My Secret Diary Read online

  We ate a large Sunday roast together too while listening to The Billy Cotton Band Show and Family Favourites on the radio. We particularly enjoyed listening to Hancock's Half Hour as a family, all three of us convulsing with laughter. We watched television together in the evenings. For a long time we only had one television channel so there weren't any arguments about which programme to pick.

  There must have been many ordinary cosy evenings like this:

  Thursday 3 March

  I'm sitting at the table. The time is twenty to eight. 'Life of Bliss' is on the T.V. Daddy has just got in from work. I ask Mummy what happened at her office. Mr Lacy was in a good mood, she replies, and goes back to her newspaper. What are you looking for? Mummy asks Dad. My black pen, he replies, have I got time for a bath before supper? Only an in and out says Mummy. Daddy has his bath. We sit down to our supper of macaroni cheese (one of my favourites). After supper I do my maths homework. Daddy helps, bless him. Then I watch T.V. It is a Somerset Maugham play, and very good. P.S. Mum bought me some sweet white nylon knickers.

  I was still very close to Biddy and struggled hard to please her. I took immense pains to find an original Mother's Day present for her. I went shopping in Kingston with my friends Carol and Cherry, all of us after Mother's Day presents – though we got a little distracted first.

  We first went to Maxwells the record shop, and I bought the record 'A Theme from a Summer Place'. It was lovely. Then we went to Bentalls. First we went to the Yardley make-up, and a very helpful woman sold me my liquefying cleansing cream and Cherry a new lipstick. Then we bought our mothers some cards, and Cherry bought her mother some flowers, and Carol bought her mother some chocs. But I knew what I wanted for my adorable, queer, funny, contemporary mother. A pair of roll-on black panties, a pair of nylons and a good (expensive) black suspender belt.

  I record happily on Sunday: 'Mum was very pleased with her panties, belt and nylons.'

  I tried to please Harry too. I didn't buy him a vest and Y-fronts for Father's Day, thank goodness – but I did make an effort.

  Saturday 4 June

  I bought a card for Father's Day, and some men's talcum and three men's hankies as well.

  Biddy and Harry bought me presents too, sometimes vying with each other, to my advantage: 'Biddy gave me a pound to spend for when I'm going round Kingston with Carol – and then Harry gave me five pounds. For nothing!!!'

  They could be imaginative with gifts. Biddy not only bought me all my clothes, she bought me books and ornaments and make-up. Harry tried hard too. He was away up in Edinburgh for a week on business (I wrote, 'It feels so strange in the flat without Daddy'), but when he came back he had bought lavish presents for both of us:

  Saturday 21 May

  Daddy came back from Scotland today. He gave me a little Scotch doll, a typewriter rubber, a coin bracelet, an expensive bambi brooch, and a little book about Mary, Queen of Scots. He gave Mummy a £5 note.

  Harry could be generous with his time too. That summer of 1960 I had to do a Shakespeare project so he took a day off work and we went to Stratford. It was a good day too. We went round Shakespeare's birthplace and Anne Hathaway's cottage and collected various postcards and leaflets. My project was the most gorgeously illustrated of anyone's. But he mostly kept to himself, out at work on weekdays, still playing tennis at the weekends, and when he was at home he hunched in his armchair, surrounded by piles of Racing Posts and form books. If he wasn't going out he rarely bothered to get dressed, comfortable in our centrally heated flat in pyjamas and dressing gown and bare feet.

  Biddy frequently changed into her dressing gown too and sat watching television, tiny feet tucked up, her Du Maurier cigarettes on one arm of the chair and a bag of her favourite pear drops on the other. As the evening progressed, one or other of them would start nodding and soon they would both be softly snoring. I'd huddle up with my book, happy to be left in peace way past my bed time.

  They never went out in the week but they started going out on Saturday nights with Biddy's friend Ron. They must have been strange evenings, especially as my parents were practically teetotal. Biddy stuck with her bitter lemons. Harry tried a pint of beer occasionally but hated it. One Saturday night he pushed the boat out and had two or three and came home feeling so ill he lay on the kitchen floor, moaning.

  'Well, it's all your own fault, you fool. You were the one who poured the drink down your throat,' said Biddy, poking him with her foot.

  Harry swore at her, still horizontal.

  'Don't you start calling me names! Now get up, you look ridiculous. What if someone walks along the balcony and peers in the kitchen window? They'll think you're dead.'

  'I wish I was,' said Harry, and shut his eyes.

  I don't think he enjoyed those Saturday nights one iota – and yet he agreed to go on a summer holiday that year with Ron and his wife, Grace. I don't know if Harry had any particular secret lady friends at that time – he certainly did later on in his life. I think Biddy and Harry came very close to splitting up when I was fourteen or so. I know Ron had plans to go to Africa and wanted Biddy to go with him. But I was the fly in the ointment, flapping my wings stickily. Biddy wouldn't leave me, so she was stuck too.

  We went out very occasionally on a Sunday afternoon, when we caught the bus to the other end of Kingston and went to tea with my grandparents, Ga and Gongon. The adults played solo and bridge and bickered listlessly and ate Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolates. I ate chocolates too and curled up with my book. If I finished my own book I read one of Ga and Gongon's Sunday school prize books or flipped through their ten volumes of Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia.

  I preferred visiting Ga by myself. I'd go on Wednesday afternoons after school. She'd always have a special tea waiting for me: thinly sliced bread and butter and home-made loganberry jam, tinned peaches and Nestlé's tinned cream, and then a cake – a Peggy Brown lemon meringue tart if Ga had shopped in Surbiton, or a Hemming's Delight (meringue and artificial cream with a glacé cherry) if she had been to Kingston marketplace.

  Ga would chat to me at tea, asking me all about school, taking me ultra seriously. I should have been the one making her tea as her arthritis was really bad now. She had to wear arm splints and wrist supports, and for a week or so before her monthly cortizone injection she could only walk slowly, clearly in great pain. It's so strange realizing that Ga then was younger than me now. She looked like an old lady in her shapeless jersey suits and black buttoned shoes.

  One Wednesday it was pouring with rain and I was sodden by the time I'd walked to Ga's, my hair in rats' tails, my school uniform dripping. Ga gave me a towel for my hair and one of her peachy-pink rayon petticoats to wear while my clothes dried. But when it was time for me to go home they were still soaking wet. I didn't particularly mind but Ga wouldn't hear of me walking the three quarters of an hour home up Kingston Hill in sopping wet clothes. She was sure I'd catch a chill. She insisted I borrow one of her suits. She meant so well I couldn't refuse, though I absolutely died at the thought of walking home in old-lady beige with her long sagging skirt flapping round my ankle socks.

  Ga could no longer make her own clothes because her hands had turned into painful little claws due to her arthritis – but she would press her lips together firmly and make herself sew if it was for me.

  Wednesday 27 January

  After school went up to Ga's. She has made my Chinese costume for the play, and also gave me a lovely broderie anglaise petticoat. Isn't she kind?

  Yes, she was very kind, in little sweet ways. On 14 February I always received a Valentine. That year it was two little blue birds kissing beaks, perching on two red hearts outlined with glitter. There were forget-me-nots and roses sprinkled across the card, and inside a little printed verse and an inked question mark. I knew it wasn't from a boy, although I was supposed to assume it came from a secret admirer. I was pretty certain it was Ga wanting to give me a surprise, sending me a Valentine so I could show it off at school.