Hi Michael,
Oh, God, against all reason and judgement I have just agreed to meet one of my constituency stalkers on Saturday! It’s that recent acquisition, Margaret, she of the canine faecal obsession. She meets none of the usual criteria to get through my screening process. Different issue every time, from the global to the trivial, all put with equal vehemence and with no apparent discrimination, and not one of them the least bit promising publicity-wise. (And I had been hoping to have a peaceful and potentially image-enhancing morning, too. I’d found a gem: the new landlord of a formerly rowdy drinkers’ pub in the town centre – average age of punter sixteen and a half – who’s had his application for an all-day licence turned down by the borough council. He’s invested in a stack of high chairs and an imported Italian coffee machine the size of a Nissan Micra, and wants to create a family atmosphere and turn the place over to continental-style drinking. Now, there’s one that presses all the right buttons – an absolute gift!)
But the trouble is, this Margaret person has got me running scared, actually threatening to tell the Rottweiler that I don’t take constituents’ letters seriously. I could do without that as things stand just now – I was just edging my way back to the door of the prime ministerial kennel and preparing to knock. So it sounds like she’s not just an old biddy but a stroppy old biddy to boot. Or even possibly (since it appears that she’s involved in that WITCH mob) a stroppy man-hating old biddy. Now trying to decide what to wear on Saturday: full body armour, or trainers for a quick getaway?
Richard.
Richard Slater (Labour)
Member of Parliament for Ipswich
Hi, Margaret. So: latest instalment in my abecedarian love life. That night with Paula I did meet someone, but his name was Andrew and I’ve done A. He was pretty hot, though, and also fairly insistent, so I let him see me home in the taxi, but he didn’t come in. I think he may have been put off when I kept asking if I could call him Drew.
But then I found him, right on my doorstep. Well, waiting outside my classroom at 3 p.m. every day, actually. Declan. He’s the father of Zoe in my class – and before you say anything, yes, he is a
single
parent. (And the nearest thing I have to an ABIE.) Tall, with mussy dark hair that makes me want to fluffle it with my fingers, and to-die-for brown eyes. He’s about the only dad that does the home-time pick-up, which is odd when he’s one of the few who appear to be in gainful employment. He has one of those high-powered I-work-from-home-now kind of jobs, computers or consultancy or something, to fit round Zoe. Mind you, he can’t be doing that well, or why would he still be living in Moss Side? We’re still at a very early stage so I haven’t asked exactly what he does, nor where Zoe’s mum is. It’s just been a couple of drinks. We haven’t even been to bed yet (what, after two dates? What’s going on, Becs, I hear you say, this is not like you), but obviously Zoe is a complication, and I have my reputation to worry about. I mean, I’m his daughter’s teacher for Chrissakes!
So, what’s with you? How was your Easter holiday? And what have your coven of (Ips)witches been up to?
Love and hugs,
Becs xxx
Dear Becs,
Going out with a parent! Does the head know? Isn’t it against paragraph 32(b) of the Primary Teachers’ Penal Code? Up there with smoking within view of a minor, saying ‘inches’, or setting out a sum vertically before Key Stage Two? Punishable by public flogging at the wall-bars by the chair of governors? I suggest you locate Ed or Ethan immediately, to lead you back to the straight and narrow.
(By the way, I’m not sure you can have a lone male ABIE. They are normally female – or else come in pairs, dressed in matching rainwear.)
The main excitement here is that on Saturday I am going to meet my elusive MP, the slippery Mr Richard Slater – he’s invited me to his constituency surgery to talk to him about asylum seekers. He holds it in some obscure community hall – I’d always imagined these things went on at the town hall, or the local Party HQ. Anyway, I’m very glad of the opportunity: I really want to convince him of how appalling it is that when someone comes to this country thinking it will offer her safety, and she’s homeless, even a voluntary organisation can’t offer her support, if they are funded by the state. It’s just a nod towards the knee-jerk xenophobes who think we’re going to be swamped by immigrants making bogus asylum claims and sponging off social security – and what does it mean? People like Nasreen (I don’t think I mentioned her – she’s an Albanian girl living at Witch House), all on her own in a strange country where she barely speaks the language and certainly can’t read a form, unable to make use of the services she requires when she’s homeless and in need.
Trouble is, I’m sure he’s not going to listen. He is reputed to have been quite a lefty at one time, when he was on the city council. Persephone says he supported financing the Multi-cultural Centre, and helped find the new premises for the Women’s Aid refuge after the old one was torched by someone’s ex-partner. But then, she says, he took being New Labour so seriously in ’97 that he freshly minted himself. From what you read in the local press, he’s now so sensible that he makes a pair of lace-up Start-Rites look like a walk on the wild side. He even abstained on the war in Iraq – I mean, he actually
abstained
! If he didn’t agree with military intervention then why didn’t he vote against like a decent human being? It’s like saying, ‘Hmm, should we violate international law and embark upon a war that will cost the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis? Well, maybe not, but I don’t really have much of a view one way or the other. Now, where were we, about those EU cabbage subsidies . . .’
Love,
Margaret xx
PS. ‘Abecedarian’ is a cool straight 8.
If you nod towards a knee-jerk xenophobe (1.5 points), aren’t you are in serious danger of getting clocked on the head? Sounds like you need to give
him
a good bashing about the brains with a copy of the Asylum and Immigration Act.
And
please
can I keep Declan? He’s so pretty!
Becs xx
42 Gledhill Street
Ipswich
17 April 2005
Dearest Petey,
I feel like I’ve been busy recently, though I haven’t exactly
done
much, to speak of. I suppose it’s just that I don’t seem to ever just sit and watch telly any more. Last night that Nasreen came round again, the girl I told you about from the hostel, for another session with Margaret and the Biff and Chip books. I made us all a pot of tea when they were finishing, and went and joined them in the sitting room. Nasreen has hers without any milk. Luckily she mentioned it before I’d done the cups, because I still always put the milk in first – do you remember how you always teased me about it when we first met, because you said it showed I was posh. What a joke! Mum and Dad were really proud when I got the job at the bank, but they’d still have laughed at the idea that a daughter of theirs could ever be posh. I just started doing it because then you can see better whether the tea has brewed enough, when you start to pour it in.
Anyway, we sat and chatted, and Nasreen is lovely. She’s shy and her English is a bit shaky, but she has a really pretty smile. She always wears a scarf, but it’s not one of those black ones that hide half your face, it doesn’t even cover all her hair, she wears it back a bit on her forehead, and her hair all loose and escaping at the back. It’s not even a special scarf, just an ordinary flowered one – I think Sarah at work has got one nearly the same, from Debenhams in the sales after Christmas. And her hair is wonderful – so black it’s almost purple or blue, and catching the light, so that it made me think of the word ‘lustrous’ out of one of my romances. I think she must put scent on it, because when I leaned over to pass her her tea I caught a waft of something sweet, like Turkish delight or cinnamon or that orange flower water Dora puts in her chocolate buns. Maybe there’s no wonder that the men in the east think their women should cover up their hair, to keep that beauty all for themselves, I thought.
Well, then Nasreen started telling us why she’d left her country. It was me who asked her, I think Margaret had never liked to, but I suppose I was curious, why someone should leave their home and friends and come somewhere so different when she’s so young (eighteen, she said). Snuffs went and sat next to her on the settee and put her head on her lap while she was talking. She always seems to pick up on it if someone is sad (you know what a comfort she’s been to me without you here). It seems Nasreen had a boyfriend that her family didn’t approve of. Gjergj, his name is apparently – she wrote it down for us because English people can never spell it – and I said, how funny, that’s like my husband, his middle name is George, and that made her smile. Apparently it was because she is Muslim and he is a Christian. ‘Albanian Orthodox’ is what Margaret called it, I think – she seems to have been reading up on Nasreen’s country. I’d never heard of it – I thought there was only Russian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox. Poor Nasreen must have been really scared. She says she thought her brothers would actually hurt her, or Gjergj, and that’s why she ran away. Isn’t it awful what families can do to one another, sometimes? And of course English families can be just as bad. There’s another young girl in Margaret’s hostel, really bad with her nerves she is, because her father abused her when she was little.
Me and Margaret have been swapping books. I’ve got her on to my old Nevil Shute novels, and she’s lent me a book called
Ruth
– it made me think of your sister. But terribly sad, it is, it’s about a girl who has a baby and she’s not married and the man abandons her. It’s by that Mrs Gaskell. (I wonder why she’s always ‘Mrs’? You never hear anyone saying ‘Miss Austen’, do you?) Funny that they never made us read Mrs Gaskell’s books at school – it was always the male writers like Dickens and Thomas Hardy – well, apart from Jane Austen, but she was the only one. Margaret says she is named after someone in another one of Mrs Gaskell’s books. Her dad chose it because it was his favourite story. She was talking about her name last night, in fact, how she has always hated it because she thinks it makes her sound old. I’d never really thought much about my name before – it’s a pity really, because it means I never asked Mum and Dad about why they chose it, while they were alive. If you write it in capitals it looks rather like one of those things where the initials stand for something – an acronym, isn’t it? – or the new name of something that used to be nationalised. But I like the way it has ‘core’ in it, like the heart of something. Because your name is at the heart of who you are, after all, isn’t it? Your grandad was Peter, wasn’t he? I can’t remember how old you said you were when he died – about twelve, I think? I wonder if he was like you.
Margaret met the MP yesterday, at his ‘surgery’ as they call it – makes it sound like she’s going to him with the flu. She wanted to talk to him about Nasreen, something about how she can’t stay in the hostel because of being from abroad. I thought that was all illegal now, treating people differently because of where they’re from, but apparently not. I asked her how it went, because she’d been full of nothing else all week beforehand, and she did say he is going to meet her again next week, and get her some answers, so I suppose she was fairly happy about it, but she had a sort of hazy look that she gets sometimes, so I decided not to ask her any more.
The rosemary alongside the path has come into flower this week. It looks a picture, and it’s brought the bumble bees out of nowhere. It got me thinking about the year when Snuffy was a puppy, and she thought that all the springy plants, the rosemary and the hebes, were a game we’d put there specially for her. Do you remember how she used to take a run up and leap into the middle of the bushes as if they were a bouncy castle? You always knew when she’d been at it, because she’d come in smelling of rosemary, and then you’d go out and survey the damage, and poor Snuffs would creep under the kitchen table and look so guilty that you hadn’t the heart to be cross with her. Most of the garden got flattened that summer – but it was only one year, because by the next spring she got too heavy to bounce and went straight through if she jumped on the plants. So then she got bored of it, and of course everything soon grew back to normal. You know, love, every time I call Snuffy in from the garden it reminds me of you, and how tickled I was when you came up with the name for her. Odd really, because we never even really watched ‘The West Wing’, did we? We just used to see the end credits before our Friday gardening programme. Mind you, you always preferred the ones on the BBC. But you used to tease me for looking less and less like Charlie Dimmock and more and more like Pippa Greenwood.
Dora at the bank has invited me to a do for her and Dave’s thirtieth anniversary at the end of the month, at the social club at Dave’s work. Nearly twenty years we’ve been friends now, me and Dora. I remember she took me under her wing on my very first day at the bank. ‘We’ll be Dora and Cora,’ she said – and we still are! Anyway, this anniversary got me thinking about their twenty-fifth. Do you remember, Pete? They had it in that boat they’ve turned into a pub down at the docks, and you kept making jokes about having another tot of rum, and calling everyone ‘me hearties’ and ‘landlubbers’ until it drove me crazy and I went up on deck in a huff. But then when I was looking over the railings you came after me and put your arms round me from behind and took hold of my breasts and said ‘Ahoy there’, and that you’d found a chest of treasure, and suddenly it all seemed funny again, and I turned round and you kissed me.