I worked for Lennie Robertson for a few more years, though I hardly saw her after the divorce, which came a few years later. I remember reading in a local paper that she’d married again, so I bought a card and sent it to her, care of an address I’d found for her in another Wealden town. I wished her well and hoped she was happy. I truly hoped she was happy, because I’d always thought she was wonderful.
Now that I’ve made my home in the USA, I think I should write about the Americans who came to live in our small hamlet when I was about ten. The family comprised an African American couple and their two young boys, who both attended the local primary school. I think about that family every so often and I wonder what they made of us. The man was a teacher on a three-month exchange program at another private boys’ school in the area. Each morning the woman would walk from their house on the hill with her boys, neat as pins in their new school uniforms, both carrying American book bags that were nothing like our old-fashioned school satchels. And she was so beautiful—everyone commented on it. I remember going into the shop for some groceries, clutching the list Mum had scribbled on the torn open back of a cigarette packet, and the neighbors were talking about the American family.
“And she’s so lovely,” said Jean, who lived up the road.
“Oh, isn’t she,” said Ivy. “She looks just like that Jackie Kennedy.”
She reminded everyone of Jackie Kennedy, with her elegant suits and pill-box hat. Women in our community wore headscarves, sometimes over curlers that seemed to be in twenty-four hours a day.
One winter’s morning some local boys were skylarking around as I was waiting at the bus stop—they were pulling thick ice from puddles and throwing it around. One boy missed his friend and the ice, sharp as a freezing cold windowpane, hit me across the knees. Muddy ice and blood oozed down my legs onto my clean white socks and I tried to clean them with my gloves, determined not to give in to the pain. The American lady rushed over, pulled a starched white handkerchief from her black leather handbag, and began to clean my knees.
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” she kept saying, and I remember I just wanted her to carry on speaking to me, because her voice was so smooth and velvety and dignified.
I kept thanking her and saying sorry, and I said I’d take home the handkerchief to wash and return it, and she said everything would be okay. Then she smiled at me and put her hand on my shoulder, and I thought then that the women were right about her—she was just like that Jackie Kennedy.
I’ve often wondered if the family knew that when we all stared at them as they went out in their car on a Saturday or to church on Sunday—and they always went to church—it wasn’t because of their color, but because they were Americans and we all knew they were used to driving on the wrong side of the road. When she went into the shop, the beautiful American lady with the pill-box hat might never have known that people were interested in what she was buying because we knew they had big refrigerators in America, and we wondered how much food they could get in theirs. They were our first—and only—foreigners and Americans into the bargain, and we were all quite in awe of them.
24
Leaving
With zero knowledge of how, exactly, I might escape the career locomotive steaming ahead in a direction that didn’t interest me, I was soon training to be a teacher. I left for college after a final summer working on local farms. I’d spent a few weeks following A levels looking after Pammie and Ella, so when they went off on holiday for the summer, my brother and I managed to land a job together apple and pear picking at farms in Horsemonden and Brenchley, typical Kentish villages not so far away. We were taken there by van, which meant we didn’t have to catch a bus. In the early 1930s, artist and writer Clare Leighton traveled around England to complete The Farmer’s Year, a series of wood engravings depicting farm life. Of apple-picking in Kent she wrote of September, “It is the month of ripeness—a golden, crimson and russet month. Here in Kent the orchards offer themselves to stage the drama of the year.”
I loved that last golden summer working with my brother, as we moved our ladders—wide at the base and narrow at the top—from tree to tree picking Worcesters and Bramleys, big, tart apples mainly used for cooking, and sweet Cox’s Orange Pippins, and my favorite Kentish apple, the crispy brown Russet. Time and again we’d fill our picking aprons—formed of two voluminous deep canvas bags joined by a strap that went around the neck so the opening of each bag was at hip height and the base almost to the ankles—then we’d clamber down the ladders to pour our apples into bushel boxes. With our load lighter, we’d rush up to the top of the tree again, working hard to weigh ourselves down with apples picked, and money earned.
I’d chosen a college in South London that was situated in a large park filled with trees—many later lost to the Dutch Elm disease epidemic that ravaged Britain’s open spaces. I knew I wanted to be in London, but I also liked the idea of getting out into the country; the location offered me reasonable access to both. I’ve done that ever since—chosen to live in places where I can have my cake and eat it. Now I live just twenty miles north of San Francisco, so I can get into the City with ease, traffic notwithstanding, and yet from my home I can walk up through a redwood grove and out onto protected land from the Marin Headlands and on to Point Reyes National Seashore and beyond.
From the time I started college, I couldn’t wait to leave. In one of my first English literature classes, the instructor handed back my essay and in a throwaway comment said I had a very journalistic style to my writing and maybe I was in the wrong place. I should have upped sticks right there and then, seeing it as a “message”—but I couldn’t stand the thought of what might ensue when I called to tell my parents that I’d left college before I’d even really started. Fortunately, I have something of my father’s patience about me. I could sit at the riverbank with my fishing rod, the fly bobbing in the water and the hook ready, and I could wait and wait all day for something to bite. I never became a teacher, though I completed my training and did very well at college, earning distinctions for my academic work and praise in my teaching practice.
Despite the doubts I had about college even before it began, I met Judy on the first day, and she became one of my dearest lifelong friends—and I can tell the tale about the time Judy and I were knocked flying by Mick Jagger and he didn’t even stop to apologize, or even help us up from the floor. His dad was an instructor at the college and we just happened to be walking along the empty corridor when Mick came careening out of his father’s office, making a run for it before a few hundred students found out he was in the building. That lasting friendship was something I cherished far more than the college experience, which I just got on with.
I’d been at college for only a short time before I knew I had made another error. It wasn’t just that I didn’t really like what I had chosen to study, but I also missed being in the true country. A park with a lot of trees wasn’t quite cutting it for me. Yet college was made bearable by Judy and another friend, Sue. The latter’s boyfriend had a grocery shop and would leave big baskets of fresh fruit from his weekly trips to Covent Garden Market, so we all liked him. Judy’s boyfriend—later husband—worked for Mars, so chocolate was often plentiful. And there was Ann, a tall, stunning redhead who loved books as much as me and who also wanted to be a writer. To this day I look out for her name, and am sure that one day I will see it on the side of a book. Or maybe she’s a bestselling author writing under a pseudonym.
By the end of my first year I was going home almost every single weekend, having snagged a ride from a fellow student who lived in Hawkhurst and made the long journey back and forth to college daily because he had a family.
At the close of my second year I had saved enough money to visit Jenny in Canada and I had a blast. I knew I only had another year of college to endure and had put by enough money not only for the trip, but to get me through the final leg of my studies. I loved Canada
and loved finding my way around Toronto alone while Jenny was working for a travel agency. Her parents took us to Ottawa, Quebec and over to Vermont and upper New York state, before looping back into Toronto again—it was an amazing trip. Then Jenny came home from work with a special treat—tickets for us to fly to Bermuda. She had received complimentary rooms for a week at one of the best hotels on the island. Life was changing almost too rapidly for me to keep up, and I felt my naivety keenly—Jenny seemed so worldly and sophisticated and I was still a country bumpkin.
As if presaging my future, my flight was delayed out of Toronto to London—I was returning home just a week before college started again. The airline accommodated the stranded passengers in a new five-star hotel overlooking Lake Ontario. My room was enormous and I felt like a movie star, yet I had a deep sense that there would be more experiences like this, though I wasn’t quite sure what might come next.
Mum and Dad met me at Gatwick Airport, rushing toward me as I came through customs.
“You’re home,” said my mother, pulling me to her. “Oh, you’re home.”
By the time I left college, I wanted only to travel. I didn’t want to teach, and there was a glut of new teachers anyway, so many of my fellow students had to look for jobs outside the profession. A year after leaving Canada and having graduated from college, I was back in that same Toronto hotel, working for the airline that had taken me across the Atlantic to see Jenny. I was a penniless graduate who had found a way for someone else to pay my way as I collected labels from around the world that I would slap on the side of my suitcase over the next two years.
I might have taken a circuitous route to the end goal, but at the age of thirty-six, twenty years after a vocational test funneled me into teaching, I signed up for a journalism class at the University of California in Los Angeles, and I began writing for magazines while at the same time holding down a day job. I was a bit late to the game and I was definitely too old to try to become a foreign correspondent reporting from war zones—just as well as I’d probably be dead by now—however, I became the US correspondent for two educational journals in the UK and recorded a few essays for radio broadcast. With the all-important clips to my name I was able to extend my reach and began writing for other magazines, cobbling together the career I’d wanted from the very beginning.
One thing led to another until a day some nine years later when, in a moment of artistic grace, I wrote a war story that slipped into my imagination while I was stuck in traffic on a rainy day in California. It never rains in California, it pours. I was living almost six thousand miles away from the land of hops and apples, of farms and fields, of wild garlic and celandines, and of London in darker times, but it was as if the voices of those elderly women and their secret loves echoed down the years, along with the images of young men lost to war and the sweethearts left behind. The story became a manuscript, and the manuscript became my first novel.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
But this memoir is a glimpse at a certain place and a certain time, traveling back and forth across the years before my birth and lingering upon the stopping places of a country childhood that framed who I might become.
Dad’s business went very well for some years, until he was in his mid-fifties, when not only did repetitive motion injuries caused by his work and arthritis in his elbows begin to give him great pain, but he was losing jobs to men who charged less, men who didn’t have the same training or level of craftsmanship, but were cheap. And to be fair, he liked coming home early to watch cookery shows on TV—sometimes with a little regret that he hadn’t taken up that place at the army catering college. But then he wouldn’t have met Mum.
Mum’s career had gone from strength to strength. By the time I was working in academic publishing, Mum was chief administrator at a men’s prison, and on one occasion, on Boxing Day, was called out in an emergency because there was a riot. Knowing my mother, she probably arrived on the scene and told everyone to get back to their bloody cells and stop their sodding nonsense. In time she moved on, taking up the chief administrator position at a women’s prison, while at the same time involved in management training at other prisons and at the Home Office in London. As her standing grew in the department, she began to be offered plum jobs, and at one point the position of chief administrator of one of Britain’s most notorious high security prisons was on the table. The government paid for my parents to visit the area to look at properties and the local community, and they were very positive about it—Dad knew he could get work there, and both my brother and I had left home so they considered themselves free agents. Then came time for Mum to visit the prison and she told me that the hair stood up on the back of her neck the moment the big gates slammed shut behind her—she knew she would have to turn down the job. Had she accepted the position, she would have been the first woman promoted to the position of chief administrator of a British high security prison.
A friend recently asked me if I’d watched Orange Is the New Black. I shook my head—I’d heard enough stories of prison life. In the mid-’70s there had been a successful drama on British TV called Within These Walls about a women’s prison, starring the classic British actress Googie Withers. Whenever it came on we quickly changed the channel before Mum could shout, “Oh no—I have enough of that all day!”
I was almost thirty and Mum fifty-seven when she was again contacted by a senior Home Office official and formally offered another plum job, one that was only ever offered to staff of high regard when they were three years away from retirement. The role would be to represent her Home Office department—prisons—in the Prime Minister’s office, and would mean a lot of travel away from home on those occasions when she joined the government entourage during the PM’s official journeys overseas. Her remit was to ensure her department’s interests were taken into account in the drawing up of any international agreements. If a given trip required an early morning departure, she would stay in a government house near the PM’s residence. Who knew that there were many such representatives in a PM’s entourage, acting in the interests of not only every government department, but sections within that department?
Mum called me as soon as she was offered the job—typical of the position, she had only twenty-four hours to make up her mind. She wasn’t sure what to do. On the other hand, I was absolutely sure what she should do.
“Go for it, Mum. Think of the travel! Think of the things you’ll see and do! And it’s so important! I mean, they said you’d be going to China next month! What does Dad say?”
“He says whatever I want to do, he’s right behind me.” My father had retired a year earlier at fifty-six.
“Well, there you go. Call them back and tell them you’re in.”
She turned down the job.
“What do you mean, you turned it down?” I could not believe my ears when she called to let me know her decision. I was working my own way up the career ladder and this was the 1980s. We professional women all had our linebacker shoulder pads and we knew where we were going, shoving doors open to get to where we thought we’d like to be. I discovered a few years later that I didn’t want to be there at all.
Mum was firm. “I just didn’t want to be away from your dad for that long, Jack.”
“And?”
“And I had this terrible vision of Margaret Thatcher running into my bedroom at four in the morning and saying, ‘Quick, Joyce, you’ve overslept. Get up,’ and me still in my curlers, saying, ‘Oh, just give me another five minutes, would you, Maggie.’”
I laughed. “I suppose it’s for the best,” I said. “And you never did like dung-spreading, did you?”
In their mid-forties, my parents had taken up ballroom and Latin American dancing. It was Mum’s idea—Dad had to be dragged along to the first class. Mum decided that they should make new friends, because I was at college and John would be going off on his own at some point. Yet my fa
ther took to dancing like a duck to water, and soon they were joining dance clubs and were off dancing every night of the week, either in lessons or with new friends they’d met. They became dance instructors, winning medals and competitions. I went home for my twenty-first birthday, for some crazy reason thinking my parents might have organized something special for me, but as I walked into the house, they rushed past me, my mother telling me that they were off dancing and I’d find my cards on the kitchen table. Then my brother went out with his mate Pete, and I spent my twenty-first birthday alone watching Starsky & Hutch. Birthdays never had been a big thing for my parents, though we usually had a decorated cake. They forgot my twenty-second birthday altogether, but the following week I was in Toronto again on a four-day layover, so Jennifer’s parents put on a special dinner for me, presenting me with a birthday cake iced with the words, “Happy Birthday, Jackie—from your Canadian Mum and Dad.”
Mum was about seventy years of age when she saw an advertisement in the local paper, “Apple Pickers Wanted.” The farm was only a mile away from the house, so she told Dad that she was going to call the farmer and apply. Dad rolled his eyes and said she was welcome to it, but no, he was not going back to farm work after all these years. “Please yourself,” said Mum. She called the farmer, who asked her a few questions then told her she could start the following Monday. On her first day, Dad packed up her sandwiches and a flask of tea, just as he had when they were young, and waved her off to work. At the end of that week, when Mum opened her wage packet and counted her earnings, Dad changed his mind. Friends and relatives thought they were crazy, but every year for the next ten years they picked apples as summer turned to autumn and they had a great time doing it. The farmer maintained they were his best workers. As Mum said, “We’ve gone back to our roots.” They would work in the orchards until late afternoon, come home, have a bite to eat and then go out dancing. Their zest for life knew no bounds.
This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing Page 24