next stage must come soon.
It was considered by the professionals and indeed by Jess that Anna would, in time, be unable to cope with the demands of state primary education. A special school of some description would have to be found, where she could acquire special skills. In the right environment, she might even be able to learn to read. Miss Laidman encouraged Anna to write her letters, but she could not teach her to read.
Miss Laidman had a colleague called Fanny Foy, who taught music at Plimsoll Road and at one or two other schools in Stoke Newington and Finsbury Park. Miss Foy loved Anna, and would spend extra time with her. Miss Foy had a little sister like Anna. Fanny Foy, I discovered, moonlighted and played the violin in a theatre orchestra at night. She had a double life. She knew all the musicals. She taught Anna the tunes and a lot of the words.
When Anna was seven, Jess moved out of the upstairs flat above Jim and Katie, feeling perhaps that she should not become too attached to, or dependent on, them or their residence. Or perhaps she was getting irritated by the competitive marital discord occasionally displayed in the household. Jim and Katie were relieved, though they did not say so, because they needed the extra space for their own growing family: when Jess announced that she was moving, Katie had a third child on the way. They needed the space and, prospering on two incomes, they no longer needed the rent. And probably they were not happy with a witness to their domestic discord. Better to rage in private than in earshot of a highly acute and perceptive lodger and her innocent and perhaps too guileless child. Jim’s ambitions and Katie’s ambitions were increasingly in conflict, and the conflict was becoming increasingly overt.
Jess moved to a shabby little three-storey terraced property a few streets away, in easy reach of her old friends and our reliable support system. Houses were cheap then, and, although it was difficult for a single woman to get a mortgage, Jess must have produced a satisfactory deposit for No. 23 Kinderley Road N5, raised from her father, or from the Professor, or from some other undisclosed source of finance. She must have found a friendly broker. She was, after all, a graduate in what was considered respectable and regular, though not very remunerative, professional employment. Maybe the Professor gave her a good reference. He could hardly, one might think, do less: although really, when considering the Professor, it is hard to know what to think that he might have done.
Sometimes I wondered if Jess made up the story of the Professor. She told it to us in instalments, over those early years, and perhaps improved and embellished it at each telling. We are all adept at rewriting the past, at reinventing it. Perhaps Anna was the result of a one-night stand, or of a liaison with a fellow-student of which Jess was ashamed, and which she had decided to disown.
The story of the Professor was, as Jess unfolded and disclosed it to us, dramatic and colourful. It had those virtues. Jess was a good storyteller. She has told me many stories, over the many years of our friendship, and some of them have certainly altered in the telling. Some of them have become so entangled with my own memories that I feel as though I have witnessed events that are part of her life, not mine. This is partly, but not wholly, to do with Anna’s love of repetition. Anna would say, ‘Tell us about that time when Gramps tried to jug the hare’, or ‘Tell us about when you went swimming in your nightie’, or ‘Tell us about the tree-frog’, or ‘Tell us about when Gramps ate the mouse’, and Jess would tell.
Jess is a good listener as well as a good narrator. I have told her things I have never told to anyone, should never have told to anyone. Jess was, and is, an attractive woman, with a hypnotic intensity of attention that tends to mesmerise an interlocutor. She concentrates on others in a manner that sucks out the soul. It would be fair to say that we were all rather in awe of her. Not a great beauty in any classical style, but noticeable, memorable, one might even say seductive, although seduction was not on her agenda in Anna’s primary-school days. She must have mesmerised the Professor. When she is talking to you, she transfixes you. Her short-sighted eyes are very fierce and piercing, a cornflower-blue. This explains some of her history. Had she not given birth to Anna, her life would have been different. It might have been played at fast and loose.
She wasn’t a great beauty, but she had a style that turned heads, a confident way of walking and of being in her body. I don’t know how a man would describe her, but men (including the Professor, or whoever the Professor represents) were attracted to Jess. If it hadn’t been for Anna, we would have feared for our husbands.
In her new home in Kinderley Road, Jess gave enterprising little suppers at which she amused herself and us by cooking, usually successfully, odd little dishes, some composed from ingredients from the West Indian store round the corner. Her pigs’ trotters were a triumph, and once she ventured on pigs’ ears. She enjoyed confronting taboos. She and Anna were fearless eaters. You need not feel too sorry for Jess. Some sorrow is appropriate, but she was not, as I hope I have made clear, an object of pity. We regarded her with respect, affection and alarm. She was good company. We laughed a lot, over our cheap meals and cheap wine, on our excursions to the park, on our turns on the swings and the roundabouts.
There were park attendants in those days, some of them rather bossy and disagreeable, officious little despots of their small domains, and I remember an unpleasant altercation when one of them reprimanded Anna for tipping some sand from the dog-frequented sandpit on to a miserably bare adjacent flowerbed. Jess leapt to her daughter’s defence with an impassioned speech which impressed and alarmed us all. She was a fierce mother, a cat, a lioness, guarding her kitten. She never allowed anyone to criticise Anna.
And not many wished to do so. Anna was a good girl.
If Jess longed to pursue her academic career more actively, she did not let us know. She did not complain. She appeared to have accepted, on Anna’s behalf, the home front and the life of the mind. She continued to read, to study, to think, to write, to venture into the wilder wastes of intellectual speculation. One can do all those things from a little house in a back street off the Blackstock Road near Finsbury Park tube station, with reasonable access to the SOAS library and the British Library and the Royal Anthropological Institution.
Some think, indeed, that the brain grows keener in confinement. In the field, the brain wanders and cannot settle. As Guy Brighouse’s was so fatally to do.
Jess managed, during this early period of Anna’s infancy, to teach two days a week at an adult education college, and with Guy Brighouse’s help she obtained a generous bursary to write a thesis. Guy looked after Jess well. Her thesis, you may not be surprised to hear, dealt with the assessment and treatment of mental incapacity and abnormality in the area of Central Africa that she had visited in that first youthful escapade into what was not to her the heart of darkness. (Northern Rhodesia became Zambia even as she was working on this project.) She had toyed for a while with the idea of writing about representations of the enfant sauvage in the literature of anthropology, a subject of great cultural richness, but too open-ended for a beginner, or so Guy Brighouse, by now her supervisor, told her. So she confined herself under his not very attentive guidance to the impact of missionaries on the practice of traditional remedies and ‘witchcraft’ (for this was Dr Livingstone’s realm, the land where he strove and died) – and, tangentially, with the variability of the concept of IQ with reference to ‘the savage mind’. (The word ‘savage’ was still, at that period, almost acceptable, although it sounded better in French.) She had to rely very heavily on secondary sources, but she made the best of a bad job.
She had enjoyed exploring the nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century accounts of explorers and big-game hunters and native commissioners, discovered in periodicals and learned journals and government reports. She noted their degrees of condescension and racial prejudice and their appalled condemnation of insanitary living conditions in the African colonies. (The laziness, the dirtiness, the unhealthiness! The smallpox, the jiggers, the worms, the ticks, the syphilis, the scurvy, the leprosy!) She had learnt that the people of the big lake went mad when sent to work in the copper mines, and would not eat of the flesh of the amphibious land-dwelling fish called nkomo, because if you ate of this mad non-fish