The Peppered Moth (49 page)

The house would have to be cleared, and, again, Faro volunteered. She had already taken a selection of Dora’s treasures to her bedroom in the Poplars, but there was a lot of rubbish still to go before the house could be put on the market. Faro and Steve made several trips to the Rose & Rose Greendump with the worst of the stuff. The contents of the freezer proved a problem. Steve, a Jewish vegetarian, was particularly worried about the pork chops, which looked as though they had been there for decades. It didn’t seem right to chuck them in a greendump. A pity, said Faro, that Great-Grandpa Bawtry’s Destructor had ever been decommissioned. They’d have roasted away nicely in there.

Faro tracked down the house of Dora’s friend Dorothy, but she came too late, for Dorothy had died suddenly, and the house was for sale. Dorothy Cooper, née Clarkson, had lived in a house called Walden in Quarry View Road, Wath-upon-Dearne. If Faro had expected a picturesquely depressing residence, she was disappointed. Wath itself was depressing, because depressed, but Walden proved to be a pleasant 1930s building with stained glass in the panels over its bow windows, and a front garden full of rose bushes. Had it been named after Thoreau’s
Walden
? Had Dorothy Cooper read Thoreau? A little island of peace, overlooking the quarries. Faro stood there for a two minutes’ silence, watching the removal men as they heaved out the old furniture. In the garden next door stood an extraordinary and unlikely object, twelve foot tall, bristling with wires and spikes and crowns of thorns. Was it a sculpture? No, the removal men told Faro. It was a ham-radio transmitter. From this forgotten ridge, somebody was reaching out to the world.

Faro, amongst the leavings of her great-aunt’s life, sits alone, one dark winter evening. She is once more going through the drawers of the living-room sideboard, where Dora had kept her papers and her photographs and her albums. It is a sad task, but Faro is not unhappy, for she is spending the night with Steve, and looks forward, as always, to seeing him. She has, at times, wondered if she should brave spending a whole night in Swinton Road, to see if the ghosts of her grandmother and great-grandparents will visit her, but she has not been able to face it. It is too unpleasant there, and she does not think the ghosts will come.

She has, however, on her various visits, found some evocative mementoes. She has found her aunt’s little suede autograph album, and read its jokes, its poetic inscriptions, its pious exhortations. She has found the little brownish card from Breaseborough Urban District Council inviting George Albert Bawtry to a dinner at 6.30 on Monday, 2 June, at Hardy’s Rooms to celebrate the opening of the Destructor and Electric Lighting Works in the year of the Coronation of King Edward VII, 1902. It is signed,
Obediently Yours,
by a committee of four. She has found
Little Henry and His Bearer
and
The Dairyman’s Daughter,
and various inscribed hymnbooks and Bibles. She has found books of coloured scraps, carefully pasted in by tidy children. She has found postcards from her great-grandfather to her great-grandmother, dating back to the days when Ellen Bawtry was still Ellen Cudworth. She has found postcards from unknown Cudworths and unknown Bawtrys. Her aunt’s old driving licence, and her postwar ration book. A sheet of Polyfotos of a much-replicated fierceeyed Chrissie Barron, aged about ten, in a panama school hat, and a similar sheet of her Uncle Robert, staring solemnly at the camera and half-strangled by a large knotted school tie. A photograph of the little sisters, Bessie and Dora, in their Sunday best, all frills and embroidery and sweetness. A photo of Grandma Barron’s wedding day, taken in Breaseborough churchyard. A photograph of Bessie and Dora, fair and young and pretty, sitting on a grassy bank in cloche hats, full of hope, smiling. A rather surprising portrait of Great-Grandpa Bawtry in drag, looking like Charlie’s Aunt. A lineup of about twelve motorbikes and sidecars, off on a rally, the men in caps, with cigarettes bravely clenched between their teeth, the women in hats with earflaps. The Mongol hordes of South Yorkshire. They conquered nothing.

There are too many memories here. Impatience is overcoming Faro. She has several plastic bags full of rubbish, and she is sure she is about to discard something important. Though how could any of this be of any importance? These are such little lives. Unimportant people, in an unimportant place. They had been young, they had endured, they had taken their wages and their punishment, and then they had grown old, and all for no obvious purpose. And now she is throwing them all into a plastic bag.

Most of Auntie Dora’s books, apart from the Victorian Sunday school keepsakes and Dick Francis hardbacks, are old
Reader’s Digests
or cheap book club editions, and Faro boxes them up for charity. She hesitates when she finds a novel by Georgette Heyer called
Faro’s Daughter,
and starts to browse through it. It tells the story of the beautiful Deborah, spirited niece of an aunt who runs a gaming house in Regency Mayfair. Faro, skipping rapidly, is pleased to find that despite her professional disadvantages this daughter of the game marries the disdainful and stylish gentleman who had been so rude to her in the first pages. This unlikely romance is cheering. Faro admires the innovative boldness of Georgette Heyer, and her careless disregard of probability. She puts the book to one side. She reprieves it from Oxfam. She will hand it on to her mother. She glances at the rest of the Georgette Heyer collection, and finds another title of interest, a very early work called
The Black Moth.
It doesn’t look as though it is about industrial melanism, but she puts that to one side too. Maybe Georgette Heyer is trying to tell her something?

Auntie Dora has asked her to look for her gold bracelet, her father’s silver watch and her mother’s engagement ring. So far, Faro has not discovered them. She will have one more look, in Auntie Dora’s bedroom. She climbs the narrow staircase, lit from above by a dangling light bulb. Dora’s bedroom is very damp. The window had been left open, letting in the rain, and now it will not close properly, for the old wooden frame is swollen. There are dark patches on the plaster ceiling, shaped like the billowing mushroom clouds of atomic explosions. The room smells of cat and human urine. Here is the very bed in which Chrissie and Robert would snuggle up to warm, buttery Auntie Dora when they were on their Breaseborough visits. These are the very stains at which they had stared, and of which Chrissie had spoken to Faro. They had frightened Chrissie, for those had been the days when children lived in fear of another Hiroshima.

Faro rummages in the chest of drawers and on the top shelf of the wardrobe. She discovers a cache of all the crisp new linen tea-towels that she and Robert and Chrissie have been giving Dora as Christmas extras over the years, emblazoned with representations of the counties of England, the wildflowers of Wales and country recipes from Somerset. She finds, in the bottom drawer, a forlorn pile of antique unused bed linen, and folded amongst it a pair of beautiful lace-edged pillowcases, embroidered, white on white, and enclosed in yellowing tissue: with them is a handwritten card, which says
To Dora, for your Bottom Drawer, with best regards from ABB.
She also finds a couple of promising boxes. One is square and wooden, one is round and lacquered. Both contain a touching jumble of what look like more or less worthless treasures—a glittering paste buckle, a chipped Wedgwood cameo brooch, some strings of pearls and glass beads with broken clasps, a rubber-banded scroll of out-of-date banknotes, a little leather child’s purse of coins, a tortoiseshell hairpin, an amber cigarette holder and a silver napkin ring with the initials DCB engraved upon it. Faro spills the coins out over Dora’s glass-protected kidney-shaped dressing table. There are bronze farthings, with their stubby little wrens, and octagonal threepenny pieces with their emblems of flowering thrift, and a silver sixpence dated 1951. The sixpence is discoloured. Faro has never seen a farthing before, but the sixpence reminds her of something. She can’t think what.

She finds the gold chain, and the engagement ring. The ring is a clear and eloquent candidate for pity. Its slender golden band has worn thin and its shaft is broken. She tries it on, but even in its broken state it is far too small to encircle Faro’s smallest finger. Can Ellen Bawtry’s fingers ever have been so slender? This fragile circle bears a diamond-shaped cluster of eight small dull rubbed pearls, which, examined through Dora’s bedside magnifying glass, look more like tiny teeth than jewels. In the centre of the pearls is set a tiny square of pale green glass. It does not even pretend to be an emerald. Faro feels sorry for the poor ring, and for her grandmother.

Bert Bawtry’s round solid-silver watch is more robust. It has a heavy silver chain attached to it. Its face displays roman numerals, in a plain handsome black script, on a white ground. Faro manages to prise open the complicated layers of its back, inspects its hieroglyphic hallmarks, and gazes into its intricate workings. She shakes the watch, holds it to her ear, and to her astonishment hears that it begins to tick. Its second hand moves. It lives again. It has waited patiently through all this time for her to come to discover it and reawaken it.

At the bottom of the wooden box is a brown envelope. Inside it is a photograph. It is of the two sisters, taken on Grandma Barron’s wedding day, for Bessie is wearing her wedding dress, and Dora is playing bridesmaid. They are sitting in a backyard on a bench next to what is clearly an outdoor privy. It must have been taken at Slotton Road, before the sisters set off to the church to meet Joe Barron. Both sisters look happy, shy, hopeful and enchantingly pretty. Bessie’s hair is charmingly shingled, Dora’s is in ringlets.
The world was all before them, where to choose
... Faro stares at this photograph, in the belief that it has more to say to her than it can show. She examines it through the magnifying glass, and it seems that through the curve of the thick plastic lens, round the receding edges of the image, she begins to see movement. It is as though the frozen moment lives again. Somebody is standing behind Bessie and Dora Bawtry, in the shadows. Who is it? Will this person come out of the shadows? Who is there, with these young women? Is it their Redeemer?

On the way down the stairs, she remembers, with a sense of sudden shock, the last time she had seen a silver sixpence. It had been hidden in the Christmas pudding that Bessie Barron had served up at her last family Christmas at Woodlawn. Bessie, who had sliced the pudding, made sure that little Faro got the sixpence, and Faro, who had noticed the manoeuvre, had nevertheless been pleased and excited to find the little coin, hygienically wrapped in foil, half hidden in her rich brown fruity portion. Faro stands stock-still on the seventh step, for she can see Grandma’s happy face, smiling, as Faro cries out and unwraps the silver treasure. Grandma Barron had always made a good Christmas pudding. Faro had always enjoyed the Surrey Christmas. She felt safe there, in that large, bright, clean house. Like a proper child.

After Bessie’s death, Chrissie Barron had bought all her puddings from a shop.

This is a novel about my mother, Kathleen Marie Bloor. The epigraph is a poem by my daughter, Rebecca Swift. Neither Rebecca nor her brothers appear in this volume, and my brother and sisters have also been excised. The later parts of the story are entirely fictitious.

My father died in December 1982, and my mother shortly afterwards, in April 1984. After her death several friends—mostly novelist friends—suggested that I should try to write about her. Use your mother’s blood for ink, one of them urged me. So I tried, but it wasn’t easy. I think about my mother a great deal, uncomfortably. Night and day on me she cries. Maybe I should have tried to write a factual memoir of her life, but I have written this instead.

I encountered great difficulties. The worst was the question of tone. I find myself being harsh, dismissive, censorious. As she was. She taught me language. One way of escaping from this would have been through comedy. And my mother did often teeter on the brink of appearing as a figure from an Alan Bennett comedy—opinionated, provincial, ridiculous. But I do not have the talent for that kind of comedy, and my mother was not a comic character. She was not funny. She was a highly intelligent, angry, deeply disappointed and manipulative woman. I am not sure if I have been able to find a tone in which to create or describe her.

I recognize that I appear to betray a bias in favour of my father, and that I may not have been able to bring him to life. I find myself repeating that he was ‘a good man’. And so I believe he was.

The plot also presented difficulties. I knew something about the early lives of my parents, and drew on letters which my father wrote to his best friend. This correspondence began in their schooldays and continued through the period when my father was acting as travelling salesman for Drabble’s Sweets, through his years at Downing College, through the early years of his marriage and the birth of my elder sister, and through the war, when I and my younger sister were born. On my father’s death, that friend, also now dead, gave me these letters, and I think he would have wanted me to use them. They gave me many social details about raffia baskets and coffee sets and T. S. Eliot. So my descriptions of those early years are backed up by documentary evidence and by some research, though I have also filled out the record with invention. But the Drabble social background continues to mystify me. What are my father’s sisters doing on skis in the Alps in the 1930s? Is the photograph a studio fake? Where did the money come from? How much money was there? And what was the family of Leila Das doing in South Yorkshire? How did they get there? I could spend years trying to answer these questions. Maybe, one day, I will.

I have checked some, but not all of my mother’s stories. The trauma of her Tripos was, I believe, as she and I have described it. She often spoke of Miss Strachey, and she was taught by Dr Leavis: somewhere I have the reference he wrote for her when she began to apply for teaching posts. She admired Virginia Woolf, and in particular, curiously,
Orlando
, though she cannot have read this as early as she thought she did. Of course, she may have told different stories to my sisters and my brother. Each child has a different mother, as I believe Winnicott says somewhere.