6
My grandparents used to take great pleasure in retelling the story of the day they brought me home from the Nichol for the first time. How I burst into tears upon sight of my grandfather, horrified that a person could be so tall. He was as high as Big Ben to me. I burrowed into my grandmother’s skirts to get away from him, and no matter how much he tried to coax me out, cajoling me with flowers he picked from the train station and sweets he bought in the village, I refused to look at him even once on our journey to Reading. I stayed stuck to my grandmother’s side like a puppy, and, like a puppy, I thought if I couldn’t see him, he wouldn’t see me. The pair of them loved to relive that day, taking turns to tell each part, finishing each other’s sentences, even though I’d heard it a thousand times and could tell it back to them myself. It was a moment of true joy for them, when they found me: a little girl to replace the one that had been lost to them.
I was intrigued by my grandmother at first. Her dark hair and small features made me think of my mother. But where my mother was soft, my grandmother had girders of steel. I don’t remember that in my mother. My memories, as fragile and distorted as they are after twenty-five years, are that she was gentle and quiet. I used to think her weak, but given that she left her home at sixteen to be with the man she loved, and then, when abandoned, survived for five years in Whitechapel with a child, she must have had some of that steel. My mother may have been foolish, but she was braver than I have ever been. Yet for many years I judged her, arrogantly wondering how a girl could be so foolish as to risk her life for something as silly as love. I didn’t understand at the time.
When my grandfather returned home from work each day, I would hide behind the drapes and refuse to come out. My grandmother took this as disobedience, a lack of respect for my grandfather, and dragged me out.
‘Don’t do that, Alma,’ he would say. ‘Leave her.’
‘We will have to be firm with this one,’ came her reply. ‘She’s half feral. Do you know, she refuses to wear shoes! Throws them off, she does, runs around the green in her bare feet, comes back with them black as coal. Whatever will people think!’
‘Let the poor thing alone,’ he’d say. ‘She’ll come out when she wants to.’
How I hated wearing shoes, and being tied up in ribbons and trussed up in fussy dresses and having my hair pulled about. But I loved the bed I had all to myself, and the warmth, and the house with rooms you could go in and out of, and the food. There were so many rules I didn’t understand, and no one explained them. It was like being in a game where no one told you its name or any of its rules, you had to learn for yourself by losing, over and over. My grandmother said I drove her mad, because the only thing I would say when she tried to have me do something was, ‘But why?’
It continued like this for some time. I kicked off my shoes, tore the ribbons from my hair, chased the ducks around the green and tormented the nicely turned-out little girls from the village with my wild games, then hid behind the curtain when the big tall man came home because I was petrified.
His footsteps made the earth shake, or at least the floorboards beneath my bottom. When he sat down in his chair, I could hear it groan. The scale of him made me think of a monster, and I’d met monsters before. He started to read books aloud from his chair while I hid behind the drapes. He would find the good stories from the Bible and share them in his booming voice; when he got to the most theatrical parts, the loose glass on the old cabinet would rattle and the fire would spit and I would peer out from behind the curtain to look at him.
‘You look daft reading aloud to an empty room,’ my grandmother told him.
‘It’s not empty – you’re in it,’ he said, flashing me a wink as I crouched on the floor, having emerged from the other side of the drapes.
‘Whatever will people think!’ said my grandmother.
‘No one will think anything, Alma. It’s an empty room, remember – you said so yourself.’
I began to sit cross-legged at his feet so as to listen to his operatic flourishes. Soon I was running to meet him when he came home, then crawling up onto his lap so I could see the words on the page. I still didn’t say much, and I was mute with all strangers and continued to hide my face in my grandmother’s skirts.
We were sat this way one afternoon when there was a tap at the window that startled us both. We looked, but there was nothing there. It sounded like something had been thrown at it, so my grandfather told me to stay inside while he went out to investigate. When he came back, he was carrying a tiny bird in his hands.
‘It’s a little dunnock, Susannah. He must have got himself confused, or scared, chased by a sparrowhawk maybe, and
