Man at the Helm (26 page)

Miss Kellogg felt responsible for the poorness of the Husky’s performance and put in a word with Mr Holt and our mother was given special dispensation to borrow her Snowdrop van on Fridays and keep it for the weekend. It wasn’t usually allowed, but a blind eye was turned for her in view of the bad advice from Deputy Dawg. This meant she’d drop Deano the van boy at home before the last two calls and then drive home in Sofie (which was the name she’d given the Snowdrop van), the downside being that she and Deano the van boy would have the unloading and loading to do first thing on the Monday. Still, this was better than relying on the erratic Hillman Husky. We loved having Sofie the Leyland van, registration SOY 731F, parked outside our house with its snowdrops on the side and showing clearly we were part of a wholesome endeavour.

One Saturday morning our mother suddenly said she had to nip out and did anyone want to go with her. In the end Little Jack went and sat beside her in the van boy’s seat.

They were back an hour later and we couldn’t believe our eyes.

They’d had a haircut each and no longer looked like themselves. Jack had had a crew cut and it made him look like a new
person after all the years of sticky-out curls and a fringe in his eyes. He looked like Action Man. Our mother had had hers chopped to the shoulder, bluntly as if with an axe. It hung in clumps, darker now, and with the fringe cut in you could see her eyes and brows. She looked like a girl on a ranch with lots to do.

The pair of them stood and let us gaze at them.

‘Did Geraldo do it?’ I asked.

‘I can’t afford Geraldo at the moment,’ she said. ‘We went to Durex Tony’s.’

Tony was a man in the next village who cut hair in a grubby cubicle next to a sock factory and sold Durex and cigarette lighters. He had a picture of a half-man half-horse on the wall and was rumoured to have an illegally rude tattoo on his torso. Little Jack claimed that Durex Tony gave him a cigarette to smoke while he cut his hair with a shaver. But our mother said it was a lollipop.

On the Saturday afternoon after the haircuts, we decided we should go to Wistow Fields and let Debbie have a decent run. Debbie hardly got runs now, since we didn’t have a field of our own, and she hated traipsing the pavements on the lead and without a lead she was liable to go awol.

Our mother had settled quite well at Snowdrop by then. She hated it and hated the early mornings and the horrible bossy man in charge, but she was showing signs of not feeling quite so miserable.

‘You’re in a good mood,’ my sister said that Saturday.

‘I am, actually,’ said our mother, and I studied her.

She’d been battling with the pills, battling the urge to take them and the misery she felt without them, and with help from Dr Gurly she was beginning to have the odd day of feeling
vaguely OK with just a minimum of pills. And we hadn’t been to London for months.

We three clambered into the Snowdrop van at around 4 p.m. with a packet of almond slices and some bottles of Sola Cola. My sister sat in the van boy’s seat with Debbie at her feet. Jack and I jumped up into the mesh bunks and sat atop loads of grubby laundry and our mother swung herself up into the driver’s seat. The drive that day to Wistow Fields was honestly one of the best quarter-hours of my life. Our little family (plus Debbie) unified somehow by the lumbering great van, her growling engine – top speed 35 miles per hour – our mother’s left arm, bare to the shoulder, heaving the ponderous gearstick around and her bare feet whacking the pedals, Georgie Fame singing ‘I say yeah, yeah’, and Jack and me rolling around in the fixed cages among the damp and soapy hand towels collected from seventeen pubs on Friday.

We were happy, all of us at the same time, and as we clattered over the cattle grid into Wistow Fields I wanted us to keep driving and stay moving and get eventually to some better place (like America, where people would ask us how we were doing, only nearer). But we slowed up and parked on a verge, tumbled out and ran around a bit.

Our mother kept her Grundig going and my sister switched to a home-made tape from the hit parade and suddenly it was the New Seekers, whom we usually hated but joined in with. And we stayed there, singing songs we usually didn’t like and eating the almond slices, and Debbie rolled in fox poo and we had to force her into a brook and our mother lay on a line of dirty Turkish roller towels and swigged from a Schweppes bottle and puffed away on Embassys and told us funny things about the Snowdrop lot. How supportive and amusing they all were. How they’d all had their own ups and downs. We heard again
how Miss Kellogg had lobbied for us to be allowed use of the van and how she’d shouldered the blame for the Hillman Husky from Ray’s Reliables. We also heard the story of how the smell of bacon had brought Miss Kellogg back from the brink of suicide in 1970.

‘How?’ my sister asked.

‘Well, she was feeling suicidal and suddenly the aroma of sizzling bacon drifted in through her bedsit window and she realized, in the nick of time, she was more hungry than suicidal,’ explained our mother.

We were all thrilled to hear about the bacon saving Miss Kellogg’s life. Our mother said she herself had never felt suicidal and couldn’t imagine such a thing. Which was nice to hear, and Little Jack said that if he ever got suicidal, he’d just do a load of daredevil things until he was either cheered up or killed.

Interestingly, the revelation about Miss Kellogg and the bacon rescue took us dangerously close to the subject of ham, which we usually skirted around and avoided (it leading to the subject of Charlie), and it’s funny that although we had no reason to ever mention ham or cooked meats, the subject seemed always to be lurking along with other things we didn’t want to mention like pets, baby donkeys and Dorset. But somehow, there on Wistow Fields that Saturday afternoon, with the sun low in the sky and droplets of Sola Cola on our moustaches, it had been OK to come close to the subject of ham. In other words, we were recovering.

After a while the day started to end and the Grundig started to slur and we were just thinking of heading home when I saw a look of great anxiety cross our mother’s face. I thought it might at least be a herd of angry bulls or something that could do us great harm, but it was just a man.

A man striding towards us, quite ordinary, hands in pockets.

‘Who’s this?’ I asked.

‘Shit,’ said our mother, ‘shit.’ And she scrambled to her feet and patted her hair.

‘What’s going on here?’ asked the man. Brown trousers, thin belt, long sideburns, sleeves rolled up.

‘We just came out for a run around,’ said our mother, looking crumpled.

‘Pick these towels up,’ he said, gesturing at the towels lying on the grass. He went to pick up the Schweppes bottle but she intercepted it. Then he swung himself up into the van.

‘How did you get all those children here?’ he called from the van.

‘Two went in the cages,’ she said.

Although the man didn’t seem aggressive or even particularly angry, our mother was a bag of nerves. He was icy and machine-like and we guessed it must be Mr Holt (the boss) and we edged away so as not to witness our mother being told off. Before long, our mother told us all to get into Mr Holt’s mustard-coloured Austin 1100, which we did, and he drove us home. All four of us plus Debbie.

After dropping us at home Mr Holt walked all the way back to Wistow Fields, on foot, to collect the van, drove it back to our house, got into his car and went.

‘What was he so cross about?’ I asked later on.

‘He’s just a miserable bastard,’ our mother said. And she kicked the door to her room, thinking about him. She didn’t kick it very hard, but her foot (bare) made a hole in it. I have to say, the kick wasn’t much more than an angry gesture, but the hole looked like something awful had happened and I really wished it wasn’t there.

Our mother was upset for the rest of the weekend and dreaded going back to Snowdrop on the Monday morning. So
all the excitement of the new manly haircuts and the niceness and unification of the van ride and the not minding thinking about ham came to nothing. I was furious with Mr Holt and felt sorry for our mother. My sister felt the exact opposite and said that our mother was to blame for being irresponsible, for taking a mile when she’d been given an inch, and mostly for being drunk in charge of the Snowdrop van.

Monday morning came and she was gone by seven. I meant to worry about her all day but I forgot until I got home and saw her there at 3.45, which was much too early.

‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Were you sacked?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘but the bastard gave me a verbal warning.’

It sounded bad. ‘Verbal?’ I said. ‘Is that bad?’

‘Not as bad as written,’ she said, and I still wasn’t sure.

‘Why are you home so early?’ I asked.

‘I was suspended without pay for the day,’ she said.

She said Mr Holt was a bastard again and that she was ashamed and that she couldn’t do the job and all sorts of rambling stuff. Mainly that Mr Holt was making life hell for her, being picky and horrible.

‘Could you have a pill?’ I wondered.‘Would it cheer you up?’

‘Oh Lizzie, I don’t want to, but I do want to. But I really don’t want to.’ And she poured herself a drink instead.

Then my sister came in, thank God, and I wasn’t alone with her any more.

‘Oh God, what’s wrong?’ she said. ‘Why are you here so early? Did you get the sack?’

Soon our father called to take us for the day. It seemed that Bernard had been let go and he was doing his own driving in an automatic Citroën with an interesting suspension action. He didn’t come into the house but tooted outside in the street and sat at the wheel, looking uncertain. We drove the forty minutes or so to his side of the county without saying much, the rattle of his onyx ring on the vibrating gearstick mesmerizing and annoying at the same time, and I think it was that that made my sister pull the side of my hair. There was no other reason for it.

We started having a tussle in the back seat and pulling each other’s hair. It was unusual for us to be fighting like that and I was offended at her starting it. It seemed too intimate a thing for our father to witness; nevertheless, I fought hard and actually made her cry, which was horrible. The startling thing was that our father completely ignored us. He didn’t look at us or say anything, only turned to Little Jack next to him and reminded him to notice the car’s suspension.

‘You’ll feel the car lowering when we come to a stop.’ Or something.

When our fight had completely finished he asked us how we were enjoying our new house.

‘It’s very small but fine,’ said my sister.

And when we arrived at his house we found he had moved too. He was surprised we didn’t know but concluded he’d forgotten to tell us or our mother had. His new house was a good deal less grand than his last, though not quite so small as ours and still
managed to have all the features you’d expect from a superior dwelling, plus his housekeeper was still going round with a cloth and pegging things out on the line.

‘I hear the firm has gone bankrupt,’ said my sister. I marvelled at her use of language. The Firm.

‘Well, yes, there have been some problems,’ said our father.

We had the dreaded Sunday lunch, albeit at the kitchen table, and the baby who was a bit older by now wasn’t all that well behaved and therefore didn’t make Jack seem inferior, and the newer baby was of less interest to everybody, being the second and a girl and brown-haired.

My sister brought up the subject of our mother’s job and said how much she was enjoying driving a Leyland van all day long and running into pub toilets five days a week, and after sounding quite interesting it went on too long and seemed pointed. I was cross with my sister. First, the unprovoked hair-pulling in the automatic Citroën, then the below-the-belt account of our mother’s work. I wondered what was the matter with her. But then, as if in answer to that, I blurted out something truly awful. I didn’t plan to and as I began it seemed like plain old chitchat, but as soon as it was out I realized it was nothing less than heartbreaking.

‘People keep saying you’re evil and bad,’ I said to my father, between mouthfuls of the roast dinner.

My father didn’t wince, he just said, ‘I am sorry you’re having to hear that kind of thing. It’s very unfortunate. I really am very sorry.’ And his wife let her knife and fork clatter onto the table and looked at the wall.

‘It doesn’t bother me,’ I said, thinking that made it better.

I didn’t steal anything from the house on that trip. I usually took a pot of jam or a tin of mandarins. There was less on offer and I didn’t feel it fair or right now the firm had gone bankrupt.
But I did smoke in the bedroom and finish a bottle of lemonade that was meant to be for all of us.

Back at home my sister exaggerated how small and ordinary our father’s new house was, to make our mother feel better, but then accidentally mentioned Mrs Penrose and our mother pounced on it.

‘They can still run to a maid-of-all-work, then?’ she said.

‘Yes, but to be fair he hasn’t got a chauffeur any more,’ my sister said, and then realized how silly it sounded and we all laughed.

Our mother settled down at the laundry after the verbal warning and got back into the swing of being a Snowdrop driver, Mr Holt remaining a fly in the ointment, though. If he hadn’t been there our mother would have found the getting up and going every morning so much easier. He was a stickler and seemed to notice every detail and to be actually on the lookout for mistakes and problems. If she was a few minutes late, he’d tap his wrist at her. If she unloaded in the wrong bay, he’d make her load up again and move the van. If she and Deano were back early, he’d give them an errand. One day a customer had rung to say a roller towel had jammed only moments after our mother had installed the clean one and left. Mr Holt made her go out to the customer and unjam it.

Once she’d found a dozen clean folded tea towels in the van and realized they’d left a customer without his correct number. They’d been halfway home when the discovery was made and decided to leave it until the next day. Back at the depot, Mr Holt noticed the tiny pile of hidden towels with his eagle eye and sent her back into town. When she put up a reasonable argument for dropping them in the following day, he simply waved her on and said, ‘Wedge. Thin end of.’

It really seemed as though Mr Holt picked on her especially, that was the galling thing. One morning he stood in front of the van as she pulled out of the depot. He waved her down and told her to get out. Then he sent her home to change into sensible footwear. He insisted on all van drivers and boys taking a lunch break at a certain place on whichever route they were on and would check to see if they had indeed had a stop. Our mother said this showed he was a fascist.

The absolute worst of it was that none of her colleagues at the Snowdrop would complain about Mr Holt. No one seemed to want to say how picky and petty he was, and as far as she could tell, the rest of the workforce seemed to think his management style perfectly reasonable. They weren’t friends with him or anything, except after work hours when he might chuckle at a joke or make an ironic observation; he was a popular, albeit distant, boss.

She told us that if she’d been able to get it off her chest, moan about him or slag him off, it might have made things easier, but she couldn’t and apologized for ‘bringing it home with her’. I didn’t mind, neither did Little Jack, who suggested putting a picture of him on the dartboard, but that seemed too drastic. Our sister did mind. She told our mother she was part of the workforce now and the workforce needed leadership. And it was natural for someone from her background finding themselves suddenly in a subordinate role to resist and that she needed breaking in like a young horse. And that was probably what Mr Holt was doing, hence it seeming as if he was picking on her.

One day Deano the van boy called in sick and Mr Holt took his place on our mother’s van. It was the worst day of her life, worse than all the court appearances, drugged-up hellish days in bed, school days, you name it. Mr Holt had sat in the passenger
seat all stony silence, glancing at the dash as our mother drove the route and used the handbrake whenever possible. When our mother got home she needed two Disprins and a hot whisky to shift a day-long headache. The day had seemed like a week, she said, and we told her that was exactly how we felt after going to our father’s and that it wasn’t Mr Holt’s fault (nor our father’s), just the tension of the situation. Of not being able to relax.

We wanted details of the day. Mr Holt had insisted on a proper stop for lunch and the two had had to sit and eat a cheese and chutney cob together and he had chewed very slowly. He’d made her refuel before returning to the depot. He’d made her drop new price sheets off at every stop and, worse than anything, he chatted to the customers who knew him and he asked how things had been, customer service-wise.

‘Didn’t you chat amongst yourselves?’ my sister asked.

‘A bit,’ she said. ‘I told him why I’d taken the job at Snowdrop.’

‘I hope you didn’t say for the money,’ said my sister.

‘I said I’d taken it because we’d been derailed,’ she said.

‘
Derailed?
’ we said.

‘Catastrophically knocked off course, but that now I was taking control.’

‘Taking the helm,’ I said.

‘Well, I didn’t say that, but yes,’ she said, and went to phone Deano.

My sister knew about my friendship with Melody by then and was quite understanding about it. The two of them had a mutual though lopsided respect for each other. My sister liked Melody but was slightly contemptuous of her attempts at prettiness and ladylike ways. Melody’s admiration of my sister, however, was unconditional. I expect it was because mine was (unconditional)
and things like that rub off. I wasn’t constantly advertising my sister’s virtues or anything, but had said the odd thing that would have struck a chord with Melody. Such as her trying to save a duckling’s life and her having the guts to snitch on a dinner lady who called a girl with a lazy eye ‘Nelson’.

Our friendship came under some strain around the time of our move to the Sycamore Estate, though. It was nothing to do with our not being neighbours any longer, but my early grapplings with the semantics of fashion accessories coincided with Melody’s handbag-usage phase (and her wearing of a beady necklace which she claimed played down a veiny sternum). Somehow the handbags and beads signalled she wasn’t going to shape up as a friend. The final straw (metaphorically speaking) was a fabric bucket with bamboo hoops for handles, which Melody suddenly had with her at all times. What made me most sick about it was her habit (out of necessity) of frequently saying to me, ‘Can you just hold my bag a moment?’

This was because she couldn’t perform any two-handed task while holding it, due to the hoops being too small in circumference to be slipped up on to the shoulder. So, time after time, I’d be left holding it while she fiddled with her shoelace or gate latch. It wasn’t as if the bag ever had anything worth carrying in it either, such as a Wagon Wheel or a penknife. I could tell this by the weight – it was, for all its stupid bucket-size, light as a feather. It was, like so many women’s things, like a clumsy prop for a fancy-dress costume.

It sounds harsh, I know, but I had just realized that opting for anything sensible in the way of bags, shoes, trousers (even books and hobbies) marked you out as a tomboy (even if you weren’t a tomboy as such), and although being a tomboy was thought by adults to be marvellous, it was a problem when it came to other children. Other tomboys might admire you but would often want
to compete in tomboyishness, and that meant possibly having to fight them or having to jump off a roof or watch them dissect a wasp without minding.

Non-tomboys would not admire you – they’d think you were heading in the wrong direction and were either a lesbian in the making, which seemed a bad choice, or too lazy to make the effort for womanhood. I suppose they had to think these things in order to justify their own inconveniences and encumbrances. But back then it all felt like a trap.

Anyway, Melody had the womanly bag – and was looked up to by other budding women in spite of her childish clothes and veiny sternum – and she seemed happy. One day, it came to a head. Melody said, ‘Could you hold my bag for a sec? My necklace has slipped round the wrong way.’

And I said, ‘No, I bloody couldn’t … Why the hell do you carry it around with you anyway?’

‘It’s my knitting,’ said Melody, sounding shocked and hurt.

I said I doubted there was any knitting in the bag and that she just wanted to look like a budding woman. Melody adjusted the beads with the bag between her knees and shuffled quickly away and I was furious with myself, as you are when you do things like that. It felt like an ending.

Grocery shopping was a trial. Our mother was OK sending us to do it a bit at a time and the system where we nipped across the road to Miss Woods’s when we needed something had suited her down to the ground. But self-serving a trolley-load of groceries and toilet paper in a brightly lit space had got the better of her enough times that we knew to avoid doing too much in one go. However, now she was a full-time worker it seemed sensible to stock up in one big weekly shop.

Our mother had settled well at Snowdrop and I was over my
episode with the pig and my sister was over the Brownie letter and Little Jack even seemed to be speaking more easily and our mother was well into the reflection of the mountain in the lake. My sister and I had been discussing the Man List and wondering if it was time to recommence with the quest to find a man for our helm. So, one Saturday afternoon, sailing up the A50 in the unreliable Hillman Husky, our mother said, ‘Shall we call in at Woolco and do a big shop?’

With all these very positive things in mind, we thought it would probably be fine. And we said yes. Because while a failed big shop was always depressing and upsetting, a successful one was to be celebrated for all the obvious reasons – mainly that we could have fried eggs on toast and Debbie could enjoy Pal for active life or Pedigree Chum or whatever was on offer and we’d have a whole week with no worrying about margarine or Weetabix.

Anyway, we went and loaded a trolley with essentials and the odd treat. Things seemed to be going well and it looked as though we’d get through it when suddenly our mother said, ‘No, I’m unequal to this, it’s too much – come on, I have to leave.’

And, as usual, my sister protested. ‘We need this stuff, Mum,’ she said.

‘I can’t do it,’ said our mother, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’

‘But, Mum,’ said my sister, ‘we’re almost at the tills.’

The two of them argued briefly, but in the end we left the trolley by the soap powders and came home via the Red Rickshaw with ‘no beef savoury feast for 2’, which is what we always did on these occasions. On the way home my sister made a very clever observation.

‘We always go to the Chinese takeaway if we leave the shopping,’ she said.

‘That’s because it’s always nearly supper time and we’ve no food,’ said Jack.

‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said my sister, ‘it’s always that time in the afternoon.’

‘So what?’ I said.

‘It’s a classic low time for middle-aged women and people with mental illness,’ said my sister.

You might think our mother would’ve been pleased to hear that and feel a bit better about it all, but she wasn’t and told my sister to stop talking such a lot of utter crap. And then, just as she said that, pulling into our little driveway we saw the most amazing and beautiful sight – a cluster of carrier bags huddled by our front door. A family pack of Andrex, a tray of Pal for active life, and a family-size box of Daz automatic. It was our shopping, the exact shopping we’d just abandoned at Woolco.