Alone

by Pip Granger

  Propaganda to this effect was peddled in newspapers and especially in women’s magazines, which extolled the virtues of being homemakers and mothers. ‘We were expected to clean all day and then to have tidy hair, a clean frock and our slap on, so we looked attractive for our man when he got in from his day’s graft.’ Mother paused briefly and let out a humourless laugh. ‘Not that your father ever troubled with the grafting part.’

  On top of all that, Fifties wives were expected to have a meal on the table and their old men’s slippers warming before the fire. To be honest, I never remember Mother doing those things, but then, she was the breadwinner, and even if she had tarted herself up, warmed slippers and the rest, there was no guarantee that Father would come home to reap the benefit. No wonder she didn’t trouble.

  ‘We were supposed to forget all about our war work, all that lovely freedom and the lolly that we had earned in our own right. We were to blot it right out of our minds. It was back to having the housekeeping doled out to us as if we were children and being banged up in the house as if it was a prison.’

  It was hardly surprising that, in this climate, Father’s fast cars and light aircraft tended to leave the local little girls cold. Smelly old engines were very definitely boys’ stuff. So, unlike the boys, the girls did not flock to our house; they stayed away in droves.

  My mother was a creative woman, and having a proper house to turn into a home by collecting new (to us, at least) furniture, running up curtains and cushion covers, and hooking new rugs, must have been a real treat for her, even if the other housewifely duties left her cold. It had been such a long time since she’d had a place to call her own. Then there was a garden to whip into colourful shape as well. The women in my mother’s family were all keen gardeners. A family joke was that the most common view of a Marriott female was her bum sticking up out of a flowerbed as she planted, weeded or tidied, and Mother was no exception. Neither am I, I’m pleased to say.

  Mother’s initial happiness with our new home and the opportunities it afforded to let her creative streak rip would, tragically, not last. Booze and Father saw to that.

  Alcoholism is as progressive a disease as an untreated cancer, and my parents’ drinking was growing steadily more excessive, expensive and destructive. By the time they moved to Essex, their marriage was hanging on by a frayed thread, and it wasn’t long before Mother’s efforts at home-making were being undermined by booze-fuelled rows. Father seemed to take particular delight in destroying the things that Mother had just made, and he thought nothing of tearing precious curtains and cushion covers to shreds, grinding cigarette butts out on her homemade rugs and hurling our new china, collected piece by treasured piece as Mother could afford it, at newly decorated walls. He would disappear for days on end, too, increasing Mother’s fears that he was sleeping with other women – which he undoubtedly was. Needless to say, Mother’s initial euphoria evaporated, and bitterness and deep depression took a firm hold. Her drinking escalated still further in her attempt to stem the waves of misery that threatened to engulf her.

  I think that she must have been desperately lonely as well. Not only were we shunned by our neighbours, but Mother was at work all day, so there were few opportunities for her to have a natter over the fence, to help friendly relations along. I suppose she must have made friends among her teaching colleagues, but inviting them home was absolutely out of the question, because she never knew what state Father would be in, if he was about. And anyway, she had her own, secret addiction to service as soon as she got through the door.

  ‘I couldn’t bring anyone home who was likely to report back to school that I drank like a fish and fought like a fishwife with my husband. I would have lost my job and would never have got another in teaching. Anyway, if I brought a woman home, chances were that unless she had two heads, that lecherous bastard of a father of yours would have made a pass at her. The swine could not help himself.’

  Of course, the loud and sometimes violent domestic brawls didn’t help Mother and me to make friends either. Domestics were supposed to happen quietly behind closed doors. Yelling loud enough to wake dead Pharaohs was not the norm: muttering caustic asides between gritted teeth was the usual British way of strife. And women were meant to be ladies at all times.

  A stream of Anglo-Saxon invective pouring forth from painted lips was unheard-of, except, perhaps, among the upper classes, where it was seen as another unfortunate eccentricity due, probably, to all that inbreeding. It certainly was not supposed to happen on a respectable council housing estate in Essex. It happened a lot in our house, though, when Mother suspected Father of straying again, or when he had systematically destroyed something she had worked so hard to buy or to make. On those occasions Mother could, and did, swear as fluently as Father. This was another good reason why the local girls and their mums avoided us, in case being foul-mouthed was catching.

  ‘Anyone would think we had the damned plague,’ Mother would complain sometimes when Peter was off playing and Father had disappeared again, leaving us alone to amuse one another. Not that Mother was much of a one for playing with her children. After a hard day at school, she was pretty tired of kids, any kids, but her own in particular. Evenings and weekends were for catching up on chores and her reading and, of course, for drinking, so I was left pretty much to my own devices.

  Boys were made of tougher stuff, and they were not, for the most part, tied to apron strings in the way that girls were. It didn’t do to be too protective of boys. They had, after all, to grow into men, possibly fighting men at that. Everyone was afraid that too much feminine influence might turn them into ‘nancy boys’, and that would never do. Homophobia was rampant in those far-off days and anyway, homosexuality among males was illegal: practising gay men, or even accomplished ones, could be imprisoned. There were no such laws for lesbians, because it didn’t occur to the Victorian lawmakers that ladies, or even women, would do such a thing.

  The old double standard flourished in the tucked-up, thin-lipped, grey, miserable, austerity-ridden society of 1950s England, and my family was way, way, way out of step.

  ‘You fucking whore!’ Father’s voice jerked me out of sleep. I lay huddled under my thin, army surplus blankets in the dark and waited for the sound of smashing china and crashing furniture. They didn’t come straight away.

  ‘No, darling,’ Mother answered in a relatively reasonable, but slightly slurred voice, ‘merely a talented amateur.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Just stating the bald facts, darling, nothing more.’

  I heard a hard slap. ‘I said, what do you mean by that? Who’ve you been with?’

  ‘You bastard!’ An almighty crash, followed by the tinkling of glass. Another fight had begun.

  ‘You could’ve fucking killed me! That thing was solid pewter, you could’ve caved my head in.’

  ‘What a pity I’ve got such bloody awful aim, then. And what do you mean, “Who have I been with?” Chance would be a fine thing. While you’re off straddling your tarts I’m stuck here night after night baby-sitting your bloody kids.’

  ‘They’re your kids too.’

  ‘So they are, more’s the pity. I should have had my head examined the night I met you.’

  I stuck my fingers in my ears, squeezed my eyes shut and disappeared under my bedclothes, trying hard not to cry. I hated it when my parents argued. I don’t know how long it was, but some time during this particular row, I felt someone poke me in the side. I pushed the blankets back and opened my eyes to see Peter standing by my bed in the gloom.

  ‘You OK?’ he asked.

  I nodded, but it wasn’t true. I wasn’t OK. I was shivering and terrified, as I always was when they got tanked up and fought so furiously.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked in my turn.

  Peter also nodded. ‘Shall I tell you a story?’ he asked, and I agreed that he should, eager to shut out the misery being played out downstairs and to hear how the brave pilot, P
eter Pots, slew the Hun single-handedly over the English Channel.

  The family always called Peter ‘Pots’, a nickname he’d had since he was tiny and learning to live without nappies. Instead of asking for ‘Peter’s pot’ when he felt the call of nature, he asked for ‘Peter pots’, and from that moment on, his fate was sealed. I still think of him as ‘Pots’ and I often write a character called Potts into my books as my private memorial to him.

  We crept down the next morning to find the wind and the rain blowing through what remained of the living-room window. Further inspection showed that something had crashed into the metal frame so hard that it had snapped under the impact. We went outside and crunched across the broken glass to see what could possibly have done all that damage. It was a heavy pewter plate, with a crumpled edge that showed it must have been thrown like a discus to snap the metal window frame like it had. Father had been right: had it connected, it would have killed him.

  The inspection over, we went back inside, embarrassed by the hostile, and occasionally pitying, stares of passers-by who had also had their sleep interrupted by the furious battle in the night. Peter made us breakfast and we ate in tense silence as we waited for our parents to surface. Only Mother did, looking like death warmed up. Father had buggered off, God knew where, and had left Mother to look after his ‘bloody kids’, and to face down the curious and disapproving neighbours. We didn’t see our father for some considerable time after that. The funny thing is, I can’t remember for the life of me who looked after me during that period, it’s a complete blank, but somebody must have, because I was still too young to go to school. Perhaps it was Mother’s school holiday, and we didn’t need Father. Which is probably just as well, because it wasn’t too long after that that he left us for good.

  It must have been during this period that Peter and I were sent away on holiday to Hastings, to stay at a bed and breakfast place with our father’s much older half-brother, Will. Will usually lived in one dingy room in a sooty boarding-house in Willesden, so the Hastings trip was his summer holiday. Father was missing, and Mother wanted a break from childcare, so Uncle Will, a lifelong bachelor, obliged by offering to take us off her hands for a week or so. Will tended to hang around our little family rather a lot. It gave him a sense of belonging. Anyway, Peter and I decided that we really didn’t want to stay with him any longer.

  ‘What do you say to going home?’ Peter whispered in the dark after Will had tucked us up in bed. I nodded my agreement. I didn’t like it with Will and I didn’t like the place we were staying in much either. The landlady seemed to have nine million rules governing the behaviour of children, all of which boiled down to, ‘Thou shalt not have fun, make any noise, run about or stay in your room after nine in the morning.’ What’s more, there were no toys or books to amuse us, just Will: to us, he was an old man and, being a bachelor, he had no idea how to play with kids.

  While Will was still snoring in his bed the next morning, we quietly got dressed. When we were ready, Peter stealthily retrieved our return train tickets and a crisp, ten-bob note for food, tube and bus fares, from our uncle’s wallet and we tiptoed silently across the room and out of the door. Once on the landing, we legged it down the stairs and out on to the street. The relief of getting away from Will and that horrid, dark house so redolent of cabbage and cats’ pee was wonderful, and a feeling that I can still remember today.

  It was a bright, breezy morning and I had the fresh, clean smell of the sea in my nostrils. We walked as quickly as we could to the station, looking back all the while in case Will had woken up and was in hot pursuit. He hadn’t, and he wasn’t. Once at Hastings station we asked someone which platform we needed to get a train to Waterloo. The man told us, then looked suspicious and asked us where our mummy was.

  ‘She’s at home,’ I piped up.

  ‘Where’s home?’ the man asked.

  ‘Harold Hill,’ I told him helpfully, while Peter gave me a sharp kick in the ankle.

  ‘What are you doing here all by yourselves, then?’

  ‘We’re not by ourselves, our uncle’s with us,’ Peter told him.

  ‘I see no uncle.’

  ‘That’s because he’s waiting for us on the platform. He said we could pretend to be great explorers and that he’d wait for us on the platform,’ Peter explained. ‘Can we go now, he’ll be ever so worried?’

  ‘Yes, all right, you cut along and be quick about it, the London train’s due any minute now,’ the relieved man told us. So ‘cut along’ we did, and pretty sharpish at that. We wanted to be safely on the train in case Will woke up and found us, our tickets and his ten-bob note missing.

  We made it to Waterloo, and then had to take a tube train to Embankment, where we changed to the Circle Line to take us to Liverpool Street station. Once there, we boarded yet another train that took us to Romford and from there we caught the familiar bus home. I am astonished that we managed such a mammoth journey all by ourselves, when neither of us was tall enough to see above the ticket counter at the tube station. But manage it we did, thanks largely to my brother’s memory and impressive resourcefulness.

  We were asked several times what we were doing travelling about all on our own, and each time Peter came up with a plausible story. Sometimes he said our uncle was in the toilet and would be back soon; or he’d use the explorers again, and he’d wave his hand vaguely to indicate that our uncle was somewhere ‘over there’. He must have been convincing, because we were allowed to carry on unmolested and we made it all the way home safely.

  Mother was shaken rigid when she got in from the pub to find us calmly sitting at the kitchen table scoffing jam sandwiches that we’d made for our lunch. We’d left Hastings before we’d had a chance to get any breakfast, and although we’d bought some chocolate from a vending machine at Liverpool Street, we were still starving.

  ‘What’re you doing here?’ she demanded.

  ‘We didn’t like it there,’ Peter explained.

  ‘Why didn’t you like it there? What was wrong with it?’

  We’d rehearsed our story on the way home, so Peter was glib as he told her what a misery Will had been and how we preferred to stay at home.

  Mother sighed heavily. ‘And what about me? Did it occur to either of you that I might like a little time on my own?’ She didn’t wait for a reply but answered her own question, ‘No, of course it didn’t, you selfish little sods. So where’s Will now?’

  ‘We left him there.’

  ‘I beg your pardon? What do you mean, you “left him there”? Where did you leave him?’

  ‘In bed at that house, the one that smelt of cats’ pee, cabbage and rotten old socks,’ Peter explained carefully. We had agreed not to mention that Will scared us when we were left alone with him. We simply did not have all the words to explain, and anyway, we were afraid that our father might kill him if he knew how weird Will was. We didn’t want our father hanged for murder, and we didn’t want to push our mother further off the rails. To be honest, I don’t think we’d reasoned it all out as clearly as that. We simply knew that trouble was best kept to ourselves, and that some secrets were best kept away from our emotionally fragile and volatile grown-ups. To this day, I have blanked out exactly what Will did to us to make us so afraid of him, and perhaps, in a way, that is best. I only know that when he eventually died, it was a huge relief to both Peter and myself, and we were not even remotely sorry to see the back of him for ever.

  ‘Does he know that you’ve buggered off?’

  We both shook our heads but kept our lips buttoned. It was obvious that Mother was getting cross and we didn’t want to get into even more hot water when we were already up to our necks in it.

  We were saved by the bell, because at that moment the telephone rang. It was Will asking if Mother had heard from us or the police at all, because he’d misplaced us somehow.

  ‘Don’t worry, the little sods have turned up here,’ she told him.

  Peter and I looked at one anoth
er, utterly relieved to be back. Even though home was rocky at best, at least it was familiar. We knew the rules, and we knew how to survive there.

  When Peter died – more than a dozen years ago now – I was devastated. I still miss him, but to be honest, I suppose I love and miss the boy he was when we were young, because I never really knew him as a man, or even as a teenager. Peter was sent away to a public school when I was nine, and in a sense, I lost him then. He married very young and emigrated to Canada – largely to get away from the family, I’m sure.

  I still have my treasured memories of him walking me to and from school or puffing out his little chest and taking on anyone he caught bullying me. I shall always remember the comfort that he brought on nights when the fights downstairs woke us up and either I crept into his room, or he into mine, and he’d tell me stories. My favourites were about the bloodstream, when the white cells rushed to defend the body against invaders and huge battles ensued. In those stories, the white cells always won, and nobody ever died – except the invaders of course, and they didn’t count.

  I started writing my novels when Peter was dying, in order, I think, to nail down the few, short years that we spent together. Although I was unaware of it when I was writing, I realize now that the character Luigi is, to young Rosie, what Peter was to me. My brother Pots was, when we were children, my brave protector, my best, and sometimes only, friend, my hero and my witness.

  In reality, I lost my brother fifty years ago when he went away to school, and again when he married and emigrated to Canada, but when he died, I knew, once and for all, that he was gone for ever. I love and miss him more than I can say.

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