Bad Blood (17 page)

They made no close friends in those early years. Their union was exclusive and inward-looking. Later, as they settled down, they found social and public roles – he in the British Legion
and the Road Haulage Association, she in the Women's Institute drama group, of which she became the leading light. But they would never dilute their own relationship by mixing as a couple. Man and wife, realist and dreamer . . . in truth they were more than one flesh, they had formed and sustained each other, they had
one story
between them and it wasn't at all easy for me or my brother to inhabit it. I regularly cast myself in the part of the clever, unwanted child who's sent out to lose herself in the forest, but manages nonetheless to find her own way, being secretive, untruthful, disobedient, and so on and on, as they never ceased to complain. The children of violently unhappy marriages, like my mother, are often hamstrung for life, but the children of happier marriages have problems too – all the worse, perhaps, because they don't have virtue on their side.

Where were we? We'd only once had a geography lesson at Hanmer school, one sunny morning when Mr Palmer with a flourish draped a cracked and shiny blue-green-brown map over the blackboard next to his desk and sat surveying us, tapping his pointer gently in the palm of his left hand. Geography was a game. He'd call out a name – Manchester or Swansea or Carlisle – and one by one we had to walk up to the board and point at it. Any straying finger got a sharp rap from Mr Palmer's stick. Naturally most of us got it wrong, since we'd never seen a map of the British Isles before. The only way to win at this game was to approach very slowly and see if you could spot your town in time, but since most kids couldn't read very well (or at all) this didn't help a lot. I did all right with something beginning with B (Bolton or Blackburn or Birkenhead or Birmingham) but I cried anyway, I always did. Although we may not have found out much about geography that day, we were being taught a lesson, the usual one: to know our place. Hanmer wasn't on the map and Hanmer was where we were. Most of us, according to Mr Palmer, would be muck-shovellers. Two or three of us, equally pawns in the game, would be allowed to get away with it – this time.

Hanmer school's best moments had been the times when no one pretended we were being taught, when fun was decreed
with no forfeits – like the warm-up session for the Christmas party when Mr Palmer, a beaming ogre, led us in carols and nonsense songs, ending with an ear-splitting, hysterical chorus, ‘Ooooh, the Okey Cokey! That's what it's
all abOUT
!' Or the summer PT lesson when we ran up a bench propped against the churchyard wall, round some gravestones, through the bindweed and nettles – this corner beetling over the schoolyard hadn't been used for a century – and down another bench into the playground again. Or the day of deep frost one winter when the big boys were sent out with buckets of water to make a slide on the field below the bike shed and we all took turns, marvelling at the long green grass trapped flowing in the ice under our feet like seaweed.

My brother had already started on his school career and would in time be promoted to carrying coke for the cast-iron classroom stoves – perhaps in fulfilment of Mr Palmer's theory of hereditary roles, for Clive was in everyone's eyes much more a Stockton. His time at Hanmer school would leave him with a legacy of fiery temper tantrums. In my case its frustrations, mystifications and menace made me chronically shifty. You learned at Hanmer school to keep the world of grown-up authority out of focus, to look askance, to stare stubbornly at an invisible point in the air between yourself and them. You learned to seem dull and stupid. I was no exception. Mr Palmer may have massaged my results to match my vicarage IQ, but I was far too scared of him to feel any complicity. And – although I didn't know it at the time – Miss Myra and Miss Daisy regarded me with special distaste, as the granddaughter of the old devil who'd corrupted their niece Marj. My being bookish hadn't brought me any closer to my teachers than any of the other children.

The blank stare came in handy outside school. I gave my
parents, particularly my father, this treatment, which he interpreted quite rightly as a form of insubordination. Shy and sly were close. I had acquired from Grandpa (bad blood!) vanity, ambition and discontent along with literacy. I didn't know my place. And although my parents were in public proud of me for getting into grammar school so precociously, they were at the same time, in private, convinced that my addiction to print was part of my general delinquency. This was particularly galling, because they couldn't object to it, indeed had to pander to my whims, leave the light on all night and buy me a school uniform. Other kids' parents had promised them extravagant rewards (a watch, a new bike) if they passed the exam. Mine promised me nothing, they knew I was bloody-minded enough to call them to account.

Neither a watch nor a bike would have been much use to me in any case. I couldn't tell the time, although I kept this a secret. The involuntary sulk that I lived in included clocks: just as I couldn't meet people's eyes, I couldn't look a clock in the face. I squinted at them so hastily and at such a weird angle that they made no sense. And I covered up this odd blind spot by allowing myself always to know vaguely whether it was something to or something past the hour, and usually what hour it was. The church clock struck and alarm clocks went off, too, which helped. My lateness in coming home from my morose wanderings was connected with my clock problem – it wasn't that I was late because I couldn't tell the time (after all, there aren't many clocks in the fields and woods), more that I couldn't tell the time because I resented and avoided any occasion that meant turning up for inspection.

There was a shadow of satisfaction in my ineptitude. By contrast, not being able to learn to ride a bike was altogether shaming. My mother must have passed on to me something of
her own recently acquired phobia. Certainly she always prevented me from messing about on other kids' bikes in the vicarage square when I was six or seven years old. The square had no traffic, but she was convinced I'd pedal straight into the road out of perversity and get run over. By the time I was ten, however, it was an embarrassment to everyone that I was such a wimp and my father undertook to teach me – which turned my lack of confidence into a full-scale mental block. He was systematic and elaborately patient, and very soon exasperated. Under his eye I fumbled, abashed, my arms and legs felt stiff and rubbery at once, my hands were slippery with sweat, and the bike would fold over and collapse as soon as I touched it. I'd emerge from these sessions in tears, covered in scrapes and bruises without having cycled an inch. My father, disgusted, said I was a Member of the Awkward Squad – no Physical Co-ordination, no Sense of Balance.

No watch and no bike, either, just the prospect of Whitchurch Girls' High School, which was where my mother went back in the past, another scary blank to me.
Getting on in the world
seemed impossible. I was at a loss, at a loose end. It was like being inside one of the books I devoured. You could feel the momentum of the plot carrying you along, but you couldn't tell what came next and the sensation of powerlessness was horribly baffling. Since I couldn't skip to the end, I averted my eyes, changed focus, looked somewhere else. Before I got out of the sticks, I would get further in. I found a place to hide.

Just opposite us, but sidelong to the road, looking indifferently away from the council houses, was Watsons' farm. Your first sight of it was the milk stand, a raised platform of planks from which the Milk Marketing Board lorry picked up full silver churns early every morning, leaving empties behind. Most
days when it wasn't raining the milk stand was the favourite seat of one of The Arowry's other outsiders, too lame to wander far, the pale twenty-year-old son of our quietest council-house neighbours, who was dying of the TB in his bones. Sometimes I'd sit beside him in silence, kicking my legs, but more and more I ventured through the rutted gateway into the Watsons' farmyard. It was a muddy enclosure, only partly paved, with their house at one end, the rest bordered by cowsheds, the haybarn, a selection of stores and stables and lean-tos, and a manure heap in the far corner. In this yard lived a busy claque of hens, some semi-stray cats, an old collie-dog called Trigger, who'd seen better days, and the queenly cows who came back to be milked. They had names like Mabel and Rose, and knew their way to their stalls by heart, although they were lodged in different, odd corners, since Mr Watson had no shippon big enough for all twelve of them.

I hung around and made friends with Trigger – who was short of friends, since he was smelly and had a festering wound on his face from a rat bite that wouldn't heal. The Watsons' hens, more feral than free-range, laid in cunning gaps between bales of hay or behind old cartwheels in the tractor shed. Soon I was collecting the eggs in a broken bucket, sweeping up shit and straw after Mabel and her court, and chopping up roots for their winter feed in a kind of monster cast-iron mincing machine, with a handle I had to turn with both hands. Mangolds to the mangle, mangel-wurzels, the roots of scarcity, rock-hard and bright orange on the inside. This was wordless work, with no recompense save for the sense of something real to do. Mr Watson would hail me in a joshing, coaxing voice, as if I were some stray creature myself, and I wasn't required to answer beyond a grunt or nervous giggle. I turned up, he let me stay – always outdoors, however, there was no question of entering
Mrs Watson's domain, although she'd hand out hot, sweet tea at the back door, where her pet guinea-fowl pecked around with their freckled feathers ballooned against the raw weather.

The particular bliss of Watsons' farm was that it combined the reassurance of routine with the freedom of wandering off. They had no wish to take me in. They would have been in their late forties, they had grown-up children of their own, only their son Edgar was still in the process of leaving home. Edgar milked the stubbornest cows and once, when he caught me loitering in the corner, squirted warm, sweet, sticky milk in my face. He made me feel suddenly, agonisingly, too close for comfort – needy and ‘nesh'. When he wasn't around I was allowed to try to milk an easy cow myself. I wasn't much good at it, my fingers weren't strong enough and I couldn't begin to get the rhythm you were supposed to, with the milk pinging gently into the bucket. But I did learn how to buckle leather straps on to the back legs of the two cows that liked to kick, one of them known jokily as Jezebel. I did penetrate that far into the mysteries of milking.

Because Mr Watson was easygoing and didn't mind me being clumsy, I was a lot less clumsy around him. He labelled me a ‘funnyosity' when he found me sitting in the hay with my nose in a book (too much reading was well known to send you daft) and so suffered me gladly. He worked hard, but at the same time the pattern of farm days was loose and wide-meshed, there was a desultory quality about it – unlike the Business, it didn't have to be reinvented from scratch all the time. Mr Watson gave the impression that the farm ran him, rather than the other way around.

It was gently running down, that was why. Watsons' had about thirty acres all told, but the disorderly carve-ups and amalgamations of Hanmer tenancies over the years meant that
the fields were dotted around the neighbourhood, not one of them adjacent to the farmyard. Most of this land was used for grazing or growing crops for feed – hay, bitter kale, stony mangolds and millet. I followed in his wake one day when he sowed millet like a man in a parable, walking up and down scattering seed from a basket by hand. Millet-seed is fine and black, and I went home looking like Uncle Albert after his coal round, which so tickled my mother that for once she didn't tell, except to make a joke of it. The whole episode appealed to her taste for the picturesque.

However, Mr Watson's methods were generally less romantic and more mechanised. He had an ancient Fordson tractor, bought forty-second-hand to replace the carthorse that died shortly after the war, whose tackle still hung in the shed. The Fordson was juddering, deafening, temperamental, filthy with oil and dust, and moved very slowly. Mr Watson and I would ride out on it to the more distant fields, me perched on one of its huge mudguards, holding tight and bundled up in scarves. It was very exposed, with no cabin to shelter in, but the two of us were cosy all the same, enclosed in our capsule of fumes and noise. Impatient cars and trucks had to queue to overtake us, we wouldn't alter our stately pace. Couldn't, in truth – but that made us all the more like a force of nature.

Riding on the tractor and feeling its hammering engine in your bones was better mesmerism than trudging through the mud. You could steep yourself in essence of Hanmer, for hours at a time you were fully occupied going nearly nowhere – to the field, then up and down the field, then back to where you started. Farming life seemed a perpetual-motion machine, or an effect of gravity, something cyclic and unstoppable. Actually, it was because this kind of small-scale tenant farming was vanishing that the impression of stubborn persistence was so
strong. Ways of life have been dying out in rural England time out of mind, at least for the two hundred and fifty years since the great wave of eighteenth-century enclosures. It's the sense of an ending that's timeless. The best symbol of this version of pastoral is a rusting and discarded piece of farm machinery in the corner of a field. Well, almost the best. When, a bit later, I encountered Thomas Hardy's wry verses ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations” ', I realised he'd described exactly the pull of a world endlessly coming to an end.

Only a man harrowing clods

In a slow silent walk

With an old horse that stumbles and nods

Half asleep as they stalk . . .

The poem's official message is that life on the land goes on despite supposedly ‘historic' disasters like world wars. However, there's an ironic twist, since this minimal, anonymous existence has no more respect for individuality than the obscenity in the trenches. It's a scene that might well itself have been scoured by battles. Such quiet landscapes are graveyards. ‘Portion of this Yew / Is a man my grandsire knew' Hardy writes in a jollier variant on the same theme.