Giving up the Ghost: A memoir

Three, four, I am still four: I think I will be it for ever. I sit on the back doorstep to have my picture taken. Fair hair gushes from under my bonnet. My clothes are a pair of brown corduroy trousers and a pink woolly cardigan with a zip; I call it a windjammer. I have another just the same but blue. I have a yellow knitted jacket, double breasted, that I call a Prince Charles coat. Summer comes and I have a crisp white dress with blackberries on, which shows my dimpled knees. I have a pink-and-blue frock my mother doesn’t like so much, chosen by me because it’s longer; people of six, I think, have longer skirts, and I am beginning to see that youth cannot last for ever, and now hope to be taken for older than I am. The onset of boyhood has been postponed, so far. But patience is a virtue with me.

We go to Blackpool to stay at Mrs Scott’s boarding house, just the three of us: my mother, my father, myself. I insist that we stand before a mirror, all three. They are to pick me up and hold me between them, my fat arms across their shoulders, my hands gripping them tight. I call this picture ‘All Together’; I insist on its title. I know, now, that this tableau, this charade, must have caused them a dull, deep pain. We do it time and time again, I insist on it and I am good at insisting. As a knight I am used to arranging siege warfare, the investment of major fortresses, so the reluctance and distraction of a couple of parents isn’t going to stop me pulling life into the shape I want it to be.

Standing on the pier at Blackpool, I look down at the inky waves swirling. Again, the noise of nature, deeply conversational, too quick to catch; again the rushing movement, blue, deep, and far below. I look up at my mother and father. They are standing close together, talking over my head. A thought comes to me, so swift and strange that it feels like the first thought that I have ever had. It strikes with piercing intensity, like a needle in the eye. The thought is this: that I stop them from being happy. I, me, and only me. That my father will throw me down on the rocks, down into the sea. That perhaps he will not do it, but some impulse in his heart thinks he ought. For what am I, but a disposable, replaceable child? And without me they would have a chance in life.

The next thing is that I am in bed with a fever raging. My lungs are full to bursting. The water boils, frets, spumes. I am limp in the power of the current that tugs beneath the waves. To open my eyes I have to force off my eyelids the weight of water. I am trying to die and I am trying to live. I open my eyes and see my mother looking down at me. She is sitting swivelled towards me, her anxious face peering down. She has made a fence of Mrs Scott’s dining chairs, their backs to my bed, and behind this barrier she sits, watching me. Her wrists, crossed, rest on the backs of the chairs; her lady’s hands droop. For a minute or two I swim up from under the water: clawing. I think, how beautiful she is: Monday’s child. Her face frames a question. It is never spoken. My mother has brought her own bedlinen, from home, and below my hot cheek, chafing it, is a butterfly: spreading luxuriant wings, embroidered on the pillowcase by my mother’s own hand. I see it, recognise it, put out my hot fingers to fumble at its edges. If I am with this butterfly, I am not lost but found. But I can’t stay. I am too hot, too sick. I feel myself taken by the current, tugged away.

I am changed now. Not in that fever but in one of the series, one of those that follow it, my weight of hair is cut off. What remains is like feathers, I think, like fluff. I lose my baby fat. For another twenty-five years I will be frail. In my late twenties I have a narrow ribcage, a tiny waist and a child’s twig arms fuzzed with white-gold hair. At twenty-nine I am cast as a ghost in a play: as Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, walking with noiseless slippered feet, a phantom of air and smoke. But then my life will change again, and I will find myself, like one of Candia McWilliam’s characters, ‘barded with a suit of fat.’ I will be solid, set, grounded, grotesque: perpetually strange to myself, convoluted, mutated, and beyond the pale.

All of us can change. All of us can change for the better, at any point. I believe this, but what is certainly true is that we can be made foreign to ourselves, suddenly, by illness, accident, misadventure, or hormonal caprice. I am four, and my mother tells me this story about myself: that when I was born my hair was black and thick. At the age of five I mourn for it, weaving in my mind the ghost of a black plait that trails over my right shoulder. Once, I say to myself, I was a Red Indian. I get a feathered headdress and a tepee, bought for me in Manchester: so clear am I, about my new requirements, about my antecedents. The tepee is erected in the middle of my grandmother’s floor and in it I have a small chair and small table. People step around me. I take my meals in the tepee, and believe my hands are brown, as they wield the spoon. But already it feels like a game, whereas in some previous time, in another life, I believe I had a right to this kit. I know that there is no truth in this belief. But it has created in me a complex emotion; what I feel, for the first time, is nostalgia.

It is 1957. Davy Crockett is all the go. I get a fur hat with a tail. We sing a stupid song that says Davy, Davy Crockett, is king of the wild frontier. It makes me want to laugh but I’m not sure who the joke’s on. We sing he killed a bear when he was only three. Somehow I doubt it. Even I didn’t do that.

Where are the knights of the Round Table? In abeyance, while I get to grips with the how the West was won. Now another thing occurs. I make a fuss! It is related to my role in life. When exactly do I become a boy?

My mother and father have been to Manchester, without me. We have brought you a present, they say, as they take off their coats. What is it? Well, it is a cottage set. It is taken out, extracted from a long cardboard box which has a cellophane window to show its contents. It is a doll’s teaset, a teapot, milk jug and sugar bowl made to look like rustic cottages, with little doors and windows: though only the teapot has a roof, a thatched one. I am puzzled at first—what is the use of it or where is the amusement to be derived? Then they say, we have bought your cousin Christopher a shooting range! A shooting range? I open my mouth and bawl. Shooting range!

Well! I can hear them saying. She did make a fuss! We had to give it her!

The shooting range consisted of a metal bar on a stand, which you placed on the carpet. On the bar swung four crude animal shapes made of moulded plastic, painted in primary colours. I only remember the owl; perhaps it was the only one I recognised, or perhaps I knew that people don’t shoot owls. You were supplied with a tiny rifle, which shot out a cork. You had to lie on your belly, very close, if you were going to hit the animals; you knew you had hit them if you made them swing on the bar. That was all there was to it. I found the thing tame. I had thought ‘a shooting range’ would entail actual destruction. Slaughter.

Everyone is disappointed. Them, because they thought I was too mature for the shooting range; and it was true, I was. And me, because I can’t get to grips with this cottage set at all. They must have bought it for someone else. Some ideal daughter, that they don’t have. It hangs about the house though; the teapot, unused, sits in the china cabinet, looking silly, but my mother keeps hair grips in the doll’s cottage that is meant to be a sugar basin. Years pass. A dozen sets of crockery are smashed, but the cottage survives. The edges of its tiny window panes accrete a rim of grime. And grimly, night after night, my mother studs the grips into my hair, trying to impart a curl. In time my shorn hair grows again: grey-blonde, straight, down to my waist and as flimsy as a veil. ‘The weight pulls the curl out,’ my mother protests. But the curl isn’t ever there, and nor is the weight.

I am only playing, inside the Indian’s tepee, and I know it. I have lost the warrior’s body I had before the fever. My bullet-like presence, my solidity, has vanished. Ambiguity has thinned my bones, made me light and washed me out, made me speechless and made me blonde. I realise—and carry the dull knowledge inside me, heavy in my chest—that I am never going to be a boy now. I don’t exactly know why. I sense that things have slid too far, from some ideal starting point.

Later, when I am six, I am given a black doll. My mother wants to bring me up to mother all races. The doll is huge, half as big as me. She cries ‘mama’ when you rock her: if you bother. Her tiny lips are scarlet, and they are parted to show the tip of her scarlet tongue. Her hair is close-cropped wool. She wears a white frilly dress. I know that, if I tow her about,I will make it grubby; this is a peril I have no intention of entering into. I recognise the probable expense of the doll, and that—in some way—she belongs to my mother who has procured her. Her pottery forehead is hard against my lips.

My mother and father sit together in the front room of 56 Bankbottom. It is afternoon, summer, perhaps four o’clock; I am stupidly slow about telling the time. Certain hours bring their charged, unmistakable light, the low rays slanting through the glass. They are sitting with a chess board between them; not the travelling set, for no one is going anywhere today. Black men and white: neither makes a move. The house is quiet. Where are the others? I don’t know. I am intimate with the chess pieces, the knight being still my favourite: his prancing curved neck, his flaring equine muzzle. The silence draws itself out, a long note in music; the light glitters with dust motes. No one moves, neither man nor woman; their hands are still, their eyes cast down. The pieces quiver, waiting to be touched: the black and the white, the smooth-skulled bishop, tall and powerful Queen: the pawns, babyish and faceless. And so many of the latter: toddling across the board, so quickly nudged out of line and ventured, so easily picked off by snipers, and dropped back to coffined oblivion in the wooden box with its sliding lid. I understand the game, almost. The groove in the bishop’s head fits the nail of my little finger, and the white pieces are of pale wood, grain swirling around their curves; the heads of the pawns, imagined beneath my fingertips, roll like shelled peas. Light, dust, silence; four o’clock.

A noise rips open the air. My parents raise their heads. It is a motorcycle, unsilenced, tearing open the afternoon, snarling down the street: 60 miles an hour. It rattles the windows; it is loud enough to wake babies, to frighten dogs. Then in an instant it has passed us, the noise fading to a snarl; changing and dying, in no time at all, to a long and melancholy drone, to a sigh. No one has spoken. But we have heard. Someone clears their throat: not me. They shift in their chairs. Their heads droop again. The racket, the roar, lasted for seconds, but the inner ear replays it and cannot help: winding away, with an afternote like vapour on the breeze, down the long and winding road.

I think, I shall remember this. I shall remember this for ever; this dying note, the slanting light, their bent heads. It is a moment of pure self-consciousness, the foretaste of what is to come. I know, besides, that they are not looking at the chess board; they are looking, covertly, at each other’s faces.

I went to school, taking my knights—small, grey, plastic knights, in a bag. They were for a rainy day. My mother said this would be all right.

One had simply never seen so many children. It took me a few days to establish their complete ignorance. Evelyn I had got trained, to a degree, but no one here understood anything of the arts of war. Giant Gazonka? They didn’t know him. Machine-gunning? They simply looked blank. Suppose a camel came in, and they had to command him? They went around with their mouths hanging open and their noses running, with silver trails from nostril to top lip: with their cardigans bagging and sagging, their toes coming out of their socks, their hair matted and their bleary eyes revolving anywhere but where they should look. When they came back after dinner time, they stood in their places, beside their infant chairs, and gawped at the blackboard. Thereon was the chalked word ‘Writing’. The children chorused, ‘Wri-i-i-ting.’ After a few days of this, I thought it would be a mercy if I varied the performance by clapping my hands and singing it, to a syncopated rhythm: wri-ting—wri-tingg! Mrs Simpson said, ‘Do you want me to hit you with this ruler?’ I made no answer to this. Obviously I didn’t, but I didn’t either know why she proposed it.

I kept my bounce for a week or two, my cheerful pre-school resilience; I was a small pale girl, post-Blackpool, but I had a head stuffed full of chivalric epigrams, and the self-confidence that comes from a thorough knowledge of horsemanship and swordplay. I knew, also, so many people who were old, so many people who were dead; I belonged to their company and lineage, not to this, and I began to want to rejoin them, without the interruptions now imposed. I couldn’t read, but neither could any of the other children, and it was a wearisome uphill trail in the company of Dick and Dora, Dick and Dora’s dog and cat, who were called Nip and Fluff, Dick and Dora’s Mummy, and Dick and Dora’s garden. Sometimes Daddy put in an appearance, and if my memory serves he was balding and tweedy. It was dull stuff, all of it, and as my head was already full of words, whole sagas which I knew by heart, I was not convinced that it was necessary. Before I was entrusted with paper I was given chalk and a slate, but the slate was so old and thick and shiny that the letters slipped off as I tried to chalk them. At the end of the morning I could only show letters up to D. Mrs Simpson expressed surprise and disappointment. She didn’t threaten violence. I was given plasticine to work the letters in. Instead of making them flat on the table I wanted to make them stand up, so by the time the bell rang I was, once again, only up to D. I was giving a fair impression of a child who was slow and stupid. I was both too old and too young for the place I had arrived at. My best days were behind me.

One of my difficulties was that I had not understood school was compulsory. I thought that you could just give it a try and that if you didn’t like it you were free to revert to your former habits. To me, it was getting in the way of the vital assistance I gave my grandad, and wasting hours of my time every day. But then it was broken to me that you had to go; there was no option. Not to go, my mother said, was against the law. But what if I didn’t, I asked, what would occur? She supposed, said my mother, we would be summonsed. I said, is that like sued? I had heard the word ‘sued’. It sounded to me like the long, stinking hiss emitted when a tap was turned on the gas cooker, before the match was applied. Sued, gas: the words had a lower hiss than ‘marzipan’ and long after they were spoken their trail lingered on the air, invisible, pernicious.

So there was no choice about going to St Charles Borromeo; somehow I confused its compulsory nature with its permanent nature. One day, I thought, my mother would fail to collect me. She would ‘forget’ and, tactfully, no one would remind her. I would be left at school and have to live there. My grandad would want to get me but a grandad is not in charge; he never comes to school. Even if my mother was on her way to retrieve me, she would be prevented by some accident, some stroke of fate. Thinking of this, my eyes began to leak tears which blurred my vision. Sometimes I yelled out with exasperation and fear of abandonment. Mrs Simpson took off her tiny gold watch, and showed it to me. When the big hand, she said, and when the little hand, your mother will be here. She put her watch on her teacher’s desk. The big girls and boys, who were already five, were allowed to bring me up and show it to me. I so hated their hands, their arms weighing down my neck, that I tried to cry silently, but a boy called Harry, who had blazing red hair, would call out, ‘She is crying, she is crying,’ whenever he saw tears dripping from my closed lids.

I thought I should be abandoned for ever, in the Palace of Silly Questions. Do you want me to hit you with this ruler?

The children’s favourite game was called ‘water’. At the close of each afternoon, games were given out—paper, paints, crayons—and the most favoured child of the day was called forward to the washbasin, which stood in the corner of the classroom. The pleasure of ‘water’ consisted of filling the basin and floating plastic ducks on it.

I got home and my handkerchief was damp. ‘Did you drop it down the toilet?’ my mother said. She wasn’t angry, which was a relief; these days I seemed to magnetise wrath. ‘No,’ I said. My voice was faint. ‘I had water.’ How could she know the stultifying horror of those two yellow plastic ducks? Of thirty minutes in the company of said ducks? And that this was supposed to be a prize, a favour, an honour that made the children fume with envy, the unseen children at your back? Never turn your back on the enemy: any knight knows it. Worse, how could my mother think, how could she ever imagine, that I would use the school lavatories? A near-approach had been enough for me, to those stinking closets under the shadow of a high wall, the ground running from the pipes that burst every winter, the wood of their doors rotting as if a giant rat had gnawed them from the ground up. We had an outside one at home, shared with no. 54; but excuse me, this? I had to go to what was called ‘the babies’ lavatory’, which was half-size. The trouble with the babies was, they were so very approximate in their arrangements; they didn’t know the lavatory bowl from the floor.

So did she not know everything, my mother? I thought that was the set-up, between mother and child. I understood a fair percentage of other people’s thoughts, or at least the thoughts of the people to whom I was related, the people with whom I lived on Bankbottom; I understood outlying uncles who wheezed in, and could predict with a fair degree of success what they would say next. I assumed that comprehension was reciprocal. I understood my mother to understand me. I was devastated that the mere fact of being a mile up the road meant she didn’t know what was going on in the infants’ classroom.

I can’t say I learned nothing, at St Charles Borromeo. I learned bladder control; which is good for women, useful in later life. The second thing I learned was that I had got almost everything terribly wrong.