My Animal Life

by Maggie Gee

  For a start, she, like me, had two brothers, one real and one step, Graham and Dennie. Her stepfather, Reg Leadbetter, a farmhand whose work had given them the house, a big square tied cottage on Billingshurst High Street, would sometimes put his foot down; he seemed strange and old, wiry and weather-beaten, hard to understand with his strong Sussex accent, but he grinned at me, gappily, amiably enough, though once when I stayed one night too many I heard him in the bedroom: ‘When’s that gal going?’ Whereas Janet’s mother Renee (it rhymed with ‘beanie’) was adorable, a pushover. I love her still. I see her in the white overall she wore to work in the old people’s home, her big toothy smile and shallow chin, always pleased to see me, often laughing, short black wavy hair streaked with grey. Kind to me. Loving to Janet. (What do children need? Kindness. Love.) There was a box of chocolates always open in the kitchen, and luscious white bread, forbidden at home. At Christmas, a row of bottles of sweet drinks. They had a small steep garden and a kind of shed where the boys were often doing something with bikes. In the front room the TV was always on. There was a huge dark sofa, into which you sank, and sat in a row in contented silence. Dennie wore leathers and had shiny black hair which he combed in a quiff, and was very handsome, more raffish and less academic than Janet’s real brother, Graham, a gentle, humorous boy who played football. Of course I was in love with both of them, which neither noticed, so all was well.

  The forbidden had to do with the bikes. Unable to learn to ride because of my father’s obstinacy, I had done it, in the end, with frantic speed, on my cousin Sue’s bike on Wolverton Rec (pronounced Wreck; I didn’t know it was short for ‘Recreation Ground’) when we were at my grandparents, on holiday. I remember the bike: small, bright turquoise. Perhaps Uncle Lloyd had painted it. And the giddy feeling: cycling furiously forwards, having finally got up the speed to keep going, riding wildly on, unable to steer, unable to stop, until I fell off. I was probably about eight or nine when I learned, and I had had no practice since.

  That didn’t matter. Janet had plans for us. ‘Let’s cycle to the sea,’ she said one Saturday. How did she know how to get to the sea? The sea was twenty miles away, and the road already had heavy traffic. ‘We’ve got a spare bike.’ They had; but the brakes were dreadful, and there was no suspension. As a total amateur, I did not notice this. Hurray! For not noticing, for no health and safety! Hurray for two teenagers biking to the sea!

  I remember the snacks: Bourneville chocolate and peanuts, and freewheeling downhill, queen of the world, a tiny Janet flying on ahead of me, with round green fields on either side, cool sunny air blowing back my hair and the smooth whizzing sound of the chain for music, unable to brake, soon going so fast that the impetus carried me half-way up the next one — fortunately, as most hills defeated me, and Janet had to wait while I trotted up behind her. The bike had no gears, and the tyres needed pumping, and one of the handgrips was nearly worn away, but it opened up the world, it made us girls heroes, proved we could do more than our parents had told us.

  Oddly, I don’t remember if we got there. If we did get there, what did we do? I think it was Seaford, and we were tired, and had one portion of chips between us, and rested our aching calves on cool sand. But it was the riding away that mattered.

  What else do children ideally need? Alasdair Gray once wrote that all children need is two adults who cohabit in relative amity. In which case, I didn’t get what I needed, and nor do a lot of other children. I haven’t always given it to Rosa, either. Nick and I love each other to distraction, but the distracted don’t always get on. We are over-reactive, mercurial, rash. When trouble comes, it’s hard to stay calm. I rage and he sulks, or he rages, and I’m fearful, but because of my history, I have to shout back, lest I turn into my quiet, frightened mother. Then something shifts, and we are laughing and tender. Sorry, Rosa, again, for the tropical storms. Though I hope you’ve never had to fear your father would murder your mother, which was my fear, as a child.

  Standards. I do believe children need standards, even as something to rebel against. Not that I like the word ‘standard’, which sounds, well, too standard. But the other sense of ‘standard’ works for me: a flag held up against the blue, a watchword to remember when there are hard times. Nick’s mother told him this: ‘Always be kind, always be faithful, always be true.’ When my whole career started to crumble before me, a friend of mine, not a very close one but a woman I had always liked, said, ‘This is when character tells.’ That was bracing. But I think it had such an effect because it took me back to things I had been taught as a child, most of them by my father: Never give up. Have some backbone. The Gees were too free with moral precepts, yes; but sometimes moral precepts can help.

  There are useful absolutes. Do your best. Don’t steal, don’t cheat, don’t tell on people. They are ropes to hold on to in trouble. When parents from my own generation, liberal baby-boomers all, tell me they feel morally at sea with their kids — ‘you can’t preach to them, their world’s so different’ — I think, is it really so different? Children need their parents to have some expectations, or else they will push, and push, and push, to see if there are any boundaries at all, and sprawl on their faces when nothing is there.

  Hope. Children need hope. Should parents, ‘being honest’, diminish their hopes? ‘He’s hopeless at cricket, just like me.’ ‘I’m afraid that Alfie is a klutz at the piano, he takes after his father and mother.’ Smiling charmingly at their own deficiencies, but also miring Alfie in them. To the child: ‘For heaven’s sake put down those plates, you’re only going to drop them again.’ To you, as the family arrives at your house: ‘I’m sorry that Sally can’t say hallo properly, it’s not that we haven’t taught her any manners.’ Neither you nor Sally had noticed this gaffe, but the parent is terrified you will judge them. To their son, who has a plan: ‘Don’t waste your money on buying a guitar, you’ll only give up, like you did with the recorder.’ To an adult who is showing interest in the child: ‘It’s not worth asking her a question about that, she won’t have anything interesting to say.’ I have heard them all, wincing for the child. Nearly always, the parent is projecting their own failings on to the children, not seeing that others don’t look at children simply as culpable extensions of the parents. So they pass on cruel judgements that were probably made about themselves, a lifetime ago, by their own parents. But children need not to be publicly judged by their parents. If it happens too often, they believe the judgements.

  Bigger despairs can be passed on. Children have a right not to despair of their world.

  When I was just eight, our teacher, Mr Norris, addressed the whole junior school together, which wasn’t hard, for in the tiny village school at Watersfield, all the over-fives were in the same classroom. He had thin sandy hair and a bird-beak nose and that morning his voice was more serious than usual. I think it was November 1956. Perhaps Mr Norris didn’t have a family; perhaps, that day, he needed one. He looked across us, we plain village children whose ages stretched between five and eleven; he must have seen the usual round pink faces, the unlined brows that understood nothing; the people with whom he spent his days. Smells of fart and fidgeting. And then out of the window at the sunny, chilly playground fringed with yellowing willows, then the blank water meadows.

  ‘The next few days’, he told us, slowly, ‘will decide if the world will go to war. Planes are already in the air …’ That is all I remember of the speech that followed, and all it needed to infect me with terror.

  In fact, the Suez crisis was ratcheting up into its worst phase. Israel had just invaded Egypt as part of a Franco-British deception. Russia was threatening reprisals. But none of us children knew anything of this. I had gathered from reading the Daily Herald, the more basic of the two papers we took, that there were bad people called communists, who sometimes pretended not to be, so every so often they had to be unmasked, often in things called unions. Those were the days of reds under the beds. I knew that Russia was our enemy. Suez, though, wa
s a blank to me.

  But war — the next days would decide if the world would go to war. Russia was somehow involved in it. For children who’d grown up, as all of us had, in the immediate shadow of World War Two, whose fathers had fought in it, and come back changed, who had heard their parents talk about the war a thousand times — if ‘war’ was mentioned by our head teacher, that meant the thing behind the shadow would come back, the terrifying thing we had all escaped by inches. War meant death. War was the end.

  And indeed, things must have looked black to Mr Norris and other grownups at the time. I know now that American air defence — NORAD — had been told that unidentified aircraft were flying over Turkey, a hundred Soviet bombers were in the air, a British bomber had been shot down over Syria, the Soviet fleet was on the move. These ‘facts’ had moved forward contingency plans for a NATO nuclear strike against Russia.

  Actually not one of the ‘facts’ was true, messy and dangerous though the Suez crisis was. The ‘unidentified aircraft’ were a flight of swans, the British bomber had a mechanical fault, NATO, on balance, preferred not to strike, the world was not about to end.

  But I watched the skies, and thought about dying. Watersfield was on the flight-path to Gatwick. For the next few days, every plane that flew over was the one that would bomb us to smithereens. There was a constant ache of fear, which peaked when the hum of a plane began, a nagging presence growing slowly louder. Night-times were the worst, lying in bed and listening to the drone of distant engines.

  What did Mr Norris think he was doing? Why did he want to frighten us? What point is there in telling children of evils that they are too small and powerless to do anything about? I sometimes think one reason for the apocalyptic streak that runs through so many of my novels might be the burden of terror Mr Norris gave me, which lingered long after the crisis went away. (But before I blame him for too much, I must ask why terror came to me so easily. I had seen my father trying to fight with my grandfather, rolling up his sleeves; ‘Come out and fight me.’ I had seen my mother crying in the kitchen. So the nerves and networks for fear were established. I did not have that ‘relative amity’.)

  Children need hope. Deserve to have hope. The world will muddy it soon enough, so if adults can, they should leave children unclouded. Apocalyptic global warming has not yet happened. Should children be taught it is inevitable?

  There were times in my childhood when I had no hope, when my whole mental landscape was choked with fear …

  The cause of the original, primal terror was crumbs on a pale carpet. My brother John had dropped crumbs from his plate in Grandpa and Grandma’s front room, which was only used for special occasions. I believe that Uncle Lloyd and Aunty Hilda had come round, with their children Sue and Martyn, for ‘elevenses’, so perhaps there was some degree of competition about the behaviour of the children. Poor John managed to spill his crumbs (it was the only carpeted room in the house; the others had lino, with bright rag rugs that Grandma made; carpets were rare, and mattered). Indulgent to his first and favoured grandson, Pa leaped up and got the carpet-sweeper, a modern innovation, in those days, working on rollers, like a very small, silent vacuum cleaner. But my father had told John to pick the crumbs up. ‘I’ve told him to clean it up himself,’ Dad said. ‘John will pick them up, he has to learn.’ ‘Well this is quick and easy,’ Pa insisted, advancing on my father with the carpet-sweeper. ‘No, he has to learn.’ A full-blown confrontation had come from nothing. ‘I’ll pick them up,’ said John, as eager as everyone was to avoid trouble.

  But trouble could not be avoided between these two fathers fighting over one son. Soon Pa had said the unforgivable. Apparently yielding, but in fact planting in my father’s breast an unbearable barb, he said, ‘Well, Vic, we won’t argue. You’re John’s tyrant.’ Though he said the word ‘tyrant’ as though it was neutral, though the form of what he said was yielding the point, there was bitter gall in the content. And my father, maddened like the bull he was, a heavy man compared to his father’s neat, dancing gadfly, groaned, ‘Tyrant? I’m not a tyrant. I’ll … Come outside, Pa. I’ll fight you.’

  (And of course, the bitterness came from the irony. Pa himself, in his time, had been a tyrant. He was now indulging his grandson as he had never indulged his son.)

  That morning of the year when I was six, I believed that the world was going to end. I remember every detail, half a century later. I watched Grandpa follow Daddy into the Peel Road garden. An unspeakable horror was coming upon us.

  But then, through tears, I saw something else: Grandpa was pulling and patting at my father’s arm, not hitting him, trying to calm him down. ‘Don’t take on, Vic, don’t take on.’ The bomb didn’t fall. The war didn’t happen. The men, in the end, did not fight each other, we did not leave for home, as my father threatened, and the battle blew over, with much pain, and Grandma grey-faced, sitting clutching her chest.

  Did the adults understand what it meant to us children? It is happening still, in the blaze of white light as the back door opens and they lurch into the garden.

  I can only gauge how it weighed on me from my memory of the next time we went to Wolverton. That we were going to go back, after such dreadful events, had oppressed me since my mother had mentioned it. We had been with my father’s school, Watt Close, on a foreign exchange trip to Holland. I loved the holiday; the hotel had a swimming pool with big rubber rings, and chocolate milk. There were wide red and yellow fields of tulips, and a stormy barge trip on the Zuider Zee. But as the days went by, the fear began. We were going to Wolverton as soon as we got back. I prayed that the holiday would never end.

  I was incapable of stopping time. I was powerless in the grip of my family. Inexorably, we got to the day when we were off the boat, and on the train in to Euston, the station where we always changed when we were on our way to Grandpa and Grandma’s. The glass of the window, which I pressed my head against to feel the almost pleasant pain of the train jolting, was hard and offered me no help. Raindrops ran in jerky streams down the glass, hanging fire, immobilised, till heavy as tears, then splitting when you least expected it into a slick sprinting delta of water. I tapped the pane, smeared it, desperate to affect them; they carried on endlessly, uninterested. But then I remembered an idea I had had when I was falling asleep in the hotel in Holland. Of course, I could simply stop breathing. If you wanted to die, you could simply stop breathing. I could not stop time, but I could die, quite easily, and never have to go to my grandparents’ again. I tried it, cautiously; it wasn’t too bad. I was sure that by the time I gasped air back in, I was almost dead, it was almost done. My spirits lifted. I was six years old, and cheering myself with thoughts of suicide.

  In that way, and at that moment, I would say, looking back, I must have lacked something children need to live. I do not blame my family. They could not help it.

  But once again, nothing happened. We went back to Wolverton. Everyone was nervous. Pa and Vic made an effort to get on. We spent more time at Stony Stratford than usual, and in the evenings, sat and surrendered to the soothing authority of ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ on the black-and-white television. My second and third attempts to stop breathing were in any case a great deal harder than my first. It was something, of course, I could not fully rehearse. And I needed not to know that my escape route didn’t work.

  What do children need? For life to go on. Somehow the wounds scabbed over, the rawness disappeared. We got over the horror, as families must. Given time, both body and mind can recover, as long as no one has actually gone beyond hearing, beyond reparation, as long as no one has died.

  More and more I think that only life matters. That the embryo, though its life will not be perfect, be allowed to cling on. Allowed to be born. That the quarrelling adults don’t murder each other.

  I managed to grow up with two living parents. All over the world, children long for that. And having had it, I can’t complain.

  I leave home

  I do not leave home
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  I was a very immature seventeen. I was hideously unready to leave home. Socially, sexually, emotionally, practically. I had never had a boyfriend, never had sex, never had a job except six days’ currant picking, with Janet, on a local farm. I had never been out in the evening. I could not drive, sew, cook, shop or clean; could not manage money or social life.

  I was clever, though, and had read a lot, and was as desperate to get out as I was unready.

  I was also in the middle of my only ever breakdown, though I didn’t realise it till decades later.

  My last year at school was eventful. In the month that I was seventeen, I sat Oxford and Cambridge entrance, the only girl to do so from Horsham High School, sitting alone in the stuffy prefect’s room, my pen flying over the paper. The exams, in those days, were general essays, which gave you a chance to show off a bit, plus a translation paper, which was my idea of bliss — I loved French and Latin with cerebral passion. Then I was called to interview. This was much more taxing: what to wear, what to say? I would have to talk to strangers, which I was not used to. Dad did not let strangers into the house. Mum and I went to Horsham, once again to Chart and Lawrence, the only clothes shop that there was, and bought a ‘good suit’, a russet brown, wide-gauge, corduroy suit with a curved half-belt on the double-breasted jacket. It was purest chance that it was in stock. Lined in rust-brown silk, it was expensive, but Oxbridge interviews were important. Vic’s pride, Vic’s money, bought it for his daughter.