Read The Generation Game Online
Authors: Sophie Duffy
The Generation Game (35 page)
And there, in that final word, that name, I decide I will.
Sheila is waiting for us on the platform as we get off the train, the anxious grandmother, desperate to get her hands on you, stunning in your yellow shawl.
“She’s gorgeous, Philippa. Absolutely lovely.”
“Hold her,” I say, passing you over.
As the train pulls out of the station, I fight the feeling I am in an old film,
Brief Encounter
or
The Railway Children
, though there is no steam, no red bloomers, just the August
sunshine, but the emotion is swirling all around, the three adults wondering where all the years have gone, wishing Bernie and Wink had lived to see this day.
Before leaving, I take one last look up the track, letting the breeze brush over me, breathing in the sea air. I am home. We are home.
Sheila drives us, slowly and very carefully, to Bob’s News. “I’ll call back later,” she says. “Give you a little time to settle in.”
As her Volvo disappears, Bob and I are left standing outside the shop.
“You won’t recognise the place,” he says. “I’ve made some alterations.”
The alterations include a new till, a new line in healthy snacks, (
How are they doing? Not very well
) and a new lowered false ceiling thus dispensing with the need for fingerless gloves
in winter. Out the back, the kitchenette has been upgraded to one of B&Q’s finest. And out in the yard, Andy’s rose bush is flourishing. Then we go upstairs… which is a
revelation! All the woodchip has been stripped off and replaced with smooth new plaster painted the colour of the sky over Torquay on a good day. Which makes a change from the old beige. A job lot
so every room has been done over. The living room, the bathroom, Bob’s room, Helena’s room, every room but one: mine, which remains the same with the wallpaper of bluebells that match
the Cavalier’s eyes so well. And there he is, the old swashbuckler, hiding in the pattern, lying in wait until bedtime tonight when he will be astonished at what I’ve brought home.
“Why didn’t you do my room?” I ask Bob.
“I thought you’d want to be consulted.”
“You never wanted to see me again.”
“Let’s not be reminded of all that.” He straightens a picture on the wall, Adam Ant in all his glory. “It’s over now. You’re back home.”
“Yes,” I say. “Back home.”
I should feel a little bit sad, disappointed, that my life has come to this, living back home at my age (nearly forty-one!) but I just feel relief. And the best thing about my room is that now I
will share it with my daughter who will sleep in a cot purchased by her grandmother, Sheila. Not a lick of lead paint to be found.
Later, after Sheila has called back and we’ve consumed one of her cottage pies made especially for the occasion, we sit around the living room, Captain preening himself
on his perch, the television off, the window open, so we can hear the gulls and see the twilight sky that was once partially obscured by an unstable horse chestnut tree.
“Helena would be proud,” Sheila says, holding you, stroking her little fingers. She is content, her granddaughter, gazing up at Sheila’s shock of badly dyed hair.
“I need you both to do something tomorrow,” I announce grandly, for we are on the brink of a most historical event.
Bob and Sheila swap a look, wary at what I am about to suggest. I have no idea at this moment that tomorrow this wariness will be justified.
Tonight I will not draw the bedroom curtains. I don’t want the Cavalier scaring my little girl. There is plenty of time for them to get acquainted. For now I want to
watch the stars, those I can pick out of the sodium glare of the great metropolis of Torquay. I want to think of your namesake up there, a special speck of stardust watching over you. Watching you
grow up.
You wake me bright and early for a feed and a nappy change and for once I manage to leap out of bed rather than crawl. Today I am on a mission. I’ve waited a long time to
be qualified for it. Over thirty years. Now I am a mother I can go in the backyard and dig up the Time Capsule.
Breakfast is a quiet affair. Sheila has stayed over (‘saves me going home and back again as you want me here tomorrow, Philippa’). She and Bob eat their magic muesli which I notice
has worked its way into the pantry. I make my way through half a loaf of Hovis, breastfeeding being hungry work, even with apprehension swirling round my stomach. What if everything has gone
mouldy, like on
Blue Peter
? What if I find it all too sad, just as I am beginning to get a grip on my new life?
Bob’s latest shop assistant, Karen, is a genuine Devonian who, when her husband lost his dairy herd to foot and mouth, was sent out to earn some money while he
diversified and did a PGCE (he couldn’t do any worse than me). So Bob and Sheila are free to come out the back.
We stand in the yard, Bob and I, a trowel apiece. Sheila sits in one of three deckchairs, cuddling you, saying how pretty you look in her new (ridiculously puffy and lacy) summer dress and
matching mini sunhat that she bought as a coming home present.
“Mind Andy,” Sheila warns as we start digging.
“Don’t worry,” I reassure her. “He’s nearer the rose bush.”
The unidentifiable shrub has grown considerably over the years and Bob and I are having some trouble with woody roots but after a while, as my muscles begin to ache (even though they are in
pretty good shape from baby-carrying), Bob’s trowel finds some resistance. Something hard.
“A stone?”
“No,” he says. “I think this is it.”
“It’s not soggy then?”
“No. I wrapped the tin in polythene when we dug it up before. Things were getting damp.”
“You did? But you weren’t supposed to look.”
“
You
weren’t supposed to look. And you didn’t. You fainted, remember. We had to lug you inside and lie you out on the sofa. I felt I’d missed my vocation as an
undertaker that day.”
“I don’t remember as a matter of fact. Not much anyway. Only that I woke up and missed Andy’s fur beside me.” There is a pause before I ask: “So did you? Did you
look in there?”
“Yes,” he says, sombre, smearing some dirt across his forehead in an effort to wipe off the sweat forming there.
I am worried now, seeing the wariness creeping back. Why did I have that last piece of toast?
Bob gets back to the matter in hand and pulls the tin from the earth. After a moment’s hesitation, he brushes the clumpy red soil off the top of the polythene with his soft shop-boy hands,
and removes the tin. Then he stands up and presents it ceremoniously to me. I sit down with it on a deckchair, the one Helena used to sunbathe while I splashed about with a washing-up bowl of soapy
water. The smell of Fairy liquid mixed with sunshine. Rainbow colours dancing on the water. Bubbles floating in the air. Crushed red geranium petals at my feet…
“This is it then,” I say, prising the rusty lid off with a screwdriver that Bob has fetched from the lean-to.
Yes, this is it. Lucas’ life in a box, a chocolate tin, lined with Helena’s misplaced Laura Ashley blouse. I handle each of the items in turn, most of them pretty well preserved,
though smelling of a potent cocktail of dead air and sweet memories:
A set of decimal coins.
A set of stamps.
A Beano.
A Monkees single,
Daydream Believer
.
A lock of glorious messy hair.
That
Blue Peter
annual.
A school photograph. Our class, squashed together, some of us cross-legged on the playground floor, others on benches, sitting or standing depending on size: Miss Mothball, Mandy Denning,
Christopher Bennett, Lucas, in his bobble hat. All the other children whose names I can half-remember or who I’ve completely forgotten. Children who could now be dentists or tax collectors or
traffic wardens. Who could even be dead, like Lucas… And there, above my Thing Two, is a little fat girl called Philippa, not looking at the camera at all, but looking down at her best
friend in all the world.
And here are the things I put in at the last moment, my booty from the outside loo: one of Andy’s whiskers, a gold button, some shells from the beach, plus a lock of my own frizzy hair
that has baffled hairdressers from here to London.
And now. At the bottom, in a plastic wallet, is another photograph I don’t remember ever seeing, though there is something vaguely familiar in the faces that stare out at me down through
the years. A Polaroid photograph. A plumpish, big-boned woman, maybe in her forties for she has crow’s feet and slightly matronly hair, wearing what was known as a bed jacket, sitting on a
chair with a baby, a bonny newborn, in her arms. The background is institutional… a hospital… you can make out a metal bed to one side… Who are these people? Why are they in
Lucas’ Time Capsule?
I flip the photo over and there in beautiful schoolgirl handwriting are the words that one day I was meant to read.
Elizabeth
and
Philippa,
August
6th
1965,
St
Thomas’,
London.
That is me, as a baby, one week old, the first time I’ve seen me so small. Maybe it is wishful thinking, but I am pretty sure I can make out you, Lucy, in there. And at last I get to see
my grandmother, who died so long ago. She got to hold me after all, just as Sheila is holding her new granddaughter in the deckchair. Maybe she was sick in the hospital when I was being born. A
death and a birth. They often go hand in hand… But how did this picture get in here?
Images beat about in my head: Helena coming into an empty dining room. Bare boards and dust. A forgotten marble.
That’s where my Laura Ashley blouse got to
. Helena’s slender
hands as she gave me the tin. The Secret Project. She knew all about it. She must’ve slipped the photograph into the box before I buried it. All those years ago… Why didn’t she
just give me the photo? Why bury it in the garden?
We sit quietly out here in the yard, listening to the shop bell in the background, the low hum of chatter floating through the back door, Karen’s gossip, the pip-pip-pip of the new modern
till. A seagull freewheels overhead, ever hopeful for scraps, then vanishes, leaving an almost reverential hush. As if this is a moment of revelation. And surely it is, for Bob has disappeared
briefly inside and reappeared with a battered old letter. A faded blue Basildon Bond envelope that he places in my hand.
“I rescued it from the tin when we dug it up, you know, Lugsy and I.” He gestures at the hole in the ground. “After you fainted, Wink and I sorted through everything as we
could see they wouldn’t last forever. Just as well really – we didn’t imagine we’d have to wait this long.” He nods over at you, attempting a joke that doesn’t
seem at all appropriate right now.
“Go on.”
“So we saw this photograph which Wink put in the plastic cover. But it’s the letter that tells the whole of it. The bigger picture, as it were. And I’ve kept it inside because
if it got ruined you might never find out. What Helena wanted you to know, once you had a child of your own. So you’d understand. She wanted you to be a mother when you read this,
that’s why she buried it. That’s why Wink and I rescued it.”
“And did you read it?”
Bob blushes. “I’m afraid so, yes.”
Nothing, not even Bob’s build-up, prepares me for what I read, as I sit on the deckchair, the box in my lap, the letter in my hand. The longest letter Helena has ever written me.
Dear Philippa,
By now you should be a mother. You should have seen the photograph of you as a baby sitting on Elizabeth’s lap. And now is the time for you to know the story behind this photograph.
The truth.
Picture it: Elizabeth, wife to a judge, mother to Helena, is diagnosed with breast cancer. It is 1964 and her chances of survival are not good. She is forty-two, a woman who should be in
her prime. She feels she has done nothing with her life, other than support her husband and entertain on his behalf. Her daughter, Helena, has been packed off to boarding school in Wales so
Elizabeth doesn’t even have the satisfaction of being a proper mother to her. And now she is facing a death sentence, each second ticking by reminding her that she has not even begun to
live.
Now go back a few years. Helena is eight-years-old and the judge has decided to book a fortnight’s holiday for the three of them in Torquay. Maybe he is thinking for once of his wife
and daughter – on the other hand, it could be his golfing handicap. They stay in the Palace Hotel, where there is a young waiter who happens to take a shine to mother and daughter who
frequently dine alone. He has no family of his own and he enjoys chatting with intelligent, witty Elizabeth and giving extra dollops of ice cream to pretty, bright Helena. On their last evening,
after Helena has been put to bed and her husband retired to the hotel bar for the duration, Elizabeth has a stroll around the Palace grounds and who should she bump into but the young waiter,
having a sneaky cigarette. He shouldn’t be out there but something made him seek the fresh air, other than the opportunity for an undetected smoke. They pass the next two hours deep in
conversation and though they are from different worlds, different generations even, they find they can talk about nothing and everything. Elizabeth remembers what it is like to be young and for
that reason, the next day before they leave the hotel for the final time, she slips a piece of paper into the waiter’s hand. On the paper is written her address and telephone and the
instructions that if he ever finds himself in London he must look them up. She doesn’t suppose for one minute he will, but the gesture seemed romantic to her and she was only too happy to
go along with this whim for once.
Nine years later, that is exactly what he does. He calls the number and Elizabeth answers straight away as if she knew it would be him. She has recently received the bad news and is
wondering how she will get through the next few months, worried about leaving Helena alone with the judge, she can be so moody, he so hot-tempered. When the young man suggests a trip to the
cinema, she can’t help but laugh. Such a youthful thing to do. And so romantic. So she finds herself saying yes, and that is how they end up going to the pictures watching a matinee showing
of Goldfinger. He meets her outside with a single red rose. She hardly recognises him, he is well and truly a man now, about thirty, and not in his waiter’s uniform, but in a smart, dapper
suit. They enjoy themselves so much, slipping back into their once familiar ways, that they agree to go again the next afternoon. And the next. By the fourth showing, they know all the words, all
the hammed up orchestral manoeuvres, and their relationship has passed from friendship to something altogether different so that they find themselves booking into a quiet, exclusive hotel in the
West End where one afternoon of passion results in Elizabeth falling pregnant, despite the new-fangled coil that she has fitted to ward off this very thing happening on the rare occasions she and
the judge share the marriage bed. She is filled up with cancer; the last thing she wants is a baby. The waiter goes back to Torquay without ever knowing about the baby or the cancer, promising he
will be back in a few months. Unfortunately it takes him rather longer than that as he has a nasty case of shingles and when he does eventually return, he phones the house in Dulwich only to be
informed that regrettably the judge’s wife has passed away. What he isn’t told is that she refused what treatment might have prolonged her life in order to save her unborn
child.
Elizabeth took a brave, possibly stupid decision and told the judge of her indiscretion and the consequent pregnancy. The judge, rather than making a song and dance about it and divorcing
his dying wife, which wouldn’t go down well in society, arranged a private adoption, though it would be a miracle if Elizabeth lasted long enough for the baby to be born at full term. But
there was something about her resolution that made the judge prepare for the eventuality.
When the time came, the judge was unable to confine his wife at home as she was too ill. He booked her into a private room at St Thomas’ hospital where a strict sister was up to speed
and utterly professional (if a little sergeant-majorly). On July 29th 1965, Elizabeth gave birth to a baby girl who she named Philippa. She was born clutching the coil that had failed Elizabeth
but that was a symbol of the miracle that she was. It had been agreed between the parties concerned that Elizabeth would nurse her baby for ten days – that was the only demand she made and
the judge in a rare moment of weakness agreed. After that, Philippa would be handed over to her new life. Her new identity.
But before that happened, when she – you – were a few days old, against my father’s orders, I snuck into the hospital and I met my baby sister – well, technically
half-sister. You had this frizzy hair and big eyes that seemed to look at amazement at everything around you. But at the last minute, I couldn’t let you go. So I told my mother – our
mother – that I would bring you up as my own. I would take you away to a place where no-one would ever find us. Elizabeth agreed – what mother wouldn’t want to keep her two
daughters together? – and, before any papers were signed, she instructed her solicitor from her hospital bed – and what would turn out to be her death bed – to set up a trust
fund that would pay an income into my account every month until you turned eighteen.
So, Philippa, it was all arranged. A few days later, when you were a week old, I came to the hospital for normal visiting hours to see you both. The last time she held you, our mother, she
was smoothing your hair. I took a photo on a Polaroid borrowed from a happy father down the corridor before she kissed you goodbye and handed you over to a nurse for feeding. Then she kissed me
goodbye, whispering thank you, and slipped her ring onto my finger before going to the loo as agreed. I took her place in the chair. When you were brought back, winded and pink, I cradled you in
my arms, telling the young nurse that I would watch you until Elizabeth returned. I asked if it would be possible for a cup of tea, I was parched due to the hot weather. She promptly disappeared.
I wrapped you up in a yellow shawl smuggled in with me in my Harrods bag which I had also stuffed full with nappies and baby cream from Elizabeth’s bedside locker. All my other worldly
goods were squeezed into my vanity case which I’d kept out of sight under the bed. Then as if Fate had arranged it, a man in a pinstripe suit wandered, lost, into the wrong room. I asked
him if he would be a gentleman and help me out, knowing we’d have a less suspicious exit with a man in charge. I smiled sweetly and he said of course and carried my bag while I held you
close. We walked out of that hospital, you in my arms, into the hot August sunshine. The start of our new life.
That is the truth behind the photograph. The rest you must ask Bob. I pray he is still there to tell you.
Your loving sister,
Helena.
