My Animal Life Read online

  When my mother was dying in hospital (because, as happens so often, death suddenly bore down before we could get her out) and the morphine was carrying her a little away from herself, she slipped back into the past, and talked about the churchyard opposite the house where she was born: ‘There are women in long white dresses walking about between the graves,’ she told me as I sat by her bedside. One sentence she repeated, holding my hand: ‘There’s someone waiting for me at home who is good as gold, good as gold.’ This was her mother May, née May Davis, source of my mother’s occasional feyness, genetic wellspring, I imagine, of my own writing, lover of rhymes, daughter of the nearest thing in my own family to a writer.

  I only remember my mother’s mother as a very old lady. Grandma Church was in her eighties when she died, in what must have been 1952, because I was only four and recall for some reason the gaiters and brown checked coat I wore on the day of her death, alas the same day as the death of one of the two spinster Gardiner sisters who lived next door, Miss Lou and Miss Grace. So that I, hopping in from the garden into the kitchen where my mother was crying, still chanting my repeated refrain of the day, ‘Poor Grandma, poor Miss Gardiner,’ was rounded on with natural asperity by my mother, who said, ‘Never mind Miss Gardiner, how about Grandma?’ — and my father made everything worse by telling her off for being unfair. The guilt of having caused my mother double pain still gives me a little stab of unhappiness.

  Grandma Church, to me, was an old lady, tall and big for an old lady, who made puzzling jokes and had long ashen and brindled hair wound around her head in a thin coiled sausage, and dark brown tortoise-shell spectacles. She had a fur coat with shiny worn edges that probably came from her employer Mrs Coe, but she still had a smiley mouth, not like the thin lips that most old people had, a feature I always admired in my mother, whose mouth never grew mean or old. Grandma Church would bend over and talk to me, so I liked her even if I never quite understood her, but then children never quite understand grownups, so this seemed nothing remarkable. I remember, one time when Grandma and Grandpa were staying with us at Bromsgrove, a conversation one day on the sunny landing about a hair, which Grandma showed me, and stroked across the palm of my hand (was it growing on her face? Perhaps.) When I reported this to my parents I recall my father looking serious, and saying something to my mother, who said, ‘Oh she’s all right, Vic, never mind.’ This was explained much later when Mum told me that her mother had been ‘senile’ in her last few years but that Grandpa hadn’t helped by ‘taking over everything at home so she felt that she couldn’t do anything at all’.

  But what little my Mum also told me made it clear that her mother could have done anything if she had not been born poor. For a start, in the wedding photograph for her marriage to Bill Church, May Davis is strikingly beautiful, by far the best-looking of all the sisters and aunts in attendance, with big dreamy heavy-lidded eyes, full lips, only half-smiling, a small tip-tilted nose and pale blonde hair. Beside her Bill looks swarthy and sensual and Italianate or Jewish, and a little small. The secret of their marriage may have been that she was five years older than him, and thus almost on the shelf. Well, he gave her seven children, and to look at him, sex and laughs. It was May who read to my mother, and made her love books. And this is the puzzle about the Davis side of the family: where did the education come from? Was there money, once, that was lost? Did it trickle away between all those sevenths of sevenths?

  Because May’s mother Martha Davis née Leeson, my great-grandma, was a poet of sorts, a strange, sharp-looking woman with a long curving crest of nose, thin witty lips and eyes set so wide they were practically looking in different directions. Fleshy in her middle years, corseted in black with a strict high neck and lace cap, in old age she attained a kind of hawk-like beauty — there is a faded photograph of her in glory, slender once more, mounted straight-backed and imperious on a tall machine which, Aunty Eve assured me, was ‘the first tricycle in Northampton’. Did the money to acquire this style and dash come partly from writing?

  Hat competition at the wedding of my maternal grandparents, Bill and May Church

  Martha Leeson wrote verses for birthday and Christmas cards, in bulk, and took them to Market Harborough station in a suitcase, where she met a man who paid her, very little I imagine, and took them away. Is rhyme a genetic trick, an echo-receptive angle of the genome, I wonder? My mother could rhyme as easily as breathing, firing off her poems to women’s magazines and winning ten shillings or the ‘star letter spot’ with regularity, and I find it hard not to rhyme when I write prose, and my daughter finds it natural to rap.

  Grandma Church’s stubbornness changed my mother’s whole life for the better. Mum was born with a turned-in foot, and May her mother was told by the doctor that she would have to have a caliper; nothing could be done; little Aileen, her seventh child, would always walk with a limp. But May refused to accept it. Instead she carried my mother to and from the nearest hospital every week for treatment, ‘three or four miles’, as mum told me, and another three or four back. It worked; my mother later became a sprinter, hurdler and hockey-player, and I still have the small blackened silver cup that pronounces her Wolverton Grammar School Sports Day’s ‘victrix ludorum’.

  Great-grandma Martha Davis née Leeson, writer of birthday-card verses

  In other ways Grandma Church had grown tired by the time my mother was born, after all those children, with no money and a husband who drank. That’s probably why she didn’t teach my mother how to sew, or make clothes, because Mum’s elder sisters both had these skills. It must also be why, as my mother told me still with some sadness a lifetime later, ‘Mum never came to any of my school events,’ so Aileen had to shine on sports days unregarded (but she always came to everything that I did, by way of compensation; every play, every parents’ evening, every Sports Day, there Mum would be, with a camera, smiling and cheering me on).

  The battle between my parents — who nevertheless loved each other, and all of us — was fought through their families, as marital battles so often are. Gees were martial, while Churches appeased and then secretly deceived. My father was frightening and sometimes aggressive and my mother wasn’t, and ‘a man should lead’, as he asserted, so when conflict was overt, he would always carry the day. When we made our regular visits ‘home’ to Bucks, the division of time was never just. We always stayed at Wolverton, with Pa and Ma, and only walked over the fields to my mother’s home, Stony Stratford, for occasional meals. There my father felt off his ground, and uneasy, particularly, as I think now, after Grandma Church died, when there was just Grandpa Church to deal with, the man who my mother called ‘Dad’, the only plausible other man and authority figure in her life. Though Bill, shambling and laughing in his cardigan and slippers, with mould in his bread-bin and his tribe of seven children dispersed to the four winds, was far from being an authority figure. But he could annoy my father terribly, by making jokes and being funny, and once, I remember, just by saying, ‘Relax, Vic, make yourself at home,’ then going into the kitchen to prepare whatever we were eating, ham and pickled onions, probably, on thick plates, and by the time he returned my father had worked himself into a rage, fulminating to my mother, ‘I AM relaxed, I AM at home, what does he mean?’

  Of course my mother minded all this very much. And then, Vic criticised her brothers and sisters, when we were back in our own home and away from the battleground of Wolverton v. Stony Stratford. Eve and Albert were too rich and ‘too selfish to have children’ (which was far from being the case. I only understood how much sadness had been concealed when I was eighteen, and in a moment of revelation, Eve showed me, one day, the life-size blonde figure of a child, a giant doll over four feet tall, which she kept sitting on the sofa, when no one was there. She had called her Annabel. Was that selfish?) Arthur and Frances, also childless and therefore fond of their nieces and nephews, annoyed Dad by generously buying me, in the face of his protests, from Woolworths, the flat gold and silver cardboard
crowns I craved, to celebrate the Coronation in 1953; I still remember the row between the grownups afterwards in the hot sunlight on Bromsgrove High Street, the horror of it, my gift poisoned with guilt, wishing I had not asked for it … Uncle Arthur and Aunty Frances never came to stay again.

  As I remember these quarrels I find myself growing annoyed with my father, for all the trouble he caused, for the gnawing anxiety under my ribs (it’s there now) that I always had to feel, as a child, when we were going to family, ‘to see people’, or indeed going out at all, because visiting a café for a cup of tea or coffee was a minefield with my father — the staff might ignore or insult him, or other customers might sit too close, for he had an exaggerated sense of personal space, which must not be invaded or even passed through by others. This extended to houses and gardens (Vic needed to be detached, but could not afford it), and even to roads, whether semi-private (on the little modern estate where they died in a thin-walled, thin-skinned modern bungalow, he objected to his neighbours’ children riding their bikes down the shared access road which passed his front window) or public (he drove very fast and increasingly badly, and saw any overtaking as a challenge, so it was normal to be roaring down the flat Norfolk roads with Dad in a desperate race for pre-eminence, two abreast, his passengers fearing death. The armour-plated Landrover they bought in their fifties overturned at least twice and frequently disappeared for repairs after crashes Dad never admitted to.)

  Dad was a self-deluder, as all of us are, only more so. Not always, and not at the end, when he faced the impossible thing he had always rejected and fled, his death, with clear eyes, and courage. But the high moral code he had been force-fed sometimes made him absurd: ‘I have never told a lie,’ he would say, quite frequently, when accusing one or other of us of untruth (thus telling a lie, of course). When my brother and I got older, we questioned him: ‘You must have done, Dad.’ ‘No, never.’ Shaking his head at us and himself to make it true. He was never wrong, either; evidence was nothing to him, he would simply refuse to consider it; some of the worst father-son arguments of my elder brother’s teenage years were about facts. For example, about the time of a radio programme: John would leave the room and reappear red-faced and triumphant pointing to the item in the Radio Times, but my father, outraged, would shout, ‘Leave it!’ and refuse to look.

  As Gees go, Vic was acknowledged, even by other Gees, to be an extreme example. My brothers, in my memory, though they might say different, admired him more as their distance from home lengthened. Male Gees have testosterone in buckets, or maybe that should be spades: buckets AND spades. It is hard for a lot of male Gees to fit into a tiny house, especially when one or more of them is adolescent.

  But it was my father, really, who never grew up, not his sons. Part of Dad remained an inconsolable child, needing to be loved and praised more than anyone I have ever known, horribly easily thrown off kilter emotionally, for all his jut-jawed determination. He imagined the world wanted to fight with him, to put him down. He fought back relentlessly, but it cost him. He had to rehearse whatever had happened with my mother, over and over, until she was exhausted. He could never let anything drop until she had acknowledged him to be entirely in the right. Of course: with such a fragile ego, how could he afford to be wrong? How bored she must have been, how tired, and her ‘Yes Vic’s would become thinner and thinner, her face blank, her voice hoarsened by suppressed irritation and disbelief.

  (But then, wives should tell their husbands the truth at least some of the time. If only she could have been braver at the beginning, when all habits are made. Wives have to let their husbands know the reality of how they are behaving in the world, as husbands should wives, since that is part of the compact of marriage: I will help you understand how others see you. My mother got too tired and too frightened to keep that part of the bargain.)

  Since one of my aims in this book is to try to find a way to forgiveness, of others as well as myself, I have to ask why Vic was ill-at-ease enough to make others around him so uneasy. Never at home enough unless literally in his own home, and even then, in old age he started to keep the curtains half-closed so people couldn’t look in. Partly, once again, I would put this down to fundamental differences in the geography of Gees and Churches. The Churches managed to live, nine-strong, in a house with barely half a dozen rooms, in a row where a common path ran all along the back to link the whole terrace. Their back step down to the path was less than ten feet away from the next back step where their neighbours sat, and the long strips of garden were not divided by fences. It all spoke of easy communal and social life, contact with the outside world, relatively low expectations. The Gees, by contrast, five-strong, lived in an end-terrace house twice as big. Their garden — end-terrace houses always had bigger gardens, which partly accounted for their status — was firmly enclosed by a tall red-brick wall with a pointed rooflet of blue slate. No one called at the front, and to get to the back door from the criss-cross of ‘back ways’, like northern back ways, you had to mount a big step and press a noisy metal latch to open the gate, then traverse the blue-grey path through the garden. Pa’s home was his castle; so, later, to our detriment, was Vic’s.

  And then there was the year Vic was born, that ominous 1914. He was six months old when the archduke’s nephew was assassinated at Sarajevo, starting the great war that fed the soil of Europe with the blood and bones of frightened young male humans. Grandma Gee was already pregnant again, with Lloyd, too soon for my father, who was always jealous of his younger brother, born before my father was one, taking Ma’s love and attention. Meanwhile Grandma Gee’s own two beloved brothers, Joe and William (known as ‘Laddie’), the only boys on the Brown side of the family, had gone off as private soldiers with the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry. And thus began the tragedy whose aftermath Grandma whispered to me one morning, tucked up in her bed in the downstairs front room, for by then she was too frail to go upstairs, and I remember it soft and warm, a nest of talc and lace and specialness (for she was telling me secrets) and safety; safe because I didn’t really understand what she said. How can you understand death before anyone close enough to be painfully missed has died? How was I to know why the beautiful photo of frail soft Grandma as a young married woman, centre of a triptych of sisters, showed her in elaborate black silk, with a huge black feathered hat, and behind the girls their mother, Mrs Brown, toothless and grim with a great dark mourning plume bursting out of her head like black smoke?

  One died in Salonika, one in France. Grandma told me how she and her sister Kit had ‘gone to look for the graves of your great-uncles —’. ‘Which uncles?’ ‘You never knew them, pet.’ She and Kit ‘had never been abroad before, we didn’t speak any French, but we were determined to find them.’ What she told me was comedy: not speaking any French, she and Kit had ‘needed to go to the lav’, ‘So we had to get down and squat, to show them! Squattay Voo!’ I loved this story, which gave me a completely different idea of my invalid grandma, as an intrepid explorer (and indeed that was part of the truth that time had obscured, for my own mother told me that Ma, when young, used to take her sons on the train up to London, which made Vic’s inability to let Mum go out on her own seem especially puzzling).

  Left to right, front: Kit, Lottie (my paternal grandma) and Ede, after the death of both their brothers, with Great-grandma Brown behind

  It isn’t, though, when I think. His need for her was limitless. Behind Ma’s story were the deaths of the only men in her family, both of them killed before Dad was three (and my father once told me, with tears in his eyes, that Laddie said to Ma he was ‘going off to fight for me’, for the baby who was born just before the war started; Laddie fought, and died; did the legend of his sacrifice leave Dad feeling guilty?). How much grief and mourning was there in my father’s early years, how much terror between the deaths of the first young uncle and the second? How did Ma, in her sorrow, manage to look after her sensitive son, ‘Grandma Gee’s Fairy?’

  Maybe tha
t was why she wanted him to be a girl: so he wouldn’t have to go off and be killed, like her brothers.

  It all left my father with a horror of death and funerals. Children must be protected from death: ‘Never look back’ was his watchword; we didn’t attend our grandparents’ funerals, nor the uncles’ and aunts’. I realise now that the first family funeral I ever attended was my own father’s. By then I was in my forties. Being dead, Dad couldn’t stop me going. He would never consider insuring his life, refused to take anything from the house when his parents died except one photograph of Aunt Ede ‘for Margaret’, and was so averse to contemplating his own death that his pension stopped with him, leaving my mother, in the end, with no income. There had been a lifetime of relative comfort for which she always thanked him, and made us be thankful too, saying, ‘Your dad is a good provider,’ because she remembered, from childhood, real poverty, and loved, in the 1980s, getting cash from the wall. But because of Dad’s phobia about death, in 1992 she was left with almost nothing.