The Heelykididdlywatt

15 June 2007

Mr and Mrs Anderson lived next door to us. They were childless, which made them pretty exotic. Particularly being Catholic, I simply didn't know any grown ups without kids who weren't nuns, priests (little did I know!) or my great Aunt Irene who rarely talked to us but talked to herself constantly. (I was always told it was because she'd had polio as a child, but suspected she was just rather mad; a thread, I would discover, that was woven into the fabric of both my mother's and my father's families. What hope did I have? I used to think. As it turned out, none whatsovever.)

Mr and Mrs Anderson did not find children endearing. They didn't smile when we blurted out something undiplomatic, or broke something in our overexcitement, or screamed just to see how loud we could do it. The only thing that Mr Anderson loved, as far as I could tell, was his dichondra lawn.

A dichondra lawn was, as everyone knew, almost impossible to achieve. But Mr Anderson was no average gardener. He had created in his front yard domain a rich carpet of velvety green made up of tiny clover-like blades of something that was surely not grass. You couldn't call it grass any more than you would call a sharp-finned shiny Cadillac a car. To keep it in perfect condition, he never even walked on it unless he was weeding, mulching, feeding or watering it; and even then only in his bare feet.

He scowled at our parched patchy front lawn and quietly cursed the weeds in it whose seeds blew onto his precious dichondra. Mr Anderson was constantly weeding his dichondra and keeping a jaundiced eye on the comings and goings of the band of renegades who were the children of his next door neighbour, a woman who wasn't even respectable enough to have a husband. Although he complained to my mother and grandmother on a number of occasions about our cutting across his front yard, he failed in his attempts to get us to act like anything but the kids we were. And so he erected a fence made of a few short sticks with string run between them, to make it plain that trampling his dichondra was not to be tolerated.

We didn't take nearly as much notice of Mr Anderson as he took of us. I was five and my sister seven at the time; and we reasoned that Mr Anderson simply refused to appreciate that my brothers were not beholden to the kind of rules mere mortals must adhere to. Because they were geniuses.

My brother Steve was some kind of Einstein and I was in awe of him. He was an inventor of rare talent in my view. Having watched a fairground ride astutely, he attempted to create a ride at home that I could sit on and be carried round and round as long as I wanted without paying for a ticket. Unfortunately, the only motor he had to power it was from the Erector set he got for Christmas. But any genius, surely, has to experiment with prototypes first! When he was given a small tape recorder, it was his pride and joy and he couldn't wait to find out how it worked. I was profoundly impressed by the deftness with which he took it apart and removed it innards to examine them; and just because he then couldn't put it back together again, it didn't make his experiment any less impressive. He had an intellectutal curiousity that I thought was breathtaking. Once he wanted to know how it felt to be locked in the trunk of a car, so he went inside the trunk of our battered old Plymouth, Brutus, and had us close it and then open it again to let him out. He said it was thrilling and each of us four had to try it then. Wow. Pitch darkness like I'd never known! We continued to do this over and over until Steve suggested we all get in at once and see what it was like. So we enthusiastically climbed in and slammed the trunk closed. One minor hitch was that there was now no one outside to let us out again. I started to yell for help but my sister Nancy, always practical and having seen a lot of movies on this theme, told us we must save our oxygen. I tried to hold my breath. But my brothers found that the parcel shelf behind the back seat was accessible from the trunk and pushed through it to save the day! I was so proud of them, but they had great humility, I thought, because they told me that on no account should I tell Mom.

And Steve did have another very useful and unique talent. It involved going to the annual church fair and standing at a stall where there was an uprght homemade wheel with numbers on it. People were encouraged to place bets on what number it might land on when it was spun, so it was a lot like the poor man's roulette. (And at a church fair? Was gambling not on of the Seven Deadly Sins? Maybe not.) The prizes were bags of groceries, donated, as were all the prizes, by parishioners. Now my brother knew than no homemade wheel could be perfectly balanced. So if he observed it long enough, he figured he could make a fairly accurate prediction of the most likely numbers to come up. After watching for a very long time, arousing the unease of the volunteers manning the stall, my brother took out a roll of dimes and started to bet. He invariably came home with bag after bag of groceries until the Church stepped in and made him stop betting. My mother was embarrassed by his cunning, but very pleased to have the groceries.

There was a woodpile in the backyard that I think was there from before we moved in. I never went near it because I was convinced there were black widow spiders in it, which there probably was. My brothers thought some good use must be made of it.

Roller-skating was very popular then. But it wasn't like roller blading. The skates were metal, with four wheels, one in each corner, and designed to attach to your shoes. You used a roller skate key to open them, put them on, and the tighten them to fit your foot. We all had roller skates, but there are only so many times you can fall down on the hard concrete sidewalk or run into a lamppost before the thrill is gone. My brothers Steve and Keith had a brilliant idea about what to do with the unwanted skates. They would build a car for us to ride around in from the old wood and the wheels from the roller skates.

This, I thought, was the most creative and ingenious plan they had come up with yet! Imagine cruising around the sidewalks in our homemade car!

They set about making it, fearless of the black widows that I knew were in that woodpile, using hammers and nails and looking incredibly impressive as their design took shape. In the end it was huge! The four of us could sit in it, two in the front and two in the back! There was only the wheels to put on now and we'd be cruising. There was a minor hitch though. The car was so spectacularly heavy and the roller skate wheels so pitifully small that our beautiful car would not move an inch. My brothers were undeterred by this small setback. The wheels were taken off the car and it was left in the backyard and now called a "clubhouse".

They now had an alternate plan. If the car was too heavy they would need to make something lighter. There was an old wooden door on the woodpile and genius took its course. They attached the roller skate wheels to the door and a small rope which they would use to steer it. I looked at it sceptically.

"That's not a car!" I said.

"Of course not," Keith said, "It's something much better. It's a heelykididdlywatt."

Now I had never heardof a heelykididdlywatt before, and I suspect my brother made this up on the spot, but it did look promising. Much lighter than the car.

The street we lived on was on a hill, so we dragged our heelykididdlywatt up to the top and prepared to take it for its maiden run. The door was big enough to accommodate all four of us and my brother Keith sat in the "driver's seat" in front and held the steering rope, and Steve, Nancy and I sccoted up behind him. I looked around to see who might be watching us because I was sure they would be very jealous when they saw our beautiful heelykididdlywatt careening down the sidewalk.

We set off from the top of the hill and I was delighted to discover that, this time, the vehicle they'd created was not too heavy and we gathered speed at a terrific rate as Keith steered us down the hill! The thrill was unbelievable and I screamed at the top of my voice with excitement. What an invention! Surely we could market this and become rich!

Now unfortunately, despite the steering rope, the heelykididdlywatt had no axle. So the concept of actually steering it, as in making it go the way you wanted it to, was really not a part of its design. So when the thing started to veer to the right, there was really no way to steer it back. And, also unfortunately, the heelykididdlywatt had no brakes. My brothers had been thinking more about how to get it going than how to stop it.

As Keith struggled for control, it became obvious that the only thing to do was to bail out! But we were going so fast! And what if we ended up in the street and got run over by a car? The door on wheels finally veered off the sidewalk and hit something soft and then tipped us all out violently on the ground, but at least in one piece.

As I lay there on the ground, the first thing I saw was dichondra.

When we got up, shaken, we saw the deep ruts the roller skate wheels had driven into the ground, churning up carefully mulched soil and pulling those little clover like blades of Cadillac grass up by the roots; and the squashed dichondra where we had all been pitched out. Mr Anderson had run out of his front door but, by instinct, still didn't tread on his dichondra, choosing to shout angrily and with tears forming in his eyes.

"What have you done?" he shouted, "What is that?"

Steve brushed the soil and bits of dichondra from his patched jeans.

"It's our heelykididdlywatt!" he said proudly, "What do you think?"

Popular Girls

19 June 2007

I knew from a very early age that I was a misfit, from a family of misfits, and I have watched with awe and admiration the ease with which some people can be charming, charismatic, attractive, sought after; and belong. More than anything I wanted to belong somewhere, or at least to not be so noticeably a D+ student in the School of Life. But the only times that has happened to me were the magical times that I found other misfits to belong to.

No one else in my family seemed to care whether they fit in or not. Keith never spoke much, attended to his studies, played the piano, went caving and, if he felt stressed, went off on his own to climb Mount Witney. Steve grew a beard and long hair and, inexplicably, wore a top hat wherever he went. (My mother pleaded with him to lose that hat to no avail.) And my sister would burst into operatic song for no apparent reason in the most inappropriate of circumstances. But I was different. I wanted, and still do want if I’m honest, to conform.

And so I was lonely. Though my grandmother insisted that the reason I was teased so cruelly at school was because my classmates were jealous of my intellect (God bless her!), I came to accept the pain of it like a lifelong arthritis sufferer, and escaped into a world of my own making. A world of pretend.

When I was nine years old the eighth grade girls were preparing to put on a school Christmas performance of the operetta Amahl and the Night Visitors. My passion for a pretend universe having been noted, Sister Lydia asked me to play the part of Amahl, the eponymous eight year old (I love that word – I learned it from watching the film critic Barry Norman on TV!) who encounters the Three Kings on their way to Bethlehem and is cured of his lameness. (Yes, I played a boy, and the other girls played the Kings). My character’s lameness, believe me, was nothing compared to that of the production itself, which was performed before the school assembly, standing (not sitting) outside in the playground as we mimed to Sister Lydia’s scratchy record of the operetta as it played over the public address system. At the end, when we took our bow, the whole school erupted into applause, so delighted were they that the performance was over.

The experience gave me an idea, however, and when Easter came I wrote a play about the Last Supper for my fourth grade class. It was a bit of an extravaganza because I had to cast all twelve apostles and dress them up in sheets to look like those robes you see on the statues in the church. The geeky kids were easy to recruit (like me they would d anything for a chance to stand out), although no one wanted to play Simon the Cananite, who nobody had ever heard of, or the villain, Judas. But there were simply not enough geeky kids to go around. That’s when I was approached by Susan Tratz and Patty Scanlon.

Susan Tratz was a brassy, very savvy girl whose breasts, at the age of ten, were already apparent. Patty Scanlon was slightly knock-kneed and skinny, something she hated because this was (if any of us are old enough to remember it) when curves were in and thinness was out, and Jean Shrimpton was considered so much sexier than Twiggy. Susan and Patty were two of the most popular girls in school and they were intrigued by the idea of being in a play, even if it was written by me. They insisted on playing Jesus and Peter (the starring roles) and, though the entire production was a bit of a debacle, everyone involved seemed to have a good time.

Susan and Patty appeared to change their attitude to me after that. When I was asked by Sister Irene to write a Christmas play for the second grade girls, I wrote one about a Christmas in occupied France during the Second World War involving a class of French children and their two teachers. Pandering to their proximity to popularity, I wrote the parts of the two teachers for Susan and Patty.

After that I seemed to be taken under their wings. I started to write stories, in instalments, about Susan, Patty and all their friends, set in the future, when they would marry the guys of their dreams. It was what they wanted and I had yet to discover artistic integrity. These stories, which I wrote furtively in maths, science and history classes (which I really loathed) were circulated around the class among the popular girls whose appetite for them was insatiable.

Susan became my mentor and confidant. She took me in hand and got me to shower every day, stop picking my nose, do something with my unruly hair, find some more attractive clothes and to rein in my conversation. Not everyone, she told me, was as keen on The Man From UNCLE as I was, particularly not to the point of buying a plastic Man From UNCLE gun with plastic shoulder holster. And she told me very emphatically what to do and not do with boys: it was absolutely “making out” only, no tongue, otherwise you were a slut. She was saving her virginity, she told me, as a gift for the man she’d marry on their wedding night.

By the following year, Susan and Patty both had boyfriends. Susan was walking home from school (we were too young to date!) with the gorgeous Jim Frelita and Patty with the ultra-cool Tommy Houlihan. They thought it was about time that I had a boyfriend too and Jim and Tommy had just the candidate: their own geeky friend, Marcel Fischer who, understandably, was only ever called “Fish”. The four of them fixed it up for us and, behind the gym at a nearby boys’ school basketball game, I was kissed for the first time. Fish gave me his green St Christopher medal which meant, as everyone knew, that we were going steady (don’t ask why a St Christopher medal. I didn’t even know why back then and anyway St Christopher has now been demoted from his sainthood by the Vatican). Amazingly, he didn’t ask for it back for another two whole weeks.

As we neared the end of eighth grade, we looked forward to going to high school and entering a more grown up world. My mother wanted me to go to the local coeducational Catholic school that my older sister attended, but Susan and Patty had opted for the single sex Catholic school on the other side of town. They assumed I would go there with them.

My mother had by this time decided that, in light of her experience with my older brother, she would let me choose were I wanted to go. It was the first time I ever had to make my own choice about anything important and I was terrified.

Though I was grateful for her friendship over the previous four years, I realised that she had become the most forceful presence in my life and, though it had never made me one of the popular girls (only a sideshow for their amusement) I had done whatever she told me to do in a desperate bid to ride on the coattails of her popularity. And I knew it was time to break free. She told me I was making a mistake. And in my first year and a half at my new school, as isolated and lonely and bullied as I had ever been, I had begun to think she was right.

We stayed in touch for the first part of our freshman year, but drifted apart after that. A few years later I heard she’d had a surfing accident. A wave caught her the wrong way and she flew into the air, the surfboard twisted over and the scag hit her between the legs. So she was never able to give the gift of her virginity to her husband on their wedding night.

Fortunately she did not give birth to a bouncing baby paddleboard nine months later.


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Peanut Butter Coloured Hair

5 July 2007

When we were kids, my sister Nancy ate so much peanut butter, my mother said that one day she’d turn into a peanut overnight. My mother was fond of these flights of fancy, and she also told me, when I toppled over my milk glass, (I’ve always been very clumsy) that The Cow was going to come to the door and say angrily, “Where’s the girl who spills my milk?” I used to say this to my three year old son when he spilled his milk, but I had to stop. It terrified him!

My sister did have peanut-butter coloured hair, however. And deep, clear blue eyes and freckles and fair skin that made her, after a spell in the California sunshine, resemble a tomato with leprosy. She had a trusting and unwavering belief in the goodness of people, even when my brother Steve accidentally shot me in the head with his bow and arrow. (At least he said it was an accident.) Her trusting nature got her in a lot of trouble over the years, and I came to be very protective of her, even though I was her younger sister.

The taunts our schoolmates hurled at us, that hurt me so badly and made me so desperate to conform, seemed to have no effect on her. I don’t think she even noticed; but I did. Once, when a streetwise toughie demanded a bit of my candy bar and I refused, the insult she chose to throw at me, with all the disgust and disdain she could muster, was that I was just like my sister.

“Thank you,” I said defiantly. As she walked away she spat out the Ultimate Parting Insult.

“Nosepicker!” In the prepubescent world I lived in, it was apparently OK to shake other kids down for candy, to steal, to bully, to even (like that thug Riccatone who once phoned the house to say that he was going to beat the hell out of my brother for no particular reason) resort to mindless violence. But nosepicking was not to be tolerated.(I am pretty sure that Riccatone must be in Folsom State Prison now. Or at least he should be. Either that or he’s an LA policeman.)

My sister and I had a collection of small hard plastic dolls when we were kids. They were a bit smaller than a Barbie, a doll we never owned because it was so expensive and because I was never all that interested in the idea of a doll with boobs and a boyfriend.

Among our collection there was a doll with brown hair and brown eyes, and another one with blue eyes and peanut butter coloured hair. The first was supposed to be me. The other, my sister. And we used them as conduits into fantasy worlds of our own creation (from which, it could be argued, I have never emerged), in which I was a successful writer and she was a famous singer.

My mother had a huge passion for classical music, and played opera and symphonies on our battered old record player, and bought us an album of “Children’s Classics” for Christmas one year and “Peter and the Wolf” another. Despite her efforts, it never took with me. But it did with my sister.

She was a gifted classical singer from an early age, and was always chosen as a soloist at high school concerts. She was, as is the tradition, an introvert with an extrovert inside screaming to get out (whereas I am an extrovert with an introvert outside screaming to get back in) and found getting up in front of an audience terrifying at first, until a professional singer gave her a winning tip. So when she came out to sing, she would acknowledge the applause, not with an inaudible, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”, but with an inaudible, “Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.” It seemed to do the trick. We all thought she was destined for greater things.

But sometimes Fate has a cruel way of stepping in.

In the summer of my sister’s junior year in college, she went to Vienna where she saw an awful lot of opera on the cheap, buying standing room tickets on the day and doing a lot of “second acting” where she milled with the opera crowd when they came out at the intermission, and then went back in to watch the second act. She came home just before Christmas. A few months later an Austrian guy turned up on the doorstep. This was Willy.

Willy was about fifteen years older than Nancy, had a big blond beard and wore a beret. His clothes were on the bohemian side, except for the green woollen traditional Austrian jacket that he stubbornly wore everywhere, even in the heat of the California sun.

My sister had met Willy in Vienna. They had had an affair and, despite her asking him not to follow her home, he wasn’t the kind of guy to take no for an answer. This turned out to be a major character trait.

He was a rare book dealer and an artist. The main theme of his artistic oeuvre was human genitalia. Penises and vaginas, to be blunt. He drew them, painted them and sculpted them in plaster, stone and even stainless steel. He once even constructed an eight foot penis.

Now I have made mistakes with men in my time. What woman hasn’t? I lived for nearly five years with a musician who spent almost all that time we were together screwing anything with a hole in the middle. Once I threw him a surprise birthday party and the surprise was that every woman there had slept with him. And the woman I persuaded to take him out to the pub until the guests had arrived did not take him to the pub…

But any mistake I ever made was, in the power of its destructiveness, a football though a window compared with the grenade my sister threw into her life when she got entangled with Willy. He was jealous, possessive and domineering from the start. In Vienna, she later told me, she had to stare at the ground every time they were in public or else he’d accuse her of flirting with some passer-by. Nevertheless, inexplicably, she married him, with him insisting she vow to love, honour and obey, not cherish. Alarm bells should have deafened her by now.

I was living in a two room guest house at the time. It had no hallway, just the front room and a rear room off of which was the bathroom and kitchen. Nancy and Willy had no money, so I offered to put them up until they got on their feet. I gave them the front room of the house, thinking they would have more privacy that way. Willy took an almost instant dislike to me which, for my sister’s sake, I decided to ignore.

One day someone knocked on the front door when Willy and my sister were not at home. I went to answer it, which involved walking through the front room but for some reason the door to their room. There was no lock on it, and yet it appeared locked. Nonplussed, I went out the back door and walked around to the front with a key so that I could let my visitor in. Walking back through the front room from the other side, I saw why I hadn’t been able to open the bedroom door. Willy had nailed it shut! To prevent me from invading his privacy! How he had been planning to get to the bathroom was not clear.

But I said nothing about this, and nothing about the evil glances directed at me whenever he was around. Until one night, though the paper thin walls of my room, I heard Willy talking to my sister about what a scheming, manipulative and evil woman I was and I finally saw the red mist. I burst into their room, shouting like a maniac about how I was letting them stay there for free and how dare he!

They moved out the next day and Willy decided that something had to be done about Nancy’s attachment to her family and to her friends who, he was sure, were trying to turn her against him. So after that, none of us were allowed to be in the same room with her unless he was present. I did not speak to my sister alone for another seven years.

During that time, she gave up any thought of pursuing her music. She worked for the bus company while Willy stayed home and built penises and vaginas, and spent her money on rare books. The family decided not to say anything. If she was happy, that was the main thing.

But she was not happy.

Now my family, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, is a bit mad. Maybe even a lot mad. We have a streak of bipolar disorder, formerly known as manic depression, that runs like a seismic fault through our genetic geology. Research psychologists plot schematic charts of family histories, marking a black dot on every member with bipolar disorder. Our chart looks like a Dalmatian.

So, when, in the summer she turned thirty, she received a small inheritance from my father’s mother, and went out shopping, coming back with over a hundred pairs of panties and three hundred pounds worth of sheet music of ridiculous stuff she was never going to sing, I thought she was going mad. But when she then enrolled at the Vienna Conservatory of Music, abandoned all her possessions, left Willy and filed for divorce, I knew it. And it was glorious! Manic or not, I had my sister back.

We had so much to catch up on and we talked many long nights, both in London when she visited me, and in Vienna where she swiftly became very happily settled.

“When did you stop loving Willy?” I asked her.

“Oh I never loved him,” she said.

“Then why did you marry him?”

She didn’t speak for a long moment, then said, finally, “He was so in love with me. I didn’t want to be the bad guy.” All those lost years. Because she didn’t want to be seen as heartless.

Nancy was determined to make up for lost time, and she emerged from her music course determined to succeed. She had a one-woman show that made her a cult cabaret hit. She auditioned for anything and anyone anywhere in Europe, including for a theatre musical producer who told her she wasn’t raunchy enough for the part. So my sister came back with a black wig on, pretended to be someone called Gayle, and did a raunchy audition. She still didn’t get the part but the producer, who wasn’t fooled, was impressed by her tenacity.

She finally got her break when she was cast as one of the principals in the Hamburg premiere of Cats in 1986. On opening night I watched her on the stage of the Opperettenhaus, singing a mock opera duet that was greeted by an audience of eleven hundred with wild applause, foot-stamping and shouts of “Brava!” I was so unbelievably proud of her. To be here. To be doing this. Against all the odds. And I cried with joy.

But, what God gives with one hand, He often seems to take away with another. She confided in my on a visit, just before she went into rehearsals, that she’d found a lump on her breast. And it turned out not to be “nothing”.

She managed to recover from surgery before she went into rehearsals, having radiotherapy and chemotherapy during the run. She was fine for a year and then developed secondaries, still staying in the show until she finally had to move in with me in London while she had six months of further chemotherapy. On the 25th of October, 1987, aged thirty-six, she died.

When my sister was sick, she heard about a cancer support group which was being held in a classroom at a local school. She got to the school – late as she often was – but couldn’t find the right room and, by luck alone, found herself hurrying down a corridor where she overheard someone in one of the classrooms talking about The Illness. And knew she’d found the right place.

She was welcomed warmly with hugs and smiles and cups of tea and was offered a chair. It was only then that she realised that The Illness they were talking about wasn’t cancer, but alcoholism. Nevertheless, my sister stayed for the whole meeting.

“Why did you stay?” I asked her.

“They were so nice,” she said, “I didn’t want to offend them.” Nancy never did want to offend anyone.

The grief of losing her washed over the next few years of my life, and still comes to haunt me every time I hear a joke she would have liked, or something that would have made her cry, or something trivial, like a note on written in a page of a book in her handwriting. But what God takes away with one hand He sometimes gives with another. A few years after her death I was blessed with the most beautiful baby boy. With clear blue eyes. And freckles. And fair skin that would make him, after a spell in the sunshine, resemble a tomato with leprosy. And peanut butter coloured hair.


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Grandma

8 July 2007

It was 1959 when I started school and single mothers hadn’t been invented yet. At least not at Catholic schools where parents were expected to stay together no matter how miserable they were, and mothers wore sunglasses to pick up their kids whenever they had a black eye or two. Fortunately, it was a sunny climate.

There was only one other kid in my entire school that didn’t have a dad and that was Peggy Wilson whose day was dead, which was at least respectable. And when, in religion class, Sister Wilma talked of the importance of Jesus’ diktat that “what God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (which I thought would be a good reason to have all-woman divorce courts), she added that the children of broken marriages are “just a little less favoured in the eyes of God.” She didn’t look at me. She didn’t have to.

All my friends had dads, who sat in front of the TV watching football and drinking beer, or built stuff, or fixed broken stuff in the house. Susan Tratz had the coolest dad of all because he had a metal messkit from the Battle of the Bulge, which he showed off with great pride because he’d been a medic and, when supplies weren’t getting through, had to take a bullet out of a man’s guts with the messkit knife. He never said whether the hapless soldier survived, however.

Although I didn’t have a dad, I did have two parents; my mom and my grandma. My grandma had had a hard life. Her father had died when she was very young, and her sister had been stricken with polio. This, I was told, was the reason Great Aunt Irene used to talk to herself constantly and resent it if you tried to enter the conversation. I have never read that polio can be responsible for that kind of behaviour, and I was pretty convinced she was hearing voices that weren’t there. When their mother had to quit work because “she became confused”, (the family mental health picture has never looked particularly rosy), my grandmother had to go to work to support them all. She was just fifteen years old.

She accepted this with great stoicism and, despite the fact that she’d never been able to get an education, was one of the most well read and well informed people I’ve ever met, with the possible exception of my mother. Unless you had really done your homework, it was a bad idea to try and argue with either of them, or my Aunt Lucille either who once invited a Jehovah’s Witness into her living room, and debated with her so fiercely, the poor woman fled!

Grandma bore the lifelong responsibility of caring for her “confused” mother and my Great Aunt Irene. She was married late and widowed young; and was sustained by the intensity of her Catholic Faith.

When my mother’s marriage collapsed, my grandma took us all in and my mom went to work in the Ovaltine factory, earning half of what a man would doing the same job. Grandma assumed, without question, the job of looking after us kids until my mom got on her feet. She stayed for the next thirteen years.

She must have been only fifty-nine when we first lived with her, just six years older than I am now, so I it’s funny to think how painfully old I always thought she was. She was very short, walked with a slight limp and her white hair, which she always wore under a hairnet, was so thin that it seemed only a dusting of snow on the expanse of her scalp.

Having survived poverty, the Great Depression, and the privations of World War Two (when God spared her son by ensuring the war ended before he could be shipped out), she was tough as old boots. I never heard her complain about anything and only saw her cry twice in my life. She was utterly unsentimental about everything except, secretly, children.

She loved us with the passion of Mama Tiger! Keith was special because he’d had a hard time during the divorce. Steve was special because he’d had club feet and was asthmatic. Nancy was special because she had such a good heart. And I was special because…well, because I was hers.

I was the only one to have been raised from a baby by my grandma, and I was the last one left at home when my brothers and sister went to school. It was probably the only time I ever had an adult’s undivided attention as a child. And I gloried in it!

She taught me all the things girls were supposed to know back then; how to do the washing (using bluing for the whites. When did they stop using bluing anyway?), make up the beds, clean, sew, mend, cook and bake. On sunny summer days we went out into the yard to hang the washing out and I handed her the clothes pins. On rainy days we stayed in to make fudge; a recipe I still have burned into my memory and involving such eccentric measurements as: three “bent spoonfuls” of corn syrup. The bent spoon from the drawer was the only trusted measure for her recipe.

When I was teased mercilessly at school, she would feed me stories of how they were all jealous because of how smart I was (which made me wish I was stupid!); and when I pretended to be sick so I wouldn’t have to go to school to face them, she would say, “You’re sick of school I think,” wink and let me stay in bed. When I started to write my stories, she would listen while I read them out to her as she ironed. Now I’ve raised a kid myself and I realise this must have been a good way to keep me occupied while she was ironing, but this was beyond the call! I wrote screeds of the most childish drivel, that went on and on and on and on! (Like my blog stories, in fact. So you see what I mean.) But, not only did she listen patiently, one day she said, “When you grow up, you’re going to be a writer.”

“I can’t be a writer,” I said, “Girls grow up to be housewives.”

“Who says?” she demanded, “Is your mother a housewife?”

I looked away. That my mother was not a housewife was surely a source of shame, not pride.

“Girls can be anything they want to be!” she insisted, “And you should be a writer.”

My grandmother hated anything she thought was unjust. She had hated Herbert Hoover during the Depression for declaring, “If you don’t work, you don’t eat,” as thousands starved and the Midwest turned into a Dust Bowl. She remembered the signs in the ads as she struggled to find work that said, “No Irish Need Apply” and felt a visceral connection to the Civil Rights Movement and their fight to confront that kind of prejudice. She once admonished me for saying, at the age of nine, “Black and white are equal, white skin is prettier than black skin.”

“No it’s not!” she snapped, “You think that only because you’re white, and that is prejudice! Black skin and white skin are both as beautiful in the eyes of God!” (My grandma brought God into an awful lot of stuff.)

Most of all she hated that women were such second class citizens,, and that my mother was being paid half of what she was worth because of her gender, which, at the end of the day, meant that we wore hand-me-downs and patched jeans, and ate hash and pot roast, and had lean Christmases.

Grandma believed passionately that God had put us on Earth with a mission to leave it a better place than the one we arrived in, no matter how small that effort might seem. We lived across from the school and, when the street inevitably flooded in heavy rain, she would wait on our porch with dry towels so that, when the kids waded across in their bare feet, they could dry them off before putting their shoes and socks back on and walking home.

My mother regularly worked twelve hour days, six days a week; and when she wasn’t working she was often crying. Depression hadn’t been invented yet either, except among rich people. But I knew she spent an awful lot of time on the edge and I was sure that, if my grandma ever left, we would all be cast adrift and battered to death on the Rocks of Life.

If I came home from school and couldn’t find Grandma, instead of looking in the yard (which was where she invariably was), I would check to see if she’d taken her clothes. I would have nightmares and wake up crying and when she came asked why I’d say, “Cause I’m scared you’re going to die someday!”

“Of course I’m going to die someday!” she’d scold, “We’re all going to die someday! Now go back to sleep!”

When she was diagnosed with cancer, I was eleven years old. My nightmare fears were finally invading my life as I knew they would one day. So I did a deal with God. I was too young for my grandma to leave me, I told him. And I asked Him if He would just leave her with us till I was sixteen and able to deal with it. God fulfilled his part of the bargain. Grandma went into remission and stayed well for another five years.

One day my sister and I came home from school and Grandma was lying on the couch unconscious and twitching and Irene was flapping about not knowing what to do. I knew she must be really upset because she was talking to us.

We called an ambulance and they came and took her away to the hospital, reassuring us that everything would be okay. I remember thinking, “How the hell do you know?”

She’d had a stroke and no one thought she’d last the night. I visited her with my Mom and my Aunt Lucille and my sister when she regained consciousness. Her speech was very slurred and she couldn’t use her left side. She took my hand and squeezed it, trying to say something to me.

“What are you trying to say Mom?” my mother asked.

My grandma said it again. And again, becoming more frustrated.

“Sorry, Mom,” my Aunt Lucille laughed, “I think we’re too stupid to understand!”

But I knew what Grandma was saying. I could decipher it. Why didn’t I say? Why was I embarrassed? She was saying, “I love you.” I should have said I love you back. But I wasn’t used to her being sentimental.

Grandma miraculously recovered from her stroke and was ready to be discharged from the hospital when the doctors discovered that her cancer had come back. And that she was dying.

It was a pretty cruel trick on God’s part, I thought; and he had obviously exploited the fine print in our contract. My grandma died a few months later, just after St. Patrick’s Day, when I was sixteen years old. I was left wishing I’d done a better deal with God.

She died as she’d lived; poor. Her worldly goods consisted of little more than a few knick knacks, religious items and a closet full of old and faded dresses, bar the one she wore at Sunday Mass.

I’m sorry she never lived to see me become a writer, but, in any case, I was a late bloomer and she would have to have lived to be 101. But she would like to have been right. She did like being right.

Her legacy to me was a recipe for fudge, her bent spoon, a wicker laundry basket complete with clothes pegs, the skills of bed-making, sewing and making do, the secret of good parenting, which is unconditional love, a hatred of injustice, and her conviction that Jesus really did mean it literally when He said:

“I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me. Truly I say to you, as you did it for one of the least of these my brethren, you did it for me."


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Not Quite James Bond

22 July 2007

If there was anything my mother missed about Chicago when she moved us to California in the Fifties, she never expressed it to me. Chicago was a beautiful city of great architecture, but she seemed unmoved. It was the home of jazz. So what? And it had seasons. California only seemed to have one season. Round about January, the leaves would abruptly fall off the trees and quickly grow back before anyone noticed their embarrassing nudity. My mother, when pressed, would concede that, yes, California did not have real seasons, without the slightest sense of regret. Mainly because, in Chicago, they had real winters.

I understand that in Chicago, there are winter days that are so cold that the hairs in your nose can freeze before you walk fifty yards. This impresses me because my nose hairs have never frozen under any conditions and I am left to wonder what that feels like. And apparently in Chicago it also snows a lot.

The one thing my mother seemed to miss the least about Chicago was snow. She had had her fill of shoveling the stuff, putting chains on the car, falling on her ass on the ice, and dressing kids up in snowsuits, galoshes and mittens only for them to go out for ten minutes and want to come back in again. So, when her brother Gene offered to take my mother, my brothers, my sister and I up to the “snow mountains” to play, my mother told him she was washing her hair that year, but he was welcome to take us if he wanted. So he did. Four kids. My uncle is a saint.

It is one of my earliest memories, but I can remember getting kitted up in the Chicago snowsuit and galoshes (that I probably grew out of by the end of the day) and going off to build a snowman, have a snow fight and then want back in the car after ten minutes. (Some things, as my mother could have told Gene, never change.) I think it must have been on this trip that my brother Keith embarked on his love affair with mountains, snow and ice.

As soon as Keith got his license at the age of sixteen, the call of the wild, the proximity of mountains covered in snow and the availability of my mother’s Ford Galaxy station wagon was irresistible.

Skiing, of course, was out of the question; and was about as likely for a group of ragged kids from Bellflower as yacht racing. (In any case skiing has always seemed to me a very expensive way to break your leg. It is so much cheaper to buy a ladder and then fall off. If you borrow a ladder, it’s even cheaper.) So one day my brother brought home a four-man toboggan.

For the price of a tank of gas, we could kit ourselves up in layers of ordinary clothes and shoes, putting plastic bags around our socks to keep our feet dry (which never worked), drive up to Wrightwood and stop by the side of the road wherever we spotted a good toboggan hill, climb to the top and careen down the hill at a speed that would have made my mother, had she seen us, call a halt to the whole thing. But she wasn’t there. Obviously. Theoretically, you can steer a toboggan by lifting the curl. And theoretically you can brake it with your feet. Neither of these things are true. We ran into a lot of trees.

One evening, as we were returning from a particularly good run that we’d found that day, that required us to bail out at the bottom before we hit a road full of passing cars, there was a major hitch. It was starting to snow and a ranger, anticipating a heavy snowfall, had closed the road and there was a locked metal gate preventing us from getting out and getting home.

For some reason, this didn’t alarm me at all and I thought it would be a great adventure to sleep in the car all night. Keith was not enthusiastic about the idea. First of all, the heat in the car would run out as soon as the engine was switched off and the engine would switch off as soon as the gas ran out. And secondly, if the snow reached the tailpipe, exhaust would enter the car and we would all be found dead the next morning. Keith always had to ruin everything by being practical.

So he got out of the car and hiked down to the ranger station to get someone to come and unlock the gate. The ranger station was closed, however, so he hiked back again and had a good look at the gate.

“Well,” he drawled quietly, “I think we’re going to have to break through the gate.”

Finally! An exciting climax to the adventure. We were going to accelerate into the barrier and smash through it at great speed like in a James Bond film. Sadly, this was not what my brother had in mind. He inched up to the gate until the bumper touched it. Then he revved the engine gently until there was enough force on the padlock to break it. And we were on our way. Not quite James Bond.

I didn’t discover the meaning of the words “laconic” or “taciturn” until I bought a dictionary and I didn’t own a dictionary for a very long time. My mother-in-law once asked me how I could be a writer and not own a dictionary.

“I use short words I can spell,” I replied. (I wouldn’t mind that being written on my gravestone. I still use short words I can spell. It’s just that I also do crosswords now and, as everyone knows, you can’t do crosswords without a dictionary.)

Keith, I discovered from the dictionary, was both laconic and taciturn. He was quiet, self-contained and kept his own counsel. Another way of looking at it was that he was uncommunicative, unemotional and stubborn. That’s kind of how I looked at it as a kid anyway, particularly when I was having a tantrum at him and he just quietly went into the bathroom, closed the door in my face and locked it.

So when he announced at the age of eighteen that he had signed up for the Air Force, it came completely out of blue – or out of the Wild Blue Yonder, as it were. (Alright, I can hear you groan at that one.) I guess, with the Vietnam war escalating, he figured he’d join the service before he got drafted.

He was the first of us to leave home and it was quite a shock. The prospect of there not being seven of us living together in our house in Bellflower had not occurred to me before.

The Air Force soon realised my brother was a very smart kid and started training him intensively in electronics. My brother Steve, who knows about stuff like this, said he achieved the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in electronics in less than eighteen months. So intense was his training, in fact, that he was not given Christmas leave that first year.

We were a very close family and the idea of a Christmas without Keith was unthinkable. So my mother, my brother Steve, my sister and I boarded a Greyhound bus for the fifty-two hour journey to Biloxi Mississippi where my brother Keith was stationed.

It was a trip that could only be described as a modern reinterpretation of Dante’s journey into Hell. We were woken at three o’clock in the morning to get off and sit in a freezing terminal in San Antonio so the bus could be cleaned. Steve got food poisoning from one of the Greyhound cafes on route. And Texas just went on and on and on and on and on.

We spent Christmas in a Biloxi motel in the warm glow of a small, spindly tree decorated with paper ornaments, and had our dinner in one of the only restaurants in New Orleans that was open on Christmas Day. I had coffee for the first time to show how grown-up I now was. (I was twelve.) It was half milk and I shovelled about half a cup of sugar into it. My brother seemed subdued that day, but he didn’t talk about it. He never talked about it.

We were delighted when we heard that Keith wasn’t going to be sent to Vietnam. He was being sent to the Middle East which, to us then, was just a place where there was a lot of sand and camels. I didn’t even know there was oil there; I thought that was all in Texas.

I was never clear about what happened next. He was apparently recruited into Intelligence and was given a Secret clearance. I guess if anyone knew how to keep secrets it was my brother Keith.

Then, about a year later, my mother packed us all in the Ford Galaxy station wagon and told us we were going up to Travis Air Force Base in Northern California to visit my brother. He was in the hospital. And what I discovered when we got there was that he was in the psychiatric ward. Something had happened and my brother had snapped.

The person we visited was my brother but not my brother. He talked even more slowly than usual, when he talked at all, and his eyes looked glassy, the quick intelligence having disappeared somehow. He was drugged up to the eyeballs on Thorazine.

He was eventually given a medical discharge and came home and never talked about what happened. But there was a lot that was not right. After getting the equivalent of a college degree in electronics, Steve told me, Keith couldn’t even get past Ohm’s Law. Whatever that is. Sounds like something you’re supposed to know. Like the definition of a sentence if you get your degree in English. (That wasn’t a sentence by the way. No verb.)

He seemed to crack up on a regular basis after that, and at those times his stint in the service seemed to haunt him. He would be convinced that the CIA was after him and that the Red Chinese had broken into his house and taken things.

My brother, we later discovered, was bipolar, manic depressive as it used to be called; just like my father and like my sister who once stayed with us when her marriage was breaking up and bought a hundred pairs of panties over a period of a few days and the sheet music for about three hundred songs she was never going to sing. (Why does a classical singer need the music for the Whiffenpoof Song? “We are poor little lambs who have lost our way. Baa, baa, baa!”) By the time I was diagnosed as bipolar there was no denying that mental health was not my family’s genetic strong point.

When I brought my soon-to-be husband Richard home to meet my family many years later, I was more than a little worried what he would think. He was from a nice middle-class English family and I could only hope that my family would appear sane for a couple of weeks, or at least house-trained.

Shortly after our arrival Keith asked Richard if he’d seen John LeCarre’s spy mini-series “Smiley’s People”. Rich said that he had and then Keith asked, more quietly, if he remembered the “scene in the bank where they do the switch”. Well, he didn’t remember the “scene in the bank” but said he did because he was a polite middle-class English boy. My brother leaned over to him conspiratorially.

“That’s how they really do it,” he said.

Between my sister’s panties and my brother’s “scene in the bank” there was now no hope of convincing Rich my family was sane. He was later to discover I was a raving lunatic myself. He seems to have taken it all in his stride however and adores them. (Quite right too!)

My brothers were always close but, though I dearly loved Keith, I never knew him. He was always distant somehow and had seemed to like it that way. This grieved my mother. She really wanted us to be close.

“He’s got such a good heart,” she’d say, “He feels things very deeply.”

My brother’s love of all things icy continues to this day. He ice skates and has done competitive ice dancing all over the States. Just after my mother died, Keith fell badly on this ice, broke seven ribs and ended up in intensive care.

When he came out of the hospital something very strange started to happen. He started to talk about his life. He started to talk about his feelings. He came over to Scotland for my fiftieth birthday and we sat talking over a pint in the pub until my son phoned to ask when the hell we were coming home. He helped me through my breakdown and we talked often, one bipolar bear to another. And then one day I realised that, for the first time in fifty years, we were close.

I guess he realised, as we had to realise, that, out of the seven people who made up our household, only three of us remained; and the absence caused by my sister’s death would always cast a shadow over us. We were all we had left of the family we’d grown up with; the only ones who could remember, could understand. And we really needed each other.

I talk to my brother Keith every week now and we have commiserated as I have fought my battles with my failing career; and as he has fought his against his bouts of unemployment, his inadequate health insurance and his cancer. One night I told him I loved him. I think it was the first time.

“I love you too,” he said, also for the first time.

It was time for him to give up his secrets. Even though it was not quite James Bond.


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