Things My MotherS Never Told Me

My ambitions start the day I discover I have one mother too many. And no father. At nine, I set my mind on being a nun; at thirteen a missionary. If I’m lucky I might even end up as a Christian martyr snapped up by a passing South American crocodile. That would teach them a lesson. One October Monday I slide out of bed feet first onto a rag-rug pegged out of scraps of orange and green, then cross cold brown lino to my school uniform. It lies on a dressing table with a heart- shaped mirror: a creamy Chilprufe vest, baggy navy winceyette knickers, and a navy dress with a red sash. And two pieces of linen, white as Communion wafers. The first is a piqué collar which I clip to my dress with a ring of snap fasteners. The second is a diamond lozenge to line those terrible knickers. Washing, then drying them every day on the wooden airing rack in front of the fire, is too much like hard work. I’ve just turned six and school is still a novelty. I love it. I snuggle under the routine - prayers, lessons, playtime – as if it were a patchwork quilt. But this morning after our last hymn in Assembly, Reverend Mother holds up an envelope. ‘I want every girl to take a letter home to her parents.’ I don’t like the sound of this. What are ‘parents’? Her accent makes ‘parents’ rhyme with ‘ants’, which get everywhere, live in colonies, make routine tracks, pass secret messages. I’m not sure what parents are but somehow I know there has to be a man in it somewhere. Many things I have at home – an upright piano and our tortoiseshell cat Tommy - but there’s not a daddy in sight. Already I’ve heard of other girls’ mysterious midnight epiphanies when fathers come home from the War and astonishing baby brothers and sisters appear out of thin air. No such excitements at the house where I live. Tyna is standing in the scullery beside a copper where the whites are being boiled. ‘I’ve got a letter from Reverend Mother. It’s for my parents.’ ‘It’ll be the bill for your fees for this term,’ she says quickly without looking up. How do grownups know what’s inside an envelope without even opening it? I watch her wipe her hands on her cotton pinafore. She puts the letter on a dry bit of the wooden draining board. ‘What are parents?’ I ask. Silence. She turns and wrings the rinsed sheets so tightly they squeak. It’s as if she hasn’t heard. She’s made a bit of a mess by splashing soap suds on the flagged floor and I dip the toe of my shiny Start Rite lace-ups into the puddle and drag it round to make a proper circle. Tyna doesn’t tell me off. Picture the three of us like dolls in a doll’s house. The front’s been taken off and there we are strung out along the ground floor. Tyna is standing in a steamy scullery at one end, sheets twisted like giant skeins of wool piled up on the wooden draining board beside her. She has a Craven A cigarette between her lips and is probably coughing but that sound is so familiar no one hears it. She’s 37 years old, 5ft 2ins, with delicate bones, hazel eyes and pretty but wispy hair. She doesn’t rate her looks. ‘If someone picked me up they’d drop me at the first lamp post,’ she’d say when warned about walking down a dark street in the black-out. Her hands are scaly and roughened by the hard work she has done since a child. . Bigga is at the other end of the house, at the front, serving customers in our shop. She is taller than Tyna and older, with thick black wavy hair and a body sheathed in a Spirella corset. The Spirella lady comes to the house for a fitting and I watch her kneeling beside Bigga and lacing up her tummy. Once the lady joked, ‘If you have corsets which lace up at the back you need a maid or an understanding husband.’ Bigga doesn’t have either of those. I’m in the middle of the house, kneeling in front of the fire. I lift my sleepy cat off my lap and, with the fire tongs, build precarious castles and caverns out of glowing coals. I crash them all down with the poker and start again. Tommy sleeps through it all. The door to Tyna and Bigga’s bedroom is never shut and I can always go along the corridor to see them if I have a nightmare or ear-ache or there’s a thunder storm. I climb carefully over Bigga as she is the nearest to the door, snuggle down in the crack between them and pull the cerise satin eiderdown over my head. Their bed on Christmas morning is the best place in the world. I tip toe on the icy cold lino along the landing in the dark and slip into the space between them. I can see a lumpy white pillowcase at the end of the bed. I don’t want to spoil it by letting my cold feet touch them, waking them up too early when they might be cross, so I keep very still. When they stir I crawl to the end of the bed and pick up the pillow case by the two corners at the bottom and everything tumbles out all over everywhere. Their bed is covered with parcels wrapped in crepe paper or tissue paper: could be hand knitted dolls’ clothes, Glitterwax, Snakes and Ladders, Diary Box chocolates, a magic painting book where coloured pictures appear when you brush the page with water, fat wax crayons, a tin box of paints (‘be careful not to cut your finger on the sharp edges’), a fine lawn hankie edged with handmade lace, and Enid Blyton’s Nature Lover’s Book. An Aladdin’s cave.