The Cornflake House (2 page)

Also, there was the question of our relations. We loved Granny Editha well enough, in spite of her irritating little ways, but none of us would have chosen to believe we were related to Eric. He frightened and fascinated us. Much as we all yearned to have a man in our lives, we fled from his company. At least he couldn't chase after us; part of his menace lay in the fact that he had only one leg.

Before my grandmother met Eric she ran her fenland smallholding on her own. When her parents died, she carried on picking fruit, feeding chickens and hoeing the vegetable patch in all the fierce variety of weather. How was she to know, as she accepted the offer of marriage from the knife and scissors sharpener who called on her one day, then came back and called again the next, that she would still be running the place on her own after her wedding? Having hardly ever ventured away from her square, flat homestead, having met so few people before, I suppose Editha thought she'd done well for herself by marrying at all. I once overheard my mother asking Grandma why she'd hitched up with Eric, and the answer was ‘because he came, it seemed meant – once he was on the doorstep'. There you have it, as simple a truth as the answer, ‘because he asked me,' which must have been given by a million spouses. Editha wasn't young, had no expectations, and Eric can't have been so dreadful at that time when he had both his legs, all his hair and a flat stomach as yet unstuffed with Grandma's chickens and potatoes.

What you also have, in that answer of Editha's, is the seed of one of the ruling factors in my own mother's life. She believed implicitly in certain things being meant to be. Who knows how different our lives would've been if that belief hadn't existed? We would never have been brought up in The Cornflake House without it; maybe never have been born at all.

Whatever else he did – or mostly didn't – do, Eric has to be given credit for loving his baby girl. In that, at least, Editha was always able to defend him. He might have been the fattest, laziest slob who ever sat by a fire day in, day out, but he doted on the brown-haired, brown-eyed baby. Not that fatherhood inspired him to get off his backside and make more money, his grinding wheel lay rusting in an outhouse right through his daughter's childhood, but he was generous with his smiles. He must have loved to see his little girl running around, helping her mother to keep the place going. By the time she was four my mother was capable of dragging a full scuttle of coal from shed to kitchen. According to Mum, she was six when her dad taught her how to chop wood, small pieces at first, of course; Editha tackled the full sized logs.

Then it was time for Eric's little helper to get an education. She walked the mile or so to school alone, her route a dead straight line across the wetlands, following a ditch between raised fields. I've walked that journey with her, a nostalgia trip, and I know how exposed to the winds and the rains she was. What strikes you is the absence of landscape and colour; an artist, especially in winter, would need only to mix greys and dull greens to do justice to that scene. Whichever way you turn, the horizon is spiked with church spires, but no other landmarks are visible. The only trees there are willows which grow along the steep bank. These have been cropped by the locals and stunted by gales until their trunks are dwarfish, their branches skeletal. There was little comfort at the end of Mum's journey either. Like most buildings in the area, the school was a makeshift affair. We looked for it together, Mum and I. After all the stories, I was excited at the prospect of seeing the buildings; but they'd disappeared. New houses stood on the site, their gardens covering the old playground. This is probably no bad thing for my mother's generation, some pretty horrific memories were attached to the place.

Before its demise, the school consisted of one central brick hall surrounded by ‘temporary' wooden classrooms with tin roofs. On wet days the rain played these roofs like steel bands and old stoves, which smoked at the teacher's end of the classrooms, were encircled by small pairs of steaming boots and shoes.

It's difficult to picture my unconventional mother as a schoolgirl, but schoolgirl she was. A dark, secret creature, decidedly unkempt, dirty even. Her toes, inside worn sandals, seemed to have been outlined by thick pencil, and her heels were hard as earth in a drought. Her bare legs were tanned all year round and her once green dress had been washed until it was a thin, sad yellow. Around her oval face she wore her hair, which was almost black and hung in natural ringlets, cropped to fall on a level with her lips. Ribbons, slides, hairgrips, she hated all of these. When the ringlets reached her chin she chopped them off herself.

She told us how her class teacher, a washed-out creature called Miss Downy, hated her. Apart from her untidy appearance, my mother had an unusual, perhaps rather silly name. She was called Victory. This wasn't short for Victoria, as many supposed it to be, but was actually another extension of Victor. The Victor she was named after had been, apparently, a bit of a lad and much admired by Eric who was his closest friend.

Victor had died on a train, or rather off a train which had been speeding from London to Peterborough. Both Eric and Victor had been full of drink and bravado on that fateful journey, showing off for the benefit of two unfortunate young women who had no choice but to share a carriage with these loudmouths. Hiccupping into the face of the girl he preferred, Victor had boasted how fast he was in all things.

‘No stopping me, is there Eric?' he slurred. No doubt Eric had nodded loyally.

‘Well, you'll have to stop at Huntingdon,' the young woman quipped, ‘we all will.'

Determined not to be stumped, Victor had told her he could get to Peterborough faster by road.

‘Oh yes?'

‘Yes.'

It was the last word he was to utter. Well, he may have cursed as he hit the ground, but there was nobody with him to record the fact. Eric's eyes would moisten as he told of the rush of wind which swept through the carriage when Victor opened the door …

‘He was one of the best,' he'd assure us, shaking his huge head. Then a smile would cross Eric's face and he'd nod knowingly. ‘Still, he was right after all. Train hit a stray cow, stopped for hours while they cleared the line. Police car picked up Victor's body, drove him to Peterborough and there he was, when we pulled in, waiting for somebody to identify him.'

Editha would whisper to us children that the end of this story was pure fiction, sugar to sweeten a bitter pill, and we believed her. But since invention wasn't one of Eric's strong points, we grew up confused, yet with the whole scene in our heads: the corpse in the police car was always pictured smiling, grinning even, having had the last laugh.

There was never any question of a second child. Eric named his only offspring after his only friend. I expect the ‘y' was Editha's contribution. Victory had no second name.

Of course Victory's teacher didn't dislike her merely because of her name and her dishevelment. She could have been a filthy child called Battle Zone and been teacher's pet if only she'd behaved herself. But Victory wasn't an ideal girl to have in a class of reasonably well-behaved between the wars children. For a start she abhorred rules and regulations, or at least found them wholly incomprehensible. Why must a drawing be the size of one small piece of paper? Why should a poem have more than two lines but less than twenty? Why all sit together, stand in rows, walk in crocodiles and eat the same food? It made no sense to that one little girl.

War was waged between the difficult child and the uncompromising Miss Downy. The teacher had her own armoury, of course; the ruler and the weight of authority. But Victory had a secret, superior weapon which she could use without moving from her desk or batting an eyelid. In fact batting an eyelid would have ruined everything, because the secret weapon was The Stare. The trick was to stare for some time and with unwavering concentration at an object, until said object responded in its way. It was as simple as that.

The Stare could cause sticks of chalk to snap in two just as Miss Downy began to write on the blackboard. Under pressure from The Stare, the heel of one of the unfortunate teacher's shoes was seen to tremble and collapse. A chair leg fell off, landing Miss Downy on the floor. The door refused to open when class was over; and, my mother's personal favourite, one beautifully straight-seamed stocking succumbed to the pull of The Stare and burst with a joyful ping from the grip of Miss Downy's suspenders.

Miss Downy was, naturally, suspicious; but who in their right mind would accuse a small girl of such trickery? Although she couldn't blame Victory outright, the teacher subjected her to punishments both physical and mental. She found fault with all of Victory's work, often holding up pages of writing for the entire class to ridicule. This left my poor mother with a lifelong complex about reading and writing; she would do neither in front of anybody else – although I often came across her struggling with a letter or a book when she thought she was alone.

For hours at a time the other children saw only the back of the scruffy child as she stood in a corner or faced the blackboard. Victory's classmates were perfectly content to laugh out loud at her when they were all assembled under Miss Downy's supervision, but they gave her a wide berth in the playground or when passing in corridors. They knew instinctively that she was too frightening a soul for them to bully, and too dangerous for them to befriend.

The pupil–teacher war reached a climax one day in January, in the so-called spring term. During the morning lessons Victory began to shake violently. At first she couldn't explain herself to the angry Miss Downy, but when pressed she muttered that it was the roof which was frightening her. Encouraged by their teacher's sneer, the whole class tittered. All eyes peered upwards at the ceiling which looked exactly as it always did. More giggles followed, until order was called.

‘I've had just about enough of this silliness,' Miss Downy complained, as if Victory was forever finding fault with parts of the building. ‘You will sit still on your seat or you can stand in the corner until break-time.'

Without further invitation, Victory scraped back her chair and hurried to her usual corner.

I'm sorry Matthew. We'll have to leave young Victory there, facing the wall, for a while. My cell mate has returned from the laundry, her face puce, her hands wrinkled from steam and hot water. Her return means lunch is nearly ready and hungry or not, when the bell tolls …

I share this little home from home with a lass called Liz who's as dark as I am fair but otherwise similar to me in that she chooses silence instead of chatter. On my first day, using a language of grunts and nods, we laid down a few ground rules; as long as we stick to these I see no reason for the quiet, but not antagonistic, status quo to change. I shall return to rescue Mum from her corner when I have stuffed myself with whatever delicacies the kitchen staff have dreamt up for our delight.

Two

Rice pudding; one of the few foods which manages to be disgusting and comforting. I would describe the main course, but even after my efforts I doubt if you'd be any the wiser. Besides, why should you share my abundant interest in food? I can't imagine that you were also brought up in a clutter of children, that you know what it is to have to fight for every slice of bread, to dash for the last biscuit, to wonder how it feels to own a whole packet of crisps. I bought myself some Kraft Cheese Slices with my first wages, sat in a secret place near home and scoffed the lot. I remember the luxury of having so much, the completeness of those squares as I folded them, not to be divided amongst my siblings, but in order to fit an entire slice into my greedy mouth.

Liz is asleep above me. She was reading, but now I can hear that tell-tale breathing which is almost a snore. I find the routine of prison life infuriating, Liz finds it exhausting. I feel like a schoolgirl, sneaking out to meet a forbidden boy. These bunks creak, but I'll brave it. I need to sit at the desk to write properly.

I'll take you back to that different time and place, to the East of England whose flatlands have a temporary air, as if a wave might come and reclaim them any moment. To the company of an unusual little girl who stands in a corner of her classroom because she says she's afraid of the roof. In this child's company, anything is possible; but right now she's just a vulnerable schoolgirl, shivering, close to tears of fear and frustration.

In vain the class tried to ignore the virtual rattling of the child in the corner as the minutes to break-time crawled by. Finally the bell rang and they all escaped to the freezing playground.

‘The sky was just a white sheet,' my mother would say when telling this tale, ‘as still as a shroud on a corpse. And so it stayed, right through break and on into the next lesson, which was, as I remember, arithmetic. I was so scared I couldn't speak, not that anyone would have listened to my warning. I went straight back to my corner without being told. I felt it was safest. The children were doing sums, heads down over their books, and Miss Downy was marking homework. How they managed not to notice the silence I shall never understand. It was as if the world was holding its breath and all the animals had gone underground, the birds too.'

It was a freak storm; everybody who discussed it afterwards used that word, freak. It came from nowhere and hurled the still English countryside into sudden, devastating turmoil. Throughout the little school doors slammed and window panes cracked in two. The wind rushed through the cloakroom and ripped all the coats from their pegs. Gym bags were tossed about like kites and a flood of rainwater appeared instantly in every doorway. In the playground swings wound themselves round and round their frames, while the one and only tree creaked, swayed and shed branches like tears. But while the rest of the school was being amazed by such trifles, Victory's class were hanging on to their desks for dear life, because they were actually exposed to the battling elements by the sudden disappearance of their roof.