Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (John MacRae Books) Read online

  Evelyn’s mother is wrapped about and about in a big pinny. She is cheerful and talks in a Scottish way. My mother calls her Kath, which I think a melting name. She teaches me to say “Kirkcudbrightshire”: which is where she comes from, as I come from no. 56. When she gives me my dinner she puts the salt already on it; Grandad has noticed that I don’t take salt, but she can’t know that. Her legs in thick dark stockings are the shape of big beer bottles, so when anyone says, “Stout,” I think of Evelyn’s mum.

  Evelyn’s house—the Aldouses’ house—is darker than ours and has a more dumpling smell. Not being Catholics, they don’t have a piano, but as they are at the end of the common yard, they have a more tidy and well-arranged plot, with flower beds. Outside our house my grandad has grubbed out a bed for nasturtiums, and trained them up a wall. He calls them storshions, and says you can pickle and eat the seeds, good in what they call a sallet, but I think, what a waste. My whole vision is filled with these pale leaves, these flowers. When I try to put names to their imperial colors, to the scarlet and striated amber, my chest seems dangerously to swell; I imagine them to be musical instruments, broadcasting stately and imperial melodies from their own hearts, because their shape is like that of gramophone horns, which I have seen in pictures. These flowers combine every virtue, the portentous groan of brass, the blackish sheen of crimson: to the eye, the crushable texture of velvet, but to the fingertip, the bruise of baby skin.

  Evelyn’s dad, Arthur, grows geraniums. Their flowers are scarlet dots, their stems are bent and nodular. When Arthur comes in from work in his bib and brace, his sleeves are rolled up above his elbows, and I see the inside of his arms, the sinews and knotty veins. I think his arms are the stems of plants, that he is not human, perhaps an ogre. When I hear him at the front door I run out of the back door and run home.

  I am aware, as time passes, that adults talk about this, and that it makes them laugh. He who laughs last, I think darkly. Evelyn’s father has sap, not blood. If they don’t know he’s dangerous, so much the worse for them. Fear is nothing to be ashamed of, nor is running away, when the retreat is tactical and the enemy is a green man.

  I am four. Four already! Ivy Compton-Burnett describes a child with “an ambition to continue in his infancy,” and I have that ambition. I am fat and happy. When I am asked if I would like to give up my cot for a sweet little bed, the answer is no. Every day I am busy: guarding, knight errantry, camel training. Why should I want to move on in life?

  My grandfather lifts me up and sits me on his folded arms. We scan Albert Street, a cobbled road that runs at the end of our yard. Unsmiling, he nods his head across the street, to where there is a sturdy wall, higher than a man, topped with vast, flat flags, so broad an army could march on them. Its stones are black with soot, and it is a wall so sturdy, so formidable, that it appears it will stand forever. He says, without emphasis, almost casually, “Your great-grandfather built that wall.” I feel his sturdy pride, I feel the strength of his arms. I think, we built everything!

  At the back of the yard is a nursery school, a prefabricated building with a plaque on it, to say that it was opened by Lady Astor; I employ someone to read it out to me. My grandfather tells me the people from the nursery hang over the back wall, saying can’t Ilary come to our school? But he says, he tells me, that he wants my company, that I am too useful about the place. Grandad and I have special food, at different times from other people. When he comes off his shift he eats alone, tripe, rabbit, distinctive food that is for men. Around noon each day I take a lamb chop, and a slice of bread and butter.

  Winter: we go to the pantomime. We sit high up in a box, in the dark of the afternoon. I like the box better than Mother Goose. A man wearing ordinary man’s clothes comes out onto the stage. He holds up his arms. He says to the audience, “I am Anthony Eden.” The audience roars at him. I know he is not.

  Two problems occur. First, the spaniel. From time to time a dog would trot down the steps to our yard, look about with its tail wagging, and then trot away again. It was a decrepit dog, aged and shapeless; I had been seeing it for a long time. It had a long sad face and was brown-and-white in patches. “When I was young,” I said diffidently, “I used to think that dog was a cow.” I was hoping to prompt the reply, “Well, actually, secretly, it is,” but the reply I got was, “Don’t be silly.”

  I knew it was a dog. But I couldn’t help thinking that, in some way, and secretly, it was a cow. Deception seemed to be in the air. The true nature of things was frequently hidden. No one would say plainly what was what: not if they could help it.

  Somehow, I got into trouble. I was supposed to have said that my friend Evelyn was a liar. She had complained to her mother, Kath, about it. The word “liar,” I now learned, was a terrible word, prohibited, and one such as no child might say. Even if one adult were to say it to another, it would still be a cause of scandal.

  Mrs. Aldous came down the yard to complain to my mother. She stood and looked stout. There were high words. My mother took me aside and spoke to me tactfully. She was trying to negotiate a formula that would suit all parties. She put it to me: “Is it possible that you said, ‘Evelyn, you tell lies?’” I denied it. No such conversation had taken place. I was baffled. There were more high words, family to family. I stopped Kath as she was crossing the yard. I wanted to have this out. I put my hand up to detain her, and tugged at her pinny. “I didn’t say it,” I told her. She leaned over me, smiling, oozing Scots sweetness, her hands spread on her thighs: “Ahh, but lovie, you did.”

  The incident fizzled out somehow. I was left with a sense of injustice and bewilderment. My friend had lied about my having said she lied. Why? Must she always be believed, and me never? I knew I had not uttered the words complained of, because I was not concerned with whether she told lies. She was a steady and regular confabulator, but what could you expect of someone with a plant for a father? I could hardly say that in my defense. It seemed like one of those knots that gets harder to untie the more you try to pull it apart.

  I sensed more trouble ahead. One of these days I had to go to school. My mother, who worked as the school secretary, had already brought a reading book home and tried to coax me toward it. I had taken it up secretly, and been knocked back by the “Introduction for Teachers.” When my mother turned the pages and showed me the short, squat, words I would be required to master, I was simply not interested.

  My grandad, when he was under arms, was an instructor in the Machine Gun Corps. It was he who would teach me all my martial arts. He could still recite the manual for the Vickers Gun, tripod-mounted, belt-fed, and I learned it from him, just as, when she was a child, my mother had learned it. I expect we thought it would be handy.

  I spent time with my grandmother, time with her sister Annie. At no. 58 they sat by the fire on upright chairs, wooden and unforgiving; they were old, I thought, but sadly had no armchairs. They talked and talked, in an interweaving pattern of old and interesting words, and the refrain was, “Kitty, we were born too soon. Oh, Kitty, Kitty. I wish I were ten years younger.” “Oh Annie, we were, and so do I.” Annie Connor says she hopes she will never hate anyone, but the thing she could not fail to hate was a Black and Tan. And for people of the Orange persuasion she can’t care. My grandmother simply doesn’t speak on the topic. I think if a Black and Tan came to the door looking peckish, she would probably feel sorry for him and make him a strawberry pie.

  At no. 56, only my grandfather occupied an armchair, his cigarette between his fingers, his brass ashtray balanced on the chair arm. Women didn’t take their ease; when young, I thought, they ran about, and when old, they perched on upright chairs until they died, simply slumping to the linoleum, knocking their heads on the fireplace, and waiting to be carried away to the undertaker, Mr. Worsley, who buried Catholics. Maggie, Annie Connor’s daughter, was neither old nor young. She never sat down. Neither did my mother, nor my cousin Beryl. My grandmother was so creased by anxiety that her face resembled a pleate
d skirt. Like her elder sister’s, her hands were fat, with cracked and harsh palms, and I thought she had got these from washing clothes with Fairy Soap, from wiping the fireplace with Vim. Grandma was forever on hands and knees, mopping, towing a little flat black mat she called “me kneelin’ mat.” When someone came to the door, and she didn’t know who it was, she would hide on the stairs. She never went out. Officially this was because of her bad leg but I knew there were other reasons and I was sorry for them: like a child, she was too shy to speak to strangers. When something made her laugh, tears sprang out of her eyes, and she swayed on her hard chair: swayed as much as her corsets allowed, and creaked. She and Annie Connor had the most terrible corsets, salmon-pink: like the Iron Maiden, from which their heads stuck out.

  My mother would tell me, later, of her parents’ narrow and unimaginative nature. My grandmother had become a millworker when she was twelve years old; my mother herself was put into the mill at fourteen. She was of diminutive size and delicate health; she was pretty and clever and talented. Her school, by some clerical error, had failed to enter her for the scholarship exam that would, her parents permitting, have sent her to grammar school. But it didn’t matter, she said later, because they would not have permitted it. It would have been just as it was for her father, a generation earlier, for George Clement Foster pounding the cobbled streets of Glossop: circa 1905, he ran all the way home, shouting, “I’ve passed, I’ve passed.” But there was no money for the uniform; anyway, it just wasn’t what you did, go to the grammar school. You accepted your place in life. My mother would have liked to go to art school, but on Bankbottom nobody had heard of such a thing. She applied for a clerical job by competitive exam, but it went to a girl called Muriel; poor Muriel, she got all the questions wrong, my mother said, but you see her uncles had pull. Thwarted, unhappy, she stayed in the mill and earned, she said, a wage as good as a man’s. The work was hard and took a painful toll on immature muscle and bone. It would be many years before the effects showed; but in those days, with energy to spare, she danced and sang through her evenings, in amateur shows and pantomimes. “Cinderella” was her favorite part. Her favorite scene: the Transformation. She asked herself, could she really be the child of her parents? Or some changeling princess, dropped into Bankbottom by accident?

  For the whole of my childhood I worried about the glass slipper. It is such a treacherous object to wear: splintering, and cutting the curved, tender sole of the dancing foot. The writer Emily Prager once said that she had rewritten, as a child, the second half of the story; Cinderella gets to the ball and breaks her leg. My own feelings were similar; the whole situation was too precarious, you were too dependent on irresponsible agents like pumpkins and mice, and always there was midnight, approaching, tick-tock, the minutes shaving away, the minutes before you were reduced to ashes and rags. I was relieved, as an adult, when I learned that the slipper was not of verre, but of vair: which is to say, ermine. The prince and his agents were ranging the kingdom with a tiny female organ in hand—his ideal bride, represented by her pudendum. Never mind her face: he had not raised his eyes so far. All he knew was that the fit was tight.

  Three, four, I am still four: I think I will be it forever. I sit on the back doorstep to have my picture taken. Fair hair gushes from under my bonnet. My clothes are a pair of brown corduroy trousers and a pink woolly cardigan with a zip; I call it a windjammer. I have another just the same but blue. I have a yellow knitted jacket, double breasted, that I call a Prince Charles coat. Summer comes and I have a crisp white dress with blackberries on, which shows my dimpled knees. I have a pink-andblue frock my mother doesn’t like so much, chosen by me because it’s longer; people of six, I think, have longer skirts, and I am beginning to see that youth cannot last forever, and now hope to be taken for older than I am. The onset of boyhood has been postponed, so far. But patience is a virtue with me.

  We go to the seaside, to Blackpool, to stay at Mrs. Scott’s boardinghouse. Just the three of us: my mother, my father, myself. I insist that we stand before a mirror, all three. They are to pick me up and hold me between them, my fat arms across their shoulders, my hands gripping them tight. I call this picture “All Together”; I insist on its title. I know, now, that this tableau, this charade, must have caused them a dull, deep pain. We do it time and time again, I insist on it and I am good at insisting. As a knight I am used to arranging siege warfare, the investment of major fortresses, so the reluctance and distraction of a couple of parents isn’t going to stop me pulling life into the shape I want it to be.

  Standing on the pier at Blackpool, I look down at the inky waves swirling. Again, the noise of nature, deeply conversational, too quick to catch; again the rushing movement, blue, deep, and far below. I look up at my mother and father. They are standing close together, talking over my head. A thought comes to me, so swift and strange that it feels like the first thought that I have ever had. It strikes with piercing intensity, like a needle in the eye. The thought is this: that I stop them from being happy. I, me, and only me. That my father will throw me down on the rocks, down into the sea. That perhaps he will not do it, but some impulse in his heart thinks he ought. For what am I, but a disposable, replaceable child? And without me they would have a chance in life.

  The next thing is that I am in bed with a fever raging. My lungs are full to bursting. The water boils, frets, spumes. I am limp in the power of the current that tugs beneath the waves. To open my eyes I have to force off my eyelids the weight of water. I am trying to die and I am trying to live. I open my eyes and see my mother looking down at me. She is sitting swiveled toward me, her anxious face peering down. She has made a fence of Mrs. Scott’s dining chairs, their backs to my bed, and behind this barrier she sits, watching me. Her wrists, crossed, rest on the backs of the chairs; her lady’s hands droop. For a minute or two I swim up from under the water: clawing. I think, how beautiful she is: Monday’s child. Her face frames a question. It is never spoken. My mother has brought her own bed linen, from home, and below my hot cheek, chafing it, is a butterfly: spreading luxuriant wings, embroidered on the pillowcase by my mother’s own hand. I see it, recognize it, put out my hot fingers to fumble at its edges. If I am with this butterfly, I am not lost but found. But I can’t stay. I am too hot, too sick. I feel myself taken by the current, tugged away.

  I am changed now. Not in that fever but in one of the series, one of those that follow it, my weight of hair is cut off. What remains is like feathers, I think, like fluff. I lose my baby fat. For another twenty-five years I will be frail. In my late twenties I have a narrow rib cage, a tiny waist, and a child’s twig-arms fuzzed with white-gold hair. At twenty-nine I am cast as a ghost in a play: as Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, walking with noiseless slippered feet, a phantom of air and smoke. But then my life will change again, and I will find myself, like one of Candia McWilliam’s characters, “barded with a suit of fat.” I will be solid, set, grounded, grotesque: perpetually strange to myself, convoluted, mutated, and beyond the pale.

  All of us can change. All of us can change for the better, at any point. I believe this, but what is certainly true is that we can be made foreign to ourselves, suddenly, by illness, accident, misadventure, or hormonal caprice. I am four, and my mother tells me this story about myself: that when I was born my hair was black and thick. At the age of five I mourn for it, weaving in my mind the ghost of a black plait that trails over my right shoulder. Once, I say to myself, I was a Red Indian. I get a feathered headdress and a tepee, bought for me in Manchester: so clear am I about my new requirements, about my antecedents. The tepee is erected in the middle of my grandmother’s floor and in it I have a small chair and small table. People step around me. I take my meals in the tepee, and believe my hands are brown, as they wield the spoon. But already it feels like a game, whereas in some previous time, in another life, I believe I had a right to this kit. I know that there is no truth in this belief. But it has created in me a complex emotion; what I feel,
for the first time, is nostalgia.

  It is 1957. Davy Crockett is all the go. I get a fur hat with a tail. We sing a stupid song that says Davy, Davy Crockett, is king of the wild frontier. It makes me want to laugh but I’m not sure who the joke’s on. We sing he killed a bear when he was only three. Somehow I doubt it. Even I didn’t do that.

  Where are the knights of the Round Table? In abeyance, while I get to grips with how the West was won. Now another thing occurs. I make a fuss! It is related to my role in life. When exactly do I become a boy?

  My mother and father have been to Manchester, without me. We have brought you a present, they say, as they take off their coats. What is it? Well, it is a cottage set. It is taken out, extracted from a long cardboard box which has a cellophane window to show its contents. It is a doll’s tea set, a teapot, milk jug, and sugar bowl made to look like rustic cottages, with little doors and windows: though only the teapot has a roof, a thatched one. I am puzzled at first—what is the use of it or where is the amusement to be derived? Then they say, we have bought your cousin Christopher a shooting range! A shooting range? I open my mouth and bawl. Shooting range!

  Well! I can hear them saying. She did make a fuss! We had to give it her!

  The shooting range consisted of a metal bar on a stand, which you placed on the carpet. On the bar swung four crude animal shapes made of molded plastic, painted in primary colors. I only remember the owl; perhaps it was the only one I recognized, or perhaps I knew that people don’t shoot owls. You were supplied with a tiny rifle, which shot out a cork. You had to lie on your belly, very close, if you were going to hit the animals; you knew you had hit them if you made them swing on the bar. That was all there was to it. I found the thing tame. I had thought “a shooting range” would entail actual destruction. Slaughter.