by Jeremy Page
Those two women became the most notorious flower arrangers in the Fens. Each Saturday they stood in the cool dusty calm of the church, all their flowers smelling green and wet on the tiles where Elsie and I searched for fossils. My mother in her utility dress with the faded rosebud half-apron tied round it, the shine of sheer tights below it, her only concession to luxury. One of the women would go to the church Bible and call out the Sunday service readings and gospel. Ethel Holbeach, big as a turkey behind the lectern, turning the pages of the Bible and her voice sounding nervous just because she’s up there talking even though it’s only my mother, Elsie and me listening. Vanity of vanities, sayeth the preacher, all is vanity, and my mother says stop, I’ve got an idea. It’s the final passage of Ecclesiastes and it’s a difficult one to pull off. How’s it go again? my mother says from the back of the church. God shall bring every work into judgement. The other bit. The preacher sought out to find acceptable words? Yeah - that’s it. And my mother’s piling up the flowers on the floor. There are thistles and thorns and if you can get beyond them you can find the fragile early buds of a lone agapanthus. Ribbons round the base, distracting and false like serpents’ tongues, swirls of gypsophila like as many misleading clouds, but if you try hard enough you’ll find it, you’ll find the beauty. It’s going to be a good one, my mother says, and Ethel Holbeach grins, showing her poor fenland teeth.
Elsie spent more time at the farm, sometimes with her mother, more often alone. She had her own stool in the kitchen, and as time went by she and my mother developed their own shorthand communication: the silent exchange of ingredients, a hot spoon passed to be tasted, a sauce to be stirred. Horseradish grated from the root, folded into sour cream and wine vinegar, Elsie squeezing the lemon - hand in front, love, don’t let it squirt in your eye - driping tabasco in like a scientist. Arranging it on the plate next to warm peppered mackerel and sourdough rolls. Go and get Pip now, my mother says, wiping her hands on the worn rosebuds of her half-apron. Little Elsie dragging her stool round the kitchen, standing on it in her busy little T-bar sandals as she reaches for the jars, the pots, the ladles and packets before my mother even asked her. And when all the business was done Elsie would watch me eat.
‘There, see, he likes it, I know what he likes.’
I kept my silence. In my first three years a stream of Ear, Nose and Throat consultants and child psychologists tackled my case. Just how many times was I crept up on and tickled in the ribs, or balloons inflated and popped by my ears? I was shown animals and encouraged to moo and baa in imitation. A dog’s bark, a cat’s meow. My parents were told to talk all the time to each other, and, when they weren’t talking, to sing. So at breakfast they filled the room with talk of what they might do later, what jobs they had to complete, how the weather might change, how fat the pig was getting. As my mother cleared the plates away my father would walk outside, singing a tune until he got into his car, turn the ignition, and fall silent at the wheel.
Forcing a conversation that wasn’t there was a great effort. For a month they kept it going for the sake of the child psychologist until my father called the office to tell him it wasn’t working only to hear that the psychologist had been transferred to another district anyway. This bit of news was relayed to my mother that evening over cod fricassee and that was the last thing they said that night.
Goose had her own ideas on how to break my silence. She sent recipes containing tongue and, increasingly, laxatives (bunged up at one end, bunged up at the other). Coffee powder stirred into soups, chocolate sprinkled on prune puree. Raw fish for breakfast. Some foods were specified with certain types of weather. Eel broth in fog. Suet pudding in rain. But when the postcard arrived saying I should be fed mackerel heads, uncooked, under a high-mackerel or leg-of-mutton sky, my mother knew the game was over. I’d won the day. The two women had repaired their differences, and my mother knew two things: one, there was nothing physically wrong with me; and two, her son was silent, had been silent from birth, and - as she told me once, bending down to see me and touching my lips with her finger - she preferred it that way.
But my father felt my silence was unnerving. It mocked him. It needed to end. That’s why - after sending my mother to Lynn on an errand - he took me to the feed-shed across the yard, looped some rope over one of the game hooks drilled in the wall, and then bound it tightly round my ankles till I felt the heat of the rope. I was left there, where he hung his pheasants, wriggling against the cruel rope and straining to see if he was still around. For an hour I hanged, blood pounding in my head, occasionally getting a whiff of his tobacco, knowing he was by the pigsty, smoking his pipe. Waiting for me to cry out, or for my mother returning in the car. Whichever came first.
Late in the morning he came in and tapped his pipe out against the wall, the weariness of yet another defeat clouding his face. That’s enough, he said, I guess you ain’t going to say nothing. Never.
That evening as my mother bathed my swollen ankles in a bowl she listened to my father’s explanation that I was a growing lad and my boots were already too small. After a while he left the room and went to read his books in the study, and she whispered to me.
‘We’ll get the bugger back. Some day.’
He’s in the storeroom again, under the bare light bulb. The girl’s in there too, laughing at a joke he’s made, and when she moves her head a girdle of light shines on the woven flatness of her hair. He can hear the bubbles rising in the cider in their cups. One of the lads calls her peaches and cream. He’s never heard the expression before, but it makes total sense.
While he’s in there, my mother is telling me the events of her youth, and before them, of Hands and Goose on the edge of the marsh. She tells me how bleak she felt when she had to leave North Norfolk and about the first night she spent on the lawn behind the house. About the half-drunk cup of tea, the crumbs of stale bread and the mice shit on the corner of the table, all that was left of the previous tenant. She tells me my father had started off being a great dreamer like my own vanished grandfather, but that as the years passed he was becoming lost to something, though my mother didn’t know what. She tells me about Norfolk’s skies, the saltmarsh, about fish and crablines, meals of tongue and samphire. We’re in the garden, where Elsie and I had been given a strip each to make our own. She’d planted tulips, putting the bulbs in like her father, and when they didn’t grow as well as his, she’d dug them up and planted onions instead. I’d filled my plot with glass and metal, mantraps to keep the others out.
My mother calls us over and there, in the soil beneath her, she’s parted some large fleshy leaves to reveal a perfect white cauliflower. The leaves squeak when she moves them. Now the sun will get to its crown, she says. And as we marvel at the wonderful vegetable, she begins retelling the story of Hands, my grandfather, whose head had been found sticking out through the black mud of the Morston Marshes. It’s the first time Elsie’s heard it, and she giggles at the description of the longshoreman wading through the channel, the morning’s catch jangling at his belt. At how Hands had rolled his eyes in fear when Goose had covered him in samphire, and how he’d kept his boots on in the bath. She ends where she always ended - with the story of her own birth, of the magnificent clouds in the sky, the quilt disappearing on the line, and the grotesque granny-slip her mother had tied into the umbilical cord. At this, she lifts her jumper and shows her belly button while Elsie stares with wide-eyed horror at the rotten knot that wouldn’t last in a washing line but which has somehow taken graft in my mother’s skin.
I felt angry that this story was being told to Elsie. It wasn’t her grandfather, after all. What about her own grandfather - wherever he was - with his long Quaker beard like Father Christmas? Jealous of Elsie and my mother, and still hearing Elsie’s thin laughter, I ran into the house and lay on the floor, banging the tiles. I picked a stump of crayon and ran it round the skirting board. Then I drew another line with it. The line became shapes - zigzags, parallels, circles - then I saw
my mother, standing in the doorway, eyes glistening with a cry of joy she was holding in, her hand to her mouth because she didn’t want the joy to leave her.
That first crayon soon wore to nothing as I covered the furniture, walls, tiles and bricks. Wherever I went, my mother followed, translating as quickly as I scribbled, like her own cloud-chasing mother. The line I drew around the room was taken as the Fens’ horizon, the clumsy round shapes above the line were claimed to be the sun, the moon, even cloud formations. The skirting board was covered with the dark shapes of those things that live in the earth. The carrot, the beet, the potato. Poplars grew up across the plaster in long straight lines as high as the sideboard, as did the funereal shapes of my mother’s garden flowers. There were people too, shadowy people leaning against gates, drawing up in decrepit cars, skulking below the brims of wide summer hats, hiding behind trees. Pigs and bulls fought each other in running battles across the kitchen, chickens roosted unperturbed on chair backs. Around the doorjamb of my father’s study there were a series of curving zigzag lines. I spent several days completing them, the crayon sweating between my greasy knuckles, my teeth clenched tightly. The solitary stinkhorn was sketched on the plaster where the wall had blown with damp, tulip heads and bull’s horns fought it out on my father’s car. Dogs and seagulls wheeled round each other, chasing their tails along the bricks of the house.
Each evening my mother interpreted the drawings for my father, who must have felt as though a kind of free insanity had broken out in his house. How I’d written about food behind cupboard doors, drawn the smells of the cooking as she stirred the pot. How I’d written Gull’s name and she hung it round his neck. And one evening, I have a dim memory of finding my father crouched with a torch on the living-room carpet, peering at the drawings leading to his study door. Sometimes I reconjure him there, with a J-Cloth and soap erasing what I’d done a few hours earlier, sometimes I see him with a stub of crayon himself, changing what he sees before him into more recognizable, less revealing images before his wife has a chance to see them. Always I imagine him with a guilty expression as I stand fierce in the light of the open doorway, the well-worn stub of crayon indignant in my hand.
Hanging the name round Gull’s neck may have been the last straw, because as soon as he ripped it off he produced a letter he’d been concealing about plans for my education.
A month later - with my hieroglyphs as high as the ceiling in some places - he announced a special-needs teacher from the outskirts of Lynn would be coming to visit. Mrs Crowe, he said to me. Mrs Crowe, whose first gesture when she entered the house was to raise her eyebrows and look down her nose at the graffiti. Who held her skirt carefully so as not to get any crayon wax on it. As you see, Mrs Crowe, my father began shyly, he do want to learn. He want to speak, really, so if you can change all this wild scribbling into half-decent copperplate I reckon you’re the one for us.
My mother was stunned by the betrayal. Mrs Crowe was allowed into the house, but with suspicion, not least because my mother had no role in appointing her. My mother tested the teacher by leading her around some of the hieroglyphs, pointing out a goat here, a river there, cloud formations, malformed vegetables. She showed the empty space of wall around the spot where my father leaned his Gallyon & Sons shotgun, and the halo of what looked like flames spreading away from this space along the plaster. She made the rotund teacher kneel down and peer at the shadowy people hiding behind the legs of the dresser till the round fenland face of the woman became flushed. All this time I stood behind my mother’s legs, clutching at her skirt and hiding my crayon.
Eventually Mrs Crowe stood up and stared calmly at the mother and child before her.
‘And you say he doesn’t speak?’
‘Never.’
‘He’s had tests?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with Pip, Mrs Crowe. Medically. He’ll speak if he wants to. When the time comes.’
‘But you want him to write?’
‘He wants to write.’
Mrs Crowe looked down at me. ‘It will all have to come off,’ she said, looking at the walls. ‘I can’t have this.’
Three days a week Mrs Crowe scrubbed my hands, confiscated my beloved crayon, and in its place gave me a brand-new, sharpened pencil. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings at nine o’clock sharp I would open the kitchen door at the moment Mrs Crowe raised her hand to knock. Caught in that silly position, or even at the moment when she was still fussing with her hair, she’d be ushered in. It was my first victory. My second would be stubbing the pencil so hard the lead broke, and then watching Mrs Crowe sharpen it with growing frustration as she found the lead was broken all the way through. Watching the pencil being ground into Mrs Crowe’s fist was satisfying but short lived, because soon she began to bring her own, previously untampered-with instruments for my lessons.
Mrs Crowe’s first name was Cassie. Cassie Crowe. My father referred to her as Ali. Attagirl, Ali, he’d say, give the lad the jab. Oh shut up, my mother would say. Grow up, George, and he’d laugh even more, looking at the sparkle of the drink he held in his hand and shaking his head.
Crowe would put an apple on the table and tell me the mysteries of the letter ‘a’. To me, the shape of the letter she drew already meant ‘apple’, except it had no leaves on the stalk. I drew them in and passed the paper back to her. She rubbed them off and passed the letter back.
I knew what she was doing - she was teaching me to write words. And as soon as she knew that’s what I wanted most, she gave me a notebook to hang round my neck.
‘Whatever you want, you write in there. You have a voice now.’ A notebook has hung round my neck ever since.
But on the other days of the week the crayon was back in my hand. Instead of the glaring public space of the walls, I found more secret places to practise my art. Like crawling under my father’s bed and drawing on the slats, or squeezing in the kitchen cupboards. Between the tins, under the shelves, below the chairs and on the backs of picture frames. Even the insides of book jackets - these were my places. And one by one my father found them all with rattish tenacity. Scrubbing with sugar soap. But he never found the coop. Oh no. That was my secret. Or he knew about it but didn’t like chickens - which was odd, considering where he ended up in life. Each day for a month I sat in that grubby coop with the hens and my crayons. The dry, sharp smell of the birds, the dust suspended in the air, the powdered crust of their shit intrigued me. As did the chickens themselves, sitting calmly in the dark, napping, shifting warily on their nests. I wedged myself in there and sat for hours, seduced by the secret calm of the coop and fascinated by the erratic hen lore. Though I spent my days in there, they never got used to me. Only one bird seemed at ease: a Rhode Island Red, which spent its days wedged into a gap behind the boxes. It never went out and never left its space, though it must have managed to eat somehow. In all the hours I was in there, it never stopped looking at me.
At first I drew the hens in their boxes. I drew their dreams of eggs and the cold porcelain egg placed in their nests to encourage their laying. I drew a fox sniffing near the door to keep them awake at night, a bowl of mash and grit to keep them hungry. And on the roof - that’s where I painted the sky. Not a sky I’d ever seen before, but a mass of clouds shredded by wind and filled with light. Clouds on clouds, in banks, fronts, storm surges and downdraughts. For several weeks I spent my days in that dingy coop, working and reworking that mural. Crawling out late in the afternoon, I’d look up at the bathroom window and see my mother smiling at me and waving for me to come in.
I was not a cloud reader. But there, in the confines of the chicken coop, something urged me on. I drew a fishing cuddy, falling apart, sinking in a storm, two men stranded on a sandbank. A beehive built from the prow of a boat, a rust-red sail, fish hung to smoke in a chimney, pigs curing in vats in the ground, an oak tree falling like an avalanche in a dark wood, a brightly painted van, a piece of blue driftwood and a razor blade with a charging bull’s insigni
a on its handle. And in the centre of the sky, a cloud in the shape of a sperm whale.
All that has gone, consumed by the fire that is coming closer by the minute now.
One summer evening, while my mother yet again repaired the decoy birds my father had shot to pieces, the phone rang. It was Goose, calling from the Albatross Inn.
‘May, I’m worried. Have you seen the clouds?’
My mother turned towards the window and looked up at the high evening sky and the line of strange clouds moving in the direction of the North Norfolk marshes.
‘What about them?’
‘Look after yourself, May, you promise me that.’
9
Bedlam Fen
She plucked and cleaned a pigeon while I watched the feathers fall across the floor - each feather seesawing through the air giving up its tiny gift of flight. She told me to close my eyes and when she let me open them again the feet had been cut off and put to one side. Together, like a pair of shoes. She cut the pigeon in four and laid the pieces in a pie-dish on thin slices of mushroom, which she described as a mattress, soft enough for any bird. There was ham in there too, in strips, and an egg that had been peeled and quartered. She let me sniff the dish and then she rolled on a layer of pastry, leaving a small hole in the middle on top of which she put a button of dough.
While it was in the oven we listened to my father dragging stores about in the sheds. She smiled at me, but his activity was unsettling her. He shouted at the weight of bags and the mess of it all, and before he’d finished she’d opened the oven and her knife made a dry noise as it prised the button off the pie. She told me to watch out for the pigeon’s birdy soul and as she said this a thin reed of steam came out of the hole, and she poured in the rest of the stock as if she was putting out a fire. The pie-dish went back into the oven on a lower shelf and when she closed the oven door - a strange sight through the window: in the yard, the Mary Magdalene. For the last three years stored under a tarp in one of the sheds. My father was busy dusting it with the palm of his hand, tapping the hull and very noticeably avoiding my mother’s gaze. It was in the way, it was old and rotten, but he knew he couldn’t just throw it out. That would mean the dream was over. That they’d never again lean into each other’s bodies in the fenland twilight.