My Animal Life(32)

Did the adults understand what it meant to us children? It is happening still, in the blaze of white light as the back door opens and they lurch into the garden.

I can only gauge how it weighed on me from my memory of the next time we went to Wolverton. That we were going to go back, after such dreadful events, had oppressed me since my mother had mentioned it. We had been with my father’s school, Watt Close, on a foreign exchange trip to Holland. I loved the holiday; the hotel had a swimming pool with big rubber rings, and chocolate milk. There were wide red and yellow fields of tulips, and a stormy barge trip on the Zuider Zee. But as the days went by, the fear began. We were going to Wolverton as soon as we got back. I prayed that the holiday would never end.

I was incapable of stopping time. I was powerless in the grip of my family. Inexorably, we got to the day when we were off the boat, and on the train in to Euston, the station where we always changed when we were on our way to Grandpa and Grandma’s. The glass of the window, which I pressed my head against to feel the almost pleasant pain of the train jolting, was hard and offered me no help. Raindrops ran in jerky streams down the glass, hanging fire, immobilised, till heavy as tears, then splitting when you least expected it into a slick sprinting delta of water. I tapped the pane, smeared it, desperate to affect them; they carried on endlessly, uninterested. But then I remembered an idea I had had when I was falling asleep in the hotel in Holland. Of course, I could simply stop breathing. If you wanted to die, you could simply stop breathing. I could not stop time, but I could die, quite easily, and never have to go to my grandparents’ again. I tried it, cautiously; it wasn’t too bad. I was sure that by the time I gasped air back in, I was almost dead, it was almost done. My spirits lifted. I was six years old, and cheering myself with thoughts of suicide.

In that way, and at that moment, I would say, looking back, I must have lacked something children need to live. I do not blame my family. They could not help it.

But once again, nothing happened. We went back to Wolverton. Everyone was nervous. Pa and Vic made an effort to get on. We spent more time at Stony Stratford than usual, and in the evenings, sat and surrendered to the soothing authority of ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ on the black-and-white television. My second and third attempts to stop breathing were in any case a great deal harder than my first. It was something, of course, I could not fully rehearse. And I needed not to know that my escape route didn’t work.

What do children need? For life to go on. Somehow the wounds scabbed over, the rawness disappeared. We got over the horror, as families must. Given time, both body and mind can recover, as long as no one has actually gone beyond hearing, beyond reparation, as long as no one has died.

More and more I think that only life matters. That the embryo, though its life will not be perfect, be allowed to cling on. Allowed to be born. That the quarrelling adults don’t murder each other.

I managed to grow up with two living parents. All over the world, children long for that. And having had it, I can’t complain.





I leave home


I do not leave home


i


I was a very immature seventeen. I was hideously unready to leave home. Socially, sexually, emotionally, practically. I had never had a boyfriend, never had sex, never had a job except six days’ currant picking, with Janet, on a local farm. I had never been out in the evening. I could not drive, sew, cook, shop or clean; could not manage money or social life.

I was clever, though, and had read a lot, and was as desperate to get out as I was unready.

I was also in the middle of my only ever breakdown, though I didn’t realise it till decades later.

My last year at school was eventful. In the month that I was seventeen, I sat Oxford and Cambridge entrance, the only girl to do so from Horsham High School, sitting alone in the stuffy prefect’s room, my pen flying over the paper. The exams, in those days, were general essays, which gave you a chance to show off a bit, plus a translation paper, which was my idea of bliss — I loved French and Latin with cerebral passion. Then I was called to interview. This was much more taxing: what to wear, what to say? I would have to talk to strangers, which I was not used to. Dad did not let strangers into the house. Mum and I went to Horsham, once again to Chart and Lawrence, the only clothes shop that there was, and bought a ‘good suit’, a russet brown, wide-gauge, corduroy suit with a curved half-belt on the double-breasted jacket. It was purest chance that it was in stock. Lined in rust-brown silk, it was expensive, but Oxbridge interviews were important. Vic’s pride, Vic’s money, bought it for his daughter.