My Animal Life

by Maggie Gee

  No wonder they channelled their own unfulfilled ambitions through us. What they had deserved, we would get. John and I always had to be not just the brightest but the youngest, both going to Oxford as painfully raw seventeen-year-olds, which was a tragic mistake, since if children are pushed on ahead of their peer group they grow lopsided, like a plant with only one side turned to the light. My childhood emotions and social skills never had a chance to catch up with my brains.

  Many of my mistakes as an adult I could put down to this accelerated childhood, which cut me off from the peer group that sensible parents know is the only place, more than universities or prizes, where acceptance matters. To be liked, known, at ease, with good friends; it’s another part of happiness, pace Proust (and who wants to spend their life on their own, like him, in a cork-lined room, writing in bed? Occasionally, when the phone or email stops me writing, I envy him, but not very often.)

  Pushed up into a class of eleven-year-olds at school when I was only nine, and in any case, coming from another part of England as I did, always a foreigner to my new giant Billingshurst classmates, the sturdy children of Sussex farmers and cleaners and builders; weedy and small, weighing only four stone when I arrived at the school in my skew-whiff pink National Health glasses, and sickeningly praised by the teachers, my fate was sealed.

  ‘Your mum and dad do your homework.’ ‘They don’t.’ ‘They do.’ ‘You stole your story from a book.’ ‘I didn’t.’ ‘You did.’ ‘Your family is posh’ — but I knew they were not. There were arm-twistings and slaps in the cloakroom from the glamorous Lamb twins, Joyce and Jean, and pushing and shoving and Chinese burns in the bike-sheds from the butcher’s fat carrot-top son Peter Sawyer and his sinister bright-blue-blazered, wedge-headed friend, who surely cannot have been, as I remember him, German, and called Kurt or Karl? (Of course it is possible. Looking back, the bullies are often the misfits, and we were still close to the war.)

  But the Lambs — ah, the Lambs — they were different. Joyce — straight blonde hair and pretty — and Jean — dark curls, freckly animal face, a good runner but more of a bully than her sister — were queens of popularity, practically film stars, polished and posh, to me, as fresh paint, and though they hated and oppressed me, I wanted nothing on earth so much as myself to possess their grey pleated skirts, tight yellow polo neck jumpers, and most of all, so much that I almost desire them still, cherry-red corduroy trousers: banned by the headmaster, for fear of establishing a trend, within a week.

  Mum did her best. Billingshurst just had a wool shop, so she had only the limited resources of Horsham’s premier department store, musty Chart and Lawrence, at her disposal, to assuage my passionate pleas for clothes like Joyce’s and Jean’s. Perhaps I thought they would make me look like a big girl instead of the skinny little weirdo I was. But no, there was nothing rational about my longing, it was just love. The Lambs were like girls in books, a perfect pair, because each, as in stories, had a ready-made best friend; they had stepped straight from the front page of Girl, dark Wendy and shining blonde Jinx, with their narrow red legs or knife-edge grey pleats, their sunshine yellow tops and victorious smiles. I instructed my mother (as I thought) in the exact items to be bought; I had had no new clothes since for ever; now I could only wait.

  Poor Mum. She must have gone on the train to Horsham and braved the old dragons of Chart and Lawrence. But in those days shop assistants saw my mother coming; despite her carefully narrowed vowels, for which a Gee uncle once mimicked her on a Wolverton bus. (An insult my loving mother never forgot. Oh class! How it makes us fear each other’s judgements. ‘Trying to be posh.’ ‘Not posh enough.’) She came back, indeed, with a pleated skirt, and most daringly, trousers. She was excited, but also afraid. She had taken a risk; my father never let her wear trousers, for in my sharply gendered family, trousers were for boys (which, in the great economy of action-reaction, must be why I now nearly always wear them).

  Trousers and a skirt! Two new garments at once, and not on her birthday, for little Marg! Ungrateful churl that I was, I took one look, and pretended to like them, but within ten minutes, collapsed into sulks. The skirt was slightly hairy wool plaid, and brown. It was ordinary. No one would notice it, or admire it, or want to be my friend. The trousers, or what Mum called ‘trews’, were red, as she pleadingly pointed out, but they were dull red, orangey (‘I hate that colour, it’s horrible’), not corduroy, and made even darker by a pattern of small black dog-tooth check. And in any case by the next Monday, when I might have worn them, trousers were banned.

  But not by my father, not for me. This was the fascinating, terrible thing about my father; though, as long as he could, until I was fourteen or fifteen, he banned anything potentially sexual in my life, such as layered haircuts, mascara, lipstick, high heels; though until I was ten I was never allowed to walk even as far as the station (400 yards) on my own, he eventually encouraged me to do all manner of things — work, travel, be independent, try to be famous — that his wife was forbidden. Why? I think now that because I was half him, and he could do anything, I could do anything too. I have heard of other fathers who do exactly the same — urge the daughters onward, keep the mother close at home.

  The injustice was obvious to both of us, but Mum was generous, and rejoiced in my relative freedom. She said wistfully, sometimes, after all her three children had finished their qualifications, ‘I’m the only person in the family without a degree.’ Dad would be brusque and dishonest: ‘You’re cleverer than all of us, you know you are Aileen. You don’t need a qualification to prove it.’ Of course, she did need it. I heard that exchange too often.

  Never tell someone else what they do or don’t need.

  In the end, Mum got what she needed, by leaving, after all the three kids had gone out into the world, after Vic had retired and they had left the Billingshurst community where separation would have meant disgrace in the married middle class they had moved to.

  It didn’t last. In my memory it was only weeks. My father was astonished, and despairing, because he adored, and depended on, Aileen. Because she was afraid, she left him without warning. Took the car, and fled to me, who by then was doing a PhD in Wolverhampton. I had to pretend, in answer to my father’s desperate phone calls, to know nothing. As I write this I still feel frightened, because Aunty Eve, who knew Vic didn’t like her, told us, in case we softened, ‘We think he’s got a car and he’s coming to find you.’ And so my mother and I set off on a panicky zigzag trip round unpleasant cheap hotels in Northamptonshire and Leicestershire. The logic behind this was never spelled out, though Mum’s niece Jeanette, her elder sister’s daughter, with whom she had lost touch, was fabled to keep a pub called ‘The Red Cow’ in Kirby Muxloe near Leicester, and in my researches since I have discovered that one side of Mum’s family, the Meakinses, had frequented Northamptonshire for generations. So maybe she was trying to go home, to shelter in the folds of a lost name. In any case, it didn’t work; we rushed around like moths trying to escape from a light that searched us out and drew us back. The terror of it was, ‘He’s coming after you.’

  Traumatic. I was twenty-seven, but the idea of my parents splitting up was unthinkable, much though I wanted my mother to be free of fear, and have the life she wanted. She had talked about leaving for years, but only to me, and of course, loving her, I could not dissuade her. I wanted her to be happy because the pity I felt for her unhappiness was unbearable for me.

  But how would they cope on their own? Could there be a Mummy without a Daddy, a Daddy without a Mummy? Inside, at this critical moment, I was still six years old. I suspect that somewhere in every child whose parents split up is this helpless terror; the foundations of the world are shaken. The rigid shell that contained all the anger and fear in that marriage had broken, and now it was everywhere, glistening and quivering, terrible, revealed in the open. Every night Mum slept with a knife under her pillow, every day we drove somewhere with me sitting beside her, sedating myself by drinking B
ritish sherry from the bottle.

  But the truth was very different from Eve’s report. My father was not angry, he was overwhelmed with grief. He had not tried to get a car to replace the one Mum had taken, and in any case had no idea where to find her, though later (perhaps in order to protect his love for me) he always pretended to think she’d spent the time away from him, not with me, as was the case, but with Eve and Albert, who of course he disliked already. When Aileen discovered that he only wanted her back, her resolve crumbled, and she became tearful. Her whole demeanour changed; now she felt she was doing wrong.

  Within weeks she was negotiating to go back, or rather, in agony, I was. We all three met at another hotel, gloomy and English; a stiff meal at a small round table. There were obvious conditions, such as no more frightening behaviour and money of her own in a separate account; and there were touching ones, such as ‘us to have friends’, ‘us to have interests’. He agreed to everything, and improvising, I threw in one Mum had not had time to think of: ‘She wants to do a degree. She’s determined.’ ‘Your mother doesn’t need a degree.’ ‘Well she wants one, Dad.’ This time he conceded.

  1977. And now their lives changed and expanded. Though my father had left his job two years earlier, this was the point when they started to live like the retired professional people with a good pension that they actually were. My mother registered to do a Humanities degree at the Open University. They marched round and knocked on the door of another couple their age, the Bishops, who also lived on Barratt Road: ‘We want to be friends.’ According to my mother, my father actually said those very words, unconsciously ticking off one of her conditions. Silver-haired John Bishop and his wife were just right, as friends; he was, I think, a retired tax officer, something not too different from a retired head teacher, and like Dad, he painted. They had the same size house, the same kind of car (Mum and Dad had by now pulled back from their belligerent, armour-plated Landrover into a pearly-green Golf, or rather a succession of Golfs, bought new, by my father’s rigid theory, changed every year), the same kind of mildly Germanic walking shoes and not-quite-country-coloured quilted rain-jackets. The same voices, within the same unthreatening range of accents, not posher than us, just right. And John Bishop painted and drew just well enough to be a worthy friend for Vic, but not too well, so as make him jealous.

  Now they had friends. For the first time, they entertained.

  (And here I must make a digression in order to explain what this meant. For throughout my childhood, the only people who came to the house in Billingshurst when my father was home were the following:-

  Family. Rarely, because they nearly all lived north of us, and besides, there were eggshells they had to step lightly across. But the extended Gee family was, like my father, loyal.

  Once, as a duty, the newly arrived head of Billingshurst Junior School, Mr Shaw, and his lean and racy wife Jackie (‘She’s like a yappy little dog,’ said my Mum, unused to female competition, and ‘He’s vain,’ said my Dad, having noticed, correctly, how my primary head teacher used his blue flashing eyes and surprised upright gingerish brows to command attention).

  The woodwork teacher from my father’s school, Dougie Henderson, and his beautiful, soft-fleshed wife Margaret, who by their sheer physical dark-eyed charm and aura of perpetual laughter — were they Jewish or Italian, somewhere? More likely Scots, for Dad always had a soft spot for Scots — won my father over, made him feel safe (though both Mum and I were in love with the dark-jawed, dark-eyed, incredibly relaxed and soigné, slightly chubby Dougie Henderson; could men really be warm and tender and funny?)

  Lastly, once a year, ‘the Louis’, Roger and Christiane Louis, always called ‘Monsieur and Madame Louis’ by us, the French teachers who came to Sussex with the French school with whom my father’s school did foreign exchanges. My mother put roses from the garden in the bedroom, but Monsieur Louis removed them with a charming apology, saying, ‘My wife says they are too smelly,’ which made my mother, in secret, laugh almost as much as the time Madame Louis, conversing at tea, referred to Margot Fonteyn: ‘she ees a very great Ballot-woman. I theenk,’ which might have been all right had my eyes not met my mother’s, whereupon she summoned me from the room ‘to help in the kitchen’, where we both collapsed, weeping and knocking our heads on the rose-pink Formica worktop in an attempt to muffle our laughter.

  Oh, and the vicar, the Reverend Evan-Hopkins, once called for tea. The Rev Ev, as we called him, lacked the common touch. When told about the camping holiday we planned in Switzerland, the poor man said, in the fluting tones he could not help, ‘Everything on your backs, I think you’re marvellous.’ The Rev Ev was unfeasibly tall and weedy, his admiration for our peasant frames probably sincere, but it stung my father, after the vicar was gone, to cynical laughter. Thenceforth ‘Everything on your backs’ was Dad’s catchphrase for the vicar.

  I make that seven people in total. Some of those once, twice at most. Many of the events marked by tension, social anxiety, and afterwards the ‘bloomin’ inquest’ in which my mother thought my father specialised. No wonder I began adult life as a social cripple, exhausted by gatherings of more than five people, terrified of parties, where, if I actually got through the door, I gabbled nonsense. Only in my last decade have I realised that I enjoy entertaining. Thus I follow the parental pattern, only slightly younger than Mum and Dad were when they first blossomed.

  Now I see that this, too, was all about class. Having left the close communities of Bucks where everyone was roughly the same, where no one could feel out of place because every street and house was alike, my parents were lost. You can leave the working-class, through sheer energy and drive, but never quite arrive anywhere else. Arrivistes! We lived in limbo, ‘new build’.)

  Mum and Dad took three decades to learn the basics of middle-class social life. Firstly, a drinks cupboard, a post-separation innovation which they stocked lavishly with middle-class sweetish drinks with glamorous names like Dubonnet, Cinzano Bianco, Martini, but hardly used (we children repaired to it regularly, to cushion our fear of what had briefly been out in the open and now, after a brief reordering, was being shoved back out of sight again). Secondly, friends. Two was a milestone, but the world opened up when they started adult education classes in Norwich, at Wensum Lodge. Life regained structure and meaning. It was a forty-five-minute drive from Holt to Norwich, and a forty-five-minute drive back, but they went three times a week. More surprisingly, they actually went to different classes — my mother to Spanish and Creative Writing, my father to Drawing and Painting. (This was almost miraculous; they had been welded at the hip for decades, with my mother unable to shop, or visit the doctor, or have coffee with her daughter, or go up to London, on her own. This was the new regime, and surely a relief for Vic as well as Aileen. If you never leave your wife alone, can she ever freely come back?)

  At Wensum Lodge, Vic did not have to control things. The teacher, at last, could relax into being taught. Vic idolised his teachers, one in particular, Peter Jamieson, who did fine-grained black-and-white woodcuts, one of which hangs in our dining-room now, an arch of profusely detailed oak-leaves framing a sheltered garden with cow parsley in bloom, in the middle ground a house whose roof protects the onlooker from the sun’s aureole, blazing behind the chimney. How happy Dad was to buy it: ‘Exhibited in RA Show 1972’. Fear no more the heat o’ the sun. And the foibles of their classmates, mostly retired, of course, were an interest. My father was still prone to prickliness, especially with males — this one was ‘a show-off’, that one ‘a big mouth’ or ‘too big for his boots’ — but many of them he grew fond of; retirement meant he no longer had to stay top of the heap. Time for a rest.

  You could say, if you wanted to be reductive, that the final and furthest point of their escape from the old dark class was a new brick bungalow in Barrett Road so small they could never, once they had shut the back door with its big glass panel, get away from each other; thin walls, matchstick-flat doors, too hot an
d, as Dad’s eyes became worse, too brilliantly lit, almost a stage-set, with enormous 150-watt bulbs and additional fluorescent strips, like futuristic light-swords, bearing down on the small kitchen-diner where they ate; with a featureless grass-and-geranium garden, a rolled-door garage and a tiny turquoise bathroom. Sometimes going home felt grim.

  But I know that from their point of view, the years brought something kinder. Age is a class and a place of its own, with its dress code of comfortable, washable warm clothes that most people wear, its permission, for my father, to wear a tracksuit top sometimes (they were new and European to him, not a sign of the underclass) instead of a head teacher’s jacket and tie; its unifying drill of small movements through which the old signal to each other, its cap-badge of grey or white hair. Its own accents, finally nothing to do with the class they were born to, slight breathlessness, an increasing softness or harshness.