When I Had a Little Sister: The Story of a Farming Family Who Never Spoke. Catherine Simpson

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СКАЧАТЬ Jack was our neighbour and looked like a manifestation of God himself – if God ever wore fustian breeches and lived in a red-brick cottage in the middle of Lancashire. He had white hair, a white moustache and a mahogany desk full of chocolate.

      We took up his dinner (his midday meal) every day on the tractor the quarter of a mile from our farm. My dad drove and Elizabeth and I bounced along clinging to the tractor cab, struggling to keep the plate straight to stop the gravy and the peas from dribbling into our wellies.

      We’d find him sunk in his armchair by the open fire. He wore a jacket and weskit and trousers shiny with age and of an indeterminate colour best described as ‘old’. He had pockets of mint imperials and barley sugars.

      He was glad to see us and would greet us with a ‘How do’ and creak out of his chair and root around in his antique desk to find each of us an Aero bar. The desk had shiny black knobs down each side and soft fraying leather on top and a secret drawer. Old Jack showed us how to slide out one of the knobs to open the secret drawer.

      Old Jack’s cottage had no running water, no electricity and no gas. It was 1968, and by then his wife had been dead more than thirty years. Old Jack had lived there on his own since his brother Old Jem died of lung cancer in 1962. Old Jem had never smoked but had spent every night huddled over the coal fire in the cottage to keep himself warm. Old Jack had had two brothers and a sister, all unmarried, who had lived with him after his wife died and who themselves then died at seven-year intervals – Agnes was the first to go in 1948. She was a woman with an ‘erratic mind’ who ‘fizzled out somehow or other’, as my father remembers it. Seven years later Bob shot himself with a 12-bore shotgun on the back cobbles of the cottage. Bob was seventy years old, newly retired and unable to face life without his job on the dykes.

      My dad had been visiting Old Jack every Sunday evening since the 1940s and for years there had been games of Nap and Pontoon, with Agnes, Bob and Old Jem, playing for pennies; the oil lamp rocking on the table as they excitedly slapped down the cards.

      By the time Old Jack died in 1968 we’d been delivering his meals by tractor every day for ten years and we were the closest thing he had to family.

      A year or two earlier when Old Jack was well into his eighties, he’d turned up at our farm on his bike with his Last Will and Testament shoved in his weskit pocket. He was leaving the lot to my dad and another neighbour, he said; his tiny cottage, its contents and his ten-acre meadow with his cow in it. To Elizabeth he was leaving his ebony and gold antique chiming clock, to my baby sister Tricia he was leaving his Edwardian sofa, and to me he was leaving the loveliest thing I have ever been given – the beautiful antique writing desk with the shiny black knobs and the secret drawer full of chocolate.

      Old Jack died ‘of old age’ in his sleep when he was eighty-six and he was laid out in an open coffin in the cottage’s tiny sitting room. I was four years old and wanted to go and see him.

      ‘I want to see Old Jack.’

      ‘No.’

      ‘I want to see him.’

      ‘Stop mithering.’

      ‘What does he look like?’

      ‘Like he’s asleep. Now stop mithering.’

      ‘Is he in bed?’

      ‘No, he’s in a coffin.’

      ‘What’s a coffin?’

      (Sigh.) ‘It’s a box you get buried in. Now that’s enough.’

      ‘What kind of a box?’

      ‘Oak with brass handles. It’s a box that’s oak with brass handles.’

      I thought about this. A few years later I would learn about oak boxes with brass handles; I would see them on The Dave Allen Show where they were usually balanced on the crossbars of bikes or slithering out of vans and sliding down hills chased by the vicar. But at the age of four I had never seen one and they intrigued me.

      ‘Can I go to the funeral?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘You’re too young.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Children don’t go to funerals. Don’t ask again.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Ask again and you’ll go to bed.’

      Dad brought the antique desk from Old Jack’s with the tractor and trailer. He wrapped his long arms round it and staggered into the house with his knees bent. Unlike with Great-Great-Aunt Alice’s bracelet and evening bag, my mother did not consider the desk rubbish. She said, ‘That desk’s mahogany, it’s a Davenport – put it straight in the sitting room.’ That meant I’d only see it on Christmas Day or if somebody was born or if somebody died.

      It was not going in my bedroom because it would get ruined. It was too good, my mother said. It was too good to get scribble gouges and felt-pen marks and cup rings on it. The mahogany desk was going in the sitting room and that was that.

      Occasionally over the years I would turn the brass knob on the sitting-room door and push the door over the thick carpet and stare at the mahogany desk wedged between the grand piano and Tricia’s Edwardian sofa. It was a long way away; acres away over the swirling turquoise and gold carpet and flanked by tarnished photograph frames and piles of sheet music and china vases that I wasn’t allowed to touch either. It was far, far away – much farther away than it had been in Old Jack’s living room. It was not covered in scribble gouges or felt-pen marks or cup rings. It was not ruined, but its secret drawer was never opened and no one ever stroked its frayed leather top. No, the mahogany desk may not have been ruined but it was dusty and fading and empty of chocolate and so far away it was lost to me.

      One way or another there seemed to be a lot of death about as we grew up – Old Jack, Great-Great-Aunt Alice, Grandad, endless farm cats, sickly piglets and occasional calves born dead, which is possibly why I was obsessed with ghost stories – tales of people coming back, people who were dead but not truly gone. I read and reread Aidan Chambers’s Ghost Stories and More Ghost Stories and, when all else failed, my Sunday-school prize, Saints by Request.

      One afternoon Wuthering Heights came on the television. Mum said, ‘You might like this, it’s a ghost story.’ I watched, enraptured by Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. The following day Mum went specially to John Menzies in Preston and bought me the book. I was ten years old and sat on the hearthrug doggedly reading it although I did not understand many words and had to skip Joseph and his broad Yorkshire dialect altogether (even though Joseph was basically Gran). Over several evenings I immersed myself in the passion and the brutality, the obsessive revenge, the jealousy and the violence of a story about a girl called Cathy that took place largely in a Northern kitchen. Mum recalled me finishing the book, turning to the front, reading the introduction, asking ‘What’s incest?’ (pronounced in-kest), getting no answer and starting the book again. This was a wild world where life and death were close to each other; where it was better to commune with somebody even if they were dead than not commune with them at all.

      Elizabeth, Tricia and I attended a Church of England primary school and we regularly went to Sunday school at the village church. Sunday school mainly consisted СКАЧАТЬ