When I wasn’t drawing, I played with other children. My mother made sure that I had nothing to do with children who weren’t ‘nice’ and that meant I was always wary of bringing friends home in case she disapproved of them. Because of this, I was in the habit of going to other people’s houses to play and on the rare occasions that I did happen to bring friends home, she would ask, after they’d gone, ‘Have you been playing rude games?’
I had no idea what she meant by ‘rude’ games. To me, with my child’s limited vocabulary, the word ‘rude’ meant cheeky or bad-mannered. But I could tell from the expression on my mother’s face and the tone of her voice that the word, in this instance, meant something different, something unpleasant and nasty of which I had no understanding and a hot rush of blood would colour my face. She would interpret this as an admission of guilt, the same as she did when she asked me ‘Have you been touching yourself down there?’ I was never quite sure what she meant by ‘down there’. Evidently, it was some forbidden and mysterious part of the body I hadn’t yet discovered and to interfere with it was a mortal sin. If we were out shopping or walking in the park and she saw a little boy with his hand down his trousers she would fix the unfortunate parent with a Medusa-like glare and say in a voice so loud that everyone could hear, ‘Fancy letting a child do that!’
All my friends had birthday parties, to which I was invited. My mother never asked me if I would like one, too, and I knew that if I so much as hinted about having one, it would probably incur her wrath. It was bad enough if I asked permission for a friend to come to tea; she’d always make excuses like ‘I haven’t enough food in the house’ or ‘ Not today - some other time, perhaps.’ So I had to be content with going to other people’s parties and watching, wistfully, while they unwrapped the presents the guests had brought. My mother would never actually buy a present for me to take: it was always something of mine which could be passed off as new. If something was marked with a price, she’d erase it and write on it a higher one.
One of my friends had a slide for her birthday. It was a most impressive piece of apparatus even though it wasn’t as big as the one in the local park. After tea, we all trooped out into the garden so that everyone could have a go. In the excitement, I forgot my mother’s injunction that I was not to climb anything or play dangerous games because of my bones and so I scrambled up the steps of the slide with the rest. It was my misfortune that I happened to be in front of a particularly ill-mannered and odious boy; as I was lowering myself into the sliding-down position, he gave me such an impatient and energetic shove that I was pushed off the slide and went flying on to the ground.
I knew at once that my arm was broken and though the adults carried me indoors and tried to comfort me, I wept inconsolably, not from pain but because I feared the inevitable fury of my mother; also, I was offended by the unforgiveable rudeness of the boy who had pushed me.
It was an accident, they told my mother when she arrived in answer to the unexpected summons, just children getting over-excited. I was indignant and outraged that the hateful boy was not going to be punished, especially as he was outside with the other children playing on the slide as though nothing had happened. Still, experience had taught me that it was better to say nothing to my mother. There would only be trouble.
One day, I received an invitation to a fancy dress party. There would be prizes, it said, for the best costumes. When I found out that all the other children were going to have proper, bought outfits, I didn’t want to go because my mother said she was going to make me a costume out of crêpe paper. ‘You can go as a lovely flower,’ she said. ‘How about a daffodil?’ I did not believe her when she told me it would be just as good as all the others. My worst fears were realised. I knew it as soon as she began to tack the lime-green and yellow paper on to my reluctant person: it was going to be a disaster! She cut and tugged and tweaked in a vain attempt to try to achieve the effect she had in mind but at the end of her labours I think even she had to admit that it hadn’t quite turned out as she’d hoped. When she told me to look at myself in the full-length mirror in the hall I was aghast. Not even the most resourceful and imaginative of minds would be able see a resemblance between the confusion of crumpled paper out of which I peered and a daffodil.
‘Never mind,’ she assured me. ‘There’ll be so many children there that they’ll all be too excited to worry about what anyone else is wearing.’
I did not want to go to the party. I begged, pleaded and feigned illness but still she wouldn’t relent. So, protesting, I was marched off to the hall where the dreaded event was taking place and pushed through the door.
‘You really do look just like a daffodil!’ she lied.
When the time came for the judging of the best fancy dress and I was asked the question I had been dreading, I was so humiliated and embarrassed that I couldn’t speak.
‘What are you meant to be, dear? repeated the woman, looking perplexed. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I was a daffodil. She would have laughed, I knew. She tried again, but I kept my head down and my eyes fixed on the floor. She called to another woman who was involved with the judging.
‘This little girl won’t tell me what she’s meant to be!’
Both women studied me and tried to guess what or who I was supposed to represent.
‘Are you an animal of some kind, dear? A fairy? A cartoon character or someone out of a comic?’
But I remained stubbornly mute. In the end, they gave up. I think they felt sorry for me. Fortunately, there were consolation prizes for every child in attendance and I was delighted with mine: it was a woolly lamb with features embroidered in black and I was so pleased that I forgot my humiliating ordeal. I called my lamb ‘Larry’, after the television puppet and it became one of my favourite toys.
The best parties of all were those given by the Americans who, during the War, had been based in all parts of the country. There were always music and entertainments and they went out of their way to ensure that every child had a good time. When it was time to go home, everyone was given a bag containing toys, balloons, sweets and an orange. I decided that the Americans must be the nicest people in the world.
One day, something very strange indeed happened to me. It was also the day I very nearly died. Because my mother was always late getting up in the mornings, I had learned to dress myself and choose what clothes to wear. That morning, because my face felt so hot, I thought I’d wear something nice and cool. I had two favourite dresses, identical except for the colour - one was pale blue, the other pale yellow - made of a soft, satiny fabric. They had little, puffed sleeves and smocked bodices. I always had difficulty choosing between them because I liked both colours. After some serious deliberation, I decided on the blue.
The main problem with dressing yourself when you are very small is that you can’t do up things which fasten at the back and my dress had a row of little buttons which had to be attended to. The house was very quiet and I knew there was no point in calling out for my mother because she’d still be asleep. My father, though, was probably up and about so I decided to call for him. When I shouted ‘Daddy!’ my voice sounded strange. Somehow, everything seemed different, as though it were not real, as in a dream. Then, at the very moment my father came into the room, I collapsed on to the floor. In the fraction of a second it must have taken for me to fall, I suddenly found myself watching my own body as it hit the ground. Deeply interested by this curious turn of events, I studied my prostrate form; I was not at all sure that I had, after all, made the wrong decision about the blue dress.
My father stood over me, looking perplexed. I could tell that he didn’t know what to do and I wanted to reassure him that I was all right but he seemed not to hear me. After some moments, he went away and I guessed he was going to fetch my mother. She ran into the room and crouched over me, trying to wake me, and very soon some more people came in, accompanied by my father. How agitated they all seemed! It was so funny that I found myself laughing. I couldn’t understand why they were so concerned about me when I was perfectly all right. I tried again to communicate, to tell them not to worry, but they couldn’t hear. And how stupid I looked, lying on the floor like that! Then two more men arrived carrying a red blanket. After examining me, they proceeded to wrap it around me. Things were getting really exciting now. ‘What a lucky girl you are to have such a lovely red blanket!’ I told myself. I followed as they carried me downstairs and out of the front door. In the road, parked right outside our house, an ambulance was waiting. I’d never been inside one before, so I was very interested, especially in the rather alarming-looking apparatus at the front of the vehicle made of silvery metal and lots of rusty-red rubber tubing. I watched the men lay me down and tuck the red blanket around me and then, suddenly, everything vanished............
I remember nothing until I was told, much later, that I had had something called mastoiditis and that I had nearly died. I knew, instinctively, that my curious experience had something to do with dying but I said nothing because I didn’t know how to put it into words; besides, I doubted that anyone would believe me. It wasn’t until many years later that I found out other people had had similar experiences when they’d been close to death. There is a physical explanation for the feeling of euphoria and the blinding light which many have described and religious conditioning probably accounts for the angels and other nebulous entities which some claim to have witnessed. It is harder to find an explanation for the out-of-body sensation which I had. I think the main reason for my being able to remember it so vividly is that, during it, I had heightened awareness, even though I was unconscious. Is it possible that, when someone is near to death, the activity of quantum particles in the brain cause what physicists call superpositions - or mixtures - of quantum states? In other words, the person having a near death experience is neither dead nor alive or both dead and alive, whichever way you like to interpret it.
My life had been saved by an emergency operation and penicillin but in order to perform surgery it was necessary to shave the hair from the affected side of my head. When I came home from hospital my mother had the rest of my hair cut into a bob and to cover the bald part she attatched an over-large hair-ribbon. I hated that ribbon with a vengeance. It flopped down over my face and got into my eyes while I was drawing. Besides, my hair was straight and slippery and the wretched thing was always falling off and getting lost and then my mother would get angry and tell me to be more careful.
That summer we returned to Brixham for another holiday. Uncle Albie wanted to take a photograph of me with my cousin Stepanie in his studio above the shop and so we were dressed in our best frocks and made to sit side by side on a stool. Stephanie had long, fair hair which curled over her shoulders in wringlets while mine was scraped over my forehead and secured with the detested ribbon which was tied into a ridiculously large bow. Stephanie smiled coyly at the camera while I, head turned sideways to hide my bald bit, sat stiffly and self-consciously, feeling stupid.
By now, I was beginning to realise that my mother wasn’t like other childrens’ mothers. She seldom demonstrated any affection but I didn’t mind that very much because I disliked any kind of physical contact with her. She was always criticising other parents and other chidren and one of her favourite expressions of contempt was ‘That child looks wormy to me!’ I never understood the comparison, thinking she was referring to garden worms; she meant, of course, worm infestation but I didn’t know about such things then. Both my parents were heavy smokers and I began to develop what I think was almost a phobia of tobacco; contact with it would cause actual, physical sensations of revulsion such as gagging and retching. If I saw a cigarette end floating in a lavatory bowl I refused to sit on the seat and the sight and smell of a full ashtray would fill me with utter disgust. I hated the gestures assumed by smokers: the tapping of the cigarette on the packet before they lit it; the way they held it between their fingers; the sucking in and exhaling of smoke. My distaste of tobacco grew as I got older and sometimes I would wonder, vaguely, why other children seemed not to be bothered. Forty years later, while I was doing the ironing one evening and at the same time idly watching a television programme about the evils of smoking, they showed some childrens’ paintings. They’d been asked to paint portraits of their mothers and a surprising number of the pictures depicted the subject with a cigarette in her mouth.
‘If a mother is a heavy smoker,’ said the presenter, ‘a child comes to associate the cigarette as an intrinsic part her and subconsciously it becomes a symbol of comfort.’ Suddenly, after all those decades of wondering why I hated tobacco so much, it was blindingly clear: such had been my terror of my mother that in my young mind the cigarette became not a symbol of comfort but a symbol of fear. Even to this day I am revolted by tobacco.
One thing for which I’m very grateful to my mother, though, is that she helped me to develop a love of books. As an avid reader she would visit the library several times a week and I would be expected to sit quietly and look at a book while she browsed. You had to be as quiet as a mouse in a library in those days and noisy children were not tolerated. There was always a stern-faced librarian to glare at you if you misbehaved in any way. You were expected to take the utmost care of the books you borrowed and if there was any infectious disease in your home you were obliged to report it so that the books you’d been in contact with could go away to be sterilised.
Every night, before I climbed into bed, I was made to kneel down and say my prayers:
‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child!
Pity my simplicity
And let me live my life for thee!’
Like many other children taught the same prayer I used to be puzzled as to why mice needed pitying; and where, exactly, was that place called Plicity? My religious education began even before I started school because my mother packed me off to Sunday school as soon as I was deemed old enough. I didn’t want to go but my mother said I had to because I’d been christened in the same church and that my name was written in a big book with all the other babies who’d been christened there, too. I and the other children were in the charge of a bossy young woman who had a whiskery upper lip and smelt of boiled turnips. She told us that Jesus loved every child and that Mary was a good person because, if she saw boys fighting in the street, she’d go to them and tell them that it was wrong. It was very boring. The only consolation was that we were each given a little book about Jesus. Every Sunday the teacher handed out a small, coloured picture depicting some uplifting subject to each of us and we had to stick it on to one of the blank spaces in our books. If you didn’t attend the class, you didn’t get a picture. It was a good incentive to get us to go to Sunday school because, like all the others, I wanted to fill my book so that I could get another one.
I was told that I would be starting proper school in the September of that year. I would enjoy it, my mother said, and I’d be doing lots of painting and drawing. I was apprehensive but she told me there was nothing to be scared of. But I was scared already of many things: hospitals, injections, tigers and wolves, the dark shapes under my bed which stared back at me malevolently when I lifted up the frill of my bedspread and, of course, my mother herself. I convinced myself that I would be scared of school, too. I had had a couple of upsetting experiences relating to the outside world. Once, my parents had taken me to London where we’d met up with some other family members. We were walking along a busy shopping street and the adults were talking and taking very little notice of me. Suddenly, everyone stopped to look at something in a shop window; I looked, too, but couldn’t see anything of any particular interest. I carried on looking, convinced that there must be something I’d missed. When after some moments I turned around, everyone had disappeared. Obviously, they had forgotten about me completely. Dismayed, I looked about, searching desperately for someone familiar. But when you are very small you can’t see a great deal when so many people are thronging about you. It was, after all, a busy London street. When at length the fact dawned on me that I was well and truly lost, I began to panic. I had been told several times by my mother that if I ever got lost, I should look for a policeman; he would take me to the Police Station and they would give me cakes and lemonade while they set about finding my mummy. The policeman on the beat was a common sight in my youth and you never had to go very far in order to find one. But I remained rooted to the spot, too terrified to move and tears of distress began to spill down my cheeks. Then a woman spotted me and asked if I was lost. I nodded and she said the best thing to do would be to look for a policeman. Some other people had gathered around by this time and a policeman was quickly located. He spoke so kindly and so sympathetically to me that I immediately relaxed and confidently clutched his hand as we went off to the nearest police station. ‘We’ll soon find your mummy,’ he reassured me, ‘and while you’re waiting how would you like to have some lemonade and cakes?’
So it was true, then! I cheered up immediately and began actually to enjoy my big adventure. But we didn’t get to the police station after all: suddenly, out of the crowds of people, my mother appeared looking anxious and harrassed. I was almost sorry to see her. She was very apologetic to the constable and told him how grateful she was for his assistance. Then she grasped me by the hand and marched me off without a word. Very soon, we arrived back at the place where my father had parked our car and there he was, waiting for us.
‘You’ve got to punish her!’ said my mother, after she’d explained what had happened. So my father pushed me into the back of the car, lifted up my skirt and smacked my bottom. I cried bitterly, not so much for the indignity of having my bottom smacked, but for the fact that the whole incident had been their fault, not mine. It was through their negligence that I’d been lost. Worst of all, though, I’d missed out on the lemonade and cakes.
There was another occasion when my mother sent me on a shopping errand. I was used to going on my own to my friends’ houses, which was not a very great distance at all, but the shops were much further afield and I was full of apprehension. What was worse, I had to go to two different shops and everything my mother needed was written on just the one list. Supposing they didn’t hand back the list when I’d finished in the first shop?
‘Just ask them for it back!’ said my mother, impatiently.
So off I trotted with the list, the money and the ration books in the shopping bag. It was a long way for someone so small to negotiate and I was relieved when I reached the shops at last. In the grocers’, I had to wait for a long time to be served because, being such a young child, the shopkeeper obviously thought I was with somebody and so he kept on serving other customers who came in after me. After a while, he realised I was unaccompanied and asked me if I needed anything. I handed him the list and the purse with the money in it and watched while he weighed tea and sugar and margarine on the scales and put them into paper bags.
‘How old are you, dear?’ asked a woman waiting to be served.
‘Four.’ I replied, flushing with discomfiture.
‘You’re far too young to be out on your own!’ she exclaimed and proceeded to discuss with the shopkeeper what was evidently the outrageous negligence of my parents. Still talking, he handed me the shopping, the ration books and the change but, just as I’d feared, not the list. I was so unnerved by the entire business that I was overcome with shyness and did not want them to know that I had to go to yet another shop. My next port of call was the greengrocers’ but what my mother wanted there, I’d no idea. I knew she liked tomatoes, so I thought that was what she’d probably written on the list and I asked the greengrocer for a bag of them.
‘How many do you need, love?’ asked the woman.’Half a pound?’
I had no idea, of course, and again I was tongue-tied. When I returned home with the purchases my mother was exasperated. She certainly had not wanted tomatoes, she grumbled. And what on earth was she going to do with many? She was so annoyed with me that I feared she might send me back to the shops. However, I think she saw my distress and a look of guilt flashed across her face. It was a great relief to me that I was never sent again on a shopping errand.
In September, I started school and found, after all, that my mother was right and that there was nothing to be scared about. I trotted off quite happily every morning, accompanied by her, to the school entrance. Although I hated numbers and counting, I enjoyed all the other things we did, especially looking at picture books and listening to the teacher reading aloud. My self-esteem was boosted by the fact that everyone - both teachers and children - admired my drawing skills and I had plenty of opportunities for showing off because we did a great deal of drawing and painting. I had my midday meal at school and couldn’t understand why so many of the other children detested the dinners which I enjoyed so much. I was too young to understand that my mother was an appallingly bad cook. After the War, when meat was a scarce commodity, rabbit was often on the menu at home. The saucepan would be rattling away on the stove, the contents boiling furiously, while a grey scum oozed out from under the lid. The smell of the stewing rabbit had a sweet sickliness about it which turned my stomach and I detested the unpleasant, rather bitter taste of it. For pudding, my mother often made suet roll. She’d mix the suet, coarsely grated from a big lump which she’d buy from the butcher, with flour and water, then roll the dough up in a cloth and tie the ends with string. When it had been boiled and removed from the cloth it looked like a giant, slimy maggot. Even the jam with which it was served couldn’t disguise the leaden texture and the cloying fattiness of it. The only things I really enjoyed at home were the National Health orange juice and Virol. I loved the sweet, malty, rather metallic taste of the syrupy mixture and while I’m sure it must have contained many beneficial minerals, it couldn’t have been very good for the teeth. As well as the orange juice, we also had cod-liver oil which was utterly detestable. Nothing seemed to take the taste away after the daily dose had been spooned into my mouth and the fishy smell seemed to linger for hours afterwards. My mother often served up sardines on toast and I hated the oily, bony things so much that it gave me a lifelong aversion to tinned sardines.
I used to feel sorry for my father because he wasn’t allowed to have the things he enjoyed, such as mushrooms on toast, pickled herrings or tinned pilchards in tomato sauce and if he happened to mention to my mother that he’d enjoyed something she’d cooked, she’d make sure she never served it up again.
Because my life at home was blighted by fear of my mother, starting school was probably the best thing to happen in my young life. My teacher was a young woman who praised, encouraged and enthused whereas my mother criticised, sneered and belittled. I soon found that it was better to keep all my small joys to myself, not to let her see that I had found delight in something. If I made the mistake of expressing pleasure in anything which wasn’t a result of her doing, she would tell me to go and pick up my toys or chide me for getting myself dirty and that she had better things to do than to clean up after me all the time.
After a while, I began to gain confidence. I was becoming less timid and my self-esteem had improved. But I had been going to school for only a few weeks when something happened to me which was to have a profoundly disturbing effect on my life.
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