One of my favourites yesterday was the competitive potatoes. Without wishing to malign the potatoes, I could see very little difference between them. Perhaps the winner had a little more muscle tone. It was also a very slow race, I stood there for some considerable period of time and I could hardly see them moving. It must have been a relay, because they were in teams of four. No team dropped a baton, and I’m confident no team failed a drugs test.
The competitive ethic was everywhere. Potatoes, cabbage growers, horses in fancy dress. I was slightly disappointed because there had been talk of me judging the horse fancy-dress competition, but when I arrived, someone else was down to judge it. I had been practising by shaking my children’s hands for the past fortnight, looking them straight in the eye and saying: ‘Well done. Jolly good effort,’ which was slightly confusing for them at teatime or indeed when they got up on a morning. But in a way I was relieved, because I was not sure which hoof I should shake when it came to the horse. Did you perhaps shake all of them? Or more if it was a male horse?
The fact that I once thought that I might judge the fancy dress meant I sat and watched it with a particular interest. Two horses came as walls. That is to say they were covered in brick painted sheets. On one wall a little Humpty Dumpty sat with two King’s Men in bearskins riding behind him. A woman next to me muttered: ‘I’m sure Humpty Dumpty comes out every year.’ I thought that harsh, but as I say, they are very competitive up here. Even the potatoes. The other wall came as Hadrian’s Wall, complete with a Roman soldier in a red tunic and helmet. Other Roman soldiers followed on horseback and two little Romans in togas tried to keep up behind them. Needless to say the Roman ‘man’ had to pull a reluctant Roman woman behind him. She was probably saying: ‘But Gluteus, I like Londinium.’ The audience liked the little Romans and their horses. They love Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. I have found, when there is a pause in the conversation, if you say: ‘So, that’s a fabulous wall, you’ve got up here,’ it gets you quite a long way. That and: ‘So, do you ride?’ If all else fails: ‘So, do you farm around here?’ Aside from Hadrian’s Wall, there was a teddy bear’s picnic – lots of children dressed as teddy bears, some poor bear girl pushing a bear baby in a buggy round and round the main ring, which will probably put her off motherhood for life. The horse was dressed as a picnic blanket.
Hadrian’s Wall won, which was a safe choice, but you had to give full marks to the parents who blacked up their children. Blacked up their children. Just one more time. Blacked up their children. I watched the cavalcade across the field as they walked on. A rider in a black hooded cloak, another with a Arabian scarf wrapped around part of his face. Each rider pulled along a blacked-up child; one wearing a large black Afro wig, the other a black Mohican with a ponytail. I said: ‘Oh my God,’ as they came by, ‘are those children pretending to be black?’ At that moment, one of the children raised a placard with the words: ‘The Abolition of Slavery, 1807.’ That was a yes, then. Full marks to parents who attempt to be political at an agricultural show. I would have made them my winners for sheer front. On the other hand, cor blimey. Cor blimey. I nudged my husband as the slave trade came by. I said: ‘What you said earlier … I don’t think that’s true.’
Monday, 3 September 2007
Heartbreak Hotel
My husband has spent more time with us this summer but is due back in the office. An hour before he left, he said: ‘I am so ready to go back to London.’ Then he said: ‘But I’ll miss you.’ And he went, waving cheerily as he pulled away. Cue massive tears from the four-year-old due to start full-time school on Wednesday. The six-year-old said: ‘You have to stop because you’re making me sad now.’ While my baby girl stretched out from her high chair to lay across the tea table, gaze into his sodden little face and tell him: ‘Don’t cy. Don’t cy.’
Tuesday, 4 September 2007
Lady of the Flies
Summer, then, has been insane. Not a little mad, but fullblown, lollopy, lollopy insane with builders and moving and more builders and children everywhere. Today was particularly bad – for a start, the flies came back. Often one fly is on top of another. Having sex. I said to two of them: ‘Get a room.’ Then remembered they had: my kitchen. I make the pancakes, pick out the flies and feed the children. The Dairy Farmer’s Wife is expected at ten, so I tidy round furiously. She is slightly late, which means the children have time to untidy everything by the time she arrives.
Halfway through lunch with the Dairy Farmer’s Wife, the builders arrive. I was not expecting builders this week as they are technically on another job. My builder puts into my care his teenage apprentice, who is tasked to strip out my en-suite shower, which I want tiled. This means I now have no sanctuary. The apprentice is at that age when every word he utters has to be wrenched from him. He makes me think to the future, to how my sons will be when they are grown. The noise level with my outlaw boys after six weeks of summer is horrendous. If we had neighbours, they would be drawing up a petition to get us rehoused. I said to them tonight: ‘Boys, the noise has to stop.’ I do not think they heard me. In ten years, if the builder’s apprentice is anything to go by, I will be pleading with them to speak to me at all.
After lunch, the Dairy Farmer’s Wife takes the children down to her farm and I arrange to meet up with them in two hours’ time at their swimming lesson. I had wanted to do some work but realized instead I needed to spend the time finding things for school tomorrow and writing names on clothes. I have always suspected parents are forced to write names in the clothes so that when teachers get the children mixed up, they can haul up the collar and read it. Some of the clothes these days have a space for the child’s name and his class. I put ‘aspirational middle’ but I got bored after the gym kit. I do not have to bother finding my four-year-old’s new school shoes because he had already told me he is not wearing them. For some reason, I can find no blue airtex tops for the six-year-old and no school trousers for the four-year-old. In the midst of this, the Yorkshire Father drops by with his five, seven, nine and eleven-year-old boys. Within ten minutes, the nine-year-old has killed fourteen flies and the eleven-year-old, twenty-eight. They line up the bodies for me on the floor. When they leave, I put away all the clothes and calculate that I have exactly, to the second, five minutes to drink a cup of tea and eat expensive chocolate to make myself feel better about everything. I spoon a fly out of the tea. At that very moment, the Evangelicals arrive with their three children. I make the grown-ups a cup of tea (two minutes), chew a large piece of chocolate (one minute) and chat (another two minutes); I leave them finishing their tea outside the cottage.
I am very stressed as I drive to the swimming pool and think about how to persuade my four-year-old to fall in love with school. During the complicated transfer of child seats in the car park between the Dairy Farmer’s Wife and myself, I manage to reverse the car with the back passenger door open and scrape the car next to me. I leave a note. I want to leave an amazingly complicated rationale for why I parked where I did, explaining why the door was open, that I had not noticed, that at the very moment I did notice and turned to check, a child shouted out for me and I stalled, the door swung out, scraped and did damage, and what a bad day I am having. I settle instead for a ‘terribly sorry’ and ‘my apologies’ and ‘please call me and let me know the cost’ sort of note, sign it with my name and weight it down with their windscreen wiper. I am aware that I have not done anything to improve that driver’s day either.
After we get home and have eaten tea, I go upstairs to check on the children to find the six-year-old has given the baby girl a piece of paper, a squeezy bottle of red paint and a paintbrush. The baby girl is painting the paper, and my newly sanded floor, pillarbox red. I am not happy. I explain why I am not happy. I know I should say: ‘Thank you for looking after your sister and for being so creative. Shall we take the paintbrush away now and give her this nice wax crayon?’ Instead, I say: ‘What were you thinking of?’ among other things. By the time I pu
sh, bully, plead and cajole everyone into bed, I am fit for nothing more than killing flies and drinking wine while I do it. Around 9.30ish the phone rings. A woman on the other end says: ‘Hello, you left a note on my car …’ I want to cry. I swallow and say: ‘Yes, I am so sorry. I was trying to fit a child seat and I didn’t realize the door was open and …’ She is lovely. Coincidentally, her car is going in for other paintwork jobs and she tells me her husband is a mechanic. She does not want any money from me. More importantly, she does not shout at me. She thanks me for the note and says she has got children too. I put the phone down before I cry. I think: ‘How about that? The day just got better.’
Thursday, 6 September 2007
Say cheese
I dropped the boys at school. I remembered to take the camera to capture my four-year-old’s first day. In most of the shots, he is looking unhappy but reconciled to his miserable fate; in one, he hides behind his six-year-old brother, but that might have been because he wanted me to stop taking photographs. He was brave, which made it more bearable; he wobbled only once when the teacher drew him away from me, but righted himself. I was holding it together until the moment it was time to leave him to it and I was handed a packet of tissues and a teabag wrapped in a white silk ribbon. ‘Go home. Have a cry and make yourself a cup of tea,’ a teacher said. Really, I was fine up to that point. They might as well have erected a billboard outside the school gates with the words: ‘He’s not your little boy any more, Mummy.’ And in very small letters underneath: ‘He’ll forget your birthday, make excuses at Christmas. Eventually, he won’t call and when you’re really old, he’ll put you in a home and never even visit.’ I looked for the billboard when I came out. I thought: ‘I don’t want a cup of tea. I want my son back.’
I could not bring myself to drive home, so the baby girl and I drove in the opposite direction to a market town. Not the nearest market town, another one. One further away, so that I could kill more time. I told anyone who cared to listen that I did not live in the town, I was not supposed to be there, my son had started school and I did not want to go home when he was not there to fill it with his noise. Even my baby girl was looking embarrassed by the end of it. The nice lady who sold me blueberries and red exotic flowers knew how I was feeling. She had a six-year-old boy who did not like school, did not want to go back, felt he had no one to play with. She said: ‘I would watch him in the playground without him knowing. I had to stop. It was making me ill.’ I almost gave her my tissue-teabag favour. I thought: ‘Been there. Done that.’ Instead, I said: ‘I know. You worry, don’t you? I hope it goes well for him today.’ She smiled at me and said: ‘Yours too.’
Monday, 10 September 2007
Tory knockers
The other night, I got an offer from the Accountant I could not refuse. A ticket to a fund-raising ball at a local castle for Conservatism and cancer. Who thought up that combination? Not one that Conservative Party spin doctors would rejoice over. This is real politics out in the real world. Forget the obvious dangers of associating the party with a nasty disease that might kill you, let’s just get on with it and raise some money. Quite right too. Conservatism. Cancer. There is a difference.
I caught a lift with the Accountant. Unfortunately, I had also asked the Oyster Farmer and his wife for a lift. They arrived at my door about twenty minutes after I had left. I blame sleep deprivation for every brainless thing I do. The children have a rota going as to who will wake me up at night. Monday night, it was all of them. Tuesday night, they let me sleep through to give me a false sense of security. Wednesday, the four-year-old woke up at one in the morning, sat up in bed, called for me and when I stumbled in, told me: ‘It’s dark. I can’t find the bed.’ I said: ‘You are sitting on the bed.’ Then he insisted on coming in with me and lying awake for an hour and a half, occasionally stroking my face with infinite tenderness which meant I could not even shout at him. Thursday, 3.10 a.m., the baby girl started screaming: ‘Wata. Wata. Wata’ as if I had her on a salt diet. Friday, 2.20 a.m., the baby wailed madly and collapsed back into sleep just as I got to her; about forty-five minutes later, the four-year-old woke me again because he said he was having a nightmare. Then, on Saturday morning, my six-year-old complained he had also called for me during the night and I had not come. I said: ‘I didn’t hear you. What was wrong?’ He said: ‘I couldn’t find the duvet.’ I said: ‘Well, where was it?’ He said: ‘The bottom of the bed.’ I said: ‘Your duvet was at the bottom of the bed and you tried to wake me up in the middle of the night to get it for you?’ ‘Yes – and you didn’t come. Where were you?’ The consequence of this extreme sleep deprivation is low brain function, a distinct lack of amiability and periodic, acute stupidity such as arranging for a variety of lifts for the same occasion.
Anyway, I was running late owing to the fact I had meant to lay everything out for the ball the day before, but had not had the time. I also had to go with my hair half done because my hairdryer decided to cut out right in the middle of blow-drying it. I contemplated sticking my head in the Aga to finish the job, but thought it might traumatize the children if they saw me. I do not want them telling me in twenty years’ time that their earliest memory is me lying on the kitchen floor with my head in the oven. Which is electric. When I left the house, it was without jewellery, gloves or the right handbag because I could not find any of them. Luckily, I found my long frock which I was convinced had gone to the textile bank or the charity shop when we moved house the last time. My husband is in London and Girl Friday has been on holiday, but she came in to babysit for me. As I walked out the door, I told her: ‘Don’t let any of the children in the bathroom, because when I tried to empty the bath, the chain came off the plug and I can’t get the plug out.’ She said: ‘OK.’ I suspect she thinks we live in chaos. I walked up to the Accountant’s house, trying to shake off the thought that: A) my hair looked a mess; and B) there was a slightly scummy pond in the bathroom and the baby might throw herself in it reaching for a rubber duck while I was out. The headlines would read: ‘Baby Drowns in Bathroom Pond as Champagne-Swilling Ma Jives with Tory Boys. Devastated Mother Blames Cameron and Cancer.’
The Tories may be the traditional party of low taxation, but this does not hold true for fund-raisers. We had no sooner sat down than demands for money started in the form of strange party games. There was also a ‘Grand’ auction and a silent auction. In the silent auction, you wrote your name and the amount you were willing to pay underneath the particular lot you were interested in; later on, as excitement built and the auction was about to close, you told a girl and she wrote it on a board for you. The lots included a 1994 Subaru Legacy Turbo 4×4 Estate (which fetched £810); the funds for this were to be shared with the campaign to stop the wind turbines on the Sheep Farmer’s land. (They are very political, these people.) I think Cameron would have preferred to see a bicycle in the silent auction rather than something that boasted ‘wide boy spotlights on the front’. You could also bid for ‘a day’s hunting for two’ with two different hunts; a hacking jacket; a gundog workshop for four handlers and dogs; and a carriage driving lesson. I was tempted by the gundog workshop; presumably you throw a gun in the air and the dog is taught to fetch it; I decided instead to bid for a day’s stalking on an estate in the south of the county. With just a minute or so to go, a bid for £275 came in over my head for the stalking and the girl started writing in the new name. I turned to complain. I said: ‘You just beat my bid.’ I did not add: ‘You Tory bastard.’ I thought that would be unsporting. I was glad I did not. He was very charming. He said I could go stalking with them and to call. I shall take him up on it. I am hoping we might see George Clooney.
I found myself looking round, saying to myself: ‘So this is what Conservatives look like.’ They still wear dinner jackets and lurex. I do not think they do this when they are knocking on doors for votes, but I could be wrong. I hope they do. There was a blonde girl in a black corset with the most enormous pair of breasts you have ever see
n. Mesmerizing. I found myself wondering whether one would ever grow larger than the other. The skirt of the dress was scooped at the front on either side to reveal legs, but no one was looking at her legs, which I am sure were shapely, or her face, which I am sure was lovely. Wherever this girl went, her fellow Tories turned to stare at the passing and fabulous breasts. The Accountant said: ‘That girl is gorgeous – the best-looking girl here.’ I said: ‘Excuse me.’ I felt like saying: ‘Take my word for it – my nipples are bigger.’
Tuesday, 11 September 2007
A pirate’s life for me
Yesterday morning started off in the way all mornings should – in fancy dress. School wanted the children to come ‘dressed as a character from a traditional tale or nursery rhyme. My six-year-old dressed as Captain Hook. My four-year-old as Shere Khan from The Jungle Book. I think we were pushing it. Then the baby girl wanted in. She demanded the red satin-look coat of Captain Hook. I had to bribe her with Superman’s red polyester cape and a Santa Claus hat to be Red Riding Hood.
I admire her taste. Hook’s red satin coat was my best dress ever. I wore it in the Eighties; hence the shoulder pads. The V-neck promised glories if you would only watch it long enough, while every time I took a step the skirt split wide open to reveal taut, shiny thigh. The entire dress was held in place by two buttons at the waist. As I looked at it in the cheval mirror, I would think: ‘If I undo those two buttons, just those two buttons, the entire dress falls to the floor.’ Sometimes, I would watch myself undo the buttons to see the dress shimmy from my shoulders, feel its brief caress before it folded itself into a flimsy heap at my pedicured feet. I do not think I ever looked better in a dress, but the days of taut shiny thighs and shoulder pads are long gone. There came a moment, a couple of years ago, when I thought: ‘The days of this dress are over and I have a boy desperate for life as a pirate.’ I laid it out on my bedroom floor, took a large pair of dressmaking scissors and scythed into my vamp past. I remade it: tightened up the waist, shortened the skirt, blanket-stitched narrow sleeves from the scraps and attached them to the ex-frock with white cotton. I did not think my son knew what it was I did. I thought he watched me cut and sew because he was anxious to be a pirate king. Yesterday morning, he hauled out the dressing-up trunk and dug around among the soldier’s armour and green clown curls for the crumpled red coat and a battered black hat with a broken red feather. He pulled on the coat and said: ‘You made me this. It was your best dress.’ I picked up a black and wetted paintbrush to colour in his piratical moustache and beard; I took his chin in my hand and tilted his beautiful boy face to the morning light; I said: ‘Once upon a time.’
Wife in the North Page 24