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folksongs about nightingales and strawberry fairs: we English-country-danced. ‘Home’ was respected and I was a homie. We practised the Alexander Technique once a week, and learned how to stand properly, and no one did anything dreadful or sudden. It was observable that education was meant to prepare you for adult life, not terrify you into submission.
The headmaster did for a time instead of a father. Mr Eggleton was a plain, kind, dull man with a face as long as his legs: I could see the advantage of dullness: it went along with reliability. If Mr Eggleton said he’d be at a certain place at a certain time he would be. He taught us calligraphy: joined-up writing was not enough: now you must make the words look graceful. We used his name to practise on because of all the above the line and below the line loops, and when my handwriting becomes indecipherable I will practise it the sooner to return to legibility. He would let me hold his hand. There were boys at this school, which was thrilling, but the girls didn’t play with them.
My only social problem at Elmwood was the march into school when the bell rang for the end of playtime. It was 1937. Militarism was beginning to infiltrate even here on this grassy slope at the back of beyond. Ferdinand the Bull might prefer to sit and smell the flowers than fight, but he was increasingly on his own. We marched into school in pairs, heads held high, in step, swinging arms. I was the new girl, arrived mid-term. I had to walk on my own, unpartnered. I hated that.
I did not want to be despised, to find myself in the wrong place in the pecking order. I was beginning to read other people’s thoughts: it was quite painful. It was not for many years that I realized other people tended not to be able to do this. They heard what people said, not what they meant. They did not interpret silences. No wonder they went round so confident and bullish. But soon the marching-in problem was solved, when a new girl turned up to walk in with me. She didn’t have the gift of marching: she was too languid for that, but at least we were a pair. Her name was Aliz: she was a refugee, she said, a runaway from Germany. Like me, she didn’t have a resident father. She slept in a feather bed and was always ill. I had to defend Aliz against accusations of being peculiar, of which being ‘delicate’ was evidence, as was coming from a country you had heard about in geography but certainly couldn’t place on a map. Then she changed her name to Alicia which suggested to my other friends that she was getting worse, not better. She was affected. I tried to get her to desist but she said Alicia sounded less like a servant than Aliz.
I was always amazed how fancy people could be. She’d tell me stories of people walking along roads carrying suitcases and being machine-gunned by aircraft, but seemed to worry most about her name. I tried to find out why her family had had to run away. She didn’t seem to know the answer either, other than that she was Jewish. When I asked what that meant she said she wasn’t supposed to turn on the light on Saturdays, which seemed much the same as not eating meat on Fridays. The adult world baffled her as much as me: but she was inclined to shrug and comb her hair in the mirror, while I bounced up and down in indignation or curiosity.
In retrospect it is remarkable how little the adult world at that time confided in its children, even when it came to explaining why others were trying to kill them. Reticence and decorum seemed almost more valuable than personal survival.
I developed my playground skills. I became knucklebone champion of the playground – knucklebones is the same as five-stones: only we played it with scrubbed sheep’s knuckles from the butcher, not metal crosses. You toss the bones in the air, catch all five on the flattened back of your hand, and then perform deft scooping and collecting tricks with your fingers. I was good at that, having a wide hand, and also at spelling, for which I was famous, thanks to the St Mary’s passion for excluding me from prayer, and the spelling book. I could walk on my hands, do back-bends and touch the back of my head with my foot. Such are the accomplishments of young girl children.
At home things were looking up. My mother stopped painting powder boxes and we moved into a proper house at the end of the tramline. We had a garden with a stream running through it and a walnut tree which we could climb. Jane and I shared a room. We even had the luxury of a bedside table each: plywood apple boxes up-ended – the partition making a convenient shelf – and covered with a piece of curtain stretched on a wire: a bit splintery compared to Alicia’s smooth maplewood, but bedside tables nonetheless. There was an outside loo, as was normal enough in a mild climate, before the advent of indoor plumbing. Sit out there at night and see the Southern Cross rising, that bold four-pointed constellation, somewhat skew-whiff, totem of the southern hemisphere.
Even my mother was obliged to admire the Southern Cross, though she sorely missed the northern skies of her youth. There seemed no way she could ever get back to England now. She was trapped. Some points of light in the heavens were shared, she explained to me. She taught me to distinguish Betelgeuse from Mars – the former trembles in its redness, the latter stays steady – to recognize the cool splendour of Venus, to find the North Star and its pointer the Plough.
A telegram came to say that Edgar had died, and I remember weeping to keep her company, but she was weeping for someone I had never met and a world I didn’t know. I felt oddly out of sympathy with her, knowing that the more she regarded the old world, the less she regarded mine. I saw the big burnished Southern Cross as belonging to me and my vanished father: my mother could have the little point of the North Star, and all it stood for, as her part of the heavens.
I realized that my mother was a remarkably good person. She got off the tram home to rescue an injured dog, which she’d seen lying in a gutter. No one else took any notice of it, but just walked by. She taught us to love our enemies – or better still, avoid making any. She stayed in bed every morning and wrote her magnum opus, and I would rather she made our breakfast and got us to school but I held my tongue. I no longer wanted to be a Catholic but I still had ambitions of sainthood. I learned the art of reading while I walked. There wasn’t much traffic, though I do remember being nearly run over by a van, and the outrage of its driver. I was allowed to read at meals: Alicia never was.
At the end of every month money from my father was expected in. Then my mother waited for the post. It seldom turned up, or if it did it wasn’t for the right amount. I didn’t like to ask where he was and when he was coming back, it seemed impolite. But I was sure he was doing the best he could.
My father had a proper job. He was to be medical superintendent of the whole Coromandel Peninsula. Even my mother was impressed. We were to visit him: we were to stay for the summer, for a whole eight weeks. No, she wasn’t coming, she didn’t have the time. We were to go on our own. It seemed good news could come as well as bad, and as suddenly. Out came the map: Jane already knew where Coromandel was. She knew so much I didn’t, though she seldom bothered to pass the knowledge on. The North Island stretched up into the Pacific as if groping for the rest of the world: it divided like a hand up near the top, we were to go onto the thumb.
My mother packed our clothes and everything we would need into one small thin brown leather suitcase which Jane was able to carry. She was nine, I was seven.
How neatly and carefully my mother folded and packed: even so, one of us always had to sit on the case to close it. That same suitcase did us for the six years during which summer-with-my-father became ritual. We were the first of the shuttle children. Who else’s parents, in those days, lived in different places? (No one used the word divorce: like insanity and cancer, these tragedies were too irrevocable for words to lightly describe, and mercifully, were rarer then than now.)
The journey in itself was excitement enough. It would take two days. Overnight on the