Alone

by Pip Granger

  ‘You know Mrs Nichols? The thin-faced woman with the poodles? Turns out she has a previous husband – not Mr Nichols – living just around the corner. And two older children.’

  Tony seemed not to hear as he continued to watch the couple – a small, dark-haired nurse and a tall, thin man in a check dressing gown – as they paused at the second hut in the row of four. The nurse knocked on the door, opened it after a very brief pause and guided her charge through it. A moment later, the nurse came out alone. She stood for a moment, scanning the grounds. Tony stopped rubbing his cheek, abruptly got to his feet and waved to the nurse. She waved back and began the trek across the lawn to our picnic site beneath the tree on the grassy knoll.

  ‘Hello, Tony,’ the nurse puffed as she reached us.

  ‘Hello, Anne,’ Tony replied, all vagueness gone as he smiled widely. ‘May I introduce my sister, Joan, and her daughter.’ He turned to my mother. ‘Joan, this is Anne. I wrote to you about her.’

  ‘So you did.’ Mother smiled at Anne and stuck out her hand to shake her small, neat mitt. Formalities over, she asked if she’d like a sandwich and a little cake.

  ‘I’d love to. It’ll be half an hour at least before Miles finishes his session with Dr Armstrong.’ There was a small, rather awkward pause. ‘Isn’t it the most splendid day? It’s so warm for spring.’

  Mother and Tony agreed that it was, and I kept my mouth shut. Nobody was talking to me, anyway, not really, so I was free to watch and listen. I could tell that Uncle Tony was smitten with Anne, so I concentrated on her at first. She was petite, short and slender, which made Tony’s six foot seem enormous beside her. Her dark hair curled a little under her crisp, white nurse’s cap and she had soft, brown eyes the colour of melted dark chocolate. Her skin was very pale, almost translucent, and she had a few freckles scattered across her nose. As the three grown-ups chatted, it became obvious to me that Anne was equally smitten with Uncle Tony. Their eyes lingered on each other just a little too long and each agreed with everything the other said.

  Mother, in her turn, was being very polite, and she wasn’t sarcastic once. She obviously knew something that I didn’t: that Anne was special to my Uncle Tony, and we all had to try hard to impress her.

  I made sure that I ate daintily, didn’t speak with my mouth full of shrimp paste sandwich, didn’t slurp my orange squash and only spoke when I was spoken to – which wasn’t very often. Once we’d dispensed with how pretty my name was and how I was doing at school, I was more or less done with.

  ‘Have you been nursing long?’ my mother asked. ‘And do you enjoy your work?’

  ‘I’ve been fully qualified for a year and, yes, I do enjoy my work. I understand that you are a teacher, Mrs … er … Joan? Well, nursing’s like that, a vocation.’

  ‘Anne’s father is a vicar,’ Tony volunteered. There was a bit of a glint in his eye, which he directed towards his sister. I wondered if he was warning my mother to keep her views on vicars and vocations to herself.

  ‘Is that so?’ Mother asked mildly and made no further comment on the subject. I heaved a sigh of relief. I didn’t want anything to embarrass the nice nurse, or my nervous uncle.

  ‘I wonder how long this lovely weather will last?’ Mother continued. ‘It is so difficult to know what to wear, jumpers or blouses.’

  Anne agreed. ‘Having a uniform helps. At least I don’t have to think about it while I’m working. Which reminds me, I had better go and be ready to retrieve Miles. His session will be over at any moment. Thank you so much for the sandwich, Joan. It was lovely to meet you. Tony talks about you a lot.’

  ‘It’s been a pleasure, Anne,’ Mother, the perfect hostess, assured Tony’s lady friend, for I was sure that that was what she was, as well as being one of his nurses.

  Tony’s eyes followed Anne back across the turf to the door of the hut and again as she escorted Miles back to the main building. ‘What do you think of her?’ he asked his sister anxiously. His hand rose to his cheek once again.

  ‘She seems very nice. It’s hard to tell much more than that after such a little time. But she does seem very nice.’

  ‘She is,’ was all Uncle Tony said. But he managed to make it sound really deep and meaningful.

  After another hour or so, the afternoon sun lost some of its heat and we decided it was time for us to take our leave of Uncle Tony and brave the long trek home. We collected up our picnic gear and stowed it away in the oilskin bag. Back in the main building, the air was heavy with the institutional smell of disinfectant, floor polish and boiled cabbage, and our footsteps sounded loud on the shabby, but highly polished, dark green lino. I could hear someone crying in the distance, and we passed a few people who shuffled aimlessly in and out of rooms, their expressions blank.

  No one spoke to us as we made our way through the seemingly endless institutional corridors. We had to see Uncle Tony safely signed in again, and then get to the main door and the bus stop just outside. As we were negotiating a long corridor, I noticed that one of the many doors that lined each side was ajar. I wondered if it was a door to one of the barred rooms I had noticed on our way in, so I peeked in as we walked past. The barred window was high up and mean. Very little light penetrated the small room, but there was enough for me to see that it was completely lined with mattresses, the walls as well as the floor.

  ‘That’s a padded cell,’ Tony informed me. ‘That’s where we wind up when we have aversion treatment.’

  His tone was bleak, and I shivered so violently, my teeth clattered together.

  14

  Milking Almonds

  Father’s new baby was very quiet, so quiet that I had to watch her for some moments to make sure that she was still breathing. It was a relief to see her little chest rise and fall and her blue-veined eyelids flutter with her dreams. Do newborn babies dream? I wondered. If so, what do they dream about? It occurred to me, as I stared at the scrap in the cot, that they might pick up fragments of feelings and memories from their mothers during the long, boring months that they had to spend banged up in what is, effectively, a prison.

  I knew where babies came from: they came from wombs, and wombs were dark places inside women. Everyone knew that. At least, that’s what Peter had told me after he’d received his sex education lesson from Mother before he went off to boarding-school. As babies are in the dark for nine whole months, surely, I thought, they have to have something to amuse them – otherwise they’d go potty. The blokes in the war films were always expected to go a bit funny in the head when they got thrown into ‘the hole’ in a POW camp. That’s what it was for, and that’s how you knew that they were heroes, that they did their stint in solitary without going mad. But their stint was usually only days, sometimes weeks; rarely, if ever, nine whole months!

  I don’t remember much about the birth of my half-sister, Valerie. She was born in May, by Caesarean section, and Gaby had a great deal of trouble recovering from the operation. Valerie was born with a thick thatch of dark hair and she was a pretty baby in a very slightly Oriental way. I was fascinated by her hands and feet, which were sweet and, of course, minute. Her finger- and toenails were particularly fascinating. During the months of waiting, I had been asked to think of some names for both sexes, but all the ones I came up with were vetoed for one reason or another. I seem to remember that I rather fancied Alicia for a girl, but nobody else did. Apart from that, the big event is a bit of a blank as far as I am concerned.

  To be fair, I did have pressing concerns of my own at that point, namely puberty, which was playing havoc with my hormones and my complexion. I found the whole business perplexing, frightening and, frankly, unhygienic. Mother had done her best to prepare me for periods, but in those distant days, when only a very few married women used the newfangled tampons, they involved sanitary towels and sanitary belts, and I don’t think anything can prepare a person for those particular instruments of torture. Besides, up until I started my periods, bleeding had been a sign that something w
as dreadfully wrong, and I could not quite rid myself of that idea. Especially as the bleeding came from a place that girls were brought up to keep very private indeed, and to be thoroughly ashamed of while they were about it.

  Then there was the furtive business of actually purchasing sanitary towels. A man might try and serve you at the chemist’s, which was too dreadful to be borne, so I simply would not do it. In the end, my long-suffering mother had to do it for me. It was a big red-letter day, a proper rite of passage, when I finally bought my own sanitary towels, and an even bigger one when I lost my embarrassment about it. I also became convinced that I smelt bad, and became obsessed with bathing and changing my clothes with greater frequency than Mother, in her role as washer-in-chief, thought was strictly necessary. My main memory of puberty is one of deep, deep shame and enormous embarrassment.

  It was around this time that Mother felt it necessary to point out sorrowfully that it was a pity that I hadn’t inherited ‘the family skin’. Instead of the peaches and cream complexion that she had been blessed with, mine owed more to lemons. It was, and still is, of a rather sallow hue and, worse, Mount Vesuvius had taken to erupting on my chin with monotonous regularity. I had what my great-aunt Dora, who was a fur buyer for Bourne and Hollingsworth, would have described as ‘cheap skin, dear. Cheap skin’. Naturally, being a cripplingly self-conscious eleven-year-old, who had reached puberty long before most of her peers, I was just aching to hear that my skin, along with everything else, was not living up to the exacting standards of my mother.

  Education was my second pressing concern. I was preparing for the transition from primary school to secondary education, and there was the whole business of the very important eleven-plus examination. Pass, and a body went to grammar school: fail, and it was the vastly inferior secondary modern. Mother was convinced that I’d fail the mathematics part of the exam, and she was almost certainly right about that. In my opinion, God, or Nature, had been mean when it came to digits, and ten (twenty if you count toes, and I did – sometimes) were nowhere near enough to help with long division or complex multiplication problems. Despite Mother’s increasingly fractious attempts to help, algebra, fractions and percentages remained mysteries that all the fingers and toes in the world could not help to illuminate for me.

  In the end, my mother decided that, rather than run the risk of failure, she wouldn’t enter me for the eleven-plus exam at all. I wasn’t to know it then, but this was a very bad decision. It taught me that it is better not to try at all, than to try and be seen to fail. It took me decades to get past this notion, and to realize that by not attempting frightening or difficult things, one failed anyway. Not taking my eleven-plus also branded me as an abject educational failure in my family circle, and was yet another reason to feel deeply ashamed of myself. Somehow Mother always managed to make me feel personally responsible for failing to inherit the brains, skin and small backside – all highly desirable attributes – that she felt characterized her side of the family.

  It is possible that these personal problems may explain the huge, dark hole where memories of Valerie’s birth, and how I felt about it, should have been. What I do remember, though, is sitting in my tree in Grandma’s garden, wrapped in scarves, gloves and a heavy winter coat, some time in the chilly months before Valerie was actually born, and thinking very solemn thoughts.

  It seemed that everyone expected me, the current baby of the family, to be a little jealous of the new arrival, because he or she would take my place. What they all failed to realize was that the place that was about to be taken really wasn’t up to much. It had always been made very clear to me that babies were simply a bloody nuisance that trapped mothers against their will and sent fathers running for the hills. What’s more, I was in my last year at the junior school, and my periods meant that I was maturing into a young woman, so I didn’t really want to be the baby any more. Frankly, I thought I’d grown out of it, and a jolly good job, too! My conclusion was that babies do not ask to be born, and are therefore not responsible for putting people’s noses out of joint.

  There was also one enormous compensation: it meant fewer visits to the Soho flat. This outcome was a great relief to me, despite my continuing love affair with Soho itself, because Gaby and Father’s marriage was, to the onlooker, a match made in hell. I found their rows profoundly distressing and terrifying, and with Peter no longer there to share the misery, the visits became even more of an endurance test for me. I don’t remember ever visiting the apparently unhappy couple because I wanted to; I was packed off mainly because Mother wanted shot of me for a while and, just possibly, because Father wanted to see me. For Gaby, I think the visits were a duty thing, something she enjoyed occasionally, put up with most of the time, but often resented.

  I made up my mind to try really hard to confound expectations, and to make sure my hooter stayed straight and narrow by keeping the green-eyed monster at bay. After all, a disjointed nose would only be seen as yet another failure, to add to the brains, skin and arse.

  ‘Doug and Gaby read about some connection between leukaemia and something radioactive, called strontium-90, I believe, in the milk supply. Seems as if this stuff gets into the grass, the cows eat it and the milk becomes radioactive in its turn. So now, cow’s milk is off the child’s menu and they’re buggering about with almond milk instead,’ Mother told her friend, also called Joan, a good few months after my half-sister was born.

  ‘What about mother’s milk?’ Joan asked, as she sipped her cup of tea.

  ‘I don’t think that idea lasted long with Gaby. It’s not fashionable to breast-feed nowadays,’ Mother replied tartly. ‘The kid was on that formula stuff from the start, I believe, and now she’s already moving on to solids.’

  ‘Funny how there are fashions in everything, even baby food. Lots of babies are being fed formula these days, you know.’ Joan was quite a bit younger than my mother, and had just become engaged to be married, so she was keenly interested in all things to do with weddings, marriage and motherhood.

  ‘I’ve really got no idea what goes on with babies now – thank God,’ my truly grateful mother intoned. ‘It’s a whole lot of palaver if you ask me, sterilizing bottles and all that nonsense, when in the normal run of things, all you have to do is clamp the brat to your nipple, with no soaking in sterilizing liquid required. What I do know is that Gaby’s got this bee in her bonnet about cow’s milk being dangerous.’

  That was the first I had heard about Valerie being at risk from something as ordinary as milk. It also amazed me that any milk at all could be got from something as solid as almonds. I tried to imagine milking almonds, but couldn’t get past the lack of udders.

  ‘Isn’t this almond milk stuff terribly expensive?’ Joan asked.

  ‘Of course it is! Breast milk is free, cow’s milk is cheap, so naturally, they’ve got to scour the bloody neighbourhood looking for the most costly option available. They’ll get her mink nappies next, and a diamond-encrusted silver potty. Heaven forfend that any child of theirs has to place its arse on humble plastic.’

  ‘Should we all be drinking this special milk? Or is it just for babies?’ I was feeling worried, but also quite relieved. I’d never been keen on milk, and always made an absolute point of pouring it out of the window at school whenever I could. This was helped by the fact that I sat at the back of the class with the rest of the dunces and, as luck would have it, I was right next to a window. But that didn’t help my worry for my parents, both of whom drank their tea with plenty of the dodgy white, wet and radioactive stuff.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, don’t you start!’ Mother snapped testily. ‘It’s bad enough that they’re hysterics, without you joining in. Why don’t you go away and play or something and leave Joan and me to chat in peace?’

  Your a snotty cow. wear going to get you at home time.

  YOU STINK

  The scrappy, ragged and faintly grubby piece of lined paper confirmed my worst fears about being smelly. It was a m
onth after the beginning of the new educational year, and I had not settled well at my new school. Choosing to send me to the secondary modern school that shared a name and a playground with the primary where Mother was deputy headmistress had seemed like an elegant solution to coordinating our school holidays. It was always difficult for my mother to find something to do with me when our school timetables did not mesh. Childcare had become much more of a problem since Peter had gone away to school, and Gaby was preoccupied with her new baby.

  As usual, my face didn’t fit. Part of the problem was that the other girls had been brought up together and had played knock down ginger, He, skipping, two balls, jacks, five stones and hopscotch together in the streets clustering around the school. They had been classmates since the very beginning, at the age of five, and worse, almost all of them had, at some point, been through Mother’s hands, either because they had been in her class or had been sent to her by their own teachers for a spot of discipline.

  I, on the other hand, had never lived, played or attended school in Dagenham before. I was on my fifth school, and my mother, as a teacher, was classed as ‘the enemy’ at worst, and ‘one of them’ at best, by the other children. Naturally, I was tarred with the same brushes and automatically ‘sent to Coventry’, which meant that I was completely ignored most of the time. If I spoke, it was as if I wasn’t there. If I tried to join in any game in the playground, the deafening silence that greeted me was broken just long enough for someone to tell me to ‘piss off’. As usual, I got the message fairly quickly and kept pretty much to myself at playtimes. I was, after all, quite a solitary person by nature, or possibly by nurture – or the lack of it.