Bad Blood: A Memoir

In those years almost the whole country wore this ill-fitting uniform designed for non-combatants – serviceable colours, grating textures, tell-tale unfaded hems that had been let down, bulky tucks. Our true household craziness and indifference didn’t express itself in clothes, but in more intimate kinds of squalor: for instance, nearly never washing the bits no one could see. This was almost a point of vicarage principle, a measure of our hostility to the world outside and separateness from it. Inside our clothes civilisation had lapsed. And this wasn’t to do with money.

Grandma had the scented soap, but she didn’t use it – she bought it for its smell, and kept it wrapped in tissue paper in drawers and trunks. Her line was that her skin was too sensitive for soap and water. We even had a bathroom, but somehow the only way to wash was to boil the kettle and fill a bowl, and do bits – very little bits and usually the same bits – at a time. The resulting tidemarks, in my case round my neck, wrists and legs, would be desperately scrubbed at from time to time. Hair was another problem, a tangle of troubles: brushing was usually felt to be enough of a trauma, without the business of tangling it up all over again with washing, so that my pigtails stayed plaited for days on end. Our secret grubbiness was yet another thing that set us apart. If other children were dirty, that meant they were common, their parents were foully neglectful and slummy, you could catch things from them. One of Grandma’s favourite terms of abuse, in fact, was ‘dirty’ – villagers were dirty, callers were dirty, I mustn’t play with dirty children. So there were two different kinds of dirt, theirs and ours. It was a most metaphysical distinction, as befitted the vicarage.

As if to demonstrate the point, next door to us, also fronting on to the square, was a sixteenth-century tumbledown timber and brick cottage crammed with children I wasn’t supposed to mix with – the Duckets, one of Hanmer’s most shameless tribes. The wall that divided us from them provided me with a perch from which I could look down into their back garden. Our side had a lawn with borders and apple trees, and was neglected and overgrown and peaceful. Theirs was like a bomb-site, a muddy, cratered expanse with twisted pieces of old prams and bike frames, and shards of crockery embedded among straggly weeds and currant bushes. The Duckets epitomised what my grandmother meant by ‘dirty’: they were openly poor (the father was a farm labourer), they bred like rabbits and they spilled out of their house wearing their ragged hand-me-downs for all to see.

The vicarage was a secret slum, but the Duckets’ doors were always open, so you could see Mrs Ducket with her hair in curlers running about bare-legged in slippers, or – even more scandalously – sitting down with a cup of tea and a fag. They had no secrets. Their kitchen drain (on the opposite side to us) disgorged a slow stream of soapy slime and tea-leaves into the open gutter that ran along the main village street. The Duckets kept yappy dogs and skinny cats, and had kittens and ferrets in their pockets; they didn’t go to church, although sometimes one or two of the children would be spruced up and sent to Sunday School. While I was forbidden the square, they were positively driven out of their house, back and front, in all weathers, clutching wedges of bread and damson jam. They reached over our wall and picked the apples, according to Grandma. And (the crowning horror) they had bugs in their hair.

The Duckets made me feel lonely. Even the bugs were more fascinating than frightening. Once or twice I managed to ‘play’ with Edna, the girl nearest to my own age, through the crack in our side gate. She squatted in the square, I squatted in the vicarage kitchen yard; I squeezed my dolls through the gap one by one for her to look at and she squeezed them back. But otherwise I’d climb the wall and sit astride, watching Duckets in the plural, whenever I was left to my own devices. Which wasn’t often. Grandpa and I must have pottered about in church almost every day, and the echoing spaces, the stained glass and the smell of Brasso, chrysanthemums, damp pew-oak and iron mould from the choir’s surplices were heady compensations for isolation. He’d tell me stories and read me to sleep at night, when he’d often drop off first, stretched out on the couch, mouth open, snoring, his beaky profile lit up by the candle. In fact, he got so impatient with my favourite books (which both he and I knew by heart) that one momentous day, before I was four, he taught me to read in self-defence. This confirmed me as his creature.

I knew my name came out of one of the blacked-out books – Lorna from Lorna Doone – and that he’d chosen it. Now he’d given me a special key to his world. We were even closer allies afterwards, so that when he took me with him in the rattling Singer to Whitchurch, and into the bar of the Fox and Goose down Green End, it never occurred to me to tell on him. There were several expeditions like that. He was well known in drinking circles and was looked on as something of a speciality act, a cynical and colourful talker, always with his dog-collar to set him apart. I was the perfect alibi, since neither my mother nor my grandmother had any idea that there were pubs so low and lawless that they would turn a blind eye to children. Few were willing to, however; and there were other times when I found myself sitting outside on the steps of one of his favourite haunts, an unfriendly place with a revolving door called the Lord Hill, in the company of streetwise kids a lot more scary than the Duckets. Perhaps I did tell about that, or perhaps someone spotted me: at any rate, the pub outings came to an end.

Not the collusion, though. I’d kneel on the threadbare rug in his study while he worked on his sermon, or talked to the odd visitor, pulling out the books and puzzling over big words. Sometimes he’d show off my reading to strangers, but for the most part I was meant (this was the point of it, after all) to be quiet. When he was in very good moods he would draw pictures for me, starting mysteriously from the vanishing point and drawing out the rest into perspective. I learned that trick too, never very well, but well enough to disconcert people. Our mutual ‘minding’ turned by untidy stages into a sort of education. Since he was a man of many wasted talents, not only with words and images but also music, I might have had a full set of pre-school ‘accomplishments’, except that I was tone-deaf. Despite that, I was made a member of the choir as soon as I could sit still long enough – under strict instructions to open and shut my mouth in silence, along with the words. I was quite useful, in fact: I could be shifted across from the girls’ bench to the boys’ (my pigtails bundled up into my cap) depending on where there were the most gaps. Watching Grandpa dress up in the vestry, processing behind him, listening to him intone the liturgy and preach, I basked in his reflected glory.

I took to lining up my toys in a corner of the garden I called ‘the secondary school’, where I lectured them and told them stories. More than once they got left out overnight and were brought in sodden in the morning, to be dried out in the oven of the kitchen range. My teddy, a utility bear with a flabby square stomach made out of flowered cotton, was scorched ever after. An omen there.

I was going to have to go to school soon and that meant the village school, which would make nonsense of the dirt distinction, and – as it turned out – leave scorch-marks on my spoiled soul too. There was some reluctance to send me there sooner than need be, but the temptation must have become irresistible. When Grandpa was out, or hung-over, or not in the mood, I would wander the house in an ecstasy of self-pity, wailing ‘What can I do-o-o?’ over and over again, tears dripping down. This was my own precocious contribution to the economy of frustration and want, and nobody could stand it. If the day was fine, Grandma might take me out into the garden, where we’d exorcise my misery by attacking the brambles and nettles with sharp scissors, pretending they were Grandpa, or Duckets, or other people on her hit list (‘Ugh! Nasty old thing! Wicked old devil!’). She got even more fun out of this than I did, but she often didn’t feel energetic enough for such games. So at four and a bit I went to school, and the whole village gave a shake and rearranged itself. I got bugs in my hair and started to lead a double life: one of the many – Hanmer school had a hundred-odd pupils, aged four to fourteen, in 1947 – and yet the sole vicarage child. I put about the story that you could play in the churchyard if you played with me.

II School

Perhaps I really did grow up, as I sometimes suspect, in a time warp, an enclave of the nineteenth century? Because here are the memories jostling their way in, scenes from an overpopulated rural slum.

First there was dinner money, then the register. Then Miss Myra would hang up a cracked oilcloth scroll with the Lord’s Prayer printed on it in large curly letters. She prompted, we mumbled our way through, getting out of sync during the trespasses and catching up with each other to arrive in unison at ‘For ever and ever. Amen.’ Next we’d be set to copy it out with chalk on jagged slices of slate. If you got to the end you simply started from the beginning again and went on until it was time to stop. You spat on your slate and rubbed it with your finger when you made mistakes, so sooner or later the letters all got lost in a grey blur. Not many in the babies’ class learned to read or write by this method. That didn’t matter too much, though. Hanmer Church of England School was less concerned with teaching its pupils reading, writing or arithmetic than with obedience and knowing things by heart. Soon you’d be able to recite ‘Our Father’ and the multiplication tables with sing-song confidence, hitting the ritual emphasis right: ‘And twelve twelves are a hundred and forty-four. Amen.’

After a couple of years in Miss Myra’s room you moved to her sister Miss Daisy’s, and after that to the biggest class, belonging to the headmaster, Mr Palmer. He was a figure of fear, an absentee deity. Offenders from the lower classes were sent to him for the stick and were known to wet themselves on the way. His own class, too, regarded him with dread. He liked to preside over them invisibly from his house next door, emerging when the noise reached a level deafening enough to disturb him, to hand out summary punishment.

The further up the school you went, the less you were formally taught or expected to learn. There was knitting, sewing and weaving for older girls, who would sit out winter playtimes gossiping round the stove, their legs marbled with parboiled red veins from the heat. The big boys did woodwork and were also kept busy taking out the ashes, filling coke buckets and digging the garden. None of the more substantial farmers sent their children to Hanmer school. It had been designed to produce domestic servants and farm labourers, and functional illiteracy was still part of the expectation, almost part of the curriculum.

Not long after I started there, this time-honoured parochial system was shaken up when some of the older children were removed to a secondary modern school over the nearest border, in Shropshire. This thinned out the population and damped down the racket in Mr Palmer’s room, although quite a few restive overgrown kids still stayed on until they were fourteen and the law allowed them to leave. Passing the eleven-plus (‘the scholarship’) was unheard of; and anyway harder than it might have been, since grammar schools in neighbouring counties had quotas for children from the real sticks, i.e. the Maelor district. When my time came, Mr Palmer graciously cheated me through. Strolling past my desk on his invigilation rounds, he trailed a plump finger down my page of sums, pointed significantly at several, then crossed two fingers behind his back as he walked away. So I did those again.

Perhaps the record of failure was starting to look fishy. The world was changing, education was changing, and the notion that school should reflect your ready-made place in the scheme of things and put you firmly back where you came from was going out of fashion even in Hanmer. It was against the grain to acknowledge this, though. The cause of hierarchy and immobility was served by singling out the few children whose families didn’t fit and setting them homework. Mr Palmer drew the line at marking it, however. The three of us were given sums to do, then told to compare the results in a corner next morning. If all three, or two of us, arrived at the same answer then that was the correct one. If – as often happened – all three of us produced different answers then that particular long division or fraction retreated into the realm of undecidability. Most of our answers were at best odds-on favourites. I developed a dauntingly Platonic conception of arithmetical truths. The real answer must exist, but in some far-removed misty empyrean. Praying (‘… and forty-four. Amen’) seemed often as good a route as any to getting it right.

Sums were my cross. Numeracy was not one of Grandfather’s gifts; we never played with numbers, which were a subdivision of dilapidations and no fun at all. I went to school armed against the spit-and-chalk routine – words went on working – but with sums I struggled like the rest, since it was never part of Mr Palmer’s plan (the school’s plan) to reveal that the necessary skills were learnable. If you passed the scholarship, that was because you were somebody who should never have been at Hanmer school in the first place, was his theory.

One day he lined up his class and went down the line saying with gloomy satisfaction ‘You’ll be a muck-shoveller, you’ll be a muck-shoveller …’ and so on and on, only missing out the homework trio. As things turned out he was mistaken – by the time my Hanmer generation grew up there were very few jobs on the land, the old mixed labour-intensive farming had finally collapsed, farmers had gone over to machinery, and the children he’d consigned to near-illiteracy and innumeracy had to re-educate themselves and move on. Which they did, despite all the school had done to inculcate ignorance. Back there and then in our childhoods, though, in the late Forties, Mr Palmer seemed omniscient. He ruled over a little world where conformity, bafflement, fear and furtive defiance were the orders of the day. Every child’s ambition at Hanmer school was to avoid attracting his attention, or that of Miss Myra or Miss Daisy. We all played dumb, the one lesson everyone learned.

We’d have seemed a lumpen lot: sullen, unresponsive, cowed, shy or giggly in the presence of grown-ups. A bunch of nose-pickers and nail-biters, with scabbed knees, warts, chapped skin and unbrushed teeth. We shared a certain family resemblance, in other words. Some of it was absolutely, organically, real: seven or eight huge families accounted between them for nearly half the population of the school. There were brothers, sisters and cousins who slapped, shoved and bossed each other unmercifully, but always stood up for their own flesh and blood (thickened, it was rumoured, by incest) in the end. ‘You leave our Doreen alone.’ Or else.

Having big brothers or (much better) big sisters – since the big boys had their own separate playground and didn’t usually deign to intervene – seemed the first condition for survival in the infants’ class. In fact, though, these rough, protective clans were already on the way out. There were quite a few parents who’d worked out that one way of escaping poverty was having fewer children, and a subtle eye could have detected among the mass of rowdy, runny-nosed urchins a small sub-class of better-dressed, prissier and slightly more respectable children. The girls wore hairslides and newly knitted cardigans, the boys were ‘nesh’ (the Hanmer word for anything from clean to feeling-the-cold to cowardly) and were endlessly tormented. Being an only child – as I was, for the time being – was a mixed blessing at best when it came down to the gritty realities of the playground. The ‘nesh’ ones I despised and it was entirely mutual, since I was dirty, precocious and had never been treated like a child. And the tribes despised me for being sole, pseudo-clean and ‘stuck up’.

So the playground was hell: Chinese burns, pinches, slaps and kicks, and horrible games. I can still hear the noise of a thick wet skipping rope slapping the ground. There’d be a big girl each end and you had to leap through without tripping. Joining in was only marginally less awful than being left out. It’s said (truly) that most women forget the pain of childbirth; I think that we all forget the pain of being a child at school for the first time, the sheer ineptitude, as though you’ll never learn to mark out your own space. It’s doubly shaming – shaming to remember as well, to feel so sorry for your scabby little self back there in small people’s purgatory.

My first days at school were punctuated by fierce contests in the yard, duels almost, complete with spectators, with the one girl who might have been expected to be my friend. In fact, she did become my very best friend, years later, when we went round holding hands painfully fast and giggling together hysterically, but for now she was my sworn enemy. Gail (she even had a funny name, like me) had hair in ringlets, green-hazel eyes and pale, clear, slightly olive skin stretched tight and shiny over her muscles, and she was nearly a year older than I was. She’d have won our war in any case, though, since she was so physically confident, in charge of her body even when she was five. Was she already going to dancing lessons? I don’t remember. In adult life she became a teacher of physical education and modern dance herself, and even in the days of our adolescent intimacy she would sometimes win an argument by twisting my wrist. I was convinced at the start, anyway, that she was simply better at inhabiting her body than I was – not only better at face-pulling, hair-pulling, pinching, scratching and every sort of violence, but wiry and graceful, so that she made me feel like an unstrung puppet.

Once she’d thoroughly trounced me in public, Gail ignored me and held court in her own corner every playtime. She remained something of a loner, however. Other little girls might admire the ringlets and the dresses with smocking on the yokes, and the white socks that stayed up, but she was not allowed out to play in the square after school and everyone knew that she had to sit for hours every night while her grandmother twisted her hair in rags. What really set her apart, though – even more effectively than the vicarage set me apart – was the fact that her mother was divorced.

Given that quite a few kids in Hanmer didn’t know who their father was – or at least knew that he wasn’t the one he was supposed to be – it may seem odd that divorce stood out as a social sin. But its novelty was against it. It was untraditional, new-fangled and (worst of all) above Gail’s mother’s station. Someone like Lady Kenyon (the Kenyons were the other local grandees, a lot richer and more dashing than the Hanmers) might be divorced and that was fittingly aristocratic; for the local garage owner’s daughter to do it was very different. Who did she think she was? People saw her as some new brand of fallen woman.

She was disapproved of in the vicarage, too, but mostly for reasons of envy. There was a history behind this: Gail’s mother and my mother had been friends before the war. They had starred together in the pantomimes my grandfather had put on in the village hall in the days before he had been overtaken by booze and bitterness. My mother, whose name was Valma – another of Grandfather’s romantic choices, although I’ve never known where he got it – and Gail’s mother, whose name was Ivy, had played Prince Charming and Cinderella respectively. They stood there in a surviving photograph, two slim young women with their arms clasped around each other’s waists in the middle of the assembled cast, their big, hopeful, lipsticked smiles looking black and glamorous. Gail’s mother, being divorced, looked pretty much like this still, except that she was even skinnier. She also had a job driving the local taxi. Whereas my mother, thanks to a combination of marriage, poverty and her parents’ crazy demands, lived in (comparative) purdah. This was what made Grandma furious. She said that Ivy looked like Olive Oyl in the Popeye cartoons, or like a stick of liquorice. And that she was common. But it was all sour grapes. Secretly Grandma must have thought divorce a good idea – her notion of marriage, after all, was that a man signed you up to have his wicked way with you and should spend the rest of his life paying through the nose. But her expressed opinion coincided with village wisdom.

Even playground games, in the intervals of thumps and pushes, were all about the changeless order of things. ‘The farmer wants a wife,’ we’d chant, joining hands in a ring – ‘Heigh ho, heigh ho, the farmer wants a wife.’ And when the snotty little boy in the middle had chosen his bride, ‘The wife wants a child … The child wants a dog. Heigh ho, heigh ho’ – which sounded like ‘ee-oh!’, this farmer was related to Old Macdonald – ‘The child wants a dog.’ This doggy extension of the nuclear family seemed to join human arrangements on to the whole wealth of species, top to bottom, patriarch to pup. And then the climax – ‘The dog wants a bone.’ The bone, by tradition a tiny, would be vigorously bounced, thrown into the air and caught on the way down, by the farmer, wife, child and dog, while we all shouted triumphantly, ‘The bone – won’t – stand! Eee oh! Eee oh! The bone – won’t – STAND!’ Being chosen as the bone was a mixed delight, scary and painful as well as thrilling, so I wasn’t sorry that my turn seldom came round. This game, all the games, were a bit like those horrible group therapy exercises where you’re meant to let yourself fall in order to learn to trust the rest, who catch you. Mutual dependence – farmer, wife, child, dog, bone, representing the great chain of being. And you couldn’t be outside of it. Gail and I and the other milder misfits curried favour with the pack in our separate ways.

My great advantage was the churchyard. Mr Downward, the sexton, would turn a blind eye to all but the most boisterous grave-hopping games if I was involved in them. He seemed to regard the churchyard as an extension of the vicarage garden and indeed the wall between them was so tumbledown in one place that the boundary was only a pile of long-fallen bricks in a nettle patch. As the vicarage child I was a licensed trespasser and I shared out my immunity among the ‘dirty’ children I could persuade to play with me after school, or on Saturdays. I was especially popular when there had been a Saturday morning wedding: we all collected confetti, but its dolly-mixture colours didn’t last long in that rainy region, you had to pick up the little pink bells and white bows and silver horseshoes quickly or they dissolved away. We especially treasured the silvered sort and scorned the cheap variety stamped out of waste paper, often mere dots with cryptic fragments of print on them. Once there were drifts of silky paper rose petals on the path, each shaded from cream to crimson, and these we saved up reverently.

Funeral wreaths were even better, although only for looking at until they were thrown on to the rubbish heap in the corner, when if you were lucky you could salvage a carnation or lily or chrysanthemum still blooming – luxury flowers a cut above the sweet williams, wallflowers and Michaelmas daisies of village borders. We marvelled, too, at the glass and porcelain immortelles under their glass globes, and the graves that had shrubs growing on them and shorn grass looked impressively tidy, but it was the bunches of flowers people brought to lay on the graves that gave us our chance really to join in the grown-ups’ mourning games. There’s nothing small children enjoy more than parcelling things out according to some system of just deserts and it was obvious that many of the dead were being short-changed. This a gang of us – mostly girls – set about putting right, redistributing the flowers in jam jars and empty vases filled at the sexton’s pump so that everybody had some. We weren’t strictly egalitarian, however. Certain graves, particularly one with a soulful baby angel in white marble belonging to a child who’d died in the 1930s, always ended up with the best bunches.