an extract from the birds, the bees and other secrets

‘We ought to be able to die like that.’ Her eyes follow
the leaves as they drift downwards.

‘Beautifully.’ She pauses, her hands whispering over the
 sheets like small frightened animals.

‘Not like this, all thin and ugly.’

‘But Mum, you’re not thin and ugly!’

‘I’m not stupid either.’

Bird-like eyes challenge me out of a face which has become
gaunt almost beyond recognition.

‘Not stupid, Cass. You can’t fool me.’ She sighs, and the sigh
is so slight that it scarcely lifts the crisp white sheet covering
her.

‘The cancer may have eaten my body, but it hasn’t got
my brain.’ A sudden smile; a glimpse of the old Mum. ‘It
wouldn’t dare.’

I smile back, and take one of her hands in mine. It feels
unbelievably tiny and fragile, and I hold it like a small
precious thing which I must be careful not to break. All of
her is precious now; now that I am about to lose her. Her
smile, the blue of her eyes, her sense of humour, her total
unselfconsciousness, her incorrigible optimism. I find myself
studying her greedily, absorbing every detail, for although she
is so changed, I don’t want to forget a single thing about her.

‘I wasn’t a very good mother.’ Her voice is pensive. ‘I
never really meant to be a mother. I’m not sure – not sure
what I meant to be.’

It may have been true that, at the time, my mother wasn’t
sure how she had managed to produce children, but she certainly
made up for any ignorance of her own by trying to
ensure that the same fate never befell my brother or me. The
fact that she furnished us with the information at an age
when it was of no use to us whatsoever was neither here nor
there; my mother had, in her own words, ‘done her duty’.
This duty took the form of her (again to use her own
words) ‘gathering’ us to her, and telling us the facts of life.

‘I believe in being frank,’ she informed us, years later, and
with some pride.

‘I think children should know these things as soon as they
can understand them.’

But my brother and I didn’t understand them at all. Bewildered
by her inventive use of props (an egg from the larder
and a jam jar full of tadpoles) and baffled by her garbled tale
of eggs and passages, of body hair and bleeding, poor Lucas
had nightmares for weeks, while the whole episode (apart
from the tadpoles – how I longed to be allowed to keep those
tadpoles!) passed me by completely. It seemed to bear no
relevance whatsoever to my own narrow childish life, and so
I filed it away at the back of my brain (retrieval later on was
to prove tricky) and forgot all about it. Long after my brother
had stopped waking in the night, screaming with fear, I was
still blissfully ignorant of where I’d come from, nor did I care.
I had more important things to think about.

Two years later, I was to have my first real encounter with,
as it were, the facts of life in action.
Awakened one night by what sounded like cries of pain
coming from my mother’s room, I ran into her bedroom to
find her apparently writhing around under the bedclothes
with her new friend, the (as I realized, years later) aptly
named Mr Mountjoy.

‘Mum! What’s happening?’ I stood panic-stricken in the
bedroom doorway. ‘Are you – are you hurt?’

My mother, who was rarely lost for words, emerged from
under the covers, pink and dishevelled, and came up with an
inventive if baffling explanation.

‘We were looking for a button.’

Mr Mountjoy stifled a kind of choking noise, and my
mother gave a rather odd little smile and sat up in bed. While
she was careful to pull the counterpane up with her, I couldn’t
help noticing that she didn’t appear to be wearing any
clothes.

‘It’s all right, darling. There’s nothing for you to worry
about. Mr Mountjoy is . . . helping me.’

Mr Mountjoy, apparently intent on continuing the search,
disappeared under the bedclothes again and my mother
waved her hand in the direction of the door.

‘Go back to bed now, angel. Everything’s going to be fine,
I promise you.’

But I didn’t think that everything seemed fine at all. My
brother and I had never known our fathers (we had one each,
our mother had told us, as though that were something to be
pleased about), and I for one wasn’t used to finding strangers
in her bed. Certainly, she had had men-friends, but if she had
slept with them (and I must now assume that she had), I
had never had any knowledge of it.

‘That Mr Mountjoy was in Mum’s bed last night,’ I told
Lucas as we walked to school together the following morning.

‘What do you suppose they were doing?

She said they were looking for a button, but they weren’t
wearing any clothes.’

‘Honestly, Cass! What do you think they were doing?’

Lucas, with his full two years of seniority, was apparently
better informed than I was.

‘I don’t know,’ I said crossly. ‘I wouldn’t ask if—’

‘OK, OK. I’ll tell you then.’ Lucas paused portentously.

‘They were having sex, of course.’

‘Having sex,’ I repeated. ‘I see.’

But of course, I didn’t see. In fact I remained totally
ignorant of all matters sexual until a biology lesson at school
several years later, in the course of which the hapless Miss
Wilson took us on a whistle-stop tour of reproduction,
moving seamlessly from the buttercup, via the rabbit, to sex
in human beings.

‘You didn’t tell us any of it! Any of it!’ I accused my
mother, when I got home from school.

‘Everyone else knew, but me. And all that about buttercups
and rabbits – you never mentioned buttercups or rabbits!’

‘I don’t know anything about buttercups and rabbits, but
I did tell you about people. I told you everything.’

My mother looked bewildered. She had been playing Beethoven’s
Emperor Concerto on the ironing board. It was one of her
favourites, and the record player was turned up so loud that
we could hardly hear each other speak.

‘I told you when you were five,’ she shouted, obviously referring
to the gathering together of Lucas and me.

‘I told you all you needed to know.’

‘But I didn’t need to know it then. I needed to know it for
now,’ I shouted back.

‘So as not to look silly in front of everyone else!’

‘You must have forgotten. How was I to know you’d
forget something so important?’

Mother’s fingers began to move up and down across the back
of one of my school shirts, and she had a dreamy expression on her
face.

‘And I wish you’d listen,’ I yelled. ‘I wish – I just wish I
had a normal mother!’

This was certainly true. While I loved my mother dearly
and was not on the whole a conventional child, I didn’t
always appreciate her many eccentricities. She was one of
those people who conduct their lives with no apparent reference
to the rules of normal behaviour. The piano-playing was
only the tip of the iceberg, and in fact apart from when I was
trying to talk to her, or when I had friends round, I didn’t
mind it too much. But she seemed incapable of editing the
thoughts as they floated into her head, and this could lead to
fearful misunderstandings. If someone was looking ill, or
tired, or, worst of all, just plain ugly, my mother wouldn’t
hesitate to tell them so. In shops and cafes, on buses and in
the school playground, she was an endless and rich source of
embarrassment.

Conversely, she would pay outrageous compliments to
total strangers, and this could be almost as embarrassing.

‘Did you know, you have the most wonderful eyes?’ she
once informed a rather forbidding-looking young man on a
train.

‘Sort of treacle toffee, with a touch of—’

But before she could finish her sentence, the young man
had got up and moved to another compartment.

‘Well!’ said Mum, much annoyed. ‘How rude! Can you
imagine why anyone would want to be so rude?’

Both Lucas and I could well imagine why the young man
had found our mother’s company less than congenial, but we
wisely kept our counsel.

And then there was the somewhat eccentric domestic setup
in which we passed our childhood. True, the rambling and
dilapidated Victorian house (a legacy from a long-dead aunt)
was spacious, and the jungle of a garden offered plenty of
scope for our imaginations, but the place was a social minefield.
There was the Lodger in the basement (always referred
to as the Lodger, although the actual individual enjoying
this title changed so frequently that we had trouble keeping
up with who was supposed to be living there). Up in the attic,
there was my mother’s Uncle Rupert, who had been with us
for as long as I could remember. He was a rather fey, ineffectual
man of wispy appearance and indeterminate age, who
lived off the dole and spent his time inventing things. Thinking
of things for Uncle Rupert to invent was a regular family
pastime, and so he was never short of ideas, but he rarely
came up with anything which could be considered even remotely
useful.

Mum, however, wouldn’t hear a word against him.

‘Rupert’s so clever,’ she would say, ironing his shirts
(between piano concertos). ‘He could have gone a long way,
you know.’

Lucas and I often wished Uncle Rupert would do just that,
for his lengthy occupations of the only bathroom, the pacing
of his heavy boots across the floorboards above our bedrooms,
the smell of his clothes (aniseed balls, stale sweat and
tobacco) and, as I approached puberty, his covert appraisal
of my developing body (never enough to complain to Mum
about, but certainly enough to inspire a healthy revulsion)
did nothing to endear him to us.

‘Does Uncle Rupert have to live with us?’ I asked once.

After all, none of my friends had resident uncles. Theirs were
the kind of uncles who were only seen on family occasions,
and if they did visit, they came sweet-smelling and wholesome,
bearing gifts of toffee, and if you were lucky, money.

‘Of course Uncle Rupert has to live with us,’ replied my
mother, shocked. ‘You must understand, darling. He has
nowhere else to go.’

Other people who often had nowhere else to go were,
variously, my mother’s friend Greta, an exile from her native
Switzerland who spoke little English and cried a lot; a tramp
called Richard, who played the ukulele outside Woolworths
and for whom my mother had a soft spot

(‘Not a tramp, Cass,’ she chided me once, ‘Richard’s a Homeless Person.’

‘But he calls himself a tramp,’ I objected.

‘That’s different,’ said Mum);

an actor called Ben, who had fallen on hard times but had once had a
walk-on part in Coronation Street; and the nice man from the chemist
(Mum’s words) who kept falling out with his landlady. These people
didn’t all come to stay at once, of course, but they turned up at regular
intervals to spend a few nights on the put-u-up in the living room
and join the queue for the bathroom. Whether, like the
Lodger, they paid my mother anything towards their keep
Lucas and I never did find out. Nor did we discover whether
any of them were into hunting for buttons. But we did resent
their regular intrusion into a household which was at best
disordered and at worst chaotic, for what our mother seemed
to forget was that we, too, had nowhere else to go, and that
moreover, this was our home. Quite often it felt more as
though we were all living in a hostel.

What I didn’t realize until years later was that my mother
was desperately lonely, and that her greatest dread was to
wake up one morning and find that she was no longer surrounded
by people. If there was no Lodger, she would visibly
droop (I thought at the time that this was due to lack of
revenue), and would send Lucas and me several times a day
to our corner shop to ask if anyone had enquired about the
advertisement she had placed in their window. If the phone
was silent, she would fret that it might be out of order

(‘nip round to the phone box and give us a quick ring, Cass,
there’s a pet’).

If no one called round, she immediately assumed she
must have done something wrong. Flighty, insecure, by turns
manically happy or beset with a sadness bordering on despair,
she was not a restful person to live with.

But it was by no means all bad, and in fact my friends
envied me my haphazard upbringing, for I was given the kind
of freedom they could only dream of. We climbed trees and
constructed tunnels underneath the hay bales in the local
farmer’s barn, and our mother turned a blind eye. We stayed
up late with her, listening to unsuitable programmes on the
wireless, and went trick-or-treating at Halloween long before
the custom had caught on this side of the Atlantic. When
Lucas remarked once that raw cake mixture tasted so much
better than the finished article, and couldn’t he have an
uncooked birthday cake, Mum said what a lovely idea, and
of course he could. The cake was consumed with spoons out
of bowls, and while several of the party were ill that night,
all agreed that it had been worth it. Their parents, however,
evidently did not think the exercise had been worth it, and at
least two of Lucas’s friends were banned from our house for
some time afterwards.

‘We did have fun, didn’t we?’
It’s as though she is reading my thoughts.

‘Do you remember the time I sent a note to school and we
went picking primroses?’

‘Oh yes!’

A blue and white spring day, a dapple of bright new
leaves, and the primroses like stars in the chalky soil, their
faces turned to the sun. We picked the slender pink stems,
sniffing the perfume of the flowers, and filled a basket with
them, then sat on our coats on the ground

(‘Don’t sit on the wet grass; you’ll get piles.’ ‘Piles of what?’
‘Never you mind.’)

to eat our picnic lunch of crisp rolls and ham and apples. It
never occurred to me at the time to question what we were
doing. My mother always reasoned that we were her children,
and if she wanted us out of school for a day, then that
was her right.

‘What did you say in the note?’

‘What note?’

‘The note you wrote to the school on the primrose day.’

‘I forget.’ Her eyes start wandering again, then return
with a snap. ‘Oh yes! I said you had your period!’

‘Mum!’
I was ten years old at the time, my chest as flat as
a board, my body smooth and hairless as a plum.

‘Well, what did you expect me to say?’

And of course, as usual, there is no answer to that.

‘And Deirdre and the cowpat. Do you remember that?’

Blowing up cowpats with Lucas and his friends in the
field behind our house, choosing a nice ripe one

(‘crisp on the top, with a squidgy middle,’ advised Lucas, the expert);

our excitement, watching the smouldering firework, waiting
for the explosion; and the sheer joy when a particularly messy
one erupted in a fountain of green sludge, splattering the
blonde ringlets and nice clean frock of prissy Deirdre from
next door. Oh, Deirdre! If you could see yourself! We rolled
in the grass, kicking our heels, convulsed with mirth, while
Deirdre, howling and outraged, ran home to tell her mummy
what bad, bad children we all were.

‘What’ll your mum say?’ one of Lucas’s friends asked
anxiously.

‘Oh, Mum’ll laugh.’

Mum laughed. She tried to tell us off, but was so proud
of the inventiveness of Lucas, and so entertained at the fate
of prissy Deirdre, that she failed utterly. But she promised
Deirdre’s mother that we would all be ‘dealt with’.

‘Whatever that means,’ said Mum, dishing out chocolate
biscuits and orange juice.

‘Poor child. She doesn’t stand a chance, with a mother like
 that. But I suppose she had it coming to her.’

‘I wonder what happened to her?’ she muses now.

‘Who?’

‘Prissy Deirdre.’

‘Married, with a nice little semi with net curtains, a Peterand-
Jane family and a husband who washes the car on
Sundays.’

But Mum is no longer listening. She is drifting away from
me again, her eyes wandering, her fingers plucking at the
sheets.

Mum rarely if ever told us off, and not only appeared to
trust us implicitly but often sought our advice. We were
always invited to be present when she interviewed prospective
Lodgers, and although these meetings were rarely the formal,
fact-finding missions she fondly imagined them to be, she
always listened to what we had to say. As we grew older, she
would even seek our views on her latest man-friend, although
in this she tended to disregard our opinions and go her own
way.

‘Can’t you see he’s just after somewhere to stay?’ Lucas
exclaimed on one occasion (the gentleman in question had no
job and no visible means of support).

‘So that suits us both, doesn’t it?’ Mum cried gaily. ‘He
can live here with us!’

‘But Mum! He’s just using you!’

‘And I, my sweet, am using him.’ She patted Lucas on the
head. ‘One day, you’ll understand.’

Money, or rather, the lack of it, was an ongoing problem,
and to this day I’m not sure what we lived on. True, there
was the Lodger, and Mum did have a variety of odd jobs, but
she quickly became bored with them, and was out of work
more often than she was in it. In this as in every other area
of her life, there would be sudden bursts of industry, where
she would appear to be holding down several jobs at once.
Then her maternal conscience (a flighty thing at the best of
times) would kick in, and she would be at home for weeks
on end, baking amazing cakes from recipes of her own invention
and making strange-looking garments on her ancient
Singer sewing machine. The cakes were always different and
always odd-looking – sometimes burnt round the edges, often
flat as pancakes – but they were invariably delicious. The garments
– usually made from, and looking exactly like, old
curtains – we hid at the backs of drawers and cupboards until
she had forgotten about them. Sometimes she worked from
home, as on the occasion when she took a job packing bottles
of cheap perfume in little boxes. The perfume-packing
regularly fell behind schedule, and the whole family, plus the
Lodger and sundry hangers-on, would end up helping her
out. The smell of that perfume – ‘Gardenia’ – haunted me for
years afterwards.

On one memorable occasion when finances were particularly
bad, Mum decided that she would capitalize on Lucas
and me, and to that end she decided to take us along to a
modelling agency.

‘You’re both good-looking children,’ she told us, as she
scrubbed and brushed us into shape. ‘I’m sure they can use
you for a catalogue or something.’

I was enormously excited. It would never have occurred
to me to think of myself as model material, but perhaps Mum
knew something I didn’t. With high hopes of fame and
glamour, not to mention days off school, I allowed myself to
be dressed in a hideous flowery frock passed on to me by a
friend of Greta’s, and off we set. But the woman at the agency
shook her head.

‘No, no. Not the girl,’ she said, after I had paraded in
front of her. ‘I’m afraid she’s not suitable. The boy, now . . .
The boy we can certainly use.’

At the time, it seemed desperately unfair, but when I
look back now, I can see that Lucas’s high forehead, clear
complexion and dazzling combination of blond hair and
brown eyes must have made him an exceptional candidate.
But to Mum’s credit, she turned the offer down. If the woman
wouldn’t accept us both, then she shouldn’t have either of us.

‘They come together,’ she said grandly, as though we were
some sort of double act. ‘I can’t allow you to have Lucas
without Cassandra. It just wouldn’t be right.’

Lucas, it has to be said, appeared to be much relieved at
these tidings. He had been worrying for days about what his
friends would say if he were to turn up in their mothers’ favourite
magazines advertising cutesy children’s clothes, but
I was bitterly disappointed. I think it was the first time in
my life that I realized my looks were unexceptional. Never a
particularly vain child, I had nonetheless hitherto been quite
pleased with what I saw when I looked in the mirror. Mum
had always told me I was pretty; I had therefore had no
reason to believe otherwise. Now, it seemed, I must accept
that there was room for doubt, and I never quite regained the
cheerful confidence in my appearance which I held in those
early years.

Was my childhood a happy one? As with many childhoods,
the memories are so tinged with nostalgia that it is hard
to be objective, but there were certainly some wonderful
moments, and there is no doubt that I was much loved.
But when I was fourteen, everything was to change.