The Frances Garrood Collection

by Frances Garrood

  There had been no party to commemorate the second anniversary of Octavia’s death; even Mum realized that this had not been a good idea, and that something sombre and reflective might be more appropriate. So this time, we had all trooped down to the churchyard with armfuls of roses from the garden and scattered them on her grave. It was a beautiful June day; the best kind, with a blue and white sky and air alive with the sound of birdsong; the kind of day which can so easily exaggerate emotions and rekindle joy or grief.

  After the scattering, no one seemed to know what to do. Had we been religious, we would no doubt have prayed, but as it was we just stood in silence, covertly watching each other, waiting for a cue from Mum as to what was to happen next. Beneath my lowered eyelids, all I could see was feet: Mum’s unsuitable high-heeled shoes, already sinking into the wet grass, and the childish round-toed shoes favoured by Greta; the crisp turn-ups of Call Me Bill’s trousers and Richard’s ancient brogues neatly laced with string. Lucas’s shoes were black and highly polished as Mum had requested that he should come in his uniform, and the more sensible among us had come in stout shoes or boots. In Lucas’s Scouting for Boys, a book over which he and I used to howl with mirth, we had read that one could tell a lot about a person from his footwear, and for once I could see it might well have a point.

  I am ashamed to say that my thoughts were preoccupied not so much with Octavia but with the unwelcome presence of the Charlton Heston Lodger, whose attendance both Lucas and I thought quite inappropriate. After all, he had arrived after Octavia’s death, and any feelings he had were inevitably centred around Mum. I noted with satisfaction that when he placed a protective arm around her shoulders, she shook it off and moved away from him. Perhaps she too felt that while this relative newcomer might be accepted into her bed, he was not welcome at the graveside of the baby he had never known.

  But that was back in June, and now it was August, a month I was accustomed to look forward to as the one time in the whole year when I could please myself. This year, however, was different, and while I was still glorying in my new freedom from the world of school and examinations, I realized that I couldn’t just sit around at home doing nothing for the next three months, so I took a job at the local cinema as an usherette.

  At first I was rather pleased with myself. For the first time in my life, I had regular money of my own (Mum’s attempts at distributing pocket money, although doubtless well meant, had been sporadic and unreliable), the work was undemanding, and I had a torch to read by. But by the time I had seen Seven Brides for Seven Brothers twenty-nine times and sold enough ice cream to put me off the stuff for life, I thought I would go mad, especially as it was very soon made clear to me that reading books by torchlight was not in the job description.

  ‘Give it up and do something else,’ advised Mum, whose easy-come easy-go attitude to the world of work seemed to have done her little harm. But I liked to think that I was made of sterner stuff and so I stuck it out, much to the entertainment of Lucas and his friends, who regularly heckled me from the back row between their amorous gropings. I have never felt quite the same about the cinema since, and am always particularly nice to the usherettes.

  Meanwhile, I was eagerly looking forward to November. The doubts which had been sown as to my suitability as a nurse had only served to fuel my enthusiasm, and while a year ago I had never even considered nursing as a career, now I couldn’t believe that I had ever thought of doing anything else. I knew I was intelligent, I believed that I was caring, and while I liked to think that I had taken on board the matron’s warnings of the pressures of hard work and emotional stress, I was in no doubt that I could cope with them when they arose. As for leaving home, London was only an hour and a half away by train, and there was always the telephone. Mum was still preoccupied with Charlton Heston, Lucas was living at home, and Greta and Call Me Bill were there to help hold the family together. They would hardly notice that I was gone. As I stood for long hours in the darkened cinema, with nothing but my thoughts and the noise and dazzle of yet another all-too-familiar film to occupy my mind, I built up such a delightful fantasy of my new life that I am surprised I could have been so gullible as to believe in it.

  The reality, when it came to it, was of course totally different.

  For a start, I and the others in my group were stationed in a nurses’ home some distance from the hospital for eight weeks of classroom training. I had to share a bedroom with a girl called Angela, who looked as though she had come straight off the set of a Carry On film; all long legs and pouting lips and fluttering mascara. Angela and I disliked each other on sight, and this made for a difficult few weeks.

  Then there was the Home Sister, a redoubtable woman of the old school, whose mission in life seemed to be to ensure that military discipline was maintained at all times, and that during the hours of darkness we were kept in and anyone of the opposite sex was kept out. This last group included Lucas, who came to visit me, and Angela’s father (at least, she said he was her father but he looked a great deal too young and glamorous to be anyone’s father — in this, I was on the side of the Home Sister).

  Those eight weeks seemed interminable. The drone of the tutor’s voice induced in me a kind of torpor, and the only relief came from our brief forays into the practical room, where we practised our hospital corners and bandaged one another’s arms and legs, and the one afternoon a week when we were allowed onto the hospital wards, where we felt more like spare parts than proper nurses.

  And, to my surprise, I was homesick. It was the first time I had been away from home since Octavia’s death, and I felt suddenly vulnerable and insecure. Octavia had died while I was at St Andrew’s, and in some part of my mind there was the illogical thought that if I had been at home, it might never have happened; that my presence at home was necessary in order to keep everyone safe. I knew this made no sense, and that it was more about my needs than those of my family, but I couldn’t get away from it. I worried and fretted if I hadn’t heard from home, and when Mum’s letters did come, they were as irregular and scatty as the ones I had received at boarding school, and all the more poignant for that, for they reminded me of a time when our family was still untouched by tragedy. As for phone calls, the evening queue for the only pay phone was long, and I rarely had more than a few minutes to talk.

  ‘You’re all right, are you, Mum?’ I would ask. ‘You’re sure you’re all OK?’

  ‘Of course we’re OK,’ Mum would reply, sounding amazingly cheery, and she would grab hold of the nearest person to endorse her reassurance (on one occasion, the only family member available was The Dog, and I was subjected to a costly minute of snufflings and lickings which offered no consolation whatsoever). ‘Have you seen any operations yet?’

  ‘No, Mum. I keep telling you. I shan’t see operations for ages. I’m still in school, remember?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She sounded disappointed. A nurse who hadn’t seen any operations obviously didn’t really count.

  ‘But I shall. We have to. We all have to do a spell in theatre.’ I hesitated, trying to think of something which would interest her. ‘We did see a brain in a bucket,’ I offered.

  ‘A brain in a bucket! Fancy!’

  The brain in question had been brought in to illustrate a session on the nervous system. It looked grey and pickled and very dead, and yet all I could think of was that that brain represented a whole person; all of someone’s life and thoughts and memories were in that bucket, together with their talents and abilities, their sadnesses and their triumphs. When it came to it, I reflected, only your brain was really you; other parts of the body were mere trappings in comparison with that amazing organ. I found the whole experience quite unnerving, and while the other girls appeared to be torn equally between disgust and hilarity, I found my encounter with the bucket and its grisly contents very sobering.

  Twenty-seven

  Mum is asleep now, drifting on a gentle tide of morphine, gradually bobbing away from me. Before lon
g, she will be out of reach. She will have embarked on that part of her journey where I can’t be with her. Soon, I shall no longer be able to talk to her.

  I’m glad that she is at peace, but at the same time I want to say to her: ‘Don’t go! Stay a little longer! Please don’t leave me. I’ll be lost without you.’

  Another memory. I am about five years old, and have become separated from my family in a London park. Everything seems enormous — huge trees, vast expanses of grass, a lake as big as the sea. I feel very tiny and very lost and absolutely terrified. What if they never find me? What if I have to stay here all night? What if the swans come and get me (‘They can break a man’s arm, you know,’ my mother had helpfully informed me only minutes before). And worst of all, what if I get carried away by a Stranger?

  They eventually find me, filthy and sobbing, hiding under a bush only yards from where I last saw them. Mummy! Oh, the joy of being folded into that familiar bosom, petted and soothed, and comforted with strawberry ice cream in a cone.

  Drifting in and out of sleep, I wonder in my wakeful moments whether in some strange way her mind and mine might join together in our separate states of unconsciousness; whether her sleep can merge with my own, and she can find some comfort in the companionship of my dreams. For these dreams — tiny little vignettes now — are all about my mother. I see her running down a hill on a bright summer’s day, arms outflung, laughing; decorating a cake for my birthday, the letters melting into each other, the C of my name running down the side of the cake; weeping over the intransigence of a particularly difficult Lodger.

  And appearing, totally out of the blue, at visiting time, sitting by the bed of a patient in what was only my second week as a proper signed-up member of the nursing staff on my first ward.

  ‘Mum! What on earth are you doing here?’ I hissed, looking around to see if anyone had noticed her.

  ‘I had to come up and see you, Cass. In your uniform.’ She beamed. ‘I thought it would be a lovely surprise for you. You don’t have to take any notice of me,’ she added. ‘Just you carry on. I shan’t be any bother.’

  I hesitated. On the one hand, Mum looked much like any other visitor, and might well pass as one provided she behaved herself. On the other, try as she might to make it otherwise, ‘bother’ of some kind or another tended to accompany Mum wherever she went.

  ‘What about your job?’ I asked her. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’

  ‘Oh, that!’ Mum laughed. ‘I phoned in with the flu. And don’t look so disapproving, Cass. This is important. I couldn’t let you down, could I?’

  If being let down involved not being visited by Mum at work, I felt I could have coped with it all too easily, but I knew that she would never understand. To Mum, not coming to see me in my new uniform would have been the same as not coming to see me in the school nativity play when I was five.

  ‘You will be good?’ I pleaded, aware of the ward sister watching me from behind her desk.

  ‘Good as gold,’ Mum promised. ‘This lady hasn’t any visitors, so I can keep her company. She comes from Bromsgrove,’ she added, turning to her new friend. ‘I had a cousin who lived in Bromsgrove,’ she told her. ‘Now isn’t that a coincidence?’

  It was also, as far as I knew, untrue, but if Mum did nothing worse than enliven someone’s dull afternoon with fictitious tales of her past, I wasn’t going to stop her, so I returned to my work. When Mum left at the end of visiting time, I breathed a sigh of relief. She had made her inspection, and that, as far as I was concerned, was that.

  But I had underestimated Mum, for two weeks later, she was back.

  ‘Mum, you can’t keep doing this,’ I muttered, making as though to straighten a pillow. ‘Or if you must come, you could at least warn me.’

  ‘That would spoil the surprise,’ Mum said.

  ‘I don’t want surprises.’

  ‘Don’t be so ungrateful, Cass. I don’t know what’s got into you.’

  ‘What’s got into me,’ I said, ‘is that I have just started on a busy surgical ward with a dragon of a sister, and I want to make a good impression. Having my mother following me around does not make a good impression.’

  ‘Nurse Fitzpatrick! I thought I told you to do the temperatures!’ The booming voice of the dragon interrupted our little dialogue.

  ‘Temperatures!’ murmured Mum, pink with pride. ‘Fancy!’

  These visits of Mum’s — always unannounced but always at visiting times, and on one occasion, she even came accompanied by a friend — continued sporadically until the day when she was found feeding grapes and chocolate to a patient who was supposed to be fasting in preparation for an operation.

  ‘Who is that woman?’ demanded the sister. ‘She’s a blessed nuisance. I’m sure I’ve seen her before.’

  But none of the other staff knew, and I certainly wasn’t going to say that the blessed nuisance had anything to do with me. To Mum’s credit, she allowed herself to be soundly reprimanded and escorted off the ward without so much as a glance in my direction, although she did make her feelings clear when we met for tea afterwards.

  ‘I think it’s disgraceful, starving a poor old woman like that. She hadn’t even had any breakfast!’

  And try as I might to explain why this was necessary, Mum simply couldn’t see it. If someone was hungry, then it was her duty to feed them, just as it was her duty to house the homeless (increasingly, I suspected, in my room, since I was no longer around to defend it).

  But in those early months, there were other and worse surprises than Mum’s visits. I learnt, among other things, that the decibels generated by a trolley’s worth of gleaming metal bedpans cascading onto the floor rivalled the kind of sound one might expect if a high-speed jet ploughed into an iron foundry; that a carelessly spilt pint of blood could make a bed — not to mention its hapless occupant — resemble a battlefield; and that an apparently sick and frail little old lady could, when confused, throw an amazingly powerful punch (I had the bruises to prove it).

  I also learnt, for the first time in my life, what it felt like to be totally exhausted — physically as well as mentally.

  ‘How do you do it?’ I asked Angela, who was preparing for yet another night out on the town (I was becoming quite attached to Angela, possibly because we no longer had to share a room). ‘Where do you get the energy?’

  ‘Priorities, Cass. Priorities.’ Angela applied another layer of mascara to her bat-black lashes. ‘After a day in the sluice, a girl needs to remind herself what it’s like to have a good time.’ She applied a generous dose of lacquer to her hair. ‘It wouldn’t do you any harm to come with me.’

  ‘No thanks.’ I was lying on her bed, watching her get ready. ‘A hot bath and bed for me.’

  ‘You’re old before your time, Cassandra.’ She shook her sleek peroxide head at me and bent to squeeze her feet into a pair of needle-sharp stilettos. ‘What you need is a bit of fun.’

  ‘Am I so boring?’ I asked her.

  ‘Not boring.’ Angela shrugged her bare shoulders into a faux fur coat borrowed for the occasion. ‘It’s just that you never seem to let your hair down. You always look so — serious. You don’t go to parties or out on dates —’

  ‘I went to that party last week!’

  ‘Yes. And stood in a corner looking miserable. That nice boy tried to chat you up, and you behaved as though he was trying to abduct you.’ She gave a final twirl in front of the mirror and grinned at me. ‘I wouldn’t have minded being chatted up by him, I can tell you.’

  After Angela had left on a waft of cheap perfume, I returned to my own room and thought about what she had said. It was true that I didn’t like parties. All that getting-to-know-you small talk, usually conducted against a background of ear-splitting music; embarrassed shuffles round a smoky dance floor followed by the fighting-off of unwanted advances; the solitary walk home, leaving my friends still part of that vibrating, hormone-charged, inebriated mass of partying humanity.

  Later o
n, lying in the bath, gazing at the twin humps of my breasts, ribcage, hip bones, knees and toes, rising like pale hillocks from the steamy water, I acknowledged for the first time my fear of the opposite sex. Hitherto, I had rationalized my feelings, putting them down to disinterest rather than anything stronger; thinking that I was independent-minded enough to plan — even to want — a future without the encumbrance of husband and children. But now at last I saw what had been staring me in the face for some time.

  I was afraid of men.

  Twenty-eight

  I suppose I must have imagined that Uncle Rupert had, if not ceased to exist, then at least been expunged from our lives. After that day when Mum had unceremoniously thrown him out of our house, I had assumed that she’d also thrown him out of her life. It never for a moment occurred to me that she might have kept in touch with him.

  But of course I should have known better.

  Incoming calls were received by the payphones situated on each floor of the nurses’ home, and if no one felt like making the pilgrimage to the end of the corridor, they often went unanswered. But on this occasion, I had a feeling that the call might be for me, and so it was I who answered it.

  ‘Oh, Cass!’ Mum sounded breathless. ‘I’m so glad it’s you. Something awful’s happened.’

  ‘What? What’s happened? Is it Lucas?’

  ‘No. Not Lucas.’

  ‘Well, who? Who then?’

  ‘Uncle Rupert.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Uncle Rupert.’

  ‘Uncle Rupert.’ My voice sounded very faint, drowned out by the thumping of my heartbeats, and I felt the blood rush to my face.

  ‘Yes. He’s in prison.’ There was a catch in her voice. ‘Oh, Cass. I didn’t want to have to tell you, but there’s no one else I can talk to about it.’