Girl With Dove: A Life Built By Books. Sally Bayley

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       Miss Marple

      Miss Marple was at the back of her garden wrestling with her roses when Dolly Bantry called by. The greenfly had got to them again and she was determined to see them off. Dolly would just have to wait for her tea! Miss Marple gave a vigorous spray from her bottle of lemon-scented chemicals. She shook the pink petals ever so gently and untied her garden apron. She rubbed her hands and gave one of her small, barely noticeable smiles.

      (Miss Marple by me, age eight)

      When I was eight I wanted to be Miss Marple. I still do. Miss Marple knows everything about everyone, but nobody knows anything about her. She has no backstory. You can’t see behind her and you can never get around her. Miss Marple sits in her chair in the front of St Mary Mead and looks out upon the world. There is nothing behind that antique chair except china shepherdesses and fallen roses.

      When I think of Miss Marple I always think of my mother and grandmother and their old English roses. That is Mum spraying off the greenfly at the back of the garden. That is my grandmother putting on the kettle for tea, my grandmother, Edna May, with her nose against the window, watching Mum snip the blooms. Tea roses, climbers, I don’t know which, but pale pink, baby pink, the pink of Mum’s pillowcases; the pink of Little Bo Peep’s cheeks when she blushes from the heat.

      ‘Sit in the shade,’ Mum says. ‘Always sit in the shade, never on the side of a hill. Wherever you are, find a nice bit of shade. English girls shouldn’t sit out in the sun. Cover yourself up and put on a nice hat with a wide brim.’ Pink, rose pink, the colour of my straw hat, after all these years.

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      I know the names of all the old English flowers because I had a grandmother and a mother who tended to them at the bottom of our scrubby patch of garden. I am the daughter of an English florist and I have been trained to smell flowers suspiciously. If the roses didn’t smell, they weren’t real.

      ‘Artificial!’ Mum declared. ‘Nothing at all. Not a single bit. Not even a tiny bit of pong!’

      Roses that don’t pong weren’t roses at all. When you smelled a rose you had to make sure that what you were smelling was the real thing, the old English thing, the smell that sent you back. Ring-a-ring-of-roses, a pocket full of posies, we all fall down, and back, headlong back.

      English flowers should always send you back, back to days when girls wore aprons to do their chores and nannies fussed over tea and scones in the nursery. Days that never existed, days that never were, days we dreamed up from storybooks and nursery rhymes. But we wanted them nonetheless: as much as my mother wanted her roses to grow up alongside the wall and behave nicely; as much as Miss Jane Marple wanted to defeat the greenfly so that she could tell Dolly Bantry before tea that she had won, and that her roses were now as bona fide and factual as the Bayeux Tapestry.

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      Miss Marple likes to deal with facts, because facts are concrete. Mum likes facts too. Facts are as square as her windowboxes filled with pansies.

      ‘You’ve got to get your facts straight, Sally. First ask, what are the facts? You’ve got to get your facts first before you can begin anything!’

      But if you want facts you have to go looking for them. ‘They won’t come to you,’ Mum says. ‘You have to make an effort!’

      Miss Marple finds most of her facts inside St Mary Mead, the quiet English village she has lived in all her life. She knows everything she needs lies inside that quaint, chocolate-box place. Open up the lid, and there she is: an old lady tucked inside a pretty village. St Mary Mead with its Norman church spire and neat borders, St Mary Mead with its pleasant-faced locals, St Mary Mead full of people who remind you of someone else.

      ‘It reminds me of Mr Hargreaves up at the Mount,’ Miss Marple tells her nephew, Raymond, when he comes looking for facts for his novel. But Raymond doesn’t follow, because between you and me, Raymond isn’t half as clever as he thinks he is.

      He doesn’t know that you don’t have to go very far to find a fact. Miss Marple knows that facts can be found by looking just over there: in the face of your mother as she lifts her head from the hot pan; in the veins of your grandmother’s hands as she picks up the shopping from the stairs; in the pattern on the curtains you stared at as a child.

      There were small gay papier-mache tables in the drawing room, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and painted with castles and roses … for curtains, Gwenda had chosen old fashioned chintz of pale egg-shell blue with prim urns of roses and yellow birds on them.

      (Agatha Christie, Sleeping Murder)

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      As a child I was terrified of curtains. Flapping curtains were big black birds out to get me. Curtains were black-winged creatures that came in the night and covered my face. Curtains hid spiders and flies. Curtains suffocated sleepless children.

      People hide behind curtains. In English villages, women spy behind their net curtains. ‘Net curtains cover a multitude of sins,’ Mum used to say. ‘You can get away with murder if you hang your curtains well.’ You can watch the world go by and no one will ever know that you are snooping and sneaking.

      My mother loved her net curtains. She hated it when they started to get dingy and dirty, when The Woman Upstairs moved in and brought her yellow clouds of smoke.

      But this came later. Before then, there were no net curtains in our downstairs flat, only a scrappy back door that flapped open whenever the sea is blowing a sharp wind across the front, my grandmother said. My grandmother, Maisie – Maze; my grandmother, who had knobbly fingers from arthritis and who never owned a smart handbag like Miss Marple because she didn’t have the time to clutch it tight with two hands. My grandmother, who never had two hands spare because her hands were always in soapy water, in the sink, or under the grill; my grandmother pulling out rows of toasted cheese or dragging a bicycle basket full of bread up the stairs.

      But sometimes my grandmother went into the garden and snapped the heads of peas. She rarely did the roses. Those were for Mum. No. Maisie did the vegetables and peas, the beans and potatoes, the cabbages and rhubarb. My grandmother was like Mr McGregor: she dug her spade deep down inside the soil until she made the worms scream.

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       Grandmothers

      In 1976, when I was four, the water ran out. There were no more baths. Worse than that, Mum’s roses were wilting. She rushed back and forth through the back door with perfume bottles filled with water. Mum spent all summer spraying her roses back to life.

      ‘That way the police won’t know,’ she told Maze. ‘They won’t come snooping about. As long as I don’t get the hosepipe out, nothing will look amiss. A few drops of water here or there isn’t going to make much difference. I must keep them moist, I must keep the roots moist, Maze, twice a day, morning and night. They don’t stand a chance in this heat. They’ll be killed off. I don’t want my roses killed off after all this.’

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