Bio tex (a human stain)

Funny how something like this can unearth a memory.  It came up the other day when Son had a washing machine disaster with red trousers that coloured everything else pink.  I suggested he try and remedy the situation with Bio tex.  And then I remembered Donna.

She lived in one of the expensive houses at the bottom end of the mews that ran by the side of the flats where I lived as a child.  Her house had wrought iron bars across the windows on the ground floor and a door bell that went ding dong when you pressed it.  Her family was from the States, where they would rather have lived, but the father's work kept them in England.  They looked down on my family because we did not have money, or if we did then there were no visible indications of it.  My family looked down on Donna's because they had no culture, or none that my family recognised, and the fake antique coach light over the front door was a sign of this lack.

I can't remember how she and I met - probably in the mews where I sometimes played with my sister.  Donna was always nicely turned out in dresses or skirts, white ankle socks and penny loafers on her feet.  My sister and I were, by her mother's standards, scruffy and when not at school we usually wore trousers and scuffed shoes.  Donna's mother told her to remind me to wipe my feet on the mat when I came into the house.  She rarely addressed me directly, but I felt her eyes on me.  She was tall, straight and thin with long, shiny fingernails, always dressed as though for a special occasion.  Unlike my mother, she did not go out to work.  She eyed me from their gleaming kitchen or from the cream-covered sofa where she sat with a box of chocolates, reading a magazine or watching television.  Donna was nervous of her mother and exceptionally careful not to do or say anything that might displease her.  It was easy to do this, particularly with dirt or the possibility of it.  I was told never to sit on the cream sofa in case I made it dirty.  Donna was punished if she came home with a mark on her clothes.  When we went to the playground she wouldn't go near the sandpit.  She brushed the seat of the swing with the palm of her hand before sitting on it.

One hot day in my kitchen when we were having my favourite drink of raspberry cordial with soda water and ice, some of the cordial syrup spilt on the white kipper tie that lay on her chest, over the navy blue dress.  Donna had protruding front teeth that bit into her lower lip whenever she was nervous.  They bit hard as she looked at the stain.  She whispered, my mother will kill me.  I understood the situation well enough not to suggest that the tie could just be washed.  It was not just the fact of having marked something, though this in itself was bad - a sign of disrespect, lack of care and wilfulness.  The raspberry juice would leave a stain on the white that would not wash out.  My mother will kill me, repeated Donna.  I pictured her mother's face as she stood on the threshold between kitchen and shiny parquet-floored hall.  Even when she was not angry there was the sense that she was looking for a mark - some point to which she could direct the fury that simmered beneath the tight lips, the dark eyes that moved over one's face and body like searchlights looking for the fault.  Though she might not literally kill Donna,whatever punishment was delivered would be fearsome.

I rummaged under the kitchen sink where we kept detergents.  I remembered something that had once been used to make a cloth white again after wine was spilled on it.  On the cardboard box it said to soak in cold water but I boiled a kettle, filled a bowl with hot Bio tex solution and put the kipper tie in it.  Almost at once, the stain turned blue and then began to fade before our eyes.  As the material whitened the colour came back to Donna's face, and after ten minutes all evidence of stain had disappeared.  I fetched the iron and ironing board and pressed the tie until it was dry.  And we lived happily ever after and at some point went our separate ways - I to boarding school, she back to the States.

But the stain does, in a sense, endure.

**

Stories and Lies

I have been reading John Burnside, who recently won the T.S.Eliot for his extraordinary Black Cat Bone. This and Hunt in the Forest have taken up residence by my bedside and I have also been reading his memoirs. I am interested in the narrative he constructs from his life. In a sense, all narratives about ourselves are stories. John Burnside's father was, he discovered after the father's death, a foundling - left on someone's doorstep and passed from place to place, an unwanted burden in hard times. So his father told lies, told this story and that, about who he was, where he came from and the identity of his parents. Any story was better than the fact of having been abandoned on a doorstep without even a label around his neck.

The stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are, where we come from, are perhaps a kind of lie, even for those of us who were not left cold on a doorstep. They have to be lies, partly because all stories are lies, and most of us need to place ourselves within the context of a narrative that makes sense. But there is something else: Jeanette Winterson's autobiographical Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit was, in a sense, a lie about her childhood and her mother. The story she wrote was not as bleak and dark as what really happened. She wrote a story she could live with. But even in her recent memoir, which tells her story as it really was, I find myself asking questions about her father and why he failed to protect her. He comes across as an essentially good person and probably was - but my guess is that the narrative JW has constructed requires this because at the very end of his life she was close to him and there was reparation - a kind of healing. She is still telling the only story she is prepared to live with.

The narrator of her novel The Passion says: "Trust me, I'm telling you stories."

I tell (myself) many stories about where I come from, pinpoint landmarks on the road that led me to where I am now. In terms of location, there were many as we were so often on the move, from England to Germany and back again, from one place to another, frequent change of schools. What strikes me now is that there is nowhere I look back on to say: this is where I come from; these are my people and this my language. There is no 'we' because I did not belong to a group, and family life was fragmented. In my working-class primary school my accent and manners were strange. I did not realise I had a German accent. In schools where middle-class children went, my accent and manners were strange. I had picked up a cockney accent and still carried a trace of the German. I met the boy who would be my first husband when I was sixteen. He came from somewhere - a tenement in Glasgow and a community. Where he came from was written into everything he did and said. I married him and picked up a trace of his accent.

This is the story I would have to lie about - what the narrative would need to cover: that I spent my childhood among strangers and came from no particular place. I lived in books and other people's stories. This is not so unusual, especially for an introverty child who is an early reader. I can draw a map of my childhood, say where I have been, in this book or that story, from Peter Rabbit through Narnia, Wind on the Moon and Mallory Towers to the diaries of Anne Frank. But this is the only map I can make and it is not enough for a satisfying narrative. I construct others, therefore - put together versions that feel coherent and reveal an aspect of what I feel to be true; of lived experience. If a story no longer serves its purpose, I make another one.

Trust me, I'm telling you stories.

***

the less travelled

Just had a phone call from Son - somewhere in the middle of a rain forest (Trinidad) - on low battery. Bless the boy, but it's lovely to hear from him, and at least his companion has battery. Ridiculous that I should be thinking this way (in India he was in the desert on low battery), but now that they are with us, the mobiles, even a day trip to Bognor would probably feel risky on low battery. Because what if -

I am not well-travelled, and twenty-five plus years of chronic illness has made me cautious about any kind of journey. I am trying to remember what I dreamed of doing when I was little. I don't think that travelling was a motif. In my teens I wanted to be somewhere wild and remote, and self-sufficient, but with a red enamel kettle and wooden kitchen utensils. Well, I have partially achieved that - hardly anyone has heard of or knows where Edge-on-the-Weald is, and it is (after a fashion) pretty wild. I have the wooden utensils. The red enamel kettle, though, is missing. I have a serviceable electric one.

When Son was little he said to me that he wished Mr. Signs were an explorer: because then I could go with him on his journeys. We talked about what he wanted to be when he grew up: an astronaut, a train driver, a farmer; and he wanted to travel - to Australia, Greenland, Canada and Scotland.
He wondered: what had I, as a child, wanted to be when I grew up? One of my answers would most certainly have been a ballerina - why, I can't think because when my aunt took me to see Swan Lake (Rudolf Nureyev, Margot Fonteyn), I was bored. It was probably the standing on points, and the illusion of weightlessness; the fact that I had always wanted to be able to fly.

When Daddy was little, did he want to be a person who worked in a office?

I remember the question, but not what I answered. I told Mr. Signs about it. How we laughed!

***

Mach's Gut

The final wedding party was in a place that was once a farm collective in the old GDR and is now occupied by artists, writers, musicians and biodynamic gardeners. We had a couple of nights in the East Side Hotel, hard by the old wall that separated east Berlin from west, you could see it from a porthole beneath the window in our room.

There was a pre-nuptial party, a coach ride to the registry office in Köpenick followed by a two-hour river journey with champagne and canapes. It was the wedding of my ex-stepbrother, there were people I had not met for many years. The elephant in the proceedings was ex-stepfather who has for many years, King Lear-like, cut himself off from everyone he ever knew. His absence was a palpable presence. He had many children, many liaisons, some also connected to my mother's early life in the Free German Youth. It is complicated, but when you are in the middle of proceedings it somehow isn't. My e-s-b wanted a celebration that brought the disparate pieces of his life together. We were, for the duration, a patchwork community, brought together by this event to be (for a space) all of a piece. This is what celebrations can be very good for.

I also had an appointment with anthroposophical doctor who knows about PBC. He has basically endorsed what the specialist over here said, so off I go on the new regime with medications - sans alcohol or anything with paracetamol, so obvious that it's barely worth mentioning; except that doctors over here tended to equivocate and shrug when I asked about these. Will need to find other, possibly more fun things to give me a break from muscle pains.

The appointment was in Kladow, where I lived for nearly three years as a child. I experienced a kind of symmetry to this. The language and sense of place live strongly in me, though the actual and imaginary sometimes merge, and who is to say that the imaginary is less true. I always pictured a pine forest at the back of my house where the small window of my bedroom was and where, for a time, I used to fear that witches might fly through. In reality there are just a few trees, similar to the kind found here on English Edge. In fact the whole area is not dissimilar and it is as though in coming here I found an English version of the German village, though I was not consciously looking for that. I learned to read in both languages, I read early and intensely so the stories became a part of the environment. The years were not happy or easy ones. My father was an actor with a distinguished theatre company in east Berlin but things were not turning out the way he had hoped and though the wall was not yet in place, the east/west division loomed. Each day he would go from the west, where we lived, to work in the east. My sister was born in the British military hospital. My mother went to parties in town but was, I think, depressed. She had not (nor would she ever) come to terms with her father's death in Buchenwald.

By the shores of the lake, where the steamer takes tourists on excursions, Mr. Signs and I stopped by a kiosk for coffee and streuselkuchen. In Germany, wherever you go there is sure to be food of some kind. A customer who was clearly a regular said goodbye to the melancholy kiosk man: Tchus, Jurgen - mach's gut! Go well; literally, make it good. In the Berliner accent it sounded like mach's yut. I remember this, the softening of the letter g. I can still speak like a Berliner if I need to, my accent almost perfect. But anyone who knows can hear that there is something not quite right, I don't have the words, the language is broken, I am not from there. But in a sense I also am. We are such stuff as memories are made of.

- and he is walking

I am in the classroom, writing with my fountain pen in the grey London County Council notebooks. I dip the pen in the ink well that nestles in the hole in my desk. When it runs dry Miss Routledge fills it again. You have to be good at writing to be given a fountain pen, some people still use pencils because their handwriting is not neat enough or their spelling is bad. Writing and spelling are my best things and arithmetic is my worst. Chandra sits beside me, she is my desk partner and she hasn't yet been given a fountain pen.

We made friends when I told her that I liked curry and rice. Shyly she told me that she and her sister ate curry and rice at home every day because her family was from Pakistan. She invited me to her house for tea. We ate rice with dall and a sauce with chicken wings that was so hot it made my tongue feel bitter and burned but I ate it anyway and said it was nice. Then her sister gave me a piece of something hard and white that tasted of old boiled milk, Chandra said it was a sweet. She lived in a basement flat where the electric lights were always on because there was hardly any light from the outside, and the electric heater was on, three bars of it, even in summer because it was cold in the basement and Chandra said her mother and older sisters felt cold all the time in England.

Chandra is writing in her notebook with a pencil, her fingers pressing on the stub as she concentrates. The paper has flecks of brown and shiny yellow. Miss Routledge says that paper is made of trees. I can see pieces of the tree in Chandra's notebook. I can see the words she has written: Humpty Dumpty is walking and he is going to see the wite rabit and he is walking and he is going to the play grond and he is walking.When Chandra came to my house I read her some of Alice in Wonderland, the part where the White Rabbit makes a flustered appearance, saying oh my paws and whiskers.
Rabbits don't wear gloves, said Chandra.
It's just a story, I said.
But rabbits can't wear gloves, said Chandra, because they haven't got fingers.
So I stopped reading and we went to the playground.

Humpty Dumpty is going to the swing and he is going to the bech and he is going to the party and he is walking.

In the summer holidays Chandra and her sisters went to Southend for a day and that was their summer holiday.
It isn't a holiday if you only go for a day, I said.
It was a holiday, she said, we went on the beach and we had ice cream.
I decide to copy everything that Chandra writes. I want to know what it is like being Chandra.

Humpty Dumpty is walking and he is going to the shop and he is walking and he is going to the play grond and he is walking.
I whisper, you already wrote that he is going to the playground. Chandra looks at me and smiles. Then she shrugs and carries on writing.
Humpty Dumpty is going to the bech and he is walking.
Chandra furrows her brow when she writes, she gives it all her concentration. Humpty Dumpty is walking, she writes. I begin to notice a pattern - an activity, or a particular destination, followed by the repetition of Humpty Dumpty walking. He doesn't seem ever to arrive at the beach, the playground, the rendezvous with the white rabbit, he is in a state of perpetual motion, walking always intending somewhere or other. The walking, though, is the thing, and we come back to it, Chandra and I, as I faithfully copy her words, mesmerised by the seeming purposelessness of Humpty Dumpty's walk, stirred to some extent by his persistence in always finding some new destination. I picture his large egg shape, eyes open and hopeful, his short legs with tartan trousers moving quickly, arms out at his sides.
Miss Routlege is standing behind me, looking over my shoulder.

What is this rubbish you are writing, she says? What do you think you are doing?

rhythm of life

I spent a considerable part of the day throwing things out: books I will give to a charity shop, paper to the recycling. However much I throw away, there always seems to be more - stuff that I don't need or use, no-one else would want it, but it seems wasteful to just throw out. I am trying to simplify in every way possible, and bring some kind of stability to my days, an underlying rhythm that will support what I need to do. Difficult with M.E., which behaves predictably only in the sense that it will almost certainly scupper long-term plans.
When I was growing up I envied children who had predictable lives. When I was thirteen I came home from boarding school and went to a crammer in Hammersmith. Things were chaotic at home, I never had breakfast, ate sweets and chocolate bars in the few minutes between lessons, scuttling from one room to the next, then nothing very much until supper.

In the underground, I would try to choose the same carriage every day, judging the distance along the platform from the tunnel. This was so that I would see two girls that always got on a couple of stations after mine. They were dressed in school uniform and went to St. Paul's School for Girls. Their conversation was trivial (by whose standards I was judging this I can't think): to do with last night's homework, what they ate for supper or breakfast and how the new stocking tights already had a small ladder at the side. I found it mesmerising, though, and listened as if caught in a trance, knowing that on a Tuesday they had French, so there would be talk about that and possibly a recitation of some irregular verb. On Wednesday there was Latin and on Friday there was chemistry. On Friday there was the additional spice of some possible revelation about what they were doing at the weekend. There would be nothing more interesting than a teatime visit to or from an aunt, a trip to the shoe shop with mother to buy some new school shoes and, of course, more homework. The more ordinary and mundane the detail the greater my satisfaction in hearing about it.

I pictured the bedroom of the larger girl, who always sat down with a comfortable plump before arranging and patting her skirt. I imagined that she would have a soft, fluffy candlewick bedspread, cream or pastel pink, that matched her slippers and dressing gown; one of those ceramic hedgehog night lights, perhaps, left over from childhood; everything very neat. As the train came out into the open and drew near to our destination she always, at exactly the same point, drew a dark beret from her school bag and began the business of arranging it on her head. It had to lie flat at the back and be slightly raised at the front, never just pulled on. She would be patting and adjusting for a good five minutes before it was just as it should be. Her friend always came with beret already in place. The patting and adjusting was more, I sensed, that just putting the beret on for the purposes of adhering to school regulations (what troubles lay in store for those caught beret or tie-less), but was a way of becoming the person she needed to be in order to go through the day as she needed to. It was like putting on armour before the battle, checking the point of the sword, buckling up.I did not want her life, that was for sure. But sometimes I wanted to feel what I though it must be like to be her - to have no thought for the next day other than the completely predictable - just to know what that might be like.

The rockanroll life goes on.

chemistry

I woke at some ungodly hour thinking about stink bombs. I can explain. At some point in the next couple of months we will have to find a way of clearing out the loft. Son will be arriving home with all his stuff and though he will come and go, his stuff will need house space for a while. Therefore some things will need to go loftwards, but loft is full and, apart from Signs children's art works and old soft toys I have gone blank and can't remember what is up there, apart from a 1960s chemistry set (unused) my dad gave me for Christmas one year.

It is still in its cardboard box, everything in its place: the glass vials of blue, yellow and red crystals, the pipette, a thin pamphlet of instructions, unread. On the box is a picture of two children, a girl and a boy, that remind me of my Janet and John early reading books. She is neat and wholesome in tight plaits, he is smart and keen, short back and sides, holding a vial up to the light.

It was the Enid Blyton books about girls’ boarding schools called St. Clare’s and Mallory Towers. All human life was there, but there was no complexity. If you were a girl who liked to be pretty and neat, this was what you manifested in all you did. Ditto if you were good at lacrosse and team games. The sensible girls who held the social structure together never did anything reprehensible and if one of those did, say, utter one small untruth or throw a paper dart at mam’zelle in the heat of the moment, she would suffer the purging effects of inner remorse until all was made clean again. She would in due course be made head girl. There was the fat one who ate too much, stole other peoples’ tuck and was lazy, the shy one with problems who would be taken into the protection of the sporty one and go on to develop some artistic gift such as playing the violin, and then there was the odd-ball, slightly out on a limb with a touch of the Tomboy about her and cheerfully self-sufficient who was tolerated and indulged by the rest because she was a decent sort and frightfully clever. She played practical jokes and got away with it. She had a chemistry set. She made stink bombs. She might set one off on a particularly auspicious occasion when parents and teachers were gathered together and the girl no-one liked because she was so vain and up herself was about to make a long speech no-one wanted to hear. The stink bomb sent everyone rushing outside onto the lawn to have their cool lemonade and cucumber sandwiches and the clever, naughty girl was severely reprimanded but the headmistress had a twinkle in her eye. The twinkle followed this girl around like a charm. She could write her own script. She could duck out of things she didn’t want to do (embroidery, hockey practice), she could build a crystal radio set and make stink bombs. She had a secret tree house in the grounds where she kept her treasures: old medals, stamps and coins, a daily journal like a kind of lighthouse keeper’s log book; her chemistry set. When the school goody-two-shoes found out and reported her, it was goody who got the flack for being a sneak, not clever individualist stink bomb-maker. And when the time came for a heroic act, she would come and save the day – rescue the new first-former from the blazing fire. Decent.

More importantly, she had a life that was her own, one that I coveted. I possessed a journal, all I had written into it so far was the words for Raggle Taggle Gypsies but I could work on this. The boarding school would come and with it my chosen persona. All I needed was the chemistry set. I must have flicked through the pamphlet once at any rate. There was no reference to stink bombs. You could mix one substance with another to make something else happen, melt the crystals down and make a large one. I was not interested. But still, I had it.

My boarding school was not like St. Clare’s or Mallory Towers. People were less fathomable. My own nature too was a mystery to me. I was not brave, clever or charismatic or resourceful enough to learn how to make a stink bomb. I read books and found that reading about such things was more to my taste than putting them into practice.

But still. The box has come with me, moved from place to place for decades. The crystals have congealed and hardened. The pink on Janet’s cheeks has faded and John seems altogether insubstantial, as though touched by a wraith from the land of Mordor. There is a yellow and a blue that is never seen on children’s packaging any more, not even in Eastern Europe. The set is what we might now call long past its use-by date; untouched, yet still touched by the glamour of its original promise. I'll never bring myself to open it or throw it away.

Magical Thinking

Apart from wanting to have a magical piece of wood that could be used as my double, like the one given to a girl in my German story book, I never wished for any particular magical power. This wasn’t because I didn’t believe in magic, but because magic was something I lived by and within most of the time. It must have been an elevated kind of magic, the sort you don’t necessarily use for crude personal gain or to make life easier, more congenial – because life was not easy or congenial. When we came back to England from Germany, I was a strange creature moving from one place to another, changing schools with each move, each new place putting me at one more remove and making me stranger. I lost my father en route because my parents separated: first he was on tour, running around on all fours being a pantomime cat, then when he came to back to London he lived in a bedsit. My mother was distracted, career-building, unpredictable, there were girls from Scandinavia, Germany and Spain to look after me and my sister and they were bored, resentful, unpredictable. My school-teachers were sometimes well-meaning, sometimes not, and it was easy to do something that would get you into trouble. There was nothing surer than magic.

I carried it inside me. Story books helped, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, though only a few of them carried the DNA of magic. Magical Thinking is a reductionist or pejorative term sometimes used by psychoanalytic therapists to describe the strategies used by insecure individuals to ward of anxiety etc. Magical thinking was sure ground beneath my feet and represented the hidden light that lay just beneath the surface of things and sometimes broke out, like a shining behind cloud, or like song that you feel in your breast. It came from the heart rather than the head and radiated down to my fingertips, keeping my hands warm. You could say it was a faculty I developed in extremis, but none the less real for that.

When I was nine I would go into the room I shared with my sister and look out of the window in the direction of London Zoo from where one could hear the wolves howling. A new breed had been brought in from Russia. They looked out of the bars of their cages and found nothing they recognised but the wide black sky and the moon.
I looked out at The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all,
And the star of the sailor, and Mars and pictured the pail that was half full of water and stars, and all was in place, packed tight, the magic, nothing missing. It was the coldest winter for over twenty years and in the new year, in February, a poet who lived nearby put her head in a gas oven and died. She was Sylvia Plath, but I didn’t know about her yet. She and I had the same doctor and she probably went to the same playground, with her two small children, that I went to.

If you lived without any magic at all, life was just boiled cabbage and gristle for lunch, a cold home-coming, a beige carpet with ugly stains in the shape of cockroaches. I made a post box out of an old biscuit tin – cut a slit into its lid, damaged a knife in the process, threw the knife away to lose the evidence (my mother kept wondering but never knew where it had got to, her best kitchen knife). I posted notes through the slit – messages (to whom?) saying, when the moon is blue your wish will come true (meaning that the moon would without a shadow of a doubt sometimes be blue, for it was written, yes in my own hand, and I had seen it in my mind’s eye); and messages that were simply the titles of books I had read: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, What Katy Did, Five Children and It, The Borrowers, The Wind on the Moon, Das Doppelte Lottchen, Peterchen’s Mondfahrt – and lines from A Child’s Garden of Verses.

Dark brown is the river, golden is the sand

The Writing

I am back on the prose project again (I won’t say the N word in case it comes and smacks me on the head for leaving it so long). Still keeping an eye on doing something with poems but last year was not hugely encouraging. I need to keep sending out, and will.

The project I’m working on has a first person narrator and draws from autobiographical experience but the narrator is not me. This is something of a relief as I wasn’t sure at the outset because she and I share so many details, including some years at an inner London primary school in the 1960s, which is where I am now with it. I wish I’d known how childhood stays with you forever, I would have eaten even more sweets, my teeth couldn’t have been any worse than they were. Whatever difficulties had to be negotiated in the classroom, the playground or at dinner time (slugs hiding under the salad cream, gristle in the stew and fearsome dinner ladies) you knew that sweets would always be there for you – cheap, reliable, plentiful. Even the poorest kids seemed able to afford those. You could get four chews for a penny and a generous bag of fluorescent sherbet for tuppence. Actually, I am not writing about the sweets at the moment, but it’s good to know that they are there in the background and the writing, I feel sure, will want to go there at some point. Sweet cigarettes, though (remember those?), have made an appearance. They were basically the same as what are now sold as “candy sticks”, but with a red tip at the end so you could pretend you were smoking them, and they used to have cards with pictures of footballers that you could swap with the boys for a bit of liquorice shoelace. Bazooka bubblegum could last a whole day if you stuck it under the desk in between sessions.

It seems hardly believable now that the girls and boys playgrounds were separated by a brick wall, but that is how it was, and we had our own entrances too. If a girl tried to play in the boys playground she was called a Tomboy and if a boy came into the girls playground he was a Cissy. You wouldn’t want to be called either of those things, but being a Tomboy was fractionally easier than being a Cissy as it carried with it a smidgeon of respect borne out of fear.

The narrator has an easier time of it than I did, not having lived in Germany and come back to England with an accent (not to mention the weird haircut and Lederhosen), but there will obviously be other complications in her life because, as Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes) says, “the happy childhood is hardly worth your while.” She is, though, optimistic and resourceful and it is another child’s predicament that becomes the catalyst for events that unfold.

But why am I talking about it when I could be writing it? Well one reason is that I am bog-tired after driving through a pea-souper of fog in the small hours to collect Son from somewhere or other in the middle of blasted heath after his return from Dublin. And then I couldn’t sleep. And when I did I woke again after only a few hours. And today I have a trip to Lewes. And – most interestingly – whenever I sit down to write the Project I kind of gear up for it because it counts as Work, but whenever I sit down to put words onto blog, I just do it.

Yes, I know.

Living in Narnia

I went there with my sister. In the holidays we had long weeks with nothing to do but whatever we could find to amuse ourselves with. Eva, the Norwegian au pair who took care of us, had a serious boyfriend she was in love with which meant that she was always in a good mood but also not particularly present; so we could do more or less what we liked, and sometimes she would forget about lunch or supper. We didn’t mind. My sister was nearly six years younger than me and I was used to looking after her, as she was used to relying on me for the next thing, the next game to play or place to be.

I made Narnia in the space above the built-in wardrobe in our bedroom. To access it we needed the wooden stepladder. Once inside, the space was generous enough for the two of us to sit comfortably with our sandwiches, biscuits and fruit, or whatever I could find that would most closely resemble the tea that Mr. Tumnus the fawn made for Lucy that first time she stumbled through the wardrobe into Narnia and perpetual winter. Really there should have been a boiled egg but that would have been too difficult. There should also have been an iced cake with a cherry on the top. I improvised. The cake was made of plasticine. It was old and all the colours had bled into each other long ago so the cake was a kind of sludge brown with streaks of pink and turquoise through it. I found a red marble that served as the cherry. The walls of the above-wardrobe space were covered with our drawings of the Narnian forest, Mr. Tumnus’s sitting room and Aslan the lion, true King of Narnia. We had to keep the doors open a little so as not to sit in darkness, and the green and yellow daylight, the sound of Eva vacuuming the flat as she sang along to pop tunes on Radio Luxembourg, slightly broke up our perfect Narnian winter. We needed a candle so I rummaged around in the sitting room cupboard where my mother kept the Christmas things. My grandmother sent beeswax candles from Germany; they had a mellow, even light and gave off a scent of honey. I stuck the candle to a saucer and we closed the doors to the outside world, even though Lucy would have said that it is a very silly thing to shut oneself into a wardrobe.
“You’re very clever,” said my little sister. A selection of stuffed animals were with us, pressed against the wall and corners. Benjamin, the largest bear, was Aslan and Alfie the monkey was Mr. Tumnus. We ate our sandwiches which I had cut into triangles. On each triangle I had put a small decorative flourish with Heinz tomato ketchup or Daddies brown sauce. There was a small bowl full of raising and peanuts. “You’re a good cooker,” said my sister munching a sandwich. I read an excerpt from the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – the part where all four children had found their way to Narnia and are in the house of the beavers.

Eva absent-mindedly put the stepladder away and called out to see where we were. My sister was about to push open the door and call back but I shook my head and whispered, “let’s hide.” So we did, just like the Pevensey children had, and Eva thought we must have gone off to the playground. And when we jumped down, back into the ordinary world, no-one had really noticed our absence. Just like in the book.

Which is a long way of saying that I’m going to be retreating for a month or so – maybe not into Narnia but, you know – the place where story comes from. And I’ll be closing the door, but not completely –

Be seeing you.

The Key of the Kingdom

Today I saw a collection of keys set out on a friend’s kitchen table. The one that caught my eye was a tiny grey key attached by a ring to a small padlock with metal clasps on the sky-blue body of it. The metal clasps were designed so that they held the blue like lips. It reminded me of the key and padlock that used to belong to the lock diary I had as a child.

I wanted to be like Anne Frank with her imaginary friend, Kitty. But the lock diary was a heavy, plastic, embossed brick of a thing from Woolworths and each day was sectioned off, a small space, because it was a five-year diary. So the things I wrote were small and unelaborated.

I went to Primrose Hill today.
Deirdre came and we had cake.

Deirdre was the masseuse who came to give my mother treatments. Her husband was a political prisoner in South Africa. After the massage treatment she would sit on our living room floor which had under-floor electric heating and eat cake and talk. She always stayed a long time. She said her life was hard, she had two daughters and didn’t know when she would see her husband again. She was fat and cheerful as she spoke but she said she just had to take each day at a time and that was how it was to live with a broken heart. I didn’t put any of that in my diary – there wouldn’t have been room, and even if there had been, would I have set it down? I wanted to be passionate and upbeat like Anne Frank. Even when she was railing against the unfairness of the adults and saying how it was to live hidden away in an attic for so long, she had a voice that sang in full-throated relish of life and all its particulars. A five-year diary with a small space for each day would have been no use to her at all. It allowed no room for the particulars or for reflection.

If I’d had the kind of writing book that existed in my imagination, what might I have written? The key to the kingdom of the articulated inner life was not yet forged. The small diary key did not, in any case, really provide a safe and secret place. It was held shut with a thick band the same colour as the cover. At my boarding school some girls nearly cut it so as to look inside – the temptation to look into secret places is strong. And anyone could have bought an identical diary from Woolworths and used the key to look inside. This happened to a girl I knew, and so her mother found out that she had let a boy put his hand inside her knickers.

I lost the key to my diary and had in any case abandoned it. It lived for a while in the loft of my mother’s flat and then I don’t know what happened to it. Perhaps it still exists somewhere with the words that were written into it:

I went to Primrose Hill today.
Deirdre came and we had cake.
Daddy sent me a postcard.
I have got a new red beret.

A Bit of Boot Camp

The good news is I’ve been given this award by Ms Minx


She has awarded it to people she reckons are less lazy than she but I suspect she is probably a hive of industry compared to me. Some of the most industrious people I know seem to be so without looking as though they are doing that much. On the other hand, there are those who do very little and I wouldn’t call them lazy. Why is that? It’s to do with the quality of attention that they bring to life, I suppose.

At the many schools I attended I was often thought of as being lazy, dreamy (a euphemism) or at any rate someone who “could try harder.” As a child one tends to accept whatever label is given as true. But looking back, I don’t think I was at all lazy; bored, disorientated or alienated is something quite different and I certainly was one or all of those for substantial amounts of time. When I walked out of the school building the day of a biology exam and went to Hampstead Heath instead, it wasn’t laziness that drove me but a sudden conviction that I knew what I needed – to get out. The English teacher there liked me because I was good at books and poems and writing stories (especially those) but it didn’t stop me from being Asked To Leave. Actually, had they known, I was a tireless worker for anything that had to do with the life of the imagination, which was all I cared about because it was all I understood. I played elaborately and inventively and created for myself and my young sister an otherworld that sustained us through difficult years. I read everything and when I ran out of children’s books I took from the adult shelves, no-one stopped me, so I have a store of read books inside me. I taught myself to cook and steal and play the guitar, all useful skills in their way, though I only really use one of them now.

But I’ve got this Lent thing I’m doing: instead of giving up chocolate I’m working on poems, with the idea that I’m actually going to send stuff out. It’s a kind of recognition that there are things I haven’t got round to doing that I should be doing. Call it laziness (one could) or not being sufficiently grounded. I have this idea, you see, that if editors can’t be bothered to come looking through my files for my poems and get them sorted and published then, you know, sod it. Well nothing has happened so obviously something has got to change – and I suppose it has to be me. A bit of self-imposed boot camp is in order. And gold stars.

Eight Random Facts About Signs

I have been tagged by Cusp.

Here are the "Rules":
(Note from Signs: Please adapt or ignore as you see fit).

1. Let others know who tagged you.
2. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
3. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
4. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged.


1) My mother was chosen to present a bouquet of flowers to Hitler when she was a child at school in Germany. She had long blonde plaits and Aryan-blue eyes, they didn’t know her father was a Jew and in Buchenwald. She lived with her grandparents. Later, she was sent to England on Kindertransport.

2) My father’s skin smelled of apple pie and sandalwood. My mother says this was because, as a baby, his mother bathed him in goat’s milk. He came to England from Germany in the nick of time, with his family.

3) I have been to eleven schools and wonder if it is for this reason that I have never felt I belonged anywhere, or because I feel myself to be a diaspora Jew. My father thought that it was that it was good, not belonging too much to anywhere. He said, “My home is where I hang my hat.” I sometimes think I should get myself a hat and a nail to hang it on.

4) As a child I lived in Germany for some years. Back in England, I couldn’t get used to the food, especially school dinners. We had to finish everything on the plate, but at my table there was a hungry Greek boy who ate everyone’s leftovers, so I passed my potato lumps, cabbage and meat gristle to him when the dinner lady wasn’t looking. He nodded and smiled. His name was Gregory.

5) I know by heart all the German stories and songs I used to have on gramophone records. Whenever it snows at all I think of Frau Holle in the sky shaking her feather bed and pillows, and the children’s chorus refrain: “Frau hi ha Holle, du, schuttle immer zu!”

6) I once met Harold Pinter’s mum in the launderette near Primrose Hill (before it was posh) doing a bag wash. She looked and sounded like Terry Jones in the Monty Python Jean-Paul Sartre sketch. She told me who her son was and asked whether I’d heard of him. She said that he didn’t visit her very much.

7) My sister and I had our fortunes told by George Melly. He was sitting in a teepee dressed as Gypsy Rose Lee at a (Labour Party fund-raising) garden party down the road from where I lived. He told my sister that she would spend her life looking after an aged parent and that I would be a famous actress. I was delighted but my sister was not best pleased. As it turned out, my sister became an actress and I, though only god and the angels will bear witness to this, have vowed to look after my aged mother (in my fashion) when the time comes. She is still going strong with weekly Pilates and aqua aerobics.

8) When I was three or four my Spanish nanny, who loved me dearly and wanted to secure my place in heaven in the hereafter, had me secretly baptised in a Catholic church. I don't know how the secret was discovered. I remember the priest pouring water on my head. I haven’t seen the the nanny since I was five and she went back to Spain to look after her mother and unmarried brother, but we sometimes exchange Christmas cards. She never married or had children. She thinks of me.


I have tagged:

Anna Mr
Chipendale
Digitalesse
NMJ
Surroundings
That's So Pants
The Periodic Englishman
Moonoverwater

House Bonne Femme

What shall I do with her, this house that people come to view and will not buy? I have prepared her each time so as to draw attention to her best features and though not possessing the propertyspeak “wow factor”, her virtues are plain to see. Her defects also. And the people who come are not, I sense, people without a bob or two to spend on something with fuller dimensions. She will appeal to worthy hippies of modest means. Where the devil are they? According to instructions, I have buried my figure of St. Joseph (and dashed good-looking he is, too) upside down at the front of the house. I have shown due respect and wrapped him in a polythene bag to protect from the damp earth, but have forgotten to mark the exact spot so hope I will be able to dig him up again when the time comes so as not to incur the wrath of the heavenly saints – if I have not already done so.

I have let things slip a little, it has to be admitted. I can’t keep the house as pristine as it should be. It is clean but cluttered – by showroom standards, that is. There are things on surfaces, books everywhere and sheaves of paper for the non-existent “to do” file lying around like indolent teenagers that won’t get their act together. The cat’s latest hobby is eating prickly grass to regurgitate on the carpet. It leaves marks. Because the house is on an unadopted, unmade road it gets easily dusty, which I don’t mind, but you can’t show a house off without washing its face, and I forget to.

It occurs to me, not for the first time, that I didn’t have a proper upbringing. My mother had people to “do” for her – a cleaner that came most weekdays plus a live-in mother's help/au pair. She wasn’t rich, it was just how people like her lived then and, one supposes, labour was cheap. For much of the time she worked and, in between husbands, she was a single parent so it undoubtedly made life a little easier than it might have been. I can’t remember ever seeing her doing the cleaning and she only really cooked for high days and dinner parties – exotic things like salade nicoise and fondue. She shopped at a German delicatessen for things like salami and stollen and went to Selfridges for asparagus and smoked salmon. I’m not complaining. Our dysfunctional relationship had nothing to do with her lack of hands-on housewifery. But I never absorbed the skills. The cooking thing I picked up myself – doing it was fun and at the end of it you had good things to eat. It was the cleaning up after that got me. It took me years to learn that there were other ways of removing burnt sugar from a pan than scraping with a knife or that you could clean windows with vinegar water, that there were better ways of maintaining lavatory hygiene than pouring a bottle of bleach down it once a month, that sweeping a floor worked better if you worked from the outside into the middle. Still, I came of age at a time when women were no longer, in theory at least, expected to take all this on their shoulders and never lived among people who considered a dirty front step the sign of bad character. Or if I did, I didn’t notice or care. Him Outdoors has always done his share, and more in the days with young children and me not strong enough. So it’s fine. But I could do with a bit of help from Stepford Wife right now – just while I’m giving the old house a bit of a push, until a new match is secured for her.

Good and Bad at Games

Fame - what is it anyway? “The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little,” said Lord Byron, and he was experienced. But now we have Battle of the Blogs, courtesy of Leesa, and as I have been nominated (my one is here) it is only proper to enter into the spirit of the thing. This is quite out of character as I am and have always been bad at competitive games, the spirit of them I mean. I am sure that this is one of the reasons I was booted out of my Very Good School. Certainly it was an attitude thing, but it was not a case of I’m a free spirit and bollocks to the system, I would have obliged if I could; I was always, and remain, baffled by the concept of team spirit. I had none and couldn’t imagine why others did. I would rather have spent the entire games period scuffing my shoes behind the painted white line on the tarmac ground than run around trying to get the ball into the net.

Also (with hindsight) I was not robust, or my energy was not that kind of energy. I wanted to play the sort of game where there was no winning and losing, there was just the playing. This also ruled out board games like Monopoly or Risk and most card games. It was transformation I was after, pure and simple. Call it an active imagination or the desire to be anywhere but where I happened to find myself in the given moment. Luckily there were always one or two stragglers behind the lines that were kindred, and so it has continued. And there are those in the ranks of the game-players and trophy-collectors with whom I have contact, eye to eye, heart to heart, who take time out to stand in my territory, who graciously invite me into theirs.

I did win a couple of medals, though, for ski-ing: one of them was a gold one for racing. I competed because I was on a trip with the school and was told I had to. I didn’t mind, I was in it for the whoosh on snow and the mastery, the joy of the slalom weave around the posts, transformation, pure and simple. Being given a medal for something I loved doing anyway was strange and good. The golden medal (I imagined it was real gold) was something solid I could hold in my hand, feel the weight of. I wore it on my anorak and it lent me a shine. A bit of fame. It was ok.

Small Good Things

I have been considering how I might answer on judgement day to account for myself and my time on this earthly plane. What have I done here, what achieved? Well not a lot, is one way of looking at it. But I have had my moments and those will have to stand between me and eternal damnation:

I have learned how to make a wooden spoon. I made one at school (a Steiner one obviously) when I was 11, and if asked I could make one again now, from the first drawing on a piece of wood cut for the purpose to the last bit of fine sandpaper and rub of oil so as not to let it go naked into the world. In time it fashions its own skin. It was my father’s favourite cooking utensil. He took it with him into his second marriage. My stepmother loved it too, she used it even when the end was burned, having been left near the gas hob. She may have used it until her death. They talked about it, how when she cooked she always looked for it. To steal from the title of a Raymond Carver story, I count that as a small good thing.

I have found people to play with. In the tarmac playground at primary school, I bounced a ball against the brick wall that separated us from the railway track. I only played with the ones that knew without telling how to make things up as you go along, who could perhaps skip, count and chant dippidippidation my operation, how many people at the station but could also see that there was a door in the brick wall that might lead to the best and the worst of all possible worlds. I played with the ones who would go through the door without asking questions, brave soldiers. And sometimes my comrades-in-arms were stronger than I was. Shakela who, tired of my reading the Beano all the afternoon she came to play, seeing there was very little time left, said: let’s pretend that each minute is a whole day and we can fit in as much playing in quarter of an hour as we could in two weeks. Quintin who had to stand up and be told by Miss Williams that he was filthy and should be ashamed of himself, and who said, I had a bubbly bath last night Miss, and I’m clean and turned to me smiling, showing all his white teeth, who was the butt of Miss Williams’ anger (you’re disgusting Quintin, what are you?) and who at playtime shared with me a chocolate egg that looked like a real one with a white crispy shell.

Who can pull rabbits from a hat and let them go? Turn wine into water and pour it into the river home of a talking fish? I allowed for many possibilities. So my old friend who wanted stories was glad of a woman as beautiful as her hair was black who came from another planet in a spaceship to leave us notes in strange handwriting that said when the moon is blue your wish will come true and a gift of green Palmolive soap, a handful of nuts and raisins stuffed into a sock.

And I write poems. If the One with the black book doesn’t accept these things as currency then I will take my bag of tricks and go elsewhere.