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

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СКАЧАТЬ read to find circuses, wild animals, long dresses, castles, enchanted forests and magic faraway trees. Re-entering real life after being lost in a book was painful and disorientating.

      At the table I read the back of the cereal packet. I read the primary-school library over and over again. I read the set texts Elizabeth brought home from secondary school: Animal Farm, White Fang, The Otterbury Incident. I read the Daily Express. I read the Radio Times. When I ran out of stories I read the dictionary. I compiled my own dictionary of words I didn’t understand. ‘Tippet: a woman’s shawl; Brougham: a horse-drawn carriage; Stucco: plaster used for decorative mouldings’ reads the list, in what must have been a Georgette Heyer phase.

      Until sixth-form college my reading was unguided so I read Tender is the Night but not The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina but not War and Peace, Lady Chatterley’s Lover but not Women in Love. I chose books from Garstang Library purely on covers and titles. I read the entire works of P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie, fascinated by their versions of English country houses. I read everything Catherine Cookson wrote and pronounced ‘whore’ with a ‘w’.

      My mother brought back library books in the Ulverscroft Large Print series for me, knowing I wore glasses without understanding they were for distance not for reading. Producing a child who needed glasses was perturbing for my mother: ‘I fell down stairs when I was expecting. I didn’t make such a good job of you.’ I never told her I could read small print perfectly well, because I liked getting lost in the great big words.

      But my mother did give me occasional random compliments. ‘Your ears lie good and flat. The back of your head is well shaped. Your eyebrows suit your face.’

      I was short of books and often panicked about it, so one day I prised open the cupboard door on the stairs as the hinges made sharp cracking sounds and splinters of paint flaked off. Inside were dusty and faded hard-backed books. I inched one out and shut the door, pressing the cracked paint on the hinges back into place. The book was Sue Barton, Senior Nurse and was signed on the flyleaf ‘Marjorie Simpson, 1956’.

      I took it downstairs and sat on the hearthrug in front of the open fire. My mother said: ‘What’s that? It looks like rubbish.’ I struggled through a few pages but there was no adventure here; it seemed to be about nothing but a nurse in trouble with ‘Sister’ for being on the ward with her ‘slip’ showing. My mother was right, it was rubbish. I squeezed my hand again between the painted-up doors, scraping my knuckles as I put Aunty Marjorie’s book back in the past.

      I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I’ve been able to read. I wrote my first book aged nine in a hard-backed Silvine notebook with marbled endpapers. It chronicled the adventures of ‘Sandra’ and ‘Barbara’ – two girls who apparently went everywhere (mainly to dancing lessons) on horseback and had a sworn enemy called Mr White. My best friend, Alex, and I acted out the adventures of Sandra and Barbara every day in the school playground.

      My writing ambitions faltered after that because writing became embarrassing; self-indulgent and pointless, particularly after a boyfriend found something I’d written when I was a teenager and flicked through with a sneer on his face. ‘What is this? What do you think you are – a writer?’ Later I discovered he had scrawled in the margin ‘This is stupid’, in case I hadn’t got the message.

      My mother read gardening books, dressmaking books, yoga books and recipe books, but no fiction. She referred to fiction as ‘made-up stuff’, and asked ‘why do you read that?’

      I left school at eighteen with dismal A-level results and became a bank clerk then a civil servant, jobs taken for the sake of taking a job – because that’s what you did. I also had to pay the mortgage I’d saddled myself with aged nineteen – because buying a house was something else that you did. In my mid-twenties I retrained as a journalist because that seemed an acceptable way to earn a living with words. My mother died when I was forty-two and shortly after that I began to write pieces of fiction and memoir. It took me until my first novel was published, when I was fifty-one, to realize the death of my mother and the birth of my writing were linked – that in losing my mother I had acquired the right to write my own life.

       Chapter Five

      After Tricia died the thought of what would be involved in clearing the farmhouse was terrifying.

      A few years earlier I had viewed a house for sale in which the owner had died of a heart attack only days before and I had been appalled to see bread on the kitchen units that was still in date and the dead owner’s appointments on the calendar for the following week: Coffee with Bernard, 2 o’clock.

      Families move at different speeds. Tricia had been dead six months when Dad said, ‘What about doing something wi’ yon house?’ and we knew we couldn’t put it off any longer. At first I thought we’d get a skip, but no, Dad built another enormous bonfire in the orchard – this time away from the telephone wires – and, bit by bit, we ferried generations of possessions onto what was in effect a funeral pyre.

      Not knowing what to do with many things with sentimental value, we threw them into a ‘Memory Box’, actually a yellow cardboard box in which my new boots had just arrived.

      These were the things we saved:

      Tricia’s childhood jewellery: tangled silver chains, little charms and bent and twisted earrings; her drawings and paintings, watercolours of cats and dogs and horses and self-portraits; photographs of Tricia with friends we didn’t know in places we didn’t recognize. I studied her face, scanning her expression for signs of distress – did she want to be there? Was she enjoying herself or was she desperate to be alone, smoking? Was that a false smile? Was she suffering? Was that one of her good days or one of her bad?

      We saved stacks of her notebooks and diaries that I couldn’t bear to read – including the notebook that the police officer had removed along with her body. ‘She wrote a lot, didn’t she?’ he said the following day when he returned to take down more details. Elizabeth was angry. We did not know what she’d written in that notebook so why should he? Apparently, though, the book did not shed any light on her thoughts on her last night on this earth – it did not contain a suicide note. We were allowed to have it back after the inquest, except by then it was lost. Incensed they had been so careless with her things, we asked the Coroner’s Office to chase it up until the police found it and hand-delivered it to Dad’s in a sealed envelope to stop him reading it and getting upset.

      We saved Tricia’s soft toys. How do you burn a teddy bear you remember from childhood, no matter how filthy? We saved a home-made sheep, a rock-hard badger and a gangly Pink Panther. Who made these? Nobody could remember. It was probably Mum’s mum, Grandma Mary, who took up handicrafts with a passion after her husband, Grandad Ben, died – sublimating her grief in patchwork dogs, hessian dolls and punched leather work.

      We saved Tricia’s one-legged Tiny Tears doll called Karen who we found naked except for a bikini drawn on in green felt pen and wrapped in Mum’s old fox fur with its flat nose and glass eye. Karen and the toys were rescued from the farmhouse only to be flung on a rocking chair in a corner of Dad’s house where they remain, described by my teenage daughter, Lara, as ‘that pile of old weird shit’.

      We saved sherry glasses – stacks of sherry glasses in styles ranging from the delicately etched of the 1930s to the clunky and chunky of the 1970s – even though we had never drunk sherry except at Christmas. Where had all these sherry glasses come from? Dead great-aunts? СКАЧАТЬ