Handmade Part Five

PART FIVE

The Christmas After Normandy

It's September when I write to Alma, following the holiday in Normandy which ended with her not speaking to me. I choose a card and write a short message. I say I know I wasn’t at my best or most patient on holiday or in the aftermath and that I’m sorry. I add that I'm looking forward to coming to Somerset and to us all being together at Christmas. Alma replies in a conciliatory, though not apologetic tone. As always, I am the apologist, but I'm used to this and I'm content with her reply. I've spent a lifetime smoothing over the cracks in our relationship, why would I stop now? I breathe out. I'm relieved. It feels to me as if the rift between us has been healed.

After the children were born, we spent every Christmas and most summer holidays with Alma and Kit. They were good grandparents, and the children have many happy memories of being with them, and of us all being together including M and his partner who the children thought much cooler than J and me. I want to honour these happy times. I do not want to diminish or deny them, but the Christmas after Normandy was not one of them. In fact, the Christmas after Normandy was the last we would all spend together as a family.

Preparing for Christmas that year, I considered the events of the summer to be behind us. Forgotten. I assumed that everything would be back to normal. We travelled down as usual, had a happy Christmas Day and all was well until the day after Boxing Day. The evening meal was over and Alma and I were alone in the kitchen. She was washing the dishes and I was drying. We were making plans to go to the shops early the next morning before I set off back home. It was something we did: visit the shops together before I left. The custom had grown from wanting to soften the departure, for her sake. A last coffee together, a last hour with the children.

Alma had given me a blouse from Marks & Spencer for Christmas but it was too big. I was conscious that she'd bought a lot of gifts for the whole family but had received fewer in return and I felt bad about it.

'Why don't we take that blouse back Mum and get something for you instead?' I said. 'You bought so many presents for everyone you should have something else, like those shoes you wanted,' I suggested.

Alma froze.

She turned to face me, 'How dare you reject my present,' she said.

Unwittingly, with only good intentions, I'd set off another bomb every bit as explosive as that in the Normandy kitchen.

'I wasn't, I just thought…' I protested.

But the damage was done, she pushed past me out into the hall and didn't speak to me for the rest of the evening.

The following morning, I'd packed our cases and was getting the children ready to go out before setting off on the journey home when Alma appeared.

'Are you coming down to the shops Mum?' I asked, hoping to make light of last night's upset.

'Why would I want to go anywhere with you?' Alma replied. There was venom in her voice. Hate, even.

I felt the tears prick at my eyes. I bent down to help the children do up their shoes.

J who had witnessed the exchange said, 'Wait for me. I’ll come with you. '

As we leave the house, I'm holding back the tears hoping the children won't realise what's happened. I have no heart to shop and no purpose in it. After half an hour or so, we make our way back to the flat. As we arrive M and his partner, and Alma and Kit are about to get into Kit's car. Five minutes later and they would have been gone. I've no idea where they were going or how Alma persuaded them to leave. But I've no doubt she intended to punish me by ensuring we would arrive back to an empty house to collect our suitcases and set out on the long journey home without any of the usual warm goodbyes.

The children are confused. The adults are confused. We have no idea what's going on, but Kit and M close the car doors, and we all go back inside. J collects our cases and packs the car. I thank Alma for Christmas, but she doesn’t reply. Kit's confusion has turned to anger. I see it in the way he looks at Alma, but he stays silent. We say our goodbyes, hug each other, though not Alma and I, and we leave for home. There is something about this latest rejection that feels preternaturally cruel. I leave in tears. I have no idea what will happen next. I do not know then that this is the last time I will see Alma until I make the pilgrimage south to her hospital bed.

The Sea

Moving back to Burnham and into the bungalow, means returning to the sea. I will miss the estuary and its fields which have become a different kind of playground: a world of secret places where I lie low, cloaked in green hidden from Alma’s intrusive gaze. Now that I'm fourteen I'm beginning to construct a new life for myself beyond her reach. A typical teenage life which revolves around meeting up with others my age, especially with boys.

I'm still doing everything I can to stay in Alma's good books. This means I lie a lot about where I've been and what I've been up to. I worry about lying so much. I internalise the bad feelings, the unworthiness, the guilt. In hindsight, with the benefit of the knowledge I've now gained, I understand that I was simply operating to survive. I had only myself to be sure of and depend on and I needed to do everything I could to protect myself from Alma's rage. I was not a bad person.

If you recognise yourself here; if like me you were the daughter or son of a narcissistic parent, know this: whatever you did, you were just trying to survive.

In Burnham I have the mirror of the sea. My dreams and hopes are a summer swell lapping at the sea wall, my fears roll in on the black tide of the night. There is the long beach to walk on, and a mile or so down-beach are Berrow Sands and the dunes, now a site of Special Scientific Interest, rich in flora and bird life and home to the rare lizard orchid. The dunes offer cover. It's not the orchids or the blackcaps I remember but the dune slacks that form between the high ridges. Here is where I lie down in secret hollows with my new-found love.

Burnham is much livelier than Highbridge, especially in the summer season when holiday makers and day trippers arrive. The seafront is a promenade with an orchestra of lifeguards, boats, swimmers, sandcastle builders, sandcastle building competitions, swing boats, puppet shows, candy floss and slot machines. L and I are still best friends. We meet in Burnham now. We work together at the Sea-Spray café during our school holidays. We go dancing at the Winter Gardens in Weston- Super-Mare once a month to soul music bands.

I don't walk by the sea as often as I would like to. Alma has rules about how and when I'm allowed out. She doesn't care for sand, it gets in everything. Why would I want to walk along the shore, take off my shoes and socks and feel the sand between my toes, sieve its diamonds and peppercorns through my fingers, watch the weathered rock and the bones of sea creatures as they fall? Why indeed? In Alma's world walking on the beach is no excuse for leaving the house, especially on a school night.

But the sea is ever present even when far off. It's scent lives in the air. It is a constant, offering its unfailing comfort wave upon wave, returning me to the timeless space of the estuary. A canvas whose form, mood, colour, and rhythms, I come to know in all seasons. In summer I walk the strand of an incoming, sunlit tide. In winter I track its frozen edge.

The Duffle Coat

I am allowed out twice a week at the most. Tuesday evening and once at the weekend. I need to study, and school comes first. I make tea most evenings as M and I are the first ones in. Alma draws up a household rota for chores. On Thursday evenings I clean the bedrooms: Kit and Alma's which is downstairs, and mine and M's rooms in the eaves of the bungalow. On Sundays I do all the household ironing which includes the school shirts, Kit's work shirts, and Alma's overalls.

It's around six o'clock on a school night when the argument with Alma starts up. I don't remember what we were arguing about, but it escalates quickly. I sense it's getting out of hand and will come to no good. I see the signal in her darkening eyes. I need to get away. I need to get out of the house. Even though it is not on the schedule and therefore not allowed, I move away from her and say, 'I'm going out. I'm going out for a walk.'

I leave the kitchen for the hall where I lift my duffel coat off the end of the banister. But Alma has followed me and is pulling me back. She grabs my coat with one hand and the collar of my school blouse with the other. She shouts that I'm not to go out. She won't have it. How dare I? She grabs me round the neck.

Kit appears in the hall. 'For God's sake Alma, leave the girl alone,' he says. This rarer than rare intervention stops Alma in her tracks. It stops me in my tracks too. Alma lets go. I seize the opportunity and make my escape. Outside, I stand behind the high privet hedge that shields the bungalow from the back lane until the shaking stops, until I get my breath back. Then I make my way through the winter streets to the sea front, knowing that once I reach the sea everything will be calmer. I will feel better

Hugo Clare says, 'In turmoil we are drawn to water...The sea has a power to draw out and rearrange our anxieties in simpler patterns.'

I don't remember any other occasion on which Kit took mine or M's side against Alma. In later years M would say of Kit, 'He sacrificed us on her altar.' 'He did nothing to protect us.'

M was right.

For a long time, I saw Kit as Alma's victim and to some extent he was, but as an adult he should have resisted. Sad though I am to say it, because he was the parent who showed love and affection and kindness, Kit played his own part in the narcissistic dance that was our life with Alma. Privately he acknowledged her unreasonable behaviour, but he seemed afraid or unable to stand up to her. He would excuse and bargain: Don't upset your mother, You know what she's like, Just be good, Your mother is/was a very difficult woman. Your mother's not well, were oft repeated phrases. His was the mantra of comply and don't rock the boat. Kit offered us no safety, no shield. On the contrary he enabled her and I've come to understand that the narcissistic mother and the enabling father go hand in hand.

The Narcissist 2

Here are thirty things a narcissistic parent is likely to be or do. I chose them from the books and papers I read on the subject. I chose those with echoes of my own story but to be honest there were few in any list I read that I didn't recognise.

Among other things a narcissist will:

Tell you how much they have sacrificed for you.

Expect you to wait on them.

Focus on appearance.

Deny your privacy, go through your things, read your phone messages, diary.

Need to be the centre of attention and if there is no opportunity or if you are the centre of attention, she will try to prevent it, or not come, or undermine in someway, steal the spotlight or slip in a critical comment

React to criticism or a lack of control with rage. She will threaten and may become violent.

Send you to Coventry.

Demand your attention regardless of your needs, create dramas in which she is the focus.

Say she loves you and will do anything for you.

Be envious of you.

Feed off your tragedies. Ruin or dismiss your successes and celebrations.

Expect you to meet her emotional needs.

Have no boundaries and share inappropriately.

Be charming to others.

Be overly sexual, flirt with your boyfriend.

See herself as victim.

Not allow you to be your authentic self, never allow you to be bad or challenging.

Divide and conquer.

Look for attention through illness.

Be odd about gifts or presents.

Be obsessed with how she looks.

Have little sense of humour.

Avoid introspection.

Take everything personally.

Make it all about her. Make you feel selfish and guilty.

You may recognise some already from my story. Others perhaps are still to come.

Encyclopaedias and the Kama Sutra

It was not much bigger than a hardback, blockbuster novel. Fat and red and fraying at the edges, its boards were creased. The binding was coming unstuck, exposing brown deposits of dried glue and it was in danger of disintegrating. Because of this, whenever I consulted it, I turned its fragile, yellowing pages with the utmost care. It was the only reference book we possessed: The Pears, as in soap, Encyclopaedia. In truth more like a dictionary. If you looked something up, you were lucky to find more than a single paragraph on the subject. When it came to doing my homework it was all I had at my disposal and was wholly insufficient. To be fair to Alma, she was the one to acknowledge the problem and to set about finding a solution. Encyclopaedias were purchased and the weekly Look and Learn magazine.

The Pears Encyclopaedia was one of only two books Alma and Kit owned, the other being a paperback copy of the Kama Sutra which lived in Kit's bedside cabinet drawer and which I read surreptitiously when I was supposed to be hoovering the bedrooms. My trick was to switch the Hoover on, sit on the bed moving the tube and nozzle over the carpet with one hand so that it sounded as if I was busy, while opening the Kama Sutra with the other. Just as with the Pears Encyclopaedia I exercised the greatest care when turning the pages, anxious not to leave a mark or crease that might be noticed. I knew instinctively it was not a book for a fourteen-year-old, but I loved it. I loved its erotic content for sure, but I also loved the exotic world and the poetic beauty of its language.

I was unaware then that I was reading it in Burton's translation. I've learned since that it was his choice to use words like lingam and yoni from Sanskrit to make it more palatable to the British public. I savoured these words, as I did the illustrations. I devoured the wide-ranging content like the list of the Arts to be Studied Together with the Kama Sutrawhich included: arranging flowers, dancing, magic, sorcery, making parrots and making lemonade. I was learning about other cultures, about language and life and not just about sex. It was sensual and exciting and a world away from Alma's pronouncements on love and sex about which, unsurprisingly, Alma had her own firmly entrenched ideas.

Alma didn't believe in love. She refused to countenance anything with a whiff of romance to it and would switch off any romantic dramas or films that came on the television. To her it was all dangerous, sloppy, rubbish. There was no such thing as love. There was only sex. According to Alma, sex made the world go round. It was a favourite saying of hers.

I am fifteen.

'Don’t think anyone will ever love you,' Alma tells me repeatedly. 'Men only want one thing. Sex.' By this time, I know the identity of Alma's former lover. When Alma told me I was twelve. It came as no surprise. I already knew, though I don't know how. Perhaps I'd seen them together. Perhaps I'd sensed their attraction. He was after all a family friend who was around a lot.

Alma likes to talk about this lover and other men she knows. She likes to talk about sex and what men tell her they'd like to do to her. She describes to me in detail Kit’s inadequacies as a lover One of the problems according to Alma is her desirability. He cannot control himself around her. She recounts Kit's erotic dreams which feature her. For my part, I have no choice but to listen. Sadly, years later when I’ve left home, and Kit and Alma are in the process of separating, Kit will also reveal intimate aspects of their sex life to me.

It is as if they forgot who I was, as if neither ever saw the real me. As if I am not their child.

When in adulthood I came to work with women in prison who had been sexually abused, I puzzled for a long time about why I felt such a bond with them. I knew I hadn't been sexually abused but in time I came to see how I'd been used as a surrogate partner by both my parents and that this in itself was a form of abuse. Both looked to me for the emotional support that would more appropriately be provided by a spouse or another adult. Both shared inappropriate details of their sex life with me. In the literature on narcissistic parents this is referred to as emotional incest.

In Alma's world I am doomed. I cannot win. No one is ever going to love me. So, what about sex? Before long Alma will complete her edicts on these matters by telling me, 'It's funny, you know, but I can't ever imagine you being sexy.'

Despite it all, perhaps because of it, I wanted to believe in love. But Alma's messaging somehow found its way into my thinking and perhaps one of the saddest things I’ve had to face in recalling my early life with Alma is how unloved I felt and how much that feeling lingered. Even now, it’s not easy for me to think of myself as loved. Or worthy of love. I have to be convinced of it. My assumption has always been that others are more lovable, and more desirable than me. Though having my children and experiencing their love, wore this belief down, it's really only now, as I stand back, away from the day to day demands and pre-occupations of childcare, that my granddaughters with the sheer authenticity and innocence of little children, have crashed through the barriers of a lifetime of doubt, and convinced me that I am loved.

2024

December, nothing moves in the garden. The pear with its symmetrical, upright branches, stands bare like a candelabra. J puts lights up in the privet hedge and drapes them through the honeysuckle. We celebrate the solstice, the twins' birthday, and gather for Christmas.

The day after Boxing Day, the family are all together here in the house. I go out for the morning with my daughter, leaving the men behind. When we get home, I walk through the hall and into the kitchen. I stand in the open doorway where I can see my three granddaughters sitting at the dining table in their highchairs. Before I even think about putting down my bag or taking off my coat, in the instant they see me, a cry goes up, of 'Nana.' It's loud and in unison and I can't recall a time when I was ever greeted so enthusiastically or allowed myself to feel such unconditional approval and love. A moment which may seem small in the great scheme of things is for me the best Christmas gift I could have.

A Pale Blue A-Line Shift

Alma could make a dress in an afternoon, often cut from an old dress or leftover fabric. But the fabric of the pale blue dress was chosen by me, a soft crêpe made up as an A-line shift. I meet my first real love N, wearing this dress at the Saturday evening dance, where the Mods gather in their mohair suits and the women in their short skirts and cropped hair. We fall in love as only teenagers can. We stay together until I leave home. He is everything my first boyfriend was not. He is kind and generous and loving. True to form, Alma disapproves though in time she is forced to accept him.

The A-line shift is just one of many dresses and items of clothing Alma makes or buys me when we go out shopping together. Boutiques are springing up locally and we regularly frequent the new Broadmead Centre in Bristol. Outings to shop for clothes or fabric are the best of it. Alma is at her happiest shopping in the new sixties world of fashion: Mary Quant, black and white, geometric patterns, trouser suits, hot pants, knee high boots and mini skirts.

My first trouser suit made by Alma was in maroon corduroy. It was double-breasted with a three-quarter length jacket that I wore for years afterwards. Later she made me another trouser suit in emerald-green wool, chosen by her, again double-breasted but this time with a stand-up collar. I liked the style. I hated the colour and the thick, prickliness of the wool that scratched my legs. I felt like a traffic light wearing it, ridiculously self-conscious but I daren't say so. Alma had made it, and as such it had to be appreciated and worn. There could be no dissent. Alma had her own ideas about how I should look and there were always aspects of my appearance that failed to satisfy. I was never enough.

'You don't make enough of yourself,' she would say to me regularly in the years to come.

About this time, Alma gets a new job away from the factory in a record shop in the High Street in Burnham. It's a job she enjoys and is good at. She keeps up with the latest trends in music and pop. She's in touch with the town's youth. It's a job made for Alma, one that plays to her strengths.

Silence

In what I think of as the bungalow years, Alma hones a new weapon in her arsenal of control and humiliation. The weapon of silence. There are days on end when she doesn't speak to me, sending me to Coventry as the saying goes. Coventry being the city reduced to a broken place of fragments and ruin by the bombing in the Second World War.

Alma's silence is made of steel: a truck moving through the night rattling the windows and doors of the house with its weight. It's the scraping of butter on her Ryvita, the press of her pen on paper, the scream of gulls on an incoming tide. Alma’s silence is an ironing basket piled high with clothes, a peach and a punnet of strawberries bought in appeasement, a poem written for her.

In her novel, 'Coventry,' Rachel Cusk maintains that sending someone to Coventry is in effect proposing the ‘idea of their annihilation.’ When you send someone to Coventry, ‘you are asking how the world would look without them in it.’

I don’t remember the crimes that deserved such punishment. But I remember my longing for it to be over and my desperate attempts to make up for whatever it was I'd done. I fawned. I offered her small gifts. I stood for hours doing all the ironing without complaint. I was as good as I could possibly be. I did everything but beg. The silences Alma imposed were for me as powerful and destructive as any physical punishment.

'Your mother shouldn’t treat you like that,' an aunt once said out of Alma's hearing. She'd called into the bungalow, seen me at the ironing board and realised that Alma wasn’t speaking to me. 'Don’t let her do that,' she said.

I see my aunt now, standing in the kitchen. I hear her voice mingling with the steam from the iron but what am I to do? How to resist? I don't dare protest. It will only make matters worse.

I don't forget my aunt for openly voicing her disapproval of Alma's treatment of me, for being on my side, as I saw it. For being one of the few. I am thankful for the acknowledgment of my reality, recognising what I knew to be true but had trouble believing, that this was no way to treat a daughter, or anyone else for that matter.

‘When your mother pretends you don’t exist it is like you are dead…’ Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo.

I lived in the constant shadow and threat of being sent to Coventry; of experiencing Alma's rejection. It was a kind of soul murder. I go back again and again into those silences, into her disapproval like a dog let in from the cold, tail between its legs. In time it is the weapon Alma will use to break with me completely and I will have no choice but to learn to live in the silence.

The Bra

By now I’ve lost a lot of weight, and I am relatively thin, but my breasts are not much more than small points. Like all teenage girls I agonise over this. I look down on them while I'm in the bath, willing them to grow but they fail to respond.

I'm sitting with my boyfriend N on the green sofa in the front room of the bungalow. We are watching TV. An empty clotheshorse stands by the electric fire. Alma comes in from the kitchen carrying wet washing in a basket. She sifts through the washing, hanging it on the rails of the clotheshorse until she comes across my bra. She holds it. My 32A cup, or was AA cup, bra. She dangles it in front of me.

'I wonder whose this could be? she says looking from me to N. 'It’s so small.'

I am grateful to N that he doesn't smile or laugh or say anything. I am red with embarrassment.

Alma will return to the size of my breasts often. This she says, is the reason I look thinner than her. It's because I'm flat chested. Her breasts are bigger. In Alma's eyes the teenage me is growing into her competition. 'Don't tell people I'm your mother. Tell everyone we're sisters,' she says when we go out together.

I have no desire to compete with Alma. It's too dangerous. My small breasts keep her happy. Small is good. I've learned to make myself small around Alma. But when you make yourself small to make someone else big you lose a true sense of self. You lose confidence. You come to believe in your smallness. You step into the shadows when you could be in the light. You teach others that you don’t matter as much as they do. It becomes a habit. It becomes a lifetime habit not easy to break. A habit of playing down achievement and not competing, of putting yourself down, of not asserting yourself and giving way too easily. Of not, as my son reminds me from time to time, ever taking a compliment.

Girl With a Pearl Earring

...represents a young woman in a dark shallow space, an intimate setting that draws the viewer’s attention exclusively on her... online Britannica

Here’s a heresy. The worst of all. Dare I say it? The Girl with the Pearl Earring is me. You are looking at me Alma, me your daughter. First and foremost, I am young. I am younger than you, and I am not your sister. I turn my head to meet the viewer's gaze, eyes wide, lips parted as if I am about to speak. I think of speaking but hold my tongue. I half smile. I learned long ago to live in the space your silence makes. The days when you refused to speak to me. When you sent me to Coventry, for what I barely remember, perhaps for the thing called, 'answering back.' You do not answer your mother back. Ever. The shame of what I did to ingratiate myself. But The Girl with the Pearl Earring is no longer cowed or shadowed by shame

I am wearing blue. Blue was not your colour. Your colour was red, sometimes black. My blue is a costly ultramarine derived from the semiprecious lapis lazuli. More precious than gold.

My head is covered, sometimes I'm known by other names: Nana, 'Girl with a Turban.' I wear headscarves often, even now.

'Why do you cut your hair,' you plead 'You could make so much more of yourself. Why look so nervous? Why be so small? Why are you such a prude?'

The Girl with the Pearl Earring is modest. Perhaps innocent and maybe not the prude you accuse her of being. You talk a lot about how handsome your son is and how the women flock to him. I am not much interested in flocking men. I have an interior beauty of my own. Look at me. See me why don't you.

January 2025

A heavy snow falls overnight. The bare branches of the philadelphus blossom white. Snow lies five or six inches deep on top of the frozen bird bath. In the field opposite the house the barn owl hunts by day. J and I watch him from the bay window of the bedroom through binoculars. He is creamy white against the snow, black-eyed with tobacco-brown stained feathers.

The following morning the sun is out and the thaw sets in. For the first time since Christmas, I leave the house to meet with a friend. I'm having coffee with D, who is a painter. We're talking about art and books, politics, children, mothers; we have much in common when it comes to mothers. We are talking about creativity. D says that when she paints, she is retrieving the lost parts of herself.

I am much taken with this idea, put so simply and so beautifully. I take it away with me. I think about it. I think about how writing this memoir is the same for me. How in this process I too am retrieving the lost parts of myself; discovering not only who I was and what was lost or given up to Alma, but also who I have become. Together they begin to make a whole.

The Bikini

In the photograph I'm sitting on the steps of a caravan. I'm sixteen and wearing shorts and a brown blouse made by Alma. She made us both one in the same material. I'm on holiday at the seaside in Devon with one of my mother's brothers, my uncle J and my aunt R and their two children who are younger than me. In the photograph I'm smiling. My head is tilted shyly to one side. I look happy.

J and R allow me to go off alone and swim in a tiny cove at the edge of the caravan site. I go each evening. There is no one there but me. I sit on the rocks looking out at the glassy, green, sea, then clamber down and slip into the water. I feel the power of aloneness and the power of choice, even if it is only the choice to swim or to stay and sit a little longer. The sea is as warm as the affection in which I'm held. There is space to breathe.

I can’t think that I would have asked for such a thing, but my uncle and aunt take me to buy a bikini. We find a small boutique selling swimwear in the nearby town. We look through the racks. Choose a bikini they tell me, go and try it on. I choose one that's green and blue like the colours of the sea. I squeeze into the tiny changing cubicle believing I could never wear such a thing. R helps me try it on. It fits. I come out daring to believe I can.

Was it their idea or mine? I don’t remember. Perhaps I'd admired one on someone else or when we were out shopping. What I do remember is that when I came out of the cubicle my uncle smiled approvingly and declared me a 'bobby dazzler.' The bikini was duly bought, and I wore it that night to the cove.

A White Dress and a Pair of Angel's Wings

I do well at the Grammar School. I'm a B plus, A minus kind of student. Mostly I'm happy at school especially when I get to the sixth form where the rules are fewer, and we are treated more like adults. Alma saved all my school reports. I have them still. Words used repeatedly to describe me are conscientious, sensitive, pleasant, pleasing, and good. Always good. Good is the word that occurs most often. My history teacher says I am quietly controversial, my form teacher says unobtrusively, she makes a good contribution to school and form life. Clearly, I have things to say but I know how to keep my head down.

In the fifth form, I'm cast as an angel in the school play.

'She makes a perfect angel,' I hear one of my English teachers say to another during rehearsals. I am typecast. I am always the angel, the poor, good child. Later in the sixth form, when we audition for Hecuba, the Greek tragedy by Euripides, I am chosen to play Polyxena, the daughter who is about to be killed on the Tomb of Achilles as a blood sacrifice.

I don’t care about being typecast. I love drama and acting.

'You don’t need me to come and see you in the school play, do you?' says, Alma.

'No, no, its fine,' I reply. How could I want or demand that kind of attention?

Kit doesn’t come either.

Alma however always attends parents' evenings. She comes home from one such meeting and tells me my English teacher, Mrs R, is concerned about me as I appear to be such a fragile and vulnerable girl.

Alma finds this laughable, ridiculous even. 'God knows why she'd say a thing like that,' she says

Opportunities for Smiling

With a surname like Joy people expect you to be happy and smiling. In the years from fourteen onwards, when we've returned to Burnham, and later when I meet N and we start going out, I smile more. I am increasingly happy, no longer confined to the small angry rooms of my earlier childhood. I'm out early in the morning to catch the bus to school and don't return home until around five. I'm away from Alma more.

If I were to make a film capturing these new-found opportunities for smiling it would roll through a series of sunshine days to a soundtrack of the Beach Boys, God Only Knows, as played on the jukebox in Seaspray Café. It would unfurl in the freedom of wheels: me out on my blue bicycle cycling to work, cycling down the Berrow road all the way to Brean. It would be sunlight on sea and moonlight on the pool at the Holimarine holiday camp. It would be going to parties (though not too many-Alma made sure of that) hanging out with school friends and their older brothers who listen to Bob Dylan and smoke dope. Not that I smoke, or only rarely, a few Number Six. Smoking comes later in the years at Uni away from home. It would be kissing in the back lane with N, watching TV in his house, eating chicken sandwiches his mother makes us before going out and leaving us alone, climbing into his bed, skin on skin. The dancing and the singing. The seafront in summer. The pubs where we drink underage, discos at the youth clubs we attend, a weekend away from home and a midnight walk.

My life is an expanding universe where there's less room to think about what Alma might be doing or what her needs are, although nothing has changed as far as she's concerned. She's still unhappy much of the time, prone to long bouts of depression, crying a lot and staying in bed. I continue to wait on her and do my best to alleviate her unhappiness. In doing so I learn a new lesson. Gradually over time, I begin to learn, though no doubt the learning has taken place over a long apprenticeship, that despite my surname and despite my smiling, it’s best for me not be joyful. And never to be too happy.

I understand now that my happiness was dangerous, standing as it did in opposition to Alma's thoughts and feelings. If I was happy then she was not in control of me. And if I was happy when she was sad then her misery was intensified and I was lacking empathy. I wasn't the person Alma had groomed me to be. I was uncaring and unsympathetic.

I didn't have to be told any of this. I'd learned the behaviours. In true Echo style I'd learned to match Alma's mood and reflect it back to her. I knew the signs too, the digs, the puts down, the accusatory: 'Well you were enjoying yourself, weren't you? I saw you.' As if enjoyment were a crime.

Alma comes to me and tells me that she has a lump in her breast and she’s afraid it’s cancer and that she's going to die. Even though I’ve lost my religion, even though I’ve stopped going to church, I pray. I pray like crazy that she won’t die. I worry for weeks until she gets the results back. Thankfully it turns out to be a false alarm. This is not the only time that I get caught up in her concerns and worries about cancer - she is particularly afraid of cancer - and about suicide and death. In the light of her needs, in light of these serious matters, I keep my youth and my joy to myself. A pattern is formed from which I do not deviate. Throughout the years to come I will conceal my true feelings. I will keep my happiness to myself

A Laura Ashley Smock Top

It's summer and I'm wearing a Laura Ashley white smock top. My arms are brown from the sun. Alma and I are standing in the queue in Marks & Spencer's, Weston-Super-Mare. I am twenty-four and have just returned from a glorious holiday in Crete with J. I'm living in London but have come home to visit. Alma has picked me up from the station and we’ve gone straight to M&S food hall. So far nothing has been said about the holiday, and I know better than to bring it up. But as we wait in the queue, Alma asks, 'How was the holiday then?'

'Oh, you know,' I say, 'it was okay. The first place we stayed in was above a café so it was a bit noisy and the beds weren’t great.'

I continue in this vein. I don’t say that I’m happier than I have been in a long time, or that I'm in love, that I am in love with J and in love with Greece. I don't say how we ate at a table on the edge of the sea, how the night fell instantly, a black sky littered with stars, more than I'd ever seen. I don't talk about the clear turquoise sea, the ruins at Knossos, the mosaics, the boats, the palm trees, the fishermen, the veranda where John Williams had - according to the landlady - played his guitar into the night.

It might seem insignificant, but I’ve never forgotten this moment with Alma, standing in the M&S queue. The difference between what I felt and what I said could not have been more stark. They were poles apart and I knew in that moment that it would always be like this. I was forced to recognise that being in a relationship with Alma meant it was impossible to share your joy, likewise your success or achievements, your happy times. They all reminded her too much of her loss. No joy, no fun, nothing exuberant, don’t get carried away. Happiness is an illusion. Don’t be good at something - well be good enough but don’t shine. Don’t take the limelight. Stay backstage. Understudy. Don’t be romantic, trusting or believing in love. Keep it under wraps.

I knew not to steal the spotlight from Alma. I knew not to take up too much space. I knew instinctively feeling good was dangerous. When I did feel good, I suffered badly from guilt and I spent a lifetime deflecting any mention of anything good in relation to me or anything I'd done.

In The New Science of Narcissism, W. Keith Campbell and Carolyn Crist write: 'If you are an adult child of a narcissist, it is likely that you feel bad about feeling good, as if you’re not entitled to feel good, to being told good things.'

Miss M

There are people who come along and change your life. Miss M is one of them. She arrives at the school when I'm fourteen. She's here to teach us art and she takes her job seriously. Very seriously. I already look forward to double Art on a Thursday afternoon. I love painting even though it's with worn brushes, powder paints and sugar paper. I love the peaceful atmosphere, the absorption it brings, the quiet of the room. I'm not very good at it though. I don't have much natural talent although I do have a feel for colour and pattern. But the thing about Miss M is that she believes everyone can draw and she begins to teach us how. Time in the Art Room becomes sacrosanct.

She teaches us how to look properly, to observe our subject, how to measure, how to make and vary our line. I am enthralled. She's hard to please, she pushes us to improve and unusually for me I don't mind her harsh criticisms, I want to learn. As well as teaching us how to draw and paint, Miss M introduces us to the work of artists among them those of the English landscape school and the French Impressionists. We begin to study the History of Art and I decide straight away I want to take Art O' Level. The school, along with Alma and Kit, think I should stick to more academic subjects. They say it's a waste of my ability, added to which Alma doesn't much like Miss M. But I am consumed by this new and exciting world of still life and figure drawing, of pencil, charcoal and ink and I won't give it up. I insist on taking it. I live in the scent of wood and ash, wax and clay, the chalky smell of paint and damp paper.

When it comes to A levels I choose Art and Miss M again. I enjoy it even more now as I'm able to concentrate on three areas: textile and fashion design, plant drawing and the History of Art. The Art Room is my sanctuary; a place apart and I spend many lunchtimes there absorbed in my work. I live in a world of colour and paint, a world of fabric and pattern; of the pencil and ink I use to draw the delicate stems and leaves of grasses and flowers.

It's down to Miss M that I fall in love with Vermeer and that, against the school's advice, I go on to study the History of Art at the University of East Anglia, about which I have not a single regret.

The Mistress and Her Maid, Vermeer

Vermeer paints the mistress and her maid at a table. The cloth is under painted with veridian, a deep and brilliant green used as a base colour to intensify the upper level of blue. It is so degraded now that it cannot generally be seen in reproduction. The figures are in sharp focus: a mistress with pearls threaded through her hair and dropping from her ears. She wears ermine cuffs and collar. The maid is plainer, duller and wears brown. It is as it should be, she will not steal the limelight. She is there to serve not to question. To do the mistress’s bidding.

Had it been centuries later and Matisse or Cezanne at work, there would have been a bowl of apples and oranges on the table, crimson and ripe for eating. Alma liked to eat oranges. She would pick one from the bowl, roll it between her palms and press her thumbs over it to loosen the skin, but she would not peel it. Alma did not want peel under her fingernails.

When Alma wanted an orange Kit peeled it. If Kit wasn’t around, the task fell to me. Alma liked to be waited on in all kinds of ways and I learned to fetch and carry for her, as well as doing chores, making cups of tea and peeling fruit. Alma expected it. She behaved as if it was her right to be attended to, and she trained me well: maid in the brown gown. She trained me through disapproval, silence and guilt.

She trained me through fear, through what I later learned to be the process of parentification. A term coined by the Hungarian American psychiatrist Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, one of the founders of the field of family therapy. It describes what happens when the roles of parent and child are reversed, when parents look to their children for emotional or practical support, or both, rather than providing it. The child becomes the caregiver, often taking on adult responsibilities and behaviours before they are ready.

Long after I’d left home, whenever Alma came to stay, usually for much longer than was good for my family, I would wait on her. Bringing her cups of tea, offering her titbits, making sure her favourite TV channel was on regardless of J and the children. Alma came first and I was at her beck and call.

When Alma came to help after the birth of K my first child, when I was a new mother with a week-old baby, she declared she had M.E. She was ill and Kit had to come and fetch her and take her home.

Letters 1

There is no privacy. My personal space is not my own. Coming in from being out with friends, especially if I should be five or ten minutes late - I wouldn’t dare be later - Alma stops me in the kitchen to look me over. An inspection takes place. She pulls back my collar and checks my neck. She's looking for love bites. She checks for smoke and alcohol on my breath. She looks for any indication that I've been doing something I shouldn't.

Letters, granted there are few, but any letters addressed to me are opened first by her. Phone calls, we have a phone now in the hallway, are listened into. I don’t keep a diary or journal. I stop writing altogether. Up until the age of fourteen or fifteen I wrote poetry, often writing poems for Alma that I read aloud to her. In doing so I learned that hearing them was not enough, she had to possess them. She would take them away and make copies without my permission. In Alma's world anything written in my hand belonged to her and it was this belief that would ultimately be our undoing. She lived as if there was no boundary between us.

From my point of view there were many things I did not want to share. There were things that could not be said, and so I found it best to keep my thoughts and ideas to myself and not to commit anything to paper. I look back on this with sadness and regret, regret that it takes me so many years to pick up a pen and become a writer again.

Alma's lack of boundaries was invasive. Is this why years later after she's been visiting us, I find myself standing at the sink washing dishes, having the strange, troubling experience of no longer being myself or of inhabiting my own body, but of being Alma instead? To put it another way: I am lost but Alma is omnipresent. I begin to fear that if Alma dies, she will be able to see and hear everything I do, wherever I go. There will be no escaping her.

Kilve Court

The house was high and square, surrounded by wide lawns and extensive gardens. Outside it displayed all the symmetry of the Georgian house, inside were stone floors and oriental carpets, rooms with books and music rooms. It was a place to study drama and art, a place of inspiration and expectation and a place unlike any I'd been before. I’d seen how my grammar school friends lived. I’d visited their homes so different from mine, but I hadn’t really tasted that life until my visits to Kilve Court. Kilve Court was, and still is, a residential youth centre run by the Somerset Education Committee. It sits in the Quantock Hills on the edge of Bridgwater Bay where the hills come down to the sea. It's a short walk from the house to Kilve Beach, the Jurassic coast on the Bristol Channel, famed for its fossils.

I still have one of the programs for the drama production course I attended in 1967. It's one of the few possessions I have from my youth, others being: family photographs, school reports, a book of Common Prayer from Edith, a copy of Wind in the Willows from an aunt, and my battered one-eyed teddy bear that I've kept since the age of five.

I take an old suitcase down from the cupboard and root through looking for the programme. I lift it out. It's in surprisingly good condition. The contents are type written and it's autographed by staff and by the other lower sixth formers who were there. They write nice things about me. I'd forgotten that. They write about tears. I must have cried there. Perhaps as part of my performance as Zabina imprisoned wife of Bajazeth, in an extract from Christopher Marlow’s Tamburlaine. Zabina is kept on stage in a wooden cage. Typecast or what?

Kilve Court is also where I meet and fall in love with Vermeer: in the dark, in the house not far from the sea when I am just seventeen. This time it's an Art course. I don't remember the name of the teacher but he was a watercolour painter who demonstrated by day and also lectured us in the evenings, bringing with him a carousel of slides. Image after image. Flutter, thunk, click, flutter, thunk, click, a slide shunts into place, The Art of Painting, appears, a curtain drawn back. The master at work. Vermeer is intent on his canvas, his blue eyes on the room before him. A room which is nothing like the rooms I know or their colours. Which is a revelation.

As are the the midnight walks on frost covered lawns. Forbidden of course, we go out from the dormitory following each other's moon-lit shadow down to the fossil beach and the white edge of a dark sea. They must’ve known we were out. I think probably they gave us some leeway as we were quiet and no alcohol was involved, or if there was I didn’t see any. The program states: students may not bring alcohol onto the premises and the Hood Arms is out of bounds.

Students are requested to bring outdoor and indoor shoes, slacks or jeans and a warm woollen sweater. Girls are requested to bring a dress for dinner in the evenings. Male visitors are expected to wear ties for this meal.

It all seems very proper and old-fashioned now, but I don't remember it like that. I remember it as exciting and liberating. It was as if I stood on the cusp of a new, enticing world. I am thankful for a place where I felt entirely different about myself and my future. And I'm thankful for the people I met there.

A Green Frilled Blouse

To celebrate my A-level results Alma takes me to a newly opened boutique in the town and buys me a new top. I choose a lime green, silky blouse frilled at the neck and at the end of the sleeves. I wear it with my maroon suede miniskirt. My results do not all come on the same day. Firstly, I get my English and History results: I get an A for both. Two days later, because the paper was from a different board, I receive my Art result which is a B. Alma is disappointed.

'Such a shame you didn’t get three A’s,' she says.

We go out to eat as a family to celebrate. Edith and Jack come with us but there's tension in the air as there so often is when Alma and Kit are together, and the evening seems to be more about them than me. N is with us, but we are about to go our separate ways as I prepare to go to university.

To her credit, Alma is all for me leaving home for university. She encourages me in every respect while at the same time presenting herself as a victim. All the other mothers she knows have their daughters living close by, she tells me. She's fond of reminding me of her sacrifice on my behalf and of the daughters who stay. I feel intense guilt because of it. I feel guilt every time I return and then leave again, throughout these years in which little changes. Years in which Alma remains depressed and deeply unhappy. The doctors prescribe Valium. My leaving home has only added to her unhappiness, as does M's leaving for university five years later.