My Animal Life E-Book

Maggie Gee

• Herausgeber: Telegram Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

How do you become a writer, and why? Maggie Gee's journey starts a long way from the literary world in a small family in post-war Britain. At seventeen, Maggie goes, a lamb to the slaughter, to university. From the 1960s onwards she lives the defining events of her generation: the coming of the Pill and sexual freedom, tremors in the British layer-cake of class and race. In the 1980s, Maggie finally gets published, falls in love, marries and has a daughter -- but for the next three decades and beyond, she survives, and sometimes thrives, by writing. This frank, bold memoir dares to explore the big questions: success and failure, sex, death and parenthood -- our animal life. 'A wise and beautiful book about what it feels like to be alive -- I really loved it' Zadie Smith 'Exceptionally interesting and brave ... a wonderful book' Claire Tomalin 'A fine, honest, complex portrait of an artist's mind' Michele Roberts, Independent 'Every word strikes like a hammer on an anvil, throwing off sizzling sparks' Bidisha, The f word 'Anyone who yearns for that lost post-war Britain would do well to read this vivid, minutely observed memoir ...Gee has a sensuous eye for detail' Sinclair McKay, Telegraph 'It is a testament to Gee's skill with structure, her lightness of touch and her honesty, particularly about the most painful episodes, that she has fashioned this account of a fundamentally satisfying and happy writer's life into such a page-turner.' Melissa Benn, New Statesman 'Maggie Gee writes with such courage and wit. This is a vivid portrait of a woman finding her way through the maze of class ridden post war England, the 60's, feminism and how to be a mother and a writer.' Diana Melly 'Highly recommended for all aspiring writers' Bernardine Evaristo 'Observant, honest and sensitively-written...' Michael Holroyd 'Fresh and funny ... with a zest for living that bounces off the page...' Psychologies 'Sensitive, honest, courageous, stylish' The Times '[Gee's] utterly compelling on the rollercoaster of writing life, from early success to rock-bottom rejection. Often joyous; infinitely wise; passionate and poised, this is a book you'll want to sit in silence with and hug to yourself -- then start again.' Daily Mail

Leseprobe

MAGGIE GEE was chosen as one of Granta’s original ‘Best Young British Novelists’. She has published many novels to great acclaim, including The White Family, shortlisted for the Orange and IMPAC prizes, My Cleaner, My Driver and The Flood, longlisted for the Orange Prize. She was the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature and is now one of its Vice-Presidents. She lives in London.

‘I really loved Maggie Gee’s My Animal Life. It’s an unusual memoir in that it’s about an essentially happy life. I found it wise, idiosyncratic and bracingly honest. Subjects include: families, writing, feminism, the queerness of the literary profession and Willesden — topics close to my heart.’ Zadie Smith, Guardian

‘Maggie Gee writes with such courage and wit. This is a vivid portrait of a woman finding her way through the maze of class ridden post war England, the 60’s, feminism and how to be a mother and a writer.’ Diana Melly

‘It is a testament to Gee’s skill with structure, her lightness of touch and her honesty, particularly about the most painful episodes, that she has fashioned this account of a fundamentally satisfying and happy writer’s life into such a page-turner.’ Melissa Benn, New Statesman

‘My Animal Life is full of riches. It’s the fascinating story of Maggie Gee’s life from childhood through to middle age. She writes with uncompromising honesty about the triumphs and vicissitudes of her personal and literary life and offers balanced and wise insights into family and friendship, motherhood and marriage, class and race. Highly recommended for all aspiring writers.’ Bernardine Evaristo

‘This is an unusual book: part social history, part family history and part an autobiography which chronicles the evolution and career of a gifted novelist. Observant, honest and sensitively-written, it will be required reading for all admirers of Maggie Gee’s fiction. I greatly enjoyed it.’ Michael Holroyd

‘I think it is exceptionally interesting and brave … Maggie Gee’s account of her life as a writer cuts to the bone as she relives triumphs, rejections, despair and renewal. It’s a wonderful book, for its boldness and vigour, and for its piercing honesty.’ Claire Tomalin

‘Anyone who yearns for that lost post-war Britain would do well to read this vivid, minutely observed memoir … Gee has a sensuous eye for detail’ Telegraph

‘While chronicling the successes (and pitfalls) of an artist’s life, My Animal Life paints a fine, honest, complex portrait of an artist’s mind.’ Michele Roberts, Independent

‘Sensitive, honest, courageous, stylish’ The Times

‘An equal sense of measure and probing intelligence are brought to every aspect of her life, no matter how wretchedly funny or banal the anecdotes … What Maggie Gee brings to this well-known world of literary striving is a unique seriousness and insight, coupled with an understanding of the political shifts in the society she has occupied … This is not at all a piece of autobiographical vanity publishing, but a revelation so profound and pared down that every word strikes like a hammer on an anvil, throwing off sizzling sparks.’ Bidisha, The f word

‘Maggie Gee writes lyrically about being a writer, mother, daughter and wife, and of the highs and lows that come with the territory. With integrity and disarming honesty she shares her journey from bookish child from a working-class family who won a scholarship to Oxford, through a glittering start as a novelist, to publishers’ rejections mid-career, and finally to justified acclaim and renewed confidence. A beautifully wrought, perceptive and uplifting memoir’. The Good Book Guide

‘[Gee] writes her physicality in a resonantly celebratory way …’ Siobhan Murphy, Metro

ALSO BY MAGGIE GEE

Novels

Dying in Other Words

The Burning Book

Light Years

Grace

Where are the Snows

Lost Children

The Ice People

The White Family

The Flood

My Cleaner

My Driver

Short Stories

The Blue

Maggie Gee

My Animal Life

TELEGRAM

First published 2010 by Telegram

This ebook edition published 2011

EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-84659-096-2

Copyright © Maggie Gee, 2010 and 2011

Images © Victor Gee, Charles Rankin, Nicholas Rankin, Rosa Rankin-Gee, 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

TELEGRAM

26 Westbourne Grove, London W2 5RH

www.telegrambooks.com

To my family

My animal luck (i)

here today gone tomorrow

I am alive at the time of writing this. And so are you. For nearly four billion years of life on earth, neither of us existed: we were a blank. For the next few billion years before the sun burns up the earth, our bodies will be bones under the ground, or ash, asleep.

But now, in this astonishing living moment, we are between two states of non-being, two endless nights. Unprepared, we are thrust on stage. The light is on, the eye open. Life! Brains and muscles, feathers and fur! From nothing, we are ourselves, moving and breathing, here. Suddenly, this is our chance; our luck, our animal luck.

(After my mother died, one of the sayings she liked, ‘This is not a dress rehearsal’, ran through and through my head. It would come to me at opportune moments: when about to have a tiff with my husband at a motorway service station, say. Mustn’t waste time being unhappy.)

As I sit in the window writing this, house-martins swoop like acrobats, sunlit then shadowed, up under the eaves above my head, dip and swoop, dip and swoop, white bellies, black wings that flare into brief transparency with the blaze of the sun behind them, elegant licks of black at quick heads and brief V-for-Victory tails. Go, martins! Enjoy your luck! They are scooping up insects in headlong flight, the day’s warm on their breasts, they have young to feed.

Today in the chapel at St Cuthman’s, the retreat where I have come to write, the priest said, ‘God did not make you for the dark of death, but to live.’

Four days before I came here, I was in St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, having a gastroscopy for sudden unexplained stomach pains. They started at Christmas, five months ago, after a lifetime’s happy eating. I had waited and worried for all that time, unable to eat as I usually do, unable to drink my evening glass of wine, losing weight, five pounds, then six, then eight, oppressed as I lay awake at night by fear, for my mother and most of her siblings died of cancer.

I found I had symptoms of everything: cholecystitis, pancreatic cancer, liver cancer, bowel cancer. There is far too much on the net about cancer. Oh virtual world of death and terror! My gloom became great: I felt relief when I found any disease that gave a chance of living five years. Five years, I computed. My daughter would be twenty-five, and might even have a child or be married; I might have written two more books. Just give me five years, and I could bear it. But quite a few of the diseases which beckoned me offered a lot less than five years. The pain was there when I ran; when I exercised at all; when I lay in bed at night. When I forgot about it, it nudged me, suddenly, a strange line of pressure right across my stomach high under my rib-cage, with a knot of discomfort on the right-hand side. And then there were the noises, great skirling borborygms that made people look at me, surprised, in meetings. (I remembered my mother: that happened to her.)

Finally, after a night when I only slept between six and seven in the morning, the date of the much-dreaded gastroscopy arrived. The greater fear, of hearing I would die, for I had read that the doctor performing the gastroscopy told you the results straight away, was diverted into smaller but equally pressing ones: that I would be unable to swallow the fibre-optic tube with the camera on the end, that I would choke — very rare, but possible, the internet hissed.

Nick came with me to the hospital. I could feel his love, for which I was grateful, and his anxiety, for which I was sorry. Though he’d been a medic on an oil rig, as a young man, he hated anything medical, anything that reminded him of what he’d rather forget, that the insides of bodies are vulnerable. But here he stood, by the St Mary’s bed, smiling at me, holding my hand, asking me how to spell ‘sphygmomanometer’, and correcting me when I got it wrong. He had asked me, as a distraction and as part of the great game of marriage, the tiny, half-in-fun, deadly serious, up-and-down, never-ending battle for pre-eminence between two people. When we were first married — I was slightly older, and had published two books, as he had not — he discovered how sleepy and helpless I was in the morning, and would bring me breakfast, which was wonderful, and ask me questions about geography, at which I was hopeless. (‘The capital of Mongolia?’ ‘Odessa?’ ‘Wrong!’) Our war-games now were subtler, and the love between us twenty-five years deeper, but he could still spell sphygmomanometer, and I, at this moment, could not.

A nurse came to the bed and checked our details. ‘Maggie Gee for a colonoscopy?’ ‘Oh no please. I’m sure it’s a gastroscopy.’ ‘We’re doing colonoscopies this morning.’ ‘It’s a mistake,’ I asserted. She looked at me, unbelieving. ‘There is your name, see, on the colonoscopy list.’ I looked: there it was. ‘I don’t care, I’m not having one.’ She saw I meant business. ‘I’ll go and check.’ Thank God, she came back and said, ‘You are a gastroscopy but you’re with the colonoscopies for some reason.’

What was the reason? I wondered in a flash of panic. Because my case was particularly bad? Would they come in through my throat, and go out through my colon, having removed all that cancerous rubbish in between? (And yet, over the two weeks before I got my appointment, the pains had definitely been lessening. Another, equally powerful jab of thought: was it too late to leave the hospital?)

But now a white-clad male nurse had arrived. I was spared from speculation by concrete choices. Would I have a sedative, in which case I would probably forget everything about what had happened, or not? My call. Des, the velvet-voiced, melting-eyed Irish nurse, talked as he took my blood pressure, caressing into extinction most of the syllables of the ‘sphygmorrter’ he was using (thus proving the point I had just made to my husband, that his precious ‘sphygmomanometer’ was a bad word that had made me misspell it), and seemed to hint that I should, or at any rate that he would. But half the patients did, half did not. ‘I’ll try without,’ I decided. Be with the bolder, tougher half.

Quite soon, knees up and semi-naked on a trolley in the procedure room, I thought, ‘Wrong decision’, but was too embarrassed to change it. They laid me down on my left side and put a blue plastic object with a hole in it between my teeth. I remembered that I often breathed through my mouth. Today, not an option. British shyness and good manners kept me lying there, gasping, be-dummied, immobile. Then I saw it, whipping steelily about in the air like a snake to my right and above me, the infinite length of the tube I was meant to swallow, at its end the tiny camera glowing with a fierce blue light, the doctor looming behind it like a fakir, green-capped, green-gowned, faceless. I closed my eyes and gave up, remembering what had finally allowed me to fly, after years of neurotic terror, someone saying, ‘You don’t have to fly the plane.’ Yes, I could not be in charge of this moment.

Seconds later, it was inside me. The doctor gave a would-be reassuring commentary, his tone merry and slightly manic: ‘This is the worst bit, we’re going over the tongue, we hmm — let’s see — YES! and down the throat, going down now, we’re in the stomach already! Now I’m going to blow some air into the stomach … Going further down, we’re in the duodenum …’

I tried to grunt in protest, to let him know he was risking my life with this five-star itinerary, and the nurse’s reassuring pressure hardened. ‘You’re doing very well, not long now.’ ‘Samples,’ said the cheery maniac, ‘scalpel’, and then something new whizzed and pinged down the tube. ‘We’re just taking some biopsies, coming back now, having a good look round inside the stomach, then we’ll be out.’ I lay there exhausted, eyes watering, weak as a baby. ‘Is it over?’

The whole thing only took five minutes. Any longer and I don’t know what I would have done, but after all, what could I have done? By now I was no longer thinking of cancer; I was just thinking, ‘Thank God he’s stopped.’ Small blessings, like small worries, briefly erase greater ones.

‘You did well,’ said the nurse. ‘Don’t worry. Lots of people actually fight. I had to hit one bloke quite hard.’

Not long after, the doctor, who without his mask looked young and gentle, came round the ward. I did not entirely take in what he had said, though I nodded and smiled and asked questions.

‘It all looked totally normal. We didn’t find anything nasty. No tumours or anything like that. The stomach looked pink and healthy. No sign of a hiatus hernia. We’ll look at the samples of course.’

We didn’t find anything nasty. No tumours. The stomach looked pink and healthy …

I never got a firm diagnosis. ‘Probably just an infection.’ Or something to do with the extra kidney randomly discovered during those five months. How different are we all from the diagrams? What strangenesses lie under the skin?

Life. I was given it back. Not a year, not five years: no shadow. It took me several days to understand, and to shrug off the greatcoat of terror. It’s a common enough experience; the mind has been told, but the body can’t turn on a sixpence from one mode to another. The chemicals that are triggered by fear can’t disperse on the instant. People talk about ‘feeling flat’ when the good news comes, of its ‘not sinking in’. The body has depths; it is an ocean. How long does it take for a storm to die down?

But later, how light I felt. How light I feel. How grateful.

Outside the glass, the house-martin swoops, closer, closer, then turns on one wing and is off again, dancing away across the void. Not pinned on its back. Not ash on the ground.

When I first knew my husband, Nick was trying to get a newspaper to send him to the Falklands, where there was a war on. He had lived in Argentina, he knew Spanish. In the end, it didn’t happen, and we got married. One of the great pieces of luck in my life. But he used to say then, and has often said since, always to my intense dismay, ‘If I get killed in a foreign country, I want to be buried where I die.’ I thought, at first, he didn’t understand how sharply I would miss him and need the comfort (however bleak) of a body, or ashes, to visit.

Now I see that perhaps his wish has something to do with a life’s trajectory, the distance you can travel from your starting point. Maybe an animal’s life is best tracked through movement. The tiger flashing past the shadowing grasses, slipping beyond everything: sleep, death, families.

Why ‘animal life’?

I am an animal

Why call this book My Animal Life?

Not to degrade my life, but to celebrate it. To join it, tiny though it is, to all the life in the universe. To the brown small-headed pheasant running by the lake in Coolham. To my grandparents and parents, and my great-grandparents who like most people in the British Isles of their generation wore big boots, even for the rare occasions of photographs, and lived on the clayey land, and have returned their bones to it, joining the bones of cattle, horses, foxes. To the blind out-of-season bee bombing the glass of this window. To link, in a way I only learned to do in my thirties, my mental life to the body I love and enjoy, to my secret sexual life and my life as a mother.

My animal life joins me, also, to my death. That mysterious thing round a bend in the road which, like every other animal stretching in the breeze and the sunlight, I wish not to know about, not yet.

I am writing this book to ask questions — to which I do not know the answer. How can we be happy? What do men want, what do women want? What do children need from us?

Can I save my belief in the soul from my love of science?

How can we bear to lose those we love most? How do we recover from our mistakes — our many mistakes?

How do we forgive ourselves? And our parents?

Why do we need art? Why are we driven to make it?

And class: can we ever really change it?

If it seems rash to ask such questions, I have always been rash. And I am too old to be afraid.

We all ask questions something like these, silently or aloud, in pain or in hope. It is the process of asking I want to record, as the plane comes bumping down through low cloud.

Underneath, it’s still there. Earth. Families. The patterns of being stamped in our nerve-ends. The long stern game of our unknown genes.

My brother John, Grandma and Grandpa Church, me

Two families

and which one won

Nothing about families is simple. No, wrong: there’s a joy about the ‘all of us are here, we are back’ which begins a celebration, the joy of meeting and recognising and counting, the sense of completeness falling like balm: we’re home.

How I wish they could all be here now, Mum and Dad, Gees and Churches, the uncles and aunts, shrugging off scarves and coats, fussing and laughing and settling down; in both families, hugs and kisses. The dead are with us: Uncle Arthur palms a two-bob bit and smuggles it into my pocket, Aunty Eve takes both my hands in her ring-carbuncled fingers and offers the scented dust of her cheek, little Grandma Gee comes rocking towards me like a full-bosomed sea-legged sailor, dot and carry, dot and carry, all dimples, raising her hat to release a thin froth of curled white hair, but, suddenly fretful, calls, ‘Pa! Pa! will you hang this up?’ — her small navy head-hugging straw hat with the long pearl hatpin — but he is too busy crowing at my brother John, his beloved eldest grandson, ‘I’ll match you over 100 yards when you’re eighteen, boy! I’ll walk down the aisle at your wedding!’ All back from the grave, all home. Waves of laughter and tears crossing over.

But before that epiphany, if this was real life, there would be hours or days of preparation, negotiation, tension, not to mention shopping and bed-making and cooking, the rehearsing or erasing of half-forgotten fears and resentments, the burden of hope. Let everything be right, let everything be ready, what shall we tell them and not tell them? Don’t let us down.

And after the perfect moment of reunion, what then?

I come from two different families, the Gees and the Churches. My parents’ given names both tell a story. My father’s was Victor Valentine Gee, quite a burdensome, aspirational one, expecting from the child who was born in 1914, the year the Great War broke out, exploits both martial and romantic. Vic was named for Valentine’s Day, the day he was born on, a secret softness he tried to keep from the oikish adolescents he taught. His initials were V V G, which meant Very Very Good when teachers put it on homework; his demands on himself and others were high.

The Gees were clever and had standards, an end terrace house in Wolverton, Bucks, which meant they were upper working-class, a giant metal roller for the grass leaning against the garden wall, crimson hollyhocks six foot tall, and upstanding moral convictions. Wolverton was a grid of nearly identical red-brick terraced houses with blue slate roofs, a Victorian ‘New Town’ expressly built by the London and Birmingham Railway Company in 1838 to house the men who built the trains. Vic’s father, my grandfather Walt, was a Labour man and trades union leader at ‘The Works’, supposedly a hero for turning down a large cash offer from the bosses to go over to management, a figure in the community, as he let me know one day: ‘They’ll never let me buy my own drinks, in the club,’ he said with a wink. That didn’t sound good to me. ‘Why not?’

‘The Club’, the railway works pub-come-social club, was almost opposite number 62 Peel Road, and I associated it with happiness. Going up alone at night, since I was the youngest, to the dark first floor of my grandparents’ Victorian house, creeping into my soft snow-cold feather-bed with its small warm heart, the stone hot water-bottle put there in advance, I would wait shivering until the music across the way began, and the hum of male voices; then the light from the club, getting brighter as night fell, imprinted through the curtain an intricate, impossibly beautiful, longed-for pattern of lace on the wall.

Why couldn’t Grandpa buy his own drinks? ‘There’s always someone wants to buy me a drink,’ he divulged, and offered me another treacle toffee, a paper bag of which soft dark brown squares he always kept in the pocket of his jacket ‘to keep himself regular’, as Grandma explained, for pleasure in this ascetic family always needed justifying, except for my grandfather’s fondness for drink. At tea (which was also supper) there was a clear rule, no jelly or fruit cake without bread and butter.

Grandpa was a trim, fit man, with bristling white hair, kept short, and a neat moustache to disguise what might have been a hare lip but was actually damage he did himself as a young man in Cosgrove, the canal-side village where he grew up, by diving from the bridge into too-shallow water. ‘Pa’ (as both my parents called him) wore collarless striped shirts and a buttoned, fitted grey waistcoat, always smart, with a watch and watch-chain, which leads me to his special skill as a watch-maker and mender, with a workshop in the garden which was sacrosanct, next to the outside lavvy with its puzzling neat squares of torn newspaper speared on a hook. He sat in his workshop, visible through the open top of the split ‘stable-door’ he had put on, peering down god-like through his monocle-like watch-glass at the tiny gleaming mechanical galaxies of cog and spring he had opened up. No one dared disturb him there, still less go in and touch the minute spread pieces of metal that in my memory would cover the whole of his work-top like hard glittering fallen petals, infinitely interesting but forbidden. Once or twice he let me look in, but always with a firm, ‘Don’t touch, my duck.’ Did he understand how I longed to, loving as I always did (and still do) the detailed and microscopic? He made three grandfather clocks for his three sons, the wooden cases slightly dull but the faces meticulously scrolled and furled and the hands like the elegant dark outlines of heads of herons.

Pa was also his chairs; where the rest of the family relaxed in armchairs or on the brown cracked leatherette sofa with its worn velvet cushions, Pa was only ever seen to sit perfectly erect in one of two upright wooden carver chairs he had made, one at the head of the table in the kitchen where we ate, one, with a pale blue-green-silver brocade slip-over cushion sewn by Grandma to soften the back, in the little dark sitting-room, semi-obstructing the door to the hall, an en-garde throne where no one but Grandpa ever dared to sit.

It was a family of men, one of those families genetically biased towards boys. My father was one of three brothers, three sons, Cecil, Victor and Lloyd, though my grandmother was said to have wanted a girl so much that she kept my father’s blond locks long till he was five years old, thus causing him to be known as ‘Mrs Gee’s Fairy’ — not easy, especially when you secretly know you have a cissy second name, Valentine. Only Lloyd achieved parity between the genders, with a boy and a girl, Martyn and Susan, who (miraculously) always seemed to get on. Cecil had one son, clever Keith, who produced three boys; Vic had me, of course, and I, very late but lucky, gave birth to a girl, but he also had two boys, my brothers John and James, who fathered six boys between them. I grew up very used to men.

Grandma Gee probably suffered from men, and certainly suffered from Pa, who was difficult. A lean, driving, impatient, intelligent man who had been a sprinter, and still walked, in old age, at a furious pace, despite his doctor warning him to slow down. He did so, on his morning walk, for the few yards of pavement that passed the doctor’s surgery, then sped up to a military clip again, a little deception of which he often boasted. Grandma and Grandpa Gee’s arguments were bad, and my father, who as a boy had always been drawn in on his mother’s side, and still did, as an adult, get enmeshed in Oedipal fights against his father which made us children tremble, later decided that Pa had sometimes been right; perhaps because he saw himself in turn becoming Pa, with a manifestly suffering wife, and with children, my brother and me, who’d been turned against him. The first argument between my parents I remember was when I was six or seven, at Watersfield, when I came home from school for lunch. I think it was about food; why was my father at home? Was Mum’s cooking not up to the occasion? I think she had cooked bubble-and-squeak, fried-up potatoes and cabbage, which was something the Church family ate and was actually one of my early childhood favourites; maybe it wasn’t good enough for Dad, who had very recently become a headmaster, pulling himself up with pure determination by his own boot-straps; maybe he wanted food that spoke of their new bright future. What was terrible was seeing my mother cry at table, and my father saying, ‘I have no respect for tears, Ma always used tears.’

Ma: Grandma Gee. The frailest of my four grandparents, dying relatively young, in her seventies.

Charlotte or Lottie Gee née Brown looked small and delicate (though plump, liking peppermint imperials ‘for my digestion’), with a tiny nose, round cheeks, dimples I inherited and bright blue eyes. By the time I remember her, she had fine pleated pale skin, curled white hair and a chronically bad hip, as well as diabetes and Raynaud’s disease — fingers and toes whose blood-vessels go into spasm with cold, turning whitish-blue, and when the blood-flow suddenly returns, an alarming reddish-purple (she died, in the end, from a heart attack followed by gangrene). She still loved clothes, particularly hats, and elaborately pin-tucked blouses worn with brooches over her big soft bosom, and was prone to tell me things I had never thought about, but liked, such as ‘Yellow suits you.’ Grandma made a pet of me, I think because Pa made a pet of my cousin Susan, the only other girl in my generation of Gees, daughter of Vic’s brother Lloyd. Sue was very slightly younger than me, and much prettier, with the big blue family eyes (mine were green) and a perfect button nose (mine was long and Irish), and lived in Wolverton, thus having the advantage of playing for the home team. Sue had what seemed to me a huge wardrobe of wonderful dresses, because her mother Aunty Hilda, unlike my own beloved mother, was good at buying and making clothes. But Grandma, known to everyone but her grandchildren as Ma, took me into her bed as a treat in the mornings and whispered the unthinkable: ‘Susan isn’t prettier than you.’ I must have asked her, or she wouldn’t have said it. ‘You’ll be very pretty one day.’ This was amazing; I was skinny, with glasses, but perhaps if Grandma said so it was true. (I have a vague uneasy memory of checking what Grandma had said with Grandpa. I really wanted to know: ‘Am I prettier than Susan? Grandma says I am’ — which was not exactly what she had said, but was what I hoped to hear. ‘No, you’re not.’ Serves me right.)

Grandma made me pretty clothes. I was helped to be a girl by the extended family. My mother’s deficiencies as a dress-maker must have been common knowledge, because everyone made me clothes, some of them remarkable: Grandma knitted me an outfit of multiple pieces in royal blue wool — (is blue royal any more? richer, deeper than sky-blue) — that had a short gathered skirt with buttoned over-the-shoulder straps, a beret, and a bibbed one-piece bathing suit. When I outgrew it she knitted me another bibbed swimsuit I liked even better, orange with a sharp white edge. Best of all, she made me a fluffy white angora bolero, softest, lightest, whitest delight. Aunty Ede, Ma’s sister, who had worked in the cotton-mills in Leeds (was it my father who told me that the three sisters came south from Bradford?) sent a work of art when I had just started junior school, a wonderfully busy cardigan with eight large cats’ faces, four on each side, knitted in relief, with green eyes and embroidered whiskers, and the neck and cuffs edged with knitted piecrust frills in scarlet, drawn in with scarlet threads finished with pom-poms. With what passion I wore it to school and accepted compliments (it must have dazzled, in the austere post-war world of the 1950s), how vividly it shines more than fifty years later from the phantom closets of my childhood. Aunty Elsie, on my mother’s side, posted, about a year later, just before we moved to Watersfield, a dress of great beauty. Indeed the most beautiful dress I had ever seen: filmy white muslin with raised dots of pale blue, pale blue smocking across the bust, white Peter Pan collar decorated with palest blue ‘S’-bending ric-rac braid, one row of it there and two on the hem, and puffed sleeves. Tragedy: it was too small (and my father was cross: I cried and insisted it fitted, as it strained and creaked under the arms, and he blamed Aunt Elsie because she was from my mother’s side). Compensation: Elsie also sent a white satin petticoat, frilled, which was almost as pretty and fitted me perfectly, though I was never allowed to wear it on its own to birthday parties, as I wanted. When I was confirmed, yet another aunt, Bertha, my godmother, made me a white gathered skirt and blouson boat-necked top from a stiff heavy material that proclaimed my fourteen-year-old virtue (would any fourteen-year-old girl now living in Britain accept, sight unseen, a skirt and top sewn by her aunt?) But I wanted to like it, and did: on family windfalls rested my adolescent hopes of femininity and glamour.

There were reasons why my mother wasn’t, at least while I was young, very good at getting me clothes. For a start, money. There can’t have been much, when Dad was only a teacher and she (because he was a traditional man) wasn’t working. Dad had said, in his very unromantic wartime proposal on the station platform when he was on leave from the Air Force, ‘Two can live as cheaply as one, Aileen’; but three, and then four, and then five, as they added children, could not. All the same, the rest of the family, source of my extravagant gifts, were no richer, and most of them were poorer. It wasn’t just money. Now I see it was because of my mother’s own childhood. A seventh child and third daughter, Mum never had any new clothes of her own, only cast-offs. How was she to know how to make them, or what to buy?

And so we move to the Churches: my other family, my other side. My mother was Aileen Mary Church, but should have been Eileen. The C of E vicar objected to Eileen (because the name was Irish, thus possibly Popish. Zillah Meakins, Mum’s grandma on her father’s side, seems to have been Irish and probably what was then called a ‘tinker’, a gypsy; the Meakinses were frequently away, and had their children christened in batches.) The amiability with which her father changed tack at the christening when the vicar baulked was said to be down to drink, but it also tells you something about the gap between Gees and Churches, because it is inconceivable that a Gee would have changed the name of their child from Eileen to Aileen on a vicar’s, or anyone’s, say-so — not when they were sober and even less when drunk.