FACT: While governments claim they will perform miracles, Godiva genuinely did. Stories abound of people who received psychic comfort from this wonderful lady, children who laughed for the first time when exposed to her love, of remissions in cancer cases after visits. The government may harp on about how they’re going to bring about a revolution in our health, but 20 years ago Godiva was going out and doing it.
FACT: She proved to all of us how a girl from even the most underprivileged of backgrounds can make something of herself in this world. Godiva always avoided talking about the great sadness in her childhood that led her to change her name and cut off all contact with the past, but we all know that she was the victim of terrible demons that she never entirely came to terms with.
FACT: We all loved her. The vegetables-have-souls brigade may claim now that it isn’t so, but there wasn’t a single person in this country – apart from snobs and ivory-tower academics – who didn’t feel personally touched by her, because she was very much one of us. She put her arms out and embraced us all, and we loved her for it.
What I am saying here is this. Godiva was the closest thing to a saint that this world has known for well over a century. She loved without discrimination, she gave and forgave without any thought for her own interests, she brought about miracles in a cynical world and she died a martyr for her own causes.
I’ve done my homework, and guess what? This recent discovery at Belhaven qualifies this wonderful woman for sainthood. And that’s what I think she should be. If you think so too, write to your MP. Not that they’ll pay any attention, if past history has anything to say about it. This government will never let the people’s choice be a saint. She didn’t come from Islington after all, did she?
© Daily Sparkle 2000
Chapter Ten
Too Much Coffee
Stupid. I’ve been sleepwalking for the past eight hours, and what do I do? Drink three giant mugs of Jasmine’s special coffee and find myself, when Harriet finally allows us to go home, wide-awake and jittery with caffeine, head buzzing slightly in that too-tipsy-to-go-to-sleep, not-pissed-enough-to-pass-out in-between state. A nice cup of Horlicks, that’s what I should have had: a nice cup of Horlicks and some vitamin B. But no. At three in the morning, with Harriet, who practically fell asleep on the stairs and had to be dragged up the last two flights, spreadeagled in her bed snoring, I am jittering around the living room like a great big jittering thing, drinking gallons of water and stuffing all the high-carbohydrate foods in the house into my jittering gob.
This is not good. I’m not good at being alone and wakeful late at night. I’m not one of those people who can settle to watch bad pop videos on the telly, or read a book or embroider or something. I’ve never shaken off my early training; if I’m alone late at night, I start to obsess. About everything. Like: what the hell am I doing with my life? And: if something happens to split us up, how would we work out custody of Henry? And: what happens if Godiva really does become a saint? Are we going to have to start going to church? And: why, after all these years, is it that my mother can still turn me into a quivering jelly from the other side of the Atlantic?
I know there will be an email waiting from her. Might as well get it over and done with. Take another glass of water over to the computer and go online.
She answered within five minutes of me sending mine. Of course, people in America remain permanently online because they don’t run up backbreaking phone bills if they do. But all the same: it would be so nice if just once in her life Grace had gone ‘Oh, look, an email. I’ll make a cup of tea and then I’ll answer it,’ or ‘Oh, sod it, I’ll wait till the red bill comes.’ It would make it so much easier to relate to her as a human being.
Thank you for having the courtesy to reply. Please be prompt, and please study the guest list. There will be important people there, and I expect basic courtesy.
No sign off, as usual.
The quivering jelly replies, ‘Of course. I will look forward to seeing you. Anna’. Underneath her message, in the inbox, a strange address: [email protected]. It takes me a minute to work out who it’s from.
Hi there, wildgirl, and salutations from County Cork. It’s great here, though there seems to be an Internet cafe in every town, so instead of the craic you’ve just got all these people staring at screens and talking to their cousins in America. Just wanted to know if my attempts at getting rid of your visitors the other day did any good. Also to say that getting waylaid at the GeogSoc was probably the most exciting thing that happened to me in London! You’re quite a girl.
yr knight in shining armour, Nigel
Love-beads! I click on reply and start to type.
You! How are you! Thanks: your ruse worked brilliantly. What did you say to them? There’s not been a sign since. How long are you there for? Coming back through London at all? Love, wildgirl
Oh, goody. I still haven’t forgotten the way he looked on the stairs. I do hope he’ll come back through and make a night of it. Something nice to think about. Maybe I’ll be able to get to sleep, if I turn in right now.
So I do. I really try. It’s half past three and even Henry’s ready to come to bed. He’s been looking reproachfully at me for ages now. Trots after me as I go downstairs and climb into bed.
And I manage to think about fun things for precisely two minutes. And then I start to worry again. Why the hell did my bloody mother have to come back now? I don’t have time. I don’t have time. It takes concentration to psych myself up, and there’s Harriet in a state and the press sniffing around looking for her, and I have to get my hair done and find some clothes and the fridge hasn’t been cleaned for months and I don’t even know where University College is and I don’t even have a proper job and do you think she knows?
Fuck it. Sit up in bed, switch on the light. Everything is as usual: a scatter of clothes, silk scarves tied round the foot of the bed, curtains blocking out the daylight that will come creeping in in a couple of hours. I’ve got a nauseating sense of impending doom. You can’t just retrain yourself. I’ve had a sense of impending doom for as long as I can remember: a certainty that retribution is going to come screaming down on me one day, whatever I do. Damn it, I like my life. Why do I have to feel guilty all the time?
Is this how she feels? Is this how Grace feels? Is this perpetual gnawing fear of discovery a by-product of our upbringing, or is it the fact that I’ve thrown away all her expectations, that I am what she would call a failure, that every time someone finds out who I am, they look at me in confusion? I can see it written all over their faces: what the hell went wrong? How on earth did someone like her produce someone like you? Whatever happened to all that promise? Surely you should be head of department somewhere, at least?
Late-night heebie-jeebies: I hate them. I wanted to do something with my life, I really did, but you try carrying a name like mine around with you and see what people offer you. All I want is to be normal. I want to have a good life, a real life: a life that doesn’t involve the isolation of wild success, a life that doesn’t involve the endless self-castigation of failure. But you know, you present a CV, and people can’t help but put two and two together: my name, where I grew up, my seventeen O levels and my five A levels, the degree over and done with before I was twenty, and it has the weirdest effect. Everyone is scared to death. You would have thought that they would look at me and see the mess I am, but they don’t. The arty people think: oh, God, how on earth are we going to cope with someone who evidently hasn’t had a day’s emotion in her life, who’s going to be logical and clinical and never let her discipline down enough to allow inspiration to come in? And the scientists? The money people and the people who deal in calculation, logic, all the things the artists project on to me, that isn’t there? Obvious, isn’t it? None of them want me around. They’re all convinced that if they let their guard down for one minute, make a single slip-up, it will get back to Grace and they will feel publicly humiliated. They all think I’m a spy.
Usually, what I would do when I get into this state is wake up Harriet. And I would go on about it, and Harriet would say look, calm down, you’re great, you’re doing brilliantly, when our money comes through we’ll open the gallery and you can sell my paintings and everyone will love you and want to suck up to you because you can sell theirs as well. We’re fine, we’re great, we’re having a good time. We’re still young and we’re still going out; look at the people who love you, look at the friends you’ve made, look at the progress you’ve made. That’s what we both do for each other when the screaming fear gets to us in the middle of the night.
But that isn’t an option tonight. All I’m doing is obsess about normal stuff. Harriet’s the one in trouble; Harriet’s the one who needs help and love right now. And Harriet needs sleep.
Again I search my head. Does Grace wake in the night and feel like this? Is this why she never sleeps? Is what she’s done the same thing to me as that Peter Waters did to her?
Chapter Eleven
The Golden Child
I, like Harriet, have a trust fund of my own, a pot that will eventually buy me my freedom. And the irony is that the money comes from the man who put me in chains in the first place. My grandfather, Peter Waters, wrote one of the biggest bestsellers of his era, and, as someone who liked to think he was cleverer than the authorities, he left the proceeds not to my mother, the cash cow, subject of the book, but to me, when he died.
The grand irony of my grandfather’s literary success is this: he never realised that of the 8 million people who bought Sowing the Seed: How I Brought My Daughter up a Genius, 7,980,000 of them bought it as comedy. Presumably the other 20,000 actually followed his advice on the upbringing of their children. Certainly, I have a collection of roughly that many letters thanking him for his ruminations. Sometimes it makes me nervous: all those people, fifteen-odd years older than me, who went through the same life. What are they like now? And what if the 20,000 letter-writers are only the tip of the iceberg? What if, say, a million people followed his advice? That’s only one in eight, after all, of the people who bought the book. And if, say, they had an average of 1.5 children (the Waters method is so intensive it rather precludes the possibility of large families), and only one in a hundred of those children proved susceptible in the long term, that still means that, spread across the developed countries of the world, there are some 15,000 second-generation Graces. Single-minded, voraciously knowledgeable, evangelistical, unforgiving. I have been known to wake screaming from a nightmare where they have all got together and are tracking me down. Imagine: pursued by 15,000 zombies in cardigans.
But, like I say, that wasn’t why most people bought the book. Carolyn, my grandfather’s secretary-cum-housekeeper, remembers vividly the book’s role on the dinner-party circuit in the sixties; the most popular game of the time, aside from finding uses for car keys and Mars bars, involved guests competing to find the most extreme example of banality employed to support insanity. Ever popular was ‘Under no circumstances permit the child to run aimlessly about here and there, hither and yon. A running child is not a concentrating child.’ ‘Attention to detail is the core of all achievement. No picture can truly be in perspective if the details are wrong’ was another frequent winner.
She also says that Peter used to tear round bookshops demanding to see the manager when he found his tome under comedy, and fired off letters to editors complaining bitterly when the error was perpetuated in print.
He was, of course, a great writer of letters. A writer, and filer, and triplicator. I still have, in the trunk where his fan mail resides, a box file of correspondence, spanning fifty years, with the various editors of the Times crossword (‘Recidivist? There is no example of this back-formation in my dictionary …’). I have a folder of complaints to local councils about wastage (‘Why do your officers deem it necessary to append postal enclosures with paper clips? I calculate that at a rate of 400 letters per day, the council is wasting £500 per year on paper clips alone …’). I have an envelope of replies from the Queen (‘Her Majesty has asked me to thank you for your interest and assure you that we take all correspondence seriously …’). And another (‘while we take your point about the use of the split infinitive, we feel that the grammatical abuse in the phrase “To boldly go where no man has gone before” has become synonymous with the programme …’) from the duty officers at the BBC. I’m not sure why I keep them. Maybe one day I’ll throw them away.
So what sort of person was he, this super-parent whose obsession was such that he did little, at least on the surface, for himself after the birth of Grace? I remember him more as a beard. As a superbeard. He had one of those carpet beards that covered everything from neck to eyes – or at least to the point at which his square, steel-rimmed spectacles started – and by the time I can remember, the beard was a couple of inches thick. He was a tall man, and thin and tweedy, and being told by him to speak in full sentences was rather like being ordered about by an over-solemn bottlebrush.
If I’d been a psychologist looking for a Ph.D., I think I might have chosen Peter as a subject. But he wasn’t stupid, and must have known that people would be queuing up to spot his pathological traits, so little remains in terms of history surrounding him. What we do know is this: until the birth of his daughter, Peter Waters was a minor civil servant whose role in Whitehall was unknown in the outside world but made him deeply unpopular within. He lived at first alone then, in his forties, with his much younger wife, Sylvia, in a modern three-bed semi in Amersham, and was employed to root out waste and petty theft across the Home Office. He wasn’t exactly the man with the keys to the stationery cupboard, but he was the man with the requisition forms.
In the years BC (Before Child), Peter spent his days stalking the corridors of power, clutching sheafs of pink and yellow paper. No one ordered a bulldog clip, a pad of carbon paper, a box of pencils, a rubber band without triplicate copies of the requisition landing on Peter’s desk. And Peter, who had worked out optimum-usage graphs for every piece of equipment known to office life, would consult his charts (a sort of embroidery pattern of tiny coloured X’s on squared paper) and see that everyone’s orders were, as it were, in order. And if he felt that some filing clerk was going through too many paper tab labels, or that typewriter-ribbon usage in surveys didn’t accord with their production, he would leave his windowless cubbyhole and creep on silent soles to the offending office to demand an explanation.
‘He was the most feared man in the ministry,’ says an anonymous former colleague in a profile in the Mail the week of his death in 1980. ‘We all dreaded his approach, because a visit from Peter Waters meant hours discussing how exactly one went about using the amount of paper one did. But you have to hand it to him, it worked. Stationery wastage was at an all-time low while he worked there, and had almost doubled within a year of his leaving.’ This may sound like a petty sort of achievement, but Peter Waters saved the ministry some £15,000 a year when he was working, and this was in the 1930s.
And then came the years AD, or After Daughter. ‘To be honest,’ says the same anonymous source, ‘the birth came as a bit of a surprise to all of us, as no one had thought – not that we discussed that sort of thing much at the time – of Peter and Sylvia as a couple who made much of their marital status. He was older than her – at least fifteen years – and we’d always assumed she had married him for security rather than passion. He seemed such a dried-up chap, sort of dessicated, and she was a mousy little thing. There were a few unkind jokes going around. It’s always the quiet ones, that sort of thing. But I don’t think that anyone doubted Grace’s paternity for very long; it became very obvious that Peter was absolutely besotted with her. Which was great for us. Suddenly, we were able to have two pencils from the stores at a time …’
When Grace was three months old, Sylvia Waters made herself scarce from the family home, leaving only a note and a collection of embroidered napkins behind. No one knows what the note sa
id. Peter destroyed it the day he found it, and the following day handed in his notice at the Home Office. ‘I have a duty,’ said his letter of resignation, ‘to ensure that my daughter, who now finds herself, through no fault of her own, handicapped in comparison with her peers, has the best start in life I can give her.’
I still don’t know if this letter was disingenuous or not. It’s chicken and egg, isn’t it? Had Sylvia stayed, would Peter have developed such an intense passion for his daughter? Or did she leave because, the incubation period over, her family had no further use for her services?
Whatever, the one-parent unit turned out to be surprisingly well equipped to cope without the attentions of a mother. At forty-four, Peter had over twenty years of index-linked civil-service pension built up, and was able to take retirement on compassionate grounds. Well, possibly a combination of compassion and relief, the pensions department being as vulnerable to cross-examination on the subject of India rubbers as any other. And as he had never been known to spend a penny on frivolities, the Amersham house, bought fifteen years earlier on a mortgage, was as close to paid off as scarcely mattered.
‘I had a choice,’ he writes in Sowing the Seed, ‘between my own satisfaction and the future of my daughter. Many parents, too caught up in the here-and-now, choose their own, short-lived gratification. I do not think that I will lay myself open to criticism when I claim that I had a higher calling. Better a childhood dedicated to work and thought, than a lifetime filled with the inevitable mediocrity of play!’
Grace was born in 1938, when the Luftwaffe was still a gleam in Hitler’s eye and property prices in the London hinterland still relatively high. Presciently, and within six months of fatherhood, Peter had sold Amersham and taken his pension to rural Shropshire, where land was cheap and farm cottages were being sold off to make way for combine harvesters.
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