I grew up in a small town, the only child of elderly parents. Our town, a cotton town, had fallen into decay by the time I was born; cheap textiles from the Far East were beginning to flood the markets and those mills that remained struggled on with antiquated machinery, which it was not worth the cost of replacing; the workers too were ageing, and by the time of my middle childhood were like a parody of themselves, a southerner’s idea of the north. Under the factory walls of plum-coloured brick, stained black from the smoke and daily rain, plodded thick-set men in bib and brace, with shorn hair and flat caps: and angry-looking women in checked head-scarves, with elastic stockings and shoes like boats. Beyond the mill chimneys, you could see the line of hills.
The streets of our town were lined with brick-built terraces, interrupted by corner shops which gave no credit: by public houses in which people would declare they never set foot: by sooty Nonconformist churches, whose attendance dwindled as the 1960s drew on. There was a time when each of these churches had outside it a wooden board, and pinned to the board a discreet notice in fading type, announcing the times of services and Sunday schools and the names of visiting preachers. But a day came when these notices were replaced by posters, splashed in screaming colours: CHRISTIANITY HASN’T FAILED, IT’S JUST NEVER BEEN TRIED. The town’s cinema shut down, and was turned into a supermarket of eccentric design; the Mechanics’ Institute closed its doors, had its windows smashed, decayed for eighteen months, and then reopened as a tyre salesroom.
My mother, made redundant from her job in the weaving shed, went out cleaning houses. A change took place in our own form of worship; the priest, now turned around to face the people, spoke a debased lingo that they could all understand. Opera manuum ejus Veritas et judicium. The works of His hands are truth and judgement.
My father was a clerk; I knew this from quite early in life, because of my mother’s habit of saying, ‘Your father’s not just a clerk, you know.’ Each evening he completed a crossword puzzle. Sometimes my mother read her library books or looked at magazines, which she also called ‘books’, but more often she knitted or sewed, her head bowed under the standard lamp. Her work was exquisite: her tapestry, her drawn-thread work. Our pillowcases were embroidered, white on white, with rambling roses and trailing stems, with posies in plaited baskets, with ribbons in garlands and graceful knots. My father had a different cable-knit cardigan for every day of the week, should he choose to wear it. All my petticoats, cut out and sewn by her, had rows of lace at the hem and—also by the hem on the lefthand side—some motif representing innocence: a buttercup, for example, or a kitten.
I can see that my mother was, in herself, not exquisite. She had a firm jaw, and a loud carrying voice. Her hair was greying and wild and held back with springing kirby grips. When she frowned, a cloud passed over the street. When she raised her eyebrows—as she often did, amazed each hour by what God expected her to endure—a small town’s tram system sprang up on her forehead. She was quarrelsome, dogmatic and shrewd; her speech was alarmingly forthright, or else bewilderingly circumlocutory. Her eyes were large and alert, green like green glass, with no yellow or hazel in them; with none of the compromises people have when it comes to green eyes. When she laughed I seldom knew why, and when she cried I was no wiser. Her hands were large and knuckly and calloused, made to hold a rifle not a needle.
My father and myself were fair, lean, quiet people, our features minimal and smooth; our eyes changed colour in different lights. I was a little Englishwoman, my mother said: cool. This struck a chill in me, a deepening chill; I wanted to believe I belonged to another country. My mother and father had both left Ireland in their mothers’ wombs, and their workaday north country accents were as flat as mine. My father looked entirely like an Englishman; he could have passed for an earl, or an earl’s flunkey. His narrow body bent itself in strange places, as if hinged and jointed differently from other people’s. His legs were long and seemed extendable, and his feet were narrow and restless; when he came into a room he seemed to hover and trail about it, like a harmless insect, daddy longlegs.
It was my parents’ habit, at intervals, to shut themselves in their bedroom; then my mother would mention, loudly and contentiously, the names of strange towns. Colchester was mentioned, so at another time was Stroud, and so was a place my mother pronounced lengthily as Kingston—upon—Hull. Later I realized that these were places to which we might have gone to live, if my father had taken up an offer of promotion. But for one reason or another he never did. When I was in my teens they would take me into rooms separately, and hiss between their teeth—false, in both cases—about who had wanted to go and who hadn’t, who had wrecked whose chances. It was beyond me to make any sense of this: to trap them in a room together and get them to have it out, spit out the truth of the situation. Perhaps I already suspected there was no truth to be had; their fictions were interwoven, depending one on the other.
In summer, when I was a small girl, we would take a bus to the outskirts of the town, and walk in the hills, rambling along the bridle paths in clear green air. We were above the line of the mill chimneys; like angels, we skimmed their frail tops.
Once you have begun remembering—isn’t this so?—one image springs another; they run through your head in all directions, scampering animals flushed from coverts. Memory’s not a reel, not a film you can run backwards and forwards at will: it’s that flash of startled fur, the slither of silk between the fingers, the duplicated texture of hair or bone. It’s an image blurring, caught on the move: as if in one of my family snapshots, taken before cameras got so foolproof that any fool could capture the moment.
I remember this.
I am six years old, and I have been ill. After this illness I am returning to school. It is a spring morning, water gurgling in the gutters, a keen wind. I am still shaky, unused to going out, and I have to hold tight to my mother’s hand as she leads me through the school gate. Perhaps I don’t want to go; I don’t know. There is one tree in our school playground, and the scud and dapple of sun across its leaves is like the feeling in my limbs, now heavy, now light. Everything is new to me. My eyes are clear and cold, as if they have been rinsed in ice water.
Inside the classroom the air is hot and fusty. It smells of damp and wool and of our playtime milk cooking in its bottles beside the radiator pipes, growing glutinous and clotted. Perhaps in summer, when we have our holidays, this smell goes away? In detail: chalk smells of peaches, or I think the word ‘chalk’ is like the word ‘peaches’, because of the texture both sounds share, the plushness and the grain. Rulers smell of their wood, of their varnish, and of the salt and flesh of the hand which has warmed them: as you draw them beneath your nose you feel each dividing notch, so that each fraction of an inch has its measured segment of scent. My teacher will snarl—her eyes popping at me—that in all the time I’ve been off sick she thinks I might have learnt to draw a straight line. But that’s later; for this morning there’s an element of sweetness, and this shivering light. It is as if my teacher has forgotten who I am, and that when she last saw me she threatened to hit me for singing. My renaissance has called out of her a vague good-will. ‘Let me see,’ she says, looking around the classroom. ‘Where would you like to sit?’
The luxury of choice. My fingers curl into my palms like snails. I know what I would like: to sit next to someone who has a certificate to show that there are no insects in their hair. Eggs, my mother says, eggs are what you find, but I cannot imagine eggs unless they are hens’ eggs. While she scrapes my scalp with the steel comb she always emphasizes that lice are democratic, that they visit the rich as well as the poor—though we don’t, I think, know anyone who is rich—and that they like, they positively prefer, clean heads over dirty ones. I come into the category of clean heads, and she tells me this so that I will not look down on the insects’