by Thorne Moore
My school, Serena’s school, infants and juniors. My stomach lurched. It was weird, more than weird, seeing it there, jiggled into a precise place in the real world and not just a figment of my imagination. If it were marked on this map, it stood to reason it must be there still.
I had to go and see, didn’t I? Whatever it was I was looking for, Marsh Green was far more likely to give me answers than an afternoon with Miles Pearce.
I consulted the road atlas again. Lyford. It must be getting on for two hundred miles from my Yorkshire home, but most of it would be on a motorway. I’d never driven on a motorway. I’d never driven much further than the city centre where I worked. Before today, nothing would have persuaded me to attempt it. I was too old for new experiences, I’d have said. Silly little lady, can’t cope with all that rush and traffic.
But today. Today the traffic could go hang itself.
Today, I’d drive to Lyford.
It wasn’t that hard, motorway driving. At least not when it involved just driving. It was the complications along the route that got me. Complications like actually getting on to the motorway in the first place. I know you’re just supposed to feed on, but everything was going so fast. I stopped to wait for a big gap and ignored the hooting behind me. And then there was the changing and merging. How do people cope with this on a daily basis? I knew which roads I wanted – I’d written them on a Post-it note and stuck it to the windscreen, but I still found myself going three times round a massive roundabout before I managed to get to where I wanted to be. Once I was in the flow, on the right motorway, safely heading south, everything was fine. Not particularly fast because I refused to move out of the inside lane, so I spent most of it stuck behind crawling lorries, but I didn’t care. It brought me, eventually, to the exit for Lyford North.
Once I turned off, I pulled over, opened up the atlas, and tried to equate its roads with the urban sprawl that spread, like a grey fungus, beyond the next couple of ploughed fields to the distant curl of downs. The atlas map didn’t really compare with the Ordnance Survey. Might have something to do with the thirty years that separated them. Lyford seemed to have doubled in size. I found the motorway junction marked. If I turned right, to a roundabout, and then right again, I should be able to turn left onto Foxton Road, and then trust to luck. The atlas would be no use once I’d entered the maze of the council estate, but I was convinced I’d remember it, when I was there.
In a way, I did. A house here, a shop there, a corner. Little details that had the skin on my neck crawling with an imminent recognition that refused to explode into life. Everything had changed so much since 1966. It had been changing, even while I was there. I could remember the prefabs smashing down. I could remember bulldozers and diggers and cranes trundling in, to get to work on the rubble and weed. They’d been busy since I’d left. It wasn’t just the prefabs that had vanished. Thornton farm too, along with its fields and elm trees, and the pig farm at the end of the allotments. Anything suggesting countryside had been rubbed out. Marsh Green had been on the outer edge of the town, but Lyford had swallowed, belched, and now the estate was halfway down its gullet.
I crawled along Foxton Road, missed what I was looking for, turned in the car park of Pirton station and drove back.
There it was. The first entrance to Linden Crescent. My street. Not a crescent, really. It was three sides of a square, abutting Foxton Road at both ends. I parked and walked its length, but I had to look at the house numbers to identify number twelve. My old home. New door, new windows, new roof tiles, the front garden paved over. I didn’t recognise a thing about it. Except… the fire hydrant marker, by its gate. That was still there. Yes!
A prickle ran up my arms. What was I seeing? The past superimposing itself on the present, or the present, fat and loud, sitting on the echoing caverns of the past?
I locked the car and left it in the street. Day after day, for five years, I’d walked from this house, across the estate, to school. Not many of our families had cars, even though our fathers nearly all worked at the car factory. We didn’t need them. We had buses. We walked.
It was as a pedestrian that I’d had known Marsh Green, so that was how I needed to rediscover it. But everything was so hopelessly changed, I doubted my instincts would be enough to guide me. My old Linden Crescent had been marooned, detached from the rest of the estate because the road supposed to link it in hadn’t been completed. A concrete stub ran out from the crescent and stopped abruptly at a hawthorn bush and a wilderness of boggy ground. We children had marked it out for hopscotch… More and more little details were coming back to me.
Hopscotch markings had long gone. The connecting road was completed now ‒ Meadow Way, apparently. I wasn’t sure where it would take me so I followed the Crescent round and set off up Foxton Road, as I’d done every morning, with my sister Hilary. I counted off the streets that led into the estate. Capstone Way. That was the street I turned up to go to school. Beech Road, leading to the Green, the knot of streets where Angela and Denise had lived. Lucy Road, leading to the Rough. And then, Rowlands Avenue.
Rowlands Avenue had really been part of a different world. The last street off Foxton Road, before the road ran out into farmland. It must have been the work of some 1930s developer. Someone with ambitions that never materialised beyond one short cul-de-sac in the middle of nowhere. Even though it found itself rubbing shoulders with the later council estate, it contrived to stand apart, quietly gathering its skirts in bourgeois disdain for its hustling cheap-rent neighbours. A dozen or so houses primly perched along it, not huge or overtly grand but privately owned and deeply conscious of it. They had blue posters in their windows when there was an election. Everyone on the estate had red ones. When I was ten I’d been unaware of the cultural significance of its detachment, but I’d known it was magically apart. Like Linden Crescent, it didn’t quite connect, but unlike Linden Crescent, it didn’t want to. You could reach Rowlands Avenue from the estate, but only by a footpath.
Not any more.
It had doubled in length, disappearing into a tight web of eighties housing. But I found the house where Serena had lived. The house where we, her tribe, had gathered in a garden among roses to drink orange squash and eat chocolate fingers. It had changed less than my old home, maybe because it was posher. Really posh - it had a garage. Still had a garage. The windows were new, double-glazed, but they’d kept to the old design. There were still roses in the garden. They couldn’t be the same ones, surely. Not after thirty-five years.
I ventured in through the gateway, my pulse racing, and realised there was a woman in the garden, bent over one of the shrubs, her back to me. My heart stopped.
The scrunch of gravel under my foot raised her up, turning towards me.
‘Serena!’ I said it, because she was Serena, but even before I’d got to the end of the word, she’d transformed into a completely different woman. Short, dumpy, twenty years older than me, her neatly styled hair dyed ash blonde. Her look was imperious, eyebrows raised in a question.
‘Yes? Can I help you?’
‘I…’ My tongue felt twice its normal size. I was tripping over my words. ‘Serena Whinn. Sorry. I – sorry, I was looking for Serena Whinn.’
‘Yes?’ Well, I don’t know a Serena Whinn, I’m afraid, so you’ll have to look elsewhere.’
‘She used to live here.’
‘Not for the last twenty years, she hasn’t.’
‘Oh. No, of course. Before that, then.’
‘I wouldn’t know. We bought this house from a couple called Jackson, in ’82.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry. To have bothered you.’ I was retreating, then I stopped. ‘You don’t know anyone, do you, who was here before then?’
She laughed, with a hint of indignation, as if the notion of anyone having lived in the area longer than twenty years was too preposterous for words. ‘I can’t say I really know my neighbours, but as far as I’m aware, we’ve been in Rowlands Avenue the longest.’
‘I see. Thank you. Sorry to have bothered you.’ I stepped back out of the rose garden and turned along the avenue, blindly walking, while the disappointment sank in. Seriously, had I genuinely expected that this stupid, impulsive trip would bring me face-to-face with Serena? Or with anyone at all from that era? I walked down the original stretch of Rowlands Avenue and on to the end of the later addition, facing a road that led right into a new estate and left, between blocks of flats, into Marsh Green proper.
I turned left, without at first appreciating that it was Marsh Green. So much had been built up, I couldn’t work out where I was. Then, in a broad gap between two blocks of maisonettes, I looked down a paved footpath, over a bridge, to Marsh Green Junior School.
My numbing despondency was drowned in a new flood of prickles and stirring memory. My old school was the same and yet changed utterly, like everything here. The past and present swimming in and out.
I walked down the path, across the bridge and stared through metal fencing. The brick-built halls, for gym and dinner and assembly, the long wings of classrooms with French windows and paved patios were still there, rather shabby, smeared with graffiti, damaged glass boarded up, but the wide tarmac playgrounds were cluttered with Portakabins and the huge, daisy-studded playing fields had been reduced to a patch just big enough for five-a-side football. New housing occupied the rest.
I stood there, fingers entwined in the wire netting of the tall fence – taller than in my day – and as I peered through, listening to the shrieks and laughter of children in the playground, I could hear the echo of us, thirty-five years earlier, calling, jabbering… Serena’s silvery laugh.
*
There are clouds piling up, looking dark. The wind is getting colder. I wish I had my cardigan as I stand watching. Soon, in another week perhaps, we’ll be in our woollen kilts and jumpers and our gaberdines, but for now we’re still in cotton frocks. All the same, our cotton frocks – different prints but the same pattern, with sashes and gathered skirts. Except Angela’s. She has straight dresses without waists, made of Crimplene because her mother works in a clothing factory. Our mothers don’t go out to work. They sit at home sewing our cotton frocks on their Singer sewing machines, and knitting our winter jumpers.
I think maybe Serena’s mother buys her frocks too, even though she doesn’t go out to work, because they always have smart little lace collars, and puffed sleeves with cuffs and ours are just plain.
I watch her powder-blue skirt whirling as she skips. It’s like she floats, like a fairy. She’s so lovely.
Then she turns and waves at me, gathering her skipping rope in one hand. ‘Come and play with us, Karen! You can be with Ruth.’
Dare I step forward? Serena has smiled at me, but I’m still too bashful to do more that stand on their periphery, admiring.
Serena holds out her hand, drawing me in, and I run up obediently to Ruth’s side.
Angela’s unknotted one end of her rope, and Denise’s, and taken the wooden handles off and now she’s tying them together to make one long rope.
She hands me one handle and Ruth the other. We’re to turn the rope for the others.
I’m not very good. I knew I wouldn’t be.
‘No, no!’ Barbara stamps. ‘You’ve got to do it together. You’re making it go all wiggly.’
Serena smiles encouragement and with her sunshine all around me, I manage to get the rhythm right. When she smiles, I always get everything right. At the far end of the rope, Ruth begins to look less pained.
Serena is first in, skipping lightly over each flick, graceful as a fawn. The others are chanting the rhyme. ‘Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, turn around. Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, touch the ground.’
She can do anything. I’m glad I’m not skipping, because I’d keep tripping on the rope, but Serena never does.
‘…Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, say goodnight!’
‘Barbara!’ says Serena, as she floats free of the rope, barely losing breath.
Barbara charges in, like a bull. Her feet land heavily with each jump. Angela is standing ready for her turn, straining like a greyhound. Denise is bouncing behind her, looking anxious. They – we – are one. The golden girls, the skipping rope uniting us in an endless circle. Beyond us, nothing matters. Through the whirling rope, across the playground, all alone, I see…
I see other children watching, mournful, unchosen, longing to be where I am. Just as I used to stand, watching and longing.
*
What was so hugely significant about a skipping game? It was just normal play. Maybe that was it. Its very normality had a golden allure that was swallowed up by what came next. After my accident, normality ceased to exist. Things can’t be normal if you have a fractured skull, broken this and that, internal damage. I’d been in hospital for months, and I was in and out – more in than out ‒ for the rest of my childhood. A few days, or maybe a few weeks at school and then I’d be back, to my new normality of bright lights, needles, pills and the smell of sick and disinfectant. When I did make it to school, teachers couldn’t remember who I was. They gave up. I didn’t bother taking O levels or CSEs, because there was no point. My education came from the books I read, lying in hospital wards.
That was where I learned to escape into books. To shut out the pain and tedium of real life and hide in exotic worlds, peopled with impossible heroes and villains.
But there’d been none of that, when I’d lived here, in Lyford. Nothing to predict that I wouldn’t have sailed through school normally, like all my friends. Never brilliant, never Oxbridge material – haha, that would have been a joke, coming from Marsh Green council estate – but I could hope to do well enough if I worked hard. Maybe that was why the image of Serena Whinn was haunting me. The ghost of what might have been, if only I’d stayed on here, with Serena’s charm to protect me. The dread that accompanied her memory was simply my subconscious dread of the accident still to come.
Someone blew a whistle. The playground noise subsided. Not instantly, but it settled. An adult voice barked. Quiet.
*
Dead silence. It’s like the sky has fallen in. We all stop. Even the teachers on playground duty stop talking, and look in shocked disbelief.
And Kenneth is shocked too. That’s what’s so impressive about it all. Nothing shocks or worries Kenneth. Nothing ever cows him. But now he stands silent and aghast.
Kenneth’s the boy nobody messes with. He’s the boy they step into the gutter to avoid, the boy they hand their sweets and marbles and cigarette cards to, in order to escape a kicking. He’ll give them a real kicking if they don’t, not just a bit of a shove.
He’s the boy Mr Cutler chased round the dining hall, roaring, ‘Come here, boy! I’ll see you hung, drawn and quartered for this, you little wretch!’ Which was a bit disturbing, seeing a teacher get so angry and Kenneth not caring, just running out laughing.
He’s the boy who shouted a bad word in assembly, who lets off in class, who smells, whose skin is scurfy and whose hair is nitty. Kenneth is afraid of no one and nothing, but now, there he stands, frozen, horrified.
He’s been in a barney with other boys, throwing punches, kicking, snarling as usual. I watched, keeping well clear, but others were cheering on him or his opponents. Barneys are part of playground sports. I hadn’t been watching him exactly. I’ve been watching Serena Whinn and her friends, playing a game that has them running from one end of the playground to the other. I want to join in so much, but I know I never will.
And then it happened. Kenneth stepped backwards, arms windmilling, and a flailing blow caught Serena as she’d run past.
Serena Whinn had tumbled.
That’s why the silence has fallen. We freeze and watch in silent horror as she pulls herself up from the gritty tarmac, teetering, tears of unexpected shock welling in her big dark eyes. There’s a collective intake of breath. Serena Whinn is in tears! Someone has made her cry!
The universe rocks in horror, but it’s Kenneth’s ho
rror that impresses itself on my mind. He has done what no mortal can do without facing the fires of hell. He has hurt Serena. For the only time in his wicked life, Kenneth looks appalled at what he’s done.
*
He was caned, of course. Mr Cutler had a cane, but I think Kenneth was the only one it was ever used on. Kenneth…the rest of his name wouldn’t come to me. What had happened to him? Hung, drawn and quartered, probably, just as Mr Cutler had predicted. Kenneth was an argument for predestination, if ever there was one.
Who cared? I didn’t want to know about Kenneth whatever his name was. It was Serena I wanted, and she was gone. Everything was gone.
I pulled back from the school fence, onto the bridge over the brook.
It was a new bridge, one of those characterless slabs of concrete with grey metal railings, tightly spaced for fear of compensation claims by tumbling children or pensioners. It seemed ridiculously large to span that tiny brook.
My brook.
Did it have a name? It was always just The Brook to us. I looked down into its sluggish waters, and ice crystals began to form in my stomach.
Dark water, and I was drowning in it. It was closing over my head. I couldn’t breathe.
Stop it! I couldn’t drown here. The water was barely a foot deep. Look. This was just the brook that wound among our houses, sometimes in meadows of buttercups, sometimes in deep gullies between backyards, sometimes disappearing entirely underground. Even less of it was left above ground now, as the estate had filled in. No more buttercups or grassy banks. Just a short stretch of deep ditch.
My mesmerised eyes followed the flow of empty paint cans, shopping trolleys, black plastic as the ditch skirted the fences of back gardens before slithering into a culvert. A black mouth, half-blocked by a rusting grid that dammed up scum and foul debris.
I couldn’t take my eyes from it. My head began to swim. The sense of dread began to coalesce into…