Thursday, 14 March 2019

The Banker's Niece 20: Leaving home

1972

‘Are you sure you won’t regret it?’ said Ollie.
    ‘God no,’ said Jane. ‘I can’t stand the thought of any more academic work. I want to get away. Live a bit. Be free.’
    ‘I suppose you could always go to university later,’ said Ollie.
    ‘Maybe,’ said Jane without enthusiasm.
    Jane and her younger brother were out walking, following a path that wound around the edge of the Downs. Jane had finished her A levels the day before and Ollie was home from school for the weekend. It was late June and baking hot.
    Jane wore the denim shorts with the frayed hem that she’d made herself by ripping the bottoms off a pair of jeans. On top she wore an old white shirt of her father’s with the sleeves rolled up, and on her feet her school plimsolls, now rather grubby. She was pretty pleased with the outfit.  Luckily she’d managed to get out of the house before her mother saw her and said something that made her crumple.
   ‘But you’re only sixteen,’ said Ollie. ‘How will you manage on your own in London?’
    For a moment she wavered but then she realised that being young was the reason for her plan.
    She’d been young for her class throughout her school career. It had started when she arrived at junior school already able to read and they’d immediately moved her up a year. She could read because she loved books, not – in her opinion - because she was clever. But once labelled clever, the teachers complained whenever she turned in a poor piece of work. She ‘wasn’t doing herself justice’, she was ‘resting on her laurels’. (She had to ask her mother what that meant.) She’d felt like she was always treading water. She could never float. She remembered waking up one morning and thinking, every day there’s something to dread.
    And now she’d had enough.
    ‘Seventeen next week,’ she retorted, ‘and I’ve arranged to rent a room in a house with four other people.’
    ‘That’s clever,’ said Ollie.
    Jane was pleased with herself too, even if the house belonged to friends of her parents, who’d bought it for their daughter Fiona when she moved to London to study physiotherapy. Jane hadn’t met Fiona yet but they’d spoken on the phone and she sounded all right – as far as someone related to friends of her parents could be.
    She was glad Ollie approved of the house at least. He’d always been the sensible one of the two of them. Even though he cried at the end of each holiday, he’d never complained about being sent away to boarding school. He’d always known that he wanted to be a doctor and was already gearing his school subject choices to that end. Sometimes she wished she could be more like him.
    ‘And what will you do?’ asked Ollie.
    ‘Oh anything,’ said Jane. ‘Secretarial work probably. A friend told me about a course that only takes six weeks so I might do that.’
    She hadn’t fancied any of the careers suggested by the school – teaching, the Civil Service, the Law. They all sounded like an extension of school or inundated with men like her father – which was the last thing she needed.
    How could she be expected to know what she wanted at this stage anyway? She had no experience of the world. It would be enough to earn some money.
    Jane wiped the sweat from her face with a sleeve. The morning sun blazed from a cloudless blue sky. There was no shade on the path and the ground, so black and squelchy in winter, was cooked to a hard pale-grey. Flinty stones poked out and dug into her feet through the soles of her plimsolls.
    To their left the slope fell away to fields and the village where they lived. Seeing it all so small made her realise just how much of the world there was to find out about and how impatient she was to do so.
    To their right the slope rose through grass nibbled flat by sheep and then through bushes and small trees to the tall silent beechwoods. These stretched for miles and were full of little footpaths only a fraction of which she and Ollie had explored. Jane had heard of plans to build a motorway through the woods, part of a ring around London. That didn’t seem right, somehow.
    ‘Phew,’ said Ollie. ‘It’s hot.’
    Jane shot him a glance. He did look a bit strange. She could see damp strips in his light-brown hair and his black eyes glittered like they did when he had a temperature. According to family lore, he’d been very ill as a baby (with what, she couldn’t remember) and he still came down with something every time he overdid things. Her mother called him ‘delicate’.
    ‘Shall we go in the woods?’ she said. ‘It might be cooler there.’
    ‘Good idea,’ said Ollie.
    They started climbing a path through the scrub and Ollie whistled to let Bunty know where they were.
    Bunty, the gardener’s plump sandy dog, always came with them on their walks. She’d vanished into the undergrowth soon after they reached the start of the Downs but they knew where she was because of her woofles and whimpers as she raced after small animals. She raised her head now from a clump of brambles, noted their presence and vanished again.
    Jane knew how the dog felt. She loved the scrub too. It was untidy and wild and full of life. In the autumn, berries festooned it like Christmas decorations. Now, in midsummer, it hummed with bees and everywhere Jane looked she could see wildflowers. Why grown-ups bothered with gardens she couldn't imagine.
    Since her Wildflower Diary, a project in the first year at senior school, she knew all their names. That had been one of her best summers ever. She’d been out every day walking the Downs with Bunty, looking for plants. She pretended she was one of those mad Victorian traveller-women in the big hats. She'd never wanted to come home. Each year since, the flowers have returned and each year she has greeted them like old friends. 
    The orchids in particular thrilled her as she knew how rare they were and how particular to the Downs. As she looked now she could see that the ground around the path was thickly dotted with the plump bright-pink blooms of pyramidal orchid. She hoped that when they reached the edge of the woods she would find the mysterious bee orchids again.
    Ollie was striding ahead, scrambling up the slope in front of her, so he couldn’t have been feeling too bad. These days his legs were almost as long as hers. She hurried to catch up with him. She could have a proper wildflower-spot another time.
    'What does the school think of your plans?' he asked.
    'Oh, they just think I'm taking a year out because of my age. After all some universities won't take you until you're eighteen.'
    Ollie nodded. ‘And what about Mum and Dad?’
    About two years ago they’d decided between them – well, Jane had come up with the idea and Ollie had agreed – that they were too old to carry on calling their parents ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’. Their parents didn’t seem to have noticed the change however and still used the old names when talking about each other to Jane and Ollie. It was slightly annoying but better, she supposed, than the usual disparaging remarks they made about things she said.
    ‘Oh you know,’ laughed Jane. ‘Dad said something like “I never went to university and it never did me any harm” and Mum said “I’m sure you’ll meet just as many nice people in London as you would at university”.’
    Ollie gave an unconvincing laugh and she wondered if he understood what she meant or whether he had any idea what it had been like for her left at home alone for five years with their parents. On the other hand, she’d never heard him say anything critical about anyone so maybe he thought she was being too harsh.
    Jane lifted her hair to let some air on to her scalp and neck.
    Little did any of them know, Ollie included, that her main aim in leaving home and heading for London was to find lots of ‘not-nice’ people, especially boys. She may have kept up with her older classmates on the academic front but on the social side she was way behind.

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Tuesday, 5 March 2019

The Banker's Niece 19: Jane has a bad day

Jane drums her fingers on Clio’s steering wheel. The road ahead of her is completely blocked by a small white pick-up and a vast black four-wheel-drive, parked side by side facing in opposite directions. The drivers, with their heads out of their windows, are deep in conversation. She’s been there for five minutes.
    Such behaviour is not unusual and when Jane first encountered it she found it quaint. She laughed about it with William over their evening drinks.
    ‘You realise that for many people who work in the countryside', he said, 'it’s the only social contact they have. Of course they’re going to take their time. And anyway it’s extremely rude to drive past somebody you know without stopping to talk to them.’
    Jane’s mind boggled not only at the isolation William’s words revealed but also that you might pass an acquaintance in a car in the middle of nowhere. How come, with all the people she knew in London – many hundreds probably if not thousands, she’d never once bumped into any of them by accident?
    ‘You should get out and introduce yourself,’ he said. ‘Join in. They probably know who you are already.’
    But she never has, and she certainly isn’t going to today.
    Rain is streaming down the car’s windscreen and wind is sending a hail of twigs on to its roof. Every so often an extra-strong gust shakes the vehicle like a dog who's making sure that the rabbit clamped in its teeth is properly dead.
    Both men look extremely dubious and as soon as she stopped she engaged the door locks. The one in the four-wheel-drive has long curly black hair and whenever he glances in Jane’s direction she gets the impression he’s laughing at her. All she can see of the one in the pick-up is the back of a bald pink head, rolls of neck fat and an arm bursting out of a red-checked shirt.
    Worst of all, it’s already ten to nine and if she doesn’t get a move on soon she’s going to be late for work again. No way does she want to encourage the conversation.
    She’s already encountered a flood which involved a long detour round unfamiliar lanes with only her new compass to guide her, and then she spent ten minutes crawling behind a vast brown and white horse and its vast female rider, her only amusement working out which bottom was bigger.
    What else is in store? Fallen trees? Hedge-cutting? Stray sheep? Cattle crossing? Bewildered rabbits refusing to get out of the way? She’s had them all at one time or another.
    Oh for those simple journeys to work in London. A twenty-minute walk if the weather was fine and a twenty-minute bus ride if it wasn’t. Totally predictable, totally anonymous, no animals of any kind.

She stops outside Henry’s office and checks her watch. Nine o’clock exactly. Phew. She’s managed to make it on time, even if on time wasn’t good enough for her father who served in the navy during the war. ‘If you’re not ten minutes early, you’re late,’ he used to say. Blow that. Why can’t he get out of her head?
    She’s run all the way from the carpark, waving a quick hello to Lauren in reception before taking the stairs two at a time. She hasn’t even stopped to leave her coat and bag in her office. She’s still panting as she pushes open the door.
    Sam is already there. She sits the opposite side of the pale oak table, her laptop open in front of her and a mug of coffee by her side. A brief interval of sun haloes her fluff of pink hair. She’s wearing a black polo-neck and black leather jacket, as ever making Jane feel dowdy even though she thought she looked quite chic first thing when she put on her navy cords and navy Shetland jumper.
    Henry has his back to her and is bending over some papers. He’s in butter-yellow moleskin trousers today, the exact same shade as his hair. She wonders if he chose them deliberately.
    The two of them appear to be sharing a joke.
    ‘Sorry I’m late,’ says Jane, as much to announce her presence as anything, seeing as neither of them has yet looked in her direction.
    ‘Oh for f--k’s sake,’ says Sam, raising her head a fraction. ‘She’s hardly through the door and already she’s apologising.’
    ‘Sorry,’ says Jane again before she can stop herself.
    Sam bursts into raucous laughter, opening her mouth so wide that Jane can see her rows of silver fillings.
    Jane pulls out a chair the near side of the table where she always sits. She may be the last in every time, but at least she gets the view.
    Henry, to one side of her, carries on shuffling papers.
    The offices take up the south-facing arm of Courtney Manor stables, with the editorial department on the first floor and everyone else underneath. Sam, Jane and the Editorial Manager squash into half the first floor while Henry has the other half. His plate-glass windows give on to a landscape that includes at least half of rural Devon and stretches all the way to the long curves of Dartmoor.
    Jane concentrates on the view in an effort to soothe her head. It was only yesterday, Tuesday, that she crawled out of her sick-bed, and even then she didn’t get dressed. She spent the day in her dressing-gown stuffing down food – scrambled eggs on toast, falafel and onion bhajis bought as nibbles for William, soup out of the freezer.
    The migraine, which started on Saturday in Muddicombe village shop at the end of her walk, turned out to be more vicious than any migraine she’s endured for years. It was like one from the old days, when she first began to suffer them, with both ‘upward vomit’ and ‘downward laxative’ as Chaucer so neatly put it. It’s amazing how these literary references return at appropriate times. Her old English teacher would be proud of her.
    Migraines are fickle things. They can vanish in a few hours or rumble on for days. From her current general yukkiness she fears this is one of the latter kind. She probably should have spent another day at home but she was worried about taking too much time off work as she doesn’t yet feel established. She supposes it’s the result of having a job that didn’t exist before. Not that it bothers Sam.
    It’s a pity she’s walked straight into one of the weekly meetings. She hoped to avoid this week’s as they’re supposed to take place on Mondays but unfortunately it was one of those times when Henry was ‘delayed’ in London. God knows what he gets up to there. He says he’s ‘networking’ – trawling for new authors, keeping up with publishing trends – but does he really need to do that now he’s employed her and Sam? It’s a bit annoying and she wonders how Mrs Henry (as she’s always known) puts up with it.
    ‘For f--k’s sake,’ says Sam again. ‘Take your coat off. Settle down. Let’s get on with this débâcle.’
    She pronounces the last word ‘debbackle’ and Jane wonders whether that’s deliberate. She sees Henry wince but it’s difficult to know which line Sam has stepped over this time. There are so many.
    ‘Excuse me,’ says Henry, straightening up at last. ‘I’m in charge.’
    She might have guessed. He lets Sam get away with homicide but some things are sacred: his family heritage, his three out-of-control wolfhounds and his authority.
    ‘No you’re not,’ says Sam. ‘You’re never here.’
    Too true, thinks Jane. Why couldn’t she have said that herself?

‘Roof leak gone?’ asks Lauren.
    Jane nods. She can’t speak at the moment, as migraines both interfere with her ability to process words and make her weepy, which is an awkward combination.
    ‘I knew Vinnie would sort you out,’ says Lauren, biting into a home-made white bread and ham sandwich. ‘He’s a good lad.’
    It’s lunchtime and they’re sitting under the eaves of the middle arm of the stables. Because the Manor is a long way from the nearest pub or shop, Henry has fitted the space out as a staff restroom, installing a kitchen at one end and furnishing the rest with low tables and armchairs.
    ‘How about that back door of yours?’ says Lauren, ripping the foil off a strawberry yoghurt. ‘Not sticking any longer?’
    Jane shakes her head. She’s clasping a packet of her own home-made sandwiches - tahini and cucumber in organic wholemeal spelt – but hasn’t managed to open it yet.
    ‘Excellent,’ nods Lauren. ‘Brad’s very busy so I’m glad he got out to you so quickly.’
    It was Jane’s domestic dramas that first drew the two of them together, in spite of Lauren being thirty-six years younger than Jane, eight inches shorter and three stone heavier.
    One morning Jane just happened to mention that there was an atrocious smell in her garden. She’d written it off as one of those inexplicable rural phenomena but Lauren interpreted it differently.
    ‘That’ll be your septic tank,’ she pronounced. ‘Probably needs emptying. I’ll get my cousin Nige out. He works for Shhhifters.’
    Jane had no idea she possessed a septic tank, let alone what they did. Come to think of it, she still doesn’t. It’s not something she wants to pry into.
    Lauren it turned out lives in Muddicombe like Jane, what’s more from a family that has lived in Muddicombe since before records began. She's therefore related to or knows everyone, and whatever Jane’s problem finds someone to deal with it. It’s like having an entrée to the local mafia.
    Jane tries to reciprocate by giving her small editorial jobs. Lauren has been in reception at Courtney Press ever since leaving school six years earlier and is desperate to move on.
    Yoghurt finished, Lauren pulls open a packet of prawn cocktail crisps and starts browsing on her phone.
    ‘Hey,’ she crunches. ‘This is interesting. You know that Rick Rockford? Rick the Rock. The lead singer of Minotaur. Quite hunky for someone that old.’
    Jane stares at her.
    Lauren, head down, carries on reading. ‘It says here that he’s retiring from life on the road and coming back to live in Devon. I must tell my gran that. I’m pretty certain she went to school with his mum. Did you know he came from Devon?’ She looks up.
    ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Are you all right?’
    Tears are streaming down Jane’s face. She doesn’t know where they come from or why they’re suddenly here.
    ‘I’m not sure,’ she quavers.

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Friday, 22 February 2019

Looking for cranes on the Somerset Levels

Novel-writing

I’m taking a break from novel-writing at the moment as it’s a very intense activity.

On the Somerset Levels

Yesterday Frog, Dog and I went for a walk on the Somerset Levels, looking for the reintroduced cranes.* We didn’t find any cranes but we found lots of other things. Here are some of them.

There was mistletoe everywhere. This apple tree is almost giving up.

Strange fruit  (Spot the dog.)
Reflections in the River Parrett
A burst of new hawthorn leaves
Wild cherry blossom (or blackthorn?)
Periwinkle

Cranes

Cranes once lived in great numbers all over the UK, giving their name to places (eg Cranbrook, Cranford), food (eg cranberries) and plants (eg cranesbill). They became extinct as a breeding bird in this country at the start of the seventeenth century through being hunted for food and as the marshland where they lived was drained. 

In 1979 however three migrant birds set up home on the Norfolk Broads and in 2010-14 another group of birds was reintroduced to the Somerset Levels. Both groups are doing well.

They are big grey birds like herons but look different in flight. They are related not to herons but to moorhens and coots.



(Thanks to thegreatcraneproject.org.uk  for the information and picture above.)



* Thanks to Roselle Angwin and her blog for reminding me about the Somerset cranes

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Friday, 15 February 2019

The Banker's Niece: List of chapters

1 The tarot reading

5 'I wish we could run away'   Spring 1978
8 Black Dog 1    Spring 1978
9 Black Dog 2   Spring 1978
12 Stonehenge   Spring 1978
17 The concert   June 1979
18 Lethal weapon   New Year's Day 1980
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Tuesday, 12 February 2019

The Banker's Niece 18: Lethal weapon

New Year’s Day 1980

Jane stirred the mince that was browning in the frying-pan. The smell turned her stomach and she wondered not for the first time whether she should look into becoming vegetarian. Perhaps that would help her mysterious ‘heads’.
    She could hear bangings and crashings in the barn underneath the flat where Rick kept the Mini and his motorbike. He’d bought this in the summer so that he and Jane had independent transport. With all his comings and goings it had become impossible for her to rely on him to give her lifts to and from work and he became resentful when she tried to pin him down. She was surprised he allowed her to drive the Mini, but needs must she supposed.
    She hated to think what he was doing to the vehicles. He’d been down there all day, not even reappearing to grab his usual lunchtime cheese sandwich or make himself one of the many cups of tea that punctuated his days. She kept tensing, thinking she heard his feet thudding on the outdoor steps, and then relaxing when the noise turned out to be nothing more than the wood creaking in the breeze.
    Only one more evening to get through and then she would be back at her job and Rick would vanish into his packed programme of work, rehearsals and gigs.
   
Except for the Saturday before Christmas when Minotaur had a concert in Bristol and they all stayed overnight with a friend of Dougie’s, and Christmas itself which she and Rick had spent with their respective parents, the two of them had passed the entire holiday period together. Jane could hardly remember when they’d last had such a long time alone with each other. Christmas the year before probably and that hadn’t been great either, now she thought about it.
    It wasn’t a deliberate choice but both the university where Rick worked and the publisher where Jane worked had shut down for the festive period and they didn’t realise what this would mean until it was too late.
    Rick’s working life had of course been transformed by this new postgraduate, Chris. Unlike the other – male – academics, he said, she treated him as a human being. Instead of barking out orders from the door and then complaining, she had apparently come right into his workshop, stepping over all the pieces of equipment-in-transit (of which there were many), introduced herself, explained about her work and then with great deference asked if he might have time to help her. He’d spent most of the summer, it seemed, driving her around the coast and helping her take samples of seawater.
    Jane had met her once when she descended to Rick’s workshop herself, something she’d done often when she was working odd hours as a waitress but couldn’t do once she’d started her proper job in January, except on the occasional day off. Rick and Chris had been drinking tea together, sitting on high stools. Both had jumped up when she appeared and fallen over each other to make her a cup of tea too. The atmosphere was slightly strange but she put it down to Rick’s natural guilty conscience as Chris wasn’t pretty at all. She was tiny and very thin with short spiky hair. She looked more like a boy than a girl.

Jane lifted the frying-pan off the heat and tipped the mince into a large heavy saucepan. Then she took some onions, carrots and celery from the fridge and a knife from the drawer.
    It was getting dark. The sun was disappearing behind the folds of the hills in an orange glow. The sheep in the field below the window were still bleating lustily however, still nibbling at the grass. Did they ever stop? How on earth did they keep warm in the long cold winter nights?
    The banging down below had stopped and she noticed for the first time the faint strains of music from the transistor radio that Rick took with him everywhere. So he must still be there, but what was he doing?
    Was he holding his breath like her, trying to work out what she was doing?

She’d fallen into her job almost by accident. She’d written to all sorts of companies fifteen months earlier when looking for a proper job, and attended several interviews, but Peninsula Books was the only place that offered her a position.
    ‘It’s your secretarial experience that sets you apart,’ said Graham, the Editorial Manager, leaning back in his chair and patting his large stomach. ‘Lots of our girls can’t type and of course, when you’re dealing with manuscripts and authors, typing looks so much more professional.’
    Jane didn’t see any typewriter on Graham’s desk, nor any sign of manuscripts or letters to authors. In fact, there wasn’t much on his desk at all. She wondered what he did.
    The mention of typing upset her. She’d had enough of that in London. Had she really spent three years at university, only to be relegated to typing again?
    ‘Do you do fiction?’ she asked to cheer herself up.
    She’d discovered the company in the Yellow Pages under ‘Publishers’ but didn’t know anything about them until she picked up their catalogue in reception as she waited for Graham (who was half an hour late). All she could find in the catalogue was dull non-fiction books – political biographies, manuals about car repair and carpentry, cricket facts, guides to buying wine.
    Graham flushed. ‘No.’
    ‘Never mind,’ said Jane, hastily backtracking. What had she said wrong?
    ‘All you girls want to work in fiction,’ he snapped.
    In spite of Graham and the subject matter of the books, the job turned out all right. It suited her skills, both her photographic memory for spellings and her degree in French and Spanish which meant she knew about grammar and the precise meanings of words. People began to praise her, which made a pleasant change.
    But the best part of the job was Alison with whom she shared an office. Alison was three years older than Jane (being twenty-seven) and much wiser and such a good listener.
   
Jane chopped the vegetables and put them into the frying-pan to brown.

At least her latest ‘head’ had gone, the one that had come on after the visit to her parents - alone as always, but what else could she do? Well, she called the attacks ‘heads’, but the piercing pain in her right temple was the least of the problems. What she hated even more was the vomiting.
    If only humans could be like dogs. They just opened their mouths and out it came. But perhaps they didn’t like the sensation either. She remembered Bunty, her parents’ gardener’s dog. She used to walk around with her back arched like a hyena for several minutes before settling down to a good retch. And then, so as to avoid all that tedious clearing up, she consumed the results. So clever.
    At first, about twelve months ago when the attacks started, she’d thought they were hangovers and expected each one to be the last, so long as she was careful. But now she didn’t, and they were making her depressed. Alison thought they might be migraines.
   
Jane tipped the browned vegetables out of the frying-pan and into the saucepan with the mince, adding two tins of tomatoes and two beef stock cubes and leaving the mixture to simmer.
    That was suppers for the week sorted. Vats of mixtures were what she did these days, now that she and Rick didn’t eat together. Each could heat up as much as they wanted when they wanted, adding potatoes, pasta or bread depending on how much time they had.

The music stopped and a footstep thudded on the outdoor steps. He was definitely coming up.
    Quickly, she slid the knife under a tea-towel – or ‘drying-up towel’ as her mother would call it. It would never do to leave a lethal weapon on show. The imprints of Rick’s fist on the wall above their bed and the shards of glass on the floor where Jane threw her water-tumblers were warning enough of that.
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