Events have occurred before feelings could begin. These have left memory meme fields. My father born in 1901 the son of a butler to a family of aristocrats. He told us very little of his childhood: his decision at the age of 16 to vote for the Socialist Party. As a youth his dressing like an aristocrat, yellow suede gloves, top hat and watching working class children barefoot, begging, eating dry bread from street soup kitchens.

 

His political decision causing so much controversy that his father disowned him. His walking to London several hundred miles taking only a handful of belongings. His job as a silver service waiter. Serving Laurence of Arabia and George Bernard Shaw, a vegan who would not use soap and smelt of liquid paraffin.

 

My father turning down a scholarship to Cambridge University. To me an uneducated, hard working, compassionate, gentle man with a photographic reading skill. His passion pulp fiction sci-fi mags with early stories by Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. His simply looking at a page and with one glance having it whole, reading in random page order, often starting near the end and simply opening pages here and there and having many books on the go at once and them all making sense.

 

A sensitive man who cried during the moon landings as we watched it on TV telling us 'remember, anything that you can dream of can one day be achieved. It was his crying I felt.

 

My father 16 years older than my mom. She had my twin and I when she was 36 which was old in those days. My great grandmother was a gypsy. My grandmother taught us the use of the pendulum for dowsing using a needle and thread. She could sex pregnancies. She taught us to recite the alphabet backwards at about age 3.

 

My mother was very gypsy looking. I have a photograph of her in her teenage years looking Asian with long black ringlets. When I travelled India before my first child was conceived I went up to the Niligri Hills where they grow tea but high above Ooty it is home to several distinct tribes. They are looked after now by missionaries. One of these tribes has all the women looking just like my mother when she was a teenager – all hook nosed, black ringlets. Gypsies came originally from India.

 

My mother was terribly psychic. She would see ghosts regularly and I have had many of these experiences. I discovered recently I could use dowsing rods. My daughter has the same ability. I have managed to fix a friend's computer using the rods. These are the interesting points but mostly it is intense cold and hunger.

 

Most of what's concrete is hung on physical feelings. Walls are paper-thin. There is regular wife beating, although my father is unique in being quite literally pacifist. My mother drinks and it is many years into adulthood that I come to understand the word alcoholic. She is also severely post-traumatized from the war. And here the war means the Second World War although there are a scattering of old men around with limbs missing and ghost eyes and these are the few remaining from the 1914-1918 First World War.

 

Britain is still rationed. We don't see bananas until we are a handful of years old. All fruit and vegetables are seasonal, nothing is imported. For two weeks of summer come strawberries and lots of people get strawberry rash bought on by over eating them. When salad comes it is one type of limp lettuce and I devour whatever is on the plate – limp lettuce, one tomato, one radish and a spring onion. It is always minute details like this.

 

My sister and I born at 7 months weighing about 3lbs each. We are O rhesus negative and my mom O rhesus positive. There is no anti-D injection. In pregnancy my sister and I lie vertically, uncurled, in my mother's womb so that she looks barely pregnant. She is given repeated x-rays. When she goes into labour no one knows she has twins in there. In the hospital they leave her for hours – her only company a window cleaner who pulls down the window to talk with her. I come out twenty minutes after my sister and am cyanotic. I still do not know how I am here. I was often told stories as a youngster that when twins were home-birthed the second one was wrapped in newspaper and put under the bed to die.

 

Only the words keep me here. We are incubated for three months until we gain weight and there is no covering of eyes against the bright lights to cure the jaundice. I have no circadian rhythm and take medication to sleep from a tiny age. Almost anything disturbs sleep. The sound of the trains bringing coal to the factory at the end of the street. The sound of other kids out playing in the tiny yard. The cold.

 

The terrace composed of tiny two up two down houses. There is a scullery with one stone sink and one cold tap. There is an outside privvy and a coal house and a dustbin house. We are lucky as each house has its own toilet. In some of the other terraces there is one toilet between three houses. We use a chamber pot under each bed and in the winter the only heat in the house comes from a coal fire which is in an immensely high black grate in what we call the back room.

 

The fire is a source of mystery and wonder. On one side of the fire is a small oven in which grandma places a brown earthenware pot full of mutton stew. We always sit too close to the fire and get hot-aches and we stare into it and see visions. There are two tiny leatherette covered box seats attached to each end of the fender. We keep the shoe polishing stuff inside one of them.

 

The outside world is a forbidding place in winter and it is not until after May when it gets a little warmer that we venture out. The windows are stuck up with tape to prevent drafts. In one of the bedrooms there is still blackout fabric from the war as curtain. In the spring the men come out and sit about. They sit on walls. One of them sings nursery rhymes. He is one of my mother's ex-boyfriends and is shell shocked from the war.

 

The factory at the end of the street made ammunitions for the war. My mother was in charge of a night shift – worked round the clock. One day she changed shifts to go and meet a boyfriend who was home from Dunkirk and her entire shift was bombed and buried. There was no heavy lifting gear as most of the metal was sent for the war effort so all these women were buried alive calling for her and their men. She never recovered.

 

She intones this and several other stories on an almost daily basis. I take it as normal that mothers sit and shake and twitch and tell the same stories over and over again. Her repetitions would have blocked out almost anything except that I can go back in my head almost to birth because of the talking with my twin. We check out the talking even now. The same dreams. Talking to each other every morning even as tiny babies.

 

We are raised by my grandfather virtually until he dies when we are 3. He had been in the Boar War and had contracted malaria and is subject to rageful fits. During the Second World War my grandmother and he left the house to go and live a few streets away as the factory was constantly threatened. My mother wanted to return but my grandmother would not so my mom came back with my grandfather and lived with him for all her young adult life. It was years and years afterwards that my sister and I worked out the biggest family secret of them all – how my 'cousin' was conceived.

 

The family scapegoats its truth against my aunt. My aunt with five children by five different men. In the war years there were so many women with illegitimate babies – many of the fathers American soldiers. And it was to my aunt that my 'cousin' was assigned.

 

My grandfather an imposing figure of a man. He is stooped but comes to the bedroom door every night and uses his walking stick to stand upright to over six feet. Mornings he gets my mother to make up his bed settee.

 

A Bear and Two Mints

 

Each morning he'd welcome us

into the vapour of his

Oxford-twilled legs: lining up

Christine, Penelope, and a bear called Keith,

in descending order of height,

along the back of his bed-settee.

 

Two extra-strong mints would be

enthroned upon each knee,

the holes in their centres - like specks on a shelf -

winking at me and sis.

 

At lunch times he’d lure us back,

the sea-smog of his stout slithering down

the inside of his outwardly polished glass

and with tell-tale interpretations he'd tempt us aground.

 

“I killed a Zulu once,” he drawled.

 

Ready for bed and trumped up on my father’s shoulders,

I saw the old man through a crack of our customary closed front door,

pleading for them to turn his room the right way round,

him sickening with its motion as his right side withered.

 

That next day, trundling toys out into the sun,

I could still hear him shouting for his blackblack-mary.

It was then that I learnt to join up he’s gone he’s gone he’s gone

with the tears of prostrate women.

 

Years later, many, many years later in therapy there are memories of incest and these are particularly difficult to recall, as there are certain experiences, which never broke through into words, not even the telepathic words between my twin and I.

 

My grandmother decides at the age of 84 to leave my grandfather and take a job as a housekeeper to an elderly man. When my grandfather dies she comes back to look after us. She is a tiny, forbidding woman with bead black eyes and a 16 inch waist and her mother died at the age of 90 still with jet black hair down to her knees which she got my mother to comb out on her death bed.

 

So now my grandmother looks after us and my mother goes twice a day as if it is a religion to the pub down the road. We get chicken pox at some point and we are left in bed with our bed-ridden grandmother – the local doctor calling and being horrified to find us abandoned in bed and sick. He writes on my back with pen a note for my mother. It reads something like: they have chicken pox. When this wears off it will be gone.

 

In those days there was no bathroom of course. The bath was a huge tin one and was hung in the yard. We wash from the washing up bowl which was also used to make pastry in.

 

bedtime

her body was her twin's but there were two
of them so always the argument who went
first

there was no hot tap only
cold so water had to be boiled
in the kettle and poured into the

bowl and there was no special bowl
only one used for washing up
it was enamel and had to be

put on a towel as the table was polished
and there was only one table
and that was in the back

room as there were only two
rooms and the front room
was the best room

and never heated and only used
in the summer or for visitors
so they washed in the
 

bowl on a towel on the table in the
back room and argued who went
first

and whoever went first had to strip and
both parents watched them
whoever

stripped first had to
wash with the
flannel the

body in a strict order
from the face to the
feet down

with no
soap on the
face as it was bad for the complexion

and there was fairy soap and then
when lux came out it was lux and then
camay but camay came much much later and by then

they had breast buds developing and mounds
but there were still arguments
about who would go

first. Eventually they were allowed to wash
in the scullery with the
bowl in the

sink but by then the
bowl was plastic
and the

pubic hair
showed

 

We are lucky in having our own 'copper' – a boiler in the tiny kitchen which has a place to light a wood fire beneath it to heat up enough water to do the week's laundry. In the terrace just down the street my best friend has only one communal copper at the end of the yard. But it was only nanny who ever lit our copper. My mother never used it. Monday was always washday and even today my elderly neighbour still does the major part of her laundry on Monday.

 

We have an open drain in the yard. There is a narrow conduit between bricks and everything from the kitchen sink runs down to one central small grid, which is shared by the neighbour across from us. There is a day for disinfecting outside. There is bin day. The milkman delivers each morning by horse and cart. The coal man delivers by horse. The rag and bone man comes every few months – his call can be heard several streets away. The women rush around to find any scrap metal they might have or any other useful bits to throw out. There is sometimes thruppence from him if he gets anything worthwhile.

 

In winter the snow piles up against the kitchen wall and the toilet freezes. It has a wooden commode-like seat with a metal cistern above and a chain. Sometimes I still say to my kids – why don't you pull the chain when they forget to flush the lavatory.

 

The memory memes. Food is scarce and always money. The pay packet is put on the table on Friday evening and the money taken out first for beer and cigarettes. The shopping list is written. On Friday afternoon there is seldom any food left and neighbours come round with bones for the dog or spare bread. No one locks doors. There are no cars in the street.

 

The memory memes. In winter it is sometimes totally silent outside. Then the snow has come. There is always thick frost on the inside of the windows in winter which we call jack frost and only lino on the floor in the bedrooms.

 

For Jan

 

Into a wonderland we went that day, searching

for our dreams with spoons. Blue bricks, open drains, all

hidden under pristine baize. Dustbins, summer's flies, forbidden

dirt, forgotten.

 

Puffed-out house sparrows, strangely bold and spitting hunger

flicker above grey guttering. A slight white slope angles

against the scullery, shovelled expectation

making way for coal and we tap this enormous mountain

 

with futile abandon, secret visions close at hand.

We throw tiny, tight snow packages air bound, create name-

less shapes, barren silence. No

one disturbs our precious reverie, building crystal

                    

sand castles. But a short

while in ecstasy, unprepared against backyard air,

an unknown feeling fetches us running on

gelid feet down the hidden valley, gloveless hands clawing

 

the bleak back door. Inside, imprisoned by fire, tears

reflect sadness burning in your face: we stand like melting mirrors,

while tall intruders call instructions, wipe

grievous puddles from their fostered floor. After

 

one week's weary passing, we waited side by side for freedom,

culling with our eyes one chosen snowflake, watching its pearly

passage ineffectuate a final fusion. The broken

 

wireless crouches, dumb and majestic

in its bakerlited aura and 4 tiny leather boots,

already 1 size too small, hide polished fates in their cupboard

below stairs. The blind snow whispers on, wet slag burns uneasily

 

in the fresh blacked grate, while outside, buried by the season's graceless fall, scattered ragged rainbows lie frozen, cracked

within their lone ice mountain, stacked up against a bare

salt slaked wall.

 

We take thin pre-cut white bread sandwiches to school wrapped in greaseproof paper. Cucumber ones or jam. But some of the other, rougher children take sugar on the bread and no butter. We consider it to be very low class to take sugar sandwiches but I would have preferred them.

 

There is free milk – bought in as a precaution against rickets by the socialist government. The milk is delivered in crates of one dozen third of a pint bottles. In winter this too freezes and lifts the little aluminum top from the bottle. There is no way to force the straw in and it is compulsory to drink it. It makes me feel sick to think about even now.

 

In school we use slates and chalk and there is a huge blackboard along the front of the room. I have many months off from school being ill and the entire second year at home with rheumatism and bronchitis. I can easily read and write before I go to school. My mother has taught us how to do long multiplication and how to use a micrometer which is one of the tools she has bought home from the factory and nanny tells us stories of the imaginary fairies which live in the art deco lamp shade. Upstairs in the unheated horror bedroom there are still old gas lamps coming out of the walls.

 

On my first day at school I really believe I only have to go on one morning. It is an Indian summer and still warm in September and I come home and sit on the front door step and will not go back. My mother often comes to the school after the pub and stands at the fence. There are no railings as the metal was all sent for the war effort. She is unusually talkative or sometimes tearful. After a while the teachers tell us we are not allowed to go to the fence.

 

My reception class teacher plays a word game. She holds up pieces of card on which easy words are written such as wall, chair, desk. The first child to run to the right place gets a sweet.

 

When she holds up the longest word she says, "Now class, this is the most difficult word. The first person to run here gets two sweets." It is the word blackboard and I think it is the easiest word, already seeing words as shapes. I think all the kids must know it and that she is teasing and I rush to the front of room flinging myself against the blackboard to find no one else has moved. The entire class laughs and she makes it worse by saying, "Now then class, you are all very stupid for laughing and she is very clever. Here you are, two sweets." They laugh again and I take to my seat vowing never again to show the class how well I can see the word shapes.

 

Despite poverty and illness my sister and I are top at everything in school. I win my first poetry prize at about age 7 for writing a poem about a squirrel. It goes:

 

A little golden head I saw,

A bushy tail, a tiny claw,

Leaping and jumping too and fro,

Out to gather acorns.

 

There are three verses and as the teacher begins to read it someone puts up their hand and says, "Please Sir, it don't rhyme."

 

He looks me straight in the eye and says, "I think you intended each fourth line not to rhyme but for us to expect it to, didn't you?" I say yes, meekly. Later that school term there is a visit from an educational officer who comes to assess us. He tells the teacher my sister and I will go to university when we grow up. She and I come top in the county in our 11plus exam and go to Grammar School.

 

It is a long walk to the bus stop and two buses to the Grammar School. My mother takes two jobs to pay for our school uniform. In first year physics we are studying something to do with heating. We are asked to put up our hands to certain questions about house plumbing. The teacher is appalled when we do not put up our hands for any answers about the bathroom. We tell her we have no bathroom. But by then we have a shower in the kitchen as the old copper has been removed. The class all burst out laughing. School is always like this, shame and pretence and always the words which are shapes.

 

I excel in math, art and English but I'm not allowed to take math at A level as there are not enough staff and there is a strictness about the science/art divide. I go on to study psychology and make a career in it. I lose math completely – the shapes the calculus made in my head.

 

I win another poetry prize at school at age oh 12 or so and this time I am allowed to choose a book as prize. It is an obscure science fiction book, which my father likes, and the teacher double checks to make sure that it is this one I want. By this age I have already begun to do what the men in my life want.

 

My only protest is that my sister and I have begun backcombing hair into a huge beehive, folding the Grammar school beret into a quarter and hiding it in the mess so as to avoid detention after school for not wearing correct uniform.

 

One Friday night when our parents are out at the pub we shave off our hair completely and the next day go into town on the bus and buy black Biba lipstick and army boots. In adult years Friday Night developed from being left at home alone with a bottle of pop and a packet of biscuits to a regular binge night and I develop my mother's taste for alcohol.

 

Britain is moving out of the post war years and everyone takes out hire purchase and buys G-Plan furniture. We have the old lino ripped up and a fitted carpet in the front room and gas fires in both rooms. There is a small wall mounted electric water heater in the kitchen. There are real live gypsies moving in next door – of the type who have been in a caravan and at night they throw their drunken men down the stairs. I wet the bed at age 14. We eventually get to the top of the list for a council house.

 

This ends up being on a morbid housing estate, all concrete and identical front doors but at least it is not a high rise flat and there is a bathroom. There is no central heating and the upstairs is full of condensation in the winter. It is the sixties and Kennedy gets shot on the black and white TV.

 

My mother has passed her menopause in the slum, doped up on phenobarbitone and whiskey and has come out of her period of extreme agoraphobia into mania, thinking she is the most popular woman in the street and that everyone is somehow plotting against her. My father has a heart attack and has to give up his job at the factory, which has now become two bus journeys away since the house move.

 

My hair is growing out and I make my own caftans on a non-electric Singer sewing machine. My mother has been prescribed Mandrax (Methaqualone) for sleeping. I go into hospital to have my tonsils removed and meet Jane who is a year older than me and lives in the very posh part of town. She gives me some pills and when I ask what for she says, "Oh just to feel good." We stay friends after I leave hospital and she takes us to buy dope. She and her friend and my sister sit up all night smoking my first dope in my parent's council house listening to Pink Floyd's The Piper At the Gates of Dawn.

 

We ask for regularly for Mandrax even on school nights and one Saturday we go to Jane's big house and take LSD. Her dad is a toy wholesaler and we spend the trip throwing balloons around and driving toy cars along the spirals in the carpet of her huge dining room. The sixties are no longer blood in black and white. I spend my sixth form doing drugs and doing exams and there are more than simply word shapes in my head.

 

My first serious long-term boyfriend is a violent man 12 years older than me from the local drug scene. I get through Art School first and then University all on a cocktail of daily cannabis and intermittent LSD, speed and Seconal. Everything is too easy. I am released from the relationship because he is eventually imprisoned in Syria for drug running and I quit recreational drugs, fall in love and marry. Of such things were dreams made of.

 

Except I still wash in cold water at the sink first thing in the morning and keep my heating on constantly – turning it off for perhaps a few brief weeks in the English summer. My son has inherited the mathematical shapes in his head and my daughter the gypsy looks, dowsing and word shapes. My parents died way, way back, seemingly to take with them an entire universe.

 

Counting On the Gods and Goddesses of Eldon Terrace

 

Its history is still. Hidden

down pyjama bottoms in some

warm flannelette feeling

Where nanny would never suspect

and mommy only look for washing

 

Otherwise hands went colding out for balls

Would end up adult cracked like Shirley’s

scrubbing floors one room for each day-of-

the-week. Wiping away strands of hair

from her greasy forehead bruised every Sunday

 

morning. Huge tits (‘breasts’, whispered)

from The Pill – hushed, also furtive, arms

crossed over fence or hedge. Bouncin’ the back

yard to ‘er My Paul. Regular not like

oh what was her name’s – the red head’s? And

 

just to think, we believed her

Sat at home with her dearole mom and daughter

fat and always waiting for mythical Dad. Then

some fella’oud ‘ad a heart attack, slump-

ed heavy as lead over his wheel. Dead

 

‘Course I never worked out why his one&only

Morris Minor went careering into that curb

Police. Oh my God, so rare back then, came

not even to check up after the schoolboard man

but to fish poor Mrs. Whatever ‘er name from

 

outa the car. Men. We never thought them

of any consequence ‘cept sat on walls, shell

shocked, eye-lost, burbling nursery rhymes

All of them somebody’s once. Utility-serge

and dads nearly all dead or at best with

one leg. So

 

sex. Hardly figured did it? Loud on boozey breath

tap-swilled down the butler sink, clotted along open

drains under propped lines holding — if you were lucky

and it didn’t freeze or if they weren’t stolen by

knicker-sniffin’ Lesley — pegged underwear:

 

women’s pants, vests, pillow cases, handkerchiefs

boiled of their snot, even sheets

Flecked with slack dust if the coalmen had bin

Washed down by Mackeson, piss and star light

Sex – you’ll have to have it when you grow up

 

Tea cup, D cup, cup the warm inviting brew

of hidden clit down the flue of jarmies

Oh but we knew how to breathe and shake

and keep quiet about it and I did it at

school in love with my reception teacher

 

Her tits like my mommy’s had never been

Later, Mr. Courts and at the Grammar

some mad-un-married old harridan head who hired

two males in one term, thinking to reign us in

A Mr. Forget-his-name, little and thin,       the

 

Physics master who we tied to a chair during

a naphthalene experiment and hoisted him

on pulleys from last week’s project and then

left him.                                   Almost blew

up the damn science block. Talk about stink!

 

Stupid bleedin’ spinsters. Their no-men

hell bent dead from the wars

Psycho-frantic Miss Reed and her gobble-de-gook

religious education and the Latin mistress with

her fag stench and tweed two-piece and lesbian

 

lover, the ever repressive Hitlerian Miss Gray

Biology mistress (that word so - Unapt)

Oh you may think it strange now girls but I do

assure you you’ll fall in love with one man and want to

Be With Him for the rest of your life

 

Tubes, eggs and scrotum up on the board

Here’s lookin’ at you, you bull dyke pig

Here’s wishin' eh? But you don’t know what you

don’t know is I wanked under my desk at aged 5

I could read ‘John and Jill’ and write my address

 

and damn it come right under your noses

IFOnly I coulda been as much trouble for

ladies up our terrace as I had been for you

cows. Margaret and her Tony who laid her

out regular and you’d never see'er Mondays

 

Old Mrs. Brown who could do nothing but run

who lent us dog bones from outof’er pinny on Fridays

‘til pay came. Stooped Mrs Humphreys. Her hooked

nose. Who’d fucked granddad under my mom’s

and God only knows how the two kept at it

 

For years my mother and her bangin’ cupboards

through walls and other acts of attrition

Sweeping disinfectant demarcation in snow

Mrs. Low, who though she knew Mr. Low felt

us up or at best just sat us on his lap, kept her

 

nose out of his business. Poor bloke first one as

he was to be made redundant
The Mrs Jones’s. The younger one whose husband

died falling off his bike and then whose daughter

died of meningitis and who got psychosomatic-

 

arthritis and never walked alone again

No, I know none of them came

They wiped kids’ arses, struggled bags of potatoes

home along blue brick roads and kept days

full of windows, damp clothes, steps and ironing

 

Blimey. Prettied by Amami, California Poppy

Nulon, Coty and Mum Rollette in the sixties

All floozies up the dark entry. Even they couldn’t

see their bruises. Grown old before their time. Christ

 

I’ve lived more than their years in orgasms

alone

 

I thank God for the simple pleasures risking their comeback through trauma. This is my life lesson. My faith. My cross. School dinners – beetroot, soggy carrots, mashed potato, cottage pie, stew, greasy dumplings. The Penny Tray (of sweets) in the Off Licence on the corner on the way back from school. The wishing tree in the local park.

 

I know how to make good pastry, rhubarb crumble and rice pudding. I know how to hand wash clothes and how to peg them out to dry so that the seams don't stretch and how to darn and knit. I also thank God for these hands that can dig the garden, build a up a blazing coal fire from newspaper quills. I thank God for the shapes in my head and all the sacrifices that were made on my behalf.

 

Sometimes I cannot control the words in my head. I still don't know how the twin-hyper-empathy works or what it is. Or if I am to be a complete person. But I thank God I can be one in my own write.