cliffs, Mother lay down on some towels and fell asleep, Susan just splashed in the sea.

  She could still feel the glow of that day even now – her arms and legs prickly with sunburn, the icy cold of the water, the sharpness of the stones under her bare feet. It had seemed then that their family had walked through a gateway into a whole new realm where they could laugh, enjoy themselves, go where they wanted, when they wanted. The restrictions they’d lived under for so long were now gone for ever.

  Susan sat up sharply. She didn’t want to think about what happened after that, for it was so cruel and unfair that it didn’t work out as she’d expected.

  On the very night they got home from hol
iday, two days before Susan’s sixteenth birthday, Mother had a stroke.

  She said she felt strange as they went into the house. Susan went to make her a cup of tea, and when she got back Mother was slumped over on the settee in the drawing room, and Father was phoning for an ambulance.

  The details of the months her mother spent in hospital were hazy to Susan now. A blur of rows of white-faced, sick old ladies in hospital beds, shiny floors, flowers and unpleasant smells reminiscent of Granny, that was all she could recall. She remembered how she hated to go in there, yet she did go, almost every afternoon on the bus, praying to herself that today Mother would be better.

  She had to write and tell Beth she couldn’t stay at the house after all. But Beth didn’t come to Stratford anyway, she wrote back saying she’d got a summer job in a shoe shop in Hastings. In the back of her mind, Susan thought that meant Beth had found new and more exciting friends back home, and had been glad of an excuse to back out of the holiday.

  Mother didn’t get any better, she just lay there with her face twisted up in a grimace, unable to speak or move. Father kept on saying that she could see and hear and her mind was as active as always. He said she would get better, they just had to be patient.

  He went to see her every night after he’d come home from the office, and he noticed even the slightest improvements. He seemed to understand what her grunts meant, he could get her to respond to his questions by blinking. His belief gave Susan hope.

  He explained to Susan what he thought had caused the stroke. ‘It was because of the sudden release of pressure when Granny died,’ he said. ‘All those years of looking after her, the endless washing, feeding, worrying about her. It took its toll, like a pressure cooker building up steam. The lid had to blow.’