by Sophie Duffy
And in a circle around us, there is a smart(ish) Bob with a gorgeous Tamarine, Jeremy in a ridiculous suit, next to Jessica Talbot in a dress (hallelujah). Jessica is holding the camcorder steady, capturing the hushed moment for future generations (or You’ve been Framed if someone slips and bangs their head on the font).
For there will be future generations. Feet will tread over the threshold, in kitten heels, in sling-backs, in Crocs, in sandals like Mr Maynard’s, in plastic Cinderella slip-ons, in Marks and Spencer’s wide-fit. People will seek, people will worship, people will knock over flower arrangements (thank you, Jeremy). They will enter this sacred place for comfort and for refuge, for celebration and for joy. They will look up at St Hilda, shining away in her own blue slippers. And they will look further, beyond, to eternity. Knees will bow, tongues will confess, souls will sing. Now in Penge. And forever more. Amen.
If you enjoyed This Holey Life, don’t miss the brilliant debut novel by Sophie Duffy,
The Generation Game
The Generation Game
Life is the name of the game
Bruce Forsyth
2006
Oh dear. How did that happen?
Last time I looked, I only had myself to worry about. Now I’ve got you. Another person. Yesterday you were hidden away, tucked up inside me, completely oblivious to what lay ahead. Now here you are, floppy and exhausted, the biggest, scariest journey of your life over and done with. All screamed-out and sleeping the way babies are supposed to on a good day.
So what now? Where do we go from here, you and I? Backwards, I suppose. To the beginning. While you are quiet and still and here in my arms. Before they chuck us out and send us home.
Home.
But where to start? Where is the beginning exactly?
Long before the bags I packed full of nappies and cream and teeny-weeny babygros. Before the hairy ride in the taxi over the speed bumps of East Dulwich banging my head on the roof while the Irish cabbie recited his Hail Marys. The tracks I played on my iPod, full blast to drown out the noise I couldn’t help making. The Best of The Monkees. Hearing those voices and tambourines took me back to a time when I had a best friend in all the world who I thought I was going to marry. Who I thought would be there forever. Who taught me that everything changes. (A Monkees compilation was as far as your father got involved in your birth. That and the quick leg-over that was lost somewhere amongst the ravages of my fortieth birthday.)
Long before then. Right back at the beginning, my beginning, way back when I was held for the first time in my mother’s arms.
Were my fingers ever that small? My toenails? Was my skin ever that smooth and wrinkled at the same time? My hair that fluffy? My grip that tight? My nose that squashed?
Did my mother hold me and wonder these very same things?
I can’t answer these questions.
And try as I might, I can’t tell you everything that went before. Everyone I could’ve gone to for help, for answers, has gone, is lost – in one way or another. But I’ll tell you what I can. I’ll tell you about the people who loved me. Who brought me up somehow, against all odds.
I’ll tell you about Lucas, the boy I was going to marry.
I’ll tell you about your father (though I’d rather not).
And I’ll tell you about a little fat girl called Philippa.
I’ll tell you my story. Our story. Because there’s nothing worse than wondering. Knowing is always better.
Chapter One: 1965
Family Fortunes
On the 29th day of July, 1965 I arrive in the world – a brightly-lit poky delivery room high up in St Thomas’ Hospital – amid a flurry of noise. The doctor is shouting at the midwife, the midwife is shouting at my mother and my mother is shouting so loudly, her screams can probably be heard across the Thames by the honourable gentlemen in the Palace of Westminster, possibly even by the Prime Minister himself, if they weren’t on their holidays. In fact, my mother is so busy screaming, she doesn’t seem to have noticed that I am already here. But I am. I have arrived in style, waving a banner, heralding my birth. I am happy to be here even if she isn’t so sure. I’d put up some bunting and have jelly and ice cream if I could.
(It is years later before I find out the truth: that I am in actual fact yanked out of my mother with a sucker clamped to my head, her (ineffective) coil clenched in my tiny fist. I am lucky to be here at all.)
I spend the first week being manhandled by stout nurses in starchy uniforms. They poke me and prod me and tip me upside down for no apparent reason. They bring me to my mother every four hours (‘Baby’s feed, Mrs Smith! Left side first!’) and whisk me away again to be comprehensively winded and gripe-watered before I’ve even had the chance to take a good look at her or to have loving words whispered in my newborn ears. Instead I have to lie on my tummy in a little tank in a large room. I am one of many. The others cry a lot. I give up and join in.
When I am seven days old, I am brought to my mother’s bed. It is empty. She is sitting in a chair next to it, reading a magazine. She looks quite different fully clothed. She has long legs and red lips and green eyes and smells of something other than the usual milk. The nurse hands me over hesitantly, as if I might explode in the wrong hands. But these are the right hands. My mother’s hands.
‘Time to go,’ she whispers to me after the young nurse has gone. ‘You’ve been here long enough.’ And she embarks on her plan to smuggle the pair of us out of St Thomas’, swaddling me in a yellow blanket despite the sweltering August heat (‘Always keep Baby warm, Mrs Smith!’). Not an easy operation as the sergeant major of a sister is of the belief that new mothers are incapable of doing anything more strenuous than painting their fingernails.
But my mother, I am already discovering, is a skilful liar. She convinces a stranger in a pinstripe suit – lost on his way to visit an elderly aunt – that his time would be better spent posing as her husband and my father (the first in a number of such attempts). He is only too happy to oblige and, at a carefully chosen moment when Sister is on her tea break, the young nurse relinquishes Mother and I into his control. We follow meekly behind him, down squeaky corridors and ancient lifts until at last we are out through the front doors and into my first gulp of fresh air (well, semi-fresh, this is London after all).
Mother gives the poor chap a cheery wave and a dazzling smile that makes it quite clear his assistance is no longer required and makes for Westminster Bridge, in her Jackie Kennedy sunglasses and killer stilettos, clutching me to her breast, like a fragile parcel she has to post. She hails a black cab all too easily and bundles me into the back of it while the cabbie deals with all our worldly belongings: a Harrod’s bag full of nappies and, more importantly, my mother’s vanity case.
Inside the Cab we are bumped and swayed along the London streets at unbelievable velocity. It is not as comfortable as my little tank. Or indeed my mother’s womb where I was safe and happy, swimming about in her amniotic fluid sucking my thumb, listening to the drum beat of her heart, not a care in the world.
At last we come to rest at Paddington Station. My short life as a Londoner is almost over.
Some time later, I lie in my mother’s awkward arms on the train, hot and fidgety. We have a carriage to ourselves. She is feeding me from a bottle. I preferred it when she fed me with her own milk which tasted of grapes and hospital food, each time slightly different. It is all the same out of these bottles and I keep leaving pools of curdled cream on her shoulder as she pats me rather too vigorously on the back (‘Come on, give me a good one, pleeeasse,’). I have the hiccups and tummy ache. Doesn’t she know I am too young to be on the bottle? Doesn’t she know that breast is best? My mother tuts, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. Maybe she is a hay fever sufferer. I know so little about her. This is the first time we have been on our own together.
Over her shoulder the world whizzes past the window so fast it hurts my little eyes, spins my tiny head. Maybe I am drunk. Maybe she’s given me to
o much gripe water to try and staunch the crying. She could probably do with a gin and tonic herself.
After a fitful sleep the train jolts me awake as we pull into a hazy greyness otherwise known as Reading. Heavy doors bang and crash but we stay where we are, trapped together in our carriage. Mother’s green-lidded eyes are closed but it is unlikely that she is sleeping as her fingers appear to be playing an invisible piano. The journey continues as does the winding and the curdling and the sniffing.
We do not get off at Swindon either, a new town with new hope. We carry on, via Bristol, heading south through Somerset and into Devon until we reach the coast. Sandy beaches, coves, and palm trees. The English Riviera. Torquay.
‘Our new home, Philippa.’
My mother sighs – whether from relief or regret is anyone’s guess – before lugging me and the bags out of the carriage and onto the platform, where she stands for a moment looking wistfully back up the track. Then she turns her face to the sun and lets the warm breeze brush over her. She sighs again, taking in this new air. Air that will thankfully make me sleepy over the weeks to come.
‘Right then, Philippa, let’s go.’
I don’t know where we are going. Of course, I don’t. It could be to one of the hotels on the cliffs or to one of the painted Victorian villas overlooking the Bay. Our lives are all set out before us and we could do anything. I could be destined to attend the Girl’s Grammar. To have tennis lessons. Elocution lessons. Cello lessons. I could be part of a happy family…
Unfortunately it is 1965 and my mother is unmarried.
So my first home turns out to be two rooms above a garage. Nothing flash – not Rolls or Daimler or Jaguar. No. The cars in the showroom below aren’t even new. There isn’t a showroom to speak of. Just a ‘Lot’ out the front, full of second-hand cars run by a bloke called Bernie from Wolverhampton. ‘Sheila and me came on our holidays here in 1960 and fell in love,’ he informs my mother, with a misty sheen to his eyes as he holds open our shabby front door to show us into our home. ‘We’ve never looked back.’
Advice we should all take on board.
(Too late, too late, I’ve started so I’ll finish.)
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