Girl With Dove

Preface

The Reader’s Backstory

All stories have backstories, at least all stories worth knowing about, and all readers want to pry into those unlit spaces. We read to get back to those dark and dusty corners, to scrape back to old patterns: the strange symbol beneath the damp plaster, the squiggles on the crumbling wall. Reading is a strong torch shining through the dark.

As a child I was terrified of the story of Sleeping Beauty and the jealous old fairy who stalks the palace grounds. The fairy is furious that someone so enchanting should live, so she casts a spell on Beauty. Soon after, Beauty pricks her finger on a spindle; the needle is so sharp, and cuts so deep, that everyone is sure Beauty will bleed to death.

But another, kinder, fairy turns back the spell so that Beauty will not die, but instead sleeps for a hundred years. Everyone agrees that this is better than nothing: sleeping is better than dying. But from that day on, the king and queen begin to watch their daughter and worry. Not a day goes by that they don’t think of that sharp needle cutting through their fair daughter’s skin.

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Reading is a form of escape, and an avid reader is an escape artist. I began my escape the moment I started to read. Aged four, I already had sentences stored up; I knew some words and I could put them together in a line.

But Mum didn’t have enough time to help me. She was managing babies and nappies; she was turning dingy cotton nappies from grey to white. Back from grey to white, sparkling white.

But white is very hard to get back once it’s been ruined. Mum used that word a lot. To ruin something was to turn it from white to grey. Nappies were never completely ruined, because you could boil them and bring them back to life. Nappies could always start again, as long as you kept them on the boil for long enough and didn’t mind the steam.

Mum hated plastic on babies’ bottoms. She preferred cotton, and cotton needed cooking to make it clean.

Every day Mummy boiled the nappies inside a large grey saucepan that sat on the hob. I climbed on a stool and peered down into the grey water. I stirred the nappies with a wooden spoon, and I was the Nappy Witch.

Mummy took out the nappies and hung them on the backline. They flapped in the breeze. I ran underneath them, and when they touched my scalp I screamed. Nappies were hard and scratchy. I asked Mummy why nappies weren’t soft, and she said they had to be strong so they could take all that scalding hot water.

‘But why do you boil them so much, Mummy? You’re making them hard.’

‘You can’t have those nasty plastic things so close to a baby’s bottom. Cotton is what you should put next to a baby’s bottom, nice strong cotton.’

Strong cotton, strong cotton, strong cotton. Strong cotton. I sat beneath Strong Cotton and I felt my brother’s fingers and toes. Strong cotton kept out the sky, strong cotton kept the wind away. Strong cotton kept babies nice and safe.

I made a tent from strong cotton and put my baby brother David in it. David was Baby Jesus and I was Mary, which, by the way, is my middle name.

‘Where on earth have you put the baby?’ Mummy asked. ‘Stop playing silly devils.’ Her face was hot and red and the clouds were poking up from behind.

‘He’s here, Mummy. He’s asleep, beneath the strong cotton.’

‘I can see that, young lady, I’m not blind. Stop playing silly devils with the baby. Leave him there under the tree, near the roses, where I told you. I want him out where I can see him.’

Mummy stuck her nose in the air and went back into the kitchen.

Then one day David went missing. I couldn’t find him anywhere. He was no longer beneath the roses when I went out after lunch. I put my hand inside his cot and felt soft white cotton on my hands, bare white cotton, warm cotton, and I yelled,

‘Mummy, Mummy, David’s not here! Mummy, Mummy, David’s not here! Mummy, Mummy, where is David, Mummy, where is David?’

Sometime in the summer of 1976, the very hot summer, the summer we were all dripping-hot and cross, the Nappy Witch came and took David away, and Mummy went to bed for a very long time. She went for two hundred sleeps, maybe more. Soon after, the Lady Upstairs moved in and Mummy fell under a thick, dark spell. She didn’t wake for years.

1

Miss Marple

Miss Marple was at the back of her garden wrestling with her roses when Dolly Bantry called by. The greenfly had got to them again and she was determined to see them off. Dolly would just have to wait for her tea! Miss Marple gave a vigorous spray from her bottle of lemon-scented chemicals. She shook the pink petals ever so gently and untied her garden apron. She rubbed her hands and gave one of her small, barely noticeable smiles.

(Miss Marple by me, age eight)

When I was eight I wanted to be Miss Marple. I still do. Miss Marple knows everything about everyone, but nobody knows anything about her. She has no backstory. You can’t see behind her and you can never get around her. Miss Marple sits in her chair in the front of St Mary Mead and looks out upon the world. There is nothing behind that antique chair except china shepherdesses and fallen roses.

When I think of Miss Marple I always think of my mother and grandmother and their old English roses. That is Mum spraying off the greenfly at the back of the garden. That is my grandmother putting on the kettle for tea, my grandmother, Edna May, with her nose against the window, watching Mum snip the blooms. Tea roses, climbers, I don’t know which, but pale pink, baby pink, the pink of Mum’s pillowcases; the pink of Little Bo Peep’s cheeks when she blushes from the heat.

‘Sit in the shade,’ Mum says. ‘Always sit in the shade, never on the side of a hill. Wherever you are, find a nice bit of shade. English girls shouldn’t sit out in the sun. Cover yourself up and put on a nice hat with a wide brim.’ Pink, rose pink, the colour of my straw hat, after all these years.

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I know the names of all the old English flowers because I had a grandmother and a mother who tended to them at the bottom of our scrubby patch of garden. I am the daughter of an English florist and I have been trained to smell flowers suspiciously. If the roses didn’t smell, they weren’t real.

‘Artificial!’ Mum declared. ‘Nothing at all. Not a single bit. Not even a tiny bit of pong!’

Roses that don’t pong weren’t roses at all. When you smelled a rose you had to make sure that what you were smelling was the real thing, the old English thing, the smell that sent you back. Ring-a-ring-of-roses, a pocket full of posies, we all fall down, and back, headlong back.

English flowers should always send you back, back to days when girls wore aprons to do their chores and nannies fussed over tea and scones in the nursery. Days that never existed, days that never were, days we dreamed up from storybooks and nursery rhymes. But we wanted them nonetheless: as much as my mother wanted her roses to grow up alongside the wall and behave nicely; as much as Miss Jane Marple wanted to defeat the greenfly so that she could tell Dolly Bantry before tea that she had won, and that her roses were now as bona fide and factual as the Bayeux Tapestry.

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Miss Marple likes to deal with facts, because facts are concrete. Mum likes facts too. Facts are as square as her windowboxes filled with pansies.

‘You’ve got to get your facts straight, Sally. First ask, what are the facts? You’ve got to get your facts first before you can begin anything!’

But if you want facts you have to go looking for them. ‘They won’t come to you,’ Mum says. ‘You have to make an effort!’

Miss Marple finds most of her facts inside St Mary Mead, the quiet English village she has lived in all her life. She knows everything she needs lies inside that quaint, chocolate-box place. Open up the lid, and there she is: an old lady tucked inside a pretty village. St Mary Mead with its Norman church spire and neat borders, St Mary Mead with its pleasant-faced locals, St Mary Mead full of people who remind you of someone else.

‘It reminds me of Mr Hargreaves up at the Mount,’ Miss Marple tells her nephew, Raymond, when he comes looking for facts for his novel. But Raymond doesn’t follow, because between you and me, Raymond isn’t half as clever as he thinks he is.

He doesn’t know that you don’t have to go very far to find a fact. Miss Marple knows that facts can be found by looking just over there: in the face of your mother as she lifts her head from the hot pan; in the veins of your grandmother’s hands as she picks up the shopping from the stairs; in the pattern on the curtains you stared at as a child.

There were small gay papier-mache tables in the drawing room, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and painted with castles and roses … for curtains, Gwenda had chosen old fashioned chintz of pale egg-shell blue with prim urns of roses and yellow birds on them.

(Agatha Christie, Sleeping Murder)

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As a child I was terrified of curtains. Flapping curtains were big black birds out to get me. Curtains were black-winged creatures that came in the night and covered my face. Curtains hid spiders and flies. Curtains suffocated sleepless children.

People hide behind curtains. In English villages, women spy behind their net curtains. ‘Net curtains cover a multitude of sins,’ Mum used to say. ‘You can get away with murder if you hang your curtains well.’ You can watch the world go by and no one will ever know that you are snooping and sneaking.

My mother loved her net curtains. She hated it when they started to get dingy and dirty, when The Woman Upstairs moved in and brought her yellow clouds of smoke.

But this came later. Before then, there were no net curtains in our downstairs flat, only a scrappy back door that flapped open whenever the sea is blowing a sharp wind across the front, my grandmother said. My grandmother, Maisie – Maze; my grandmother, who had knobbly fingers from arthritis and who never owned a smart handbag like Miss Marple because she didn’t have the time to clutch it tight with two hands. My grandmother, who never had two hands spare because her hands were always in soapy water, in the sink, or under the grill; my grandmother pulling out rows of toasted cheese or dragging a bicycle basket full of bread up the stairs.

But sometimes my grandmother went into the garden and snapped the heads of peas. She rarely did the roses. Those were for Mum. No. Maisie did the vegetables and peas, the beans and potatoes, the cabbages and rhubarb. My grandmother was like Mr McGregor: she dug her spade deep down inside the soil until she made the worms scream.

2

Grandmothers

In 1976, when I was four, the water ran out. There were no more baths. Worse than that, Mum’s roses were wilting. She rushed back and forth through the back door with perfume bottles filled with water. Mum spent all summer spraying her roses back to life.

‘That way the police won’t know,’ she told Maze. ‘They won’t come snooping about. As long as I don’t get the hosepipe out, nothing will look amiss. A few drops of water here or there isn’t going to make much difference. I must keep them moist, I must keep the roots moist, Maze, twice a day, morning and night. They don’t stand a chance in this heat. They’ll be killed off. I don’t want my roses killed off after all this.’

After all this. Mum said this a lot. After all this was Mum’s effort to plant her roses against a crumbling brick wall, to turn a nasty bit of council turf into Miss Marple’s garden. After all this was something grown-ups said about things that happened before us, before my brothers or I were born, before we even arrived at our house by the sea. After all this was back then, back when things were different, quite different, Mum said.

After all this meant that I had a grandmother who lived with us. Maisie was Edna May, but we called her Maze and she was with us ever since I can remember. Maze was before and after all this; Maze was always and everything. Maisie, Maze, Edna May Turner, the old lady whose back bent like a turtle; the little old lady who rode her bike along the sea front in a gale-force wind. Maze, the lady who picked us up from school when Mum wasn’t well. Maze, Maisie, Mary, May, Mary Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? Like this, just like this!

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Maze, Maisie, Mary, May. Finding out adults’ real names is difficult. Everyone is in disguise. Miss Marple is usually ‘Miss Marple’ but sometimes she is ‘Jane Marple’, like Jane in the Peter and Jane books we read at school. I don’t know any other Janes, not J-A-N-E Janes anyway. But it’s hard to imagine Miss Marple as a little girl like Jane, with yellow hair and a white cardigan, who plays with her blue rubber ball in the garden.

Jane is a Christian name, which means it comes first. Adults call you by your Christian name and so do your friends. Jane has yellow hair and her skin is brown because she spends all her time outside. Jane is always throwing a ball into the air, or chasing her dog, or running after her brother, Peter. Jane doesn’t look as though she ever sits down and reads a book. Jane plays in the garden in her pretty pink dress and nice white cardigan. Jane looks happy doing this.

In the Peter and Jane books Jane isn’t reading, but I wasn’t reading before I went to school. Mummy didn’t have time. She said she was very sorry but she couldn’t sit down with me and read a book right now because she had to put the nappies on. School would do that for me and I would be all the better for waiting my dear.

When I first discovered words they were sitting with their arms folded nicely on small squares of white card: ‘pretty’, ‘nice’, ‘much’, ‘like’, ‘but’, ‘of’, ‘is’, ‘ball’, ‘play’, ‘jump’, ‘dog’, ‘outside’. The words were all about Peter and Jane and Peter and Jane only ever did one or two things. Peter and Jane played with their dog or they played with their ball in the garden. When Peter and Jane were outside playing the sun was always shining. Sometimes they got hot. Then Jane took off her white crochet cardigan (crow-sh-ay) and put it on the back steps. Her mum got cross when she did that because she’d only just washed it and dirt stains never came out of white. Not properly.

Peter and Jane are always playing and they are always happy. They are never at school and they are never reading. I don’t know why, because reading is the most important thing. Reading, my grandmother told me, was the stepping stone to better things. If you were a good reader you would never have to face all this. You would never have to crawl over the big grey rock at the bottom of the garden with the sharp edges that stubbed your toes. You would never have to make a garden from scratch. You would never have to borrow a drill from the council and pull up all the muck someone else had left behind. You would never have to work for the council. You would never ever have to take the bins out.

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It was my grandmother who first helped me read, my grandmother, Edna May Turner. When she was young, Edna May was like one of Miss Marple’s girls. She was a girl who came to polish silver and serve tea on the lawn; a girl who came to shine up the oak banister; a girl to make gooseberry fool and collect the windfall apples in the autumn; a girl to answer the doorbell; a girl to run errands in the village.

In 1930 or thereabouts (what year was my grandmother born?) Edna May Turner was carrying out the tea; she was crossing a hot lawn in a pretty English village. Edna May, the maid who was coming on nicely; Edna, the maid Miss Marple had found through her friend Dolly Bantry, was carrying a silver teapot towards an old lady sitting in the shade. Edna was concentrating so hard on the tray in front of her that she couldn’t see that the woman in front of her was lifting a large pink bloom towards her companion.

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Miss Marple is a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner.

(The Murder at the Vicarage)

How old is Miss Marple? Nobody knows. My grandmother was in her sixties and then her seventies when she was living with us, but we never really thought about how old she was. Grandmothers are just there, always and forever. They never go away and they never get older. Grandmothers are like the stone lion that sits on the corner of our front steps. Maze sits on her kitchen stool and slowly grows green lichen around her ears. We pat her on the way in and on the way out and sometimes we sit down on the steps with her and cry.

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What did I know about Maisie? Not much, just scraps. She had white hair and she was ‘five foot five and shrinking’. That’s what she told us anyway.

‘Then you’re five foot four, Maze,’ I said.

‘A little bit more than that dear, a little more … you’re always a bit more than you think you are.’

Maze weighed eight stone five, she told me. Eight of the boulders at the bottom of the garden, eight of those rocks that fall down the hill like Jack and Jill in the stories she read to us; eight of those pebbles I picked up from the beach and put on top of my book to keep it flat. At eight stone my grandmother was both heavy and light. One day, she might just roll away.

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When are grandmothers born? Nobody knows that either. What year was Miss Marple born? Before or after Queen Victoria? Sometime after Queen Victoria was dead, I think, perhaps before the king of England abdicated. ‘Abdicated’ means he left the throne; got up and walked off and left that shiny polished throne right behind him.

‘Flounced out,’ Maisie said. ‘He flounced right out to that beaming woman with her handbag.’

The king of England flounced right out of his throne room. He ab-di-ca-ted. The king got his sums wrong on the abacus. He pulled too many red balls over when he was counting. Or he began a different sum and no one could make sense of it: not all the kings and queens of England added up together, and one white king with one red wife meant that the one in the middle, in between, wasn’t a queen. She wasn’t even a lady. Her name begins with W and it sounds like a man’s name.

‘What was he thinking, rushing off to that woman with her big red lipstick and smile … that woman with her pointy elbows? She has too much powder on her face! It isn’t decent! Too much powder and not enough sense! Powder should stay on babies’ bottoms!’

Maze spoke as though she had been there, in the crowds outside Buckingham Palace, standing at the front. Sometime in 1936 Edna May was pushing her way through thick arms and legs, she was pressing her small blue beret to her head. Maze was waving her flag and looking hard for a glimpse of that bad lady with the bright red lipstick and the big white forehead.

‘She looked like the moon,’ my grandmother said. ‘The moon wearing a large smile.’

‘Always put on your best smile,’ Mum said. ‘You never know who might be looking. Now wipe off that silly grin and go and wash your hands.’