My Animal Life Page 8
Its own comforts. With a lifetime of duties eased away, time for those: couples walking the narrow pavements in the afternoon, matching heads, bent forwards, gilded by winter sun; ‘days out’, trips to the sea to watch birds and boats. Educating themselves, their souls expanding; instead of being educators, putting out year after year until, like bulbs, they were exhausted. Glasses of warm Ribena, my father’s favourite, brought to him almost hourly by my mother, all day long.
Not just comforts, but luxuries (from the point of view of the class my parents were born to) and new pleasures. For my mother, though my father was ashamed of her for being frank and saying so, money. The mortgage paid off, the pension arriving every month so they actually told us they felt, if not rich, ‘quite well-off’. My mother’s joy in knowing she would never be poor while my father was alive (and her paradoxical unwillingness to accept that she would be poor, barring a miracle — or as it turned out, cancer — once he was dead.) The money was not just the thick silken feel of the notes she took, every time with wonder and gratitude, from the hole in the wall, but the freedom to spend. How she enjoyed her food shopping trips to Holt on her spanking red bike with the basket on the front (Vic still, even after the beginning of the New Life, didn’t like her to take the car on her own, perhaps because it brought back memories of her driving away and not coming back.) What she carried proudly home was often what she called ‘a bit of lux, eh Marg?’ — the antithesis of the plain food of the 1940s and ’50s, a living denial of the meagreness of rations in the house on London Road when she was a child. Anything with spices or something unlikely super-added would appeal to her: ‘Come on, let’s try it!’ She wanted superfluity for its own sake, partly to show that she could and partly because, in the seventies and eighties, it was suddenly on offer. Decades of plenty! Stuffed olives, sugared ham, pickled walnuts, ready-made sauces in bottles that made extravagant promises. ‘Rich’ things: Stollen cake, ‘Buttered brazils’, Christmas puddings in July. ‘It’s a bit different,’ she would say, with eyes brightened by her memory of childhood hunger. No more watering the milk; no more fried eggs cut in two. Though to the end of her life, Mum could never throw food away. The fridge always concealed a secret, that once she had been poor: at the back of shelves, little saucers with shrunken dark remnants of meals that would never be eaten, ten peas cratered like moons, one shrivelled parsnip, a half-inch of liver.
And I wonder, too late, looking back, whether all the newfangled pickled and spiced and sugared concoctions which Mum fell upon delighted, dry-roasted, cook-chilled, marinated — might have had something to do with the cancer that killed her.
But before the final reckoning was drawn up for my parents, there was time for years of ‘lux’, and some real luxury, brought to their feet by the river of age. Thanks to the Travel Club of Upminster (bless you, oh Travel Club of Upminster, now deceased, which flew plane-loads of pensioners off to the sun), Vic and Aileen found they could spend January and February abroad. As my father’s neck grew stiffer and his fingers more knotted, as his pounding pace faltered and shortened into the small-stepping shuffle of Parkinson’s, as my mother’s right shoulder began to ache, they longed for warmth, for the winter in Norfolk is harsh, with winds coming straight from Siberia and not much cover, on their little modern road with its newly planted, slow-growing shrubs. Then through one or other of their new coevals, their new classmates, they heard you could spend the winter in Portugal, land of almond blossom and beach-cafés, for less than the cost of your normal central heating. Moreover, ‘in four or five-star hotels! Including meals!’ They could hardly believe what they were telling us.
Five-star hotels. Did the skinny seventh of a seventh of a seventh ever dream she would get to stay in a luxury hotel with a balcony over the beach, not for a week but for months? As Vic became weaker and his glaucoma worsened, they were whisked not long after Christmas by the local taxi from their bungalow all the way to Gatwick, then into a disabled buggy that carried them painlessly all the way to their plane. Taxis. Airports. So far from the streets they were born in. My mother, who had always been frightened of flying, decided not to be. She was a pragmatist: ‘What’s the point of being frightened? You have to get on with it.’
But sometimes there’s good reason to be frightened. In 1990, Mum must have repressed her fear and her sense that something was wrong, as all her life she had repressed her emotions, tried to placate and please. She was a long way from home, amongst the almond blossom, with the balcony over the strip of beach and the blazing sea, taking the same dazzling walks every day, the same question waiting when they came back to the room. She had only her husband with her, with whom her habit was concealment. When her digestion became more erratic, there were other things she could blame: the hotel kitchens, eating too much or too little, the heat. Constipation, then diarrhoea. ‘I’m fine.’ But then she was home and the evidence was undeniable, brutal, she could feel it, hard, in her abdomen. Now she had to tell. ‘Vic, I’ve found a lump.’
But I don’t have to tell that story, not yet. I don’t have to see it all happen again. In life it came too fast, in this book I can keep her with me, my beloved mother, until her loss can be borne. And I have to remember (because tragedy sits heavier in the scale-pan than everyday contentment) that she told me, more than once, during those last Norfolk years of retirement, ‘I like my life, Marg. I hope you know I like my life. And when it’s just Dad and I, we get on fine.’ When the children were there, Dad was more ‘on edge’, she explained, ‘although you know he loves to see you’.
But she said, ‘I like my life.’ How many people can say as much? And she said something else as well, when asked. ‘After I went back, he never hit me again.’
There were things she could add up as triumphs. She drove the car (they got their first car in 1970, when they were both in their fifties; this in itself was a triumph); passed her test, to Dad’s fury and disbelief, before he did; as his eyes declined, she became for the last few years the only driver. Mum in the driver’s seat! She was a star in her creative writing class, popular for her quick wit, her one-liners, her Church gift for telling jokes. (Rarer in women, this talent bypassed me and went straight to my daughter. My husband says, ‘You’re funny but you can’t tell jokes,’ which is true; I can never remember the punch line, nor indeed the beginning.) She got her degree, her BA, from the Open University, aged sixty-four, and that mattered enormously to her. And the books she read for the politics and society modules filled her with indignant delight, fuelling the growing socialism she hid from her husband.
Why? Because she could not let him think the Gees had won the ideological battle. I remember sitting with her in the sunny kitchen-diner where Mum and the rest of the family always gathered while Vic presided alone in his red velvet Parker-Knoll armchair in ‘the front room’ next door, drinking crimson Ribena, often in a wine-red woollen waistcoat, mostly out of earshot though every so often he would call through, ‘What was that, Aileen?’ Mum was full of excitement about an article she was reading for her Open University course that told her the numbers of barristers, judges, top civil servants and cabinet ministers who came from public schools. ‘Eighty-five per cent,’ she announced to me happily, green eyes flashing across the kitchen table, smiling as if it was tremendous news; reinvigorated by this insight into a bad old world where nothing much had changed since she was small and poor — except that she and Vic and their children and other families like ours, by a miracle, thanks to the war and the welfare state and in particular free education, were no longer at the bottom of the heap, no longer poor, no longer working-class. ‘Can you believe it, eighty-five per cent!’
‘What was that Aileen?’ came through the tiny hall, past the two open, flimsy doors, his voice weaker with the Parkinson’s but still insistent, reluctant to lose its grip.
‘Nothing, Vic.’
There’s a saying, or maybe a song, ‘Lucky if you don’t get old before you get dead.’ Not true of my parents. They were
lucky to get old, if not very old, because age was a destination, a place they could go as of right and be welcomed. Somewhere they could finally arrive. Another class, kinder and more comfortably furnished, offering them at last a respite from climbing the hill, and from pushing their children on. A narrow ledge in the light, before it went out; a small warm plateau.
My animal luck (iv)
What do children need? (parents)
Yes, parents. Since rights, really, are a luxury, a fiction, that’s all biology insists we have: parents. Egg and sperm, conjoined. And to be allowed to be born.
So really I am asking something different — what do children need to have a chance of happiness? What do they need to live their lives?
And ‘parents’ is still the answer. My parents, for all their difficulties, for all the moments they gave us of worry, and pity, despite the pressures and even the fear, were all the parents that I needed. They loved me greatly. I never doubted that. They loved all three children, ‘you kids’ — and always put us first. My father was really a frustrated artist, with the darkroom he loved where he developed large black-and-white photographs, some of them stunningly bold and good, but a time had come after the war when he had to make choices. Photographer or teacher? He chose the steady job, teaching, because he put his family first. And with that choice came some of the deformations of his character from which we suffered.
Children of course need space, food, water, the animal necessities, which most of them get, in the developed world. They need food that isn’t too faddy; so far as possible, they need foods that children have always eaten, because new ideas tend not to last. Skimmed milk, for instance, was the fad of my time; ‘healthy’ margarine of my mother’s. She changed over to Flora because it was better for us. Years later, we discovered it wasn’t. Just as we discovered, a few years ago, that whole milk contains more fat-soluble vitamins, more essential fatty acids, all things children need. My daughter had been drinking semi-skimmed milk, along with her parents, for most of her childhood. Sorry, Rosa.
Breast milk is so obviously best for babies that the success of formula milk is astonishing, after a hundred thousand years in which Homo sapiens raised their young without it. Not so astonishing, of course; formula milk frees women to work outside the home, which means, in the modern world, she can help feed the rest of her family. But breast must be best for the babies, except in those cases where the mother just can’t. (Not fair to blame the babies, though. How many times did I hear in clinics, ‘He won’t latch on properly,’ ‘She doesn’t seem to suck.’) With enough time, and not too much pressure, for the great majority of mothers and babies, it will happen.
What helped me? My mother, coming with my father to the University College Hospital bed on Christmas Eve, the day after Rosa was born, saw me ineptly nuzzling her to my hard dry breasts, swinging her from one side to the other, with exhausted arms, and said, with a delighted smile, ‘Isn’t she doing well?’ to my father. ‘Oh, Margaret, you are doing well.’ Which made me feel I was doing all right, and helped me stumble on till we found our own way, Rosa and I, as we fell in love, which with luck is what parents and babies do. Mum did what a parent should: she encouraged.
What didn’t help me was the hospital. In those days they had charts, which seems unbelievable now, that all mothers had to fill in, with a column for ‘LH’ and a column for ‘RH’, twenty minutes each side, to be ticked five times a day. Insane. Fortunately, there were a lot of mothers, all lying around annoying the nurses, so no one noticed I wasn’t doing it right. Rosa and I took much longer than that, and always did, for the nine months I fed her. If she had a long feed, she was perfectly contented, and at around four months, began to do something glorious afterwards, something which, in retrospect, looked forward to the teenage years when she began to sing: she produced, this little scrap of a thing, unable to talk, of course, or crawl, a sound we called her ‘milk song’, a humming, silvery sound that soared and dipped, tiny and pure, angel music. The sound of perfect happiness. In a few months, the song had gone. But Rosa and I had our animal bliss.
(After writing that paragraph, I worry. Of course I only write it because I did breast-feed, it worked for me, we were both happy. If I had not been able to, as might well have happened, for at one point my nipples became so painful that I had to use, briefly, an anaesthetic spray that is now no longer legal — sorry, Rosa — I would see things differently, would take the practical line about babies surviving perfectly well on formula milk — which of course, they do. Advice, advice. How pleasant to give it. But taking it’s like eating pellets of paper.)
Children do need parents, and an animal life. A chance to climb and run and play out of the house, somewhere where the parents don’t know what they are doing. A chance to take some manageable physical risks, so they can find out for themselves how far they can go. But my father banned ballet, which would hurt my feet, skating and roller-skating (risk of falling over), horse-riding (risk of falling off), tree-climbing, unless in Grandpa Gee’s apple-tree (risk of falling down and breaking neck), Girl Guides (risk of uniforms and fascism), bike-riding (risk of road accidents), pets (risk of bites, scratches, infection), make-up and layer-cuts (risk of sex), walking on my own (risk of sex and murder), sitting in the sun (risk of sunburn), too much reading (risk of myopia), bed after 7.30 (risk of insomnia), television (risk of ideas from America). I was over-protected to a great degree, so my happiest memories of the years between nine and fourteen, the years when children should be starting to explore the world and test out their abilities, are all to do with times when my father had no idea what I was up to.
The risks of blanket prohibition should be plain. If parents know about something, they can mitigate the dangers; if children tell them nothing, they are in the dark. I don’t think it occurred to Dad that we would defy him, although he always told us to think for ourselves. I put this suggestion into practice.
I was allowed to play in people’s houses, whither I would be accompanied, and later collected. In point of fact, few people asked me, probably from a sense that our family was different, in a village where most people had lived for generations — the Toppers, the Muggeridges, the Aylings — and where nearly all children had to go, in the end, to the school where my father was head. In any case, raven-haired, freckled Pat Brewer asked me to her house, which was down past the station, not so modern as ours, part of a little row. Pat had a younger sister, and her mother was a flushed, kindly woman. Pat said we would go and play in the woods. ‘I’m not allowed to,’ I said — and followed her.
So began a magical, terrifying time when we excited and frightened ourselves half to death. Daux Wood had a typical Sussex ecology, a mix of bushes and saplings and big stag-headed oaks, with smaller hawthorns and silver birches and sandy, chalky clearings full of bluebells. We ran across the half-expected hazards: couples having sex in the long grass, vaguely-seen, because we turned our heads away and hurried on, flashes of white and wet red against the darkness which made us giggle and choke as we ran. The real fascination lay in going on further, piercing the thickets of brambles and bracken, pushing on after the paths had nearly all petered out. If you did so — with no idea of how you had come, so we never knew if we’d be able to find it again — you suddenly came to a patch of half-cleared heathland, slightly higher than the rest, hemmed in by forest.
I suppose, though recreating childhood distance is hard, it was a hundred yards square, or maybe less. Whenever we found it, it looked slightly different. Sometimes we seemed to see men, on their own, frightening men in drab brown macks, or men we allowed ourselves to think frightening, and perhaps, in fact, there was only one. The area was protected by a barbed wire fence which hung disconsolately in broken loops. We named it — probably I named it, since I was the child in love with names — the May Islands, after the regular circular bushes of hawthorn (also called ‘may’) round the perimeter, which were yellow-creamy-white in the month of May, and had the sweet, poisonous smell of d
anger. Once I broke some off and took it home to my mother, lying ‘Pat’s Mum sent you flowers from her garden.’ But the petals were already falling like dust, and my mother said, ‘May in the house is unlucky,’ which added to my triumphant sense that the place where they had come from was criminal and sinister. Often we ran away as soon as we glimpsed the line of yellow bushes, unable to stand the tension any more.
But once at least, we went much further. At the centre, almost invisible from the edge, there were some long low buildings with shuttered windows, half-buried in the ground, with flat corrugated roofs, a spooky, deserted, inexplicable place with a notice whose lettering was painted out. Once something moved behind a half-darkened window and we ran, scraping our knees, twisting our ankles, for home. We built stories around it; we became secret agents. We could not stay away, though we could hardly bear to be there. In my mind the strange, sickly beauty of the hawthorn blossoms became confused with a sense of sin, the fact that Pat and I were risking our lives, the man, or men, we had seen or not seen, the hot-faced couples crushing the grass. I was nine, nearly ten, Pat was ten, nearly eleven, we were both on the verge of adolescence, and for both of us, for the whole of one spring, Daux Wood was the best place we had ever been.
In the end I could not resist telling my mother. She looked worried and said, ‘There used to be a prisoner-of-war camp in there. You shouldn’t go there. It’s trespassing.’ She told my father, and that was that. No more visits to the Brewers.
But children need fun, and adventures. They need to find the borderlands of what is forbidden. After Pat had faded, Janet Gray became my friend, and was my ‘home’ best friend for the next ten years, until life sent me to university and her to a nurses’ training college. One of the best things about Janet, apart from her love of running and her malleable nature, her kindness to me and her perfect small nose and her tomboyishness, which matched my own, was that her house was the total opposite of mine, full of people, noisy, easy-going. As usual, with very close relationships, there were psychic similarities, too, about our families.