just like me. Peas flick from their pods into a white enamel colander, which has a rim of navy blue. The scent of inner pea pod rises around me. I count the peas. I tug the embryonic peas from the stalk, and count them as half, or quarter. My grandmother makes strawberry pie. A question people pose is, ‘How many beans make five?’
I used to be Irish but I’m not sure now. My grandmother was born on Valentine’s Day, or so she always thought; my mother says that Annie Connor, being the eldest, gave out to her brothers and sisters the birthdays she thought they would like. Now someone has produced an official paper, and Grandma’s birthday’s got altered to the first of March. Everyone laughs at her. She laughs too, but she’s not happy to change. They say she used to be our Valentine, but now she’s a Mad March Hare. Her name is Kitty, sometimes Kate; before she married she was called O’Shea. Her mother—before she married—was called Catherine Ryan. She was a small illiterate lady with an upright walk. An old person who remembers her has told my mother, ‘While you are alive and walking, Catherine Ryan will be alive.’ Or words to that effect.
Much later, when I’m in my teens, my godmother lets it slip that Catherine Ryan was fond of a drink. We have to revise our mental picture of this famous walk of hers, and my mother is no longer so pleased about the comparison. I defend my great-grandmother, saying that I’m not surprised if she took a drink: surely she was like the old woman who lived in a shoe, she had so many children that she didn’t know what to do? Ten, eleven, twelve? I’m always losing count; there’s Paddy and Martin and Daniel and Joe, there’s John and Joanna and Mick. And why did her husband leave her, alone with all those babies? My mother says, it wasn’t his fault; he would have come back to her, Patrick Ryan, if only she had made it possible. My mother is usually on the side of men; I’m, usually, not. Grandma says: one thing about my mammy, anyway, she may have taken a drink but she never smoked a pipe. And oh, she knew how to cook cabbage!
My mother says: ‘Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace, Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go, Friday’s child works hard for a living, Saturday’s child is loving and giving, but the child that is born on the Sabbath day, is blithe and bonny, good and gay.’
I have various thoughts about this. I think my mother must be Monday’s child. I know I am born on Sunday but it would be complacent to dwell on it. Besides, I think any parent would prefer Saturday’s child. I ask, which day is my daddy? She doesn’t miss a beat. I think it must be Thursday, she says, because he has to go into town every day.
My father Henry is tall and thin, with a tweed sports jacket. His black hair is slicked back with a patent solution. He wears spectacles and looks very intelligent, in my opinion. He brings home the Manchester Evening News.
When he comes in from work he carries on his coat the complex city smell of smog, ink, tobacco. He has a travelling chess set, its leather cover worn, which folds up and slides into a pocket. The chessmen, red and white, fit into the boards by tiny pegs. I can play with them, but not the proper game. I am not old enough, wait till I am seven. (He might as well say, wait till you’re forty-five, for all that seven means to me.) With his good pen, Henry completes the crossword puzzle in the paper. I sit on his knee while this occurs. To help him, I hold his pen, and click the ballpoint in and out, so it won’t go effete and lazy between clues. I like to get close to people who are thinking, to glue myself to the warm, buzzy, sticky field of their concentration. Henry reads the racing page. It is horses who race. To aid him, I imagine the horses. He says their names. I picture them strenuously.
With my mother and my father Henry I go on the green electric train, the same colour as my raincoat; this coat I have picked specially, as blending in with the electric train; it has an industrial smell of rubber. When we step into the train, with its wide automatic doors, I take the hands of my mother and father and ensure that we all step in together, leading off with the same foot. I am afraid someone will get left behind, and I believe that once the doors have swooped closed you can’t open them again. Suppose one person stepped on first, and the doors closed, and that person was on the train alone, sent ahead: worst of all, suppose that person should be me?
We go to Manchester, to Mrs Ward, my father’s grandmother. (Alice, his mother, has gone up in the fire.) My great-grandfather is still alive and sitting in the back room by the range, but nobody seems to take much notice of him. He has white hair and a black suit and a watch-chain across his meagre belly; I designate him the trade of watchmaker. My Manchester great-grandmother is diminutive even by my standards, with a skull the size of an orange. She takes me upstairs and opens a chest, out of which she takes scraps of shiny, silky fabric. These are to dress my dolls, she explains. I am too polite to say I don’t dress dolls, or sew with stitches.
When my mother sees the scraps, she assumes a look of scorn. Scorn is a beautiful word. He curls his bearded lip in scorn. Bastion is a beautiful world, as is citadel, vaunt and joust. Anyone who hesitates near me, these days, has to read me a chapter of ‘King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table’. I am considering adding knight errant to the profession of railway guard. Knight errant means knight wanderer, but I also think it means knight who has made a mistake. Mistakes are made all the time; it is a human thing, in a knight, to slip up once in a while.
I am waiting to change into a boy. When I am four this will occur.
I suppose the trips to Manchester occupied a span of years; first the three of us went, then just myself and Henry. I had a dread of the streets and roofscapes, which were like a trap. I was used to looking up and seeing hills. The bay-windowed red-brick houses seemed to me squalid, though they were larger and better appointed than the stone-built millworkers’ cottages in Hadfield. My cousin Geoffrey, a large boy, was told off to take me to the park. It was a gritty walk on the endless pavements, under the second-hand sky, and when you arrived there was only a rabbit of limited interest, twitching its nose through wire. I do not remember Geoffrey’s face at all, only his huge legs in flapping flannel shorts, the blunt bony bulk of his knees. He was my adopted cousin, I was told; I wonder why, out of all the things that weren’t explained, this one thing was explained to me. Back at the house Geoffrey would trap me between items of furniture, sticking out one of those huge legs to prevent me toddling the way I meant to go, then when I turned back barring me with an outstretched arm, so that I revolved about and about in a tearful muddle. He was teasing, he meant me no harm. I saw myself through his eyes, silly, frilly, too tiny to outwit him or hit him, baby fists clenched in exasperation. And this picture dismayed me, so far was it at odds with my own image of myself. In my own mind, I was already at least middle-aged. My judgement of Geoffrey was that only the accident of my small size concealed my great superiority to him in every way. And this made it doubly galling, that I was stuck in an alley between armchairs, and would be rotating there until somebody noticed and said, ‘Now Geoffrey don’t torment her…’
Sitting up at the big table with a white cloth, we ate ham and tongue. The white plates were icy to the touch. Once I asked my mother, why do we always have ham and tongue? She snapped, ‘Because you said you liked it.’ I am amazed; I don’t expect my likes to have any sway in the world, and clearly, neither does she.
The journeys home I don’t remember. I expect I was pole-axed with fatigue, what between Geoffrey and the rabbit and the watchmaker and the strain on my mother’s face. I left us to herd on to the train any way we could.
‘Ward’ means watch, it can be a place of surveillance, it can be the name for a defensible segment within a castle: a place for sentinels.
I have a friend. It is Evelyn, a Protestant. I go down the yard to play with her. Evelyn’s mother is wrapped about and about in a big pinny. She is cheerful and talks in a Scottish way. My mother calls her Kath, which I think a melting name. She teaches me to say Kirkcudbrightshire. When she gives me my dinner she puts the salt already on it: Grandad has noticed that I don’t take salt, but she can’t know that. Her legs in thick dark stockings are the shape of bottles, so when anyone says ‘Stout’ I think of Evelyn’s mum.
Evelyn’s house—the Aldous’s house—is darker than ours and has a more dumpling smell. Not being Catholics, they don’t have a piano, but as they are at the end of the common yard, they have a more tidy and well-arranged plot,