Tying Down The Lion (9 page)

Grandma is right. Mum shouldn’t still feel like a visitor. Audette Gardens isn’t just her mother-in-law’s house. It’s meant to be her home. We want her to sit in the front-room at Christmas and smile at us all over the roast turkey, instead of staring into the steam.

“Look, here’s Naomi,” Gillian says, nudging me and opening out her picture of a beautiful coloured woman.

“She’s a role model,” Gillian says, although she has no idea what that means.

“Finger or bridge? White or Hovis?” Gaye Kennedy asks.

Gillian doesn’t know, but she writes her sentence on the first page of her project book.

Naomi Sims is a roll model.

“What’s your Contrast, Gillian?” Gaye demands to know.

“She’s the only black model.”

“Oh.”

Miss Whipp hands out scissors and demands silence. She watches us work for a minute, then sighs as she pulls a stack of marking towards her. It’s just a barricade. I know the sound of a Wagon Wheel being unwrapped when I hear it.

I am beginning to sweat. Our notepads will be inspected at the end of the lesson. Above the blackboard the clock keeps clucking. Pages rustle. Scissors snip. Stiff old brushes scrape. And I am more stuck than the ton of blotting-paper confetti a million fourth-years before me have crammed into the inkwell.

“Now remember, everyone, cheerful projects please! No dead people. And no toads that squirt poison please, Timothy Forrest. Oh, and Jacqueline Bishop, no more spiders, dear. Let’s have something nice.”

Nice is Miss Whipp’s favourite word. Our other English teacher has labelled it lightweight, antiquated and unfashionable, which sums up Miss Whipp pretty well.

I sneak another look at Gillian’s project.

Naomi was a foster child. She was bullied at school for being so tall. Today she is a beatiful model on the cover of the
New York Times,
Fashion Suplimint.

I pick up a Sunday newspaper that falls open at the women’s pages. Everything there reminds me of mothers. A sketch of stewing steak beside an article on how to brown it. A picture of a new-born baby with a tube in its nose. An advertisement on how to clean a staircase with Ajax. An interview with Enid Blyton about Noddy. Apparently his name is Purzelknirps in Germany. I’m not sure he’ll catch on.

Flicking through a withered supplement, I spot an article about the Cold War. Turning the limp pages, mildly interested, I read a short article:

September 1962, Klein-Glienicke, a Berlin village on the border.

The priest led the funeral party as far as the barbed wire. At last the family were united, but only in the bleakest sense.

The priest raised his voice to ensure both sides could hear the service. He stood at a distance to make it easier for the family in the West to see their relatives and the coffin in the East.

The family had fled to the West in the fifties, but their grandmother stayed behind. Too old, she said, to escape; too old to begin her life again.

They were not allowed to cross back, even for her funeral. They were not considered to be mourners. They were defectors. They would have been arrested and might never have seen daylight again. All they could do was look through the gaps in the wire.

Two policemen in the West watched the armed guards on the other side and stayed close to the mourners, just in case. Both sides stood as near to the divide as they dared. Separated by barbed wire, guns and dogs, yet united by the same grief, they could not even comfort each other with a touch, or a kiss.

I am barely aware of the others snipping and murmuring. Someone asks me to pass a ruler. When I hold it out, my arm doesn’t feel like my arm, and is still hanging in mid-air after the ruler has been taken. I am with the mourners on the desk.

An ordinary family is forbidden to hug at a funeral. Guards watch their tears and restrain their panting dogs. Daughters clutch the wire fence as they stare at their mother’s coffin sinking into the ground. A little boy passes a handkerchief to his father and struggles to remember his grandmother’s face. This is the last time they will all be together, looking through wire, this ordinary family.

I turn the page and find a photograph of a tiny German factory in an old terraced street that used to be lined with tall, dark tenements. The factory made felt shoes and slippers. It reminds me of the “Elves and the Shoemaker” story. Dad used to read it to me from the Grimm’s book of fairy-tales he has kept since he was a boy. Mum would never read them, even though the Grimms were German. She begged Dad to get rid of the book in the end. It really upset her. And Victor never liked the thought of the ugly little men marching through the house in the middle of the night and taking over. But Grandma said it was a very German thing to do.

The felt-shoe factory’s ground-floor windows are walled in. On the first-floor they are boarded up. The heavy doors are sealed. The stone walls are crumbling. Crazy wildflowers are growing out of the ledges like hippy hair. The shop front lettering is still clear, painted in bold black. My patchy knowledge of the German language doesn’t extend to footwear. I only know it says felt shoes and slippers because there is a paragraph about the factory.

The street, Bernauer Strasse, is in East Berlin, but its front doors and windows once opened into the western sector. The residents woke one morning to the noise of hammering and discovered their front doors had been nailed shut. Some leapt to freedom from upstairs, leaving everything behind and falling into blankets held out by friends and relatives.

At first, the residents in the higher apartments could lean out of their windows and talk to friends who looked up from the cobbled western pavement. But the East German police led all the families out the back way and sent demolition crews to tear these tall, gracious border homes down to their ground-floor façades. They are now a core section of the Wall and no one can cross this street.

I reread the last sentence and, like a flickering segment of cine-film, I see Mum tearing to the parade at closing-time when we run out of salt or shoe-polish or denture-glue while, plank by plank, I watch the light disappear from the frosted glass panel Dad fitted into the front door at the cost of half a thumb.

The owner of the deserted factory had to pack up his nails and pieces of felt while other, stouter nails were hammered into place, gradually leaving him in absolute darkness.

I wonder if he cuts out the felt somewhere else. The other side is probably not a soft-shoe sort of place. Communists probably wear one hideous, approved style, similar to my driving-shoes.

I look hard at the picture. It’s a desolate place, the kind you see in England. The pre-fabs where Stan and Elsie live are on a bomb-site. A year before the war ended, one Doodlebug took out a whole street. A few years later six pre-formed sections, six men and one day were all it took to make each new home. They built rows and rows of them and made a sort of village, but they are still surrounded by wasteland.

“Right from the start people said the pre-fabs made it all look bleaker,” Big Stan always says. “Because they’re temporary, you see. That’s what we keep being told. Not built to last. They remind folk of the bombing. Hurry up and turn the whole lot into a nice estate with proper foundations, they say. But from day one we settled right in, me and Else. Lovely fitted kitchen. Walls already painted a lovely cream. Mongolia, I think they call it. Our neighbours are our friends. All from day one. Never been temporary to us.”

When Bernauer Strasse survived the bombs, the families and the felt-shoe man must have thought their homes and businesses were safe, but a different, more chilling desolation has set in; a silent war without an end.

The east side of Bernauer Strasse has electric wire, anti-tank barriers, a tarmac strip for the guards to patrol, gigantic lamps and watchtowers. The sandy death strip is well-raked to reveal footprints and is sprayed with anti-plant chemicals. The west side is deserted, convenient for people washing their cars, or just for somewhere to park.

I keep looking at the blind windows of the little factory facing the cobblestones congested with weeds. I imagine Mum’s face if I made this project about the contrasting halves of her city, one free and one captive.

The page flutters in my hands while Gillian’s pen skates over her pad.

“Jacqueline, what are you doing?” she hisses. “It’s nearly ten to.”

“It’s all right,” I whisper back, pulling my notepad towards me, not even looking up. “I’ve got it now.”

“About time. Oh no, my cartridge is empty. Have you got any?”

I scrabble about in my pencil-case. “It’s Platignum, mind.”

“Oh bugger, I need Osmiroid.”

Miss Whipp glances at us and we set to work, Gillian switching to pencil.

“I hate having to go over it in ink afterwards. It never looks the same.”

“Don’t forget to leave the rubbing out until the ink’s dry.”

“I’m not a twerp, Jacqueline.”

She sulks for a while, but soon I hear the furious whisper of her pencil across the page.

Naomi is a pieneer for black women. Her mother gave her away. Doors was slamed in her face. She felt...

“Jacqueline, how do you spell aliernated?”

I tell her, but she doesn’t believe me.

I speed up. Not just because the bell is about to ring, but because my project is writing itself. It took me an entire geography lesson to finish one sentence about ziggurats, but Berlin stirs me more than Mesopotamia. The words are being sucked from my pen, each with its own shadow because my nib is split.

“Remember you can’t do spider-webs again,” Gillian says with the vague sneer that close friends somehow get away with.

“Actually that one was really about homes.”

“Cobwebs aren’t homes.”

“They are to spiders.”

“They’re death-traps to flies.”

“Well some things have two uses.”

“Oh.”

I don’t want to show her the factory. I can’t explain this project to her and probably can’t explain it to old Walnut Whipp either. All I know is the Bernauer Strasse picture is printed onto my brain, and I’m still thinking about homes as if the spider project was never finished.

“Aren’t you cutting anything out?” Gillian asks, frowning at me.

“Might do.”

“We’ve got to. It has to be illustriated.”

“I’m not bothering with…illustriations yet.”

“Be like that then.”

Gillian makes a show of gluing Naomi Sims onto the cover of her book. I do snip my picture out, but I’m not sure yet if it will explain anyone’s story. To Miss Whipp it might just look like a derelict building and there are plenty of those here. No one knows how Oaking Potted Meats is still standing.

The bell rings.

“Take your projects home, but hold them up as you pass me,” Miss Whipp calls above the racket of scraping chairs.

“Now you’ll have to say what you’re doing,” Gillian says.

But what I’ve written makes no sense yet. It’s just questions about the boarded and bricked-up street. Not whys or how-could-theys, but questions about where people go when they say they’re going home, and how they might feel when they can’t say that anymore.

While the stone crumbles, wild plants thrive, weaving in and out of the fragments of Bernauer Strasse’s stolen homes. Nature is taking over, a quiet and final conclusion.

Home is where your mother waits for you. All roads ought to lead there. And when they arrive, people are meant to have a front-door they can open and close behind them.

Mothers should never have to take frightened children out of their homes, and children should never need to wrench their weeping mothers’ fingers from the edge of the let-down and lead them out of the back door.

Gillian and I join the queue filing past Miss Whipp.

Naomi Sims wants to lift the spirrit of the africkan-american woman.

“You must sympiate with that,” Gillian says, watching me look at her work and trying to see mine.

“I’m not African-American. How come I should sympathise…er, sympiate with Naomi Sims?”

“Well, feeling foreign and that. You’re half-something, aren’t you? Not from one place or the other.”

“No, it’s only my mum who’s foreign. I know exactly where I come from.”

“How come?”

“I’ve just never felt out of place.”

When my turn comes to show my work, Miss Whipp, a chocolate sliver garnishing her front teeth, holds my book out, peering at it without her reading-glasses, which are buried under a mountain of foil wrappers.

“Well done, Jacqueline. Lots of nice writing here. Jolly good. Keep it up while you’re off on your hols, won’t you?”

“Yes. Thank you. I will,” I say, relieved to scuttle past without being questioned.

But the relief is short-lived.

“Mine’s on Naomi Sims,” Gillian is saying.

“Right, dear, I’ll make a note of that. Is she a pop-star? Oh, Jacqueline, hold on. I haven’t entered your subject on my list yet.”

I look back. Her pen is poised. Gillian is grinning with the satisfaction of a girl whose best friend is in a hole.

I am a spy about to deliver a dead-drop at dawn. Old Walnut will discover the whereabouts of the hidden gen from a discreet chalk-mark on a wall. All she can do is wait for my next move. I am in absolute command of my mission.

“It’s all under control. I’ll let you know,” I say, suddenly hot and prickling because no one ever says that to a teacher. It’s probably what people in offices say when, for an entire fortnight, their out-tray has contained nothing but a fold-up windcheater and three broken staplers. “I’m just finding out, you see. I’m…er… sort of writing my way in. Actually, I need to go to Berlin to suss it all out.”

“Please don’t say that dreadful word, Jacqueline.”

She refuses to leave a blank space on her list. Her fingers claw at my arm. I can hear her chins chafing her frilly collar. “You should do that nice Sandie Shaw, dear. For the contrast aspect of the project, her dismal side is obvious. Absolutely dreadful pair, aren’t they?”

The
Daily Mirror
said Sandie was being named “the other woman” in someone’s divorce. Does Miss Whipp mean that? Ah, I see. She’s referring to Sandie’s penchant for bare feet.