Isa and May

by Margaret Forster

  It dismays May.

  Today, I spent four hours in the British Library studying Katharine Fry’s two-volume transcript of her mother’s forty-six volumes of journals – pleasurably, but probably pointlessly – and then I took a bus to go and visit May. She lives off the Holloway Road in the small terraced house she’s lived in since she was married in 1947. It had been damaged in the war, but not seriously, which was why the rent wasn’t out of her husband Albert’s reach. He soon put right whatever was wrong – something to do with a chimneypot going through the roof – and eventually he was able to buy the house when his plumbing business did well. I don’t know how much this modest little place cost, though I’m sure May remembers to the last penny, but it’s worth half a million now. This thrills May, though she doesn’t really believe it, and every now and again she fantasises about what she could do with the money if she sold the house. ‘Not that I’m moving,’ she always ends. ‘They’ll carry me out feet first.’

  But she really should move to somewhere more suitable now that the narrow, steep stairs are a trial to her. She only goes up and down them twice a day, and claims the exercise is good for her, but it gives her arthritic knees hell (or ‘gyp’ as she calls it). Watching her go up them isn’t as scary as watching her come down. Going up, she sort of crawls, and though pathetic to witness it looks safe enough, whereas coming down she sways on each step and a catastrophic fall seems imminent. There’s a stair rail on one side, but not on the other, and she clings to it with both hands, putting her off balance.

  It’s impossible, travelling along Holloway Road in a bus, to imagine the quiet streets that run off it, just a few minutes’ walk away. The traffic is so heavy and thunderous on that major artery, and then suddenly it fades and there are these enclaves of small houses with hardly a car driving past. In May’s street, a couple of houses have recently been painted, one cream, one a heathery lilac, and a few window boxes have appeared on upstairs sills, the geraniums startlingly colourful against all the drab rendered concrete walls. May doesn’t know if she approves of them or not. ‘This ain’t Chelsea,’ she mutters. That’s her comment on a front door that has been stripped down to its pine wood. ‘Folk trying to pretend they’re living somewhere else.’ She likes front doors to be a seemly black, with a brass knocker always kept polished, as hers is.

  May’s house does not have a bell. There is no need for newfangled things like bells, which she maintains scare the life out of you and are always going wrong. A knocker that alerts the whole street to any visitor trying to gain entry is good enough for her. My parents have been trying for years to have not just a bell but an intercom put in for her, or at the very least a spy hole – but May won’t hear of it. She says she can look out of her parlour window to see who’s at her front door. ‘In the dark?’ my mother asks. May says that she doesn’t open the door after dark anyway, and if she wants to know who’s knocking she can shout through the letter box and ask. That’s what I had to do today, because I’d forgotten my key, shout through her letter box after I’d hammered away with the knocker without result. No face had appeared behind the net curtains of the parlour window, no sound of shuffling footsteps along the passage inside. ‘Granny May!’ I yelled. ‘It’s me. Isamay.’ A door banged inside, and I heard her shout, ‘Hold your horses!’ and at last she made her way to the front door and opened it.

  There was no great welcome. Instead, she scowled and said, ‘Where you bin, eh?’ I said I’d been busy working, which met with the usual snort of derision – ‘Working! Working, she says! As if she knew what working was!’ I followed her down the passage – it is always called ‘the passage’, never the hall – with her still muttering that real work was something I was unacquainted with in spite of my recent years temping, and that my grandfather could have told me a thing or two about work. May loves to talk about Albert and his ‘emergencies’, as though he’d been a doctor, a surgeon, forever rushing to save lives. She was describing one of his emergencies as she led me into her back kitchen – ‘Middle of the night it used to be sometimes, the banging on our door ’cos someone had a flood, something had burst, and send for Albert, it was, and off he’d go . . .’ Any minute and we’d be on to the toilets he’d had to sort out – ‘now that was work’ – and the unmentionables he found in pipes he unblocked, dirty work, hard on his knees, wore his overalls into holes, all that kneeling . . .

  I always try to listen humbly, even though I’ve heard all this, or versions of it, so many times. May is right. I don’t know what ‘real’ work is. My maternal grandfather’s work was real and hard, and, at the time, not well paid (though it would be now – last week I paid a plumber a £60 call-out fee just to come and look at our leaking shower). When May finished her tirade the way she always finishes it, with the repetition of the words ‘you don’t know what work is’, I agreed. The moment I agree, she changes her tune. ‘Mind you,’ she always says, ‘brain work is good. If you can get it. You’re smart, you are, and your dad and your mum, my Jean, going for the brain work. No flies on you lot. I’d have gone for it myself if I had the brains. I’d have done the brain work and laughed all the way to the bank instead of down on me hands and knees scrubbing other women’s floors.’ It was never any good protesting that my particular brain work was making me in debt to the bank at the moment, with no prospect of things changing financially for the foreseeable future.

  May does have brains. She hasn’t had much education, but she’s clever, she could have done ‘brain work’ if things had been different. Hers is the usual, or rather common, story of a woman of her era and class. Class: that was what made the real difference. Left school at fourteen, got a job in a factory making parachutes – it was wartime – and then in a shop selling hardware, an ironmonger’s, and that’s where she met Albert and married him when she was two weeks away from her eighteenth birthday. After that, it was four children and going out charring for ten years till Albert prospered and she could stay at home. She could have educated herself, true, but as she puts it, she didn’t have ‘the habit’, and anyway she was always exhausted and had no time or energy for book learning. May is not philosophical about the opportunities denied her. On the contrary, she’s resentful. She envies her own daughter, my mother Jean, and she envies me. But at the same time she can never make her mind up, it seems to me, whether she admires women who’ve succeeded in doing brain work for a living, or whether she despises them. It isn’t easy to tell.

  ‘What you bin up to, then?’ she asked when she’d made us some tea and we were settled at her kitchen table, which was covered with brass ornaments she was cleaning. They were so familiar – the jug (usually full of artificial flowers, lurid things made of plastic), the plate, the bell, the three monkeys, all polished to a high shine every six weeks. Even the Brasso tin made me nostalgic for all the times, so long ago it seemed, when I’d been excited to be allowed the privilege of smearing the smelly khaki stuff on to the ornaments. I touched the tin with the tip of a finger and was at once told not to do so, I’d get my hands dirty. She used to make me wear gloves to do the polishing, which was all part of the charm – oh, how vigorously I would rub away with the soft cloth she gave me, rubbing and rubbing until the brass shone. ‘Can you see your face in it?’ May would ask, and if I could, the job was done to her satisfaction.

  She asked again what I’d been up to, complaining that I was away with the fairies from the look of me. I told her about Elizabeth Fry. She frowned and asked why was I going on about this Mrs whoever-she-was. Mrs Fry, I said, you know, the famous prison reformer. That was a mistake. May said, excuse me, I ain’t never heard of her, being ignorant, and what’s the point you reading about her? Without thinking, I asked did there have to be a point, couldn’t learning be for its own sake, and May was furious – ‘Don’t get clever with me, madam!’ she shouted.

  Somewhere, I have May in me. I am said to be stubborn, like her. Like a mule, when I don’t want to do something. Can’t be moved, just like my g
randmother. And I have a temper, just like her, sudden flashes of rage that used to come over me (hardly ever now). May used to watch me, when I was a small child, in the middle of one of these tantrums, with a strange expression on her face, half horrified and half sympathetic, a slight smile playing round her lips though verbally she’d be expressing disapproval. She would say that she used to ‘carry on’ like that but that her dad thrashed it out of her. I wasn’t thrashed, rather to her disappointment, I think, though she would never have wanted to see me hurt. ‘The sight of a belt would do her good,’ she’d tell my mother, who ignored her (which took some doing). May never gave me the sight of a belt, but she often shouted at me, when I was in one of these states, that any minute I’d feel the back of her hand, and she’d raise her arm over me to warn me that it was going to come down and slap me if I didn’t stop. It never did end in a smack. Once the raised arm, and threatening words, had intimidated me, she’d slowly lower it. She only liked to see me suitably cowed.

  But this is only one side of May, the grumpy side. Unfortunately, it’s the one we all see most often these days, though I try to cling to the memories of the other May, the grandmother who doted on me and was so cosy to be with and laughed with pleasure at everything I said and did . . .

  ‘Are you wandering again?’ she asked me. I said sorry, I was day dreaming. She said she knew what I was doing and if that was all I was going to do, ‘gather wool’, I might as well go. I said I had to be off anyway and she said she didn’t know why I’d come at all if I was hardly going to warm a seat and had no chat. I got up and gave her a peck on the cheek and said I’d see myself out and that next time I’d come for a proper visit. ‘Don’t bother if it’s going to be a trouble,’ she said.

  ‘Bark’s worse than her bite’ is what my grandfather apparently used to say (he died, both grandfathers did, before I was born). I’m not sure he was right.

  No British Library today. No safety. No leaving Euston Road behind, the noise, the traffic, the dust and dirt, and entering all that silence and clarity. Clarity? Whatever do I mean? But yes, clarity, of purpose. Whereas today it was a supervision day and all was confusion. Not that Claudia’s room is in any way confusing or muddled. It is orderly, as she is herself, dressed as she always is in her calf-length skirt and her boat-necked long-sleeved top, the skirt always black, the top always some vivid colour and its neckline followed by a silver necklace of impeccable taste. The colours of her tops change but never the design. I admire how she sticks to her quaint yet elegant style of dressing. It gives her an old-fashioned but somehow glamorous look. I make an effort on supervision days. I get out of my jeans and sweaters and try to look reasonably well turned out, though probably Claudia wouldn’t think so.

  I dread going to see her. I dread the uncertainty, the slight panic. I know that I am going to feel, every single time, that I have to prove myself, to show that I know what I am doing, which of course I don’t. To get the subject for my dissertation accepted, and to start on this course, I was obliged to make the subject matter sound more authentic, worthy of research, than it actually may turn out to be. It was a struggle, touch-and-go, whether it was suitable for an MA in Women’s Studies (Hums.). I know there is something worthwhile here, but trying to summarise it had me desperate, scrabbling around at the edge of my mind looking for a firm hold. Claudia undoubtedly knew this, so it was good of her to accept me. But naturally, she expects results. She’s not going to allow me to drift along exploring half-baked theories only to discard them. She wants to see a clear line of enquiry leading to an original and interesting conclusion.

  She doesn’t like me. It’s childish to say that, even more childish to care about whether it is true, but that is the trouble – Claudia Harmsworth makes me feel a child. She’s an unusual woman, not like most people’s idea of an academic at all. I think people might guess she was an actress, what with her beautifully groomed hennaed hair, pageboy style, and her bright red lipstick and nail varnish, and the habit she has of continually raising her carefully plucked and shaped eyebrows, which gives her an air of permanent astonishment. She’s a very still, alert person. ‘Still’ and ‘alert’ may sound like contradictions, but in Claudia they combine. She sits the whole time I am with her without moving, legs neatly together, hands clasped in her lap, and she watches me intently. I see her eyes following my own gesticulating hands, noting how many times I fiddle with my hair, taking in my restlessness. I annoy her, I am sure. I feel she wants to shout at me to stop jerking about like a marionette on a string, to be calm, as she is calm. And my speech, in her presence, is equally all over the place. I start sentences, then interrupt myself and start again, only to remember what I really want to say, and so I have to begin once more. The more rope she gives me, by allowing me to rant on, the more securely I verbally hang myself.

  I confessed about Elizabeth Fry. At length I tried to explain why I’d thought she would fit into my dissertation (without mentioning the likeness to my grandmother May as the real starting point for my choice, of course). Claudia listened, she raised her eyebrows, and then she asked several questions I couldn’t answer. Had I looked, she enquired, at the early tracts about Mrs Fry – ‘Illustrious Woman’, ‘Angel of the Prisons’, for example? No, I hadn’t. Did I think she was a precursor of the feminist movement? Or was she rather a figurehead of philanthropic endeavour? She quoted the Reverend Sydney Smith, who apparently said of Mrs Fry, ‘We long to burn her alive. Examples of living virtue disturb our repose and give birth to distressing comparisons.’ What weight did I give to that? She was checking out that I was doing my research properly, and that upset me, though I know she’s entitled to, it’s her job.

  But she ended that supervision by being quite encouraging. Elizabeth Fry, she said, might yet prove promising for my purposes. She agreed that a grandmother ready to put her work before her family was surely sending out a very strong message to granddaughters. I might find that, far from being an exception that proved a rule, she altered the rule itself. It was worth investigating.

  I felt quite heartened for once when I left. No clearer about what I am really trying to prove, but at least reassured that the trail I’m on might lead somewhere.

  There are other matters to attend to. Next week it is Grandmother Isa’s eightieth birthday. Isa – who likes to be called Grandmama, not Grandma, and certainly not Gran or Granny or Nana – cannot bear the idea of being old. All her life, I am told, she has concealed her age (and, I’ve begun to suspect, other things) from those who would like to know it. When I was around four or five, I asked her how old she was, and she told me that a lady never reveals her age and that it is rude to ask (when I asked May how old she was, she said she was twenty-one). So facing up to being eighty is hard for Isa, though my father predicts that there will now be a volte-face and his mother will start boasting about her age.

  In any case, Isa is prepared to come out and celebrate being eighty with a party. She has spent months on preparations, writing all the invitations herself. My father was dumbfounded when he saw the list of guests, claiming he had never heard of half of them. It includes two cousins, both women, from Canada. Isa has never met them, but claims to have been in correspondence over the years with one of them, Mary-Lou, youngest child of her father’s brother. There are also to be members of her dead husband’s family at this party, in-laws from Somerset with whom Isa says she has kept in touch, though none of us can imagine how, when there has never been any previous mention of these relatives-through-marriage. And she has invited May. My mother wishes she hadn’t. Very kind of Isa to include May (who loves a party), but it fills all of us with foreboding. May accepted, though she was sarcastic about the invitation from ‘Lady Muck’, and commented she’d thought Isa had turned eighty years ago. This was not just unkind but the implication was unfair. Isa does not look older than eighty. She doesn’t even look eighty. Her appearance is impressive, whatever May says. She has good skin, with few deep wrinkles, due, she says, to never sit
ting in the sun. A tan is an abomination to her. Her hair, though white, is still thick and healthy-looking, and she has it cut and shaped every three weeks by a hairdresser who comes to the house. It’s true that her neck is scrawny, but she hides it with silk scarves, ever so artistically tied, and she dresses in such a way that the emphasis is on her still very neat waist. She is slim but not too thin. The only age-related thing she can do nothing about is the backs of her hands, which are quite heavily covered with dark brown patches. Isa is vain, and so these blemishes distress her, but she knows that compared to her contemporaries she looks wonderful – she has not let herself go. Nothing, she says, is more lamentable than letting oneself go, and that includes the putting on of excess weight or becoming slovenly about dressing.

  My contribution to this party is to write a poem in celebration and recite it. A parody is the obvious route to take. I have got as far as the first verse: