Man at the Helm (6 page)

We loved to walk in the meres – a network of narrow lanes between the fields that farmers had trodden, ridden and driven into existence over the years. Wide enough for a tractor, just, they were perfect for ponies or walking children and edged with charming tunnel-forming trees and bushes from which things would dart and scamper. We liked playing in the streamy ditches that ran alongside and, because my sister loved farms and all farmy things, we’d peek into farmyards and little paddocks where baby things could often be seen.

It was the animals she loved, of course, and it slightly bothered her that the farmers didn’t seem to like them that much. She noticed that farmers never stroked their little calves but would shove them aside as if they were nothing but a nuisance, and if a hungry piglet poked his little pink snout up, a farmer wouldn’t smile or say, ‘Hey, little fella,’ he’d bash it on the nose with the bucket. My sister loved all animals and it was her ambition to see a family of hedgehogs in line – as you see on greetings cards. And she had a list of mammals she’d seen, like other people have lists of birds or trains. She’d spotted her first badger by the age of four and had been pleased to see it. She used to say that only people who loved animals should be allowed to be farmers and those who were indifferent might become a policeman or butcher instead and just have the one dog.

I stuck up for the unloving farmers, explaining that farming was a job and the farmer couldn’t keep stroking the babies and being sentimental or he’d get nothing done and the corn would
choke in the weeds etc. Farming was like being a parent: you might coo for a moment at someone’s baby in a pram or a kitten in a brandy glass, but when it came to day-to-day life you just got on with it and if your kids came too close, you’d shove them out of the way and get on with whatever you were doing.

Anyway, one day in early spring my sister suggested a visit to Turner’s Farm, a mixed sheep and cow farm. The main reason being that she’d heard that some early lambs had been born. But also she was wondering if we might add Farmer Turner to the Man List, him being a farmer and all the associated benefits. She was hoping of course that he’d turn out to be an animal-loving farmer. I was dubious on all counts, having seen him looking stern and overweight in a dirty vest. But we set off down the meres to investigate and on the way picked a bunch of catkins. Our mother liked to have these in a brown jug in the hall as a reminder to hang on because spring was on the way.

Near Turner’s Farm we clambered over a dilapidated gate and noticed, across the field, a cow acting strangely. As we drew closer we saw that the cow, a young one, had its head stuck in a disused plough that had been left rusting near a gateway. Every few moments the cow would struggle and pull and her feet would scramble and churn underneath her but she’d stay stuck.

‘If I could just turn her head slightly,’ said my sister, ‘it would come out.’

And that seemed true, for the cow wasn’t as stuck as she thought. A slight turn and she’d be free.

We stayed quiet a while thinking and I saw the lush, herby grass the cow had been trying to reach under the plough, strands of it hanging from her muzzle. She struggled and churned again, stopped and let out a low moan.

‘Help me,’ said my sister. ‘Let’s try and get her out.’

My sister approached but the cow immediately became distressed and we decided to go to the farm instead and get Farmer Turner – who would reassure the cow before releasing her. We ran to the farmhouse three fields away, pelted into the yard and rapped on the door. A grim-looking potato-faced woman with one enormous hairy eyebrow stood with one side of her lip up and listened to our tale and sent us to a barn where the farmer stood winding wire around something. Sunlight was slipping sideways through the planked wall and he looked quite romantic with bare forearms on such a cold day. My sister told him about the young cow.

‘If you could just turn her head to a thirty-degree angle,’ said my sister, who knew her maths, ‘she’d be right as rain.’

‘It’s number 81,’ my sister called after him as he jumped into his Land Rover, ‘the cow is number 81.’ Because like me, in the still moments, she’d noticed the aluminium tag on the cow’s ear.

Farmer Turner bumped and jolted out of the mucky yard and we ran behind, pleased with ourselves. In my happy little head I put Farmer Turner to the top of the Man List and smiled, thinking how thrilled he would be to swap the one-browed, potato-faced woman at the door for our sexy mother with her bone structure and see-through blouses. I jogged along with thoughts about a possible new life with this capable man at the helm – all the lambs for my sister and tractor rides for Jack and a happy family for me and Debbie. And number 81, tame and probably mine.

Breathless, we caught up, leant on the gate and waited to see some expert remedying followed by number 81 cantering away, indignant, mooing.

My sister turned to me. ‘Man at the helm?’ she said.

‘He’d be perfect,’ I said.

‘I was thinking we could write to him …’ my sister began, ‘and ask him for advice on manure …’ But before she could
finish, we were rocked by the unbelievably loud crack of his rifle. I felt the noise through the metal gate, right up to my eyeballs.

The cow flopped immediately and hung by her head from the rusty metal trap. Only then did the farmer twist her head the necessary thirty degrees and let it drop. For a moment she looked like a dead stag in some old painting with oversized dentures and folded over neck. The farmer kicked it straight and a clearish liquid poured from the cow’s open mouth, ran down the hard mud and made a tiny steaming lake where our catkins lay.

We trudged home in silence. I tried to speak to my sister to say, ‘How awful!’ or something, but all she would say was, ‘Look out for catkins, Lizzie.’

And then, having picked a new bunch close to home, I held them out for her to inspect. She took them and looked at them and then flung them down and walked quickly on. I didn’t catch up because seeing someone try not to cry is one of the saddest things to see. I lagged behind and looked for catkins.

Our mother kept Dr Kaufmann’s little pills with her purse in the fruit bowl. She took the stated dose and apparently felt better and calmer. My sister said we shouldn’t make anything (too positive) of this calmness because people who take pills often act out the effects they are expecting to feel and in the case of these particular pills our mother was certainly expecting to feel calmer.

‘So, it could all be an act?’ I said.

‘Sort of,’ said my sister. And added, ‘It’s early days.’

Overall, she didn’t seem that much better to me, just sleepy, like a darted bear that can no longer object or maul. She occasionally got the giggles if anyone said ‘cheeks’ or ‘crumpet’ but there’d always be a short delay and she’d soon forget what it was that set her off, by which time we’d be laughing at her laughing
and she’d say, ‘What are we laughing at?’ and we’d all stop. It was nice to be laughing, though.

Our mother continued to write the play, but less so and only after she’d read to us from
The Hobbit
, which seemed to go on for years, and if she’d reached the necessary level of inebriation, which was usually around 8.30 p.m. The necessary level lasted only a short while, then she’d be too drunk and simply listen to music, though very quietly. Rachmaninov, who resembled her father-in-law as a young man with his nice mouth and dark eyes, or Bob Dylan, who looked like he might be from
The Hobbit
.

With our mother in this reduced and carefree state and without Mrs Lunt’s daily toilings – mopping floors, heaving great baskets about the place and replenishing the Dairylea – our new home soon became horribly untidy and chaotic. We left the shutters at the front of the house half closed – we didn’t want anyone seeing in too clearly.

Instead of ignoring the situation like any normal children, my sister and I got involved and gleaned from a tattered booklet how to use the washing machine – we felt it imperative as things were piling up and we were re-wearing dirty clothes out of the Ali Baba. But the booklet was from a Hoovermatic de-luxe twin-tub and our machine wasn’t a Hoovermatic de-luxe or a twin-tub, so it was partly guesswork. We found a basic cycle that whirled everything around in warm water for a few hours and stuck to that one.

We had mishaps – a few catastrophic. Twice the door was left open, once when a corner of a towel was trapped and once when it was just not closed, and the boot room flooded. Those times of flood were the worst times because so many things got wet and spoiled, including a runner in the hall that had been woven by twenty-one girls for twenty-one days and had cost twenty-one rials – each girl earning one precious coin. We flung it over
the line for a few days. It dried out OK but it went and stayed stiff and smelled like a wet dog for ever after. We felt guilty about the twenty-one girls, their hard work ruined.

Worse by far, though, was the second flood and the resulting ruination of the balsa-wood boxes that our mother’s father had brought for her from India. Especially as he had died just a short while before the second flood and she hadn’t even said goodbye. Mind you, she’d never really said hello either as he’d been at war when she was born. And when my sister asked if he had died peacefully our mother replied, ‘Yes, he ceased upon the midnight with no pain.’ Which meant he had been put to sleep by a doctor as if he were a poorly pet because it was the kindest thing, and came from Keats.

Anyway, the warm soapy water from the second flood washed away the beautiful hand-painted elephants, ladies, birds and so forth from the Indian boxes. And caused the sides to buckle and swell and when we tried to rescue them the staples popped off and they collapsed into a smudgy heap.

And we did an awful thing. We put the spoiled boxes into rubble bags and put them out for the bin-men and never said a word to our mother about what had happened. We thought she’d never notice. We knew it unlikely that she’d ever again go into the boot room now she was taking Dr Kaufmann’s helpful pills. And I don’t think she ever did. And later it occurred to me just how very bad it was. Not us causing the flood or hiding the broken boxes, but that she’d never again think about them or remember them or wonder about them. Even though she’d loved them so very much.

The full impact of Mrs Lunt giving us up dawned on us gradually in that boot room, as did the full horror of doing laundry. Mishaps continued and it became very stressful. Many items of clothing came out ruined – hard and small or the wrong colour
or matted, or twisted like lengths of ancient rope, discarded rags washed up on beaches.

Then there was the drying of it. The hanging it on the line for all to see or on the two wires strung across the boot room. The smell of it when we didn’t get to it in time or the weather was humid.

And then there was the ironing. It was dreadful how crumpled everything looked and how depressing the crumpledness was – it being such a sign. A thousand little creases, not a few deep and straight ironed-in lines, but the chaos of the crumple, like wayward microscopic worms shouting, ‘No one cares any more, make us wards of court.’

I decided one particularly crumpled day to ‘do’ the ironing: (
a
) I had to get rid of the creases for our ventures into public (school) and (
b
) I remembered the aroma of hot linen from Mrs Lunt’s daily ironing drifting around the house as a happy thing, and therefore I thought that in doing the ironing I’d be killing at least two birds.

‘Where’s the iron?’ I asked our mother.

‘The iron what?’ she yawned.

‘The actual iron, for ironing things with?’ I asked.

‘It’s gone awol,’ she said.

She often said things had gone awol and I was never sure what awol meant. I thought it meant ‘nipped out of a left-open gate’ because the thing that most often went awol was our Labrador. And her going awol meant she’d nipped out of a left-open gate.

I found the iron eventually in a big cupboard that wasn’t anyone’s business except the daily help’s. But since we had no help it became my business and my sister’s. It contained the iron and the ironing board and some soda crystals and buckets, brushes and a small mangle, folded tablecloths and other things of that sort.

Getting the ironing board up was a job in itself and I knew why Mrs Lunt, at the old house, had ironed a few items every day, including pants and tea towels, to legitimize the leaving up of the board. Doing it was awful too. Not as bad as the other aspects of the laundry but bad all the same. First of all, if the iron was hot enough to make any inroad on the creases it soon began sticking to the clothes. I melted a hole in a favourite nightie and made an iron-shaped brown mark on a T-shirt. I ironed a bit of my own exposed stomach and twice the iron fell to the floor and once a bit of it broke off as a result.

My sister came to look at me and said I was doing more harm than good. I mentioned the smell of hot linen and the sense of well-being and she said it smelled to her as if a blacksmith had gone berserk burning horse hooves and wasn’t at all pleasant.

My sister and I saw first-hand how utterly terrible housework was (laundry being particularly horrific) and that it was never-ending and tyrannical. We went to our mother and asked how she thought we might cope now she was semi-conscious much of the time. She explained that she herself was temperamentally unsuited to housework and laundry and always had been – even before the pills had kicked in. And hearing there was such a thing as temperamental unsuitability to it, we realized we were probably afflicted in the same way and felt a bit better about everything. Of course it’s a shaming thing to look back on, but there it was.

And all of a sudden we realized that Mrs Lunt was obviously suited to housework and saw her in a new light – as capable, strong, unusual – and felt wretched and stupid for letting her go without more of a fight. Our mother sympathized with us but said there was no easy solution. Helps like Mrs Lunt were thin on the ground in villages and, like the Brownies and Scouts, had waiting lists as long as your arm and you had to swoop whenever
one came free and try to engage them before anyone else got there. There was a story of an elderly lady on her deathbed having to endure people knocking on the door, swooping for the daily help.