The birth of Ann, as the baby was called in the family, brought a measure of happiness to us. We were glad that Mother was glad. Nor was this particularly unselfish; it gave Father more peace, and it gave Nelson and me the chance to play with less supervision. I believe we really loved Ann, almost as much as Mother demanded we should. True, my brother did drop her once while carrying her round the garden, but I recall the sincerity of his penitence after, which had nothing to do with Mother’s tears or Father’s chastisement!
Mother’s success with Ann went to her head – or womb, rather. Two years later she bore another little girl, but this baby was still-born.
I recall poignantly the news of its arrival. One of the maids was keeping Nelson and me amused; she kept running out of the room and coming back, telling us, ‘You’ll hear it cry presently! It’s coming now!’ I remember leaving our toys and going to kneel on the wooden window seat; I stared through the panels of yellow semi-frosted glass that flanked our windows and wondered what it felt like to be a child that as yet was nowhere – listening eagerly for its cry and hearing instead a cuckoo, asking myself if there was a connection between mysterious bird and mysterious baby. Then Father came and told us – he took our hands – that the baby was dead and Mummy was very sad.
‘It would have been a little sister for you,’ he said. ‘But God took her away again at the last moment.’
After that we were more devoted than ever to Ann. Neither Nelson nor I would have put it past God to take her too.
Our little town boasted one superior kindergarten, run by a Miss Matilda Unwin, and to this I was sent at the age of five. Nelson was almost ready to leave and go on to grammer school.
Kindergarten was satisfactory enough. We bullied and were bullied, but nothing very terrible. I was immediately attracted to several of the girls and, although most of this attraction was entirely undeclared, it was generally reciprocated in some degree, which contributed considerably to the pleasures of school, since seats were scarce in the youngest form and we had to sit two at a desk. So I was able to cuddle against Sheila, in her lovely golden-brown cord dress, which reminded me of wallflowers. It had a white lace collar, and white socks went with it. Her legs were pretty, but I believe I loved her only on the days when she wore that fetching little dress.
I was continuously fond of Sonia, who had attractively short-cropped fair hair. She was a tough and adventurous little girl and we used to play together out of school. At one time we planned to marry, but then she was sick in class, right – splash! – into her desk, and I turned my affections elsewhere.
Even in those days, just like adults, we thought of little but sex, although it took diffuse and childish forms. We invented a lovely game to play in the playground: Farmers and Cows, it was called.
With our heel, we scarped outlines for sheds in the playground gravel. And with sure instinct the boys were the cows and the girls were farmers or dairymaids, coming to milk the cows. This meant they had to give a really good squeeze and feel of our tiny genitals. It was the best game we ever invented!
Innocent fool that I was, I ran home and told my mother about it. She flew into a terrible fright, trotting round the room and seizing up Ann before her to cuddle – whether to protect the child or herself, I don’t know. I was forbidden to play Farmers and Cows again.
But the old serpent of sexuality was rampant on the playground now. The girls naturally wished to know more about the strange udders of their cows. Behind Miss Unwin’s house, beside the water-butt, by the tatty privet hedge, I unbuttoned my fly-buttons and showed my rosy little wee-wee to Sheila and Hilda.
They were interested but sceptical. Hilda, darling girl, reached out and touched it and said it was nice. Sheila was more cautious. Already our grown-up selves were foreshadowed there.
The next picture I have is of a slight advance. The water-butt again, scene of happiness and depravity. Sheila and Hilda there again, and a smaller girl, name forgotten. Again I open my trousers and exhibit. Again they stare, with none of the maidenly modesty that will afflict them in a very few years.
Hilda and the little girl look very closely, getting in each other’s way. Sheila stands back, half-leaning against the wall.
‘It’s nice,’ says the small girl. She makes no attempt to touch. ‘You can come and play in my garden after school, if you like.’
She lifts up her dress and takes her knickers down; Hilda follows suit. Both show me what they have, and the little girl giggles a lot and flaps her skirt up and down. I concentrate on Hilda’s thing. It looks pretty and chubby. Her stomach and thighs are pleasant to me.
I say to Sheila, ‘Let me see yours too.’
‘Some other time,’ she says, lolling from side to side, smiling into the distance, confident possibly that I would enjoy what she kept concealed. As far as I recall, she never did show me.
After school Hilda and I decided that we would go into the little girl’s garden and play, the assumption being that we could then have a better look at each other. But the little girl was met at the school gates by a nanny and led away firmly by the hand, while we were shoved away.
Time went by, the endless congealed time of children and lunatics. Basically, cricket and Red Indians interested me more than female wee-wees. They seemed to possess more potential in those days.
The slump was on. Father went about with a long face, predicting that the bank would have to close. ‘Money has dried up,’ he said. Money has dried up – a marvellous phrase! I pictured it golden, damp, congealed, like beaches as the tide leaves them.
We were seeing something of beaches at this time. Taking advantage of a customer’s bankruptcy, my father bought from him a small bungalow on the North Norfolk coast. We used to drive there for summer weekends – a long boring drive that grew interesting only when we got through Spalding and King’s Lynn and could smell the sea. The bungalow was on the dunes just outside Hunstanton. The tide went out for miles, leaving all that congealed money, and I never got over the wonder of it.
The sea air was supposed to ‘do me good’. I suffered much from bilious attacks at the time, greatly to the bafflement of our family doctor and my parents. Nelson called me a dirty beast, but I was always scrupulous about never being sick anywhere but in the right place.
It is clear enough to me now what ailed me. I was emotionally upset by my mother.
She was no disciplinarian. Father would take a stick to Nelson and me when we were naughty; it was a painful punishment that left no after-effects – only Father’s habit of insisting I shook hands with him directly afterwards, as if to absolve himself from guilt, faintly annoyed me. But Mother’s way of inducing goodness into us was altogether more deadly. She threatened that she would not love us any more, and that she would run away from home, taking Ann with her.
Perhaps such threats would mean nothing to an insensitive child, if there is such a thing. To me, who had experienced separation from my mother at birth, they loomed enormous. I was frequently sick because that would keep Mother at home; she pampered me marvellously when I was ill in bed. (At the time, of course, I had no inkling of my own thought processes.)
My mother was capable of actually carrying out her threats. On one occasion, when Nelson and I had done something of which she did not approve, she put Ann into her coat, hat, and leggings, stuffed her in the push-chair, and was off. We had the terrible mortification of seeing her from our bedroom windows, heading for the market place, Ann howling with apprehension as she went. If my memory serves, this was the last occasion on which I saw Nelson cry. We cuddled together against the bed and wept, ‘She’ll never come back! We must try to be better boys!’
No doubt Mother’s treatment of us had much to do with her mysterious nerves, which the seaside was expected to alleviate. Sometimes, Grandfather and Grandmother came down with us for the day, to look after the children while Mother went for one of her walks along the beach. In covert misery I used to watch her