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Surprise
I am nine and being returned to boarding school. It is Sunday night, and the clocks havenāt gone back yet so there is still light as we pull up to a traffic light, next to a dark blue Volvo. I roll down my window.
āHELP ME!ā I scream. āI AM BEING ABDUCTED!ā The driver of the Volvo looks embarrassed, which is the chosen response to most public displays if youāre British. My mother leans forward and gives him a wave and a thumbs up, the light turns green, and I see his relief as driving etiquette mercifully prevents him from further investigation. As we pull away, I leave him with a howling āCALL THE POLIIIIIIIICE!ā and proceed to start taking off all my clothes and throwing them out the window. My rage and sadness are not an act. I am dumbstruck with horror at the thought of going back to boarding school, and each time I am returned at the end of a weekend away, I try to explain this to my mother. My protestations have now reached operatic levels of desperation, as she is resolute in ignoring my desire to stay at home and be a day student. We live three miles from the schoolāit makes no sense. But it makes sense to my mother.
In the UK, in 1976, women were finally allowed to apply for a mortgage without a male co-signer. In that same year, my mother decided to leave my father and got to experience what an anomaly of social progression the mortgage thing actually was. As my parents werenāt married, the judge in the family court decreed that for my mother to retain custody of me and my sister, Kate, she had to: (1) be married; (2) have bought a house; and (3) have us in school by the time she had relocated. The amount of time the judge gave her to accomplish all these things was seven weeks.
What impossible nonsense has been thrown at women down through the ages, and how tirelessly do they continue to rise to the challenge. My mother would not be outdone by some bewigged distillation of the Victorian patriarchy and proceeded thus: she sold everything she owned, including a small number of shares in my dadās company, and bought a dilapidated cottage in the middle of Hampshire in England. She then cheerfully told the man she had begun a relationship with that they were getting married, and after that, marched into the school where she herself had gone and said they had to take her children (school fees pending in the nearish future) in the name of EQUALITY. My mother was always very sure of her plan. When things didnāt work out, she dwelt on the failure for about a heartbeat and in the next breath had a fully formulated new plan and her own 100 percent commitment to it as backup. She had longed for and waited for my father to leave his wife. Religion, respect, and wanting to have his cake and eat it too meant that he hadnāt, in all the time they had been together. He loved my mother with all his heart but felt safer keeping her as an eternal exit from the marriage and devotion he felt to his wife and the daughter they had together. After sixteen years, the exit exited.
We arrive at a falling-down cottage called Mildmay (very swiftly renamed Mildew); it is late August and I am six. Mum wears an HermĆØs scarf around her head, an impeccable cashmere sweater, and the dirtiest jeans, covered in mud, with Wellington boots to match. She is the sartorial embodiment of her own dichotomy: one half chic, model, designer, and wit; the other, hands deep in the earth, growing her own vegetables, and never giving a second thought to the planes over New York or the boats in the South of France that she could be sitting on.
āSO, what do you think?ā She stands, smiling, holding a bagful of our things from home. She has just told us that we are moving here, to this place, that Dad will not be coming with us, and that it is going to be a great adventure.
āItās shit,ā I mutter.
āWhat did you say, Minnie?ā
āI said, āitās SHIT.āā
Then I run away. I run to the back of the cottage we have just arrived at and throw myself into the tangled jungle that is back there. Weāve been staying all summer with some friends in another part of the countryside, and I had been told that morning that we were going for a drive and that there was a surprise where we were going. āSurprisesā are very well branded as a good thing, when everyone knows in their soul that surprise is actually a form of aggression. To that, I respond in kind.
I fight my way through the high grass and discover a chicken-wired fruit cage full of wildly growing raspberries, blackberries, red currants, and black currants. Even the fruit is in prison, I think. At the end of the garden, I find an old fence and a paddock beyond with a fat horse in it. I click my teeth at him, and he comes trotting over and lets me pet his nose till he realizes I donāt have any food, then he tosses his head back and stands looking at me with slight betrayal.
āOh, horse.ā I say. I then lay my chin down on the fence and cannot believe this is whatās happening. Is this how it goes? You think you live in one place and the next you donāt, itās just gone, and you find yourself thrown into a story you are expected to inhabit. Where are the people whose story this place had been, now? Are they in my old house, looking up from my bed at the light with the unicorn on it? Are they staring in disbelief at our lovely new sofa? I look back at the cottage, dark streaks of damp mottle its back wall; it is a place I feel weāve visited before and couldnāt wait to get away from.
I drag my feet, walking back to the front of the cottage. Little, patent town shoes squish through the mud, already scuffed from their country interaction. Longing for pavement, I arrive at the front door.
Our motherās chief concern about us living in London has been the disconnection from nature. Often, when driving along a highway, she would pull the car onto the hard shoulder, turn on the hazard lights, and force march us up an embankment, and over the roar of traffic, shout the names of roadside flora.
āCAMPION. CELANDINE. ELDERFLOWER.ā
I do not know if what nature can give me will make up for what has seemingly been taken away, my dad foremost among those things.
A brown Ford Escort is parked outside the gate to the cottage and a man is walking up the path toward me. Mum comes flying out the door and hugs this man.
āMin, say hello.ā I look at him, at the hugging, and surmise that he is why we have left London, our home, our new sofa, and Dad. The man smiles distantly at me, and I say to him,
āYou are why there is all this . . . trouble.ā I reach for the word because there doesnāt seem to be one big enough to encompass what on earth is going on. He smiles more, thinking I am joking. I go on.
āYou. Did. This.ā
āMinnie, thatās enough,ā Mum says sharply.
Perhaps weād all have thrown in the towel right then on the doorstep if any of us had known that it was just the beginning. For the next two years, a simmering tension runs as background noise to the honeymoon period of my motherās new marriage. My sister and I go as day students to the boarding school Mum has insisted accept us, but each evening, crammed around the tiniest kitchen table, our knees knocking against each other in horrible familiarity, I glare at this step-person. My motherās plan has, against all odds set by the British legal system, worked out. She has not made allowance, however, for its component parts to not get along quite so viscerally. My stepfather and I are definitely at odds.
I take up a lot of space, my sister is much quieter than I am, but together we are an unavoidable reminder to my motherās new husband, of her previous life, and we are definitely a bulwark between him and her sole attention. I donāt know what he had thought it would be like being married to a woman with two small children. This, combined with the fact that Mum has never really taken care of us by herselfāwithout the help of a nannyāmakes me think that their plan (however satisfying sticking it to the courts might have been) was not something they have actually thought through.
I am the helpful herald, pointing out the cracks, sometimes using anger to alert them to the particularly big problems in this new dynamic.
The cottage is so small, it is impossible to pick sides and create enough space to feel the power of your particular faction. We are all constantly on top of each other, having to navigate the necessity of turning our backs to the wall to face each other as we shuffle past in the hallway. Mum has become this co-opted stranger; I want to rescue her and remind her that we are love and he is an interloper. But she has chosen him to forge a new life with, and for all his vague annoyance at our presence, his shouting and inability to find common ground with us, Mumās need for this marriage to work supersedes everything for a lot of reasons.
The place my stepfather and I clash the most is around mathematics. He sits in a room with me and tells me to learn my times tables. I look at the numbers for a while, I appreciate their patterns, but their representations are too vast for me to comprehend, too mysterious, and instead of wanting them to reveal their secrets, I prefer their mystery. I have no intention of turning my brain into scrambled eggs making sense of something whose impenetrability I actually find beautiful.
āIf you donāt learn to do mathāto multiply and add in your headāyou will not be able to function in the world.ā
āI shall have a calculator.ā
āYou wonāt always have a calculator.ā
āYes, I will.ā
āYou shouldnāt need a calculator; you have a perfectly good brain.ā
āWhy? Why shouldnāt I? Calculators do math, my brain does other things.ā
āMath teaches you logic.ā
āI donāt get math! It is logical for me to have a calculator.ā
At this point, red in the face at my obstinance, he tells me to stay in the room until I have written out all the multiplication tables. As soon as he is gone, I run for the door, take the stairs two at a time, and lock myself in the cottageās only bathroom. Soon, there is pounding on the door and some threats, then the loud assertion that he is going to get a drill and take the door off its hinges. There is a tiny window in the bathroom that opens upward like a hatch. I am small enough to crawl through and then able to stand on a small amount of flat roof outside. Itās too far to jump down, but our neighborās oak tree leans helpfully across the alleyway at the side of the cottage, and I can jump for its nearest branch quite easily, and with a firemanās pole slide, be on the ground in seconds.
I have learned fast that running away is an adrenal choice, and your escape is determined by how calm you can remain while your little synapses are firing madly and your body floods with super small-girl strength. I also realize that nine out of ten plans fail when you donāt know where youāre going. I always head to the woods, and the only hazard between my getting there or not is the neighbor into whose garden I now jump.
I only know him as Gavin Gipsonās dad. Mrs. Gipson and her kids, Gavin and Lorna, have moved out. Gavinās dad doesnāt make a lot of noise; his silence is strange and has a low hum of menace about it. What is even stranger is the fact that he never wears pants. I donāt just mean trousers; I mean pants in the British sense of āunderwear.ā He wears T-shirts and wellies in the garden, clipping back his roses, backside to the sun and the windows of our galley kitchen. Once, when I had knocked on his front door, collect...
