And so it went on. The selling, the packing, the ending. As we walked home on the final day before Jenny and her family were due to fly to Toronto, we held onto each other and wept as we said goodbye. She promised to write every week and I promised to write back. I cried myself to sleep and never felt lonelier than when the bus pulled in at her stop the following Monday and she wasn’t there. I even forgave her brother for stealing my bike every time I called at their house.
On the following Monday at school, as I sat outside during morning break, my friend Anne-Marie came over and sat down next to me. We had got on like a house on fire since meeting during our first week in the same class.
“You all right, Jacs?” She’d always called me Jacs, and spoke my name with a little Welsh lilt. Anne-Marie’s family came from Brecon, in South Wales.
I shrugged.
“Would you like to come over to my house after school this Friday?”
I rubbed the back of my hand across my eyes and nodded. There and then, Anne-Marie became my new best friend—a most precious lifelong best friend.
Jennifer kept her promise and wrote often, but soon her news seemed far removed from my life in the country. She was in a softball team, and I had no idea what softball was. She lost a tooth playing ice hockey, and I could only imagine how terrible a game that was. We had to play field hockey at school, and because I didn’t have shin pads, I was always returning home with massive bruises. I still have dents on my shins from field hockey. Jenny sent me a small ornament made by Indians—no one called them “First Nations” people then—it was a baby in a thing that looked like a snowshoe and contained a message: To My Best Friend Ever. I still have it.
Teen years are never the easiest of times, but during the year Mum left the farm tensions seemed to rise in the house and life became—for me, at least—like being on a seesaw, or a rollercoaster. Both my parents were working hard, but the highs and lows of my mother’s moods became troubling for me in a way I think my brother avoided, and not only because he was a boy and younger, but because Mum looked upon him differently. Since his brush with death it seemed there was nothing he could do wrong, and though he wasn’t mollycoddled, without doubt he avoided Mum’s temper. On the other hand, even when I tried to lie low, I seemed to become the lightning rod for it. One reason for her moods was the financial pressure. I was growing fast, and she hated having to buy new school uniform items, complaining bitterly about the cost. Fortunately, a grey school skirt had been passed down to me from a cousin, and though it was too long when I started at the Mary Sheafe School for Girls, Mum made me turn it over at the waist and pin it, not only so it fitted around my middle, but wouldn’t drag around my ankles. That was to be my school skirt until I left at sixteen—by which time I was turning it over at the waist again so I had a miniskirt. My blouses were bought large to last me, as was my school sweater. My gym kit was brand new—the red shorts and yellow Aertex shirt—and we had to have our summer dresses made in a specific fabric to an approved design because the dresses could not be bought off the peg. I heard the refrain time and again, about the school thinking we were all made of money, until Mum was put in touch with a friend of a friend who would make the dresses for me.
I was thirteen when Celia came to stay during the summer. I was so excited, though I can’t think why she came to stay because she was a teenager with a great social life in London, and there wasn’t anything for a city sixteen-year-old to do in our neck of the woods. She was training to be a hairdresser at Vidal Sassoon’s salon in London’s West End, and had a lovely short haircut, and of course we know about her clothes. I was so excited because she had come to stay for a whole week and I would have her to myself. She was a big fan of Paul and Barry Ryan, the singing twins who had a hit that year with a song called “Eloise,” although Celia would sing their earlier hit, “Don’t Bring Me Your Heartaches” time and again. I think she found it frustrating that we didn’t have a record player.
I had so much fun trying to copy Celia, and she helped me out with her Mary Quant Paintbox. That was the name of the box of makeup produced by Mary Quant, the hippest fashion designer in London—and Celia had one. While Mum and Dad were out at work, Celia would apply makeup to my eyes and I was thrilled to look so different. I felt really grown up and not like a gangly kid—in fact, I looked at least eighteen and I knew it. On one occasion, Mum came home from work and stared at me, taking in the eye liner and eye shadow; the heavy mascara, the hint of blusher across my cheeks and the fact that I was wearing one of Celia’s Twiggy dresses. She’d styled my hair in a low bun at the nape of my neck, so it looked as if I had short hair, and for a brief moment I kidded myself that I looked like the famous model. I wasn’t sure about the way Mum looked me up and down and for a second a silence seemed to fill the air, so I had a sense that something was shifting, and she wasn’t at all happy with what she saw before her. Then she told me I’d better wash that stuff off my face before Dad came home because he’d go mad if he saw me looking like that, and to change into my own clothes.
One day Celia wanted to buy a plain white T-shirt and some colored tape, as it was “all the rage” to wear a T-shirt with your initial on the front. We walked into town, found the requisite T-shirt and iron-on tape in navy blue and came home, whereupon Celia put together the fashion statement for all to see, the giant “C” on the front of a white T-shirt. Mum and Dad commented that it was all very nice. After Celia left to return to London, I took out some of my savings and on the following Saturday morning I walked into Cranbrook to buy a white T-shirt and some red tape. I planned to copy Celia and put my initial on the T-shirt. Dad came home from work that afternoon just as I was pinning the large “J” onto the T-shirt.
“What’re you doing, Jack?” he asked.
I explained that I was going to iron my initial onto the T-shirt, because it was the fashion and “everyone is doing it.”
Any reasoning that included reference to what “everyone” was doing was always like a red rag to a bull to my father. It was one of the few things that would make him mad.
“Why would you want to be like everyone else?’ he would ask.
I never found the right answer, but on that day Dad gave me a piece of advice that seems to have underpinned not only my life, but my brother’s. Dad knelt down beside me, picked up the tape and said, “Jack, you’ve got to think different. Let’s you and me find another design, do something else with the tape—let’s go and buy some more colors. Think different, love—always think different.”
Yes, my dad got there with the “Think Different” slogan before Steve Jobs, except that with Dad’s Cockney accent, it was “Fink Different.”
Soon after school began again following the summer hiatus, there came a day that I will never forget, because it marked a turning point in my relationship with my mother that was perhaps seeded when she came home and saw me wearing Celia’s makeup and a very fashionable minidress—which she left for me when she returned to London. I realized Mum saw me as some sort of competitor, that I was no longer just a daughter, but someone she didn’t quite know how to deal with, living in the same house.
We had the Ford Cortina estate car then, a beige vehicle that followed a terrible green Morris 1100 that looked like a squatting frog and was always breaking down—that in turn had come after the trusty grey Morris Traveller. My father had complained bitterly about the newer Morris, wishing he hadn’t sold the old one, though the Cortina was decreed “a nice little runner.” Perhaps it was Mum’s day off, but whatever the reason, she picked me up from school, a rare event. I was surprised when I saw her waiting outside the school for me, with John in the back seat. After doing some shopping in Cranbrook, we set off for a house in Benenden where Dad was working with one of his former colleagues from Abnett’s. Most of the laid-off painters had set up on their own and would get in touch with each other if a big job came up needing more hands. On this day Dad was working
with Bill—a lovely man who should probably have retired, but was still working because he and his wife liked to take their caravan over to Europe, and the extra money helped pay for their wanderlust.
I can still see Dad and Bill packing up their overalls and brushes as we came along the driveway of the big house. We all got out of the car and as I walked toward Dad to give him a kiss, Bill said, “Albert, that girl of yours is growing into a beauty.” It’s the sort of thing adults always say about their friends’ daughters and was in the same vein as how tall they’ve grown, and was it only yesterday they were running around in nappies. I blushed, but my mother hadn’t missed a beat.
“She may be growing up, Bill, but she’ll never be as good looking as her mother.”
I wanted the ground to eat me up and never spit me out again, and I blushed even more. Mum’s words seemed to hang in the air for a second that seemed like a minute, then Bill winked at me and said, “She’s getting there, Joyce—she’s getting there.”
I walked back to the car feeling as if even the roots of my hair would combust into flames. While my mother could be my greatest supporter, one who I know loved me very much, it was as if a line had been drawn in the sand that day and I became an enemy, the daughter who had to be shown who was boss, or who had to be taken down a peg or two. In truth, I was so lacking in confidence, I don’t think I was up even half a peg in the first place.
There was sometimes little warning of an incoming verbal missile, or a lie told about me in company, or an opportunity to make a joke at my expense. I would sometimes hear her talking about me to her sisters, when they were exchanging stories about their teenage daughters. I’d hear her say, “You’ll never guess what it had the cheek to say to me the other day . . .” And there would be a made up story of something I was supposed to have said, or done—or more accurately, what it had done. There were times when she just needed a sparring partner, probably because my dad was one to seek the easygoing quiet life, as was my brother, who kept his head down most of the time.
Sunday mornings could be the worst. I would always get up early, often to go with Dad when he took the dog for a walk across the fields. Or I would walk by myself, increasingly seeking the quiet balm that the woods offered—I’d sit alone for hours, afraid to come home to the fusillade. Sometimes I’d sit for so long at the base of a favorite tree that I thought I could feel it growing along my spine, or I would lie on my back in the middle of the five-acre field to watch the clouds scudding along, convinced I could see the sky moving past as the earth turned in space. I’d often place my hands against the base of a tree to feel the warmth, in the same way that I rest my hands just above my horse’s hoof to feel his pulse. I would never have said as much, but in my solitude I had a deep sense that every tree was connected to every other tree, and was even linked to the blades of grass and the flowers in the woodland around me. I could feel the aliveness, and liked the company.
Mum slept late on Sundays—and who could blame her? She worked hard all week. But if I was in the kitchen, I could tell from the way her feet hit the floorboards three floors above, how her approaching footfall echoed down the stairs, whether she would appear singing, “Oh what a beautiful morning,” or if she would be yelling, “Where’s that girl—where’s that lazy little cow, I’ve got a job for her.” Then the nagging would start, and go on, and on, and on. I might have been a lot of things, but I wasn’t lazy. And then there was the mirror.
We had a mirror in the kitchen, useful if someone else was in the bathroom and you needed to make sure your school tie was straight before you left the house. It was an old art deco mirror, rectangular with beveled edges and a broken chain on the back. Although there was a place for it to be shoved away underneath the counter next to the stove, so you could whip it out if you needed it, we tended to leave it on top of the counter for much of the time because it was heavy.
My mother would often stand in front of the mirror when she was shouting at me, staring at her reflection as if she had been drawn in by the furrowed brow and the flared nostrils, a hallmark of her temper. This fascinated me, the urge to watch herself losing her temper. One day when I was about fifteen—and, let’s be fair, sometimes answering back—I watched her looking at the mirror as she nagged, and I said aloud, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the—” And I ran to my room and didn’t come out again for a while until she’d calmed down. I thought she would kill me. I think it was not long afterward that I dropped the mirror and it broke into hundreds of pieces. An accident. Just slipped through my fingers. Really.
Yet amid all those verbal attacks, I adored her. I thought she was the most wonderful woman—witty and intelligent and I knew she had a capacity for deep compassion. My friend Anne-Marie loved her and said she thought my mum was really funny. And she was. It was just that I was often the subject of her jokes. But even then I realized that my mother’s disappointment at leaving school when she was fourteen must have been so much more difficult to bear as I reached the age at which she had been sent to work in a laundry. As I approached that same marker, the minimum school-leaving age in England was raised to sixteen, so I worked even harder to buy any clothes or other essentials needed so there was no family burden, and of course I looked forward to that regular big plastic bag of hand-me-downs from Celia and her sisters—though they were fast becoming too small as I had grown taller than the girls on that side of the family.
My despair became even darker when Mum decided I was putting on weight. It started when she noticed I had “puppy fat” and escalated the day she told me I had legs like a footballer. I dropped my hems and I walked two miles on roads without pavements (sidewalks) to buy a pair of baggy jeans from a shop in Hawkhurst that sold clothing for men in the building trade. The torment escalated with my new nickname: Fat Arse. My family thought it was just hilarious when she called me Fat Arse the first time. John then started calling me Fat Arse, and Dad laughed—and the fact that Dad laughed crushed me. I thought he would be the last person to add to my humiliation. They all laughed a lot about me being Fat Arse, then when I became upset I was admonished for not being able to “take it.” You had to be able to take it in our family, whatever the it was. To this day, I hate hearing people teased or on the end of unwanted attention and then hearing someone say, “Oh, they can’t take it.” Even worse is when the person doing the teasing—and teasing is never as innocent as it sounds—says, “Oh, she’s all right—she can take it.” I’ve never worked out why people have to “take” verbal abuse dished up as humor and then be accused of not being able to “take a joke” if they fail to laugh at themselves.
My mother stopped calling me “Fat Arse” when I’d lost so much weight she didn’t quite know what to do—she thought I had an overactive thyroid and sent me to the doctor, who in any case had been feeling around my neck every time I’d seen him since I hit puberty, on the lookout for the family thyroid problem. He also continued to slap my hand because I couldn’t stop biting my nails. Having noticed the weight loss, Mum had no idea that I wasn’t eating much for two reasons. Not only did I want to put a stop to being called Fat Arse—and in truth, I was never fat at all—but I also felt guilty about the fuss she’d made about the cost of school meals when I was sixteen and transferred to Cranbrook “Grammar” School to do my A levels. After my first year there, I withdrew my name from the meals list and instead ran around to the grocery shop to get a yoghurt and apple for lunch. By that time Mum had left the dentist and was working for the government. I don’t think she noticed because she only noticed things that were on the school bill, not things that were missing.
Jenny noticed, though. It was a late summer evening in the year I turned seventeen, when Jenny arrived at the house out of the blue. I was aware of movement outside the window and saw her run past toward the front door—a taller version of the friend who had left four years earlier. I could not believe my eyes, but I had the door open even before she had a chance to kno
ck, and we just held onto each other, crying. I had no idea she was coming over from Canada—she’d wanted it to be a surprise for me. Her accent had hardly changed, but she seemed so international, so different, in a way. Yet the same. The same Jennifer. She wanted to go to a pub and drink a pint of Newcastle Brown Ale, her favorite (When had that become a favorite drink? Could you even get Newcastle Brown in Toronto?), and she wanted to see her old boyfriend, Steve. She blurted out that she wanted to do this, and wanted to do that, and wanted to hear all my news. But as she stood back to look at me, she said, “Jack, you’re even thinner than me, and I’m shorter than you!”
Mum and Dad came from the kitchen when they heard me call out to say that Jenny was right there, in the house, all the way from Canada. Mum had heard what Jenny said about my weight, and added, “You’re right, Jen—I’ve been telling her for ages to put some meat on those bones.”
I looked at Dad. He looked at Mum, then John interrupted, “What sort of car have you got in Canada?” He’s still what they call a “petrolhead.”
I can’t remember the answer and the question of my weight was forgotten—but not by me. I knew Fat Arse could come back to torment me again.
21
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes . . .
A friend who is the same age as me, born in the mid-1950s, recently asked me if I consider myself to be a child of the 1950s or 1960s. I shook my head and laughed. “Neither,” I said. “My childhood was more Edwardian until I was about fourteen.” Then I became a child of the ’60s. Sort of.
The year I turned fourteen was a year when so much changed for us, though perhaps I was the only one to notice the shift, to join the dots of meaning in this year we weren’t laughing, despite last year’s promises. Jenny had left. I was becoming even more unhappy at home. And then our small community seemed to lose the final tenuous threads that still attached it to the Edwardian age. The petrol station and car repair shop at the end of the road changed hands—it was housed in what had once been the stables for the old inn that had preceded construction of The Railway Arms, which in turn was built at the same time as the railway. The pub had been renamed The Duke of Kent years earlier, but there was still something old and ancient about the way “the Duke” was part of the community. The local hunt still met at the pub for a “stirrup cup” on foggy autumn mornings, before galloping off in search of the elusive fox. Although I hated the idea of hunting foxes, I loved the tradition because I would walk up to the top of the road on hunting days to watch the ladies, especially, as some still rode side-saddle and wore little bowler hats with a veil to shield their eyes. Now the hunt met somewhere else—perhaps the hunt protesters had moved them on. In time I would be a vocal opponent of fox hunting, but I also knew that most foxes managed to avoid the hunt. They’re clever, canny creatures.
This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing Page 20