hair gets messy. My best girl, he whispers in my ear and carries me round to the table of puddings and I can have a taste of any one I want. The music’s louder. Daddy’s laughing with Alan Crawford. I put my head down because I’m sleepy. Alan’s cigar makes my eyes itch and Daddy twirls me round and round and I can still see, near the stairs, my sparkling mother.
Hugo is my hero. I’m his best girl, his darling. When he comes back from France he gives me a doll. I have a cupboard full of dolls with clothes as beautifully stitched as my own. He looks like me. He has dark hair, blue eyes and freckles which on him don’t offend my mother. When I think about him now I feel different. He could tell me about the history of France and how to put a drain in a house. How to play cricket and what was the best way to land a Spitfire on bumpy ground. But he never asked me what I wanted or if I was happy.
My parents went away on holiday and left me with Pammy. The house was quiet and we ate in the kitchen. It seemed huge compared to the nursery. There was a round wooden table with red chairs. The floor was black and white. The door led into the garden, a tiny town garden with a wall all round. A cherry tree with blossom like pink snow and red bark that peeled like paper. I watched the sparrows splash in the bird bath. I sat on the kitchen step. Pammy called, ‘Lunch!’ and we had sausages and mashed potato.
I can’t remember Pammy’s face, but she was pink and fat. She wasn’t a nanny but a nurse, and sometimes she wore a nurse’s apron with a little watch pinned to it. But that was when I was very little. I remember her in Bath wearing flowery dresses that squeezed across her stomach. Sandals with socks and a white cardigan with pearly buttons. Her bosom was enormous and her cardigan never fitted over it. She smelled of Coty’s L’aimant and Imperial Leather soap. She treated me with the briskness and matter-of-factness that nurses were supposed to treat their patients. I like to think that when I was a baby she sang to me and cradled me, because I’m sure my mother never did.
Pammy likes Elvis. When my parents are away we go into the lounge and play records on the stereogram. I’m not allowed in the lounge and neither is she, but we won’t tell. Pammy sings along and now I can see her face. Her face is round, her hair is short and mousy, she sings ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ in a whisper, she knows all the words. My mother is beautiful and Pammy is not, but her lips tremble when she whispers, ‘They’ll make you so lonely you will die.’ Her eyes are closed. This is ecstasy. It looks curious and rather frightening but I want to feel it too. I close my eyes. The music stops and Pammy says, ‘Would you like some milk and biscuits?’ She looks embarrassed and pinker and smooths down the covers of the easy chairs. They are covered in yellow roses like the curtains in my room.
I remember these times, which in my memory stretch for months but were probably only weeks. We never visit anybody. She reads me stories in a flat voice. Cinderella. Little Red Riding Hood. Snow White. I try as hard as I can to see Cinderella’s glittering ball like one of my parents’ parties, the grinning wolf like Alan Crawford and Snow White singing as she makes sausages and mash for the seven dwarves.
Sometimes we go out, to the park I now know as Henrietta Park but I call it the pretty park. It’s filled with blossom and flowers and sunlight. There’s another park with swings and slides and a boating lake, but that’s too far, says Pammy. We sit on a bench. We sit in the sun and watch the people. She’s not a great one for talking. If I ask a question, she says, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ or ‘Don’t ask me that.’ Am I getting this wrong or was Bath quieter then? Now it’s so busy and in the summer heaving with tourists, but I remember warm late-spring afternoons in a park bursting with blossom. We watch a man walk right round the park. The shadows are getting longer. He passes by, raises his hat, and says, ‘Good afternoon, ladies.’ We walk back up the hill, slowly because Pammy puffs and wheezes. I see the paint on the doors. Peeling dark green paint, dark red paint. The windows of the houses are thick with lace curtains. The houses are a gold honey colour, all standing next to each other like old people in a church.
From my nursery window I can see right across the town and it frightens me. We live up so high we might fall down. Pammy sits by the window and looks out as if she has been put in charge of all the people and not just me. At night I want my curtains closed. I can’t sleep unless they’re closed. I don’t want to see how high up we are. In the night I imagine the house is balanced on a rock and any minute it’s going to fall down and we’ll all be buried. I start crying and screaming, ‘It’s going to fall down any minute!’ Then Pammy comes in, in a flowery nightie, and puts on the light. I want to tell her how scary it is, but I can’t. She tucks me in and sits next to me. She yawns and yawns and rubs her eyes. I say, ‘Leave the door open.’ She pads back to her room heavily, like a bear. I think I can hear her getting into bed. The springs bounce. I think I can hear her snoring. I feel comforted.
I went to school and Pammy left. This is a fact. I don’t remember it. I don’t remember saying goodbye or tears or presents, but I remember my school uniform. Grey and blue. A grey skirt, a blue blazer, a grey hat with a blue ribbon. Grey socks. It was one of those little private schools there used to be so many of but they got closed down because they were crap. We sat in rows and copied out letters of the alphabet. A,a,a. B,b,b. By the time I went to school I could already read, but nobody paid attention to that. The school had once been a house and the playground was the garden concreted over. The headmistress was called Miss Tanner. There were three boys, but the rest of the children were girls. I had never seen so many children before, shouting, skipping, singing, playing games I had never heard of and didn’t know how to play. The boys fascinated me. They had long grey socks, long grey shorts, and in between were plastered knees. They cut their knees and didn’t cry. Their shirts came untucked and they didn’t care. One had ginger hair and freckles, but orange freckles he wasn’t the least bit ashamed of. He stuck his arm next to mine and said, ‘I’ve got more than you.’ The other two boys were brothers, Desmond and Peter. They communicated by nodding to each other. Desmond got slapped on the hands with a ruler by Miss Tanner, because he was bold. He stood there, pink cheeked and defiant. It was Peter who wailed. Afterwards in the playground they plotted how they were going to get her. They were going to hide her chalk. They were going to piss in the girls’ toilets. They were going to get a black man to look up her skirt. I was silent and insignificant. They didn’t notice me. I heard it all.
My father took me to school and my mother took me home. She didn’t talk to the other mothers. After all what had she to say to the dowdy women with fat babies in prams, but my father smiled and chatted. They were respectable women, but marriage had made them sport tweedy skirts and cardigans of sludgy green, over-permed hair and unflattering footwear. My mother was as remote as a princess. Sunglasses, and her hair under a headscarf. A cream suit and little pointed shoes. She said the same thing to me every day. ‘Did you have a nice time?’ It wasn’t the sort of question that needed an answer. She held my hand not out of affection but so I wouldn’t get lost. She walked slowly, as if she had all the time in the world, turning her head to look at her reflection in shop windows.
I’m in my bedroom at night and I’ve had that dream again about the house falling down. I’m crying and crying, but then I realise Pammy isn’t there anymore. I also realise that no matter how much I scream my parents won’t come upstairs. It’s a strange thought and a horrible one and it quietens me. I lie there in the darkness but I can’t sleep. Then I do an odd thing. I get out of bed, open Pammy’s door, and run back into bed as fast as I can. Pammy isn’t there, but I can imagine that she is. I imagine I can hear her snoring on the other side of the nursery. I imagine it so much I can hear it. Then everything feels better.
I still do this, don’t I, when I’m by myself? I imagine somebody’s there when they’re not. It’s better than being alone.
She woke up under the sloping roof of the hut to a wet, windy
