The Cornflake House (11 page)

You had to say which ‘luxuries' were best, in our competition for the house, put in order of preference things we'd never seen before. It was boom time, women, having worked through the war, were supposed to be lusting after labour-saving gadgets. These delights would seem primitive to us now, the ‘super-twin' washing machine, which included ‘Spin Drying!', was the size of a small garden shed, but each item was miraculously modern then. We put the Dishmaster fairly low on our list, it being hard to cope with the idea of a machine doing our mountains of washing-up, but the Kenwood Chef, billed as ‘your servant in the kitchen' sounded just the job. And as I say, Mum knew only too well that she was getting it exactly right. There was a tie-breaker to finish in no more than ten words … ‘I eat my cornflakes every morning because…' We mulled this over for a while, until Mum came up with; ‘all year round, there's sunshine in every crispy, crunchy bowlful.' Simple, but effective; nobody had ever equated cereal with the weather before.

Those who doubt the existence of magic should have been there, in that sleepy Lincolnshire village when Mum and I posted our entry. I swear the envelope floated down that post-box. And if that wasn't convincing enough, they should have seen our faces when we opened the reply. Mum might have known she'd win, and I had my suspicions, but the rest of them could hardly take it in.

‘A
house
?'

‘Yes, a whole house.'

‘We won a house? By eating cornflakes?'

‘And doing a quiz thing, yes.'

‘A house? Like Grandma's?'

‘Umm, but modern, with an indoor toilet and stuff.'

‘Will we have to give it back?'

‘Will we have to share it?'

‘Will we have our own rooms?'

‘No; no; and of course not. It's a house, not a Grand Hotel. It's got three bedrooms, not eight.' But still, three bedrooms, detached, with gardens front and rear – and all for next to nothing, for eating one box of cornflakes instead of the gooey porridge Grandma usually dished up. My brothers and sisters made me read the glorious news over and over ‘…
delighted to tell you / please confirm by return of post / we look forward to hearing which carpets you have chosen,
' and yet again I read the phrase,
‘your very own Dream Home'.
Those five words must have been repeated hundreds of times. The smallholding might have been on a cloud, the air was light with dreams come true.

It seemed, after all, that there was a God. And He was, to quote the hymn, good, good, good, and He smiled, unlike most adults, benevolently down on us. A vast, charismatic figure of the heavens who could change fortunes with a wink of his eye. In my imagination, this deity was a cross between the standard bearded father figure and Hughie Green.

But have you ever considered that expression; dreams come true? Today, with the arrival of the national lottery, there are new millionaires every week, twice weekly in fact. According to reports, instant wealth can bring pleasure and pain in equal measures. In our dreams we omit the pain, naturally enough. Sun shines on us as we drive gleaming convertibles, champagne corks pop, fountains play in the large, well-kept gardens of these dreams. But imagine great riches actually falling on your head, sudden as death. Everything would need to change. Deceits would have to be practised, moves made. We'd discover a fresh set of worries. Where would we be made welcome, where would we belong? I have no answers so I'm grateful to be the child of a wise woman. My mother had the ability to harness chance. For all I know she may have looked down that road and seen a future in which we had limitless funds. Maybe she foresaw one child after another going off the rails, taking drugs, killing themselves in fast cars. Maybe. For reasons best known to herself, she rationed her good fortune, tempered any greed she may have experienced. If she'd wanted to, she could have picked six numbers from forty-nine as easily as you might select a decent wine in an off-licence; but she believed in effort, knew the delight in spending one's own hard-earned wages; understood that some dreams are best left unfulfilled.

Yet she won us The Cornflake House, because we were out-growing our caravan, because she thought that, having only the one parent, we deserved at least the stability of bricks and mortar. Did other families ever seriously consider the possibility of winning one of those prize houses? Did people transport themselves, whilst munching their breakfasts, into the back-of-box world created by an artist who was only allowed to use three colours? I mean I really don't know how carried away with fantasy folks get, when there is only a remote chance of winning – and statistics to prove exactly how remote that chance is. But if they did follow through that dream scenario, I suspect they may have found themselves wondering if winning a home was what they really wanted. Home; an emotive word, conjuring, for most of us, an image of our chosen haven. Does anybody who hasn't won a major, life-changing prize ever realize the stigma of winning? Perhaps the truth is that there are no winners; you are vomited out of one class without hope of being accepted by another. Those who own property are top of the pile, those who rent still have aspirations, ambitions, but those who get their houses by chance have no say and no status. There you have it, do you see? We won and we were grateful; but in different circumstances we might have been even more fortunate. We might have been able to choose where we lived. Supposedly, the essential things in a person's life are their relationships with other people and their relationship with their surroundings. Take one family of vagabonds, move them across England from secluded Lincolnshire smallholding to select Surrey cul-de-sac, and stand back, wait for the fireworks.

On our first night as homeowners, while the party raged and neighbours popped by to complain about the noise, Mum sensed my feeling of anti-climax. She made me a fizzy drink which I imagine was three parts champagne and one of orange squash and which restored in me a feeling of excitement and well-being. So, drunk as the rest of them, I sailed through the evening, hardly noticing the gradual way in which the rooms filled with furniture. Having taken a nip or two, to help them recover from the shock, even the cornflake manufacturer's representatives helped out. I remember being asked to hold the suit-man's jacket while he helped Owen with a sofa. In fact some of the cornflake people were still there, hanging over various chairs, when we kids came charging down the stairs the next morning.

The party, Dino and Merry's toilet habits and the sight of the poor caravan rocking to the strains of Taff and her current choice of lover, set the seal on our relationship with the inhabitants of Fisher's Close, the cul-de-sac where The Cornflake House was built. Why the place was called Fisher's Close when it was on the site of an orchard, I never could fathom. I suppose the builder must have been a Mr Fisher, or a man who fished. The other home owners chose more appropriate names, Cherry Tree, Apple Orchard, Damson House. (There seems to have been some confusion as to what fruit had been grown there before the land spurted those little dream homes.) Had we been accepted, welcomed, my mother might have decided on Pear Blossom or the like for our house. But since we were met with resentment and distaste, she painted our legend on a large piece of wood, in letters red as blood, and nailed this sign to a post on our front lawn. She used a sledgehammer on the post, staking respectability through its heart. ‘The Cornflake House' sign stood up to all weathers and was repainted each year so that it might shine as a constant reminder.

I ought to point out how very select the area around Fisher's Close happens to be. Across the narrow road beyond the close lies a golf course, open only to those with large bank balances and the correct outfits. The course is serene, paint-box green with puddles of pale yellow sand. It's bordered by the ‘rough', a stretch of bracken and shrubs which is a paradise for wildlife and for kids playing Hide and Seek or Cowboys and Indians. Further afield the land is a pleasing patchwork of meadows and copses, dotted with small ponds. The houses there are grand affairs, borrowing styles from many countries and ages, but each hidden discretely beyond drives of laurel or rhododendrons. A walk or bike ride down the leafy lanes of this part of Surrey leaves you with the impression of distant chimneys, half glimpsed tennis courts, a dash or two of turquoise from a far swimming pool. A couple of miles down the road you come to the country's largest cemetery. Acres of graves and tombs are separated by a maze of paths. Quite a playground, for children with a suitable sense of the macabre. Zulema was especially fond of this place, begging me to follow her there on our old bikes, persuading me to play refugees searching for lost families, mothers hunting for the graves of tiny infants, jolly games like that.

For the seriously energetic, beyond the vast cemetery, is a heath, a tangled prickly expanse, not to be explored without a bag of provisions and a compass. After a rare fight with my mother I once ran away, empty-handed, to this heath and hid in a dip. I hoped I would be found, hugged, forgiven and led home. In silence I grew colder and more frightened as darkness threatened. At dusk I clambered out of my pit and raced towards the sound of traffic. A man in a Jaguar gave me a lift. The journey, which had taken hours on foot, was over in five minutes; the row was over too, thank God.

Into this rich man's paradise our family fell like fleas on velvet.

We were lucky to have Owen helping us with the move. Apart from the obvious benefit of his biceps, having a man by Mum's side as we arrived made us seem slightly less outlandish. We must have looked like a complete family, large but not without the correct balance of adults. On the other hand you wouldn't have needed a degree in genetics to see that Owen was not father to many of us. He was a bristly man. I supposed he did shave, but his cheek could make a child's skin sting for hours. We were always hungry for male company. Being fatherless we attached ourselves to Owen, bristles and all, like leeches. He loved the attention we gave him, but best of all, he loved Victory. As usual, this love was not returned. I expect Owen harboured hopes of fathering an eighth child; but my mother was so into the mystical that seven was the number she had chosen and seven we were to stay.

Owen seemed to us to have appeared from nowhere, but I suppose my mother picked him up on one of her nights out. She still went out on the town with Taff while we were living at Editha's smallholding. I remember the scent of violets and the two of them giggling as they tried on each other's lipstick. Taff was a dazzling blonde with a sexy, floppy fringe at that time. She tended to go for pinks, as shocking as possible. My mother looked best in crimson. Every time I smelt that perfume and saw those make-up bags open, my heart would sink. Being left out is bad enough but being left in charge of a tribe like ours, knowing that Fabian would bully me and Merry would crash into me all night … well it wasn't my idea of fun. I'm ashamed now, of my long, sulky face. My mother deserved a break if ever anybody did.

There was usually an Owen, or a Pete or a Dave in my mother's life. They had little joy with her, after – I imagine – the initial bliss of sexual conquest. She tired of them instantly, as if the act of sex was an end in itself. Owen stayed the first night with us in The Cornflake House but he and his lorry vanished in a cloud of exhaust the next morning. He'd lasted longer than most. Looking back, I honestly think my mother kept him hanging around while she arranged the move simply because he had a lorry. After Owen there were no others. Not in the house anyway. Mum still dabbed her neck with violet scent and went out when Taff came to stay, but she never brought a man home.

Anyway, back to our first days in our shining new house. Seven children of mixed origins and a mother who looked like a Gypsy fortune-teller. I wonder who was the most stunned? Us at finding ourselves so socially elevated, or our neighbours who must have believed the god of housing estates was playing a bad joke on them?

I think the position of our caravan was the last straw. Before he left, and after Taff was through with it, Owen towed it on to the front lawn, stuck a pile of bricks under the tow bar and threw open the door to air the old heap. And there it rested, never more to sway down the lanes of England. Demoted from home to playhouse over night. It didn't go to waste; bears and dolls lived there for years, rigid in front of plates of paper food. Wounded mice and wild rabbits hid or were hidden there, away from the cats and dogs. Almost every one of us children buried diaries and notes inside the built-in beds. My mother wasn't a great believer in punishment, but she would sometimes ask offending children if it might not be a good idea for them to spend a while in the caravan, cooling off. We went willingly; space all to ourselves was considered a prize.

I believe it will still be moored there, our egg-house, looking more incongruous than ever. It stood out, as if a dinosaur had laid it, amongst the neat, communal front gardens. The caravan represented our old life, the days before we reached The Cornflake House, when we ran even wilder and met no opposition, knew no prejudice. We never outgrew its confines. One by one, as adolescence bit us, we found it an invaluable refuge. The ideal place to try out new make-up or to squeeze spots in private. Perfect for late-night goodbyes, an oasis of softness in a prickly world, tailor-made for snogging. I had my first French kiss in the caravan, my tongue tentatively exploring the roof of Brian Holder's mouth while persistent rain drenched less fortunate lovers.

If my name wasn't worse than mud in Fisher's Close, I would take you there, Matthew, on my first night of freedom and teach you the true meaning of rocking around the clock.

Seven

I'm in the toilet, the washroom, having a wash, only face and hands. We get baths twice weekly and then I dip my head under the water and let my hair float free. Other than that I wash each evening. This is evening and I'm soaping my palms, a soothing action learnt in early childhood and practised daily throughout my life. I'm remembering, as usual, the little turquoise bathroom of The Cornflake House and how we'd fight for a few moments' privacy there, amongst the seashells and rather smelly flannels. There was always somebody huffing on the landing outside, impatient for their turn. It strikes me as odd that I've got this place to myself, it's more often a case of standing in a line, touching elbows with other women as they rinse the day's dirt from their faces. There's an eerie moment when I consider my solitude in this busy place more than odd, but only a moment, for the door bursts open and I have company.