My first days at school were punctuated by fierce contests in the yard, duels almost, complete with spectators, with the one girl who might have been expected to be my friend. In fact, she did become my very best friend, years later, when we went round holding hands painfully fast and giggling together hysterically, but for now she was my sworn enemy. Gail (she even had a funny name, like me) had hair in ringlets, green-hazel eyes and pale, clear, slightly olive skin stretched tight and shiny over her muscles, and she was nearly a year older than I was. She’d have won our war in any case, though, since she was so physically confident, in charge of her body even when she was five. Was she already going to dancing lessons? I don’t remember. In adult life she became a teacher of physical education and modern dance herself, and even in the days of our adolescent intimacy she would sometimes win an argument by twisting my wrist. I was convinced at the start, anyway, that she was simply better at inhabiting her body than I was – not only better at face-pulling, hair-pulling, pinching, scratching and every sort of violence, but wiry and graceful, so that she made me feel like an unstrung puppet.
Once she’d thoroughly trounced me in public, Gail ignored me and held court in her own corner every playtime. She remained something of a loner, however. Other little girls might admire the ringlets and the dresses with smocking on the yokes, and the white socks that stayed up, but she was not allowed out to play in the square after school and everyone knew that she had to sit for hours every night while her grandmother twisted her hair in rags. What really set her apart, though – even more effectively than the vicarage set me apart – was the fact that her mother was divorced.
Given that quite a few kids in Hanmer didn’t know who their father was – or at least knew that he wasn’t the one he was supposed to be – it may seem odd that divorce stood out as a social sin. But its novelty was against it. It was untraditional, new-fangled and (worst of all) above Gail’s mother’s station. Someone like Lady Kenyon (the Kenyons were the other local grandees, a lot richer and more dashing than the Hanmers) might be divorced and that was fittingly aristocratic; for the local garage owner’s daughter to do it was very different. Who did she think she was? People saw her as some new brand of fallen woman.
She was disapproved of in the vicarage, too, but mostly for reasons of envy. There was a history behind this: Gail’s mother and my mother had been friends before the war. They had starred together in the pantomimes my grandfather had put on in the village hall in the days before he had been overtaken by booze and bitterness. My mother, whose name was Valma – another of Grandfather’s romantic choices, although I’ve never known where he got it – and Gail’s mother, whose name was Ivy, had played Prince Charming and Cinderella respectively. They stood there in a surviving photograph, two slim young women with their arms clasped around each other’s waists in the middle of the assembled cast, their big, hopeful, lipsticked smiles looking black and glamorous. Gail’s mother, being divorced, looked pretty much like this still, except that she was even skinnier. She also had a job driving the local taxi. Whereas my mother, thanks to a combination of marriage, poverty and her parents’ crazy demands, lived in (comparative) purdah. This was what made Grandma furious. She said that Ivy looked like Olive Oyl in the Popeye cartoons, or like a stick of liquorice. And that she was common. But it was all sour grapes. Secretly Grandma must have thought divorce a good idea – her notion of marriage, after all, was that a man signed you up to have his wicked way with you and should spend the rest of his life paying through the nose. But her expressed opinion coincided with village wisdom.
Even playground games, in the intervals of thumps and pushes, were all about the changeless order of things. ‘The farmer wants a wife,’ we’d chant, joining hands in a ring – ‘Heigh ho, heigh ho, the farmer wants a wife.’ And when the snotty little boy in the middle had chosen his bride, ‘The wife wants a child … The child wants a dog. Heigh ho, heigh ho’ – which sounded like ‘ee-oh!’, this farmer was related to Old Macdonald – ‘The child wants a dog.’ This doggy extension of the nuclear family seemed to join human arrangements on to the whole wealth of species, top to bottom, patriarch to pup. And then the climax – ‘The dog wants a bone.’ The bone, by tradition a tiny, would be vigorously bounced, thrown into the air and caught on the way down, by the farmer, wife, child and dog, while we all shouted triumphantly, ‘The bone – won’t – stand! Eee oh! Eee oh! The bone – won’t – STAND!’ Being chosen as the bone was a mixed delight, scary and painful as well as thrilling, so I wasn’t sorry that my turn seldom came round. This game, all the games, were a bit like those horrible group therapy exercises where you’re meant to let yourself fall in order to learn to trust the rest, who catch you. Mutual dependence – farmer, wife, child, dog, bone, representing the great chain of being. And you couldn’t be outside of it. Gail and I and the other milder misfits curried favour with the pack in our separate ways.
My great advantage was the churchyard. Mr Downward, the sexton, would turn a blind eye to all but the most boisterous grave-hopping games if I was involved in them. He seemed to regard the churchyard as an extension of the vicarage garden and indeed the wall between them was so tumbledown in one place that the boundary was only a pile of long-fallen bricks in a nettle patch. As the vicarage child I was a licensed trespasser and I shared out my immunity among the ‘dirty’ children I could persuade to play with me after school, or on Saturdays. I was especially popular when there had been a Saturday morning wedding: we all collected confetti, but its dolly-mixture colours didn’t last long in that rainy region, you had to pick up the little pink bells and white bows and silver horseshoes quickly or they dissolved away. We especially treasured the silvered sort and scorned the cheap variety stamped out of waste paper, often mere dots with cryptic fragments of print on them. Once there were drifts of silky paper rose petals on the path, each shaded from cream to crimson, and these we saved up reverently.
Funeral wreaths were even better, although only for looking at until they were thrown on to the rubbish heap in the corner, when if you were lucky you could salvage a carnation or lily or chrysanthemum still blooming – luxury flowers a cut above the sweet williams, wallflowers and Michaelmas daisies of village borders. We marvelled, too, at the glass and porcelain immortelles under their glass globes, and the graves that had shrubs growing on them and shorn grass looked impressively tidy, but it was the bunches of flowers people brought to lay on the graves that gave us our chance really to join in the grown-ups’ mourning games. There’s nothing small children enjoy more than parcelling things out according to some system of just deserts and it was obvious that many of the dead were being short-changed. This a gang of us – mostly girls – set about putting right, redistributing the flowers in jam jars and empty vases filled at the sexton’s pump so that everybody had some. We weren’t strictly egalitarian, however. Certain graves, particularly one with a soulful baby angel in white marble belonging to a child who’d died in the 1930s, always ended up with the best bunches.
It’s tempting, now, looking back, to see in our pious and partial efforts a dim reflection of post-war social policies. Certainly Hanmer churchyard was a pretty good microcosm of inequality. None of those children who puddled around so busily at the pump, and solemnly divided up the daffs and the pinks, had any graves of their own, as it were. Their families must have been buried there, but the graves were unmarked, they had no more property in the churchyard than anywhere else. My family had none there either, of course, but that was because they had recently moved to Hanmer. Nowadays my mother lies there under her stone, alongside my grandparents’ grave. I wonder if any of my generation of upwardly mobile Duckets or Williamses or Briggses have invested in graveyard real estate? Back in the late 1940s their families inhabited anonymous, untended tussocks after they died. I think we kids took it for granted that life after death was a class matter. I know we spent many fruitless hours searching for the entrances to the Hanmer and Kenyon vaults, in the expectation of meeting real ghosts: it was clear to us that the only reason they needed those underground apartments was because they were somehow undead. Or perhaps this was a theory I suggested. Away from the playground, on church territory, I set up as an expert on such spooky topics and managed – on some blissful days – to feel accepted, a member of the child world of Hanmer.
Well,