‘And fathers?’
Again she waits.
‘Dad told Sean, if he wasn’t better behaved, he’d be back in the orphanage.’
‘And how did you visualise the orphanage?’
‘Lots of unhappy children. Lots of beds. Bare walls. Bare floors.’
‘Like school then?’
I watch the therapist’s tissues, wondering whether before each session she makes sure that at least one frosted white corner is lovingly pulled free of its box.
‘Maybe …’ she begins, but I finish the sentence for her.
‘Maybe what I’m realising is that my worst nightmare came true.’
Lie 33: School is really nice
At Aberlour House we were forced to write a letter to our parents first thing on a Monday. After morning run, and our porridge breakfast (Monday, Wednesday and Friday were always porridge), and an assembly, seated cross-legged on the parquet floor, we were sent to our form rooms. That first year it was the science room, my lies watched over by the host of reptiles and rodents, one ingesting another in glass cages that encircled the room. I found these lies more difficult to construct than any of the others that would follow.
It rained often and I sat in my too-starchy, too-new uniform, watching the tears on the glass. I’m sure I was good at the dreaded grammatical connectives – first; then; after; when. What was impossible was to find the words to fill in those spaces that must go between, each one choked from me one letter at a time. It felt too impossible to write how it really was. Of the few I still have, I read that Ed and I are preoccupied with the weather. We ask what it is like ‘over there’, knowing that in Saudi it will be blazing sunshine and cloudless skies.
By contrast, many of the letters we receive are almost wholly preoccupied with logistics. Did I receive the cheque? Have Beaver Travel sent the visa? Would I please get in touch with the school secretary regarding hotel arrangements for a transit in Amsterdam? In one letter there are instructions on how to buy a train ticket, and anxiety over how I will travel the ten miles between school and the station to make the purchase. In another they have organised for me, aged thirteen, to be sent a visa application form to complete myself.
A letter of mine asks what date Granny will be taking us out. I’m worried, I write, because I cannot read her handwriting. About that transit in Amsterdam a few years later I worry too. How will we find the hotel, I ask, and will anyone help us to get back to the airport in the morning? What if we miss our flight?
The combination of love and distance in these letters feels like a coach trying to manage a team down a phone which keeps cutting out.
‘It was good to hear your voices,’ Mum writes, ‘and to know that you made it over to Granny’s ok as per the instructions …..’ (her ellipsis – all five dots – I take to mean that her instructions have not been followed to the letter), or ‘Hope the journey back to school went well. The lady sitting beside you looked a right grump.’ Dad asks: ‘Have you heard from the travel company about your visas yet? You should be sent the passports fairly soon, so look after them – no more leaving them in the wet.’ In another Dad says he has spent the day imagining my movements through airports. His plans have unravelled. He is only able to locate me through a family friend. ‘You’ve gone to Kinross,’ he tells me. It is not the only occasion the arrangements have not worked out as they should: a lost identity card, lost shoes; a drowned passport and a mounting anxiety that my incompetence will bring all their carefully laid plans to nought.
These letters from home were handed out by a member of staff, shouting out our names as we picked up our orange squash and biscuit at break. Every day, at least once, someone would call out Violet’s name. I would focus on the secretary’s dog, who drooled copiously, willing ‘Doyle’ to be called.
After a few years I stopped being interested in my parents’ letters. My mother’s, which were typed up and photocopied for the generalised recipient, with postscripts sometimes added by hand, were so boring that I often wouldn’t bother to read them at all. Even now, only occasionally does something catch my attention and always when the typescript is broken up by pen.
One PS for instance tells me that she’s had a sniffy note from Sean, complaining about her typed, standardised correspondence. If I also have a problem with it, she writes – ‘Too bad!!’
In my mid- to late adolescence Dad’s letters comment on how I haven’t written. He underlines how very long it has been and that Mum is going scatty about it. Perhaps I was no longer interested in spinning the line.
But before, back when we all knew the story needing to be told, Dad says that the best bit of one letter was the last line. According to him, ‘I like school and it’s really nice.’
Reading these words, I look back to that heroic bent head, my eleven-year-old self struggling to make it up, and can’t imagine where she found the reserves for such deceit. Ever since, the bare page has held no fear. I have faced it in more straitened circumstances before.
Lie 34: There will be no morning run
Violet had a green tie dressing gown in soft teddy-bear material, with ghastly appliqué on the chest, and a huge pair of shaggy slippers in a lighter shade of green. Her mother had ordered the entire uniform list, from the two pairs of navy over-pants to six white vests, from Aitken & Niven on George Street in Edinburgh. The dressing gown and slippers were, it turns out, a sales lady’s choice.
That first term we were in different dormitories, all named after local castles, or distilleries, it was never clear. In each room there were bare boards, utilitarian bedside lockers with one cupboard and one drawer; the inevitable bunk beds. Each bed was assigned by seniority. We both found ourselves on the bottom bunk.
I was keen. Not to be the best, but to have the whole thing over with. And the thing I was most keen to have over with was morning run.
Morning run was announced by an electric bell hooked up to a switch in the centre of the large Georgian mansion. One ring demanded every child bound out of bed, don skirt (no knickers), cardigan and plimsolls, then run to the front door where a member of staff flushed us out single file. We ran, often very fast, because it was cold, in a large arc around the house.
The bell went at 7 a.m., and morning run began at five past. I was often at the front of the ruffled, pasty-legged queue, Violet blundering in at the back. She had waited with an ever-increasing hope for a second bell.
A second bell, i.e. the sound of one bell immediately followed by another, meant Serious Inclement Weather – sleet, hail, torrential rain. However, some staff liked to leave the gap between two bells so long that I would be in the corridor, already dressed, before the cancellation came.
I never hoped for second bells, and the only reason I didn’t was I had forsaken it. Hope brought with it despair, and by week three I had no armour left.
Violet nurtured hope and she nurtured a real annoyance at the unfairness of it all – the terrible food, the morning run, the cold. To struggle against it all was to remain alive.
Soon she was engaged in a Night Raid (always spoken of with its attendant capital letters). A Night Raid was a terrified journey along the upstairs corridor, a journey that transgressed an invisible line separating the girls’ side of the house from the boys’. My dormitory was on the way, and beyond lay Mrs Mcleod, the boys’ matron. A scary, pissed-off beast of a woman.
That Friday night I was woken by the titters of four eleven-year-olds tiptoeing through our dormitory. Then came the angry whisper of a senior girl, which provoked a chorus of creaked beds, requests to go to the toilet, moans of ‘Shut up!’ Then, like the bass line coming into a song, the ancient house groaned a warning. Matron had heard us, and was up.
The light snapped on. Blinking I peered over the lip of my duvet and all I could see, sticking out from beneath Sarah-Louise’s bed, like the feet of a corpse, were Violet’s huge green slippers. I tried hard not to look at them. To look at them would be to give her away, but I couldn’t believe the f
act of them. Their hugeness and fluffiness and thereness, all made worse by the fact that instead of standing in the mouth of the door like she usually did, Mrs Mcleod came barrelling through it; a hurdy scary gurdy, screeching in an Aberdonian accent, her cheap black-rimmed spectacles all fugged up.
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, she was in the middle of the room, her thick finger jabbing the air.
‘If Ah hear another squeak out of yous the lot of you’ll be down on report.’
I had never been on report. Never ever. Violet could often be seen on the black and white marble squares outside the headmaster’s office. She knew that the only way out was expulsion, and worked tirelessly towards that fatal goal.
But like a botched overdose, Mrs Mcleod stepped back over the slippers, still with her finger aloft:
‘Ah’ve warned yous. Not ahnother squeak!’
When the door slammed behind her there was silence. A profound silence, eventually punctured by the scrabbling and unravelling of bodies from in and beneath beds.
It’s only now that I see that perhaps the lie was Mrs Mcleod’s, choosing not to see the slippers. In the moments when she was most herself, asleep in her single-bedded room, she was as lonely as I. Cast adrift from home, institutionalised, hungry, cold, she was an old woman working out her last few years in penury and occasional despair.
But Violet doesn’t see it like this at all. Mrs Mcleod, if I were to remember things better, didn’t see anything because she couldn’t. The truth, Violet would argue, is Mrs Mcleod saw no slippers. They were the indiscernible green mess in a peripheral fug. An obstacle that, like any other, she had just grown good at avoiding.
Lie 35: That woman is ill-disciplined
One of the masters smelt clean, like he scrubbed himself, and wore cords and brogues and navy waistcoats over pressed shirts. Although he was titled he liked us to call him by his initials. It was a pretence at affection for a man who, for me at least, only inspired fear.
To my mother the titled T. was perfect. She was affected by the word of Debrett’s – ‘the authority on etiquette, taste, and achievement’ – and their peerage. She aspired to be a fellow parent to the queen. Sirs and Ladies made for a reassuring start.
My mother often described their first meeting, at which she pointed out that both her children were ‘painfully’ shy.
His reply would have included an ingratiating smile:
‘Don’t worry, Mrs Doyle. That won’t last long here.’
It was the only ingratiating smile he probably ever gave her. Our school fees were paid by the Saudi government. We didn’t even qualify as the new rich. T. preferred the company of the other parents. Before Sports Day, in the summer term, he would have us all on our hands and knees in the flower beds knotting dead daffodils, awaiting the Laird of Eigg Island in his 1927 Rolls-Royce.
Once the shine of Debrett’s had worn off my mother minuted (always the efficient secretary), on airmail letter paper, a meeting she had had with him about Ed’s worsening behaviour.
‘Livid’, as she describes him, he had told her that he would get more sense speaking to her husband – ‘Aberlour is not an hotel.’ When Mum would not be drawn, or would not apologise, T.’s mood worsened. She queried him about another mother and was told that the woman was ‘ill-disciplined’. Mum surmised in the footnotes that these words were used on account of the fact that the ‘other woman’ was black.
On one occasion he introduced a rule that we were not allowed to ask directly for an item in the dining room, but instead had to lure our fellow eaters into offering us what we needed.
‘Would you like the salt, Matron?’
‘No, thank you, Miranda, but would you?’
The last full day before the Christmas holidays T. announced in assembly that the girls would have a swimming lesson. But because we had already packed our trunks there would be no necessity for us to wear our costumes. They might get wet.
An older girl, Eva, found me fretful in the library. Desperate to get out of it I was too panicked to think of a credible excuse. Eva had no intention of swimming either. Even at eleven the threat of a wet swimming costume seemed to both of us too bogus to be true. It was not the nudity that unnerved me. It was the deceit, because I was never quite as troubled by T.’s birthday baths.
Birthday baths were a ritual. Anyone with a birthday suffered them and on occasional mornings T. came early to the girls’ dormitories, before the bell.
With his help we would strip the birthday girl down and drag her screaming to a waiting bath. Whispering about it in the dormitory after lights out, we noted that he preferred to come help with those who were ‘bigger’. So Angela’s twelfth began in just this way, the dormitory in hysterical pursuit. Two of us took one arm apiece, T.’s huge hands clamped hard to her spread ankles. Swinging her three times, we dunked her in.
Even now this swim, the one which Eva rescued me from, for some reason seems worse. It is the thinness of his excuse. If wet costumes were an inconvenience, wasn’t it obvious that we do something else?
I hunted for the episode in my diaries, forced back to my very first one, which scripts a year at Aberlour House in the most banal terms:
‘During activities we had to do the Long Run without stopping. Sarah’s tits have grown. Goodnight.’
Unfortunately there is no mention of wet costumes. Neither do I account for Eva’s uncharacteristic negotiation with T. on our account. But I do remember that to get us out of the swim she lied. Talk of menstruation would have undoubtedly thrown him off guard – an unexpected gynaecological hiccup that at our age he can’t have anticipated. We were released.
Nothing remains in memory of what Eva and I did after that.
I wonder if we watched T.’s knotted fingers, his signet ring catching the light. I speculate on his impatience as he stood by the side of the pool. How countless small hands struggled, as they left the changing room, to cover nipples and the split between downy legs.
But that cannot be the truth, because being a child bystander that morning would never have been allowed. T. would have been the only person at the poolside that morning, and the only person clothed.
Yet I do remember swimming. When I trawl through the tedium of the Holly Hobbie diary I find two occasions that mention naked swims. Maybe because they are optional, my eleven-year-old self does not find the fact of them quite so worrying. On one occasion I tell myself in the diary that I am too shy to go naked: ‘We had the birthday party and then we went for a swim. I didn’t go nuddy, but everyone else did.’ And on another I join in.
The decrepit building where the pool was housed was a reclaimed Nissen hut. It had a chilly changing room, which stank of rot, the blunted light shining through a maxi-glass window.
In memory I cannot remember whether I am wearing my suit, only how we climb up into the above-ground pool, a queue of shy, pale bodies packed tight against the steps. We hurl ourselves at the water, glad of it, the water slopping over the side, slapping time on the concrete. T. orders everyone up against the sides, instructing us to hold hands. He wants a whirlpool. The chatter and shrieks that fill the hut quieten. Together we circle, pulling the water round and round. It sloshes and spills, our faces focused on the sucking hole at our centre, the contents of the pool pouring out.
Lie 36: I have never enjoyed taking a poo
In the two-volume Encyclopedia of Deception which I found in the University Library the entry for ‘Self-deception’ sits conveniently beside ‘Self-justification’ and ‘Self-inflation’. Self-inflation tends to be universal. In a survey of academics 94 per cent placed themselves in the top half of their profession, which can only mean many of them are no good at determining the odds.
Self-justification most of us indulge in too, seeking out people, books and newspaper reports that corroborate our own world view. For instance, I hoover up tales of institutionalised abuse and articles that confirm Blair will always be a megalomaniac, while overlooking anything pro private
education or leaving the EU.
The extent of self-deceit is a good measure of a person’s capacity to lie. The scientist Robert Trivers makes the case that self-deceit is evolutionarily valuable. When we are blind to ourselves, we are more convincing. Holding self-belief, despite evidence to the contrary, bewitches others. Donald Trump, Donald Rumsfeld, Nigel Farage are good examples. Their conviction is blinding.
Yet self-deception can make us strangers to ourselves.
Did T. believe that he was a good person? Certainly. Did he deceive himself that naked swimming and birthday baths were a positive part of our education? Probably. Did that self-conviction help parents assimilate what was inappropriate? Yes. We lived in the days of Jimmy Savile, Gary Glitter, Rolf Harris: men who believed that groping women and children was part of the job.
The psychologist Joanna Starek describes self-deceit as holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously. An example might be: ‘The kids are absolutely loving school. Loving it.’ All the time knowing that their son meticulously packs his bag (and repacks it) throughout the final three days of holiday, while their daughter won’t pack at all.
Some might also call this denial. We can deny anything, even a terminal cancer diagnosis. Denial offers the brain a helpful time lag between hearing the news and processing the consequence. But if we stubbornly continue to deny, it becomes increasingly difficult to haul ourselves round to the truth.
We indulge in this kind of cognitive yoga because admitting to ourselves that we are flawed has its own psychic cost. Believing that we are more generous, more intelligent, more interesting than we are is one way of living with ourselves. We also believe, ironically, that we don’t tell as many lies as we do. A little bit of self-deception, some would argue, is normal and should be encouraged. Those who are realistic about their abilities and the way their lives will pan out, say psychologists, tend to be clinically depressed. Depressed people lie less. They admit the horrible things they’ve done to others and the mistakes they have made. And they are right. Life is not a picnic and sometimes we contribute to making it worse.
A Book of Untruths Page 9