Anita and Me (18 page)

I stood shivering in the doorway, watching Uncle Amman lead them to the car which was parked a little way up the lane.
I told myself that if Pinky and Baby managed to get into the car without being told off, they were okay. The whole incident would be forgotten on the way home. I held my breath as Auntie Shaila held open the car door for them. Pinky got in first, Auntie Shaila did nothing. They were fine. Then as Baby got one leg into the car, Auntie Shaila cuffed her soundly on the back of her head, making her bangles jingle. Baby immediately burst into sobs, so Auntie Shaila hit her harder and then reached over her to slap any bit of Pinky that came within reach. ‘So now you are becoming robbers? My own daughters?’ Every word was punctuated with a swing, followed by a plaintive ‘Mama nahin! Nahin mama!’ ‘So you think because you live here you can become like the goree girls? What next, huh? Boyfriends? Babies? You think you can spit in my face? Your own mother!’ Auntie Shaila was still shouting over her shoulder as Uncle Amman pulled shakily away, forgetting to put his headlights on until he was halfway down the hill. I briefly saw Pinky and Baby silhouetted in the back of the car. They had their arms wrapped around each other and their heads lifted in silent wails, like they were howling at the stars.

I could not sleep that night and apparently neither could papa. I heard him tossing and turning next door, and then much later, through a hazy half-doze, heard his heavy footsteps going downstairs. The next morning he did not look at me and when Anita came calling at the back gate, he picked up his newspaper and left the kitchen, slamming the door behind him.

Spring was always my favourite season in the village, and as the first cuckoo sounded, almost every cottage door would swing open revealing taut-jawed women in pinnies and headscarfs brandishing an armoury of cleaning materials. You could not walk down the street without falling over some possessed female hunched over a front step with a wire scrubbing brush, choking over the clouds of dust rising from the scores of rugs being beaten to a pulp by strong sleeveless arms, picking your way through clusters of china dogs and horse brasses laid out on sheets in the watery sun, drying to a gleam whilst indoors, cupboards, shelves and cabinets were being emptied and washed down. The air filled with dust motes and the women’s screeching voices, calling to each other from their upturned nests, swapping domestic hints, ‘Yow want to try some lemon juice on them glass doors!’, the latest gossip, ‘Some big knob come down to look at the school…says it’s too small to keep open! That’s the bloody point, in’t it? Don’t want the estate kids coming round here …’ and always the litany of marital woes, ‘So he spends all the housekeeping, rolls into bed stinking like a brewery and says, brace yourself chick, I’m coming up! Course, I bloody walloped him! We made it up after though …’ ‘Yeah I bloody know, I live next door remember! …’

I loved hanging around the houses during this ritualistic skin shedding, fascinated by the objects and memories behind all those shut doors, intoxicated by the smells of disinfectant and coal tar soap which complemented the
sticky new buds adorning every tree certain that something clean and brand new was about to happen.

Of course, not every household embraced the spring with soapy red arms; the Mad Mitchells next door merely chucked a few more bits of junk into their front garden, adding to their bizarre monument to kitsch. There was an old style perambulator filled with a jumble of mangy fur coats, a half-smashed fake crystal chandelier, a coal scuttle, two brand new bedpans, a car battery and two cracked wing mirrors, a hat stand, a stuffed mongoose, and a collection of rusted, unopened cans of fruit. Whilst mama tut-tutted every time we passed their house, taking in the grimy opaque windows, the tattered curtains and peeling front door, I always checked to see if there was another imaginative addition to the Mad Mitchell Collection. I thought it was like a living sculpture, each object telling a story which grew more complex with every new throwaway, charting the changing tastes and fortunes in their lives. Whose baby had gurgled in that pram? Why didn’t they ever eat those tins of fruit? Was the mongoose once a dearly beloved pet? My excitement increased when mama told me that mongooses came from India, and also fought and ate snakes. Had there once been a plague of serpents in Tollington, like those pestilences Uncle Alan had talked about at Sunday School? Maybe Mr Mitchell had lived in India and brought back the mongoose to clear up the village.

It was true I had never seen any of the Mitchells travel further than the town shops. Journeys seemed to bother them greatly. They would line up at the bus stop at least a half hour before the hourly bus was due, Mr and Mrs Mitchell checking the horizon every few minutes, not seeming to notice Cara wandering down the white lines in the middle of the road, singing to herself. Mr Mitchell’s favourite place was definitely his outside lav, which looked out onto the entry dividing our houses. In winter, I’d hear him straining and cursing as he rattled his newspaper, but for him, warmer weather meant he
could stay in there as long as he liked, sometimes for hours on end, and not bother to lock the door. That was his version of a spring clear out, I supposed. Whilst running down the entry, I often glimpsed a hairy leg with long johns draped around the ankles, and once or twice he’d even called out a cheery, ‘Bloody noice morning, Meena duck!’ as I had scampered past, terrified one day a sudden breeze would swing open the door and I would face the moral dilemma of whether I should ignore or greet an elder sitting on the bog.

Later on, when I read about The Sixties, when enough time had lapsed for those two words to be headed with capital letters, I felt as if I was reading about some far off mythical country where laughing teenagers in sharp suits and A-line dresses drove around in psychedelic Minis, having sex in between chain-smoking and dancing lumpishly in the audience of
Ready Steady Go!
We owned a Mini which I was not sure had a fourth gear – that was the only point of contact I could find.

Tollington’s version of the sexual revolution was Sam Lowbridge’s heavy-petting sessions on the park swings, which were always cut short by a giggling audience of five-year-olds or Mrs Keithley running out of her yard brandishing a garden hose. Drugs were what Mr Ormerod kept on the top shelf of his shop, buttercup syrup, aspirin tablets in fat brown bottles, Old Sloane’s Liniment Ointment, a particular sell-out item round spring cleaning time. Parties were what grown-ups had, my parents’ chaotic passionate music evenings, the occasional tea dance organised by Uncle Alan in the church hall when our yard would be overrun by blue-rinsed ladies and proud old men with ostentatious cravats, whilst the local dogs would be driven barmy by the high-pitched whine of dozens of hearing aids jamming the airwaves. Sometimes, the Mitre pub would host an engagement party or stag night, playing loud rock and roll music that made the geese shit in
terror and cower under the apple trees, but the music would always be switched off at ten o’clock on the dot.

But if Tollington was a footnote in the book of the Sixties, then my family and friends were the squashed flies in the spine. According to the newspapers and television, we simply did not exist. If a brown or black face ever did appear on TV, it stopped us all in our tracks. ‘Daljit! Quick!’ papa would call, and we would crowd round and coo over the walk-on in some detective series, some long-suffering actor in a gaudy costume with a goodness-gracious-me accent. (‘So Mr Templar, you speak fluent Hindustani too! But that won’t stop me stealing the secret formula for my country from where I will soon rule the world! Heh heh heh …’) and welcome him into our home like a long-lost relative. But these occasional minor celebrities never struck me as real; they were someone else’s version of Indian, far too exaggerated and exotic to be believable. Sometimes I wondered if the very act of shutting our front door transported us onto another planet, where non-related elders were called Aunties and Uncles and talked in rapid Punjabi, which their children understood but answered back in broad Black Country slang, where we ate food with our fingers and discussed family feuds happening five thousand miles away, where manners were so courtly that a raised eyebrow could imply an insult, where sensibilities were so finely tuned that an advert featuring a woman in a bikini could clear a room.

Our revolutions were quieter and often unwitnessed, I soon realised, after years of earwigging on the elders’ evening chats. They had their own version of history: ‘You remember, walking round Swiss Cottage, trying to find a boarding house that did not have that sign “No Irish, Blacks or Dogs?”…Hai, the letters I wrote home, so many lies about the jobs we had, the money we were making. My mamaji still thinks I am a college lecturer…You know that old trick, you ring up and get an interview in your best voice, then they see your face and suddenly the job is gone…Ah yes, but also these people on
Christmas Eve, they see us standing at the bus stop in the snow and drive all of us right to our front door…these people can be so cruel…some of these people are angels, I tell you…if only mama/papa/bhaiya/didi were here to see this …’ None of these stories appeared in any book or newspaper or programme, and yet they were all true. But then I was beginning to realise that truth counted for very little, in the end.

I did not realise quite how starved we were of seeing ourselves somewhere other than in each other’s lounges until Reita Faria, the reigning Miss India, won the Miss World contest. This is such a distant memory that I must have been very young, but the sense of excitement and pride it awoke in my parents and their friends obviously made a lasting impression. I have a vague recollection of our telephone ringing constantly immediately after the announcement whilst the TV remained on full blast, and then our house being invaded by various Aunties and Uncles all bearing pans of the food they had cooked that evening, ready for another impromptu party. The mantra that went round the rooms stays with me too. ‘And she a doctor as well!’ crowed Auntie Shaila, everyone’s long-held belief confirmed that Indian women were the brainiest and most beautiful in the world. If only Rita Farrier had come along when I was ten and it was Spring, and I could have taken her hand and walked down the main street in Tollington, both of us in saris, her stethoscope flapping around her long brown neck.

Sadly, Rita never made it to Tollington, but even without her, Spring in the village was always welcome, and always celebrated by our only communal, organized event, the Tollington Spring Fete. This was held in the grounds of the grandest house in the village, an exquisite Tudor mansion owned by Mr Pembridge, a local Tory councillor and businessman who did something minimal and managerial in construction. Every year, they would throw open their garden to a number of stalls from all the surrounding villages, the
proceeds of which would be distributed by the local churches to a chosen charitable cause. The Pembridges lived at the posh end of the main village road, where the houses gradually became larger and more set back from the pavement. Their wrought iron fences enclosed miles of manicured emerald lawn, riotous flower beds, horse chestnut and beech trees shading an outdoor pool and a salmon fishery. Mrs Worrall told me that the house itself was at least three hundred years old and originally belonged to the Squire of Tollington, whose last remaining heir, a daredevil bachelor, had been killed in the Spanish Civil War. The ironwork on the gates delivered the motto,
Semper Eadem
, which papa told me meant, Always the Same. And indeed, the Pembridge mansion had not changed in all the years I could remember, remaining an island of grace, tranquillity and unimaginable wealth whilst the village school halted any new intake of children, preparing to gradually close down, and the neon motorway lights began slowly appearing, poking their stiff necks above the horizon.

On the morning of the Fete, most of the village gathered outside the Pembridge gates, talking in hushed whispers whilst they waited to be admitted. Not all of them were wearing hats, but if they had been, lots of doffing would have been the order of the day. The grandeur and elegance of the place affected us all, made even more desirable by its very inaccessibility. For the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, the Pembridge mansion remained out of bounds to us, as effectively as if it had been surrounded by electric fences and a shark-infested moat. Of course, most passers-by would feel compelled to slow down and drink it in, the women all breathy and eagle-eyed, checking for a change of curtains or new shrubs in the herbaceous borders, the men seemingly unimpressed, although their eyes would narrow and nostrils flare at the salmon lake and the blue Rolls-Royce with its numberplate PCC 1. We did catch glimpses of Mr Pembridge easing himself in and out of his car on his sweeping driveway, always in a suit with a carnation as red as
his face in his lapel. And sometimes we would catch sight of Mrs Pembridge in the back seat, as they left, we assumed, for a party. She was a thin, bored woman with a head far too big and bouffant for her body, who would acknowledge our stares with a cursory flicker of a smile.

Anita and I were very excited to learn that they had a son so there was indeed a young heir to the manor, and one day he actually rode through the village on a huge skittery horse. Unfortunately, the horse was better looking: Graham Pernbridge had his mother’s skinny frame and his father’s ‘mardy’ face, and when he stopped to ask us the time, he talked like he had a shilling’s worth of gobstoppers in his mouth. He was obviously not a born horseman, and sat like he was waiting for it to explode underneath him. Not long after, we saw him zipping about the lanes in a bright red Porsche, which seemed to suit him better. Paula watched him burning rubber as he took a corner and sighed, ‘One day some lucky cow is going to marry into all that.’

Mrs Lowbridge picked her teeth with a hairgrip and replied, ‘Ar, but she’ll have to marry Mr Plug-Face to get to it. Inbreeding’s a terrible thing, ain’t it?’

Mama, of course, had not wanted to accompany me and papa to the Fete. Nowadays, she seemed to exist in a selfcontained world of nappies, cleaning, cooking and fitful twitchy catnaps, brief moments in between my brother’s incessant, cheery demands. He was not exactly a naughty baby; he didn’t yowl for hours on end like Mrs Keithley’s Nicky used to, to a single note of whining torture which could strip paint and compel church matrons to murder. He did not throw food around or break ornaments or deposit curdy omelettes of sick on the furniture, like most of the other babies that had passed through our doors. In fact, if he had been ugly or maladjusted, at least we would have had the excuse to give him away to the Sunshine Orphanage in Cannock, whose minibus occasionally trundled through the village. We kids always rushed to wave at the vehicle with its huge painted
rainbow on the side. I was expecting to see thin, hollow-eyed ragamuffins slouched shivering in the cushioned seats who would gaze at us with longing, and maybe raise a skeletal hand in timid welcome. Instead, they all appeared indecently healthy, even though their uniforms of striped shirts and brown cords were rather naff, and returned our greetings with bored indifference or, once or twice, two fat jerking fingers out the side windows of the bus.

So I did not think I was being too unreasonable when I did suggest to mama, after yet another sleepless night, if she could maybe drop Sunil at the orphanage for a trial period. Her reply was to burst into tears and rush into her bedroom where she locked the door, and did not come out until papa spent ten minutes talking softly to her through the keyhole. He then pushed me into my bedroom and told me to ‘Stay there until you realise what you have just said …’