As a sort of reward for not being a
social entity, my many and varied talents are starting to become known and I'm
being pushed by all and sundry along on the road to the kind of fame or maybe
it’s notoriety that I now realize I have always wanted.
One of my better friends - I can't
say best friend, because I have friends for music, friends for tennis, friends
for walking to school, and even friends for the breaks between lessons – named Sarah
has a delicate constitution and frail appearance. So she is playing the heroine
in a mild, frail, harmless sort of way, reciting her lines as though she is
reading a shopping list, holding her hands like herrings and displaying her
left profile as often as possible, because someone has told her she looks more
like Elizabeth Taylor from that angle. A pity she hasn't taken a leaf out of
Miss Taylor's book and thrown herself into the part a little more
energetically. She has a habit of scraping her throat between the lines, and
when I watch her, I can see quite plainly that she is untalented. But she looks
the part, there's no doubt about it. I wonder fleetingly if I look the part I'm
playing, and hope not. It comforts me to know that all the lines on my face are
painted ones. I get even more
comfort from the knowledge that I am too dramatic for roles that require a
gentle constitution. A gentle constitution is the last thing one needs on an
opera stage.
Sarah is actually my walking to and
from school friend, and she is anything but talkative, which is off-putting
until you get used to it. I think that's where I must have learnt to talk to
myself. She has a neurotic brother called James, and the family live in a
semi-detached pebble-dash house with a pocket handkerchief front lawn in the
road between my bus stop and the railway bridge we have to cross to get to
school.
Sarah has a difficult life. Her
mother has an incurable disease and is already very lame and in pain a lot of
the time. There is an affinity between Sarah and me, because we both have a
sick parent. But that's about all we have in common. Sarah has dark, shining,
shoulder length hair which turns up magically at the ends and which she washes
lovingly every Thursday. Don't ask Sarah to go anywhere on Thursdays. Even her
boyfriend, who was her first and last, as she married him soon after she left
school, doesn't stand a chance on Thursdays.
Sarah isn't much
older than me but she is more grownup and quite probably wiser. She shoulders
the burden put on her by the progressive disease afflicting her mother with a conscientiousness
far beyond her years. She cooks, shops, cleans and nurses, and never complains.
She is solemn and usually frowning. Her face lights up very rarely and when she
does find something funny, she just laughs a bit then returns to being morose
and withdrawn.
When we walk to school in the morning
she never says more than five words, so I invariable prattle on to myself. In
the classroom she merges in with the group who aren't classed as academic or
promising, but industrious and persevering. Though we take most lessons
together, I can't remember having any communication with her at all once we
enter the school grounds. She keeps a low profile during lessons. I don’t
really know anything more about her than I’ve just written. She’s really just
my walking to school friend.
Sometimes, if Sarah and I happen to
leave the school premises at the same time, I go into the house on the way home
from school to say hello to her mother, who sees little enough of the outside
world. As time goes by, she stops being able to drag herself on sticks to the
garden gate to look for Sarah coming home. She is carried up and down stairs by
Sarah's dad, and a few years later the family moves to a bungalow in the
country, because Sarah's mother now has to sit in a wheel-chair and very soon
even that will be too much for her.
Being around Dada during the dark
days of his relapses has made me philosophical about illness, if only from the
aspect of feeling lucky that it is not me. Watching Sarah's mother struggle to
hold a biscuit and direct it into her mouth is a lesson in learning compassion
and it is mortifying to realize how powerless I am to help her. Sarah's mother
senses my discomfort. Her eyes even twinkle and she tries to comfort me. She
has accepted her fate. But I haven't. I would dearly love to be able to wave a
magic wand and have her get up and walk normally. But as much as I would like
to, I am unable to think of anything to say or do that would be of any use to
her. Somehow, all my histrionic antics seem trivial in the face of this
real-life tragedy. But she has a wonderful smile, and somehow seems to spread
happiness despite her predicament. I remember her smile to this day and am
grateful for it.
I am starting to realise how little I
understand my own father's critical state of health, but the silence which
prevails at home goes on and on, leaving giving us children no chance to show
even that we care and could share the burden. Mama never asks me to help her.
All I can do to alleviate the situation is to keep out of her way and be the
best at everything I do so that nobody will have to bother about me.
For quite a while, I attend both Miss
Orlando's singing lessons and her choir, and have elocution lessons,
recommended by the English teacher, who thinks I should get rid of every
vestige of an accent if I am serious about going on the stage. But she has an
ulterior motive, too. She would like me to go in for a reciting competition,
and countrified vowels do not go with Robert Browning.
Our Latin teacher has also decided
that I am a candidate for reciting, but he’s thinking about Esperanto. This owl
like figure, gaunt and spectacled with horn-brimmed glasses that make him look
thoughtful, could probably write poems in any of the six languages he speaks
fluently. He has instead been writing poems in this weirdest of weirdo tongues
and I am to attend a congress with him and read them out after his talk. After
school, I stay behind for Esperanto lessons, so that I shall at least be able
to hazard a guess at the meaning of what I am reciting, but I must confess that
I never do get the hang of it.
Reciting Esperanto on the podium of a
huge assembly hall is like having a bad dream in a language you have never
learnt. When you enter the hall, it’s like the tower of Babel, except that all
around you, voices float through the air chanting what sound like rhyming
hexameters in a single curious lingo. There is an echo and no microphone, so
while the other speakers labour on, I lean forward as though I am hard of
hearing, in the hope that some of the mumbo-jumbo will make sense, but it
doesn't. Whatever pearls of wisdom are being dropped on the multitude, they are
inaccessible to me.
The conference itself would be like a
parent's meeting at school, if it weren't quite so reminiscent of an ancestral
gathering. Nearly everyone is as old as, or older than the hills, which I don’t
quite understand, given that Esperanto is a modern invention. When they are not
comparing poems, they are bickering over esperantic grammar. My contribution is
not until the small hours, reciting an ode in which the letter 'K'
predominates.
In real life, the Esperanto freaks
are indeed mostly retired teachers. Owl is the brightest spark there, and
certainly the youngest. He explains a new and innovative grammar rule to the
enchanted audience, quoting lots of examples taken from the poem I am to read
at the end of his talk. There are so many languages in the world, I am
thinking, why couldn't they take one of the endangered species and revive it?
That way they would be doing their bit for posterity, instead of reinventing
gibberish. And anyway, isn't English perfectly acceptable as a means of
communication all over the world?
I'm even looking forward to getting
back to French, or I would be, if we weren’t going to have a newcomer, Miss
Owens, teaching us. And Latin has its good points, too, now I’ve finally
mastered ablatives and vocatives and no longer need the special, dry-bones
tutoring by Miss Greene, the prune-faced classics scholar who was dug up to
coach people like me, who have to catch up on a whole lost year, like it or
not.
Soon after the Esperanto conference,
Owl announces his imminent departure. He's going to devote his life to higher
things, whatever that may mean. So that explains Miss Owens’s appearance.
How can he do that to us?
Owl is going out with a bang. There's
to be a Fête Champètre, which is a sort of French party in a field only we’re
having it in the inner courtyard next to the assembly hall. The party is
entirely in his honour and much to my relief I am not to be called on to rehash
his Esperanto poems. Instead, I am going to sing one of Edith Piaf's greatest
hits that can be translated to mean ‘no, I don’t regret anything’ and probably has more significance for Owl
than it will ever have for me, since I constantly do things I will regret
forever.
I don’t really want to admit that my rendering of the Piaf
song has brought tears to Owl’s eyes and caused audible sniffs from other
members of staff, but it has.
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