My Animal Life (3 page)

Charlotte or Lottie Gee née Brown looked small and delicate (though plump, liking peppermint imperials ‘for my digestion'), with a tiny nose, round cheeks, dimples I inherited and bright blue eyes. By the time I remember her, she had fine pleated pale skin, curled white hair and a chronically bad hip, as well as diabetes and Raynaud's disease — fingers and toes whose blood-vessels go into spasm with cold, turning whitish-blue, and when the blood-flow suddenly returns, an alarming reddish-purple (she died, in the end, from a heart attack followed by gangrene). She still loved clothes, particularly hats, and elaborately pin-tucked blouses worn with brooches over her big soft bosom, and was prone to tell me things I had never thought about, but liked, such as ‘Yellow suits you.' Grandma made a pet of me, I think because Pa made a pet of my cousin Susan, the only other girl in my generation of Gees,
daughter of Vic's brother Lloyd. Sue was very slightly younger than me, and much prettier, with the big blue family eyes (mine were green) and a perfect button nose (mine was long and Irish), and lived in Wolverton, thus having the advantage of playing for the home team. Sue had what seemed to me a huge wardrobe of wonderful dresses, because her mother Aunty Hilda, unlike my own beloved mother, was good at buying and making clothes. But Grandma, known to everyone but her grandchildren as Ma, took me into her bed as a treat in the mornings and whispered the unthinkable: ‘Susan isn't prettier than you.' I must have asked her, or she wouldn't have said it. ‘You'll be very pretty one day.' This was amazing; I was skinny, with glasses, but perhaps if Grandma said so it was true. (I have a vague uneasy memory of checking what Grandma had said with Grandpa. I really wanted to know: ‘Am I prettier than Susan? Grandma says I am' — which was not exactly what she had said, but was what I hoped to hear. ‘No, you're not.' Serves me right.)

Grandma made me pretty clothes. I was helped to be a girl by the extended family. My mother's deficiencies as a dress-maker must have been common knowledge, because everyone made me clothes, some of them remarkable: Grandma knitted me an outfit of multiple pieces in royal blue wool — (is blue royal any more? richer, deeper than sky-blue) — that had a short gathered skirt with buttoned over-the-shoulder straps, a beret, and a bibbed one-piece bathing suit. When I outgrew it she knitted me another bibbed swimsuit I liked even better, orange with a sharp white edge. Best of all, she made me a fluffy white angora bolero, softest, lightest, whitest delight. Aunty Ede, Ma's sister, who had worked in the cotton-mills in Leeds (was
it my father who told me that the three sisters came south from Bradford?) sent a work of art when I had just started junior school, a wonderfully busy cardigan with eight large cats' faces, four on each side, knitted in relief, with green eyes and embroidered whiskers, and the neck and cuffs edged with knitted piecrust frills in scarlet, drawn in with scarlet threads finished with pom-poms. With what passion I wore it to school and accepted compliments (it must have dazzled, in the austere post-war world of the 1950s), how vividly it shines more than fifty years later from the phantom closets of my childhood. Aunty Elsie, on my mother's side, posted, about a year later, just before we moved to Watersfield, a dress of great beauty. Indeed the most beautiful dress I had ever seen: filmy white muslin with raised dots of pale blue, pale blue smocking across the bust, white Peter Pan collar decorated with palest blue ‘S'-bending ric-rac braid, one row of it there and two on the hem, and puffed sleeves. Tragedy: it was too small (and my father was cross: I cried and insisted it fitted, as it strained and creaked under the arms, and he blamed Aunt Elsie because she was from my mother's side). Compensation: Elsie also sent a white satin petticoat, frilled, which was almost as pretty and fitted me perfectly, though I was never allowed to wear it on its own to birthday parties, as I wanted. When I was confirmed, yet another aunt, Bertha, my godmother, made me a white gathered skirt and blouson boat-necked top from a stiff heavy material that proclaimed my fourteen-year-old virtue (would any fourteen-year-old girl now living in Britain accept, sight unseen, a skirt and top sewn by her aunt?) But I wanted to like it, and did: on family windfalls rested my adolescent hopes of femininity and glamour.

There were reasons why my mother wasn't, at least while I was young, very good at getting me clothes. For a start, money. There can't have been much, when Dad was only a teacher and she (because he was a traditional man) wasn't working. Dad had said, in his very unromantic wartime proposal on the station platform when he was on leave from the Air Force, ‘Two can live as cheaply as one, Aileen'; but three, and then four, and then five, as they added children, could not. All the same, the rest of the family, source of my extravagant gifts, were no richer, and most of them were poorer. It wasn't just money. Now I see it was because of my mother's own childhood. A seventh child and third daughter, Mum never had any new clothes of her own, only cast-offs. How was she to know how to make them, or what to buy?

And so we move to the Churches: my other family, my other side. My mother was Aileen Mary Church, but should have been Eileen. The C of E vicar objected to Eileen (because the name was Irish, thus possibly Popish. Zillah Meakins, Mum's grandma on her father's side, seems to have been Irish and probably what was then called a ‘tinker', a gypsy; the Meakinses were frequently away, and had their children christened in batches.) The amiability with which her father changed tack at the christening when the vicar baulked was said to be down to drink, but it also tells you something about the gap between Gees and Churches, because it is inconceivable that a Gee would have changed the name of their child from Eileen to Aileen on a vicar's, or anyone's, say-so — not when they were sober and even less when drunk.

Gees, I was always hearing, had ‘character' and ‘backbone'. ‘If you're going to do a thing, do it
right.' ‘Stick to your guns.' I see these traits come down into Walt Gee's grandchildren, ourselves and our Gee cousins: dogged determination, self-belief, drive, competitiveness at sport and life, on the plus side tenacious loyalty and a mission to do something good in the world, on the minus — I see it in myself — a tendency to be sanctimonious, and at our worst, grandiose. Lucky for me then, lucky for my husband and daughter and friends, that my brothers and I are half my mother's, touched with the redeeming brush, I hope, of the supple, easy-going, anarchic, witty, unashamedly self-interested, sensual, unsentimental, potentially criminal Churches.

Aileen's family lived in Stony Stratford, a walk away across the fields from Wolverton, in a smaller terraced house on London Road facing the graveyard, which had two rooms downstairs, the back room where we sat and ate and the front room for best, never used, with a scullery out at the back and an outside loo that was a wooden plank with a round hole in it over darkness, and smelled. They were not, like the Gees, upper working-class; Mum said the Gees were ‘a cut above'. The Churches were lower working-class, and mostly Tories, which went against their own class interest, whereas Gees, being argumentative, were Labour. I imagine the Churches found Labour politicians too smug for their taste.

When Mum was small, she remembered the family being so poor that her mother had to cut fried eggs in two. She had contracted TB, which flourishes in overcrowded conditions like theirs, but recovered. Grandpa Church, Bill Church, had been in the Indian Army in the First World War, where he was a non-commissioned officer in the mess, and had such a good time
— (there is a group photograph in which he is the only man wearing his cap pushed right back on his head, showing thick black curls, and a big unmilitary, sarky, sociable smile) — that he didn't want to come home. Then Bill worked as a smelter in the steel works, a hellishly thirsty job requiring a lot of beer in the pub on Sunday morning, after which he returned a different man for his lunch, surly and furious, and my mother and Aunty Eve hid under the table.

But by the time I remember him Grandpa Church was an old man, rheumy-eyed, flushed, immensely genial, small and rather loose-lipped, his longish white hair covered now by a beige flat cap, in a brown cardigan, who did a pensioner's part-time job in a grocer's shop, and made jokes about giving us a ride on the bacon-slicer, which, not understanding, I was eager to accept. Grandma Church had been a ‘help' for Mrs Coe, not far away in the same row of terraced houses, all of which the Coes owned, doing her washing and cleaning, and must have cleaned for others too. May Church had had seven children (though she lost one, a little boy called Louis, possibly from the TB which my mother survived), making my own mother Aileen, the youngest, that magical thing, the ‘seventh of a seventh of a seventh', the third-generation child who supposedly has premonitions, ‘the sight'.

Did she? My mother was reluctant to give up that reputation, rationalist though at bottom she was, saying her premonitions were ‘always bad'. (But I think of her,
au fond
, as an optimist, a woman who lived in the cheerful, accepting, make-the-most-of-it present, whereas my insistently upbeat father — ‘Never look back', ‘Don't talk about death', and on the telephone later, demanding a ‘Yes', ‘Are you fit and well?' — was
at bottom more fearful than her, an ingenious, comprehensive worrier.)

Gees, descendants of the perfectionist craftsman and activist, Pa, and the needlewoman and aspirational homemaker, Ma, who hung framed reproductions of pictures like Watts's
Blind Hope
on the sitting-room wall and had a four-shelf bookcase of mostly improving books, became craftsmen or teachers themselves, jobs with a certain rectitude. My elder brother John became head teacher of a comprehensive school, like our father; my younger brother Jim began, and ran, the NHS Counter Fraud Service; I am a moralising writer (though my anarchic side is pure Church). How proud Grandpa and Grandma Gee would have been! Churches, the more numerous offspring of slapdash Bill Church and fey May Davis (of whom it was said, by a possibly jealous sister-in-law, ‘she couldn't even make a decent cup of tea'), had more dubious skills. One of Mum's brothers was a bookie's runner, one did conjuring tricks, all told jokes (Gees couldn't) and were slightly cynical and made each other laugh, one was photographed smiling in an elegantly laid-back way near the top of a human pyramid, some emigrated, all liked money even if they had none, and some, like Eve and Albert, managed to acquire it. Churches occasionally had illegitimate babies, Gees had lifelong but not always amicable marriages. Churches had a gene, usually suppressed but life-enhancing, for red hair, as expressed in the waves of my beautiful, rebellious and eventually well-off cousin Maureen, and the crimson crest (heightened with henna) of my purple-and-turquoise-wearing, cricket- and claret-loving, scientific, artistic and eccentric second cousin Jane Teather; Mum had some chestnut in her thick dark
hair, and my daughter Rosa was a strawberry blonde until she was six. Red meant, well, a bit raffish. Where Gees became trades unionists and in later generations lefties, Churches became Foresters or freemasons, liking the secrecy, the drink and the dinners. Uncle Albert was a Worshipful Master and once, vowing me to secrecy, showed me his gilt and silver regalia, which in my memory (but can this be right?) included an elaborate garter; his wife Aunt Eve, my mother's sister, wore furs, had enormous gold rings on all her arthritic fingers, collected silver Masonic gifts, and drew in her eyebrows half an inch above the ghost of her real ones. They were snobs, and gossips, though kind and generous, and my father suspected them of patronising him. Churches had charm in bucketfuls, Gees had pride in spades.

When my mother was dying in hospital (because, as happens so often, death suddenly bore down before we could get her out) and the morphine was carrying her a little away from herself, she slipped back into the past, and talked about the churchyard opposite the house where she was born: ‘There are women in long white dresses walking about between the graves,' she told me as I sat by her bedside. One sentence she repeated, holding my hand: ‘There's someone waiting for me at home who is good as gold, good as gold.' This was her mother May, née May Davis, source of my mother's occasional feyness, genetic wellspring, I imagine, of my own writing, lover of rhymes, daughter of the nearest thing in my own family to a writer.

I only remember my mother's mother as a very old lady. Grandma Church was in her eighties when she died, in what must have been 1952, because I was only four and recall for some reason the gaiters and
brown checked coat I wore on the day of her death, alas the same day as the death of one of the two spinster Gardiner sisters who lived next door, Miss Lou and Miss Grace. So that I, hopping in from the garden into the kitchen where my mother was crying, still chanting my repeated refrain of the day, ‘Poor Grandma, poor Miss Gardiner,' was rounded on with natural asperity by my mother, who said, ‘Never mind Miss Gardiner, how about
Grandma?'
— and my father made everything worse by telling her off for being unfair. The guilt of having caused my mother double pain still gives me a little stab of unhappiness.

Grandma Church, to me, was an old lady, tall and big for an old lady, who made puzzling jokes and had long ashen and brindled hair wound around her head in a thin coiled sausage, and dark brown tortoise-shell spectacles. She had a fur coat with shiny worn edges that probably came from her employer Mrs Coe, but she still had a smiley mouth, not like the thin lips that most old people had, a feature I always admired in my mother, whose mouth never grew mean or old. Grandma Church would bend over and talk to me, so I liked her even if I never quite understood her, but then children never quite understand grownups, so this seemed nothing remarkable. I remember, one time when Grandma and Grandpa were staying with us at Bromsgrove, a conversation one day on the sunny landing about a hair, which Grandma showed me, and stroked across the palm of my hand (was it growing on her face? Perhaps.) When I reported this to my parents I recall my father looking serious, and saying something to my mother, who said, ‘Oh she's all right, Vic, never mind.' This was explained much later when Mum told me that her mother had been ‘senile' in her last few
years but that Grandpa hadn't helped by ‘taking over everything at home so she felt that she couldn't do anything at all'.