by Pip Granger
‘Nah,’ he answered, around a bite of cheese sarnie, ‘but me dad was, according to me nan.’
‘Don’t you know?’ I asked, much to the relief of the others, who didn’t like to ask such a personal question.
‘Not really. He pissed off before I was born.’
‘So his name was Chester, was it?’ Anne asked, forgetting that she was supposed to act uninterested.
‘Nah, his name was Eugene, Gene for short, like that dancer bloke in the films. The one who ain’t Fred Astaire.’
‘You mean Gene Kelly,’ I informed him.
‘Yeah, him.’
‘So how come your name’s Chester, then? Why ain’t you Gene?’
Chester rolled his eyes. ‘’Cause Gene’s a girlie sort of name, ain’t it? I don’t s’pose me mum thought much of it neither.’ Chester took another bite of his sandwich. ‘If I tell you, you’re not to laugh, and I don’t want anyone taking the piss. Is that a deal?’
Fascinated now, we all crossed our hearts and hoped to die.
‘Well, according to me nan, the Yanks who came over in the war loosened the local girls’ knicker elastic by bribing them with stockings, bars of chocolate and packets of fags,’ Chester explained, ‘because everything was really scarce on account of the rationing. According to me nan, some girls would do almost anything for a pair of nylons, a chunk of chocolate or a packet of ciggies by the end of the war, and it seems like my mum was one of ’em.’
‘We know about rationing and the shortages,’ Carol complained.
‘Well, me mum’s favourite fags was Chesterfields, so when me dad buggered off back to America, not knowing he’d left a bun in me mum’s oven, she decided to call me Chesterfield, in his memory, like, seeing as she didn’t have a clue where he lived, or have the heart to call me Gene. So I’m named after a bleeding packet of fags. Bloody marvellous, that is.’
‘Don’t you like it?’ Carol asked.
‘Would you want to be called after a lousy packet of fags?’
‘You should think yourself lucky she didn’t smoke Camels. If she’d called you after them, you’d’ve had the right hump!’ I giggled at my own joke.
‘Oh very funny, very droll.’ Chester grinned good-naturedly, while the others tried hard not to laugh. ‘You promised not to take the piss. Just for that, I’ll have to turn you upside-down.’ And he did. Luckily, I was wearing my shorts, so he didn’t get an embarrassing glimpse of my knickers.
To this day, the gentle hum of insects, the scent of hay and pong of warm horse are some of my favourite things, and they instantly remind me of the days I spent with Raz’s ponies, when every second was utter bliss. Those days were, without any doubt, the very happiest times of my young life.
Mother was not to be deflected from her party idea. ‘Why not do both?’ she suggested magnanimously. ‘Have your party and a day on Rita. You’re in charge of the invitations, and I’ll do the rest.’
I am ashamed to say that I shoved the problem of who to invite to my party so far to the back of my mind that I blanked the whole thing almost completely. When it did flit across my mind, I told myself that I had plenty of time and pushed the thought back into the darker recesses. Sadly, the time ran out and I still hadn’t had the confidence to draw up a list of possible guests. I was so agonizingly shy, and so certain that no one would want to come to any party held in my honour, that I failed to invite a single, solitary soul, not even my best friend Joyce, or my friends at the airfield.
The great day dawned, and I still hadn’t had the nerve to tell my mother that I’d failed so dismally on the invitations front. As I climbed on to Rita’s back I told myself that I’d ride around and invite any likely candidates during the day. But I didn’t. Once again, I shelved the problem and gave myself up to the joy of Rita’s quiet company and steady amble. I had a lovely day’s riding around the fields and lanes near the airfield, and discovered several nooks and crannies that I had never known were there, including a large, ornately carved stone horse trough parked on a little green in the middle of a small collection of farm cottages. The trough was far too fancy for its setting and I wondered how it had got there, but there was no one around to ask, so I never did find out. However, Rita was duly grateful for a drink and, as a special birthday treat, I gave her an apple from my picnic.
Eventually, the moment came to go home and face my mother, the music and the mountain of Marmite sandwiches, individual jellies and birthday cake that awaited me and my non-existent guests.
‘What do you mean, no one is coming?’ Mother demanded in exasperation. ‘I’ve spent all bloody day churning this lot out. We’ll never eat it all between us.’ She sighed heavily, and glared at me. ‘Why in God’s name did you leave it so late?’
I couldn’t answer, because I didn’t have the nerve to tell her that I simply hadn’t had the confidence to ask anyone. The silence from me dragged on and on, until in the end Mother roared up the stairs, ‘Pots, come down here.’
Peter was home for the long summer holiday and was skulking in his bedroom, knocking up yet another model aircraft from balsa wood, tissue paper, glue and smelly old enamel paints. Heavy feet thundered down the stairs.
‘Yes, Mater, what can I do for you?’ Peter had taken to calling our parents ‘Mater’ and ‘Pater’: it was a public school thing, as was leaping to his feet whenever a woman entered a room, pulling chairs out for ladies to sit upon, and always walking nearest the kerb when in female company. However, little sisters did not count as females in his view, and I was never on the receiving end of these good-mannered niceties – unless he was showing off to some girl he was hoping to impress.
‘You can haul your carcass around the neighbourhood and drag any likely looking type in to help to eat all this grub, that’s what you can do. Your half-witted sister seems to have “forgotten” to ask anyone to her birthday party. How she managed that, I shall never know, but manage it she has!’
Peter laughed. ‘Typical! OK, I’ll see what I can do.’
Anyone with a heartbeat was dragged to our table, despite vigorous objections from some of Peter’s friends, who really didn’t want to be caught eating jellies and partying with a bunch of thirteen-year-old girls. Luckily for them, there was little fear of that, because there were no thirteen-year-old girls, apart from me and Christina, who lived up the road and really wasn’t supposed to be in our house at all. Her mother was a pillar of the local Baptist church, and deeply disapproved of her daughter fraternizing with the daughter of a divorced woman. Christina had to sneak in the back door just in case she was seen, and everyone present was sworn to secrecy.
In the end, we did manage to eat all the food, the reluctant guests appeared to have a good enough time and, as a punishment for my dereliction of duty, I was made to clear up the mess while Mother and Peter enjoyed a well-earned rest.
It was to be a decade or two before I attempted to throw another party, and even then I wasn’t happy. It would seem that I’m just not a party animal, although I would have loved to have been. When faced with a large group of people, I still go straight into blind panic mode and either freeze up so no one can get a word out of me, or hog the limelight and talk nine thousand to the dozen, all with a slight edge of hysteria in my voice. I can hear it, I can will myself to shut the hell up, but I can’t seem to do it. There is no middle way for me.
I am at my happiest when tucked into a corner with a good view of everyone else being sociable. Then I play games with myself, like ‘Spot the alpha male’ or ‘Who’s with who?’ or ‘Who is the boss in their household?’ It passes the time, it keeps me happy and, best of all, it stops me from making a bloody fool of myself by running off at the gob.
Nowadays, I can, in all honesty, say that I am working when I’m watching my fellow humans from the sidelines. Their body language speaks volumes and helps me to develop the characters in my novels. What’s more, calling it work stops me from thinking about what a useless social animal I’ve turned out to be.
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17
Never the Bridesmaid
‘You self-centred little cow, don’t you ever think of anyone but yourself?’ Mother demanded as I stood there, my head hung in shame.
Mother had just told me that she was going to marry again, and the first thing I thought of was to ask if I could be her bridesmaid. I had never been a bridesmaid, having so little family to do the deed for. Father’s surviving half-brother, Will, remained a bachelor to his dying day, as did Mother’s only surviving sibling. There were no cousins, no aunts, no nobody. I had seen so many photographs of other girls being bridesmaids and getting all dolled up in pretty frocks like little princesses and had longed and longed to be one of their number for as long as I could remember.
Sadly for me, my mother was not a frills and frou-frou kind of a gal. She was more your tweedy sort, and had decided long before that I was to be the same. There were all sorts of practical reasons for this decision, of course. Sensible, sturdy clothes and stout shoes lasted longer, for one thing, which was always a consideration in a household where money was perennially tight and where the rigours of rationing, austerity and poverty had left an indelible mark. Mother had never forgotten the Rest Centre, and the abject misery and shame of being destitute still clung to us like a bad smell. Therefore, she took a very hard line on such frivolities as pretty dresses, silly shoes, jewellery and posh scent. For Mother, the height of girlie fun was to have a really good soap as a special treat, and, if absolutely necessary, a dab of powder on her nose and the merest smear of lipstick on her full and sensuous lips.
‘If you’re angling to get one of those ridiculous bridesmaid dresses, you can think again. We can’t afford clothes that you only wear once and then stuff into the wardrobe. If I decide to have you as my bridesmaid, and it’s a bloody big if, you’ll have a nice serviceable dress and sodding-well like it. It’s my wedding, not some excuse for you to tart yourself up, and don’t you forget it.’
Even as I blush at the memory of that one-sided conversation, I still think Mother was too harsh in her judgement of me. I was only a kid, and I’m pretty sure it’s normal for young girls to long to be a bridesmaid, with all the fuss that it involves. That longing didn’t make me selfish, it made me a fairly average sort of a girl – for once. I knew in my heart that Mother’s wedding was to be my one possible shot at the prize, and I was right. I never did get the chance again.
Don, Mother’s third and final husband, was much like Rita in a way: he was a gentle giant. He was not particularly tall, but he was particularly wide. His shirt collars fitted easily around my waist, and his barrel chest was huge, a fact that impressed Peter Pots mightily. Don had once been selected to play rugby for Scotland because, as Peter kindly explained to his ignoramus of a sister, once he got hold of the ball and started charging for the line, it took more than a handful of burly blokes hanging off him to slow him down.
‘It’s the momentum, you know,’ Pots told me. I didn’t know what momentum meant, but I nodded sagely, in case I was treated to an even longer discourse on the subject. I wasn’t interested in rugby, or football, or cricket either, and I had grown just about old enough not to hang on to every single word uttered by my big brother. I still hung on to quite a lot of them, because Pots could be interesting when he chose, but the finer points of sport were tedious, frankly. Sport was boys’ stuff, invented to bore the bums off girls, in my opinion. And that opinion hasn’t changed a whole heap over the years.
Anyway, Pots was entranced by the notion of Don playing rugby for Scotland, but Don’s father was not. Don was told that he had to be a civil servant instead, like his father and the rest of the family before him. Don gave up rugby, but, showing the defiance of youth, gave the Civil Service a miss and became a constable with the Metropolitan Police. The bonus of working in London was that it kept him well away from his stern, disapproving father, who lived in Edinburgh. Don worked as part of the section that was responsible for policing the Thames and enchanted Peter (but not me) with gruesome tales of fishing bodies out of the river, of grabbing a corpse by the arm only to find that it had come off in his hand. There was also a lot about bloating that I shut my ears to when Pots tried to relay these tales to me – which he did, with typical brotherly relish and a total disregard for his sister’s delicate sensibilities and queasy stomach.
During the war, Don had been a flying instructor in the RAF, and was stationed out in what was then Rhodesia. He was thus spared the incredibly dangerous business of flying in combat. Don’s flying Spitfires and other aircraft was, of course, a huge plus as far as my brother was concerned, as he had ambitions to be a pilot himself. Then, just to complete Don’s hero status, when the war was over he worked in a motorbike shop. When Mother met him, he owned and drove a Norton Dominator. For Peter, the man was a god!
I liked Don for other reasons. He was a gentle man, a calm person and he made our mother happier than I had ever seen her. That’s not to say that she lost her sharp tongue or her sarcastic wit, because she didn’t, but he was solid and dependable and Mother needed that more than anything. Don was not the kind of man to betray or to batter his wife, or, indeed, his stepchildren, and for Mother that must have come as an enormous relief – even if she did, later on, find him just a touch boring on occasions. I never heard Don raise his voice, not once, and in a crisis his size and calm manner made him a rock-like presence and a great comfort to our mother and to me.
The whole family liked Don, even Father, who envied his even-tempered nature. For me, there was an added bonus. Don became enormously fond of me. He’d once had a curly-haired little girl of his own, Diana. She was a brunette and I was a blonde, but my curls reminded him of the little girl he’d lost, and he loved me for it. Diana had had a brain tumour that had rendered her blind, partially paralysed and, eventually, deaf as well. She had died when she was about five, and Don’s marriage to her mother had foundered shortly afterwards. It seems that his wife had been having a long-term affair and, once their daughter was gone, she saw no reason to remain with her husband.
Because of all this, Don was happy to become part of our funny-peculiar little family and to relinquish his lonely bedsitter, bachelor life once and for all. He even flogged his beloved motorbike on the eve of the wedding, in favour of a family saloon that would take all four of us.
‘Let her be a bridesmaid, Joan,’ he told my mother when she relayed my request to him. ‘She’s just a wee girl, and it will make her happy. I have a few pounds tucked away. Buy her a dress with that.’
And so Mother and I went shopping, and I tried to hide my disappointment at the plain, pale blue dress and bolero jacket that she chose for me. There wasn’t a frill or a bit of lace to be seen. ‘You’ll be able to wear that anywhere,’ Mother informed me stoutly.
I was, however, allowed to wear a pair of sheer stockings instead of ankle socks and, on the day, I carried a pretty bouquet that Don had ordered for me when he had ordered flowers for Mother. I think the dear man had seen my crushing disappointment with my dress and had done his best to put matters right without getting on my mother’s hair-trigger nerves. Don had caught on quickly that Mother could be a tetchy type and spent the rest of his married life, which I believe was happy for the most part, trying very hard not to get too far up Mother’s roomy Roman nose.
Not long after the wedding, Don joined the Civil Service at last and worked at the Criminal Records Office at Scotland Yard. The increase in income that this change brought about enabled us to move to what was to become my favourite childhood home, a split-level Edwardian house in nearby Harold Wood. This move proved fortuitous, because it was relatively handy for my new school. I was, at last, free from the stigma of being a teacher’s child, as nobody at my new school knew or cared about the history of my parents. Not a soul had even been taught by my mother, which was something of a miracle, considering just how many teaching posts she had held in Essex over the years. I was simply viewed as the new girl, and was accepted at last.
I was called names, but then so were most people. It was more good-natured teasing than anything, and mine was the kind of name that lent itself to some unfortunate abbreviations that proved just too tempting for the boys. But compared to what I had come from, that was nothing. It was as if a huge and crushing weight had been lifted off me, and I was so very grateful and relieved that I even made some academic progress. True, anything to do with numbers was still a big struggle and almost a complete mystery, but those lessons that involved language skills, such as history and English, became my modest strengths. I even got the odd A- or B+ for my essays, which did not seem to impress my mother much, but impressed the hell out of me! I wasn’t used to it and I was thrilled. I managed to stagger up a few grades during my time at the school, and wound up, eventually, at the bottom of the A stream instead of at the bottom of the E. I was also the only person in my year to pass both English Language and English Literature at O level, and I was so proud of myself, I thought I’d burst. It was only when I realized that I would have to move to yet another school in order to take A levels that my happiness deflated a little. But that came later. To begin with, I was simply delighted to come and go through the school gates with no fear and no bruises to my body or to my fragile ego.
Three months after my arrival at the new school, Father and Gaby had their second daughter, Nicci. Once again, the baby was born by Caesarean section, and once again, Gaby took quite a while to recover. Nicci, on the other hand, was a robust little thing from the start and, unlike her sister, was fair and blue-eyed like the rest of Father’s brood. As she grew older, nobody seemed at all worried that she might drink radioactive milk.