Bad Blood (30 page)

My parents' plan was that I should go to a Church Home for Unmarried Mothers, where you repented on your knees (scrubbed floors, said prayers), had your baby (which was promptly adopted by proper married people) and returned home humble and hollow-eyed. Everyone would magnanimously pretend that nothing had happened, so long as you never seemed to be having a good time or developing too high an opinion of yourself – from now on you could count yourself lucky if they let you learn shorthand and typing. Look where so-called cleverness got you . . .

My father was appalled, but also triumphant. Just as in the old days he'd done his best to beat vicarage corruption out of me, now he righteously denounced me for my scandalous offence against decency, monogamy and my mother. He galloped off on his high horse, chivalrously saving her once again from the horrible past, and she was up behind him, her arms clasped round his shining armour. I wept and sulked, and called up in my mind's eye a rival image of a louche Lord Carlton riding by, but it was no good, he wasn't going to. Nonetheless I swore to myself that rather than go to their Church of England Home I'd hitch a lift down the brand-new M1 motorway to London, ask the way to Soho, and look for a man who'd have a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and a knowing,
appraising smile, who'd fix me up with a back-street abortion, so that I could start my career in vice.

Charities didn't take you until you were six months pregnant, however, and they couldn't think of anywhere to send me until then. My mother didn't want people in South Wales to know and my father's aunt in Queensferry was too old, although no one knew me there and she had supervised factory girls who were no better than they should be during the war. For the moment, since nothing showed yet, it was decided I should go to school as usual and tell nobody. There was, after all, a chance I might have a miscarriage. Dr Clayton said that I should carry on doing gym – but I'd long given it up and I could hardly start colliding with vaulting horses again without drawing attention to myself. Judging that I was distraught, he also prescribed sleeping pills, since he didn't know that I never slept much. He gave them to my mother to dole out in case I was tempted to try killing myself, but I wasn't, not even to frighten them. I didn't want to gratify their expectations – suicide would have been an acknowledgement of guilt and despair, whereas I didn't feel guilty at all, only furious. If they were outraged,
so was I
and I wasn't going to give anyone an excuse to send me to a mental hospital.

But I did wonder if I was going mad. How could I have got it so wrong? Such was the irreality of the situation that I'd have been a lot more prepared to find myself pregnant if we'd actually used a condom, since that would have meant I had to know what we were doing (but then I wouldn't have done it). However, French letters, rubbers – the only contraceptives available and only to boys – were, like all other ways of divorcing sex from reproduction, trashed by the myths of the times. Having sex using a rubber was like having a bath with your socks on, boys said nastily, and in any case it was an
insult to the girl, because you'd only use one for hygienic reasons. Likewise, mutual masturbation, having sex during a period, oral sex, sodomy were all variously outlawed as dirty, sick, perverse or criminal. Thus everything conspired at once to fetishise and forbid the one true act.

These ideas had penetrated deep into my mind, that was the catch – I scorned virginity as just something ‘nice' girls traded on the marriage market for a suburban semi and a car, but I had absorbed the notion that real sex was some kind of visionary initiation involving the whole of you. It seemed until that moment that Amber had only been half alive and according to Lawrence (as we solemnly noted down) the phallos was a column of blood that filled the valley of blood of a woman. That's why I was so sure that I hadn't done it. And even on the most crude system of moral accounting you paid for pleasure, surely, and since I hadn't had the pleasure I shouldn't be paying. It was grossly unfair, like some kind of travesty of the immaculate conception . . . The first gynaecological examination I had was my definitive deflowering. I hurt and bled, for I was still partly a virgin – in fact, as opposed to mythology, even that wasn't a question of yes or no.

Contingency didn't count, however. Getting into trouble meant you were certainly bad, which in turn meant you were either pathetic or evil, and it was obvious which to prefer. I'd read and reread Dennis Wheatley's
To the Devil a Daughter
(a 1950s best-seller and another of Uncle Bill's anthropology books), all about how the baser forms of eroticism threaten the very fabric of Western civilisation. The heroine is nice in the daytime, but when dusk falls she dresses up, drinks, gambles, kisses men with her mouth open and shows signs of being able to look after herself – shooting off an automatic, for instance. That's not her true character, though, she was dedicated to the
devil as a baby by her father, in return for worldly success. Dad is a self-made man and also therefore an agent of Bolshevism: the Satanists who recruited him are working for the Soviets, plotting to manufacture homunculi to serve Big Brother, and their spies and allies are ‘pederasts, lesbians, and over-sexed people of all ages'. Our heroine is saved at the last minute from donating her virgin blood to the evil Empire and is handed over intact by her repentant father to the hero on her twenty-first birthday.

The book's charm naturally lay in the queer behaviour of Ellen/Christina when she was not herself – in one memorable scene she twisted her ankle and asked the nervous hero to help her pull her stocking up: ‘the flesh there was like a cushion of swansdown under a taut-stretched skin of tissue-thin rubber', he reported with awe, before taking his hand away sharpish; he was nearly distracted by Satan! Alas, rereading it now, even such moments pale before passages of unconscious bathos like the flashback where Dad is seduced by a devilish vision of a factory with his name in lights: BEDDOWS AGRICULTURAL TRACTORS; or the time when the heroine is asked to tell all she can remember about her daytime good-girl life from the beginning and it takes her the best part of an hour.

In my case the bad blood had skipped a generation. You're just like your grandfather, my mother had said when we rowed over clothes or make-up, but now it was almost too blatant to need saying. Only Grandma didn't regard it in that way. Opposed to my father in everything, she saw my plight as the result of being rash enough to go
anywhere near
a member of the male race and cast Vic as the villain of the piece, while my parents were rather disposed to see him as a mere accessory after the fact, so convinced were they of my devilish duplicity. For the same reason they didn't doubt my ability to conceal
my condition from people at school and they were right. No one suspected, not even Gail. I couldn't bring myself to tell her, not because she'd be scandalised, or betray my secret, but because she'd be fascinated by how it felt, curious about every sensation and so make being pregnant more real than I could bear. Although I didn't hold out any hopes for a providential miscarriage – my luck was obviously lousy – it was easier to cope day to day, throwing up in the mornings, feeling faint in assembly, without anyone's empathy. A misery shared is a misery multiplied when nothing can be undone, and I reflected bitterly that mine was multiplying anyway, all those cells splitting and getting on with their lives, whatever I felt.

It was hard work remembering who I was and staying myself, and probably I was a little crazy. What else to make of a couple of letters addressed to me (‘Miss L. Stockton') that have survived from that autumn? They are almost identical. This one is from Miss E. M. Scott, the Principal of St Aidan's in Durham:

24th November, 1959

Dear Madam,

Thank you for your application form. I note that you will not be 18 until January 1961, and as I do not normally admit students under the age of 18, I cannot consider your application for admission in October 1960.

Yours faithfully . . .

The letter from St Mary's College said the same. Had I applied because people at school expected me to? But then they would have anticipated this response, surely? Perhaps I was, as we say now, ‘in denial', and somehow imagined I could divide into two and one of us could make her escape to the far north. Perhaps I wrote off without consulting anyone. Grandpa had
been a student at Durham, ‘MA Dunelm' it said on his brass plate in the chancel, although in another version of his blighted career he hadn't had the money to finish his degree. But then he couldn't have been ordained without one. Unless he'd faked it. Whatever had prompted me to fill in the forms, I'd neglected to change my date of birth and Durham wouldn't have me.

Vic, meanwhile, had been wondering whether to run away to sea. His mother was wretchedly disappointed in him for following in his brother's footsteps, her pride in him was battered down and her stoic resignation was hard to take. She was far too decent to think he should get away with it, they couldn't just carry on as if nothing had happened, he'd have to leave school in disgrace – she foresaw it all, straight away, the defeat of her hopes for him. Like my parents, she saw us as juvenile delinquents who'd forfeited our chances. We were as gratuitously criminal as the kids from good homes (rebels without reason) you read about in the papers, teenagers who robbed sub-post offices or stole cars in insolent defiance of the law, except that in our case it was the moral law, which was, if anything, worse. At first we were forbidden to see each other, but there was no point, as my father said (with a disgusted shrug), the damage was done. He loathed the idea of us copulating with impunity, but he needn't have worried. We were ourselves so stunned by this bad magic we'd managed that for the moment we merely huddled together for warmth, each other's only friend.

Small scenes surface: Vic and I sitting together on the verge of the drive at Sunnyside, staring into space, clutching our knees, picking pebbles out of the gravel and chucking them away, which was when I told him the bad news and had for just a second the wild hope that he'd say it couldn't be, although I knew he wouldn't and he didn't. And the two of us, on a
bleaker day, walking fast along one of the new Crescents or Ways on the housing estate between my house and his. We're holding hands, I'm chewing aspirin for a headache and we're in earnest conversation, conspiring together.

There'd been no recriminations between us. I hadn't said why wasn't he more careful, he hadn't said I led him on – although those were the days when it was certainly the girl's fault (people even said rape wasn't possible, you had to have let it happen); and although I knew that he was rumoured to have done it with a sad girl called Mildred, a waitress in Eccleston's café, where we listened to records, who had badly bleached, matted hair and was supposed to be a bit soft in the head and hadn't got
her
pregnant. We were innocent. And the more we talked the more innocent we became – babes in the wood, brother and sister, orphans of the storm.

Being sworn to secrecy had cut us off and locked us up together in embattled intimacy, and from cellmates we turned into soulmates. We invented a story for ourselves which started out as a kind of excuse, but soon took on a life of its own. It went something like this: the baby was an accident, but really we knew what we were doing. We were each other's other half, or even closer. We were one and the same, we'd abolished the differences the conventional world assumed between the sexes, we had a union of true minds as much as bodies. Well yes, we were in love, but that wasn't the point. We were
serious
. So the bad luck that had entrapped us (making a baby the first and only time, and without really going all the way) was transformed into a portent. It showed we were meant for each other.

The parents were treating us like corrupt children – we patched together a new, mutant myth out of poems and stories and sheer necessity. Our brainchild. In it we grew up overnight
and cast off the mind-forged manacles of Hanmer and Whitchurch . . . I led him on this time, for sure. This one I was certainly responsible for, so was he and so were other people who knew nothing about it – including Gail, Grandpa, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Miss Roberts my Latin teacher, and Vic's friend Martin, who'd been asked to leave Ampleforth, done some camp consciousness-raising in the grammar school sixth form and added Wilde to our list of set books.

As the dank, disgraced autumn of 1959 turned to winter we reinvented marriage, for better and for worse. If we got married we would no longer be legally in the guardianship of our parents, we'd worked that out too. Of course, we needed their permission and they very much didn't want to give it. They didn't think we should marry at all – we were far too young and too irresponsible. It was an insult to matrimony. It was also shaming, it would make us look lumpen, real white trash, common as muck. On the other hand if we were bold enough to go to a magistrate for permission we'd probably get it, because I was pregnant and we weren't – they weren't – respectable or well-off enough for their objections to count. And the case would be in the
Whitchurch Herald
.

And what if we ran off to Gretna Green? Reluctantly, gradually, my parents came around to the idea and so did Vic's mum: we'd marry and Vic would move into Sunnyside to start with. It would be postponed until Christmas, however, just in case . . . and so that we could leave school during the holidays, a bit less visibly. And then? Well, Vic could take the entry exams for the Civil Service and A-levels, and look for a job; and as for me, my immediate future was accounted for. Dr Clayton told me and my mother that it was well known that as your pregnancy advanced you became absorbed by it, serene, preoccupied, reconciled, round. My mother, I could tell, wasn't
convinced, presumably she didn't remember it quite like that. And I was appalled at the thought that he might be right and that I'd forget to be angry. (He wasn't and I didn't.)