The Generation Game

by Sophie Duffy

  It is an Aladdin’s cave inside. Glass jar upon glass jar filled with rubies and emeralds and diamonds and amethysts and gold and silver and pearls. Sherbet Lemons, Acid Drops, Aniseed Twist, Toffee Bon Bons. And all the rest of the names I can’t yet read but know by heart from the shapes and colours and smells.

  ‘You can have a quarter of whatever you like,’ she says to me. Then she too is lost in her own world of comfort, the lines of neatly stacked cigarette packets beckoning her from behind the counter, where a man has looked up from his newspaper at the sound of Mother’s voice.

  ‘Afternoon, madam,’ he says. ‘And what can I do for you?’

  I am far too absorbed in making my decision and distracted by the rows of comics at my feet to hear what she says in reply. It is sometime later that we find ourselves back outside on the pavement (a paper bag of wine gums clutched in one of my hands, a copy of Twinkle cherished in the other) and Mother is telling me that the Nice Man has offered her a Job.

  ‘But you already have a Job, Mother. Do you need two Jobs? Are we very poor?’

  ‘That other Job was a Bad Job.’ She tears open a fresh packet of Consulate with some venom at the memory of this Bad Job. This one will be a Lovely Job, Philippa. A Proper Job as they say Down Here. (Down Here being the only place I’ve ever known but still a foreign land to Helena.)

  ‘Just think, Philippa,’ she says. ‘Think of all those sweets!’ And she plants a (second of the day) kiss on the top of my head that I wouldn’t swap for all the sweets in the shop.

  It is Saturday at last. Hurray! No uniform today. No Christopher Bennett. No Miss Hitchcock with her man-shoes and voice of doom. But Mother has her Job to do and so I have to go to Auntie Sheila’s for the morning with my duffle bag of ‘things to keep me quiet’.

  I like going to Auntie Sheila’s – as long as Bernie is at the Lot. Terry ignores me as he has recently become a teenager. He spends his time in the garage attempting his Guitar Riffs and playing darts. Toni treats me like the pony she’s never been allowed to have because Sheila thinks riding will give her bandy legs, which are of no use for ballet. Toni battles with my frizzy hair, trying to train it into French plaits, pulling my scalp and making my eyes water. But it is worth it for the pretty ribbons she weaves through them. Toni makes obstacle courses in the garden and I have to gallop-and-trot and leap over bamboo canes pilfered from Bernie’s neglected greenhouse.

  This morning I have been awarded a blue rosette that Toni pins to my jumper (another of her hand-me-downs). She made it from an old cornflakes packet and strips of neatly-cut crepe paper. ‘What do you think, Philly?’ she asks, arms folded, beaming at her handiwork. ‘I saw Valerie Singleton do it on Blue Peter last week.’

  I have no idea who Valerie Singleton is as we do not have Television at home. But I know I want this beautiful handcrafted rosette.

  ‘Can I keep it, Toni?’ I ask in my sweetest voice.

  ‘Course,’ she says. And she pats me on the head and produces a sugar lump from her pocket which she offers to me in the palm of her hand.

  I wish Toni was my big sister. My only hope is for Mother to give me a baby sister but when I asked her one time, she spat her tea across the kitchen table with such force it hit the far wall, so I don’t hold out much hope.

  ‘Let’s go and ask Mum for a Nesquik. It’ll help keep your coat all shiny.’

  And with a click-click of her tongue and a tug on the reins (one of Bernie’s best polyester ties), we walk on to the kitchen.

  Auntie Sheila is baking a cake. She has a smut of flour on her rouged cheek (she is almost as glamorous as Mother – but it has been a long time since Helena has done any baking). She pops the cake in the oven and dabs at her face with a tea towel. We sit down and watch her make two chocolate milkshakes and – with a finger to her lips as Mother has modified my dairy intake – she sets one of them on the table in front of me.

  That night, my (slightly crumpled) uniform hangs on the back of the bedroom door, waiting for Mother to wash it, moving like a ghost in the draught from the window. My rosette is pinned to my pyjama top.

  It is daylight still (of course) but I don’t really mind. I am so tired after my first week of school and a day of gymkhanas that it takes just a few minutes of trying to work out the pattern in my curtains before sleep takes me off to dream of a horse in a hat being ridden by a boy with messy hair and skin like egg shell.

  2006

  The pattern in these hospital curtains is disturbing. Laura Ashley slash IKEA. It’s using up all my energy when I should be conserving it for the job in hand – Motherhood – which is probably going to be even trickier than I thought.

  I could have trouble bonding with you, Fran says, my over-friendly midwife. She’s worried that you will remind me of your ‘father’ (who she is yet to meet but has heard all about) and that will inevitably lead to resentment. I think resentment is the least of my worries. Resentment is a bit of a luxury I wish I had more time for.

  My friends have never liked Adrian. They think he is patronising and insincere. They are right. But then I don’t particularly mind those qualities in him. It is the Casanova stuff I’m not so keen on. Or the golf. Or the mother. Or the cocaine habit that he promised he’d left behind in the 90s along with the Spice Girls and the Teletubbies. But then his promises have proved to be empty words.

  So there’s just you and me, Baby. And you smell divine. I could breathe in your scent forever.

  The boy I was going to marry smelt of currant buns.

  Chapter Three: 1969

  New Faces

  The boy’s name is Lucas Jones. Although he lives in the next street, I’ve never seen him before, not until that fateful day when School brings us together. By the end of the second week of term Mother has discovered the reason for this: he’s only recently moved to Torquay from London with his mother who had a Divorce from his father – which means they don’t like each other anymore. My mother likes his mother however, because now she doesn’t feel so bad about leaving the capital behind, knowing she isn’t alone in such recklessness.

  She’d like to ask Lucas and Mrs Jones to tea but she can’t possibly let them see the Squalor we live in so she arranges for us all to meet in a teashop in town one Saturday afternoon after Mother’s stint at the newsagents. She makes me wear white gloves and a flowery dress that shows off my chubby knees. She unravels this week’s French plaits and tries to brush out the kinks in my hair. ‘A hundred brushes a day, Philippa… fifty-nine, sixty… If I’ve taught you nothing, I’ve taught you that… sixty-two, sixty-three... ’

  The tearoom is full of genteel ladies nibbling cream cakes and sipping tea from bone china cups. Lucas and I are each given psychedelic orange squash with a straw and an iced bun. Helena and Mrs Jones order Earl Grey with no milk, throwing the uniformed waitress into a flurry.

  The conversation is a little awkward at first but our mothers soon get into their stride:

  ‘Don’t slurp, Lucas.’

  ‘Take your gloves off, Philippa. They’ll get sticky.’

  ‘Don’t chew with your mouth open, Lucas.’

  ‘Sit up, Philippa. You look like a sack of potatoes.’

  ‘Don’t put your elbows on the table, Lucas.’

  ‘Slow down, Philippa. You’ll choke if you’re not careful.’

  And so on.

  After a few minutes, when they realise that they went to neighbouring preparatory schools (pre-Wales) and had mutual friends, they forget all about us and we can slouch and slurp as much as we like. Then I decide it is my turn to get the conversation going with Lucas.

  ‘D’you like Miss Pitchfork?’ I ask him.

  ‘No,’ he says.

  (Hurrah!)

  ‘D’you like Christopher Bennett?’

  ‘No.’

  (Hurrah!)

  ‘D’you like Mandy Denning?’

  ‘She’s alright.’

  (Boo!)

  At least Lucas shrugs his shoulders when he says
this so I suppose he isn’t particularly bothered one way or the other about Mandy Denning. It is in that moment, seeing that gesture, that I determine I will become his friend. When someone asks Lucas Jones if they like Philippa Smith, he will say: ‘Yes. She is my best friend.’

  When we’ve finished our tea, Mrs Jones asks, ‘How about a stroll along the seafront and maybe an ice cream?’ She looks at Helena for reassurance that this is acceptable (I noticed her taking in my knees as I tried to hide them under the tablecloth).

  ‘Good idea,’ says Mother.

  We bob up and down, gathering together hats and gloves, while Mother counts out coins, insisting it is her shout although, confusingly, she says this in her normal husky way. As we shuffle in and out of tables, heading for the door, Lucas is the one who suddenly shouts out in a real shouty voice, ‘All scream for ice cream!’

  And every one of the genteel ladies turns to stare at our party. They tut-tut and stir their cups ferociously. Mrs Jones says, ‘Lucas!’ in a way I will come to hear many times – a sort of growly hiss, a cross between a mother bear and a snake. Then she slaps his thigh, leaving a handprint the colour of raspberry ripple on his shell-skin.

  I want to marry this boy.

  School is more bearable now I have Lucas for a friend. He might only be small and thin but he has a voice that even Miss Pitchfork must envy. A voice like a crow having a bad day. A voice he uses sparingly, for greater effect.

  Lucas and I soon settle into a shared routine that gets us through the six hour long haul. We play together at break in our corner. We pick each other for teams in gym. I save a place for him on the carpet. He saves a place for me in the hall at lunchtime where I give him my greens in exchange for potatoes. (He is a boy of mystery.)

  We see each other after school too. When I am invited to play at Lucas’ – a bigger house than ours, almost on a par with Auntie Sheila’s in terms of tidiness – Mother is spurred on to tackle our grotty terrace, starting with the little front room that Helena refers to as the Parlour. She buys cheap magnolia paint and I am allowed to help her slap it over the walls. Luckily we have no carpet, only bare boards so our inexpert approach doesn’t much matter. We paint the floor too. A dark green. And she swaps a pair of earrings for a Persian rug at the junk shop on Belgrave Road, along with a couple of prints of city life that send Helena into a daydream.

  Finally, after she’s blitzed the kitchen with Ajax and scrubbed the downstairs bathroom with so much Vim her eyes are watering, she is happy to ask Lucas back to play.

  The big day arrives. Mrs Jones has coffee with Mother while Lucas and I build a den upstairs in my bedroom using blankets, an umbrella, the clothes horse and some imagination. I am Thing One and Lucas Thing Two. We try putting my bobble hat on Andy but he isn’t having any of it, so we use a teddy instead, with a sock stuffed full of hankies for a tail. Lucas wants to tidy up after a while as he feels uneasy about the mess.

  ‘Let’s go out in the backyard,’ I suggest when we are done, skipping across my forgotten carpet, visible once more.

  ‘All right,’ he says.

  ‘You can see a Magical Land through a hole in the fence,’ I tell him.

  ‘You mustn’t fib,’ he says.

  ‘I’m not fibbing. Just you wait and see.’

  To add to the sense of mystery, I tell him it is a secret and we mustn’t let our mothers know in case they spoil things. We tiptoe downstairs – I am pretty deft at tiptoeing despite my weight as I’ve had plenty of practice pretending I’m not there when Helena is in one of her Moods. We can hear enraptured voices coming from the Parlour and so it is easy to sneak down the passage and out through the kitchen door into the backyard. Helena prefers to call it a courtyard and she’s stuck pots of red geraniums around it because they remind her of Italy and Sofia Loren films. The courtyard is let down by the old outside lavatory that I am not allowed to use but where I store my treasures (a gold button, a lock of hair, three shells and one of Andy’s whiskers). One day I will divulge my booty to Lucas. But today I am going to show him the Magical Land.

  ‘There, Lucas.’

  I point over at the fence. It looks like a giant rabbit has burrowed its way through the bottom in the corner. Before you can twitch your nose, Lucas is down on his hands and knees, peeking through to the other side.

  ‘Wow,’ he says, in wonder. ‘You’re right.’

  For on the other side of our backyard, through this tatty old fence, is a land of giant gnarly trees, hidden pathways, stone pillars and angels and temples adorned with flowers. And a sharp tang that Lucas says is fox pee. He used to have a family of foxes in his garden in London, lucky thing. All we’ve got in our yard are big fat seagulls at which Mother actively encourages me to throw stones. And sometimes Andy puts in an appearance when he can be bothered to venture outside on a summer’s day for a spot of sunbathing, baring his tiger stripes next to Helena’s flat brown stomach.

  ‘Let’s go in,’ Lucas says.

  I can’t possibly love him anymore than I do at this moment. His sheer courage swipes my breath away.

  ‘After you,’ I manage to say.

  So I follow his scrawny legs through the fence, squeezing myself as fast as I can because he is already up and running down a stony path, shrinking into the distance. When I eventually catch up with him, my chest is on fire and I have to bend over for some minutes to cool it down. Lucas is oblivious to my pain. He is totally absorbed in examining one of the stones. It is a huge cross – I know that much from Auntie Sheila who wears a gold one on a chain around her neck. On a Sunday, while Bernie fiddles with his cars and his accounts, Sheila takes Terry and Toni to church for bread and wine (which I reckon must have something to do with her famous cheese and wine parties). But I have no idea what the cross is for. And I have no idea at all how symbolic this moment will become one day.

  I watch Lucas’ lips move. He is reading in his head in a way I can only wonder at. I can barely read my own name (it will be a long, long time before I can spell it – what was Mother thinking when she chose it?). His skin looks even paler than usual. His eyes dark and sad.

  ‘What’s wrong, Lucas?’

  ‘It’s a dead boy.’

  ‘Where?’

  I look around me frantically, thinking we’ve stumbled upon a tragedy (which in a way, of course, we have).

  Lucas says, ‘No, silly,’ and goes on to explain about tombs and headstones and graveyards. Apparently that is what my Magical Land has turned out to be: the graveyard of St Bartholomew’s where – beneath the very ground we are standing on – dead people are buried.

  I do know about dead people; I am not completely naïve. Virtually all my grandparents are dead. Even my father is presumed dead having got lost while exploring the jungles of South America. I clutch onto the hope that he’s just been mislaid like my white gloves (actually they are shoved up the chimney in my bedroom because they are such hateful things) and that he will turn up again one day. I am constantly worried that my mother will die before this miracle happens and I will have to go and live in an orphanage and I will never be chosen by a nice family because I don’t have doll-hands like Mandy Denning. So I do know a bit about death (though not as much as I will in time – which is true for everybody). But, like Lucas, I am intrigued by the stone and I ask him to read the mossy old writing on it. (I am not in The Slow Readers for nothing.)

  He takes a big breath and I am expecting the Voice but instead all that comes out is a hoarse whisper:

  “ALBERT MORRIS, DIED AGED 7. SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN, AND FORBID THEM NOT, TO COME UNTO ME: FOR OF SUCH IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.”

  And a single perfect tear drop rolls down his shell-cheek. I reach out to him and wipe it away with the tips of my fingers.

  ‘Pooh, Philippa,’ he shouts, his Voice back. ‘Your hands stink!’

  So I chuck mud at him and he pushes me over (he is stronger than he looks, my Lucas). Then we hear voices… someone is coming! We run and run as fast as we can –
in case it is the dead boy at our heels – back down the stony path and through the rabbit-hole into the yard. We slink into the bathroom and clean ourselves up with wet cotton wool before Helena or Mrs Jones has even noticed we are gone. Though it is all I can do to keep our secret when Mother interrogates me later over the mud stains on her Vim-cleaned basin. So I do what I always do. I blame the cat.

  Another Saturday. Only this one is going to be different. Auntie Sheila is excused babysitting duties as she has to accompany Toni to a ballet exam (Grade 4 – she is a proper little Margot Fonteyn). Mother’s other option, Mrs Jones, is also unavailable as she has taken Lucas to London for a few days to stay with his grandparents (lucky Thing Two). He is going to the Planetarium and the Changing of the Guard. (I am not sure what the guard is changing into. A clean uniform, perhaps?) But there is excitement of a different kind in store for me: a whole morning in the sweet shop with my Quiet Bag, sitting out of the way, in the back room.

  The nice man who gave Mother the Job is called Bob (which rhymes – Miss Pitchfork is getting through to me at long last). His proper name is Mr Sugar which makes Lucas roll over with laughter when I tell him. I think it is a lovely name. Much nicer than Smith. Mr Sugar is as nice as his name and lets me choose a comic. I opt for Twinkle again as you can’t go wrong there. He also lets me fill a bag with penny chews and throws in a packet of colouring pencils from his stationery sideline.

  ‘Take this as well,’ he says then. And he balances a colouring book entitled Picturesque Devon on top of the heap of goodies in my arms so I stagger about like a contestant on Crackerjack’s Double or Drop. (I have seen this at Toni’s and I am beginning to get a taste for popular culture.) Mother is too busy tidying the cigarette shelves to notice this act of kindness so I draw on my reserves of politeness and utter a thank-you-very-much-Mr-Sugar.

  Out the back, I settle down at the desk, clearing a space amongst the invoices and receipts before making a start on a liquorice shoelace and a picture of a Devon pixie. I have not yet ruled out the possibility of the existence of pixies. I had hoped to see one in the Magical Land but now realise I will have to widen my search to a place that doesn’t contain dead bodies as I don’t think they attract pixies. Only angels. (Is my father an angel? Maybe he is in the graveyard? I will consult Lucas on his return.)