Cross My Heart and Hope to Die (20 page)

I decided to be a devil and have the curry. Yet another experience. It promised an exotic change from Mum's cooking, but I wasn't sure about it when it arrived, a heap of coagulated rice topped with glistening chunks of mustard-coloured gristle. Still, I was committed to paying for it, so I ate as much as I could and washed it down with greasy coffee. My final cigarette tasted rank, and I stubbed it out half-finished.

When I left, with the steamy café filling with men in raincoats and women in headscarves, it was raining steadily. My poncho was far from waterproof, and I decided to shelter in Blackwell's. I'd looked forward to browsing in a big bookshop, but when I got there I found that I couldn't raise much enthusiasm for anything.

I was looking listlessly at a big volume of French Impressionist paintings when my forehead felt suddenly chill. I touched it and found that it was a good deal damper than the rain had made it. My hair was clinging stickily round my face and my knees seemed to have disconnected themselves from my feet. I didn't feel very well at all. Closing the book, I made for the exit, putting my boots down carefully one after the other, and leaned in the doorway breathing cold rain. Better to stay in the fresh air, I decided. Couldn't get much wetter, anyway.

I would soon have to set out for the bus station, but there was one more place I particularly wanted to see, New College. I turned left out of Blackwell's, in the direction of New College Lane, but I hadn't gone more than a few steps when nausea started to rise in my throat. I swallowed hard, hoping to keep it down by will-power, and walked on gingerly up the lane. A spasm of nausea caught up with me near the college gate, but I tried to keep my mind on medieval architecture. The walls and the tower were blurred and out of focus, though. The harder I stared, the more precariously built it all seemed. And now there was a griping pain in my insides, and it wasn't just nausea I was worried about.

I knew I'd passed a public lavatory somewhere, not too far away if only I could find it. No use trying to hurry, or something desperate might happen. I retraced my wanderings with a slow fixed tread, alternately flushing and shivering as pain and nausea came and went, and I got there with just a whimper to spare.

When I emerged, feeling white in the face, one hand lugging my grip and the other clutching my middle, I had exactly seven minutes to get to the bus station. I don't know how I made it but I did, half-running, half-tottering, with my grip banging against my boots and my feet hurting like hell, desperate to get back home. I'd had Oxford, in more ways than one.

By luck, I got a seat to myself on the bus. I took off my boots and wiggled my toes thankfully. London, here I come!

Mum was resentful when I didn't get a place at Oxford, and Dad was terribly disappointed, but I snapped at her that it was nothing to do with not being posh enough, and explained to him that I'd rather go to London anyway. My only grievance was the waste of time. If Miss Dunlop hadn't insisted on my staying the extra term I could have been in London already, having a go at living. But at least I could now leave school and start to earn some money.

I spent the week before Christmas helping as usual with the mail. A van delivered to outlying houses such as ours, but deliveries in the main part of the village were done by Mrs Howlett, the sub-postmaster's wife, in her postwoman's outfit. The Christmas mail was more than she could cope with single-handed, particularly as her husband needed her help in the office, which was the front room of their house next-door-but-one to Gran Thacker's shop.

The deliveries took me about three hours in the early mornings and two in the afternoons, riding a heavy red post-office bike like Mrs Howlett's. I needed the bike, with its large front carrier, to hold the parcels. There wasn't much actual riding, it was all start and stop and staggering up people's garden paths under the weight of my letter-crammed pouch. I found that my Christmas spirit evaporated rapidly while I was on the job, but with luck and Sunday working I could knock up five or six pounds.

And Gran Thacker was prepared to pay for a little help too, in the week before Christmas when customers went mad and bought enough food for the two-day holiday to last them a fortnight. Dad was run off his feet in the shop, so as soon as I'd finished my morning deliveries I rushed round there and got busy loading up the shelves and filling paraffin cans until it was time to go back to the post office again. We took sandwiches with us and Gran made a pot of tea, as she always did for Dad, and we spent our half-hour dinner break in the store-room with our feet well up, counting off the days until Christmas.

Christmas Day was much as usual, quiet if you didn't count the almighty row the Crackjaws were making on the other side of the wall. I'd decorated the house with the paper chains I'd made when I was a kid, with a bit of holly balanced on top of Gran Bowden's grandfather clock for luck. We didn't have any use for mistletoe. Dad gave me a present of two pounds, and I gave him a lovely flowery tie which he put on straight away. It really suited him. Mum gave me the surprise sweater she'd been knitting every evening for the past month, and I gave her a pound box of Milk Tray. I don't know what they gave each other, they didn't mention it.

While Mum cooked the dinner, with me preparing the spuds and sprouts, Dad biked down to Gran's, taking our presents: knitted tea-cosy from Mum, tin of tea from me, and a big tin of fancy biscuits from himself. We'd bought the wool and the tea and the biscuits from the shop, of course, so Gran got it both ways, the profit as well as the presents.

As usual, Dad biked back almost as unsteadily as Ziggy Crackjaw does from the White Horse, bringing Gran's present to us. She reckons she doesn't approve of alcohol, but she can't bear to see anything going to waste so she makes it into wine: dandelions, peapods, elderberries, tea-leaves, potato peelings, anything she can lay her hands on. Gran Thacker could make wine out of old boots if she put her mind to it and used enough yeast. Because her wine's home-made she's convinced that it's non-alcoholic, though she might know from Dad's flushed face after one glass that it's got a real kick to it.

This year's present was potato wine; 1968, a good year for potatoes. It tasted earthy, but it went down well with our Christmas cockerel, specially fattened by Mum for the occasion. After we'd stuffed ourselves with bird and veg, followed by Christmas pud, we heated water in the biggest saucepan and washed up together, Mum washing, me drying and Dad putting away. Then we ate once-a-year chocolate mints and watched the telly, and when the Queen came on to wish us a happy Christmas we drank her health, only Mum got hiccups in the middle of it and I had to sober her up with a cup of tea.

Somewhere about five o'clock, we had the traditional family row. While Dad and I were hard at work in the week before Christmas, Mum had gone mad making mince-pies and cakes. Quite apart from the fact that her baking is inedible, we were all too full to eat any tea. But when Dad and I tried to refuse, Mum shouted about our ingratitude after all the trouble she'd taken to please us, and so we ended up as usual eating a heavy tea just to pacify her, and suffering from martyrdom and indigestion for the rest of the evening.

On Boxing Day it snowed, and that night it froze, hard. Mrs Howlett, doing her post round solo again next day, slipped on someone's steps and broke her leg.

I wouldn't have wished it on her for the world, but as far as I was concerned it couldn't have happened to a nicer person. The moment I heard the news I rushed down to the post office to volunteer.

For the next three months I was the village postwoman, with an official armband and a big red bike to prove it. It wasn't a full-time job and I didn't qualify for the adult rate, but I had my eighteenth birthday that January and that upped my pay a bit. With overtime, because of the bad weather, I was taking home just over five pounds a week. Fantastic. I gave Mum three pounds, and saved the rest. No expenses; I'd gone off smoking ever since Oxford.

I certainly earned the money, though. It was a very bad winter, snow and ice until the end of March, and once or twice our lane was impassable until Mr Vernon unblocked it with his tractor and snowplough. Dad had to sleep at his mother's during the worst of it, so that he'd be on the spot to open the shop at the proper time. He did offer to ask her if I could sleep there too, but I didn't fancy living in such close proximity to Gran Thacker. I preferred to fight my way through the snow.

I got up at five, every morning except Sunday, and did my best to be at the post office at six, when the mail was due to arrive from Breckham Market. Sometimes it was late getting there, and quite often I was, but whatever the weather and however long it took I managed to complete each day's deliveries somehow. Mr Howlett, the sub-postmaster, had impressed on me that The Mail Must Get Through, and I felt quite heroic about my part in the process.

It's a rotten job in winter, though, setting out from the post office in freezing darkness, back and bike both loaded, to deliver by torchlight. Bike wheels skid on the rutted snow of the roads, legs sink into the roadside drifts, feet slip on icy garden paths, fingers are so numbed that they can't feel the letters. People's letterboxes are either non-existent or sealed up against the draught, so it's trudge round to back doors, ‘Good dog, good dog, there's a good boy, shut up you stupid animal,' while the snow crumbles over the tops of your wellies and soaks your socks. I'd have gone on strike, except that no one had asked me to do the job in the first place. So I just thought of the money and ploughed on.

It wasn't quite so bad when daylight came. And there were one or two housewives, Dad's nice regular customers, who would invite me in for a cup of coffee if they happened to see me, and that hope helped to keep me going. I was always careful to stand on their doormats while I drank it, so as not to make a mess on their kitchen floors, and I worked on the principle of never refusing a hot drink, even if I'd just had one elsewhere, in case the offer wasn't made again.

My only exception to that was with old Miss Griggs, who'd been the headmistress when I was at the village school. She lived in a house at the far end of Byland, on the road that led out to where the Hall had once been. Her house was my final delivery point. She had a lot of mail because she belonged to various organizations, most of them to do with wildlife, and she used to watch out for me like a hawk.

I suppose it was a bit mean of me to try to nip up the path, slam the letters through her box and make my getaway before she could open the door. She was retired, and probably lonely, and it was very nice of her to keep on offering me cups of coffee even though I always refused them with the excuse that I was late and had to get back to the post office. But I'd had enough of Miss Griggs when I was at school. By singling me out for her favour she had made my life a misery. If she hadn't been nice to me, I wouldn't have been tormented by Andy Crackjaw, and the memory of that was still so painful that I wasn't prepared to forgive her.

As the weather improved, so did Mrs Howlett. By the time spring had sprung and the early birds were making a racket in Spirkett's Wood as I rode past in the mornings, I was made redundant. Still, I'd done very well out of the job. Twenty pounds saved, though I'd worn a hole in the seat of my jeans and demolished several pairs of Dad's socks.

Mum said she'd never been richer in her life. With the prospect of field work to come, when all three of us would be out earning, she took it into her head that she'd like to go away for a holiday later in the year. We'd never been away, and Mum fancied going to a Butlin's holiday camp.

‘Hope you enjoy it,' said Dad.

‘All of us, I mean. A family holiday before our Janet goes to college.'

‘I'm not going to a holiday camp,' I said, alarmed.

‘Why ever not? There's bingo, competitions, dancing, something for everybody. Enjoy yourself for a change, lovey.'

‘I'm saving,' I pointed out. ‘I couldn't afford it.'

‘I'd help you,' said Mum generously. ‘What about you, Vince? You'd come with us, wouldn't you?'

‘No, I wouldn't.'

‘Well, you miserable devil, Vincent Thacker! Why can't you behave like anybody else's husband?'

‘Because I'm not, am I?'

They didn't often take the trouble to have a personal row, so I went to the kitchen and let them get on with it.

I'm just about sick and tired of you. Just when we get a little extra money and can go out a bit, you won't come with me.'

‘I'm not stopping you, am I? You can go by yourself.'

‘A fine thing that'd look, having to go on holiday without my husband! You never come out with me. I don't know why I ever married you.'

‘You know damn well why you did. You were glad enough to, at the time!'

Dad stamped out and I made a thoughtful pot of tea. This was a new one on me. So I must have been on the way before they got married … I'd read some statistics about pregnant brides so I knew it wasn't unusual, but it comes as a bit of a shock when your own parents are involved. Statistics is other people. Besides, it was beyond imagining – Dad and Mum so consumed by passion for each other that they couldn't wait for the wedding ceremony! I decided to ignore it.

‘Tea up, Dad,' I yelled, and the Crackjaw mongrel went into hysterics behind their back fence.

Mum clipped the Butlin's coupon from her magazine and sent for the brochure anyway, but when she discovered how much the holiday camp would cost she nearly had a fit. In the end, she decided that she was going to Stopat'um for her holiday, as usual, and put the money towards a washing-machine instead.

Before field work started I spent a few days with Caroline Adams in Breckham Market. It made a change, but I didn't enjoy it much, apart from the use of their plumbing. I bought some new underclothes and dressmaking material in the town, but we spent most of the time mooching about, drinking coffee, and then drifting back to her room to listen to records. Caroline hadn't got a place at Oxford either, so she was going to York. Since leaving school she'd been working for her father, but she'd hated it and had walked out of his office. Her boy-friend Richard was giving trouble, and what with one thing and another she was fed up and couldn't wait to leave home.