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

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       Chapter Seven

      Until Tricia was seven she slept in a little alcove in my parents’ bedroom – the farmhouse had four bedrooms but with Gran using one and the roof leaking in another we were short of space. Unfortunately for her there was a small passageway leading to her bedroom with a bolt on the outside of the door and Elizabeth and I sometimes took it upon ourselves to lock her in when she was supposed to be in bed but didn’t want to go. I remember hearing her crying behind the bolted door begging to be let out as Mum and Dad watched television oblivious downstairs – or in Dad’s case slept in front of the television. I remember Elizabeth bending and putting her mouth to the keyhole and hissing ‘go to bed’ while I leaned against the spindles at the top of the stairs.

      It is memories like this that haunt me still, years later, now she is gone. I wish I could not still hear her crying to be let out from behind the locked door. I would do anything to change that memory and I try to replace it with a better one.

      This better memory is of me and Tricia climbing into the same bed – my bed. Mum shouts from downstairs, ‘Are you in bed?’ And we hold hands and reply ‘yes!’ without letting on we’re in the same single bed. We giggle and snuggle down in the dark, happy that we are warm and together and, in our minds, getting away with something. My mother must discover her there when she comes to bed because when I wake up in the morning Tricia is always gone.

      Our bolting of the door to try to get Tricia to stay in bed probably isn’t surprising considering the methods my mother used. She bought a sheet of plywood to put up at the window of our bedroom every summer evening to make it dark – her version of shutters, I suppose – but Elizabeth and I did not appreciate this brown monstrosity and propped it against the tallboy and slid down it until it snapped in two.

      The tallboy was ugly as well. It had drawers crammed with material, never used, that burst out if you slid open the drawers and was impossible to shove back in without skinning your knuckles. This tallboy was a far cry from my Cousin Angela’s kidney-shaped dressing table that wore a pleated skirt of white and pink roses. My cousin had pink walls to match and a pink bedspread. My cousin was pink. I was not pink. I longed to be pink.

      Mum also removed the light bulb from our bedroom so we couldn’t keep putting the light on, until one day when I was six years old and Grandma Mary asked me what I wanted for Christmas. In all innocence I told her I was writing to Father Christmas for a light bulb. ‘Poor lass,’ she said and within a day or two the light bulb had reappeared.

      Tricia had an affinity with animals. As a child she slid off café chairs in search of dogs on leads and cried because the Blackpool donkeys looked sad. We had a dentist with slicked-back hair and a smirk who crept about in brown suede shoes and was known as ‘the butcher’, but she agreed to go for check-ups so she could watch his tropical fish flit around their glass cube.

      She loved horses and read over and over the ‘Silver Brumby’ books and My Friend Flicka