by Fay Weldon
Gwinny And The Brothers
Anyway, by the end of the forties Aidan, who’d kept busy putting up again what bombs had knocked down – the V-1 on the sweet factory at the other end of Standard Road had blown in a lot of windows – could afford to bring the outside loo inside, and plumb and wire No. 23 to contemporary standards, admittedly not very high in 1946. Even by the time she was three Gwinny would toddle along behind her father whom she adored, offering spanners and paintbrushes as required, even pasting up wallpaper, and was much annoyed when her mother called out from the bedroom that she was giving birth to a baby. That was a shock. No-one had warned Gwinny in case so doing stirred up some disturbing conversation about the birds and the bees. In a society without access to contraception any talk at all about sex was discouraged. Girls needed to be kept innocent. Gwen pushed the boat out a little when she was tipsy but Aidan frowned upon ‘loose talk’.
Gwinny remembers crying and trying to stop her father leaving the flour-and-water pasting job half-done and responding to the moans and groans coming from the marital bedroom. She’d wrapped her arms round Aidan’s legs to stop him from going and had to be shaken off. So of course the paste had dried out by the time he returned. Too late to call the local midwife. She remembers the boiling kettle, and watching aghast as the baby emerged from the bloody red gap in her mother’s centre, first a perfectly tidy if smeary bald head, then the cord, then the great untidy wrinkled balls, out of all proportion to everything else, flopping everywhere. That was Geraint.
And after that, by the end of the war, Owen, Trefor and David had arrived in swift succession, all home births, all boys, like the swing of some disastrous Foucault’s pendulum in her life. Every time the oversized, wrinkled, floppy balls squeezed out, first the heads and then the organs of their own procreation – though with David the bum came first, he being a breach birth – Gwinny felt the future close in on her, while Dadda rejoiced in the next room and said, ‘Thank God, a boy!’
Gwinny had witnessed girl newborns – ‘our little midwife,’ the neighbours would say, ‘only waist high and always such a help!’ And girl babies had such neat little pink folds where their legs met. She longed to have a little girl of her own.
It seemed strange to her when faces fell when she said, ‘It’s a girl.’ Everyone else always wanted boys.
The Cinderella Years
So here was little Gwinny, busy as Cinderella, washing nappies and trimming the wick of the Aladdin heater, looking after boys and never allowed to go out with her Dadda in the van. Even when she was nine and the nappies stopped her mother Gwen had to have her cups of tea brought up to her. At least there was now an electric kettle. Gwen was delicate, and frequently bedbound. The doctor said after Owen’s birth that she should go carefully, but Aidan said doctors knew nothing and anyway contraception was against God’s will, Gwen was perfectly healthy and pretty as a picture, just a little too fond of the drink. Hadn’t he turned her home into a palace? And he was a man after all, and had a man’s needs. So Trefor and David came along in swift succession.
When Gwinny was ten, and Geraint seven, Geraint spat at Gwinny when she told him to clean his own muddy boots, and told her that she was a bastard, not part of the family at all, only fit to be their maidservant. She was to clean the boots at once or he’d beat the living daylights out of her. She cleaned the boots, but when she next saw Dadda she asked him if it was true about her being a bastard. Dadda took his belt to Geraint – which he hardly ever did – and said Gwinny had his name, she was a Rhyss like the rest of them, so she was his daughter.
But it didn’t end there because her mother got upset at Dadda using his belt on Geraint, her favourite. After that she began telling Gwinny about the stranger coming to the door. Not that Gwinny minded all that much, because she’d already decided about being switched at birth. If her real father was a stranger at the door then he was obviously a passing prince. All the same she rather went off her mother, and her father too. One of them must be telling lies, and if it was her mother then her mother was in a state of mortal, not even venial, sin.
And of course now she was in trouble with Geraint for telling tales. Life was clearly never going to be simple. But she was doing well at St Patrick’s Primary, her convent school, and they said she’d get into Camden Girls where there was an entrance exam if she worked hard enough at Maths.
Gwinny tried teaching her younger brothers, but they seemed incapable of stringing two words together, no matter how hard she slapped them. All four boys had trouble reading and writing at all. They weren’t under a spell and it wasn’t catching – dyslexia is 70 per cent a genetic condition, as later generations would discover – but in the forties and fifties such children were dismissed as mentally retarded, and not encouraged to turn up at school for fear of holding others back.
So the Rhyss boys were at home a lot, deriding Gwinny’s attempts to teach them, developing uncouth eating habits, spurning knives and forks, eating fish and chips from the chippie in Kentish Town with greasy fingers and then wiping them on their corduroy shorts. Or eating spam fritters, their favourite, off the table without plates when their father could be bothered to fry any. All the while Gwen cut the crusts off her elegant tomato or fish paste sandwiches and nibbled at them delicately – she had very little appetite herself and coughed and swayed round rather a lot. The boys didn’t worry about being illiterate, and as they got older used sweethearts and wives to do any necessary reading and writing.
One way and another it was increasingly left to Gwinny to do the housework and laundry – still no washing machine – and more and more she resented it. She stopped being a good little girl, was rude to the singing teacher, fell out with the art teacher, and failed to hand in her homework; she bunked out of school to follow Lonnie Donegan and Chris Barber whenever they appeared round London, played a comb for a skiffle band, and had a run-in with the truant officer.
She was jeered at by her brothers, who tore up her drawings and drowned out her singing with football chants, told her she was turning out a bad girl like her mother, and pulled her pigtails until tears came into her eyes, when they would jokingly grab her and slobberingly kiss her better. They were giants of boys, massive, all four of them. She hated them. David was a bit better than the others but not much. At least he used a knife and fork.
When her mother forbade her to go to the Ballad and Blues Club yet again to listen to Ewan MacColl, and then to the Norrington Awards at the Drury Lane theatre (‘not for the likes of us’), and her dad said that rock and roll was the work of the Devil and that a single advance ticket for Bill Haley’s world tour at one pound four shillings was not just ridiculous but immoral, and it was high time she stopped lounging about and annoying her brothers, got a job and learned what money was worth – she knew it was time to leave. The next day was her birthday. She was going to be sixteen.
That night she packed her mother’s best leather suitcase – she tried Geraint’s rucksack but it was far heavier even than the suitcase – stole four pounds three and six from her father’s pay packet, opened her brothers’ piggy banks with the can opener and stole a total of thirteen pounds, eight shillings and fourpence – the brothers ran a nice little business dealing in cigarette cards at the school they seldom went to – released her plentiful fair hair from its pigtails, smeared on Max Factor lipstick in a greasy scarlet streak too wide in places for her lips (she couldn’t get to the mirror without waking the house) and spent the night on a bench on Primrose Hill: not far from home but at least not there. That was in June 1955. There was a full moon. She used her suitcase for a pillow and spread a coat over her legs. Lisle stockings are quite warm anyway. She slept well, fortunately unmolested.
Not that there were many molesters on the hill in those days. By day the occasional flasher would turn up and try to intimidate school children playing happily, unsupervised, on the hill. Gwinny for one had no clear vision of what this ridiculous purple swollen stick was for, other than it w
as forbidden. But you just had to stare and point and cry ‘Seen better than that at home’, whereupon the flasher would slink away abashed and you could get back to whatever you were doing. But that was then and this is now.
A Lesson Well Learned
As my Dadda had predicted, I very soon went to the bad. I got pregnant the very day I ran away, gave up the baby, and then, homeless and distraught, moved into various houses of ill fame, where my looks, a natural intelligence and a kind and uncomplaining nature served me in good stead. By the time I was in my early forties I’d received two big inheritances – not spectacular sums – one million or so in 1981 and a lot from another source, plus another title, in 1984. All that was not so much luck as hard work and good judgement. Being a trophy wife is not easy. It’s a competitive and insecure business; and does not necessarily bring happiness with it. My luck seems to be more about parking spaces than anything else and the occasional burnt offering to Aphrodite.
This is simple enough to do. You wear a rose crystal pendant round your neck, light your frankincense twig – you can now get them on Amazon for a fiver – write a sincere poem to an imagined lover on a sheet of typing paper, place a lock of your hair on that (you’re meant to add honey but this gets so sticky I leave it out), sprinkle rose petals and a little salt water (tears are best, but if you can’t manage these for laughing, buy some contact lens solution from the chemist – it’s saline after all – remember the conch shell on which she rose from the sea). Roll the contents up in the paper to make a little packet, and then burn it in the sink – in a microwave-proof bowl to be on the safe side. I’ve always found it works but it’s still only my sample of one. Don’t put too much trust in it. Because it works for me doesn’t mean it will work for you. And I am an unreliable narrator.
I’d been discovered as a ‘model’ in my late teens, ended up as a grande horizantale in Paris in my twenties, returned to London and dangled my legs in fashionable bars for a time, had been lucky enough to land an old rich lord who died aged ninety-two when I was in my early forties. And just as well, for I was beginning to suffer from early onset rheumatoid arthritis in my extremities – not badly, but enough to swell, curl and redden my fingers and toes – which rather wrecked my potential in a market where youth, gaiety and physical perfection are so much in demand. His family took me to court and got nowhere. I suppose I was lucky in the judge. ‘She loved him and looked after him,’ he said, ‘that is all there is to it.’ He banged his gavel and I was a million better off. But it was true. I had been very fond of old Bunny.
His best friend Lordy Peterloo was my pet name for Lord Petrie of Mainsworth, who took me on after the funeral; Bunny having left me to him in his ‘wishes’, so I warmed his Lordship’s even older bones and not much more for four years. I really cared for him too; his family wanted him to die before he spent all his money and I didn’t like that, so I married him. I spent those years finally taking my O and A levels (the exams which had taken over from School Cert. and Matric), then a degree in Eng. Lit., always useful in the trophy mistress business. ‘Good conversationalist’ goes along with no holidays, no children, no apparent bust or buttock surgery, excellent table manners as qualifications for this very hard-working profession.
Then he too died and left me £1,550,000 along with a title, which I suppose was lucky enough, there being others who’d had some claims on his assets, including four young pole dancers from Stringfellow’s. And as I could see I was not now the vision of loveliness I once had been, it seemed wiser to give up and retire. If the host of younger punters now arriving on the scene were to be satisfied, long, perfect crimson enamelled nails on straight fingers needed to creep up the pole. A stray bent arthritic finger creeping up smacked too much of mortality. Youth calls to youth. The computer age had arrived and money had become easier for the young to amass. They could afford quality and insisted on it. No point any longer in naked bosoms peeking out from behind that exhausting pole. Mine were no longer pert. I was no longer the kind to lure important and titled persons to my side – my giggle of adoration rang too false. I was a second-division trophy mistress and must face it, not the first-division kind who end up with top rock and rollers or Heads of State, and when finished with get simply handed on, not cast adrift. The same as happens to old nannies as they outlive their usefulness.
So retire: be satisfied with the occasional honourable mention and your well-deserved gains.
Back To Where I Began
And then my father, the master builder, died and left me the little house in Standard Road, NW5, where I’d been born and bred. This was very much to the rage of my four large brothers. I might be the eldest child but I was a bastard child, my mother’s by-blow and not one of the real family. I had no right to the inheritance, and that as a bad girl who’d brought shame upon the neighbourhood and not been seen for thirty years it was outrageous to come back and demand anything at all. The house was morally theirs, not mine. I was a born whore, had even been seen ‘touting my wares’ on Primrose Hill the very day I ran away – a foul calumny – and wasn’t fit to lick the family boots I used to clean for them.
I’d been rather taken aback by their vehemence, which somewhat echoed Rozzie when at the age of twenty she told Victoria Hedleigh, then aged thirty-three, that as the elder child Rozzie had the legal right to inherit; and Lady Victoria retorted that Rozzie might have the right DNA but she was still not of the right blood line, being a blackmailing tart of loose virtue and legally a bastard, not of any prestigious inheritance.
They’re all such great hypocrites, the Dilbernes! Like her great-great-aunt Rosina, a well-known lesbian, author of 1904’s scandalous The Sexual Manners and Traditions of Australian Aboriginals. Sebastian gave me a copy of the book to read, which was where I read about the great Bandicoot, who peopled the world by lifting his arms when he woke from sleep and letting thousands of the little people run out of his armpits, which is why we have Australians. Rosina hated Australia – I think she was something of a satirist. Victoria is a lesbian, her father tells me, but no satirist. She takes nothing lightly.
My brothers had been raised as good Catholics though their own behaviour had scarcely been any better than mine. They’d all gone whoring, within marriage or without. I had always seen myself as a good girl who just happened to fall in love with men nearing the end of their lives; though of course, as I see now, ‘falling in love’ is open to many interpretations especially in my profession. But once my mother (so profoundly respectable in spite of her own confessed history) had predeceased him, it seemed that my father had felt able to forgive me. He left me the home in which for the first fifteen years of my life I had laboured so hard. How could I not rejoice?
A Morning On Primrose Hill
The morning of the day after Gwinny ran away from home in June 1955 dawned bright and beautiful. (1955 – the year Ruth Ellis was hanged, the war in Vietnam began, the Warsaw Pact was signed… and I, Gwinny Rhyss, lost my virginity.) Gwinny woke to bird song and a bright new morning dawning: the sinking moon still in the sky, grey and enormous in the west, as the sun rose in the east and the grass became very green and the sky very blue. She sat up. Her muscles ached a little but not too much. She was on her favourite bench near the top of the hill, in a circle of trees, with a view over all of London. The air was soft against her skin and quivered with expectation and delight. She rejoiced, though quite why she was not sure, remembering that she was a thief, a runaway, an ingrate.
‘Maiden Mary, meek and mild, take oh take me for thy child’, she mouthed, appealing to a familiar deity for help, as no doubt her mother had before her – much good it did her – and then, for no other reason than it was what she had been brought up to do, she began to repeat her Hail Marys: ‘Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb JESUS.’ Because the priest at the confessional required an appropriate number of Hail Marys as penance for various sins, and you might have to say
it a hundred times, the emphasis fell on JESUS. She thought she should do a thousand to be on the safe side.
But after ten she stopped and fell quiet. The air around her had stilled and there seemed to have been some kind of shift in reality. The air was being sucked from her lungs. The trees seemed to be bending as if they were bowing down. The hills did that in the psalms, and the valleys did too. This was no longer the familiar park where she played with her friends. But perhaps places always looked like this in the early mornings, everything the same but different.
The sun suddenly glanced through the trees and dazzled her; now everything was white and shiny, brighter and brighter in reverence as something approached; and her ears were opened and now she could hear faint notes of music, some wind instrument plinking and plonking, but getting louder and louder by the minute, and now a slow thud, thud getting heavier with each footstep as the leviathan came near: but wasn’t the leviathan a sea monster? She was in some kind of sacred grove where there was not even a difference between sea and land; she had seen such a picture in a library book: had she disturbed some sacred rite? She had no business here, it was all too strong for her; she got up and ran, suitcase banging against her legs. And as she ran even the daisies beneath her feet seemed touched by a kind of brilliance, the glory of the Lord, and every blade of grass exalted.
She made for the WC outside the workmen’s café in Regent’s Park Road to scrub up and redraw her lipstick more accurately. There was a good mirror. Lipstick proved she had joined the adult world: she may have used it rather liberally. Then she went in and ordered a full English breakfast. She was rich, after all. Nearly twenty pounds. It would see her through and more till she had a job. Eggs and bacon, sausage, black pudding, baked beans, and HP sauce on the table. The place was busy. She was the only woman there so she got a few curious looks. These people might think she was a bad girl, up to no good.