Easter 2008
When I tell Mum that I’ve been asked to run a writing workshop for families who’ve had a stillborn child, she goes through to the kitchen to make another pot of tea, leaving me in the back room with the wonderful view of the loch, and this pot of tea, that we haven’t even started, still scalding into the thick cork mat.
I tilt back a little in my chair to try to see her. Her back is to me, shoulders square with the sink, the kettle already grumbling to a fresh boil. I even dare rocking back on the chair – French-polished mahogany legs braced in a triple dove-tailed frame, made by her father in the dim workshop at the end of the Doncaster garden that he never got fitted up to the mains. Where he French-polished this table, that I’m bracing myself against, under the glim of three bike lamps, and French-polished the huge sideboard in the front room that is filled with things kept ‘for best’ and is covered in strange fawn-coloured hand-embroidered doilies.
The doilies were sent from Calcutta by Auntie Elsie decades ago. Their willow leaves are embroidered so fatly that they look like handfuls of slugs, not the waving tracery of leaves. When Mum read Auntie Elsie’s note saying she’d bought them to support a leper colony, Mum promptly boiled the lot, and they’ve never quite ironed flat ever since. There are loads of them – the top of the sideboard is covered in a colony of various sizes of leper doilies: for the carriage clock, for the tall squint stoneware vase I made when I was eight, for the ashtray Mum made at my dad’s pottery night class, for the framed photos of Dad in his interview suit and his Navy kit, for every card I send Mum during the year, and, at Christmas, for every Christmas card – as if their thin card could slash the French polish.
Every flat surface in this house is French-polished, is completely incapable of standing the slightest heat, the slightest damp, the tiniest scratch or dent. Every flat surface is a constant challenge and worry to Mum. As is the fact that I don’t want any stick of these heirlooms – that I have my place stuffed with IKEA wipe-clean.
So I am rocking back on the two back legs of the mahogany chair – and feeling very very wicked for doing this because They’re a bit of good wood, and They need looking after. And the frame doesn’t give a millimetre – or a sixteenth of an inch as my granddad would have known it. And the kettle’s long boiled and I can see Mum clearly now through the back room door and her shoulders are still square with the sink, and her apron straps X over her shoulder blades in that over-engineered way of theirs and, as far as I can see, there’s no shaking going on. But no washing-up either. And the kettle’s long boiled and there’s no noise. No sniffing or quiet plop of tears. There never has been.
I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to be here until I was twenty-three. I was standing at Grandma’s sink, wiping her chipped enamel saucepans dry with one of her worn teatowels, and Grandma just mentioned it – and was mildly surprised when she realised I’d no idea what she was talking about. Well, I suppose your mum’s a bit sensitive about it – because she lost so many.
I was stunned, but Grandma was completely straightforward – taking it as read that these things happen. For my grandma, growing up on a farm, and with eight siblings (that managed to live beyond infancy) these things did. But not to my only-child mum who grew up without even a garden, or a pet.
There’d been my brother – big, and born a week late (and then only after a whole bottle of Castor Oil to get your mum going). And then four years, with at least one miscarriage each year. Mum and Dad had, it seems, been struck on the idea of having five children. And we weren’t even Catholic.
And then, finally, there was the experimental drug – to help glue me into Mum’s womb for the full term. And Mum being told: Of course, you can’t have any more after this – it wouldn’t be safe. And that she had to Stay calm and that Nervous mothers really don’t help matters.
And I had been a rapidly dividing three-month-old bundle of cells inside her when the first Thalidomide baby was born in Britain.
And now I’m forty-seven, and Mum’s still never mentioned it. So, I tell her about being asked to run the writing workshops for families of stillborn children, and she sees that I’m waiting for her to say something. That I’m busy doing my twenty-first-century-talking-therapy-I’m-ready-to-listen-to-your-pain thing. And she goes to make that fresh pot of tea. But, when she eventually comes back in (she’s forgotten the tea) she says:
It was only two of them that were late on. And the one that came when I was still at home…well, your father dealt with that. He got rid of the mess. He was used to clearing up the mess – because of his rabbits.
Easter 1966
The previous October, we all moved to this cold place: the central industrial belt of Scotland. To make the transition easier, my brother and I were given a pet for the first time – to give us something to look after, to explain the move to.
My brother is nine, I am four. We each have a rabbit. They live on the back lawn, in the separate hutches that my dad built. There is Duke (my brother’s rabbit) – aloof, intelligent, handsome, gentlemanly, exactly half of him brown and half of him white as if he’d had a ruler laid straight down his middle. And then Snowy (my rabbit) – pure white in overflowing folds of flab, indolent, bitchy, pink-eyed, foul-mouthed, with huge unruly claws, way too sullen to exercise, and a terrible flirt.
She deigns to listen to the overtures of the wild buck rabbit who comes out of the woods to woo her. Who stands for hours at a time, up on his back legs, his delicate front paws clinging on to the wire diamonds of her hutch. She occasionally presses her bulk up against the wire, but mostly just sits pretending he isn’t there – while she paints her nails, and stubs out her cigarette in her cold cream.
We have been putting Duke and Snowy into a long run together every day since we moved here, but Duke only ever shags Snowy once – after fastidious months of understandable repugnance.
As a schoolboy during the war in Sheffield, my dad had bred rabbits – for their meat to sell in his mum’s fish and chip shop, and for their fur which he’d crudely sewn into hats and mittens and flogged to fulfil his schoolpals’ fantasies of being Davy Crockett. He’d built a triple stack of hutches to line the shop’s back yard and looked after them in between homework and rumbling barrels of potatoes for his tiny dad to slice through the chipper. So, when Snowy started to ‘show’, Dad realised she was carrying a lot of babies.
It is Mum who tells me the following tale. Not Dad. He never mentioned it. And Mum didn’t tell me until I was in my mid-teens, and a girl in my class had just been expelled for ‘being up the duff’ – and (worse) having a bodged abortion.
It is the morning that Dad knows Snowy is due, long before either my brother or I are awake. Dad and Mum slip through into the kitchen. Mum yawns and tightens her thin green dressing gown round her and fills the kettle for a pot of tea. Dad nods at the kettle, says: I’ll do it first. Mum rubs his shoulder, then reaches under the sink for the yellow bucket she keeps specifically for when Dad is sick with his migraines. She watches as Dad carefully fills the bucket with water at blood heat. Watches as he creeps out over the frost-pricked grass in his slippers, balancing the bucket that gently steams in the Falkirk air.
She doesn’t go back to bed, she stands, a pale green figure, watching him through the kitchen’s glass door (my dad’s vain attempt to bring some light into the kitchen that faces due south but is under the cliff of the council estate ridge). She watches as he cracks open Snowy’s bedroom door, and counts. Behind her the kettle boils – and then starts to cool.
He’d known there would be too many – that Snowy, being Snowy, may decide to eat the lot. So he has rubbed an old gardening glove with Snowy’s raisin droppings, and now slips his gloved hand into the hay nest, under her yielding bulk, and pulls out six tiny pink hairless shut-eyed babies. And drowns them.
Mum watches him shut Snowy’s bedroom door and carefully carry the bucket down the lawn to stand it on the crazy-paving by the bin. He straightens up and taps on the kitc
hen window. His face is very white. He mouths:
Jolly – can you bring some newspapers.
She takes him out a bundle of Falkirk Heralds and a Scotsman and goes straight back in – can’t watch while he fishes the little bodies from the lukewarm water and wraps them: corner over, roll, edges in, roll, then places the roll slantwise onto another new newspaper, corner over, roll, edges in, roll, another newspaper, corner over, roll, edges in, roll. The movement is a type of ballet – learnt from serving in the fish and chip shop from when he could only just reach the counter – double- and triple-wrapping the steelworkers’ fish suppers so they’re still steaming when they get them home. Another newspaper, corner over, roll, edges in, roll – until the parcel is as fat as a toddler and he crams it deep down in the dustbin so my brother and I won’t spot it.
And then he had wandered around the dark frost-held garden for about half an hour. Mum said she’d gone out to him twice to try to get him to come in. Had even gone up to the far end, with the gentle tinkle of a full cup of tea chattering in its saucer. Up to where Dad stood by his compost heaps. And she’d balanced the cup and saucer carefully on the top of one of the fence-posts and put her arms round him. But he’d not been able to speak, or even drink his tea – just gestured her back inside.
When he had, finally, come back in – weeping – Mum said she’d had to make a fresh pot. She’d patted his shoulders and smoothed her palms across his raw cheeks, and taken him back to bed. And, by the time we got up, Dad had one of his migraines, and Mum was scurrying in and out of their bedroom with cold flannels and fresh-smelling pillows, and we had to do our usual routine of tiptoeing round making no noise – so we had to mute our joy at finding eight new rabbits. Imagine her having eight babies, Mum! Isn’t it amazing!
Surprisingly, Snowy proved to be a good mother. All remaining eight survived. When they were a few weeks old, and fully furred and frisky, I tried to run a race with all of them. I laid two washing lines across the lawn – start line, and finish line. Of course they went off in eight different directions, which I hadn’t ever thought of, and it took us the rest of the day to round them up.
A few weeks later we had found homes for them all. The coalman took the coal black one, and the milkman had the two white ones, and a Dutch art student had the one that looked like Duke (who was, himself, Dutch).
When Mum told me – even though it was all those years later – that Dad had come back into the kitchen weeping, she said it with that clipped, tight tone in her voice. She always sounded like that whenever she mentioned someone – especially my dad – who showed ‘too much’ emotion. She hated it that he cried. And, as the years passed, he would cry at all sorts of things. He would well up at a film, or a piece of music, or telling us something about his childhood dog, or a sad news story. But Mum never got any easier about it. Always this clipped tone to her voice, this pinched look to her face. This: ‘He-absolutely-shouldn’t-be-doing-that’.
Easter 1975
I am fourteen. It is still another nine years before I find out about my Mum’s miscarriages.
Mum, Dad and I are renovating Edrom Station – turning it into a home. It is a little rural halt in Berwickshire. It’s been derelict for sixteen years and nature has moved in. The platform is a carpet of fox-and-cubs, milkweed and sheep’s-bit scabious, wrens are nesting in the men’s loos, swallows in the old lamp room, hundreds of mice under the floors and in the roofspace. We try our best to work around them – until the mouse pee over every surface, in every bed, dribbled on every plate and mug in every cupboard gets too much, and we set traps that we have to clear four or five times a day, for weeks. Mum isn’t unusually squeamish about these – it is something else that gets to her.
It has been a long dry winter, and then sudden heavy spring rain that has lasted for several weeks. Everything is sodden, and all the gutters and downpipes are choked with leaves and autumn debris.
Mum and I are clearing this one downpipe.
There is a smell – clay and animal and wet. A cold smell.
The spring birds are singing:
SEXSEXSEXSEXSEXSEXSEXSEX.
As we clear the downpipe the smell becomes something much more solid – like we are chewing it. It is slimy and horrific and yet, just leaves, oak and beech, some crisp-dry, some fat with rain like layers of rich cake, come out of the downpipe. We reach further and further up with our Marigold gloves and our improvised fencing-wire hook. And then it comes. A perfect nest of leaves and chewed fertiliser sack. The size and shape of a gowpen – a pair of cupped hands. And in it – bodies.
Small, pink, furless, perfectly-formed except for their eyes – over-big and closed but shining black through the pearl-thin eyelids. They are curled round their own tiny hands, and each other. Curled in this nest, constructed with such care in the dry leaves in the shelter of the downpipe just before the rains came. Six of them.
The nest is brimful with water. The smell is atrocious, even before I pour the water away.
The stench is so thick that I only gradually hear my mum through it. She is saying Oh God – over and over again. She has shoved herself back, away from the end of the downpipe where we have been grovelling and hauling for half an hour. Shoved herself back on her welly-heels and is yanking her Marigolds off any old way, inside out, tearing at them, and continuing to say Oh God Oh God Oh God. Not loud. And not in anything that could be termed disgust. It sounds like recognition. And it’s shocking. Because Mum never blasphemes.
Yes, the smell is appalling, physical, cramming itself up our noses, running down the backs of our throats. But I remember thinking at the time: What’s she in such a state about? I remember looking at the abandoned Marigolds on the soggy grass, hearing her stumble into the house without taking her wellies off, hearing the kitchen taps coming on full blast, and the water running and running and running.
The Gorge
Suzanne Batty
I couldn’t stop thinking about the greenness.
Maybe that’s when the yearning started, in the midsummer light – all that setting and seeding, all that ripeness and rejoicing! I felt drawn to newness, to a certain gleaming transparency around the usual, household objects. It was my first summer in the new house with Anna, in the heat; there were no fans in the shops, no parasols or watering cans. I had taken to getting up at five, wandering out into the derelict garden in the cool air, the grass high as a ten year old.
I was picking up glass by the old rockery when a man came out of the house next door, which I had thought was empty, and started to practise dance steps behind a trellis where a mile-a-minute clematis was beginning to grow. His bright white, skin-tight bodysuit flashed like a handful of doves against the red wall. But it was the woman I really noticed. I saw straight away her magnificent expectancy. She sat on the low wall watching him, stroking her baby under her taut skin. When they saw me they came over and spoke to me kindly as if I were about to splinter or disappear.
Maybe that was when my daughter stuck her little fingers through the ether and waved.
My mother used to say – don’t have children. Look what it did to me. Do something interesting with your life. But I wasn’t doing anything interesting. Everywhere I looked, I saw dead ends. Worse than that, I had become a civil servant. I tried to make up poems in McDonalds at lunch time, but there was something about the clocking in clocking out that strangled them at birth. Mostly, I didn’t write any more.
On my thirtieth birthday Anna said, ‘You might as well give it up. You’re not going to get anywhere now.’
She said, ‘You’re too old.’
I suppose she wanted us to be failed artists together. At least it would have given us something in common.
When I first met Anna, I was almost blinded by the aura of light around her, by her glittering eyes and steel toe-capped boots. But she turned out to be just another of those shiny, annihilating people I used to fall for. In many ways we were a perfectly normal couple. In the evenings and weekends w
hen we were alone together, there was sometimes screaming and once a fire kicked over and once (did I imagine this?) hands around my throat. It was obvious that love had locked us together in some dark, unfathomable way and we had to endure it.
It was impossible to write with Anna around. She sucked all the colour and light and sound out of the air surrounding her. She was like a volcano going backwards and what was left behind was burnt and thin and formless. It wasn’t her fault. Her problem was that people had always been cruel to her.
One speechless night, in the brief darkness, I found myself lying in the garden on the warm, cracked path, red brick dust on my face, snails making for my eyes. I listened to all the swollen-headed babies whispering under the hardcore (feed us, feed us), their little hands like weeds between the paving stones (hold us, hold us) and, out of the chorus, the voice of my daughter saying if you let me come into you I will make you feel placed on earth, precise and sacred, not thrown down, not cast out like a clumsy, jagged thing.
Anna said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘I don’t like children.’
Anna said, ‘You’re just depressed.’
She said, ‘Your problem is you’ve always had people being nice to you,’ and went into the kitchen with her cigarettes.
She couldn’t help it; a child would have forced her to face the lie she was living. She would have had to face her mother who, after eight years, was still allowed to refer to me as ‘that girl’. When her mother came to visit our new house, she went poking around in her shiny, narrow shoes asking Anna what we thought we were doing, two single girls in a family home? Maybe she was right. Two empty wombs with room under the stairs for a pram and room at the table for a high chair and we couldn’t even agree on the decorating.
Some Girls' Mothers Page 6