Bad Blood (20 page)

From the lonely farms and homesteads
We gather in its walls,
Thro' early morning's golden hours
Until the soft dusk falls.
Just a merry little kingdom
Which is our very own,
A wondrous little harvest field
Where varying crops are sown.

The Arcadian simplicity of Whitchurch is a perfect setting, we're
almost
a boarding-school. We'll set our girls apart with the same ease as we turn (watch!) harvest into a metaphor. Verse two is in many ways the best, a virtuoso variation on
mens sana in corpore sano
, somatic weather:

Sturdy of limb and quick of eye
The hockey runners go,
When keen across the playing fields
The wintry breezes blow!

But when the smiling summer sun
Looks down from azure skies
The straight ball spinning o'er the net
Like wingèd lightning flies.

Perhaps Miss Bostock had a rather different picture of the girls from Mr Montague Phillips, for these sporty types sound too hoarse to have reached his high notes. She's more interested in solid virtues (that ‘straight' ball says a lot, no curvy underhand strokes); although she pays her own tribute to decorative convention with ‘e'er', ‘wingèd', and ‘azure', so poetically wrong for damp, cloudy Shropshire. And note the deftly transferred epithet in ‘keen': we're so keen this vile wind from Wales is just a breeze to us. Verse three is about military hero Sir John Talbot, who stands for Britishness – we'll face any threatening ‘shadows' (very vague these) with his courage. But the fourth and final verse puts it all together, team games and virginity pitted against the forces of darkness ‘out there':

When we leave our little kingdom
To seek a wider world
And embark upon life's ocean
With snowy sails unfurled . . .

In my generation we crudely interpreted this line as a warning against ‘going all the way' with boys, but we were underestimating Miss Bostock, who was also talking in code about the Empire and exporting the values you'd learned as a half-back to India or Africa, or at least chastely producing sons who would. This was the far-off mythic origin of the air hostess fantasy, although we didn't recognise it. Perhaps the fact that the dreadful chorus was set to follow inexorably yet once more helped blur Miss B.'s grand perspective on the wide world: Back to schoo-oo-ool.

Joining in the chorus without a sound, I was on my own. In my first high school year I had no friends, I was mostly invisible as well as inaudible: small, grubby, uncouth, a swot and no good at sports. Then there were the bugs. We finally bought the lethal shampoo from Boots and applied it, and they died, but not all at once, and for a while afterwards I went on scratching out of habit.

And – worse, much worse – during that first winter I had braces fitted to my teeth, top and bottom, a mouthful of complicated shiny wires. Now that it's almost a stigma
not
to visit an orthodontist and a metal grin is sexy, like having multiple earrings or a stud in your eyebrow, a licensed young ugliness, it's hard to believe how grotesque my braces seemed back in Whitchurch in 1953. No one else I knew had them. It was an outlandish deformity, like having a very, very bad squint, a squint so awful you had to wear an eyepatch; or having a purple birthmark; or a leg-iron. Even wearing glasses made you vaguely repulsive and absurd. Sometimes I'd comfort myself that at least I didn't have glasses
as well
, but it was no good, my shyness had taken on this terrible, visible life of its own. I was truly tongue-tied, locked in my scold's bit, and most people tried not to look at me nearly as hard as I tried not to look at them.

The braces were the most agonising part of my rite of passage into the land of Latin and they hurt physically as well – each time they were tightened my jaws were racked. But my actual visits to the dentist became an adventure. Teeth had to be very crooked for the National Health Service to pay for ‘cosmetic' work then and mine were. I had been referred to a scholarly consultant on Liverpool's Harley Street, Rodney Street, who showed me ‘before' and ‘after' plaster casts of other patients to encourage me, and said that people were very often assigned the wrong teeth.
You inherited them from some ancestor who'd had a quite differently shaped jaw and they simply didn't fit, but stuck out and were squeezed sideways like mine. Mouth-breathing hadn't helped either, but that interested him less than the vision of genetic mayhem in mouths through the ages.

He was fascinated by teeth in an impersonal way and finding me teachable, he talked to me about his work in flattering detail. According to him my teeth weren't really mine, so I needn't feel embarrassed and I didn't in his surgery. This was also partly because – although we never, never mentioned it – he himself was very small, almost a midget. I was taller than he by the time the treatment was over and I'd reached the height of five foot one. His littleness lent a magic to our appointments. His ‘before' and ‘after' casts in their glass cases, and his lyrical descriptions of the perversity of teeth and the heroical project of righting them, all fitted together with the stages of human evolution we were doing at school – millennia of prehistory in one dental chart. Like Dr McColl handing me my sleepless nights as a present, the Liverpool dentist made my miserable mouth into an emblem of progress. Each appointment meant a visit to the big city, too.

We'd approach from the other side of the Mersey, past Lever Brothers' enormous works at Port Sunlight, where they made yellow Sunlight soap, Persil washing powder and Lux toilet soap, and the air was heavy with an animal stench of tallow and fats, overlaid with carbolic and topped off with chemical gardenia. Then came the Mersey Tunnel, and just before its entrance a new set of smells from a slaughterhouse and tannery, hides and hooves piled bloodily in carts along the road. Then the Tunnel's smooth tube of cement and on the other side Liverpool, cratered and pocked with bomb-sites.

It was in Liverpool that I saw in reality the cityscape of the
newsreels – the remains of blitzed tenements, wallpaper, fire grates and private plumbing exposed, clinging to walls which were buttressed with wooden props while they waited for demolition. Not far from Rodney Street stood the huge new Anglican cathedral, round about it a great emptiness where swathes of streets had been razed to the ground. We'd walk its echoing aisles if we arrived early enough, for although my mother didn't like its newness it was a monument of sorts and paid tribute to the Gothic past. Then we'd move on to my dwarf consultant's cavernous waiting-room, with its solid pre-war furniture and landscapes in oils, the ante-room of ‘after'.

Fixing my teeth was mainly my mother's idea: it was part of her pursuit of prettiness and her dream of a different life. She didn't want it done because she aspired to middle-class decorum, it was something born of her absence and brooding, like taking so long to deal with the lice in my hair. It was a
vicarage
thing at bottom, personal to her and fantastical, with a buried logic. Her own front teeth were crowned, because they'd been smashed when she was sixteen, and had fallen downstairs in the dark, running to separate Grandpa and Grandma who were fighting like fiends in the kitchen. The crowns looked false, she thought, and she hated them. She must have associated them with Grandpa's vileness with her friend Marj, and the disgust and self-doubt that had spoiled her own concentration at the high school. So she wasn't only saving my looks but – as she said often and bitterly later – giving me the chance she never had. Not the chance to be pretty (she was pretty, the teeth didn't show, really), nor the chance of school, she'd had both, but the chance to be whole. Her parents' selfishness had broken her, she and my father had mended me, I could have the career she didn't – that was how her thinking worked.

And in the long run she was right, although not in the way
she meant or wanted. As I grew I found I could lead a double life: one life in my looks and another in my head, boys and Latin for short. And this in turn would buy me a kind of popularity with my high school peers. I'd be forgiven for not being a rounded character because I had a pretty face, precocious breasts and I started my period when I was eleven (a great status symbol). But my mother and father saw me turning into Grandpa's creature. She could have mended her own mouth, but some paralysing memory stopped her; I was supposed to live this for her and be different, and here I was, some kind of moral throwback.

But as long as I was top of the class I could get away with spiritual slyness. I worked very hard to stay up there. It was a pleasure, but also a matter of survival, for exam results were my alibi. This was understood between my parents and me: my academic performance was taking place on a kind of high wire; so long as I could keep it up my lack of moral balance didn't count, but if I slipped and fell I'd be revealed in my true colours, as conceited, unrealistic, self-centred and sick. If I once slipped I'd have to start all over again, to learn how to be neat, obedient, outgoing and open, a good girl. I thanked God for Latin.
Nisi Dominus . . .
Our school motto comes from Psalm cxxvii – ‘Except the Lord build the house: their labour is but vain that build it . . .' Its message is that you shouldn't be proud of your own efforts, because you can do nothing by yourself. ‘It is but lost labour that ye haste to rise up early, and so late take rest, and eat the bread of carefulness: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.' In my sleepless nights I turned this doctrine heretically upside down. If I'm getting on so well, I thought, it must mean that I'm well connected, and that the powers that be are secretly on my side.

My mother told on me, but I liked secrets, so I never told on her when I chaperoned her on her visits to Mrs Smith, who kept a clandestine little clothes shop in town. We'd do our real shopping first (the grocery ‘rations' would in any case be delivered), then we'd make our way casually up towards the quiet end of the High Street, away from the bustle of the Bull Ring, open a door that rang a muffled bell and slip into Mrs Smith's stuffy den. Mrs Smith was ‘exclusive'. Although there were always a couple of items in her window – a tailored suit, maybe, and a smart three-quarters coat, displayed on legless, armless, headless dressmaker's dummies – they had no price tags and were hardly visible, thanks to a thick film of orange cellophane stuck to the glass. Mrs Smith herself stood guard inside; she was plump, corseted, unctuous and made up in matronly fashion with powder, rouge, pencilled eyebrows and a pursed, lipsticked mouth. Her hair was done in an iron perm and she too favoured tailored suits, which she wore with costume jewellery and expensive scent. Mrs Smith didn't encourage people just to wander in and indeed we nearly never found anyone else there, although there was a chair in the corner to sit on while you waited.

I waited a lot, for my mother's dealings with Mrs Smith were delicate and involved a lengthy ritual of seduction. At
home, we leafed through the clothes catalogue in public and paid up by instalments. Those clothes displayed their attractions quite frankly, along with their prices. They arrived and you wore them, and wore them out. Here everything was much more intimate, ‘classic' and mysterious. Mrs Smith's very name sounded false, she had a black-market air, as though once upon a time she had been involved with dubious dealings in clothes coupons. What her posh accent and her breathy whispers really sought to hush up, however, was the fact that most of her stock – perhaps all – was second-hand. These were genteel cast-offs, hardly worn at all, not for a moment to be associated with jumble sales. They were the real thing, at a fraction (quite a big fraction) of the cost. When Mrs Smith insisted on the quality of the cloth and the superiority of the cut, she was addressing my mother as a class casualty and a dreamer, someone in danger of getting stuck in a council house at the kitchen sink, unless she had a good suit, or a really
dressy
dress.

My mother would go into the back room to try things on and survey herself in the floor-length mirror with an embarrassed but pleased smile, while Mrs Smith smoothed and patted and murmured. Sooner or later she'd have to ask the price, and then there'd be head-shaking and sighs; but Mrs Smith would say with a simper how well it suited her colouring and her build, why didn't she put it aside for a tiny deposit and come back and try it on again next week . . . Often we came away with nothing, but still a transaction would have taken place: my mother would have paid something off her account and something down on something ‘new', and more often than not paying a bit off doubled as a down-payment, so that her debt to Mrs Smith grew and grew. The new thing would stay in Mrs Smith's back room for a few weeks, before being brought home to be hidden at the very back of the wardrobe until she
felt able to bring it out and wear it – that is, until she could be supposed to have afforded it. This was tricky and sometimes she'd be reduced to passing off her Mrs Smith purchases as her own old clothes, something she'd found in Grandma's trunk.

Money, as usual, was the domestic sticking-point, the disputed territory between fantasy and realism – that is, between her and my father. Money was a minefield. She was supposed to be dreamy and impractical, but she was also supposed to be dependent, trusting and in a way transparent, a bit like children were supposed to be (and I wasn't). Of course my father knew about Mrs Smith, but he was never quite sure what my mother's dealings with her amounted to – either in terms of hard cash, or in terms of sentiment. Was she being unfaithful with Mrs Smith or not? The Valma of the pretty clothes and daydreams was the one he'd fallen in love with. But deceit, mystification and personal debt (the Business Overdraft was quite another thing) were vicarage vices he'd saved her from. Then again, wasn't her longing for clothes we couldn't afford a criticism of him, as though she regretted her life and was still dreaming of a different future? Did she feel cheated, a Cinders who'd married the coalman by mistake? Was she sorry she'd married him? No, no, she'd protest, and turn her face aside, as he produced extra cash to pay off Mrs Smith (cash which would turn into a tiny deposit on that frock she'd been trying on for weeks). He was on to something, I thought. After all, Mrs Smith was always saying how slender and young my mother looked, how hard it was to believe she was married and the mother of a big girl like me.