Oh dear, I am worried now that Cora will walk over and see what I have written, about her age, I mean. She is writing a letter, too – we are sitting in the living room together, both writing away at our letters; it is very Jane Austen, I think. The lost art, and all that. She writes to Pete every week, never misses – I think it’s rather sweet, at their age. Apparently it isn’t always easy to get through to the rig on the phone, depends on the weather conditions in the North Sea or something.
Anyway, Cora seem very nice. There’s a little Baby Belling in my room, and space to sit (mine’s the front bedroom, the best one in the house, which is very kind of her and Pete), and at the beginning I used to do my baked potato or my pasta up there on my own, but I hated waking up to the smell of last night’s onions, and it really seemed too much trouble to cook just for one, so I often ended up just having bread and honey for days on end. (I know how much you would disapprove of that, Gran!) And Cora was downstairs in her kitchen doing the same thing. So recently we’ve started to cook together most days. It was just weekends at first – she’d invite me down to share her supper and then I’d do a return fixture upstairs. Now we always use her kitchen, whoever’s turn it is to cook, because she’s got all the little jars of herbs and spices and everything, and my Baby Belling is under a slopy roof thing and right up against the wardrobe door, so not the easiest to get to.
Oh dear, this letter has gone on a lot and I haven’t really told you anything yet! Well, work is going fine. We learned a song about Louis Braille today (we’ve been doing about him because of Jack); we’re just finishing the class project on spiders and starting one on Islam, and Daniel McNally hasn’t pulled down his own or anyone else’s trousers for two weeks. I’ve also joined a women’s group. They meet every Thursday evening, and they run a safe house for homeless women. They seem like a really friendly bunch. Must go, I’ve promised I’ll take Cora’s dog, Snuffy, out to the park. She’s called after the man who wrote the music for ‘The West Wing’ (which struck me as odd, since Cora doesn’t seem a very political person) – the guy’s name is W. G. Snuffy Walden, and apparently it always made Cora and Pete laugh. Dreadful name for a human being, Cora says, but an excellent one for a spaniel.
Lots of love,
Margaret.
42 Gledhill Street,
Ipswich
20 February 2005
Dearest Pete,
Well, I’m sitting in the old armchair that came from Aunt Alice when she died – I know how you always like to be able to picture me when I’m writing to you – and Snuffy is lying across my feet doing her impersonation of a draught-excluder – though I never saw a draught-excluder with its eyes tight shut and a yellow rubber duck still in its mouth.
Margaret is writing a letter too, in fact we are both sitting here scribbling away like it’s a wet Sunday in a Jane Austen novel! It’s her gran she’s writing to. She had a stroke back just before Christmas, and has been in hospital all this time. Now she’s home again, and getting by on her own, but she finds it stressful to try to get to the phone when it rings, and has told Margaret that she would rather have letters from her. I expect it’s nicer anyway, when you’re old and alone, to have a letter you can take out and re-read over and over, rather than a phone call which is over and done with once a week. I often get out your letters, Pete – I had a bundle of old ones out the other day, and it felt just as though you were here in the room with me.
You will like Margaret. She’s fearfully earnest about things: she’s just joined some homelessness group (all women they are) that runs a little hostel place near the town centre. She gets fired up about everything going – you should hear her sometimes in the mornings, she actually argues with the radio if John Humphrys has someone on she disagrees with. And she writes letters to her MP! I didn’t know people still did that. I hardly know anything about him, though I’ve lived here for thirty years: that man Slater, you know, he’s New Labour, and from what you read in the
Town Crier
he’s too smooth for his own or anyone else’s good. Maybe all this crusading passion is because Margaret’s young; she’s just in her first teaching job, so I guess she’s twenty-three, maybe twenty-four. But even at that age I don’t remember ever caring quite as much as she seems to! She’s beautiful, too. I don’t mean just pretty, I really do mean beautiful, it’s the only word for it. I don’t think I’ve ever described her to you, have I? She’s tall, with curly almost-black hair, and big grey eyes with these little flecks of amber in them. And her skin – it’s so white it’s almost see-through. There’s a word for it, I think it begins with a t, but I can’t remember it. She has that gawky awkwardness of tall girls, completely unaware of her beauty. ‘Coltish’, I think would be the word for it – like Katy Carr before she fell out of the swing. (Sorry, Pete, I know you won’t ever have read
What Katy Did
, but you know me and my books.) Anyway, Katy is too tomboyish an image for her, because of that astonishing skin.
Things have been pretty quiet in the bank this week – it was Dora’s birthday, and she brought in cake for coffee break. Homemade it was, a proper old-fashioned Victoria sponge with raspberry jam and butter cream (real butter in it, too, none of your soft marge). I must admit I did enjoy my slice, but it made me sad to think she’d spent all the time making the cake for us – like she doesn’t have enough on her plate, with her eldest back home after splitting from his wife, and Dave off work again with his bad back. She’s the one who should be being spoiled on her birthday – and I bet she cooked a special tea at home, too. Oh, and the garden is starting to burst out all over the place, love: everything seems to be beginning to sprout these last few days. That forsythia we put in by the back fence – four years ago now, is it? I was trying to remember – is a riot of colour. I think it’s come earlier this year, with the mild weather we’ve had, and that and the daffs really make a splash through the kitchen window.
Well, I’d better stop now, there’s the supper to get on. I’m cooking for Margaret again. Chops, we’re having. I did them for her once before and she really loved them; might do something for that pale complexion, too! All my love, Petey, and I miss you, as always.
Cora xxx
Dear Becs,
You’d laugh at me. I’ve joined another of my groups that are going-to-change-the-world, as you always used to put it! It’s homelessness
and
the great patriarchal conspiracy this time. It manages to combine all the aspects that you would send up most of both Women’s Action and the Homelessness Support Group, from college. They work as a collective (go on, sneer, you know you want to); two of them are paid workers and the rest are the voluntary support group, but they didn’t bother to tell me which were which, and it didn’t seem to matter. They meet every week in each other’s houses. Last night Alison (who seems to be the sort of unofficial self-designated queen bee) served organic herbal tea without a trace of irony. There’s a lesbian couple and they both appear to be called Pat. I suppose that can happen – it’s not one of the difficulties of a gay lifestyle that had ever occurred to me before. Oh, and in fact, when I say I’ve joined the group, I also seem to have become treasurer. Not only did I make the mistake of revealing that I possess and know how to use a computer and spreadsheet package, but in a mad moment I actually uttered the fatal words, ‘What does it involve?’
You’d also scoff – I’ve eaten pork chops three times without turning a hair! Cora, the woman whose house I’m living in, offered to cook a few weeks back, and I forgot to say anything (seems like everyone was veggie at college, or at least knew that I was, so it was never an issue) until it was too late and there it was, staring up at me from the plate, a big slab of no-messing, like-it-or-lump-it meat. Having eaten that and not said, of course, the next time I couldn’t possibly tell her, or else she’d feel bad! What an idiot I am – I expect I’ll have to swallow my principles (and a lump of dead pig) every Sunday evening from now on, until . . . Well, until I can afford a mortgage round here on my NQT main scale salary, which will be (does rapid calculation in head) oh that’s right, never! I suppose up there you can pick up a threebedroomed semi on your way back from Asda.
School is good: the head is on another planet but his deputy, Mrs Martin, seems quite sorted, and the rest of the staff are OK. There’s a kid in my class, Jack, who’s almost completely blind, so he comes with a full-time helper, Karen, which means always another body around the classroom. I’ve got Year 3s, which I think is my favourite stage. The Infant nuts and bolts are already in place – they’ve sounded out their phonetics, and they’ve learnt to count forwards in 2s, 5s and 10s and backwards in green bottles, speckled frogs and monkeys bouncing on the bed – and now they are just beginning to unfurl their Junior wings. They haven’t yet absorbed the view that it’s cool to be bored. The most feeble attempts at teacherly humour are still rewarded with gleeful delight, and everything is fresh and interesting, so that life resembles an endlessly rolling episode of ‘Blue Peter’.
How are you getting on at that Ofsted-failing, sink-estate-fed place of yours? I don’t see how you can ever take the mickey out of me again for my world-changing tendencies, after accepting that offer! Have you thought about hiring some personal protection? I know you’ve only got a Reception class, but I hear gun crime starts young on Moss Side!
And how is the delectable Phil, by the way? Are you still together?
Love,
Margaret x
Hi Margaret, great to hear from you! I was beginning to think they didn’t have the internet down there in Hicks-wich, sorry, I mean Ipswich! (Is it true that the streets are paved with sugar-beet?) And I knew it was no use trying to text you – I remember your views about mobiles irradiating the brain. I do like the sound of the two Pats, by the way – a couple both homosexual and homonymic.
The delectable Phil is history (which is strangely appropriate since he’s got a post teaching it in Swindon). I guess the delicate bloom of our relationship may not have survived the distance between Manchester and Wiltshire, but in fact it had withered on the bough anyway before we’d even packed up and left college. It seems that Julie Biddulph also found him delectable – and so apparently did Letitia ‘Tits’ Carvaggio, just the once, when she was drunk at a post-exam party. Her outfit was really accentuating her name that night, as I recall; I went home early, and Phil always did have the willpower of a particularly suasible flea.
Since Phil there have been Aidan, Ben, and now my latest acquisition, Campbell (and no, before you say it, I’ve heard them all already – I am
not
working my way through the alphabet). Campbell is something of a toyboy, a third year Chem. Eng. student from UMIST. He’s still here now, as a matter of fact. He has an essay to finish, which is why I happened to be checking my e-mails. He does such a cute little frowny thing when he’s concentrating – makes me just want to bite his eyebrows!
But what about you, chuck? Any nice fresh-faced farmer boys on the horizon down there in Ipswich? Or are you still keeping up your vow of chastity? I seem to recall your being sworn off men, along with meat and overuse of the mobile, from some time in your second year, as being all equally injurious to brain, body or soul. You were practically married from the third week in college to your very own Mr Rochester (until it turned out he had that mad first wife locked in the attic), and for ever after that the cloistered nun! But I bet there are some Suffolk swains who can tempt you to leave the Order . . . ?
Big hugs,
Becs xx
PS. Incidentally, I am ignoring your taunts about the incomparable Brunswick Road Primary. I am not on a mission to save the socially excluded youth of tomorrow; I needed a job within striking distance of Dad’s increasingly carcinomatose colon, and it was all I could get. But, since you ask, the kids are a blast. Four-year-olds are the same the world over. Teaching Reception is basically herding cats whether it’s in Moss Side or Mayfair.
Dear Becs,
I really am sorry about your dad, and for being so insensitive. Is it really that bad?
And you’re not far wrong about lpswich being a communications black spot. Cora doesn’t even have a computer, and it’s taken me until now to get broadband sorted out.
Sorry to hear about Phil, too (I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere, continuing your metaphor, something about a flower of passion that wilts in Wilts: needs further work, I feel), but glad to hear you are keeping up the cracking pace that you set in college.
Night night. Sleep tight – or not.
Love,
Margaret xx
PS. I see you haven’t forgotten the essay espièglerie game. (Do you remember I once informed Professor Sharkey that her own early work was ‘haruspical’? And you swung some corkers past Fairbrother in Child Psych. – two ‘proemials’ and a ‘fissiparous’ in one assignment, as I recall.) I’ll give you 5 for ‘suasible’ and 6 for ‘homonymic’; ‘carcinomatose’ (if you haven’t just made it up) is an 8.5.
WITCH
Women of Ipswich Together Combating Homelessness
Minutes of meeting
at Pat and Pat’s house, 24 February 2005, 8 p.m.