September Starlings Page 10

  The insurance man was the worst. Uncle Freddie posed on the stairs, out of sight of any callers. Our peripheral vision was drawn to him like base metal to a magnet, because we knew that he would not be good. His whole body sagged downward, and the good leg curved itself like a letter C. We did not dare look straight at Uncle Freddie until the Prudential man had wobbled off on his bike, because Anne’s dear daddy was gifted with the ability to make irises and pupils all but disappear into the sides of his nose. Then he ‘did’ the insurance man’s voice, echoed the words perfectly.

  Auntie Maisie rushed out of the kitchen. She pretended to have no time for such behaviour, though she always listened and giggled while the pantomime was in progress. The damp tea-towel was slapped across Uncle Freddie’s face. ‘For a crippled man, you don’t half take the Michael out of other unfortunates. What are you teaching these two, eh? Our Liza will have you drawn and quartered if she catches you carrying on like this in front of our Laura.’ Her cheeks glowed when she looked at him, and a smile hovered on the edges of her mouth, held back by sheer willpower and a strong sense of fun.

  Uncle Freddie acted hurt and contrite. ‘Ooh, Maisie, you’re lovely when you’re angry. Look at her, girls, isn’t she beautiful? There’s a dimple now, see, she nearly smiled. Anyway, Maisie Turnbull, I’ll have you know that my game leg entitles me to make fun of my fellow cripples. Straighten your face and put that kettle on, Missus. Early to bed for you tonight.’

  She was lovely, my Auntie Maisie. Round, plump and pretty, always smelled of yeast mixed with soap and gentle perfume, wore flowered pinnies and a string of coloured glass beads that she’d won on the fair years earlier. The fine blond hair was scraped back into a bun, but little wisps tended to escape round her ears and at the nape of her neck. Uncle Freddie used to kiss the back of her neck and whisper in her ears till she went pink.

  I loved them. I suppose that they loved me too, because they never left me out of anything – unless my mother intervened, of course. At weekends, Uncle Freddie took us to Queens Park, trained us in the art of ‘handling the Americans’ and forbade us to tell our mothers about our unseemly behaviour. There were two ways of ‘handling the Americans’. Sometimes, it was best to look sweet, pretty and twinnish, ask for ‘some gum, chum’. But that worked only when we were clean. After skirmishes with roundabouts and swings, we had to use a different ploy to attract the support of our allies.

  Anne, who was endowed with great acting ability, lay on the cinder path and blubbered a lot, rubbed her big blue eyes. I ran to the soldiers, my face twisted with suppressed laughter which was usually mistaken for some other emotion. ‘My sister’s hurt.’ We got chocolates, sweets, biscuits, lectures about being careful near strangers. And once, we were given a whole silver dollar and we polished it, took turns to have custody of the shining disc.

  Anne and I must have been five when the trouble happened. The war was dwindling towards its chaotic and supposedly triumphant end. Mother and Auntie Maisie were working shifts of just four hours. Uncle Freddie was still managing the local Co-op, while my father continued to spend most of his time at the shop, probably mixing medicines and working at his bench in the upstairs rooms. Everything was normal one minute, terrible the next.

  There was a row. We children did not hear it and, for a while, we had no knowledge of its subject. But in the middle of 1945, I was forbidden to go next door, was ordered never to speak to Auntie Maisie, Uncle Freddie, Cousin Anne.

  Grief overcame fear several times and I tackled my mother repeatedly. She was more agitated than I had ever seen her, so I took the opportunity to dig deep into her mind. I think she must have been a lonely woman, but perhaps solitude was what she deserved. In a way, she was turning to me, using me as a sounding board, a figure at which she could direct her thoughts.

  ‘Please, Mother. I want to play with Anne.’

  Anger and frustration coloured her cheeks, made her truly radiant. My mother was a woman of exceptional beauty. She had copper-gold hair, clear blue eyes and a skin of alabaster that stained itself pink when she became excited. ‘You will do as I say, young lady. Exactly as I say.’

  I don’t know where or how I got the knowledge, but for a few weeks after the Big Row, I felt confident that she would not hit me. She was somewhat depleted and lacklustre after the argument, kept failing to finish off sentences. I was brave enough to keep asking why. ‘Why can’t I play with Anne?’

  ‘Because I am your mother.’

  Sometimes, adults made no sense at all. I tried to be good, obedient and quiet, failed totally, attempted to rekindle my newborn courage. ‘Auntie Maisie is my auntie. Uncle Freddie is my uncle. You told me to mind grown-ups and to be nice to them. Why is it all different now?’

  She was floundering in a pit of her own digging. Because of her rigorous persistence, I was a precocious child, could read and write, add and subtract, chant a list of capital cities, sing after a fashion, blunder through two simple pieces on the piano. She enjoyed showing off her creation, wanted me capable when it suited her, like on the days when her ‘friends’ visited and ‘took’ tea and dainty cakes. I was Mother’s party-piece-by-proxy, and she lapped up the shallow praise like a cream-hungry cat.

  My talents were not particularly remarkable, but I drew lavish accolades from Mother’s attendants. These people formed a gaggle of polite and dull women whose husbands were professional men. Auntie Maisie, even before the disagreement, was never invited to the afternoon teas, was definitely not good enough to be on show when high society descended on our home. ‘We shall move away,’ Mother declared hotly when I was still struggling to mend the breach between the two houses.

  My temper bubbled. ‘You can go if you want to. I’m staying here, I shall move next door and live with Anne.’

  She wrung her delicate fingers, turned to the fireplace, groped for the umpteenth cigarette. When her lungs were filled with confidence, she looked at me again. ‘We got them that house. I persuaded your father – it was my doing – mine!’ The hands waved a lot, one leaving in its wake a trail of smoke like the emissions from a fighter plane’s engines.

  She was proud of her hands, kept a bone-and-silver manicure set in her dressing room. The dressing room was the tiniest front bedroom, linked to the larger room by a doorway made by my father after much harassment. I spent a great deal of time running to and from the dressing room, bringing her this and that, returning hairbrushes, mirrors, powder boxes.

  She wandered to the sitting-room window, tugged at the lace curtain, cleared her throat of pretended emotion. ‘I thought we should all be together while the war was on. Your daddy paid for that house, Laura. He used money from your grandpapa, money that might have been useful in the business. Oh!’ Exasperated by my obvious lack of empathy with her grief, she tried a few tears but, finding it difficult to smoke and cry simultaneously, she opted for the former occupation and stopped snivelling.

  ‘Anne is my favourite person,’ I persisted. ‘And Auntie Maisie is good and kind and she makes her own bread. And Uncle Freddie is … is just Uncle Freddie. I miss him, I miss them all.’

  ‘Laura, you will heed me!’ All attempts at presenting a dignified front had suddenly been abandoned, and I found myself afraid again. It wasn’t the shouting, it wasn’t the idea of being beaten that scared me. No, it was Mother, the woman herself. I was beginning to realize that my mother was not predictable, that even she herself was not aware of how she would act or feel. Her face was grim and set. ‘I shall never speak to Maisie again as long as I live. She has betrayed me – they both betrayed me. I am your mother, so you must be on my side.’

  I squashed my misgivings, swallowed them with a gulp of air. She might beat me, scream, shout, tear at her hair – I didn’t care. She was wrong. Something about her was wrong. I always knew how Auntie Maisie would be. If there was sad music on the wireless, she might allow her lips to tremble, but Auntie Maisie didn’t swing from one thing to another, didn’t strut about shouting at people
and hitting out. My mother was silly. And I was going to stick up for myself and for what was right.

  I watched her, waited for a few moments. Like most infants, I was on the side of fun and good food. As my mother provided neither of these vital factors, I could not be on her side. My mother’s grey and often leaden attempts at pastry compared poorly with Auntie Maisie’s rich flatcakes, succulent fruit tarts, feather-light raisin pound loaves. As for fun, Mother thought that it was common, that it had no place in a decent semi-detached with three bedrooms, a piano and an inside toilet. My fun had been fruit-picking, glorious days spent out in the hedgerows with Uncle Freddie, stolen apples in our bags, hands and faces stained purple with the juice of blackberries. All gone, no more fun from now on, no more nice cakes. I drew myself to full height, a few inches taller than the bookcase filled with Mother’s romantic novels. ‘Auntie Maisie told Uncle Freddie that you’re no better than you ought to be.’

  ‘What?’

  I stood my ground as the shrieked word echoed round the room and rattled in my head. There might be a landslide any minute, or one of those clips across my ear that often made me sick and dizzy. ‘You’re a mill girl, she said. A mill girl like she used to be. You … you seducinged my father. And when he was sedu … what I said before, you nearly got in trouble with a shotgun and you had a blue frock at church.’ I stopped, studied her, marvelled at the range of colours on her face. For colour, my mother was an admirable woman at times. The middles of her cheeks had gone a sort of deep rosy mauve, then there was a red ring, a pink ring, and a very white, very wet forehead. I had never seen my mother sweating before. Though coming from her skin, this moisture was probably perspiration rather than common sweat.

  ‘I’m no mill girl.’ The tone was soft, dangerously so. The words seemed squashed, as if they were being forced from somewhere deep inside her. ‘I never belonged in a weaving shed, should not have been sent there, not with my frail health. Maisie was the troublesome one, the one who gave us grief. Both my parents died of broken hearts after Maisie married that old cripple.’ She approached me slowly. ‘And I was married three years before you were born. Remember that, Laura McNally.’

  I understood none of the implications, vaguely remembered Auntie Maisie going on about ‘the phantom baby’, decided to keep my mouth shut.

  ‘If my mummy and daddy were here, if they could see and hear how I am treated, they would make sure that Freddie Turnbull got a thorough horse-whipping,’ said my irate mother.

  Uncle Freddie deserved no such treatment; of that, at least, I was completely sure. Tomfoolery sat on my tongue again, jumped out with hardly any warning. This wasn’t courage, it was sheer lunacy. ‘You’re the naughty one,’ I shouted. ‘They would never, ever hurt anybody. And I won’t eat any more of your nasty stews and puddings. I am going to starve to death.’ In my mind, I held a beautiful picture of a blond girl-child, a smile frozen on its pale face, the eyes closed, hands clasped on its chest. Then the mind-picture sat up like Betty and said, ‘Mama.’ Betty was my largest doll. I never played with her because she was boring, and I couldn’t think how she’d got tied up in my imagination with the concept of my dramatic starvation.

  It seemed that I had hit yet another of her raw nerves, because she contemplated me for a second or two. Mother would not like it if I refused to eat. My plump little body was the cause of much self-congratulation on Mother’s part; she was often heard to say, ‘My daughter has not suffered because of this war. I always manage to keep her fed and properly clothed.’ She used to remove my cardigan, hold up my arm, pinch the fleshy upper with her sharp, bright nails, demonstrate the depth and quality of my upholstery. Then all the tea-ladies would put down their cups and study the pattern and the fine sewing on my dress. Well, I would tear up all my clothes too. No, I wouldn’t. Auntie Maisie had made most of them, love and warmth stitched into every seam.

  ‘Right,’ snapped Mother. ‘Your father will deal with you later. Get up to your room immediately.’

  My father would deal with me? Even at the age of five, I found this funny. Dad would tell me not to worry, not to upset Mother. Then he’d give me a sixpence and some sweets before reading a story and kissing me good night.

  ‘Go upstairs,’ she repeated.

  ‘No.’ Who said that? I wondered vaguely. Surely it wasn’t me, surely I could not possibly be so courageous, so stupid? ‘I’m not going nowhere.’ Sometimes I surprised myself and sometimes I was a fool.

  ‘Anywhere,’ she said wearily, automatically. At last, she advanced on me, gripped my upper arm in a vice that did not match those pale and delicate fingers. ‘Laura, you will be starting school soon, a very nice school with—’

  ‘With Anne.’ I would have to start treading more carefully. The shock of the row with next door was bound to wear off soon, and she was already pinching my flesh, making it sting and burn.

  She released me then, but her mouth was twisted, and I sensed that bad news was on its way. That sinister dip of the lower lip was a sure sign of victory, and I shivered inside when I saw the cunning brightness of her lovely eyes. ‘No, you will not be going to a low-class school.’ She patted her hair, lit another cigarette. I should have gone to my room after all, should have obeyed and escaped from the smoke, from the awful thing that she was beginning to say. ‘You will be going to a little convent, a private place for nice young ladies.’

  I could not help myself, could not deny such overpowering curiosity. ‘What’s a convent?’

  She awarded me one of her coy shrugs. ‘It’s a place where education is taken seriously, a place where nuns pray and slap little girls who won’t do exactly as they are told. The Catholics do one thing right, it seems.’

  Now, Catholics were things I knew about. My feeling that my mother was an unusual and even crazy person was strengthening by the minute. She kept changing her mind. You could never be sure of what she would do, of what she would say. Worst of all, her erratic behaviour distorted issues for those of us who were condemned to live with her. ‘You don’t like Catholics,’ I ventured. My father used to be one of those. I had heard Uncle Freddie and Auntie Maisie talking about that, too. ‘Liza wouldn’t budge, wouldn’t marry him at St Patrick’s, said she wanted no little Catholics bred in her house.’

  Boldly, I stood my ground. But my ground was at a safe-ish distance from those long arms and those scratchy nails. She was a slapper, a pincher, a puller of long ringlets. ‘You don’t want anything … papist.’ I managed to drag the word from a meagre store acquired while sitting on the stairs next door. ‘And nuns are papists, aren’t they?’

  She was not going to lose. There was triumph in her expression as she approached me. ‘Your father wants you brought up as a Christian. He is very pleased that I have chosen the convent for you. And we don’t want to upset your dear daddy, now.’

  ‘I’m going to Brook Lane Mixed,’ I shouted.

  ‘No.’ She was giggling and shaking her head so that the bronze curls bobbed about all round her face, as if they, too, were laughing at my stupidity.

  ‘I want to go with Anne.’

  She shook her finger at me. The talon was long, sharp, threatening. ‘To be well educated, a girl needs to be with other women and as far away as possible from boys. These nuns are quick to spot any talent you may have, so you’ll no doubt be on your way to Bolton School in the fullness of time.’

  I did not want to go to Bolton School, had no intention of finishing up in silly dresses and thick lisle stockings. ‘Well, I’m not going there, either. Uncle Freddie says they all get humps on their backs and thick glasses and pale faces from stopping in the house instead of playing outside.’ I took a breath, recharged my batteries. ‘I shall run out of class every day at that silly convent. Those nuns will have to tie me to the desk. They won’t make me learn, ’cos they can’t make me listen.’ I jerked up my chin. ‘I am going to Brook Lane with Anne.’

  ‘We’ll see.’ She turned away then, dismissed me with one of her shrugs.
Some days, she didn’t care enough even to dislike me. Being at odds with your mother is not a comfortable sensation. There were many days like this one, many occasions when she locked me in, separated me from life, ‘bested’ me. As a child, I had to accept the convent, the exclusion from the street party, had to bend to her will time after time.

  I could not go to the Bolton Fair for fear of nits, was forbidden to enter a public lavatory for fear of disasters even deadlier than nits. The fivepenny Saturday matinee with its serials and cowboy stories was out of my reach until I grew older and wiser, until I learned to be devious and clever.

  But in the early spring of my life, I had no power. And now, in my September, the woman who gave birth to me continues to shape and distort my existence.

  Chapter Two

  My bedroom was next to Anne’s, even though we lived in separate houses. We learned quickly how to attract each other’s attention by tapping on the party wall with a shoe. When I look back on some of our acrobatic displays, I think it must be by the grace of God that we are still alive, my cousin Anne and I.

  ‘I can lean out further than you can.’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘And if I kneel on the window-sill and grab the curtains, my top half dangles right down the wall.’

  ‘Yes, but I’ve had both my legs hanging out, all the way up to the waist, too.’

  ‘That’s a lie. I saw the edge of your knickers, but only just. You were never a long way out.’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘You weren’t.’ And so on. We were daring in those days. Daring, foolish and naughty, but it was fun. The sad thing was that we could not reach one another, were unable to touch, hold hands and whisper secrets. Secrets from the grown-up world were our speciality. If we had gathered no real ones, then we made them up as we went along, each fully aware of when the other was lying. It didn’t matter whether our words embraced truth or fiction – just the fact that we were communicating was enough to satisfy us.