Giving Up the Ghost Read online

  Two cities border on this space—Sheffield and Manchester. The village where I was born had grown up on its edge, nearer to Manchester. It is conventional to say that a village “nestles” in a valley; Hadfield squatted, like a fossil toad. The word “village” in itself invites indulgence: “an English village.” Thatched cottages? Roses around the door? Community, closeness? Hadfield was a community; it was close. Every person oversaw the affairs of the next; and sniggered about them. Thatch would have been carried off by the wind. Roses were an ornament for more temperate climes. I had seen them in plastic, paper, fabric, and wax, but I was eleven before I studied and handled a rose that was growing, and my reaction to it was to render it lifeless again, a severed specimen, slowly delineating it with a nib pen and sepia ink.

  There were flowers in the village, it’s true. Dahlias bloomed effortfully in the park we called Bankswood, which soon ran out into wild country, as if it had given up the pose of civilization. There were few trees, little by way of shrubs or bushy cover, no places for birds to hide or nest. Urban birds thrived; a gangster band of pigeons swaggered down Bankbottom, the street where I was born. Or—I’d like to be precise—the street where I arrived home from hospital in the arms of my mother, Margaret Mary, a petite woman who could draw, sing, dance, arrange flowers, play the piano, and recite poems, a woman who—if she hadn’t been a millworker—wouldn’t have been out of place in a Jane Austen novel: and who now found herself unhappily married, and trapped. There was no divorce for Catholics. You could get an annulment, or run away. Nonconsummation was a usual ground for annulment; not easy to plead if you have a baby in your arms. Running away, with that burden, isn’t an option either. She had to make the best of it, carrying her child upstairs to the front bedroom of her parents’ house, which they had vacated for herself and her husband and her new daughter: squeezing up, as grandparents did in those days, to fit themselves into the smaller space of the freezing bedroom at the back of the house.

  Much later, when I had a new, Protestant father, when my family made itself over and moved to Cheshire, I learned to name garden birds from a pocket manual with monochrome illustrations; I soon got good at magpies. A few years ago I bought myself a book called The Easy Way to Tree Recognition, admirably straightforward and systematic. The foreword is soothing: “In some ways, trees are easier to identify than birds. First and foremost, they never fly away.” If you’ve got a tree, I say to myself, you can always put your hand on it, it won’t flit or slip away. When you’re somewhere else you can remember it, root and branch, as you can remember your life when it first put out its leaves. But is it simple or compound, and does it grow with a single stem? Are the leaves aromatic, are they hairy, heart-shaped, or toothed? “Does it have needles? How long are they? Do those needles have sharp tips?”

  Hadfield squatted, so: sluiced by rain, battered by the four winds. Its streets were steep, its small houses gray and stony. Textiles were its livelihood, but the industry was failing by the time I was born, and workers were gravitating to mills elsewhere, or to the factory which—like a factory in some grim period comedy—produced tinned meat and pickles. In the years after the Second World War, you might say grayness was a British condition, and it had not dispersed by 1952. As I grew up, and especially after I was eleven, my immediate family grew into a comparative prosperity: or at least, into a fraught, edgy imitation of it. But my mother often told me (claiming me for the war generation), “When you were born, you were given a number; you were issued a ration book.” The times were meager, pared to the bone; in Hadfield, the wretched weather encouraged a grim view of life. Even the most svelte woman, stumping cobbled streets in the Hadfield winters, looked like one of those babushkas snapped in monochrome in a Moscow townscape: figure waddling and shapeless, eyes screwed up against the wind. The springs were late, the summers drenching and short; soon it was time to get out your wadding and your padding again, and face up to the skin-flaying attrition of the months from October to April.

  The Cheshire town where we moved when I was eleven was barely a twenty minutes’ drive away. Yet spring arrived there six weeks earlier, announced by the blossoming of ornamental cherry trees, by the cheerful whistling of the neighborhood’s men as they turned back their shirt cuffs over winter wrists and carried cans of oil out to their garden sheds; by the sound of lawn mowers clearing their throats, trying an experimental cough before the season’s pleasant work began. When summer rain fell, people said comfortably, the roses need it, don’t they? Lovely for the lawns.

  Possibly there was nothing to be done for Hadfield; as soon as I was able to reason about it I realized that leaving, preferably soon, was the wisest course. I ask myself now, looking back—if a ray of sun had shone through the deluge one spring day, and a Hadfielder had by chance found the end of the rainbow, what would that Hadfielder have done? Stared at the pot of gold for an hour; kicked and turned it about; sniffed the ingots, scratched at them with a fingernail; stamped them into the soil and said—said what? Nothing, zero, zilch: in the dialect, “nowt.” Stomped into the pub scowling and said he’d found this pot, eeeh, call that a pot, call that a rainbow, it’s nobbut a fraud. If the parable of the talents had been set in Hadfield, all the talents would have been buried and no one would ever have been able to find them again.

  There was no overwhelming reason, except for the weather, why the Hadfield people should have been so prosaic, distrustful, and life-refusing. A good percentage of them were of Irish descent like my own family, and had come in successive immigrant waves to serve the spinning machines and the looms. But just as you must not indulge the word “village,” you must not indulge the word “Irish.” The to-and-fro traffic with my family in County Waterford seemed to have ended before I was born. The best talker in my family was my grandfather, who was English; it is possible of course that, as he was the man with the steady job, he was the one who was allowed to hold the stage. His income helped his wife Kitty’s family when misfortune struck: which seemed to be regular, like the strike of the clock.

  When Kitty was a girl, she didn’t go down to stone the Cheshire children. At that date, tribal hatred had not resolved into childish games, and the lines of demarcation were clear: not the county boundary, but the religious divide. The Irish fought the English every Saturday night, on a certain street called Waterside; later when my mother would tell me this I’d put my hands over my face, saying, “Yes, don’t tell me again,” protecting my own torn eyeballs and glassed scalp from the collective memory of damage. My mother thought the fighters were roaring boys, obeying some quaint, life-affirming custom, nation against nation. I thought they were tubercular wastrels propped up by drink, puncturing each other with shivs and costing their families the funeral money. I never imagined that I was part of their story. My role is behind the scenes, a sort of Scorcese continuity girl.

  Someone has to pick up the bits of flying flesh, blot the blood, fake or not: and keep the narrative on track.

  In Hadfield, you knew before you could walk which you were: us or them, Catholic or Protestant. It is true that by the 1950s we were less obviously, violently sectarian than our equivalents in the north of Ireland. Our religion didn’t require us to throw petrol bombs, or for the men to kill one another on a weekend. But it did allow us—us Catholics, that is—to luxuriate in the knowledge that our neighbors were damned. They lived in the same cramped, cold row houses, without hot water or bathrooms, with the lavatories outdoors and a single fireplace in the downstairs room at the front. But we Catholics were getting mansions in heaven, with balmy breezes wafting, whereas they were getting their only warming in hell. They’d probably like to see a nice cheerful fire—until they were thrust into it.

  A little girl—her name was Evelyn—was born a few doors away, six weeks before me. Our mothers had us playing together before we could walk, I suppose; Evelyn was part of my natural landscape, part of my own body, a thing that goes back beyond memory. I must have been three before I learned the wo
rd “friend,” but then, when I learned what manner of thing she was, I registered her as separate, different. It was probably when we were three that we began to quarrel. Whenever we had an upset I would just check my temper and say, under my breath, “God help her, she’s a Protestant, she doesn’t know any better.”

  Evelyn was smart, slick, and sweet. She had limp dark hair, pinned away from her face by a slide made of plastic tortoiseshell; she had small eyes, slow to travel, their light kindled only by her constant and justified irritation with me. If there was a problem, she’d pull rank and scold, “I’m older than you!” It was true, and I never gave her a row about it, though I thought a birthday at the end of May was a barbarous thing; birthdays should be in July, like mine, when you had a half-chance of good weather. Evelyn grew angry when I criticized her birthday, but her smacks were small and theatrical and painless, administered with a flapping upraised palm; she was a girl, and did sly girly things like pinching. Two little creepers, eavesdroppers, we listened to everything adults said, took on their concerns, and turned them into games. We played Operation, which was about major surgery—a surprisingly bloodless, philosophical game, which involved no exposure of skin or body parts. We played School, which was far more violent; I never went down to Evelyn’s end of the yard unless I was armed, so I made a tetchy teacher, likely to whip out a pistol or draw my sword if there was any disruption to the lesson. We played Wedding; monotonously, week after week, we married each other.

  Evelyn collected postcards of ballerinas: frozen-faced women in black-and-white poses, a leg held stiffly in the air. One of them was called “Doreen Wells”—a name that seemed to me like a plunge into some dark, unfathomed Protestant pool. So that I had something to show Evelyn, my grandmother gave me the tiny cards that came out of tea packets: “Wildflowers.” There were fifty-eight in the series. “We’ll see if we can get them all,” my grandad said. I didn’t read the flowers’ names, just their number; I pasted the cards against my face, and smelled the tea that had been breathed in by the paper.

  Evelyn, when shown a tea card, simply drooped her wrists and worked her fingers disdainfully, as if she were shedding soiled kidskin gloves. “I’m quite artistic,” she said, sighing, putting her head on one side; we had been watching television, in its infant form, and that is the kind of thing characters said. “Oh are you,” I said. I was embarrassed to reveal that I didn’t know what she meant. She was always catching me out in that way. But now I said, “Evelyn, do you know how to machinegun? I have the complete instructions, and also how to go on if, God forbid, the mechanism should jam.”

  “Share and share alike,” said Evelyn’s mum, beaming down on us, rustling a brown paper bag from the greengrocer. “Share and share alike,” Evelyn chirped, producing—how?—from the baggy sleeve of her cardigan a blunt fruit knife. With its useless blade and with her fingers she shredded and minced the fat plums her mother had given us. “We are not,” she said, “each to have our own individual plums. We are sharing them.”

  I watched my fruit being mangled. Too communitarian, in my view: the fingers were too Protestant, mincy, thin. Small children taste each other’s flesh, and I thought Evelyn’s finger-tips—which I had sucked as often as I had sucked my own—had become alien as we grew. I never tried to convert her. I didn’t think it could be done. You were just born that way. It was sad for her.

  I can’t make sense of childhood, I can only report it as it felt, minute by minute. I don’t understand the terrain anymore, but I can walk it or trace it on a map. If you moved west out of Hadfield, you moved into the milltown conurbations of Manchester, themselves saturated with immigrant Catholics. The railway would take you in less than forty-five minutes to the town itself, with its great soot-blackened university and Victorian hospitals, its trodden pavements slick with rain and the oily soles of shoes, its great bomb-sites and demolition areas, its fast, troubled urban pulse. But from any hillside in Hadfield, when you raised your eyes to the east you saw the moors, the hills, the infinite, opening space of danger, loss, the perpetual uncertainty of low dank cloud. It seemed to be a landscape in which theology and geography had got inextricably mixed. There was a topographical feature, ill understood by me, which was visible (or might have been, but for the mist and rain) from Hadfield’s streets: people gestured into the murk, and mentioned “the Devil’s Elbow.” The road out over the moors was called the Snake; it appears on maps as the A57, the Snake Pass, Glossop to Sheffield. All this seemed acceptable to me, part of the unacknowledged strangeness of life; until I grew up and went away. First I had to learn to walk, to make a line, a confident line, a path of my own through my family, stumbling house to house: I am two years old.

  This is the first thing I remember. I am sitting up in my pram. We are outside, in the park called Bankswood. My mother walks backward. I hold out my arms because I don’t want her to go. She says she’s only going to take my picture. I don’t understand why she goes backward, back and aslant, tacking to one side. The trees overhead make a noise of urgent conversation, too quick to catch; the leaves part, the sky moves, the sun peers down at me. Away and away she goes, till she comes to a halt. She raises her arm and partly hides her face. The sky and trees rush over my head. I feel dizzied. The entire world is sound, movement. She moves toward me, speaking. The memory ends.

  This memory exists now in black-and-white, because when I was older I saw Bankswood pictures: this photograph or similar ones, perhaps taken that day, perhaps weeks earlier, or weeks later. In the 1950s photographs often didn’t come out at all, or were so fuzzy that they were thrown away. What remains as a memory, though the color has bled away, is the fast scudding of clouds and the rush of sound over my head, the wind in the trees: as if the waters of life have begun to flow.

  Many years later, when there was a suspicion about my heart, I was sent to hospital for a test called an echocardiogram. A woman rolled me with a big roller. I heard the same sound, the vast, pulsing, universal roar: my own blood in my own veins. But for a time I didn’t know whether that sound came from inside me, or from the depth of the machines by my bed.

  I am learning, always learning. To take someone’s picture, you move away from them. When you have finished, you move back.

  The results of the test, I should say, were satisfactory. My heart was no bigger than one would expect.

  I learn to walk in the house, but don’t remember that. Outside the house, you turn left: I don’t know it’s left. Moving toward the next-door house: from my grandmother (56 Bankbottom Hadfield Near Manchester) to her elder sister, at no. 58. Embedded in the stonework on the left of my grandmother’s door is a rusty iron ring. I always slip my finger into it, though I should not. Grandad says it is where they tied the monkey up, but I don’t think they really ever had one; all the same, he lurks in my mind, a small gray monkey with piteous eyes and a long active tail.

  I have taken my finger from the ring, and tasted it for metal. I am looking down at the paving stones beneath the window. I have to pass the length of that window before I arrive at no. 58. I keep my eyes on the narrow stones which, placed edge to edge, form a curb. One, two, and the third is a raised, blueish stone, the color of a bruise, and on this stone, perhaps because it is the color of a bruise, I will fall and howl. Because I know I always, always cannot get past; and because howl is my stage of life, it is indulged in me. This goes on, till one day the consciousness of self-fulfilling prophecy enters my head. I decide I will not fall; I will not fall, and see what happens. I negotiate the bruise stone. It is the first time. Only once is needed. Now I can walk outside the house. I jump into the arms of my grandfather, George Foster, and I know I have nothing to fear.

  At no. 58 the top of my head comes to the outermost curve of my great-aunt, Annie Connor. Her shape is like the full moon, her smile is beaming; the outer rim of her is covered by her pinny, woven with tiny flowers. It is soft from washing; her hands are hard and chapped; it is barely ten o’clock, and she is getting the cab
bage on. “Hello, Our Ilary,” she says; my family have named me aspirationally, but aspiration doesn’t stretch to the “H.” Rather embarrassed for her, that she hasn’t spotted who I am, I slip her my name of the day. I claim I’m an Indian brave. I claim I’m Sir Lancelot. I claim I’m the parish priest and she doesn’t quibble. I give her a blessing; she says, thank you, Father.

  My head comes above the keyboard of the black piano. When you press a key the sound is bronchial, damaged; the piano at no. 56 has a more mellow note. I know how to find middle C because on the piano at no. 56 this key has a brown stain on the ivory, and a frill chipped out of it, as if some tiny animal has nibbled it. I am fond of the pianos, their two different voices and smells: the deep, disdainful, private aroma of their wood. Nobody has told me yet that I am disastrously unmusical and had better leave the pianos alone. If someone will play I will stand at the side with my fingers on the wood and feel the resonance, the piano breathing and purring like a cat. I do not know a cat. Tibby is Mrs. Clayton’s cat. He lives at no. 60, and flees along the wall. I do not know him. He is a Protestant cat. George Clayton is the first in the yard to rise in the morning, winter and summer long before dawn, treading from his house to the lavatory. I see him in the afternoon, coming home in broad day: a bulky figure in blue overalls, with a bulky blinkered head. One day he dies. Mrs. Clayton, people say, is “taken to Macclesfield”: that is to say, she is mad. When she returns, the cat Tibby still flees along the wall. Instead of George, Mrs. Clayton gets a blunt-headed dog called Shula. The dog’s kennel name, she tells me, is Shula Ballerina. It snaps and snarls and hurtles about the backyard. This does not prevent her going mad again.