Bad Blood (14 page)

So in my memories of that first council-house year, which must have been two years in truth – the year I turned nine and Grandpa died, and the year I turned ten, which was the same year I stopped sleeping and passed the eleven-plus – I'm on the outside looking in, through glass that's frosted by my breath (I'm out of breath, I've run home by some slushy short cut). The view is wintry, and smeared over with tears and phlegm, but it's not unpleasurable although it is unhappy. That whole period seems to have a frosty film over it, but that is its character, something that belongs quintessentially for me to the early 1950s.

My cold comfort has joined a world of
then
, a time with a new texture to it – like the brittle plastic of those new raincoats that closed with stiff press-studs, and that cracked and turned yellow; or like the opaque greaseproof-paper bags in which Smith's Crisps reappeared once the relaxation of wartime rationing allowed. I couldn't at first understand my mother's delight in these crumpled fossils with chewy grey bits (they must have used frost-bitten potatoes back in the beginning as a concession to austerity) although I saw the point of the blue twist of salt from the first moment: it was a matter of luxury, having portable food you could play with. Crisps were for eating between meals
and spoiling your appetite, and you could blow up the packet when it was empty and burst it with a bang. But the most important and telling of these new, ephemeral 1950s things were the light bulbs, which came both see-through and pearl. Every council house had one central overhead light in the living-room. Some people enshrined it in a mottled glass bowl hanging by chains and had standard lamps in the corners as well. Once the power was switched on, dateless darkness was in retreat, change was at hand.

Even outside the slow spring came, and with it coltsfoot, snowdrops, primroses, cowslips and ragged wild daffodils. We composed ‘Nature Notes' about them in school for Miss Daisy – those of us who could write at all – with new biros that made even more blots than the old dip-pens. And we presented her with gallons of frogspawn which duly turned into tadpoles, which ate each other until there were just a few fat cannibal monsters left, all black belly and no sign of legs, who got poured down the sink. This perverse development wasn't recorded in ‘Nature Notes', which after all were meant to reflect the universal order of things, not what actually happened at school. Outside school, tadpoles turned into frogs with no trouble, as we well knew, for the countryside was so wet we more or less shared their element.

Everywhere round Hanmer there were streams and field drains and ditches gurgling away, and water stood around in puddles, ponds, pits and meres. This nature wasn't as ‘natural' as it was supposed to be either, however. Hanmer was a most picturesque place from a certain distance, but close up its substance was heavy and strange. In the spring the ground sucked at your feet; with every step you could savour the pull of the mud. This was what I liked so much about tramping around the fields, this stubborn resistance in every sticky clod: you
could hypnotise yourself with it, just putting one foot in front of another was so absorbing. This way you could lose yourself until you slowed to a dazed standstill and seemed a very passable village idiot, content to sit for hours in a thicket unseen, waiting for nothing in particular to happen. Quite a few people were doing this at the time around Hanmer, including solitary patients in blue hospital uniforms from a wartime camp at Penley a few miles away, mostly Polish and suffering from TB. Juvenile Hanmer lore had it that they were Germans and when a gang of us got together we'd bravely jeer at them for losing the war. They took no notice, just wandered on, staring sadly into space. Then there were the tramps left over from pre-war days and two or three full-grown village idiots, who talked to hedges and gates, and had trousers tied up with string.

Try as I might to lose myself in the landscape, however, I was still only an apprentice misfit and self-conscious in the part. Other kids who hung about at all hours turned out to have errands – big brothers or sisters to fetch, a message to carry to someone working down the fields, or to Dad in the pub. You loiter with a lot more conviction if you've even the shadow of a purpose to neglect and that I lacked. And the truth was that often no amount of trudging would get me to the state of dreamy abstraction I craved. Then I was simply lonely. I wanted friends desperately and, as it happened, the move to The Arowry held out hope, for it gave me a second chance with two girls from school who'd had nothing to do with me when I'd lived in the vicarage – Janet Yates and Valerie Edge, who were now neighbours. Valerie, brown, rosy, curly-haired and tall for eight, lived at the first council house to be finished, which already had a proper garden with dahlias in the borders. Janet – slighter like me, but unlike me, neat and tidy – came from a smallholding down the lane, with a bush of pungent,
grey ‘Old Man' at the gate and a path made of red-and-blue bricks. Gates and gardens figured large in our friendship because we spent at lot of our time together leaning or swinging on one or other of our gates. With Valerie and Janet you didn't wander off, not because they weren't allowed to, exactly, but because they were too grown-up, they saw no point in it.

They were busy being big girls, practising for real life, which meant not so much mothering dolls or playing house or dressing up (although we must have done all these things), as whispering in a huddle, sharing secrets, giggling behind our hands and linking arms around each other's waists. It was like a dance, a dance of belonging with no private space in it, all inside-out intimacy, and I found it euphoric, intoxicating. And then we would quarrel, for the magic number three is a formula for dissension: two against one, two whispering together, turning away and giggling, the third shamed and outcast. It's obvious now that this was the real point of the whole elaborate dance, its climactic figure, but back then, of course, each quarrel seemed a disaster and I'd run home, tears streaming, and howl on my own back doorstep for hours. My mother, dismayed in the first place by my obsession with such ordinary (if not common) little girls and even more put out by the intensity of my grief when they turned their backs on me, would say, ‘It's not the end of the world.' But she unwittingly provided me with exactly the right words. That's what it was, the end of the world, every time.

I cast myself as the odd one out, but in truth it wasn't always so at all. The real shame that sticks to this memory comes when I recall the pang of pleasure I felt when Valerie and I shut out Janet. Our emotional triangle was a very good rehearsal for the world, the mimic anticipation of group psychology was perfect, even down to the fact that Valerie was never excluded.
She was more sure of herself to start with and she remained innocent of the needy jealousy the other two of us suffered, so became ever more blithely, unconsciously cruel, our unmoved mover. Valerie for her part adored her mum.

Mrs Edge, who came from a large family, had like many Hanmer women of her generation broken that pattern, hence the council house. She lived in hers with style, not only were her net curtains whiter than white, but the whole space, and the whole shape of the day, had an elaborate decorum. She changed her wellies on the back step for carpet slippers with fake fur round the tops, or hid her curlers under her turban, or combed out her hair and put her lipstick on, to a regular, reassuring rhythm. And she supplemented her husband's wages with money she earned by making wreaths in the backyard (holly for Christmas, chrysanths and carnations for funerals) and doing flowers for weddings. Once I went with Valerie and her mum to gather moss, which she used for skewering the flowers into, on the frames of the wreaths, with sharp wire. We went across the fields on footpaths and finally no paths at all until we came to a weird wood or copse where all the trees stood in spongy moss, dead and leafless, and – this was the unforgettable, magical thing – when you jumped up and down, their skeletal trunks waggled against the sky and the whole wood shook.

It was Valerie's mum's example that inspired a game that was not – for once – part of the dance of rejection. True, it just involved Valerie and me, but Janet was away for the summer holidays, staying with some auntie or cousin, not a shadowy rival waiting in the wings. This game –
Doing the Flowers for the Dolls' Wedding
– developed a mimic reality and depth our other games lacked. It didn't seem like play at all, in fact, that was its charm. We planned for weeks, discussed
exactly what the dolls wanted, made lists of the different bouquets and sprays we'd need for the bridesmaids and matron of honour, as well as the bride herself (who'd ordered flowers for her hair too) and priced them all, including buttonholes for the families, strictly graded in order of kinship and importance, with mothers top. We were confined to wild flowers mostly, and of course we had to miniaturise everything for the dolls, but these additional problems only enhanced the busy, anxious pleasure of the whole thing. In the days before the big day we picked our flowers and ferns, and put them in separate jam jars ready to be made up into bunches of different sizes and splendour, which was something you had to do at the last minute.

We even arranged to borrow a camera, to take a group picture of the happy event, in order to immortalise our handiwork, although I don't think we managed to take one, for I never remember seeing it. Perhaps it was an overcast day, or possibly no one would lend us a camera – for they were expensive, temperamental, grown-up toys back in 1952. Nonetheless, although the wedding itself hasn't left much trace, it was a great success, for it was the background
Doing
of the flowers over all that time (we were only nine, it must have seemed an age) that counted. So much so that neither the dolls nor their clothes figured at all prominently in our professional calculations about how to get things exactly right – although the dolls were all the wrong sizes and baby-shaped (we were pre-Barbie, let alone Ken). This was fantasy at work, with the emphasis on work. And the other thing that made it idyllic was that we plotted and staged it all on my back doorstep, since Valerie's mum didn't want us under her feet.

For most council-house kids were shooed out of the house, although they didn't take off across the fields. When I played with Valerie I knew where I was for a change and so did my
mother; I didn't wander far; I wasn't late back. But Valerie's habits – the Edges kept regular hours – didn't rub off on me, when she wasn't around I was still out of step. The Arowry idea was that children came home to eat and sleep. From the start I'd been bad at coming home and now, some time during that first year, I stopped sleeping once I was there as well. Part of the reason was that I'd developed an illness of my own, although not such a glamorous one as my little brother's – chronic sinusitis, which meant a permanently blocked nose, headaches and faceaches, and made it very difficult to breathe, especially at night. This I compounded by lying awake in the dark crying, which made my symptoms a lot worse and other people's nights hell too.

Eventually, Dr McColl was summoned to see me one morning when I was particularly puffy-eyed and wretched. He was a visitor from the past, just as I remembered him, mauve-skinned, and smelling reassuringly of Scotch and cologne, and he gave me that very day a prescription for how to survive at number 4 The Arowry. Not medicine – that was minimal, aspirin for the headaches and some aromatic stuff to inhale – but books.

When he turned up I was learning something off by heart for school, and perhaps that gave him his clue, for he quickly discovered that I knew a large part of the hymn book and even quite a few of the more bloodthirsty psalms by heart as well. He said he thought I might find more interesting things to read. He also told me that I should consider myself lucky, since I had much more time than people who slept; and he told my mother that she should let me have the light on all night. So he gave me – gave me back – the company of Tarzan and Alice, and William and Sherlock Holmes and Masterman Ready and the Princess and the Goblins . . . It was an unheard-of
indulgence to use up electricity in this way, but doctor's orders prevailed. Dr McColl had won me space in the council house, a lighted box of my own. Remembering his magic words, I'd look out in the dead of night across the countryside, where not one other light was burning, and practise feeling pleased with myself.

Bit by bit the council-house space that had been designed for a model 1950s family took on a different shape, with a hint of vicarage about it. By the time Clive was ready to move into his own room with its nursery curtains, Grandma was squatting there, and he had to share mine and learn to sleep with the light on. The planners' conspiracy against disorder gave way before the shift system we improvised. We never really shared the open-plan living-room and never sat down to eat at the same time, so the table was only laid at one end, and the rest was used for ledgers, homework and wind-up racing cars. At night Grandma would stay up late and have the whole space to herself, while upstairs I read myself into a dawn doze just in time for my mother to come in and draw the curtains, and recoil from the fat moths my light had lured in.

The atmosphere indoors was tense, still. No one had enough private space, certainly not my parents, with all those war years of separation to make up for. When we first moved house Clive absorbed their attention, but as he recovered and started school, they turned back to each other. The first time I really saw them this way, saw through the mist of my own making, was on the day the eleven-plus results came out. Mr Palmer sent me running home mid-morning with the news and, when I arrived, I found my mother and father sitting alone together in the living-room at the homework end of the table. This was all wrong, my father never came home in the day, but there he was, wearing his old battledress jacket, his arm was round
her shoulders and she'd been crying. I was breaking in on some secret crisis, she'd been taken ill, the doctor had just left (how often sickness spoke for us), she was all right now, she had thought she couldn't swallow, that something was stuck in her throat, but it was all just nerves . . . My news fell flat before this revelation. For a moment I could see them as just two, the couple they'd be without the rest of us – strangers encamped in that windy field, trying to make a new life for themselves.