My Animal Life(13)

She must have been tired, or my father was in a bad mood, because the one who arrived, with her back to the lit-up landing, black against the light, was the other mother I clearly knew also existed, not my loving, gentle mother but her doppelgänger, angry and slightly hoarse. I told her about the chain mail, which she could not see although it was everywhere. She tried to be kind, and was kind, looking round the world she could see for any evidence of fencing, and finally came up with some dark braid dangling from the edge of the round papyrus lampshade above my bed. I thought, ‘This is hopeless,’ and then I was kind. Because I saw that she needed to go, and she could not help me; and in any case, she had come, and the landing light made my room less frightening, more finite, and me less afraid, so I pretended the braid was the only problem, and she fetched some scissors and cut the ends off, then went away leaving the landing light on and the door half-open and myself only half-alone, and at least half-comforted. Because as long as love tries, it is love, though we all live in different worlds. If love is the urge behind the act, then surely there are no objective failures? And to think you are loved enough — to list, sometimes, the names of those who have loved you and who you love, without drawing up more demanding accounts of profit and loss — is for me the beginning of happiness.





I am in print


instead of Jane


Print arrived, as an extension of myself, when I was seven or eight. For today’s children with their keyboards and computers and printers, there’s nothing magic about it. But print, in the 1950s, was something removed from the sphere of childhood, something professional and grownup. To me it became an obsessive excitement.

Children like me learned to write in pencil, with unsatisfying slowness. I was hard on myself about writing; I liked to write my name in all my books, but then only months later would go back and be appalled by the crippled ‘M’ like a collapsing mountain range, the big straggly ‘A’ with its tepee-like overgrowth at the top, the ‘R’ like a rudimentary bird, the ‘g’ in ‘Margaret’ a sudden lower-case, humble and loopy, scraping the bottom of the barrel of my name, the uneven capital letters of ‘GEE’ in a drunken final dance, with ‘E’s like broken forks. I rubbed out and rewrote so many times that the frontispieces of my books were worn bare.

Why was I so harsh? It’s true that, in different ways, both my parents were perfectionists, a trait which imprints itself without fail on the children in letters of fire. But I remember my mother protesting at the time and saying, ‘That writing was very good for your age, leave it alone.’ I refused to stop rubbing, worrying a blurry grey hole in the page. More likely this habit went back to my first day at the Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, infants’ school, when a teacher whose name I don’t remember gave us all strips of pale cardboard with our names on to copy into books, and instead I wrote down, triumphant, the name as my mother had taught it me, big, in capitals, MARGARET MARY GEE: which was roundly rejected by my teacher, who told me, ‘We don’t write in capitals now we are at school,’ took my paper away and made me do it again like the cardboard strip, correctly. I went home ashamed and infused with scorn for myself and my mother, though of course, as any parent will know, big letters are easier to write with their straight lines and right-angles. But they weren’t on the teacher’s card.

This was the start of a troubled relationship to writing by hand that lasted until I was in my mid-teens. Too deferential on that first day, too critical later of my own first tries, I became in time a guerrilla warrior of handwriting. We seemed always to be moving schools (I went to three different primary schools as my family moved from Worcestershire to Sussex) and at each fresh school, I had the secret advantage of knowing, as the new teacher did not, what I had been taught before. The first time I moved, to tiny Watersfield village school where all the juniors sat in one room, divided by age into rows, I said, with perfect honesty, that I had been taught at Bromsgrove to write in loops, and found to my surprise I was allowed to keep them, in the face of Roman-nosed Mr Norris’s preferred italics. In any case it didn’t really matter how I wrote, since I could not in any respect learn to handle the new school’s white china ink-pots, full of made-up lumpy ink, that slotted into holes in the rows of desks, nor the stained wooden dip-pens with their tortured and twisted metal beaks, some crossed, which spluttered and creaked on our exercise books. I was ink all over: hands, face, books, skirt.

Came the day of the visitor from somewhere outside in a mackintosh — maybe London? I was only six — and the whole school gathered together to watch an inspiring slide-show, on a hanging screen, about Typhoo tea. We saw pictures of glowing green India, and women in beautifully patterned pinks and reds, their heads protected by scarves, picking ‘only the finest tips’ from the rows of tea-plants. We were told a little about the women’s lives, and a lot about the life-story of the tea, how it shrank black and dry and arrived at last in silver-paper packets cased in small neat cardboard boxes, to be decanted into the metal caddies on all our mothers’ kitchen-shelves. (British kitchens, like Indian tea-picking jobs, then belonged only to the mothers.) The opening of this window on the world by the rain-coated visitor from London presaged a great excitement: the Typhoo Tea Handwriting Competition.