Auto Da Fay. Fay Weldon
in the gothic tower of the convent as I ran up and down shrieking and splashing in the mud and called out to the world that I was a wicked girl and a heathen and the ringleader, and she would let my form teacher know in the morning. I spent a night of terror so abject nothing has been as bad since, not even the night in the haunted house in Saffron Walden years later. Nameless horrors, scrabbling to get in, the worse for being un-named. In the morning nothing happened. There was no hammer blow. I did not tell my mother because her life was hard enough.
I got a bad sore throat and lay with my pecked ankles in bed and couldn’t go to school and was tremendously happy. The doctor came and said I might have scarlet fever and if so I would have to go to an isolation hospital. I prayed to God that I could go, and to the Cardinal in his wonderful sweeping scarlet gown, all the way from Rome, the Holy City, to intercede for me with God. My prayers were answered, which was gratifying. I had begun to doubt the deity. I thought it said in the Bible that if you threw your bread upon the water it would be returned threefold: I’d throw some of the stale biscuits into the Avon but nothing ever came back, though rather more ducks than usual would come by. The ducks seemed so happy and free, though sometimes they too would turn on one of their number, a Beverley duck, as it were, and peck it to bits.
I loved the fever hospital. The nurses were kind and the other children were friendly. My ankles healed and fears of limbo receded. My confidence in the deity was restored. Invalid food, the like of which is not known in today’s hospitals or sick-rooms, food to tempt the reluctant appetite, was cooked and served. A little pale and white, it’s true – clear beef broth, steamed fish and mashed potatoes, and vanilla blancmange – followed by hot sweet milk and white-iced biscuits – but every spoonful you got down you was applauded.
Anything parents brought in had to be sterilized in great steam cupboards, and if they visited us, which they were only allowed to do once a week, they had to sit the other side of a thick glass partition. I had a fit of neurosis which I remember to this day: a girl in the bed opposite had a bag of sweets: she threw me one and missed and it went under the bed, but I chose to believe she had not thrown it, and had treated me badly, and wept and wept until a nurse came to comfort me. I knew perfectly well it was an accident but preferred to be miserable, for the sheer drama of it. Later in life I would treat lovers and husbands in this way. Taking offence and suffering because of it, knowing in your heart they are not in the least to blame, you just want a drama, and your turn at being a victim.
One day unannounced, it was not my mother sitting the other side of the glass screen when I was led in for the family visit, but my father. At least that was what the nurse said he was, and I had no reason to mistrust the nurse. I didn’t know what to say to him. He seemed tall and handsome and I was immensely flattered that he had come to see me, and to think that I was his daughter, which gave me some kind of right to him. He talked about his plans: they did not seem to include living in the same house as us. That was fair enough, I could see he would hate the magpie. He gave me two shillings, and then he disappeared again.
When I came out of hospital my mother said my father had gone to the North Island to look for a job. North! The island I had never seen. That was where the excitement and energy lay, I was convinced. It was the land which contained my father, where the weather got warmer with every mile you travelled, where I had never been. Further south and all was bleak and next stop the South Pole, where there was nothing but penguins. I was increasingly awed by the map. How vast the globe was, and how proud I was to be British: why, a whole third of the nations were coloured red, which meant we governed it. The disgrace of being a homie was balanced by the specialness of being English. But how far away we were from the rest of the world! I knew only too well, because of the time that lay between my parents’ coming and going, what distance meant. You measured it in days and weeks, not miles.
School was on hold for me, while I recuperated. I managed to forget about it. One Sunday afternoon Jane and I were sent out to play in Cranmer Square. Frank had come south. He was to take us out for the afternoon; we were to drive to visit the black swans which lived on a lake outside the city. No, he was not coming into the house, the landlady would not like it, we were to wait for him outside. We had ribbons put in our hair. I had the check dress Jane had worn for the Rita Angus portrait, which fitted me by now. There was no choice. We were given no option as to what to wear. There wasn’t much to choose from, anyway. School uniform and Sunday best and that was about all.
Jane’nFay went out to play. She skipped and I played sevens. We didn’t speak much. We improved our skills while we waited. I could read what was in most people’s heads but seldom these days what was in hers. I thought it might be something to do with the colour of her eyes. She had dark, dark brown eyes like my mother’s, and mine were bright blue like my father’s. I adored her and felt apologetic, the cuckoo chick in her nest, growing larger and larger, wearing her cast-offs, and resented for something I couldn’t help, for being there. I daresay most younger siblings feel like this.
Time was getting on. No sign of a father. I wanted Jane to go back inside to ask what the time was, but she wouldn’t. I went. It was three o’clock. I played more sevens but kept dropping the ball: Jane kept stepping on the rope. In the next hour hope and disappointment fought it out, and minute by minute disappointment gained ground until there was no hope left. The sun sank lower across Cranmer Square: I came to the understanding that I was not central to the universe, and that no amount of wishing and hoping would twist it to my convenience, and the sun would just go on sinking.
Around four-thirty my mother called us in and said, ‘Well, he’s not coming, is he?’ in the tone of one who was disappointed but not surprised. I sat down to read Ferdinand the Bull yet again, practising insouciance. I did not like people being sorry for me. Just sit down and smell the flowers, like Ferdinand. I have, and I date it to that day, become expert at receiving bad news. I keep my face still, gain time to reassess my situation, to retreat or advance as required. Grit the teeth, face a changed world, go back afterwards to mop up the emotion. I was more like a New Zealander than a homie in this, and have stayed so. New Zealanders go into danger gear at the drop of a hat: you don’t see them emoting all over the place. That’s why they run Aid Agencies and such like: they don’t panic.
Later my mother said he’d had flu and hadn’t been able to come. I didn’t quite believe her. I thought it was probably something to do with Ina, or Jean, or Helen. Be that as it may, he had gone back to the North without stopping by.
We left the boarding-house. I was so pleased I tried to set the magpie free of its chain: my mother said it only attacked because it was unhappy. But it preferred its imprisonment: it wouldn’t let me near it. I had rather hoped for a bungalow like other people had but my mother had found us rooms above a disused stable in an old mews on the road out to Papanui. Poverty is a stubborn thing: you seldom escape it with one bound. But the great thing was that I no longer had to go to the Convent. I was to go to a school called Elmwood instead.
There had been some upturn in the powder-box trade, and my mother had sold a novel to her publishers, and received a cheque for fifty pounds. She seemed to have changed her mind about the desirability of a convent education for me, though Jane was to stay at St Mary’s for another year. Now I was at a school of my own our names began to separate out.
Elmwood was run on progressive lines: there were no turrets and towers, it was just a great space of green grass interrupted by low, airy custom-built classrooms. There was a swimmingpool. Nobody lied or stole or cringed. Teachers read us