Our turn did not come for a long, harrowing time, long enough to watch one boy of about my age be carried screaming into the room everyone sooner or later disappeared into and, after an agonizing interval of bull-like roars, followed by a silence that was just as alarming, emerge limp and white-faced in his mother’s arms, his eyes closed. My heart thudded and real fear gripped me so that I began to shake. What did they do in that room? My mother put her arm round me and squeezed me to comfort me but I was beyond her sympathy. I knew she was powerless. She was in the hands of these big, bustling women who strode around the clinic in such a hurry, their white coats flapping. They could do what they liked to me and my mother could not stop them. The worst fear I had, worse than the thought of the pain to come, was of being separated from my mother, which is exactly what happened. ‘Next!’ one of the nurses roared, and it was my turn. My mother stood up with me but was told I was A Big Girl and it was only a finger and I didn’t look as if I was going to be silly and make a fuss, so it would be better if I went in on my own. Obediently, my mother let go of my hand. Just as obediently, I trotted after the nurse who told me that I was A Good Girl, not like some. For once, praise sounded hollow even to my five-year-old ears. I wished I had the courage to behave as my insides wanted me to, to scream as the boy had done.
The doctor was busy having a cup of tea and a biscuit. She crunched the biscuit and eyed me through her wire-rimmed spectacles and repeated what the nurse had said, that I was both A Big Girl and A Good Girl, and she threw in A Bonny Girl too. When she’d brushed the biscuit crumbs off her coat she looked at my finger and said what my mother had already said, it was a cut gone septic. To my joy, she then told the nurse to ‘bring the mother in’. Once brought in, flushed and trying to look dignified, though her facial tic worked against her again, my mother was treated to a lecture on hygiene – my mother, the most fastidious practiser of hygiene imaginable. She went redder and redder, but speaking in a very quiet voice said she always washed cuts and put Dettol on them and had done so in this case, and had dressed this cut finger and changed the dressing every day and – but the doctor interrupted at this point, clearly realizing at last that she was not dealing with some ignorant woman. My mother, as ever, looked smarter and neater than everyone else around her even if her clothes were old. A little battle had been fought and, though I didn’t understand what it was about, I felt happier because my mother had seemed stronger. But not for long. The doctor said my finger would have to be lanced and would my mother please hold my hand steady. My mother took hold of my hand and smiled at me encouragingly but all her short-lived strength of mind had gone and, as she told me to close my eyes and take a deep breath and it would all be over in a minute, I saw that it had. I’d seen the doctor select a thin, sharp-looking instrument and I knew what was going to happen and that it would hurt dreadfully and there was nothing my mother could do about it. I began to pull my finger back and said I didn’t want it to hurt. ‘It’ll hurt more if we don’t get the poison out,’ the doctor said (just as my father had done, only to be furiously reprimanded by my mother, but she didn’t now reprimand the doctor). ‘No,’ I said, ‘no,’ and hid my finger behind my back. ‘Oh dear,’ said the nurse to the doctor, who was smiling, ‘and we thought she was A Good Girl, didn’t we? Maybe Mummy had better go and let me hold her.’ Now I was bawling and crying and clinging frantically to my mother but it made no difference. The strong nurse prised me from her arms and I heard her say, ‘Out you go, Mother!’ and she went.
It was all over, as promised, in a flash, a moment of searing pain quite unlike the throbbing before, and then some cool, soothing substance was applied to the finger and a bandage put on and a leather sheath over it. The nurse told me to run along and find my mother outside. I tried, but only got as far as the door and fainted instead, to everyone’s interest – five, it seems, is too young for a faint. My mother recalled the wonder of it for years, as well as the drama, this five-year-old staggering out of the room and slowly crumpling up in a heap on the shiny floor of the corridor. ‘It was scandalous,’ my mother always ended, ‘the way they treated us.’ But then the entire medical profession was always thought scandalously callous or useless. My mother saw herself as let down over and over again, and the fear of doctors and hospitals and clinics grew with her rage and humiliation. Never, ever, were members of this medical profession seen as compassionate, kindly people. No. They had power over her but were invariably thought to have misused it. Their knowledge was admitted but their use of it deeply suspect. My mother, for all her intelligence, never let a doctor know of her contempt. She never questioned the decision of any doctor because she was much too afraid of her own ignorance being exposed and because doctors had rank and she did not. Often her demands (though never voiced) were for miracles. They were unreasonable and no doctor could have fulfilled them, but there were many times when she just craved a detailed explanation and did not have the nerve to insist on it (and it was certainly not in her experience freely offered). So the whole object in our family life became to keep away from all doctors. Forced to succumb and put herself at the mercy of one, my mother got in a state at once.
Waiting-rooms made her agitation worse, especially Dr Stephenson’s. It was such a dreary, funereal place, not the slightest attempt made to supply either colour, comfort or distraction. We began tip-toeing and whispering as soon as we entered the big outer door and by the time we were in the actual waiting-room our voices had dried up with apprehension. It was a huge room, high-ceilinged, with big windows shrouded in net curtains, and in the centre was an enormous mahogany table with a glass vase (empty) on a lace mat laid not quite halfway down. We sat on leather-covered dining-room chairs, the leather stretched so tightly over the seats that it squeaked when our bottoms touched them. It felt strange, sitting on these chairs, ranged round the walls, when they were so far from the table they matched. There was no reading matter except for leaflets about such compelling subjects as head lice. The silence was intense, disturbed only by fidgeting, by the ticking of the imposing clock in the hall, and by nervous coughing, some of it my mother’s. It was holier than St Barnabas’s church and just as cold. But my mother would always say how lucky we were to have doctors who no longer charged for their services and that sitting in that awful room was a privilege and one her mother could have done with and would have been thankful for – bad enough being ill without the additional worry of having to pay to be better.
VIII
When the war ended, I was seven. Lily was forty-four, Jean forty and Nan thirty-six. Nothing much changed for any of them except that Arthur was back full-time at the Metal Box and Jack no longer had a nice little earner exploiting the black market (though that continued for a bit longer). The war, in my family, had meant so little. No men had been killed or wounded or imprisoned nor were they returning victorious. The war had meant rationing and that was about all, though Jean had heard Glasgow being bombed and knew it was about something rather more. The women didn’t have to learn how to slip back into normal life because, in their particular cases, they had hardly had it interrupted.
Normal life for my mother was dull. This dullness was reflected in the weekly letters she wrote to Jean in Motherwell, but nevertheless she enjoyed writing them. I liked to sit and watch. It was a formal business, this weekly letter-writing and it impressed me. My mother looked so important doing it. She would spread a felt undercloth on the living-room table and put a sheet of blotting paper on top of it and then a bottle of Quink ink and a pad of blue Basildon Bond notepaper, and then she’d pick up her blue and black Conway Stewart fountain-pen and start. Her handwriting was fluent and vigorous, quite large, both up and down strokes firm and clear, and while she was writing there was no hesitation. It was all done at speed. I had to sit quietly so as not to spoil her concentration, but when she’d finished I’d ask what she’d written about. The answer would be ‘nothing’. Watching her fold the four or five sheets up, written on both sides, I’d prote
st – how could she have written nothing, the paper would be blank if she’d written nothing. ‘Nothing worthwhile,’ she’d say, ‘but Jean likes to read anything.’
So did she. Jean’s letters, also about nothing worthwhile, were little events. My mother would look for her letter arriving, on Tuesdays, and the moment it came slip it unopened into her apron pocket to save for later. It was a treat, kept for the afternoons, when the washing and cleaning were done. She’d sit with a cup of tea, all nicely changed into her afternoon skirt and blouse, and read Jean’s account of wash-day and how the prop had collapsed and dirtied an entire load, and about how Mary next door had had a bad asthma attack, and how Dave was exhausted what with his long shifts and then studying at night school to become an optician like Jack, and how she’d been on the bus to Glasgow but hadn’t bought anything, and how cold it had been… More or less the same prosaic account every week. My mother always finished these letters looking faintly disappointed. Jean’s life was so similar to her own and seeing it described, week after week, only served to emphasize her own discontent. What on earth did either of them have to write about except what women living in a tightly structured domestic slavery always have to write about? Nothing. Nan said she didn’t know why they bothered. These letters of her sisters bored her to death. She never wrote to Jean but then, apart from depending on Lily to write for both of them, she was not speaking to Jean (now that would have made a good letter but it was never written down). They had had a row, about food. Jean and her family had come to stay with Lily and had not brought any rations. Nan noticed and was furious – Lily had a bigger family to feed and couldn’t afford to use her rations for Jean – and tackled her sister. Jean in turn was furious and denied she had scrounged off her sister – and so began a feud which lasted almost a decade. Lily was the go-between, constantly trying to make peace between her sisters and reminding them how their mother had loathed family disharmony more than anything. She didn’t know how they could keep it up. (My father did, though – he had just begun not speaking to his only brother and with remarkable staying-power kept it up thirty years. I have still not been told the reason for this total breakdown of communication, though I ask all the time.)
Occasionally, Lily and Jean had something beyond the absolute ordinary to write to each other about. The letters were thicker and livelier when Nan moved from Carlisle to Nottingham. There was so much to comment on. Nottingham, for a start – it might as well have been the moon, it was thought of by the sisters as so outlandish. When Jean went to Motherwell it was near Glasgow, of which everyone in Carlisle had heard, but Nottingham? Visions of forests and Robin Hood and that was all. Nan was reported by Lily to be excited. Nottingham, wherever it was, was south and to move south was smart. And Jack was moving there to manage his own shop which, Nan said, would soon become a chain of shops. However, Lily also reported to Jean that Nan and Jack were to live above this shop at first, only at first, but still, above a shop… Michael wouldn’t be with them when they moved. He was being sent away to prep school. Well, that certainly had the pen flying. It was scandalous. Poor little Michael, already an excitable child, difficult, prone to bronchial trouble and never properly recovered from a terrible accident when he was eighteen months old. He’d fallen on the doorstep and smashed a milk bottle and the glass sliced deeply into his upper lip – the horror, the agony of it. The lip was stitched up but Michael’s sweet little face was disfigured for life, the stitched-up area giving the impression of a hare-lip badly corrected. And now he was being sent away, only seven. How could Nan allow it?
It was a topic for open discussion not just in letters but in our house. I asked what prep school was and why Michael had to go. Privately, I thought the idea of being at school all the time utterly desirable, but I managed not to say so out of loyalty to my mother – if I said what I felt, that it sounded a good idea, people might think I wanted to leave my mother and it would hurt her. Prep school, my mother explained, meant preparatory school, a school to prepare pupils for entry to public schools at thirteen. Jack had gone to one and then on to Worksop, of which no one had ever heard, but my mother said it was ‘a bit down’ from Eton and we’d heard of that, somehow. Michael had to go to a prep school or he wouldn’t get into Worksop and become a gentleman like Jack. Nan couldn’t prevent him being sent away because Jack was boss. This surprised me. I’d thought Nan was boss. She always seemed to be. But no, apparently Jack held the purse-strings, as it was referred to, and what he said went. Very interesting to me. Everything to do with Michael’s education was interesting. While in Carlisle, he’d gone to the fee-paying Carlisle High School Kindergarten, which for reasons I’d never understood upset my mother. She muttered about wishing her children could have that chance. What chance? Michael could hardly read and I could. He definitely (at six) couldn’t write properly and I could. Jack knew this. He was forever getting me to read his newspaper to him and then passing it to Michael and asking him to do the same and when Michael couldn’t, laughing. Cruel and silly, but exciting when an enraged cousin Michael tore the newspaper up while I sat modestly with downcast eyes.
Nan was going to be a lady of leisure in Nottingham, so my mother said. She’d only have a flat to clean and would have the charlady she’d always had. Jack didn’t want her ruining her lovely hands, remember. Lily’s and Jean’s were already ruined. All that washing and scrubbing with never a thought of rubber gloves; who had time or money to go bothering with those?) If Michael was away at school she would have nothing to do except cook and shop, and then only for two people and with sufficient money. Plenty of time for that forty winks she’d begun to have lately, a habit which had Lily and Jean convulsed, though I could never discern quite why. They’d laugh when they were together discussing Nan’s forty winks, how she’d literally lie down with a newspaper over her face, and keep absolutely still, after lunch each day. It was to keep her young – Lily’s and Jean’s laughter would increase at this point and they would always end with one of them saying to another, ‘Really, isn’t Nan annoying?’
Annoying or not, Lily knew she would miss her. Their own mother had always longed for a sister. After a mother it was what women most needed in life and she had had neither. ‘You’re all lucky,’ Margaret Ann evidently used to tell her three daughters. ‘You’re twice blessed with two sisters apiece.’ It didn’t matter how different sisters were in personality or abilities, they could be relied upon in a way no one else in a working-class culture could be. Not that Lily had ever relied on Nan but on the other hand she had often felt the benefit of Nan’s presence. She’d been there, in Carlisle, for nearly ten years now, visiting twice a week and helping in emergencies. She’d sewed for us, making Pauline and me the dresses my mother couldn’t afford, making costumes for plays at school – never had there been an archangel with wings like mine in the Nativity play, wonderful contraptions of gauze and wire – making others for fancy dress competitions (her Carmen Miranda outfit, the head-dress a miracle of felt fruits, won me first prize). She took me for picnics too, in the car to Silloth, company for Michael. In her own way, Nan had been good. ‘She can afford to be,’ said Arthur, but Lily jumped on him – no need to spoil Nan’s thoughtfulness, her generosity. She would be missed; there was no substitute for her support. My mother had women friends, but friends were not the same. They were not family.
My mother had two categories of friends, those from her office days and neighbours. She very occasionally went into the Public Health Department to see those few friends who after all this time were still there and some of them visited her. One of them was a man, Leonard Oates, who had started as an office junior two years before she left, Uncle Len to us. My father smirked when Len came, which my mother hated. Len was apparently known to have been sweet on my mother, which my father found amusing, partly because he was ten years her junior and partly because – very veiled hint, this, and quite untrue – he suspected Len of being a ‘nancy boy’. Len was quiet, gentle, refined, rather silent
and a bit timid. My mother liked to see him. They’d have slow, careful conversations about things to do with mutual office friends, about the old days. Len went on exotic holidays which my mother loved to hear about. (‘He can afford to,’ Arthur said again, and was told to shut up.)
But the friends I knew more about were the neighbours. Mrs Gillespie lived across the road in one of those private estate houses my mother had always envied (though it was only rented). Mr Gillespie worked as a railway clerk so the Gillespies were a cut above the blue-collar workers in Raffles. Mrs Gillespie – Ruby, though never called that, the prefix kept always in place, then – was a bustling, energetic figure, more important to me than to my mother. Mrs Gillespie was fond of what she called ‘hikes’, which sounded so adventurous and exciting even if they turned out to be the same familiar walks along the river Caldew, and she was forever changing her furniture around and decorating and making things. She had one son, Colin, my age, and encouraged me to come over to play. I went eagerly but not much playing with Colin went on. He’d open the door a crack, stare gloomily at me and ask what I wanted. I always had to have some excuse to have come over, something apart from that lame-sounding ‘Your mam said I could.’ Mrs Gillespie would eventually realize I was on the doorstep and bustle along the hall and welcome me in. I played with her most satisfactorily. She was a one-woman handicraft industry, always with bundles of raffia ready to show me how to make baskets and mats, always ready to get out paper and paints and let me slosh about (Colin didn’t slosh, he was a good artist). I couldn’t get into the Gillespies’ house quick enough or for long enough. ‘You’d think she lived there,’ my father grumbled, and I was always about to say I wished I did when I’d catch sight of my mother’s face and desist.
Hidden Lives Page 13