Don't You Love Your Daddy? (2 page)

‘You’d better come to my house for your Sunday roast,’ my grandmother would say, each time my mother failed to put in an appearance. Her mouth, devoid of lipstick, pursed in disapproval at what she saw as her daughter-in-law’s neglect of her wifely duties. She sniffed loudly and added, ‘I doubt Laura’s prepared anything.’ Which, of course, my mother hadn’t, and as the men in our village thought it was something special if they made a cup of tea, it was unlikely that my father would cook our lunch.

My grandmother’s Sunday lunches seldom varied – ‘Men expect to eat a roast whatever the weather does,’ she always said. So, regardless of the season, a large joint of roast beef would be placed before my grandfather for him to carve, and the table was covered with jugs of onion gravy, dishes of crisp roast potatoes, a selection of vegetables and a platter of golden Yorkshire puddings. Plates were piled high, second helpings were offered, and thick slices of apple tart or spoonfuls of fruit crumble covered with custard were passed round.

I liked going to my grandmother’s house, where mouthwatering smells drifted from her sparkling kitchen. In her home I was always made a fuss of, but I didn’t like hearing disparaging remarks about my mother.

‘So she’s not well again?’ I would hear my aunt say to my father, before my grandmother could tell her not to talk about it in front of me. Several censorious sniffs would follow until she was unable to keep her thoughts to herself. ‘I’d like to know what Laura’s got wrong in her life to make her feel so sorry for herself. There’s you in a good job – with all this building of new estates round here, a carpenter will always be in work. You live in a nice house and have two lovely children. She never wants for anything, does she? She needs a bit of firmness, that one does. You’re just too soft for your own good, David, and it’s a bad example for young Sally and Pete as well.’

The deep depressions that dogged my mother were viewed with little tolerance – ‘bipolar’, or ‘manic depression’, as it was more often called then, was not an illness that was widely recognized and my mother’s ‘bad days’ received scant sympathy from my father’s female relatives. Women’s Liberation and, with it, the knowledge of the various physical and mental problems that beset women might have started in the sixties, but during my childhood, it still hadn’t knocked on any doors in our working-class northern village. Like their mothers before them, these married women seldom went out to work: instead they believed that their role in life was to keep a clean house, cook tasty meals, and bring up their children in the manner that they had been raised. My mother’s inability to do those tasks consistently was frowned upon, and her mood swings were put down to laziness and ingratitude.

On Sundays, which my father referred to as ‘our Lord’s day’, we were not allowed to play in the street or the play areas on our estate. ‘It’s disrespectful to the Lord,’ my father would state firmly. So, once lunch was finished, I sat on the sitting-room floor and coloured in picture books or watched television if there was an old black and white film on. From time to time my eyes would drift longingly to the street outside: I could hear children playing and I’d wish I could join them. But I knew I would be refused permission should I ask.

When we returned to our house, often it was to find it in darkness with my mother asleep on the settee and the fire my father had lit that morning gone out.

Our home was a place where shouts followed by shrieks and muffled sobs were heard constantly. Their consistency gave them a veneer of normality, and over the years, as I grew from toddler to small child, they became woven into the fabric of my life. My father seldom tried to hide his impatience or lower his voice when he was confronted with what he thought were his wife’s imaginary illnesses. Too often I overheard him shout, ‘Pull yourself together, Laura.’ For days at a time she seemed incapable of doing that.

I learnt when I was about three that what my mother called her ‘black days’ made her cry, but I seldom questioned why. I only knew that the noises of her unhappiness and my father’s frustration frightened me. At night when the sounds of their anger and despair carried up the stairs and into my room, I would lie in bed with my fingers stuffed into my ears, praying for them to stop.

At fourteen Pete was at the gangly, sulky stage, with a voice that squeaked one moment and was a deep bass the next. When he heard my father erupting into red-faced, fist-waving fury, he would glare at him and storm out of the house. The sound of the back door banging was his only way of showing how upset he was. I wished I could have followed him but I was too young. Instead I just curled up tighter. With my stomach churning, I waited for the shouting to cease.

Over the years, my memories of my mother have merged into one large photographic collage that I have hung in my mind to look at when I think back to how it was then. Some are blurred, as if faded with age, but others are still sharp and clear. I cannot put in order all my memories, but I do know that every one of my mother and the time I spent with her occurred before I was six and a half.

I know, because that was when everything changed.

As a small child I learnt to recognize my mother’s extreme mood swings: warm smiles when I awoke heralded a good day. ‘Come on, up you get, lazybones,’ she would say, as she tickled my stomach, then pulled me out of bed. On good days she would brush my pale blonde hair. ‘Such beautiful hair – you must never cut it short,’ she would say, as she tied it into bunches or drew it back from my face with a black velvet hairband.

‘It’s like yours, Mummy,’ I replied, for my mother’s hair was the colour of the corn that was harvested in the autumn.

‘Mine’s not as pretty,’ she would say, then dress me and take me downstairs for breakfast.

I can still see her on warm sunny days, in a long denim skirt and a red and black crocheted waistcoat she had made for herself. She always tucked her shoulder-length hair behind her ears when, in a whirl of frantic activity, she cleaned the house from top to bottom. Her green eyes sparkled mischievously as she changed bedding, vacuumed the carpets, cleaned windows and washed the net curtains, stained yellow by the cigarettes she had smoked. Everything smelt of bleach and polish. Scatter cushions were plumped on the Dralon lounge suite, old magazines and newspapers were thrown out and everything was put away until nothing was out of place.

On those days it was just the two of us alone until my brother returned from school and my father from work. Once the housework was done we would spend our time playing games or my mother would sit me next to her on the settee, her arm around my shoulders as she read me stories. Noddy and his friend Big Ears came to life for me as did Snow White and her Seven Dwarfs. Sometimes my mother would make up her own stories where I was the central character and heroine. They were always about meeting fairies, friendly dragons and laughing giants – and it was those tales that I loved most.

On other good days we would spend the whole afternoon painting and drawing. My mother would put big colouring books on the table and drape a protective cloth over my dress. While I was absorbed in splashing bright colours on to the paper she baked cakes and biscuits, giving me the mixing bowl to scrape out. I would watch the oven out of the corner of my eye: she would give me a biscuit the moment it was cool enough to hold.

There were times when my mother, having spotted a new recipe in a magazine and eager to try it out, would dash to the shops for the ingredients. When she got home the table was soon covered with bowls, as vegetables were expertly diced, meat chopped and cream whisked. ‘Sally, we must lay the table properly,’ she would say, after one of those rare frenetic cooking bouts. The dinner service, which had been a wedding present, would be unearthed from the sideboard and washed. Small pieces of silver – a jug, some spoons, a salt cellar – also came out. I was given the task of dipping a cloth in the silver polish and rubbing away the tarnish that had stained them since the last time they had been used. I liked the rough gritty feel of the pink paste on my fingers when I helped her remove the dark stains and admired the gleam of each piece when we had polished it.

On those evenings my father would smile as he walked through the door and remark on the clean house and the cooking smells. Even Pete would sit down and eat with us instead of grabbing a snack and disappearing to his room under the pretext of having homework to finish. With my parents seemingly relaxed in each other’s company, we appeared to have become a normal family. On my mother’s good days I was content: she was the mother I loved and, for a short time, I could believe that the interlude would last – but it never did.

Near our house there was a play area for the children, and during the summer my mother and I would often spend mornings there. The swings were the first thing I headed for and I would beg my mother to push harder to make me go higher. With my legs stretched out and my head tipped back, I shrieked with delight when the swing rose higher and higher. Up there, I could see neighbours hanging out washing, children playing and teenagers sunbathing. When my mother had had enough of pushing me, we would go to the seesaw where she bounced me up and down.

On the down days, when my mother ignored my pleas to go to the play area because she was too tired to take me, I was confined to our small garden and left there to amuse myself. My bright red Space Hopper was brought out and I would bounce up and down on the broken concrete path for hours.

I thought that I must have caused my mother’s unhappiness – I couldn’t understand why she was so unhappy on some days and so happy on others. Maybe, I thought, it was the unsightly red spots of my eczema, which had appeared soon after I was born, but I never found the courage to ask her.

‘You’re a beautiful little girl,’ she told me on her good days, but by the time I started school I had ceased to believe her.

I can only imagine how my mother felt when the midwife placed me in her arms for the first time – after all, that is her memory, not mine, one that she polished with love, for that is what mothers do, before sharing it with me. ‘I loved you the moment I saw you,’ she told me. ‘With your fuzz of blonde hair and those big eyes of yours, you were a gorgeous baby.’

Well, maybe I was to her, but each time she tried to reassure me I thought about my eczema. It covered my arms, crept up my neck and speckled my chest, and I thought of how I must have looked, with my baby face scrunched up and my skin marred by those angry red spots. Ever since I was a tiny tot I had heard the comments of well-intentioned people. Walking by my mother’s side, her hand wrapped firmly round my tiny one lest I stumbled or fell, I heard neighbours and friends ask about my health and how my eczema was. Gazing up at them, I asked them silently to bend down to my height and ask me, but they never did. It was as though those ugly red spots rendered me both invisible and deaf.

‘Will that rash get better?’ they would ask. ‘Does it hurt her?’ And: ‘Will it clear up when she’s older?’

Each time they stopped my mother and put their questions to her, I felt her fingers grip my hand a little tighter. ‘Of course it’ll clear up,’ she always said. ‘It’s just a children’s thing.’

As I grew, the questions continued, but still they never asked me. If they had I could have told them that, yes, it hurt, that I hated those red spots and the itching, but they never did, so I never told them.

Every day my mother had to smooth cream, which helped soothe my skin, over my body – ‘Even when you were just a tiny baby and I had to rub it in, you were so good,’ my mother told me. ‘You never cried.’ But I thought I must have.

At night my nails were trimmed, and when the rash spread and nearly my whole body was raw, she tied little white mittens over my hands to stop me scratching. My grandmother invented another way to stop me rubbing my rash when it spread over my arms: she cut open Fairy Liquid containers, removed their tops and bottoms, put my arms into them and taped them on.

‘It won’t get better if you scratch it, so this is to help you,’ she told me, when tears of pain and self-pity ran down my face. She took a boiled sweet out of her handbag, unwrapped it and popped it into my mouth.

‘Come, Sally, give your nana a kiss,’ she would demand and I, standing on tiptoe, would raise matchstick arms, encased in their ugly covering, place them round her neck and reluctantly press my lips to her dry, papery skin.

I hated how I looked even more than the feeling of my arms being stiff and unwieldy. On warm days, when I wore a short-sleeved dress, I didn’t want to leave the house and walk to the shops or the park with my mother. I was aware of the pity on her friends’ faces and the curious stares from other children, and nothing she said reassured me, although she told me she loved me and that my rash didn’t matter.

On my mother’s black days she didn’t seem to notice me or even acknowledge my existence. There was no smiling face looking down at me when I awoke so I would climb out of bed and, still in my nightdress, go in search of her. Sometimes she was still in bed, a huddled shape hidden under the blankets; at others she was in the sitting room lying on the settee, her face turned to the wall. Frightened by her remoteness, I would sit silently, watching her, wishing she would wake up.

Those days seemed to accelerate the spread of my eczema, and as the dreaded itching began, my body twitched and I was unable to control my fingers. They would scratch until the skin on the back of my knees started to crack, weep and bleed, while my hands broke out in a mass of runny sores. It was not until I cried with pain that my mother’s eyes would open. When she saw what her neglect had done, guilt would penetrate the dark fog of her depression. Raising herself up, she would wrap her arms around me, croon comforting words into my ears, and my face would be damp with her tears.