Lorna Sage

Hanmer’s pretty mere, the sloping fields that surrounded us, and the hedges overgrown with hawthorn, honeysuckle and dog roses that fringed the lanes, might as well have been a cunning mirage as far as grandma was concerned. They did nothing to alleviate the lousy desert that made up her picture of village life. She lived like a prisoner, an urban refugee self-immured behind the vicarage’s bars and shutters. None of my new school friends were allowed in the house, of course. You could get into the vicarage garden via a side yard, or by climbing over the walls, and that was the way we did it. The whole thing was clandestine, the other children weren’t supposed to be really there at all, any more than that picturesque backdrop of lake and trees and cows. Meanwhile, insulated and apart, vicarage life went on. In the church, in bars, in books (grandpa) or in a scented bedroom fug of dreams of home in South Wales (grandma). That is, of Tonypandy in the Rhondda, which rhymed with yonder, but with its Welsh ‘d’s softened into ‘th’, so that it seemed the essence of elsewhere.

These days Hanmer School is tranquil and thriving, just the kind of country school people campaign to keep open because it’s gentler than the bigger urban versions, and the kids get more individual attention. Astonishing, to me, to go back and eavesdrop on these well-behaved children who wear uniforms, talk trustingly with their teachers, and have even produced a booklet which tells me that the school was first built in 1676, and that the Charity Commissioners reported in 1847 that it was damp and dirty, with rotting furniture. This 1847 school is more recognisable to me than the present one: all this cleanliness is unnatural. And what are they doing being literate, for God’s sake? This isn’t the school I knew. Perhaps I really did grow up, as I sometimes suspect, in a time-warp, an enclave of the 19th century? Because here are the memories jostling their way in, scenes from an overpopulated rural slum.

Grandfather’s skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path, and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the vestry, excuses for getting out of the vicarage (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn’t get up to much. I was a sort of hobble; he was my minder and I was his. He’d have liked to get further away, but petrol was rationed. The church was at least safe. My grandmother never went near it – except feet first in her coffin, but that was years later, when she was buried in the same grave with him. Rotting together for eternity, one flesh at the last after a lifetime’s mutual loathing. In life, though, she never invaded his patch; once inside the churchyard gate he was on his own ground, in his element. He was good at funerals, being gaunt and lined, marked with mortality. He had a scar down his hollow cheek too, which grandma had done with the carving knife one of the many times when he came home pissed and incapable.’