Bad Blood (13 page)

The land of the living certainly presented a chilly prospect without him. We lost caste immediately. Our lack of substantial claims to respectability was obvious – he left no money and no property – and the moral claims had, of course, been forfeited long before. The Church chivvied Grandma to leave the vicarage to make room for the next incumbent, and the dusty accumulations of twenty years were brought out into the light: pieces of the good dinner service that had survived the plate-throwing days, chairs with tattered upholstery and tobacco burns, brittle curtains, moth-eaten rugs and mountains of old newspapers. Most of the furniture went into store, the piano and the books were squeezed into my parents' council house,
where they looked alien and apologetic, and made the shortage of space even more acute.

And after acrimonious discussions, Grandma was squeezed in too. She had been plotting to return to sister Katie and South Wales, and the paradise lost of the shop, but to everyone's surprise their brother Stan found the desperate courage to say no. The worm turned. He wouldn't be smothered with sisters and anyway the shop couldn't afford her (this was perfectly true, but then it couldn't afford Katie and Stan either). So with a very bad grace Grandma moved in with my parents. It must have seemed like a bad dream – no sooner had they escaped the poisonous atmosphere of the vicarage than it followed them in the form of this short, fat, ill-tempered incubus smelling of cold cream, stale talc and mothballs. Grandma, of course, blamed fate, and my parents, for her disappointment, and never stopped complaining about the discomfort of her surroundings, even further (if that were possible) from shops and cinemas. The raw council estate, where cows wandered over the unfenced garden plots on their way to the fields and
the neighbours could see in
, was for her Hanmer squared, essence of Hanmer, and she scorned it with a passion.

She was horrible to live with, but at the same time she was a link with the lost past. One day, when she was still sorting through the stuff in the vicarage, where everything seemed to me to be wearing thin and getting see-through, as though a spell were dissolving, she told me a tale that epitomised her witchiness. I'd called by after school, and found her muttering and wheezing with laughter, so I could tell she had some malicious story she wanted to impart. After a whiff of smelling-salts she got it out. Going up to bed that morning, as was her habit, she'd passed an apparition on the stairs – Grandpa getting up, as always. I was suitably thrilled and impressed, not so
Grandma. With her characteristic lack of imagination (which had at moments like this its own surreal genius) she assumed that it was just the sort of cheap theatrical trick he
would
pull. ‘If the old bugger thinks he can frighten me that way,' she wheezed triumphantly, ‘he's got another think coming.' And she went back to packing paper bags inside paper bags, sliding the odd ill-gotten pound note in between, doubtless. And I went away with food for thought – ‘another think coming' – hoarding the stories that would keep me going in the open-plan future.

The cement strip of front path was hardly dry when we moved into our brand-new council house and it was months before the electricity was connected, although the wiring was all there and the waiting switches. Bright lights and straight lines were signs of the times. Hanmer was catching up. The very existence of houses not owned by the Hanmers or the Kenyons (or the Church) was itself a new departure. Those council semis, built in the early 1950s on a flattened field at the top of a windy rise half a mile out of the village, made a square hole in the old social map. The address had a mysterious sound – ‘The Arowry' (we were number 4) taken from ‘Yr Orwedd', the Welsh name for a medieval Hanmer family manor. In prosaic fact, however, the present-day Sir Edward had simply sold the Rural District Council a scrubby site, with one empty, tumbledown black-and-white shack on it which was duly demolished – to make way for a dozen families who couldn't be accommodated in the old pattern of farms and smallholdings and tied cottages.

In Hanmer, up until then, your house came with your livelihood, more or less, and most roles had been passed on through generations. My grandfather's tenure at the vicarage had been a matter of less than twenty years and now we were among the new people. Council-house people were socially mobile – upwardly in most cases, although not in ours. We all shared a
sense of being out of place, on the move. Some of the men were self-employed builders, carpenters, or joiners. Some worked for firms outside the village. One ex-serviceman was a security guard on the new Wrexham Trading Estate. They were local people but they didn't work on the land, they were in Hanmer's version of limbo. And so were we.

For me the loss of the vicarage and my small share in Grandpa's shadowy prestige was awful. I made up for it by becoming for the first time truly a country child, a native of Hanmer, wandering the fields and footpaths in squelching wellies. Most of the Arowry families had brand-new children much younger than me, so in the mornings I'd join the straggling band of true Hanmerites who walked to school along a bumpy little road called Striggy Lane. They made the journey as lengthy and devious as possible by dawdling, wading along the muddy ditches, or crawling like commandos through the prickly undergrowth on the steep hedge banks. These kids progressed in a sort of noisy silence, with yells and whistles and hoots, breathing hard. In cold weather you watched your breath on the air.

No one talked much. There were two wild and weedy girls, twins, who had invented a private language of their own and otherwise didn't talk at all. They were Briggses, who lived up at the Mere Head, the ‘back of beyond' according to Grandma and my mother. Briggses were many and skinny and big-boned, and out-at-elbow and sometimes sockless. Grandma had a story about them. She said she'd once given a very nice pullover to one of the boys in the family, only to see the scrawny patriarch himself, Mr Briggs, shamelessly sporting it the very next day. There were (I always felt) things wrong with this story. For a start, why would she have given away a good pullover when we wore matted, moth-eaten woollies? I was being
literal-minded. Looking back, I can see that she was enjoying a fat woman's joke against a thin little man (as on the seaside postcards), and smuggling in a sly allusion to the comic disparity between his disgraceful potency and his physique. Although, of course, the official point of the story was to insist on our claims to gentility, which daily decayed.

I acquired a juvenile tramp's knowledge of the reliable bushes to shelter under when it rained hard and the farmers' wives who were good for a cup of tea or hot Bovril. Whenever I could, I got out of number 4 The Arowry, for I refused to feel at home there. There was no room. It wasn't just that the house was smaller, nor that Grandma crowded us. It was a case of emotional claustrophobia. There's something cloying and close about living in a proper family that has always brought out the worst in me and it started back then. I had never known my parents together, as one, when I was small. When my father was demobilised they had become lodgers in the vicarage, an attic bedroom their only private space. The fact that I somehow belonged to them, and with them, had been obscured for me in my grandparents' divided dominion. For a husband and wife to get on together,
gang up with each other
, seemed strange and unfair. (Perhaps this is why people dream back with nostalgia to the extended family? Not because you get more parenting, but because you get less? Who knows, perhaps we secretly long to avoid being eggs in just one basket, which is what you get if your parents build a nest on just one branch of the family tree.) My baby brother Clive's birth and the move to the brand-new house not long afterwards reordered the domestic world. Clive was the child of our parents' reunion and of their married life together. Indeed, I was free to ‘run wild' outdoors precisely because so much of their attention was focused inwards and on him.

There must have been envy behind my tomboy transformation and sour grapes (if they didn't want me, I wouldn't want them), but it didn't seem like that at the time. Boys were better in theory, I knew that. Grandma, though, thought maleness in general a mistake and for a while it looked as if events would gruesomely prove her right. My small brother engrossed our parents' attention mainly because he was dogged by illness, for all the world as if there'd been a bad fairy lurking at his baptism to cast a spell. Boy babies are more vulnerable: Clive flamed up with erysipelas (St Anthony's Fire) shortly after he was born in 1949; next, before he could talk, he was rushed into hospital tortured with a ‘twisted bowel'; and then, when he was two and a half, he contracted polio.

It was a fearful word that conjured up visions of survivors encased in iron lungs like sarcophagi, with only their heads sticking out, being plucky for the newsreels. At the least, you imagined having to wear iron braces on a wasted leg for the rest of your life. ‘No matter how it is called,' says the
Science News Letter
(1955), cited in the
OED
, ‘poliomyelitis, infantile paralysis, or polio for short, it is a scourge that has long been a crippler and killer.' Any envy I'd nurtured was promptly repressed. If that was the price for being the centre of attention then I was lucky to be left out. In fact, it was during Clive's illness that I first became truly addicted to the glum pleasures of plodding about alone, for I was quarantined – vaccinated, and kept home from school to see if I would come down with it too. I wandered aimlessly around the plashy fields, producing aches and pains by the power of suggestion. Even I didn't believe in them, though: I was mobile, I plodded on.

Clive and I in 1954

Clive, who had only just learned to run, lay prone on a cot in the living-room, hemmed in by the three-piece suite, the dining table and the piano. Dr McColl stuck a pin in his foot
and he felt nothing. Nonetheless he recovered, thanks to a rigorous programme of exercises, with father as physiotherapist. ‘Infantile paralysis' turned out to be less terrible than its reputation in his case, because he
was
an infant: it was most devastating in adults. In a few years the general terror of the disease would abate, since the end of the great post-war epidemic was in sight, conquered by mass vaccination – although the major souce of infection (polio is passed on through sewage) hasn't been eliminated to this day.

Once our particular all-absorbing present-tense crisis was over, there was time to put two and two together and to realise that Clive had almost certainly picked up the virus at the seaside. On our trip to South Wales that year we'd stayed in Porthcawl, which had a marvellous beach with rock pools to paddle in, called Rest Bay. An additional delight was the wreck of a Greek oil tanker, the
San Tampa
, perched high on the cliff – as improbable as a ship in a bottle – deposited there by a great storm. One man with an acetylene torch sparkling in
the sun crawled over her hull cutting her up very slowly for salvage. The sand was still invisibly clotted with gobs of oil, which stained your skin and clothes, and had to be cleaned off with methylated spirits back at the boarding-house. Equally invisible, but a lot more dangerous, was the untreated human waste that came in with the tide as the Atlantic rollers rushed merrily along the Bristol Channel.

Grandma was adamant, however, that polio was a Hanmer sickness that had no connection with sacred South Wales. She was still in the vicarage as the raw year turned to winter, blissfully unaware that she was going to have to move into the council house as well, so for the moment I was the only interloper in that new nuclear family with the cot in the living-room. On dark afternoons I could see them there in the lamplight because, unlike the other houses, ours didn't have net curtains, an act of impropriety which showed from the start that we didn't know how to behave in our new life. Everything about our situation felt exposed, it was somehow safer outside. And although very soon the council put up concrete posts and a chain-link fence to mark out our garden, it wasn't a boundary you could believe in, and I had the freedom of the winter lanes and fields as soon as I left the house. It snowed a lot, and I discovered the pleasure of adding my tracks to those of birds and rabbits, dogs and foxes, on the white ridges of ploughland, and squatting down by a hedge to pit the snow with yellow pee, as the animals did, too.

I found out that most hedges were made of hawthorn, ‘bread and cheese', you could chew its leaves but not until spring. For now there were only icicles to suck on. But they were delicious and came in different flavours, depending on whether they hung from the rusty guttering of a barn or the green edge of an overflowing water-butt. When puddles and ponds froze
over, you could bounce on their creaking, elastic ice. More than once I went through and had to empty the slush out of my wellies and trudge back to a telling-off and very likely a beating when my father got home. For my mother, although she wanted me out of the house where I was miserable, whiney and under her feet, warned me always not to ‘wander off', and became hysterical when I came in late and filthy. I was supposed to be out of sight but just around the corner so that she needn't worry, but of course I wasn't and she did, and once we'd moved I was always in trouble indoors.