This is essentially a ghost story.
A few weeks ago my Dad – who has been on a decluttering mission since my mother’s stroke left him with sole jurisdiction over the domestic space – emailed me to say he’d come across some old archive material that would interest me. When we next visited he handed over an old Marks & Spencer carrier bag, emerald green with pale gold lettering, so redolent of a bygone era. It contained a school magazine with a story of mine in it, the script of my infant school play and all my reports between the ages of seven and twelve. If it had contained the full set of Nancy Drew and Malory Towers novels, it would have been the entire essence of my childhood in paper form.
Mr Litlove, with the unerring instincts of the third sibling of four, fell on the school magazine, rightly surmising that this had the potential to be the most embarrassing item of memorabilia. I was most curious about the reports. These were wilderness years, the part of my education I couldn’t recall very distinctly from a time when I had no sense of my own performance. Subject-wise they held no surprises. My reading level was praised, particularly my vocabulary, and my English work was good. Maths was much more of a problem, and the comments were up and down, more ‘tries hard’ and ‘lacks confidence’. I never enjoyed maths and had to learn how to tolerate it. Creeping in, too, was a consistent thread of exam anxiety: ‘mark was of a lower standard than expected’, ‘a surprising drop in standard’, ‘her term’s work is not reflected in her test result.’ It was the start of a lifelong struggle to do myself justice when under pressure. Art was summed up by the first ever report I received – ‘neat but average’, and sport never really rose above the damning remark ‘she perseveres’.
There was one comment that did stand out. Under the heading of ‘General Comment’, my form mistress from the year I turned 10 had written ‘On occasions when she finds work difficult or challenging, she must NOT become over-anxious, or this will make the problem more difficult.’ I can remember how important it was for me to do things quickly. The most desirable quality I wished for myself was that of celeritas – the opposite to gravitas – the quicksilver ability to be light and swift. I felt compelled to hurry up, to race to the finish, not to keep people waiting, not to weigh heavy on the earth. It’s funny how physical this sensation was, and still is. Earlier today I was making Mr Litlove his pudding of the moment – a grapefruit tiramisu – and I was folding the whipped egg whites into the mascarpone mix, which must be done very slowly and carefully. And I noticed that the slower I went, the faster my heart beat, until I realised I was holding my breath and had to stop and walk away. I must have been an odd little duck as a child. The comments on my personality are mostly things like ‘she is confident and self-assured’, ‘she is a capable, self-assured, grown-up little girl’, and I am generally described as ‘pleasant’. For the most part, it’s true. I wasn’t shy. I never minded speaking up or having a go. But underneath that, I was extremely anxious and very tuned into the people around me, empathetic at a visceral level, with one eye always on the horizon in case of threat.
Forgive me – I was on my way to my first ever disco and thought I looked cool…..
‘Are you ever going to read this story?’ Mr Litlove asked me, rather too full of glee for my liking and suspiciously keen. Well, not if I can help it. I often don’t like what I wrote last week, so the chances of something I wrote aged 12 pleasing me are pretty low, and it’s hard to see clearly while wincing. In any case, I figured it must be a bit of description I remembered writing about autumn – golden leaves falling in misty mornings, the kind of thing I’d have presumed would please my teachers. ‘It’s not that,’ Mr Litlove said. grinning. ‘It’s a horror story.’ A WHAT? I had never, to my knowledge, written a horror story in my life. ‘Of course I’m sure,’ Mr Litlove said. ‘It’s about a young woman who comes for a job as a secretary to an old lady, and the old lady imprisons her and sucks the life out of her so she can be young again.’ I blinked. I really didn’t know what to do with that. ‘It’s okay,’ Mr Litlove said comfortingly. ‘It’s not like the other contributions are any good either.’
I did have a look at the magazine later to see who else had a piece in it (scrupulously avoiding even a glimpse at my own), and in fact I did rate one. It was written by the boy who became my first love when we were in sixth form, and it was a non-fiction piece describing Christmas in Denmark where he used to live. That was Tom – very good at hanging onto his dignity while the rest of us were fumbling the catch. It struck me, too, that I consider non-fiction to be a much more dignified form of writing than fiction. You are always in control of a non-fiction piece, no matter what you say in it, no matter how revealing it might appear. Any revelation is a choice. In fiction, your inner fantasies guide the writing on the page, the power comes from the authentic experience of hot, uncomfortable emotions, and to me it feels horribly exposing. It’s quite possible there’s just a better way of doing it that I haven’t come across yet.
The play script was for Cinderella, the one (and only) great triumph of my early years. I must have been five when we did this, and I was given the lead. I have what I think is a real memory of standing on the stage, sweeping with my broom made of twigs and declaiming the emotive line, ‘Oh Puss! I wonder if I could go to the ball?’ The memories are of ease: it was easy to learn lines, easy to be confident when I was speaking lines I’d been given, easy to follow direction. I was doing what had been judged in advance to be correct and my people-pleasing little heart was full.
The experience seemed, however, to produce a strange and to me unexpected consequence. One day in the following term, I arrived home with an egg-shaped bump on my forehead and a blossoming bruise. My mother marched me back to the school and demanded an explanation. The headmistress said that I had been disruptive, and that in restraining me as we approached her office, I hit my head on the handle of her door. This strikes me as extraordinary, even to this day. I can’t imagine any circumstance in which I would struggle with a teacher. I was your dedicated good girl, scrupulous in my avoidance of trouble. My mother found it extraordinary too and didn’t believe a word of it. ‘Oh I suppose we should have put in a complaint or something,’ she said when I asked her about it years later. ‘But that wasn’t the sort of thing people did back then.’ It certainly wasn’t the kind of thing my parents did. My family emanated a negative form of entitlement, an anxiety that we needed to tick a lot of boxes to earn our oxygen. My mother’s story, and she always stuck to it, was that the headmistress had taken against me because of Cinderella. To her mind, I had failed to be sufficiently humble and unassuming. I had dared to stand out.
When we came to the end of that school year and a new play was cast, I longed for a part but was destined for disappointment. My mother would say that it was down to dislike and aversion, but young as I was, I instinctively understood the principle of balance that reigned over the life of a schoolchild in the 70s. The play was Alice in Wonderland and I was cast as a shrimp, a non-speaking role that involved wearing an uncomfortable and easily punctured papier-mâché tube that stretched from top to toe. My defining memory of that performance is one of the other shrimps falling off the back of the stage, due to visibility issues. Then I promptly came down with bronchitis, caught from having nothing more than tissue paper and the obligatory vest between my skin and the kind of chilly June weather we regularly had pre-global warming. Oh health and safety! Where were you in 1976?
I understand why the idea of magic exerts such a gravitational pull over children because so much seems to happen in a realm beyond your control or reason. I wonder to this day if this story of personal vendetta could possibly be true, and my inclination is to doubt it. But it cast a kind of spell, a dark enchantment woven by a woman my mother had identified as a bad fairy. From that point on, I did feel an unspoken animosity from the headmistress, and it threw a long shadow. I was aware that I was somehow easy to dislike and school lived up – or maybe down – to this apprehension for many years. I made no friends at all in junior school. It was a time of loneliness and great isolation and a creeping fear that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. I was not like other children and this was socially disastrous.
That feeling persisted until I was in my 40s. Oh, the years passed and I ended up having friends, particularly at university where suddenly I was with a lot of people who not only liked me, but who were LIKE me. But it was really down to Mr Litlove that I finally came to accept myself. He has managed to put up with me for almost 40 years now, on good days and bad, through insecurities and grumpiness and the nuclear winter of personality that was chronic fatigue syndrome. Despite all this, he seems to like me, and whilst admittedly grapefruit tiramisu and the like have a role to play here (and I do spend quite a lot of effort on buying his love), it can’t all be down to that.
I often think that education happens at the wrong time for a lot of people. When you are growing up there’s so much going on that book learning can seem a pointless distraction from the real business of life. But this was not the case for me. The really great thing about social ostracism is that it gives you a lot of free time in which to do your homework. And oh, did I love reading! It was all I ever really wanted to do. I fell into obsessions easily – with Egyptology, with West Side Story, with boarding school stories, with the novels of Agatha Christie. Something we did as a family on the weekends was to go for a drive. There’s the passage of time for you – who in their right minds would head out into traffic these days unless you had to? But back then, we would all get in the car and trundle around the lanes and byways of East Anglia. There was a particular weather phenomenon I longed to witness, where the sheer flatness of the landscape meant that I could watch clouds raining several miles away. It strikes me now that I have always loved the overview. This is what education can give you, if you let it. I was never at ease with maths and the sciences because they demanded one right answer or else the punitive red cross was scored angrily through your work. A form of humiliation was written into their very structure. But the arts and humanities, and especially the practice of English comprehension, were up for you having a go. My openness and willingness as a child were met by their invitation to try. Have a shot at interpretation. Have a stab at writing that essay. You may never be one hundred percent right, but you’ll never be entirely wrong. I felt such gratitude to these subjects, where finally I found some mirroring, some mutuality. I still can’t see myself in my school reports where I dissolve in the gray words of pleasant willingness, of conscientious application. It was me but not the real me, not the one that mattered. It would take such a long time to find that hidden self, but when I did, it would be reflected back from the pages of books.