in school but he made excuses for me, knowing it was difficult for me to concentrate on homework without a room of my own.
Concerns about my academic performance took a back seat when Uncle Johnny became ill. He had suffered health problems ever since the war, during which he’d served in the Royal Army Medical Corps, attached to The West African Frontier Force. He had been injured during the D-Day landings and my mother often spoke of how he had arrived home in a pitiful condition, stricken by dysentery. Now when we visited Riverside Mansions there were no afternoons spent singing in the Jolly Sailor. My cousins and I were told to keep quiet: their father had terminal cancer. Uncle Johnny struggled up and down the stairs, yellow with jaundice, his face contorted by pain. At the end of the war his unit had also helped to liberate Belsen; now, in the last days of his life, he looked like one of its victims. When he finally died, my mother collapsed.
Shortly after the cremation, she went off one evening to the Bridge House with my father. She returned drunk, in distress and arguing with him. My dad told her to pull herself together and accept that Uncle Johnny was gone but she continued to rail at him. Swaying in the tiny kitchenette, she stumbled, fell under the table and lay there crying out in pain like a wounded animal. I had never seen anyone so bereft and tried to help her to her feet but it was impossible. Although she was slightly built she was a dead weight, heavy with sorrow and alcohol. I looked to my father but, still smarting from their row, and possibly trying to allay my anxiety, he seemed uncharacteristically cold and distant. ‘Just leave her where she is,’ he ordered. I hesitated, unsure of what to do.
As he walked through to the living room, my mother suddenly gathered her strength and chose a target for her rage and grief. ‘I wish it had been you instead of him!’ she screamed.
I didn’t need to see my father’s face to know what a terrible thing she had just said. She knew it too. Still slumped under the table, she began to wail. My loyalties were torn. I was a kid. What was I to do? I stood up and made a decision. I did what my father had told me to do. I left my mother on the kitchen floor to cry herself to sleep. In the morning she got ready and went off to work without uttering a word about what had happened the night before.
That incident was shocking, not least because it was never mentioned. If I had always been aware of my mother’s fragility, now I had seen her behaving more like a child than a parent. Worse, my father, her steadfast protector, had turned his back on her that night, and I had abandoned her, too. Perhaps I had realised that I couldn’t be her mother, and she couldn’t absolutely be mine. If I had always instinctively avoided rocking the boat at home, from that moment on I made a conscious effort to ensure she was never upset.
I had come to understand something significant: in general grown-ups might be able to sweep away problems and fears, but in my family it was probably best to keep unpalatable truths, and your feelings, to yourself.
Chapter Four Rebel Without a Cause
On a summer’s afternoon I am sitting in a French lesson singing, along with my classmates, a French song about a shepherdess.
Il était une bergèreet ron ron ron petit pataponIl était une bergèrequi gardait ses moutons, ron ronqui gardait ses moutons.
Unable to concentrate in the heat, and because of a dragging pain low in my belly, I keep forgetting the words. I feel wretched, uncomfortable and out of sorts, and beads of sweat are breaking out on my forehead. At last the bell rings and as I get to my feet I know instantly that something isn’t right. I make for the toilets.
I have just started my first period. Emerging from the cubicle to wash my hands and splash my face with water, I glance up at my reflection in the mirror. I still look the same, even though I am now supposed to be a ‘woman’.
Later, at home, I stole two sanitary towels from the drawer where I knew my mother hid them. No slender, adhesive-backed pads in endless shapes and sizes for the 1960s woman: just bulky towels with loops at each end that had to be attached to a special belt. And I didn’t have a belt. When my mum came home from work I felt unable to tell her what had happened. I couldn’t help feeling I had done something wrong. Perhaps I had. I was growing up.
When I was nine my mother had taken me to our family doctor, concerned about the swellings beneath my nipples. I had taken off my T-shirt while Dr Teverson gently felt my tiny breasts, his eyes decorously closed behind his heavy horn-rimmed spectacles. My mother looked on anxiously. Finally the doctor gave his verdict: puberty, pure and simple. My mother protested. At nine years old? How could a child so young display the seeds of womanhood when she herself had been flat-chested until she gave birth to me? Dr Teverson tried to reassure her—girls developed earlier these days, he said—but if my mother was reassured, she wasn’t convinced, and she had never once broached the subject of menstruation with me. I had to find out about that at school.
In some ways I was relieved we hadn’t talked about it since that appointment at the doctor’s surgery had instilled a sense of unease, if not guilt, about the way my body had begun to change. Other girls of twelve had flat chests but still proudly wore ‘teen bras’. I envied them as I ran around hockey fields and netball pitches with only a tight vest to restrain my bouncing bosom. My mother seemed to have a blind spot as far as my physical development was concerned. How on earth was I to tell her about my period?
It was two days before I eventually plucked up the courage to blurt it out. She seemed scared by the news. She was also shocked, confessing that her own periods hadn’t started until she was eighteen. Why was everything happening to me so soon? I had no answer, but at least by the next day I had my own sanitary protection—and my own ‘teen bra’.
Within a year or so, a lot of the girls at my school had acquired boyfriends and those of them who hadn’t gained respect before had it now. Interest in my clowning around had waned, and with it my popularity. I was out of fashion in more ways than one, with my hedge of dark, frizzy hair that required not so much trimming as topiary. It wasn’t a good look when everybody aspired to long, straight hair that swung in long, glossy curtains, like Twiggy’s. I spent hours every day trying to iron my hair until I found some heated tongs that did the trick. But they burned my neck and other schoolgirls accused me of having love bites. Wishing that were true, I never put them right.
Half woman, half child, I was full of contradictions. I didn’t seem to fit in anywhere any more. Going to grammar school had driven a wedge between me and my primary school friends and now it was driving a wedge between me and my parents as well. I was beginning to feel too East End for school and too West End for home. I’d always enjoyed a good debate with my father, who had a great respect for Parliament and was a staunch believer in people standing up for what was right. But as I got into my history studies, I found I was overtaking him in terms of the ammunition I was able to bring to some of these arguments. He admired Henry VIII for rebelling against the Pope, for example, and I picked holes in his reasoning by pointing out that Henry only rebelled against the Catholic faith when he wanted a new wife to produce an heir. He was chuffed that I was learning, but often what I was being taught conflicted with his own views.
My insecurity manifested itself in rebellion, principally against CFS and its suffocating restrictions. My partner in crime was June, a classmate who lived in a council house near me and who was trying to cope with a troubled home life. Her mother had recently left home and she felt abandoned. Riding the bus together to and from school, we recognised each other as kindred spirits. We shared a lack of respect for authority and an ability to lose ourselves in stories and our own imaginations. We swapped favourite books. I gave her The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s gripping account of the exodus of dirt-poor farmers from the dust bowl of Oklahoma to the ‘promised land’ of California, and June introduced me to the realm of fantastic creatures in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, in which she sought solace.
By the fifth form, June and I had come to view CFS less as a seat of learning and more as a stage for St Trinian’s-style pranks. Stink bombs were manufactured with sulphuric acid pinched from the chemistry