Chapter One - Make Your Own Distractions.

My parents met at a Christmas party in December 1957. Released from their work, and encouraged by the need for rest and the seasonal excess of alcohol with their friends, they found a quieter space to talk away from the noise, they found that they were charmed by each other. When they left the party they agreed to meet again in the new year. When they became friends they knew what others would think, but delayed getting engaged. They felt they were a long way from trading in the single lives that they both enjoyed for the irreversible step of marriage, the ultimate commitment that was expected of everyone. Any step up in personal commitment involved a financial commitment. A shared future required them to work and save hard first. They met well before the days of easy finance through Hire Purchase. Years later, when Hire Purchase first became available locally on household goods it was a ritual for married women to politely sneer at what they called 'the never never', and deride credit as 'immoral', the better to justify the 'do without' morality that they grew up with, based on wartime and post-war rationing. 

The morality that Mother had grown up with by often made a virtue of an unforgiving lack of choice. At the time Mother met dad she was living in the third of sequence of gloomy bedsits, where when they improved it was because the other tenants were better company. The nadir with the bedsits was the first one, in which she crashed for some time on a drinking friends floor with no notice, after she, at the age of nineteen, was thrown out of her parents house for missing the bus and coming home late once too often. When she knocked on the door of her parents house her father opened it, snapped, and told her to leave for good on the spot. No amount of apologies would calm him enough to let her in, even to collect what was hers. She left with her friends who ran a car, even whilst petrol rationing was still current, her father's anger ringing in their ears. 

When she met dad Mother had been working for three or four years in the same factory he started work in. There, her working life was spent tied to a large and very noisy piece of machinery which made constant movements as it wound heavy duty cabling for brakes, for industrial vehicles, onto huge spools. Her job was to make sure that the cable wound smoothly on to the spools. Through the work she developed broad shoulders, strong biceps and strong forearms, which she never lost. Much more embarrassing for her was that working the machinery somehow gave her a large bust which often drew a vocal male admiration from male factory workers that she did not know what to do with. 

What them finding each other and thinking in terms of a shared future meant to dad was reluctantly cutting back on the drink. What them finding each other meant to Mother was the end of all her plans to travel. Before meeting dad she had saved enough money throughout the year to go on foreign holidays, when independent European travels were rare and difficult to organise. When the factory closed for the first half of July of 1955, and everyone had their holidays at the same time, her first trip was to Paris. The following July holiday she went to Brussels. Both times she went with her best friend, Jill, who Mother met in one of the houses of the bedsits they both lived in. Jill intended to train as a nurse. Each July they took off with their schoolgirl French, enough savings to get back in one piece, clothes for the journey, and a planned route in which they knew they had to be flexible. 

The third shared holiday was meant to be in Germany in but it never happened. The following July she had to be present at registry office wedding of her sister. This became a low key family reunion. Her relationship with her parents had been practically non-existent for three years after her father angrily threw her out of his house for returning late once too often. When she was away from her parents she enjoyed living in the town and near her job. The town was more exciting than her parents village. In the town she had many friends, both male and female. 

I was told these stories, and many more about when she was single, when I was in short trousers. Mother told me them either to me to keep me quiet whilst we were at home or to make me walk faster when we were  out together and she had to shop for food. The paradox, which she surely knew, was that she told me the stories because I was too young to process them. I was too young to question her when one detail she shared fitted awkwardly around another. Her telling me the stories of when she was single was meant to help bolster her self belief in the earlier years of her being married, when she felt quite isolated. So when she told me of how she used to 'drink the men under the table' when she was single, to 'protect her virtue' I took the stories at face value. I had to take the stories at face value, because amongst other things Mother wanted to prove to me was how much she was the teller of stories. As far as I know she never told me about what would interest me as an adult, the actual mechanics of foreign travel from England to Europe in the mid 1950s, when she changed currencies, what transport she travelled on, how she crossed the channel, how adept her French was, where she stayed in Paris and Belgium, what her favourite food in France was. So anything I write now about it is guess work. As a child my not knowing to ask that sort of question was just what Mother wanted. 

My father's youthful travels were much more limited. At the age of 17 he was called up for National Service to train to fight in the newly declared Korean War. Late in his army training, however, he was found to have tuberculosis. He was invalided out of the service and went straight from the army into the TB isolation ward in hospital. He had the then relatively new operation to have one lung removed. After that he spent eighteen months enforced rest in a TB sanitorium. There were two items that were evidence of his time on the TB ward, both of which I rarely saw. Oddly both were connected with sowing. The first was the long scar on his back that ran diagonally with three cross points on it over, where the lung where was removed. I saw the scar only once, and that was by accident. The toilet was at the back of the house and the way to it was through the kitchen. I saw the scar when dad was having a strip wash at the kitchen sink of a Saturday morning to ready himself for meeting his mates in the pub. I wanted to go  to the toilet very badly, and I interrupted his privacy as I went through one door and then another. The second piece of evidence was more sociable but equally rarely seen. It was a cushion cover that I fleetingly saw some time when I was a teenager. Dad embroidered it whilst laid up in the TB hospital bed as something to do. In later years it was something he implied he did not particularly want, but then quietly hide, as if to resist parting with it. After leaving the sanitorium dad started work the same factory as Mother. They might well have seen each other there regularly, but at such a distance that the party was the first time they were able to allow each other a proper introduction.

Mother told me the above, about dad, and there was much more about privation being made to seem natural where that story came from. Dad never spoke to me about his own past. From what dad did say I could never tell what his past meant to him. Given how privation was sown into his life maybe that was natural. But when Mother appointed herself chief storyteller to me it did not matter to her whether the story was privation survived and adapted with, or privation that serious alters the course of her life or dads life before they married. Any story that would make my short legs walk a little faster was worth telling. My role when she told these stories was to be her attentive audience. The story would have a life with me long after the journey the day the story was told. With her telling me her stories she could have quoted Robert Louis Stevenson on travelling hopefully, particularly when we reached certain points in the day's physical journey where that the story was internally consistent took last place because we had to be watchful to complete that day's shopping.

I liked her stories so I did not interrupt her as she told me them. I did not stop her even when I half recognised that she had missed out some detail that was vital for the story to make good sense. Even as I remembered her stories accurately long after she told them, what I remember always had the gaps in it that she created in the telling. Her stories were never meant to be a reliable oral history that I might quote later, like here decades after she had lost interest in the life she was telling me about. 

It was only years after me remembering her telling the stories that I realised how big some of the gaps in her story telling were. By then it was too long after stories were told to check back with Mother and ask her about those gaps. One reason for me writing about her here is to write out what I remember and as an adult to guess where the gaps are and fill in some of the details, so the stories are more rounded out. What I am writing here is true to the times walking with her, but now they are my stories, because I am now the teller. 

The story of her being born is a one story that she always left incomplete. As her family we knew where she grew up, a one pub one shop one church village in the East Midlands. With that we knew all the misery that came from her childhood too. There were many stories about wartime and post-war rationing, and many more stories about being bullied by her older sister and other girls, where they were old enough to lie convincingly to the adults and she was the one they lied about. She did not know how to tell the adults a good lie. 

We also knew that she was born near the south coast of England. None of us ever dared to interrupt her flow as she talked about where she was born to ask her 'If you were born on the South Coast then how did you end up as part of a family who lived in the East Midlands of England?' The clues about her birth came from other stories she told. Her Grandmother, Grandma Clifton, was a bargee and a wise woman, i.e. midwife whose husband seemed non-existent in Mothers stories about her. By both her  professions she strongly related to water. I have no first name for Grandma Clifton. I have never seen a picture of her, but still I can imagine her as a resourceful and singular woman who briefly appeared in the lives of many women, and gave her strength to them as she helped them give birth. And then she left the mothers after the birth. The moment of closeness between them was over. 

It is obvious to me now that my mother was brought into the world by her gran, Grandma Clifton. My Mother's mother was called May Brigden. She married in 1930, and had two children prior to my mother being born, only one of whom survived. May worked in the fields of the farmers who owned the land around the labourers cottage she and her husband lived in to survive. Life was tough, but not so tough as the make May work the fields whilst she was heavily pregnant. The national canal system was extensive enough and active enough in the 1930's that a barge could go by canal from the backwater village May lived in to all the major artery canals in England, and right to the southern coast of England. So May's mother, Bargee Clifton took her daughter to work on the barge for the summer, collecting and delivering goods all the way the way from the East Midlands to the south coast of England. The birth happened on what must have been the near end of their 300 mile journey. May's journey on the barge would have started a few yards from the labourers cottage and for the following month or more would have been a lot of lighter work and a constant change of scenery for the mother-to-be. My mother was probably born on the barge and the birth registered at the nearest registry office, in Hove. The journey surely took at least two months as a round trip, minimum, and possibly a lot longer. 

Materially, life was hard from the time May arrived back in the village with her new daughter onwards. From what Mother used to tell me, her life really only improved when she got a job away from her home village that paid well enough for her to be able to be able to afford herself a night life in the town. If that nightlife was proof of her self-improvement to her, then her being banished from her parents house was the downside of such self improvement. After that her self improvement came slowly, through her going from one dingy bedsit with a dodgy landlord to the next, a better bedsit and more wholesome landlord. Travels with girlfriends to Europe was when she felt she was most herself. Travel was where Mother was most herself, as the details of her birth suggested that might be.

The stories she told of life after leaving her parents home and her meeting dad suggested strong friendships with other single working women. There were also many stories about her competitive drinking with single men, such that the men ended up under the tables at parties whilst in the early hours of the morning she would walk home with her female friends. 

For them being stories about drink there was always an oddly moral tone to them; women who could hold their drink better than men could hold theirs could also make sure that men did not take sexual advantage of the women they drank with, unawares, whilst they were both drunk to differing degrees. When women drank, as they could when single but not when married, they definitely had to protect their virtue and reputation among their friends and male workmates. Whilst drinking men gave every impression of caring little for the reputation of their gender, and they often revelled in images of drunken lawlessness. Men would put women's virtue on a pedestal and gossip about single women who were thought to have had sex outside of marriage, but they would never hold a similar judgement over the male that such a woman had sex with. On the contrary they would privately admire the man for breaking the moral code that limited the male choice of behaviour towards women. 

Just as in old town centres some streets were dominated by shops that did one particular trade so historically the social life of an inland port was always made up of the commercial street nearest the port having more public houses along it than any one person could remember having had a drink in. In these pubs women would always be more the measure of decorum than the men. Drunken men saw the drink as giving them license to behave badly, whereas a misbehaving drunken woman was to be mistrusted for the trouble she might cause. That was the accepted double standard.

What men did away from the company of women remained unexplained. The location was the clue: the pub, the secret bookies, or the dog racing track. The latter was where large amounts of money were placed in bets on greyhounds who chased an object they barely saw, called 'a hare', which the dogs pursued but never caught. Little did the men see themselves as being like the greyhounds which they bet on: caught up in a system that depended on them forever chasing something that most would never catch, with very few among them ever rewarded as winners-and then only for a very short time. 

The period between when mum and dad first met and when they married was two years and eight months. I know nothing about when in that time they got engaged, just as I know nothing about their decisions around marriage. The engagement could well have happened quite late in the two years plus that they first knew each other whilst they were both single. What is clear is that the idea of having being engaged meant focusing on buying a house in which to live when they were married, which meant that the engagement was linked to the deposit for the house. Though I doubt dad took easily to being parted from the drink culture. Mother might have been hesitant about commitment between engagement and marriage too. She might well have bridled rather at being seen in public, and with dad's friends, as 'his new property'.

My father was the youngest in his family. He was one of non-identical male twins, and the last of ten children. His mother died giving birth to the twins. His father died when dad was seven. The girls took over the running of the house after the death of their father in 1940. Mother was the younger of two sisters. I think she liked the ready-made 'sisterhood', of the sisters who were single and remained in the house. As each of them married so the sisterhood dwindled to one sister, the oldest Gladys who lived in the the house for the rest of her life. My father was the last of his brothers and sisters to marry. His twin brother Henry was a milkman, he never married. The story that he would never tell that was told about him was that he got a woman pregnant but he decided to not marry her. He lived on his own and paid maintenance to raise the child he accepted that he had fathered, and occasionally visited them. Henry became a mysterious and modestly presented bachelor. 

As an a youth and a young adult when I got on least well with dad I often wondered what life might be like if dad had done what Henry had, paid what he could for us and kept his physical distance. But that never happened. Instead dad paid for us, paid for the house, and stayed on even when a greater space between us might have given him privacy and made him seem more of a friend to us. I never tried to imagine what being a single mother might have been like, though some of the parents of the children I knew in primary school were single mothers and from what I saw of them life had aged them far faster than married women seemed to age. I never tried to imagine what sort of single mother Mother would have made for me and my sister. That Henry seemed so happy whilst he lived in such a detached way was as much as I wanted to see. 

Dad had five sisters. All of them were older than him. Some of them had already married and had children when mum and dad met. He had four brothers too, Mother had to make a go of getting on with this large and spread out family who had no parents. In the family home where the single brothers and sisters lived together the women were expected to tidy up after the men and themselves, which was how she bonded with them. There was the story for which there was no starting point, where somehow the brothers and sisters stopped putting out their milk bottles out for the milkman to take away. Presumably one brother thought they had told  another brother that the latter should put the milk bottles out the night before, for the milkman to collect. The brother who had been told to put out the milk bottles forgot and did not put them out. Jokingly, the dirty milk bottles got stored in the bath, which they never used, the house was too cold and water heating cost too much. The bath became full of milk bottles. Mother partly got to know her future sisters in-law through them all washing these milk bottles out of a Sunday afternoon, together, and putting enough milk bottles out after each wash that the milkman would not be suspicious that the hoarding had gone on. This sort of caper was the nearest they got to what we would now recognise as student living.

I don't know what happened between mum and dad getting engaged, saving the deposit for a house and choosing a house. Mother was that silent on that subject it was as if the subject did not exist. Perhaps she took no part in the process, so for her it was not a subject. But there must have been a sequence of events, and a fund of stories about how they both went from living singly apart to setting up house together. Looking for a house took time that was already squeezed between their five and half days a week work and their time spent with with friends. I'd like to think that they had friends who donated furniture and helped them physically move into the terraced house they bought. But equally part of me believes that they barely looked at the place that dad arranged a mortgage for before they moved in. I could believe it if more planning went into the wedding than went into the home making that started after. A lot of the home-making decisions they made were made on an ad hoc basis, long after the wedding. Like nearly every working class woman in that era Mother gave up her paid job prior to marrying. I can imagine her reluctance to leave paid work as the date for her being out of work, and becoming a housewife, loomed. Not even the bloom of being in love with dad would have stopped her recognising the social leverage she was losing as a single person and the lack of social leverage in the marriage  that she was going to step into. 

Mum and dad married in the local Parish Church on Friday 26th of August, 1960. Their honeymoon was modest; a stay in a small hotel in York, sixty miles away, for the length of the bank holiday weekend. They were seen off by the wedding party at the local railway station and got a train to York. They returned the following Monday in time to start married life in the house dad had bought and in good time for him to return to work the following day. They were now occupants of the house that I lived in the longest for the first twenty years of my life. I am sure that they did not lay down any plans for the future beyond Mother now being a housewife after leaving her job. One of her managers in work who personally dealt with her handing her notice in was one of the many men who she had drunk under the table and walked away from, with her female friends, into the night air just a few years earlier.

                                   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I appeared 11 months after they married. The earliest image of the parental house that I remember was of the living room being half empty/half full with scrappy post-war/post-rationing furniture which was good in one respect; it was light and easy to move back when the room had to double up as a nursery or become a nappy drying space. Cloth nappies were the order of the day, and they had to be washed often, and then dried over a large fire guard around a coal fire. Heat was for drying clothes and nappies more than it was for keeping a draughty house warm, I remember the condensation on the unopened living room window on wash day. In the period of these memories there was no television; there was not the money for one. There was a radiogramme with a few 78rpm discs which I have no recollection of ever hearing. It was from dad's family house and he got the last of the working use out of it before it stopped working after which it was just a piece of furniture.

There might have been children who were my age locally, but if they did exist then Mother did not know their mothers so I never met them. If my arrival in the house trapped Mother into motherhood, then she returned the favour to me by having me mostly play on my own in the living room with the toys dad bought. She had a distant friendship with Olive, her next door neighbour. She and Arnold her milkman husband would in time adopt a child called Dale. When he appeared I was about five and he was two years older than me. He had been put up for adoption because he had been born with a cleft palate. It had been operated on. But the skin between his upper lip and nose showed why plastic surgery was so called; the skin looked plastic. We were both shy when we were stood and left to learn how to talk to each other. We did not know what to say. My years of playing alone, or later being lumped in with my sister, did their job, I became naturally uncomfortable and quiet around older children, particularly my older cousins. I preferred to play on my own. My oldest friend, Graham, who is three years older than me who is still a friend, told me recently that he first saw me with Dale. The two of them were getting on well and I was the gooseberry around them, for my being too young to know how to join in. 

Dad worked a five and half day week. His presence was felt most when he ate his dinner with us, at midday, dressed in his boiler suit. Mother put a cloth on the cushion of his armchair to stop dirt or oil from his overalls spreading where it shouldn't. The protective cloth remained on the cushion long after he stopped came home for lunch in his dinner in dirty work overalls. I remember him as not even being an absence when I was very young. He was more like how I might have imagined a lodger to be; a fleeting presence who was always going somewhere and mostly seen when he coming in or going out. I'd see him still for longest when he was still and looking in the small mirror in the kitchen as he applied Brylcreem to his slightly thinning hair. This was the last preparation he made before he went to the pub.

Like all men of his time he believed that child-rearing was like housework; an untidy business from which men should detach themselves as much as possible, the better to leave it to women because they were good at it. His life consisted of work, visiting his sisters most Sundays, and, like so many other fathers being in the pub all night every night. Even when he was physically present at home there was this unnamed but understood pub-shaped aura around him that his family could not penetrate with words, and said nothing about. But this aura could penetrate and dilute the aura of the family as we were without him. The older I got the more acutely I felt this pub-shaped protection around him. The more I felt it, the more uncomfortable I felt around him. His idea of being a father seemed to be about him being detached beyond the point any preparedness to engage. I found that he had no imagination and no child-like will to pretend. This blank detachment forced us to pretend about him to live alongside him and to keep our playfulness, and most of the rest of us, to ourselves.

My sister was born four years after me. I was told that I had been easy to carry to term and that I appeared on schedule. I was a blonde until I was nearly six. I was slow, and slightly nervous. But I was an apparently calm child. Mother was so calm carrying me that she was playing bowls with her family and her friends the day before I was born. I never asked her if she won that game of bowls, though I should have. Though in one story about me Mother told I was less easy to carry. Mother lost all her teeth whilst carrying me. Apparently they fell out several at a time. To this day Mother would think it humorous, and gentle teasing, to repeat in front of me and guests she needed to entertain the story of my role in her losing her teeth, I 'took all her vitamins'. As I saw it much, much, later before she carried me she did not eat well and when carrying me she did not get the right support or diet to keep her teeth. If Mother had been less 'at ease' during the pregnancy she might have thought more about what to eat and how to keep her teeth intact. I'd say now she had a gum disease called gingivitis, and dentists were hard to find and ill-informed. The NHS had been around for only thirteen at the time. With my sister Mother suffered much worse than losing her teeth, bad as that was at the time. 

My sister burst into the world after a tough ten month pregnancy. When she arrived she proved very hard to settle for reasons that were unclear. There were now four of us at the dinner table. I now got put in the tightest corner, on the piano seat that held the sowing kit. Dad remained physically-present-but-mentally-absent. He had wanted a girl first, he got a girl second. He chose my sisters first name, after one of his sisters and Mother chose her middle name after one of her close friends from her single life. Mother chose my first name; I was name after a boy that her parents adopted under the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society adoption scheme. My middle name came from one of Dad's brothers.

My sister howled most of her waking hours from the time she was born until she was more than a year old, seemingly solidly. It was a misery for all of us in the confined space of the two up two down terraced house in which we lived. It was an embarrassment out on market days too. Gran used to come to the mid week market to shop and see Mother, Mother would shop on the market to and it was easy with me. I am sure I felt spoilt by the company and was eager to please. But when Mother had to take my sister and I to the market to shop and meet Gran then my sister cried, loudly and seemingly unstoppably. The look on Gran's face said 'Don't you know how to quieten that child?', and the look on strangers faces said something worse that I did not know how to read. Mother did not know where to look, are how much her look suggested exhaustion and helplessness. And it was true, she was tired when she was meant to be ever more resourceful to make the money stretch. She had run out of energy and did not know where to turn. 

Eventually the doctor took blood tests on my sister and a diagnosis came. My sister's crying was caused by a painful rash on her backside that was in turn caused by her thyroid gland not processing sugar. When she ate anything with sugar in it, even the natural sugar in fresh fruit, her body would not process it. the rash was was unprocessed sugar. The doctor gave Mother a diet plan for my sister where what direct sweetness she was allowed had to be through powdered glucose, which her body would process. The more the new diet was adopted the quieter she became. After that we knew when she had eaten sugar, which she still liked, because she was always in pain afterwards. From the experiences we endured on the market I remember my wanting to loan my sister to the local police force or fire station as a siren. She would have been good at it.

According to the adults around me, a quiet child was a good child. For being quiet I was good. But 'good' quickly came to mean passive. There was something wrong with how that world worked and I could not give what was wrong a clear description. When the highest praise went to least enquiring, then for them being so quiet, they had no way of receiving the praise. So there became little point in the concept of praise in the first place. This was my introduction into a circular and quite trapping logic. If I could put the right words to it, I could get out of it. But not having the right words was what put me in the trap. For being noisy from birth for physical health reasons my sister never went near the trap I was caught in. People always knew she was there, and for being female she was easily liked. This imbalance of gender expectation would multiply and have consequences that rippled out and out, and out again, well beyond the parental house.

Our other next door neighbour was a middle aged widower called Stan whose wife had been German and she had died in 1955. They never had children and he was changed by being a widower. He talked a lot within earshot of many more people than he directly addressed, whilst showing no sign of being aware of it. He did not think he was holding court with his opinions, but he was a lonely man. For decades Stan used to swap red top newspapers with us every evening and make the swap a chance to come round and talk to dad for five minutes. If I looked like I was listening because I was in the living room whilst Stan talked to dad then he would always say to me "You are earwigging! you should not be listening to me,". But who would point out to Stan that if his conversation was only for dads ears then he'd better sort that out with dad so nobody else there? Dad  wouldn't. In later years dad often appeared to be glued to his armchair, whilst Stan stood next to the chair as talked at him. Dad would not get up, but would get us to change the television channel or turn the volume down in deference to Stan. But dad would get up to prepare to go to the pub. Neighbourliness and family consisted of such petty daily repeated conflicts, in among the bigger favours done for Stan by Mother. his weekly shopping and getting his laundry done with the family laundry for a small weekly fee. Once Mother started to take pity on him as a shy widower there was no way she could withdraw from doing his shopping and laundry for the rest of his life.

I did not want to be quiet, but I equally I did not how to speak so as to audibly hear my parents listen. If I wanted to speak to my parents then I had to sound something like an adult, even though I was very far from being grown up. Most times I tried to talk like an adult I could not do it. I would have ideas that would muddle themselves up, my words would trip up over each other, and when I did speak well then they would say that I sounded like a dictionary. The were partly right about the dictionary argument, I can imagine my mimicking BBC news presenters from having heard them. What I did not know about my parents ideas about adult speech was that adults knew what to leave out as if the absence of something suggested what was missing, and the speech still sounded fluent. I was too young to do my implication tables.

Part of my difficulties with speech came directly from Mother. In the house she was the master of the malapropism with her fearlessly mistaken speech. She would unwittingly entertain us with her contorted explanations for this or that situation, say gossip about a member of the family, in which some vital element was missing in her explanation. Those who knew her best covered for her. They regularly assumed what she meant to say to save themselves time better than I could. To explain to her the difference between what she said and what she might have meant would have embarrassed her and made the explainer seem condescending, souring future relations. And anyway most explanations of what mother meant vs what she said would have taken too long and would have been too difficult to make then memorable to Mother. If they did not do that for her they did less for those doing the explaining.

Where Mother was often most mistaken was when she thought she saw jealousy. She believed that if she treated my infant sister and I strictly equally, regardless of age, then I should not be jealous. And I was not, but I was different to my sister. Granted, Mother knew what strictness was she had been brought up as a High Anglican Christian. Whilst living with her parents she attended church three times every Sunday until she left home, under pressure, at the age of 19. Mother's ideas about fair parenting and discouraging jealousy were apparently based on the Biblical story of King Solomon. The original story can be found in The Old Testament 1Kings Ch 3 verses 16-28. Mother never ever read the original story to me. I doubt she knew where it was in The Bible and I looked it up for the purpose of this memoir. She misremembered the story as she bowdlerised it to me and my sister playing too noisily for Mother's liking in the living room, as she ironed or did some other domestic chore. 

It is easy to see why she did not tell us the original story too. The actual story is about two prostitutes who share a house where each bears a child at nearly the same time, one child dies in suspicious but not criminal circumstances and Solomon has to decide which prostitute the remaining child belongs to. This he does with the threat of a sword, offering them half a child each. The mother most prepared to disown the child and let it live with the other prostitute clearly has the greater maternal feeling. That mother was the one offered the child. The threat of the sword also proved that other mother was actually grieving for the loss of her child by wanting the child of the other prostitute. Not that grief was mentioned anywhere in Mother's world.

Terraced houses are very small. From the moment the family is started they will make every room is multi-purpose, often simultaneously. There would be no room in a terraced house big enough to have a heartfelt and highly vocal disagreement with anyone if those disagreeing cared about the neighbours. When children play they like to make noise, and they are at their most free making playful noises in the open air, or in large rooms. My sister and I were the same. In Mother's version of The Wisdom Of Solomon there was a busy and wise ruler/mother of two children who were being noisy in a confined space when she needed quiet to concentrate on her work. So the child who was most vocal about apparently being most possessive would be cured of their jealousy by being quieter and wanting less. My sister and I had to submit to what the space expected of us, and it wanted quiet so the wise ruler could get on with her work, and be relieved of direct parenting values whilst serving the adults and the household around her. My sister's age and the fight in her always made her the winner of any argument. 

If a quiet selflessness was the best rule for surviving the parental house, then school was a place where being vocal and outgoing was vital. I adapted badly in this new environment. The fear of punishment for speaking out came to haunt me and get me bullied in school. If children were roughly equal and obedient in the classroom, then the time in the playground was when children formed their own hierarchies. In the playground I withdrew, or stood as near as the teacher on watch as I could without being seen to want to be 'teachers pet' I was just not very masculine according to the model of masculinity required for the playground and sports field. Thankfully healthier and more open models of masculinity have appeared to me since. 

As my sister and I grew, so she exerted a pressure for the re-ordering of the parental house. Rooms were re-purposed through decoration. Mother treated me as older than I was, and though this I lost most of the toys that I had, and the space I had to play with them in. They were boxed up in boxes that took up quite a large amount of space to be kept for future non-existent children. My role in the house as the first child shrank. I remained caught between home and school; at home I had to put my sister first more often. In school I was meant to put myself first to keep my personal space, though I did not know how to. The adults inferred that I 'should be more responsible', though what I should be responsible for and how to be responsible, when the adults had taken over all the shared space in the parental house eluded me.  

Find Chapter 2 here

Find the introduction and chapter guide here.