Читать книгу Girl With Dove: A Life Built By Books - Sally Bayley, Sally Bayley - Страница 10

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Grandmothers

In 1976, when I was four, the water ran out. There were no more baths. Worse than that, Mum’s roses were wilting. She rushed back and forth through the back door with perfume bottles filled with water. Mum spent all summer spraying her roses back to life.

‘That way the police won’t know,’ she told Maze. ‘They won’t come snooping about. As long as I don’t get the hosepipe out, nothing will look amiss. A few drops of water here or there isn’t going to make much difference. I must keep them moist, I must keep the roots moist, Maze, twice a day, morning and night. They don’t stand a chance in this heat. They’ll be killed off. I don’t want my roses killed off after all this.’

After all this. Mum said this a lot. After all this was Mum’s effort to plant her roses against a crumbling brick wall, to turn a nasty bit of council turf into Miss Marple’s garden. After all this was something grown-ups said about things that happened before us, before my brothers or I were born, before we even arrived at our house by the sea. After all this was back then, back when things were different, quite different, Mum said.

After all this meant that I had a grandmother who lived with us. Maisie was Edna May, but we called her Maze and she was with us ever since I can remember. Maze was before and after all this; Maze was always and everything. Maisie, Maze, Edna May Turner, the old lady whose back bent like a turtle; the little old lady who rode her bike along the sea front in a gale-force wind. Maze, the lady who picked us up from school when Mum wasn’t well. Maze, Maisie, Mary, May, Mary Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? Like this, just like this!

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Maze, Maisie, Mary, May. Finding out adults’ real names is difficult. Everyone is in disguise. Miss Marple is usually ‘Miss Marple’ but sometimes she is ‘Jane Marple’, like Jane in the Peter and Jane books we read at school. I don’t know any other Janes, not J-A-N-E Janes anyway. But it’s hard to imagine Miss Marple as a little girl like Jane, with yellow hair and a white cardigan, who plays with her blue rubber ball in the garden.

Jane is a Christian name, which means it comes first. Adults call you by your Christian name and so do your friends. Jane has yellow hair and her skin is brown because she spends all her time outside. Jane is always throwing a ball into the air, or chasing her dog, or running after her brother, Peter. Jane doesn’t look as though she ever sits down and reads a book. Jane plays in the garden in her pretty pink dress and nice white cardigan. Jane looks happy doing this.

In the Peter and Jane books Jane isn’t reading, but I wasn’t reading before I went to school. Mummy didn’t have time. She said she was very sorry but she couldn’t sit down with me and read a book right now because she had to put the nappies on. School would do that for me and I would be all the better for waiting my dear.

When I first discovered words they were sitting with their arms folded nicely on small squares of white card: ‘pretty’, ‘nice’, ‘much’, ‘like’, ‘but’, ‘of’, ‘is’, ‘ball’, ‘play’, ‘jump’, ‘dog’, ‘outside’. The words were all about Peter and Jane and Peter and Jane only ever did one or two things. Peter and Jane played with their dog or they played with their ball in the garden. When Peter and Jane were outside playing the sun was always shining. Sometimes they got hot. Then Jane took off her white crochet cardigan (crow-sh-ay) and put it on the back steps. Her mum got cross when she did that because she’d only just washed it and dirt stains never came out of white. Not properly.

Peter and Jane are always playing and they are always happy. They are never at school and they are never reading. I don’t know why, because reading is the most important thing. Reading, my grandmother told me, was the stepping stone to better things. If you were a good reader you would never have to face all this. You would never have to crawl over the big grey rock at the bottom of the garden with the sharp edges that stubbed your toes. You would never have to make a garden from scratch. You would never have to borrow a drill from the council and pull up all the muck someone else had left behind. You would never have to work for the council. You would never ever have to take the bins out.

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It was my grandmother who first helped me read, my grandmother, Edna May Turner. When she was young, Edna May was like one of Miss Marple’s girls. She was a girl who came to polish silver and serve tea on the lawn; a girl who came to shine up the oak banister; a girl to make gooseberry fool and collect the windfall apples in the autumn; a girl to answer the doorbell; a girl to run errands in the village.

In 1930 or thereabouts (what year was my grandmother born?) Edna May Turner was carrying out the tea; she was crossing a hot lawn in a pretty English village. Edna May, the maid who was coming on nicely; Edna, the maid Miss Marple had found through her friend Dolly Bantry, was carrying a silver teapot towards an old lady sitting in the shade. Edna was concentrating so hard on the tray in front of her that she couldn’t see that the woman in front of her was lifting a large pink bloom towards her companion.

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Miss Marple is a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner.

(The Murder at the Vicarage)

How old is Miss Marple? Nobody knows. My grandmother was in her sixties and then her seventies when she was living with us, but we never really thought about how old she was. Grandmothers are just there, always and forever. They never go away and they never get older. Grandmothers are like the stone lion that sits on the corner of our front steps. Maze sits on her kitchen stool and slowly grows green lichen around her ears. We pat her on the way in and on the way out and sometimes we sit down on the steps with her and cry.

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What did I know about Maisie? Not much, just scraps. She had white hair and she was ‘five foot five and shrinking’. That’s what she told us anyway.

‘Then you’re five foot four, Maze,’ I said.

‘A little bit more than that dear, a little more … you’re always a bit more than you think you are.’

Maze weighed eight stone five, she told me. Eight of the boulders at the bottom of the garden, eight of those rocks that fall down the hill like Jack and Jill in the stories she read to us; eight of those pebbles I picked up from the beach and put on top of my book to keep it flat. At eight stone my grandmother was both heavy and light. One day, she might just roll away.

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When are grandmothers born? Nobody knows that either. What year was Miss Marple born? Before or after Queen Victoria? Sometime after Queen Victoria was dead, I think, perhaps before the king of England abdicated. ‘Abdicated’ means he left the throne; got up and walked off and left that shiny polished throne right behind him.

‘Flounced out,’ Maisie said. ‘He flounced right out to that beaming woman with her handbag.’

The king of England flounced right out of his throne room. He ab-di-ca-ted. The king got his sums wrong on the abacus. He pulled too many red balls over when he was counting. Or he began a different sum and no one could make sense of it: not all the kings and queens of England added up together, and one white king with one red wife meant that the one in the middle, in between, wasn’t a queen. She wasn’t even a lady. Her name begins with W and it sounds like a man’s name.

‘What was he thinking, rushing off to that woman with her big red lipstick and smile … that woman with her pointy elbows? She has too much powder on her face! It isn’t decent! Too much powder and not enough sense! Powder should stay on babies’ bottoms!’

Maze spoke as though she had been there, in the crowds outside Buckingham Palace, standing at the front. Sometime in 1936 Edna May was pushing her way through thick arms and legs, she was pressing her small blue beret to her head. Maze was waving her flag and looking hard for a glimpse of that bad lady with the bright red lipstick and the big white forehead.

‘She looked like the moon,’ my grandmother said. ‘The moon wearing a large smile.’

‘Always put on your best smile,’ Mum said. ‘You never know who might be looking. Now wipe off that silly grin and go and wash your hands.’

History is remembered by a series of smiles.