right.
Sums were my cross. Numeracy was not one of Grandfather’s gifts; we never played with numbers, which were a subdivision of dilapidations and no fun at all. I went to school armed against the spit-and-chalk routine – words went on working – but with sums I struggled like the rest, since it was never part of Mr Palmer’s plan (the school’s plan) to reveal that the necessary skills were learnable. If you passed the scholarship, that was because you were somebody who should never have been at Hanmer school in the first place, was his theory.
One day he lined up his class and went down the line saying with gloomy satisfaction ‘You’ll be a muck-shoveller, you’ll be a muck-shoveller …’ and so on and on, only missing out the homework trio. As things turned out he was mistaken – by the time my Hanmer generation grew up there were very few jobs on the land, the old mixed labour-intensive farming had finally collapsed, farmers had gone over to machinery, and the children he’d consigned to near-illiteracy and innumeracy had to re-educate themselves and move on. Which they did, despite all the school had done to inculcate ignorance. Back there and then in our childhoods, though, in the late Forties, Mr Palmer seemed omniscient. He ruled over a little world where conformity, bafflement, fear and furtive defiance were the orders of the day. Every child’s ambition at Hanmer school was to avoid attracting his attention, or that of Miss Myra or Miss Daisy. We all played dumb, the one lesson everyone learned.
We’d have seemed a lumpen lot: sullen, unresponsive, cowed, shy or giggly in the presence of grown-ups. A bunch of nose-pickers and nail-biters, with scabbed knees, warts, chapped skin and unbrushed teeth. We shared a certain family resemblance, in other words. Some of it was absolutely, organically, real: seven or eight huge families accounted between them for nearly half the population of the school. There were brothers, sisters and cousins who slapped, shoved and bossed each other unmercifully, but always stood up for their own flesh and blood (thickened, it was rumoured, by incest) in the end. ‘You leave our Doreen alone.’ Or else.
Having big brothers or (much better) big sisters – since the big boys had their own separate playground and didn’t usually deign to intervene – seemed the first condition for survival in the infants’ class. In fact, though, these rough, protective clans were already on the way out. There were quite a few parents who’d worked out that one way of escaping poverty was having fewer children, and a subtle eye could have detected among the mass of rowdy, runny-nosed urchins a small sub-class of better-dressed, prissier and slightly more respectable children. The girls wore hairslides and newly knitted cardigans, the boys were ‘nesh’ (the Hanmer word for anything from clean to feeling-the-cold to cowardly) and were endlessly tormented. Being an only child – as I was, for the time being – was a mixed blessing at best when it came down to the gritty realities of the playground. The ‘nesh’ ones I despised and it was entirely mutual, since I was dirty, precocious and had never been treated like a child. And the tribes despised me for being sole, pseudo-clean and ‘stuck up’.
So the playground was hell: Chinese burns, pinches, slaps and kicks, and horrible games. I can still hear the noise of a thick wet skipping rope slapping the ground. There’d be a big girl each end and you had to leap through without tripping. Joining in was only marginally less awful than being left out. It’s said (truly) that most women forget the pain of childbirth; I think that we all forget the pain of being a child at school for the first time, the sheer ineptitude, as though you’ll never learn to mark out your own space. It’s doubly shaming – shaming to remember as well, to feel so sorry for your scabby little self back there in small people’s purgatory.
My first days at school were punctuated by fierce contests in the yard, duels almost, complete with spectators, with the one girl who might have been expected to be my friend. In fact, she did become my very best friend, years later, when we went round holding hands painfully fast and giggling together hysterically, but for now she was my sworn enemy. Gail (she even had a funny name, like me) had hair in ringlets, green-hazel eyes and pale, clear, slightly olive skin stretched tight and shiny over her muscles, and she was nearly a year older than I was. She’d have won our war in any case, though, since she was so physically confident, in charge of her body even when she was five. Was she already going to dancing lessons? I don’t remember. In adult life she became a teacher of physical education and modern dance herself, and even in the days of our adolescent intimacy she would sometimes win an argument by twisting my wrist. I was convinced at the start, anyway, that she was simply better at inhabiting her body than I was – not only better at face-pulling, hair-pulling, pinching, scratching and every sort of violence, but wiry and graceful, so that she made me feel like an unstrung puppet.
Once she’d thoroughly trounced me in public, Gail ignored me and held court in her own corner every playtime. She remained something of a loner, however. Other little girls might admire the ringlets and the dresses with smocking on the yokes, and the white socks that stayed up, but she was not allowed out to play in the square after school and everyone knew that she had to sit for hours every night while her grandmother twisted her hair in rags. What really set her apart, though – even more effectively than the vicarage set me apart – was the fact that her mother was divorced.
Given that quite a few kids in Hanmer didn’t know who their father was – or at least knew that he wasn’t the one he was supposed to be – it may seem odd that divorce stood out as a social sin. But its novelty was against it. It was untraditional, new-fangled and (worst of all) above Gail’s mother’s station. Someone like Lady Kenyon (the Kenyons were the other local grandees, a lot richer and more dashing than the Hanmers) might be divorced and that was fittingly aristocratic; for the local garage owner’s daughter to do it was very different. Who did she think she was? People saw her as some new brand of fallen woman.
She was disapproved of in the vicarage, too, but mostly for reasons of envy. There was a history behind this: Gail’s mother and my mother had been friends before the war. They had starred together in the pantomimes my grandfather had put on in the village hall in the days before he had been overtaken by booze and bitterness. My mother, whose name was Valma – another of Grandfather’s romantic choices, although I’ve never known where he got it – and Gail’s mother, whose name was Ivy, had played Prince Charming and Cinderella respectively. They stood there in a surviving photograph, two slim young women with their arms clasped around each other’s waists in the middle of the assembled cast, their big, hopeful, lipsticked smiles looking black and glamorous. Gail’s mother, being divorced, looked pretty much like this still, except that she was even skinnier. She also had a job driving the local taxi. Whereas my mother, thanks to a combination of marriage, poverty and her parents’ crazy demands, lived in (comparative) purdah. This was what made Grandma furious. She said that Ivy looked like Olive Oyl in the Popeye cartoons, or like a stick of liquorice. And that she was common. But it was all sour grapes. Secretly Grandma must have thought divorce a good idea – her notion of marriage, after all, was that a man signed you up to have his wicked way with you and should spend the rest of his life paying through the nose. But her expressed opinion coincided with village wisdom.
Even playground games, in the intervals of thumps and pushes, were all about the changeless order of things. ‘The farmer wants a wife,’ we’d chant, joining hands in a ring – ‘Heigh ho, heigh ho, the farmer wants a wife.’ And when the snotty little boy in the middle had chosen his bride, ‘The wife wants a child … The child wants a dog. Heigh ho, heigh ho’ – which sounded like ‘ee-oh!’, this farmer was related to Old Macdonald – ‘The child wants a dog.’ This doggy extension of the nuclear family seemed to join human arrangements on to the whole wealth of species, top to bottom, patriarch to pup. And then the climax – ‘The dog wants a bone.’ The bone, by tradition a tiny, would be vigorously bounced, thrown into the air and caught on the way down, by the farmer, wife, child and dog, while we all shouted triumphantly, ‘The bone – won’t – stand! Eee oh! Eee oh! The bone – won’t – STAND!’ Being chosen as the bone was a mixed delight, scary and painful as well as thrilling, so I wasn’t sorry that my turn seldom came round. This game, all the games, were a bit like those horrible group therapy exercises where you’re meant to let yourself fall in order to learn to trust the rest, who catch you. Mutual dependence – farmer, wife, child, dog, bone, representing the great chain of being. And you couldn’t be outside of