Among Others

“My” room here is small, with a bed and bookshelves with Auntie Teg’s art books on them. There’s a terrific pair of pictures by Hokusai on the wall—they’re clearly part of a story. One is of two Japanese men looking frightened fighting a giant octopus; the other is of the same two men laughing and cutting their way through a huge spider-web. I don’t know their names and I don’t know their stories, but they have tons of personality and I like lying here looking at them and imagining their other adventures. Mor and I used to tell each other stories about them. Auntie Teg bought them in Bath, along with the brown and cream Moroccan blanket that hangs on the wall in the lounge.

Lying here writing this, every so often Persimmon cries outside the door to come in to my room. If I don’t open it, she keeps on doing it. If I do get up and hobble over to the door, every step a minor victory, she walks in, looks at me disdainfully, then turns around and leaves. She’s a tortoiseshell cat with a white chin and stomach. She sees fairies—in Aberdare where there are fairies, obviously, not here. I’ve seen her see them and turn the same look of disdain on them as she does on me, while keeping a wary eye to make sure we don’t get up to anything. Auntie Teg has done an oil painting of her lying in front of the Moroccan blanket—the colours are wonderful together—where she looks like the loveliest gentlest most beautiful cat. In reality she likes to be petted for about thirty seconds, after which she turns on you and attacks your hand. I’ve had more bites and scratches from Persimmon than from all the other cats in the world put together, and Auntie Teg often has scratch marks on her wrists. Having said that, she adores her and talks to her in baby talk. I can hear her cooing now, “Who’s the best? Who’s the best cat in the world?” She might be in the running for most beautiful, with her lovely markings and aristocratic carriage, but I think the best cat would have better manners.

We’re going up to see Grampar tomorrow. It’s not like at half term, Auntie Teg isn’t in school. It’s not going to be easy to get time to go to find the fairies, though she is going away for a few days over New Year and I should have a chance then. Auntie Teg isn’t old, only thirty-six. She has a boyfriend, a secret boyfriend. It’s very tragic actually, a bit like Jane Eyre. He’s married to a madwoman, and he can’t get divorced from her because he’s a politician, and anyway he feels an obligation to her because he married her when she was young and pretty and sparkling. In fact, he was Auntie Teg’s childhood sweetheart and kissed her on the way back from her twenty-first birthday party. Then he went to university and met his mad wife, though she wasn’t mad yet, and married her, and only later realised that he’d really loved Auntie Teg all along, and by then it was clear that his wife was mad. I’m not sure this version is quite accurate. For instance, his wife’s father was someone who could help him get a parliamentary seat. I wonder if there was some self-interest going on. And would it really ruin his career to get divorced and remarry? It would much more ruin it if it came out that he was involved with Auntie Teg. However, she says she’s happy as she is, she likes living alone with Persimmon and having a few days with him now and then.

I got to help make dinner. You can’t imagine the pleasure of wiping mushrooms and grating cheese when you haven’t had a chance to do it for a long time. Then eating food you have cooked, or help cook, always tastes so much better. Auntie Teg makes the world’s best cauliflower cheese.

It’s also very nice to relax and be looked after for a bit.

Saturday 29th December 1979

Not much of this year left. Good. It’s been a rotten year. Maybe 1980 will be better. A new year. A new decade. A decade in which I shall grow up and start to achieve things. I wonder what the eighties will bring? I can just remember 1970. I remember going out into the garden and thinking that it was 1970 and that it sounded like yellow flags flying, and saying that to Mor and she agreed, and running up and down the garden with our arms stretched out, pretending to fly. 1980 sounds more rotund, and maroon. It’s funny how the sounds of words have colours. Nobody except Mor ever understood that.

Grampar liked the elephant, and Auntie Teg was really pleased with the dressing gown. She waited to open it until we went up to Fedw Hir and we had a little Christmas around the bed. They gave me a big red polo-neck pullover, and a soap-on-a-rope, and a book token. I didn’t tell them about the ear-piercing. There’s no point upsetting them needlessly. It had already been legally established that they have no rights with me—the fact that they brought me up counts for nothing. Any mother, however evil, and any father, however distant, that’s the court system, and aunts and grandparents nowhere.