Climbing the Stairs (17 page)

Anyway I had six weeks of that treatment and then I went home. I had to go back once a month for the first three months and then once every three months and then once a year. I still do now
although it was over ten years ago and I’ve never had a recurrence.

When I got back came the problem of a bra. The old bras I’d got were no good at all. The Marie Curie had given me the address of where to go for one on the National Health Service. Maybe
now it’s a better model but at that time, believe me, it was pure stodge. An appalling pink-coloured thing, a cross between a liberty bodice and a strait jacket. I’ve never seen
anything like it in my life. I thought they would have tried to do something better than that. I mean just at a time when you feel mutilated and even though you try to laugh about it, you do feel
mutilated, you’d have thought they’d have produced something artistic.

Well I accepted it because it was on the National Health but I didn’t wear it. I bought myself a pair of falsies and a bra to go with them. I only needed one falsie, but they
wouldn’t sell them singly. There’s a waste of money. It was the cult of the huge bra a la Jane Russell and breasts was all coming in then and everybody was endeavouring to look twice
the size they really were. So perhaps it was as well I didn’t get them singly otherwise I’d have looked unbalanced.

Of course wearing a falsie can be a very tricky thing. The first time I put a bathing costume on and went swimming I was very disconcerted to see it bobbing merrily around on top of the waves. I
hastily stuffed it back but I felt awful. I don’t know whether anyone noticed or not but it was a pale pink colour and it looked most peculiar. Anyway after that I used cottonwool. I thought
of buying one of those bras that you blow up and you’re provided with a little pump. I would only have blown up one side but then I thought it would be a bit awkward if I had a puncture. I
couldn’t really carry a repair outfit around with me, could I? So I gave up that idea.

But though I joked about it then and joke about it now, losing a breast does something to you in a sort of psychological way. You never feel the same person again. Not to yourself. Maybe you
seem the same to other people. In the beginning you feel degraded and then you don’t feel a complete woman any more. All right there’s things on the market to make you look the same
externally but there’s nothing on the market that makes you feel the same internally.

But don’t let me make a big thing out of this psychological feeling. What I would say to anyone would be if they suspect anything like that is to go straight away to a doctor. Mine was
only a breast operation – one amongst many, but I made a friend at the Marie Curie who was there for an internal cancer operation – and a very big operation indeed. She was in hospital
for months, but now she’s out, she’s doing a full-time job in domestic service and she still only has to go in once a year like me. She caught it in what were the early stages and
although the operation was a big one because it was internal it hasn’t spread all over her body. But I had a sister-in-law who suffered the pains and wouldn’t go in and when she had to
it was far too late. If it’s caught early mostly it can be cured and even if you have to have the operation I had you can still live a very happy life.

17

S
OME PEOPLE JOIN
evening classes because they’re bored and want company. I didn’t. I just wanted to be able to converse with my sons. I
found that I wasn’t able to do this because they’d all won scholarships and gone to the grammar school. There they were, eleven and thirteen and fifteen, sitting at the table talking
among themselves and Albert and I were completely left out. It didn’t worry Albert – he didn’t care whether he conversed or not. He likes to be quiet but I enjoy making
conversation and I hated being excluded from it.

You hear children say that they’ve got nothing in common with their parents and the psychiatrists tell you that parents mustn’t become divorced from their children, that they must
make efforts to understand them. They say you don’t understand them because if you never talk to them you can’t understand them. As well as cooking, washing and doing the cleaning for
them you’ve got to be able to talk to them otherwise they consider you less than the dust. They won’t realize that you’ve worked so darned hard looking after them that
you’re tired. Oh no, if you’re not bothering to keep your old brains exercised then there’s something wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with them if they don’t
understand these things.

Anyway I found that conversation was reduced to the weather and the headlines in the newspapers and after you’d said that there was nothing else to say. Then I read an article that said
that the more one soaks up knowledge the more the brain expands to absorb it. Something like Parkinson’s Law where the work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion, which
is the truest law I’ve ever known. You’ve only got to look at our town council’s employees. They demonstrate Parkinson’s Law to a tee. So I decided that although I’d
never believed in keeping up with the Joneses, I’d try and keep up with the boys – and that to do this I’d got to start educating myself by going to evening classes. I thought,
well, I’ll try this theory out.

It didn’t work with me this Parkinson’s Law – maybe because I started too late. I thought, oh, well, the more you take on the more your brain expands – and I took on
three things straight away – French, social science, and something called metaphysical philosophy. This last one I took as a sort of status symbol. The very name of it! I imagined myself
surprising all my sons with some gem of intellectual conversation that I’d got through this metaphysical philosophy. A sort of female Oscar Wilde I visualized myself as, with repartee and wit
flashing round the table. But after six weeks of classes I hadn’t understood a word of metaphysical philosophy. The dictionary defined it as abstruse and abstract and, believe me, the
dictionary definition was correct. Certainly it was abstruse.

We had to do homework on it and we were picked at random to get up in class and explain in layman’s terms what we’d written. Well, I copied mine clear out of the book. I hadn’t
any idea what it meant. I was just hoping that I’d get away with it. Unfortunately I was picked one night to get up and I couldn’t say that I’d copied it out of the book. It would
have been too terrible for words, especially when you want to be a big noise and I always liked to be the big noise. So I stumbled through it somehow or other and the teacher said, ‘I
don’t really think you’ve grasped what it means yet.’ I thought – no, you and me both because even if you’ve grasped what it means you can’t explain it in lay
terms. So after six weeks I gave it up. I didn’t bother about metaphysical philosophy any more. But I did keep on with the French and social science.

Social science I thought would have some bearing on life; the social approach, not history with dates and figures or what’s been. I thought it would enable me to co-relate the sort of life
I was leading to the world around and would give me an idea of what made people tick – that kind of thing. It didn’t, but that’s what I thought it would do.

I suppose I started where most people were leaving off. There must have been a lot that I should have studied before I even took on social science but I didn’t know. People used to say,
why didn’t I take up a craft, but I didn’t want to do things with my hands – tatting, lampshade-making, glove-making and things like that. I’d quite enough to do with my
hands running a home and I didn’t want to start threading beads or petit point or making pictures out of bits of felt. That sort of thing’s all very well if you’ve got an artistic
sense, but I haven’t. I’m devoid of it. No – I wanted to use my brains; I wanted to be able to talk to my boys. I wanted to be able to baffle them with social science, then we
could sit at the table and have unintelligible conversations, all of us, because as soon as there was a gap in what they said I could rush in with mine, and they wouldn’t be able to
understand me any more than I could understand them.

The French course was ludicrous. In my imagination I thought that as they were learning French they would help me. I didn’t realize that the rot had set in with regards to children and
their parents. My generation had revered their parents; whatever their parents said was law and gospel and you believed what they said and you gave them respect as well as love. But by the time I
became a parent children no longer thought that what their parents said was true or gave them any respect at all. When I used to come out with my little
bons mots
in French they hooted with
laughter at my pronunciation. I pronounced the words as they looked. I got old Hugo’s French dictionary out at the table and I’d say, ‘
Voulez vous passer le sel s’il vous
plaît
,’ saying it like you see it in print.

And they’d say, ‘Mum wants the vinegar? Pepper, Mum? Pass Mum the mustard, Dad.’

The little blighters knew I meant pass the salt but they purposely misunderstood.

When I said, ‘
Chacun à son goût
,’ they’d say, ‘Get up, Dad, you’re sitting in something. You’ve got your arse in the goo.’ They just
made fun of me all the time. But I plodded on. Once I start anything I do it till the bitter end, except for metaphysical philosophy.

The teachers, too, vary in their approach. I’ve had ever so many kinds of teachers. Some of them have the idea of ramming a lot of facts and figures down you – perhaps it’s
because they were taught that way themselves and they haven’t been able to get out of it, but students who go voluntarily want the lessons made interesting. They naturally find facts and
figures unpalatable and that’s why I think attendances fall off. Some teachers don’t make allowance for the fact that all we go there for is leisure-time activities, that we
haven’t had much schooling and that we require time to assimilate knowledge. They get impatient. And you have only got to make people who are a bit insecure about their early education feel
that they don’t know enough for them not to come any more. They’re very vulnerable. You’re vulnerable with your children but at least you can laugh it off. It may hurt you –
it got beneath my skin even in my own home. But in classes if you have a teacher who makes you feel that you’re ignorant, you think well what the bloody hell am I doing here? You
haven’t gone there to be humiliated so you stay away. Not all teachers are like that. Some are very good indeed. But still you can sense that some are thinking to themselves, she
couldn’t understand this when she was young so what hopes has she of understanding it now?

We students know that teachers are often tired. That they’ve been teaching all day and that this is only an extra to them because they want to earn a bit more money. The advantage is that
with us at any rate at the beginning everybody is very enthusiastic. They want to learn. And yet again it’s funny because in any class where you have to use your brain attendances keep
dropping. You may start with about thirty and you’re lucky to have got ten by the time the course is over.

I don’t know about the handicraft courses. I only attended one. It was flower-arranging and that was a lark if ever there was one; it was an absolute riot. The teacher must have had a
marvellously aesthetic eye because she could make the most wonderful arrangements out of next to nothing, from the most unlikely materials.

She set us a task one week. She gave each of us a list of things that we had to make an arrangement with; my list said two or three smooth round pebbles, a piece of driftwood, a cabbage leaf and
a stick of celery. I thought to myself: this is me, it’s right up my street. I got the stones and the driftwood down on the beach and it didn’t take me long to get a couple of sticks of
celery and a cabbage leaf. First I tried arranging it on a flat dish among some wire mesh in a sort of – well it was a kind of . . . I thought it was a . . . but it wasn’t, so I took it
all out and I got a lump of plasticine and started again. I stuck the stones round it and the cabbage leaf (wilting) and the two sticks of celery (brown at the ends). You ought to have seen the
result. I carted it up there just for a laugh. Everybody had got their arrangements, some had very fine muslin cloth draped over them, some in cardboard boxes and all were very lovely – even
I could see that. And I came up with mine in an old brown carrier bag.

So they said to me, ‘Where’s your arrangement?’

I said, ‘In this bag.’

‘In a bag,’ they said. ‘Well, what is it?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s a cabbage leaf and two sticks of celery and pebbles.’

When I got it out everybody nearly died of laughter. They made ever such rude remarks. So they lost one pupil at handicrafts.

It was when I was fifty-seven that I decided that I would study in real earnest, not just as a leisure-time activity but where I really sat for something. Mind you, I’d been in earnest
about the other things. I’d enjoyed them, had a lot of fun, made a lot of friends, and acquired a lot of knowledge. But I thought I’d like to do something in competition with the
younger ones. So I went to the technical college.

I found joining the class there a far different proposition from joining the leisure-time activities. In the leisure-time activities most of the people were about my age because we were doing
things because we’d retired or because our families had grown up. But studying for ‘O’ level were young people who for some reason or other had failed when they were fifteen and
were trying again. So when I tried to sign on I thought I might be rejected on account of my age.

I waited for hours in the queue; on the signing-on days there are queues everywhere. You’d think that half the town was dying to go to learn. So I waited in the queue and when I finally
reached the young man who was behind the desk he looked at me in amazement.

He said, ‘What are you doing here, this isn’t a leisuretime activity, you know? This is studying leading to an examination.’

‘I know that,’ I said.

So he said, ‘Well, you obviously don’t want to do that. You’re in the wrong place.’