The Banker's Niece 14: The Chart of Food and Drink Consumed

1969

‘Half a piece of toast with butter and marmalade,’ wrote Jane in the column labelled Breakfast. ‘One cup black tea.’

    Good, that was good. She didn’t see how she could cut that down any further without her mother making a fuss. However, it wouldn’t be long before her mother noticed that there was half a piece of toast left over in the toast-rack at the end of the meal and wonder to whom it belonged.

    Jane had toyed with the idea of getting her father to eat it while her mother was in the scullery, but he only played with his own piece of toast, leaving most of it in crumbs on his plate, and anyway at breakfast he concentrated on his Times, which he folded into neat readable squares on the table next to him, and she didn’t like to interrupt.

    In the column marked Lunch she wrote ‘Nothing’.

    Perfect. No room for improvement whatsoever. Again, however, she wondered how long it would be before her absence from lunch was noticed. The prefects who headed the tables wouldn’t worry about an empty place occasionally as girls were always going missing – sobbing in the cloakrooms because of ‘boyfriend trouble’, in sickbay because they’d slipped over during Games, catching up on homework, leaving the school illegally in order to buy sweets.

    However teachers patrolled the buildings looking for stragglers and you had to have a jolly good excuse for them to leave you alone. Jane hid in the grounds, which was all right now that it was May, but would be impossible next term, as either she’d have to get outside somehow with her coat or mac, or she’d have to manage without them and reappear shivering and/or wet.

    There was a campaign led by some of the braver sixth-form girls for people to be allowed to bring packed lunches if they wanted. She doubted they’d win but, if they did, that would be the perfect solution. She could bring a packed lunch and give it away.

    Next, the column marked Supper. This was the trickiest one of all, as both her parents were present at the meal and both reasonably alert – unless her father had had too much whisky and her mother too much wine.

    Not that her father noticed what she ate and didn’t eat these days. The only time she could remember him noticing her at all was a few months ago, before she started her Chart of Food and Drink Consumed, when he suddenly looked up from his paper and said, ‘Haven’t you got nice and thin.’ She hadn’t realised it herself until then, but she had suddenly shot up in height so perhaps she’d stretched.

    ‘Cauliflower cheese, one boiled potato, salad,’ she wrote. ‘One apple. One glass water.’

   It was particularly annoying that she had to eat the potato, given that her mother never ate potatoes.
   No, the only way she improve on supper was to avoid it altogether, as she did lunch at school, but the only way she could do that was by going to a friend’s house and pretending to her mother that she would eat there and then pretending to her friend’s mother that she’d already eaten. But she only went out at weekends and in any case her mother was getting wise to the trick and trying to make Jane have some bread before she went.

    Her mother couldn’t actually force the bread down Jane’s throat, at least Jane didn’t think she could. But it was scary thought nonetheless, especially as they’d been learning about the suffragettes, and Mrs Clay, the history teacher, had shown them pictures of women tied to chairs or pinned to the floor, with food being poured down tubes stuffed up their noses. One of the girls in class had started gagging and had to leave the room.

    She slipped that week’s chart into her Biology textbook inside her school bag. It was the safest place she could think of.

Once upon a time Jane and Ollie had had their own private kingdom up in the attic. The stairs to the attic were steep and narrow and close to the ceiling and grown-ups struggled with them but she and Ollie used to scamper up on all fours and then float down holding on to the banister with their feet hardly touching the steps like in dreams. Only the airing cupboard and a secret passage separated their two bedrooms. They found the secret passage by accident. Well, Jane did.

    Both bedrooms had a cupboard under the eaves. At least grown-ups called them cupboards because they couldn’t stand up in them, but Jane and Ollie could, so they called them dens. At the far end of each den was a hatch and when they were feeling brave one or other of them would stick their head through the hatch into the darkness of the roof-space beyond.
    One day, when they were in Jane’s den, Ollie dared Jane to climb through the hatch and, because she was a year and a half older than him and enjoyed showing off to her goggling brother, she did. After a terrifying crawl across splintery rafters, through sticky cobwebs and past gurgling water-tanks, Jane found herself coming out of the hatch in Ollie’s den.

    They leapt up and down. It was exactly like in one of their favourite books, The Magician’s Nephew*. Who knew what else they might find in the roof? An entrance to another world? A mad uncle?

    What they did find, or at least what Jane found, was somewhere she could put things and be sure that neither her mother nor Mrs Greenaway would ever find them. And the main thing she put there was her Notebooks.

     She could hardly remember a time when she didn’t have Notebooks. She started them almost as soon as she could write, as soon as she realised that shouting and disagreeing with parents only got her shut away and that the angry letters she wrote them and pushed under the door of their bedroom probably weren’t even read. They never said they got them, at any rate.

    As well as copying things out from books, using her different-coloured biros, she wrote pretend angry letters. Writing these was almost better than writing real letters as she could put anything in them. She could threaten to kick people or pull their hair or scratch their faces, or even kill them. It was wonderful.

    The nearest she’d got to any of that in real life was kicking the life-size model of Father Christmas (when no one was looking) that sat in the hall every December, and having a wrestling match with Gaynor, the fiery Welsh girl at school. Unfortunately in that case, a teacher saw them from a window and told them to stop.

    Then she started using the Notebooks for writing stories about herself, in which she always got exactly what she wanted. That was exciting too, as it started her thinking about her future, about being grown-up and free. She decided that the only thing she wanted to be when she left home was naughty.

    One day other stories started to float into her mind. They weren’t about her. They weren’t even about people she knew. She didn't have to think about writing them: they wrote themselves. They gave her tingles. They were magic. They were like a secret passage in her mind.

    But two years ago when Ollie was eleven he went away to boarding school and her parents decided that she should move down to a bedroom on the first floor. With Elaine, the nanny, gone there was a spare room, even with the two rooms kept for guests and her parents taking up three rooms between them – one for sleeping and one each for their clothes.

    ‘We’ll be able to keep an eye on you down here,’ said her mother.

    ‘And we’ll save on heating,’ said her father.

So here she was sitting at her desk in Elaine's old bedroom. It wasn’t too bad. There were three rooms between her and her parents’ bedroom. She had her own bathroom. She still had a view.

    She missed Elaine. She used to sit on Elaine's rug in front of her electric fire in the evenings after Jane's bath and they had long talks together. Once on her night off Elaine took Jane on the bus with her to stay with her parents at their flat in Tunbridge Wells. Before bed they all sat round the gas fire together drinking Horlicks, and Elaine's mother smiled at Jane. She felt so happy.
    But that was a long time ago.
    She looked out of the window. The sun was setting behind the line of trees on top of the Downs. Perhaps she and Ollie could go walking up there when he came home from school in the holidays. She missed Ollie too.
    She had no time for Notebooks any more, what with homework and her chart. She didn’t even know if the Notebooks were still in the roof-space, as the attic was shut off and she had no excuse for going up there. And anyway she’d be much too big to get through the hatch now.

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* By C S Lewis. The prequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.