by Sally Bayley
The Zachary Merton came from Africa. It belonged to a man called Zachary who everyone called Zach. Zach had decided it was safer to deliver babies by the sea in England than on the coast in Africa. In Africa, elephants and baboons might get at them and carry them away into the jungle; Zachary Merton knew of a baboon that had stolen a blond child and brought it up on banana leaves and mongoose. After a year, the child started to grow long dark hair and speak gibberish. Gone to the devil, said the locals, godless, forsaken. So Zachary the African, who was a good Christian man and came from a place called Moab, moved the Zachary Merton to Rustington on Sea where he painted it pearly white and planted palm trees around it to keep out the pesky flies. But there weren’t many flies in Rustington on Sea, even in the summer, so Zachary Merton from Moab took down the palm trees and planted some elms because the locals told him they would withstand the pull of the salty wind. And Zachary Merton stayed in Rustington on Sea for many years; for long enough to see many blond babies born to healthy mothers – and without a single doctor in sight.
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Hours pass and Mr Chillip the doctor is forced to sit with Betsey Trotwood in the front parlour. Betsey Trotwood insists on keeping cotton wool in her ears to keep out the screams coming from upstairs.
Mr Chillip’s view is that this ‘unknown woman of portentous appearance’ is quite a mystery. Why on earth is she here, and where does she come from? This is what we are all thinking. But Betsey Trotwood doesn’t hear any of our thinking. She just carries on warming herself by the fire with cotton wool in her ears.
‘Stubborn is as stubborn does,’ Maisie says. Finally, after a lot of noise from upstairs, and a lot of pacing to and fro from Betsey Trotwood, the baby comes. The screaming upstairs stops; the murder is over.
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Mum tells me that I was born at six o’clock in the morning on a Monday or a Tuesday. She can’t quite remember now. I was born in my mother’s bed, not at the Zachary Merton. My brothers were born there instead. On the morning of 29 August 1972 I rolled over onto my mother’s white sheets in her double bed and went straight to sleep. ‘Well, we won’t be having any trouble from her,’ sniffed Cynthia Mary Grouse, and packed up her stiff black bag and left.
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‘Well, Ma’am, I am happy to congratulate you,’ says Mr Chillip, bounding downstairs. But happy Mr Chillip doesn’t yet know what danger he is in. ‘I am happy to congratulate you,’ he says blithely, grinning from ear to ear no doubt.
‘And she? How is she?’ says Miss Betsey Trotwood, sharply. Mr Chillip looks confused.
‘The baby,’ said my aunt. ‘How is she?’
Then Mr Chillip lets it slip. ‘Ma’am … I apprehended you had known. It’s a boy.’ Poor Mr Chillip; he doesn’t know what’s hit him.
My aunt never said a word, but took her bonnet by the strings, in the manner of a sling, aimed a blow at Mr. Chillip’s head with it, put it on bent, walked out, and never came back. She vanished like a discontented fairy, or like one of those supernatural beings whom it was popularly supposed I was entitled to see, and never came back any more.
Poor Mr Chillip. For a man to be bashed around the head by a bonnet somehow seems worse than being bashed around the head by a saucepan, which might really hurt. Being bashed around the head by a bonnet is just very silly and rather surprising. ‘Foolish,’ says Maze. ‘Just plain foolish.’
But before anyone can say another thing, Betsey Trotwood disappears like a discontented fairy. Whoosh! Whoosh!
12
Hand-Me-Down Histories
The governess had run away two months before; and for all Mr. Rochester sought her as if she had been the most precious thing he had in the world, he never could hear a word of her; and he grew savage – quite savage on his disappointment: he never was a wild man, but he got dangerous after he lost her … He broke off acquaintance with all the gentry, and shut himself up like a hermit at the Hall.
(Jane Eyre)
Some people have special powers for disappearing. Betsey Trotwood does, and so does Jane Eyre. All the characters I read about – all the ones I liked, at least – seemed to disappear into thin air.
When Jane Eyre leaves Thornfield Hall she disappears like a sprite in the night. She isn’t seen for years. When Jane Eyre runs away, Mr Rochester spends months and months searching for her, tracing the forests wild. I think that’s what people do when they go mad over love. They start running around the woods looking for fairies.
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
Ye-eah we wept, when we remembered Zion
That’s a song by Boney M. But Zion is just another name for the past, and when I think of the past I remember the records we played. I see those black circles spinning me around and around until I’m lying on the front-room floor feeling dizzy and sick.
‘That’s enough now,’ says Mum, coming out from behind her bedroom door after lunch (it’s always after lunch when Mum comes out). ‘I’ve heard quite enough of that now. Can’t you find something else to play?’
But it was Roger who gave us that record, Roger who came to our house with the people in stripy clothes, Roger who left us records, Roger who sang ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’ with his guitar on his knee, Roger who held hands with all of the wailing people of Babylon.
And Roger came with Sue, the Sue that everyone talks about but pretends not to know, the Sue who ran away, so they say. Roger came with Sue, so Roger must have known. Roger held hands with everyone: with Mum and Maze and my aunt and a man called Peter and a woman called Cynthia. Once upon a time everyone held hands and sang ring-a-ring-of-roses. Once upon a time a striking dark-haired woman sat on the floor of a house by the sea and told everyone that God was coming through the window any minute now and that they should hold hands nicely and say their prayers. So they did.
Sue held Roger’s hand, round and round the garden like a teddy bear until they felt hot and dizzy from the singing. Then Sue led Roger into the garden and they sat down on the dry grass and stroked the rose petals and lifted them up towards the sky. Sue opened her hands and let the petals fall over her head and they lay back on the grass and closed their eyes and dreamed of Zion.
It was Sue who led Roger away: away from the people strumming guitars in the kitchen, the people wandering down the hallway, the people sitting in the front room cross-legged speaking Greek, the people Mummy holds hands with too, the people The Woman Upstairs beckons in through the back door with her bony finger, the people Maisie brings tea to on a tray, the people who sit around and whisper prayers to King David hoping he will come back down to earth: those people, the people praying for Zion.
But Zion is over the hill and far away, and for Zion to come, you have to lift your face unto the Lord.
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When you tell a story, at some point you have to move backwards. You can’t just keep ploughing on. Things won’t make sense otherwise, not to you nor to anyone. You have to know that the reason things are the way they are now is because other things happened before.
‘Before you came along things were quite different,’ Mum says mysteriously. ‘Quite different, young lady. Things weren’t always as they are now.’
Miss Marple knows this. She knows that before the vicar married Greta things were very different indeed. For one thing, there was a lot less talk of detective fiction. But when you think about it, most stories are about what happened before: before Noah’s Flood, before Eve ate the apple, before my aunt moved in, before the wailing people came to our house, before David died, before Sue Blunt disappeared, before the body was found in the vicar’s study, before Mary the maid screamed, before Letitia Blacklock acquired the lump on her neck. But then, if none of that had happened, we wouldn’t have anything to talk about. It’s just annoying always being the person who comes after.
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Sometime before I
was born Mum had been a seamstress. You only learn about the past in bits and pieces, when someone is in the mood to tell you. Mum told me things over a cup of coffee in the morning when she sat down to eat her crust. Every morning Mum ate a wafer of crusty bread with some butter on it. She liked bread without much bread in it, just the crusty part, the edge of the bread, the edge of the rocks where the knobbly faces jutted out. I watched Mum eating her crust and the rock folded flat in two.
While she was drinking her coffee, Mum told me that she used to make clothes for money. She had an old sewing machine called Singer but she did a lot by hand. Mum liked to say that she did things by hand. Doing things by hand included making embroderie anglaise.
Mum was so good at embroderie anglaise I imagined she had a job repairing the Bayeux Tapestry. A long time ago Mum went to France on a ferry. She took her sewing machine with her. Mum was sailing to France because she’d been asked by the kings and queens of Normandy to make a picture of them all out hunting. The French kings and queens wanted their picture to be as pretty as possible; they wanted their picture surrounded with roses.
Mum loved sewing embroderie anglaise. She put it all over my clothes. Embroderie anglaise was the pretty flowers she sewed onto the bottom of clothes; embroderie anglaise are flowers that grow along an old hem. Embroderie anglaise can cover up a multitude of sins. Skirts that are suddenly too short, dry and tattered hems.
But they don’t need much water, Mum says. You want to make sure they keep their shape. Too much water is as bad as too little. Roses must grow together, with small spaces in between.
Embroderie anglaise is the part of the garden that lines up in rows, the back of the wall where Mum runs her roses. Her roses are still young now, but one day they will grow up to be beautiful young ladies: Mary and Constance and Eveline.
‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row, a row, with pretty maids all in a row.’
Broderie anglaise, Mum said, was what the French king, William, sent to the English queen, Matilda, in order to win her over. When Matilda ran her fingers over the little pink and red ripples and the tiny blue and white crosses on the sea, she smiled and said, ‘Oui.’
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Every story has a backstory. This is my backstory, but it’s not really mine, if you know what I mean. It’s what Mum calls making do. Making do is sewing over the bare parts of clothes around the elbows and knees. Sometimes it means adding another layer to the hem. Then it becomes a hand-me-down. History is full of hand-me-down projects.
Sometime before I was born there was a tall flint tower overlooking the sea. Some people say it was Norman, others that it was Saxon, but the tower had stood strong and sturdy for hundreds of years. One day in the 1970s – I can’t say which year exactly – a queen came to live in our long, thin house by the sea. Suddenly our house had a tower. The tower had a flag on top that faced out towards the sea.
The queen brought a subject with her. He was her only subject. The queen had lost all her other subjects. The subject’s name was David, but after a while he was sent away too, because the queen didn’t think he was a suitable subject and he would certainly never make a king. So the queen went to live in the tower alone. She disappeared behind the white door in the tower and didn’t come out for years.
Then one day the tower fell into the sea. No one knows how this happened, but the story goes that one night a fire broke out on top. The floor was rickety and old and some candles had been left burning. The people in the tower lit candles when they sang their songs, but when the Spirit of God moved among them, they forgot the candles lying on the floor. And the flames crept through the orange and brown carpet and swallowed it whole.
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History is full of sad queens and aunts. See Queen Victoria after Prince Albert died. She sailed off to the Isle of Wight and refused to get the ferry back. With no queen on the throne, England was scuppered.
Then there is the sad history of Betsey Trotwood. After she heard the news of her handsome husband’s death, she went off to live in a tiny place by the sea. This is the history of Betsey Trotwood according to David Copperfield:
From India, tidings of his death reached home, within ten years. How they affected my aunt, nobody knew; for immediately upon the separation, she took her maiden name again, bought a cottage in a hamlet on the sea-coast a long way off, established herself there as a single woman with one servant, and was understood to live secluded, ever afterwards, in an inflexible retirement.
(David Copperfield)
After all this, Betsey goes into exile. It isn’t true that nobody knew how she felt about the news. Of course they knew. They just didn’t want to know. Anyone who moves to a cottage far away by the sea can hardly be rejoicing. You move away because you don’t want anyone you know to see your tears.
And then there is the story of Jane Eyre. Thorough bush thorough brier Jane Eyre moves away too. After the scene at the altar, after Mr Rochester goes mad with disappointment, after the ghastly woman upstairs is discovered and comes downstairs, after her wedding veil is torn in two, Jane knows there is no staying, so she flees.
Early one morning, she stows herself away inside a coach with a small parcel of belongings. She leaves Thornfield Hall and its turrets and tower behind her. She leaves Mr Rochester slumped asleep on a chair outside her room, Mr Rochester, desperate and alone. She leaves! She leaves because she must. Her soul has told her so. Let me be torn away! Like Cinderella, she orders the carriage.
And the carriage takes her to a town called Whitcross where she finds a stone pillar pointing four ways. Now she must decide which way to go. But just as the carriage pulls away she realises that she has left her small parcel behind. Without that parcel she is absolutely destitute and alone.
So she strikes out across the heath. Starved and sodden, she sees, in the distance, a village and spire. She stumbles into the village and spies a shop. A baker’s! Hot dough! She can almost feel it on her tongue. Fresh bread rears up in front of her, delicious and warm. She asks the shopkeeper for a bun, but the lady with the pinafore tied round her waist says no. We can’t have ragamuffins like you coming in here and asking for free loaves of bread. Keep your filthy hands off! Now out you go!
Almost dead with hunger, Jane arrives at a cottage door. She knocks and a servant answers, a woman with a suspicious look. Before the woman can close the door on her, Jane falls across the threshold. Moments later, she is scooped up by a tall, handsome man with a Greek face who carries her inside.
This is the beginning of a new Jane, a Jane with new relatives. And so exit Jane Eyre of Thornfield Hall with the tall, dark tower.
PART TWO
13
Aunt Jayne
This might surprise you, but I had another aunt, called Jayne (with a ‘y’), my younger aunt who came to visit when the sun came out. She was Aunt Jayne who came down in the summer. Aunt Jayne was ten years younger than my other aunt. She was the whoopsie-daisy sister.
The first thing you need to know about Aunt Jayne is that she had a boyfriend and his name was Bill.
‘Fancy that!’ said Maze, who loved Aunt Jayne because Aunt Jayne always brought presents. ‘Fancy that, coming all that way on the train, with all those things. Such extravagance, Jayne. Really, you shouldn’t. You should save your money for better things. What on earth does Bill say?’
But Aunt Jayne never went into what Bill might say – Uncle Bill, she called him – because no one wanted to know what Bill had to say and her words would have been wasted.
Uncle Bill only came down at Christmas, and then he sat in the corner of the front room and ate a Toblerone: a long pyramid-shaped tunnel of chocolate running through the Alps.
‘The Swiss have to build their tunnels through the mountains to get anywhere. You’ve got to get around mountains in Switzerland. Broom-broom … right on through.’
Un
cle Bill snapped off a piece of the chocolate tunnel and handed it to me. ‘Don’t tell the grown-ups. Never tell the grown-ups anything. They’re not fun.’ Uncle Bill had a voice that fell down quietly at the end. His words mashed slightly at the end, because Uncle Bill was Irish and Irish people speak with a lilt said Maze.
‘Sing-song … their words go up and down, up and down, over the hills and far away. Now really, Bill, don’t you have better things to spend your money on than big blocks of Toblerone?’
Better things was food and milk, school shoes, summer sandals, the electricity bill; better things was fresh eggs, bread, and proper minced meat. For Aunt Jayne, better things was getting some sun on your limbs.
‘Children in England look like uncooked pastry,’ Aunt Jayne pronounced to whoever was listening. ‘Let’s get some sun on those limbs.’
Aunt Jayne believed in picnics and ice cream and sunbathing. A picnic meant a rug, sandwiches wrapped in tin foil with thick cheese, chocolate fingers, and fresh strawberries. So Aunt Jayne scooped us up – my brothers, three cousins and me – and took us down to the beach. Before we left the house she made sure that we all had our swimming costumes on under our clothes, ‘to avoid any beach embarrassment’, she said, because Aunt Jayne was a real lady. She knew what should be kept in and what out. ‘Tummies and bottoms in, shoulders out.’
‘Naked bits,’ said my brother Peter. ‘No naked bits on the beach. We’re not perverts! No one’s to see our naked bits. Perverts will, though. Perverts live to see naked bits!’
Perverts were hard to spot because they were always brown. They blended in. Perverts lay out in the sun all day turning brown. Not a single part of a pervert’s body remained white because perverts wore no clothes. They even sat down to eat their corn flakes in the nude.