Shop Girl

by Mary Portas

‘Move the basket.’

  ‘Move the basket! You want me to give Father Bussey a cup of tea with a basketful of pigeons in the room?’

  ‘It won’t be for long.’

  ‘If I had a penny for every time I’ve heard that!’

  ‘I’ll move them as soon as I’ve found a loft.’

  ‘And when will that be? To think that our home and garden are going to be filled with filthy birds. What will Cathy and Jean think? And Dick Froome?’

  ‘These birds are almost pigeon royalty. Their bloodline stretches all the way to Belgium.’

  ‘I don’t care if they’re from Timbuktu! Build that pigeon loft or I’ll put them in a pie!’

  With that, my mother storms out.

  Having animals in the house has been a sore subject ever since Michael asked if he could bring home a mouse called Herbert that his friend Mick Rae wanted to give him.

  ‘Mice?’ Mum had shrieked. ‘We’ll be overrun with them before we know it. My father spent his whole working life trying to catch them. There will be no mice in this house!’

  But, determined to bring Herbert home, Michael had smuggled him up to his bedroom in a shoebox and hidden him under the bed. My mother had no idea the mouse was there until she knocked the lid off the box while she was cleaning one day and a string of tiny baby mice ran across the floor. Herbert was in fact a very pregnant Henrietta.

  ‘Bejeezus!’ my mother shrieked, as mice scattered. ‘Ring your father! Ring your father! Tell him to come home now!’

  Chasing after the mice with her broom, she’d wailed as they disappeared down cracks in the skirting.

  It took weeks to catch them and no living creature, apart from Patch and our canary, has been allowed over the threshold since. I’ve pleaded with Mum to let me have a monkey and promised to keep it on a lead but she won’t budge.

  Until now.

  The pigeons are in a cage that takes up about half of the Front Room and are unlike any I’ve ever seen. These have reddish feathers instead of grey London ones, and Dad is hoping that by next year his new birds will have had enough chicks for him to start racing them.

  ‘I did a bit of racing as a child,’ he’d announced at the dinner table one night, and we’d looked at each other in surprise because he rarely talked of the past. ‘I’ve decided I’m going to do it again and put a loft in the back garden.’

  After buying a subscription to Racing Pigeon and researching bloodlines, as if he was buying a thoroughbred horse, my father dug up the grass in preparation to put down crazy paving on which the loft would stand. But after spending weeks scouring the ads for one, he’d found nothing.

  ‘What sort of people race pigeons?’ my mother would mutter to herself, night after night, as Dad sat with the magazine. ‘The sort that go to the pub and wear flat caps, I’ll have no doubt. What will the neighbours think?’

  It was a mystery why my mother was worried about the neighbours. Mr and Mrs Dix had moved out and been replaced by Mary and Cecil, who were as common as muck, as far as Mum was concerned.

  ‘Would you look at this?’ she’d screeched one day from upstairs.

  I’d run up to find Mum shaking with laughter as she looked down at Mary hanging out the washing in a baby-doll nightie. When she bent down to pick out Cecil’s pants from the basket, it was clear that his were not the only ones in the wash.

  ‘For the love of God, would you look at that brazen hussy?’ Mum howled.

  Cecil’s Irish mam had also moved in with them. With a roll-up permanently stuck to her lip and hair yellowed by nicotine, she’d stand on the front step wearing a housecoat as she called to Mum asking if she wanted a cuppa.

  ‘No, thank you!’ Mum would shriek, as she bustled into the house tut-tutting about bringing the neighbourhood down.

  She is furiously stirring a pot of mince as I walk into the kitchen.

  ‘Taking up the garden with dirty birds!’ she hisses. ‘Those vermin will be in that room for months, mark my words. Just look at the loo.’

  I stare at the hole in the corner of the kitchen. It’s been there ever since Dad decided to bring the outside loo inside two years ago and set about the wall with a hammer. There is now an entrance to the loo off the kitchen but Dad still hasn’t got round to putting a door on the hole. We are just about hidden behind the wall when we pee but there’s no privacy in terms of sound. There are times when I wish I didn’t have brothers.

  The door opens and my father walks into the room.

  ‘I’m going to make a start on the crazy paving,’ he says gruffly. ‘Let me know when tea is ready.’

  My mother sighs as she murderously stabs the wooden spoon into the pot.

  Oxford bags

  I’m wedged behind a curtain beside a stall at Watford market. My mother is holding up a tiny mirror in front of me in the driving rain.

  ‘What do you think?’ I say.

  ‘I think if that’s what you really want then I’ll buy them for you. But God only knows why you’d want to wear trousers that will surely trip you up.’

  The fashion for flares perplexes my mother but I have been desperate for a pair of Oxford bags for months. Bolan wears them and I want to wear them too. If only Mum would buy me a pink silk shirt, I’d look just like Marc. My passion for him burns as brightly as ever and David Bowie is now my other god. Ziggy Stardust has just been released and Tish and I have learned every word of the ‘Starman’ lyrics.

  Mum is intrigued by these musicians. Dad is confused.

  ‘Are they fellas?’ he keeps asking, whenever they appear on telly.

  But those men fascinate me with their androgynous looks, skinny frames and clothes that blur the boundaries of all I’ve ever known. It’s not just what they wear. It’s the way their clothes are used to express something that I don’t fully understand. It’s the first time I’ve realized clothes can say something about you, tell the world what you want it to know. After a decade of mostly clean-cut pop stars, glam-rock boys, who look like girls wearing silk and glitter, ruffles and eyeliner, appear on Top of the Pops as if from another world.

  I envy my older brothers and Tish who are starting to experiment with clothes. After turning fifteen, Tish has got a Saturday job at Boots and I want to die when she brings home Rimmel lipsticks and 17 eye shadows that she buys with her staff discount. Michael is working weekends at Mac Fisheries in St Albans and Joe is still earning money with his newspaper delivery round, so they all have money in their pockets. Suddenly they are experimenting with fashion as well as music and I am counting down the days until I can get a job too. There are 1045 to go.

  For now, all I can do is badger my mother to buy me something, and I’ve spent weeks pleading for some trousers to wear to Linda Barnes’s birthday party. It’s only been a year since Mum bought me my first brand-new outfit for my eleventh birthday – a two-tone tonic skirt, orange jumper and an orange bobble hat with a peak. But I’ve finally persuaded her to buy me the trousers.

  I stare at myself with pleasure. Cream with a large orange check, the Oxford bags hug my skinny body perfectly. Lisa Cooper, the prettiest girl in my class, has a pair that she bought at Chelsea Girl. As I look at myself, I vow that no one will ever know mine came from Watford market.

  Fast forward a few days and I’m running around in bright sunshine on the lawn at Linda Barnes’s house. In a moment of excitement during a rounders match, I fling myself forwards to catch a ball, lose my footing and skid along the grass. I return home with green stains all over the trousers that even my mother’s vigorous washing cannot get out. Bowie and Bolan would never have got grass stains on their trousers, I think, as I stare forlornly at my ruined flares.

  Philips cassette tape

  Sister Mary Hill walks towards the tape player. Grabbing her chin, she starts to stroke the hairs on it. She always does this when she is nervous.

  ‘Quiet, please, girls,’ she says. ‘Hush now.’

  Sister Mary slips the tape into the player with quivering hands. Sher
ry Lander snorts with laughter.

  ‘Now, come on, girls!’ Sister Mary squeaks.

  She presses a button and we wait.

  ‘The raaaaayproductive cycle of rabbits is similah to that of humans,’ a woman’s voice says.

  She is so well spoken that she sounds like the Queen. Sister Mary Hill goes pale as she sits down and stares at her feet. We look at each other expectantly. I know a little of what is coming because Carrie Lowman revealed the secrets of sex to me soon after I started taking the bus to St Joan’s.

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’ she’d said disdainfully.

  Carrie Lowman was the kind of girl who smoked fags behind the public loos and had boys as friends, the kind of girl who knew all about sex and was prepared to reveal its secrets.

  ‘Bits and pieces,’ I’d said defiantly, hardly daring to admit that the only hints I’d got about sex so far in my life was seeing Sid James seduce Amanda Barrie in Carry on Cleo.

  Carrie explained the exact details of the process in the time it took for the bus to get from Watford to Rickmansworth.

  ‘Get out of here!’ I’d squealed, when she’d told me the key parts. ‘Are you serious?’

  Now a class of twenty convent girls and one unfortunate nun wait for the woman on the tape to speak again.

  ‘The male rabbit’s penis becomes erayct,’ the voice finally says. ‘He then inserts it into the female rabbit’s vaginah.’

  I swear that Sister Mary Hill will have to say about fifty Hail Marys after listening to this. If she’d had to say the words herself, it would have been a hundred.

  GPO telephone

  Sister Alma looked like Charles Hawtrey in a habit, while Sister Frances had such huge buck teeth she resembled a rabbit, and Sister Mary Hill was not dissimilar to Olive Oyl. Sister Josephine, meanwhile, caused a scandal when she left the school in my first year to get married. To a man.

  There were only two of those at St Joan’s. One was Mr Photiadis, who was about ninety and taught Spanish. The other was the maths teacher, Mr Mallison, who looked like a walrus. Cracking balls at us down the hockey pitch, he’d blow the whistle as Miss Gains panted along behind him with her terrier, Brecht. The head of English, she wore plaid skirts, with cardigans and brogues, and put the fear of God into everyone because she was so strict. Miss Gains was the kind of woman who would have viewed losing all her limbs as a minor setback.

  Sister Joan somehow managed to make even a nun’s habit look glamorous and I always got As in English because I liked her so much. It was the same with Mrs Blainey, who taught French and was so chic that I excelled in her class. Sadly, though, even Miss de Rosario’s good looks didn’t make me fall in love with maths. Half Indian, she was tiny and wore red pleated skirts with matching red lipstick. She did, however, put on a few plays at St Joan’s and I eagerly took the chance to start putting my private love of performance into public practice.

  I had little time for the teachers who didn’t interest me, though. Reciting Latin verbs in Miss Burns’s class made me want to shoot myself but, luckily, she was so short-sighted that I could fling a banana skin across the classroom and she wouldn’t notice. Then there was our timid but slightly eccentric Irish deputy head teacher, Sister Angela, who taught us environmental studies in a glass building that had been built as an extension to the red-brick school. When it heated up like a furnace in the summer, our lessons were constantly disrupted by her hot flushes.

  Sister Angela was particularly fond of the ducks that lived on the school stream, and one day Susan Smith, Margaret Woodhead and I decided that they should see a bit more of life. Lifting them up, we carried them to the tennis courts and let them loose. Soon a duck hunt was under way as Sister Angela had another hot flush at the thought that her ducks had been kidnapped. Once again, someone spotted me and I got hauled in front of Sister St James.

  She looked at me calmly as she sat on the other side of the desk. ‘Did you take the ducks, Mary?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘I didn’t so much take them. I moved them. It was only a joke.’

  ‘And you like jokes, do you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sister St James leaned forward with a stern look in her eyes. ‘We all like jokes, Mary, and I know that you’re good at making people laugh. Your teachers have told me so. But the thing about jokes is that they need to be kind. You understand that, don’t you?’

  Guilt fluttered inside me.

  ‘And the reason your joke on Sister Angela wasn’t kind was because she grew up on a farm in Ireland so the ducks are important to her. They remind her of home and she’s miles away from her family. So do you see that sometimes your jokes can get out of hand?’

  Shame washed over me as I stared at Sister St James. I thought of Mum and Dad and all their family in Ireland; the fact that Sister Angela didn’t have anyone of her own in England to look after her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered.

  ‘And can I trust you not to make any more jokes like this in the future?’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  ‘Good. Now go back to your class and make sure I don’t see you here again.’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  Having left Sister St James’s office, I was called in to see Mrs Duncan, who handed me an envelope. ‘It’s to inform your parents of what has happened,’ she snapped. ‘I’m sure they’ll be disappointed.’

  They would indeed. So I dropped the letter into a bin on the way home and never mentioned a word about it to my mother. We were having tea when the phone rang and I raced to answer it.

  ‘Mrs Newton?’ Mrs Duncan’s voice hissed down the phone.

  ‘Yes,’ I squeaked.

  ‘I’m just ringing to find out if you got the letter we sent today.’

  ‘Yes, I did see it, Mrs Duncan, that I did,’ I said, trowelling on my best Irish accent. ‘I’ve talked to Mary and there’ll be no more fuss like that.’

  ‘It really was a most unfortunate incident.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt. I’m thoroughly ashamed of her. Make no mistake. I’ve punished her very severely.’

  ‘You have?’

  I could almost hear Mrs Duncan smiling at the other end of the phone.

  ‘She is in her bedroom now doing her homework and I will make sure that she doesn’t misbehave again. And now I really must go because I have to take my son to football.’

  I knew that Sister St James was right, of course, that I had to learn to curb my mischief in future if it was going to hurt people. But there was one person for whom I would never make allowances.

  ‘Are you coming in for your pudding, Mary?’ Mum asked, as she popped her head out of the kitchen door. ‘It’s treacle sponge.’

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ I said innocently, and skipped into the kitchen.

  Bic biro 2

  I look at the list of names on the notice-board. Everyone is signing up their parents to take part in sports day. Fathers are going to run fifty metres and the mothers are having a rounders match. The biro in my hand quivers as I hold it up to the page.

  I know my mother and father will not come to sports day. Dad is too busy working and Mum will feel out of place on her own among the other parents, who are the kind of people to march in and talk to the teachers. The kind of people who speak in loud voices and organize everyone. My parents would never make a fuss like that.

  While my classmates invite me to their houses and I am always happy to go, I don’t invite them back. I’ve got a good excuse because Watford is a forty-minute bus journey from Rickmansworth. The only friends who come to see me are the ones from Watford. Girls like me, whom I’ve known all my life.

  ‘You don’t want to invite anyone from school back for tea?’ Mum asks now and again. ‘I’ll make your favourite, shepherd’s pie and flapjacks, if you want?’

  But I don’t want those girls to come to Watford and hear the Irish accents, smell the soda bread or see the half-built loo wall in the corner of the kitchen and the pigeon loft in the garden. I don’t
want anyone to whisper about my family or snigger in the corridor when they tell what they’ve seen.

  ‘It’s okay, Mum.’

  She gives me a long look, then bends down to kiss me. My heart lurches.

  I push the pen onto the paper and write my father’s name: Samuel Newton. I know he won’t come and I’ll have to make up an excuse on the day that he was too busy at work. But for now I want to see his name on the board alongside all the others.

  Aladdin Sane by David Bowie

  ‘Ready, Mary?’

  Michael is holding the needle over the Bush record player.

  ‘Think so.’

  ‘No, wait!’ says Tish. ‘Her hair needs a bit more backcombing, doesn’t it, Joe?’

  My brother walks up to me and pulls at the tufts sticking up from my head.

  ‘Give me the comb,’ he says to Lawrence, his voice so serious it sounds as if he’s ordering a nuclear missile strike.

  Joe digs the comb into my hair.

  ‘Ooooow!’ I screech.

  ‘Stop being so dramatic,’ Joe snaps. ‘There’s no point in doing this if we don’t do it properly.’

  He wiggles the comb up and down my hair for what feels like for ever before telling Lawrence to get the Silvikrin. The air around me is filled with fumes as he sprays.

  ‘Right,’ he finally says. ‘You’re done.’

  ‘Can I have a look?’ I cry. ‘Where’s the mirror? Lawrence, get me the mirror!’

  ‘Get on with it!’ roars Michael, as he stands ramrod straight, itching to start the record.

  Spinning on the turntable is the latest LP we’ve bought – Aladdin Sane by David Bowie. The wait since Ziggy Stardust has felt like a prison sentence. Neil Young, Roxy Music and Van Morrison; the Rolling Stones, the Ramones and Lou Reed – Michael has made us buy into a record collection that most twenty-somethings would envy. I can only feel sorry for the girls at St Joan’s who are either too busy riding ponies to listen to music or into Donny Osmond and Mud.