Mad Joy
Authors: Jane Bailey
Jane Bailey
With thanks to The Royal Literary Fund for supporting me in the writing of this novel
At the age of five I ran into a wood, and nearly two years later I walked out of it and into the nearest house. I was covered in filth, shoeless, with leaves and plant stems matted in my hair. My mother – or the woman I would call my mother, Gracie Burrows – found me curled up on her armchair beside the fire. I did not say where I’d come from, because I did not speak.
For a long time I lived mute with Gracie Burrows and she, for her part, was quite happy to be ignorant of my origins in case anyone should reclaim me as their own.
Imagine the scene. On that very day in 1927 Gracie had buried her father, the clockmaker Edmund Burrows, and last remaining member of her family. There had been a small gathering back at the house afterwards. A pitifully small gathering: three half-dead neighbours, in fact, who’d had nothing better to do on a Thursday morning. Gracie had washed up the last plate of crumbs and covered the pyramid of uneaten paste sandwiches with an upturned bowl. She had most probably fought back tears of anger at her wasted life, just as she had always kept her emotions in check through years of duty and restraint. And the newly orphaned, lifelong childless spinster was about to yield to some fierce unfettered grief at last,
when she unlatched the parlour door to find me, a fetid, grubby gift of fate.
We both played our parts so well: she not wanting to know, and me not willing to tell. It was a fine act. We thought we could keep it up for ever.
It was a long, long time since I’d been in a house, and the being there brought a rush of chaotic ghosts. The smell of carbolic soap, paraffin and vegetable leaves; the sooty smell near the range and the linen warming above giving off a powdery cooked-cotton aroma. The sweet, oily smell of the pantry, laced with the trace of cheese and mould and bread and vinegar and everything that had ever been stored. The insides of old wood cupboards, tarry and camphoric: the echo of a chair-leg scraping; the space, the dryness, the silence, the warmth.
The garden was damp and sulphurous with cabbages, little white insects floating around them like thistledown. A stone path led down to the lav and robust clumps of nettle.
The front garden was altogether different. Just a few feet from the road, it was bursting with colour: marigolds, roses, lavender. It was the lavender which had struck me on that bleak September day. Its few remaining florets rose high on their stems, soft and grey with only a hint of mauve. The familiarity of that dignified mist toppled me back to another time, when sitting in its tall stems meant healing and calm.
I had seen a cat by the side of the road – a black and white cat with a pensive, intelligent face. Black and white was good. Dark and light. Balance. It rose and put its tail straight up, as if
beckoning me to follow the little mast. I followed it breathlessly across the road, through the outrageous, uninhibited lavender, and in through Grade’s front door, which was ajar. It
welcomed
me into the parlour where two comfy chairs stood by the range. It took one, and settled into a snug curl on the cushion, showing me what to do on the other. She – for she introduced herself with her eyes – explained that this was a good house for me. Contented and exhausted, I fell asleep.
Grace Burrows was a tallish, big-boned woman who walked as if she were wading through a very deep river. Her face was wide and soft, and on each side of it, covering her ears, she wore a little brown bun.
From the very first moment I woke to see her, I felt I had arrived. The armchair opposite hers by the range seemed to have been waiting for me, its dense old cushion curved already into my shape. I was allowed to explore in any room, and I could touch anything I liked. The only exception was a beautiful porcelain shepherdess on the mantel above the range, because that – although it might not look like it – was a ‘nair loom’. I respected her wish. In any case, I was suspicious of something that pretended to be a shepherdess but which was, in fact, something else altogether.
I loved the picture of her parents on the mantel. They were kind, loving people, she said. I liked the way they looked so old-fashioned, and the advice they used to give, according to Gracie: ‘Never trust a woman with more than two handbags,’ ‘A bird in the hand isn’t worth anything unless you can eat it,’ and ‘A man who wears shop-bought socks is a gentleman.’ They peered out of their silver frame with remarkable goodwill, and I felt a twinge of regret that I hadn’t known them.
* * *
The bed that Gracie put me in that first night was so cool and deep and soft that I wanted to weep. But I was not used to sleeping alone, and she was not used to sleeping in the double bed in the front, so after several visits from her, checking on me, stroking my forehead, kissing me tentatively, I made my own way to the front bedroom and curled up in the soft curve of her, and fell into an easy sleep at last.
I always slept with her after that, pressed up against her wide back or cupped in the warm cotton of her nightgown. And I knew I had always slept with someone. The sappy woodsmoke smell of Nipper, the musky, shadowy smells of long past, and the warm cake smell of Gracie’s soft skin, these all smelt of security. There was nothing that terrified me more – truly terrified me – than a cold, empty bed, with no one but myself to fill it. I did not choose to ask myself why. I slept with Gracie until I left home, although as far as anyone else was concerned, the back room was my room. In it I kept my few clothes, and spent time looking out of the window at the hills, or talking to myself in the mirror.
Views out of windows were dangerous for me. They were a reminder of being inside. But the view from my back room was a good one. It was a long view, taking in the hills in the distance, with sheep that grazed and were going nowhere. I liked the sheep for staying on the hill. Their progress was slow, and when they weren’t there, they were somewhere else. But they never, ever disappeared for good, and I was grateful to them for their consistency.
Because I arrived so soon after her father’s death, Gracie saw me as a gift. She named me ‘Joy’ and told people I was the orphan of a distant cousin who’d died of a tubercular cough. Owing to my mouth being permanently ajar like an idiot, and my tendency to say very little, I was soon known as Mad Joy by
my classmates at Woodside School. There was no bullying involved; it was purely descriptive. They had all sorts at that school, and mad was just one in a spectrum of words to describe the ragbag of children we were. Others were Stinker, the boy who sat on my right in class, Weasel, the girl who sat on my left, and Spit Palmer, the sweet-natured girl in front of me whose neat parting and pigtails I gazed at for most of the day and who had a slight lisp.
Mo Mustoe was a few months younger than me, and emaciated. Most of the children in Woodside were thin because our diet was so poor and we ran around a lot. But Mo Mustoe looked as if you could pick her up and put her in your pocket. Mo’s older brother was Stinker (or Robert) and her younger brother – who was two but weighed more than she did – was called George, and thought he was a sheepdog as long as I ever knew him.
From the moment she patted the empty seat beside her, I saw little Mo Mustoe as an ally. She seemed perfectly content with my silence, and chattered away to me as if my grateful looks were replies. I must’ve always said the right thing because she was always delighted with me.
Other children were not so safe:
‘She mad or what?’
‘Bit touched, ent she?’
‘She got a tongue or what?’
Once Mo put her hands on her hips with pride and said, ‘She only speaks to me.’
They laughed at her, and I could see a worried frown appear. Her confidence was so frail and I began to see it was something new she had invented for herself: for a moment her special powers had made her interesting. This playing dumb lark was not so easy as I’d thought. The trick was to make no connections and therefore risk no hurt or derision. But if you overplayed it, you became too interesting. And now this thin runt of a girl had
drawn attention to both of us, and I had to make a decision. I could stay mute and watch them laugh at her, or I could play along.
I waited for her to test me out. She looked at me helplessly, as if she’d been caught out trying to be someone when she was, in fact, worthless. I looked back at her, willing her to make me speak. I would, I decided, say something short if she asked me to: a yes or a no. That wouldn’t hurt. But she said nothing, just looked crumpled and defeated.
Suddenly I lunged forward and put my hand to her ear. I could think of nothing to say, so I whispered ‘Yes.’
The children, who had started to turn away, turned back.
‘What she say, then?’
Mo seemed to grow and glow with my one small action. ‘She got a spell on her!’ Mo breathed, her face alight with
excitement
. ‘If you want to speak to her, you best ask me.’
I had done that. I had made little Mo happy and important. And she for her part had let me fit in. She had given me a role – and a place beside her.
We sat there in class all day, learned nothing and were very happy. It seemed a far better place than the last school I could remember. Here at Woodside, Miss Prosser loved us as if we were her very own, and gave us each a quarter of an apple on Fridays. We had a kitchen garden to plant and dig, logs to play on, songs to sing and triangles and tambourines to make a nice racket on. We thought we loved Miss Prosser with all our hearts. We loved her headphone hairdo, her downy face and her dingy brown handbag; but although we knew she was lonely, we prayed she would never get married in case we lost her for ever.
Nothing much really happened in Woodside except the seasons, and I was happy enough with that. But no one ever went anywhere. If they walked to the next village they’d get homesick and if they had to go to Gloucester or Stroud for
market they’d come back full of complaints about the place, consoling themselves they were glad they lived in Woodside. It seemed to me they had no aspirations and no curiosity. They got up in the mornings and went to work in the fields and grew so bored that they invented days to celebrate.
A few weeks after I arrived there was ‘Apple Day’ in October. I remember it well because there was a smell of ripe apples in the air, and just before I was put to bed Gracie rapped on her back window at some people taking apples from the orchard down beyond the end of her garden.
‘Tiz them bloody gypsies again,’ said Mrs Mustoe from next door. She walked right on in whenever she felt like it, and gave her two pennies worth. ‘Steal the ruddy shirt off our back, they would. Greedy beggars.’
‘Only take what they need,’ I ventured.
This sudden utterance drew such surprise from Mrs Mustoe and Gracie that I thought they were pleased I was speaking. But then Mrs Mustoe narrowed her eyes at me suspiciously, and Gracie shuffled me off to bed, at pains to change the subject. Later when she tucked me in she looked at me with a mixture of anxiety and tenderness, and opened her mouth to say
something
. But, of course, she didn’t want to know too much, so the matter was left floating. If only she had asked, I could have told her I wasn’t a gypsy, and saved her a lifetime of worry. Instead I rolled on my side, paddled my limbs in the coolness of the smooth cotton sheets, and remembered.