The Quivering Tree (4 page)

My mother's reaction was what, at the age of twelve, I should have expected.

‘What do you mean, not going? You can't stay here on your own!'

I did not see why I could not do exactly that, and I proceeded to say so. With some smugness I pointed out that
I
would never dream of trying to stop
her
from going to live where she wanted, so why, when it came to me, was she acting the exact contrary, without charity or any regard for my own heartfelt desires?

‘You'll have to pay my board and lodging,' I conceded, ‘but then it costs you money to keep me at home. I don't see why I can't go into lodgings, the same as Alfred.'

‘Alfred isn't twelve years old.'

When I suggested that in some ways I was a fitter candidate for lodger than my brother, since I knew how to launder my own underwear, which was more than he did, to say nothing of sewing on buttons and darning socks, my mother's defences began to crumble, the way they usually did when I saw fit to mount a sufficiently determined attack. It's possible – I don't know, I don't wish to do her an injustice – that the prospect of a London life which, except during the school holidays, did not have to make room for an unruly, demanding child, had suddenly appeared seductively on the horizon. My mother was too old, I had been born too late, too long after my siblings. Though I knew nothing of how children were begotten, I felt instinctively that I must have been a slip, an error of judgement. Not that my father had ever appeared other than delighted by my existence, and my mother had always been very kind.

Once I had accustomed her to the idea in principle, the persistent obstacle remained: what would people say? Although she was leaving the city and, to hear her speak, had not the slightest intention of continuing her Norwich acquaintanceships across the 110-mile-long divide, the thought that people might speak ill of her, accuse her of abandoning her child to the problematic good offices of a landlady, was something she found difficult to contemplate.

‘I suppose I could always speak to the Kings or the Harrisons,' she said at last. ‘They might be willing to take you.'

But I did not want to, I categorically refused to be ‘taken'. I did not see myself living with people who were sorry for me because I was a little orphan Annie. If anyone was going to do the taking, I wanted it to be me. I had a strong sense of moving, not just into a new house but into a new life which I must enter unencumbered by any of the old furniture.

Next day I went to see the person who, after some thought, I had nominated in my mind for the post of landlady. Her name was Mrs Curwen and she lived on the slope of St Clement's Hill, bang opposite the Secondary School where I was a pupil in Form 111a. She also taught there: botany. In those days, teachers in the State system had to give up their posts when they married, so I imagine that Mrs Curwen was a widow – I certainly never saw any husband about – and as such, a proxy spinster as it were, had been allowed back into the maiden fold. She couldn't possibly have been divorced, because the Council or the school governors or whoever was in command would never have countenanced such a woman teaching the young. And she couldn't have been a courtesy Mrs, as Mrs Crail, the headmistress, was reputed to be, the way cooks and housekeepers at that time often were for status' sake, because she had a little daughter about seven years old.

Mrs Curwen seemed to me a good choice on several counts, not the least of which was the proximity of her house to the school, a nearness, I reckoned, equivalent to an extra half-hour in bed in the mornings. Secondly, I liked her. She blushed a lot, which made her look prettily rosy, and she spoke with a stammer which, in some way, seemed to bring her down to a child's level instead of, like most of the other teachers, being perched on top of some invisible Mount Sinai whence they issued commandments incised on tablets of stone.

Thirdly, I liked botany, everything about it, and especially the seriousness of the botany exercise books with their bluelined pages interleaved with beautifully heavy plain paper for drawings and diagrams. I loved the names into which botany was buckled as into magical armour, names that belonged in spells, like Oenotheraceae and Caryophyllaceae. The spells themselves, which went by names like Baer's Hypothesis of Photosynthesis, were very potent and enough to send delicious shivers down your spine. I sensed too that Mrs Curwen liked me as a person, not just the way teachers usually liked children who were good at their particular subjects; and finally, I had deduced, from the way her daughter often wore dresses, not only with hems that had been let down leaving the stitch marks showing where the old turn-ups had been, but often with borders of another fabric altogether added on to them to make them last longer, that her mother could do with a bit of extra money.

I waited until I could be sure everyone had gone home from school – I didn't want to bump into anyone I knew, to whom I would have to explain about the diarrhoea and so on – and then I went to call on Mrs Curwen, who was surprised to see me, but welcoming. Her home had a friendly untidiness, with dented cushions on the couch and toys strewn about the floor. She gave me tea and fairy cakes with chocolate icing on them, which I thought a good omen so far as her cooking was concerned. As soon as I had explained the purpose of my visit her daughter, who was called Viola and who was present, began to jump about, crying, ‘Oh, do let her come, Mummy! Do let her come!' Mrs Curwen went very red, and stammered a lot: but in the end she said that she didn't see why not.

When it came down to business, Mrs Curwen was totally inadequate. She hadn't a clue how much to charge for my board and lodging, and I needed to know so that I could tell my mother. After a great deal of stammering she came out with a pound a week, which I didn't think enough, and said so. Now that I was convalescent, I warned her, and my appetite coming back, I was eating like a horse, and she had better make it twenty-five shillings, just to be on the safe side.

So it was decided – or so I thought. Until a week later, that is, when my mother received an note from the school secretary, requesting her attendance at the school, to speak to Mrs Crail.

Mrs Crail, the Secondary School headmistress, looked remarkably like a pig, which was not necessarily a disaster since pigs normally, whatever their intrinsic nature, have faces which look extremely good-natured, with cheeky little snouts and mouths that are turned up at the corners in a perpetual smile. Mrs Crail always held her head thrown back a little, perhaps to lessen the number of her double chins, unless it was due to the weight of the large bun of lack-lustre hair she wore wedged into the nape of her short neck. The really dreadful thing about her was that, notwithstanding the way her piggy mouth turned up in its perfect crescent and the way her small eyes constantly half-closed themselves as if in the throes of irrepressible mirth, you only needed to be in the same room with her, even with the central heating on, to feel it growing colder by the minute, a new Ice Age on the way.

Smiling, crinkling her eyes, speaking in low, genteel tones, she disseminated sarcasm, venom, and a total hatred of children – even of those who tried to toady up to her, which I suppose was something in her favour, if not much – until the very air seemed poisoned, unbreathable. To parents summoned to her presence – no parent who had instigated such a meeting did so twice – her manner was insufferably patronizing, a masterpiece of bullying disguised under the heading of doing what was best for your child. My mother returned from the ordeal pale and shaken, uncertain as to what had actually been said to reduce her to that condition. She was uncertain of everything except of having been instructed that Mrs Curwen was no fit person to whom to entrust her daughter, and that she was not to do it on pain of – my mother couldn't quite remember what, only that it didn't bear thinking of. That the
diktat
had to be obeyed went without saying.

Appalled that Mrs Crail's writ should run with equal force outside the gates of school as within, I demanded: ‘Didn't you ask her why?'

‘She smiled at me,' my mother responded weakly, ‘and I didn't like to.'

A few days later a letter came to say that Mrs Crail had arranged for me to board with Miss Gosse and Miss Locke who shared a house somewhere up the Sprowston Road. It came as no surprise. If, in her wisdom, she had booked me into the local brothel, assuming Norwich boasted such an amenity, I am pretty sure my mother would not have dared to raise an objection. The cost of my accommodation was to be thirty shillings a week as against Mrs Curwen's twenty-five.

I grumbled: ‘Probably the extra five shillings is for Mrs Crail's commission.' Gone my vision of last-minute dashes across the road as the morning gong was going. ‘And it's probably half-way to Wroxham.'

‘It can't be all that far.' I could see that, the prospect of London resuming the foreground of her thoughts, my mother was rapidly losing interest in the conversation. ‘If Miss Gosse and Miss Locke can bike it every day, I'm sure you can.'

A few minutes before eight I turned off the alarm on my clock which I had set to make sure I shouldn't be late down for my Bovril, and sat on the edge of the bed waiting and watching for the long hand to reach the twelve. Though it was still light out of doors, my room was already dark, and I was glad that I had completed my unpacking without having to cope with lighting the gas mantle; something I knew I would have to get used to, but not just yet, whilst I was hungry and strange and new. Bovril was supposed to give you strength, so the advertistments said. I hoped it would give me courage to conquer the alien force hanging from the ceiling.

I had hung up my clothes behind the curtain, and put away everything else in the chest of drawers, including Alfred's pound note which I tucked in among my handkerchiefs inside the sachet embroidered with my initials which I had made at Eldon House, the private school where you learned to be a little lady but did not, unfortunately, get an education, which was why I wasn't there any longer. The empty suitcase waited by the door to be returned downstairs. As for the books, I dragged the box under the bed free of the dip in the mattress, and, reaching in at random, brought out the dozen which came out easiest. It would be quite exciting, changing over, say, every other week: greeting old favourites after an interval, discovering afresh the pleasure of reading them.

The ones I was able to arrange on the shelf over my bed were something of a commentary on my life up to that point; and, for a moment, I wondered nervously whether it was wise to leave them out on show for anyone who came by to see. Was it even possible that Mrs Crail, having been instrumental in bringing me to Chandos House, would make a formal inspection of my quarters? Then I thought, momentarily brave in my new persona:
Let her come! See if I care!

The truth was that my family – or, at any rate, my father and my brother Alfred – had passed on to me an obsessive and indiscriminate passion for the printed word, which was such a passport to treasure that (whilst they might unwillingly concede that some books were worthier than others) they could not find it in their hearts to condemn anything that came in printed form as being entirely without merit. Having learned to read well before I went to school, and having from the first been given the freedom of the St Giles bookshelves, I read
The Old Curiosity Shop, The Sheikh
, and
Mrs Strang's Annual for Girls
with equal respect and enjoyment. I thought most of Kipling quite as good as Ethel M. Dell and both very nearly the equal of
The Naughtiest Girl in the School
. The very thought of all the books in the world still waiting to be read was dizzying. I realized that I didn't have a moment to waste if I was to get through them all before it was time for me to die.

In my Chandos House bedroom, waiting for the clock hand to move – perhaps because I was now living with schoolmistresses, or perhaps because I was hungry – my resolution wavered. I sensed that, so far as literature was concerned at least, the time of joyous anarchy was past. Unless, perhaps, whilst I had been ill, I had been growing up without knowing it, and knew already, without being told, that Ethel M. Dell was
not
as good as Kipling, whatever another part of me might think. Either losing my nerve, or just to be on the safe side, I rearranged my meagre shelf: took down
The Way of an Eagle, The Sheikh
, and the small bundle of
Peg's Papers
which I had rescued from Maud; shoved them back in the box out of sight, and replaced them with
Ivanhoe
and
Huckleberry Finn
.

Two minutes before eight I stepped out on to the landing, bringing the empty suitcase with me. A dim light was burning, a gas bracket, turned down low, creating shadows which were not friendly. It seemed to me that there were a great many doors, all of them painted brown, all of them shut, a contrast with St Giles which made me momentarily tearful before I reminded myself to welcome the bad feeling since it balanced out the happiness and made the latter morally OK. I wondered which was Miss Gosse's door and which Miss Locke's. I hoped Mrs Benyon's door was not too close to mine.

Miss Gosse was waiting in the hall, going through the letters on the brass tray to make it look, I think, as if she wasn't waiting at all but was there on private business. She smiled up at me with a touching anxiety as I came down the stairs. I warmed to her because I could tell by her expression that she was doing her best, and I hoped she would warm to me similarly, because so was I. I should have liked to ask her if she would have wanted me for a lodger even if Mrs Crail had not told her she had to have me, like it or not, but I was afraid the chances were that as an honest woman not used to lying, she would reply ‘No'. After all, she and Miss Locke had each other for company. They had to put up with children all day long at school, and it stood to reason they wouldn't have wanted one at home as well, outside working hours. It was different for Mrs Curwen who had a child to look after anyway, so one more wouldn't have made all that much difference. Miss Gosse and Miss Locke would almost certainly have been better pleased with a dog – a King Charles spaniel, perhaps, to match Miss Gosse's bright bulging eyes and her puggy little features.