He came again today. This time he told me his name is Dr Travis. Perhaps he's just learning the trade. His voice is soft. He sits quietly in the corner, with one leg crossed over the other. Or maybe it's a double act. Lorna's the tough interrogator, and maybe Dr Travis is to be the gentle one, the one who puts the cigarette to your cracked lips, only to have the other one knock it away again with a stinging blow to your jaw. Once Lorna's softened me up, maybe Dr Travis will let slip some remark, just in passing, gentle and low. And that's when I'll spill the beans. Out of gratitude at his kindness. So they hope.
Sometimes he writes in a little notebook with a pencil. His pencil is miniature, with a gold top. I can see it has a point carved with a knife, not a point sharpened with a pencil sharpener. I can't understand people who sharpen their pencils with a penknife. It doesn't give a decent end. That was something Tillie taught me, when I was at the kitchen table with the little boys, drawing: never to put up with anything less than a sharp point. Tom heard her and sniggered. It was all information, but was it good information?
There are more groups than mine. Hanny just told me that in her group Rose had talked about giving birth to a baby and killing it on a rubbish dump. Moira was leading the group and sat forward on her chair, electrified, pressing her little tiptoes into the carpet. Hanny said this must be something that Moira hadn't heard from Rose before, something that wasn't in the file. Hanny said she would have thought Rose was making it up – we're always making stuff up – but for Moira's reaction. 'I reckon people are here for more reasons than they give out,' Hanny said. 'I reckon everyone's here for something really extreme.'
Rose usually sits next to me in Activity. I've never heard her speak a word. Only those little noises in the back of her throat. Squeaking, mouse-like noises. I'd like to hear her story.
20
Nuns
When we were eleven we had to take the test for grammar school. Naturally, I failed. So did most of my class. We weren't expected to pass, and we didn't expect to. They didn't train us for it at my school. They let us rely on luck, and native talent, and most of us didn't have either of those. We were the whatever-per-cent, the large but humble majority, who were seen as somehow not up to it. I don't understand how a thumping majority can possibly be thicker than average; even with my standard of maths, that doesn't add up. But we opened the envelope and went where we were told.
Isolde was already at the grammar and Barbara automatically assumed that she would go there too. She told me so. Tom was at the boys' equivalent. They had to catch a train to get there. Barbara liked the idea of getting a train every day. There was a Paynes Poppets machine on the station platform that sometimes spewed out your sixpence as well as the packet of sweets. It was Paynes Poppets and train travel that attracted her to the grammar, as much as any standard of education she might receive there.
But Barbara didn't get through to grammar school. I could quite see if she'd spent her whole time making leaf-prints and dodgy pastry that they wouldn't be interested in taking her, and I was glad. Now she would have to come to the secondary modern with me and find out what life was really like. That it doesn't always – or even often – deal you the hand you wished for.
And if she came to the secondary mod with me, I would have a ready-made friend. We could spend every day together and breaktimes would be a cinch.
'Oh no,' she said. 'I'm going to St Mary's. It's a convent school. We're taught by nuns.'
'Are you a Catholic?' I asked.
'I can be,' she said, shrugging airily.
My mother had a horror of Roman Catholicism. The thought of nuns teaching biddable children made her shudder visibly with repulsion. But then I always felt that she went too far with the things she found repellent, showing off about how sensitive she was: bacon fat, frogspawn, nuns, women in tight trousers, they all made her sputter and gag as if poison was being forced down her throat. Histrionics. I mean, I don't like spiders, but if I see one in the distance I don't make a point of going over and stamping on it. Live and let live, that's me.
But nuns and Barbara?
'I bet they make you wear uniform. And turn up on time.'
'We're going to buy the uniform tomorrow,' she said. She sounded almost smug.
Her uniform, when we saw it, was very ornate. Tom and Isolde, whose school outfits were reasonably plain, looked askance.
'Why has your hat got a French revolutionary's rosette on it?' Tom asked, drily.
'Just don't ask me ever to walk down the road with you,' Isolde said, folding her arms and turning away, putting her seal on the matter.
I thought she looked ridiculous. Well, I wanted her to look ridiculous. This was the Barbara who had sneered at my ordinary brown check school dress and said that the Wren wouldn't want its pupils all looking the same. As if they had some wonderful essential difference that must at all costs be preserved. And now she was preserving that difference by getting togged up like a Parisian Communard. But I didn't dare say anything. You didn't criticize Barbara. Or, at least, I didn't criticize Barbara.
On Sundays here they have a church service. You don't have to attend, but I think a lot of people go for something to do. The singing is terrible, but I just sit back on my hard wooden chair and let the white light wash over me. The windows of the chapel aren't stained glass, they're frosted glass. Not quite the same. Very non-conformist. Very public lav. I don't bow my head in prayer or sing the hymns or anything, I just sit. It's terribly relaxing. I never thought of church as relaxing before.
Perhaps I'll find God again. Or He'll find me.
On Sundays at home we were always very busy. In the morning we went to the main service, Mum and Brian and I, and Dad if it was a particular date in the calendar, like Easter or Christmas or Whit Sunday or Harvest Festival; and in the afternoon Brian and I were expected to go back again, to Sunday school. Most of the children who went didn't have to do both. Sunday school was for little kids who couldn't be trusted to keep quiet during the sermon. We could be trusted. I had a handbag, a special handbag just for church, white with a gold metal clasp. I had little white cotton gloves. I felt very visible, walking down the road. We had to clean our shoes on Saturday evening, in order to be ready for church the next day. Brian had to wear a jacket, a fuzzy greenybrown jacket just like a man's. For year after year we received mind-improving books on prize-giving day, because our attendance was exemplary.
Then adolescence hit.
I began to feel resentful, about the little handbag, the prissy gloves, all the fuss about getting ready as if God could see us, as if God could spot the dirty fingernail, the unbrushed collar, as if God was petty enough to get enraged about such things. I began to chafe at the endless, endless hours sitting there, being exemplary children, perfect church-goers.
It was Barbara's shifty attitude to religion that first got under my skin, like a worm, writhing away and making me itch and twitch. A hideous disease-bearing African worm, the kind we heard about when missionaries came to talk to us about their farflung duties. With colour slides.
If Barbara could be, at one and the same time, a little heathen who spent her Sundays running about barefoot in the garden, playing swingball and It and tennis when God-fearing folk were in church, and yet be counted as religious enough to be taught by nuns, what was the meaning of it all? Some people seemed to be able to have it both ways, when it suited them. I just didn't understand. I began to wonder how I could have it both ways, how I could wriggle out of my obligations without paying a price.
'Patrick's a Catholic,' Barbara told me, 'and Catholics have to swear when they get married that they will raise their children to be good Catholics as well.'
'What about Tillie?' I asked. 'What's she?'
'Oh, Tillie's a Protestant. Dutch people are.'
'I mean, what if she doesn't want you to be brought up a good Catholic?' I had in mind my mother, shuddering at nuns. What if my father had been a Catholic? How would she have managed?
Barb
ara shrugged.
'And what about all the others, Tom and Eugene and everyone? Are they good Catholics? If they are, it doesn't show.'
Barbara thought about this, rolling her tongue over her exposed teeth like a horse. 'They are, but underneath. I'm the visible representative.'
'What, like – you're Jesus and they're the Holy Ghost?'
I had her there. Barbara, having spent all her Sundays playing poker and tennis, had no theology whatsoever.
So I went off to my new school, and Barbara went off to hers, braided and beribboned and decorated like a soldier in a particularly heroic army.
She made a friend there. She hadn't had a particular friend at the Wren, she'd said they were all too stupid or deranged to warrant her attention. I saw her walking back with this girl. They climbed down off the bus at the same place, and I saw them walking along with that slow walk which means you have more to say to each other than will fit into the space before you have to go your separate ways. I felt a stab of jealousy, quite unlike anything I'd felt before. It wasn't the dull ache that came when the girls at junior school cold-shouldered me. The two of them stood on the corner talking for a few minutes, then pulled away, and both began walking more quickly in different directions. I didn't know whether to catch her up or not. I trailed behind her like a spy, slowing my pace, ducking into the shadow of the hedge, holding my breath when she turned her head to glance both ways before crossing the road.
'Caro, what the hell are you doing? Get over here!'
Her voice was peremptory. She must have glimpsed me out of the corner of her eye. I stood up straight and walked towards her, my breath catching stickily somewhere in my ribs. When I got within reach she grabbed my arm, hard, and pulled me towards her.
'Come on, you idiot. Stop avoiding me. I want to know everything about your stupid day. Don't leave anything out.'
So I thought perhaps this new friend wasn't so important. I thought perhaps it would be all right.
'Secondary school now, eh?' my aunt Gloria said to me, on the first Sunday after term began. 'Very grown-up.'
I replied with just a painful grin, all stretched lips and no teeth.
'Bet they work you hard there?'
Well, no, actually. Not as you'd notice. Not yet awhile, anyway.
'No orange squash for Carol,' Gloria said to Stella, who'd just come into the room and hadn't a clue what this badinage was about, or even that it was badinage. 'Too much the young lady these days. A nice cup of tea for Carol. Or would you rather have coffee?'
Stella mugged me a look. I mugged back. I think it was the first time we had ever exchanged any real form of communication.
'Didn't call it a secondary modern in my day,' said Gloria.
'Holloway Prison, more like,' Stella muttered.
'East End Lane School was its actual name,' Gloria told her, 'as well you know. You were three forms behind me.'
My mother sat quietly through all this. She wasn't an expert on education. I guess she had gone to some other school, some even more hopeless country school where everyone sat squashed into the same room and did their dismal best. She didn't mention where.
'And how're you getting on at school?' Gloria would ask, every so often. I felt she did this for form's sake. I guessed she wanted a multiple-choice answer: (a) very well, thanks, (b) fine, thanks, (c) not too bad, thanks very much for asking. I guessed she wasn't enquiring about the curriculum, or the school's approach to discipline, or hoping to delve into my exercise books.
And at home it was 'Have you started your homework yet?' and 'Have you finished your homework yet?', with regular inspections through the serving hatch between the kitchen and the dining table. I spread out my books. I sharpened my pencils. I must have had the sharpest pencils in the school. If there had been a prize for that I would have got it, year after year. I scratched my scalp with my sharply pointed pencils and wondered about the effects of graphite in the brain. And then the hatch doors would snap open and my mother's face would appear, breaking off from the washing-up. 'Carol!' The only way she knew how to enquire about school was to monitor the homework production line. But if I said I'd done it, and slapped my book firmly shut, she would nod and pull the hatch doors closed, and in a minute or two emerge, without her apron, and switch on the wireless and sit down to knit. And if I said I was off out to Mildred Clark's (Mildred Clark's!), to work on a joint history project, she would nod grimly, as if this was only proper, and add, 'Don't be late back.'
'We have to get it finished. It's due in tomorrow. Mildred's mother says she'll give me a lift home.'
I enjoyed the odd rococo lie. It was naughty, really. I relied on the arcane mysteries of the educational system to keep her in thrall. Maybe I wanted her to say, 'Hang on a minute, Carol.' I waved my lies aloft, like the red rag to the bull, but without success. The bull was disappointingly docile. It stood in the far corner of the field and turned its little, stupid eye away.
One good thing about secondary school: suddenly I was allowed to venture much further afield. My mother no longer bothered to throw a limit around the neighbourhood. Out of sight, I was out of mind. Once you could get on a bus unsupervised you could conquer the world, and there wasn't anything anyone could do to stop you.
Because the convent school was out of town, Barbara had to get a special bus to it. The rest of us used ordinary public transport. I would see the convent girls, in their sky-blue and navy and brassy gold braid, waiting in groups at special corners. There were no proper bus stops for them, just appointed places that they, and the bus drivers, knew about. It felt like a coded world, a world that excluded me.
'I can't play right now, I've got prep,' the new, serious Barbara said to me, when I called round. 'Don't you have prep? We have an hour each evening, minimum.' Well, I had homework, but it was rather patchy, and my teachers said they were going to let us take it easy at first. Break us in gently. Ten minutes to start with, maybe fifteen. Working up to as much as half an hour. They let us take it easy for a long time. I don't think they relished marking books at my school.
'I must change out of my tunic first,' she said, another time, standing at the top of their steps, while I straddled my bike on the path below. Her tie was still firmly knotted, her cuffs buttoned and clean. Could this be Barbara, who never even knew what she had on, who turned cartwheels in dresses, displaying her knickers, who stuck her hands right through the torn pockets of her shorts and waved them at me to make me laugh?
'We do Latin. Do you do Latin yet?' she asked, in a tone of voice that made me think she already knew the secondary mod drew the line at Latin.
I began to wonder if it was worth even trying to stay friends. But after a few weeks she got bored, and the old Barbara reasserted itself.
'Bloody nuns!' she said, running down the road to catch up with me, taking my upper arm in her hard, pinching fingers.
The nuns apparently had men's names, names they took on when they entered holy orders: Sister Ignatius, Sister Benedict, Mother Francis-Xavier. 'Bad enough looking like blokes with no make-up and all bald under those veils, without calling yourself after blokes as well,' said Barbara.
And 'They're obsessed with sex. If we had absolutely no interest in boys they would put it into our minds, because they're always – but always – going on about how to protect yourself from boys, and what boys are after, and how we mustn't get led astray. They want us to be constantly alert as to the dangers of impure thoughts, but I bet we wouldn't have half so many if they didn't remind us about it so frequently.'
And 'Every week they make us bring in money for the little black babies in Africa. They write down everything you bring in a notebook, so it's not anonymous. It means you always have to bring something, and they know exactly who's brought the most, and they announce who it is.'
'But that's blackmail!' I said. I thought of my mother, who always gave me sixpence for the Sunday school collection. Never less, but never more.
'I don't think they send it to
their missions abroad,' Barbara went on, lifting her lip. 'I think they keep it for themselves, and spend it on lipstick and high heels and booze!' And she went off into peals of laughter. But I was concerned.
'Do your mother and father realize what the school is like?' I asked.
Barbara just shrugged hugely and said, 'Oh, them ...'
'You should tell them,' I advised. I thought that Tillie would write a letter, Patrick would charge up to the school, coat-tails flying, voice booming, surely? They weren't like my parents, they wouldn't worry about interfering. To them, education wasn't something you took lying down. They would act first and then think about the consequences. I could imagine them – Tillie at a table in the sunshine, head bent, composing her letter on a big sheet of creamy cartridge paper, hitting just the right balance of politeness and persuasion; or Patrick, big and jolly, banging his fist on Mother Francis-Xavier's desk and saying, 'It's not good enough for my girl!', but with a nun-seducing twinkle in his eye. Diplomacy and dramatics: Barbara had both of these at her disposal.
But she didn't want my advice. She never wanted my advice. That wasn't the point. She wasn't even listening. 'I can see them all now, in the staffroom,' she went on, 'with their veils flicked back and their skirts drawn up, red mesh stockings and black patent stiletto heels, knocking back the whisky. 'Another wee drop, Sister Benedict?' 'Don't mind if I do, Sister Ignatius.' Glug glug. 'Sister Iggie, be a darling, give us a whiff of that latest perfume from Chanel!' And she leaned on my shoulder, weak with laughing. 'Oh God, just imagine it, I'm sentenced to stay there for another five years at least. I shall get expelled for insubordination. Just see if I don't.'
But she didn't.
Maybe if she had, maybe if it had been threatened, that's when Tillie or Patrick, or both of them, arm in arm, would have marched on the school, protesting her innocence. Standing up for their daughter. Like parents should.
What does Lorna want with me?
Living In Perhaps Page 13