As a young child, I wished to be a borrower; a tiny, sentinel-like, brave presence that would pilfer small objects from our family and feast like a Queen on a single gold-wrapped chocolate caramel. I wanted to live with my parents but for them not to know I was still there; I felt that - at full child size - I was often a burden to them, rather than a source of interest and joy. If I were small, I could live cosily in the airing cupboard where I kept my flower press. I could keep a close eye on the big wide world and alert a grown up to trouble, if needs be. I had a route planned out through the house to the kitchen, with a mechanism of pulleys to snaffle food; a path through the rockery in the garden that would make for perfect borrower-sized adventures; a spot next to the robin hole (a hole in the hedge where our resident robin would nip in and out through the day) where I would set up a camp, complete with tiny campfire, where I would lie on my back and watch the stars come out. When I later learned of the hearth faeries - the broonies and ùruisgs of Scotland - I felt instantly drawn to them, as if a fragment of my soul were some kind of hearth spirit, a tiny protector of home and heart.
It was a ritual that fired up my young, impressionable imagination. Five maternal aunties; a conspiracy of cardplayers were about to plunge into another table top drama. A memory etched in my mind.
Pennies, half pennies, thruppences and tanners were smashed down in the middle of the kitchen table so hard the Babysham bottles clinked and clanked, ringing out the start of the game. Voices cracked the air with expectation. I sucked hard on my sherbet lemon and focused on the players.
White sticks were passed round and set on fire, smoke blown across the table which grew into cumulus congestus cloud enveloping the entire table. I gazed across at them through a smoky haze; mystical figures, faces contorted with frowns, smirks and knowing nods. The local cigarette factory did well on Thursday nights. ( Pay day )
A second sherbet lemon was needed for the next part as cards sliced through the murky air like flying cleavers as shouts of ' bust!' 'twist!' 'deuce!' 'flush!' and 'diamond takes all!' punctured holes through the mist. Glasses were drained, voices clashed, air crackled as cheeks reddened. Cards were slammed down in frustration. Howls and curses marched around the room giving orders.
To a chorus of, ' I'm out! bugger!' Chairs were unceremoniously pushed back and toppled over and fingers jabbed into the air like red hot pokers. The winnings provocatively scraped into an eager pocket. The plunder would eventually end up back in the cigarette factory where my aunties earned it the week before.
Through the smoky haze, my crimson lipped aunties, shining like beacons of hope shuffled the cards to a shout of ' Your deal!' This was unforgettable theatre. They have all now been swallowed up by history, but wait for me in my dreamscapes.
Oh Tanya that is haunting and compelling. I love the image of the bramble thicket of stories that form us. I cannot wait to read more.
I feel fortunate that the stories I was told were very different. On my mother's side, I was told about my great grandmother, a suffragette and fierce teetotaller who thought nothing of snatching alcoholic drinks out of people's hands at parties. Her daughter, my grandmother, was the first in her family to go to university. My paternal grandfather was by all accounts a charismatic but difficult character who demanded worship from the rest of the family. My father and his brother were expected to walk with him to the station every morning . They deeply resented this. Quite how these stories formed me I am not sure but they did not cause me to shrink from life. Rather, they were, in an odd way, something to live up to, strong, eccentric, flawed characters who didn't conform.
Well, you know, children can’t be trusted. They tell stories.
I understood bedtime stories and stories in books, good enjoyable things to be encouraged; I knew about stories the grown-ups told each other at the dinner table or in the living room after, which were rewarded with guffawed laughter; incomprehensible to us, but evidently a good thing. What was wrong with children telling their stories?
But they didn’t mean stories, they meant lies. How confusing to the child that hears things literally.
That didn’t happen, stop telling stories.
My stories, the ones which earned me an early bed, or a red hand-print, weren’t stories, they were truths. Hadn’t we always been told never to tell lies? But now, even as I took the vow, followed the rules, I was disbelieved. Children telling stories was a bad thing, not to be tolerated. Punishable, even when they were the truth.
So I didn’t tell stories, any stories, didn’t tell my stories, didn’t retell those of Bimbo & Tospy, or Marmalade or Pookie. I kept them tight inside the suitcase in my head, until I stopped hearing them at all.
Father Christmas; the Tooth Fairy; God
Perhaps as you get older, the meaning changes. Perhaps never means sometimes. Now lies fit on to a sliding scale of seriousness depending upon the teller and the lie. White lies and fibs, fairy-stories, untruths, falsehoods and fictions, tall-tales, yarns. Justifications for when a lie might be excused, or expected, or, even, kind. Embroidering; embellishing; exaggerating. So only children must not lie, or face the consequences, and adults must do as they please. The lie of the lie.
They tried, these three women, my great-grandma, grandma and mom. They made sure I had pretty dresses for dances. They told me to go to college. They told me they loved their kids but not to have babies early, that it is a sacrifice, kids change everything. They told me there is a stuckness to having children. They told me not to marry the first person I had sex with. They told me to keep men guessing and that if I couldn’t be good then to remember the date. They told me my life could be different. They told me to stay thin, that men liked a flat belly. They told me men were the disease and the cure, necessary and ruinous, men cause whispers and startles and that what they don’t know won’t hurt them, fear is not respect but men don’t know that (would that matter?), men as means to an end, men cause the end, men control the end. Men are the dealers, women the gamblers. Women roll the dice and the house always wins. I learned to tuck and roll, to stop, drop and roll, roll with punches, roll with it, roll away, women as tumbling dice.
Birds roll in dirt to clean their feathers. They roll their eggs during incubation. They roll their heads from heavy metal poisoning.
It is hard to write of yourself in this way, where I fit into this, knowing they wanted it different for me, but some days I still feel stuck, the bird still sitting on a dead egg. I fear loss. I retreat. I harden. I go outside and walk but every walk is some sort of loop, a migratory return. Site attachment.
I am Cinderella's granddaughter. That was her story, she held it in her bones. My grandmother was illegitimate, born dirt poor. Her mother married a widower who had his own children, and they had more between them, but she was always "different". She didn't understand why until she was getting married and discovered she had a different surname on her birth certificate.
My grandfather spotted her on a factory holiday. She looked like a film star, and he looked like Errol Flynn. She was awestruck by his family house. I know that house, and it's a three bedroomed detached house that held two parents and nine children - but to my Granny it was a palace.
My granddad rescued her, but she rescued herself first. I don't know if she saw that. She worked in a jelly factory, she dressed as well as she could, she embraced life. She told me once that a friend had asked her if she and her husband should buy a house or a car? A car, my granny said immediately. You'll have a lot more fun with a car. That was her. She was always up for a coach trip, a day out, a laugh. She worked hard, but she enjoyed herself. Once lockdown's over, I will put her diamond ring back on and remember her sparkle.
There were prayers before bed. Three of us slept in the small bedroom, little girls. Each evening we knelt down, side by side, at the bed, and gave thanks to God for the day that had passed and our parents, brother and sisters, and the wonders of the world, in words that we didn't understand. Heaven, hallowed, kingdom, fruit of thy womb, sinners, death all spoken rapidly so we could get to the end, to story time. The lights were turned out and in the blackness D, my father, told us stories about other worlds. Arabian nights, Hannibal crossing the alps, families of donkeys, leprechauns in the mountains, some he read but most he made up. Together we went on adventures that were not possible in real life, to places that only existed in the stories.
Sometimes a story took several nights to tell, so the prayers the following night would be even quicker. He rarely talked about the past and, as there were six children in the house and we were so busy living, we didn't reflect too much on the present. Instead I learned to value each and every moment, be it spent managing the ordinary or absorbing new experiences.
Lovely, poignant words Tanya, what a world you create. I look forward to reading more. Thank you!
Mar 12, 2023·edited Mar 12, 2023Liked by Tanya Shadrick
Children should be seen and not heard, someone said. So I tried to be quiet but sometimes, well sometimes I just couldn’t keep the words inside of me. Especially when nobody else said anything and I knew, I just knew that there was something that had to be said. Those words just had to come out. Well, there was a price to pay when you dared to be heard. When you dared to release words that once spoken out loud somehow made you feel better. I knew the price but still words would find their way out time and time again when everything felt wrong and I thought I could make it feel right again. Right again for me, but mostly right again for the others. It made me feel angry when those others were being quiet and I just knew that they had something to say, something that could explain things and that could maybe prevent them from feeling even worse. They were choosing to be seen only it seemed and I couldn’t bear it and I couldn’t understand why. So many feelings, so confusing.
Then one day someone said that I had too much of what the others didn’t have enough of. Did I? I remember feeling pleased that I had something even though I didn’t know what the something was. I didn’t think to ask. It felt rather special in a way, and if the others didn’t have it, well, it was extra special then wasn’t it? I wasn’t just a girl, I was a girl with something special, and the others didn’t have it!
Then someone said that a lady was only a lady until she opened her mouth...
My mother and I have a new game that has us rushing gleefully upstairs to see a little bird fluttering mid-air, asking for food. We are flattered and delighted, over and over again. I’m fourteen. My sister has left home at seventeen; I’ve inherited her ID style-mag subscription. My brother’s a weekly boarder; I have to wash up after Sunday roast, and I’ve never done my homework beforehand.
Half my lifetime earlier, my mother returned from work with a story. “I was standing at the bus stop and a bird on top of the lamppost dropped dead at my feet. A chaffinch. So beautiful!” Thinking of brown sparrows, I’m unconvinced. A bit boring. Then she describes the pink, slate blue, chestnut and green feathers of the tiny bird in her palm, and maybe this is what sparks my love of wildlife.
It’s a chaffinch that draws us into the game that we know is wrong, unnatural. For a while we can’t resist the gratification, then we pull ourselves together and just stop. Hidden in the hedge is the secret nest. Last time we peeped there were five warm eggs in its perfect mossy cup. Now there are five horrifying, pathetic corpses. We feel guilty. Is it our fault?
In my twenties, I lived in the West End of London. Dismayed at the sirens my end, my mother held the telephone out for me to hear birdsong. The large pond my parents excavated attracted kingfishers. They planted lots of trees. My mother regaled me with a story of how a cock chaffinch had been tap tap tapping at the windowpane. Loud as a hammer, waking her EVERY dawn. Annoyed her so much she blasted it out of the yew tree with an air rifle.
I was born into the post war world, to a family still grieving and living in austerity. Like so much in our family, war and grief were never spoken about, but hung like an unseen fog seeping into my early childhood and beyond. Only child and only grandchild. I grieved for the unborn children who would never become my cousins and for the uncles I never knew. I was their substitute, created to bring back joy and hope.
I smiled a lot and tried to bring happiness to the many adults who surrounded me. That was my job. A heavy burden for a small child.
My escape from trying to be happy even when I was sad or afraid was to be found in the books, stories and films that fed my imagination.
Sunday mornings, cuddled up to my father, I listened to exciting and magical stories from a new page in our invisible magic book, creating a story together.
I rowed across the landing in an upturned card table complete with kitchen towel flag. Swallows and Amazons.
I hid from the Nazis behind musty clothes in my parents’ wardrobe. The Silver Sword.
Endlessly singing Nick Nack Paddy Wack I frequently dived into bushes to escape bullets and bombs. The Inn of The Sixth Happiness.
Left to my own devices I squeezed through the park railings and perched high in my favourite tree daydreaming.
I dragged brown paper carrier bags filled with my mother’s cast-off skirts to a
den under the rhododendron bushes, crawled through the hayfield creating
pathways and tunnels, and one snowy winter I rolled the largest snowball in the world around the putting green until it became too heavy to push any further.
I can’t think of a full story I was told as a child. Only snippets, like these.
My great-grandfather on my dad’s side was Nicolai Roman. When my Grandma was five years old, something fell on him at the Willy’s Jeep car factory and he died. That was 1938, and companies didn’t give money to families when there was an accident. So my great-grandmother Eva, who spoke Polish and no English, had her eldest daughter translate for her in negotiations with the car factory. Because of the money they were awarded, at Christmas and Easter, there were at least three meats on the table.
My mom’s devoutly Catholic mom, Anne, had to get married because she was pregnant with my Uncle Andy. She sternly warned her four daughters never to mess around with boys. None of the girls knew about the out-of-wedlock conception until they were grown up and did the maths.
At age 13, my mom was chosen to be May Queen at Sacred Heart Catholic School. She wore one of her teacher’s wedding dresses, a blue satin shawl and a tiara in her chestnut hair. She looked 25 years old.
My parents met on a blind date when my mom was 15 and my dad was 19. According to my mom, they messed around.
Six months after my parents got married, my dad threw my mom’s clothes out the window of their first floor flat and went back to live with his mother. My mom got a job and learned to scuba dive while my dad was gone. Eventually he moved back. My dad then also learned to scuba dive. One time the scuba equipment my mom bought for him failed and he ended up in hospital for three weeks with ‘the bends’. They joke that she was trying to get rid of him.
I mustn’t sit in the smoke. I mustn’t breathe in the smoke. I mustn’t smoke.
I sit in the ground floor room, as it fills with marijuana smoke. It is bigger than the others, with a double bed, a metal clothes rail, and a scratched chest of drawers under a window which looks out onto the hotel car park.
I mustn’t sit in the smoke. But I must.
The shift finishes between 10:00 and 11:30 each night. We stand in groups at the pass, every table cleared, every piece of cutlery polished, lingering in our black and white as the last couple push silver forks into their mouths, oblivious that their dessert is keeping us from our beds.
When we are finally able to leave, I linger too, for the chefs to finish. The room on the ground floor belongs to one of them, and near to him I am safe and I can forget.
I have a baby inside my womb. It is small still, and not a bother. The baby likes the bedtime story and so do I. The chefs call it banter.
Inhales and exhales of smoke pass lungs slowly, intensifying the effect. Laughter and shouted words are exchanged, the lyrics of Oasis filling the gaps. I giggle with my eyes shut, curled in the foetal position. We lie together like this, the baby and me. We don’t smoke, but we do listen.
There is no father to read bedtime stories to my expanding tummy. No house to return to, no discussion about which colour we should paint the nursery or the right pram to buy.
But there is the chef, the spliff between his lips, the smell of the unchanged bed, the voices around my head.
This bedtime story is the best one we can listen to right now.
In the beginning there were people. Neighbours in the courtyard, family across the street, neighbours queuing at the bakery, family across town, out of town guests staying with neighbours, out of town family the city folk plagued each time we 'escaped the concrete jungle'. There were games, visits, jokes, parties, funerals, weddings, epic rows, epic meals, kids crawling under tables and running between the legs of giant dancers.
Around one year old my parents went to a New Year's Eve party and left me behind with grandma. Fists hitting freezing panes, tears searing my cheeks, I watched through the condensed window in disbelief as my parents melted into the gooey darkness. The first betrayal.
Around two years old, a boy twice my age with sun bleached curls, of a place so far I couldn't picture it, casually joined my games some torrid afternoons. He asked my hand in marriage soon--that is, he asked my parents! Neither him, so serious, nor them, so amused, cared what I thought. I thought I was, and indeed I was, ignored.
Around three years old, I was made to sit under my parents' gaze, under the arch of the gate, under a cardboard hanging from my neck: "I've been a bad girl again and my parents would like to swap me for a nice boy." I wasn't sorry, I was fuming: if they didn't want me, why should I want them?! A chap stopped by eventually, offering his boring son. I took his hand and started walking. The first step.
As all the people slipped away, so did all the laughter, all the veil. Betrayals filled the space. I bent and bent and bent and walked a touch farther away most days. I'm still not far enough; my back still aches.
It was sitting in the chair of my grandmother's beauty shoppe that I learned how her world worked and what was expected of me. I was nine years old. At times I still hear the sound of the scissors slicing off my hair; I can see her. I'm watching her in the big square mirror all over again. She starts out slow, snipping away my long, thick, black hair. The pair of scissors are relatively small and slender, but when she begins to snip faster and faster, the sound of metal slicing through hair filling the air, that slender pair of scissors might just as well be shears, one of those silver pairs with blades twice as wide and thick.
Snipping turns into shearing so quickly. I cringe every time I hear it, my shoulders hunching up towards my ears. I don't want her to cut off my hair, and she doesn't answer me when I ask why. She and my mother made the decision, talking in German as they always do when they don't want me to know what they are speaking of.
I am used to her cutting my hair, but it is how she is cutting this time that makes me uneasy. Scared. She isn't physically harming me; it's her detachment, as if she is somewhere else, angry, like she is trying to get rid of something, something very bad. And I sit watching the long black ribbons of my hair fall to the floor, the tie of the vinyl apron wrapped around me scratching my neck.
It's been over 30 years since the day I lost my hair, and I now know why my grandmother did it: it reminded her of my grandfather, the man my mother never knew, whose face she never saw, whose name she did not know up until four years ago. I don't think my grandmother ever imagined that my mom would find him: my Sinti grandfather Georg, dark hair and sparkling eyes, from a family of musicians.
Two dads; I was different and I liked that, two lots of presents, right? Watchful, shy but with a fire in my belly, I longed for my daddy and remember crying on Sunday nights when he’d have dropped me home. Weekends with him were within the ‘sureness’ of my Nan’s house; bacon and sausages and endless bossing of my dad to play with my dollies and there’d be treats! It was wonderfully predictable and ‘safe’ is the word that springs to mind. Home with mum and daddy number two is more blurry, younger brothers and that growing awareness of the ‘adult world’ -what’s really going on? What are you talking about? This from 5/6 years onwards is the dominant feeling I had as a child, a watchfulness that I have carried through my life and has almost certainly contributed to the risk averse part of my core. But what of “The Girl Within”? Emily Hancock’s book, read in adulthood, stirred a cloudiness surrounding that child. She never went; she’s absolutely there in the adventure craving gobby drunken teenager, the protesting for animal rights, the searching for just cause to shout truth to power, and this survivors instinct, the refusal to lie down and be silent, a beautiful inheritance from my mother’s survival. The safety seeking I’ve craved has brought me wonderful gifts, I am able to give and receive love and I am hugely grateful. But to live, I must stir the pot and connect with that girl inside, where will she take me? I wonder...
As a young child, I wished to be a borrower; a tiny, sentinel-like, brave presence that would pilfer small objects from our family and feast like a Queen on a single gold-wrapped chocolate caramel. I wanted to live with my parents but for them not to know I was still there; I felt that - at full child size - I was often a burden to them, rather than a source of interest and joy. If I were small, I could live cosily in the airing cupboard where I kept my flower press. I could keep a close eye on the big wide world and alert a grown up to trouble, if needs be. I had a route planned out through the house to the kitchen, with a mechanism of pulleys to snaffle food; a path through the rockery in the garden that would make for perfect borrower-sized adventures; a spot next to the robin hole (a hole in the hedge where our resident robin would nip in and out through the day) where I would set up a camp, complete with tiny campfire, where I would lie on my back and watch the stars come out. When I later learned of the hearth faeries - the broonies and ùruisgs of Scotland - I felt instantly drawn to them, as if a fragment of my soul were some kind of hearth spirit, a tiny protector of home and heart.
Lasting Impressions
Steve Harrison.
It was a ritual that fired up my young, impressionable imagination. Five maternal aunties; a conspiracy of cardplayers were about to plunge into another table top drama. A memory etched in my mind.
Pennies, half pennies, thruppences and tanners were smashed down in the middle of the kitchen table so hard the Babysham bottles clinked and clanked, ringing out the start of the game. Voices cracked the air with expectation. I sucked hard on my sherbet lemon and focused on the players.
White sticks were passed round and set on fire, smoke blown across the table which grew into cumulus congestus cloud enveloping the entire table. I gazed across at them through a smoky haze; mystical figures, faces contorted with frowns, smirks and knowing nods. The local cigarette factory did well on Thursday nights. ( Pay day )
A second sherbet lemon was needed for the next part as cards sliced through the murky air like flying cleavers as shouts of ' bust!' 'twist!' 'deuce!' 'flush!' and 'diamond takes all!' punctured holes through the mist. Glasses were drained, voices clashed, air crackled as cheeks reddened. Cards were slammed down in frustration. Howls and curses marched around the room giving orders.
To a chorus of, ' I'm out! bugger!' Chairs were unceremoniously pushed back and toppled over and fingers jabbed into the air like red hot pokers. The winnings provocatively scraped into an eager pocket. The plunder would eventually end up back in the cigarette factory where my aunties earned it the week before.
Through the smoky haze, my crimson lipped aunties, shining like beacons of hope shuffled the cards to a shout of ' Your deal!' This was unforgettable theatre. They have all now been swallowed up by history, but wait for me in my dreamscapes.
Oh Tanya that is haunting and compelling. I love the image of the bramble thicket of stories that form us. I cannot wait to read more.
I feel fortunate that the stories I was told were very different. On my mother's side, I was told about my great grandmother, a suffragette and fierce teetotaller who thought nothing of snatching alcoholic drinks out of people's hands at parties. Her daughter, my grandmother, was the first in her family to go to university. My paternal grandfather was by all accounts a charismatic but difficult character who demanded worship from the rest of the family. My father and his brother were expected to walk with him to the station every morning . They deeply resented this. Quite how these stories formed me I am not sure but they did not cause me to shrink from life. Rather, they were, in an odd way, something to live up to, strong, eccentric, flawed characters who didn't conform.
Well, you know, children can’t be trusted. They tell stories.
I understood bedtime stories and stories in books, good enjoyable things to be encouraged; I knew about stories the grown-ups told each other at the dinner table or in the living room after, which were rewarded with guffawed laughter; incomprehensible to us, but evidently a good thing. What was wrong with children telling their stories?
But they didn’t mean stories, they meant lies. How confusing to the child that hears things literally.
That didn’t happen, stop telling stories.
My stories, the ones which earned me an early bed, or a red hand-print, weren’t stories, they were truths. Hadn’t we always been told never to tell lies? But now, even as I took the vow, followed the rules, I was disbelieved. Children telling stories was a bad thing, not to be tolerated. Punishable, even when they were the truth.
So I didn’t tell stories, any stories, didn’t tell my stories, didn’t retell those of Bimbo & Tospy, or Marmalade or Pookie. I kept them tight inside the suitcase in my head, until I stopped hearing them at all.
Father Christmas; the Tooth Fairy; God
Perhaps as you get older, the meaning changes. Perhaps never means sometimes. Now lies fit on to a sliding scale of seriousness depending upon the teller and the lie. White lies and fibs, fairy-stories, untruths, falsehoods and fictions, tall-tales, yarns. Justifications for when a lie might be excused, or expected, or, even, kind. Embroidering; embellishing; exaggerating. So only children must not lie, or face the consequences, and adults must do as they please. The lie of the lie.
Everything will be alright
You can trust me
She’s just a friend
You just need to work harder
I’ll look after you
Just be yourself
It won’t hurt
I love you
They tried, these three women, my great-grandma, grandma and mom. They made sure I had pretty dresses for dances. They told me to go to college. They told me they loved their kids but not to have babies early, that it is a sacrifice, kids change everything. They told me there is a stuckness to having children. They told me not to marry the first person I had sex with. They told me to keep men guessing and that if I couldn’t be good then to remember the date. They told me my life could be different. They told me to stay thin, that men liked a flat belly. They told me men were the disease and the cure, necessary and ruinous, men cause whispers and startles and that what they don’t know won’t hurt them, fear is not respect but men don’t know that (would that matter?), men as means to an end, men cause the end, men control the end. Men are the dealers, women the gamblers. Women roll the dice and the house always wins. I learned to tuck and roll, to stop, drop and roll, roll with punches, roll with it, roll away, women as tumbling dice.
Birds roll in dirt to clean their feathers. They roll their eggs during incubation. They roll their heads from heavy metal poisoning.
It is hard to write of yourself in this way, where I fit into this, knowing they wanted it different for me, but some days I still feel stuck, the bird still sitting on a dead egg. I fear loss. I retreat. I harden. I go outside and walk but every walk is some sort of loop, a migratory return. Site attachment.
I am Cinderella's granddaughter. That was her story, she held it in her bones. My grandmother was illegitimate, born dirt poor. Her mother married a widower who had his own children, and they had more between them, but she was always "different". She didn't understand why until she was getting married and discovered she had a different surname on her birth certificate.
My grandfather spotted her on a factory holiday. She looked like a film star, and he looked like Errol Flynn. She was awestruck by his family house. I know that house, and it's a three bedroomed detached house that held two parents and nine children - but to my Granny it was a palace.
My granddad rescued her, but she rescued herself first. I don't know if she saw that. She worked in a jelly factory, she dressed as well as she could, she embraced life. She told me once that a friend had asked her if she and her husband should buy a house or a car? A car, my granny said immediately. You'll have a lot more fun with a car. That was her. She was always up for a coach trip, a day out, a laugh. She worked hard, but she enjoyed herself. Once lockdown's over, I will put her diamond ring back on and remember her sparkle.
There were prayers before bed. Three of us slept in the small bedroom, little girls. Each evening we knelt down, side by side, at the bed, and gave thanks to God for the day that had passed and our parents, brother and sisters, and the wonders of the world, in words that we didn't understand. Heaven, hallowed, kingdom, fruit of thy womb, sinners, death all spoken rapidly so we could get to the end, to story time. The lights were turned out and in the blackness D, my father, told us stories about other worlds. Arabian nights, Hannibal crossing the alps, families of donkeys, leprechauns in the mountains, some he read but most he made up. Together we went on adventures that were not possible in real life, to places that only existed in the stories.
Sometimes a story took several nights to tell, so the prayers the following night would be even quicker. He rarely talked about the past and, as there were six children in the house and we were so busy living, we didn't reflect too much on the present. Instead I learned to value each and every moment, be it spent managing the ordinary or absorbing new experiences.
Lovely, poignant words Tanya, what a world you create. I look forward to reading more. Thank you!
Children should be seen and not heard, someone said. So I tried to be quiet but sometimes, well sometimes I just couldn’t keep the words inside of me. Especially when nobody else said anything and I knew, I just knew that there was something that had to be said. Those words just had to come out. Well, there was a price to pay when you dared to be heard. When you dared to release words that once spoken out loud somehow made you feel better. I knew the price but still words would find their way out time and time again when everything felt wrong and I thought I could make it feel right again. Right again for me, but mostly right again for the others. It made me feel angry when those others were being quiet and I just knew that they had something to say, something that could explain things and that could maybe prevent them from feeling even worse. They were choosing to be seen only it seemed and I couldn’t bear it and I couldn’t understand why. So many feelings, so confusing.
Then one day someone said that I had too much of what the others didn’t have enough of. Did I? I remember feeling pleased that I had something even though I didn’t know what the something was. I didn’t think to ask. It felt rather special in a way, and if the others didn’t have it, well, it was extra special then wasn’t it? I wasn’t just a girl, I was a girl with something special, and the others didn’t have it!
Then someone said that a lady was only a lady until she opened her mouth...
My mother and I have a new game that has us rushing gleefully upstairs to see a little bird fluttering mid-air, asking for food. We are flattered and delighted, over and over again. I’m fourteen. My sister has left home at seventeen; I’ve inherited her ID style-mag subscription. My brother’s a weekly boarder; I have to wash up after Sunday roast, and I’ve never done my homework beforehand.
Half my lifetime earlier, my mother returned from work with a story. “I was standing at the bus stop and a bird on top of the lamppost dropped dead at my feet. A chaffinch. So beautiful!” Thinking of brown sparrows, I’m unconvinced. A bit boring. Then she describes the pink, slate blue, chestnut and green feathers of the tiny bird in her palm, and maybe this is what sparks my love of wildlife.
It’s a chaffinch that draws us into the game that we know is wrong, unnatural. For a while we can’t resist the gratification, then we pull ourselves together and just stop. Hidden in the hedge is the secret nest. Last time we peeped there were five warm eggs in its perfect mossy cup. Now there are five horrifying, pathetic corpses. We feel guilty. Is it our fault?
In my twenties, I lived in the West End of London. Dismayed at the sirens my end, my mother held the telephone out for me to hear birdsong. The large pond my parents excavated attracted kingfishers. They planted lots of trees. My mother regaled me with a story of how a cock chaffinch had been tap tap tapping at the windowpane. Loud as a hammer, waking her EVERY dawn. Annoyed her so much she blasted it out of the yew tree with an air rifle.
Rosemary Kirkus
Bedtime Stories
I was born into the post war world, to a family still grieving and living in austerity. Like so much in our family, war and grief were never spoken about, but hung like an unseen fog seeping into my early childhood and beyond. Only child and only grandchild. I grieved for the unborn children who would never become my cousins and for the uncles I never knew. I was their substitute, created to bring back joy and hope.
I smiled a lot and tried to bring happiness to the many adults who surrounded me. That was my job. A heavy burden for a small child.
My escape from trying to be happy even when I was sad or afraid was to be found in the books, stories and films that fed my imagination.
Sunday mornings, cuddled up to my father, I listened to exciting and magical stories from a new page in our invisible magic book, creating a story together.
I rowed across the landing in an upturned card table complete with kitchen towel flag. Swallows and Amazons.
I hid from the Nazis behind musty clothes in my parents’ wardrobe. The Silver Sword.
Endlessly singing Nick Nack Paddy Wack I frequently dived into bushes to escape bullets and bombs. The Inn of The Sixth Happiness.
Left to my own devices I squeezed through the park railings and perched high in my favourite tree daydreaming.
I dragged brown paper carrier bags filled with my mother’s cast-off skirts to a
den under the rhododendron bushes, crawled through the hayfield creating
pathways and tunnels, and one snowy winter I rolled the largest snowball in the world around the putting green until it became too heavy to push any further.
Occasionally I even stopped smiling.
I can’t think of a full story I was told as a child. Only snippets, like these.
My great-grandfather on my dad’s side was Nicolai Roman. When my Grandma was five years old, something fell on him at the Willy’s Jeep car factory and he died. That was 1938, and companies didn’t give money to families when there was an accident. So my great-grandmother Eva, who spoke Polish and no English, had her eldest daughter translate for her in negotiations with the car factory. Because of the money they were awarded, at Christmas and Easter, there were at least three meats on the table.
My mom’s devoutly Catholic mom, Anne, had to get married because she was pregnant with my Uncle Andy. She sternly warned her four daughters never to mess around with boys. None of the girls knew about the out-of-wedlock conception until they were grown up and did the maths.
At age 13, my mom was chosen to be May Queen at Sacred Heart Catholic School. She wore one of her teacher’s wedding dresses, a blue satin shawl and a tiara in her chestnut hair. She looked 25 years old.
My parents met on a blind date when my mom was 15 and my dad was 19. According to my mom, they messed around.
Six months after my parents got married, my dad threw my mom’s clothes out the window of their first floor flat and went back to live with his mother. My mom got a job and learned to scuba dive while my dad was gone. Eventually he moved back. My dad then also learned to scuba dive. One time the scuba equipment my mom bought for him failed and he ended up in hospital for three weeks with ‘the bends’. They joke that she was trying to get rid of him.
I mustn’t sit in the smoke. I mustn’t breathe in the smoke. I mustn’t smoke.
I sit in the ground floor room, as it fills with marijuana smoke. It is bigger than the others, with a double bed, a metal clothes rail, and a scratched chest of drawers under a window which looks out onto the hotel car park.
I mustn’t sit in the smoke. But I must.
The shift finishes between 10:00 and 11:30 each night. We stand in groups at the pass, every table cleared, every piece of cutlery polished, lingering in our black and white as the last couple push silver forks into their mouths, oblivious that their dessert is keeping us from our beds.
When we are finally able to leave, I linger too, for the chefs to finish. The room on the ground floor belongs to one of them, and near to him I am safe and I can forget.
I have a baby inside my womb. It is small still, and not a bother. The baby likes the bedtime story and so do I. The chefs call it banter.
Inhales and exhales of smoke pass lungs slowly, intensifying the effect. Laughter and shouted words are exchanged, the lyrics of Oasis filling the gaps. I giggle with my eyes shut, curled in the foetal position. We lie together like this, the baby and me. We don’t smoke, but we do listen.
There is no father to read bedtime stories to my expanding tummy. No house to return to, no discussion about which colour we should paint the nursery or the right pram to buy.
But there is the chef, the spliff between his lips, the smell of the unchanged bed, the voices around my head.
This bedtime story is the best one we can listen to right now.
Thank you Tanya, and yes please to the archive removal for this piece, too.
In the beginning there were people. Neighbours in the courtyard, family across the street, neighbours queuing at the bakery, family across town, out of town guests staying with neighbours, out of town family the city folk plagued each time we 'escaped the concrete jungle'. There were games, visits, jokes, parties, funerals, weddings, epic rows, epic meals, kids crawling under tables and running between the legs of giant dancers.
Around one year old my parents went to a New Year's Eve party and left me behind with grandma. Fists hitting freezing panes, tears searing my cheeks, I watched through the condensed window in disbelief as my parents melted into the gooey darkness. The first betrayal.
Around two years old, a boy twice my age with sun bleached curls, of a place so far I couldn't picture it, casually joined my games some torrid afternoons. He asked my hand in marriage soon--that is, he asked my parents! Neither him, so serious, nor them, so amused, cared what I thought. I thought I was, and indeed I was, ignored.
Around three years old, I was made to sit under my parents' gaze, under the arch of the gate, under a cardboard hanging from my neck: "I've been a bad girl again and my parents would like to swap me for a nice boy." I wasn't sorry, I was fuming: if they didn't want me, why should I want them?! A chap stopped by eventually, offering his boring son. I took his hand and started walking. The first step.
As all the people slipped away, so did all the laughter, all the veil. Betrayals filled the space. I bent and bent and bent and walked a touch farther away most days. I'm still not far enough; my back still aches.
It was sitting in the chair of my grandmother's beauty shoppe that I learned how her world worked and what was expected of me. I was nine years old. At times I still hear the sound of the scissors slicing off my hair; I can see her. I'm watching her in the big square mirror all over again. She starts out slow, snipping away my long, thick, black hair. The pair of scissors are relatively small and slender, but when she begins to snip faster and faster, the sound of metal slicing through hair filling the air, that slender pair of scissors might just as well be shears, one of those silver pairs with blades twice as wide and thick.
Snipping turns into shearing so quickly. I cringe every time I hear it, my shoulders hunching up towards my ears. I don't want her to cut off my hair, and she doesn't answer me when I ask why. She and my mother made the decision, talking in German as they always do when they don't want me to know what they are speaking of.
I am used to her cutting my hair, but it is how she is cutting this time that makes me uneasy. Scared. She isn't physically harming me; it's her detachment, as if she is somewhere else, angry, like she is trying to get rid of something, something very bad. And I sit watching the long black ribbons of my hair fall to the floor, the tie of the vinyl apron wrapped around me scratching my neck.
It's been over 30 years since the day I lost my hair, and I now know why my grandmother did it: it reminded her of my grandfather, the man my mother never knew, whose face she never saw, whose name she did not know up until four years ago. I don't think my grandmother ever imagined that my mom would find him: my Sinti grandfather Georg, dark hair and sparkling eyes, from a family of musicians.
Two dads; I was different and I liked that, two lots of presents, right? Watchful, shy but with a fire in my belly, I longed for my daddy and remember crying on Sunday nights when he’d have dropped me home. Weekends with him were within the ‘sureness’ of my Nan’s house; bacon and sausages and endless bossing of my dad to play with my dollies and there’d be treats! It was wonderfully predictable and ‘safe’ is the word that springs to mind. Home with mum and daddy number two is more blurry, younger brothers and that growing awareness of the ‘adult world’ -what’s really going on? What are you talking about? This from 5/6 years onwards is the dominant feeling I had as a child, a watchfulness that I have carried through my life and has almost certainly contributed to the risk averse part of my core. But what of “The Girl Within”? Emily Hancock’s book, read in adulthood, stirred a cloudiness surrounding that child. She never went; she’s absolutely there in the adventure craving gobby drunken teenager, the protesting for animal rights, the searching for just cause to shout truth to power, and this survivors instinct, the refusal to lie down and be silent, a beautiful inheritance from my mother’s survival. The safety seeking I’ve craved has brought me wonderful gifts, I am able to give and receive love and I am hugely grateful. But to live, I must stir the pot and connect with that girl inside, where will she take me? I wonder...