The Fruit of the Tree (2 page)

Michael had always wanted a house in the country with a circular drive, and I, for my part, would be getting a modern house that should be relatively easy to run. But, when the wedding had taken place, the piece of land, looking somewhat smaller now that it was devoid of its weeds and trees, was still quite naked of building.

It was therefore necessary for me to serve out my apprenticeship in housewifery at ‘The Yard’, as the men insisted on calling my first marital home, and indeed, few brides could have been more in need of training in that field than me.

Michael, who was on the premises for a great part of the day, soon became aware of my inadequacies. I had always accused him of seeing me through ‘rose-coloured spectacles’, but if he had at any time imagined he was marrying the perfect woman, he was now sadly disillusioned.

I was a daydreamer and found it difficult to get down to a type of work which was wholly unfamiliar to me. I had no routine. Sometimes I sat in the bath in the morning, becoming engrossed in cleaning the tiles or polishing the taps from that vantage point, while more noticeable areas of the house remained neglected.

I never knew which job to tackle first and whatever was eventually chosen as my priority would invariably leave some other area of chaos to be discovered.

Often I was summoned to make tea for several plumbers. Needless to say, one session of tea-making and washing up would set back my housework for hours, but since ‘Women’s Lib.’ had not yet made any impression on the world, I meekly accepted my humble role without protest.

I found cooking more stimulating than housework, though I had not yet acquired any great talent in the kitchen. However, my attempts at midday lunches were often frustrated by frequent interruptions from callers—salesmen, the team of plumbers, neighbours wanting to beg or borrow some small item from ‘The Yard’ or even borrow Michael himself to put in a light bulb, or gain access to an accidentally locked house. Michael, unlike me, could fit an incredible number of jobs into the working day, which rather accentuated my own lack of speed, at the same time confirming the fact that opposites really do attract.

Like many a new bride far from her parents, I was very homesick, and “The Yard” in no way resembled a home. In addition, not only had I left behind in London most of my friends from both my school and working days, but also the Jewishness and warmth of my original neighbourhood. There was no one here to wish me ‘Mazel and brachas!’

My immediate neighbours were elderly and vaguely disapproving of “The Yard” on their very doorsteps, even while sometimes finding it useful to have a young man around. There was a constant stream of activity which Mrs. Bird on one side would occasionally watch from a peephole in the fence; men in vans loading lavatory pans, and piles of pipes and fittings lying in heaps in the concrete garden. And where the “front room” should have been was a dusty, untidy office which I did nothing to improve, and which housed Michael’s young secretary, Maureen.

Maureen, a cheerful and friendly girl, had no hesitation in sabotaging my reputation amongst my curious neighbours, confirming that I never hung washing out in the back yard, implying that I draped it over the radiators, (though I actually had an electric drying cabinet) and revealing to them other such horrendous domestic shortcomings, whilst disarmingly confessing to me that she did so.

In no way could I become mistress of this abode. On the contrary, I was an intruder. The staff, and even the local people had become used to certain behaviour, which was not going to change simply because I had arrived on the scene. The local roadsweeper, I discovered after some time, used our outside loo, and Maureen and all the plumbers used my kitchen to make tea, (when I wasn’t doing it) and wash their hands.

Recognising the advantages of removing myself from the scene, I went to a local agency and applied for a position as a temporary shorthand typist.

‘Temps.’ in Guildford were apparently not so popular as the London variety, and it was a couple of months before I was given a job with Cow and Gate. My new job added nothing to my efficiency in the home. Flinging the bedclothes back to represent a passable imitation of a made bed, I would rush from the house and beg a lift into town from any of the plumbers available. After a few days, there was invariably a complaint from Michael that his toes were sticking out of the bottom of the bed.

Nevertheless, I settled into something of a routine at Cow and Gate. I worked reasonably hard and was even offered a permanent job there. But far from typing letters to mothers about baby foods, it was my ambition to produce my own baby as soon as possible. At twenty-five I felt, rightly or wrongly, that I had no time to lose. In any case, my mother had a history of miscarriages, and there was a vague fear at the back of my mind that I too might have problems.

As I began to find my feet at home, I made my first tentative attempts at entertaining. My mother-in-law, and my brother- and sisters-in-law, with their respective spouses and one fiancé, were each invited to partake of Sunday lunch. The occasions were marked by general panic, Michael rushing around to assist in clearing-up operations and potato peeling and the like. One might have thought that my newly acquired brothers and sisters were a group of inspectors from the good food guide, instead of a rather nice bunch of young people.

I was soon bold enough to ask my only local friend, Susan, and her husband to join us for an evening meal. Susan, a vivacious Irish blonde, had shared my office in London for a year, and had been a recognised ‘kindred spirit’ from the moment she had walked through the door. Now, fortuitously, she lived about six miles away with her husband Bruce, a quietly spoken surveyor from that same office, and their young baby.

This was the only occasion when I can recall actually feeling nauseous at my own cooking, although a crop of spots which appeared on the following day revealed that I had chicken-pox rather than food-poisoning.

Unfortunately, as a result of this, our regular trips to our parents had to be temporarily curtailed until the quarantine period was over. We still sought the warmth and welcome of our parents’ homes, for we had not yet created a home for ourselves. We were still, after three or four months, two individuals full of obstinacy and dogmatic ideas, disappointed in each other’s inadequacies. Michael’s bouts of sarcasm frequently sparked off tears and tantrums in me. Living together for twenty-four hours a day only accentuated our differences, and I returned at last with relief to my letters on infant care and baby food.

Within a very few weeks, however, came the realisation that possibly I too, might be joining the ranks of worried mums writing for advice from the ‘Medical Department’ on the virtues of ground rice or chopped chicken. According to the calendar I must be pregnant.

It had all seemed so easy, it was difficult to believe it was true, but the pregnancy was duly confirmed and since the doctor was unconcerned about the chicken-pox attack in the early weeks, the next few months passed without problems.

In the middle of the pregnancy, we were able to spend a dreamy holiday in Djerba, off the coast of Tunisia, reputedly Ulysses’ island of the lotus-eaters.

This holiday was memorable only for the amount of time spent doing nothing, but in my pregnant state, it seemed ideal. Bedrooms at our hotel were lines of chalet bungalows served by a central dining room and various bars. In our case, we could step out on to an almost deserted beach, where few people could view my ‘bulge’ housed in a swimsuit. A small group of Bedouins were permanently stationed on the same beach, ready to hire out a horse or camel for a ride, but I at least did not feel obliged to do anything so energetic. The tensions of our honeymoon were gone and the pressures of fractious infants were yet to come.

By night we sat and occasionally danced in the hotel club. Often I felt the early movements of my child, strangely awakened by the beat of the music.

But just as Ulysses’ men were dragged reluctantly from their idle pleasures, we too soon had to face reality once again. Reality that included my new temporary job in an accountant’s office, a lack of money in the bank, an unbuilt bungalow and a house that was very far from being a home.

2. Unto Us

Possibly one of the least practical things that Michael ever did was to marry me in 1966, not two years after he had invested most of his money in a new business. Two may live as cheaply as one, for all I know, but not when they venture into the purchase of land. For all the money we had saved, and some we didn’t even have, had been spent on that bare expanse of land, and now as the months rolled by, our efforts were devoted to filling up the increasingly huge chasm that was our overdraft. My somewhat mean salary went straight into that seemingly bottomless pit, never to be seen again. Any additional money spent on building was a drain on our meagre resources, so at first it was limited to making use of the talents of our plumbing team during slack times. In the winter of 1966, they laid a solid new layer of road on to the muddy footpath leading to ‘the site’ as we called it, so that, in the course of the next few months, heavy lorries could deliver their loads of pipes, bricks, cement and so on.

Our present home was sparsely furnished and lacking in frills, for we begrudged every penny spent on our premises at the office. We abided by a policy of ‘make do and mend’ and had acquired from our families a couple of old armchairs, a gate-leg table and some unwanted strips of stair carpet to furnish our living quarters.

I always welcomed our trips to London, the cosiness of my parents’ home and the return to my roots. Sometimes it was possible to see my old school-friend Ruth, who also made such periodic excursions to visit her mother and freckle-faced student sister, Rita.

Ruth, a slim, dignified girl with auburn glints in her hair, who had married a month before me, was now, like me, expecting her first baby in the Autumn. Our friendship of fifteen years’ standing was impeded by the distance between us, for she had moved some fifty miles away from home to Maidstone, and our occasional visits to each other involved a long drive. Nevertheless, we and another school-friend, Pam, persuaded our husbands to take us on these trips when we could, inspecting with interest each other’s first domestic efforts. Ruth and Pam had each acquired newly built estate houses, which I viewed with a pang of envy, despite all sophisticated comment about ‘little boxes’. Our bungalow, when completed, would no doubt be just as neat and immaculate, but that event seemed far in the future, and in any case, I had no idea how I would adjust to country life and was happy to put it out of my mind.

In the last couple of months of my pregnancy, our journeyings ceased. I gave up my job to make preparation for the great day. Despite my lack of enthusiasm for housework, it was my intention to spring-clean, for the house would no doubt be neglected during the early months of the baby’s life. I had no romantic illusions about motherhood. I would feel a flutter of fear at the thought of the baby’s birth, in spite of the course of relaxation classes I had attended, and as to its eventual presence in my life, I could really only imagine it yelling, particularly in the middle of the night. So in a way, I set rather a great value on those last two months. They were the end of an era, as had been the end of my single life, and in addition, I felt they were the end of my freedom, for perhaps the next fifteen or twenty years.

Consequently, I felt rather cheated when Michael’s secretary, Maureen, broke her arm within three days of the end of my employment. For a full month, my secretarial skills were needed in the office, and then there was only one month left and so many things to do and to buy.

I had a list, which weighed heavily on my conscience, issued by the hospital, with orders to bring nighties, bath towel, a crepe bandage, a piece of old linen and other faintly eccentric items. But by the time I eventually made the trip into Guildford for my purchases, there was a mere week left before the Expected Day of Arrival.

In spite of waking with a backache, I could not postpone the pilgrimage any longer and Michael left me in the town centre before he himself set out for London. Having been remarkably fit during the whole of the pregnancy, I was irritated now at the thought that I might be plagued with backache for a whole week until the baby was born. But as the day progressed and my acquisitions grew heavier, the backache too increased in severity. In my innocence, I had not imagined that the baby would be born early, but I now realised that my labour was imminent. Even so, I frenziedly continued my search—nappy bucket—pins—roller towel material—(what could they possibly want with that?), and eventually I caught a bus home right in the middle of the rush-hour, not even having the good sense to get a taxi. Determined to get a seat, on this day of all days, I placed myself and stomach squarely in front of a seated male and my pointed look (and rounded tum) had the desired effect.

On my arrival home, I hurriedly packed my suitcase. Then, lonely and desolate in the empty house, aware of the first regular contractions, I sat wondering what to do next. I was afraid too—afraid of unknown pain, afraid of the adventure I must face entirely on my own.

In the next three hours, my sense of isolation remained unabated and indeed aggravated by the maternity home’s reluctance to receive me. There was no sign of Michael, who had anticipated a late arrival home from London, and the only neighbour who had befriended me had herself been taken into hospital a few days before. Even my mother, who telephoned during the course of the evening, could not become my confidante on this occasion. If I had told her I was in labour and on my own, she would have worried all night.