Anita and Me

Anita and Me

Meera Syal

For my parents and brother

with gratitude and love

And for Shekhar and Chameli, as always

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

About the Author

Praise

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Epigraph

I do not have many memories of my very early childhood, apart from the obvious ones, of course. You know, my windswept, bewildered parents in their dusty Indian village garb standing in the open doorway of a 747, blinking back tears of gratitude and heartbreak as the fog cleared to reveal the sign they had been waiting for, dreaming of, the sign planted in tarmac and emblazoned in triumphant hues of red, blue and white, the sign that said simply, WELCOME TO BRITAIN.

And then there’s the early years of struggle and disillusion, living in a shabby boarding house room with another newly arrived immigrant family, Polish, I think would be quite romantic; my father arriving back from his sweatshop at dawn to take his place in the bed being vacated by Havel who would be off to do his shift on the McDouglas Biscuits assembly line, my father sweeping away crushed garibaldi crumbs from the communal pillow before sliding gratefully into oblivious sleep, my mother awake at his side, counting the kicks from the daughter inside her who would condemn her, marry her to England forever.

I slept in a drawer, probably, swaddled in back copies of the Daily Mirror. My mother only found out about Kennedy’s assassination two weeks after the event, when she read the reversed newsprint headlined on my damp backside. She didn’t follow the news, no telly, no radio, no inclination, being a simple Punjabi girl suffering from culture shock, marooned and misplaced in Wolverhampton.

Of course, this is the alternative history I trot out in job interview situations or, once or twice, to impress middleclass white boys who come sniffing round, excited by the thought of wearing a colonial maiden as a trinket on their arm. My earliest memory, in fact, is of the first time I understood the punchline to a joke. I was watching some kind of Royal Variety television show on ice – I remember that because it was a balmy summer evening and I wondered how they had managed to keep the floor so cold. A man in a lime green jumpsuit raised a gun and took aim at a fat female ballerina who was gliding towards him like some vast, magnificent galleon, pink tulle emanating in a cloud from around her strong marbled thighs like ectoplasm. The man raised the gun, fired once, twice, and the ballerina fell dramatically to the floor to hilarity and applause.

‘Oh my dearie,’said the man. ‘I think I shot her in the tutu.’

My mother said I laughed so much that I threw up and at one point, called in Mrs Worrall from next door who put her teeth in and solemnly declared that I’d probably ‘had a turn.’ But I’ve always been a sucker for a good double entendre; the gap between what is said and what is thought, what is stated and what is implied, is a place in which I have always found myself. I’m really not a liar, I just learned very early on that those of us deprived of history sometimes need to turn to mythology to feel complete, to belong.

1

‘I’m not lying, honest, papa!’ I pleaded as he took my hand and pulled me towards the kerb, briefly checking for traffic along the twisting country lane. It was hot and I could feel beads of sweat and fear threading themselves into a necklace of guilt, just where my itchy flesh met the collar of my starched cotton dress. Papa did not look angry, he had the air of a man on a mission. He was walking along with that jaunty air that my mother said had made her fall in love with him, a hop of optimism in his walk that belied a sensitive, introspective-looking face. His features effortlessly combined those same contradictions of vulnerability and pride, the sharp leonine nose that swooped down towards the generous questioning mouth, meeting in what looked like the fleshy imprint of a single teardrop.

I scuttled after papa along the single road, bordered with nicotine-tipped spiky grass, the main artery which bisected the village. A row of terraced houses clustered around the crossroads, uneven teeth which spread into a gap-toothed smile as the houses gradually became bigger and grander as the road wandered south, undulating into a gentle hill and finally merging into miles of flat green fields, stretching as far as the eye could see. We were heading in the opposite direction, northwards down the hill, away from the posh, po-faced mansions and towards the nerve centre of Tollington, where Mr Ormerod’s grocery shop, the Working Men’s Club, the diamond-paned Methodist church and the red brick school jostled for elbow room with the two-up-two-downs, whose outside toilets backed onto untended meadows populated with the carcasses of abandoned agricultural machinery. There was only one working farm now, Dale End farm, bookending the village at the top of the hill, where horses regarded the occasional passers-by with mournful malteser eyes.

From the crest of the hill, on a clear day, you could see the industrial chimneys of Wolverhampton, smoking like fat men’s cigars, and sometimes glimpse the dark fringes of Cannock Chase, several square miles of thick conifers bristling with secrets and deer, where every so often, forgotten skeletons of ancient victims were discovered by local courting couples. But the horizon gradually disappeared as we marched down the hill towards Mr Ormerod’s shop, down into the valley of…I wished I’d never gone to Sunday School, I wished I did not know the name for what I was now feeling. Sin. One word, three letters, eternal consequences. Unless I confessed all now. I swallowed and looked around, as if for help. There was my home, halfway down the hill, standing on the corner of the crossroads, one of the miners’ tithe cottages huddled around a dirt yard which was the unofficial meeting place for our small community. There was the small overgrown park next to the Yard, where the swings and ricketty slide were watched over by the witch’s hat of an ancient metal roundabout.

I could see children riding their bikes, screeching in and around the parked cars and lines of washing, practising noisy manoeuvres which threw up clouds of dust, punctuating each skid like exclamation marks. I could see my mother, even at this distance her brown skin glowed like a burnished planet drifting amongst the off-white bedsheets of her neighbours. She was wearing one of her slop-around outfits, a faded Punjabi suit whose billowing trousers rippled in the breeze, mercurial wings fluttering at her ankles. She paused, gathering some bundle from a basket at her feet, and then with one motion shook out a peacock-blue sari which she began tacking to the washing line. It puffed outwards in a resigned sigh between her hands. She looked as if she was holding up a piece of the sky.

Maybe someone from the Big House would come out and save me. The Big House, as gloomy and roomy as a set from a Hammer horror film, was the only building set apart from the main road and lay at the end of an uneven track which began five hundred yards from our front door. The Big House occupied its own island of private grounds, shielded by high mournful trees and a barbed wire fence. Two ancient, lopsided wooden signs declared NO TRESPASSERS! and BEWARE OF GUARD DOGS! The latter featured a slavering Doberman frothing at the mouth, except the paint had peeled around his muzzle, replacing what were once ferocious teeth with flaking splinters so he looked like he was chewing on a loo brush.

On windy nights, the trees around the Big House, a thicket of towering chestnuts and poplars which sometimes blocked the sun and filtered damp green light into my bedroom, would talk to me urgently, telling me to open the window, spread my arms and flap over the fields to their waiting branches. At least that’s what I told my mother when she found me crouching on the windowsill with a copy of the TV Times in my hand. I tried to explain what the trees had whispered, that the Golden Shot was a fix and Bob Monkhouse, the devil himself. I was not allowed to watch any television for two weeks after that.

The Big House, as usual, seemed deserted. I noticed papa was unconsciously clenching and unclenching his fingers around mine as we walked, and I wondered if it would be a good or a bad move to take away my hand. Then I got distracted, noticing a kestrel hovering behind the old pithead of the mine, visible just behind the grey green slates of the Big House’s roof. The Tollington mine had once employed the whole village; it had been feted as a small but plucky contributor to the Black Country’s industrial growth, not as technically impressive as the nearby Cannock Pit, not as imposing and thrusting as the one further afield in Wirley, but a respectably productive enterprise all the same.

Our adjoining neighbour, Mrs Worrall, had once shown me a yellowing newspaper cutting commemorating the day the Mayor of Wolverhampton had come to visit Tollington mine. It must have been during the war, for some of the grainy bystanders were decked out self-consciously in their Home Guard uniforms and a coalman’s dray was parked in the left hand corner of the photograph, where a shire horse lurked with pricked ears. The mine and the village had been as intertwined as lovers, grateful lovers astonished by their mutual discovery; you could see it in the stiff backs of the men and the proud smiles of the women. Mrs Worrall had pointed to an indistinct blob whose elaborate hat was just visible behind the mayor’s jowly face, ‘Me, that is,’ she said grandly. ‘That hat cost two weeks’ egg rations,’ claiming her moment of fame by association.

Then the mine suddenly closed down in the late Fifties, no one seemed to know why. A few of the luckier miners were offered temporary jobs in the adjoining pits, but most of the able-bodied men with families had moved on to look for work, leaving behind a gaggle of wheezy old geezers and dozens of stout, dour-faced miners’ widows who had nowhere else to go. It had been a community of tough, broad-armed women and fragile old men until a few new families started moving in, drawn by the country air and dirt-cheap housing – families like us.

But no one, not even Mrs Todd who was eighty-five and kept her colostomy bag in a sequinned pouch under her pinafore, not even she could remember seeing anyone ever going in or coming out of the Big House since the mayor’s visit. The owner in those days was a ruddy bouncing ball of a man, who in the newspaper cutting is holding onto the mayor’s hand with two fat fists whilst a woman I presumed was his wife, in a shapeless smock, stands at his side looking faintly embarrassed.

However, a few years later, someone else bought the mine: someone who never cared to mix with his neighbours or his work force but delegated all his duties to faceless officials; someone for whom the pit closure apparently had no repercussions, or at least not any that would make him want to emerge and share the grief and confusion; someone who presumably still lived there because we would occasionally see smoke curling out of the chimney. There were occasional flurries of excitement, when every few months a delivery van from one of the posh stores in Wolverhampton would back up to the peeling gates, and discharge siege-worthy supplies of groceries. Some of the local women would gather around the van, shaking their heads at the sod-off grandeur of the delivery, muttering at the parade of wines, preserves, spices, monogrammed biscuits and extra soft toilet roll, each item taken as a slap in the face from a stuck-up stranger. But despite their unashamed snooping and straining to glimpse through the always drawn curtains, the Big House’s inhabitants remained a mystery so incomprehensible that it was no longer even discussed.

The kestrel gave out a faint cry, sharp and forlorn all at once, and plummeted from view. Papa quickened his pace. I realised, sadly, that whoever lived in the Big House would not break their solitude to save a little Indian girl who had been caught telling lies.

We passed Mr Topsy standing outside his postage stamp garden, a riot of blazing rhododendrons and grinning gnomes trying to burst out of their fenced-in borders. Nearly everyone’s garden was like this, making up in content what they lacked in space, every frontage crammed full with miniature ponds and stone clad wishing wells, tiny porches stuffed with armouries of shiny horse brasses and copper plates, a row of Santa’s grottos all year round.

It was a constant source of embarrassment to me that our front garden was the odd one out in the village, a boring rectangle of lumpy grass bordered with various herbs that mama grew to garnish our Indian meals. ‘This is mint, beti,’ she would say, plucking the top of a plant and crushing the leaves under my nose, ‘This one thunia… coriander I mean…this lemon verbena, you can make tea from this …’ I did not want things growing in our garden that reminded me of yesterday’s dinner; I wanted roses and sunflowers and manicured hedges and fountains where the blackbirds would come and sip. I wanted to see mama in a big hat doing something creative with a pair of pruners. I looked at Mr Topsy’s garden and felt furious. Suddenly, somehow it was his fault that I was standing here in front of him waiting to be tried and punished by a jury of grinning gnomes with no genitals and fishing rods.

‘How you doing, Topsy?’ Mr Topsy had christened me thus as he claimed he could not pronounce my name, and I returned the favour by refusing to ever learn his. He talked out of the side of his pipe, like Popeye, and had a bullet shaped face softened with a dusting of white and grey whiskers. He scratched his belly absent-mindedly and I became suddenly fascinated by the size of his trousers. There was enough material in one leg to build a den and his fly stretched all the way from knee to navel like an operation scar.

‘Alright, Mr Kumar?’ My papa paused and exchanged pleasantries, still holding tightly onto my hand. I could not speak, as by now my teeth were embedded in the strawberry tarmac of a penny chew which I had sneaked from my dress pocket. I thought I might be able to swallow the evidence of my crime before we reached Mr Ormerod’s shop. I hurriedly unwrapped another and stuffed it in, gagging on the goo. I looked up at papa. His silhouette momentarily blocked out the sun and his eyelashes seemed spiked with light. He could traverse continents with a stride and hold the planets in the palm of his hand. He was going to kill me.

We reached Mr Ormerod’s shop and stopped outside the window. The display had been the same for years: a huge cardboard cut-out of a Marmite jar dominated the space, bleached on one side where the sun had caught it, the Player’s Capstan cigarette display behind it, featuring a saturnine sailor’s face in the centre of a lifebelt. A few days earlier, Anita Rutter had told me that this sailor was in fact her father.

I had been in my usual spot outside Ormerod’s window having a visual affair with his sweet display when she had sauntered past, arm in arm with her two regular cohorts, Sherrie, who lived at Dale End Farm and Fat Sally. As they came nearer, they began exchanging excited stage whispers and clumsy dead-arm punches. I had instinctively stiffened and busied myself with reading the small print on the Marmite jar, my heart unaccountably flipping like a fish. Anita stopped and looked me up and down, her top lip beginning to rise.

She pointed at the Player’s Capstan sailor and said, ‘That’s my dad, that is. He wuz in the Navy. He got medals for blowing up the Jerries, like …’ I wondered why he had taken a particular dislike for men with this name but before I could ask, Sherrie and Fat Sally burst into side-hugging laughter. Only the big girls laughed in this way, malicious cackles which hinted at exclusivity and the forbidden. I knew they were all at senior school, I had seen them round the village in their over-large uniforms, customised with badges and cropped-off ties. I was nine but felt three and a half as this particular day, mama had had one of her ‘You Always Look Like A Heathen’ moods and had forced me into a dinky pleated dress, which despite my efforts at ripping and rolling in mud, still contained enough frills and flowers to give me the appearance of a bad tempered doily.

I shot Anita a haunted look, I told her silently that this was not me. She paused and then spun round, scowling, the other girls’ smiles melted and slowly trickled out the side of their mouths. Then Anita broke into a beam of such radiance and forgiveness that my breath caught and my throat began to ache. They linked arms again and walked away, leaving questions buzzing around my head like a heat-hazy fly. It had been the first time Anita had ever talked to me and I had wondered what I had done to deserve it.

The day after this encounter, I happened to see Anita’s dad, Roberto, standing at the village bus stop. He had his blue Dunlop tyre factory overalls on and was dragging deeply on a butt end. He did not look much like his photograph any more, but maybe it was the trauma of his wartime experiences that had caused his beard to fall out and his eyes to change colour. I ambled past and smiled at him. He winked back, ‘Alright, chick?’

I stood before him for a moment, waiting for courage to open my mouth. He smiled at me again and dropped the butt into the road, squinting up the hill for any sign of the asthmatic single-decker which would take him to town.

‘Mr Rutter,’ I squeaked, ‘do you miss the sea?’

‘Ey? Rhyl you mean? Oh ar, was alright.’

He did not want to remember. I could see pain and confusion contorting his face. I changed tack. ‘Have you got any tattoos?’

He smiled proudly and rolled up the sleeve of his oily overall, stabbing a finger at his forearm. ‘Look at this, chick.’

The flesh looked like the exam paper of an unhappy dyslexic; a row of names in blue fuzzy ink ran up his arm like a roll call, Brenda, Deirdre, Janice, Gaynor, just legible under unsuccessful attempts to cross them out with what looked like blue marker pen. He tugged the sleeve up further to reveal the name perched on top of an undulating muscle, still pristine and untampered with, three letters set in a faded red heart, MUM. ‘That’s who I miss, chick. No one could replace her. No bugger alive.’ He sniffed loudly and rearranged his Brylcremed quiff. Suddenly he raised a hand to his eyes, scanning the top of the hill, and shouted, ‘Bus, ladies!’

All at once, several cottage doors flew open like airholes on a concertina and blew various women out of their houses adjusting headscarves, closing handbags, shouting at husbands, voices hoarse with cigarette smoke or muffled by herbal cough sweets but all dipping and rising in that broad Midland sing-song where every sentence ends in a rhetorical swoop. ‘What you done to your hair, eh? Dog’s dinner or what, aaar! Am you gooing up bingo tonight or what, eh? Mouthy wench, that Sharon, aaar? Ooh, yowm looking fit today, Roberto duck, getting it regular then, aaar?’

These women were commonly known as The Ballbearings Committee as they all worked at a metal casings factory in New Town, an industrial estate and shopping centre and our nearest contact with civilisation. The factory had opened, by way of compensation, soon after the mine closure, and everyone had assumed that the jobs would be given to the ex-colliers. But it was not the men they wanted; they wanted women, women who would do piecework and feel grateful, women whose nimble fingers would negotiate their machines, women who, unlike their husbands, would not make demands or complain. So it was that in the space of a few months, the hormonal balance of Tollington was turned upside down. There must have been a time when women waved their men off on doorsteps with lunch boxes and a resigned smile, but I could not remember it. It seemed to me that they had always run the village and they had always been as glamorous and shocking as they were now.

There was not much room for dialogue with these women, whose communal tone of voice said, I know the answer but I’ll ask you anyway but make it quick, chick. They appeared ensemble as coiffured maenads in belted macs and bright lipsticks who all worked together, lived together and played together, and bounced off the village boundaries like a ballbearing against the sides of a pinball machine. Too much energy and nowhere to put it, and though I knew some of their names, Mrs Dalmeny, Mrs Spriggs, Mrs Povey, they seemed to exist and function as a group.

Indeed, their husbands were incidental; all I knew of them was what I would glimpse through half-open doorways on these regular morning panic runs from porch door to approaching bus, men in vests and braces, with rumpled hair who clutched half-read papers and fiddled absent-mindedly with their testicles whilst their wives flung them hurried goodbyes. I noticed there was never any show of affection, no hugs or kisses, not like my parents for whom every leavetaking was accompanied by squeezes, contact numbers on the journey in case of breakdown or terrorist kidnap and always a folded white hanky. Maybe, I told my mother once, they did not love their husbands, that was why we never saw them out together. ‘Oh no,’ my mother replied. ‘They do. They work so their husbands can eat. Their husbands must feel like ghosts. Poor men. Poor women.’

I did not think they were impoverished, watching them teeter across the road, shouting and laughing until they met and merged together like mercury. The bus coughed to a halt and Roberto made a great show of holding the automatic doors open for the women. They all flew past me in a tornado of perfume and smoke and shiny snappy handbags, pinching my cheek, ruffling my hair, ‘Alright chick?…Ooh, she’s a little doll, in’t she?…Them eyes, eh? Ey Roberto, gooing to come and sit by me, aaar?’ They drew energy from me like a succubus and I deflated as the bus doors closed with a sigh and pulled away. I could see Roberto chatting and flirting with the women but only I knew how bravely he concealed his terrible tortured past. I envied him. I wished I was a tortured soul.

My eyes travelled from the sailor’s grimace to the rows of sweetjars above his head. I knew my father was waiting for me to say something. I took in the plump, cloudy bonbons, snug in their glass jar, the cherry lips smiling back at me, the flying saucers whose paper surfaces dissolved into acid on your tongue, the humbugs and rainbow drops and Blackjack chews, adorned with the face of a grinning piccaninny. Wouldn’t anyone be tempted? I wanted to say, but I didn’t. ‘Well,’ said papa. ‘Are you going to tell me the truth? Or shall we go inside and ask Mr Ormerod what happened?’

I glanced at the brass crucifix in the centre of the window display and then shot my father a look. We both knew this was an empty threat. No one instigated conversation with Mr Ormerod if they wanted to get home before their next birthday. A sentence as innocuous as ‘How much is the thicksliced Sunblest?’ would result in a chirpy monologue which took in Harold Wilson, global disaster and the price of peas, somehow always ending in a hallelujah chorus about the glory of God. Mr Ormerod was hyperactive in the local Wesleyan Methodist church, the only church in the village, the centre of over-organised events we laughingly termed a social life, and the best way he knew how to make us feel at home was to continually try and convert us to the ways of Jesus Christ, his Saviour.