My Shrinking Face

Books were not a feature of my childhood. Beatings were. Let me be clear here – not smacks or cautionary slaps but beatings with a stick or cane. My sister, from her vantage point as six years my junior, would probably say I deserved them. I didn't feel that then, nor do I now. It is not something I have given much thought to over the years but perhaps as we get older we do begin to look back more, to try to make sense and a pattern out of the muddle of time. Childhood. Loneliness. Fear. Confusion. Caution. Reserve...

It would be too easy to judge my parents. Life must have been very difficult for them. My father was newly home from four and a half years as a prisoner of war of the Germans. Nowadays he would be feted, have a book published and appear on chat shows. Then it was an almost common-place and he seldom spoke of it except to bemoan that it had been his luck to be a prisoner of Germans rather than Japanese which was considered more 'glamorous' in hindsight. Occasionally my mother would speak of it to explain some of my father's peculiarities. He had a hatred of the game of bridge as he said it had killed more people than any other known cause. After being captured in France he had to walk to Poland and he and fellow prisoners were given clogs to wear. Fellow prisoners were playing bridge one evening and quarrelled, as bridge players do, and one picked up his clogs and hit his partner on the head. The man died. Well, that is how my father told it. The origin of popping his clogs, he said. But he had a strange sense of humour and one knew even then not to be sure..

No-one ever came to the house. It would have been unthinkable to invite anyone home, and I went only to a bank manager's daughter's house which was deemed suitable. Huge birthday parties were held for me each year when a hall and entertainment were hired and everyone invited. I had no idea how others lived and still don't to some degree. My mother had what would now be called an obsessive compulsive disorder. Books would have been considered too untidy, too awkward and wilful in their variety. In this, as in everything else, she was born out of her class. She would have been better suited to the nouveau riche who bought their books by the yard in matching bindings, or to the upper classes with their tidy libraries the domain of the men. So I was taken at three to join a public library and an adult reading group. I could already read – one of the benefits of having a father often at home (he had tuberculosis) was that I was read to as a baby and quickly took over for myself.

My clothes, too, set me apart. I was always superbly dressed. While my thoughts might be wayward my clothes were never less than perfect. And always with little white cotton gloves. I see them now, the white-clad hands, in libraries handling precious books. Then nothing must be touched for fear of soiling the gloves. Later when I had a little sister we were dressed, in the style of the little Princesses, identically. I looked at her, all chubby and pink-cheeked with golden curls and looking so beautiful that people 'borrowed' her to take on outings with them as some sort of human ornament, and knew that I, all stringy and dark and brooding, must look ridiculous. Being so precocious and an object of no curiosity meant that in some way I was allowed to be eccentric from an early age. Looking back I can see that my mother tried to control me and everything around her in a monumental struggle that she was doomed to lose.

Something happened when I was 12 – I don't know what – and she released me from this stranglehold. I was free to do what I wanted to an extraordinary degree. What I wanted was to leave. I was afraid of home but had nowhere else to go. I understand children who run away from home, who prefer the risk of strangers to the danger of those closest. I kept the company of older people, marching to Aldermarston, drinking red wine on shabby sofas in huge houses in Hampstead, and listening to jazz in caves in Chislehurst...no-one asked where I had been. School was a dreary interruption to my day. Teachers, ageing spinsters racked with jealousy and revenge, stood at the front and dictated 'stuff' that we were to copy, learn and regurgitate. Most did. I didn't bother. I considered myself to be superior in every way. I have recently been contacted by a girl who says she was at school with me. I have no memory of her or anyone else for that matter. She became a teacher, married a teacher, moved five miles down the road and now they are about to retire is 'thinking about buying a camper van'. Thinking. She writes that her life has been very boring. Oh dear, I fear I shall not make her a good friend now. I am sure she never sat, silent, enigmatic, a skinny little girl with urchin haircut, pretending to be French, at the feet of Bertrand Russell and his chums. Strangely those I was at school with report that I was always very happy and funny.

All this has left me with a confusion towards authority figures. I cannot, for example, be employed. I must be self-employed. I expect those in authoritative positions to be worthy of their position and am furious and somewhat hurt when they are not. I like rules and a framework in which to function but I am just as likely to break those rules just for the hell of it. While enjoying the benefits of a 'comfortable' lifestyle I am non-materialistic. I could walk away at any minute and not look back. I am perfectly qualified for the life of a hermit.

I remember from childhood a set of four books called 'The World of Children'. It might have slipped through my mother's ruthless life-laundry because of the uniformity of green bindings. Sixty years later I came across a set in a bookshop in Southwold, one of my favourite places on earth, and was delighted to read again this poem.
  The Doubtful Stranger

The bus was full one rainy day;
It had no room for little May;
'Now I'll be late for school,' she cried;
But then a car stopped by her side.
'Jump in, my dear,' the driver said,
But May drew back and shook her head.
She'd never seen the man before;
His car was not of those she saw
Go to work each day, while she
Stood waiting for bus Number Three.
'I cannot come with you, said May
'Please shut the door and go away,
Your business here I do not know,
You really mustn't tempt me so.
But should I not appear a fool
If you went tearing past the school'
And whisked me to a lonely place,
There to kiss my shrinking face,
Or to rob me of the things I wear
To sell for money at a fair?
Oh no, ' cried May, 'I'll stand and wait,
Even if it makes me late.'

That was 1950's. How I yearned for someone to take me away.....to kiss my shrinking face. How I despised feeble May!

Recently I visited a newly refurbished museum in Malmesbury, down the road from us in Wiltshire, and saw a tricycle identical to one I had as a child. I was never short of glamorous expensive 'toys', bought more for my parents satisfaction than mine, I'm sure.....a coach-built dolls' pram, china dolls to fill it, professional quality artist's paint boxes, a draughtsman's set of fine drawing instruments in a wooden box...and a Raleigh tricycle, a Gresham Flyer. A sturdy piece of engineering with a box on the back to transport toys and goodies. This one in Malmesbury is red. Mine was blue but my mother, who painted everything in sight, painted mine cream. Like the Queen, I thought as a child that the world smelt of fresh paint. The brown label on it, a joy in itself, said it was donated by Mrs.J.Saunders and it was her brother's trike. I exclaimed that it was identical to one I had as a child. The lady custodian said, 'Your parents wanted a boy. No-one would have bought a trike like that for a girl.' She was most likely right. I am after all named after my father and it is fortunate for me that he was Leslie, not Harold. But it takes a stranger, some sixty years later, to pinpoint a truth.

I know that if I listen carefully I can hear the mutual sigh of relief echoing down the years as I left my parents' house for good.