I hope school is still going well. Do you still take the children out on nature rambles when the weather warms up? I used to love nature rambles more than anything when I was at school.
What’s ‘The West Wing’, by the way? Is it something I should watch, do you think? Would I understand it? I am so grateful that you started me off watching ‘Friends’. I used to really look forward to my Friday evenings, and I was so pleased when Rachel decided not to go to Paris in the end. She and Ross make such a lovely couple, don’t they?
Love from your Gran xx
From: Margaret Hayton [[email protected]]
Sent: 1/3/05 02:49
To: Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]
Dear Becs,
I’ve just got back from my first call-out on the Witch House emergency rota, and I know we are meant to be hot on confidentiality, but you live miles away, and I’ve got to tell someone. It was Helen, she’s one of the younger residents, nineteen I found out tonight, though I’d have guessed much younger to look at her, she’s dead skinny and really sort of fragile-looking. She sounded really weird on the phone, said she’d taken an overdose, so I just phoned Alison first (because she’s said she’ll go with me the first time or so) and then got straight on my bike. The house is only five minutes away.
When I got there Helen was just sitting on her bed, looking sort of dazed. She’d taken a lot of her anti-depressants, plus a few aspirin. She hadn’t taken the whole bottle or anything – she’d been meaning to, she said, but then she’d changed her mind, and stopped and called me. She seemed really scared. I rang for an ambulance, but I hadn’t any idea what to say to Helen, so I just held her hand and hoped Alison wouldn’t be long. Then we heard Alison’s car, and as soon as she got there she took charge. She was super-efficient, just as if this happened all the time (and from what Helen told me later, perhaps it does). She asked exactly what Helen had taken, how many and of what, and wrote it down, and put the bottles and packets in a bag. Then she took Helen into the bathroom and got the toothmug and made her drink about ten mugfuls of water, until she was copiously sick, clumps of undigested tablets all down the sink in this watery vomit. Then we got in the car – Alison phoned to cancel the ambulance, which still hadn’t arrived – and we were at A&E within ten minutes of Alison’s arrival on the scene. Blimey, I wouldn’t want to be her kid’s teacher at a parents’ evening, if she had any kind of bone to pick!
Mind you, after all that prompt action, of course we then sat there waiting for forty minutes before we got to see a doctor. He gave Helen another emetic and she was sick again (he made her hold a stainless steel bowl, and she had to be sick there with everyone watching), but there was nothing more to come now, so I don’t think it did any good. It seemed to me like he wanted to punish her for wasting his time with something that was her fault when he’d got all these other people waiting – I guess maybe he’s met her before up there. But it’s not her fault. She’s depressed, she really is ill, just like all the others. Then he checked her pulse and blood pressure, and shone one of those little torch things into her eyes, and told her to see her GP in the morning for a check-over.
Alison drove us back to Witch House, and she had to leave, but I said I’d stay a bit, so Helen and I made a cup of tea and took it up to her room. Her stomach was really sore from all the vomiting, but weak and milky seemed OK. Anyway, she seemed to have sort of unfrozen, if you know what I mean, and she started talking, and I ended up staying until – well, what is it now? – quarter to three! Her dad abused her, it’s horrible. Started when she was still at primary school, eight or nine she was, and it didn’t stop until she finally got up her courage to leave, and came to Witch House, nearly two years ago. She just packed a few things, and got on the bus, and went to the CAB. They sent her to WITCH, and luckily there was a space straight away. She didn’t speak to her parents for about six months, and when she finally got up courage to ring, her mum just pretended everything was normal, and asked how she was, and where she was living and stuff. She even goes round there for Sunday lunch sometimes now – her mum is always on at her to go – and no one ever asks her why she left, and she hasn’t said anything, and they all pretend they are a normal happy family. Her dad’s an orthodontist, and probably plays golf, and goes to church on Sundays. But it’s eating Helen up, you can see. She says the mornings when she wakes up and can get up and shower without a huge effort of will are few and far between. She didn’t say so much about – well, you know, the suicidal feelings and the self-harm, and of course I wasn’t about to ask. And here am I, getting back on my bike and pedalling back to my normality, my pain-free, livable life. I know it’s a cliché, Becs, but I literally cannot imagine what it’s like to be Helen, I really can’t.
Anyway, sorry to load all this on you – you’ll open this in the morning, I expect, and what a cheery start to your day that will be! Hope your dad isn’t too bad, by the way.
Love,
Margaret xx
From: Margaret Hayton [[email protected]]
Sent: 1/3/05 07:17
To: Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]
Dear Becs,
I’m really sorry about that e-mail last night. I guess I was all wound up, and just needed to tell someone. Just ignore me. I’m quite calm again this morning. And I didn’t even ask how you are, or what’s going on with you. How is Campbell? Still tucked up in your bed and sleeping like a baby?
No, I haven’t found anyone round here to tempt me out of my nun’s habit yet, nor even worth setting my wimple at, to be honest. The male staff at school are all either married or ancient or both, and as my main social life at the moment (apart from chatting to Cora over our still highly carnivorous suppers) is WITCH – and, well, to be honest, I’m not going to meet any men that way, except maybe the odd violent ex-husband, and perhaps a psychiatrist or two.
They are really a brilliant lot of women, though – if a little, um, motley. The two Pats I’ve told you about, and Alison, who is a kind of absolute monarch manqué of collective working (‘la commune, c’est moi’). She’s a medical research scientist in the daytime – probably gets the bacteria whipped into line in the petri dishes. Ding (yes, that really does seem to be her name – but of course one doesn’t like to ask) comes over as a bit ditzy, but to be fair to her she kept the account books in the sort of good order that would make a Swiss military tattoo look slipshod. Susan is very quiet, about my age I think, and Emily is older, must be close to retirement I’d say, and she and Pat T. are the paid workers at the house. No one gets a surname, it’s all first names except the Pats get to be Pat T. and Pat W. respectively, to avoid descent into complete chaos. But my favourite is Persephone. She’s an unfeasibly tall Jamaican woman, invariably swathed in some flamboyant African print like a furled oriflamme around a flagpole, the effect sometimes even topped off by one of those turban thingummies, and she’s into alternative everything. Her laugh could fell trees, and she laughs a lot. She came to Britain as a kid with her mum, two of just twelve passengers on a cargo ship which, serendipitously, was carrying bananas. It is the one disappointment of her life that in forty years no one in oh-so-polite Ipswich has ever asked her whether she came over on the you-know-what. Pat and Pat call her Percy. On Planet Pat everyone has to have a masculine abbreviation for their name. If they start calling me Gary, I swear I’m leaving the group.
So what’s new with you, anyway?
Love,
Margaret x
From: Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]
Sent: 1/3/05 08:07
To: Margaret Hayton [[email protected]]
Hi Margaret, you poor thing, last night sounds quite a trauma. But this is where all your do-gooding gets you, you see. Whereas I was tucked up in bed by ten thirty. Sadly, not with Campbell, who turned out to prefer the role of sugar daddy to that of toyboy, and has cast me aside in favour of some sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in a gym slip. (Actually, I have no idea at
all what a gym slip is, or was. It sounds scratchy and uncomfortable though, so I bloody well hope she does have to wear one!) I have now decided that in order to get over this devastating rejection I really am going to work my way through the alphabet, so am out clubbing tonight with my classroom assistant, Paula, on the lookout for someone suitably therapeutic by the name of Daniel or Dean or David . . .
Becs xxx
OK, ‘oriflamme’ is a 5, and ‘serendipitously’ is a grudging 4.5. But no points for ‘motley’, you can do better than that, hon. They sound like a harlequinade, at the very least.
From: Margaret Hayton [[email protected]]
Sent: 1/3/05 08:09
To: Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]
Dougal? Darwin? Dmitri? Dante? Dhruv? Dartagnan? Dionysus? Happy hunting!
Margaret xx
42 Gledhill Street
Ipswich
Suffolk IP3 2DA
Mr Richard Slater, MP
House of Commons
London SW1A 0AA
5 March 2005
Dear Mr Slater,
I am writing to you again about the small park between Gledhill Street and Emery Street. Not only is the zip-wire still broken (see my letter of 10 February), but the problem of dog-fouling is getting worse. I myself regularly walk my housemate’s springer spaniel in the park, always ensuring that I scoop up behind her and place the waste in the bin provided. Other dog-owners, however, are not so community-minded as myself, and the area is becoming quite unpleasant for the children to play in. I see it as a hygiene issue.
I am sure that the provision of another bin designated for dog waste, closer to the Emery Street gate, would help to resolve the problem. I have written to the borough council about the matter, but have received no reply.
Yours sincerely,
Margaret Hayton.
PS. I should be grateful if you could send me a proper answer to this letter, and not just another of your standard form replies. Do you even read your correspondence?
House of Commons
London SW1A 0AA
11 March 2005
Dear Ms Hayton,
Thank you for your letter of 5 March, raising an issue of concern. Your view has been noted, and I can assure you that I shall be looking into this matter in the near future.
Yours sincerely,
Richard Slater, MP.
From: Richard Slater [[email protected]]
Sent: 12/3/05 14:28
To: Michael Carragan [[email protected]]
Hi Michael,
How is life in the heady heights of the Home Office, then? Do you have your own junior ministerial office with a shiny green junior ministerial telephone and a shiny pink junior ministerial secretary? Shall I come round and see? (Do they let us rank-and-file mortals inside there?)
Of course, as you know, the Ruler Of The World passed over me again in the latest reshuffle – all for standing by my principles and abstaining in the Iraq vote! It’s all so unfair: it’s not like I haven’t put in the graft. I served my eight years on the borough council, five of them as chair of the Refuse Disposal SubCommittee. I dutifully cut my teeth by standing for sodding Unwinnable South-East, lurking in the rain like a grinning moron in a shopping centre in Leatherhead (‘Would you like to meet the Labour candidate, madam?’ – ‘No, not really.’). And I ran a tight campaign, though I say it myself: we’d got out every one of the 137 Labour promises by lunchtime on polling day. I got my golden prize: the nomination for good old Ipswich, and I even won the seat with an increased majority. I was young, I was bright, I was (if you’ll excuse the expression) thrusting: universally tipped for high office. And then the ROTW had to have that bloody war! It’s not like I haven’t tried to make amends. I’ve been so far up the Whips’ bottoms that I could see their Weetabix most days: volunteering for Standing Committees on every strand of red tape going, coming in for divisions on a Friday night when everyone else was either in the pub or on the train back to their nice warm wives and constituencies. Just how many more months in back bench purgatory do you think the ROTW has in mind for me before I am allowed to knock on the door again?
I know I should be concentrating on just being a Good Constituency MP, in the grand tradition of those down the years who’ve considered it an honour simply to serve their public. But, to be honest, what used to be the golden prize feels increasingly like the wooden spoon. Good God, it’s all so trivial! It’s all just mad old biddies with no life who write me endless letters about nothing at all. I’ve got a new one, by the way – Doris or Margaret or one of those old lady names – she writes around once a fortnight, or that’s how it seems, about all and anything. It was dog-fouling last week – actually DOG-FOULING! I thought my days of dealing with broken paving slabs and dog mess were over when I left the borough council. I thought, in my innocence, that once I was in Parliament I might get to do something real, something that mattered! Is this really what I went into politics for?
Anyway, sorry for the long rant, Michael, but if you do get a chance to whisper my name in any ears in those elevated circles in which you now move, well, I’ll owe you one, mate. Or even several.
Richard.
Richard Slater (Labour)
Member of Parliament for Ipswich
From: Michael Carragan
[[email protected]]
Sent: 12/3/05 14:42
To: Richard Slater [[email protected])
Hello Richard, greetings from the Hallowed Halls. I have my fair share of constituency stalkers too, you know. There’s one who has turned up at every one of my monthly surgeries since the day I was elected, with a tartan coat and an elderly Skye terrier, both of which smell of mothballs. Never yet found out what she’s after – she always goes away before she’s called in. And now here we have our own special breed of Home Office letter-writer, too. There’s a file my predecessor kept marked ‘LFN’, which she explained means Letters From Nutters, and there are some real finds in there, believe me. One of them thinks she is the love-child of Peter Sellers, and writes twice a week to get him released from HMP Parkhurst, where she believes he has been incarcerated since 1980.
As for whispered words in ears, don’t think for a moment that the ROTWeiler ever comes near these less-than-smoke-filled rooms. I’m in office 4B on the corridor that time forgot, so unless the ear of Mrs Cadwallader with the tea trolley serves your purpose, I don’t think I can help.
You can buy me one (or several) anyway, and we’ll weep into them together. What about Tuesday night at 9.30? Call me.
Michael.
Michael Carragan (Labour)
Member of Parliament for West Bromwich West
42 Gledhill Street
Ipswich
13 March 2005
Darling Petey,
I’m writing this one at the kitchen table, with a cup of tea beside me, in that mug you gave me with the springer spaniel on it. I remember when you came home with it you said it looked just like Snuffy, and instead of saying thank you I said Snuffy’s ears are longer – but you didn’t seem to mind.
I’m in here because Margaret is in the sitting-room with one of the girls from that hostel of hers, Jasmin or Yasmin I think she said her name was, a very pretty-looking girl, black hair and almond eyes and skin the colour of really milky coffee. I think she’s from one of those eastern European countries, one that used to be in Yugoslavia, or maybe was part of Russia before the wall came down. Anyway, the poor little thing doesn’t speak very good English yet, I think she’s only been over here a few weeks, and Margaret is kindly teaching her a bit of reading and writing, so I left them to it. Margaret was using some of her Biff and Chip books from school, so I don’t know what the poor girl will make of them, all about magic adventures and a key that glows and makes you go small. She was showing very willing, though, and she laughed and said that Floppy (the dog in the books) looks like Snuffy, which made me warm to her, as you can imagine. I nearly said,
Snuffy’s ears are longer, and then it made me think of you, and how much I miss you, and I had to come in here and get a tissue.
I suppose it’s a problem for adults learning to read another language, because most of the easy books are for kids. Sarah at the bank (you know, the young one, who’s been off travelling round the world) said she used to teach English to foreign people. She had a special word for it – something like Teflon, though it can’t be that, that’s the non-stick on frying pans. Anyway, she has a story about teaching some Japanese businessmen using a fairy story book because it was all she had, and when she asked them if there were any questions, one man asked her to give him an everyday example of a situation where he would use the expression ‘by the hair on my chinny chin chin’!
Mr Davies told us we’re going to have another refit at the bank, starting in May. So it will be all plaster dust and working out of cardboard boxes again, with the electricity off half the time and the computers down. It only seems five minutes since the last one, although when I work it out I think it must be eight or nine years – that was when we got rid of the counter and the glass and went over to everyone having their personal banker and sitting in easy chairs. Now, apparently, Head Office says it has to be back to counters, with a complicated new set-up for queuing. Dora’s Dave is back at work, but he’s still not to do any heavy lifting. Dora says, well that won’t make much difference then, not at home at any rate.
More Than Love Letters Page 3