by Pip Granger
Heartbreak House
The first inkling I had that something was terribly wrong was a heart-rending cry in the night. The scream had a primal quality that had me sitting bolt upright in bed even before I knew that I was awake. The hairs on the back of my neck and the ones on my arms all stood to attention as the howl of misery came again. I was too afraid to investigate, and sat rigidly to attention, waiting for the animal that had made those awful noises to come and gobble me up.
What I heard next was much more familiar: it was the sound of breaking glass as something hit the wall downstairs. Then came Mother’s voice, loud and furious. ‘What makes this one different from all the other whores you’ve spent all our money on?’
Father’s voice rumbled in reply. ‘Calm down, you’ll wake the kids.’ I think that that was more scary than the screaming. Screaming I was used to, but the sweet voice of reason, especially issuing from my father’s lips, was rare indeed. It meant that whatever was going on between them was serious, very serious.
Peter arrived silently, torch in hand, and asked in a whisper if I was all right. I nodded and we waited for the drama downstairs to be played out.
‘Get out, just get out!’ Mother screamed so loudly that I was sure the Eskimos in Alaska would start packing up their igloos immediately, eager to obey.
‘I can’t leave you like this,’ Father answered, with more than a trace of worry in his voice, ‘and I can’t leave the kids with you in this state either. For Christ’s sake, pull yourself together.’
‘Pull myself together?’ Mother gasped. ‘Pull myself to-bloody-gether! You bastard. Why should I pull myself together so that you can feel better, you pox-ridden prick? Brace yourself for some bad news, Doug – I DON’T GIVE A DAMN HOW YOU FEEL! I don’t care if you rot in hell for ever. In fact, the sooner you take yourself there, with that syphilitic hag you’ve dug up from God knows what tenth-rate brothel, the better. Meanwhile, until then bugger off – just BUGGER OFF!’
‘Put the knife down, Joan, or I’ll have to take it away and I may have to hurt you,’ Father warned.
‘Then you’d better do just that, hadn’t you? Because if you don’t, I’ll kill you. I swear I’ll kill you, and then I’ll hunt down your latest tramp and I’ll kill her as well.’
Father’s voice was surprisingly gentle. ‘No you won’t, Joan, you don’t have it in you. But you must calm down, you’ll wake the kids.’ Little did he know that they’d already woken virtually everyone north of the Equator, and one or two million souls south of it as well.
Something hit a door with an ominous thud.
‘Bloody hell!’ Father roared, all patience and understanding gone. ‘You could have killed me with that. You just missed me by inches.’
‘PITY!’ Mother screamed, and we heard a tremendous clatter as she yanked at what sounded like the cutlery drawer, presumably looking for another suitable weapon. It flew out of the dresser and crashed to the floor, scattering knives, forks and spoons all over the kitchen lino. ‘Now, I told you to get out. If you don’t go, right now this minute, this one will be aimed lower down and with luck and decent aim, you’ll be singing castrato. How will your tart like that, eh?’
There were the scuffling sounds of a brief struggle, then silence for a good few minutes. Peter and I looked at each other, eyes like radar dishes, then in silent agreement we crept to the top of the stairs in an attempt to make sure that neither of them was lying dead in a pool of blood. We could see nothing, so Peter put his finger to his lips and mouthed at me to stay put. He was going to do a recce to see what was what. I nodded, too frightened to move from my spot deep in shadow. Peter tiptoed down the stairs to the dark hallway and along the passage towards the back of the house and the kitchen, where all the noise had been coming from. Before he could reach a point where he could see into the room, there was a hailstorm of cups, saucers, plates and glasses, and he was forced to beat a hasty retreat to the top of the stairs once more.
We waited. With the contents of the china cupboard exhausted, saucepans and frying pans followed. An enamel colander hit the front door, bounced and landed on the Welcome mat. This was followed by the kettle, still full of boiling water.
‘You’re insane, do you know that?’ Father yelled as he retreated under the bombardment. ‘I could be scarred for life, you maniac.’
‘Good! It would serve you right. And if I’m mad, guess who drove me to it? I wish I had never clapped eyes on you, let alone any other part of my anatomy. I really must have been mad. Look what you’ve brought me to, two brats and no hope of escape now. Just get out. Go to your whore and don’t ever come back, do you hear me? NOT EVER!’
‘Right! I’ll do just that! And for the record, she’s better between the sheets than you ever were, you middle-class nutcase.’
‘OUT!’ Mother roared, shattering eardrums in Outer Mongolia. ‘I should have known better than to take up with a low-life, lower orders guttersnipe like you. My father said no good would come of it, and he was right. No bloody good has come of it. Life with you has been worse than my worst nightmares. Get out, you useless prick, just get out and stay out.’
We saw Father storm down the hall to the front door and yank it open so hard we thought it would have to come right off its hinges, but it held, just. Mother was close behind him with the carving knife that she had retrieved from the kitchen door.
Father hesitated just long enough to see the wicked blade, and decided it really was time to go, and fast, with no pithy parting shot. He stumbled slightly and just made it through the door before the knife whistled past his head and sailed out into the dark night to land with a clatter on the concrete path.
Mother slammed the front door behind our father so hard that we heard it rattle the windows in our bedrooms.
Peter and I scuttled hastily back to my room. We heard the engine of Father’s car throb into life outside, and looked out of the window just in time to see it draw away from the kerb. I could have sworn that there was someone in the passenger seat, and I thought for a moment that Mother had gone with him, leaving us all alone in the night. But she hadn’t. Once all was quiet once again, she began to sob as if her heart was breaking. I suppose that it was.
Peter and I looked at one another, wondering what to do. We weren’t used to crying; yells and curses, yes, but not those sobs. We went carefully down the stairs and stood for a moment in the doorway of the kitchen, taking in the scene. The littered floor glittered with cutlery, broken china, glass and dented saucepans. There was a large gash in the door, where the carving knife had sliced deep into the wood. And there our mother sat, a picture of abject misery, with her head in her hands, her shoulders heaving as each gut-wrenching sob was torn from her.
Without a word, we crossed the room – negotiating the wreckage carefully, so as not to cut our bare feet – and then stood each side of the hunched shape and rested a hand comfortingly on her shoulders. How long we stood like that before she noticed us, I couldn’t say, but it felt like hours.
Eventually, the heaving slackened off a bit and she dropped her hands to reveal a tear-soaked, snot-sodden, stricken face, eyes red with weeping and filled with a pain that was almost too terrible to witness.
An arm went around each of our waists and she held us so close to her that I could smell the warm scent of Wright’s Coal Tar Soap, Pond’s Face Cream and the Yardley’s powder that she always used to take the shine off her nose. It was my mother’s own special smell, the one that clung to her old green jumper that I took to bed with me most nights after that terrible night, and held close to my nose, so that I could get to sleep.
It was to be the first of many nights that we were awakened by the haunting sound of our mother’s crying. Father had left us, all of us, and he was never to come back to live with us again.
PART TWO
Hard Knocks
7
The Family Brains
‘How was school today?’ Mother asked wearily, though I knew she wasn’t re
ally interested.
Father had only been gone a week, and we were still reeling from the shock.
Actually Mother had a pretty shrewd idea what my very first day at school had been like, because she was the one who had had the unenviable task of getting me there. What’s more, I knew that my teacher had told her everything when she came to get me at going-home time. I really, really had not wanted to go to school that morning, despite her and Peter’s efforts to make it sound like a jolly good thing to do.
‘I don’t want to go to school,’ I had screamed, as she forced my reluctant arms into a blazer so big that I was certain it would go once round me and twice round the gasworks. I hated that blazer because it reached down to my knees, and I looked as if I had no hands at all. Worse, it was scruffy and buttoned up on the boy’s side – it had been my brother’s blazer before being handed down to me.
‘I want my daddy!’ I screamed even louder. ‘I want to go out with Daddy. I want to go flying. I don’t want to go to school.’
‘Well you can’t,’ Mother snapped. I remember her face – so white and strained; she must have been close to breaking point. ‘You can’t go with Daddy, because he’s not here, is he? Now get a move on, or I’ll give you something to cry about.’ It was the first day of the new school year, and lateness was not an option for either teachers or pupils, but particularly not for teachers.
For once, my terror and misery overcame my fear of upsetting my already deeply distressed mother. I dragged my heels at every step of the journey and once we were at school, I had hysterics. I screamed, I blubbed, I threw myself on the floor and refused to get up again.
All I would say – or, rather, scream – was, ‘I want my daddy. I want my daddy. I want my daddy,’ over and over and over again.
Miss Thomas, the teacher who taught the Infants’ reception class, had an interesting, sing-song kind of a voice. I stopped screaming just long enough to listen to what she said to my poor, unhappy mother.
‘Don’t you worry, Joan.’ Miss Thomas’s voice was soothing. ‘It’s not unusual for them to be upset at being left on their first day. You cut along now, I’ll look after her, I’m used to this kind of performance. You get yourself going, or you’ll be in trouble with Miss Clayton, and that won’t do at all.’
In the end, Miss Thomas persuaded Mother to leave me with her. It was, after all, true that Mother had her own duties to attend to over in the Juniors, where she taught one of the third-year classes.
Relieved to be getting away from her screaming child, Mother left me and hurried off to her own classroom. That wasn’t the end of it, though, not by a long chalk. Sure enough, my tantrum stopped almost as soon as she was no longer there to witness it, but I wasn’t finished with being a nuisance.
The first that Miss Thomas knew I had gone AWOL was when a policeman appeared in her classroom, with me at the end of one arm.
‘I was passing on me bike when this little tyke shot out of the school gate and crashed straight into me,’ he told her sternly, holding me firmly by the hand. ‘Just as well I wasn’t a car. As it is, I bent me wheel in the collision. I think she’s all right; a bit shaken up, maybe the odd bruise, but nothing’s broken and there’s no blood anywhere but on her insides, where it belongs.’
Miss Thomas thanked the policeman profusely. Once he was gone, she turned to me. ‘Where did you think you were going?’ she asked me gently.
A tear rolled down my cheek. ‘I want my daddy,’ I told her. What I wasn’t able to tell her, because I didn’t have the words to explain, was that I had also wanted to make sure that my mother and my brother had not disappeared as my father had done.
We had been let out into a little yard to play under the supervision of a lady called Mrs Blundell. It had been very easy to give Mrs Blundell the slip – all I had to do was wait until her back was turned before I darted back into the building. My first thought had been to track Mother and Peter down. The trouble was, it was a new school year, so Peter was no longer in his old classroom, and neither was my mother in hers.
I wandered the long corridor for ages and ages, but I could not find either of them. The corridor was gloomy, and it stank of school dinners and something that I associated with having a tooth out at the dentist’s. I hated going to the dentist’s. It took me a while to realize that the awful pong came from chairs stored in stacks in the school hall. They had rubber feet to stop them slipping and scratching the glossy, parquet floor, and the gas mask at the dentist’s was made of the same, stinky old rubber.
I was too short to peer through the windows in the closed classroom doors, and too afraid of being told off to open them. In the end, I gave it up and decided to make my way home to see if anyone was there. I knew in my heart that no one would be, but I needed to check just the same.
It was to be a feature of my first months at school that, at some point during the day, I would make a break for it and appear like a lost soul in the doorway of Peter’s classroom, and then in the doorway of Mother’s. I knew it was naughty; I knew it got on everyone’s nerves – but I couldn’t help it. Every school-day I would be overwhelmed by the terrible thought that they had gone away and left me behind. I simply had to check to make sure that they were still there.
In the end, Miss Thomas had the bright idea of making it official: I was escorted to Mother’s and Peter’s classrooms by Mrs Blundell and, reassured, would go back to where I belonged. This went on for some time – until the headmistress got wind of it.
‘If you let her get away with this,’ Miss Clayton harrumphed, ‘they’ll all be wanting to see where their mothers are. She is the daughter of a member of staff, so all this special treatment smacks of favouritism. It must stop. The little madam can just get used to school, as everyone else has to do.’
After Miss Clayton’s interference, Miss Thomas made a point of keeping me close to her desk, so that I couldn’t leg it. However, kind Mrs Blundell would seek me out at playtime or lunchtime. ‘Your mother and brother are still here, little one, so don’t worry that curly little head of yours,’ she’d whisper, and I could relax once again.
I tried, I really did, but I simply could not settle down at school. I was always staring up at the sky, hoping against hope that my daddy would swoop down in his Tiger Moth and whisk me away. I missed him so much that it hurt like a toothache. It nagged in the background a lot of the time, but would stab me with an agonizing pain when the sound of someone’s laugh, or of uneven footsteps, reminded me that he was not there. For a while, his old Harris tweed jacket hung forgotten in the hall cupboard, and when I held it to my nose I could smell the mingled scents of peat-smoked tweed, his tobacco and his shaving soap, and it was as if he was holding me close once again. Then I opened my eyes, and it was just his empty old jacket; misery and loneliness would fill me up until I thought that I must surely die of it. After a time, even his smell faded from the jacket, and then, one day, it disappeared altogether, in much the same way that he had done.
Apart from his smell, I had the memory of our days tramping around Soho together and our trips in the Tiger Moth always in my mind. I missed Father’s stories the most, especially the bedtime serial that Peter and I had shared, ‘The Adventures of the Abominable Snowman’.
Story time always began the same way. ‘Where were we yesterday?’ Father would ask.
‘Snurg, the evil scientist was just about to clout Abominable over the head with an ice-pick and spread his icicle brains all over the place when Mrs Snowman, Pots and the Pippin Sist [one of Father’s nicknames for me; the other was Porky Fat Belle], the intrepid Snowkids, rolled a huge snowball down the mountain, starting an avalanche that smothered Snurg, but was just like a nice cool, refreshing shower for Abominable,’ Peter and I would tell him, eager to hear what happened next.
Father would nod, as if we’d just passed some sort of test (now, of course, I realize that he was making it up as he went along, and had no idea what he said the day before), then launch into the next instalm
ent. ‘Snurg, the evil scientist may have been buried beneath tons of sodden, soft snow, but Abominable still had to find his secret laboratory before it was too late. Snurg’s malicious minions, the Crepuscular twins, Cringe and Crud, were still working hard on the plan to create a match the size of two Eiffel Towers, laid end to end, a match so mighty that it would burn for a dozen days and a dozen nights and melt the valley of the snowfolk clean away …’
Our magic half-hour in the world of snowpeople and malicious minions would always end with the same, ritual words. ‘And what do you think happened then?’ Father would ask.
As one, Peter and I would wail, ‘Oh no, not tomorrow, Daddy.’
But ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow,’ Father would inevitably say. Now that he had gone, though, there was no bedtime story ‘tomorrow’, or on any other day. Sadly, as I lay in my bed, I wondered if Peter and I would ever hear what happened to Abominable, his family and the Crepuscular twins in the end.
Of course, my inattention at school meant that I did not seem to learn much, the way the other children seemed to do. I was proving to be a serious disappointment to my mother. ‘What a pity you didn’t inherit the family brains,’ she sighed when she had finished her meeting with Miss Thomas at the end of my first year. The news had been broken to her that I had made little progress in the three Rs; that I was unable to read, write or do arithmetic to any acceptable standard. It was official: I was the class dunce.
My apparent lack of brilliance was a great blow to my poor mother, because she came from a family that prided itself on its advanced intelligence. They were high-flyers – or at least, most of them were. One of my great uncles was the editor of The Times Literary Supplement and the author of a well-respected English textbook, as well as several novels, and another was the Mayor of Bromley. Two of their sisters were headmistresses, and the rest of that side of the family were teachers. On Grandfather’s side, they were all Methodist ministers.