in the squadron, but I am on a mission and ‘Mong’ doesn’t stand a chance. After that, all the boys want me in their team, otherwise I end up half-killing them!
When I’m not exorcising my anger in the ATC, or pushing myself through punishing dance routines to ease my pain, I spend hours and hours playing with my pets. I prefer them to people – animals don’t hurt you.
Our house is a regular zoo. After Sabre dies, we get another Alsatian called Drummer, and have three fish – Freddie, Goldie and Rainbow, so-called because she has red lips, and four rabbits which I name Bramble, Holly, Smoky and Thumper. We start off with Bramble and Holly, and we kids buy Smoky for Mum and then Thumper for Dad one Father’s Day. With each new addition our long-suffering father extends the existing hutch upwards.
Out shopping one Saturday I fall in love with a guinea-pig in the pet shop. I know Dad won’t be pleased when I come home with yet another pet, but I want this guinea-pig badly. He looks just like a ginger scrubbing brush and I call him Fibre. I pay £3 for him, and carry him home in a cardboard box. Well, Dad goes spare! There is no room to add another floor to the high-rise hutch and he says I have to take Fibre back to the shop. But good old Granddad saves the day. He offers to make Fibre a hutch but says I have to help him. Grandma says if I go down one night after school she’ll do me tea. I know what I’m letting myself in for, but I want to keep my guinea-pig so much that I agree.
It’s hot, and I’m wearing a white, short-sleeved shirt tucked into my school skirt. It is a long pencil skirt, and I look like a pencil – I really do. I’m in a stinking mood all day, and can’t concentrate in lessons because my mind keeps turning to what’s going to happen later. I walk out of the school gates towards Grandma and Granddad’s feeling sick, but the thought of Fibre going back to the pet shop propels me along. ‘Hello,’ says Grandma when I walk into the kitchen. ‘Granddad’s in the shed.’
The shed is really a garage which Granddad has turned into a workshop. It is made of grey corrugated metal and has two big windows which face the house but are obscured by the apple trees. As I walk towards the shed, hard little windfalls slide under my shoes and make me lose my footing. The entrance is round the side, and as I walk through the open door, I am met by the smell of sawdust, oily rags and Granddad’s pipe. I can see that the double garage doors at the back of the building are blocked by shelves laden with tools and rusty tins oozing sticky stuff. Years later, when I see the film Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Kreuger’s den reminds me of that shed. ‘Hello, darlin’,’ grins Granddad, looking up from the most beautiful hutch I’ve ever seen. He’s left a few nails for me to knock in, and I dutifully go over and hammer them in. Then, without a word, he shoots the bolt on the shed door – and what I dread most happens.
Afterwards, when I go back into the house, I can’t manage the egg and chips that Grandma has cooked for me. I demolish the Mars Bar which Granddad gives me though. I always eat his Mars Bars in a particular way. I unwrap the top half and press my thumb down on the chocolate coating until it cracks and the soft centre starts to ooze out. I like to see the chocolate mash between my fingers. Then I start to pull bits off it and stuff them into my mouth as fast as I can. As I force each piece down my gullet, my hand is poised at my lips with the next bit. Sometimes I eat so quickly that I swallow pieces of wrapper. I don’t enjoy the chocolate, I don’t taste it; I just eat until it is gone, and so fast that I often feel sick. It is a ritual – when the Mars is finished, the bad thing is over.
‘Have you got hair?’ I ask Yvonne. ‘You know I haven’t,’ she laughs, tugging at her blue and white dotted scarf. ‘No, not on your head,’ I say, mouthing ‘down there.’ ‘No,’ she says, looking bemused. ‘God,’ I think to myself, ‘I’m even more ugly than I thought.’
Most of the girls in my class start their periods in our second year at Lealands; mine don’t come until much later. ‘You wait till you get breasts, you wait till your periods come; then you’ll be a real woman,’ Granddad keeps saying, and I am terrified. If this is happening to me now, when I don’t have periods or breasts, what is going to happen to me when I do?
I start my periods at the end of the summer term when I am fourteen; and then, when I am on holiday in Blackpool with Mum, Dad and Lisa, my breasts grow – literally overnight. We are staying in a self-catering apartment and Lisa and I are sharing a bed. My little bumps are agony whichever way I lie, and my arms don’t know where to put themselves. Next morning I take off my nightdress to find that my molehills have turned into mountains. I am astonished – and ashamed.
I hate my boobs because he likes to touch them, and my periods because they excite him. My body feels infected and dirty, and when I catch sight of myself in the mirror, I am disgusted by it. My classmates are right – I am ugly and I probably do smell. I hate my body, hate my life and find myself looking at other boys and girls and wishing I could be them instead of me. God forgive me, I even wish I had cancer like Yvonne.
Yvonne has been off school for ages, and I visit her at home. She is really into the Royal Family, and shows me her scrapbook filled with pictures of the Prince and Princess of Wales’s wedding and baby Prince William. The last time I see Yvonne she has a patch over her eye, and talks a lot about a bone marrow transplant. I don’t really understand what she means, and it is a shock when Mum tells me one dinner-time that Yvonne is in a coma. ‘Will she wake up?’ I ask. ‘Nobody knows, love,’ says Mum, and I cry.
In December, a girl comes flying down the school corridor shouting ‘Yvonne’s dead!’. I want to go home and ask Mrs Patterson to let me off choir practice, but she won’t. I have to stand there and sing, my grief spilling onto the wooden floor. On the day of the funeral, I am in a real state. As Yvonne’s coffin is lowered into the ground, I weep and weep. ‘God’s got to get his angels from somewhere, Claire,’ says Yvonne’s auntie, putting her arms around me. She isn’t to know that part of me is crying because I want to be the one who is dead.
With my best friend gone, I hate school even more, and in June 1985 I am pleased to have three weeks off, doing work experience at British Home Stores. Each day I go into town on the bus, and work from 8.45 a.m. to 5.45 p.m. I love it. I am proud of my uniform – the pale-blue blouse and dark-blue A-line pinafore with its special loop for my locker key. I like the other staff who treat me like one of them, and not like a schoolgirl. Best of all, Mr Warner, the manager, says that if I am any good he’ll consider me for a Saturday job.
I work in all the departments – lighting, children, fashions, menswear, toys, the lot. When deliveries come I collect them from the stock room and sort them out. I tidy, count stock and fill out the DAS – the daily alteration sheet. I am too young to work on the till, but if there is a queue I jump up and wrap for the cashier.
‘You need fattening up,’ says Sheila, who works on one of the tills. She is an older lady and I am gobsmacked by her rings – three or four big gold ones, with diamonds, on each finger! She calls me ‘Little Love’, ‘Skinny Lizzy’ and ‘Rag Doll Annie’ and she’s always saying, ‘Let’s go and have a nice cream cake.’ It becomes a joke between us. She gives me sweets, and at tea break she sits next to me in the canteen and tries to tempt me with her cream cake. I don’t like cream and I won’t eat the cake, but I love Sheila to bits.
The canteen is upstairs and has a pool table and a table-tennis table, comfy seats and the sort of carpet that would hurt your feet if you didn’t have shoes on. I eat well during those three weeks. I feel happy and comfortable and the canteen food is lovely. A book of meal vouchers costs staff £1.50 each
