Becky Bananas

by Jean Ure

  If everyone was allowed to look into their future before they were born, then they could decide whether they liked it or not, and if they didn’t then they wouldn’t have to come, and that way perhaps there wouldn’t be any more awful things such as illness and accidents and starvation.

  Zoë told me that she believes everyone who dies is born again as someone else. She said, “You don’t really die, because you always come back again.” She told me that she read this somewhere and she most firmly believes it.

  It is a nice thought but I don’t understand how it can be, since the population of the world is getting bigger all the time. For example, there were probably only about – oh, I don’t know! – about five hundred people, maybe, before the Stone Age, whereas now there are about five hundred million, I should think. Five hundred billion. Five hundred trillion. So where have all the extra people come from?

  It doesn’t really make any sense, though I suppose it would be a comfort to think that you weren’t just going to disappear.

  I asked Zoë, if you did come back, whether you would come as someone quite different or as just another version of yourself, and she said she’d thought about this and she reckoned you’d come back as another version of yourself. She said this would account for people sometimes claiming to remember being alive in another age.

  That is true. People do make these claims. Like there was this woman who could remember being an Egyptian slave and could even speak ancient Egyptian.

  I think there may be something in it but that it is not quite as simple as Zoë makes out. On the other hand, if that is what she wants to believe, it would be unkind to spoil it for her by asking too many questions. We all have to find our own things to believe in. That is what Gran said and I think it is true.

  What I believe is that even if I have been someone else before and am going to be someone different in the future, it is me as I am now that is important.

  And me as I am now is going to go to Wonderland! That is my big, immediate goal. To be twelve years old and go to Wonderland.

  I am really determined about it.

  3. Me and My Favourite Things

  You were born Rebecca Banaras, but everyone

  calls you Becky Bananas.

  It was Sarah started calling me that. The first day I was at Oakfield, out in the playground at break.

  “Bananas?” she said. “Is that really your name?” And before I could tell her that it wasn’t, she’d gone and shrieked, “Becky Bananas!” and got everyone giggling.

  I didn’t think then that I was going to like her very much. But now she’s my best friend and we do everything together. Well, almost everything. There are some things I can only do with Zoë, and that’s why Zoë is my special friend. But for school and home, it’s me and Sarah. We get on really well.

  She’ll be one of the guests when I’m on This is Your Life!

  I don’t mind her calling me Becky Bananas. I’ve got used to it. Once I almost wrote it on an exam paper! I got as far as:

  and I had to go back and change it:

  We didn’t have Mrs Rowe then, which is just as well or she’d have made one of her remarks like “I see we nearly stumbled at the first hurdle, Rebecca!” She said that to Sarah once, when Sarah wrote the date wrong. She can be ever so sarcastic.

  And she always always calls us by our full names: Rebecca, Joanna, Suzanne. It’s like she’s scared of being too friendly. She says, “You do not shorten my name. Why should I shorten yours?”

  It’s hard to think how you could shorten Rowe. Sarah sometimes calls her Rosy, only not to her face. I don’t think anyone would dare call her that to her face!

  She’s all right, really, Mrs Rowe. She’s very fair. She doesn’t pick on people or have favourites, like some teachers. I think she’s one of those that Gran would have said their bark is worse than their bite. I wonder if she’d be one of the guests?

  She might be! When I was off school last year she came to see me, which not everybody did. When I told Sarah, Sarah pulled a face and said that if she was off school a visit from Rosy was the last thing she’d want.

  “Freeze the blood in your veins, that would!”

  But she was really nice and not at all sarcastic. Also, she brought me a book of ballet photographs and a get-well card with a picture of Darcey Bussell on it. I wonder how she knew that Darcey is my ace favourite dancer???

  Maybe she’s seen the photos I’ve got pinned inside my locker! But she still must have gone out and bought it specially. Not everyone would have done that. So now I think that seeming to be cold and unfeeling is just her manner, like Sarah is always laughing and making jokes so that maybe you would think she doesn’t care about things, but that would not be true. We wouldn’t be best friends if she didn’t care. For instance, she cried ever so when her favourite goldfish died.

  He was called Golden Boy and it was particularly terrible and tragic as her little sister Tasha took him out of the tank when no one was looking and he squiggled through her hands and fell on the floor, and instead of putting him back she got scared and ran screaming for her mum. By the time her mum got there it was too late and he had expired (which is simply another way of saying died).

  Sarah was really sad. She said that although goldfish don’t have much in the way of personality it is very upsetting to think of them suffocating on the living-room carpet. I can see that it would be. Especially if it happens to be your favourite one.

  We once wrote out long lists of all our favourite things, Sarah and me. We made scrapbooks and stuck them in there, with little drawings and pictures that we’d cut from magazines. Of course we were only young then. I expect if I looked at my list now I would cringe and think “How childish”. I mean, for instance, when I was six years old my favourite food was – jelly babies!

  I wonder if it would be fun to make up a new list, now that I am more mature? I think I will!

  List of my Favourite Things

  Favourite colour – Blue. I don’t know why, but it makes me happy. It is just one of those things.

  Favourite book – Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild, even though it is old-fashioned. And my favourite character from Ballet Shoes is Posy, because she is the one who becomes a dancer!

  Favourite ballet – Swan Lake. Odette is what I want to dance more than anything else! My favourite part is where she is on point, leaning back against Prince Siegfried, and he has his arms round her.

  I think that is so beautiful and romantic!

  Favourite TV programme – Ask Auntie. I have to say that because it is Mum’s programme! I like it because I like to watch Mum. I suppose if Mum wasn’t in it I might say … General Practice. I really like that.

  Sarah says it’s fuddy-duddy. That is an expression she recently read in a book and now she keeps repeating it like a parrot. Everything that she thinks dull and boring is fuddy-duddy. She says that General Practice is for old people. It is true that there are quite a lot of old people in it, but sometimes there are children and that is interesting. Zoë likes it, too. We have thought of writing an episode together and sending it to the BBC.

  Favourite Film – Little Women. I have seen it three times and would like to see it again, even though I always drench about ten hankies when Beth gets sick after holding poor Mrs Hummel’s baby. This is because I know that she is going to die, though she doesn’t actually do so in the film. (But I have read Good Wives and that is how I know.) Last time I watched it Mum got worried and said it was too upsetting for me. She would like it if I only watched things that made me laugh, not things that make me weep. I know she means well but you cannot cocoon people. “Wrap them in cotton wool” is what Gran used to say. I don’t want to be wrapped in cotton wool. I want to watch Little Women again and again!

  Jo of course is my favourite character. She is Sarah’s too. I think she must be everyone’s. The reason she is my favourite is because she is so full of life. And also because she is brave. Cutting off her hair and behaving like a b
oy at a time when girls were not supposed to behave like boys.

  I wish I were as brave as Jo, but I don’t think I am. If I were, I wouldn’t choose blue as my favourite colour. I would choose … red!

  I bet Jo would choose red. Red is bold and exciting. She would probably think blue is a bit boring. Uncle Eddy says it is the colour of peace and rest. That makes it sound like an old person’s colour. Does it mean that I am like an old person?

  No! It is simply that I like blue things. Blue sky. Blue sea. Blue flowers. Forget-me-nots and pansies. Harebells, bluebells. And the little trumpety things that Mum calls periwinkles.

  Favourite flower – My favourite of all flowers is sweet peas!

  I love sweet peas because they are very dainty and fragile. Like butterflies. Gran used to grow them at the end of her garden. They grew up the fence that looked onto the railway line.

  Sweet peas come in all beautiful colours. Pinks and mauves and whites and purples. Scarlets and lemons and even a sort of pale orange. But not, I think, blue. That is strange! Fancy having a favourite flower that doesn’t come in my favourite colour.

  When I was little I called them fairy flowers. I even made up a ballet for them.

  I can’t remember the steps now but I expect they were just skipping and hopping. I was only about four. I didn’t know steps like pas de chat or arabesque.

  Let me think of some more of my favourite things.

  Favourite Animal – The cat. Mum says cats are like liquid ornaments. She says she’d rather have a cat sitting on the mantelpiece than a Ming vase. I’m not quite sure what a Ming vase is, but I know that it is something very precious and expensive.

  Siamese cats are quite expensive.

  They are also very beautiful and intelligent, and also they talk all the time, in a yowling sort of way. Also, they have blue eyes!

  Kitty had green ones. She was just an ordinary cat. Not like Bella and Bimbo. They are pedigrees. But she slept on my bed and she cuddled and purred. She was my very favourite cat of all.

  I shall never forget Kitty.

  I am still thinking of favourite things.

  Favourite activity – Dancing! When I was young we were too poor for me to go to a proper dancing school and so Gran’s friend Violet taught me. Gran called her Vi but I called her Violet. Even when I was six years old, that is what I called her. She used to say, “I don’t hold with all this formality, ducks.”

  Violet was younger than Gran but they’d been on tour together in the old days, when Violet was a dancer and Gran was part of a double act with Granddad. And then Violet had Bobby, who was Down’s syndrome, and gave it all up to look after him. Only she would never say that she had given it up. She would say, “Gave it up? I didn’t give it up, it gave me up!” And then she’d laugh this funny, crackling laugh and light another fag. She always called them her fags.

  “Where are me fags? Pass me me fags!”

  She used to smoke her fags even while she was teaching me.

  I don’t suppose, really, that Violet was ever a very good dancer. She never did proper ballet. I think what she did was called show dancing. But she taught me how to do plies and positions of the feet, and battements tendus and ronds de jambes.

  Later, when I went to the Russell, Miss Runcie said I’d had a good grounding, so Violet must have known what she was doing even if she did pronounce ronds de jambes as “rondy jombs”.

  I didn’t know what Miss Runcie was talking about the first time she told us to do them. I said, “Oh, rondy jombs!” and everyone laughed and I couldn’t understand why.

  And then I realised and I went home and pretended to be Violet saying things wrong – rondy jombs and arabeskys and grond jetties – and Mum overheard me and told me off. She said, “Don’t you ever let me catch you making fun of Violet again!”

  Mum said that Violet was a good and genuine person who had had a great deal to cope with in life. So then I felt ashamed and regretted that I had mocked her. I wish I could tell Violet how sorry I am!

  Maybe she will be one of my guests.

  Then I will be able to tell her.

  What are some more of my favourite things?

  Favourite dancer – Darcey Bussell! One Christmas Mum took me backstage to meet Darcey and she is really nice and friendly. She gave me a signed photograph and encouraged me to keep up with my dancing. She said that maybe one day it would be her coming backstage to see me!

  I’d really want Darcey to be on the programme. If I was going to be anyone other than who I am then I would choose to be Darcey. She is everything that I dream of being.

  What else is there?

  Favourite season of the year – Summer.

  Favourite sort of weather – Sun! It is very sad and depressing, I think, in the winter, though Sarah doesn’t agree. Sarah’s favourite weather is snow! But that is because she likes to go skiing.

  Favourite Food – Just at the moment it is difficult to say as I am not terribly into food owing to my mouth being sore, but as a rule I would say it is … chocolate ice cream!

  Favourite drink – Pineapple milkshake. For sure!

  Favourite place – Covent Garden.

  Favourite music – Swan Lake! Because every time I hear it I can imagine that I am on stage, dancing!

  Favourite group – The Beatles. Me and Sarah are really into the Beatles. It was Mum who got us listening to them. John Lennon was her favourite Beatle. She says she cried when he got shot. My favourite is Paul. He is Sarah’s, too. Imagine if he was a guest!

  I think Paul is the best Beatle. He cares about animals, and I approve of that. I am going to stop eating animals as soon as I can. I wanted to do it when I was eleven but Mum wouldn’t let me. She said it wasn’t the time. Now she says, “Maybe in a year or two. We’ll see.”

  I think I will ask her if I can do it when I’m twelve. I am going to do all sorts of things when I am twelve! Going to Wonderland is just one of them. Being twelve is my immediate goal. It is Zoë’s, as well. But I will be twelve before she is! I will be twelve on 14th September. Zoë has to wait until the end of the year.

  Sarah will be twelve before either of us as her birthday is next month. But to her it isn’t anything particularly special. She just wants to go out with her Mum and buy a whole load of new clothes, and she could do that any time. Sarah’s Mum is always buying her clothes. And she always gives her a good birthday party, too. One time she hired a bouncy castle and another time there was a conjuror. But Sarah says she wants to be more sophisticated now that she’s going to be twelve.

  I don’t know whether I will have a party or not. I didn’t last year. Not a proper one. Mum said it would be “too much”. And this year I shall be in Wonderland!!! It might be greedy to ask for a party as well.

  I have just thought of another favourite thing to add to my list.

  Favourite person – Uncle Eddy! After Mum and Danny, of course. Uncle Eddy will definitely be on my television programme.

  4. “Here’s Looking at You Kid!”

  Here's looking at you, kid!

  Uncle Eddy is Mum’s brother. She calls him her baby brother because she was seven when he was born. That is exactly the same difference as between Danny and me!

  Of course Danny is only actually my half-brother. This is because we had different dads. I told him this once, when I was in a really mean mood. I said, “You’re only my half-brother! And that’s as much as I want you to be!”

  I only said it because I was feeling cross and self-pitying. It wasn’t anything Danny had done. I told Uncle Eddy afterwards and he said that sometimes when we’re feeling hurt we take it out on other people, just because they happen to be there. He said it’s a bit like getting in the way if someone’s running down the street. They don’t necessarily mean to knock you over, but that’s what happens.

  I didn’t mean to be horrid to Danny. I wish I hadn’t been. He’s only a little boy! He doesn’t understand.

  He clambered on to my bed the other day and
put his arms round my neck and whispered, “I want to be your real whole brother, Becky.” It made me cry, that did.

  Danny is a truly sensitive little boy. I think he picks up on a whole lot more than people realise, even though he is only four years old. Uncle Eddy agrees with me.

  We talk a lot together, me and Uncle Eddy. The reason I love him so much is that he is like an uncle and a dad and a big brother and a best friend, all rolled into one. He is also, quite simply, the most beautiful person I have ever seen. The most beautiful man, that is. (Darcey is the most beautiful woman. After Mum!)

  Zoë agrees with me about Uncle Eddy. She says that her insides go “all tingly” just at the sight of him. Even Sarah admits that he is quite hunky, and Sarah is a very difficult person to impress.

  But I would love him just as much if he had cross eyes and a hump back and horrible whiskers growing out of his nose! (Which is what some men have and which really puts me off.)

  I wouldn’t care what he looked like, he would still be my favourite person. After Mum and Danny.

  One way I am lucky is that Uncle Eddy isn’t married and therefore has no children of his own. If he had children of his own I wouldn’t see him nearly as often, because why would he leave them to come and see boring old me? It wouldn’t be fair.

  I am glad he isn’t married! I expect that is selfish, but I don’t care. I don’t want him ever to be!

  Well, not for a long time in case his wife got cross and said, “Oh, you are surely not going off to visit that stupid, dim child again? I want you to spend more time with me!”

  Sometimes people’s wives are like that. Like Zoë’s dad’s wife. Zoë’s dad got married again after he and Zoë’s mum were divorced and now he lives in Yorkshire and Zoë hardly ever see him. Even once when she was really sick and her mum called him and he came down, he could only stay one night because of his wife.