9 A taste of fear

I am three and a half, and now Mama’s second child is imminent, I have been told very little about the addition to our family, but the onus of looking after me has fallen more and more onto Dada’s shoulders during the last few months, and the decision to send me to school before my sister arrives is a relief to all. I am a rather grownup three year old, busy with noisy renderings on the piano, adorning colouring books and telling stories. I like pretending to be the princess in a castle, and I am drawing pictures of what my sister will look like, and willing Mama to think of a really nice name for her. Mama and Dada are looking for a bigger house to replace our American style bungalow up in the Welsh hills. 

Dada makes the fire every morning, winter and summer, spring and autumn, and I follow him round because he makes me jam butties when I ask for them. The little house is rather damp, and the mountain mists penetrate every corner of every room. Dada cleans out the ashes, washes the hearth, crumples up yesterday’s newspaper, arranges it in the empty fireplace, stacks the sticks and coal on top of it, lights the outer corners with a taper, and then fans furiously at the embryonic blaze to induce the flames to shoot up and explode like miniature fireworks against the sooty black chimney stack.

All the time he is doing this, he is explaining exactly what comes next. He never uses baby talk. We are equals, he and I, face to face, eye to eye as he kneels in front of the grate, me still in my night things, clutching my first jam butty between sticky fingers. This is our special time. I will remember it for ever and ever.

But all is not well. There are secret conversations in Welsh, which I am not supposed to understand, and I gather that it has something to do with me. Dada starts telling me all about how hospitals and tonsils work, and how nice the nurses are and that you get ice-cream every day. This promise is to rid me of any desire to eat ice cream and my dislike of ice cream, except occasionally the vanilla ice cream our local itinerant Italian sold for his van, never leaves me.

Then the worst comes to the worst, and Dada takes me in the car to one of these hospitals. It’s called an infirmary. But I am not infirm, I insist, when the word is explained to me. On the journey I stand between the front seats of the Morris with my arm round Dada’s shoulder and he tells me not to be afraid and I tell him I am a big girl.

When we reach the children’s ward, my night things and colouring books are unpacked and I am put to bed at three o’clock in the afternoon. What sort of a place is this? There isn’t even a piano and it all smells funny.

Dada urges me to be brave as he kisses me goodbye. Then I am left all alone in this ward full of sick children. I look around. Some of them are bandaged, or have their limbs in splints, and some of them lie there silently looking at the white ceiling. I try to concentrate on my books, but I hate being here, and gradually sink down into the pillow in abject misery.

I don’t know how much time passes before a nurse in a stiff white coat and hat comes to my bed, pulls the curtains all round, cutting off my view of the rest of the children, and commands me to swallow a huge tablet. Of course, I don’t do what she wants. I spit it out as far as I can.

So this is what it’s about. They want my tonsils, do they? Well, they’re not getting them, if I have anything to say about it. I struggle and scream, spitting out the offending tablet over and over again. More nurses arrive on the scene. They hold me down, one at each corner, and still I struggle and resist this onslaught. I spit red jam on the walls, on the nurses’ uniforms, on the bedclothes, and even on the curtains. I knock over the jug of orange juice so that the contents drip, drip, drip down the table next to my bed.

Finally I am taken screaming from the ward to a single room, where the procedure is repeated. But if they are inexhaustible, I am spirited and defiant.

I don’t remember swallowing the tablet, but I must have capitulated in the end. Sometime later I wake out of what feels like having being dead. I feel awful, my limbs are as heavy as lead and I am unable to keep my eyes open more than a slit. I have a horrible feeling in my throat. The post-operative room is small and barren. There are bars all round my bed, and there is nobody there to protect me, not even Dada. I can taste blood. Their triumph is my suffering.

A nurse sidles up to me and I keep my eyes tightly shut, not wanting to have anything to do with her.

“She’s asleep,” she says out loud. “Drat her for making such a fuss.”

It is my turn to be triumphant. I may not have won the battle, but I gave them a run for their money, I am thinking.

I seem to be over the really dramatic part, for nobody takes any further interest in me and there is no sign of any more hateful pills. I sit up in bed and colour all the pages of the colouring books with oil crayons that I am told are difficult to get out of bed linen. They should not have told me that. The white surface of the clinical sheets is an ideal drawing surface for princesses in crinolines. I eat the ice-cream I am offered because, as they have intimated, it really is the only food I can swallow, and within a few days I am allowed home on condition I don’t go anywhere for at least two weeks.

I don’t remember ever telling anybody about this ordeal at the time. Maybe it has something to do with my image of me as not being vulnerable. I certainly didn’t come out of the story as a heroine. I was just a little girl afraid for her life attacked by women who should have been put in prison for child abuse.

And I really don’t like ice-cream.

On Saturdays, I go with Dada to his office, and am allowed to try all the various gadgets Pauline, his secretary, uses during the week. I type letters, wet stamps on the damp sponge and stick them onto the letters Dada has got ready for the post (he saves them for Saturdays, I think, so high is the pile). I fold paper, melt sealing-wax over a candle and create state of the art sealing-wax documents full of my own hieroglyphics, many of which are still in mirror writing because I am a congenital left-hander. I even sort all the paper clips into different sizes, making long chains with them. Much more fun than daisy-chains. I am in my element. If only my sister could see me now.

But maybe she can. Maybe she has wings like an angel and can hover over the office the way she sometimes seems to be hovering over my bed.

The only difficulty I have with sister Susie is deciding whether she belongs to the unborn angels or the dead ones. Did my sister die, or is the unborn state an eternal one? Are unborn children really the purest souls of all?

One of the very nicest part of any outing with Dada and without Mama is the journey to and from wherever we are going, because our village is perched high above sea-level, so wherever you want to go, you have to go downhill first.

Petrol is severely rationed. Nearly all of it has gone to fight Hitler, a bad man from a country with a lot of trees, cuckoo clocks, leather short, hats with feathers in them, and everyone sorted into two groups: those the bad man likes and those he doesn’t. We never talk about the war so all I know is what I have overheard. Dada does nightly fire patrols, making sure that no lights can be seen from outside the houses, because then Hitler could take a pot shot at our village. Sometimes I think about all the German children living on cabbage and turnips. It doesn’t make my steamed fish taste any better though. Mama never cooks cabbage. She prefers carrots and potatoes. I’ll be grown-up before I get my first taste of cabbage.

Mama is what you’d call a conventional cook, scorning what she defines as exotic ingredients. So the only rice I ever eat is in the creamy rice-pudding topped with a creamy skin wrinkled like an ancient Red Indian’s face and sprinkled with grated nutmeg. Nutmeg is the only spice Mama uses except at Christmas for the cake. Nutmeg is an aged remedy for the plague. It improves your immune system, but Mama doesn’t know this as she grates the nutmeg over the pudding dish.

Nutmeg smells like Sunday.

Hitler made a lot of angels.

Dada is so popular with everyone that it would be easy for him to fill up his petrol tank at the local garage whenever he wanted to. But no. Dada won’t take unfair advantage, so he makes do with his two gallon a month, travelling most days on the bus. But his ration is enough to get us up the hills if we turn the engine off and glide down them.

So that’s what we do. At breakneck speed we swish down the hills from our village and nearly up the other side again, since the momentum of downhill lasts nearly all the way up the next hill. We are like the seagulls swooping down from the masts of a ship to scavenge for fishes churned up by the rudder, and then swooping back up again with their booty. And I stand between the back seats and hold my breath as we negotiate the big dipper. No safety belts in those days. No silly rules about kiddies’ seats. But then, the smoking habit that killed my father before his time was not considered in any way harmful, either. We lived dangerously in those days.

When the car threatens to stop on the uphill bit - and only then - does Dada start the engine and rev her up.

"Here we go," he says. "Tuck your head in... Up... up... down... down... up... up..."

Swish. The little Morris and I hold our breath as the motorcar performs its diving act. We seem to be leaving the ground behind. I am easily disoriented. When I look up again, the uphill part of the road seems to be coming towards me and I scream with exhilaration.

"It’s our secret," Dada says. “Don’t tell your mother. She doesn’t like me free-wheeling."

Any secret Dada tells me is safely locked up inside me for all time. He teaches me to keep silent about things that I believe could upset others, especially Mama, who hates to hear anything upsetting.

But he also tells me secrets about the world, dark secrets I don’t understand until much later. He teaches me how to rise now and again above the cruelty all of us experience in one way or another. He is a pacifist, rejecting any kind of cruelty to others, including animals. I am to set a good example. I’m not sure that I will be able to live up to that. He didn’t tell me much about the enemies within. At the age of three, my enemies are grownups telling me what to do, bed-time when it isn’t even a bit dark, nurses in infirmaries, ice cream, marzipan, and cake with almond flavouring like the ones my mother’s sister makes.