Mam unfastened my hands and stood me down. 'You have got to get used to it, Lil. In September you'll be with me in Macclesfield for good. You have to go to school.' At this point Grandpa stumped off into the house.
I idolised Mam. She was my beautiful butterfly with dark hair gleaming, blue eyes clever and knowing. She was full of talk, gossip and laughter with Nanna. In Grandpa's presence she was more subdued. But she never changed her mind. 'I am learning,' I said. 'With Sylvia and Magnus.'
Sylvia and Magnus were the grandchildren of Old Man Hammond and because of the unusual circumstances - our grandfathers having started out in life together - I was their daytime companion and friend. Most mornings I sat with them at lessons, getting things right more often than Magnus did.
'Why don't they go to school?' I asked Mam. 'Sylvia's eight and Magnus is six and a half.'
Mam said, 'It's because of Magnus's illness.'
'What's he got now?'I asked. Magnus often spent weeks in bed with what his nurse called 'a little knock'.
Mam was quiet for a few seconds, then, 'Don't say. They keep from Magnus how bad things are.'
'I won't say.'
'It was a terrible shock to Mr Hammond. When Magnus was born he was at death's door. It was a week before he stopped bleeding where be'd been joined to his mother.'
'Is it a secret?' I had the sinking feeling of excitement rolled with fright which came when Mam gossiped for it was a sin, Grandpa said, to talk with a wanton tongue.
Mam said, 'They called in specialists. Magnus has haemophilia. It runs in families but only affects the boys.'
'Has Sylvia got haemo ... haemo -that thing, Mam?'
'They don't know. Three out of four of their children will inherit it. One in four will be normal. Sylvia might be the normal one. Or she might be a transmitter, like her mother.'
But Sylvia, upon whom I tried to model myself, had roses in her cheeks and abundant blonde curls. 'Is that why Magnus can't play rough games?' I asked, knowing Magnus was afraid of hurting himself. His mother bossed and interfered, giving the nurse and governess orders never to oppose Magnus, not to let him fall or do anything dangerous.
Mam nodded. 'They think he'll grow out of it and become a normal boy. He won't. Don't tell them I've told you.'
'No, Mam.' I would not tell. But I'd worry in case I banged the dominoes too bard and caught Magnus's fingers and made him bleed for Mam said if be bled they'd never be able to stop it. Magnus was so pale I could believe he had already lost most of his blood. And here in the garden, only a week after she had told me all this, Mam was acting as if she didn't know that I went every day to Archerfield to be with Magnus and Sylvia.
'Does Our Lil go round there for lessons as well?' Mam said to Nanna. 'I didn't think their mother would …’
On the defensive, Nanna said, 'It's not all one-way. Mrs Hammond asked me to have Sylvia here when she and Lily caught measles. She was afraid poor Magnus might go down with it an'all.'
'More fool you,'said Mam.
'Eeh! I loved doing it.’ Nanna protested. 'Sylvia and our Lil are best friends. You'd never think there's three years between 'em.'
I'd enjoyed it. I'd had Sylvia all to myself. We'd sworn never to break friends, and to share all our secrets - not in those words of course. Sylvia's own words were beautiful: 'Best friends never part. Never, never fail us. Mine were 'Cross my heart. Hope to die. If I ever tell a lie.' Then we each spat on our right hand and clasped the other's, tight. Sylvia said this was the way to seal a bargain and our friendship was like a marriage. She said, 'We must share everything. For ever. First, we'll share Nanna.'
We did not take the disease badly but Nanna made us stay indoors in the parlour that housed her pride - a walnut piano resplendent with fretwork and brass candle holders. Nanna drew the summer chintz curtains in case we went blind, and she played the piano, cuddled us, made cool herb and honey drinks, nature's cures, and told us wonderful stories about the olden days when she was a girl. Nanna must have been recalling this too for she smiled as she said to Mam, 'Our Lil and Sylvia are happiest together.'
Grandpa came back into the garden, wearing his Sunday suit and gold watch and chain. I ran across the grass to stand by him and read the time out loud for soon Mam must go down to Bollington station. Mam hadn't seen Grandpa but said to Nanna, 'I thought Mrs Hammond wanted to break all connections between us.'
'Mr Hammond likes to keep connection. He's a fine man, is Mr Hammond’. Nanna said. She pronounced it 'Mistrammond' and never used the word 'the' if she could leave it out.
Mam would not drop the subject. 'His wife's a jumped-up nobody with a pretty face. She set her cap for him all right. Came down from Edinburgh on a visit and swept the board clean! She scooped up the most eligible bachelor in Macc. The jealous Scotch…'
'No!' Grandpa ordered in his chapel voice, catching Mam out in a gossip, which to Grandpa was almost as bad as telling lies. 'The ninth commandment. Thou shalt not bear false witness. I'll have no scandal-mongering. No wanton, idle talk in my house.'
Nanna, trying to bring the talk round to something we would all agree on, got to her feet and said, 'Shall I fetch our Lil's copy-book? She can show her Mam what she's done ...'
Grandpa said, 'Not on a Sunday, Isobel!' and Nanna sat down quickly. In a couple of hours I'd be in chapel again, clean and starched, holding Nanna’s hand. I never wearied, even when the sermons were long, for Grandpa had taught me a funny trick of the mind: mesmerising.
Nanna called it, 'The Iron in Our Lil' but Grandpa had taught me how to split my mind in two, so that one part of my brain told the other what to do. I could make myself do things like sums, or force myself to remember exactly what I'd done or read. I'd sit in the pew, an open hymn book on my lap, concentrating, repeating, memorising but all the time wearing an attentive expression so nobody would know I was not listening but was practising this magical 'Mesmerising'.
‘Why don't you come to chapel with us?' I asked Mam now.
There was a painful silence before Nanna came to the rescue again. 'She'll come back to it,' she assured us, as if Mam were not there. ‘At times I think we pester poor old God to death with all this praying. We all have a time in life when we lose a bit o' faith. What I say is, "If you take it to our Lord Jesus Christ, in prayer ..."
'Don't talk daft, Mother!' Mam got to her feet. 'I have to go soon, because I'm not walking to Bollington station. ' Macclesfield is six miles from Bollington and there were few trains on Sundays.
Grandpa said, 'Why not?'
'I'm getting a ride back.' Mam did not meet his eye. Instead she said to Nanna, 'You said you'd give me a bottle of elderberry ...' She hesitated then rephrased it. 'I said I'd help with the wine…’
'It's Sunday,' said Grandpa. 'Your mother doesn’t work on Sunday.'
'Goodness! ' Nanna leaped to her feet. 'I have to do t'wine this afternoon, Dad. It's waiting. It's an essential task. Not work.' She said to Mam, 'I'll give you a bottle of elderberry and what about rhubarb?'
'Thanks. I'll put them in my bag. I've been "bound" lately .. .' Mam gave a relieved smile.
Grandpa said, 'What do you mean? Getting a ride back? Who's giving you a ride back? Where to?'
'Don't get alarmed,' Mam said. 'It's only Frank Chancellor. He goes to see his mother on Sundays. He passes the end of our lane at four o'clock. If I'm there he'll drive me back to Macc in his motorcar.'
'He's a married man,' Grandpa said.
Mam laughed. 'Frank's a country man. I've known Frank all my life.'
'Is Mrs Chancellor still in that little cottage at Pott Shrigley?' said Nanna, incredulous. 'Well I never. Her son's got a big house in Park Lane. And all that money.'
'It's Frank's wife and his father-in-law who have the money. They keep a tight hold on it ...'
'I said no scandal-mongering! 'Grandpa boomed out.
'I am not scandal-mongering. It's common knowledge,' Mam said.
Mam knew everything about everybody in Mace. 'And no
body knows a thing about me,' she boasted, for she was full of secrets. Mam knew which women said, 'My drink is water bright', but got drunk in secret. She knew who their fathers were, what they had done, where they'd come from and where they'd finish up if they didn't watch out. She knew which woman got her blonde hair and her navy blue parting out of a bottle. She knew whose wife had run off with the tallyman, leaving her mother-in-law and husband behind.
I dogged Mam's footsteps, saying nothing, hoping to follow her down the lane and watch her drive away in the motor car. Nanna brought the two bottles and put them in Mam's shopping bag. 'Do you want to hear our Lil play piano?’
Grandpa had taught me to speak well and to read and write a little, but Nanna had taught me to play the piano. Nanna had 'the gift', which she had passed on to me. She taught me how to hear a tune and pick out the melody. Within a few minutes I'd be adding the chords with the left hand and arpeggios that Grandpa called the twiddly bits with the right. My hand could not stretch the octaves but it was easy, picking out tunes.
What I wanted to play was what I thought was spelled Show Pan - the Chopin waltzes Mr Hammond played. Nanna could not play Show Pan. There was very little money spent at Lindow. A trip to Macclesfteld was a once-a-month event yet only last week my lovely Nanna had put on a round straw hat and her fawn coat with a velvet collar and taken me to the music shop on Churchwallgate to buy a Smallwood's tutor book and “The Chopin Waltzer”. And I'd seen at once that if I were to play even the exercises in the tutor book I'd need fingering and theory lessons like Sylvia had every week. But that day I wanted to show off. I'd mastered 'Bluebells of Scotland' and 'Merry Peasant'.
Mam glanced at the big clock on the kitchen wall. It said it was a quarter past four. 'No time. You should have said. Earlier.’
Tears of disappointment came prickling behind my eyes but I said, 'It doesn't matter.'
'Good. Then I'm off.’ Mam took the shopping bag from Nanna and without stopping to wave, much less kiss me goodbye, she was gone, out of the kitchen door, her Louis heels catching on the gravel path as she hastened away on to the Iane and her ride home.
When she had gone my tears fell. 'I won't see her till Wednesday,' I wailed. Wednesday was Mam's half-closing day.
‘Come here, love.’ Nanna's blue eyes clouded with unhappiness as she knelt down and held out her arms.
I fell into the comfort of them, crying on her shoulder. Will you teach me to play "Blaze Away"? When it's not Sunday?'
'Course I will.' Then gently she asked, 'What makes you think we can't play a march on a Sunday?'
I pressed my teeth into my bottom lip, to stall the tears. 'Isn't blaze a bad word? Like brazen?'
'Eeh! Our Lil! You are a comical little soul. Blaze isn't a bad word.' Nanna laughed and after a second or so the comers of my mouth were fighting to join in. 'Not unless you say, "Go to blazes!"' Nanna stopped laughing and clapped her hand to her mouth, in case Grandpa heard, making me laugh, turning away tears with that infectious good humour.
I loved my warm, demonstrative grandmother. Nanna and I were never apart. At Nanna's knee I was learning to knit and stitch. At her side I learned to knead and shape and prove and bake the crackle-crusty loaves and floury barm cakes that were our daily bread. With Nanna I walked for miles, picking hedgerow berries and gathering beech and hazel and chestnuts in autumn. In the spring we found meadow flowers and pressed them between the pages of a heavy· book. We pressed the little common heartsease and the rare and glorious Felwort gentian.'And we plucked by the bucketful cowslips and oxlips for Nanna's country wine.
A little while after Mam had gone. Nanna took me to sit outside the wooden shed. I had recovered my good spirits and was happily munching on a consolation - a crust plastered with butter and honey.
Nanna, rosy-cheeked and happy, stood in the doorway of the shed, sliding pieces of toasted bread spread with brewer's yeast into a barrel of mash which was the yellow cowslip heads crushed into sugar and lemons and water. It was a shady comer of the garden where the sky was filled with flighty tortoiseshell butterflies and the heady scents of the woodbine flowers and pinks were all about us. But instead of watching the flight of the insects I was puzzling over the difference between the drink Grandpa railed against and the wine Nanna availed herself of whenever she felt a cold coming on.
'Nanna?'
'Well?'
'Doesn’t cowslip wine bring men to brazen behaviour, drunkenness and evil?'
Nanna's blue eyes twinkled. 'Good heavens, no, child,’ she said before once again dipping her fingers into the barrel. Scooping and sucking vigorously, she added, 'This isn't going to be a drunkard's brew! This is medicinal wine. To keep winter cold out. Jesus himself drank wine.'
It must be right if Nanna said so. All the same, I wondered why Mam should be so keen to take home the bottles of wine every Sunday and why she invariably hurried away before Grandpa could offer to walk with her to the station. Did Mam get a ride home with Mr Chancellor every Sunday?
Chapter two
Frank Chancellor drove downhill from his mother's cottage - the cottage she refused to leave - until he reached the crossroads. He pulled the bright red Alvis in close to a high drystone wall. He switched the engine off then climbed down and drew the canvas hood up to screw it on to the chrome pegs of the windscreen frame. It would be hot with the roof up but Elsie was afraid of being seen in the back of his motor car.
The thought amused him. It was Barnaby Sunday, for heaven's sake! The mills were closed. Thousands had queued yesterday, for the trains taking them to Blackpool, Filey and Rhyl, but Elsie was afraid someone might see her in his car and put two and two together.
Where on earth was she? He glanced at himself in the wing mirror and ran a sun-browned hand through the thick mass of dark curly hair, to straighten it. He walked downhill a few yards to the spot where he would be able to see all over the lower end of Bollington. He could make out the elementary school that he and Elsie had attended, and there was the railway station where, from the age of twelve, he had caught the train every school day. He had won a scholar-ship at twelve; won a place at the King's School, Macclesfield where he had excelled.
He was a country man at heart. He had been born in these hills, a mile or so up the hill from Lindow. His father, a tenant farmer on the Archerfleld estate, had been a hard-drinking, hard-hitting man who hated Old Man Hammond, the new owner of the land that generations of Chancellors had farmed. Whenever his father had to doff his cap to Old Man Hammond, he would come home in a filthy temper. 'Get out of me road!' he'd yell, or, 'I'll thrash you to within an inch of your bloody lives!' He used to beat the daylight out of his four eldest sons.
Frank, ten years younger than his nearest brother, escaped the worst of his father's foul temper. Frank was clever and he was an opportunist. He learned early on how to avoid his father's wrath. He'd drop to the ground before his father could touch him, and he'd call out for Ma who came to his side to intervene for the apple of her eye.
Ma was forty when Frank was born and when Frank was four, Jimmy, the last of his brothers, left home and Ma stood up to his father. When he won the scholarship she said, 'Frank's going to accept it. Learning is what Frank needs. Chancellors have farmed this land for centuries. It's a proud old family but none of them had any learning.'
Frank's only carefree hours in his boyhood had been spent with Elsie and her parents at Lindow Farm. Ma used to warn Frank, when he was only a sixteen-year-old schoolboy with years of study ahead of him, 'Don't go giving Elsie ideas. Never steal a girl's affections unless you mean to marry her.' Frank smiled now at his thoughts. If Ma knew half of what went on between him and Elsie - and all that had gone on when they were nothing but children, she would have taken a strap to him today.
There was only a year between him and Elsie. As children they wandered the hills on summer nights and bathed naked in ponds and streams. In adolescence, on winter evenings they bedded down under the barn's rafters on the straw bales, high above
the cattle, kissing and petting and fondling. My God! Thinking about her was exciting him. Where was she? He looked behind. No sign of her.
Ma could not protect him from everything, though. Ma was not there when the rich King's School lads got their laughs from the sight of him in second-hand school uniforms that were either too big or too small, for Ma's purse didn't stretch to outfitting him with new clothes.
On his first day at King's School he saw the gulf that lay between him and his new school friends - town boys from the middle classes; the new rich and the greater gulf between their families and his own. He couldn't ask any of these boys to his home, where his father spoke in oaths and his sweet, tired mother cried in secret. His new school companions grew impatient with what they saw as his standoffish behaviour.
Frank had nothing outside school - no interests but his studies and Elsie. He soon became a loner who would never have a close man friend. But he observed the other boys and adopted their mannerisms and speech. He'd say, 'How's things, old boy?' and sound choosy when anything was offered to him, with an, 'I will give it a bit of thought, eh?' or 'Not for me, I'm afraid.'
He took a lift of an eyebrow from one, a careless shrug from another, a lazy but confident gesture from yet another boy. He copied the ways of the leisured classes until he could use them at will. They never became an unconscious part of him but he learned how to lead a double life. He put aside his act only when he was with Ma or Elsie.
And because there were no distractions, he passed his School Certificate at fifteen and the Higher School Certificate at sixteen and a half. He was good at most subjects - so good it was difficult for him to decide what to do. He was too clever for the hard grind of tenant-farming and too poor for the simple indulgence of his tastes in poetry and literature. There was always the possibility of studying classics and earning a small living teaching. Or should he study commerce and chartered accountacy at Manchester? He wanted to be rich and independent and after some years, buy the farm and more land and set the Chancellor name up high like a landed family. He worked harder and again his efforts were rewarded. He was offered a place at Oxford -the only lad in his year to be offered a place and a bursary. He could do anything now. Anything might be his for the taking.
Wise Child Page 2