Bad Blood (18 page)

Hanmer wasn't on his patch, of course, but you could picture the Maelor district as a mini-Wessex, less English, less fertile, lacking a writer to describe it. The local dialect did make a lot of the syllable ‘Ur' that he singles out in
Tess
to stand for the ancient burr you can hear in country voices. In Hanmer grammar ‘Ur' or ‘'Er' was the all-purpose pronoun used for men, women, children, cattle, tractors. It implied a kind of levelling, as though all were objects, and you could use it for a tree or a stone, too. In my memory it's always associated with negatives – ‘dunna', ‘conna', ‘wunna'. You kick a gate that's warped
half off its hinge: ‘'Er wunna open,' you say without surprise. Everything had its own sullen, passive power of resistance.

At harvest times there was a carnival quickening in the air. The hay harvest in June was often a frantic race against time and weather. People lent a hand after work late into the light evenings to get the hay stacked and thatched or piled loose into a barn. But the corn harvest at the end of the summer was the event the parish ritually celebrated. As Grandpa noted in his diary, the way Harvest Festival packed Hanmer people into church along with their fruit and veg and sheaves showed just how pagan they were. Not everyone grew corn – Mr Watson didn't – but it had a shared significance, and some rackety field sports were attached to it.

For instance, each field's crop was cut so as to leave a small plot of corn standing in the middle. Then, when the combine harvester had done thudding, everyone, the labourers' families, kids and hangers-on, would converge on this corn island with hoots and yells, sticks and pitchforks, and murder the mass of voles, mice and rabbits that had taken shelter there as they made a last mad dash for safety. If you finished off a rabbit it was yours to take home. I never managed it and couldn't have taken my prize home if I had, for a bloody rabbit still warm in its fur would have been the very embodiment of my mother's food horrors. Soon no one would be eating rabbit, in any case, for myxomatosis reached Hanmer late in 1953. The whole countryside stank for weeks of decomposing rabbit flesh, sweet and foul, and unforgettably disgusting. And everywhere on the roads and paths rabbits staggered about dying by inches, blind, their heads swollen and fly-blown, so that it was a kindness to kill them quickly. Those cruel harvest games were good practice, it was useful to know how to knock a rabbit on the head.

Local people didn't know (or didn't say) that myxomatosis
had been introduced deliberately to destroy the rabbit population and save millions on the crops they plundered. Although dramatic, this act of viral warfare was all part of the drive towards efficiency – the breeding programmes, the intensive use of pesticides, fertilisers, hormones – that would put farms like Watsons' out of business. It would also drastically reduce job opportunities for muck-shovellers, for all Mr Palmer's confidence in the unchanging order of society. Many Hanmer people had cause to sympathise with the rabbits. Even Sir Edward Hanmer, who was a well-known stickler for tradition, wasn't so blind to self-interest that he didn't see that labourers were becoming dispensable. If you were his tenant in a tied cottage, it was always very hard to get him to mend your roof and only dreamers expected him to modernise the plumbing. But now when cottages fell vacant, they'd be promptly bulldozed, leaving only a lilac bush or flowering currant looking lost in the middle of an empty field to mark where someone's garden had been.

Nonetheless, for the moment, Watsons' went on existing as though it always would. I'd fetch up the cows in the afternoon from whichever field they'd been grazing and feel ineffably useful, caught up in the saving sameness of the days and carried along. They knew their own way, you simply had to amble after with a stick of office pulled from the hedge for show and shout ‘Hey up!' if they stopped to snack at the roadside. They moved in a cloud of flies and gnats, and their tails were constantly in motion whisking them away, except when one or another dropped a line of khaki-coloured cowpats along the road, when she'd raise the first few joints of her tail at a dainty angle, like a lady cocking a little finger as she lifted her teacup. They conferred dignity on their minder, these big, calm, preoccupied animals, and power too – so that when cars came,
you could stare indifferently into space and make them wait before chivvying the herd to one side and letting them through. This was better than riding the tractor, especially the times when Mr Watson borrowed the bull, and I could watch drivers' double-takes as they spotted the ring in the nose, the loose chain dragging along the ground, the slouching gait, the red eyes . . . Surrounded by his harem, this bull was a weary and docile beast, but strangers didn't know that and I'd enjoy their alarm when they realised that I was the only one in charge. I'd chew thoughtfully on my straw and bask in being a yokel, a bumpkin, a hick from the sticks.

I'd turned into a tomboy travesty of my mother's little shepherdess, orphaned and anonymous, and utterly absorbed in the world outside. The repetition of farm days made them seem a backwater of time where the future was safely accounted for. And you were superior to those – like my father and mother – who were so anxious about who and how to be. Why not just lose yourself, lose your way but find it too, in among the cows and hedges and ditches and gates that needed kicking? ‘'Er wunna move.' Stick in the mud, why not? I was well on the way to tacking together a sort of nature religion to make up for Grandpa's defection, an apotheosis of the back of beyond, in which I was just another thinking thing, neuter, drab, camouflaged. There'd be sermons in stones, and books to read in the haybarn, for ever and ever. Amen.

But even if you were very good at not telling the time – and I was – you couldn't not see the signs that Hanmer was after all located in the world of the nervous 1950s. Hicks from the sticks would be very much a part of the new post-austerity scene, they were grist to the mill, the very material of recovery. In the land of the 1950s you were meant to be socially mobile, but personally conformist; self-made, but in one of the moulds
made ready. You mustn't miss the boat, but you mustn't rock it either. Older Hanmer generations might stay put, mine wouldn't be able to even if we wanted, for better and for worse we were redundant on the land, we'd be moved on and groomed to start over as good consumers.

Among the signs of change was the trivial but telling matter of clothes after coupons. Suddenly you were spoilt for choice and yet constrained, not only by money, but by the rich variety of sumptuary laws concerning fashion and decency, from which kids were by no means exempt. Girls could wear trousers, for instance – but not generic trousers, not mere pants, nothing that captured the magic neutrality I was after when I tucked my pigtails down the collar of my windcheater and chewed my straw. Instead, the glossy clothes catalogues offered slacks, trews, toreador pants, capri pants, ski pants, pedal-pushers (a particularly bad joke on me) all in bright boiled-sweetie colours, tartans, checks, stripes and spots, announcing loudly that girls wore trousers only in play, in order to look more girly than ever. Girls' pants were cute and tight, made of stretch fabrics or with darts and high waistbands to emphasise your curves. There were jeans, true, but they were cut in the same way, and so elaborately equipped with turn-ups and decorative studs that you looked like a cowgirl in a musical. And – the crowning glory of difference – they
all
had side zips or buttons, never an opening that could for a second be confused with boys' flies, there was to be no hint of gender-bending, nothing loose or baggy or greyly ambiguous. You were a lot less conspicuous as a girl in a skirt.

All the neutral stuff belonged to boys and men, and so should jobs like fetching up the cows. Mr Watson made an exception for me, but when I strayed to other farms this division of labour was obvious. At Hunts', along the road, my favourite
tasks fell to the son, Terry, a sturdy boy a bit younger than me. Mr Hunt was training up Terry for his role with curses and cuffs round the ear, and completely ignored me – partly out of contempt, but also because it was a well-established Hanmer rule that (school apart) you weren't allowed to batter other men's children, and violence was Mr Hunt's main language. Once, when Terry tipped over a heavy wheelbarrow full of manure, his strong young father picked him up and sent him flying face-first into the midden and we had to wash him off, shivering with shock and humiliation, in the old horse trough.

Terry was very clumsy and very shy, with a terrible stammer, and his father was always in a temper, red-faced and laying about him. Hunts' was a bigger and more modern farm than Watsons', with milking machines and an echoing cement-floored shippon you could hose down, but its ways were barbaric. We'd hear Mrs Hunt cry out from her kitchen, peer in and see Mr Hunt bending her over the kitchen table with his hand twisted in her hair. And we'd creep away, Terry and I, not knowing what we'd seen – sex or just hurt and was there a difference? – and cuddle each other uncertainly in the hay, whispering, mystified. At times like that, farm life didn't look like a refuge at all, but chaotic and brutish. At least, back in the council house, you were court-martialled before being beaten.

Did Hanmer's remoteness breed cruelty, was it part of the time-honoured pattern? Perhaps men like Mr Hunt were more hysterically tyrannical because they sensed the world changing around them. He wasn't a lone monster. You didn't have to look far for split lips and black eyes, and all sorts of weals and bruises. Either women and children in Hanmer were especially accident-prone, or it was a routinely violent place. You learned
not to pay much attention. There were many wives who lived like Mrs Hunt, my own Aunt Binnie, my father's sister, for one, although we didn't know – managed not to know – until years later. Even if you were in love with the notion of life in the sticks there were stories you couldn't not ponder, though.

Mrs Parker, who was the agent with the Technicolor clothes catalogue and used to call at our house every week to collect our payments, often looked the worse for wear. She and her husband had half a dozen children, two of them said to be fathered by their neighbour, George Fitch, a brutal, thick-set man who lived in the next-door cottage with a cowed wife and a tribe of kids of his own, and whose tell-tale red hair those two Parker children inherited, rather than their official father's mousy colouring. This sort of thing wasn't unusual around Hanmer, particularly when people lived in an isolated huddle of houses like theirs. However, Mrs Parker, a handsome, big-boned, quiet woman,
was
unusual in taking on the agency for the catalogue and keeping her family, whatever their provenance, better-dressed than most.

Then, one day, she didn't appear to collect the money, and the day after that everyone knew that it was because she'd killed herself by drinking rat poison. Why, exactly, was never known. Perhaps she'd had secret plans that came to nothing, perhaps she was pregnant again by George Fitch and couldn't face the rows, or perhaps she was simply pregnant again . . . It would have been melodramatically satisfying to imagine thwarted passion, except that it was hard to think of her relation with George Fitch as an ‘affair', more likely it was a matter of occasional rape (we wouldn't have used these words back then, but we could picture the thing clearly enough).

Mrs Parker's end caused a brief scandal. Her despair broke the mould of passive resistance, she wouldn't be kicked any
more. It made an impression on me, but at the same time I treasured up my experience of the other life of Hanmer, the easygoing life on small, dying farms, ways of being you didn't have to make up as you went along. Not mine. Perhaps not anybody's for much longer, but certainly not mine. I was off across the border into England, to school in Whitchurch, all of six miles there and six miles back on the bus every day: a world away.

Without the Lord, all is in vain
said the Whitchurch Girls' High School crest on our blazer pockets. And how right they were, although it was not the Lord but His language, Latin, that was my salvation. Latin, the great dead language that only existed in writing, would compensate for my speechlessness, vindicate my sleepless nights and in general redeem my utter lack of social graces. Latin stood for higher education, still, in the early 1950s, a kind of litmus test for academic aptitude – you couldn't get into university without an O-level in Latin, it was the sign of being able to detach yourself from here and now, abstract your understanding of words, train your memory and live solitary in your head with only books for company. So it was meant to be hard, but I found it wonderfully easy, for just these reasons. I fell in love with Latin. It was the tongue the dead spoke,
ergo
Grandpa's language, of course. I could hear his show-off exasperated tones and his preacher's style in every tame declension and conjugation.

Nisi Dominus Frustra
was mumbo-jumbo for the mind's ear. The motto my new school truly believed in, however, was
mens sana in corpore sano
, a healthy mind in a healthy body, and team games, religious knowledge and ‘domestic science' figured large on the curriculum. The high school cultivated the air of being somehow still fee-paying, it was designed to
produce solid, disciplined, well-groomed girls who'd marry local traders and solicitors like their fathers. The eleven-plus had let in a leavening of out-of-towners and outsiders, but that had only made it more vital to insist on sub-public-school mores – uniforms, ‘houses', and an elaborate hierarchy of prefects and deputy prefects whose job it was to remind their juniors to stand up straight, and send them out to run up and down the playing field at break in wet weather instead of huddling in the cloakrooms. So, in falling in love with Latin, I was obeying the letter of the school's law rather than its spirit.