Canvey Island (15 page)

Then there was the small matter of children. We didn't speak about it much at first because we enjoyed our freedom and I think we were both scared by how much a baby might change us. I felt that I wasn't ready and Martin was frightened by the idea. It was part of his general anxiety, the old fear of tragedy returning. How could I guarantee that our child would be healthy, that I wouldn't die, or that nothing would go wrong?

We spent Christmas 1978 with my parents. Jonno was there with his little boy and Amanda was six months pregnant so much of the focus was on them. My mother kept giving me patient, loving looks but I could tell that hers was the smile of disappointment.

‘We don't like to pry, dear, but is everything all right?'

‘It's fine, Mummy, fine.'

‘If you need any advice, dear, you just have to ask. Or if you'd like your father to talk to Martin …'

‘No,' I said, ‘please don't do that.'

My father pretended he was unconcerned about the emptiness of my womb. Instead he asked me to play a piece of Bach on the violin. It was the only present he wanted, he said, just to listen to my music.

We went to church on Christmas Day, Martin and I all too aware of our unexercised faith but grateful for the ritual of lessons, carols
and the half-forgotten certainties that had defined my childhood. Dad read from the Gospel of St John and stood in the pulpit dressed in a simple white surplice, telling of the Christ child as a light in the darkness, a fragile hope against all the unpredictability of the world.

It was a love, he said, that was as strong as death.

He talked of the power and the freshness of new birth, the child as source of peace and joy, and of comfort from fear, and I thought, suddenly, and for the first time, that he was preaching only to me.

Every time I went back to Canvey Dad and Vi were as embarrassed to ask as Claire's parents. I could sense them starting to steer the subject round and then giving up and talking about football or the weather so it was a relief when we could finally tell them that Claire was pregnant.

‘Well, we
were
wondering,' said Vi.

‘Thought there might be something wrong with you.'

‘Thanks, Dad …'

I watched the children coming out of my old school in Long Road and recognised some of my former friends waiting outside the gates, already parents. They looked tired and bored and were older than I had ever imagined they could be. Ade's wife Kate was talking to Patsy Warner. I remembered how she used to let boys look at her knickers for a shilling a show. Linda told me that she was the first of her friends to lose her virginity. Then there was Henry Williams who used to invite the girls to watch him streak every night, and Alison Watkins, and Rosie Atkinson who everyone said had the best breasts in the school even though none of us had ever seen them.

Some of the old teachers were in a Portakabin: Mr Lister, Miss Dovedale, Mr Wheatley, Mr Keating, their names a roll-call of memory. I remembered Mr Dodd going through French irregular verbs until his mouth started to dribble, and Mr Longstaff who had left one afternoon and never come back. Why was that? we wondered. A nervous breakdown? Infidelity? Indiscretion?

When I was a child they had been tall and authoritative but now
they seemed either eccentric or desperate. If we ever returned to Canvey they would teach our child and Claire would be one of their colleagues.

I wanted to be seventeen again, with Linda and the future all before us. I didn't want to be middle-aged.

I tried to remember what it had been like in the past, when I had loved without imagining a future. Any consummated desire, any happiness, had always contained the possibility of its absence. This was how I had lived my life, holding back and protecting myself, still conscious of the loss of my mother, knowing how swiftly love could be taken away.

But now, with a child, love would have to be unconditional. I would have to provide the certainty and trust: a life without doubt.

It was 1979, the winter of discontent: freezing fogs and the roads not gritted; oilfields blockaded by fishermen and a national rail strike inevitable. There were drifts of snow fifteen feet deep, the snowman outside the school had an ‘Official Picket' sign stuck round his neck, and the temperature was twenty-nine degrees below zero. Martin's dad telephoned and told us that four men from Benfleet had gone missing at sea. Freak tides had breached the defences at Jaywick and a thousand people had been evacuated. A man had been found dead and covered in snow in a car park at Stanford-le-Hope.

There was rubbish everywhere. Water workers, ambulance drivers and dustmen were on industrial action, and Martin had stayed on to help keep a pumping station open. We didn't tell too many friends about that but he couldn't afford to strike. He was management not production line and there wasn't much of a choice with a baby on the way.

The first sign had been the surprise of my waters breaking before I felt any contractions. I awoke just before dawn to a feeling of wetness and the faint smell of protein, and I guessed what my doctor called ‘the unstoppable adventure' had begun. The spontaneous rupture of membranes was like a wave unfurling over my baby's head.

I woke Martin and told him to make a cup of tea and phone the hospital. I wanted him to be calm, and we had tried to anticipate every eventuality, but in the end we panicked like everyone else. When the contractions eventually came they
were only four minutes apart and we had to make a mad dash.

We reached the hospital at nine in the morning and Lucy arrived at three minutes past five. Martin joked that it was the only nine-to-five job I'd ever done but I was too exhausted to find it funny. Instead I think we both cried.

There weren't the words. I had started going into labour in a dream and woke to find my world utterly altered: Lucy's crumpled face smoothing from old age to a baby, the grey-blue blood-streaked flesh slowly gathering colour like dawn. It was the reverse of dying; the eyes slowly opening, the head lifting to the air rather than sinking in the last gasp of death.

I could not believe the beauty of her presence; the nuzzling smell of her, the softness of her skin, the fragility of delicate fingernails and miniature curled toes. I could not understand how I could feel so much love and so much fear at the same time. If I lost this child I would have to live with an exploded heart.

But I found motherhood harder than I had ever imagined. It hurt as the baby took the colostrum, and when the milk eventually came in my breasts felt engorged, the areolae were swollen and hard. Lucy found it difficult to latch on, so much so that I couldn't accept the fact that the bluish watery foremilk could ever be any good for her.

Martin and I were attentive, over-anxious parents, determined to be better than our own, but neither quite trusting the other, our panic due to a surfeit of love we could neither define nor resolve. We argued about feeding and how quickly Lucy should be weaned. I accused him of rocking her too slowly, of carrying our daughter like a parcel even after he'd made the effort to support the head, and of leaving her to sleep with too much light. In turn he told me I was wrapping the baby too tightly so that she was hot and temperamental; that I let her sleep too long in the afternoons so that our nights were disturbed; and that she spent so much time in our bed we no longer had any marital privacy.

What marital privacy?
I thought.
Surely he doesn't want that already?

There was no time for anything except Lucy. She didn't settle into any pattern and although people told me to let the baby take the breast every four hours and cry in between I couldn't allow her
to go without. I was determined to feed on demand even though my breasts were sore and the nipples were cracked. Milk got everywhere, through the pads and the T-shirts, because Lucy didn't take that much. Little and often, that's what she wanted, but I couldn't get the hang of it. The shock of her dependency was overwhelming. I began to wonder who I was and to hate myself: my breasts, my body shape, even the sound of my own voice.

I tried to talk to Martin but he didn't understand the tiredness and the tears and the hatred of my own body; my fear that it would never regain any of the tautness that it once had. I lost weight, watching what I ate because everything found its way into the milk, and the maternity wear fell off me. But even when I regained what was left of my figure all my old clothes felt wrong. I was reduced to wearing fishermen's smocks, drawstring tracksuit bottoms and slippers. Bits of food and sick and house dust kept sticking to me and I had no time to clean anything because I was so preoccupied with each change for the baby. The midwife came and told me to rest when Lucy slept but there was always so much preparation and tidying up to do, I couldn't keep up.

The kinder Martin was to me, the more irritating I found him. When he told me I looked beautiful I thought he was lying. When he said he was proud of me I didn't believe him. When he read that cabbage leaves could calm the pain in the breasts I shouted back that he had never understood anything about my breasts and never would. I wanted him out of the way; and then, as soon as he was gone, I wanted him back to help me.

I felt sadness and then guilt about being depressed. How could I be sad when I'd had a much wanted baby? None of the books I'd bought went into sufficient detail. They simply said I might get tired or feel like a treat: steak and champagne if we could afford it, liver and beer if we couldn't. Liver! The thought made me gag.

Some of my friends suggested some new clothes and a bit of shopping but I hated my body so much I couldn't imagine looking good in anything. I was tense and fearful, and Martin's voice took on a pained tone of sympathy that was never convincing because I knew he was wondering how long this was all going to last.

He walked slowly round the house, carefully trying to institute a feeling of serenity, which only made me more angry. I couldn't
believe how anyone could take so much time over anything. Eventually I lost my patience and shouted, ‘For God's sake, what are you doing? Get a move on. There's so much to do.'

‘Calm down, Claire.'

‘DON'T TELL ME TO BE CALM.'

‘It doesn't help when you're like this,' he said. ‘I have pressures too.'

‘Of course, silly me, it's you who have been putting yourself out. Forgive me for being so selfish and thinking it was about me, my baby and my stitches.'

‘I know it's difficult …'

‘Oh, do you now?'

‘Of course I don't know exactly …'

‘No. Not exactly.'

‘But it would be nice,' he said quickly, ‘if I knew when you were going to get over this so we could start being a family, instead of having to put up with all this …'

‘All this what?'

‘I don't know. Attention seeking.'

‘Is that what you think this is?'

‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that.'

‘You bloody did.'

‘Look. I'm doing my best. I can't help it if you're so bloody difficult to live with.'

‘Well, fuck off then,' I said. ‘Fuck off and grow up, Martin Turner.'

I could see that he was shocked that I'd called him by his full name but instead of leaving me or putting his arm around me, he gave me one of those infuriating smiles of his, like he'd thought of a joke, and said: ‘What shall I do first then, fuck off or grow up?'

I threw myself at him, beating his chest with my fists, hating the man I loved, not knowing how I could ever experience such fierce fury, or why I was so out of control, or when these feelings would ever leave me.

Martin and Claire couldn't sit still for a moment; they were so worried about Lucy, the world and each other. It was as if they thought life was going to catch them out if they didn't move quick enough. When she was in the kitchen Claire spent all her time watching the baby and checking where the food had come from: if any of the vegetables on the market had been sprayed with insecticide, if eggs from battery hens contained salmonella, if ratatouille, or whatever it was called, was safe to freeze.

Her voice was strained and high and she couldn't trust anyone with even the simplest of tasks. She was always fussing over her child and telling me I should change the way I ate and the washing powder I used, talking about additives and chemicals and how it was a sin to bleach. But her clothes had that grey look about them because she had started to use some new-fangled non-biological rubbish. I do think ecology has its limits.

Her conversation was filled with a running commentary on Lucy's every look, need and gesture, as if her daughter was the most interesting thing in the world and everyone else was irrelevant. When I suggested that she and Martin could do with a bit of a rest and were in danger of spoiling the baby, they just pointed to their motherhood manual and said: ‘No child suffers from too much love.'

Honestly. They never made it easy for themselves. I even caught Martin changing a nappy but when I said I was surprised to see him doing such a thing he told me that I had a lot to learn about the gendered nature of domestic responsibility. I didn't know what he was talking about.

I tried to remember what he had been like at the same age, but I could only think how pink he had been and how his ears might need to be pinned.

‘I remember when you were a little boy, Martin,' I said. ‘Do you remember cutting the fringes of the rug in the living room?'

‘No, Auntie Vi, I don't.'

‘You thought it was growing; said it needed a haircut.'

‘I can't remember.'

‘Then you found the scissors and started cutting away at it. Snip, snip, snip. Your father was so angry. I had to stop him giving you the slipper.'

Len interrupted. ‘Don't bring that up now, Vi.'