Summers in Norfolk
The long path round the back was a cinder path starred with cockleshells. Chalk stones, little flat moons of an un-assailable whiteness, dust-dry and spotless as freshly blanco’d plimsolls, edged the path to the front door. The front garden was a beach garden of fine orange gravel. This was land that had once belonged to the sea , a danger removed just far enough to become a source of pride and ornament. The garden made a small, human ceremony of what happened unceremoniously with every floodtide at Titchwell, when skate’s eggs and razor shells washed into the mouths of the rabbit burrows.
I think even as a small child I knew there was a measure of economy in the moon stones and the cockle-starred path. Our neighbour kept up appearances by washing her front step and pumicing it with a large chalk stone until the white rubbed off onto the step. The sea was to be used thriftily, and the shrimps we hoovered into our nets as we tramped through the shallows, the cockles we picked from the sand’s pockets, the samphire we unstitched from the hems of the marsh, were not just summer treats, they were free meals. But I was a child of the London suburbs, for whom any sea shell, even a cockleshell’s nail clipping trodden into the clinker, had an edge of mystery. Part of the magic of my grandparents’ house was that these small wonders were thrown out with the ashes.
The front of the house was always in sunlight, the back in shadow. The chalk stones were a broadcast of summer, the white of the beach hut or the old bowling skirt my grandmother wore for the beach. But the back had the water butt, its soaked wood black and speckled with green mould. Rainwater was always used for the wash because it was softer and saved on soap powder, an economy of which I knew nothing. To me the water butt was a presence. The shadow’s core, it grew colder as you approached. A wet battery, a condenser, you could almost hear it hum. To lift the tin bowl off the plank, splaying your fingers round its thick wooden handle, and dip into the water was like dipping into a second universe, held in reserve. Specks hung there in slowly revolving constellations. Insects tracked like comets across the surface. We brought the bowl up a third full, just enough to mix a similar bowl of chicken meal. But it seemed more than water: it was a universal concentrate, a galactic tonic we were feeding the hens on.
The house had a cold tap in the scullery but no bathroom. Even this ordinary water was reserved, a kind of sacrament, to be heated in the kettle and carried up to the bedrooms. In the suburbs we were richer in convenience but poorer in ceremony. Entering the front bedroom we shared each summer with our parents was like entering a church. The door opened onto stillness and dark furniture. The water jug stood in a bowl on a white cloth on the wash stand. Their very size made them ritual vessels. The china was cold to the touch. It even smelled cold, like geraniums. But our fingertips were drawn back to it, as to the marble of a tomb. First a quick dab, a furtive fascination. Then a lingering, pensive pressure.
In the morning all was warmth and benediction. We would be brought tea and biscuits, and the jug taken down to be filled. It returned with a steam fragrance, a vapour that seemed lighter and thinner and sweeter than came from the hot tap at home. Perhaps because it really was closer to steam. Washing had to be by turns, and we would hug the bed, dipping our biscuits in the tea until their half-soaked warmth merged with our half-sleep. When my mother called me up to the wash stand, it was rather like taking communion, the same awkward intimacy, the same mixture of complicity and constraint. The priest wipes the chalice from the last pair of lips, as if they had proved something of an embarrassment, and then you have to concentrate on not being gross and bodily yourself. From my mother or my sister I would inherit warm, soapy water. An initial delicacy gave way to a sense of ease, as if I was still sharing my mother’s bloodheat, as if I was back in the womb. It was rather like climbing into my sister’s bath at home. But then came the constraint of not spilling any on the white cloth or the varnished top. The wash became, of necessity, ceremonial, a slow, deliberate laving.
Mostly the sea kept us clean. But every so often we would be drummed into the ritual of Saturday night, which was bath night. A fire would be lit under the big copper, which had to be filled from the cold tap, bowl by bowl. The tin bath would be taken from its hook on the outside wall and laid on the rag rug in front of the kitchen range. Then the ladling would have to begin all over again, this time of hot water from the copper. It was never quite the occasion it could have been. I was just expanding into privilege when I would be hurried along so that my sister could take over the water. No sooner into the lukewarmth than out again, standing chilling with a towel wrapped around me, suddenly aware that the kitchen, so snug when you were dressed, was a large room with a wind rushing down from the scullery and a draught whiffling up under the door, whipping away the eiderdown of warm, moist air that would enclose me when I stepped out of the bath in the little bathroom at home. Such a rush compared to the eternity that would pass while my grandmother was having her bath and we were shut out of the kitchen. We would sit in the formality of the front room, conversing in hushed tones, as if awed by the extraordinary thought that Grandma was naked in the next room.
Food was cooked in the range but prepared in the long scullery that ran down to the back door and my grandmother spent much of her time there, out of sight. If I think back to the kitchen, it is to an absorbed silence, broken only by the turning of a page. I am curled in the crook of the couch, reading one of the copies of Radio Fun or Film Fun that still come for Billy and Peter, my grown uncles. Between my fingers I am twiddling a loose strand of the couch’s black horsehair. My grandfather is in his arm chair, deep in the Eastern Daily Press. Sometimes my parents’ voices wash over our heads. Sometimes my sister frets on the foot of the couch and I settle her down with one of the comics I have already read. This absorption lasts a long hour until supper. In a wet summer it can last all next morning as well, a secured pleasure, an out-of-bed lie-in. I turn the page as I might turn on the pillow, surfacing voluptuously, just for the sensation of sinking back. As the hours pass and my parents begin to discuss wet weather outings, I snuggle deeper into the crook of the couch.
If my grandmother enters this memory, it is as a pair of hands. She has arthritis and, as she brings my grandfather a cup of tea, she does not hold the cup out, she holds it in, at a slight angle to her arm. The arm has the thinness of age, the skin falling away from the wrist and the knob of the wristbone and rucked into little folds around the elbow. But the skin is sandy and freckled, as if it has stored every hour of sun since April. Just as her hair, once the colour of barley wine, refuses to be white. It is a fading of gold, like corn bleached by the sun. I watch her arms as she moves about the room, almost in love with their colour. As she reaches up for the biscuit tin on the mantelshelf, the muscles, still firm in their activity, draw into a ridge along the forearm, and the skin around the elbow tightens into a little whorl, almost decorative.
Sometimes, if she needed more room, if she was drawing a chicken or gutting rabbits, she worked on the end of the kitchen table. Then the fascination was to watch her fingers grope inside the chicken and draw out the string of unlaid eggs, diminishing from a shell-less egg complete in its skin to a tiny bead of yolk, an orange match-head burning inside a blood-red membrane. She used the shell-less egg for the stuffing, and almost everything else except the intestines, which were rapidly bundled into newspaper and incinerated in the range. She pulled out the gizzard, slit its little bag and cleaned away the grit the chicken used as an internal mill to grind up its corn. At this point we always tensed ourselves, expecting the grey sludge to smell like the intestines, but the little stones were clean and fresh, like rain-washed gravel. She cut the feet off, scalded them in boiling water, and scraped off the claws and scales, starting at the toes and whittling down the leg. Then boiled gizzard and feet together to make gravy. As she detached the foot and pulled the sinews out of the thigh, the chicken clenched its toes. This appalled us, and we were given the foot to see how it worked. We pulled at the dangle of sinews until we found the string that operated the toes. We had a horror from the Ghost Train, three cold claws that could pluck at your sleeve, or tickle an adult’s neck as they read the newspaper. It became a regular game, a ghostly cockfight in which two disembodied feet leapt and spurred at each other until it was time to give up their jelly to the gravy. Occasionally we were useful and helped her shell peas. We would volunteer for this, remembering the way the peas pinged into the colander and the pleasure of running our fingers through their cool shot.
More often, though, my grandmother was off in the scullery, and in the kitchen we sat in my grandfather’s warm. This is just how it felt. It warmed you simply to look at my grandfather. He was like a coal in a well-laid fire, burning in its own heat, a white steady glow. Perhaps I saw him at the age to which he was best suited. Perhaps he had really been a grandfather all his life. Already, in the earliest photo I have of him, a man still short of fifty holding me up to the camera as a babe in arms, he was well set in the mould: white toothbrush moustache, flat cap and raincoat. Summer might change the flat cap to a straw hat and the raincoat to a light grey jacket: but nothing disturbed the considered movements or ruffled the voice in its slow course. He grumbled and chuckled but my Aunt Ruth only once heard him laugh outright. She was keeping watch by his last bed, as he was dying of cancer. In his delirium he was back marching with the British Legion. Suddenly he laughed and said, 'Yes, we’ve been married six weeks’.
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