My mother screamed at spiders and taught me to.
I dropped the spoon and ran out into the sunshine.
‘The baby’s crying,’ I told Anna, who was sitting on the grass stroking my cat Tigger.
‘Well, you’re the mummy,’ she said. ‘It probably wants its nappy changed.’
‘I think it wants to come out into the garden,’ I said.
‘It can’t,’ said Anna. ‘It’s got to have a sleep.’
‘I don’t want to play any more.’
‘But I haven’t come home from work yet,’ Anna said.
‘Well, I don’t like being the mummy,’ I replied. ‘I want to go home.’
‘I’ll show you my wee-wee,’ Anna said.
‘I’ve seen it,’ I said. ‘You haven’t got one.’
Tigger wandered off across the lawn and jumped back over the fence into my garden and I went home after him.
SIBLINGS
I always assumed that my father had married again, and he had. I also assumed that he and his new wife undoubtedly had children so somewhere in the world I had half-brothers and sisters.
I even dreamt he might turn up one day and say, ‘Hello, I’m your father and these are your brothers and sisters.’ But it never happened.
Or maybe I would meet someone and we’d chat and then discover we were brother and sister. That never happened either. Yet I was convinced into my mid-forties that I had to have siblings. The odds were strongly for it.
I only met my father once. I was nineteen and just married to Sue and thought I should find him. It was quite difficult, but eventually I tracked him down. It was bad for both of us. We were total strangers and felt so awkward with each other that we never met again. By the time I thought of trying again, I had moved hundreds of miles away.
And then one day, I was standing in the kitchen at Denton Fell and my wife Heather said, ‘Oh by the way, your dad’s dead. I forgot to tell you.’ He was sixty-five.
And that was it. Everyone said he never had any more children, but there is still a little part of me that thinks they’re lying to me. It would be so amazing and wonderful.
DON’T BE SUCH A BABY
When you’re a child everything is stories. Stories and the real world are all the same because you question nothing.
Adults were there to make your decisions. Peter Pan was as real as electricity. God was as real as my cat Tigger and, if you were lucky, as you grew up, you sorted out truth from fiction.
As I grew up I realised that most of what I had been told was fiction.
Tigger was real because he scratched me. God, Father Christmas, Alice in Wonderland, my mother telling me how much she loved me, and even my father were all lies, because that’s what fiction is – a polite word for telling lies. The more I looked, the more lies I found and the more I moved into a solitary world of my own.
And being true didn’t always make things right. Even half the stuff that was true was rubbish, designed to put me in a box with all the other boxes, crammed into the darkness of a railway truck on an endless Möbius strip rattling away for eternity. In the end you have to decide on your own truths, but at eleven the lies just leave a vacuum. To a child, the world is a village. The scale of place means as far as you can see, and all the rest is pictures. There are no connections, just the small horizon of a small person.
My bed was an island in this world, my kingdom of escape and dreams, a bed so wide and me so small that when I lay on my back and stretched my arms out I couldn’t touch both sides. When I stood on the floor, the sheets were level with my waist and I had to pull myself up to climb into bed. But instead of feeling lost in this giant’s bed, I felt safe and secure. It was my world alone, no one else’s, a ship in a sea of darkness. I could sink into the feather pillows, stretch out under the fresh cotton sheets and float away into a silent world of dreams.
The house was always quiet, no radio, no music and almost no television. If a cat coughed two streets away, we all knew about it. For one hour each afternoon the doors of the old television cabinet were opened and I sat cross-legged on the lounge floor, alone in the room, and watched the children’s programmes on the small grey screen. Refined ladies from the best schools talked down to jerky marionettes made out of flowerpots and naughty glove puppets to entertain the few of us rich enough and therefore nice enough to own a television.
Boundaries were reinforced from afar. The cotton wool was packed around me. I was safe and sterilised and everything was in balance. In the kitchen my mother and grandmother made dinner while my grandfather drove home from work. Sometimes the door moved and Tigger came in smelling of Kit-e-kat and rubbed around my legs. The television was older than me, the pictures blurred and colourless, but it was a window into another world, a world where order was sometimes not as well balanced as my world, a world I never visited. When Elizabeth II was crowned queen in 1953, my mother took photographs of the TV screen with her Brownie box camera.
My grandfather had bought the TV in 1939 and for the five years of war it had stood locked shut in the corner gathering dust until 1945 when programmes started up again. My grandmother dusted it off, opened the doors and life resumed, almost in mid-sentence, as if nothing had happened.
At six o’clock every night we sat in the dining room and ate dinner. We bowed our heads and thanked God for what we were about to receive. It was a little ritual of my mother’s. The rest of us sat through it staring into our napkins. If we should have been thanking anyone, it should have been Papa who made the money to buy the food and Nana who had cooked it.
After dinner God went back to what he’d been doing before we’d asked him to bless our meat and two veg. Papa drank whisky and dozed
while the women did the washing-up. The clock ticked on the mantelpiece. It chimed on the hour. War had faded into the past and all was well in the world.
I went back up to my room and sat on my wonderful bed. Tigger was already there, curled up, purring softly to himself. He opened his eyes and stared at me, and then went back to sleep while I hid in a book or drew pictures, unless it was Friday, which was bath night – hot water with Dettol, which my grandfather got in gallon cans, filled the water with white clouds.
Whatever was the matter with me – measles (British and German versions), mumps, whooping cough, scarlet fever or the flu (I worked my way through all of them) – my mother made me drink orange juice, glasses and glasses of it to wash the germs out of my body.
Apparently germs were terrified of orange juice.
I enjoyed being ill, not seriously ill, just unwell enough for my grandmother to say I looked poorly and stop my mother sending me to school.
For several years I had the perfect childhood illness. As far as anyone ever discovered, there was nothing at all wrong with me except my temperature was a degree and a half higher than it was supposed to be. It was brilliant. I was taken to all sorts of specialists and had all sorts of tests and was diagnosed with There’s absolutely nothing at all wrong with him except his temperature is one and a half degrees higher than it should be Syndrome.
It was enough to keep me off school for days or even weeks every time I told Nana I didn’t feel well. My mother feebly protested that I was fine, but Nana was in charge and her word was law.