by Pip Granger
‘And what’s this I hear about you not mixing with the other children?’ Mother continued. ‘You’re not supposed to skulk in corners, keeping out of everyone’s way. How in God’s name are you ever going to make any friends if all you want to do is hide?’ I don’t know what my father thought of my failure to shine. Perhaps he didn’t know what a clod I had turned out to be, or now that he had his new ‘tramp’, perhaps he simply didn’t care. I was a bit confused about the ‘tramp’ bit. The tramps I saw sleeping in Soho’s doorways, walking the country lanes, or begging for food or copper coins in Romford’s market, were scruffy, unshaven men in tatty army (or sometimes navy or air force) greatcoats. Perhaps my father had turned into a tramp as well. It was an awful thought, because I hated the idea of him having to beg for food, or being cold and wet if he was forced to sleep rough on winter nights like the other tramps did.
Perhaps it was because of the embarrassment I was causing her by my academic failure, but Mother left that school at the end of my first year there and took up a post a good few miles away. It was then that Peter became my escort and we became latch-key kids. I can still remember the cold, empty feeling the house always had until Mother got home, lit the fires and made tea. I was always so afraid that she wouldn’t turn up, especially if she was late.
‘Mummy, Mummy, look what I did at school today!’ I would yell, waving my painting at her as she came through the door at the end of a long, hard day. I had got a lovely blue star for my picture and I was very proud. It was the first star I had ever got for anything, and I was hoping against hope that Mother would be pleased with me. She often mentioned my failure to inherit the family brains; perhaps my modest success would change her opinion of me, if only a little bit.
‘How many times have I told you to go and play and to leave me alone for at least an hour after school?’ Mother asked wearily, a warning edge creeping into her voice. A great lump of desolation settled in my stomach. She wasn’t interested in any answers, or my picture, or my wonderful blue star.
‘I’ve been listening to kids’ voices and looking at pictures all bloody day, and what I’d like now is one whole hour of peace and quiet to read my newspaper, do my crossword and drink my coffee in peace and quiet.’ She paused and drew a long breath, closing her eyes as if in supplication to a deity that she didn’t believe in. ‘Is that too much to ask?’ I slunk away, still clutching my picture. My happy triumph had evaporated.
It always felt as if it was my fault that Mother did not have the solitude she so craved at times. It seemed to be my fault that I had somehow been bypassed by ‘the family brains’, as if I’d wilfully been standing behind the door when they were handed out. I also thought it was my fault that Father had gone and left us so broken-hearted. I don’t know why I felt like that, but I did, and the feeling grew and grew as the miserable months after his departure dragged on. I was convinced that absolutely everything that went wrong was my fault, and that my mother heartily disliked me for it.
I tried hard to be a good girl, so that she would be able to love me, but it was no use; I was stupid, I was whiney, I was always ill and I was a dreadful disappointment to her. As long day followed long day, I became certain that her dislike of me would eventually spill over into genuine hatred; that it would overwhelm her and that, in the end, she would be driven to kill me.
At first, I thought she would stab me with the wicked carving knife she had thrown at Father the night when he left us. The fear was so great that I could only sleep facing my door, in case she crept up on me in the night and plunged the knife deep into my back. The habit became so entrenched that it was several decades before I could either sleep or sit with my back to a door, and I’m not keen on it even now.
Then I thought that if she couldn’t catch me all unaware with her knife, she might use poison. Mealtimes became a nightmare, as I expected to die in agony every time I ate. Looking back on those years now, my fear seems scarcely credible, but at the time I truly, truly believed that I was about to be murdered by my own mother. She had, after all, tried to kill my father more than once when booze, rage and jealousy had driven her to violence, and she had loved him deeply. What would she do to me, a child she couldn’t seem to love, if I annoyed or disappointed her enough?
After a few months, Mother’s pain and anger had subsided enough for her to decide to allow Peter and me to visit our father at his flat in Soho, his and my old stamping ground. This relaxation of the embargo was, I’m sure, partly due to the realization that she’d get the odd weekend to herself if she changed her mind, but was mainly due to the fact that, when she eventually calmed down, she appreciated that, for all his many faults, he was our father, and that we loved him dearly and, in his own peculiar fashion, he loved us dearly too.
‘It’s not your fault that your father’s a swine and he left you when he left me, and that must have hurt you deeply,’ she explained when she broke the news to us that we were going to visit him. ‘But the old bugger does love you, you know, and he misses you dreadfully.’ She grinned a wide grin before adding, ‘And you never know, you may even find out what happened to Abominable, the snowkids and the evil Crepuscular twins. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ As one, we agreed that we would.
The first time we went to visit Father in Soho, it felt as if I was coming home at last. Although Peter was also excited, he didn’t have quite the same relationship with Soho and its people as I did, because he hadn’t spent anything like as much time there as I had. I loved being greeted by name by some of the shopkeepers, having my cheek pinched gently and being told, ‘I ’ave missed you, cara mia, so good to see you once again. ’Ave some sugared almonds, do. And your ’andsome brother, ’e must ’ave some too.’
‘Daddy, Daddy!’ I screamed at the top of my lungs as I spotted him limping down the street to meet us. I let go of Mother’s hand and tore along as if I was a low-flying, half-crown rocket on Guy Fawkes Night. I collided with him with such a thump, I almost knocked him off his feet, and clung to his legs so tightly that any movement was impossible for several moments. Peter and Mother had to bring up the rear and wait while Father laughingly disentangled my skinny arms and hoisted me up on his shoulders.
‘Hello, Porky Fat Belle,’ he chuckled. ‘Hello Pots, and hello Joan.’
There were some awkward minutes while our parents negotiated when and where they would meet again, to hand Peter and me back into the care of our mother, and then Father said, ‘Let’s go, there’s someone who is dying to meet you.’
‘If only that were true,’ Mother smiled sweetly; ‘the “dying” bit, I mean. Right, you two, I’ll see you tomorrow. Give us a kiss.’
It hadn’t occurred to me that I was going to meet the woman who was to become my stepmother. I’ll call her Gabrielle, or Gaby for short, although it wasn’t her name. I hadn’t really thought much beyond seeing my daddy again: that had been enough for me. We met her in a café where she was sitting at a table in the window, looking as nervous as I felt. I was struck dumb by the exotic-looking woman before me. She was very thin, with dark skin and very long dark brown hair, plaited into a single, fat braid that snaked down her back and brushed her bum. When it was loose, I was to discover later, she could sit on it.
If I was rendered speechless by the sight of this strange woman, Peter was not. His large, blue eyes bored into Father’s lover as he said, ‘So, you’re the one that stole our father.’ He was nine, and so very grown-up, and what’s more, I thought he was incredibly brave. ‘When I grow up,’ he went on, ‘I will never leave my children.’ And sure enough, he never did.
I can’t remember much about that first meeting, except that Peter and I never did hear what became of Abominable, the snowkids and the evil Crepusculars. I did discover that Gaby barely spoke English, and that she had moved into Father’s little attic flat in Old Compton Street, and worse, that she had no intention of doing the decent thing and moving out again. I also sensed, but didn’t have the words to express it, that n
ot only had she taken my daddy away from me, but that I was never really going to get him back, and that I would have to work hard at being a good girl if she was ever going to allow me to share him – even a little bit.
8
No Passport to Pimlico
It was a miserable, wet, cold Saturday morning, and we’d schlepped all the way into Romford on the bus. We’d shivered and queued for a month or so at the bus stop, and then again in the post office, and Mother was gnashing her teeth in frustration.
I expect I was whining; I often was, apparently. I was not a happy child. There wasn’t much in the way of skipping and dancing about from me, not when my mother was already cross. Fidgeting only made her crosser, and I always would end up being directly in the line of her fire, even if it was Peter doing the fidgeting – or so it seemed to me.
Of course, I realize now just how hard this time must have been for all three main parties in the triangle, but at the time the only person I could see was my mother. She had lost her husband to a younger woman, with all the heartache and hardship that that entailed. She was frowned on by society for being different. And she was an alcoholic single parent in a day and age when women automatically earned less than men who were doing exactly the same job. The excuse was that men had families to keep, but as Mother said, ‘What the hell do they think I’m doing?’
The unfairness of life made her feel intensely bitter and, looking back, I can understand why. The problem is that bitterness is corrosive and it is very hard to live with. Bitterness overflows on to innocent bystanders, who just happen to be in its way. And in our house, those innocent bystanders were invariably Peter and me.
That Saturday sort of summed it up, really. The weather was awful, the waits were endless, Mother was probably dying for a drink, I was whingeing as usual and the post office clerk was being obstructive and officious – simply because he could. He had the power, and we had none. And nothing, but nothing, was more guaranteed to cheese off my mother than men with power over her. She had a low opinion of men generally, Father had seen to that, and officious swines who got between her and her money were the absolute dregs. We had been collecting our maintenance at Romford post office ever since Father had left us, and the payments were fairly regular, although they stuttered a bit on occasions and arrived either late or not at all. Most of the staff had come to know us quite well, but that Saturday there was a strange face behind the counter.
‘Identification?’ the new clerk asked.
Mother rummaged in her handbag and found an electricity bill and a rent book in her name and slapped them down on the counter.
‘These won’t do,’ the clerk told her with enormous satisfaction as he pushed them back over the counter with one finger.
‘They’ve got my name and address on them.’
‘Yes, but they could be anybody’s.’
‘Why would I have someone else’s rent book and electricity bill in my handbag?’
I could hear that the question was being forced through tight lips, and I felt the strange sensation run down my spine that I felt whenever I was around when either of my parents lost their temper. It was like a shiver running through water; it’s the only way I can describe it. It came and went in a flash, but I always felt it and I was always afraid. The fact that I didn’t know what I was afraid of made it worse, somehow. It was all too easy to imagine my brains, such as they were, spread out on the floor, or a knife sticking out of my bony chest.
Having spotted the look in Mother’s eye, the clerk wavered. Just for an instant, he seemed a little uncertain of his ground. Then, stupidly in my opinion, he stiffened with a new resolve. ‘You could have stolen the handbag. How do I know that it’s yours?’ he asked.
Mother’s teeth were now clamped so tightly together that her words had to hiss through them. ‘How do you suggest I go about proving that the handbag is mine?’
‘How about a passport? Have you a passport?’ The clerk’s face was aglow with triumph.
That did it! The clerk had pushed the ‘Blast off’ button, and Mother promptly let rip.
‘I came into Romford on a bloody double-decker bus in the pouring rain. Where did you think I was going that I would need a passport? Fucking Pimlico?’
Several people in the queue that had rapidly formed behind us and was now steaming gently tittered nervously, despite Mother’s foul language. ‘That’s right, you tell ‘im, love,’ someone muttered in encouragement. Virtually every one of them would have seen and enjoyed Passport to Pimlico at their local Odeon not so very long before, and they quite enjoyed seeing the cocky little clerk turn a deep shade of beetroot. Besides, his red-hot face was just about the only heating to be had in the entire building. Luckily for the clerk, his superior, an old hand with awkward types like my mother, stepped in and dealt swiftly with the problem by hastily handing over our money. Next thing we knew, we had been hustled politely and safely out of the building and on to the grey, glistening wet pavement. Clutching my mother’s hand, I heaved a sigh of qualified relief. I had avoided being the focus of her terrifying rage this time, but the clerk had lit Mother’s blue touchpaper and she was still fizzing. I felt that she was just looking for a place to go off, and I was mortally afraid I’d be caught in the explosion.
The next stop was my ballet class. It was held in a freezing cold hall situated behind a sooty Victorian church; more of a chapel, really. It was a squat and ugly thing. If that church had been a person it would have had no neck, a great many warts and knuckles that dragged along the ground. To reach the hall, we had to walk down a narrow pathway bordered by an unkempt privet hedge on one side and untidy rows of graves on the other. In winter, the privet dripped rain or snow down the necks of many a budding ballerina and made the path treacherously slimy and slippery underfoot. The graves would look even more sombre and forlorn in the low, grey light. In summer, the privet flowered like fury, and its cloying smell choked the air and made me feel nauseous. But the graves looked less sad in the bright sunshine, which was something.
I wasn’t a regular attender at ballet classes, but sometimes it was handy for Mother to have somewhere to park me while she zipped around and did some food shopping without me to slow her up. If she took me with her, I tended to drag a bit, either because I was interested in the hustle and bustle around me, or because I was grizzling for some wonderful thing that I had seen but could not have. I yearned for a yo-yo decorated in bright primary colours, just like the ones the big boys had at school. Or I fancied a lovely blue tin whistle, so that I could learn to play it like the scruffy, one-legged man who entertained the queues outside the Odeon on Saturday afternoons and evenings. Besides, if I was tagging along, there was no question of getting the shopping done fast enough for Mother to have time to enjoy a jar or five at the Red Lion before meeting up with me once again.
Peter was usually off doing his own thing with his friends, and was no problem on Saturdays. The trouble was, he wasn’t even the tiniest bit interested in having his pesky little sister dragging along behind him: he had enough of that during the week when he had to take me to and from school. Therefore, if we had the three bob to spare, which wasn’t always, I was dropped off at ballet and had to lump it.
The erratic nature of my attendance at classes meant that my progress in dancing was indiscernible to the naked eye. I went for quite a while, on and off, but acquired neither good posture, nor grace, nor a promising ballet career. It never seemed to occur to any of us to try me at tap, the usual alternative for girls who did not get on with ballet.
Once the path had been safely negotiated, we pitched up at the hall, although ‘hall’ is a bit grand for what was, in fact, a kind of giant shed. A very elderly benefactor had offered the necessary cash and the hall had been thrown up in some haste, before the old fellow died and his heirs withdrew his offer. It cowered there, damp, under-heated, in perpetual shade, unloved and bullied by the church, which hulked over it. A rather tatty notice pinned inside the porch informed
us when the Boys’ and Girls’ Brigades met, and that the local Drama Club took the place for regular rehearsals and meetings, as did the Mothers’ Union and a host of other societies, clubs and unions: the list went on and on. The Academy of Dance booked the hall for the whole of Saturday, with ballet in the morning and tap in the afternoon.
On Saturdays, come rain, less rain, smog, snow, sleet, or even shine, that old hall shook to its rafters every time twenty or thirty little feet landed, roughly in unison, on its battle-scarred floorboards. On the occasions when I was there, I always feared that it would collapse around our ears at every landing. But it didn’t. Rattling the windows over in one corner, as she pounded an ancient upright piano, was a little old lady dressed from neck to ankle in grubby white lace, like an ancient bride. The only visible colour in her ensemble was provided by the previous week’s menus, which wound up decorating her flat chest. A smear of egg here, a drop of mutton stew there, the odd dab of tomato ketchup, and perhaps a lick of bright yellow mustard, all added to the culinary picture splattered across her bosom. Sometimes, when I was very bored, I would try to work out from the evidence exactly what she’d eaten since last I had seen her.
‘Oh well done, Penelope, I hardly saw that wobble at all,’ our dance mistress called. ‘Madame’ was a tall, strong young woman, not fat at all, although her bones were sturdy and solid. At dance classes, she dressed in a variety of homemade, shapeless, knee-length creations, a bit like sacks, which she wore cinched in at the waist with a wide, black elasticated belt. For the morning sessions, she sported an ancient pair of well-used and rather tatty ballet shoes, and in the afternoons they were swapped for tap-dancing shoes in a similar condition.
‘Oh, that’s splendid, er, yes, you at the back in the nice red woolly. It would’ve been absolutely perfect if you hadn’t kicked Carol.
‘How are you, Carol dear? Do you think you’ll be able to walk again? Eventually perhaps … ?