David was eighteen years old when Mum turned up in London again. He’d been expecting to go to Australia to be with her as soon as he finished his education – he was extremely bright and went to Oxford, which was even more of an achievement in those days considering he came from a poor, broken home and had gone to a state school – but instead she reappeared with two new children that she hadn’t told him about.
I leaned over, fished around in the ‘To Keep’ box, pulled out the red heart purse and looked at David’s picture again. As I studied his face I remembered seeing my mother cry one other time – apart from the time I left art school and when she had to eat lentils again for tea. I looked up at the window, a pain twisting in my chest. Funny how your body records important events without you knowing. I played out the scene in my head. I’m a child and I’m sitting in Nanny’s living room with Mum and David – who must have been in his early twenties – drinking tea and talking. Nanny’s false teeth are making a clicking noise because they’re too big for her mouth and she has to keep sucking them back up to her palate. She’s saying to Mum, ‘You abandoned your poor little boy, click. Wicked, click, wicked, click, wicked.’ Mum bursts into tears. She sobs and sobs and answers, ‘You know that’s not how it was.’ I’ve never seen my mother in this state before. I rush to her side and put my head on her lap. She strokes my hair as she cries. After a while we leave Nanny’s and Mum takes David and me to the pub – ‘You’re grown up enough now,’ she says. I’m excited as I’ve never been to a pub before. We sit in the garden and Mum and David talk while I slurp at a lemonade.
That’s why our grandmother didn’t like Pascale and me. She resented us on David’s behalf. Frieda saw how upset David was during the eight years Mum was abroad and how abandoned he felt. Her house was a second home to him. She would have often heard him crying for his mummy. They probably read Mum’s letters together too, and discussed how he’d be going to Australia soon to be with her. Frieda punished us to get at Mum. Punished the children. Adults do this a lot.
Kathleen I understood from my mother that as a child David always thought he would definitely go to Australia when he was sixteen, and when we didn’t send for him, he felt lost.
Then it occurred to me that as well as not telling David about us, Mum might not have told Frieda she’d had more children, or her sisters either, until we came back to England. Maybe we were a big shock to everybody. The only way she could be sure that David didn’t find out about us was not to tell anyone.
David was so traumatised by the appearance of his mother’s new children that he had a breakdown and was admitted to a sanatorium for six months. Mum doesn’t say so in her diary, but to be away for that long, I’m guessing he attempted suicide.
Kathleen About six years ago [in 1959] David had a nervous breakdown and went to a hospital. I wanted to go and see him or the doctor, but my husband forbade it. He doesn’t want me to let the children know David is their half-brother, or that I have been married before.
In all the months David was in the sanatorium, Mum didn’t visit him. ‘I’ve always felt I should have gone to the hospital, it would have helped,’ she writes. In her defence, all mothers in the 1950s and 60s were instructed not to visit their children in hospital, whether the illness was physical or mental. But parents of those with psychological problems were especially ‘encouraged to put their children into institutions and move on with their lives’.* Please let this be the reason Mum didn’t visit David. She can’t possibly have been that cruel on purpose.
Kathleen I remember at this time I began to feel like ending my life. David was in hospital, Lucien was quarrelling with my family, my friends never came to see me any more and I had changed my job.
My sister and I were only three and five years old when Mum contemplated suicide. I always had the feeling she didn’t think much of life, had no reverence for it. She exuded the resigned air of a person whose children have died and who is just filling in time until she can follow them to the grave, or who’s seen too much death to take life seriously, which I used to put down to her living through the war.
She was only ill on three occasions during our childhood, and they were all when Pascale and I went away without her. The first time was when we went on a camping trip with the Woodcraft Folk. She fell downstairs at home, knocked herself out, broke her arm and was taken to hospital. The second time she ‘fell through the window’ of the dresser in the dining room and cut the insides of both her arms to pieces, tiny little slices of red all the way up to her armpits. I can’t remember where Pascale and I were. The third time was when Lucien took Pascale and me to France to see our relatives, without her. She ended up in hospital with poisoning. When we arrived back home she looked terrible, so white. She laughed and said she’d accidentally put boracic acid powder (poisonous if taken internally, we used it as an antiseptic – although it’s no longer recommended) in the sugar bowl instead of sugar. She was saved because she rang her sister, Phyllis, who phoned for an ambulance. I believed Mum when she said that’s what happened, but then again, I didn’t. I kept thinking, Sugar and boracic acid are such different consistencies. Boracic acid is powdery and sugar is crystals – how could she have muddled them up? Also, she didn’t take sugar with her tea or anything else, now I come to think of it. And we didn’t have a phone.
When I was a child I often used to ask Mum if she’d ever thought about suicide. ‘Yes,’ she’d say, and she’d tell me about the time she knelt down in front of the cooker, turned the gas on and stuck her head in the oven. As my face fell she’d brighten up and tell me not to worry: after a while she realised how ridiculous she must look with her bum stuck in the air and it made her laugh, so she got up, switched the gas off and opened the windows. Sylvia Plath committed suicide that way. There’s a police photograph of her at the scene of her death looking just as Mum described, head in oven, bum in air, legs splayed, cotton dress. The story must have been in all the papers at the time, especially our local paper, as Sylvia Plath also lived in North London. Plath gassed herself in 1963, when her daughter Frieda was two years old. Two years later another interesting local woman, Hannah Gavron,† also committed suicide by gassing herself in an oven. It wasn’t unheard of amongst intelligent women in North London. I don’t know if Mum really did go through the motions of trying to kill herself or whether she appropriated the narratives of these other women’s suicides; they must have resonated very strongly with her at the time. I laughed nervously whenever she told the I-put-my-head-in-the-oven-haha story, but to know that she’d contemplated suicide, let alone tried it, was enough to implant fear and doubt in my mind about her ongoing presence in my life.
The last time I saw David we all boarded a bus together in Muswell Hill. Mum paid the fare for Pascale and me but not for David. She told him he had to pay for himself because she didn’t have any more money. Her child, whom she hardly ever saw. That was the first time I glimpsed the coldness beneath her skin.
Mum not paying David’s fare felt so hugely unjust to me that I thought my body would split open and spray my insides all over the bus. I prayed to God as I slumped onto the seat that when I put my hand into the pocket of my school blazer I would find tuppence hidden in the fluff so I could pay for him myself. I fished around but there was nothing there. I felt so powerless and so ashamed of Mum. I hated being a child and I hated adults. I’d never witnessed anything so callous in my life. Was it a ploy to get back at David’s father and let him know how poor she was? Tuppence worth of revenge. The cost: David’s mental and emotional health. If Mum really didn’t have enough money for his bus fare (and that is possible), we should have walked.
The person I feel most sorry for in all this is David. I remember Mum coming into our bedroom with him when I was about nine and telling Pascale and me that this twenty-two-year-old man was our brother. He’d insisted that it was time we were told. I smiled at him, said I already sort of knew he was our brother, and we hugged. Secretly I wished he had long hair and
looked like one of the Beatles, but with his short hair and black-rimmed glasses he looked more like Freddie from Freddie and the Dreamers.
* Steve Silberman, Neurotribes, 2015
† Jeremy Gavron, A Woman on the Edge of Time, 2015
45 Flaps of flesh hung off my thumb and I think I caught a glimpse of something whitish under one of the diamond-shaped gashes. Mia said I should go to A & E, that a human bite is much dirtier than an animal bite. ‘You could lose your thumb,’ she said. I didn’t care if I lost my thumb. I didn’t care if I never played guitar again. I was not leaving my mother while she was dying. I tied something round it, something white. I think I went into the bathroom and tore off a length of bog paper. Vida and I pulled up two chairs, one either side of the bed, and sat down. I took Mum’s bony, bruised, purple-parchment hand gently in mine. Her eyes were closed – apart from that one time they popped open at the beginning of the fight, they’d been closed throughout the whole debacle. I presumed she was too far into death to know what had gone on so I acted as if nothing had happened.
But then she did the most extraordinary thing. She tickled the palm of my hand with her index finger.
Repulsion
Kathleen When Pascale was three and Viviane was five, Lucien spent all day Sunday making a whip with leather thongs which he told the children he was going to use on them. He finished it in the evening and hung it on the wall. When he was at work on Monday I took it down and threw it away. He was furious when he came home and it was gone. He swore at me and gave me a forceful back-handed slap across the face. The more I think of it all, I feel I should have been much stronger a long time ago – but I loved him and always hoped things would get better.
Another time he threatened the children with his belt and I got in the way and said he wasn’t to belt them. He said he would use it on me if I didn’t get out of the way and I threatened him with the police. He said, ‘Get out of my f. way the sight of you makes me sick, I’m glad I haven’t got to look at you any more.’
On the 15th September 1966 he hit the children with his belt, which he took off, and said, ‘You’ll be getting worse next time.’ He made Viviane clean up the floor, then he turned round poured some more water on the floor and said to her, ‘Now clean that up.’ I went to Mr Faulkner of the NSPCC and the children told him personally.
Lucien hit us with the belt, he didn’t just threaten us. Our testimonies to the authorities, with dates, are proof. He lied in his diary. My memory of it isn’t false.
Kathleen Once he said, ‘You should go down on your knees and thank God for a husband like me who doesn’t drink and smoke.’ I replied, ‘Drinking and smoking aren’t the worst things in the world.’ He went berserk, threw aside the food with his arm, jumped up, punched me in the eye with his fist and screamed vehemently, ‘I haven’t hit you for a long time, have I?’ I shook the iron at him and shouted, ‘Bloody bully. That’s the last time you’ll hit me.’ He uses his physical strength as a weapon. I went to the doctor and he sent me to Moorfields Eye Hospital. I felt so upset that I went to the Highgate Court and asked if I had to accept such behaviour – with the children growing up to be women I had to stop it. The court said no, I didn’t have to accept it, but I didn’t pursue it. I always thought he would be better when his worries were removed but now there doesn’t seem anything left to hope for.
My mother never mentioned love or companionship, any of the upsides of having a family in a positive light when we were growing up – but from where she was standing, there weren’t many. It didn’t occur to me that it would be nice to have children until I was thirty-eight. Before then I’d always thought, The last thing on earth I’ll ever do is subject myself to the hellish suffocation, domination, anger and boredom of children and marriage.
Kathleen He accused me of being the worst wife and the children of being the worst behaved but he didn’t realise it was because he didn’t have any friends to go to, or visit their house as a comparison. He was always complaining we were stopping him doing things. ‘If I didn’t have the burden of you and the children, I would go to Rome and blow up the pope.’ He wasn’t joking. He used to say he would be the first to go to the moon if it wasn’t for us stopping him (the children and I). That he would show the government how to run the country and the world, but no, they wouldn’t give him a chance etc etc.
In 1961 his naturalisation application was deferred for another four years, he became violent but when I tried to appease him, he knocked me across the room and punched the door breaking a wooden panel. ‘It’s your bloody fault, you’ve been discussing me with a neighbour and they’ve written to the Home Office. You bloody British, think you’re Jesus Christ.’
He’s not called me by my name since April 1965, it’s always It, or She, or The Thing, even to the children. As they grew older, I felt I had to hide my emotions from them as they were so unhappy. But the less I got upset, the nastier my husband became.
I was repulsed by the idea of family for decades. By the time I wanted children it was too late and I couldn’t conceive naturally. Stumbling through the many rounds of IVF – the drugs, the needles, the operations, the disappointments – I wondered why it had never occurred to me to have children in my twenties or early thirties like everyone else around me. I traced my attitude back to my mother and resented her for it.
Sick
You don’t have favourites among your children,
but you do have allies.
Zadie Smith, On Beauty, 2005
When I was four years old, Miss Benn, a plump nursery-school teacher I was fond of, gave me a hug. I didn’t like it, I wasn’t used to the feeling of a soft, warm, bosomy body. She wasn’t like my bony, smoke-infused mother. Soft wasn’t a virtue in our house. Treading the middle ground, being easy-going or an appeaser made you a betrayer in Mum’s book (which is why the rigorous attitude of ‘punk’ resonated so strongly with me – it felt familiar). My father, on the other hand, liked that I saw both sides of an argument. It gave him an opportunity to insinuate himself into my affections. He hit and ridiculed Pascale for the attributes Mum praised her for – being single-minded and assertive. He shouted at Pascale about anything, even sitting too close to the TV. She was very short-sighted and needed glasses, but it took my parents years to realise. They blamed us for so much when they were the ones who got things wrong.
Kathleen Pascale has a stronger character, Lucien can’t intimidate her so he tries to break her with his continuous smacking, telling her she is stupid and sending her up to bed. She has no sense of security and I have to continuously tell her I love her and will always be with her. One day when he sent her to get a tool and she came back with another, she came in crying her eyes out saying Daddy said she was bloody stupid, not a brain in her head. I went out to him and said don’t say that, she’s too young, it upsets her. He started dancing up and down and yelling out, she’s bloody stupid, she’s bloody stupid, over and over again.
When I was young I found any signs of weakness, dirt or decrepitude in others nauseating. I couldn’t eat for the rest of the day if we were out and I saw someone who wasn’t well in some way, even if they were just limping or dribbling, any minor ailment. The elderly and babies turned my stomach. Once we went to the zoo and I saw bees making honey. It looked like they were vomiting it out of their mouths. I didn’t eat honey again for ten years.
I wasn’t a kind big sister. I was embarrassed, self-conscious and irritable with Pascale. Only when I was at junior school, where I felt safe, did I stand up for the weaker and bullied children. It was on the way to school one morning that Mum instructed me to tell a boy in Pascale’s class to stop spitting at her. She said that because I was older – in the year above – he’d listen to me. I crossed the playground at break time, stood in front of the boy, confident that he’d listen to me like Mum said, and told him to stop picking on my sister. He punched me so hard in my (newly growing) chest that I thought he’d ruptured the skin and blood was running down the front
of my shirt. Then he ran off. In front of the whole playground. I hate you, Mum, I hate you, Pascale. Why can’t you fight your own battles?
In 1999, when I was diagnosed with cancer, I became that person I was repelled by – an ill person. A weak person who looked and acted as if they were frail and infirm. Who vomited, had diarrhoea and whose hands shook all the time – and I’ve never fully recovered. Having cancer may have ruined parts of my body and flayed my nerves, but it at least cured me of my fear of imperfection and sickness in others. My close encounter with death, disease and bodily fluids made me into a half-decent person. I needed to grow up.
46 Even though she couldn’t speak or see or raise her arm and was as near death as any living person can possibly be, Mum somehow found the strength and compassion to send me a little message by tickling my hand. When I thought about it later, I wondered if she even knew it was me sitting there holding her hand, and not my sister or Vida, but then I worked out that somehow she did know. She didn’t tickle Vida’s hand (I asked), she only tickled mine. Mum must have heard and understood everything that went on after all. I recognised the gesture. She’d used it often over the last couple of months: when we were sitting together chatting on her sofa; leaning across the kitchen table after we’d had a laugh about something; holding hands in the hospital. That tickle meant reassurance and love, closeness and goodbye. It meant that she understood and everything was OK. That little tickle was all our shared history in one gesture, and what I took it to mean as I sat by her bed was, ‘I understand and I forgive you. Don’t carry this around with you for the rest of your life.’ That’s what flashed into my mind when she did it. Dear Mum, telepathic Mum, my conscience and my guide. With the tiniest amount of pressure – I was frightened I’d bruise her – I squeezed her hand back. It was nearly over. This really was goodbye.
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