by Pip Granger
‘Come,’ Mr Webster boomed.
I turned the handle and pushed the door ajar. Sure enough, there was Mother looking rather like an untidy tweedy bag of washing as she perched on the visitor’s chair in front of the headmaster’s desk. Both Peter and I had inherited from our mother our inability to keep anything tucked in where it was supposed to be. My school shirt was always coming adrift from my skirt, and my tie looked as if the dog had chewed it, except we didn’t have a dog. True to the family form, Mother’s scarf was half in and half out of the collar of her olive green tweed coat, and she was wearing one black leather glove while the other was hanging out of her coat pocket. Her thin, mousy hair had been blown into a scruffy halo by the wind. She sat with her feet neatly tucked together and her handbag clutched on her lap as if her life depended on it – which, given how much stuff she crammed into it, it probably did. I noticed that her glove-free hand was gripping the bag so tightly that her knuckles were white. Something was definitely very wrong, but I could not, for the life of me, think what I could have done that warranted her being summoned by the head. Her eyes glittered in the weak light from the window and, for one awful moment, I thought she was drunk. I took a surreptitious, but deep, sniff of the air as I approached her warily, but I could detect no fumes other than the smell of old ashtray that bore witness to the thirty or so Kensitas tipped that she smoked each day.
The headmaster rose, cleared his throat and avoided looking directly at me as he said, ‘I’ll leave you two to it, then. Take as long as you need, Mrs er,’ – for a moment he forgot Mother’s new name, then triumphantly remembered it – ‘Stewart.’
‘Right. Thank you, Mr Webster. You’re most kind.’ Mother’s voice was husky, the way it sounded when she had been crying. I took a harder look at her. The glitter in her eyes was unshed tears, just waiting to be let loose. Pride, and a good old British stiff upper lip, made blubbing at the headmaster impossible – much to his relief, I’m sure.
We waited for Mr Webster to get out of his room and then Mother said quietly, ‘I think you had better sit down, dear.’
I looked around for another chair and, finding none, I perched uncertainly in Mr Webster’s. It was still warm, I remember.
Mother fumbled in her bag, drew out a letter and placed it with a shaking hand on the polished surface of the desk in front of her. She rested her hand firmly on it, indicating that I wasn’t to take it from her. I noticed that the handwriting was Uncle Tony’s, but I couldn’t read the postmark. Uncle Tony was away working on the Tote, but he was based at our house, and shared a bedroom with Peter when he was at home.
‘This arrived this morning.’ She paused and took a deep, shuddery breath. ‘I’ve spoken to Grandma and Grandad and they have received one too.’ Mother’s voice cracked, wobbled dangerously. A single tear escaped and slid down her face before she brushed the rest away with her impatient, gloved hand.
‘Your Uncle Tony has committed suicide. In Doncaster, of all places. He likes –’ Mother caught a harsh, strangled, painful breath, then corrected herself – ‘liked Doncaster. It seems he’s been planning it for some time, because he has been collecting sleeping tablets from doctors in every town he’s ever been to with the Tote.’ Mother paused again, longer this time, allowing me a moment to take in what she had just told me. ‘And we thought it was such a nice job for him, working on the Tote. He loved it, he said, but all the time he was planning …’ The last sentence came out in a heartbroken wail and I flew round the desk to gather my mother in my arms. We held each other as we cried together for what felt like a long, long time.
I remember thinking how funny it was that time could stretch and shrink depending on the circumstances. It seemed to me that terrible news always seemed to stretch time almost to breaking point, as if God or Nature was making sure that you felt every agonizing moment of it to the full. Mother’s voice was a broken whisper as she went on to tell me that Uncle Tony had written his letters, posted them and then had embarked on one last monumental bender. According to the hotel receptionist, he had staggered back to his room at around midnight, clutching an almost full bottle of whisky. Apparently he swallowed enough pills to knock out half of the country, downed the last of his booze and had then lain down and died. He was just twenty-six years old.
There was a gentle tap on the door and the secretary popped her head in to say that Don had arrived to take Mother home. Mother nodded. ‘I’m ready now,’ she whispered, then turned back to me. ‘You stay on at school and then see if you can go home with someone for a little while this evening. I’ve got to break it to your brother when he gets in from work.’ At the time, Peter worked at Lloyds of London, but the world bored him rigid and he later became a laboratory technician at the local hospital.
I nodded, and after a swift, comforting hug from my stepfather, they left me alone in the headmaster’s study. Nobody told me how I was supposed to go back to my classroom. So, after a while, I went to the cloakroom, washed my face in cold water then walked slowly back to the classroom door. I took a deep breath and marched in, head held high, and got on with my work for what remained of the double period of maths. The whole business had taken less than an hour, when I could have sworn it had taken most of the day.
‘What did the head want with you?’ my friend Frances asked at break time. ‘What have you done?’
‘Yeah. What have you been up to?’ Johnny Rainbird asked. He always hung around the ring fence that divided up the playground, one side for the girls, the other for the boys. He had a big crush on Frances.
‘My Uncle Tony topped himself in Doncaster,’ I told them in an unnaturally conversational tone, ‘and I don’t want to talk about it.’
The news spread around the school like wildfire. I could tell, because by lunchtime everyone was avoiding my eye, and my friends were clustered quietly in a protective circle around me, talking amongst themselves about the usual stuff – lessons, teachers and, of course, boys. Nobody mentioned my Uncle Tony.
Our little family all mourned Tony a great deal in our own ways, but we barely spoke of it. Poor Peter, possibly Tony’s only close friend, was heartbroken, but misery was not encouraged in our family. When it was unavoidable, it was tacitly agreed that no one acknowledged it. I heard Peter crying to himself in the room he had shared with Tony, but he would not discuss it with anyone. I think Mother, in common with many who had lived through the war, thought that outward shows of grief were, in some way, self-indulgent. We all must have suffered dreadfully, especially Mother, Grandma and Peter, as families always do when a suicide takes place, but everyone kept it firmly to themselves. It was the done thing.
Not all that long after Uncle Tony died, I had a peculiar thing happen to me. It started with a short piece I’d read in the newspaper about some American schoolchildren slashing a new pupil with razor blades. The new girl suffered from cerebral palsy, and she had just started school for the first time. The other pupils had surrounded her, attacked her and, as they were slashing away, they screamed, ‘We don’t want misfits here!’ I was appalled and for days and days the article preyed on my mind. I couldn’t get the images of the attack out of my head or get over the fact that children could be so cruel to one another. I was obsessed with just how unjust life could be. The girl in the article was disabled, through no fault of her own; my sister was dying, also through no fault of her own; Tony had found life so unbearable that he would rather die than carry on with it; my mother, brother and grandparents were suffering badly, and Lady had been shot, and the whole lot swirled around in my mind until I thought that I must scream and scream and scream – but I didn’t. I couldn’t, because I felt that I had no right to such strong feelings when the various parents’ suffering was so great. And there was no one to talk to, to relieve the pressure that was building inside me.
It was a Friday night, folk club night in Brentwood. I had taken to going to the folk club on a regular basis, and that evening an American called Art Garfunkel was singing.
He was a friend of my friend Kathy’s boyfriend, another American called Paul Simon. They were later to become very famous indeed, but then they were unknown except to devoted folkies. I certainly hadn’t heard of this Garfunkel fellow, and had no idea what to expect. He had a beautiful voice, pure and soaring, and it filled the small room above the pub with songs of protest and of sorrow. And, to my horror, suddenly, right in the middle of his performance, I went blind, deaf and dumb. It was as if I could not bear to see, hear or speak of any more misery, and everything simply shut down. I don’t remember being taken home, but I must have been. My mother was sufficiently alarmed to call a doctor.
‘It’s a touch of hysteria,’ I heard the doctor pronounce from a long, long way away. My hearing was coming back, and I could see his bulk outlined against the light from the lamp in my bedroom, but I still could not speak. ‘Has anything happened lately to bring it on?’
Mother shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
When the doctor had gone, Mother hissed, ‘You can stop showing off now, madam. For Christ’s sake pull yourself together. You’re not the only one who is upset, you know. We all are, but you don’t see the rest of us carrying on like this.’
So, after a while, I did pull myself together and carried on as if nothing had happened. It was the done thing: Mother said so.
19
Work, Work, Work for the Master
‘Isn’t it about time you got yourself a job and left home?’ Mother asked on the morning that I received notification that I had passed my two A levels – just.
Well, actually, I hadn’t done too badly on the english one, but I scraped through the history by the skin of my teeth. Both were something of a miracle, because in the English exam I had had to answer a question about a character in one of Virginia Woolf’s novels without ever mentioning the character’s name. I had completely forgotten it, and intense brain-flogging would not bring it back, so I had to keep writing ‘the artist’ this and ‘the artist’ that. Naturally, the minute I walked out of the examination room, the name came flooding back to me: such is the power of examination terror. The feeling that I was as dim as a Toc H lamp had dominated my educational life, and I simply could not shake it.
The history exam was even worse. I had to write about England’s Civil War and every firm fact, name and date I had ever learned about it had fled my brain as if the demons of hell were after them. In the end, I was forced to invent a Cromwellian officer whose oldest childhood friend was an officer on the Royalist side, and I explored, at some considerable length, the wicked way that civil wars divide families, friends, neighbours and communities at such appalling cost. No wonder it felt like miraculous intervention that I had passed those damned exams at all.
‘I said, isn’t it about time you thought of branching out on your own? After all, your brother’s married and gone and it’s high time you went as well. Don and I would like to spend some of our married life alone, without kids cluttering up the place, if that’s all the same to you.’ Mother was unable to keep the note of mild irritation out of her voice. I should, apparently, have thought of it for myself.
The message was clear: she felt she’d done her bit by her children, and it was time I showed proper appreciation by buggering off. All of my peers were having a really terrible time even broaching the subject of leaving home with their mothers, whereas my dear old mum was virtually hauling out my suitcase and redecorating my bedroom as she spoke. She had earmarked my room for her new study long before the ink was dry on my certificates and my sheets had lost the warm imprint of my body.
True, the new, South London flat we had moved to was very small compared to the house that we’d left in Essex, and space was at a premium. Mother had made sure of that. ‘I’ve watched my friends. They no sooner get shot of their kids than they start moving back in again. Well, I’m not having that. If the place is small enough, my two will just have to stay away and lump it.’
I took the hint and moved into a flat in Finsbury Park, North London, with Reg, a friend of my brother. Again, unlike other mothers, mine had no problem with me flat-sharing with a young man. In fact, she had convinced herself that, as I was still a virgin at the ripe old age of seventeen, I must be a lesbian.
‘There’s nothing wrong with it, you know. People can screw dogs, as long as the dog is willing, and the same goes for homosexuals,’ Mother informed me one day when she was probing to find out if I was engaged in any sexual activity.
‘What? Are you saying that homosexuals sleep with dogs?’ I asked, thoroughly confused.
‘No, no, you idiot. What I’m saying is, it’s OK to sleep with other girls as long as they’re willing. The same goes for men with men, despite the stupid law. There’s nothing wrong with any kind of sex as long as all parties concerned agree to it.’ Mother paused for a second. ‘So, are you a lesbian?’
‘I don’t think so. I mean, how would I know?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I think it becomes obvious over time,’ was Mother’s vague reply. She then lost interest in the subject, and I heaved a great sigh of relief. Other people’s mothers didn’t pry into their daughters’ sex lives, or lack of them. In fact, I’d only ever had one boyfriend, and he’d dumped me for a girl who was far more willing than I.
I sincerely believed the problem pages of the women’s magazines that I read in secret – Mother didn’t approve of women’s magazines because they were ‘such utter rubbish’ – and, on the sage advice of various agony aunts, I’d always held firm when it came to youthful fumblings. I honestly felt that sex was best left until after marriage, so as not to run the all too real risk of pregnancy. No ‘nice girl’ in the 1950s and early ’60s became pregnant out of wedlock, and if she did, there was all hell to pay. In reaction to the enormous number of illegitimate births during the war years, attitudes to sex swiftly reverted to old-time values. I’m not exactly sure when the contraceptive pill was developed, but I do know that if it was available at all in the early ’60s, it was not easy for girls on the threshold of womanhood to get hold of it. National Health doctors did not prescribe it to unmarried women and, although there were a few special clinics, like the Marie Stopes one in the West End, there were way too few of them to be of much use to the general population.
According to Mother, the mechanical methods of birth control were not to be trusted, either. ‘French letters spring leaks, Dutch caps can slip, and the Holy Roman rhythm method is useless, which is why there are so many little Catholics running about. Those spermicidal creams are hit and miss at best – and anyway, they taste awful.’ This latter statement confused me a great deal: how could a cream you stuck in your mouth stop babies? I didn’t have the opportunity to ask for illumination on this point, because Mother was in full flow, and she hated to be interrupted.
‘The only sure form of contraceptive is a glass of water. Not before or after, but instead,’ she would opine. Alternatively, she would advise ‘a sixpence – clenched between the knees’, thus showing a double standard in her view of my sex life. On the one hand she seemed to be urging me to put myself about a bit, to prove that I wasn’t a lesbian, and on the other hand, she was saying that the only certain way to avoid an unwanted pregnancy out of wedlock was to say ‘no’ and stick to it.
This was a bit rich, coming from a woman whose own son had attended her wedding to his father. But then, Mother was nothing if not unconventional. Unlike any other mother I had ever met, or discussed with my friends, mine was very frank about sex and made no bones about the fact that she thoroughly enjoyed it. I think this was probably a reaction to the tucked-up attitudes of her own mother’s generation.
‘Your grandmother never mentioned sex or contraception to me when I was growing up. As far as she knows, I still have no idea where babies come from,’ Mother chuckled. ‘But then, I don’t suppose for a second that her own mother explained it to her. According to Dora’ – the most worldly of my great-aunts – ‘my father had to send for a doctor, a priest and a t
in-opener on their wedding night. She refused to believe it, you see: the whole thing was a terrible shock to her, poor woman. No wonder there were such big age gaps between me and my brothers. I expect it took Father that long to prise her legs apart.’ Mother laughed again, but without a trace of mirth. ‘That’s why I’ve always been so straight about the facts of life with you and your brother. I didn’t want either of you to be ignorant on the subject – or ashamed either.’ This time Mother’s smile was genuine. ‘Sex is just a fact of life, like eating, sleeping, bog-trotting and the rest, only much more fun. It should be enjoyed, not feared, or – worse – thought of as dirty.’
Having passed my A levels and duly moved away from home, as instructed, I was in urgent need of a job. As I had no particular skills, it was decided that I should work in Father’s mail order astrology business as a general clerk and dogsbody until I found out what I wanted to do with my life. His offices were in London’s West End and his printing works were in Brewer Street, in the heart of my beloved Soho.
Father had set himself up as a fortune teller, and he had three rooms on the sixth floor of a large building. There was a large one for ‘the girls’ who opened the mail, processed the requests for tarot readings, typed addresses on large, noisy manual typewriters, kept files so that established punters could receive ‘shots’ or offers of further products, stuffed envelopes with horoscopes, lucky charms and further offers, answered queries and dealt with complaints. Along one wall were two long trestle tables, where the mail openers sat and processed the hundreds of forms that arrived daily: there was one pile for new customers requesting horoscopes, and others for customers wanting charms to bring them good luck. In front of each person was a long, wooden receptacle divided into sections for cheques, postal orders, pound notes and ten-bob notes.