Getting On: Chapter 1

GETTING ON
1
How do you document an obsession? Verity kept notebooks. There was a notebook resting on the purple bedspread in front of her, six inches by four inches, a blue cover with a dull design in black and white with brand names, lined paper, no margin. It wasn’t her favourite kind. There were boxes full under the bed. The ones she liked best had shiny covers and unlined paper though she never managed to keep her writing straight without lines.
Verity pressed the balls of her palms into her eye sockets, lay back on the bed and sighed up at the ceiling. She heard the gurgle of the central heating, switched on especially for the guests. She imagined herself making a bonfire after this visit, a bonfire of all the sad notes and facts she had written over the years, in all the notebooks and scrap pads and reams of loose-leaf paper. All she had ever found out was facts, dates, even dates of birth, but not what she really wanted to know. A draught blew through a gap in the window frame and fluttered a page, it was blank except for the heading ‘The Last Chapter’ written in Verity’s small round script and underlined three times. If this was the last chapter where was the beginning?
Verity wasn’t writing, she was thinking, sensing an end to all her hunting. But if this was going to be the end, what was the beginning? In the bottom of one of the boxes there was one note book different from all the others. It was school exercise book, with a grey-green cover; the first page is dated September 1970.

Verity had sat on the iron bedstead, painted a kindly white and looked out of the window across the back lawn. The memory is sketchy, not worn away by time but untouched, unused, undisturbed; too raw. Looking back she sees not snapshots but images made up of holes like lace.
She sits on the white metal bedstead looking out over the back lawn. She can remember nothing of that first journey to school. Had the family car (it would have been the Vauxhall Victor) driven up, curving around oak tree and through the front gates? Had it deposited her with her trunk outside the pillared porch and as it had driven away, had familiar hands waved from the windows? Had someone walked her through the front doors, never to be used again because they are strictly reserved for staff, and delivered her to the kindly housemistress? Had she caught the school train at Waterloo and, silent in the corner of the carriage, cautiously eyed the other children in their pale grey shirts?
“Have you been to tea yet? “ It was maternal voice. “Come along, I’ll show you to the dining room. “
She obeys instantly to avoid further kindnesses. Victoria plums ripen in September. Hanging on the tree they show a beautiful fleeting cloudy bloom, ghost fruit. There are three on her plate at that first school tea, plums of an indescribable colour, part yellow, part red merging to make orange, parts a succulent purple brown and a strip of clear, smooth, spring green covering an unripe patch that stuck tenaciously to the stone. Biting into a plum, juice that bursts in your mouth, is a search for the perfect balance of sweet and sour, fruit after fruit; will this next one be perfection in a plum? She bites into the fruit while looking down at her plate, familiar fruit in a strange dining room. Teeth slicing into wet flesh, she has met pseudomonas mors-prunarus, the bacterial canker of plums; tiny beads of amber coloured gum, gritty, lying in wait on the plum stone for teeth and tongue. She can not put a name or a face to the people that left her at school but she remembers the betraying grains in the softness of the flesh of that plum.
The very first lesson with Miss Canning, Verity sits dazed with homesickness, staring at a few chalk lines on the blackboard. A family tree, Miss Canning explained, wiping her hands down the sides of a mauve tweed skirt and seizing a stack, she handed out the brand new exercise books slapping each one onto the desks.
“You can draw your own family tree, now,” she says,” Then we can all get to know each other better.”
Verity opens the notebook at the terrifying, blank first sheet, her front teeth grip her lower lip and she squeezes her pencil between her thumb and forefinger. A new school, the first page in an exercise book, she wants this to be a beautiful family tree and she longs for a drawing with no smudgy rubbings out. Verity finishes and a prickle of pleasure begins to edge away her homesickness, she has made no mistakes.
She sneaks a look at her neighbour’s chart. So far Verity has only exchanged names with the girl before the start of the lesson. This is Jenny. Jenny is a day girl; she is tall with mousy plaits and malice in her smile. There are a lot of names on her chart, Jenny has several brothers and sisters and four grandparents. Verity looks back at her own chart. She doesn’t know the name of her other grandfather, her father’s father, so she has left a blank space but now she decides to write in the word grandfather and leave it at that, but as she picks up her pencil again Jenny grabs the book and points at the space, her fingernails have been chewed so her finger ends look bare and raw.
“You’ve only got one grandfather. Where’s the other one?”
“He died.”
Jenny snorts, “Who told you that?”
“My mum.”
Jenny snorts, “Do you know what it really means?”
“That he’s dead?” Verity tries to snatch back her book Jenny keeps it out of reach.
“That’s what they would say, stupid! It means your Dad’s a bastard.” Jenny slaps the exercise book on Verity’s hands. There is a crease in the front page.
Bastard, bastard, bastard, Verity finds the word echoing in her head as they line up for playtime. She is careful to make sure that she is not near Jenny in the queue but watches her whispering to another girl and looks away as their four eyes flick in her direction.
It was a long time before Verity was completely sure she knew what a bastard was, but the word follows her whether she knows the meaning or not, hissed as she waits in the lunch queue, written on notes passed to her in geography, chalked on the underside of her desk lid.
She can’t ask her mother. She can’t say that word out loud to her mother. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies, the silence about her grandfather was a warning. Verity had not needed to ask about her mother’s family. Her mother has told her all about her family without being asked. Verity knew that her other grandparents, if they had been alive, would have been the knitting, baking, gardening types of grandparents. Verity’s Mum has said that her childhood home was cosy, that she was a spoiled, only child orphaned suddenly and tragically and sent to live with her aunt. Only unlike the stories, Aunt Hilary was not a wicked stepparent, just a helpful aunt and that it was such a pity that they lost touch after the war. It happened a lot.
Verity hadn’t asked her father. She often looked at him, thinking the question, wanting him to read the thought and knowing that he wouldn’t. Why hadn’t she asked her father? Because she just couldn’t, she just knew she wasn’t to ask, she just knew those things the way that she knew when was a good moment to ask for another biscuit. It was in the webbing between her and her father and her mother that made them into a family.
Bastard, bastard, bastard, Verity needs to know. Auntie Irene’s telephone number is in her mother’s address book.
“What was my grandfather like?”
“I barely knew him. I was only a tiny girl when he passed on.” Irene had said and then added, “And your grandmother didn’t like to talk about it.”
“But…”
“So that’s what all that family history stuff is about. Well you’ll just have to ask your Dad, wont you? You can’t spend your whole life being obsessed.”
“What do you mean obsessed?” Verity tried on the word and found it uncomfortable but like clothes that are too tight, she found herself stuck, her life in notebooks and tea and questions. Her questions circled the surviving relatives but their answers give her nothing to perch on. She can’t give up asking.
How do you document an obsession? Obsession was counted in hours practising her mother’s signature and in false permission slips too. Verity will be visiting her Aunt Irene this Saturday signed Pamela Martin; Verity will be visiting her Great Uncle Frank this Saturday signed Pamela Martin. The first time and the second time Verity had felt terrified she would be found out and even by the third time there was a little thrill of fright left. But from then on it was easy. Nobody seemed to wonder that a twelve-year-old girl should want to visit her relatives. Maybe if she had started now at sixteen with her long dark hair centre-parted, jeans, t-shirts with floppy bell sleeves, someone would have asked a question; teenagers were thought unwilling to visit anyone older than eighteen. But familial devotion was accepted without a blink at twelve, so Verity had a mission most Sundays. Even now, at home in her own bedroom, she could smell the mildewed damp and face powder of Irene’s flat; see Irene’s face frowning at her.
There are people who collect stamps or coins or worship a lead guitarist all their teenage years and longer; Verity counted cups of tea. Tea a little too milky and a little too cold in white glass cups balanced on saucers in Sunnyside Residential home, crammed into the office with Frank and his stories of the old days. Cups of strong tea with Irene in Woolworth’s cups and saucers patterned with roses like pink cabbages, the liquid a deep brown like fake suntan. And with the tea came the smells. Sunnyside smelled fusty, of cold school dinners and mildew and pee. Irene’s flat smelled of make up and air freshener.
“Like a dog at a bone,” Irene had said, “You don’t give up do you? I’ll talk to Frank; maybe he’ll see you. Now go home, I’ve had a long day and I want to put my feet up.”
After a week or two, Verity had a telephone call from Irene.
“Frank’ll see you. It’s Sunnyside Residential Home. You want to get off at Ongar. Stop after mine, same line. It’s easy to find. Just turn left out of the tube and you’ll see it, way up on the right. Think you can find it?”
“Yeah, yeah, easy. Oh God! Thank-you!”
“And don’t keep saying ‘Oh God.’ He’s religious.”
The woman in reception tells Verity to look out for a light blue jumper and she picks him out easily, seated in one of many high-backed green chairs in the lounge of the old people’s home. Her nose is full of the smell of pee and school dinners. People bent, shrunk and twisted by age surround her. She smiles down at Frank.
“Great Uncle Frank? It’s Verity.” She can hear her voice sounding high and kindly, like her mother’s when she speaks to their ancient neighbour.
Frank springs from his chair; he is only a little taller than Verity.
“Verity, God bless you. Yes, there is something of your father about you. I would have recognised you anywhere. I must just say goodbye to my friends.”
Puzzlement seeps onto Verity’s face and Frank smiles at it.
“Did you think I lived here? No, I come to visit my friends here on Saturdays, the ones who can’t get to our church. There’s an office we can go sit. You’d like a cup of tea?”
“What was my grandfather like?”
“I hardly knew him. I didn’t come to live with your grandmother and Irene and your Dad until after.” Frank had said.
After what? Verity wanted to open her mouth and ask but silence is too deep for her to dare to jump.
There was the diary; Auntie Irene had given it to her. They were sitting in the tiny living room of Irene’s stuffy flat, sofa and chairs in dark red scratchy stuff, tea in mugs but bone china ones with flowers, tea from a tea pot. It was half-past five on Saturday afternoon and Irene kept glancing up at the clock. She put down her tea, delved down the side of her armchair and pulled out a sheaf of paper stapled in one corner.
“Perhaps that will end all your questions. Your grandmother wrote it, it’s not a proper diary, she didn’t write it at the time, she wrote it when she retired and she called it her memoir – that was her joke. That’s not the original – there’s a few copies. I typed it for her.”
Verity flicked through the pages eagerly,
“No, go and catch that train, I’ve things to do. Can’t be talking to you all evening.”
By now she had read it so many times she knew it off by heart. She tipped forward onto her belly and reached under the bed, feeling in one of the cartons with her eyes closed. She pulled out a dozen sheets of foolscap, stapled at the corner, paper yellowed and a suggestion of a cup mark on the blank back sheet. She didn’t need to read it, she had read it so many times that she ran it in her head like a her own private telly programme. Back then she had read the sheets from beginning to end without pause but, like that over-sweet orange drink you buy in the cinema that leaves you thirstier, she had been disappointed. The diary ended when her grandmother, Mary, left school and went to work.
With her eyes still closed and lying on her back, Verity watched Mary as a girl of about twelve; about the age that Verity had been when she had first read the diaries. Mary speaks directly to camera, as if she is introducing a programme. You can just see her head and shoulders; she is wearing a dark navy, long-sleeved blouse with a high, frilled neck and a white pinafore over it. Verity knows this is wrong, but there is no description of clothes in the diary, and this image has come from the Railway Children so it is the right period but not poor enough and altogether too detergent clean. But now it is there, Verity can’t get rid of it.
Mary speaks and in Verity’s minds-eye her mouth moves a little ahead of the sound,
“I, Mary Barkham, was born into a working class family in London’s East End. My father was a sawyer. I was the eldest of seven children and next came my brother Frank. There had been a girl born between Frank and me but she died before she was three months old. There was a four year gap after Frank and then another five came all one after another.
It was a hard life, with so many mouths to feed and from an early age I had to work hard to help my mother try to make ends meet. I loved school and longed for an education and a way to make a respectable life for myself. My father however thought nothing of reading and writing and looked forward to the day that we would be out in the world helping to support the family.
Verity watches Mary lower her head slightly, pause and then look up again and continue, “I would not have minded so sorely if our stretched circumstances were only due to short work and mean wages. But this was not the case. Though he was sometimes out of work through no fault of his own, more often he would drink our sustenance away in beer, he was known to hand over his entire wages to a landlord in the course of one evening in the pub.
Mary stood, in Verity’s vision, holding up a clapperboard chalked with words and numbers spelling August 1913.
Freda Naismith and I took a holiday job at the golf ball factory, they needed extra hands in the season and we always needed the money. One afternoon I walked out through the factory gates into the sunshine, arm in arm with Freda.
“Let’s walk back through the market.” Freda suggested.
“I don’t suppose you will want to stop at the Baker’s, will you? Nothing to do with a certain someone who might be serving?”
“Mary!” Freda blushed.
“Oh look out. It’s Frank. I must be wanted at home. It’s Mum. It must be her time. I’ll see you tomorrow.” I pushed my way through the knot of girls at the gates to where my brother stood with several of the tiny ones clinging to his legs.
“Mary, we had to fetch the nurse for Mum. She’s at our house but there is nothing to pay with. We went to the mill but Dad’s gone to the Butcher’s Arms. “
“Well fetch him home then.” I was angry with my brother, “What are you waiting here for. If you can’t fetch him, fetch the money before he drinks it all.” I looked at Frank whose face wore his usual hopeful smile.
“We went there. It’s next door to the mill. “
”I know where it is. I’ve been often enough. You mean he wouldn’t come home with you. What about the money?”
Frank looked down at the cobblestones.
“I’ll have to go myself then. Come on both of you.”
The pub was packed with mill hands, all powdered with wood-dust. I stood in the doorway leaving Frank behind in the doorway. I had to pluck up my courage to walk across that crowded bar, it was not thought respectable for a young girl to be in a public house. Once I had found him I made my way around the room so that I was between father and the back door.
“Dad I need the guinea for the nurse and something for the tea tonight. “I spoke up loudly as I reached my father. He scowled at me then looked over his shoulder at the front door where the boys stood looking down at their feet.
“Can’t a hard working man have a drink in peace without being chased to hell and back. “He turned back to his beer.
“Dad, I need a guinea for the nurse.” I raised my voice. The landlord moved along the bar to keep an eye on the situation.
“Dad, the guinea. “
“You been paid haven’t you? What’s wrong with your guinea? ”
“My wages are tomorrow Dad, you know that. I pay my way but this you have to find yourself.”
My Dad looked down into his glass and then finding the landlord looking at him across the bar he called for another drink.
“Pay the young lady and let her get home. I want no trouble in here. “
“What, can’t a man keep order in his own family? Hounded by my own children.” He sniffed loudly and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. The landlord reached out a huge hairy hand and took the pint glass with an inch of beer in it still and began to walk away.
“Hey!”
The landlord shook his head and busied himself tapping barrels under the counter. My father sighed and turned to his workmates for moral support but they had all moved off and wouldn’t look his way.
“Mary, take this and get home to your mother. And don’t come back in here again. ”
“I’d gladly not come if you didn’t give me reason to. Can I tell mother when you’ll be home? You don’t want her fretting after you just today, do you?”
“When I’m ready, I’ll be home. “
I pushed my brother out of the doorway and onto the pavement with all the little ones following under our feet.
“Hurry and let’s get home. I’m parched for a cup of tea.”
Frank tumbled into the wall and squealed. “What did you have to shove me for? What have I done? “
“Not much. And that’s why I shoved you. Why couldn’t you get the money? Why is it always me?”
“You’re the eldest.”
“Only by one and a half years. You mean when you are thirteen, you’ll stand up to him? ”
A stifled snorting from Frank interrupted the beginning of a quarrel.
“What’s the matter with you now? Blubbing are you?”
“It’s mother. What if she dies?”
“Why should she die with this one and not with the others?”
Frank stared at his older sister but didn’t say anything.
“She’s not ill. She is having a baby. Didn’t you know? ”
Frank shook his head but looked relieved. His face was burning red and he stared down at his shoes.
“You don’t know anything do you? “
“No.”
“But I told you to ask…”
“I tried but...”
“Frank, you’d better find out you know, and I’m not telling you. It’s not respectable for a young lady. But you should know or you’ll end up in trouble like that girl at my school.” I was teasing but Frank ran away down the street and into the house.
The chalkboard spelt out June 1914.
I was crossing the school hall; bother with a safety pin had made me late getting out of school, Miss Tremaine caught up with me.
“Mary, have you spoken to you parents about grammar school yet? The letter will need an answer before school is out.”
I spoke up. Miss Tremaine did not like mumbling, “Yes Miss. I’ll speak to them again this evening.”
“Mary,” Miss Tremaine said softly,
I turned back hoping not to have to elaborate on that fib. “Be sure to be prompt on Monday you will have the Infants for Miss Jarvis for the first hour of school. “
“Yes Miss.” I hurried out of school and caught up with Freda. “She asked me again Freda. I am going to have to tell her next week. “
“Can’t you ask again, Mary? Maybe if he isn’t, isn’t…you know.”
“Drunk. In drink or out, I don’t think he will change his mind. “
In the final scene Mary, still in her pinafore, holds up a clapper board chalked with the date July 1914.
It was my last day at school today and I cried. I will be back at my job at the golf ball factory on Monday.
Verity opened her eyes; the moral of this story was that being sent to school was for her own good. That part was easy.
She pressed the padded flesh of her palms into her eye sockets, lay back on the bed and sighed up at the ceiling. It was three days before Christmas. She tried to think about that but instead she imagined herself making a bonfire after this visit, a bonfire of all the sad notes and facts she had written over the years, in all the notebooks and scrap pads and reams of loose-leaf paper. All she had ever found out were facts, dates, even dates of birth, but not what she really wanted to know. A draft blew through a gap in the window frame and fluttered a blank page. She sat up and arranged herself cross-legged on the bed. She placed the notebook open in front of her and placed a pencil along the central crease. This was her last notebook; it was going to be the last in a long line stretching way back to when she was eleven. She picked up her pencil and underlined the words ‘The Last Chapter’ three times.
The telephone had rung during dinner the night before and her mother had returned from taking the call to report,
“Frank is coming along with Auntie Irene tomorrow, Verity. He’s your Great Uncle. Won’t that be nice?”
Her father had smiled thinly and made no comment.