A Family Affair (11 page)

It wasn't that she was physically incapable, she knew, but that she was afraid. Afraid, deep down, in a part of her psyche she could not reach with any amount of logic. Afraid because when she had tried to climb or jump or be wild in any way at all when she was little, Carrie had drummed into her: ‘Don't do that, Jenny, you'll fall. Don't do it, Jenny, you'll hurt yourself.' The message had gone home and stuck at a time when Jenny had not doubted for a moment that her mother knew everything there was to know.

She might have been quite good at hockey, Jenny thought, if only she was given the chance. It was something she could really put her heart and soul into and she longed to be part of a team. But she didn't yet have her own hockey stick – Heather had promised her one for Christmas – and she had to use one of the school's supply. Because she was always last changing, the best ones had invariably gone, and she was left with some battered relic with the binding coming unwound. Besides this, because she was so dreadfully useless in the gym, Miss Foster assumed she would be equally useless on the hockey field, and when she picked her two teams of eleven girls to play on the main pitch, Jenny would find herself left out yet again, banished to the second pitch, which didn't have any proper goals, struggling to play some sort of ordered game with Diane and Penny and a few other rag, tag and bobtails who had also been excluded. Just occasionally Miss Foster, who was nurturing future stars for the school team, sent the best players off to practice on their own and Jenny got a chance in the match proper. But when she did she was so unpractised and overeager that she was liable to race all over the field for impossible balls and let go the ones she should have safely passed.

She was a failure, Jenny thought, a total failure, and she hated it. Most of all she wanted to succeed. No – most of all she wanted to be popular! But popularity too seemed a goal too far. After all, being good at sport was the best passport to popularity if you didn't happen to be witty or pretty. And Jenny was none of these.

Another miserable time was the period devoted to cookery. Again, Jenny's slowness with any physical activity meant she was always the last to finish rubbing in her pastry and oiling her tins, so the most favourable parts of the ovens were already in use before she tried to fit her effort in, and it ended up either burned or under-cooked. And her corner in the DS room was always the last to be cleared up, so she earned the dislike of Miss Weymouth, the cookery teacher, as well as the scorn of Miss Foster.

One day, however, Jenny did manage to produce some very edible-looking biscuits, and she was pleased and proud as she loaded them into the tin and packed it away in her basket beneath a red-checked tea towel.

‘If they're nice, we can have them for tea,' Carrie had said, after complaining as usual about the expense of the ingredients she had had to provide.

Jenny boarded the coach that would take her home and which picked up at the Secondary Modern school en route, and sat down, nursing her basket and trying to hang on to the strap of her satchel at the same time. The other children – particularly the older ones, who at the ripe old age of thirteen or fourteen should have known better – had been known to snatch her satchel if she didn't hold on to it, take out her ruler and pencil case and exercise books and play catch with them. Today, however, someone spotted that Jenny had been baking.

‘What you got there?'

‘Biscuits,' Jenny said.

‘Let's have one!'

‘No,' Jenny said. ‘I've got to take them home.'

‘Go on – spoilsport!'

‘No!'

‘Well, just let's have a look. Bet they're rubbish. All burned or something.'

‘They're not!' Jenny said indignantly.

‘Let's see, then.'

And Jenny was tempted by the chance to show that she wasn't a complete ninny, as they seemed to think. She wriggled the tin out of the basket and took off the lid.

It was the biggest mistake she could have made. In a flash Wendy Pearce, who was an older version of Valerie, had snatched the tin and helped herself to a biscuit.

‘You can't have them! They're for our tea!' Jenny protested.

Some of the others mimicked her.

‘Not bad!' Wendy said, munching first one biscuit, then another, and passing the tin around, always just out of Jenny's reach. Before the coach reached Jenny's stop half the biscuits had been eaten, the children were helpless with laughter, and Jenny was hot, flustered and close to tears.

When she got home there was nothing for it but to explain to Carrie what had happened. Carrie was furious.

‘I'll go up to the school and complain. Little toads! How dare they!'

‘No – you can't go to school!' Jenny pleaded. ‘You can't!'

‘If they think they can get away with this, they've got another thing coming!'

‘No – please, Mum!' Jenny said. ‘You'll only make things worse.'

‘We'll see about that!'

Jenny felt sick with anxiety. For the first time in her life she positively did not want her mother to come out fighting her corner. To have a parent turning up at school complaining about the behaviour of other pupils would be appallingly humiliating. She'd never live it down. With a flash of insight Jenny realised her mother couldn't be there all the time and the other children would find other, subtler ways of making her life a misery. Even the teachers, whilst ostensibly taking the side of law and order, would feel nothing but scorn for her, put her down as a no-hoper, an overgrown baby fledgling unable to survive outside the nest.

Argument with Carrie was, she knew, useless. Carrie's mind was made up, and Carrie knew best. In the old days, Jenny might have sought Heather's help, but not only did Heather no longer live under the same roof, but she and Carrie were barely on speaking terms. Since the night she had walked out, taking Steven with her, there had been no more weekly visits, and Carrie got a face on, as Jenny called it, whenever Heather's name was mentioned. It was a thoroughly upsetting development and one which Jenny was at a loss to understand, though from the little she had overheard she had a dark half-formed suspicion, something she shrank from thinking about and certainly would not have dreamed of raising with Carrie.

No, Heather couldn't help her this time, and David as an ally never entered her head. David had a girlfriend now, Linda Parfitt from South Compton, about whom he was very secretive and evasive, and he spent less time at home than ever. No, there was only one person she could turn to – her father – though she rather doubted that even he would have much influence on a Carrie with her mind made up. Certainly if the subject were raised in front of her, she would not so much defend her plan of action as simply assert it – this was what she was going to do, and that was that. Joe would probably back her up without even listening to Jenny's point of view. Even if she put it to him on his own there was always the possibility that he would simply say: ‘It's no use arguing with your mother. She'll do as she thinks best.' He tended to take the line of least resistance, Jenny knew, because he hated discord of any kind, and his watchword seemed to be: ‘Anything for the sake of peace.' The thought that she might put him in an awkward position also worried Jenny, as everything seemed to worry her these days, but this was too important to her not to at least try to do something about it.

Her chance came later on in the evening. She had gone to bed, taking with her the map of South America whose states, mountains and capital cities she was supposed to memorise for homework, but which had refused to go in because concentration was beyond her, and was lying sleepless when she heard her father come upstairs. She knew it was him because she could smell the comforting aroma of his cigarette – for all her life Jenny would associate the smell of cigarette smoke and petrol lighters with safety and comfort. She heard him go into the bathroom – having ‘a swill', no doubt, before going down to the Working Men's Club for an hour – and when he came out again she called to him.

‘Dad! Daddy!'

The door opened a crack and light from the landing spilled in.

‘What's the matter?'

‘Can I talk to you?'

He didn't say, as many fathers would, that he was just going out, and couldn't it wait. The door opened wider and she saw him silhouetted against the light, a wiry, slightly built man.

‘I'm really worried, Dad,' she said, and she told him what had happened, ashamed to admit to him that she had been the subject of teasing, because she thought it would belittle her in his eyes and it was incredibly important to her that, of all the people in the world, her dad should think well of her, but needing to share it all, unload some of her anxiety.

‘They'll think I'm a terrible baby,' she finished. ‘If Mum goes to school they'll know I've been telling tales. I'll never live it down.'

‘All right, m'dear, I'll have a word with her,' he said.

‘Will she take any notice of you, though?'

‘Don't worry about it any more,' Joe said. ‘She doesn't always think, your mother.'

Jenny was beginning to feel relief, but she was also rather shocked. It was the first time anyone had ever uttered a word against Carrie to her. Even Glad had her arguments with her up front, never seeking to involve the children. And for Dad to say ‘She doesn't always think', mild as it was, was still an admission that Carrie was not all-wise and omnipotent after all. But the four little words were somehow far more than simply a gentle criticism of Carrie, more than the simple comfort to Jenny he no doubt intended them to be. In that moment a bridge was suddenly built between father and daughter, a bridge of shared confidence, a feeling that he was no longer talking to her as a child but as a young adult, who could take on board the failings and imperfections of those she had always believed to be infallible.

‘She won't go up to the school,' he said. ‘I promise you.'

When he had left her, pulling the door to after him, Jenny lay nervously listening to the rise and fall of their voices in the living room which was immediately below her bedroom, aware that, on Carrie's part at least, the discussion was a little heated and realising that it would now probably be too late for Dad to go out for his drink tonight. She wondered what they were saying, but she was beginning to feel drowsy, and hopeful too. If anyone could get around Mum it was Dad.

Her confidence was rewarded. Nothing more was ever said about the biscuits. Carrie did not go to the school to complain. And Jenny knew she had forged a very special bond with her father.

As if the incident with the biscuits had somehow constituted a

watershed, things gradually began to improve. The Grammar School

no longer seemed such a vast and frightening place, the pupils on the coach home began to lose interest in teasing her, and she even made friends with Ann, Rowena and Kathy, three girls from South Compton who had seemed an inseparable trio but who had accepted her into what had become a foursome. She still disliked gym, physics and cookery – the Christmas cake she had made had been an absolute disaster, soggy in the middle, with garish green icing which hadn't turned out at all the way she'd intended it – but she was doing well at practically everything else, and beginning to enjoy herself.

The house in Alder Road was beginning to feel like home now, with lawn sprouting and new little plants poking bravely out of the bright red soil which became a quagmire of heavy mud in wet weather and a cracked desert in summer drought, and each of the rooms had taken on a character of their own. Jenny particularly liked the row of outhouses, joined by a roofed-over passage to the main house and consisting of an outside lav, a coal house and a store room in which her newest and most treasured possession was stored – her bicycle.

As they had promised, Carrie and Joe had given her the bicycle as her Christmas present, and she still got a tickle of excitement in her tummy each time she remembered coming downstairs on Christmas morning to see it leaning against the wall in the hall covered with a blanket and swathed in tinsel.

She had to learn to ride it, of course, never having been on two wheels before, and Joe and David took turns to go along the lane with her, holding on to the saddle and running behind, steadying her, until she got the hang of it and sailed off, wobbling, on her own. By the time spring came she was quite proficient, and on fine days, when she did not have cookery paraphernalia to carry, she was able to cycle the three and a half miles to school, her satchel propped in an old-fashioned bicycle basket which attached to the handlebars.

But the really big event of that year was the birth of Heather's baby.

It came on a Saturday in February when spring seemed just around the corner. Jenny had gone into Hillsbridge, to do the Saturday morning shop for Carrie, with Heather, who was doing her own shopping. Jenny was acutely conscious of the stares of other customers as they queued for bacon and cheese at the Co-op – Heather was now very close to her time, and embarrassingly enormous. She was also behaving oddly this morning, shifting about impatiently while they waited their turn, not really listening to anything Jenny said to her.

‘Oh for goodness sake!' she snapped when the little wooden cup carrying the money and paper check got stuck halfway along the wire which carried it to the cubicle in the corner of the shop where the cashier sat in solitary splendour. ‘Blooming thing!'

Jenny glanced at her anxiously. She liked the change machine and when she was little had longed to pull the cord to send the wooden cup on its way high above the heads of the customers as the shop assistants did.

‘Are you all right?' she asked.

‘Of course I'm all right! I just wish we could get on and get home!'

But for all that she seemed to be buying more than she usually did – as if she were stocking up for Christmas or a Bank Holiday, Jenny thought, as the assistant weighed out biscuits, sugar and tea at the grocery counter.