Quite liking a rose bush
Chapter 2
It’s so exciting living in a town. I can walk to the shops! I’m a grown up of seventeen, running a home, cooking and shopping. I have no idea how to do any of these things. Now five months pregnant, I join an ante natal class and make some friends. The neighbouring women laugh with me at my incompetence, and share stories about their own domestic failures. The new husband laughs at me occasionally but is otherwise coolly indifferent. This puzzles me as he’d been very keen until now. He used to listen when I talked, and he couldn’t keep his hands off me, which was a sure sign that he was really in love. He’d said that he was crazy about me, what more proof could anyone ask for?
Our new home is next to a cul-de-sac and surrounded by replicas, with small front and back gardens just like ours. This is a complete novelty to me, having grown up in an old house surrounded by farmland. Without discussion, the husband begins planting a vegetable garden as if it is the natural thing to do. He must have spoken to me sometimes, because through him I learned to recognise purple sprouting broccoli which I’d never heard of before. It was a pleasure, picking the purple tipped stalks from the green stems.
There was a greenhouse and the husband grew tomatoes in this. As I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by telling him that I didn’t like tomatoes, I ate them and eventually grew to love the taste. One day I watched a heated battle in the greenhouse’s raised bed. Red and black ants were heaving in a mass together. I assumed that they were fighting as later on the victors, black I think, pushed every red carcass over the side of the raised bed onto the ground.
The husband never asks me to do anything in the garden, and I never offer.
Growing babies is something that I seem to be good at. My swelling body feeds the baby what it requires. Having never liked green vegetables or glasses of milk, I find that now I can’t get enough of them. Varicose veins sprout painfully on my legs but do not affect the baby’s comfort. At our antenatal class the midwife says “Who has held a baby before?” Some hands are raised, mine is not. “Who wants to practise bathing the doll?” Once again I keep quiet. I have no idea what to do and have no intention of showing my ignorance.
In the sweltering heat of that May I lug myself around, first disappointed and then relieved as the due date comes and goes. Other babies are wailing in the sun’s oven. Three weeks late, the birth finally happens. At home with a lovely old midwife and junior trainee. Although I feel utterly unequipped to look after this little morsel with her long spindly legs, I hadn’t expected to like her. No-one warned me that the back of a baby’s neck has an exquisite smell, different to anything else. When she fixes her eyes on me and lays a starfish hand on my hot solid breast, making sure that I go nowhere whilst she sucks milk, it seems like magic. With no effort on my part, my body knows how to make food for her.
The journalist Jill Tweedie wrote that when she had her first baby she didn’t have enough eggs in what she called, her Larder Of Love, to feed it a decent omelette. Looking back I can see that I was the same. “I’ve fed you, changed you, burped you! What do you want? Blood?” I wail in the long hours of the night. My husband comes home from the extra Saturday morning work he has started doing, and asks why I’m crying again. “She won’t shut up” I sob, face down on the bed beside the cot. “She’s asleep” he says. He’s right. He has the experience of a brother five years younger and one thirteen years younger so might have been able to give me some advice. He doesn’t, but then I meet Maureen.
“Couldn’t you swing their bloody heads against the wall sometimes?” she says as she hangs out her washing. Her baby is bawling from under the pram hood, and her two year old stares unsmiling from the clothes line post. I gaze at her in horror and relief that I am not the only one who has these thoughts.
A second unplanned baby arrives twenty five months later. He is a quiet little person and I’m very grateful for that. One day, hearing a commotion down the road, I look out and see Vinny who is five, with his orange hair standing on end and his blue eyes popping as he shouts and jumps on three year old Middle Child’s favourite hat. It’s a lime green cloche with yellow chiffon flowers pinned on the side. Our next-door neighbour is a keen church goer and often passes her headgear on to my children , as apparently her god likes to see her in a new hat each week. Middle Child gazes in wonder from his tricycle seat, whilst Vinny squashes the hat into the dust. “Why doesn’t he say anything?” yells Vinny. I raise my eyebrows at Middle Child. “What’s he jumping on my hat for?” he asks mildly.
Three years later, despite the Dutch Cap and then the Coil, I’m expecting our third child in the height of summer and it’s thirty degrees.
Here’s how to get onto a sun lounger when you are eight months pregnant. It’s the late sixties so forget about padding or headrests unless you are very rich.
Stand with your back to the previously opened recliner.
Twist your head round and carefully note where you intend your bottom to land.
Planting your legs wide apart in order to accommodate your huge, rock hard belly, lower yourself to a semi crouching position.
Sit slowly, in order to avoid breaking anything.
Swing your legs up, and rest your head back.
“Oh, that’s good”. Even though the thin canvas itches my back. Even with sweat trickling down into my groin. A neighbour has taken my toddler to play with her toddler who is the same age. All is quiet. Although I don’t want to do garden work, it’s rather nice lazily gazing at a nearby bush, of pink frilly petalled roses. Now, where’s Henny? Although she’s nearly school age she still needs watching.
“Oh no Henny don’t…” I swallow the words and pretend I haven’t seen that she’s busily digging quite a large hole in the flower bed. Out of the corner of my eye I’m aware of her rummaging and soil flying. The piled earth grows higher, spreading over the path. It’s too hot for a battle of wills. I look at the rose bush instead. A few days later the hole has been filled in. I don’t know who did it. Maybe it was Henny.
I often left the third baby in his pram under the flowering cherry tree on sunny days, so that he could watch the leaves waving under the sky’s blueness. One day a red ant fell straight down my front and into my bra, as I was gathering the pram and the toddler to collect the oldest child from school.
The ant dished out an agonising shot of acid. Trying not to clutch the affected breast and late as usual, I rushed down the street pushing the pram one-handed, the other hand pressed against my chest. After that I left the pram under the washing line so that the baby could watch the long line of towelling nappies flap in the breeze. Sometimes I tied red ribbons on the line to dance for his entertainment. We didn’t have daytime telly then.
The husband had turned out to be a frugal man, aside from his five pints of beer a day. Except on weekends, when double that amount was consumed, owing to a lunchtime, as well as an evening session. Getting the housekeeping money to last the week was always a challenge.
Although I don’t remember the rhubarb patch there must have been one and I made rhubarb fool and sometimes for a change, rhubarb and custard, (the same, but without stirring the custard into the stewed fruit). According to the children they were fed this far too often and none of them can stand rhubarb now.
Maureen was ten years older than me, as most of my neighbours were, and she loved her little garden. Contemptuous of all bright colours, “Loud” she would say witheringly, she cultivated a white floral palette with some pale blue touches. She was the one who introduced me to Vita Sackville West and her theories about mono coloured garden rooms. I was interested in Maureen’s garden, but not my own. Her warm encouragement towards me was a powerful nutrient, and helped to grow my confidence and resilience.
Sadly the marriage was not thriving and feeling starved of affection I wasn’t doing very well either. By the birth of the third child there was neither love nor liking between the husband and I and all hope of rekindling either, had gone. Another five years dragged by with me becoming more assertive as I grew older, and the husband meeting that with increasing aggression.
Then, in an attempt to live separately but in the same home, for the sake of the children, we moved to a larger and more isolated house several miles away.