Dear Fatty (2 page)

After a certain amount of initial resistance she gave in to my efforts to make her lie down next to me for hours on end. Mostly because I restrained her firmly every time she tried to move. I was determined we would be spooning partners. I wanted to feel her tiny body breathing calmly, sleepily, next to mine and I wanted her to be like a Disney or Lassie dog, who could understand me and all my three-year-old problems, so I endlessly blethered on into her ear, which twitched throughout these no-doubt heartfelt monologues.

When I’d had enough of talking, which was a
long
time, and she had fulfilled enough of my desire for her to be counsellor/friend/hot-water bottle, she was also very handy as a baby or dressing-up doll. Quite a lot of my doll clothes fitted her and even suited her. She looked better in pastels – it contrasted well
with
her sandy fur – and I was stunned by how becoming she was in a mob cap, although I had to bite holes in it for her ears to poke through. I think that if she had shown a bit more commitment, we
could
have squeezed more stuff on, but too much wriggling prevented any true representation of an entire outfit, complete with sunglasses and luggage.

One thing Hunni was
always
up for, probably due to the delicious taste, was liberal use of Mum’s lipstick, a stunning burnt sunset-type orangey red. Wetness of nose, hirsuteness of lips and constant licking made application tricky but, with effort and tenacity, not impossible. The overall effect was stunning and in no small part reminiscent of early Dusty Springfield. Excellent.

Obviously, to achieve the baby image was a much simpler operation – lay dog on its back, put on nappy and insert dummy in mouth. Simple but effective. Hours of contented cooing and cradling followed. That’s me contented of course, maybe not always her. Still, I’m pretty sure she favoured this sort of girly activity over the silly exploits
you
got up to with her – like walking, throwing and catching, running after rabbits or wrestling. Honestly, what were you thinking? She was a
dog
!

I’VE BEEN THINKING
about what life must have been like for you around the time I was born, when Dad was stationed in Anglesey. When I look at pictures of you pushing me in a pram, with a toddler Gary by your side, you look so glamorous and so happy. Then I look at other pictures from that time. We must have been in RAF quarters but there I am having a bath in a bucket in the backyard. Maybe this was just for a laugh – we must have had a bathroom, surely? I know that the camp was miles from the local village and the shops in Caergeiliog and that you had to walk for hours to get a pint of milk. I also know that Anglesey is hellishly windy and flat and remote. I’ve seen photos where the trees are growing diagonal to the ground because the mighty maverick gales have battered them into submission. They look tipsy, like staggering drunks, lurching sideways against their inebriation. It must have been exhausting to drag both of us such a long way in that raging raw weather, and I know that often when you arrived at the shop, so relieved to be out of the bluster and so glad to see other grown-ups, it was very hurtful when people chose to speak Welsh only, to refuse to help you in English. I know you often felt lonely and rejected but for me there is a truly visceral connection. I prick up my ears when I hear Welsh, I pay more attention when I am around Welsh people. I like how dangerous and dark and a bit caustic and secretive they seem, and somehow I have fused that persistent stormy weather with my
memories
of that country and those seductive Taliesin people. I feel a curiously enduring connection, although by rights I’m not entitled to it. I was born there, but I wasn’t bred there and I’m not
from
there, yet Wales and the Welsh prompt an acute sense of tribal belonging in me. Perhaps what I’m feeling is a distant sense of your alienation, Mum. Because you were made to feel the trespasser, I want to belong, on your behalf. Maybe it’s a bigger issue. Dad’s being in the RAF meant that you (and we) followed him wherever his work took us, so we didn’t get to belong anywhere. Sometimes we were in our home for less than a year. You might have only just got a job, we might have only just settled at school, and we had to move on again. Sort of legit gypsies really. Moving to a new camp, new town, new county, but strangely and rather comfortingly, always the same house – same layout, same G-Plan furniture. We seemed to have very little of our own. Just ornaments and books and odd items with which to try and personalise yet another RAF standard red-brick house.

It’s no wonder both Gary and I did so much sleepwalking and sleeptalking when we were growing up. We probably harboured our fair share of new-school stress, constantly having to try to carefully negotiate our way into new groups of friends. It was chum war. There were tactics. The RAF kids were easy to befriend – they had the same itinerant experience and were sympathetic. It was the gangs of local kids that were harder to crack. They were fed up with forces kids turning up, and then buggering off before true friendships could be forged. They were often wary of us and quickly judged if we were worth the effort or not. I vividly remember that crucial testing time in the first few days of arriving anywhere new, when it was imperative to make a good
show
of yourself, make sure all your wares were on display attractively – humour, hipness, kindness (but with a hint of steel), intelligence, comprehensive knowledge of hit parade, courtesy, eloquence and skipping and twoball prowess. If that failed (which it usually did due to pathetic lack of élan in any of above skills), employ bribery and giftage techniques swiftly, sometimes even deploying own toys as bait. This was a supremely risky strategy and you stood to suffer a high incidence of collateral damage, sometimes losing four or more well-loved Sindys or even a pair of champion skates or a warrior set of clackers. No matter – this is the cost of war, no one said it would be pretty, and these casualties were the price we had to pay. We will never forget them. On rare occasions, this modus operandi backfired and we were judged to be spineless tossers for buying our friends’ affections. Then,
and only then
, would I employ my master plan, a strategy that never failed, but demanded countless hours of tireless acting. I would concoct a terminal illness – ‘toxic spasm’ was a good one, as was ‘marrow fester’ or ‘trench head’, or simply ‘swollen blood’. All of these maladies meant I was not long for this world, and would elicit sympathy and pledges of eternal friendship from otherwise hostile enemy agents. RAF kid 1 – local kid nil. Result. I’m sorry, Mum, if it meant you regularly had to answer strange questions from concerned parents about your sickly daughter’s tragic condition, but somehow I eluded retribution and moved on to the next camp with renewed vigour and no small relief that I could shake off my fatal ailment and be healthy again in readiness for the next bout of ‘find some friends!’. This nomad life, which incidentally also rewarded us richly with experiences all over the country and later in Cyprus, was no
doubt
part of the nagging core feeling I had: that we didn’t belong anywhere.

For you, though, it must have been very difficult to make a home. If it’s any consolation, Mum, believe me when I say that everywhere we went was our home because you made it so. You were and are the absolute centre of all of us, and you kept us anchored when we could so easily have felt lost and confused. There might have been endless new doors but behind each one was you and Dad, making a safe and happy place for me to be. Any confidence I have had since stems from that one unassailable fact. I am loved.

Thank you.

I THINK I
was about four years or so when you were posted to RAF Leconfield and we all moved to Yorkshire. Only now do I realise that I’ve lived in Yorkshire at all – I was so unaware of our personal geography then. I
did
know it was a long way from Grandma and Grandad French in Plymouth because I clearly remember those endless hours in the car on numerous family visits. Gary and I would physically fight the entire time, mean pinches and punches and stabs and Chinese burns. You tried word games and songs to distract us, but we were compelled to battle. That was our kid purpose. If we were scolded, we resorted to verbal taunts and competitive face-pulling, but in the main it was the corporal torture that was most excruciating and most thrilling. If any of our squabbling became too dangerous, or if he was winning, I would be sure to whinge loudly to you and appeal for justice. Gary called me ‘the Foghorn’ for this crime of breaking rank and grassing him up, and accused me of being ‘a girl’. A girl?! How very low.

Another reason I recall these journeys is the smoke. God, the smoke! I don’t know how many fags you and Mum were smoking a day but it
must
have been 100 each. You obviously regarded these journeys as a perfect opportunity to catch up on any non-smoking minutes you may have carelessly frittered away not smoking, and so put in extra smoking time to get up to smoking speed. One cigarette lit the next and we travelled along in this
stinking
, acrid foggy tin box for hours. Gary and me and the dog in the back seat, sucking up thousands of fags’ worth of used smoke and gasping for air in a desperate attempt to stay alive. Heaven forfend we should open the window. Mum would screech, ‘You’re letting in the cold air! Shut that immediately!’ Yes, it would have been awful to allow fresh air to dilute the thick pea soup of swirling smog that had built up inside the car. I swear sometimes I couldn’t see as far as the back of your head. How did you see out at all? Is this why you often inexplicably used the windscreen wipers on a perfectly clear day? For years I thought I was a sufferer of carsickness until I travelled in a smoke-free car and realised that smoke was the reason for my queasiness. Perhaps Gary’s cries of ‘Foghorn!’ were more apt than we knew.

Anyroadup, I remember one particular journey back up North because there was only one topic of conversation the whole way. The Queen Mother. You told us that you had been selected as a typical serviceman, a chief technician with an average family – one boy, one girl, one nursery-school-teacher wife, dog (comes with or without clothes). A perfect family, safe and presentable enough to display to a visiting royal on a very special day for our air force base. She was coming to visit and inspect in two weeks’ time! All I could think was, ‘Why is she called the Queen Mother and not the Queen’s Mother? Was my mum therefore the Dawn Mother?’

Apparently there was a
lot
of preparation to be made before she could possibly cross the threshold of our humble G-Plan, red-brick quarter. What?! What did we have to do? Surely, you suggested, she was supposed to take us as she found us, that was the whole point, wasn’t it? Absolutely
not
as far as the Dawn
Mother
was concerned. Do you remember she flew into a flurry of excitement and didn’t sit down or sleep once in those two weeks?
Everything
was dusted, mopped, antisepticked, hoovered, pinned up on the line and beaten, including us kids. Our house would be
perfect
, we would be perfect, it would be perfect. That Queen Mother would NOT find fault with us. We would do you proud. Gary and I had haircuts, new outfits – mine was a tartan kilt and new red patent-leather Start-rites which I had been longing for, so yay and respect to the Queen Mother for those; Gary’s was a grey suit so he could be a perfect mini-man. The Dawn Mother had a twinset and a perm and you of course wore your uniform, which I always loved because you looked so spruced and tip-top and important. Who would have thought drab bluey-grey would suit anyone? You shone in it, and it shone on you, with all buttons and belts and medals and significant regalia-type badge things duly buffed till they glinted. Nothing less would do. Mum tried to get the same shine on our faces, using a chamois leather and Vim. Well, all right,
not
that, but something like it – Brasso maybe? Gary’s newly cut but still renegade thick hair was semi-tamed with liberal dollops of Brylcreem and Mum’s spit on the crown. There were new socks and new pants all round. This alarmed me – was the mother of the Queen going to be inspecting our pants? This visit was seemingly more thorough than I had anticipated. Shit. Or rather, not shit. On pants, or anywhere.
No shit!

We practised bowing and curtsying for hours until our backs and knees buckled and bled. We tried to rehearse being humble and quiet so that if the mother of the Queen ‘chose to converse with our parents, she could do so in peace, please!’. The little
pamphlet
on royal etiquette gave us some tips: we were to speak only if spoken to (royal rules, not family rules), so – should we say hello, or wait to be said hello unto? Could we try on her crown? Or feed sugar lumps to the unicorns that would pull her pink carriage? After the initial ‘Your Majesty’ we were then to address her as M’am, rhymes with Spam,
not
M’arm rhymes with farm, and never M’erm … This threw me into a panic because I felt sure I would mistakenly call her Spam from start to end.

The day came and, boy, were we prepared and perfect. Beds made with crisp hospital corners, books neatly on shelves with spines facing
out
wards, teddies and dolls scrubbed and lined up on the pillow. The house smelt of furniture wax and Mr Sheen. A newly baked cake was on the table and the best – in fact, the
new
– china was arranged beside it, as if it were commonplace that we had high tea in porcelain lady-cups. The Dawn Mum was virtually still licking us clean like a mumcat when
SHE
arrived (do I remember it correctly, Dad?) in a
helicopter!
All the neighbours were out in the road to watch. She first went for a quick visit to a suitably presentable officer and his family at the other, pedigree, end of the camp. We were always segregated like this from the commissioned officers – they had posh detached houses with huge gardens front and back whereas us oiks lived in rows around a central play park (freshly painted for the visit – several children bore the marks on the arses of their best clothes).