Tying Down The Lion (10 page)

“Have you seen them, dear? Why she insists on baring those callouses, I’ll never understand. But there’s such a nice picture of her in the
TV Times
, her bare feet thankfully cut off.”

“Oh good idea, Miss. Thank you.”

Satisfied, she writes S Shaw in the box beside my name.

Bugger Sandie Shaw. My project is all in my head. And if Miss Whipp unearthed her glasses and squinted at her
TV Times
, she would see, clearly visible through Sandie bloody Shaw’s crocheted blouse, there is a nipple. And I’m not sticking that in my notepad.

4.
Young Moon

“The car’s running on a teaspoon of petrol, Bridge. There’s nowhere open at this time of night. I can’t go on much longer.”

“And I can’t manage another minute with this bladder,” Grandma says.

“Me too,” I add in sympathy, even though I can. It’s just that I actually feel sorry for Grandma. Normally I would have said, “With whose bladder could you wait then?”

“Oh, Jacqueline, you should have gone at the last stop,” Mum says. “You are a pest.”

“And you’re Attila the Hun,” I mutter into my hand.

At last Dad finds a petrol station that is not only open, but has a primitive Ladies. Grandma and I take our time. Well, she does.

“Jacqueline, this is no more than a hole in the sodding ground. And it’s not easy in whale-bone,” she wails while I wait outside the door.

“You should wear a Berlei Gay Slant, Grandma. It’s a step-in garment in floral frosted-satin.”

“A girdle needs good bone and elastic. Not arty-farty frills and fancies.”

And all I need is a shape. Grandma’s corsets, incredible rubber-and-bone contraptions, are just for sucking in her heaving hummocks, which are not unlike the geography department’s polystyrene relief map of the Pyrenees. Every Sunday afternoon, a cigarette trembling on her lower lip, she plunges them (not the Pyrenees) into the sink and scrubs them with Lux flakes. Mum hangs them on the Sheila-Maid and winches up the pulley. They sweat away in the steam from Sunday night’s tea-towels that stew in the enamel pan we use for boiling loganberries.

“Are you calling me burly, Jacqueline?” Grandma shouts from the toilet.

“No, Berlei. It’s a girdle for girls.”

“A girdle?”

“For girls.”

“A girdle for girls?”

“Not a girdle for grans.”

“Girls’ girdles?”

“Gay Slants.”

“Good God.”

Mum and I have already spun in this same circle.

“It’s step-in.”

“Step in?”

“With a secret panel.”

“Secret? How do you know it is there?”

“Don’t be so German.”

“Jacqueline, please.”

“Sorry. But please, everyone’s got one.”

“Gillian?”

“No.”

“Lynette?”

“No.”

“How much do they cost?”

“Thirty-two and…”

“No.”

I’ll never be allowed to grow up. Mum still buys me
Rupert
annual every Christmas, and the most annoying thing is, I still read it.

Grandma eventually emerges, saying, “While your dad’s fart-arsing around with the map, sit down with your old grandma a minute, love, just while I have a quick snifter.”

With the evening wind billowing car-fumes into our hair, we sit at a battered metal table and Grandma takes out her brandy, cigarettes and Newberry Fruits.

“Ah, nice to get away from Bridge, snapping and snarling like an Alsatian.”

“I thought you’d be the uptight one, Grandma. You were terrified of the car.”

“Not the car so much, duck. Although I’d say it’s held together by no more than a couple of sticking-plasters and an overstretched rubber-band. No, it was the thought of your dad’s driving after Lord knows how many tries at his test. Nerves, you see. Behind that wheel, he looks like a rabbit answering the door to a fox. And do you know what Elsie said? She said…she said they’ll lock my Roy up.”

“Grandma, the war’s over now.”

“I know that, duck. Can you open my tin for me? Thanks, love.” She taps her ash into the ancient Elastoplast tin she carries everywhere. “No, I don’t mean the war, dear. Elsie said they’d take him away if he had one of his turns. They don’t allow turns over here.”

“Grandma, the Nazis have gone.”

“They’re on the other side, though, aren’t they? Those red communists are the same species. That time your dad glazed over in the fishmonger’s and I had to lead him out looking the dead spit of the goggle-eyed prawns, I could see what people were thinking. They were thinking strait-jacket. And that’s England for you. Christ knows what this lot would be like.”

The wind buffets the ash out of her tin, but she keeps tapping away, unable to speak for a moment.

“Elsie’s middle name should be Wooden Spoon. But why did you come, Grandma? You could have stayed at home.”

“Jesus wept, no.” She snorts at the idea, her cigarette nearly dropping out of her mouth. “I couldn’t leave your dad and you two mites in her clutches, could I?”

“Grandma, come on. I’m not a mite, Victor’s indestructible and you know Mum’s not that bad,” I tell her with great hypocrisy.

“Blood and sand,” she says, stubbing out the cigarette. “Do I have to spell it out? All right then. I came along because I didn’t fancy sitting on my Jack Jones for a week. But don’t tell Attila.”

“Oh Grandma, that means you quite like us all really.”

“No it bloody doesn’t. You know the old saying, don’t you? Why keep a dog to bark yourself?”

“What?”

“I’ll put it another way then. Why pickle your own pig-trotters when you’ve got a daughter-in-law to souse ’em for you? Not that she’s stuffed a decent bit of pork-belly in her life. But she’s supposed to be looking after me in my dotage, so I had to come along, didn’t I? I’m not rubbing me own bunions. And she’s not the only one who can tell you something for your project, love.”

“But it’s about Berlin, Grandma. About the division.”

“Well, all these walls and whatnots boil down to one and the same thing, Jacqueline.”

“What’s that?”

“Blockage.”

“Oh.”

“And you know what causes blockage, don’t you?”

“Er…”

“Not enough meat. That’s the problem. They say Hitler was a vegetablarian. So, there you go. Too much swede. His bowels were the root cause of all this. As I always say, never make a decision when you’re stopped-up.”

“I’ll remember that, Grandma.”

“Anyroad, one day back in thirty-eight, while your grandfather was still staggering back from the Slug and Lettuce, I had a visit from Big Stan. He had brought me an ox-heart, bless him. Always a pleasure to see his meat-tray, it was.”

I have to wait while she extinguishes a small inferno. Same old story, trying to blow her nose without taking the cigarette out of her mouth. My childhood memories will be forever clouded with the stench of smouldering hanky.

“All right, Grandma?”

“Yes, duck. Now where was I? Oh yes, Stan had just come back from Liverpool Street station, where he and his friends had met a train full of homeless little Jewish kiddies.

“‘They’ve just had the floor shift from under them, Nellie,’ he said. ‘The Nazis set fire to their orphanage in Berlin.’

“‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Berlin, eh?’

“‘That’s right, Nellie. In Germany.’

“‘I’m aware of where Berlin is, Stanley,’ I told him. ‘I know my geology.’

“It turned out the orphanage went up in flames the night they set all those Jewish shops and senna-pods on fire. I didn’t know much about it. I often turned the wireless off in those days, Jacqueline. Load of poppycock about whether a war was coming or not. There are some that say the bit of paper Neville Chamberlain was waving about when he came back from his chinwag with Hitler, the one that said we’d have ‘peace for our time’, was just his blooming laundry list. And I say, never trust a man with a moustache. But anyroad, Stan knew a lot of Quakers at the potted-meat plant, you know, and they set this mission up to shift thousands of Jewish children out of danger. Stan said not a single one was safe. Tch, children not safe. Jesus wept.”

Grandma rummages in her bag for an unburnt hanky, her face crinkled like old tissue-paper. I pass her mine and she keeps nodding her thanks, the way old people do when they can’t speak.

“Hey, Grandma, you usually talk the moon out of the sky.”

“That’s exactly what Stan said, love,” she says, sniffing, her voice three octaves higher. “I was choked up that day same as I am now. Stan never had kiddies of his own, you see. Elsie said she couldn’t cope with jammy fingermarks on the furniture or the whiff of nappies stewing in a bucket. But he longed for them, he did. It upset him to see all those little ones clutching their suitcases. He wanted to take an orphan home with him, but the thought of Elsie screwing up her mouth as small as a press-stud and ordering him to take it back soon forced him to turn away. And I never said this to him of course, but she wouldn’t have had a clue how to feed a child, especially later when rationing started. I already had two chickens in the back yard and a part-share of a wilful goat in Shakespeare Avenue. Smashing omelettes, Jacqueline.”

“You made omelettes from a goat?”

“Tch, get away with you. What in God’s fine garden do they teach you at that school? This project malarkey just goes to show, doesn’t it? They can’t be buggered to teach you themselves. They have to get your grandmas to do it for them. Now, where was I? Oh yes, poor Stan. I left his ox-heart to soak in salt water and made him a cup of tea. There was no more I could do to bring him comfort. Poor Stan was too shaken up even to dunk his ginger-nut. Great bear of a man he might be, Jacqueline, but he fetched hold of my hand like a baby grips its mother’s finger.

“‘You know, Nellie,’ he said. ‘None of the children were allowed to cry at the station in Berlin. Gestapo’s orders. The ones with mums and dads could say goodbye, but not with tears.’

“He could hardly speak, my Stan, after that. Fancy. And him a master-butcher with a full set of precision boning-knives.”

I push Grandma’s cigarettes closer and she stares at the packet as if she isn’t sure what it is.

“Stan wondered which misery was worse, saying goodbye without breaking down or not having a soul to say it to.”

She holds my hand for a moment before she says, “Who could turn a child out of its home, even a foreign one?”

Dad calls us and we’re on the move again. I fall asleep at last, thinking about home. Yesterday is a million years ago: Victor lining up his Red Indians in the evening square of sunlight that always appears on the kitchen lino, gunning them down with his pea-shooter; German words containing lots of ‘sch’ erupting from the kitchen when the handle fell off the potato-masher; onions sweltering in lard; eating liver on the wobbly let-down, discovering a tube-thing in my piece, and Victor saying, “Ugh, is that a pig’s willy?”

I dream about endless fields where harvest has begun and colossal wheat-drums throw long shadows. The drums become gigantic sculptures standing guard over us, their shadows thrown over our mock-Tudor car that makes other drivers hoot and point as they pass.

The shadows are alive. The car screams to a stop in the middle of the road. The wheat-drums advance, towering over us, crushing our car. Gillian is whispering that she’s hidden my smuggled copy of
Petticoat
inside our telephone because she has invented a way to make things so small they can disappear. I want to ask if she can bring them back too, but my tongue is paralysed. She says she can cut me in half and make me two people.

Now Grandma is shaking a packet of Trill over me. “Ziss vill make you talk,” she says.

Victor is driving. Mum is screaming. A guard aims a gun at Dad’s head and orders him to throw his cigarette away, but it falls inside the car because the window won’t open and flames spring up everywhere. Mum is suddenly young and beautiful, playing a piano that turns into ninety miles of bricks. The car becomes a boutique filled with crocheted dresses and Gillian is walking towards me, slim and ravishing in a mini, half-black, half-white, with a golden chain-belt, whispering how sorry she is for being evil. My tongue starts working and I yell at her to leave me alone.

“Stop shouting, Jacqueline! You’ve been dreaming since Cologne.”

I’ve missed miles and miles of pitch-black Belgium and woken to the glaring early sun of West Germany. We judder to a stop for Dad to stretch his legs. My mouth feels as gritty as the floor of Deborah’s cage. Victor climbs into the back again, horribly bright and fresh.

“T-K saw Cologne Cathedral,” he says.

“Christ, I can’t believe this, Bridge. I can’t bloody well believe this,” Dad is saying, overcome with pride that he’s brought us so far. “Last week I was in a cell with a new prisoner, all cocky-like, saying how this ain’t a bad hotel for the money. You know, all talk. And then he just sank on the bed and broke down. Weeping into his hands like a woman. Ten years he’s got. He couldn’t trust his brother to stay away from his girl and he didn’t think his Mum would live through the shame. He’d been planning on learning to drive. His girl was keen on having a go too, he said. He even thought she might be quite good at it. Just hang on to the dream, I told him, or else your nights will be too bloody long.”

“Vee are now in the Auto Corridor. It is linking Vest Germany with Vest Berlin,” Mum says, seeming vastly German now and ignoring Dad because she is glued to the window.

“Is Berlin a country?” Victor asks, aiming T-K’s rifle at a French car that looks like an upside-down pram.

“No, Victor, it’s a city, a kind of island bobbing about in a communist sea,” Dad says, watching the French car trundle past. “It’s actually in East Germany, but the west half of it belongs to the Allies. Some of Hitler’s old autobahns have become transit routes. We get on at one end and off at the other. No stopping.”

A bobbing island sounds quite friendly. Victor and I settle back.

“That old pig Khrushchev called Berlin a tumour,” Grandma says. “One of the nasty sort that goes bad. That’s how wars start, you know. When thugs like him spread talk like that, they get people worked up and wanting trouble. I wouldn’t trust him with a jelly-baby.”

“He did not wish to start another war, Nell,” Mum says. “He was trying to keep the peace.”

“Old Eisenhower was solid as rock though,” Dad says, thumping the dashboard to smother an ominous rattle. “Refused to take the troops out of West Berlin, didn’t he? Wouldn’t let Stalin hand access rights over to the East Germans.”

“But that’s why the Wall’s there, son,” Grandma says. “A bloody great barrier keeping people in. Keeping families apart. The tumour needed surgery, Khrushchev said, but look how the old sod did it. More butcher than surgeon if you ask me. And that’s no disrespect to my good friend, Stan.”