Cross My Heart and Hope to Die (8 page)

‘Never mind about the money,' said Dad, ‘we'll manage. Anyway, they say Bartrum's going to start hoeing his sugar beet at the end of the month.'

‘Is he?
Is
he?' Mum wiped her eyes with a torn scrap of sheet that she was using as a hanky and, wonderfully revived, returned to the frying pan. ‘Well, thank the Lord for that! All right, let them keep their stinking turkeys over at Saintsbury. I'd sooner scrub floors for Mrs Vernon than do that job.'

For Mum, that says the lot. She's permanently fed up with her own housework and she hates the idea of doing it for anyone else. Her own mother, Gran Bowden, left school when she was twelve, before World War One, to work as a kitchen maid in a big house. She kept at it until she married and as soon as her children were at school she was at it again, doing other people's housework as well as her own. She died when I was eight, and until a month before her death she went scurrying out every morning wearing a felt hat, with an apron under her coat, to spend the day scrubbing other people's floors. It's something Mum would never do, and she's never forgiven Mrs Vernon for asking her.

I was at home when it happened, one Saturday in March not long after Gran Bowden died. There had been no field work for weeks and Mum was getting fractious, so Mrs Vernon couldn't have chosen a more likely time to pick her way down from the farm in a camel-hair coat and a silk headscarf, towed by a large dog, to enquire whether Mum would care to give her a little help in the house three mornings a week.

‘No thank you,' said Mum, putting on her poshest voice to compensate for her baggy old clothes and the enviable fact that even at eleven in the morning Mrs Vernon smelled as sophisticated as the toiletry counter at Boots.

Mum had answered so promptly that Mrs Vernon assumed she'd misunderstood. ‘Well, of course, I should pay you, Mrs Thacker.'

‘I'm not in need of money, thank you, Mrs Vernon.'

There was an awkward pause. I knew that Gran Bowden would have asked the visitor in and apologized for the untidiness and dusted a chair for her, but Mum stood blocking the doorway. She replied nicely, firm without being rude, but her ears and neck were red and her behind shook with indignation.

‘A little extra money is always useful, though, isn't it?' coaxed Mrs Vernon. ‘Say three and six an hour …?'

Mum swallowed, tempted but not won over. ‘Not for double the money,' she said grandly.

Her opponent knew when she was beaten. ‘Then I'm sorry to have bothered you, Mrs Thacker.'

‘Not at all, Mrs Vernon.'

The farmer's wife retreated up the lane, leaving Mum chuntering away to herself on the doorstep. I stopped listening, until she said something about being thankful that ours wasn't a tied house.

‘What's a tied house?'

‘One that's part of the farm, goes with the job, like the Crackjaws'. If you're tied, you can't afford to offend your employer or you might lose your job and your house as well. Not that poor Gladys needs to worry, Mrs V.'s not likely to ask
her
to do any cleaning.'

I was puzzled. ‘But why does next door belong to the farm, when our house belongs to Gran Thacker?'

‘They all belong to Gran Thacker. Mr Vernon's a tenant farmer. He rents the Crackjaws'house from her, same as he rents the farm. Gran Thacker owns the lot.'

This bit of information was so fantastic that I stood and boggled at her. ‘Gran
owns
all three houses? The whole of Longmire End?'

‘And more. Old man Thacker owned half the village at one time. He was a dealer as well as keeping the shop, he bought and sold anything he could lay his hands on, and farms were cheap enough before the war.'

‘Then Gran Thacker must be rich?'

‘Tidy,' agreed Mum.

This idea took some getting used to. Gran Thacker certainly didn't look or behave rich. She was a dry little old thing, tough as the leather bootlaces that hung like sticks of liquorice above the shop counter. She hardly ever went out of the shop, and she bought her clothes from the drapery traveller and they never fitted properly, so she looked a bit of a freak. But Mum always said that she was sharp as a needle, and you'd have to be up very early to get the better of her.

I'd always assumed that Gran Thacker made her living out of the shop, and it was difficult to start thinking of her as a property owner. But when the idea sunk in, I couldn't resist bragging about it in the village school next day.

‘My Gran's rich,' I told anyone who would listen. ‘And when she dies, we'll be rich too.'

I suppose it got back to Mum through the Crackjaws. Anyway, a couple of days later I was for it.

‘Don't you
ever
say that again.' Mum wasn't just furious, she seemed to be in a panic. ‘Don't you dare say another word to anybody about Gran Thacker dying and us being rich. If she gets to hear it, she could ruin us. And don't let your Dad hear it, neither.'

‘But Mum …'

‘That's enough. One more word from you and you'll get the good hiding you're asking for.'

So I shut up, though I couldn't see why. But thinking about it, I realized that Gran Thacker's being rich hadn't made any difference to her or to us in the past, so it wouldn't now. And when I looked at her, I could see that she hadn't any intention of dying for a very long time to come.

Fortunately Gran Thacker never did get to hear what I'd said. I don't know what she'd have done about it but she's a real old terror when she's roused. She never seemed to like any of us, or any of her customers come to that. She didn't speak to anyone if she could avoid it, but sat in her back room doing the accounts and interviewing travellers and giving her orders while poor old Dad rushed about trying to please everybody.

Mum kept me out of Gran Thacker's way as far as possible when I was small, and always told me to mind my manners when we did meet. With Gran Bowden it was quite different; she made a great fuss of me, and if Dad's mother had been the same I'd have been spoiled to death. As it was, she was so snappy and disapproving that I never felt bold or affectionate enough to call her Gran to her face.

I was cheeky to Gran Thacker just once. As soon as I spoke, I knew that I'd chosen the wrong person to cheek. She whipped round on me faster than I'd ever thought she could move and spat out the words; literally, I could feel the drops spray on to my face, but I was too frightened to wipe them off.

‘Don't you dare be pert to me, Miss, or you and your mother will be sorry!'

I mumbled some sort of apology and nipped off home, and I didn't tell anyone. After that, I really did mind my manners with her, but the knowledge of her disapproval didn't worry me. I never felt that she counted as one of our family. As I saw it there were just the three of us: me and Mum, who does her best for me even though she drives me mad in the process, and my wonderful Dad, the nicest father in the whole world.

A November evening at home. Me, seventeen, supposedly doing some schoolwork, Dad reading a detective book from the library, and Mum knitting away like a machine-gun, rattling out a stream of socks and scarves and sweaters in horrible shades of mauve and yellow wool that Gran Thacker had bought from a traveller because it was cheap and then couldn't sell to her customers at any price.

‘Beggars can't be choosers,' said Mum, measuring me for a bilious cardigan, and though I'd die if anyone saw me in it I'd be glad enough to wear it in bed over my pyjamas. None of our doors and windows fit properly and there's always ice on the inside of the panes in bad weather.

I just didn't hear Mum next time she spoke. I admit that there are occasions when I do hear and don't bother to answer, but that night I was well away. Mrs Bloomfield had lent me a paperback of seventeenth-century poems and I sat with the book on the table and my head in my hands, absorbing open-mouthed. Before, I'd read only the censored poems in school anthologies, and this was a revelation. It sent my temperature soaring.

TO HIS MISTRIS GOING TO BED
Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defie,
Until I labour I in labour lie …
Licence my roaving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below –

No wonder I didn't notice Mum until she thumped the table so hard with a rolled-up copy of
Woman's Weekly
that I jumped and knocked over my cup and the cold tea dregs drooled over the tablecloth.

You'd never guess from the way she carried on that the tablecloth wasn't purest linen. Just because she happens to have a genuine old-fashioned best tablecloth tucked away upstairs, she has an obsession about spillages. I don't think we'd had the linen cloth out more than once. It's too big for our table and I can remember sitting under it as though it was a tent when we had a houseful of people to tea after Gran Bowden's funeral. We weren't even allowed to dirty the cloth out after this ceremonial airing; Mum had it whipped off the table and into the wash and back upstairs before you could say Bottom Drawer.

But even though the tablecloth we actually use is guaranteed wipe-down-fresh-as-a-daisy plastic, Mum still behaves as though it's linen. I just lifted my book out of the way – fortunately it wasn't touched – and carried on reading while she ranted away as usual. ‘I can never keep a clean cloth in this house …'

O my America! my new found lande,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann'd,

‘Work all day but I can never keep anything nice.'

My mine of precious stones, my Emperie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!

‘And what thanks do I get? Never a civil word from either of you, always got your silly heads stuck in a book. I've a good mind to pack up and clear off, then you'll both be sorry.'

To enter in these bonds is to be free,
Then where my hand is set my seal shall be.

It takes something drastic to interrupt me when I'm reading but Mum eventually remembered the solution. She reached over and switched off the telly, and the sudden silence shocked us both into attention.

‘Hey,' Dad protested. He usually read while the telly was on but that didn't mean he wasn't following the programme.

‘It's ten o'clock and that's your lot,' snapped Mum. ‘You're to go to bed, our Janet, I won't have you up half the night reading. The trouble I have getting you up in the mornings, and no wonder.'

‘In a minute,' I said, as a matter of principle. But the spell of the poem had been broken and I was ready to leave it.

‘Ah well,' said Dad. He got up, sighed and stretched, and went outside. I carried the cups to the kitchen while Mum lifted the kettle of hot water from the living-room fire. She obviously felt better for having a good grumble. She doesn't mean any of it but she enjoys getting it off her chest every now and then. She was quite cheerful as she gave her face a bedtime wipe at the sink, and I apologized silently by sponging her plastic tablecloth.

‘You go on up,' I said. ‘I want a wash.'

“Night, Janet,' said Dad, padding across the living-room to the stairs door in his mauve socks. He made a fuss when Mum first knitted them, but she said her piece about beggars and I persuaded him that they looked positively trendy. I was glad enough to borrow a pair in winter to wear as bedsocks.

Mum finished pottering and said, ‘Get on with it, then. I want you in bed by half-past. And don't forget to bolt the door and put the lights out and turn off the paraffin.'

‘Have I ever forgotten?'

‘There's always a first time.' She shut the door behind her and I heard the stairs creaking under her weight. Thank heaven I'm not her size, even if I do look like her.

Back in the kitchen I got busy with the Vim and the dishcloth on the blue plastic bowl. We use the one bowl for everything: washing the dishes, washing ourselves, washing clothes, washing hair, peeling spuds, the lot. Cleaning the bowl before I have a wash uses up half the hot water, but it's worth it.

Stripping off is an ordeal in our kitchen in winter so I washed in bits, keeping my clothes on as long as possible. Even with the paraffin heater on, the kitchen is a clammy place; the walls run with wet and the towels are permanently damp. It must be fabulous to live in a house with a bathroom.

When I'd finished washing I refilled the kettle from the bucket of water, stealthily made up the fire and put the kettle on it. Then I switched off the light and went up to bed, deliberately creaking the stairs so that Mum should hear me.

She slept in the front bedroom and Dad and I shared the room at the back. He had partitioned it so that we each had a very small room, but it was only visually private. We could hear each other cough and turn over in bed. I think he knew that I sometimes had a late night, but he didn't interfere because he knew that it was all for the sake of my future.

I put on my pyjamas and lay on top of my bed, under the eiderdown. I didn't dare get between the sheets in case I fell asleep. Dad was breathing lightly on the other side of the partition, though I could hardly hear him for the thunderous snores that came intermittently through the wall: Ziggy Crackjaw, drunk again.

I tried hard to ignore Ziggy, and also to forget John Donne's poem and all its implications, concentrating instead on the essay I had to write before morning. Within half an hour Dad's breathing deepened, and I slid out of bed. I had to take a chance with Mum; I couldn't tell whether she was asleep or not so I had to hope she couldn't hear as I sneaked downstairs in my old gym shoes.

Long practice had made me crafty with the creaking stairs and with the loose knob on the living-room door. Once I had shut that behind me I was pretty well safe. I poked up the fire under the kettle, put on my raincoat as a dressing-gown and made a cup of Camp coffee to keep me going. Gran Bowden's old grandfather clock was just jerking up to eleven. I pulled the books out of my school satchel, headed the paper with the quotation about human rights that was the subject of the essay, added the all-embracing injunction, ‘Discuss', and got stuck in. I used plenty of historical illustrations, from medieval Peasants'Revolts to Hitler's persecution of the Jews, and brought it up to date with the American Civil Rights movement; and I threw in quotations from Locke, Thomas Paine, Karl Marx and Martin Luther King. It was a very long essay.