Catherine Simpson - When I Had a Little Sister

As Pete and Trev sauntered about the farmhouse their eyes never looked where we pointed but flickered around each room, alighting briefly on everything else. Furniture was touched, smoothed, handled, turned upside down, and pronounced upon with a shaking head. ‘Brown furniture, you can hardly give it away these days,’ said Pete or Trev. ‘It’s all IKEA now.’ Pete or Trev grimaced. ‘A piano? It’d cost me more to take it than to leave it. The last one – I couldn’t give it away – had to get it dropped from a crane to break it up.’ Cupboard doors were opened and shut; drawers were slid in and out, out and in, removed, twizzled round. ‘Where are the drawers for this Georgian chest?’ asked Pete or Trev. Unfortunately the answer was ‘on the bonfire’. ‘Where is the other table from this G Plan nest?’ We looked at each other; maybe our eyes flickered to the window with the view of the bonfire. Nest? Was there another table as ugly as that one? Eventually Pete or Trev brought out a roll of banknotes from a trouser pocket and rapidly peeled off several. ‘Three-fifty and it’s off yer hands.’

There was almost a hysteria by now about finishing this task which had been generations in the making. The decisions we made were hasty and getting hastier because Elizabeth and I lived hundreds of miles apart and so we did the job in bursts at weekends. It felt at times as though we would never get to the end of it. I had the sensation of trying to free myself from a sticky cobweb that clung relentlessly, refusing to let go and entangling me further no matter how hard I grappled.

Not long after Pete or Trev paid us for the bedroom furniture we found a list of wedding presents, handwritten by Marjorie in 1925, headed up ‘Walnut Bedroom Suite – given by Mother and Father’. So it was walnut not mahogany. I felt a guilty stabbing – what were we doing? – before common sense reasserted itself.

As the house became emptier and brighter it seemed physically to lighten and relax. When David and Marjorie’s enormous bedroom suite was finally removed by Pete and Trev ninety years after it arrived, it was as though the house had lost its anchor or had its roots severed. The farmhouse was now empty and echoing and it seemed there was every chance that, unencumbered by our family detritus, I might return to it one day and find it had gone – that it had floated entirely away.

My sisters and I were born at New House Farm in the sitting room; the same room in which my dad was born thirty-eight years before me; a room otherwise only used on Christmas Day to watch films and eat Quality Street; a room that would one day have Pete and Trev strolling round it talking about pianos and cranes and brown furniture as they weighed up brass pots and pieces of china and searched for marks on the silver.

Me and Elizabeth ‘helping’ Dad mend a puncture around 1966

On the day I was born, Nurse Steele came with her canister of gas and air to deliver me, as she had done three years earlier when Elizabeth arrived and as she would do three years later for the birth of Tricia.

On that occasion Elizabeth and I were not told what was happening in the sitting room directly below our bedroom. We woke one morning to discover our bedroom door so firmly shut it was impossible to open. Was it locked? Were we trapped? We hammered and screamed ‘Help! Help! Mummy! Mummy!’ until Dad wrenched the door open. ‘Sssh!’ An aunt took us downstairs and gave us Chocolate Fingers and milky coffee in front of the kitchen fire to keep us quiet until we were eventually taken into the sitting room for the first sight of our new sister.

We were led through the lobby and the sitting-room door, past the grand piano, until I was on eye level with the bed that my father had brought downstairs the week before for the arrival of this baby. Mum was propped up against the pillows, smiling a little, wearing a crocheted bed jacket with satin ties. Tricia was lying on the counterpane wrapped in a white blanket. I think Mum probably decided not to be cuddling Tricia as we came in for our first look so we wouldn’t be jealous.

Nurse Steele said, ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ and I stared at this red-raw mewling thing moving in slow motion. I looked sidelong at the smiling nurse – was she laughing at me? Why was she saying it was lovely? I felt betrayed. This was not the playful, chubby-cheeked baby I had been promised – the one I could be ‘good’ with and share my toys with; I was doubtful it was even a baby at all. It reminded me of new kittens when you first found them in the barn in the nest; eyes shut and rooting for milk. Nurse Steele gave a tinkling laugh and I looked at the carpet.

Someone had played a dirty trick on me.

Years later Tricia claimed she could remember being born – the violence of it, the darkness, the eventual light. When I told Mum she snorted and rolled her eyes. As i f !

She banged her Daily Express , with an expression like Whistler’s mother, and that was the end of it. Perhaps the act of childbirth was below my mother’s dignity and she didn’t want anyone remembering that .

In our family, it seemed sitting rooms were for Christmas, for being born or for dying. This was the first room you saw, and the last.

The first dead person I saw was in 1973 when I was nine years old and I was taken to see my maternal grandad lying in an open coffin in the best sitting room of my grandparents’ farmhouse. We rarely got to see the inside of this room but there was no time today to examine the upright piano or the cabinet of china ornaments – including a china cat about to kill a cowering china mouse – or the eight black and white wedding photographs of my mother and her seven siblings framed and hanging on the wall like a catalogue of wedding styles through the 1950s and 60s.

No, today the settee had been pushed back against the piano to make room for the coffin, which was shiny oak, top of the range, and resting on some kind of stand. Grandad Ben was wearing a white satin shroud and was surrounded by white satin padding. He had died of lung cancer after being ill for only two months. He had rapidly grown thinner and weaker and his cheeks had sunk but nobody had told me he was dying.

His bed had appeared unannounced and unexplained in the living room of my grandparents’ farmhouse where the old sofa used to be – the one we sat on to watch The Golden Shot and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) on a Sunday afternoon while we ate finger rolls with mashed egg and salad cream followed by Great-Aunty Margaret’s jam slice – and he had gathered ever-more bowls and containers around him to cough and spit into; but still nobody told me he was dying.

Illness was frightening; adults whispering and shaking their heads was frightening. Frustrated that he looked worse every week and puzzled when Grandma smiled a little too brightly and said, ‘He did so well!’ when all Grandad had done was walk to the bottom of the yard and back, I asked my mother: ‘When’s Grandad going to get better?’ She was stirring a pan of gravy with a wooden spoon and kept her eyes on it and said, ‘Maybe he won’t.’

Shock trickled from the top of my head to the tips of my toes like a bucket of iced water. I had never considered there were important things grown-ups could not fix.

I wondered if my mother would ever have told me if I hadn’t asked.

When he died my mother asked me and my sisters if we wanted to go and see him. Grandad was six feet tall, a strong farmer with a forceful personality, and now here he was in his coffin looking like a waxwork. We were told his body had been embalmed so he would never change. This, I understood, was because Grandad was a Very Important Person; someone his family looked up to and respected without question. Grandad was a Worshipful Master in the local lodge of the Freemasons; Grandad was a Duchy of Lancaster tenant and had been invited to meet the Queen at St James’s Palace more than once; Grandad had played rugby for the Rochdale Hornets and as a young man had been sparring partner for professional boxer Jock McAvoy, known as the Rochdale Thunderbolt; Grandad was a personal friend of Gracie Fields and on the marble mantelpiece by the television was a postcard from the island of Capri to prove it, curling at the edges and a little singed from when it had drifted into the open fire, but still legibly signed ‘best wishes, Gracie’. Grandad was all-knowing, all-powerful and immortal.