Bad Blood (28 page)

At the Davieses' with Vic Sage (right) and our friend Martin

It was in that improbable pastoral setting that I remet Vic Sage. And – since he was so remote from my idea of a boyfriend – told him all sorts of things: that I hated my parents sincerely, not just in a manner of speaking, and couldn't believe everyone didn't; that I of course expected to pass all the O-levels I was taking, the only thing that worried me was what grades I would get; that I couldn't tell the time; that his notion that it was ‘fair' that he should be caned by his headmaster for indiscipline (for example, being drunk in the bus on the way back from the school trip to Stratford-upon-Avon) was nonsense, obedience made tyranny; and property was theft. In the evenings, waiting to be picked up by her mother or my father, Gail and I would fit ourselves into one armchair, while Mr Davies (who was older than his wife, and – we took for granted – cleverer in an abstract way) deplored our inability to play chess or even draughts decently, and we questioned him about other puzzles. I still remember his description of how you could reconcile predestination and free will: it was as though God made a documentary film of everything that happened and could watch
it when He chose. This made no difference to the choices we the actors made, our freedom wasn't compromised in the least by the fact that what happened happened and
always had
. In the midst of your life, hacking your way through the jungle, you naturally couldn't see the wood for the trees. That's how the definition of liberty went, I'm pretty sure, that summer.

Even in the Maelor District, Tory bank-rate cuts and the easing of the credit squeeze made a difference. My Hanmer contemporaries who'd left the secondary modern school at fifteen were leaving the village to find work, because farms were becoming bigger and more mechanised, and used less labour; and the cattle haulage trade was being shaken up too. With the end of meat-rationing and the birth of burgers, cattle dealers expanded their operations from the local markets and so did my father. The Business was booming. Not that there was ready cash, it was simply that the turnover was bigger and he could borrow more. He was still writing ‘Please' on overdue bills, then ‘
Please
' three months later, and it always seemed ominous that the office stationery (which came by mail order) was called Kalamazoo, as though it was designed for enterprises in cloud-cuckoo-land. Nonetheless it was true: we'd never had it so good. In 1959 we moved across the border to the western edge of Whitchurch, where the town petered out and the pavements stopped, to a house called Sunnyside. The rest of this story has a new setting. Well, new in a way.

I'd passed Sunnyside every day on the bus for years. It was an Edwardian villa (stained glass, pointy gables, fancy wrought iron) set back behind a high hedge on a gravel drive, surrounded by laurels, laburnums and lilacs, and obscured from the road
by a copper beech. Its warped white gate hung always ajar, and even the ‘For Sale' sign soon looked weather-beaten and blended in with the general air of neglect. The Davieses were ahead of their time. No one wanted a big house unless they meant to take lodgers or start a ‘Home'. And there was no pressure for planning permission. No private houses had been built on Wrexham Road since the war – the council estate where Vic lived straggled along the bottoms of people's gardens, so this wasn't a smart part of town. Sunnyside was going cheap – the house and one and a half acres of land for £1,800 – and my father saw at once that he'd be able to park a small fleet of trucks down the back garden, and that the stables would serve splendidly as a workshop and garage.

There was more to it than that, of course. I wasn't the only one oppressed by open-plan overcrowding in the council house. Whatever had been my parents' hopes when they started life as a proper nuclear family with baby Clive, they'd been sullied almost immediately by Grandma's advent and my misery, and by now number 4 The Arowry was bursting with frustration. Grandma, more and more frail and housebound, trembling with impotent resentment as well as Parkinson's disease, could hardly manage the steep stairs to the bathroom and Clive ran wild out of doors at all hours just as I'd done. Everyone hated it. What we
should
have done, though, if we'd been decorously upwardly socially mobile, was acquire a neat new four-bedroomed semi with all mod cons. Instead, we were going back to the future. Sunnyside had a heady aura of dereliction and privacy none of us could resist – or none of us except Clive and he was too young to count. We were moving back to the vicarage, but without Grandpa – bliss for my parents, and (even) for me and for Grandma, since despite its bright and cheerful name it was a shady, reclusive house with lots of solidly separate rooms.

The previous owner had ended his days shuffling between just two, the sitting-room and the kitchen opposite, through a green baize door that once divided servants from masters but had dropped on its hinges and was wedged open. In the dust of years he'd worn a path where you could just make out the mosaic pattern of the stone floor of the hallway. Sonny (Sunny?) Foulkes. His family had bought the house in 1919 – the dashing Irish Guards captain who'd built it had been killed in the First World War. It had originally been created for fun, you could still tell, for Sonny had lived in it like a squatter, changing nothing. There was a whole ‘wing' with a billiard room and (on the floor above) five tiny bedrooms for the help; cellars with wine racks and meat safes and hooks for hanging game; a cabinet for sporting guns that had been discreetly looted by lads from the estate, although they'd left behind a stuffed greyhound in a glass case; a tennis court hummocky with molehills; a sizeable paddock for grazing a couple of horses; an orchard of half-dead cherry, plum, apple and pear trees; rare rose-fancier's roses struggling with weeds and raspberry canes; and a tackle shed neatly stacked from floor to roof with empty Gordon's gin bottles. In the dead leaves blocking the drains there lived elegant pale-yellow lizards. This was a Maelor of the mind, a detached portion of time. Here we'd be once more in social limbo, unplaceable, with plenty of
lebensraum
for solitary fantastical grudges and dreams.

With minimal modernisation – installing electric light in place of the leaky gas jets, replacing the kitchen range, which collapsed in a red cloud of dust at the first touch – and some DIY decorating it would do fine. My mother wasn't dismayed at the thought of the housework, for she suspected straight away that there'd be less of it, since it was in any case impossible to keep such a big place clean. This house had vicarage dirt,
not the common kind you could be expected to mop up. To join the dirt, vicarage things that had been in store for years were retrieved, although many of them got no further than tea chests stacked in the billiard room. There Clive and a new friend Jeff, from down the bottom of the back garden, patiently blew them to bits with a toy cannon whose range they'd improved dramatically with home-made gunpowder.

Sunnyside had something for everyone and united us for a brief while, since it enabled us to go our separate ways. The night we eventually moved in there was a moment of rare collusion. Grandma had already been installed, while we'd gone back to Hanmer for some last bits and pieces. Returning, as the car crunched round the gravel of the drive – our drive – we saw her framed in the curtainless bay window, sitting on a tall chair, as if suspended in space. Her feet didn't touch the bare floorboards. She was bathed in greenish light from the television and was shaking her fist at the wrestler on the screen – witchy, grotesque and (horribly) at home. We were hysterical and laughed till we cried. But then it was only fitting she should feel at home, because the £600 that she'd extracted from Grandpa and put in a post office savings account in my name all went towards buying the house. My parents reckoned reasonably enough that it was anyway ill-gotten and that she owed it to them for all the years she hadn't paid her way, and the remaining years she still wouldn't. And as for me, I already knew that property was theft. But although I tried to feel robbed, in fact I wanted the move as much as anyone.

More. I was beginning to think that
I'd got away with it
. Got away with my secret arrogance and hopeless shyness, with counting in cabbages and blotting my copybooks, with bugs and braces and bookishness, with admiring my left profile in the bathroom mirror . . . Sunnyside, where the soul of the
vicarage seemed reincarnated in a new body of bricks and mortar, lulled me into a false sense of security. I'd duly collected all those O-levels back in the summer, and although my parents had agreed with the headmistress that (despite 85 per cent in maths) my talent was for arts subjects and I wouldn't be going to the boys' school to catch up on physics and chemistry, I didn't put up a real fight for my right to wear a white coat and become a foot soldier in the space race. I didn't any longer need to go to the grammar school to compete with the boys – fraternise with the boys – since over the first months of the new school year Vic and his friends (who were mostly doing English and history or classics), the bunch from the Davieses, had become Gail's and my co-ed chums.

Or that was the story I palmed off on my parents when they embarrassedly broached the question of what I was up to. I made us sound a bit like the busload of slow developers who, a few years later, would be preserved for posterity in Cliff Richard's
Summer Holiday
– too young to fall in love (because when they
do
they'll be serious), too busy getting the show on the road to brood on lust, too scrubbed, wholesome, bouncy and normal not to appreciate the safety in numbers (They're
all
going on a summer holiday).

On one shaming occasion before we moved house, when I turned up at Sunnyside to get a lift home with my father, who was doing some plastering in the kitchen (a false alarm about foot-and-mouth disease meant business was slack), he started on a meaningful monologue about how important it was to have self-discipline and self-respect and . . . In a panic I shut him up by recycling the school assembly talks we'd been given on freedom and responsibility, and how you had to be free to
be
responsible. I don't think I'd read Milton's immortal words about not being able to praise a cloistered virtue, or I'm sure
I'd have quoted them. Anything to forestall some awful attempt at intimacy and ‘understanding' talk about necking, heavy petting and going too far. I took an even loftier moral line than he had and so made it quite impossible for us to discuss what I did or didn't. I lied fluently and plausibly and self-righteously, because I didn't want to know myself, exactly. I
hadn't
, but not for his reasons. It was none of his business, and anyway nothing to do with my private integrity, as he seemed to think.

Perhaps he'd heard gossip about Vic's brother Cyril, who was a lorry driver in his twenties, and who'd already got a girl into trouble and had been before the magistrate for a paternity order. Cyril was quite famous in Whitchurch. He was actually Vic's half-brother: when my mother and his were Dudleston's sales ladies in the 1930s, Vic's mother had been a widow, Mrs Price, and Cyril – who was clever as well as dashing – was generally thought to have turned into a tearaway because of violent differences with his stepfather, which was why he'd run away to live with his grandparents and dropped out of school to drive a tractor. He'd been called up to do his National Service just in time for Suez, too, which hadn't helped: he came back from Cairo spoiling for a fight, and set up as a seducer and a member of the working classes. Still, Vic's mother was an old friend, and so obviously mortified by Cyril's disaffection and bad-boy reputation that my parents couldn't bring themselves to disapprove entirely of Vic. After all, he was staying on in the sixth form and (as I kept telling them) we all hung around together.

It was true that Gail had been the occasion of the first really intense conversation Vic and I had, when we told each other more – and more, once we started we couldn't stop – about our families. We were at a Whitchurch tennis club where Michael Price played and the plot was that we were supposed
to help her inveigle him into a doubles match. Instead, we swapped childhoods and sat apart in the shade, and while her courtship advanced hardly at all as usual, we confided recklessly. We boasted to each other about the awfulness of life in our respective council houses and stripped off the appearances with which our parents covered their privacy. The luridness and absurdity of his domestic set-up was wonderfully familiar, somehow. We discovered that we were cursed with craziness. The grandparents were my trump card, Vic's was his father. He came from South Wales too, the next valley to Tonypandy, or as good as – Abercynon – and was short and wide like Grandma.

He'd had a whole career as a sergeant in the regular army until Dunkirk, when he'd been invalided out with just short of twenty years' service and no proper pension. Was he already unbalanced, had he been for years and the army only just noticed, had he been traumatised on the retreat, or was it civilian life that drove him mad? Nothing showed for a while: he had a Civil Service job looking after army stores when Vic was born in 1942 and, although he was high-handed at home and a martinet as a stepfather – Cyril climbed out of the bathroom window at eleven to avoid a thrashing and never came back – that wasn't at all odd for the time. It wasn't until the 1950s that his mood swings got more extreme and he began to give orders with a new peremptoriness. Then one day in the office a typist was insubordinate and he hit her.