Canvey Island (4 page)

In the following weeks, there were fifty-three funerals. I stood by the graveyard of St Katherine's Church and watched; counting the numbers attending, looking at the long dark cars.
Your forces come against me, wave upon wave. If he holds back the waters, there is drought; if he lets them loose they devastate the land
.

I thought my mother's funeral would be the same, but when the time came it felt odd to be sitting by my father with the hearse in front of us. I thought I'd still be by the church wall and watching.

Auntie Vi was in the vehicle behind with George and her mother, and two further cars carried my father's relatives: Roger and Doreen, Tracy, Mark and ‘Mad Nan'. She had given me a small posy of snowdrops and primroses that I tried to hide because I thought it made me look like a girl.

It had started to snow. The flakes were over the windscreen and the wipers were pushing back so heavily that the car hardly moved. ‘Mother Carey is plucking her goose,' said the driver.

I wore a suit that Auntie Vi had got from the charity packages sent to the island. The sleeves of the jacket were long and the trousers too short but she said I would look handsome if I made a bit of an effort. That was hard because the trousers itched and rubbed at my legs and in order to stop it I had to wear my pyjamas underneath. That helped with the scratchiness but they kept making me remember the night of the flood.

We sat in the church with the coffin right in front of us. I
couldn't understand why everyone thought it was all right for us to be so close.

‘Is she is there?' I asked.

‘Yes, son, but it's not really her.'

‘Then who is it? How can you tell?'

‘Don't worry,' said Auntie Vi, but she wasn't concentrating because she was checking her face in the little mirror she always carried. ‘She's in a better place.'

She muttered that the church smelt of stale linen. She said that the vestments must have been ironed while they were wet rather than damp. I looked at the holes made by the woodworm in the pew. Then I knelt down and tried to pray.

I tried to imagine Mum was not there in the coffin and that she had not died. I talked to her as I always did, sometimes out loud, because if I prayed hard enough perhaps she would come back and be with me. She would live with me in my head. I would keep her safe.

We stood up to sing ‘Eternal Father, strong to save'. Then the priest said some prayers and talked about what had happened. ‘The sea-sorrow of an island,' he called it. He said that it had been a tragedy but that even then there could be hope. He told us that the everlasting love of God would never let anyone down; it was a love that was always open to those who sought it and trusted in it. Then he asked us to sit down.

‘We talk of dust to dust and ashes to ashes, but we are also water to water. We came from the sea and to the sea we must return. This is our life and we are at one with the sea.'

He told the story of Jonah and the whale and the choir sang an anthem: ‘Many waters cannot quench love'.

I couldn't understand some of the words in the service. ‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live …' (
Did that mean me? How long would I live for?
) ‘… and is full of misery.'
Is this life then?
I thought.
Is this what it means, that it will never get better?

‘He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow …' I remembered the rising waters ‘… and never continueth in one stay …' and returning to find my mother gone.

Dad stared ahead, gripping on to the pew like he might fall over if he didn't. The veins on the back of his left hand showed up as if
they were rivers. I knew I wasn't supposed to cry even though Auntie Vi lifted her veil and began to sniff. Uncle George was swaying beside her. He mumbled to himself and his eyes kept tightening, blinking and squeezing in. He kept swatting away at a wasp no one else could see and Auntie Vi tried to pretend she wasn't with him. Then the priest started talking about Mum's ‘vile body'.

I could still see the fear on her face, the wet hair swept back, the cheekbones sinking in, her nightdress wet. Even then she was beautiful. I tried to stop thinking about it and remember happy times, her singing to me before bedtime,
Doctor Foster went to Gloucester in a shower of rain
…

She bounced me up and down and we laughed and I hoped it would never stop.

He stepped in a puddle right up to his middle and never went there again
.

‘Again!' I shouted, and together we sang it repeatedly until Mum began to lose her voice and looked tired and said that it was time to kiss me goodnight.

Outside in the graveyard it was still snowing. Dad gave me a card and asked me to take the number-four cord with my uncle. I was scared because he was shaking already. I didn't want to do the job and look after my uncle at the same time. But the men had started to gather round and I could see that it would be embarrassing if I said no. I heard Auntie Vi say that it was only right.

I stepped forward, knelt down and took the lower part of the cord, leaving the top for Uncle George. He crowded in close beside me and put his hands over mine so tightly that I could hardly feel the cord and was frightened of letting go. I didn't want us to start dropping the coffin. Then the woods were pulled back and there was the heaviness as we took the weight. No one had given me any gloves and I felt Uncle George stumble and the rope slip. It reminded me of the barbed wire cutting through my hands on the night of the flood. The rope razed against the wound, and for a minute I thought I was going to fall down into the grave.

I leant back and the coffin wobbled.

‘Hold steady,' my father shouted. He looked worried, like it was my fault, even when he must have known that it wasn't.

I didn't want to be there, I didn't want to be anywhere; I would rather have been dead with my mother in her coffin where no one could touch us.

The earth was flinty grey, still clogged with the flood. The priest said prayers and passed a bowl of earth. We took handfuls: Dad, Auntie Vi, Uncle George and me.

‘Not too much, Martin,' said Auntie Vi. ‘Leave enough for us.'

I couldn't see much point in gathering earth from the grave and then throwing it back down again. I didn't want it to fall on the coffin.

I thought what might have happened if I had told Mum about the water in the ceiling; if I had held on to her when we went underwater; if I had managed to swim in another direction and reached my father sooner; and then
if I had not been born
.

If I had never been born then Mum would have gone out dancing and she would still be alive and my father would be happy instead of standing in a graveyard.

Everyone stood in silence, above and around the coffin, until the first person moved to signal that it was over. I think it was Dad. He didn't want to be there any longer and his friends began to follow straight away.

But I waited for the gravedigger to pile the earth back. That was his job because our handfuls of mud hadn't done anything. I wanted to see how long it took to fill up a grave and whether I could stop the final covering. It was the last chance to get Mum out. The gravedigger was a small old man and he gave me a smile. There were just the two of us. I couldn't understand why everyone else had gone away so quickly.

Then Dad came back from the cars with an umbrella. I kept my eyes on the spade, the earth and the coffin. Dad waited by my side for a bit but then he put his arm on my shoulder and turned me round, so that I was looking the other way. I could see the inside of the umbrella, snow falling towards us, and smoke round the engine of one of the cars. One of the drivers dropped a cigarette and put it out with his foot. Dad took my hand. I couldn't remember the last time he'd done that. It had always been Mum before.

Back at the hotel Auntie Vi changed into a different dress that showed her arms and she asked me to hand round a plate of
cocktail sausages. It would give me something to do, she said; it would stop me getting what she called
maudlin
.

Then the adults ate and drank and laughed with their mouths full of egg or fishpaste sandwiches. They gulped back sherry and bottles of Newcastle Brown and finished off the meal with Libby's fruit salad and Carnation milk. The room filled with smoke and chatter; the laughter of people with large mouths and food stuck to their teeth, men with crumbs on their ties and women who said they had to sit down. They were too tall and too fat, I thought, and they were too happy. They were people who had forgotten Mum already.

It took six weeks to get the island back to normal; there were flooded buildings with walls collapsed and the roofs off, farms drenched with salt water, people with nothing to wear. The Mayor of London set up a National Flood and Tempest Distress Fund. The Army and the Navy were mobilised, and the Queen Mother made a royal visit with Princess Margaret.

We helped sort through the paper parcels in the gym hall; clothes for Canvey that no one needed or wanted. I rummaged through faded utility suits from the war, scuffed ankle-strap sandals and tired perli-knit jumpers. Most of it was rubbish, of course, things nobody had wanted in the first place. Who in their right mind would send their best clothes to Canvey? But I did find a pair of women's slacks, loose-pleated at the waist and creased down the front, that I hoped might make me look like Katharine Hepburn.

I had this funny dream that we only had to go back to the house and we'd find Lily cooking in the kitchen with the wireless on just as we'd left her. But when we did return it looked like no one had ever lived there at all. The woodwork was swollen, the locks had gone and there was mould all over the walls.

Len told us he would have to start again. ‘With everything.'

He had built the house himself, a bungalow with an attic and an outside staircase in the Newlands area by the Sunken Marsh. There was even a little wooden bridge crossing the dyke from the sea wall. He had bought it pre-fab at a time when the island was raising money by selling land at ten pound a plot. The house had been
erected and decorated in a month, a simple family home with two bedrooms, a lounge, a kitchenette and a new tiled fireplace. Len thought that he had seen his family right.

Now he looked at the ruined wallpaper and the water-damaged furniture: the sodden settee, the warped table and chairs broken by flood. I told him he should have a good clear-out, light the fire and leave the windows open to get rid of the smell of damp.

‘Such a waste of money, Vi,' he grumbled. ‘You can feel the heat going out the window.'

‘It's the only way,' I said.

I began to clean the house, disinfecting the surfaces with Zal. Len folded his wife's clothes into piles on the bed. I could see that he was getting upset.

‘I'll do that for you,' I said.

‘She's still here. I can feel her.'

I ironed Lily's dresses and put them back in her wardrobe. Later that night I found one of her scarves under Martin's pillow. I think he wanted the smell of his mother, the soap and the talcum powder, the scent of Evening in Paris. When he thought no one was looking he carried it round and hugged it. I should have stopped him but I didn't have the heart.

I asked him to help with the meals so he'd have something to do rather than mope around the place getting in my way. I couldn't cook like Lily but I did my best. When we didn't have fish we had corned-beef croquettes, sausage pancakes and brisket roundabout.

One day I asked Martin to start mincing the leftovers from the Sunday roast for a shepherd's pie but he made a right mess of it. The mincer wasn't secure to the edge of the table and it kept slipping away and falling on to the floor. Neither of us could screw the nuts tight enough, and when the mincer came off it banged into Martin's hand and cut his knuckles.

Len was reading the paper and trying to ignore us but when it happened a third time he lost his temper.

‘For God's sake. Let me do it. I never can get any peace in this house.'

Blood from Martin's knuckles was dripping on to the remaining pink of the meat. ‘I can't help it, Dad …'

‘Get your fingers away. Can't you do anything?'

‘He's a child, Len, a child.'

‘You're just as bad. Couldn't you see it was going to fall off?'

‘Well, thank you very much,' I said. ‘You can make your own dinner.'

I took off Lily's apron and went over to the sink to wash my hands.

‘No, Vi, stop.'

‘I know when I'm not wanted …'

‘You are wanted, Vi. You know that …'

‘Don't think you can sweet-talk your way out of it now. I know you, Len Turner …'

He came round behind me and put his arms round my waist. ‘Always want you, Vi …'

‘Stop that. Not in front of the boy.'

I could see Martin staring at us all judgemental and he didn't look away at all. I think he was waiting for us to stop and get back to the cooking.

‘Go on, Martin,' I said. ‘Have a play outside.'

‘It's cold.'

‘You always say that. You need a bit of air. Have a kick about with the football. Imagine you're at White Hart Lane.'

‘You play with me, Dad.'

‘I've just got in, son. Just kick it against the wall. But don't make too much noise about it …'

Martin stopped staring and went out into the corridor. It wasn't easy living in that house but I knew Len needed me. I just had to be patient. I would do my best and, if that wasn't enough, I'd retire gracefully and let other women do the cooking and the housework. After all, there were plenty of volunteers. I wasn't the only lady in Len's life.

The house filled with women who were not my mother. They came to boil up potatoes, fry cod in batter and bake jam roly-poly. They chopped carrots, rolled out suet and whipped up milk jellies as Dad sat down to his
Daily Express
and milky tea.