Mad Joy (3 page)

The Mustoes were intriguing neighbours. Mr Mustoe worked at the manor house, and when his hours dropped with the recession, rather than help around the house, he took to trying to learn the piano. He did this because he thought he might become a pianist and earn lots of money. When he gave up, a few months later, with ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’, he sold the piano and bought an old harp (much to Mrs Mustoe’s disgust, who had hoped to see some benefit from the sale of their family piano). Strings were the thing. He would be all right if he could pluck. It was the black and white keys that were holding him back.

When he gave up the harp after a few weeks, he sold it and bought a trombone. Wind was the thing. He had always wanted to be in the Woodside Brass Band, and it had a social side to it as well, which was good for a man’s soul when his hours were cut. And so as the months and years went by, we heard an entire orchestra of second-hand instruments honk and wheeze and wail through our parlour wall.

Mrs Mustoe seemed a haphazard housewife. She was forever finding things to do in the middle of doing something else. Her washing line was always full, her laundry never done, her children wild and unkempt. She was forever running out of
sugar or bacon or milk and having to borrow, yet her cakes were flawless and her pies mouth-watering. She may have appeared careless as she slapped the ingredients together and into the oven, but they always came out as small masterpieces. She called her children by the wrong names and forgot their ages, but for all that she brought up five happy children who adored her. If George thought he was a dog, that was fine by her. She got him to eat his greens by throwing him scraps. And if Tilly thought she was a boy for the whole of one summer, that was fine too. She gave her shorts to wear, and let it pass. (And it did, soon enough, for Tilly was only trying to get the same privileges as Stinker who stayed out late and smoked, and it didn’t work.) To the outside world Mrs Mustoe looked a clumsy, incompetent, irredeemable mother. To me she was a perfect one.

Gracie, by contrast, had had no practice in motherhood. She had no confidence in the simplest of tasks. She forgot what she was preparing for supper, burned cakes, left the iron on white sheets until it scorched brown marks. Her vegetable growing was a disaster: the beans she trained beautifully up poles turned out to be bindweed; her Brussels sprouts didn’t sprout; her seedlings withered and keeled over. Her pies were too dry, her carrots too soggy, her tea always stewed, and her nooks and crannies laced with fine cobwebs.

She had but one vanity which, when she wasn’t knitting, she pandered to in the evenings by the fire: embroidery. Gracie Burrows was the finest embroiderer in Woodside – if not in Gloucestershire. Every year the church ran a competition for the best embroidered prayer cushion (an unchristian idea to boost prayer cushions) and every year it seemed you could knock Miss Burrows over with a feather, so shocked was she that she had won it yet again. Even though she spent every free moment perfecting ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ in pinks and reds and greens with the most intricate interwoven floral decoration,
even though she knew she would self-destruct if anyone else came first, she would always declare, ‘Me? What,
me
?
Again
? Good Lord above!’

Her needlework was so perfect it belied her character. Each stitch was so exactly placed, each piece of work so wonderfully creative and vibrant that jaws dropped in astonishment. It seemed that, despite the chaos of her life, every atom of her skill came together in that one activity: the ability to stitch colours together flawlessly into an astonishing feast of delight.

I talked in the mirror because that is what girls do. I practised my different selves, each new emerging possibility needing to be tried and practised before it could be approved and
unleashed
on the world at large. Sometimes I talked on the radio, sometimes I was a singer or an actress or else I held up a bar of soap and marvelled at my complexion and sang the praises of Lux. In the mirror I solved difficulties with Mo or Tilly, I gave instructions to a class of children who hung on my every word, I dealt with the attention of unwanted suitors, I explained a new invention to an audience of thousands, I told my own children how to behave, I defended gypsies to Mrs Mustoe, I gave Mrs Emery a piece of my mind, I was interviewed for newspaper articles, I turned down offers for screen and stage. I learnt how to be coy, savage, heroic, wise, coquettish, indignant and brave. And because she always pretended not to notice if she caught me talking to the mirror, I knew Gracie would be loyal for ever.

I thought I had Gracie pretty well worked out: apart from this little vanity with the embroidery, her sole purpose in life was to look after me.

Then one day she surprised me. It was when we were in Tribbit’s the grocer’s and Mrs Buckleigh came in. Mrs Buckleigh hardly ever went into village shops on her own except to buy chocolate or Turkish Delight. On the few occasions I had seen
her, she always expected to be served first, regardless of the other customers, and requested that any animals should be removed. Mr Tribbit always replied politely that he had no animals, almost genuflecting in her presence and rushing to his meagre display of sweets. On more than one occasion I had heard a kitten mewling, to the horror of Mrs Buckleigh and the abject terror of Mr Tribbit. Such was her fury that she only came into Tribbit’s shop under great duress, when the need for something sweet outdid her will to drive into town.

I became as obsessed as everyone else with the mystery, until I discovered that the phantom cat was Gracie. She was standing behind a display of tins, and I caught her miaowing furtively to a can of corned beef.

I studied her intently, and she stopped when she saw me with a curtailed little mewl. We never spoke of it, but from that day on she became considerably more intriguing.

I knew from the gentleman caller that people were still looking for me. I knew they’d been looking for me anyway, because of something bad I had done which I did not wish to remember. But even if I didn’t remember that bad thing, I couldn’t forget the men who were after me, because that was why I was here: if it hadn’t been for them, I would never have lost Nipper and Alice.

Alice Snow had seemed old to me when I met her, although looking back, she can’t have been. Her last child, born late to her, had died some years before, and she suffered from a weak chest. This, with her papery hands, sun-grooved face and lucky charms, was a pretty elderly mixture as far as I was concerned, and I instantly imagined her eating hedgehogs and brewing magic potions.

There was for certain something magical about her, but she was not a woman to be feared. From the moment the boy took me to her, I was enveloped in a thick comforting smell that wrapped me in nostalgia and warmth. I was at once excited by its familiarity – exposed suddenly from under layer upon layer of memory, singled out miraculously from the new onslaught of so many other smells – and calmed by its hypnotic, soporific perfume. It was lavender.

She set about taking care of me straight away. She bathed my ankle in water and told the boy to fetch down some flowers and herbs hanging in a row in the corner of her shadowy home. Then I was lying back, supported by the boy and the powerful smell of lavender that filled the little caravan. I yielded
completely
. Strange but comforting words were being muttered by Alice. I could smell people. My nose reached out to the frenzy of smells from the boy, delicious and disturbing, and to the soft, powdery scents of the woman, but all the while it was being lulled by the lavender into sleepy submission. I had reached a new and uncertain place, but I felt safe.

After a few days, when I had recovered enough, the boy had shown me how to catch a hare. He circled it slowly for some half an hour, getting gradually closer to it. At length the hare sat next to him, mesmerized. It was only then he threw his coat over it and took it home. I never did see what happened before it arrived in our stew, but the men always made sure that our food came to us, and that was the only way to eat animals. If they didn’t come to us, then we weren’t supposed to eat them. A mesmerized hare, a tickled trout, these were the finest foods a man could eat, not shot or chased or hooked or trapped.

The gypsy boy disappeared just days after I arrived. People seemed to come and go in the woodland camp, and another boy, Nipper, became my friend, not at all bothered that I barely spoke a word.

It was a small band of gypsies: just five vehicles and as many piebald horses. Only Alice and a very elderly couple had the well-known wooden ‘vardo’ caravans, the other three were ‘benders’, a bit like cowboy wagons only more intricately made. I never did work out the relationship between all of my gypsy friends, but I soon became part of their close-knit group of Romanis, and learnt to respect the ancestors and the spirits of trees and plants and animals. Nipper taught me how to talk with the trees and to listen to their whispering. From that
day to this I have never taken a branch or a flower without first asking its permission. And some days – even now – when woodcutters are about, I hear trees scream. None of these things seemed odd, for I was at an age when thinking and speaking animals and plants seemed perfectly natural. And it soon became blindingly obvious that no gypsy had set the trap which tore into my leg. They would never catch an animal by such barbarous means.

We always ate in daylight, around a fire, so that no dark spirits could attack the food. This way we had cleaned
everything
up by nightfall, and could go to bed with the pots all neatly stacked. And they
were
clean too. Alice washed everything in separate bowls. A bowl for men’s clothes, a bowl for women’s clothes, a bowl for pots. Nipper and I always helped, but once a month Alice would not cook for a week and we did it all. This was because once a month she was full of magical forces which might affect the food.

Each season we moved on, but to a spot they already knew from previous years. The year was a journey, Nipper said, and we must move on. It was bitterly cold in winter, and must have been hard for Alice and the elders, but for me it was an enchanting life. I remember the summer nights best of all, because they seemed to draw out the stars, and Nipper and I would lie out all night under a blanket, just listening and gazing and journeying in our imaginations until we drifted off to sleep.

One night, in the spring before that summer, we had been joined by two other caravans. They stayed for three days and brought with them some children and a chovihano, their gypsy healer. One of the men must have gone to seek him out, for Alice was very ill. Her cough had become intense and there was often blood in what she spat out.

The chovihano did all sorts of chanting and moving, and people sat round in a circle chatting and laughing. One of the
children, a boy of about my age, came over and showed me a whistle, and began to play it for me. Nipper immediately stomped off to the vardo and brought out his grandfather’s fiddle, which he proceeded to play quite badly. Then he stood up and drew me away behind a bender, stuck his hand in his pockets, and said very solemnly:

‘You’re
my
woman.’

It seemed a most natural outcome, so I smiled. ‘Okay, then.’ Marriage seemed too far off to worry about, but Nipper was a determined boy.

When we returned to the circle, the boy with the whistle had slunk off and joined two other children pulling funny faces at a fat worm which the chovihano was holding up. We watched as the healer transferred Alice’s sickness to the worm, and then hung it on a bush.

The following morning, the worm was dead, and the healer and his family departed.

Alice did seem to get a lot better that summer, but when the autumn came, she grew suddenly very ill, and one of the men went off in search of the healer. As the days passed and no one came, Nipper and I found a worm and did our own healing session. We tried to imagine the worm as Alice’s illness, and we hung it on a bush like the healer had done. But Alice kept on coughing.

One morning she went out and came back with a basket so full of apples she was staggering. It was a good sign, she said. An angry man had caught her taking apples, and another kind man had come and said she could take as many as she liked, because they were his apples. He was the kindest non-Romani she had ever met, and even offered to get a doctor to see about her cough. She refused this, of course, because all that sort of medicine was misguided, but she remained deeply respectful of the man, despite the suspicions of the other gypsies.

It must have been early that autumn then, a month or so
before Apple Day, that the police came. Nipper and I were out collecting nuts when we heard a commotion in the trees behind. Then I saw a row of silver buttons and a dark helmet, and it was coming towards us.

They were probably coming to tell the camp to move on, to tell us we were on private land. Or perhaps they had a particular gypsy in mind they were going to haul in for thieving. Nipper would have seen all this before. But I hadn’t. As far as I was concerned, these men in blue were coming for me.

I knew they would be looking for me one day. I simply hoped they had lost interest by now. It seemed so long ago since I had run into the woods, and we had moved on several times since then. But I felt certain, as I saw the uniform glinting through the leaves, heard the pant of a heavy dark-clad man, that they had come for me.

I dropped the nuts I had collected in my skirt. ‘Run!’

And we both ran. But Nipper must’ve forgotten all about our betrothal, for he ran in a different direction to me, back to his family in the vardo.

All this I could remember, but my memory stopped at the far side of the woods. I still couldn’t let myself see beyond it.

Christmas came and went and I felt settled and safe with Gracie Burrows. In the New Year we sang a wassail at school. I went home practising it:

Gracie smiled and joined in.

‘It’s different,’ I said, without thinking.

‘Different to what?’

I wasn’t entirely sure. Somewhere at the edge of my
memory
, a little fragment of the past had gone floating by.

‘We used to … it was …’ It was like waking from a dream. I tried to grasp at it, but no sooner had I touched its tail than it slithered away downstream. I was left with an atmosphere, a feeling, and even that I couldn’t hold.

Of course you could say I didn’t really want to remember, and this was largely true. But sometimes curiosity was greater than my fear, and I just wanted to know a thing myself, like a
child kicking over a heavy stone with the tip of a shoe and then jumping backwards.

Gracie often told me stories about her own childhood, which sounded wonderful. Every birthday her mother made her an elaborate cake, and everyone would come to see it, and then all her friends would have a piece. No one made cakes like Gracie’s mum. They were covered with white icing and sometimes made in the shape of an animal or a log. One year there were squirrels on it, and another year little jelly sweets. Every year her name was written in coloured icing and there would be miniature candles to blow out. What’s more, her parents always gave her a present. Other children were lucky if they got sixpence or an apple, but Gracie’s parents always bought her the best present they could afford.

I had never had a birthday cake.

‘We’ll have to make you one for your next birthday,’ Gracie said. ‘When is it?’

I couldn’t remember ever having had a birthday.

‘What time of year is it?’

I couldn’t remember. The only happy time I could remember for certain was sitting in a lavender bush.

‘There was lavender,’ I said, hopefully.

‘July or August, then. Let’s say late July. I shall make you a cake on 25th July! How about that?’

‘Is it soon?’

‘No. How about we make a practice one now?’

And so Gracie made me a cake with a candle in it for me to blow out. After a lot of clattering about in the kitchen, hours of consulting the cookbook, and flour flying in all directions, the various ingredients turned into a Victoria sponge. She squirted some icing sugar on the top from the corner of a bag and she told me it said ‘HAPPY DAY’.

I was so proud of it I asked if Mo could come round and have some too. Mo said, ‘Yum yum! Who’s HARRY DAG?’ and
Gracie chewed her lip and said it was only a quick thing she’d rustled up on the spur of the moment.

I blew the candle out and Gracie lit it again so that I could have another go, and then so that Mo could have a go too. Gracie was all pink-faced and pleased. I didn’t say thank you because I had no manners, but I was bursting with joy and she could see from my face how she’d made me feel.

The helpful thing about having lived with gypsies was that it was a good substitute for the past, for everything that had come before Gracie. But I knew there was more, I knew there was a past behind that one, and that Gracie wanted to bury it, and I wanted to bury it, but that it was still there. I knew also that it threatened Gracie in some way, and that therefore it threatened us. We both had pasts we needed to forget: my own, because I couldn’t risk losing her, and hers because she longed to have lived it so differently, and her recognition of what she’d lost hung over her like a bereavement. But Gracie, at least, had found solace. I blew in with an easterly September wind and defied fate.

For me it was different.

One night, a year or so after I’d arrived, I wet the bed and woke up suddenly, screaming, ‘Come back … come back! Please, please don’t leave me! Please …’

‘Who’s left you?’

‘He’s not looking back! … Please!’

‘Hush now! You’ve had a bad dream, tiz all. It’s just a bad dream.’ And I had believed her – or let her think I believed her. What was truth and what was untruth became a blur. All I can say for certain, looking back, is that I was happy to think it had all been a bad dream. I wanted her to be right, and since
grown-ups
usually were, what harm could I possibly be doing in colluding with her?

For many years I had a recurring dream that I was seriously wounded in some way. I would wake up, terrorized, and say things like, ‘I’ve been hurt! I’ve been badly hurt!’ I would’ve been shot by a mad woman or bitten by a tiger or crushed by a lorry. But really, on reflection, it was what I said that was significant.