My great advantage was the churchyard. Mr Downward, the sexton, would turn a blind eye to all but the most boisterous grave-hopping games if I was involved in them. He seemed to regard the churchyard as an extension of the vicarage garden and indeed the wall between them was so tumbledown in one place that the boundary was only a pile of long-fallen bricks in a nettle patch. As the vicarage child I was a licensed trespasser and I shared out my immunity among the ‘dirty’ children I could persuade to play with me after school, or on Saturdays. I was especially popular when there had been a Saturday morning wedding: we all collected confetti, but its dolly-mixture colours didn’t last long in that rainy region, you had to pick up the little pink bells and white bows and silver horseshoes quickly or they dissolved away. We especially treasured the silvered sort and scorned the cheap variety stamped out of waste paper, often mere dots with cryptic fragments of print on them. Once there were drifts of silky paper rose petals on the path, each shaded from cream to crimson, and these we saved up reverently.
Funeral wreaths were even better, although only for looking at until they were thrown on to the rubbish heap in the corner, when if you were lucky you could salvage a carnation or lily or chrysanthemum still blooming – luxury flowers a cut above the sweet williams, wallflowers and Michaelmas daisies of village borders. We marvelled, too, at the glass and porcelain immortelles under their glass globes, and the graves that had shrubs growing on them and shorn grass looked impressively tidy, but it was the bunches of flowers people brought to lay on the graves that gave us our chance really to join in the grown-ups’ mourning games. There’s nothing small children enjoy more than parcelling things out according to some system of just deserts and it was obvious that many of the dead were being short-changed. This a gang of us – mostly girls – set about putting right, redistributing the flowers in jam jars and empty vases filled at the sexton’s pump so that everybody had some. We weren’t strictly egalitarian, however. Certain graves, particularly one with a soulful baby angel in white marble belonging to a child who’d died in the 1930s, always ended up with the best bunches.
It’s tempting, now, looking back, to see in our pious and partial efforts a dim reflection of post-war social policies. Certainly Hanmer churchyard was a pretty good microcosm of inequality. None of those children who puddled around so busily at the pump, and solemnly divided up the daffs and the pinks, had any graves of their own, as it were. Their families must have been buried there, but the graves were unmarked, they had no more property in the churchyard than anywhere else. My family had none there either, of course, but that was because they had recently moved to Hanmer. Nowadays my mother lies there under her stone, alongside my grandparents’ grave. I wonder if any of my generation of upwardly mobile Duckets or Williamses or Briggses have invested in graveyard real estate? Back in the late 1940s their families inhabited anonymous, untended tussocks after they died. I think we kids took it for granted that life after death was a class matter. I know we spent many fruitless hours searching for the entrances to the Hanmer and Kenyon vaults, in the expectation of meeting real ghosts: it was clear to us that the only reason they needed those underground apartments was because they were somehow undead. Or perhaps this was a theory I suggested. Away from the playground, on church territory, I set up as an expert on such spooky topics and managed – on some blissful days – to feel accepted, a member of the child world of Hanmer.
Well, the bugs thought so, I had the school doctor’s word for that. I was sent home with a note, like most people (but not everyone: that line about lice preferring clean hair is just a propaganda ploy to get the middle classes to own up) and predictably Grandma said: one, that I’d caught them from those dirty children; and two, that there was no point in applying the magic bug-killing mixture recommended because it would mean boiling too many kettles and anyway I’d only get reinfected. And anyway we couldn’t be seen buying that stuff in local towns, we’d have to do it in a strange place where no one knew us. So I spent the rest of my time at junior school blithely passing on head lice. The first year at grammar school, too, to my utter chagrin – but that comes later. For the moment, I sort of belonged.
The high point of my career as a dirty child was also, coincidentally, inspired by the school doctor. Medical examinations were a complete novelty to most Hanmer families, and for us kids the beginnings of the National Health Service licensed elaborate games of doctors and nurses, which took place in the bushes at the bottom of the vicarage garden. Nowhere else was private enough (no one else’s family was so oblivious) and so I became, while the craze lasted, everybody’s friend.
We queued up behind a hazel tree, knickers round our knees, clutching leaves for ‘papers’, and shuffled along to have our bottoms examined by Kenny or Bill or Derek, who, after having a good look and making dubious predictions, always prescribed the same thing: another leaf, which might, excitingly, be a nettle, but never was. This one was stuck on with spit if you were a girl, and threaded over your willie if you were a boy, and you were supposed to keep it on like a poultice as long as you could. For most of one summer this illicit clinic was convened once or twice a week, until we got bored, or the weather turned. Never again was there quite such a good occasion for kidnapping other kids on to my territory.
When I think back to that time, it’s not such heady, forbidden games that really represent its feel, but other much more routine memories – like lining up with the others outside on raw winter days, all wearing damp, knitted pixie hats and rubbing our chilblains while we waited to be marched over to the parish hall for our regulation school dinner of whale-meat stew. Thinking of that produces a mingled brew of fear and longing that seems the very essence of school.
Bit by bit the fear came to predominate. I became a timid, clumsy, speechless child – agonisingly shy. In my last year at school Mr Palmer would promise me sixpence for every time he spoke to me and I didn’t cry. I think I earned a shilling. More and more I lived in books, they were my comfort, refuge, addiction, compensation for the humiliations that attended contact with the world outside. But books were nothing really to do with school, not this school. I was a real dunce at the things I was supposed to learn – how to be neat, tidy, dexterous, obedient, punctual. My sewing turned to a grubby rag, it had been unpicked so many times. My knitting was laddered with dropped stitches. I couldn’t write a line without making a blot. So I was mystified when I passed the ‘scholarship’ at ten, and felt sure it was a mistake and someone was going to find me out.
They didn’t and still haven’t, I suppose. Hanmer school left its mark on my mental life, though. For instance, one day in a grammar school maths lesson I got into a crying jag over the notion of minus numbers. Minus one threw out my universe, it couldn’t exist, I couldn’t understand it. This, I realised tear-fully, under coaxing from an amused (and mildly amazed) teacher, was because I thought numbers were things. In fact, cabbages. We’d been taught in Miss Myra’s class to do additon and subtraction by imagining more cabbages and fewer cabbages. Every time I did mental arithmetic I was juggling ghostly vegetables in my head. And when I tried to think of minus one I was trying to imagine an anti-cabbage, an anti-matter cabbage, which was as hard as conceiving of an alternative universe.
Hanmer’s pretty mere, the sloping fields that surrounded us, and the hedges overgrown with hawthorn, honeysuckle and dog roses that fringed the lanes, might as well have been a cunning mirage as far as Grandma was concerned. They did nothing to alleviate the lousy desert that made up her picture of village life. She lived like a prisoner, an urban refugee self-immured behind the vicarage’s bars and shutters. None of my new school friends were allowed in the house. You could get into the vicarage garden via the side yard, or by climbing over the walls, and that was the way we did it. The whole thing was clandestine, the other children weren’t supposed to be really there at all, any more than that picturesque backdrop of lake and trees and cows. Meanwhile, insulated and apart, vicarage life went on. In the church, in bars, in books (Grandpa) or in a scented bedroom fug of dreams of home in South Wales (Grandma). That is of Tonypandy in the Rhondda, which rhymed with yonder, but with its Welsh ‘d’s softened into ‘th’, so that it seemed the essence of elsewhere.
Her Welsh accent was foreign