When I Had a Little Sister: The Story of a Farming Family Who Never Spoke. Catherine Simpson

me.

      Tricia was the most loving and lovable child, so sweet-natured it was easy to take advantage of her. She was cooperative and eager to please – not in a needy way but in a happy way.

      Elizabeth and I were good at giving her orders: get this, get that, fetch this, fetch that, go for this, go for that, play this, play that, watch this, watch that. I made her play ‘Schools’ before she knew what a school was and had no idea about bells and desks and lessons, and stared at me baffled as I kept ringing an imaginary bell in her face expecting her to line up for playtime. I made her play ‘Hospitals’ when she was small enough to be crammed into the dolls’ cot and be fed ‘medicine’ of sugar and water. She wasn’t keen on the sugar and water but she wanted to play so much she went along with it. Tricia was always game – we’d realized that when she suddenly stood up and walked at nine months old.

      Inevitably, as two’s company and three’s a crowd, Elizabeth and I fought over Tricia and, with me being younger than Elizabeth, I often lost. When all three of us played ‘Houses’ in the old hen cabin, Elizabeth was ‘mother’ in the best cabin with all the best junk furniture and Tricia was her baby while I got to live in the rubbish cabin (the cabin next door filled with logs and chicken wire) and be the nasty neighbour, Mrs Crab-Apple.

      Me, Elizabeth and Tricia, centre front, at the WI Christmas party – my idea of heaven

      I liked to get Tricia to myself and on Tuesday evenings, when Elizabeth went off in the car with Mum for her piano lesson, Tricia and I had our own game to play: ‘Hiding from the Germans’. This entailed dashing around the farm from one hiding place or vantage point to another – from among the hay bales in the loft to the back of Gran’s Dairy, from behind the dog kennel (a metal barrel on its side) to the top of the great stone cheese presses in the farmyard we sprinted here and there, flinging ourselves onto our bellies, ‘Ssssh! Keep your head down. Keep quiet!’ as we tried to evade capture and spot the enemy before they spotted us. As a rule we were not a film-watching family and nobody bar Mr Herbert, the vicar, talked about the war (although this was only twenty-five years after the end of the Second World War) so I can only think this game stemmed from watching The Guns of Navarone or The Great Escape or something similar in the sitting room with Uncle George one Christmas Day.

      The farm provided great reading hideaways – up trees, on roofs, inside a stack of straw bales with a torch, where I’d read and itch and sneeze. I enjoyed finding a hidden place to escape into a book. Unseen among the branches of a tree or high up on a building I’d watch and think and feel safe. I always knew if Dad or Gran were near by the rattle of buckets.

      At other times I’d lie on the back lawn staring into the sky at the white vapour trails from Manchester Airport. Sometimes the longing to be on board a flight was so strong it was an out-of-body experience. It didn’t matter where it was going, anywhere was better than here. Second only to flying away was the dream of a road trip. I watched wagon drivers jealously when they visited the farm, imagining the freedom of the road. Sometimes they’d turn up with a girlfriend slumped in the passenger seat looking bored, chewing gum with her bare feet up on the dashboard among the toffee wrappers and under the rabbit’s foot dangling from the rear-view mirror, and I’d know those girls were truly blessed.

      Freedom for me meant wearing no shoes. My sisters and I were never bothered by dirt and as we ran about the farm I never wore shoes, just socks, and I could leap from one dry patch to another, from one clean, flat stone to the next, avoiding mucky puddles and nettles and sharp stones. For many years I half-believed I could fly, just a little, if I willed it hard enough. That is the sort of thing I told Tricia; that I could fly and that she could too if she tried hard enough; if she ran fast enough and didn’t breathe and only touched the ground with her very tippy toes she would fly. I can see her face now as she drank it in, solemn-eyed, amazed but believing it, believing every word I said.

       Chapter Seven

      Until Tricia was seven she slept in a little alcove in my parents’ bedroom – the farmhouse had four bedrooms but with Gran using one and the roof leaking in another we were short of space. Unfortunately for her there was a small passageway leading to her bedroom with a bolt on the outside of the door and Elizabeth and I sometimes took it upon ourselves to lock her in when she was supposed to be in bed but didn’t want to go. I remember hearing her crying behind the bolted door begging to be let out as Mum and Dad watched television oblivious downstairs – or in Dad’s case slept in front of the television. I remember Elizabeth bending and putting her mouth to the keyhole and hissing ‘go to bed’ while I leaned against the spindles at the top of the stairs.

      It is memories like this that haunt me still, years later, now she is gone. I wish I could not still hear her crying to be let out from behind the locked door. I would do anything to change that memory and I try to replace it with a better one.

      This better memory is of me and Tricia climbing into the same bed – my bed. Mum shouts from downstairs, ‘Are you in bed?’ And we hold hands and reply ‘yes!’ without letting on we’re in the same single bed. We giggle and snuggle down in the dark, happy that we are warm and together and, in our minds, getting away with something. My mother must discover her there when she comes to bed because when I wake up in the morning Tricia is always gone.

      Our bolting of the door to try to get Tricia to stay in bed probably isn’t surprising considering the methods my mother used. She bought a sheet of plywood to put up at the window of our bedroom every summer evening to make it dark – her version of shutters, I suppose – but Elizabeth and I did not appreciate this brown monstrosity and propped it against the tallboy and slid down it until it snapped in two.

      The tallboy was ugly as well. It had drawers crammed with material, never used, that burst out if you slid open the drawers and was impossible to shove back in without skinning your knuckles. This tallboy was a far cry from my Cousin Angela’s kidney-shaped dressing table that wore a pleated skirt of white and pink roses. My cousin had pink walls to match and a pink bedspread. My cousin was pink. I was not pink. I longed to be pink.

      Mum also removed the light bulb from our bedroom so we couldn’t keep putting the light on, until one day when I was six years old and Grandma Mary asked me what I wanted for Christmas. In all innocence I told her I was writing to Father Christmas for a light bulb. ‘Poor lass,’ she said and within a day or two the light bulb had reappeared.

      Tricia had an affinity with animals. As a child she slid off café chairs in search of dogs on leads and cried because the Blackpool donkeys looked sad. We had a dentist with slicked-back hair and a smirk who crept about in brown suede shoes and was known as ‘the butcher’, but she agreed to go for check-ups so she could watch his tropical fish flit around their glass cube.

      She loved horses and read over and over the ‘Silver Brumby’ books and My Friend Flicka