The Girl from Station X (3 page)

But Carmen, like Paco and Miss Ettie, was dead.

My mother was wearing a smart black-and-white suit, half-hidden by a navy-blue jacket. On leaving Sussex that morning she had put on an old brown anorak covered with cigarette burns and
dogs’ hairs, but was persuaded to take it off. Her hair had been washed, but her teeth needed attention and often she had a distracted air, as though her mind really was wandering.

In ‘the old days’ in Madrid, she was glamorous. For as long as I can remember, I have owned a silver-framed photograph of her and my father at Raymond’s christening there in
1951. My father, in his white naval attaché’s uniform, cradles his baby son and my mother, in a spotted dress and white hat, stands beside her husband. She looks animated and pretty;
more than pretty – radiant.

Now, if she wasn’t careful, she could appear just as an old bag lady.

When Maria came the next morning, she offered to drive my mother to the Escorial – the royal palace that was the historical residence of the kings of Spain. Doreen
whispered to me that there was only room in Maria’s car for four and we were five. Why didn’t we let Molly go, as she had never seen the Escorial, and Doreen would stay with me and my
son and go to the Thyssen collection?

My mother just sat there looking vague. Why on earth couldn’t she ask me and my son to go with her? I’d never seen the Escorial either and Maria was the mother of one of my oldest
school friends. But I said nothing. I was used to my mother having an entourage who indulged her every whim. I could not imagine my aunt, who was close to
her
only daughter, being in this
situation. But there were always others between me and my mother, and she allowed it.

After four days in Madrid, Molly and Nicholas and I left for home. My mother and Doreen were staying on. Our taxi driver, who beside his driving mirror had a picture of Jesus and his Sacred
Heart, took us to the airport on a route that went past our old house. This time we did see it. It
was
on the corner after all, as Doreen and my mother had thought, but it was no longer 117
– the street numbers had changed. I even thought I recognised it. The apricot tree could still be there, inside its walls.

N
orth Heath House, Chieveley, Berkshire, England, 1955. I proudly take my parents Alka-Seltzer every morning. I drop the white tablets into the
water, which I have fetched from the bathroom in two glasses. Then I watch the water fizz. I pretend that my mother is a little girl of my own age, five; her portrait, as that little girl, hangs in
my parents’ bedroom. How sweet she is, with her light brown hair, curled at the ends, and her blue eyes. What fun it would be to have her as a companion. How I wish that the little girl in
the portrait would come and play with me!

I long for my mother to pick me up, so that I can feel her soft skin. But it is always my father who has me on his lap. My mother holds Raymond, and after tea we play the gramophone, on its lid
the picture of the dog, his ears cocked, listening to His Master’s Voice; I am worried that the dog’s master may have left him and this makes me feel sad. We play ‘Bonny
Dundee’, ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, ‘Speed Bonny Boat’, ‘Hush Hush Hush, Here Comes the Bogey Man’. Raymond and I dance. My parents seem to love
being with us. Our father drives us to nursery school – even once retying my hair ribbon, skew-whiff, so it comes undone and my teacher Miss Booth has to do it again – and on the way he
teaches me and Raymond capital cities and the counties of England: the southern,
Kent Sussex Hampshire Dorset Devon Cornwall
, like a horse trotting, he explains, and the northern,
Northumberland Durham and York. Lancashire Stafford North Wales
, like a horse cantering. My father sings us his favourite songs: ‘Who were you with last night? Out in the pale
moonlight’ and ‘Hello, hello, who’s your lady friend? Who’s the little girlie by your side?’ In the nursery after tea he plays a game where he sits one of us on his
lap then asks: ‘Do you feel safe? Are you
sure
you feel quite safe? Are you
sure
?’, before his knees give way.

But it is Doreen, whom Raymond and I call ‘Deeny’, who does the daily grind with us small children – my brother Nicky was born in 1953. Doreen, with the help of Margaret, the
nursery maid Raymond and I call ‘M’Paul’, gives us porridge with brown sugar every morning while we listen to the shipping forecast, Doreen gets our clothes ready for us each day,
Doreen takes us on long walks along the road and over the common. It is Doreen, not my mother, who disciplines us, bathes us and puts us to bed.

My mother sometimes walks with us on the common – in May and June there is frothy Queen Anne’s Lace, in July poppies and sky-blue cornflowers, but not as blue as my mother’s
eyes, which are almost turquoise. My mother, with her home movie camera, films me and Raymond jumping up and down in the corn, poppies waving all around us.

My mother always comes to say good night to me.

My mother knows I’m scared of the dark. She wants me to have a night-light and a potty under my bed. But Deeny doesn’t approve of night-lights and doesn’t want me to spend a
penny in the middle of the night. I wake up and creep to the lavatory, and when I come out, Deeny is standing outside her own bedroom in her pink nightdress, her face white with fury.

Doreen is strict but my mother is sweet, fun, magical. She enjoys my imaginary characters – The Grey Lady, three girls called Snippy, Dotty and Gaga, and the Jaily Black Men, huge men on
black horses who gallop in at night from behind the pear trees outside my window. When I am ill with a high temperature, my mother takes me to sleep with her in the bedroom she shares with my
father. She wakes me during the night to give me brown medicine in a spoon, then describes the fairies she can see out of the window, like little balls of coloured light. I believe her, though
I’d imagined fairies as little people. To test whether they exist, when I’m better, I leave a tiny blue flower in a special place on the lawn. Next morning, it has gone. The fairies
took it. They do exist. My mother was right.

My mother and I – all of us – are happy at North Heath. Before I go to sleep, she reads to me from a book called
The Merry Meadow
, about a grasshopper, a rabbit and a
harvest mouse who live in a meadow full of flowers, where there is always sunshine.

We are moving soon, to live near our grandmother.

‘Does our new house have a merry meadow?’ I ask my mother.

‘Yes, it does,’ she replies, with certainty.

How I love my mother then! I associate her with the sea, because of her vivid blue eyes, her star sign, Cancer the Crab (the astrological sign associated with motherhood), and because one of the
places where she is happiest is Hope Cove, a fishing village in Devon where we now go most summers.

In Hope Cove’s village is a little square with white thatched cottages, framed with hydrangeas, white, pink and blue. Across the road, below our house, is the beach, sandy and safe at low
tide, then at high tide the sea splashing up and licking at the sea wall. The rocks under that wall form ‘my house’ – the smooth pink one the bathroom, the dark grey jagged one
the dining room, the light grey smooth one the bedroom. Raymond and I play with our buckets and spades on the sand and in the rock pools. Raymond’s bathing pants are white with red crabs on
them. My mother insists that we wear sun hats. Raymond points at me: ‘You look like a baby in that hat!’

At Hope Cove, my mother is often in a white cotton skirt and top with a pattern of little figures dancing; I remember her in that outfit in Spain. On the beach, she wears a blue bathing suit
with a skirt. She puts on a cap covered with yellow daisies and swims far out, to the rock that only appears at low tide, where you sometimes see a puffin. How brave my mother is! As a child, she
boasts, she could climb the rocks with bare feet, outdoing the fishermen’s sons. She wants us to be as courageous as she was and I want to please her.

My mother knows about the tides and how they affect her prawning. She wades out to the rocks at the far side of the beach carrying her heavy fishing net and waits patiently for the low tide to
turn. Later she returns to the house with a pale cotton bag slung round her neck, full of live prawns; she doesn’t think this cruel. One summer, like a boy, she throws a bucket of water at a
cat that has got into the garden at Hope, and when we’re back home at North Heath, she encourages Raymond to laugh with her at the newsreader on our new television. They close the TV shutters
while he’s still speaking, my mother saying to Raymond: ‘Isn’t he hideous?’ I know that the man on the television can’t see us, but her nastiness – and that
business with the cat – cut me to the quick.

From when I was a very small child, I loved my grandmother’s house, Knowle. I loved the round dark pink soaps in my grandmother’s bathrooms, smelling of carnation.
I loved her terrapin, Okie, named after Lake Okeechobee in Florida, where he came from – my mother and grandmother brought him over on a ship, where, with two baby alligators, he travelled in
a bath. I loved my grandmother’s white Chinese pheasant, which followed me up and down inside his huge cage while I ran to and fro outside. I loved her garden with its row of white rose trees
she called ‘The Bridesmaids’, her big greenhouse with its rich scents and damp heat in winter, her banana tree that she wrapped up in straw when it grew cold. I loved my
grandmother’s green wooden swing by the monkey puzzle tree, on which a couple of adults could sit facing each other, her sloping lawn with its low box hedges leading to the swimming pool and
her old magnolia tree which bloomed there in spring, its petals like huge blobs of cream.

I specially loved the woods where my grandmother and I walked. In spring they were full of primroses, bluebells, azaleas and rhododendrons. I made Gran play a game called ‘The
Trehernes’, about a married couple I had invented who lived in Cornwall, had eight children and ran a riding school. My grandmother was Mrs Treherne on a grey mare, except of course we were
on foot. As Mrs Treherne, my grandmother made occasional remarks, while I took charge of the story. I was Jane, the Trehernes’ third daughter. I had a bay pony, Tinker, and a seven-year-old
twin, Jack. My grandmother was always in a good temper, always relaxed.

By the stream in the heart of the woods was a shed with a pump inside that beat like a tom-tom. When I heard it, I changed our game to ‘Deerfoot in the Forest’, based on a book about
Red Indians that my mother had had as a child in America. My grandmother and I slipped and slithered in the mud down to the stream where the wild garlic grew. Her West Highland dog Kenny went off
hunting rabbits. His white coat became filthy. Back at Knowle, he was dried with an old towel on the veranda. Just inside the veranda door was a bowl made of thick china – cream, blue and
brown – with words going round it in capitals:
LOVE ME LOVE MY DOG.

How I adored being with my grandmother! I loved the way she would stand still in the middle of a room, or in a field, or in a bit of her garden, humming, as though there was never any hurry. I
loved her smell of sweet talcum powder, the same carnation smell as her little soaps. But later I overheard my father telling a friend: ‘Anne doesn’t like her mother’s house
because of what happened there.’

Sometimes I felt guilty that I loved Knowle, and my grandmother, so much.

On the afternoon of my seventh birthday, 24 November 1956, my three brothers and I are at Knowle while our parents are still a few hours away, packing – we have left
North Heath forever and will stay with my grandmother till our new house, nearer hers in Sussex, is ready. Deeny has hurt her back, and we have a temporary nanny.

Leaving my two little brothers – the new one is a baby of six months – in the care of Nanny B, whom we like, and who has looked after us before, my grandmother takes Raymond and me
for a walk to see her pigs. She knows that Raymond is able to climb the low fence she’s had put round the swimming pool to protect our two-year-old brother Nicky, because Raymond, who’s
five, boasts about it.

‘You’re too big to fall into swimming pools,’ I hear her reply.

We see the baby pigs, protected from their mother – who otherwise might lie on them and kill them – by a manger with a warm, rosy light, then set off back through the wood, and
across the big field home. After our walk, my grandmother helps me take off my wellingtons, then I join my brother Nicky in the schoolroom, where my mother as a girl had had lessons with a
governess. I make him play horses, using a piece of string I found by the pigs, and we gallop up and down the corridor, each time passing two pictures of a child being stolen by gypsies. The second
shows it being reunited with its family, but I don’t believe it. The first picture, of the stolen child in white garments, surrounded by gypsies with cruel faces, two pulling at its clothes,
sticks in my mind.

Where is Raymond? It’s so dark outside. I open the door to my grandmother’s dining room, just across from the schoolroom. There is my birthday tea; my cake with white icing, a pink
sugar rose and seven candles. But there is no one to eat it. A row of portraits, of women with waxy yellow faces, stare down at me. All the adults, except Nanny B, who is a long way upstairs,
bathing my baby brother, are looking for Raymond.

I send Nicky along the corridor to find out what’s going on. I don’t want to go myself, I am scared, but when Nicky doesn’t return, I go anyway, to fetch him. I hear a
man’s voice – perhaps Mr Tash’s – say: ‘Raymond’s in the pool!’ He must mean the fishpond by the veranda. Nicky and I are sent back down the corridor.

That evening my father comes into the schoolroom. He tells me: ‘Raymond’s gone to Jesus.’

My father only ever uses the word ‘Jesus’ when swearing. I sense that he is performing a duty that he loathes. I say nothing. I tie Nicky to the piano with the piece of string I used
earlier to play horses. I intend to look after him, always.