No one warned us that Empire Day, May 24th 1922 would change our lives; those of my younger sister and me, though perhaps my older brother at already 13 guessed as we stood lined in the darkened hallway outside the door of our mother’s bedroom. Perhaps he was already planning his escape. “Don’t touch the bed, now, you hear?” My brother was pushed, post-haste, through the door into the darkened room. I looked up at my aunt. Victoria. She was not a pretty woman. She was bossy. Sharp. I didn't like her very much. She lived with us in the large house we shared with my grandmother in Shepherds Bush and I wondered why she was whispering and why she seemed so….distracted…. brushing down our white pinafores as if we were rugs upon the polished linoleum floor. Hilda, my younger sister, giggled and wriggled from her grasp. She liked our aunt less than me and would never permit her to touch her without a fuss. There was sharp slap. My sister whimpered and her face crumpled into that expression that foretold she was preparing to scream for attention but for once she was shushed into silence. The door opened. My brother, Frederick, came out. He barely glanced at me as I was pushed into the room. I clutched tight onto the little Union Jack flag someone had earlier put in my hand for the parade…. “And don’t stay too long, Winnie.” The door closed behind me. I looked round the room. The curtains were closed, causing the room to look as if it hadn't yet woken up though the window behind them was open and every so often they blew into the room as a small breeze cooled the unusually clement temperature for May. The room looked gloomy in the semi dark. Smelled. I sniffed. Of what? I tried to familiarise myself with the odour but couldn't identify it. But then, the smell of death is not a familiar one to a ten-year-old child’s innocent nose so perhaps it was hardly surprising. Now I would recognise it anywhere, but at that time, no, as I sniffed again, and a third time, and then shrugged my shoulders giving up, I had no idea of what it was that the room smelled. There was mother’s bed. It had been in that position, on the adjacent wall to the window all my life. Its walnut headboard shone with the work of many polishings above the white pillow beneath my mother’s head. Mother wasn't sitting up in it as she sometimes was when I went in to have my mousey hair brushed and plaited. Apart from the pillow beneath her head, she was lying flat upon her back. She had been quite fat for a while; it was a baby inside they had told me, but now, lying as she was, she looked so slim she could have been a child like me. “Mother?” I whispered. She did not appear to hear; did not answer. Her face was wax white like dolls we had seen on trips to the museum. Her dark hair had been unpinned and was brushed neatly to each side of her face. Already she had that ethereal look of no longer being alive even though she had not yet gone. There was a sheet placed over her covering her nightgown up to her neck, and as I stood a moment at her side, I noticed a staining was creeping upwards and outwards through it above her legs. It looked like blood but I saw it like a dream, neither touched nor horrified that in giving birth to her dead child, she now bled away the last drops of her own life. I was not touched because I did not know. I stood and looked at her near lifeless face, and felt nothing. Then, I thought of the parades, of noisy children laughing, of paper cups full of orange squash, of little cakes; it seemed a better place to be than here in this dreary room that smelled; so, carefully, so as not to cause her to wake, I kissed her dutifully as I had been instructed, and said “Happy Empire’s Day, Mother.” Then I turned and left the room. Hilda followed me into her room but she didn't stay long. “Now off you go to the parade,” my aunt said. And we joined Frederick out of doors, in the warm, light street. He turned and looked at our snow white sandals and stamped on them, pinched our Union Jacks from our hands, then laughed and ran down the street. We trotted after him past the rows of iron railings, round the corner, and disappeared into the crowd. It occurred to none of us to discuss the scene at home. Turning the corner, we were lost in the parade. When we returned our mother was dead, they told us. I don’t think I understood what dead was, but I associated it with her disappearance from my life although it had little emotional impact on me. I had been her least favourite. I was the least favourite of all the family. I had one champion. My other grandmother, Sarah; my father’s mother. When she visited and everyone told of Fred’s latest accomplishments upon the pianoforte, or the fact that Hilda could now crochet beautifully, (they forgot that it was I had taught her when she was sick one day,) Grandmother Sarah would pick me up and place me upon her lap. “And Winnie,” she’d say. “What exceptional thing has Winnie done?” I cannot remember that I ever did anything exceptional. I've never thought of myself as an exceptional being although now that I am old, more than half way through the last decade to my full century, I am told so every day. Times change. It would have been better had I been told in my childhood when I could have done something with the knowledge. And besides, I don’t feel I have had any part in my longevity. Life and death are not something that one actively controls. One is merely the vehicle in which this particular strand of life has chosen to journey longer than another. Had I been told I was special in a particular way when I was a child, perhaps I would have done some things differently in my life. But it was not to be. There is always the one who is least favoured. I knew it was me. But I remember those few moments of my Grandma’s special favour, as I remembered the hand of my other champion, my father, chucking me under the chin, as he walked in from work in the evenings. “If you go on spoiling that girl,” Aunt Vic would say crossly, “She’ll come to no good.” But my father would just laugh and wink at me, knock on the bedroom door, before entering to where my mother was waiting for him within. I don’t remember the funeral. There was a certain bustle over the succeeding weeks, certain comings and goings that altered the routine of the house as the aunts and uncles came to pay their respects, whilst my grandmother who came regularly from her own rooms upstairs to join us, (my father and we three children) downstairs, along with Vic and Bill who seemed to live part up – part down, followed us around with her already aged eyes. I don’t remember the funeral but I do remember that one night, lying in bed beside my sister, Hilda, not long after my mother’s death, I heard a terrible scream. “Moooooottthhher!!!!” I sat up in bed. Surely that was my mother’s voice? Then I heard my grandmother walking down the stairs which creaked, even under her insubstantial weight, past our bedroom door, repeating over, “It’s all right, my girl. It’s all right.” “Granny,” I said the next morning as we sat at the breakfast table. My father had already gone to work and my aunt Victoria presided over the table pouring milk into our bowls. “Did you hear Mother last night?” “Don’t want it!” Hilda said, pushing the bowl away. “Drink it!” My aunt Victoria pushed the bowl back in front of her. “ Shan't!” The bowl is pushed away again. “DRINK it!” Victoria is losing her temper. “You can’t make me!” “Mother!” Victoria turns to our grandmother in appeal but she has lost the game. Hilda is Gran’s favourite and besides Hilda’s frailty and the belief that she will never make old bones, allows her to pamper the precocious nature of my sister. “Let her be, Vic.” “ Humph!” My aunt stamps around and laces up her boots. A few minutes later the front door is banged. She will be gone for twelve hours. She works at The White House, ironing fine ladies’ linen with great heavy irons heated over fires. She stands and irons the intricate little frills of nightgowns until they are crisp and like new with those great heavy irons lifted from over the coals, never burning, never scorching; a perfectionist at her job. I didn’t ask Granny again about my mother’s call but I never forgot the sound of horror in her voice calling from the beyond as she looked down the annals of our lives. Perhaps she saw what was to come next. For soon there was another departure. It was my father. Strangely, it was sometime before I realised that he, too, had disappeared; somewhere around nine months after the death of my mother. I must have been a very unobservant child! And yet I had a fondness for my father. Surely I should have noticed? I was his favourite, the only to favour him physically; perhaps the reason why my mother’s family regarded me in a less favourable light than my brother, Fred, or my sister, Hilda. Surely I should have noticed? But it is too late now, when I am only three years from my hundredth year, to wonder why it is that I did not. For a while there were more comings and goings, snippets of conversation, as the surviving offspring of my grandmother’s sixteen children turned over events. “Well, it was only to be expected…” “He was never Maria’s first choice....” “Fancy “her” not taking his children.” “But Mother, you cannot adopt them!” “What about money?” “We’ll manage.” This, my grandmother; sitting in her rocking chair, her pale eyes glassy blue staring tranquilly at nothing in particular and her grey hair swept tidily back into the bun as I had always known it. She seems always to be in her rocking chair in my memory. In motion; yet the only passive member of the family. The only one to know that at the end, no amount of fighting, no amount of planning, and no amount of struggling will alter what will be. There she sat, rocking back and forth, back and forth. That rocking chair was the nursing chair in which later I nursed my own precious darling; where for hours as I nursed her into sleep staring into her bright little baby’s face that was to be my joy forever, I would sit and remind myself of these things that had gone by and of which I had taken so little note. But I am jumping too far ahead. For the time being the discussion still persists. “But Mother, only Bill and Vic are at home. We’ll help, of course, but we’ve got families ourselves.” “Didn’t he want to take the children?” “No.” Again, my grandmother. “But Mother…..why?” “Because I promised Maria that I would. She knew she would not survive this last one. She knew he’d be off. She asked me to take the children and I promised I would.” I didn’t understand it, of course. None of it made the slightest sense. What children were they talking about? Were there to be more children in the house? I had no idea that they were talking of us; of Fred, of Hilda and of me; or that our fate lay between living on the charity of my uncle and aunt’s contributions, (for my grandmother certainly had no income,) or the orphanage. What would a child know of the complex loves and hopes and losses of the adult world? Of a father’s choices; a father they were soon to be stranger to? My history was yet to be played and by the time it was played and I did understand it would be too late. But yes, when I came to consider it, my father had disappeared. Quite where he had disappeared to, I had no idea, and little inclination to ask. I later took this passivity to the happenings in my life to be a sign of un-intelligence. My daughter has told me it isn't. She says we were drilled to it by generations of role modelling and just did as we were told, following blindly the behaviour of those who had gone before us and who told us that what they did was right. She says whole legions of men and women were denied love and life and propagation without reference or question, just as they were in the 2nd Great War; men sent abroad to be killed regardless of the sense of orders they never questioned. My daughter has a lot to say on the subject of following blindly in one’s parents’ footsteps. But then, my daughter is of that generation, the one born after the 2nd Great War, who questions everything. Today there is no such thing as accepting the word of anyone, even our elected government, without first questioning whether it is acceptable. When the war in Iraq began nearly the entire country erupted in rage. I saw it on the television at the time. Not that it did much good, of course. All those young men who came home in boxes, having left their spirits in the desert, blown from their bodies by suicide bombers. Today, everyone questions everything. Protest groups marching to prevent the building of a supermarket, the knocking down of ancient woodland, the expansion of a road or rail or air system. They talk about saving the planet. But would they have been safe themselves if all those young men hadn’t lost their blood and their legs, and their eyes and their minds in Europe between 1939 and 1945 without question? I don’t know which is right. The ways of the new or the ways of the past, and frankly, at my age, I am past caring. The future must make its own choices and no doubt with it, its own mistakes. All I know is that we three children went to school, came home, played with our toys, went to bed, as we were told and without question, and barely noticed that all the early luxuries of our youth were slowly disappearing from our lives. Yet, when I look back upon the photograph, the one of Mother and Father, Fred, and Hilda and me, all plump and beautifully clothed, I can see the difference; my hair has been parted and combed back and in it I am wearing a white ribbon and beaded hair band. My dress is of white lace; it cascades in frills down my front and over my shoulders, from under which my puffed sleeves reach to just below my elbow. Beneath the hem, a deep frill of lace, a pair of plump legs are revealed below, over which a spotless pair of white socks disappear into expensive leather buttoned shoes. Hilda is dressed in an identical though smaller outfit and in her right hand clutches her teddy bear whilst my brother sports a white sweater over a pair of short, white trousers, white socks and spotless leather lace-up shoes. We sit amongst bouquets of flowers, our family; mother and father, side by side and yet like strangers, fixed smiles upon their faces, mother’s beautiful features schooled into control as she gazes firmly into the camera’s lens, and I am struck by the contrast. For, some years later there is another photograph. We three children are standing in the sea at Southend, where we have come on a day trip with my aunt and uncle. Both my sister’s and my hair is thin and barely combed, though no poor diet could have decreased the quality of my brother’s luxuriously wavy locks. Our dresses are rolled up into our bloomers and we look like nothing more than the ragamuffin’s urchins. Gone too, are the stocky little legs I once had. They have been replaced by two thin little sticks, though, like my brother’s hair, nothing could change their deliciously curvaceous shape that one day would turn every young lad’s head. It was not until I was grown up that my grandmother told me how she’d adopted us to prevent us being taken to the orphanage. How my father came home one day to say that he was going to remarry; that he was leaving the family home; that he wouldn’t be taking his children with him; that his new wife wanted no representations of his former life living with her. I can imagine Granny’s anger. I can imagine it though I did not see it. She was an indomitable woman. She sent him off with a flea in his ear and I didn’t seem him again for twenty years. By that time it was too late to rekindle the warmth that had existed between us. I never saw him again. But again, I go too fast. I must take small steps and not keep trying to leap a paving stone or two, as I did in my youth. My grandmother sent my father packing, and somehow she managed to find the energy, the money, and the knowledge to legally adopt us as her own children. She did what she knew to be right though she did it without what we know these days as support from Social Services. There were no handouts then. Not back in 1923. All we had was the money my aunt and uncle brought in from their work and that given at random from the rest of the family; and gave it they did, without grudge, even though it meant that their own little ones might have a little less. Such generosity doesn’t exist in these days of plenty but in 1923, when her daughter’s three remaining children could have been split up and sent to orphanages, and when there was little enough to pass around, it did exist, even though I wasn’t aware of it. Of course, there had been four of us. I had been the second of four children. My mother and father gave birth first to a boy, Frederick, named I found out later, after the brother of my father, the man my mother would have married had he not inadvertently died. She had no desire to marry anyone else, but my father was mad for her, they said, and in the emptiness left by her true love, she agreed. I doubt she was ever more than fond of him. I never saw her show him anything other than formal relationship. They may barely have been acquainted in the family’s company. But behind the bedroom door something more intimate must have occurred. My brother, Fred, was three years older than me, and five years older than my sister, Hilda. He was handsome. Presumably my mother poured all her efforts into her first creation, named after the first love of her life. Even when my mother died and he was at the beginning of his graduation into adult life, I was more than aware that my popularity amongst the girls at school had at least a part to do with the fact that I was the sister of the handsome Frederick Wallis! “Winnie,” little Rose Smith says. “Do you mind if I walk home with you today? Mother doesn’t like me to cross the road on my own.” I toss my hair back over my shoulder. I am already learning flighty airs though in those days I had nothing to be flighty about, poor, thin, little scarecrow that I was. “Rose, I saw you the other day, the other side of Hammersmith Broadway, and no bird flew you there,” I pout. She smiles. “Pleease….?” The hope that my brother will join us is like print upon her face. I have a soft heart. “Well, alright then but only if you will give me one of your fruit drops next time your father brings some home from the shop.” “You can have the whole bag, Winnie,” she giggles deliciously, grabbing my arm and, child adult that she is, skips beside me down the street, past the iron railings and steep steps that lead to the below ground homes that my own daughter, still a dream creation in God’s mind on this particular day, will one day describe as “dungeons.” Rose is not lucky. Today my brother has chosen to go to the home of a friend after school where the supper will be decent and his belly will be filled. A fact I already know full well! I am not beyond a little deception for the sake of my sweet tooth! Fred, our brother, was such a nuisance to Hilda and me that when we were younger I could not understand his attraction. He was always lying in wait just after we have been sent to church on a Sunday afternoon to hurl chestnuts at our hats until they hung at rakish angles upon our heads, or stamp on our blanco-ed shoes, or pull our pigtails. Hilda would poke out her tongue and threaten to tell. I often cried. I took it as a personal affront. Besides being handsome, my brother could play the piano, though he didn’t like going to his lessons. The teacher would stand over him and when he hit a wrong note would slap her cane down upon his knuckles and make him go over it again. I went to piano lessons too, and I believe I may have played better had I not been terrified of similar treatment as my brother had described. Of course, after my mother’s death and father’s departure, there was no money for piano lessons for any of us and Fred found more convivial pastimes with his friends from school. I noticed that he was always popular. Boys were drawn to him even when he did nothing. He’d be standing outside alone, idly watching a passing car, or staring up into the sky seeking out one of the aeroplanes, and in no time, there would be a group of young lads around him and he’d be saying, “I’m going to be a pilot. I’m going to have a plane. I’m going to fly right up there and I’m going to travel the world and see the Pyramids and…” and his hand would stretch up and out seeing all those mysterious places he’d seen in books and the boys’ eyes would stare up too sharing his imaginary adventure. He was a dreamer, you see, an artist. He had vision. And his vision did not involve him living at home with an aged grandmother and with a fussy and elderly aunt, or contributing to the upkeep of his grandmother, his uncle and his aunt who had so selflessly contributed to his. He left school and got work in an office. The job didn’t last long. His boss was one of “those” men; the type who touched up young boys, knowing their families were dependent on the money and would say nothing. Freddie was having none of it, however. He was no victim. The second time it happened, he punched his boss between his eyeballs, collected his cards and left. When he was sixteen, he moved north and joined the police force in Birmingham. For a while we drifted apart. I was not an attractive child. From what I have been told, I took my first breath with a loud cry and did not cease thereafter. My mother was apparently at her wits end trying to pacify me but nothing ever did. Unbelievably sensitive, too aware of slights against me, some imagined, some real, to this day I have never lost the capacity to sob each time my sensitivities are over-reached. I felt I was the unloved one and no one in the family thought to make me feel otherwise. Probably they did not know how much I was aware of it. They certainly did not know that one day, crawling beneath my mother’s bed to hide, I found a new pram hidden away for a Christmas present. I was thrilled and excited. But when Christmas Day came I discovered that it had not been destined for me. It was for my sister, Hilda. It was she who unwrapped the new pram, whilst I unwrapped my old pram, repainted. I said nothing. I did not blame my sister. It was not her fault. But I was acutely aware of where it placed me in the family’s hierarchy of love. It was another nail in the coffin of my self esteem. But beyond the home I was not such a failure. I had some of my brother’s magnetic qualities. Girls at school put themselves out to be my friends. I was rarely alone for social company. I loved school for at school was Miss Hogarth. She took us on visits to Kew Gardens and I liked learning the names she applied to the different leaves we plucked from the trees. “What’s this, Miss?” “Why, Ivy, that’s the leaf of your namesake.” “Really, Miss? I’ll keep it.” “Miss, I’ve found this one.” “Ah, yes, that is the rhododendron leaf. In the spring we will return to see its magnificent flowers. The rhododendrons are beautiful here in spring.” Her eyes take on a faraway look. I wonder if Miss Hogarth is married? I wonder if she and her husband come walking here on spring days between the beautiful rhododendrons.” “Don’t be silly,” Ivy says when I share this flight of fancy with her. “She’s a “Miss.” She can’t be married.” There now. Why didn’t I think of that? Still, perhaps she came walking with her young man? Perhaps, if I were to save my pennies till the spring and came and visited, would see him stealing a kiss from behind this great tree…. I shyly present “Miss” with a wide golden leaf. “You have found the beautiful leaf of the maple tree, Winnie,” she says, smiling at me. Her smile makes me glow inside. I am having my first crush. And in the classroom I work hard to please her. “Winnie Wallis come out here and recite, “Pretty Little Maiden.” I trip from my desk, my head held high, and stand, like the frail leaf I had the day before held up to Miss Hogarth in my hand, and say “Pretty Little Maiden, are there any more at home like you?….” My carefully enunciated words set me apart from some of the other children. My grandmother has imparted to us all that though we are poor, we are still somehow better than our neighbours. Sniggers from the boys. I tip my nose upwards and give that little, superior sniff I have cultivated, to show that I am placed above their mockery. I am full of the beautiful words and even more full of the desire to please the beautiful Miss Hogarth…she is kinder to me than my mother ever was….and continue, “There are a few kind sir, but simple girls and proper too.” The word “proper” I emphasise in just such a way that I show I know its meaning. More sniggers. “Thank you, Winnie. Beautifully spoken. You may sit down.” I trip back to my seat, ignoring the boys although I notice one of them gives me a rather lewd wink. I pout my lips, frown, and toss my head, but smile, too. Even at eleven I am learning flirtation. I know that he turns in his seat to watch my route down between the desks. My best friend, Ivy, plain as a bread roll, shoves along on the bench, and sticks her tongue out at my part admirer, part torment. “Take no notice of him, Winnie,” she whispers. “His Mum makes him scrub their steps every morning to earn his breakfast.” I giggle. The thought of Tommy James scrubbing down the house steps for breakfast is something I can appreciate. He hasn’t heard but suspects the worse and blushes then turns back to the blackboard. Ivy winks at me, and I warm in the glow of friendship. Miss Hogarth is talking about history; about people who lived a long time ago; about how they lived, about the old Queen. I think about Granny; she was born a long time ago, I know. She has shared the years of the great Queen who my aunt was named after, and she has known her own share of unhappiness, just like the Queen. I think about palace of the Queen, and of the cottage in Herefordshire that Gran often tells me is left to the Miss Parrys and to their heirs and heirs forever. I wonder what an heir is, and whether I shall ever own one. We go to the cottage once a year. Normally in the summer. Granny likes to return to the place of her upbringing; she likes to wander along the country lanes, take a glass of beer at the pub opposite Spring Cottage in Widemarsh Street. She likes to sit on the bench, wrapped in her Victorian bonnet and old fashioned clothes and stare across the fields and remember, as I now remember my own, the days of her youth. Spring Cottage is not large. But neither is it small. It is a square building, rather Romanesque in design, the apex of its roof running central to the house from front to back, the triangular shape of the loft below, hidden by the rather ornate design above the first floor windows. The windows strangely look like those of a church. They are leaded and in the summer are flung open to allow the heat to escape and whatever little breeze there is to enter. The entrance is hidden by a shaded overhang and two poles support this awning. It is surrounded by apple orchards through which Hilda and I play hide and seek, though Hilda gets bored with the game and often says, “Here I am” before I ever find her. We sleep together in one of the upstairs bedrooms in the same three foot bed. We trip down to the High Street for Gran and buy her bread or sometimes a bit of fish. Life is simple at Spring Cottage. We get water from the well, milk from the cow, and our privy is at the end of the garden in a shack. I wonder if Queen Victoria did her numbers in a shack at the bottom of the garden. She’d have a long way to go; the gardens at Buckingham Palace are large. I’ve seen pictures of them in Gran’s paper. Neither Hilda nor I enjoy going to the privy at Spring Cottage. It is overgrown and full of spiders and all the time I sit and wait for the providence of nature to disappear down the drop beneath me, I imagine mythical monsters might at any moment crawl up the steep sides and claw me down into its depths; or perhaps a great, black, hairy spider might drop on me before I have finished. I so want to go and be rid of the place that the tension causes me constipation, something I will suffer with all my life. Hilda won’t go at all unless I go with her; I stand outside with the door open. “You won’t go, will you?” “No but hurry up. Have you been yet?” “Almost.” She scrabbles for a bit of torn off newspaper and wipes her behind; drops it down the hole and wriggles off the bit of old board she is perched upon. We close the door behind us. “I hate it in there.” “Me too! Come on, let’s go and pick an apple.” Gran was one of the Miss Parrys of Hereford before she became Mrs Cooper. Her aunt had brought her up and she had given Gran and her sister a sense of their importance in the village of Hereford. Gran’s sister, Loue, married someone else who was important with lots of money. Her aunt approved of the man. Whether Aunt Loue was happy with her choice is something I never asked her as I meet her only infrequently. But Gran? I think about it. How is it that Gran is living in a West London house that we are about to vacate because we can no longer afford to live there? Gran is poor, I know. And grandfather? What was his role in things? I don’t remember grandfather; like the late Queen’s husband, he died before I was born, but there are pictures of him in the best room on the table. He sits there in his shiny frame, all dusted and smart and serious; his hair parted neatly to one side, and his dark eyes almost frowning at the camera and there is not a glimpse of a smile from between the white moustache and beard so neatly cut. He died before I was born. Did Gran go into a decline, I wonder, like the great Queen, when her husband passed away? Or was she too busy raising the children he left behind? Gran married Mr James Cooper and had lots of children. Sixteen of them. I don’t think she lost one of them in childbirth though some disappeared into eternity before they reached their tenth year. She had them so often that one was said to have slipped out whilst she was cleaning the hearth! I hoped it was not my mother. Perhaps it was Victoria. Perhaps that’s why she is so sharp. The bang on her head on the hearth as she arrived in the world convinced her that it was not a very pleasant place to have come to and warned her she’d better look out for herself from the moment of her arrival. Well, she had! And just as well. For no young man with a rose in his hand and a gleam in his eye ever has ever come to take her away to make babies. Miss Hogarth is still talking about the great Queen, and I tune in and out considering Gran. I never was much one for history. Why did Gran marry a man who could not support her? I wondered. Why hadn’t she married an important man with lots of money like her sister? I had heard she had used every penny of her inheritance raising her children. What had Gran’s Aunt Sarah said when Gran had told her she was leaving Spring Cottage and was going to marry a man in London, Mr Cooper, and give birth to sixteen children and live a life of poverty? Did she ever speak to her niece again? I must ask her. I think of Gran in her rocking chair; rocking back and forth, back and forth; rocking time away. I hear it creaking in the big kitchen as it does, day in, day out, as I enter the house each afternoon after school. Rock, rock, rock. Rhythmical. Certain. And behind it is the ticking of the clock. Tick, tick, tick. They combine as one. Rock-tick. Rock-tick. Rock-ticking life away. The sound of the rocking chair is so hypnotic that it is with shock that I wake up to find that Miss Hogarth is standing beside me and the children are all laughing. “I am sorry that the poor Queen’s loss is so boring as to have sent you to sleep, Winnie.” She says. “Let us hope that your story tomorrow about its effect on her reign will be a greater inspiration.” She claps her hands. “That is all for today children. Remember that tomorrow is story writing day. You must bring a pencil.” There is a clatter of chairs and desks and we disappear out into the sunshine, Ivy and me. We are almost inseparable. “Come home to tea, Winnie?” Ivy says. I’m tempted. I normally go hungry to bed. But today I refuse. “Thanks Ivy, but I’ve an errand to run for Gran.” The sun burns our bare arms and legs as we skip along the pavement. By the side of me, my sister Hilda walks without skipping at a solemn little pace. She is a solemn little girl. “I bit Edith Starky today,” she says. “Bit her!” I stop in my tracks to stare at Hilda. She smiles. She has a cruel smile at times. I often find it hard to believe that she is my sister. “Yes,” she says without further explanation. We walk forward again. Ivy looks sidelong at me. I shrug. I am aware of Hilda’s flashes of temper. They are played out against our aunt on a daily basis. And sometimes against me. She has flailed the skin from my arms with her nails on more than one occasion. Hilda was the third result of my parents’ union. From the start she was pronounced as frail and it was doubted that she would live beyond her second year. When she did survive, my grandmother watched over her like a hawk, guarding her from cough or cold by wrapping her in a mountain of clothing, tempting her finicky appetite with little treats, and sighing and shaking her head in despair when Hilda took one mouthful, decided that she didn’t like the taste, and refused any further. Had my grandmother known that Hilda, despite all her frailties had the constitution of an ox, and would live, undaunted, into her ninety second year, she would have been confounded! But all that is yet to come. For Hilda, frail and standing at death’s door as she appeared to be, became spoilt and spiteful by the adulation of the family and she stopped at nothing to win her battles against all those she saw as standing in her way. Frail she may have been physically; but she had strength of will that not one of the adults could withstand. She adored Gran; as Gran adored her; and when Gran died I thought she would, too. But that was not until later. Not till, I too, had played my part in ruining her life, because for whatever reason, despite the fact that I knew she was the favoured one of us two, I loved her, and because she had no mother, I took on that role, unconsciously at first, and then by habit. Each morning I’d take her to school. Each afternoon I’d bring her home. I bathed her knees when she fell over; made her little jellies when her voice was sore; taught her the skills of embroidery and crochet and stood by her in her formidable wars with our aunt who, though equally enamoured of the little girl, sought to contain her and make her like herself. She fought, to her last breath, in vain. Yes, I protected her though I was barely capable of protecting myself, but I had I let her lose a battle or two, perhaps she would have had a more realistic expectation of life, and a happier one, too. “What made you bite Edith?” I ask when we have said goodbye to Ivy and are finishing the rest of our homeward journey alone. “She pulled my pigtail.” “But Hilda, she’s your friend!” “Not any more she isn’t.” It occurred to me that there was a kind of strange, invisible balancing act taking place in life in which some got it all, some got equal parts, and some got none at all. My brother was much beloved by both his friends and his family. Whilst I knew that I held the same charm to attract friends to me as my brother did, at home, though they didn’t dislike me, I wasn’t much favoured either. Hilda, on the other hand, had almost no friends whilst the family adored her. Mind you, I thought, it was hardly likely she was going to be popular if she kept biting chunks out of the flesh of would be friends! It would take a half a lifetime to see that we, the family, destroyed Hilda in the first five years of her life; destroyed her chances of love, happiness, good health until only a career awaited her, whilst I…. But there I go again, leaping too many paving stones ahead! I shrug my shoulders and say, “I expect she was only teasing.” “So she may have been” is her terse reply. “But she’ll think twice before she teases me again. Oh look, Winnie, there’s a cat!” We stop for a few moments on the corner of Wordsworth Road whilst Hilda strokes the cat. She talks to it as if it were a baby, asking it where its Mummy and Daddy are? She has never asked about her own. “I wish I could have a cat,” she says as we carry on our way. Next time one of my friends says their cat has had kittens I ask if I can have one? It is a little black kitten and it is brought to me at six weeks old. I give it to Hilda in a wooden carton filled with an old woollen scarf. Our aunt raises a storm. “Heavens Mother, tell her she can’t keep it! We’ve barely enough for our own mouths let alone feeding a kitten.” I shiver in the corner. I have been responsible for this. But Hilda stands with her back to the fire staring defiantly at Victoria. “If Nigger goes, so do I!” she says. And she means it. Not yet nine years old but her will is already strong enough to defy the world. “Nonsense!” my aunt says. “Give it to me. I’ll drown it. I’ll be for the best.” “Come near me or my kitten and I’ll sock you!” My sister’s voice is low with deadly venom. My aunt takes a step towards her. Clutching her feline charge in one arm, Hilda lashes out with the other and my aunt reels back clutching her face. I can see blood dripping between her fingers. I am sympathetic. I know the effect of my sister’s nails. “Mother!” She dashes to the mirror. “See what she’s done!” “And I’ll do it again if you come near me or Nigger again.” She croons over the kitten like a tender tiger that has successfully guarded her one remaining cub. “Let her be, Vic” Gran says. “The cat will find its own food once it gets older. It’ll mouse. And I’ll get some fish bits sent up when I buy some.” It is obvious the kitten is to stay. The battle has already been won. “You always take her part.” Aunt sounds more like a petulant child than her niece. She turns on me. “It’s your fault, Winnie! Bringing that thing back here in the first place.” My eyes fill with tears. I’d only meant to give Hilda some little tender creature to love. They continue to flow all evening. But that night Hilda tucks her kitten down under the sheets between her feet and mine. “Thank you for getting me Nigger, Winnie,” she says. I burn with love for her. “That’s alright.” I hiccup. “You’ll need to take care of him.” “I will. Promise!” She smiles. “Goodnight, Winnie.” “Goodnight,” I say and lie awake by her side feeling her thin body rise and fall in regular motion. I promise in my mind always to take care of her. It is a promise I am to remember. We are to be together, one way and another, all our lives. But Hilda although she is now the youngest of our family, was not always so. There was another child of our parents’ marriage. Little Bobby was born a couple of years after Hilda, and though now I remember little of him, I know that had he survived the meningitis that killed him at the age of three, perhaps he might now be sitting here beside me. It had not been an easy birth. Even I had been aware of that, for it took some time before my mother could bear to be touched, and she was never strong again. I found out, much later, that the doctor had told her that she must never have another child. That if she did, then she would certainly die. What that news did to her relationship with my father, I do not know. One can only imagine. For a while it seemed that there would be no more. Little Bobby bore none of the signs of frailty of his older sister, and so it seemed particularly shocking that one day in autumn he became sick, and by the next day was no longer with us. My mother did not wear her grief upon her sleeve but within a few months she was pregnant again with the child that took her life. And so there were the three of us; Fred, me and my little sister, Hilda. And life went on until suddenly, one day, Fred was fourteen and left school and went to work in an office. There were a few other office jobs after the dramatic departure from the first, but he was not cut out to sit behind a desk. He dreamed of adventure and travel and one day, only two years later, he packed his one bag and set off to join the police force. Our family was diminishing at a rapid pace. Now there was just Gran, Hilda and me. I didn’t count our aunt or uncle. Although they lived in the flat in which we now lived, apart from the daily explosions between Hilda and Vic, they featured little in my own life.