Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Introduction

It’s the twenty-ninth of November 1997. I’m forty-two years of age, and I’m tired. Not an auspicious start to a memoir, some would say, but then, they haven’t had my life. I think I was about eleven when the full horror of what was going to be expected of me began to dawn - at any rate it was around the start of puberty. I do recall I’d been grievously lied to about menstruation. I believed it would only last a day, if that, and the terrible combination of blood, pain and Mother and Nana dismissing my sobs of disbelief and panic with strangely satisfied expressions as they told me it would last a week, was a nightmare I couldn’t escape. A week! It wasn’t possible that ferocious Indian Brave, Red Feather (me) would have to put up with this squalid and hurtful indignity every month, for a week, forever. It was disgusting. It was a betrayal. Worse still, all these women were gloating over me with I-told-you-so expressions. Red Feather was dead, those faces said, and now I’d have to buckle down and be a girl.

   I was a child, but I wasn’t stupid.

   There was a bottomless pit of humiliation opening up in front of me, and those women seemed to expect I’d jump into it singing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. Maybe it was then I decide to live my life at a full tilt boogie and damn gender.

   But perhaps it wasn’t ever a conscious decision and all I’ve done is hurtle from one crisis to another, to avoid that yawning pit. It’s said we all perish from our own rage - and that we always meet what we fear the most. Well then, at some point I looked fury dead in the eye and hooked a bridle on it. It’s been a bumpy ride, me buckos.Chapter 1

I expect you’ll be relieved to know I don’t have many memories of being very little. I often speak to people who claim to have almost total recall of their toddling days and eulogise their Teddies as if they were dead siblings. I have always suspected that for recall of that clarity, you need the co-operation of your family. ‘Mummy says I was a terror aged two’ and ‘remember when I bit the cat - my, how we laughed’, that kind of thing. It seems to me to be a collective, rather than a personal memory. In my family, the past was a dark and dangerous voyage that had been successfully navigated to the present and what was the point of talking about it? My parents specialise in deleting what was, editing memory and denying the rest. So, a minimum of cutesy baby snaps, just the photos of me on a white fur rug - nude, except for my baby bangles (nothing changes), in a square necked frock and pearls looking plumply fractious, with Nana’s dog, Senta, faithfully guarding me in my pram. I don’t really remember these things, I just look at the photos and seem to feel Senta’s dark, rough coat, or smell . . . What? Nothing, to be honest. I was a baby, born in a hot April in 1955, the year Bill Haley released ‘Rock Around the Clock’.

   The birth took place in Colchester Barracks (or more properly, the Officer’s Quarters) where Father was stationed, at around two a.m. Some mythology surrounds my entrance into the world; it was a home birth and apparently, though I have no idea if it’s actually true, the bed props collapsed during the last moments of Mother’s labour, the resultant crash summoned Father from the sitting room where he had been nursing a bottle of whiskey, and the sight of this bloody confusion caused him to faint dead away. At six foot four inches and a bit tall, this must have been like watching a great tree being felled in the forest. Mother noticed none of this, having demanded gas-and-air at the first contraction and so having been off with the pixies for several hours, where some would say, she has remained. I always sensed from this story that I was an ungrateful baby, since it was generally prefaced by Mother’s saying what a good prenatal carer she’d been, having given up cigarettes at the first hormonal flood (though she lit up immediately after the placenta popped out and never looked back) for Jaffa oranges, with which she stuffed herself for the remainder of the pregnancy. Her Siamese cat, Gina Lollobridgida, would sit purring on the vast dome of Mother’s belly for hours, offering some sort of feline lullaby as I swam in the warmth and safety of that orange-flavoured amniotic fluid. The other comment that made me aware I’d caused difficulty was Mother’s assertion that it had taken a full six months of sit-ups for her to regain her famously svelte figure. That, I still feel, was in many ways my gravest crime.

   About two months after my nerve-wracking entrance to the world, Father left the Army - he said it was because he felt promotion from Captain upwards would be too long coming, a case of stepping into dead men’s shoes. Maybe so. But there were other forces at work; Mother craved the worldly sophistication of civvie life - the cocktail parties, or costume dances where she would appear as a smouldering, glossy-lipped Flamenco dancer, or saucy ‘Cherry Ripe’ (her name is Cherrie - actually, Cherrie Joyce but the ‘Joyce’, considered a tad common, is never mentioned; Nana very nearly called her ‘Blossom’ apparently so things could have been worse) in a little black dress and a bunch of imitation cherries and net by way of a hat. Matching lips and nails in brilliant crimson naturally completed the effect.

   Mother was Glamour. She wanted more than the hermetic, deadly world of Army Wives. We moved in with my Grandparents, at their end-of-terrace house on Hawthorn Crescent, Cosham, near Portsmouth. I have no idea how my Grandparents came to be in Portsmouth - was it something to do with my Grandfather? Like Father, he’d been a career soldier; after retirement, mysteriously, he’d moved his family to this anonymous, undistinguished suburb of Pompey - a famous Navy town. We had no other relatives either there or nearby; had the sea drawn him? Was it purely financial? I don’t know. It was a snug house though, and the walled garden was a sleepy sun-trap. 1955 had seen a hot spring and it turned into a very hot summer; I was put out in the sun, naked, a minute on each side, because that was the healthy thing to do then, before melanoma and Factor 60. Let the baby get the air, a bit of sunshine puts roses in your cheeks. I got so tanned, and my thick cap of hair was so dark, when I was wheeled out in my pram, strangers told Mother she was really brave to adopt a black baby. Mother, naturally, like the good bigot she is, was horrified at the idea people would think that of her. It was just another proof of my ability to annoy her.

   Was I a ‘good’ baby? Is anyone? What does that mean anyway - that you don’t give any trouble by crying or getting sick? I don’t know. I do know that my maternal Grandfather, the extremely troublesome William Edward (or Edwin, according to some accounts) George Hurdle, was apparently the only adult in the house who could calm me when I did cry. That Mother couldn’t, is, in her eyes, yet another testament to my intractability. Can you see how this is shaping? I couldn’t. I thought Mother was a Beautiful Fairy Princess; I thought I simply wasn’t good enough for her. I’m sure I felt it even then. Is this why I cried and cried until my Grandfather took me in his arms and soothed me back to sleep?

   Bill Hurdle is a strange, enigmatic figure. I feel a curious tenderness towards this man I never knew, and who by all accounts was a terrible person. I’ve very often been described as that myself so maybe a little bias creeps in. He was supposedly a strict, tyrannical martinet, a manic-depressive, given massive doses of ECT, who once chased Nana round the garage with an axe and whose Mother died of ‘galloping consumption’ after going to a dance in rural County Clare with another man and after he abandoned her, getting soaking wet walking home afterwards in her dancing slippers. From this, by the way, Nana extrapolated that I was a potential TB victim, and set in motion my long love-affair with disease - but more of that later.

   Bill Hurdle, or ‘Weg’ Hurdle as I call him to myself, after the initials stencilled on his Army issue tin box which I still have, had been part of the teams that went round the villages surrounding the concentration camps after the War, taking depositions from the inhabitants.

   ‘Did you see anything?’ he’d ask the stolid German burghers, ‘did you know what was happening - the black smoke, the stench, didn’t you know what it was?’

   They always said no. Always. Despite the fact you could still smell the stink of the ovens as they stood and denied everything. It maddened him. I think it destroyed him.

   But despite his ruined spirit, he loved me. I was the child of his heart.

   If I woke in the night crying, my Grandfather would carry me round in his arms until I quietened, talking to me in a low voice, telling me things that sank into my brain like ink on a piece of blotting paper. Telling me things that left their bloody, formless stain on my soul; walking round and round his room with me while the disturbing moon outside stirred our blood to boiling point. Do I feel connected to him because I share his violent heritage - perhaps. The things our ancestors bequeath us are not as easily explained as we might like to believe. I don’t look like him, though; in the photographs he appears spare and almost gaunt, with hollow eyes, a haunted expression and a brutal military haircut. His ears stick out; mine are small and neat, despite now being so heavily pierced. But I see a certain look in his eyes, in those monochrome pictures. It’s a look I’ve seen in the mirror - it says, I don’t know if I can survive this day of inane, human chatter and the vast desolation that is eating my heart; it says, Goddess forgive me and have mercy on my pain; it says, release me.

   Even his humour was manic, hysterical, gasping - the photo of him imitating a cobra being charmed by his friend playing a recorder, which involved him lying on the floor face down with a jacket over his head and one arm bent up, hand bunched into a snake’s head, reeks of that high, unstoppable craziness that I hear in my own voice, drunk and on overload.

   Then he died.

   Nana believed it was because she had brought snowdrops into the house. It was a superstition in her Mother’s family; snowdrops should never be brought inside because if they were, someone would die. The Fairies didn’t like their favourite flower being killed just to decorate human houses with their pretty corpses; they took revenge. A human life for a flower’s life - it’s all the same to the Little Folk. But that day, someone had given Nana a bunch and she hadn’t wanted to cause offence by refusing to cross the threshold with them. Perhaps she wanted to shake off the dark, Welsh peasant heritage that would have seemed primitive and rather shameful to her - for whatever reason, she broke the superstition of her Mother’s people and brought the little white flowers in. That night my Grandfather suffered a massive coronary and died. He died before I knew him, my protector died, and from then on, it was save yourself and the devil take the hindmost.

   I don’t remember much after this for a few years - I suppose it was a house in mourning but I was too little to understand, even if I felt it. Then, when I was a toddler, Mother’s brother, Uncle Tom, a person I have no memory of ever seeing or hearing about previous to his death, died in Aden, where he’d been stationed with the RAF. Actually, he died in England having been flown home after having a brain haemorrhage whilst playing water-polo. At the approximate time of his seizure, Nana had again taken snowdrops into the house; a world away, her son began his dying.

   It was like a fate, or a terrible curse; as if the narrow Welsh valley she’d abandoned reached out and claimed her men as its price for her betrayal. The house grew dark and cold; voices never raised above a whisper. Uncle Tom’s widow, Auntie Peggy, and her two adolescent daughters, Pattie and Cherry (Mother’s namesake) came to live with us. It was a confused time for me; I have a vague recollection of a busybody neighbour saying to Nana in the street, ‘does the little one know, ‘ave you told her, poor mite?’ It made Nana angry and I was puzzled - what had happened? Who was ‘Uncle Tom’? Why were these strange women coming to live with us? Why did grown-ups cry all the time and get furious when you asked what the matter was? I was terrified of my cousins, especially Pattie, who was sharp and hateful with grief, taking her anger out on me, who to her, must have seemed to be a spoilt brat with no notion of how cruel life could be. She set out to show me, in little ways, what a mean place the world could be, when the adults weren’t around.

   So it was a house of dying. I was born into mourning and tears, inheriting my Grandfather’s black humours and his clever hands, the hands that made intricate model galleons and mended watches, the artist’s eyes that filled exquisite handmade leather albums with hundreds of beautiful photographs of his travels, that tumultuous heart that finally burst.

   So it was that my whole family, a family of women with one man, my Father, came to live in Nana’s house, settling there like a harem of crows.

Chapter 2

A child growing up in Cosham learns about the sea in a different way to a child who has a two week holiday a year at a resort. Nana once told me that the seagulls who wheeled above our heads cawing mournfully were the souls of dead sailors drowned at sea. She was prone to that kind of lugubrious superstition: she also said if you stepped on a needle it would get into your body, then travel round your blood stream until it pierced your heart, that pins carried a mysterious poison called ‘verdygris’ and raw cake mix gave you worms. However, if the seagulls thing sounds a bit nautical, a bit sea-doggish, it wasn’t, because Cosham is on the mainland, Portsmouth City is an island, and they’re separated by a saltwater creek, deep and muddy, reeking of decay and silt. I believe its been filled in now, which is a great shame because I loved it and my childhood was spent secretly prowling its banks looking for dead things to prod at.

   Naturally, as a child my life centred around the house most of the time, and I played in the garden, the alley and the street. Excursions to the creek were carried out undercover of supposed nippings round to the sweetie shop, or the park or whatever. The creek, or more precisely, the grassy unkempt creek-bank, was dangerous, an outlaw place where my friends and I built dens out of branches and seaweed; iodine rich and womb-like. These dens were often vandalised or desecrated by strangers in the night; we’d find beer bottles, empty cigarette cartons and once, a vast, primeval human turd. We fished for flatfish with bits of yellow car sponge on bent pins - sometimes sacrificing Opal Fruits, as fish were supposed to be partial to them, if you chewed them for a while first. I never caught anything so I never found out what flavour they like best.

   One reason I liked wandering round the creek bank was that Home was still pretty fraught with problems. I had grown used to the presence of my Aunt and cousins and become quite fond of Cousin Cherry, who was arty and drew me pictures of horses galloping madly into nothing (scenery was not included.) The days were easily filled with whatever it is that children do in their internal world - it must have included drawing and reading of some sort because I can’t remember learning to read or for that matter, to swim. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t do either of those two things well. I do remember eating plastic beads (tiny little multi-coloured ones used for bead weaving) from little plastic bags; they were kept in the old kitchen cupboard, (the one near the door, with a top covered in yellow sticky backed plastic that had bubbled up and gone villainously black at the ratty edges), for some reason, though no one did craft-work to my knowledge. I savoured their texture, like taramasalata without the fish grease; bumpy, delicious. They didn’t taste of anything but I loved how they felt. Eventually I was caught engaging in this illegal snacking and the dreadful word SCHOOL was mentioned, striking terror into my heart. I was at nursery school already because Mother worked at the Electricity Board being smart and glam as a typist (though she was really a secretary, she said, adding to the impression she was a Princess in Disguise, forced to labour in circumstances below her dignity) in a typing pool - a workplace that has mystified the children of its workers on many occasions. My vision of it was a kind of Fifties mermaid factory, in which Mother and her equally soigné chums typed and floated in a cool, turquoise light spangled with glitter.

   I don’t remember Father being around - perhaps he was working in the Persian Gulf at that point. Then, though I don’t remember a homecoming or anything, he was suddenly there, enormous and rough-chinned, smelling of Old Spice and all the women treated him like an exotic creature who’s every whim must be catered to with a resigned sigh.

   ‘Ronnie wants a bath, Mum, shall I put the heater on in the bathroom?’

   ‘Well, I should think so - unless we’ve run out of paraffin - get it nice and snug.’

   Father’s constant complaint was that above the tiny bath in the midget bathroom were strung thin plastic indoor washing lines that came complete with miniature plastic pegs, and on these lines were draped ‘smalls’ that had been hand washed - knickers, stockings, bras - and they dripped on him as he tried to bathe, dribbling cold drips on his head and down his neck. The bathroom heater was lit in order to fool him with heat, so he wouldn’t notice that chilly shower. The heater itself was a vile, smelly brute of a thing, ancient and malevolent as only certain household devices can be. It burnt my bum once when I inadvertently backed into it and Nana sprinkled the burn with a mysterious silver powder from a small rusty tin, a leftover from her days in Germany. I have no idea what it was, but it worked miraculously.

   While this house of women revolved round Father - huge and handsome - I attended my nursery school and pondered the strangeness of other children as only children often do. Other children seemed remote, alien, unfriendly, and even then, dull and conservative. For example, when the school tortoise pissed on the table, its opalescent, milky urine fascinated me; I felt suddenly that it was possible other things, other creatures, other people even, could be different from me, have different existences. That there were an infinite number of variations, individual stories of creation, of life. Not, of course, that I could say that, being four years old or thereabouts. But as I turned, mouth agape with wonder, to the teacher, about to ask a stream of questions, I froze at the scarlet-cheeked evidence of her embarrassment and the scatological sniggerings of my classmates. I felt the world zoom away for an instance and a terrible feeling of loneliness drenched me and instead of questions, I cried out in horror. This was taken as ‘soppiness’ by teacher and peer-group alike and Mother was told, when she collected me, I was ‘over-sensitive’ or worse, had an ‘over developed imagination’.

   On another occasion, everyone in class had to sing a song, so as to earn a couple of squares of Kake-Brand cooking chocolate. They sang hymns, children’s songs, nursery rhymes. I sang ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’, by Lonny Donegan, the Skiffle King. I have absolutely no idea where I learnt it, but I knew off by heart and sang away happily not realising the silence was not admiration of my vocalising, but incredulity. I faltered to a stop, thinking my singing was so terrible I wouldn’t get the chocolate, which I badly wanted. It was from this incident my love of singing was first sabotaged by the idea I was the world’s worst singer, ever. I must have cried, because I always cried, hot and humiliated.

   I don’t remember if I got the chocolate, but I probably did as I remember clearly the thick, waxy taste of it, so unlike real chocolate. Mother was again informed of my oddness, and this time she was also mortified by my vulgarity. I only made up for it by reciting ‘The Owl And The Pussycat’ faultlessly at the nursery school Fête, but even then I lost points for stoutly refusing to take off a particularly disreputable beanie hat I loved to distraction. It didn’t go with my frilly white dress and immaculate rag rolled Shirley Temple curls. Mother and Nana loved those long, shining sausage curls and I suffered agonies because of them; I didn’t want curls, I loathed curls and my hair is naturally thick, straight and deeply resistant to curling. But what could I do? If a grown woman wants to bind a child’s long hair up into tight, painful bumps of cloth and make her sleep like that, there’s not much a child can do - and anyhow, it was something that girls had to do, we had to ‘suffer to be beautiful’ like that foul song ‘Keep Young And Beautiful’:

   Keep young and beautiful,

   It’s your duty to be beautiful!

   Keep young and beautiful,

   If you want to be loved.

   Jesus Christ, how sinister is that? But it was the motivating ethos of our house and I wasn’t going to escape it. Is it any wonder I longed passionately to be a boy?

   I remember night times best. Nana’s front room was always a warm, glowing place, wrapped in the blasting heat of the coal fire and gilded by the glow of the standard lamp behind the comfortable, saggy old sofa where I always sat. The TV would be on, Nana, Mother and Auntie Peggy would be drinking Merrydown cider and sometimes, daringly, (from a perpetual dieter’s point of view), eating bacon-and-egg sandwiches instead of a proper dinner. Sometimes there was gin-and-tonics, which was a red letter day. They would drink and smoke Embassys and I would read, goggle at the telly or roam about the room, investigating the old writing desk where Auntie Peggy kept her nail varnish - ‘Orange Flip’ - and Mother’s - ‘Rose Frosted Rose Gold’, by Revlon. The smell of nail polish and the old leather writing surface blended in a secret, intoxicating aroma.

   Behind the sofa was a cold, outcast place, taken up by a lonely, unused armchair and the glass-fronted cabinet containing treasures from the family’s Army life, a life which had allowed them to travel extensively. They had lived in Egypt for a short time and for a long time in Germany; Nana spoke wistfully of the souvenirs that had fallen by the way in their journeys - the trunk full of ostrich feathers devoured by the mysterious and voracious ‘woolly bear bug’, a waist length string of carved ivory beads the size of walnuts Mother had played with and broken, the beads scattering and never recovered. But the cabinet was a nest of wonders to me, even if to Nana it was a poor shadow of former glories.

   On the top stood elaborate, carved and painted musical beer Steins, a wooden bear, a painted, wooden Smoking Man incense burner - when the incense cone was lit and the figure re-assembled, smoke poured out of his mouth as if he’d lit his pipe. I still have him, he still smokes. There was a beautiful porcelain statue of a rosy naked lady, an exquisite model schooner in full sail made by Grandfather and a brass ashtray of the Manikin Pis urinating on a swastika, from Belgium. Inside was full of things like the little clay oil lamp supposedly from the Valley Of The Kings and an oval Ormolu box inlaid with gemstones, a ‘real’ diamond twinkling dustily on its lid. Best of all, there was a wooden musical box carved with edelweiss that creaked out an asthmatic waltz - I loved it so much it made me cry. I still get tearful listening to musical boxes, they seem so plucky and desperate, like an asthmatic street singer on a frosty evening.

   Sometimes, tired out with examining these domestic ikons, I would just sit in the curve of the sofa and watch Nana sitting opposite me with her little mongrel dog Sally tucked in beside her - Senta, my faithful black guard dog, who had been half Alsatian and half Labrador and who had been brought home from Germany despite the trouble of quarantine, was long dead and presumably in Dog Heaven. Sally, a little neurotic, pop-eyed groveller had been acquired because apparently, I had become frightened of big dogs and Sally’s hysterical angst was supposed to re-assure me dogs were Alright. Personally, I think anyone who isn’t at least a little bit frightened of big dogs wants their head examining - have you actually looked at those teeth?

   If I tired of gazing at Nana, there was always Auntie Peggy fascinatingly knitting Fair Isle, reading and watching TV all at the same time. If Mother was there, and not out with Father, I’d watch her more covertly, admiring her beauty and her soft turquoise eye-shadow, which I thought was a natural skin colouration that happened to women as they grew up; Auntie Peggy had it too, and so did Nana which proved my theory, but I was too young to realise they shared the pot of Max Factor Cream Eyeshadow in Seagreen. If I got too hot, I’d slide over to the parquet flooring by the bay window and lie on the cool, shiny wood, breathing the scent of cold and floor polish in a doze of pleasure.

   This habit earned me a slap round the face from Pattie once when she was forced to baby-sit one night. I was astonished and outraged at the injustice but to her, my indignation was doubtless the result of my spoilt nature. I’d probably disobeyed her, something she very much disliked in anyone. She was very tall and willowy, and had fabulous big hairdos courtesy of being a hairdressers model - often these beehives were tinted pastel green or pink, very chic, with nails by Mavala to match. Her beautiful net petticoats, layers and layers of sugar-water stiffened multicoloured net, pushed her skirts out in a crinoline and her shoes were evilly pointed. We never got on. I did admire one of her boyfriends though, a boy called Malcolm, who built Lego castles for me and on one occasion, helped me to be brave.

   I had crashed my bicycle in the alley and gone over the handlebars into a pothole fracturing three or four ribs. In those days, the Doctors bound you up from nipple to waist in thick white Elastoplast strapping to prevent your breathing too heavily. The time came to remove this sticky corset and chaos reigned. Mother tried inching off a bit at a time, but my screams threatened to bring the Police on a child battering call. I was bribed (with chocolate, naturally), threatened, cajoled - everything. By the time Pattie and Malcolm got in, things were desperate and I was in full mutiny. I’d live with the plaster for the rest of my life if need be, rather than go through the slow torture of its removal. Malcolm (to Pattie’s disgust) knelt down to me and solemnly asked me if I would be a good soldier and let him rip it off in one pull. It would hurt, he said, but be over quickly. I couldn’t let him down, I’d have died for him, never mind let him rip my plaster off. I agreed. He did it. It burnt like fire but the look of admiration on his face was the reward of heaven. I prayed nightly that Pattie would marry him so he’d be mine forever and of course, come and live in the house, which is how I thought life was lived. But she didn’t, and shortly afterwards, my Knight in Shining Armour was an ex. And I never saw him again. Lego lost its appeal.

   Cherry on the hand, kept rabbits and mice which was quite nice, though I never had much to do with them. She was a terrific Mod, in grey flannel pinafore dresses, black polo-neck jumpers and, thrillingly, black leather boots with a seam up the front. Her boyfriends rode scooters and were knife-sharp. She was an Art Student and tremendously cool, with short, Quant-style hair. Nana queued up for hours to get her a ticket to see the Beatles when they came to the Guildhall. Cherry studied Window Dressing, and made fascinating things out of papier maché. I wanted to be close to her, but though she was the younger of the girls, she was too old to care about a child other than the occasional kindness. My cousins and I were never ‘sisters’, never close in any way. We just lived in the same house for a while; I seldom ever saw them after we left, or indeed to this day. It reinforced my feeling that families consisted of people who were unfortunately related, but existed in a sort of bubble with no past, no joint future and no real connection to each other apart from the accident of birth. I was still an only child, and though the girls adored Father and co-opted him as best they could, it didn’t make me part of their lives.

   Nana was the central figure in my childhood. I lived in her house and she looked after me while Mother worked - some very stupid people would say that this deprivation caused all my problems. As if it were that easy. Nana was a quiet, wrinkly apple of a woman who taught me how to carry my doll Patsy, (she was a yellowy pink, leprous creature with a terrifying bald, battered celluloid head and a greying rubber body - I ate her fingers and toes in a cannibalistic frenzy when I was forbidden the beads) strapped to my hip by means of a shawl tied diagonally across to the opposite shoulder. This was how her Mother carried babies in Crumlin, the village in Wales Nana had come from - Lily May Burgess from Crumlin, though she thought ‘Lilian’ a more up-market name and tended to use that instead.

   My Great-Grandmother figured quite largely in my imagination at this time. Although not at all forthcoming about her life, like all my family, Nana did sometimes mention her childhood in Wales when we were alone. My Great-Grandparents had lived in a steep sided mining village in a two up, two down cottage which was unusual, but my Great-Grandfather had worked his way up to becoming a mines inspector, and so took home more money than average. Which was just as well, because they had sixteen children, many of whom were twins, and fourteen of whom were boys, Nana and her sister being the exceptions. Nana told me her Mother put up two pillowcases of dough every Monday, and took them to the village bakehouse to be baked into quartain loaves for the week. The family was never all in the house at the same time - especially when the boys went down the pit on shift.

   I used to ponder this excess of brothers for hours, as I longed desperately for a brother of my own. It seemed fantastic, impossible - how did Great-Grandmother ever get her figure back? Nana told a couple of other stories, such as when, having daringly gone to the pictures and seen a Western, the two girls decided that Nana’s sister (who’s name I never knew) would become an Indian Squaw, which involved them covering her long, thick, curling auburn hair with black boot polish and braiding it tightly. Her head had to be shaved as a result. Another time, Nana dabbed her face with Papier Poudré, the little ‘book’ of face powder impregnated paper leaves designed to take the shine off your nose - Great-Grandfather scrubbed her face under the pump with carbolic soap for ‘painting her face like trollop’. She said his great white handlebar moustache was quivering with rage. Nana said my hands were the same shape as Great-Grandmother’s, that used to make me happy, as if I really did have some connection with the past, some roots, and I used to look at my long fingers and imagine that Welsh life, that narrow valley.

   But Nana never said why she left, what she did before she married Grandfather or why we had no contact whatsoever with her family. Was it a scandal, or was it more mundane, simply the search for work outside the valley, drifting away, trying to climb the social ladder? She did tell me she only married Grandfather on the rebound, having been terribly in love with a handsome tubercular (TB again, a recurring theme) boy who played the piano and died, tragically and romantically (the great myth of TB, I just cannot imagine why coughing up your lungs in bloody lumps is considered attractive). She married Grandfather because, she said, she felt sorry for him . . . Oh, Nana, where are all my Welsh relatives? Where are those curly headed boys filthy with coal dust, their white teeth gleaming as they smiled at their sister Lily? Where are my Grand-Uncles, my second cousins and second cousins twice removed? Not all dead, surely? I’ve never managed to find them and such is my inability to feel familial bonds, I probably wouldn’t know what to do with them if I did - but I’d like to have had a chance to try.

   My life was bound tightly with Nana’s, like the doll-baby strapped to my side was bound to me. I breathed her smells, slept with her, lived her life, ate her food. Nana cooked the world’s best cabbage - boiled vitaminless, thick with pepper and butter, mashed with the edge of a saucer in the pan to the consistency of pureé. Her chocolate sponge cakes were sandwiched with a fat layer of butter, cocoa and sugar mixed together; her Sunday dinners guaranteed to send everyone off to sleep in front of the TV Sunday Afternoon Matineé.

   And yet, despite all the domesticity, the household maintenance, the cool perfection of her Nanahood, she was distant, uninvolved. There was something missing in her, she never lost her temper, never reacted, I don’t remember her exhibiting any great degree of emotion. She had a phrase which she used to bring me to heel, and it never, ever failed.

   ‘You can go off people, you know.’

   ‘Nana, Nana, not me, not me, you couldn’t go off me, Nana, I love you . . .’

   ‘Well then, you’d better be a good girl, then, hadn’t you?’

   It terrified me, that phrase. I had nightmares about the family, individually or collectively, just turning away from me as I begged and pleaded for them to stay, to love me as I loved them - they’d turn away and say that dreadful phrase, adding, ‘and we’ve/I’ve gone off you’. And they’d leave me, as if I was nothing, nothing to them. The worst thing was, in the dream, I never knew what I’d done to make them go off me. I used to scream myself awake and wet the bed. As I slept in a baby bed next to Nana’s bed in her room, she’d take me in with her. If I wet her bed, she’d get up without grumbling and lay a towel under me and we’d sleep together in the piss soaked bed. I’d fall asleep wondering how long she’d put up with me for.

   That bedroom was a strange place, above the living room and the same size. It smelt of face powder and old scent, the bay windows facing the street never opened. It had huge old wardrobes full of Mother’s beautiful dance dresses - one I remember was a flame coloured strapless ball gown of many chiffon layers, with a ruched strapless bodice and a floating scarf attached which draped over one shoulder.

   I can’t express how beautiful Mother looked and how delicious she smelled as she would kiss me goodnight before going out to a ‘do’. Her gleaming scarlet lips, her shining chestnut hair in elegant, convoluted waves, her huge blue eyes enhanced with mascara; no child ever had a Mother more entrancing to look at. She was far lovelier than any illustration in my books. Sometimes when I had a fever, which I did quite often due to what Nana termed my ‘lungs’, as if lungs were a condition rather than an organ, Mother would appear before going out in the bedroom doorway and would seem to be surrounded by a softly glowing halo of light (from the open door into the landing, no doubt ) like a real, actual fairy. Diamonds (well, diamantès ) glittered on her earlobes, neck, fingers and wrists. Even her strappy silver dance shoes gleamed glassily like Cinderella’s slippers. And Father, too, so very handsome; tall and broad, with his hand-tailored suits, military bearing, clipped moustache, Scots burr and piercing grey eyes. They were a veritable Prince and Princess. How did they manage to spawn the Frog Child?

   Because even then I knew I wouldn’t do. Nana’s distant gaze seemed to tell me I just wasn’t up to scratch, not the child her beautiful daughter should have had. Now, I think Nana was a woman gutted by the deaths of her men, with nothing to live for, nothing to look forward to. In an unguarded moment Mother once let slip that Uncle Tom was the favourite and she always felt left out - now history repeated itself and she left me out; the cousins left me behind and poor Auntie Peggy was a cypher, the Widow who longed to be Merry but wasn’t allowed to sully the memory of the Golden Boy.

   So from an early age, I learned that if you didn’t show off, you were simply ignored. That would never do because if you didn’t get people’s attention, you would slowly, slowly just disappear bit by bit, like Alice’s Cheshire Cat, until you vanished with a faint sigh. You would become invisible, cease to exist. Possibly, years later, someone might pause, a drink halfway to their lips, wave their cigarette casually and say to their companion, ‘wasn’t there a little girl living here, do you remember? I’m sure there was - long brown hair, rather plump, whatever happened to her?’

   And no-one would know.

Chapter 3

A few things do stick in my memory from around this time. One is The Mudlark Incident. I had seen on telly a local news item about young boys called (by the media) ‘Mudlarks’ who jumped and cavorted around in the (stinking, fish-slimy, effluent contaminated) mud of Pompey Harbour, where haughty Sixties tourists, grinning sailors and louche locals threw coins to them in encouragement of their antics. I was thrilled, really thrilled with this idea - the fabulous possibilities associated with being covered in mud, the ruination of the hated sausage curls and the cute outfit du jour, and the potential for truly mighty showing off. Also there were cross gender and showbiz overtones which made it irresistible.

   The following Sunday, after I had experienced my muddy epiphany, my parents were hosting one of their famous ‘Brunch’ parties. The house was full of cackling, braying drunks laughing hilariously at their own stupidity and being, as they fondly imagined, madly bohemian. It was perfect. I went out into the alley and found a crater full of mud. I rolled in it, wallowed in it, rubbed it in and it was, I have to say, bliss. I planned on leaping into the middle of the party with a glad cry of ‘Look! I’m a Mudlark!’ Thus becoming the centre of delighted attention and admiration for my comic brilliance and initiative. So I did it. There was a terrible silence and my capering tailed off to a disconsolate shuffle. The drunks looked at me as if I were insane. Mother looked stricken. Father’s brow furrowed with distaste. I felt the tears gathering behind my rather itchy mud-rimmed eyes and my lower (mud-covered) lip began to tremble. This wasn’t how it was meant to be - why weren’t they all laughing and saying what a clever, funny little thing I was? Just as I started to howl, Nana whisked me off upstairs to the bathroom where I was scrubbed down hastily, probably with bleach.

   Nana kept up a running commentary as she sluiced me down.

   ‘How could you upset your Mummy like that? All those people, what will they think? What were you thinking of, you wicked girl? They’ll think your Mummy’s a bad Mother. Oh, you have let us down, showing off like that - I don’t know where you get it from, I really don’t . . .’

   ‘But Nana, I was being a Mudlark, like on telly, like those boys on the telly, I was . . .’

   ‘A Mudlark? Whatever next! Those nasty, dirty boys! Only bad boys from bad homes go on like that, Borstal Boys, not a nice little girl from a good, nice home. Stop crying now, it’s your own fault, you brought it on yourself; you’re a naughty, wilful little madam, a disgrace! Showing us all up like that . . .’

   It was after this I realised I didn’t see the world as the rest of my family did. Or if they did have an individual vision, they weren’t letting on.

   Another memory is, I think somewhat earlier - or maybe not, it’s hard to pin it down. I was playing by the kerb in the street outside the house, and Nana, or Nana and Mother, were in the tiny patch of privet hedged front garden, talking either to each other or a neighbour (unusual, because we never consorted with neighbours in the general way, to the extent I never spoke to the neighbours all the time I lived in Cosham). I was in a curious, dreamy state that still occasionally comes on me, where everything is out of focus and far away and I feel free from the constraints of normal society or behaviour; it’s as if I’m not fully awake, but I am. As I played mindlessly at something, I tripped and rolled into the road. Time stood still. A truck was barrelling down the street towards me. I was paralysed with fear, I couldn’t move or scream as the howling, screeching machine bore down on me. I dimly felt Nana, or Mother, running towards me screaming but it all seemed far, far away and unconnected to me. I knew I was going to die, horribly. It seemed natural, didn’t everyone die in my house? I let go of the world. I went back into my head. Then, suddenly it was all bright and fast as a hand grabbed me and pulled me back onto the pavement. Of course, I burst into tears; so did Mother and Nana, we cried and they scolded me soundly for frightening them. But something important had happened. I knew I was mortal; that life was finite - that one day I, yes, even I, would die and it would be the end. No soppy Sunday School Heaven, no harp and angel wings, no white floppy frock. And also, no Devil, no flames of Hell, no savage Christian torture garden, no retribution - only what we had in our own heads. That sense of mortality has never left me. Life is like an endless school summer holiday with Death as the First Day Back, it overshadows every pleasure, every entertainment, you know there’s no escape. I think it became increasingly difficult to discipline me in the usual, physical manner after that, and they had to resort to more subtle, lasting, psychological means to control me.

   Around this time, I had a friend, which was unusual for me, I was never big on friends, especially female ones. Girls always seemed so sly and treacherous, they were strong and savage but covered it up with pouts and sobs and sticky, cutesy-pie pretends. As Red Feather, I was above such behaviour, the honour of the tribe depended on my pride and considerable dead-eye prowess with the spud gun and bow and sucker-arrows. Sad, really, because I was, and still am, a terrible physical coward and had to bluster and shout my way out of potentially scary situations like tree-climbing (broken limbs, callipers for life, wheelchair) or walking the high wall (death, paralysis, crippling injury, plaster casts, or worst of all - being winded).

   But, somehow or other, I ended up with Lizzie. Oh, Lizzie, what a potato of a kid you were. She wore round, pink-wire National Health children’s glasses and had her fairish hair bowl-cut by her Mother at ear length. Over this coiffure, in all weathers, she wore a beige Fair Isle beret pulled down low all round until it touched her specs. She wore a beige Fair Isle sleeveless, V-neck jumper over her white blouse, a beige Fair Isle cardie and a beige pleated skirt in Crimplene and thick navy blue school knickers with a sweetie pocket. Fawn knee socks, always falling down to her Startrites, completed her inevitable ensemble. She was humourless and stolid, but she was my friend. I have no memory whatsoever of what we talked about, if we did, but I sometimes went to her house which was near the railway line and it fascinated me.

   Particularly interesting was the fact she and her nameless younger sisters kept gerbils, not in cages but loose in the front room where they nested in a doll’s pram. The girls dressed these bouncy rats in hand knitted baby clothes their Mother made out of fluorescent pink and yellow acrylic wool. The gerbils would streak around the dingy front room like amphetamine nightmare ratbabies, occasionally tripping up over their bonnet strings or a trailing sleeve and hurtling off the sideboard in a death dive. We would rush to their rescue as they lay upside down, their long ratchety hind legs twitching; we’d kiss them better and put them back in the doll’s pram where they chittered neurotically before making another mad break for it. Nobody in Lizzie’s House of Knitwear seemed to find this odd, but I knew my family would and so I never told them, to keep my Lizzie safe from their scalpel snickering.Lizzie wasn’t allowed officially to be called Lizzie, her Mother used to get very irate about it.

   ‘Can Lizzie come out to play, please?’

   ‘Elizabeth, she’s Elizabeth, like the Queen, not Lizzie, I won’t ‘ave ‘er called Lizzie, d’you hear?’

   ‘Er, yes, Mrs. Umm - can she come out, though, please?’

   I'm sure she disapproved as much of me as my family did of poor Lizzie.

   Famously, Lizzie got to wear a pink, shiny plastic eye patch, with fluffy white cotton wool underneath because she had a lazy eye - meaning one of her eyes drifted inexorably towards her nose while its muddy hazel companion looked straight at you with Lizzie’s usual expression of resignation and faint disbelief. The patch was supposed to train the lazy one to go straight by covering up her one good eye. This meant she could barely see to walk. I was mad with jealousy, as I loved sticky plasters, bandages and all the visible signs of attention and importance. I was addicted to raspberry flavoured children’s aspirin, too. Its gritty texture reminded me of my old bead habit. I lay awake at night feverishly coveting the sympathy I felt sure was Lizzie’s now she was a ‘poor little thing’.

   I had a highly coloured vision of illness in other people’s homes - my own illnesses, though exciting at the onset, didn’t bring me the soft, delicious cuddles, pettings and exquisite invalid food children in books got, and all of which I craved. Rather, I felt very guilty for ‘making work’, and the concomitant tuts and tooth-suckings thoroughly ruined the joy of illness for me, not to mention, of course, the actual hatefulness of really being sick. But Lizzie’s eye patch seemed the perfect solution - no extra work, just the visible wounded soldier effect. It simply wasn’t fair. The only time I came near to this Sickie Shangri-La was when I fell down the steps to the park and knocked my front milk teeth out, but apart from the hilarious chorus of ‘All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth’ from all and sundry when I appeared weeping and bloody with my teeth in my hand, the effect I was striving for sadly didn’t last longer than a few minutes. I may be quite wrong, but I don’t recall ever seeing Lizzie without the eye-patch again. Perhaps she still has it, and if so - well done, Lizzie.

   I wouldn’t want anyone to think I knew no one but Lizzie - it’s true that while I didn’t have friends, as such, I did play out with the alley boys when I could, and I did know other children, the offspring of my parents friends, that sort of thing. In fact, sometimes there’d be the sort of party where drink was taken dans le jardin; and the partygoers would bring their children, as Nana’s small, fully enclosed walled garden was universally admired as the perfect safe playground. However, that proved not to be the case, on one memorable occasion.

   It was a brilliant summer’s day and the house and garden were full of women in floral prints and pastel shifts, and men in their shirtsleeves and colourful ties. We children were outside on the lawn, playing at some game or other, and being watched over by Nana and a couple of older ladies. Nana’s favourite ‘Peace’ rose was in full bloom, its huge, velvety blossoms of yellow and peach fed by her twin horticultural theories of mulching with used tea leaves and digging in horse manure she collected from the street when the rag-and-bone fella’s pony cart went by. The sight of Nana, coal shovel in hand scavenging steaming horseshit from the road before the other gardening grannies could get their scaly claws on it drove Mother to seizures of mortification; but to Nana, standards were one thing, and wasting decent muck was another.

   It was the digging in of muck that caused the problem, that bright, garden party day. Nana used an old kitchen knife, its blade worn to a vicious point, the steel dark and grainy, to dig in the little earth bed where the rose grew. I expect she couldn’t be bothered to get the correct trowel for such a little garden, and people weren’t so accessory obsessed then; the age of the designer gardener wasn’t yet upon us. The knife was handy and she used it. She also, for reasons I cannot fathom, often left it stuck in the soil blade up. I’d seen it like that often, and was careful to avoid it; it frightened me just to look at its pared-down iron wickedness.

   Now, close to the beautiful ‘Peace’ rose were the short row of doors leading to the outside toilet, the coalshed and the garage; in fact they were so close, their doors swung out over the flowerbed and Nana was always concerned the roses would be damaged by this, so we were careful. This was a family habit, but of course, the children playing in the garden that day weren’t family and no one bothered to instruct them in our ways, as they grew more and more hysterical in the heat and the excitement of playing.

   One child was running up and down the path whooping shrilly; suddenly, he leapt onto the slightly open toilet door by the doorknob and started swinging back and forth over the roses, knocking the petals off and screaming. Nana started up and moved towards him to stop him damaging the flowers - I watched in a smug way, waiting for him to be ticked off. Then, in awful slow motion, just as I registered what was underneath his flightpath, he fell off, and onto the old kitchen knife. It stuck straight through the fat part of his outer thigh; I could see the bloody point protruding through his mottled flesh, and the way the lips of the exit wound turned slightly back from the blade. There was a deadly hush, then he began howling like a dog and all hell was let loose. I was fascinated, with the detached unempathic enjoyment of a child witnessing something interesting, if brutal. I cannot imagine how Nana felt. For years I thought she must have been racked with guilt and horror, because that would be what was expected. But if I look back, her face showed no particular expression, even when the child’s Mother, scarlet with fear and rage, flecked her face with spittle while accusing her - quite rightly, I fear - of criminal negligence and crass stupidity. Nana just stood, locked into herself, apparently unmoved, her white face, her little ivory monkey’s face, still. The whole incident was never spoken of again, to my knowledge, but it accounted for the fact I never had many child targets for the trusty spud gun or the sucker arrows in that apparently perfect little children’s garden.

PART TWO

At this time Father was working for a concrete firm, John Heaver’s, in Portsmouth, and to mine and Lizzie’s unspeakable delight, he arranged for a huge industrial sized concrete mixer to grunt down our street and concrete Nana’s front drive. It was an afternoon of heavenly disruption, with burly concreting men pouring tons of Elastoplast pink concrete down onto the front garden and doing much tea drinking and thew-straining. I loved them, their red-brown muscular bodies and reassuring smell, their homely faces, thick accents and beautiful ruined hands made me feel strangely comforted. I must have pestered them to death, begging to do some concrete or bring them their cuppas. Lizzie got rather bored as the day wore on, if I remember, and sloped off early to the gerbils. But the love of workmen, the curious, painful protective sympathy for these amiable sentimental blokes blossomed in me from that day of concrete happiness.

   I felt (probably erroneously) that life in their houses would be simpler, more loving and kinder than the brittle, sophisticated cocktail party atmosphere of my own home. Where this idea came from I can’t imagine, as my family were, on the whole, anti the working classes, who they saw as shiftless, unionised layabouts who did nothing but lean on their shovels all day and tediously demand higher wages. Perhaps I saw too many old movies with faithful estate workers and their spotless but ragged offspring (me, in my dreams) sitting round the range of an evening singing hymns mournfully in a minor key or reading aloud from improving books borrowed from the Mechanic’s Library. Wherever the image in my mind came from, it meant I couldn’t believe these men were just idle good-for-nothing brute animals. The grunting heave of their bodies made me tired just watching, and even then, I thought how physically destructive and exhausting it must be to labour outside whatever the weather, and I worried about them hurting themselves and the little ragged children not having enough to eat. There was no end to my imaginative sentimentality, easy tears and desire for martyrdom by proxy. I remember trying to express this feeling and one of the family laughing and saying they probably beat their families and drank the money they earned. I was horrified, and puzzled. Drinking your money was what my family did, why was it wrong when the workmen did it? As to the beating, my beautiful workmen would never do anything so nasty, so I just ignored that part.

   I must have been going to the dreaded primary school at this point, Highbury County Primary - Nana took me there in the morning and fetched me in the afternoon whilst Mother floated serenely in the nacreous splendour of the Typing Pool and Father earned a living. I loathed it from Day One and acted up horribly every single day, often getting a humiliating slap on the leg for my pains. The fact was I truly hated school from start to finish, so much so I have blanked most of it from my mind. It seemed like a cruel punishment from God for some appalling sin I’d committed without knowing it; it was a torture so exquisite that even now, I work in schools as little as possible because the dreadful smell of sweat, boiled food, dirty old toilets and chalkdust, combined with the endless cacophony of imprisoned children and the nasal drone of idiot teachers still makes me frightened and defensive. To me, locked in the deadly sensitive world of the only child, everyone in school was vile and stupid; every day was a kind of infant survival skills course that I constantly failed.

   I do remember meeting the genial Headmaster, Mr. Law, whom I saw once on my first day and never again. I think if I’d seen more of him I might not have felt so terrified and alone, as he was comfortingly gigantic (like Father) and had a fascinating bald, shining head that gleamed in the dusty light of the long corridor where his office was. He greeted me as I quivered with horror at the coming ordeal by shouting:

   ‘Hello! Hello! I’m Mr. Law! Mr. Law sat on a saw! What d’you think of that?’

   Well, obviously, I thought he was quite, quite mad. But I wasn’t afraid of him as it seemed apparent he was some sort of large toy.

   Apart from lovely Mr. Law, I don’t have many memories of the school itself, or the lessons and other appalling activities; I could read fairly well and write a decent hand when I got there so I imagine that like the rest of my schooling, the days passed in a blur of alternating bouts of paralysing boredom or stark terror. I do recall, though, that on Friday afternoons we were allowed to bring dressing-up clothes and wear them.

   One girl had a real (rather baggy) pink tutu and worn satin ballet slippers, which combined with her tiny, thin physique and long blonde hair done up specially in a ballet-girl bun, made me nauseous with envy and loathing. Naturally, I was Red Feather; but somehow, my savage charms couldn’t quite compete with this Prima Ballerina Assoluta of the playground.

   ‘I’m the Dying Swan!’ She would pipe, and pirouette in a manner even I knew was in bad taste. But the Mothers and Teachers loved her and Red Feather and his faithful cohort, Blind Lizzie Gerbil, or whatever Lizzie was being, were crushed by comments such as:

   ‘Oh, are you a Red Indian? Is that a cap-gun? My, you are a real tomboy, aren’t you? Wouldn’t you like to be a little ballet dancer like ----- instead?’

   No, I wanted to kill things with the trusty Luger I had swapped for a soppy plastic guitar earlier. The Luger was real metal, and absolutely adorably fierce. I hoped Mini-Pavlova would choke or snap one of her sap-white skinny legs as she minced and pouted for the Mothers. But it was not to be, and even my family deplored the Noble Savage, Red Feather, wondering out loud how long ‘the phase’ would last.

   He is with me still.

   A strange and unpleasant thing happened to me around this time, which had a lasting effect on my life. When Lizzie wasn’t availa