Handmade Part Two

PART TWO

Normandy 1

It's the 6th, June 2024, the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Here in the North, it's cool despite the month, and windy too, though short bursts of sunlight catch the ruffled leaves of shrubs and trees. I'm reluctant to step into the garden, afraid I'll find it bruised by the wind. But I have washing to peg out.

The garden has survived better than I'd anticipated, nothing destroyed, not the roses, not the tall fox gloves or the slender irises which have flowered now for weeks. It is overflowing with white and pink cosmos, pots of fragrant herbs and expansive hostas. The ceanothus has unfolded in a cloud of blue and the philadelphus is in bloom.

The pear tree looks sturdy, and behind it, spotted a few days ago by J, new shoots are beginning to appear on the stumps of the amelanchier we were so sure had died. Will there be room for the sprouting shrub and the small fruit tree? In time probably not. But for now, it's hard not to welcome new life.

I peg out the clothes, resisting thoughts of Alma, especially on such a day. A day that by rights belongs to Kit.

I leave the house to shop and when the shopping's done I make for the supermarket café. I open my notebook. As I pick up my pen, I think of Kit, who died five years ago now. Kit was there on D-Day, plus two. I write this in my notebook:

All morning, I glimpse you at the corners of my vision, blurred as it sometimes is now, reminiscent of yours. In a place we used to frequent, I catch you through the window, in the sunlight on grass that could just as well be marram stretching out to the beachheads. Two elderly men are taking coffee together. I imagine them talking about the landings, about the 80 years that have passed and about the aftermath, the bodies cleared, the crosses rubbed with sand.

Then later - All morning, I put away my grief until finally I surrender to the stories of the remaining few. The teenagers setting sail with no idea what was in store. A mobilisation begun in darkness, ships lifting anchor, an armada, slowly, slowly, taking off across the water.

Kit was never sentimental about D-Day, but he was visibly moved, as we all were, when we visited, the war graves at Bonneville-la-Campagne, together on a family holiday in 1997.

The visit took place the day after we received the not unexpected but still very sad news of J's father's death. J's father was a military man who like Kit had served in the Second World War and we thought visiting the graves would be a fitting way to remember him. And it was, but the outing and the remembrance were marred by the tension in the air between Alma and me.

Alma was angry. The day before, I'd dared to challenge something she'd said, something I thought unkind and unnecessary. As a result, she'd stopped speaking to me. Uncomfortable though it was, it was not unfamiliar. I was used to Alma's silent treatment. What I didn't know yet however, was that this was the beginning of the end. The beginning of Alma disowning me.

It will take six months to play out. But it begins here, under the wide skies and white crosses of Normandy...

Motorcycle Jackets

I am five and M is a baby when we move to Highbridge. The newly built council estate sits on the flat fields of the old cheese market, across which lies the muddy river Brue and its estuary. Once a seaport village, the wharves and warehouses of Highbridge have long been abandoned but the timber yard is still in operation. It's a mile and a half from Burnham and from Edith's house, but to the five-year-old me it might as well be another country.

Our world is divided in two by the railway line. To the south are the avenues and the streets in which we play, lined with identical red brick houses with identical blue doors. There's a recreation ground by the railway line and on the edge of the estate lies the local Moorlands sheepskin factory. This solid world of concrete and brick is the one we share with the adults, our neighbours. Men setting off for work, walking to the factory. Those with further to travel riding their motorcycles: faceless, black knights, disguised in helmets and bulky waterproof jackets, our father Kit among them. The women for the most part staying at home.

It's a world full of people who have very little. No one has a car. We have neighbours who are poor through no fault of their own, some who struggle with disabilities, neighbours who drink too much, who work too hard, long distance lorry drivers, Jehovah witnesses and next-door neighbours who keep mice in their shed.

Every house has a brick built shed. Kit's is dark, full of oily rags and tools too heavy to lift. My uncle A, who lives at the other end of our avenue has a shed full of oil paints and canvases. He is married to my aunt J, Kit's sister. He is that rare thing, an artist, though by day he works in the factory on the estate. His daughter L, my cousin, becomes my best friend. We stick together through childhood and adolescence through what I think of as our, 'dancing years,' until I leave home at eighteen. At five, I am a shy, overweight child, easily bullied and L looks out for me. She is tough and estate-wise. Our friendship saves my life and is one of the really good things about the move.

In time I toughen up, but I still don't fit. Most likely that comes from having Alma as a mother, who despite her socialist principles, her willingness to help neighbours in difficult circumstances, considers herself and therefore her children to be superior. We are destined for better things than life on a council estate. Alma forbids us to speak with the Somerset accent prevalent in the streets around us.

Cotton Shorts and Gym Shoes

Skylark, marsh harrier, brown hare, what do we know of the birds and the creatures around us? Perhaps something of the gulls that track the estuary following the tide, perhaps a glimpse of an adder sunning itself in the long grass. There are the newts and tiny crabs we fish for with jam jars but mostly put back, the swans nesting on the station pond, dragonflies and cabbage whites, the fat sows that live in their pen by the railway line, the black and white Friesian cows that graze the fields.

Beyond the railway line, to the north is the world of the estuary. A world that belongs to us, where adults rarely venture, a world of magic and exploration. In our shorts and the gym shoes we call 'daps,' we tramp this wild playground. Ours is a world of ditches and banks, brambles, stray dogs, ruined warehouses, water and mud. We wander freely without limitation or oversight, across the fields and up onto the estuary where we look out to a horizon marked by ships. Like all children we take our landscape for granted. It is only much later that I come to see how it shaped me, how it stood in such contrast to what happened behind closed doors and how I return to it again and again in my writing.

This world that once lay beneath the sea fired my imagination. A place where water appeared and disappeared as if by magic, offered transformation and transcendence. We dwelt in a flat land without borders, a liminal space where time stalled, where water met air in a silvery light, a sky reflected in silt. And always on the breeze, the scent and sigh of the sea as it made its way up and down the estuary. There is something of the infinite in a landscape where the markers are few, when sea and sky fuse. All is here, past and present, and with it a hint of futures beyond. In this fluid world it was possible to dream. It was possible to slip in and out of time.

On Memory and Peonies

2024

A jug of shop-bought peonies sits on my table. They begin as small blind, buds, softening knots of deep pink. Within days they open to blowsy saucers of coral, gradually fading to cream, becoming increasingly colourless as they die. Peonies do not last well, they are fragile and fleeting, like so much of memory. Memory is uncertain, changing colour according to the light, altered by the act of remembering, of telling over and over again. Much is lost, much is evanescent. But in the moments that persist, memory is as fat and open as the face of the flower, as bright as the crimson peonies that bloomed every year in the front garden of number eight South Avenue.

I do not grow peonies, but I am doing my best to grow memories, attending to them in the hope of retrieving them, in the hope of sharpening their blurred edges and of discovering my truth. But often it's a feeling as much as a fact that comes back to me, and I wonder if memory belongs as much in imagination as in truth.

JG Ballard likens memories to shipwrecks, surviving for decades in the deep waters, on the seabed. Thriving in the dark. Diving down to the 'wreck,' I occasionally find that new treasures emerge. This week I recall, a long-forgotten memory that takes place in the house of my early years. My father is reading to me from, Alice Through the Looking Glass, the large volume is embossed in gold, the illustrations are black-and-white. I would have been four or five at most. What do I make of it? I cannot say other than that I am entranced by the notion that a girl can climb through a mirror into another world.

As so often, when I'm reaching far back into memory, scenes are only half drawn. They are not the flower itself but a representation. A sketch, the loosely executed painting of a peony. There are details finely rendered but there are broad brushstrokes and white spaces too. The viewer standing before such a painting may offer her interpretation. If the artist is no longer here who can say exactly how it was made, what was meant, what intentional, what accidental? Who can say what is altered in every gaze?

A French Pleat

Alma comes into view. She is at her dressing table in her new bedroom at number eight, poised on the stool, framed in the light from the window. She's wearing a sheath dress cut from a Butterwick pattern. She leans into the mirror while highlighting her beauty spot with a black pencil. She spits on her mascara block and darkens her eyelashes with the tiny brush. She opens up her Coty compact, powders her faces, snaps it shut, purses her lips and applies a slick of Riviera Pink. She pats her hair, a backcombed french pleat wrapped around an insert that looks like a cat turd. It's pinned tight. She holds up a can of Supersoft hairspray and sprays. And sprays and sprays. The droplets hang in a halo of mist above her head.

Scattered across the blue, satin eiderdown on the bed are magazines, diet books, her overnight pink and yellow rollers and an old headscarf. On the bedside table a blue pleated lamp and the remains of her glass of hot water with P.L.J. lemon juice, taken first thing every morning to dampen taste, to dampen the desire for sweet things. I fetch it for her. I know how to make it, just as I know how to make her black tea. Small as I am, I am already in training as Alma's handmaid.

Vermeer Paints the Back Room at 8 South Avenue, 1

There is a time when I want to be a painter, an artist of sorts, but I'm not gifted and it never seems a realistic possibility. I'm lucky enough however to discover Art History, which is some compensation. Vermeer is the first painter I fall in love with. My love is constant, everlasting. I am seventeen and away from home for the first time when I encounter his paintings. A painter of interiors; of domestic life. There is an enviable stillness and harmony in his work, one that was sadly absent in the interior of number eight.

How I wonder would he have painted the back room?

There is no curtain to draw back though Vermeer might invent one. Light comes in from the window on the left as he favours. He places his easel in the adjoining space between the tiny kitchen and the back room. Here the blue enamel boiler sits, a scuttle full of coke at its side along with the raking tools. Depending on when he paints the room, in which year, there may be a large box fireguard around the boiler. He may decide to leave it out, or it may not be there. It may be before my brother M burns his fingers on the stove top and cries for what feels like a whole afternoon. Before his young skin blisters and Alma's attempts to pacify fail. Before I sense her guilt and the lack of knowing how to comfort, followed by the rising tension, followed by anger. Before she hands him to me.

Vermeer is accustomed to painting a black and white tiled floor, setting the tiles diagonally to the picture plane. He will have to improvise; the tiles underfoot are black and mostly overlaid with thin carpet. There are none of his usual props, no Spanish chairs, no gilded wallcoverings. The furniture, table, chairs and sideboard are brown, an ugly 1950's utility set. There are no mirrors, wine jugs, drinking glasses, virginals or gilt chandeliers. There are no books.

But there is cloth.

Cloth

In the beginning was the cloth and the cloth was with Alma. Alma was the cloth. All things were made through her: buckram, brocade, boucle, lace, linen, grosgrain, collar, placket, cuff. Cotton smelling like freshly mown grass. Wool redolent of a hay barn stack. The orange scent of crepe de chine. The soft, airy, kiss of coffee-coloured silk, printed with lilac flowers, enough for the latest Vogue pattern for Mrs M, the banker's wife. And chiffon for the overskirt, like a rose petal rubbed between finger and thumb.

There were summer dresses patterned in swirls of purple and green, corduroy trousers and winter coats. A whole wedding in ice-white satin and broderie anglaise, bridesmaids with sapphire underskirts. Two months of it, yards and yards of it, transforming the room. The remnants and offcuts somehow migrating to my bedroom where they littered the ocean blue lino like small flags of hope.

In a sombre world of post war brown, Alma brought cloth. Cloth like paint on canvas, colour that seared the retina, sharp and bright. And with it work, the sheer application, sewing long into the night. The whisper, rustle, the clock-clock of the heavy cutting scissors, the hiss of a steam-iron and the stop-start, short-sharp, riff of the machine. Feet on the treadle, tape measure around her neck, pins in her mouth, head down, hands flat, Alma guiding the cloth.

That I love textiles, colour, pattern, cloth and clothes, that I fall in love with Art History, that I fall in love with the painter Vermeer, that my daughter K becomes a designer studying at the Royal College of Art, these are all part of Alma's legacy.

Vermeer Paints the Back Room at 8 South Avenue, 2

Alma is at the centre pouring over her work like, The Lacemaker. We are invisible, my bother M and me. His hand is no longer blistered, and he is now at school. We are seated at the table to Vermeer's left. Invisibility is no hardship for us, we know how to disappear. We have our pencils and crayons and books of butcher's paper to occupy us. We are always drawing.

There is never enough paper. We inhabit our drawings, M often giving a running commentary on his. We make up stories and sketch them out. We use them to make fun of people, we use drawings as a gateway to laughter and joke. We live in our imagination. We dwell in our heads. Over the years we will flourish in school. M excels and goes on to live a life of the mind as an academic ultimately working in Oxford. As for me, I am only truly happy when I have a project I’m working on, when I can walk into that special room in my head and close the door behind me. When I can live there alone, sustained by imagination.

There may have been times when as children we were sad and lonely. Times when we thought ourselves in some way responsible for Alma's unhappiness, for her anger, her emotional neglect, as children do. If only we were good enough perhaps the misery would stop. But our drawings, our imaginative life, allowed us to construct a narrative beyond the world of Alma and home, a narrative that established a clear boundary between us and her. In this respect I've come to think of us as transcendent children as described in The Transcendent Child, Tales of Triumph Over the Past, by Lillian B Rubin. Which is to say that we found ways of detaching ourselves when we needed to. We buried ourselves in drawing, books, storytelling, model-making, music, religion... We found ways of belonging to something larger than self. We fashioned portals to other worlds. We inhabited the places of the mind, places of flow and focus which helped us to survive despite the often difficult and unhappy circumstances.

But wait. What if we are no longer there at the table in the back room? What if it's summer and we're playing out, and Kit is at work? Then who knows, perhaps Alma becomes someone else. Perhaps she becomes Vermeer's Procuress; her lover's hand, for there is a lover now and he lives only an avenue away, creeping over her breast. Who knows what passion was spent in the room where we ate our meals and drew in our books?

And what of the night, after dark? I doubt Vermeer would have painted the room as it appeared at eight or nine o'clock when we were in bed, when war waged. When Kit took to drinking and the backroom world became loud and explosive. When anger reigned and I was frightened to fall asleep for fear of what would wake me. It would have needed a Goya or his like to paint such a scene.

A Paisley Cross Over Apron

It's lunchtime at Edith and Jack's. I've come home from Junior school for my dinner. Edith is in the kitchen. She takes off her paisley, cross-over apron and hangs it on the back of the door. Small as I am, seven maybe eight, I know something is wrong, something serious has happened and it has to do with Alma. The back room is crowded despite it being the middle of the day. Jack and Kit who should be at work, are there, as are two of my uncles and Alma who has been crying. Voices are raised, voices are hushed.

'Go on up and see the chickens,' says Edith. 'Give them some fresh straw and water. Don't hurry back.'

The chickens live at the top of Edith and Jack's back garden, not a big garden but a long way in a child's worId. A long way for a two-year-old like M. Go and see the chickens - this much I remember. I'm not even sure if M was there with me but I think he must have been. We were ushered out of the way while a family conference took place.

Some years later, I learned from Kit that Alma had been caught shoplifting in the Co-op that day. Kit had received a phone call in the factory, a rare thing, and had come home to pick her up from the local police station. Was he angry with her at the time? I don't know, he seemed angrier with the police. He told me he asked them if they hadn't got better things to do.

Looking back, I think the events of that day fed into the convenient image of Alma as a problem daughter and problem wife, the problem as he saw it being nothing to do with Kit. Tellingly, he didn't take her home, he took her to Edith and Jack's. And as far as they were concerned, she was the black sheep who brought disgrace on the family.

Kit went to court with Alma who got a conditional discharge. In the aftermath, he'd found tins and tins of food in the cupboards at home as well as in her wardrobe and under the bed. Alma had been shoplifting for some time.

Hunger

In the post-war years of Alma's childhood food was scarce and Alma was often hungry. Alma told me how Edith would forgo food so that there was more to share between Jack and the four children. She recalled Jack throwing his plate of food across the room insisting if Edith wouldn't eat then neither would he. She confessed that she stole food. That she once ate the last piece of cake from the tin in the cupboard and in doing so incurred Edith's wrath. The wrath of a mother who Alma said did not love her, who was jealous of her because according to Alma, she was Jack's favourite.

Can you inherit hunger the way you inherit the colour of your eyes or the shape of your nose? Is it generational? Scientists believe it is.

I eat in secret. Coming home from school, when Alma is busy or not there, I make for the pantry where the tin of Nestle's condensed milk lives. I prise open its rusty lid, dip a finger in and scoop up the viscous, sugary rush. I cannot get enough. Though the rush is always followed by disquiet and guilt. I fear being found out. How much can I eat without being noticed?

I eat in public, the currant buns with butter and strawberry jam at the children’s party in the church hall. To my shame I eat more than my share. People are watching me but I cannot stop myself. There is a hole in me that refuses to be filled.

We fight over food, especially over Sunday dinner, which Alma is never happy cooking. I see her now tears falling, bending at the oven lifting out an overcooked joint of beef. It's a joyless meal of dry, grey meat, pummelled veg and slimy roast potatoes. I ask for salad which is my favourite savoury food but she refuses point blank. Even in summer there is no compromise.

In those days salad was a plate of boiled egg, lettuce, tomato and cucumber, all of which we kept in the fridge, and which I could have made myself. But I see now that it wasn't about making another meal. It was about daring to reject something that Alma had made. It happens later with clothes, for although on the whole I like the clothes she makes me, I quickly learn not to criticise or reject those I do not. I am her mannequin and must wear her clothes regardless.

By the time I'm ten the school doctor will declare that I must go on a diet. I should eat nuts not sweets. She sends me for walking lessons because I am knock-kneed. Once a fortnight Alma and I catch the bus to the hospital in Bridgwater where I practice walking along a white line painted on the floor. Even at the time it seemed unnecessary and unhelpful. Looking back, it seems like a kind of madness.

Pain au Raisin

2024

The wind blows through the tall grasses, cabbage whites settle on the lavender. It's late morning, I look out on the garden while I drink coffee and eat a pain au raisin which is more than four hundred calories. I think about whether I should substitute it for my lunch or whether I should allow myself lunch as well.

Alma taught me everything I know about calories. She had any number of calorie wheels and pocket-sized calorie handbooks. I went on my first diet when I was twelve, but I don't lay the responsibility at Alma’s door. I don't ever remember her telling me I needed to go on a diet, but I watched Alma's struggle with weight and learned that being fat was shameful and unacceptable. As a woman I was expected to be slim. Slimming after all, was the new religion. Before long Twiggy would become our role model.

There is never a time, even now, when I am not ashamed of my heavier build. I work hard in my twenties and into my thirties and beyond to stay as slim as I can be. There is nothing like the shame I feel when through my fifties and sixties I gain weight, some of which I lose and some of which I keep. I am deeply ashamed of all the photographs in which this is obvious and no matter how hard I try to reject these judgements they sit within me like immovable rocks.

If we can inherit hunger, then can we also inherit shame?

Appearance was everything for Alma. It was the yardstick by which she judged all women, and found all wanting, including me. Including herself. Alma hated her body, too white and fleshy, too much cellulite on her legs, ankles thick and ungainly. Much of which I inherit.

As I grow up, she will begin to compare our bodies.

'You look thinner than me,' she will remind me, 'because you're flat-chested.'

I know not to answer and not to compete.

Apricot Mohair Suit

Alma, a la Jackie Kennedy, a Channel style jacket, collarless, short, with a slimline skirt in apricot mohair, all her own handiwork. Alma meeting me from school and all eyes on her. The scarlet woman, the black sheep. Dark hair, brown eyes, the Russell cheekbones, high and pronounced. Russell was Edith's name before marriage and the Russell women were known for their good looks. Alma was known for flaunting hers. This was the strutting, confident, attention seeking, Alma. Alma the beauty queen. The all-the-men-are looking-at-me and the women too.

Alma liked to compare herself to the film star, Elizabeth Taylor and was fascinated by the tempestuous love story that was Taylor and Burton.

'I look like her,' she told me. 'That's what they all say.' They, being her male admirers of which there were plenty. The male gaze was Alma's raison d'etre.

Who was I to disagree?

Alma didn't usually meet me from school. This was a stolen afternoon. The afternoon she passed her driving test and wanted to celebrate. She took me to the newly opened Bluebird café for shortbread and coffee served in fine china. Coffee that smelled and tasted nothing like Nescafe. We sat in the window: Alma the jungle cat, pearl in grit, itch on the skin of a small town. Me in tow.

Nightdress 1

We lived in her moods. Alma was the rain maker, the storm bringer. Like weather watchers we tracked the darkening clouds blowing upstream. We did our best to escape the wind that cracked the branches of the trees and flattened the corn. Kit's moods were not much better. At mealtimes when the air was thick with their silent spite, I became their conduit.

'Tell you father...' Alma would demand.

Whatever I told Kit he didn't reply, a silence ensued. Silence like thunder. Like waiting for a bomb to go off.

By night the anger was compounded by Kit's voice, a man possessed, rising in a crescendo of, 'Who the hell is it? Who was he? Tell me?' Over and over.

Alma countering, 'Shush don't shout, you'll wake the children.'

Kit didn't seem to care.

When the angry spirits relented, sadness inevitably followed. It sat in the armchair by the window where I knelt looking out onto the garden when Anna told me Kit was leaving. When she told me that it was a secret, and I was to tell no one. It trailed at the hem of my nightdress as I sleepwalked downstairs through the back room and into the kitchen.

In the end Kit did not leave. These were the days when divorce was still taboo.

Insomnia

Alma was an insomniac. In my teenage years and onwards, I often sat with her when she couldn’t sleep. I made tea, attempted to comfort and calm in those dark reaches of the night when everything seemed so much worse.

As a young child I didn’t always sleep. I was afraid to sleep and be woken suddenly by Kit shouting, or by his pleading with Alma. I would lie rigid in my bed with every doll or soft toy I possessed arranged like a force field around me. There was no room to move or barely to breathe while I waited, held my breath and waited for the anger to rise or for Kit to come into my bedroom where Alma was lying in the spare bed, and implore her to go back to their room.

I would pretend to be asleep. I didn’t want to hear what was being said, though I did hear, and I remember some of their words still. Every night I prayed to the god I believed in that it would be a peaceful night, that I wouldn't be woken.

Insomnia has stalked to me throughout my life. It’s often easier for me to stay awake than to fall asleep. I recognise still the impulse to resist, to remain alert and in control. Often, I can only sleep after a host of routines or rituals and medication though I resist prescribed sleeping tablets, other than very occasionally. Alma was addicted to them, but her tolerance was such that they no longer worked.

Insomnia can break you. A spell of nights with very little sleep can make you feel as if you are disintegrating. The self you know and rely on is undermined. You begin to unravel, to fragment. If I am familiar with this experience, then Alma knew it a thousand times over. It is enough to make you lose your mind.

Love

2024

I watch my daughter comfort her daughter with such love and such sensitivity it brings tears. I watch my son do likewise, a daughter on each knee. I think what tender loving parents they are. How their spouses are the same. I think of Kit, how for all his faults and despite the worst period when he took to drink, had a way of being with you that made you feel loved even if it was not voiced.

Kit moves to the north-east when he is ninety and we spend a lot of time together. We do a lot of shopping, a lot of keeping doctor and hospital appointments etc. On one such outing we are in the cafe in Marks & Spencer's when a woman at the next table lifts a crying toddler from his pushchair onto her knee and comforts him. Out of the blue, Kit tells me a story I’ve not heard before. We are on a day trip to Lynton and Lynmouth: Kit, Alma, me aged two and in my pushchair. When we get off the coach, the first thing we do is go to a café for a cup of tea. Kit decides he wants a newspaper. He gets up to go to the newsagent's but as he leaves, I start to cry. I cry and I won't stop. I hold out my arms to him.

'You cried and cried for me,' he says. 'You didn’t want to let me go.'

Cotton Dress, Tee Shirt and Shorts

Two small figures caught in the light, bad dreams and fears trailing lost behind them, cast off in silence and breath, in the astonishment of out of doors. The boy, M, in shorts and striped t-shirt. The girl, A, wearing a gingham cotton dress. They hesitate before the railway crossing, in anticipation of a Sunday train and people waving from the carriages. As if they might be the railway children, like the children in the TV series, waiting to be spotted by some rich, kindly person who will come to their rescue.

Once over the line, they make for the old, half-ruined warehouse, the forbidden Grey Buildings. They do not linger for fear of the the dangers lurking within the walls, for fear of meeting the ghost of the boy who fell from the roof and swallowed his tongue. They pick their way over tin cans, broken glass, blackened paper and the charcoal sticks of small fires to the other side

Out through the long grass, up onto the riverbank and the estuary, into the salvation of water and light. Away from the dark entries between house, from back rooms and black tiled halls, away from the vase of plastic roses that came free with Daz washing powder- Alma having collected a dozen- that sat on the table by the front door, leeching colour, gathering dust. Away from the echo of angry rooms.

Black Magic

He invites me in, as if he knows I will be the one to remember. I will be their witness. Alma's lover. His shed is nothing like Kit's. Kit's smells of paraffin, his smells of earth, of green leaves and Calor gas. On the workbench is a primus on which he brews his tea. There is a mug with a heart on, a pair of pink rubber gloves, a bottle of silver-top milk, a pile of compost and a packet of ginger creams. Under the workbench a tortoise lives in a box full of straw.

He puts the tortoise out on the lawn. It looks ancient. I like the way it moves in small increments and is only interested in the rhubarb leaves. It is nothing like the cats that Alma so hates, that have begun to invade my dreams, cats that I can never be rid of. Always the same dream, cats crowding into my bedroom, populating every surface, roosting like birds high up on shelves. I try hard to be rid of them, to herd them out of the door, only for them to appear as soon as my back is turned, as if from nowhere to colonise the space.

Alma's lover grew coleuses in his shed, plants which being unfamiliar and brightly coloured in deep maroons, limes and pinks seemed as exotic as the tortoise. They were velvety to the touch, tender and could not survive winter temperatures. I hadn’t known their names then. They seem somehow fitting: Mardi Gras, Freckles, Fishnet Stockings, Dark Star, Black Magic. Black Magic were Alma's favourite chocolates. The ones she insisted on. We would not have dared to buy her an inferior brand.

He was a friend of my father's and they sometimes drank together.

When our families were out walking, I fell among the nettles, and he fetched a dock leaf for me. He was always kind and attentive.

I don't doubt his love for my mother. I think it was enduring. Once, in later years when he mistook me for Alma, I saw his eyes light up. Alma had that effect, she was seductive, captivating. I saw it time and time again in the way she turned her charm on people she liked or wanted to impress, especially men, and it always seemed to work.

The older I got the more disturbing I found it, standing as it did in stark contrast to my own experience of her. When friends said how much they liked her I would be filled with crippling doubt. Perhaps she really was a good person. Perhaps I was bad. Perhaps it was all just me.

But no. In the process of writing and researching this memoir, I've learned that the narcissist can be both cruel and charming. Alma was just that. She was a shapeshifter.

Narcissist 1

There are more than a million online searches a month for the word narcissist. Narcissism is everywhere, evidenced by the websites, podcasts, books etc devoted to the term. But what does it really mean to say someone is a narcissist? Aren’t we all narcissists in one way or another? Haven't I always considered labels to be simplistic and reductive?

I read widely doing my best to avoid the easy bite-sized internet definitions. I put my faith in experts like W Keith Campbell and The New Science of Narcissism. I conclude narcissism is best described as a trait that spans a spectrum and is not necessarily good or bad, though as a disorder it can be serious and frightening. In the past narcissists have been divided into the grandiose or the vulnerable. But definitions have evolved becoming more complex and more nuanced. It's now recognised that a person can be both.

For a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder a person must show a majority from the nine criteria below. Here the criteria are represented by the acronym SPECIAL ME

SPECIAL ME

1. Sense of self-importance

2. Preoccupation with power, beauty, or success

3. Entitled

4. Can only be around people who are important or special

5. Interpersonally exploitative for their own gain

6. Arrogant

7. Lack empathy

8. Must be admired

9. Envious of others or believe that others are envious of them

It's impossible to know if Alma would’ve been diagnosed with a narcissistic personality disorder. On balance I believe she might have been. It’s possible that Alma was a vulnerable narcissist who while being self-important, self-centred and entitled was also insecure and often depressed.

I ask myself does it matter? Does understanding Alma in this way make a difference? Surprisingly to me, I think the answer is yes. In the lost hours of that early morning spent scrolling and eating ice cream, of finding the quiz and of later reading the experts, I have begun to see better who Alma was. I have begun to cast off the burden of responsibility and shame I have long associated with our relationship. I am beginning to understand how a mother like Alma might disown her child.

The Silver Sequinned Dress

I think of it as her selkie dress. The costume of a mythological creature. Alma the shapeshifter, creature of dual nature. Selkies can be friendly and helpful to humans, but they may also be dangerous and vengeful. They are often portrayed as attractive and seductive.

It was summer when Alma died. I cannot remember what she wore in her coffin, even though I would have chosen it. There is no one to ask. Kit is gone now, and even if he was still here, he'd be unlikely to remember. There were far more significant events of which he had little or no recollection when asked in later years.

I like to think I would have chosen a dress that she made herself. I know it was not the selkie dress-floor length, fan-tailed and silver-sequined-because it no longer fitted her. It was a selkie's skin from a former life, worn out dancing, worn at her most seductive, her happiest, feted and admired. The dress that hung like a haunting in her wardrobe long after she was gone. There are some things that are impossible to throw away.

After the funeral we sat on the seafront and watched the evening tide come in, spreading like lace across the sand. We laughed as if none of it mattered or would ever be spoken of again. As if it was over. But it was just another beginning.

Nana

2024

I did not think of becoming a grandmother as a new beginning. I wasn't keen on the idea. I was plagued by uncertainties about being defined as old, as an old woman with no currency in the world apart from that invested in a new caring role. And hadn't I done enough caring already in my life?

I wanted to hang on to a semblance of youth, for although there's been a shift in recognition of older women, there is still pressure for us to be youthful, stylish, slim. Normal signs of ageing for a woman, such as weight gain, grey hair, and wrinkles, equate to personal failure, to ‘letting ourselves go,' and this was exactly what Alma had accused her rivals of.

There is little mercy for a woman in the public eye perceived to be ‘ageing badly’. Publishing is no exception. I am not in the public eye, thankfully. But I know how it feels to be a woman and to be the oldest writer in the room. And however hard I try to shake off Alma's insistence on the importance of one's appearance, the indoctrination lingers.

Happily, however, I'm here to report that becoming a grandmother has if anything made me feel younger and more vital than before. I am reborn and what is more I have a new name.

I've never much liked my name. I’m not sure why this is, other people seem to think Avril is an OK name. But to my ear it's hard-edged and has too much of Alma in it. Too much of her determination to be superior. There would be nothing common for her daughter, hence a French name. Avril is of course the french word for the month of April, never mind that I was born in June. It could not be shortened she said, there would be no nicknames. I didn’t like to tell her that everyone called me Bovril, or that I secretly enjoyed it.

Nana is different. Nana is soft at the edges especially when pronounced with that County Durham lilt, like honey and pet. It's a term of endearment, gentle and kind, a name to be remembered by. In my new incarnation as Nana, I find an empathy with the child that I was. Watching my three girls grow from fragility into strength I draw a thread back to my own beginnings.

Talking to the Dead

An imaginary meeting with Kit:

He is standing in a flat-bottomed boat, on dry land in the middle of a cowslip field.

‘Here, over here,’ he calls, ‘jump in.’ He holds out his hand.

I hold back.

‘Here. This is what I mean,’ he says.

I don't understand.

‘What we shared: the land, me out digging peat, willows, water snakes, kingfisher in the rhyne. This place, a religion all of itself.’

I nod, ‘You’re right, it was the best of it.’ I take a step in his direction.

‘Rise and shine, lash up and stow, remember that?' He says, 'From my navy days.'

I smile.

'Mornings to make your heart sing. But I was young then.' He leans on the steering pole, pushing it into the grass, as if grass were water.

‘Come on. Get in,’ he says.

The boat stays where it is, unmoving, marooned.

And I want to get in. I want to share the singing that I too hold in my heart. The, 'rise and shine..' the tea every morning, him always first up. Coming in like a sun through cloud. Maybe now there can be a new language of song, I think.

I step towards the boat, but Kit has turned away. He's watching the cows poised precariously in the mud, kneeling to drink at the fishing ponds.

'See. Wasn't it always like this,' I say. 'You, looking the other way. We shared it, but never in words. Only in silence. I knew every silence that lived in that house: mine, M's, yours, hers. They haunted me. I was your medium. Ghosts don't sing.'

He turns back towards me. His hair now brown and curly. He wears a young man's quiff and an easy smile.

'You were never really there,' I say.

'I worked long hours,' he says looking at the ground.

'Was it me? Was it me who found her?' I ask, 'With the pills, the half empty bottle, that day, you remember dad, when she tried to kill herself? Did she? Was it?'

He sighs and shakes his head, 'I don't remember. Possibly, I worked long hours then,' he repeats.

'Possibly, possibly. Why is it so hard for you to say? Why are you still hiding? Where are the feelings?' I ask.

'I like nouns. Hard, solid, proper nouns, the nouns of maps and continents, stories of the world, of other possible worlds. And books, and learning. Aren't you glad? I thought you understood. I thought we, of all people, understood each other.'

'You forget I was just a child.'

'You could be right there,' says Kit. 'I was not long past child myself and as I said there was the overtime. But you sang. You had a sweet voice. People asked you to sing. Alma put pay to it, of course, in her own way. She was good at that,' he says, pushing down into the mud, leaning his weight on the pole. Until water begins to seep through grass, until the field is a mirror of winter flood, until he pushes off, away, and is gone.

Birds in the Wind

2024

The wind is from the east, sharp and cold. It's too windy for hanging out washing. The overhanging branches of my neighbour's apple tree scrape and sigh across the fence. I am grateful today for the protection they offer to the young pear. The garden is out at sea. Roses with their petals blown rock back and forth in the spoiler wind. The long grass in the field out front waves its arms. By the cemetery wall the copper beech stands fully dressed. The owl who has become our neighbour waits for dusk.

In a storm birds will perch on thick branches as close to the trunk of the tree as they can, on the protected side. Others will seek out shelter among the reeds, in roost boxes and rafter nests, wherever safety might be found.

Vermeer Paints Alma's Suicide Attempt

There is more than one painting, there are at least two, maybe more, but only one canvas. A palimpsest but not of paper, a pentimento perhaps, a scrubbing away to recover another work beneath the original. It is both and it is neither. It is a fusion that will never be separated or resolved.

First the underpainting, a child, eight years old, or thereabouts, stands unseen where the painter's easel would be. In the frame of the open bedroom door she is an observer looking in. Light falls from the left as the painter favours. It's an afternoon in early summer and sun penetrates the drawn curtains, suffusing the room in Vermeer blue. Alma sits in bed, head bowed, the lacemaker without her cap, but she is not sewing, she is not making lace except with her tears and her distress. Lying next to her on the eiderdown on the double bed is an open bottle of tablets.

Secondly, in overlapping tones the child is no longer bystander but stands firmly in the scene, by the bed, alone with her mother. Perhaps she has been the one to find her. The painting grows and yet it does not make sense, the child alone with Alma. Is Alma awake or is she trying to wake her? Is Alma threatening to take the tablets, has she swallowed them? Does the child go for help? Does she wait for Kit to come home?

In the later, finished work, the one that hangs with certainty in the gallery, the light is still from the left but the curtains are drawn back, lines are sharper, the room delineated, the glaze set. Kit is here and Dr W, both sitting on the other side of the bed, and Dr W is saying it's serious and Alma needs help but Alma is crying and pleading with Kit not to let them send her to Tone Vale, the local psychiatric hospital. Kit agrees that she doesn't have to go.

The child stands by witness to it all. She understands that her mother wants to die and is a danger to herself but prays they will not take her away especially not to a house of madness, a place feared and spoken of as if there's no return. The child leans into the safety of the bedroom wall, into the white and silver striped wallpaper.

I have no way of knowing exactly what happened, how events unfolded and over how long a period. Was it hours? Was it days? I am trying to assemble the fragments of broken time, and there are pieces missing. The spaces of memory shrink until there is only absence and a failure to connect. Our memories of childhood often live in the stories told us by family, passed down through generations. But this was not a story I was ever told. On the contrary it was a matter of shame never to be spoken of.

Since childhood I've always thought of it and referred to it as a suicide attempt. I can't say why. Perhaps I heard it spoken of as such, though nervous breakdown and cry for help seem familiar too and I wonder now if it was a threat rather than an attempt. An outpouring of grief. Alma hysterical, as she could sometimes be. In the end, threat or attempt, I'm not sure it matters much. Thoughts of suicide stay with Alma throughout her life and will surface well into the future.

You might wonder how or why a child of eight is witness to these scenes. Perhaps I am there because they forgot about me in the drama of it all. Perhaps I am there because I have already become Alma's carer, emotional as well as physical. Perhaps she has been disintegrating for weeks. And M where is he? I don't know because he is four, surely too young to be playing out. At our cousins' house perhaps. I peer through the layers and the confusion, down to the foundations of the painting, the burnt umber sketches, but clarity eludes me.

Many years later I will ask Kit to help me make sense of it. What does he remember? But just as in my imagined meeting, he prevaricates, fences, pushes me away with talk of long hours at work and weekend overtime.

I ask, 'When Mum tried to commit suicide was I the one who found her?'

He hesitates, 'Well... I don't know, I worked long hours in those days.'

What kind of an answer is this? I try to insist on more but I've left it too late. He is ninety-three and not about to change. Kit fails as always to acknowledge the truth of our lives with Alma.

Alma's desire to end her life comes from rejection. Her lover, good catholic that he is, has called it off. He will be staying with his wife, tending his coleuses and I will be tending to Alma. I will be tending to all of us all. Getting M up with me and off to the bus, making food when we get home, vinegar sandwiches for M, sometimes sugar or ketchup, cheese for Kit. When I am lying ill in bed, Alma will join me, lying in the spare bed in my room. Edith will make a rare visit and tell her she has a child to look after and she must get up out of bed. But Alma has reverted to child herself.

Kit will start confiding in me and will repeatedly urge me to, 'Be a good girl, you know your mother's not well.'

I ask M what he remembers about this time but it's a void for him. A white space. He talks about what he doesn't remember. How he has no memory of affection, of Alma ever touching or comforting him. It's the same for me. I watched her hands endlessly at work feeding cloth through the machine, but I don't remember them ever touching me or her arms enfolding me.

Later, as an adult, I am conscious of how much I recoil from her touch, how I never want Alma to touch me, ever. How I hate the idea of having to share a bed with her.

Love

A child doesn't wonder if her mother loves her or not. There is no conscious thought, there is just the doing of everything in her power to be loved and to be worthy of love. Because in the dark rooms of a mother's depression and in the lit rooms of her cruelty the child comes to suspect, not through knowledge or expression, but through feeling, that she is not loved.

I don’t truly begin to question my relationship with Alma until I take my first steps into adolescence, when she beats me again, the difference being this is a beating I will not forget. It's then I begin to see that Alma's actions do not match with ideas of kindness or love. Can you love someone and beat them?

Can you love someone and send them to Coventry for days, using your silence as weapon? Ask them to lie for you, to be complicit in your adultery, demean you, be jealous of you, humiliate you - all of which are to come?

Kit liked to insist that Alma loved us. But it didn't seem that way to M and I, and in later years, when Alma became a grandmother to my children, her mothering never rang true. It somehow seemed as if she was acting. A role that she played but did not have the natural instinct for and had never properly learned. And the play went well enough as long as the children acquiesced. But dissent was met with her sharp disapproval and an angry poke in the arm.

It was a thing she did with her grandchildren, especially her grandson: poked and prodded if things weren't going her way. When the children were good, and when she liked how they looked, she basked in the role. Approval, love, if you could call it that, was only ever conditional and she made no bones about the fact that my daughter K was her favourite.

Was Alma aware of her shortcomings? Did she feel guilty at her inability to mother or to love? Or, as I suspect, was any recognition of this lack buried so deep it was impossible to excavate without bringing down the house of cards that was her fragmented, broken self.