The boarding-house was shabby and basic. There were no shiny green quilts upon the beds to hate, or round Chinese rugs to spoil. Now they were gone we missed them. The landlady was a harridan who wore curlers in her hair, did not like children, and had only taken us in out of pity. My mother was in disgrace, her name linked in the newspapers with a named co-respondent: guilty party in the divorce. She had not fought her corner: she did not have the money to do so, or the will. (My father was required to send us a meagre sum for our maintenance every month, but it was often late, if it came at all.)
The worst thing about the boarding-house was the magpie which guarded the backyard. It lived in a kennel like a dog, its wings were clipped, and it had a long rattling chain attached to its scrawny leg. When you opened the back gate it would run at you to peck your ankles, screeching ‘Go on out, go on out!’ in a flurry of black and white raised wings and gaping orange mouth. It was what the landlady would shriek as she swept the atrocious bird from her path with the garden broom, the flesh of her ankles falling in folds over her shoes: the bird had learned the phrase from her and now mimicked it to its own ends. I had no broom with which to defend myself: I would try to sneak in the front door in Cranmer Square, but this was forbidden to children, who must use the back yard and face the bird. My ankles were covered in peck marks and sometimes even bled, but I didn’t complain: my mother had enough to be getting on with, so much was obvious, and would get us out of there as soon as she could.
I was so closely aligned to Jane that I had no vision of her as a separate being. She did not count as a sister, as a companion, rather she was an extension of me, and my mother soon became the same. We went round in a survival unit of three: Margaret, Jane’nFay.
My mother decided to paint wooden powder boxes for a living. Pretty women bought face-powder by the ounce, and transferred it to a decorated round box upon their dressingtable, and placed a powder puff on top of it, and a lid on top of that. It needed to look feminine. She would do the decorating. Alas, the pretty women did not want painted powder boxes in sufficient number for us to make any kind of a living: powder was for special occasions only. It lay on the top of the face in a floury film; Max Factor pancake foundation had not yet been invented. The limit of my mother’s skin care was a pot of Pond’s cold cream, to be applied at night.
I still have one of the powder boxes we failed to sell: pale glazed wood, with stylized flowers painted elegantly upon its lid. My mother’s training at the Slade School of Art was paying off, though not perhaps in the way her tutors had envisaged. I love it and hate it, and as for using it, that’s out of the question. Powder flies all over the room. I keep buttons in it, on the theory that one day or another I shall take up a needle and sew.
Letters came from my father. He made a book for us out of firm paper, and glued photographs and drawings to it, and scraps of poetry, and tales of things he had done and seen, and people he had met. He had taken a lot of time over it: I thought perhaps he missed us. I assumed he would be back soon and we would all live together again. (No one had mentioned the divorce.) He seemed to be quite rich: he sent a photograph of himself leaning against a KLM aircraft, in Amsterdam. He sent a book, Ferdinand the Bull. Ferdinand was stung by a bee and picked for the bullring because of it. When it came to the point he just sat down and smelled the flowers in the ladies’ hats and lived happily ever after. A good pacifist book: even my mother admired it. My father was going back to school in London to get some more medical letters after his name. Yes, said my mother, your father always has money to do what he wants. But he’s a very good doctor, never forget that.
I looked for Holland on the map. I could accept by now that the world was round. Europe took precedence in the scheme of things. They were on top, we were underneath. If anyone were to fall off it would be us.
I learned anxiety and fear. I was out playing sevens in Cranmer Square – you threw a tennis ball against a wall and caught it in a progressively difficult way – so many bounces, overarm, underarm, a group of seven to be completed before you could move on to the next stage; as solitary and obsessive an occupation as any computer game today – when I was interrupted by a boy. I didn’t know him. My concentration went: I dropped the ball and complained. He told me he had been in an earthquake, and how the earth yawned in front of you and if you weren’t careful you fell down into the cracks, and even as you scrabbled to climb out the earth would close again, and squash you. It had happened to a friend of his. He told me about how erupting volcanoes could suddenly rise up out the ground, and how the boiling lava would frizzle you alive, and he hoped it would happen to me. If you felt the earth shake beneath your feet it meant earthquake or volcano was about to happen. Then he walked off. I was petrified. Every now and then I did feel the earth shake but I was never sure if it was in my head or outside. How would one know? You could look to see if the ceiling light was swaying, and sometimes it was, but your eyes must be deceiving you, because everyone said there were no earthquakes in the South Island, only in the North, and all the volcanoes were extinct.
I don’t know whether Jane shared my fear: I assumed she did, but I may have been wrong. We were separate enough for her to love St Mary’s Convent and me to hate it. The nuns liked her and were suspicious of me. Jane was good and quiet and looked holy: I was noisy and giggly and looked frivolous.
The Convent was a tall building with gothic towers. Behind barred windows lived scores of women who wore black robes and white wimples. When they were angry, which they often were, they were like the magpie; they’d come screeching at you in a flurry of black and white, though rapping your knuckles or pinching you instead of pecking your ankles, and much more painfully. Fortunately most of them stayed in their cells in the towers: just a handful came out to teach in the school wing. Mother Teresa was nice and motherly, and would hug you and give you sticky sweets: all the others, from Sister Katherine to Sister Dorothy, ruled by sarcasm and violence. I liked their names, but that was about all.
The children, all Catholic except for a handful of heathen, which group included Jane and I, were on the whole cowed and snivelly. Their noses tended to run. I was a worse case of pious dereliction than Jane, who had at least been christened, albeit as a Protestant not a Catholic, but I had not even been that. My parents were freethinkers, rationalists, humanists – which was why I was spared Arthur Machen’s blessing. Jane was allowed to stay in the classroom while the rest of the class said their prayers and told their rosaries – some six times a day – but I had to leave the room, and stand outside the door with my spelling book, and learn the hard words. I became very good at spelling. I did not mind the exclusion much: prayers were boring and rosaries were peculiar, but I could see it was more comfortable to belong. But belonging was already beginning to seem unlikely. I was a homie, I spoke with a fancy accent, lived in a boarding-house and not a bungalow, didn’t get pocket money, and my mother put on airs. I was the youngest in my class by more than a year. I struggled to keep up.
The nuns decided that I had to be baptized. Otherwise, being unchristened, my fate was to go to limbo when I died. Limbo was the place, in their rather primitive theology, where all those born after Jesus’s time but who weren’t Catholics were doomed to go.