The Quivering Tree (30 page)

Retrieving my bicycle from where I had left it under an oak tree, I rode slowly away down the park drive, out into Earlham Road, back towards the city centre. My head had begun to ache, an unfamiliar affliction. By the time I reached the tram terminus, outside the gates to the cemetery, I was in a mood to wonder if it wouldn't make sense and save everyone a deal of trouble to turn in there and ask if they had any space going begging; if I wasn't, like Little Nell in
The Old Curiosity Shop
or Dick in
Holiday House
, hand-picked to join the heavenly choir just when life was set to become really interesting.

Still, I pressed on, all my hopes fixed on Chandos House, the one sanctuary remaining. Struggling up the rise towards St Giles, feet pressing hard on the pedals, tears came into my eyes at the thought of how near, yet how impossibly far, was my old home. As I passed Distillery Street, a fresh horror supervened. I felt, or fancied I felt, a dampness on my thighs. It wasn't possible! I wasn't a baby, I didn't wet myself. Yet the sensation of dampness, and my consequent embarrassment, increasing, I pressed my skirt between my legs and watched unbelieving, the bicycle swaying ominously, the slow spread through its pale blue fibres of a brown – no, a red stain. I was bleeding my life away!

Lest post-war generations find it difficult to believe that a twelve-year-old girl would know nothing of the onset of menstruation, let me say that I did know something, sort of. Though the word itself was unknown to me and nobody, so far as I could remember, had ever pronounced it in my presence, I was aware – more by what people did not say than by what they did – of a mystery, of conversations begun and broken off at my approach. Girls in perfect health were excused gym or swimming on no discernible grounds. A glass case in Boots the Chemist in Goat Lane was stacked with dinky brown-paper-wrapped parcels labelled ‘Sanitary Towels'. (‘What are they for?' I had demanded of the ominiscient Maud, only to be answered, ‘What you think? For you to ask silly questions about!')

Putting the clues together, someone more determined than I, I do not doubt, could have uncovered the dread secret without too much trouble. I was too happy, too absorbed in the visible world, too untidy by nature to worry about the odd loose end. Every new day brought new knowledge, fresh excitements, hurtling my way: no need to go seeking them out. Sooner or later, once I applied my mind to it, I would find out what sanitary towels were really for.

In the meantime, nearing the top of Earlham Road appalled, beset by headache and nausea, I had no idea what to do about the blood soaking into my knickers, staining my skirt. Would I be able to reach Chandos House before I was exposed to the disgust of the populace, before it ran down my legs for everybody to see? And when I reached Chandos House, what then? How was I to keep my condition a secret from Miss Gosse and Miss Locke and Mrs Benyon? That I knew it had to be kept secret was proof that I knew
something
.

The Roman Catholic church of St John the Baptist, at the junction of Earlham and Unthank Roads and just across the way from the beginning of St Giles, is so grand that people who do not know often think it is a cathedral. I propped my bike against the wall and went up the long flight of steps to the front door awkwardly, keeping my legs pressed together just in case; fearing to hear
splash, splash!
and, looking down, see my blood – blasphemy – crimson on the grey stone. I hoped there wasn't a rule which said only Catholics were allowed in. I had to find somewhere to sit down and think, and the church was the only place handy. But what should I say if somebody stopped me and asked to see my membership card?

Nobody did, and I entered into an extraordinary amount of space, which was of itself calming; dark after the bright outdoors except for a stained-glass shaft of light coming through a great window. Only a few people were about, scattered here and there, and although one or two were on their knees praying, it did not occur to me to follow their example, to ask for a miracle to happen and take away the blood. The God of the place was not the one I was familiar with, and I felt shy of asking favours of a stranger.

Sadie and Pauline Hooper, two Roman Catholic girls I knew, had often spoken to me about praying to the Virgin Mary when they wanted something, or to one or other of the saints whose painted statues were planted along the church walls. I did not take to the statue of the Virgin Mary at all – she looked much too plump and pleased with herself – and as for the saints, I took an instant dislike to the way their eyeballs rolled up to heaven, showing off how holy they were. Strangely enough, the only ones that did not turn up like that were those of the Man on the cross, the only ones you might have expected to and could have made allowances for, considering the agony. But
His
eyes you could not see at all, only the downcast eyelids keeping their own counsel.

Suddenly I knew what I must do. I went over to a vast cast-iron candelabrum where candles were burning and for sale, and bought a sixpenny one which I lit and fixed on a pricket holder, feeling the heat of all the others on my face as I settled it into place. I knew from Sadie and Pauline that this was the right thing to do, even if, in the circumstances, I was the wrong person to do it. It was almost certainly the first if not the only time that anyone in the church of St John the Baptist had lit a candle to Boots the Chemist.

Mr Spencer, the manager of the Boots the Chemist shop in Goat Lane, was somebody I had known as long as I could remember knowing anybody. He had an almost completely bald head and a very bushy beard which was disconcerting, there being moments when, looking at him, one was seized with a sudden awful anxiety that he had his head on upside down. His heart was certainly in the right place. Whilst my mother, as was her custom, was trying to remember what we had come into the shop to buy, he would prepare for me, on the house, a delicious nose-tingling drink of water into which he stirred a generous spoonful of Andrews' Liver Salts. When, at my urging, my mother from time to time bought a tin of the Salts so that we could make our own at home, it never came out with anything like comparable fizz.

To call Mr Spencer manager was a bit of an overstatement because the Goat Lane Boots the Chemist was only a small shop and the only other employee was a maiden lady called Miss Meriden who came in part-time to hold the fort out front when Mr Spencer was busy in his cubbyhole behind the glass showcases, making up prescriptions. Riding down St Giles, past the markers of my former life, I kept my first and second fingers crossed all the way that it wasn't one of Miss Meriden's days. By no stretch of the imagination could one, in Miss Meriden's hearing, mention bleeding.

Luck was with me. Mr Spencer was alone: no customers either. Relief, together with his look of unalloyed pleasure as I came through the shop door, quite unmanned me. Tears ran down my cheeks whilst, below, a bead of blood slid hatefully down my shrinking flesh.

‘My dear child, what's the matter?'

Mr Spencer came out from behind the counter. He must have seen the stain on my skirt, for his expression changed to one of jolly reassurance. ‘Had a little accident, have we? We'll soon fix that.' Crossing the shop floor to the case which held the little parcels he extracted one and held it out to me. ‘Know somewhere you can pop in and change, do you? Or there's always the lavatory on the Market Place.'

I did not take the parcel. I stammered: ‘I don't know what to do with it.'

Unaware of it as I had been at the time, a miracle had indeed occurred at the top of St Giles in the church of St John the Baptist. Mr Spencer opened the parcel and showed me what a sanitary towel looked like; with infinite tact and sweetness instructed me in the technology of its use. Out of a small cardboard container he produced a circle of elastic with, dangling fore and aft, hooks to which I was to attach the towel loops. At his bidding, I followed him behind the counter and into his dispensing cubbyhole where he left me with the cheery admonition: ‘If you hear anyone come into the shop don't move a muscle till they've gone, or you'll get me into no end of trouble!'

Later, back in the shop, over a restorative glass of Andrews' Liver Salts, he continued my education, albeit looking a little troubled by the task unexpectedly thrust upon him and as if his head might really be on the wrong way round.

‘You absolutely certain your mother never said a word to you? Or your sister? Or that maid of yours – what was her name? – Maud?'

I was absolutely certain. No one had ever told me anything.

By the time Mr Spencer had finished, however, my anger against all those who had left me so criminally unprepared had abated. Rightly or wrongly, I chose to interpret their silence, which had seemed such a betrayal, as only one more manifestation of their love for me. Time enough, I could imagine them reasoning, when the blow actually fell. Why blight my happy life before nature did it for me?

The good news that the Boots the Chemist manager had to impart – that the bleeding would only last a few days – was quite eclipsed by the further intelligence that by ‘few days' he meant a few days out of every month of my remaining life – well, until I was forty or fifty anyway, which came to the same thing. When I learned, further, that this catastrophe – there was no other word for it – was something that only befell females, my cup of wrath ran over with a slurp.

‘It's not fair!'

Mr Spencer's attempted consolation – to wit, that life wasn't fair either – did nothing to make me feel any more reconciled to women's lot. I even looked at him – my saviour though he might be – with a certain jaundiced speculation. He was a man, wasn't he? Like Alfred. Like my father. One of
them
.

I rode home safe from public humiliation but feeling sticky and devalued as I battled the interminable gradient of Sprowston Road. My supply of sanitary towels nestled in my bicycle basket, suitably disguised in a Boots the Chemist bag. Even if they caught sight of it as I came in, nobody at Chandos House could guess what I had been shopping for.

The sanitary towels cost IS 3d a packet. IS 3d a month until I was fifty! The very thought of the total made me feel dizzy. Mr Spencer, really a very kind man, must have noted my consternation because he insisted upon making me a gift of the parcel I had already started, plus an additional one to prevent my needing to worry if I were running low and for some reason wasn't able to get out to the shops. He also refused payment for the elastic circle, saying that it was a privilege, on a very special occasion, to be in a position to perform some small service for an old friend.

I promised – it was the least I could do – that I would always buy my sanitary towels at a Boots the Chemist, indicating as delicately as I knew how that, as a possibly forty-year-order, it was pretty big business, not to be sneezed at. Mr Spencer said he was sure his employers would do everything in their power to prove themselves worthy of my custom, and anyway I was showing good sense because I could take it from him that I wouldn't find them for less than is 6d anywhere else.

I would have kissed, or at least hugged him if a man hadn't come into the shop for some senna pods just then, and I felt obliged to leave quickly before he noticed the stain on my skirt. As it was, I just said, ‘Good afternoon,' and Mr Spencer said, ‘Good afternoon, miss,' and gave me a wink.

All the way back to Chandos House, once I had left the city behind, I kept looking to left and to right, making a mental note of likely places for the disposal of used sanitary towels. It went without saying that I couldn't put them in the dustbin where Mrs Benyon might come upon them. I could see that I would have to ride out and, when nobody was looking, throw them over a hedge or into a ditch. The thought of all the hedges and ditches I would need to avail myself of between now and the time I was fifty depressed me beyond measure, to say nothing of what would become of the beautiful English countryside.

I reached my room safely, my skirt unseen, and would have flung myself down on the bed had not a sudden fear of staining the bedspread prevented me in the nick of time. I leaned against the chest of drawers in sheer exhaustion. ‘Unclean! Unclean!' I whispered to the leaves trembling at the window.

Having aroused myself sufficiently to disinter a clean dress and knickers, I went with them to the bathroom where I stripped and washed myself as well as I could in cold water. I did not dare to light the geyser in case the noise it made brought someone to inquire the cause at such an unaccustomed hour. And besides, was it OK to take a bath at such a time? I had not thought to ask Mr Spencer and he hadn't said.

Not surprisingly, I did not make a very good job of the laundering. However much I rubbed and scrubbed with my bar of soap a shadowy outline remained. I might have made a better job of it if I hadn't begun to feel unwell again. The pink-tinged water in the wash basin made me want to throw up.

When it was clear that, try as I might, I was never going to get the stains out completely, I dressed myself in my clean clothes and, acutely aware of the unaccustomed bulk between my legs, went out of the house by the front door and round to the back to avoid running into anybody who might ask questions: hung the wet skirt and knickers on the line at the very end, close to the hedge, where I hoped they would escape attention.

In the scullery Mrs Benyon was leaning against the sink, in her hand what looked, but did not smell, like a glass of water. As I came through the door she raised the glass in salutation, spilling a little.

‘So you've joined the club, have you?'

I said, blushing a deep red, that I didn't know what she meant.

‘You'll get used to it,' the housekeeper observed, as if I hadn't spoken. ‘We all do.'

She swigged a good half of the contents of the glass before regarding me with amusement and – or was I imagining it? – some love. ‘You know what it means, don't you?' And, without waiting for a reply: ‘It means from now on you've got to be careful what you do, d'you understand? Bloody careful!'