FULL MARKS FOR TRYING (10 page)

In the evenings in Fleet we all gathered in the sitting room listening to the big brown radio which Grandpa first had to tune for what seemed like hours of  EEEEEEE OOOOOOOO ZZZZZZZZ BRRRRRRR noises before we got to hear any words. (Cars that start first time and radios that work as soon as you switch them on are luxuries that we didn't know about in the Fifties.)

Our grandfather sat next to the radio in case it needed a little tweak now and again, and played patience on a big wooden board that was greasy from use, while Mum and Granny and my aunts (our widowed Aunt Thea, and our young Aunt Joan who was living with us on and off then) and the rest of us all worked on some kind of knitting or embroidery or sewing. Very often, one of us young ones would be coerced into holding out our arms with a skein of wool stretched between them so that Granny or Mum or an aunt could wind the wool into a ball. For months on end I patiently did netting, which Grandpa had taught me, using string and a slat of wood. I was making an adult-sized hammock and when it was finished the whole family assembled to watch it being strung up between two trees in the garden. Then a boy who was staying with our cousins jumped into it – and went straight through the bottom . . . It was a crushing disappointment for me and the end of my enthusiasm for netting (but not other crafts).

The days seemed longer then, perhaps because they weren't gulped down by television and social media. We children did chores: helping Grandpa in the garden by picking up fallen leaves between two boards and putting them on the compost heap, or weeding the lawn with a neat little fork-like gadget that levered plantains and dandelions out by their roots; and in the house we laid the table and did the washing up which was even quite fun when we did it all together. Aunt Thea had just bought a set of unbreakable tumblers – a new invention. For some reason none of us knew the glasses were unbreakable apart from Jinny who decided to play a joke on us all; while we were busy drying up she stacked a whole lot of them together in a tall, wobbly tower and then called out, ‘Look everyone,' and dropped them on the floor – where they broke into a million pieces. Everyone stared at Jinny as though she was mad . . . she says she has felt guilty about it ever since. Why had the unbreakable glasses broken? We discovered later that they had shattered because they were wedged into each other.

After a while Dad got a job in the West Country, and we moved to Exmouth. Tessa and I went to a local convent where I got into trouble in Art for drawing women with bosoms, i.e., with a triangular bit sticking out of their fronts. This was considered ‘rude' but as a child brought up in India, with all those improbable breasts on Hindu sculpture, I couldn't understand what I had done wrong. Almost the worst thing that happened in Exmouth was that Tessa and I got chickenpox and had to stay in the school OVER THE EASTER HOLIDAYS. I don't know why we couldn't go home; Tessa thinks it might have been because our parents were doing something to our house – redecorating it? – and didn't want two sick children around. She has just reminded me that there was an up-side to having to stay on after term ended: we found a drawer full of the comic
School Friend
. At home, we had a subscription to
Girl
(which had a popular character called Lettice Leefe, the Greenest Girl in the School) and we loved it, but it was more educational and less racy than
School Friend
which was considered slightly naff – or, as they would have said in those days, ‘common' – and wasn't allowed.

Other bad things that happened in Exmouth were that I fell downstairs on to a cactus on the landing and it took days to tweezer out all the prickles, and another, more serious, was that poor Mum was going through the menopause (though of course we didn't realise that at the time) which meant that she often had rapid heartbeat and believed she was dying, so the doctor would be called in the middle of the night – they still came out on house calls in those days – and we'd be woken by grown-ups whispering loudly and moving up and down stairs. It only occurs to me now that perhaps we had to stay at school when we got chickenpox because Mum couldn't cope?

Moira was the one who had to deal with all this; she was still living at home then, working as a secretary in Exeter. She earned so little, she told me later, that when she sent her suit to the dry-cleaner's she had to stay home until it was ready because she didn't have another outfit she could wear at the office.

After a year or so, Dad was offered another job, this time with a firm called I.J. Morgan in Taunton – I only remember that because Tessa and I made up a rhyme which went ‘Silly old I.J. Morgan/Blows his nose like an organ', which must have annoyed our parents even more than the one about the banded krait in India.

We moved to an old rented farmhouse in a village not far from Taunton and went to the village school where all the classes were taught in the same room, and we developed Somerset accents. Tessa had a party piece: ‘The cuckoo is a telltale, a mischief-making burrrrrrd, he floys to east, he floys to west, and whisperrrrrrs into every nest the wicked things he's hurrrrrrrrd.'

The folk in our village were like characters from
Cold Comfort Farm
: our cleaning lady, Ivy, and her husband were proud of the fact that they had not addressed a single word to each other for twenty years (messages were transmitted via their daughter, June), and we knew a grumpy farmer who never spoke to his family at all – at meals he would just stare fixedly at whatever he wanted passed to him, and eventually someone would notice and hand down the salt or salad cream or whatever it was. We could never imagine how he and his wife had ever managed to get together to produce children.

All my life I have been prone to sudden obsessions – in Fleet once, I doggedly modelled and painted little clay candleholders in the shape of choirboys (basically a cone shape with a round head on top). It was Prue's idea, and the local giftshop bought them from me at Christmas. In Somerset my craze was for curing mouse skins to sell to furriers. It had occurred to me that you never heard of coats made of mouse or rat, so there was obviously a gap in the market which I could fill and become rich. I found out about curing skins and bought alum from the chemist, and when all was ready I collected dead mice from the traps which were set around the farm and borrowed a sharp knife from the kitchen to cut and skin them with. But when I laid my first mouse corpse out on the chopping board, tummy up, and held my knife ready, I realised I could never cut it open and skin it, even if my life depended on it.

A more enduring passion was my collection of matchbox labels – why couldn't I have gone for something like Dinky Toys or Hornby trains that would now be worth a fortune? Matchbox labels are probably one of the very few items in the world that haven't gained an iota of value since the Fifties. I looked through one of my albums of labels recently and out fell a letter from the secretary of the British Governor of Uganda whom I had obviously plagued with correspondence. It is written on paper embossed with the words ‘Government House', and is dated 15 January 1951; it reads, ‘Dear Brigid. Both your letters, the one you wrote in November, and the second one written on 6 January, reached His Excellency the Governor; but I am afraid that whoever told you that he collected matchbox tops made a mistake for he does not do so. All I can do is return your own tops and hope that you may be able to find someone else to “swap” with.'

Mum and Dad gave me four hens for my birthday that year – I think it was to teach me responsibility or perhaps to make up for the failure of my mouse-coat enterprise. I was to look after them and collect their eggs and sell them to Mum to earn some pocket money. The hens were huge Rhode Island Reds and I was terrified of them, especially as they fought and pecked each other's feathers out so they had horrible bald patches as if someone had started plucking them for the oven. In the end I was too frightened to go into their enclosure so I used to throw their food over the netting and Mum had to collect the eggs. Eventually she took them over altogether.

Two or three classes above me at the village school (meaning she was about fourteen), there was a farmer's daughter called Marge who was having an affair with a boy called Eddie, a young cowman (I've changed the names). She wondered if I'd like to watch them ‘doing it' at their next rendezvous in a barn. I said yes – I was genuinely curious, but Eddie said no.

It was all very simple and innocent in those days – somehow even Marge and Eddie seemed quite innocent. Tessa and I thought the naughtiest thing we'd ever heard was my mother's story about some boys she'd known when she was young who would look in the phone book for people called Smelly and then ring them up and ask, ‘Are you Smelly?' and when they said yes, the boys would say, ‘Well, what are you going to do about it? Ha ha ha.'

But gradually the bad old outside world was beginning to impinge – I think my parents took the
Daily Sketch
as well as
The Times
because I was horrified by the sensational stories in some tabloid at home and it couldn't have been the
Mail
because that was a broadsheet in those days, and it wouldn't have been the
Daily Mirror
because that was LABOUR. (My grandmother would never buy TUC biscuits because she believed they were made by the Trades Union Congress.)

The first news story that shocked me was the appalling murder of the Drummond family in 1952: Sir Jack Drummond, a distinguished biochemist, was camping in the South of France along with his wife and daughter and they were all killed one night, for apparently no reason. (The murder was never solved satisfactorily.) Oh God, I remember thinking, no one is safe anywhere. That same year another violent case made banner headlines – a shoot-out on the roof of a warehouse in London between the police and two young men, Christopher Craig and Derek Bentley. A policeman was killed and Bentley was hanged the following year. There was huge discussion about this across the nation – and at home – because he had not been the one to pull the trigger, but he was older (twenty) and had shouted ‘Let him have it' to the younger man (sixteen) with the gun.

But there were heroes as well as villains: Captain Carlsen who clung for days to his stricken ship, the
Flying Enterprise
, until just minutes before it sank off Falmouth (the exact opposite of the Italian captain who, fifty years later, became famous for abandoning the
Costa Concordia
and its passengers). And there were newspaper celebs too – I remember everyone at home tut-tutting over Lady Docker who, in the early Fifties, was the first person I can think of who was famous for no other reason apart from the fact that she was married to a very rich man and had a golden Daimler car.

After a while, Tessa and I were packed off from the farmhouse to what had once been a large convent near Taunton, but now had only a couple of dozen or so boarders. I hated not being at home with our parents, especially as they lived in the same county and I couldn't really understand why we'd been sent away. Only the other day my brother-in-law suggested that it was probably because our mother wanted to play bridge, and perhaps that was it, but it could have just been because putting your children in boarding school then was the ‘done thing'. Whatever the reason we were there, I cried all the time – the nuns said I was washing all the colour out of my eyes – but I think Tessa must have quite liked it because I remember having to urge her to cry too, so that they would send us home, but of course they didn't.

In my homesickness I wet my bed, which brought the punishment of having to sleep alone in a dormitory that had twenty empty beds in it, which of course made me wet the bed even more. But back in my proper dorm it wasn't much better; the other girls used to throw my beloved teddy bear, Valena, a distinguished ‘older woman' in my eyes (she had been my sister Moira's), from one side of the room to the other, and because she was ancient and bald they said she didn't look like a bear but a pig, and since she had no eyes and was shabby, they said she probably had fleas and named her Flea Pig. I felt such hurt and humiliation on behalf of my old friend – I imagine it felt a bit like being a mother whose child is being bullied. After the holidays, I never again took her out in public, but kept her in my bedroom at home which I shared with Tessa.

Tessa and I still bickered and argued non-stop and this led to the worst punishment we ever had. It happened one half-term at home: Dad warned that if we didn't stop quarrelling he would take us back to school for the rest of the holiday – and we didn't, and he did. Crying and pleading, clinging to the banisters, on to the front door – nothing melted his heart: we were told to get into the car and were driven back to school. Following that trauma, we managed to live peacefully together by dividing our room with a piece of string that neither of us was allowed to cross; later we were given separate rooms (I loved mine passionately and painted all the terrible brown junkshop-type furniture pale turquoise-blue).

My moment of glory at the convent – rapidly followed by total humiliation – came when I was chosen to play the part of God the Father in the school concert. I had to stand on a table hidden behind a tall screen so as to be mysterious, and recite the gospel of St John: ‘In the beginning was the Word . . .' I was doing fine until the screen fell down and God the Father was revealed in school uniform perched on a table, and the parents in the audience started to giggle. In the end even I could see that it was funny. My real acting triumph came on another occasion when, sadly, there were no parents present, just nuns and girls. I was squashed into a cardboard box with a TV-screen-shaped hole cut in it so that only my face showed, and acted the part of the hugely popular TV presenter Sylvia Peters. No one remembers her now, but she was on the original
Come Dancing
and was the person chosen to present the Coronation in 1953; she also trained the Queen for her Christmas speeches – which is probably why, if you listen to the Queen's voice and Sylvia Peters's voice, they are indistinguishable one from another.