Author: Elisabeth

The truth and white lies: seven autobiographical ‘facts’.

The wonderful musician and writer, Mike McClaren from Annotated Margins has honoured my efforts with a Kreativ blogger award. My second ever. I am grateful for his recognition and will respond as I must but only in part. I will list the mandatory things about me but I will leave it up to all those wonderful bloggers whom I follow – I cannot choose among them – to take it upon themselves if they so choose to list seven things about themselves, here in comments or on their own blogs.

Why seven? I do not know, but here are mine;

Seven things about me:

1. I have my mother’s names, all three of them: Elisabeth Margaretha Maria. I share my third name, Maria with all my sisters and brothers bar the oldest. The oldest, a boy, has my father’s name. The use of Maria as a third name for boys as well as girls honours Mary, Christ’s mother as part of a Catholic tradition. We girls thought it hilarious when we were children that our brothers should have a female name.

2. I was born in 1952, on Guy Fawke’s Day the year Princess Elizabeth succeeded to the throne on the death of her father, King George VI. My mother, despite a shared name with the queen, rarely concerned herself with the British monarchy. Her regal interests were with Princess Beatrice and the Dutch Royal Family. Her religious interests were with the Pope and his priests.

3. In 1952 the world’s first contraceptive pill was manufactured. Not that this brought any relief to my parents. As Catholics, they refused contraception until the last baby was born and died and my mother at 43 years of age received permission in the form of a second opinion from a somewhat radical priest who sympathised with her plight. The doctor had told my mother that a twelfth pregnancy would not only kill the baby, it would kill her.

In 1952 inflation stood at 21% and milk cost the equivalent of 7.5 cents a pint.

4. When I was a child I pretended to be devout because it brought the nun’s approval. I also loved to sing in church.

5. I have a third nipple, known as an accessory nipple. It is scarcely visible under my right breast. When I was little it looked like a tiny cave in my skin but as my breasts developed it popped out to the size of a pimple. I consider it an evolutionary aberration. In my mind’s eye I see a pig’s udder with teat after teat to feed a line of baby pigs.

6. I am sixth in line in a line of nine children. We do not count the two and half who died – my oldest sister and my last-born sister who was still born, along with a miscarriage in between. I do not forget the dead ones and would prefer to tell people that there are in fact eleven in my family of origin. I half count the miscarriage, as I feel sure that baby – in my mind, a girl – was not viable.

7. I do not always tell the truth, but my white lies are benign and I sometimes let my daydreams get the better of me, namely I allow myself to indulge in thinking about them as though they were real.

A childhood fantasy

We take the yellow bus to Camberwell. It smells of shoe polish. It smells of leather. I sit beside my mother near the front. Today there are only the two of us, my mother and me and we are taking the bus to Camberwell to shop.

I am angry with my mother. I want to complain about her plans to buy my sister pantyhose. I am older than my sister and I am still in socks. Why should she have stockings before me? But I do not want stockings. They are too adult.

My mother is humming. She must be nervous. The bus turns the corners too fast and I slide across the seat right up against my mother. Her body is hard and soft all at the same time.

An ambulance screeches past. Its siren splits the air. My mother hums on as though she has not heard it. I watch the driver’s neck. It has uneven black stubbly bits that run down and hide under his collar. The bus driver has fat stubby fingers that work the gears whenever we slow down to stop. My mother is looking ahead, still humming. Her nose juts out hooked. She is proud of it. Aquiline she says, like an eagle. A sign of aristocracy.

My mother is proud but she sits hunched over in her old green coat with her handbag on her lap. She does not wear pantyhose. She wears stockings held up with her girdle. The girdle is pink, skin coloured. She wears it to hold in her stomach muscles.

My mother is fat and frumpy and I am pleased about this. I would not want a mother who looked young and was pretty. Mothers should look like mothers. She fiddles in her handbag for her compact. It opens with a puff of powder; sweet and tacky to smell, like Lux Soap. My mother dabs the powder on her nose. She does not like her nose to shine. She squints into the compact’s tiny mirror and smears on a line of lipstick. Glossy red.

My mother was beautiful once. We have a photograph. In it she looks like a movie star. She gazes out from the photo with movie star eyes and a wistful look. Performing for the camera.

The top of the bus brushes against the branches of street trees as we turn corners. At Stanhope Street it stops for an old man who fumbles in his pocket for change and nearly falls over when the bus starts up again.
‘Pull the cord,’ my mother says. ‘We mustn’t miss our stop.’
I am taller than my mother. The cord like a skipping rope is taut till I pull on it. A loud buzz and the driver slows down. We walk towards the shops along an alleyway that leads to the railway station.

My father will kill us all. The thought pops into my mind and I want to push it away but it will not go away. He will kill us all one by one. He will start with my mother move onto my sister and then it will be my turn. He will work through the girls and then start on the boys. I have not yet worked out how he will do it, but he will. A train rattles through the cutting nearby.