Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood. Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes.
I never knew what nationality Karina was: or, as I believe, what mixture of nationalities. ‘I’m English,’ she would say defiantly. Perhaps this hurt her parents. When she was ten or so they wanted to send her off to a Saturday school, so that she could learn to read and write in her native languages, and learn folk-songs and folk-dances, and have national costumes. Stoutly, dumbly, she resisted this. ‘Wear a stupid apron!’ was all she said. ‘Wear a stupid bonnet!’
It torments me now, that I am so vague: were her parents Polish, Ukrainian, Estonian? If they themselves didn’t share a native tongue, that would explain why in their household communication was often in rudimentary English. I remember them as shapeless, silent people, in woollen clothes which they wore in many layers. They both worked in the mills, in jobs that required no verbal facility, in rooms where the clatter of the machines was so loud that speech was impossible anyway.
Karina’s house was just up the street from mine, just up Curzon Street. The houses on Curzon Street were made of red brick, like the houses in all the streets around. When you went in there was a vestibule and a sitting-room and behind it a kitchen of the same size. There were two bedrooms and no bathroom. The lavatory was outside in the yard. When I was a small child we had a rent man who called every Friday, and who stood filling the vestibule while cash was handed over and an entry was made in our rent book. Every year or so, the landlady would call to look over her property. She owned the whole of Curzon Street, every house, and all of Eliza Street too. She wore a heavy pink dusting of face powder, a dashing trilby with a feather, and a coat and skirt, which people then called a costume. ‘Did you see that costume?’ my mother would say. Every year she said this. She did not specify what it was about the costume that startled her: just ‘Did you see that costume?’ Then one year, in a violent outburst, she added, ‘I could have made it myself. Run it up for a guinea, on the machine.’
Until I was nine or so, my mother and father and I washed by rota at the kitchen sink, using a pink cake of soap my mother kept in an enamel dish, and sharing a towel that looped on a hook in the cupboard beneath. Mornings were slow work, because of modesty. My mother went first; by the time I was shouted to come downstairs, the mysteries of her bust were preserved beneath hasty pearl-buttoning, only the rough flushed skin of her throat suggesting that she had scrubbed herself half-naked just minutes before. Standing before the mirror, she would swipe the bridge of her nose with her powder-puff; it distributed a different dust from our landlady’s, and I would watch her slice down and across and down, practised and ruthless as a man wiping mortar over bricks, obliterating her mottled bits with an overlay of khaki, and slicing off the surplus with the edge of the puff. I would sit at the kitchen table, shivering sometimes, my feet dangling in mid-air below the hem of my nightdress; I watched while my father shaved. His mouth was stopped by soap, his face tilted as though he were communing with saints; the humiliating female reek of the pink soap leaked from the skin of his freckled shoulders.
But then the landlady yielded to pressure to install baths and hot-water systems for her tenants. Half my bedroom disappeared behind a partition, and became a white, unheated box. On the first day after the installation was finished, I climbed into the tub in my clothes—without the water in, of course—just to see what it would feel like. It felt frozen, glazed, slippery; enamelled cold struck into my bones.
The rent was increased, but shortly afterwards the landlady began to sell off her houses. She must have wanted to be rid of them quickly, because her asking price was only five hundred pounds. My parents went into their bedroom and hissed at each other. A heavy thumping came from the floorboards above. I loitered at the window in our front room, admiring dogs that came and went; I hoped to get a dog, but my mother said the very limit of her tolerance would be a small and perfectly house-trained cat. I strained my ears for the words ‘Kingston-upon-Hull’.
My parents came downstairs after two hours. There was a high colour in my mother’s cheeks. ‘We are to become owner-occupiers,’ she said.
Karina’s parents did not have five hundred pounds, so they continued to rent their house from the new landlord. ‘You think you’re so swanky,’ Karina said. ‘You think you’re so well-off.’
Every day Karina and I used to walk to school together. We toddled down Curzon Street towards the town centre, turning left down Eliza Street at the pub called the Ladysmith. Most streets had a pub on the corner, and they were usually named after the younger children of Queen Victoria, or dead generals, or victories in colonial wars; we were too young to know this. We rolled downhill, guided by the mill chimneys and their strange Italianate architecture—yellow brick and pink brick and grimy brick—and everywhere black vistas fell away, railway embankments and waste ground, war damage and smoke; at the end of Bismarck Street we looked down on the puffing chimneys of houses below, ranged in their rows, marching down and down into the murky valley.
We passed the Irish club, and the florist’s with its small stiff pink-and-white carnations in a bucket, and the drapers called ‘Elvina’s’, which displayed in its window Bear Brand stockings and knife-pleated skirts like cloth concertinas and pasty-shaped hats on false heads. We passed the confectioner’s—or failed to pass it; the window attracted Karina. She balled her hands into her pockets, and leant back, her feet apart; she looked rooted, immovable. The cakes were stacked on decks of sloping shelves, set out on pink doilies whitened by falls of icing sugar. There were vanilla slices, their airy tiers of pastry glued together with confectioners’ custard, fat and lolling like a yellow tongue. There were bubbling jam puffs and ballooning Eccles cakes, slashed to show their plump currant insides. There were jam tarts the size of traffic lights; there were whinberry pies oozing juice like black blood.
‘Look at them buns,’ Karina would say. ‘Look.’ I would turn sideways and see her intent face. Sometimes the tip of her tongue would appear, and slide slowly upwards towards her flat nose. There were sponge buns shaped like fat mushrooms, topped with pink icing and half a glacé cherry. There were coconut pyramids, and low square house-shaped chocolate buns, finished with a big roll of chocolate-wrapped marzipan which was solid as the barrel of a cannon.
I waited for Karina to choose one, to go in and buy it, because I knew that her parents gave her money every day, at least 3d. and sometimes as much as 6d. But after examining the cakes for some time, after discussing them, after speculating on their likely taste and texture until my mouth was full of saliva, Karina would fall silent, and turn away, with something obstinate in her face, something puzzled and pained, some expression which was too complicated for me to identify. And so we would go to school.
Two years went by, marked less by scholastic achievement than by crazes. There was a yo-yo craze, and a fashion for paper games. There were whole weeks when we did nothing but beg stiff plain paper to fold and crease and manufacture things we called ‘Quackers’, disembodied palm-sized beaks that you snapped at people’s noses. There were skipping outbreaks and new rhymes, new rhymes and amalgamations and blends of old ones:
‘Manchester Guardian, Evening News
Here comes a cat in high-heel shoes.
Clock strikes one, Clock strikes two, Clock has a finger and it’s pointing at you.
Mother mother I am sick, Send for the doctor quick quick quick.
Doctor doctor
Will I die?
Course you will and so will I…’
Karina was an efficient skipper. Her feet thundered
