Jacky Daydream Read online

  Once a month she went up to a London hospital and tried every treatment going. She even had gold injections for a while. I hoped her teeth and fingernails might suddenly gleam gold, but there was no external evidence of this treatment whatsoever and I don’t think it helped much internally either. She was in constant severe pain. Sometimes she could hardly get out of her armchair, and her face would screw up in agony, but she never once cried.

  Her poor hands were so badly affected that her fingers became claws and she couldn’t sew any more. Many years later, when I had my daughter Emma, Ga struggled desperately, her lips clamped together, and knitted her little dresses and cardigans and tiny woollen buttoned shoes, and crocheted an enormous soft white shawl. I want to cry when I think of all that painful effort.

  She had a new hip put in and there was talk of new knees, but there was a limit to what they could do. Her feet swelled with bunions and in her later years she could barely walk.

  But neither grandparent died when I was young. Biddy and Harry stayed reasonably healthy too. Biddy had frequent heavy colds like me. (I had just as many colds after my tonsils had been pulled out.) They always went to her chest and made her cough, but this was probably because she smoked so much. Her chic red packets of Du Maurier cigarettes were part of her, like her Max Factor Crème Puff powder and her Coty L’Aimant perfume. She smoked like a chimney, she sucked clove sweets and pear drops and humbugs, she ate Mars bars constantly, childishly chewing along the top, saving the toffee part till last. She wouldn’t walk for more than two minutes in her high heels and determinedly took no exercise whatsoever – and yet she’s still going strong now, in her mid-eighties.

  Harry never smoked and didn’t have a sweet tooth. He had odd tastes in food. He’d eat peanuts from the shell, cracking them into newspaper in the evenings as he watched television. He’d construct his own odd little teas of beetroot and St Ivel cheese. He rarely cooked, but he had his own particular specialities, like very good tinned-salmon fishcakes. He ate healthily, if weirdly, and he took masses of exercise, cycling all the way up to London and back every day. He frequently went for long walks and he was also a very active member of the local tennis club. He seemed fit as a fiddle – but his heart started playing up and he died when he was only fifty-seven.

  Maybe it was because of all his temper tantrums. When he was in full rant, his face would go an ugly red and the veins would stand out on his forehead. We could never tell when one of these terrifying temper fits would start up. Sometimes they came out of nowhere. Other times Biddy seemed to go out of her way to provoke him.

  ‘He’s got a terrible inferiority complex, that’s why he gets into these states,’ she said.

  She didn’t see why she should try to make a fuss of him and boost his confidence.

  ‘I’m not going to pretend,’ she said, outraged at the idea. ‘It’s not my way. If I think he’s useless, I’ll say so.’

  She did, repeatedly. When she got a job as a book-keeper at Prince Machines and they had a firm’s dance, she insisted that Harry go with her. Surprisingly, he agreed, but the evening wasn’t a success.

  ‘He just sat there like a lemon, wouldn’t say a word,’ Biddy raged. ‘He wouldn’t even dance with anyone, not even when this woman begged him. I was so embarrassed!’

  ‘For God’s sake, she was drunk,’ said Harry. ‘And it wasn’t a dance – she wanted me to join in these damn daft party games.’

  Biddy had started playing her own private game with a man called Ron who worked at Prince Machines. Surely that was part of the reason for all the rows? Yet they never seemed to argue about him. Ron was almost like part of our family – Uncle Ron to me. When I was old enough to be left on Saturday evenings, Biddy and Harry went out with Uncle Ron. They mostly went to pubs, which was the strangest thing of all, because they were both still teetotal. Maybe they sipped bitter lemons all evening.

  We even had a joint holiday together, with Uncle Ron’s wife Grace, who understandably didn’t seem keen on this weird situation.

  I plucked up courage recently to ask Biddy if Harry realized what was going on under his nose.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said impatiently. ‘We didn’t ever discuss it.’

  I always knew about Uncle Ron – and several other uncles – and I certainly wasn’t going to blab to my dad, but I did think it horribly unfair to him. I didn’t like my dad and he could be incredibly alarming and unkind, but I always felt sorry for him. It wasn’t until he got ill that I realized there were not one but two ‘aunties’ lurking in the background, both of whom came to his funeral.

  They both told me – separately – how much my dad had loved me and been proud of me. I was astonished. I couldn’t remember him saying anything of the sort to me. In fact several times he’d told me he couldn’t stand me. Perhaps they were just being kind and felt it was the polite thing to say at funerals.

  Yet sometimes he acted like he really did love me, even if he never said so. That’s what’s so puzzling about writing a true story. If I was making my story up, I’d invent a consistent father, good or bad. Real people change so. Harry might have been a bad father to me in many ways, but he lived long enough to be a wonderful caring grandfather to Emma, patiently playing with her for hours, never once losing his temper.

  Harry could sometimes be gentle and imaginative with me too. He had a passion for the countryside and as soon as we moved to Cumberland House he’d pore over maps and go for bike rides round the Surrey lanes. When I was on holiday from school, he’d take a day off from work and take me for a long country outing. We’d walk the Pilgrim’s Way, stand beside the deep green Silent Pool and struggle up the slippery chalk paths of Box Hill. We’d pick blackberries or hazelnuts, or buy bags of tomatoes to supplement our cheese sandwich picnics.

  I was a weedy little girl but I could walk seven or eight miles in my sturdy Clarks sandals. Harry was generally at his best on these occasions. He’d let me chatter and he’d sometimes join in my imaginary games in a desultory fashion. We watched an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped on the television and played we were Davie and Alan wandering through the woods. Well, I played, and Harry trudged along, nodding every now and then. Sometimes he’d tell me the name of his favourite racehorse and I’d gallop along beside him, pretending to be winning my race.

  We sometimes took the train to Guildford. Before setting out for the surrounding fields and hills Harry would take me to the big second-hand bookshop at the top of the town. It was a huge dark muddle of a shop with long corridors and sudden steps up and down and a series of connecting rooms, but if you negotiated this labyrinth properly, you found a whole room of children’s books.

  Harry had a happy knack of finding me a book I’d like. He was a member of the Westminster Public Library near his office at the Treasury, and he sometimes borrowed a book for me. He brought home Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr, a magical book about two sick children who draw themselves into a nightmare world of their imagination. It had a profound effect on me. I was very careful not to draw anything too scary with my best Venus HB pencil after that, just in case.

  He also brought me an adult book, The River by Rumer Godden, about a family of children in India. I was only eight or nine. I found it hard to get into the first few pages, but when I got used to Rumer’s strange style, I adored it. I particularly identified with Harriet, the intense literary child-narrator. Biddy had considered calling me Harriet, as an amalgamation of Harry and her own real first name, Margaret. She’d decided against this idea because she thought Harriet such a plain old-fashioned name. I was a plain old-fashioned child and longed to be called Harriet. I didn’t care for the name Jacqueline at all, especially the way Biddy said it when she was cross with me – ‘Jacqueline!’ Still, the other name under consideration had apparently been Babette, so maybe I got off lightly.

  * * *

  Two sisters in one of my books have a grandma with very bad arthritis. Can you remember who they are?