A Postillion Struck by Lightning (28 page)

But of course, life at home had altered subtly too. It was no longer quite the same. Lally was now in charge of my brother, and also my sister adored this living baby doll. I was not included any longer, and there was never really time for us to be together again. Gradually, over time, a thin wall of dislike and indifference grew between us, and we started the inevitable growing-away process. It was not to be healed for some years.

The Cottage too had gone. The auction had not been successful for my parents, and strangers bought it. We moved the wheel- backed chairs, the lamps, the beds and the wooden kitchen table across the valley to a smaller cottage up on the other Down at
Winton Street. A collection of cottages grouped round a tithe barn and a well. It was not, and never could be, the same as the Cottage. But it was agreed that this should be only a halfway house until we found something we all liked, and which was really big enough for a now large family, where we would live for ever in the country because my father hated, with all his heart, the idea of living any longer in London. With this news at the back of my mind, the grief of losing the main pivot of my life was eased a little. I accepted. There was very little else that I could do. Holidays at Winton Street were almost, but never quite, as good as they had been: there was no gully, but still the same river, no Great Meadow, but another one almost as splendid, and the village was as near, and the same faces were still about in the lanes and fields. Sometimes I used to stand at the stile on the path down to the village and look across the valley at the soft smooth side of Great Meadow rising up to the crest of the hill and see the late sun flashing on the windows of the Cottage. Then, and then only, I got a lump in my throat and stumbled on down to the grocers.

“It's the wind!” said Lally one day, coming down with me. “It seems to blow much harder up here than it ever did over there. Must be straight up from Cuckmere and the sea. Breathe it all in, it'll do you a power of good.”

But she knew.

After a year in Bishopbriggs things gradually began to deteriorate. Inevitably. I returned back from one holiday to find that I was no longer sleeping in the pink bedroom but on the Put-U-Up which now occupied the place of the piano in the sitting-room. The piano was in the dining-room. My uncle explained nicely that I was, after a year's wear, starting to destroy the furniture in the bedroom, that the chest of drawers, his only remembrance of his mother, was creaking badly because of the weight of the things which I placed in the drawers. Books and writing materials, as well as all my clothes. Also, far worse, the foot of the yellow oak bed had been hopelessly scratched by my long toenails. So it was decided that they should move back to their own room and I should from thereon sleep on the Put-U-Up.

That the culprit, or culprits, of the scratched bed end were not
my toenails, but instead the scalding aluminium “pig” or the hot brick in flannel splitting the veneer, were unacceptable excuses.

“I have repeatedly told you about cutting your toenails,” said my uncle, “every bath time. We are not made of money up here, you know, there's a Depression on.”

He had never ever mentioned my toenails, although he was frequently in the bathroom on Friday nights which was the allotted time of the week for my “ablutions” as he called them. At first I had been rather surprised that he seemed to wish to brush his hair at such an odd hour in the evening, and when I, once only, locked the door, I was firmly admonished not to do so again because how could they help if the geyser blew up or I had a fainting fit suddenly? They, after all, were responsible. So no locked doors. I only minded because it was the one place where I could sing away and feel totally private without being a “noise” either to them or the people who lived up in the house above and who, from time to time, did complain that my piano playing, pretty dreadful, by ear, and limited to a range of three melodies, “The Wedding Of the Painted Doll”, “Always” and “Over My Shoulder”, all played very loudly with both pedals firmly down, disturbed their rest and also made it difficult to hear the Football Results on the Radio. The complaints were always very tactful and genteel. However, they
were
complaints and the piano stopped. So the bathroom seemed the next best thing musically. And also the mirror over the washbowl was useful for trying out expressions.

However, my new bed-sitting-room was pleasant enough, and we all settled down together again, although the constant worry that I refused to play all games, and had no friends, was still a source of dismay and anguish. I tried (not to play games naturally, at which I was useless and by which I was desperately uninterested), but I tried to make friends and even to bring them home to tea, which was my aunt's greatest desire. This, I suppose, to prove that I
had
friends. In desperation Tom once came all the way from his tenement in Paisley, and brought with him a slow boy called Gregg. They seemed the best two suited to our sort of house.

My aunt did a vast baking the night before and was astonished, and saddened, that Tom, in a tight blue suit, and Gregg in his Fair Isle sweater, sat for most of the meal with their hands under their thighs on the ladder-backed chairs, hardly spoke above a
murmur and merely nibbled at the enormous wealth of Coburg Cakes, Soda Scones, Treacle Tarts and Fairy Cakes.

Unused to young people about them, they leant backward to be sociable and warm. But it was useless. All of us were inhibited with a deathly shyness. I hardly knew Gregg; he was usually busy in the Metalwork Class with a welding iron and solder while I battered mournfully at a copper disc beating it to death with a design of palm trees and pyramids. It was to be an ash-tray. Apart from that we hardly ever met, let alone spoke, and Tom was as out of place at a High Tea in Bishopbriggs as, he put it himself, “a spare prick at a weddin'”.

Discovering, during desperate cross-questioning, that he was studying to be an engineer, my uncle, who was one, launched into a long lecture on valves and steam compression. Tom sat mute and merely mumbled “aye” from time to time. It was a total disaster. All the more so after they had left when my uncle found that they had, in their nervousness, picked away at the rush bottoms of the ladder-backed chairs, thereby “ruining them for all time”.

I did not ask friends back again, although it was often suggested by my good, worried aunt.

The Summer Highlight for Bishopbriggs Society was the weekly Tennis Match held at the Club on the other side of the railway embankment. That is to say on the Right Side of Town. No one who was a member could be a member without being vetted. It was very stringent, and the waiting list was long. Naturally no one from the Estate was allowed on to the ash- courts, and nor did they ever try. I was allowed, with my aunt and uncle, because it was understood we all had “known better days”, and it was politely overlooked that we lived in the unspoken-of area.

Every Friday my aunt did a baking: it was the rule that every lady should take some of her own baking for the Club Tea. My life seemed to be governed by the Bakings as much as my aunt's. The Club House was built of varnished wood and smelled like a coffin. It had a tin roof and a veranda, a tea urn and a cupboard filled with white china cups and saucers. Each week a different lady supervised, and each week we all eagerly read the lists typed and pinned to the green baize board as to who was playing whom. The day was filled with light, high, cries of “Good show, partner!” “Well tried, I say!” or “Love three all”, “My game, I think!”. The thwick and thwock of ball against
gut lasted well into the evenings, for it was always light enough to play there until at least ten-thirty p.m. It grew boring sometimes, even though it was my job to retrieve, like some wretched little dog, the balls which loped and scattered about the chicken wire enclosure.

After The Tea, at which I helped to serve, and later wash up, they sat, if the weather was fine, in deck-chairs knitting and sewing until their game came up. The time passed slowly enough and I was often allowed to go home before the final game was over, to open the house and set the table for supper. I was always eager for this excuse because it meant, if I was pretty quick, that I could get back in time to put on the brown bakelite radio and just catch the nightingale singing from a Surrey wood. If it sang. It was a delicate thing to do. On with the radio, lock the front door, hang out of the window, eyes glued to the road from the tennis courts, willing, pleading, aching, for the blasted bird to sing. All Surrey flooded into the cramped, beige-and-ladder-backed room. But, as I said, I had to be quick, for apart from prudery I had learned deceit. The radio was expressly forbidden to be touched. So it was only when I had the house to myself, and played it low so that Upstairs could not hear and give me away, that I dared to put it on. And then only with a wet towel standing by, because the machine had a habit of getting warm as time went on, and the moment my uncle came back from Tennis the first thing he did was to cross the room and caress the sleek bakelite sides. Just to see. I had once been caught—the room filled with nightingales and cellos, my eyes maudlin with tears. My uncle's anger was controlled; I was being deceitful and morbid. He was polite enough in a steely way and for a short time the radio was removed to their bedroom. But I managed.

Coming back from Tennis, in the after glow of the evening, if I stayed that long, which I often did, the conversations never really varied. They were always, more or less like this:

“Have you got the key, Walter?”

“No. It's McWhirter's turn this week to lock up. He's got it.”

“He wasn't playing very well today, I thought?”

“No. Not well at all. Sun in his eyes.”

“But you tossed for places surely?”

“Of course we did. He lost. Kept hitting the net.”

“Aha. Getting on, I'm afraid.”

“Aye, that's a fact.”

“Agnes's service was poor, erratic….”

“Both getting on a wee bittie.”

“Oh aye….”

“Ah michtie-me.”

“The Brandy Snaps went down very well. They always do. Gratifying. The cream makes it look more. Next week I'll try Molly's recipe for Soda Bread. …” Their voices would drift harmlessly over me, vapour trails of cloud above the Downs, to be smudged, faded, and eventually to evaporate in the gentle business of preparing the cocoa for supper.

School went ahead slowly. There appeared to be no marked improvement in my reports, and the little notes appended to the end of my letters home by my uncle, which I was not allowed to see—they were written confidentially after I had signed my name and sent love and kisses—grew steadily more pessimistic. He was doing his best to be helpful and generous, but really … the Boy didn't seem to be settling down, after all it was now more than a whole year. There should have been some improvement. There, apparently, was none. Except that I was doing, I thought, pretty well. I was, at least, trying. I wanted to get back to the South, and I knew that without some form of improvement in my scholastic world this would be delayed and delayed. I was there to learn, at a good Scottish School, and the sooner I learned the better. So naturally I went as hard as I could; I battered away at Metalwork making copper ash-trays and serviette-rings; I made bookends and unacceptable work boxes in woodwork; I threw cups and bowls on the potter's wheel, and I did French Translation and Essay like no one else in the school. My English was filled with long poems and stories which were often read out to the whole, agonised, sniggering, class. My Geography was noted for the amount of space I covered, products I knew, populations I recorded, deciduous, coniferous, rain and dry belts I had assembled. I was even congratulated by teachers who smiled and were polite, and my exercise books, for these lessons, were marked well into the eighties. What was wrong?

Apparendy, I was failing all the time. The fact that Maths was still incomprehensible to me, that Physics and Chemistry and Engineering were far, far beyond my meagre comprehension,
seemed not to matter to me, at any rate, against the glowing reports from the few classes in which I excelled. Albeit without much competition.