Tessa Hadley: Clever Girl

I got a scholarship for the Girls’ High School (and Madeleine got in too, without the scholarship). Mum took me out to buy me a briefcase and we had lunch in British Home Stores. She was proud that I had proved myself at least good for something. Gerry said, — She’ll have a lot more to live up to, now.

I can’t remember how I found out that Gerry was brought up in the Homes — I suppose Mum must have told me. He didn’t speak to me about it until long afterwards. (At the time he only said, — Not everyone has your opportunities.) The Homes was an orphanage, a vast neoclassical grey stone building set back from a main road, its front implacable as a hospital or a prison. We said at junior school that the children who came from there smelled of wee and wore one another’s clothes. They didn’t have real mothers, only aunties.

This knowledge I had of Gerry lodged in me like a stone. It didn’t make me like him any better. It seemed an extra twist to how arbitrarily he and I were fastened together: I had to bear the burden of his childhood sorrows too. He had done heroically well, working his way up at the Board Mill, overcoming the handicap of his beginnings (his mother hadn’t been ‘able to look after him’). I was determined not to care. My own selfishness seemed to eat me up; I worked at being oblivious of all my advantages. I ran away from home and went to Nana’s. (‘Your mother’s been out of her mind with worry.’) Out at the stumps with Madeleine, I smoked cigarettes and threw up. I told my mother I was only happy at the stables. Madeleine came riding with me, bouncing unconvincingly on Boy, her smile uneasy, double chin squeezed in the too-tight strap of the brand-new hard hat Pam had bought her. She held her nose and pretended to retch when the ponies dropped their dung.

I hated the High School. Madeleine and I hated it together, though differently. Her face, wiped clear of guile, goaded one or two of the more savage teachers who mistook her blankness for insolence. At first it seemed that I had the gift of invisibility. I sank back into the middle of the range of achievement. I kept my mouth shut in class and out of it. I absorbed obsessively the intricate system of their prohibitions, so as not to attract attention by transgressing — no fewer than five lace-holes in our outdoor shoes, no green ink, all textbooks to be covered in brown paper, girls not to use the toilet in twos (in junior school we had often crowded three or four into the little cubicles, to gossip). By the end of the first week I knew that I’d found my way, through some terrible error, into enemy territory where I must as a matter of life or death keep my true self concealed. The school was a mill whose purpose was to grind you into its product. Every subject shrank to fit inside its exam questions; even — especially — the books we read in English lessons. We were supposed to be grateful, having been selected for this grinding; and most of the girls were grateful. Madeleine and I didn’t fit in. Our tree cult revived and garnered new passionate power through being driven into opposition — with our bark fragments in our pockets we were like Catholic recusants fingering hidden rosaries, and we had a code of words and signs to communicate our refusal and our mockery.

Meanwhile my mother began wearing looser dresses. It wasn’t the fashion for parents to explain themselves to their children. Mum never told me she was pregnant; only hinted at a significant change coming. I was slow to the point of stupidity in picking up her suggestions. Why was she putting her feet up every evening after supper, while Gerry and I did the dishes in competitive silence? Some conspiracy surrounded her, which I recoiled from as if I guessed it had humiliation in it for me. One Saturday morning, watching from my bedroom window while she hung out washing on the metal clothes tree in the garden (turfed at least by this time, if not yet the little paradise of planting it later became under Gerry’s green-fingered stewardship), I saw what I had not allowed myself to see: the wet sheets billowed like fat sails filled with the wind, and she billowed too. Ducking out of sight behind my window, so that she wouldn’t know I knew, I crouched around my discovery in the tight space between the bed leg and the dolls’ cot, with my back to the pink-sprigged wallpaper I had chosen and Gerry had cut and pasted and put up. (I picked at the edges of this paper sometimes, where he wouldn’t notice it, when I was in bed at night; sometimes I spat into the gap beside the bed and let my saliva trickle down the wall.)

My mother had betrayed herself, pretending to be complete and then letting this invasion inside her body as if she was not herself but any other woman. I’d never considered any relationship between my own mother and the not-quite-interesting mystery of prams and bibs and bottles. She was too sensible, too old, I had always thought. She had never even seemed to like babies, or made any fuss over them. Except me. Once upon a time she must have changed nappies and heated bottles of milk for me, fussed over me. But that was a lifetime ago.

My mother had to go into hospital for the last weeks of her pregnancy, because her blood pressure was too high. Gerry and I were left in a tense proximity at home. He made my tea when he came in from work, a procedure we both found painful. He tied Mum’s apron over his shirt and suit trousers, then with an air of weary duty set about producing fish fingers, baked beans, bacon, sausages, pork chops, chips. For a man of that era he really wasn’t bad at it. In fact, he may have been a better cook than my mother was — she was pretty awful. Only he didn’t know the little foibles of my likes and dislikes the way she did. I ate everything he put in front of me. I think I was afraid of him, alone in the house without her — afraid at least of his contempt. But I didn’t eat it enthusiastically. I cut every piece of toast, or potato, or sausage laboriously into minute pieces before I even tasted them. Then one by one I swallowed these pieces, trying not to chew, washing them down with mouthfuls from my glass of water, asking for more water frequently. Though he couldn’t have known it, I was doing my best.

I saw that I put him off his own dinner (which he ate with the apron still on).

— Just eat it, for goodness’ sake, he said. — Chew it up.

He sat at an angle, hunched around his plate, so that he didn’t have to watch me. After tea, he made me do my homework on the dining-room table. We never used the dining room to eat in except at Christmas or on the rare occasions that we had guests, so it was chilly and transitional: papered olive-green, with doors at either end and a serving hatch, African violets on the windowsill, a memory of stale gravy in the air. Letters and paperwork and Mum’s sewing washed up on the repro rosewood dining table, among the place mats with scenes from old-world English villages. Miserably I cleared myself a space. I had to spread newspaper in case I made marks on the polished surface.

After long days of lessons, we were given two or three hours of homework every night. For most of that first year at the High School I aimed for average marks that would not draw anyone’s attention. I wasn’t consciously holding back — it hadn’t yet occurred to me to desire praise, prizes, distinctions. In science and maths I struggled anyway. The physics teacher was merciless. Handsome, tall, unmarried, with a rope of white hair twisted round her temples, she belonged to the generation of women who had sacrificed everything for their education. We were supposed to learn the principles of physics not by rote but through problem-solving. One evening I was wrestling with a question about acceleration: the hare catching up with the tortoise in a race. Actual tears splashed on to the page, blotting the blue ink of my workings; my mind ached with the effort. At junior school I had been good at problems: ‘If Harry and Dick together weigh nine stone four pounds, Dick and Tom together weigh eight stone twelve pounds…’, and so on — but those problems had been for beginners, I saw now. I urged my mind to take the intuitive leap into comprehension, but again and again it baulked. Gerry looked in on me, bringing the cup of milky, sugary, instant coffee my mother usually brought. He really was trying hard.