When I Had a Little Sister: The Story of a Farming Family Who Never Spoke. Catherine Simpson
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Название: When I Had a Little Sister: The Story of a Farming Family Who Never Spoke
Автор: Catherine Simpson
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780008301651
isbn:
I took tarnished silver spoons home to Scotland and polished them until they shone, only to let them blacken again without using them. I put the headless dressmaker’s dummy, still set to Mum’s exact measurements, to stand vigil in Dad’s spare bedroom. I gathered stacks of photographs of unnamed, unknown people and tried to persuade aunts and cousins to identify them and take them away, largely without success. Some were marked but the markings left more questions than answers; on the back of one black and white photograph of a man in a suit and spectacles and bowler hat who looked like a bank manager, written in Grandma Mary’s hand was ‘Uncle Percy; cut his throat on a park bench’, or another of a woman in a 1930s dress, written in an unknown hand: ‘My mother.’ When I asked around about ‘Uncle Percy’, no one seemed to know.
As Mum had not liked sharing her things, she had been equally unwilling to share information. Family anecdotes were treated like state secrets and any request for details was greeted with tight lips and a Stop mithering or a What do you want to know THAT for? Telling stories was ‘gossiping’, even if the people involved had been dead for a generation – which meant stacks of photographs were left untethered from their stories.
There was a white box of wedding photographs showing my mother and father on the day they married in 1959; my mother beautiful without make-up and in a home-made dress – a lace and duchesse satin creation that could have come from a couture house. A dress I was disappointed as a child to discover she had chopped up to make satin cot quilts for us as babies – a decision that I now see makes perfect sense. In the black and white wedding photographs my father is handsome in a bespoke suit and white carnation and, in some, with what must be a bright red ‘L for Learner’ sign pinned to his back by my mother’s brothers.
As a child I would have revelled in the glamour of these photographs and listened rapt to the details of the day, but those details were never divulged by my mother who kept the pictures out of sight at the bottom of the wardrobe with stacks of wool and material on top. We’d get tantalizing glimpses of the white box but were strictly forbidden to ‘root’. And now it was too late. Now my mother’s memories of the day were lost for ever. My mother wasted an opportunity to talk and to share and it still makes me mad with her, even though she has been dead ten years. What was the point of having these photographs at all if they were to be abandoned to moulder out of sight?
Mum and Dad married in 1959
By contrast my father keeps the brochure for their honeymoon in his desk drawer. He takes out the small blue booklet, Cook’s Motor Coach Tour to the Sunny French and Italian Rivieras, Taking in London, Grenoble, Nice, Monte Carlo, San Remo and Paris, at every opportunity to tell us again about the casino in Monte Carlo and the ‘Paris by Night’ coach tour on the way home. This must have been quite some tour in 1959; the brochure’s instructions hint at the novelty of the trip: ‘It is not practice for hotels to provide toilet soap and it is recommended that you take your own soap and at least one hand towel … Cameras can be taken on the Continent, and films purchased quite easily … As there may be opportunities for bathing you may wish to pack a bathing suit … Sunglasses will add to your comfort … Baths (unless you have booked a room with private bath at a supplementary charge) and afternoon teas are not included.’ Torquay or, God forbid, Blackpool would not have done for my mother, but whenever Dad talked about their glamorous trip she’d respond with a dismissive wave of the hand. Who wants to know about that?
When we were left with only heavy furniture in the farmhouse we called a house clearance cum antique dealer who sent along a pair of rough-looking blokes called Pete and Trev. Pete and Trev pulled up outside with a van already packed, and with no apologies for being two hours late. The things we wanted them to take included the enormous bedroom suite my father’s parents, David and Marjorie, had arrived with in 1925 as newly-weds. This suite was heavyset mahogany elaborately carved with leaves and flowers and smelling of camphor. There were four pieces: a wardrobe with an arched bevelled mirror, a marble-topped washstand, a dressing table and a bedside cupboard with a shelf for a chamber pot.
As Pete and Trev sauntered about the farmhouse their eyes never looked where we pointed but flickered around each room, alighting briefly on everything else. Furniture was touched, smoothed, handled, turned upside down, and pronounced upon with a shaking head. ‘Brown furniture, you can hardly give it away these days,’ said Pete or Trev. ‘It’s all IKEA now.’ Pete or Trev grimaced. ‘A piano? It’d cost me more to take it than to leave it. The last one – I couldn’t give it away – had to get it dropped from a crane to break it up.’ Cupboard doors were opened and shut; drawers were slid in and out, out and in, removed, twizzled round. ‘Where are the drawers for this Georgian chest?’ asked Pete or Trev. Unfortunately the answer was ‘on the bonfire’. ‘Where is the other table from this G Plan nest?’ We looked at each other; maybe our eyes flickered to the window with the view of the bonfire. Nest? Was there another table as ugly as that one? Eventually Pete or Trev brought out a roll of banknotes from a trouser pocket and rapidly peeled off several. ‘Three-fifty and it’s off yer hands.’
There was almost a hysteria by now about finishing this task which had been generations in the making. The decisions we made were hasty and getting hastier because Elizabeth and I lived hundreds of miles apart and so we did the job in bursts at weekends. It felt at times as though we would never get to the end of it. I had the sensation of trying to free myself from a sticky cobweb that clung relentlessly, refusing to let go and entangling me further no matter how hard I grappled.
Not long after Pete or Trev paid us for the bedroom furniture we found a list of wedding presents, handwritten by Marjorie in 1925, headed up ‘Walnut Bedroom Suite – given by Mother and Father’. So it was walnut not mahogany. I felt a guilty stabbing – what were we doing? – before common sense reasserted itself.
As the house became emptier and brighter it seemed physically to lighten and relax. When David and Marjorie’s enormous bedroom suite was finally removed by Pete and Trev ninety years after it arrived, it was as though the house had lost its anchor or had its roots severed. The farmhouse was now empty and echoing and it seemed there was every chance that, unencumbered by our family detritus, I might return to it one day and find it had gone – that it had floated entirely away.
My sisters and I were born at New House Farm in the sitting room; the same room in which my dad was born thirty-eight years before me; a room otherwise only used on Christmas Day to watch films and eat Quality Street; a room that would one day have Pete and Trev strolling round it talking about pianos and cranes and brown furniture as they weighed up brass pots and pieces of china and searched for marks on the silver.
Me and Elizabeth ‘helping’ Dad mend a puncture around 1966
On the day I was born, Nurse Steele came with her canister of gas and air to deliver me, as she had done three years earlier when Elizabeth arrived and as she would do three years later for the birth of Tricia.
On that occasion Elizabeth and I were not told what was happening in the sitting room directly below our bedroom. We woke one morning to discover our bedroom door so firmly shut it was impossible to open. Was it locked? Were we trapped? We hammered and screamed ‘Help! Help! Mummy! Mummy!’ until Dad wrenched the door open. ‘Sssh!’ An aunt took us downstairs and gave us Chocolate Fingers and milky coffee in front of the kitchen fire to keep us quiet until we were eventually taken into the sitting room for the first sight of our СКАЧАТЬ