Lizzie Vogel 1 - Man at the Helm

24

We moved on a Friday with the help of Mr Lomax. Free of charge.

Mr Lomax was still a feature in our lives, even after turning out to be a partly bad apple. My sister felt sure he didn’t know that we knew of his entanglement with Charlie Bates, and though it was tempting to a righteous person like her to make him face up to his misdeeds and general badness, my sister decided that his usefulness as a repentant odd-job man was too valuable to throw away on revenge and justice.

‘But why’s he being so helpful then, if he doesn’t know we know?’ I asked.

‘He knows and that’s enough,’ she said. I still wasn’t convinced, but I didn’t mind because I didn’t think he was all bad. I have to say, though, it felt wrong not telling Little Jack, who had sensed badness in Mr Lomax all along. It seemed unfair not to reward his intuition. I said so to my sister and she said people like him didn’t need acknowledgement for their knowingness. If you know everything, you know everything and can’t expect people to be constantly telling you that you were right.

The day started well. Everything was in boxes and lots of rubbish was in bags by the bins. Our mother kept reminding us there was very little space at Willow Drive and that we should only take what we absolutely needed or couldn’t bear to part with. I packed my clothes and Monopoly and Scrabble, my collection of scrapbooks and a fan I’d got from Spain. We had eight trips to and fro on the move day in Mr Lomax’s brand-new van.

Much of the big furniture did indeed stay in the house and became the property of Dr Gurly and Sheela – the scrubbed table in the kitchen, for instance, because it was too big, and other things too valuable to hang on to.

Let me describe our new house. It had two rooms downstairs. A kitchen and a lounge. Mr Lomax fixed a piece of chipboard up to make a bedroom for our mother in the smaller half of the lounge. The remaining bit of lounge adjoined the kitchen and became our playroom. We’d never had a lounge before and weren’t sure what people had them for. Our mother, who’d previously winced at lounges, said a lounge was instead of a sitting room, only more for lounging in than sitting and usually smaller. Upstairs were two bedrooms, one of which had a pink and purple plaque affixed reading ‘Lizzie’s Room’. I can hardly put into words just how affected I was upon seeing this. I saw it as a sign that this was a most positive and perfect move for us, which I already thought. I apologized to my sister for her name not also being on the door – seeing as it was to be her room as much as it was mine and she said something that shook me.

‘Well, you’ll live here a good bit longer than I shall,’ she said. And I thought about that for a moment – life without my sister. And I think I felt what Charlie and other men felt when pondering outer space and infinity and I was terrified by it. I didn’t want to even imagine such a thing and my eyes stung and a smell of pepper surrounded me. Looking back, I was a bit all over the place, feeling first elated by the silly name sign, then devastated by a simple fact. It wasn’t a reflection on the house or the room or the idea of my sister leaving in the future. It was just that moving house is a big thing and can upset your balance and cause havoc with your emotions.

To continue with the tour of the new house, there was a dampish bathroom with pale pink tiles covering the walls and dark patches where the carpet met the pedestal of the basin and the trunk of the toilet. And that was the whole house. The staircase was a ladder of chunky planks at such an abrupt angle that Debbie never ventured upstairs and the rest of us never went up or down without due care and holding the rope, which of course Debbie couldn’t do, being a Labrador.

There were built-in cupboards and shelves around the place, including a cupboard that cut off a corner so that the cupboard was triangular and useless. The back garden was a lawny yard with a rabbit’s grave at the end. We knew this because the girl who’d lived there before had said so in a note. That it was buried there and had been called ‘Bunny’.

That first night, before we’d unpacked, I heard my sister say to our mother, ‘Lizzie’s gone a bit weepy.’ And I could have killed her because then I did cry and had to pretend to be getting my clothes out of a bin bag.

Our mother said, ‘Is she? Perhaps I should go and get some chop suey.’

And my sister said, ‘Or chips?’

Our mother went off and came back with the chips and we sat on the floor. Debbie couldn’t settle and kept wandering around. She didn’t have much space. There was no boot room or porch. There wasn’t even a space big enough for her basket and nowhere for her to stretch out like a walrus and be alone. Even the garden was too small. There wasn’t room to run or chase a bee.

Eventually, days later, when Debbie was still unsettled, we decided we’d have to start walking her and that seemed so strange. The ‘having to walk Debbie’ thing was a negative. Debbie hated being taken for a walk – I think she was embarrassed. We’d drag her down to a square of grass and she’d sniff around and go to the toilet and while we were there waiting for her to go, other dogs would turn up and do the same and all the dog owners would smile and nod.

Another downside to the new house was that it had no land, only the yard of lawn and rabbit grave. This was a problem for our two remaining ponies, Sacha and Maxwell (Bilbo and Robbie having been sold and therefore of no concern).

We should have sold them all. But we couldn’t bear to part with Sacha and Maxwell. Our mother said there was no spare money, so we had to find some cheap grazing for them or they would have to go too. ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way,’ she said.

The first thing we did was go to see Dr Gurly. We explained our predicament, which was that we desperately wanted to keep our ponies but we had strong feelings about farms and could we please keep them in their paddock until we found a nice farm with a kind and animal-loving farmer. My sister told Dr Gurly about the farmer shooting the cow in the plough and Dr Gurly said, ‘Golly, how horrible.’ I added that farmers hardly ever stroked their calves or piglets, but my contribution was badly timed and rather cut short Dr Gurly’s sympathizing over the shot cow, so I added the greasy-feathered crows hanging by their feet from boundary wire as a warning. And all the drowning, castrations, branding and baby mice. And Dr Gurly started laughing. Dr Gurly had the kind of confident manner that enabled her to laugh at things that weren’t funny but might be a bit exaggerated.

She apologized, though, and said she didn’t mean to laugh and it all sounded quite horrible and she couldn’t bear the thought of us ever setting foot on a farm again. She was joking but not against us, just enjoying our stories, and said that as far as she was concerned we could keep two ponies in the paddock, but only as a stopgap with an eight-week limit and she didn’t want the 50p per week. But she would like to check with Sheela first. Which she did later and then phoned to say it was fine but not for too long – because she wanted to get a go-kart. And go-karts and ponies don’t mix.

We found the Sycamore Estate to be a magical place. The little houses lining the curved streets being just like the triangle-topped squares Jack arranged beside his train track. And ditto the little trees dotted about and bits of picket fence. The Sycamore Estate was neat, cosy and small. The houses were either very similar or exactly the same. Some had been tampered with to give them the edge – such as a name etched onto a slice of wood.

Ours was number 28 Willow Drive and had no extras.

It was understood on the Sycamore Estate that things were as they were. If your house was prettified with fake Swiss shutters or black iron door furniture in the medieval style, then very good. If, however, yours was a bit rickety – say the lounge window was boarded up after an accident or a row, or the garage door dented after a bump – that was OK too. There was no sense that you were expected to enhance anyone else’s life via your house or behaviour.

We were tucked away and no one saw us except the other Willow Drive dwellers. No one was there unless they lived there (and I’m not counting anyone who lived there), so no one was there. No one heard what we were saying, only estate people and they didn’t mind us and we didn’t mind them. No one walked past on the way to church and no one gazed in. No one parked outside to go to the Co-op or the doctor or the butcher or on a country walk. It was as though we no longer lived in the village.

No one on the Sycamore Estate had much more than anyone else except the occasional few who’d built extensions over the garages, but those people were admired for that little bit extra and not thought badly of and they usually had four children or a fourth on the way and that was their excuse for the extra room.

As I say, a few had fake shutters in the alpine style and some had medieval-style door furniture. One or two had knobbly glass in the front door and some had tarmacked over the nine foot of lawn at the front to fit another vehicle off the road. Some had a dog, many didn’t.

No one took any notice.

After doing a few sums, my sister – who was getting to be a bit of a maths genius – showed our mother that even in the cheaper house and with a new attitude our finances weren’t going to add up. She made a sum of the money needed for the mortgage, rates, bills, dinners, school uniforms, newspapers and extras (such as sweets, wine, whisky and cigarettes, dog food) and the total of that, minus the forecast amount from the few active shares, was a pretty big number.

‘What about the money from selling the house?’ I asked, not that I needed to know, but just clarifying for our mother and to remind her it had gone.

‘That money went partly to the bank for the mortgage and partly to other people who needed money, such as Miss Woods for all the ham and tobacco, and the council for the rates and various others,’ said my sister.

Our mother’s family weren’t doing so badly in the recession, mainly being in the professions as opposed to business and having a healthier mix of shares than our mother, who never bothered to learn about investments or thought to ask for advice. She could have asked them then for financial help (perhaps she did, I don’t know) but our shortness of money was not going to be short-term, it was going to be for ever, unless something unusual happened such as winning the pools or ‘spot the ball’ and our mother didn’t even do those things. So if her family had helped with money, they’d have had to keep on helping and helping and helping (like a charity that tackles the wrong end of a problem) and that would have been wrong and embarrassing. So in the end our mother decided there was nothing else for it.

‘There’s nothing else for it,’ she said.

‘What?’ my sister said.

‘I’ll have to get a job,’ said our mother.

‘A job?’ said my sister. ‘God, what will you be?’

‘I can’t be anything,’ she said, ‘I didn’t ever train to be anything. I’ll have to do something.’

Jack began to cry at the thought of her doing something new that he couldn’t imagine. ‘What, Mum?’ he sobbed. ‘What will you do?’

‘I don’t know yet, Jack,’ she said with a sigh. ‘We’ll see. There is one thing, though …’

‘What?’ we all said.

But she didn’t answer. Her eye had been caught by a Vacant Situation in the Mercury.

‘There you are,’ she said, tapping, ‘“Drivers Wanted”. I can drive. I’m a good and experienced driver with a clean licence.’

‘What was the one thing?’ I asked, because it had sounded important and might be better than being a driver. But whatever it was, she’d forgotten it now she’d seen that Drivers were Wanted and her face had broken into a smile which included her eyes.

The driving job was the only position that appealed or seemed suitable (factory and nursing auxiliary jobs seeming a bridge too far) and she ringed it in pencil and composed a perfect letter of application to Snowdrop Laundry Services.

It wasn’t long before she heard back and was given the date for an interview and we put her through the mill in rehearsal, her last interview having been for boarding school when she was eleven.

‘Give me a practice run,’ she said. ‘Put me through the mill.’

‘What is your favourite thing about driving?’

‘How long have you been driving?’

‘Have you ever driven a van before?’

‘What jobs have you ever done before?’

‘Have you ever run anyone over or had a crash?’

And my sister, who herself had attended a recent interview at the paper-shop, asked the most probing question of all: ‘Why do you want this job?’

To which our mother answered, ‘Because I have a family to keep and I’m in debt up to my neck.’

My sister advised her against that response, saying she needed a better reason than that in order to make herself seem perfect for the job.

‘You should say you want a new challenge,’ she said, ‘otherwise it looks as though you’re just doing it for the money.’

In between the application and the interview Dr Gurly and Sheela invited us for dinner. Dr Gurly rang one evening and said, ‘Who am I speaking to?’ and I said, ‘It’s Lizzie Vogel,’ and she laughed so I knew it was her, it being the same laugh as when she’d laughed about the horrible farmers.

‘Hello, Lizzie. It’s Jill Gurly,’ said Dr Gurly.

And I said, ‘Hello, Jill,’ and we had a little conversation.

Then she said, ‘I’m ringing to see if you’d like to come and have supper with myself and Sheela on Friday night, after you’ve done the ponies.’

And I said, ‘Me?’ and Dr Gurly laughed again.

‘All of you,’ she said.

We’d never before, ever, been invited anywhere for dinner – or lunch or breakfast, come to that (not counting two weddings). Not all of us together, all three kids and our mother, as a family. Never. So we were overly thrilled. It was a bit like the time we were invited to go to Dorset except that this time the invitation was 100 per cent real and out of the blue and definitely not a misunderstanding or a lie.

How strange it was to be there in our old house (which actually still felt like our house since it was brimming with our furniture and even a picture Little Jack had painted of a boot stuck up on the side of a dresser). But it was extremely nice. Everything was.

First, the niceness of Dr Gurly and the kindness of Sheela, who, it turned out, was a doctor too but not in the ordinary sense and who knew the audiologist who’d been so cross with us at Jack’s hearing test. Sheela described her as an old bag with no sense of humour. After a bowl of onion soup which was very dark in colour and tasted slightly of toffee, we had a big cheesy bread thing with olives on top and all sorts of bits of vegetable which were both raw and slightly burnt at the same time. And with that, a great big wooden bowl of leaves and chives. Then there was a chocolate mousse, which was one of the nicest things I’d ever eaten.

‘I hope the food is all right for you,’ said Dr Gurly.

‘It’s the nicest meal I’ve ever had,’ said our mother, which was probably true because there were only nice people in attendance and no one worrying about table manners and no meat and hardly any cutlery to speak of. Also, she hadn’t had that many meals – as such – since being divorced. Just peanuts and fruit.

‘The garden is beginning to come into its own,’ said Dr Gurly, and that gave our mother the opportunity to say, ‘Just you wait – soon there’ll be Mr Gummo’s alliums in the beds and Mexican fleabane all over the paths and steps.’

And it was a lovely thing to be able to say and all because we had been invited and she had remembered about them.

‘I want to get him to put in some blackcurrants,’ said Dr Gurly.

‘Yes, and to clear away access to the drains, which have been covered over the years,’ said Sheela.

The three women drank a bottle of rosé wine in the fat bottle and then another and were tipsy and amusing and our mother told Sheela that she was probably about to start a full-time driving job and therefore desperately trying to reduce the prescription medication she was taking. Sheela stopped being tipsy and went into professional mode, which was the right thing to do.

‘It’s great to hear you’re trying to reduce your medication. Well done. Are you doing it in conjunction with your GP?’ Sheela asked.

‘Yes, sort of, yes, I am,’ she said. ‘I was wondering,’ our mother went on, ‘how long it will take until I start feeling normal.’

‘Normal?’ said Sheela. ‘You mean functioning without the medication?’

‘Yes,’ said our mother, ‘normally.’

‘As a rough guide, I always say it will take as long to normalize as you were taking the medication,’ Sheela said. ‘So if you’ve been on them for a year, you’ll need a year.’

‘Like the reflection of a mountain in a lake,’ said our mother.

‘Well, yes, that’s a poetic way of putting it,’ said Sheela.

‘Anyway,’ said Dr Gurly, changing the subject, ‘Sheela and I wanted to get you all here and have a meal and say a huge thank-you for letting us buy your lovely house.’ And she raised her glass and we raised ours.

And Sheela said, ‘And you must come and see us whenever you like. You are very welcome.’

And Dr Gurly said, ‘Here’s to Maxwell.’ And I didn’t ask why she said that, I just knew he’d done something odd and didn’t want any details.

And I realized that moving from the lovely house was the best thing we’d ever done. In moving from that house, we were welcome there, more welcome than we had ever been even when we’d lived there. I think it was the first place we’d ever been welcome. And the mousse had been the nicest thing I’d ever eaten and Sheela the nicest person and our mother was going to be back to normal in around two years. Like the reflection of a mountain in a lake. It was a lovely evening and we walked back to the Sycamore Estate in the dark.

‘That was nice,’ said our mother.

‘Are they Libyans?’ asked Little Jack.

‘I think they are,’ said my sister.

We wondered if they’d ever ask us again, seeing as we’d eaten everything all up and our mother had talked about her pill problem. And just to put the icing on the cake, they did ask us – they rang up about a fortnight later and said they were doing a curry and did we want to come over. I don’t need to write about that because it was nice again and in the same sorts of ways and we were getting used to being welcome and that in itself was nice.

The day of our mother’s interview at Snowdrop Laundry Services dawned and she got dressed in sensible clothes, apart from her sandals. My sister criticized them.

‘What?’ said our mother.

‘Your feet don’t look like they belong to a van driver,’ said my sister.

In the end she wore a pair of Mr Gummo’s shoes, which were only one size too big and had accidentally moved house with us. And she went off looking like a van driver from head to toe.

The Snowdrop depot was on the Soar Banks industrial estate, some eight miles from our home. She attended at 10 a.m. and was gone for two hours plus. When she got home, she was no longer the mother we’d always known, though I can’t quite say why. She was just different, like a toddler who’s been to nursery for the first time or a boy who’s been in front of a magistrate.

‘How did it go?’ my sister asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said our mother, taking off Mr Gummo’s shoes.

‘That’s the thing,’ said my sister, ‘you never do, unless it goes badly.’

‘They’re going to let me know,’ she said.

And then, at our insistence, our mother described the whole thing in detail with lots of ‘he said/I said’.

She’d had twenty minutes’ worth of talking with a man called Mr Holt, who was the traffic manager. Mr Holt had barely looked at her, and although he’d asked ‘myriad difficult questions’ – including some on the subject of driving – he’d not asked that most probing of questions, ‘Why do you want this job?’ It seemed to be understood that it was for money.

Then Mr Holt had handed her a road map and said, ‘It’s Friday afternoon, you’re in Malby. You need to get to Markfield. How are you going to get there in under an hour?’

And she, being OK with a map and a straight talker, said, ‘I’d curse the person who planned the routes, then go via Enderby.’

‘You’re low on fuel in Loughborough and need to get to the Red Lion in Rothley,’ he said. ‘Where would you fill up?’

‘I have no idea.’ she’d said, ‘I tend not to let myself get low on fuel.’

After a few more map-reading and route-planning questions, Mr Holt had handed her over to Miss Kellogg, his deputy, who’d asked her to park a Leyland van while she watched with a clipboard. Our mother reverse-parked it beautifully but Miss Kellogg had asked her, ‘And how do you propose to open the back doors?’

Our mother hadn’t been able to answer – only, ‘I can’t.’

Miss Kellogg explained that a van driver’s back doors are his number-one concern. ‘It’s a case of “Can I get things in and out of my doors?” and you never reverse-park unless you’re done for the day,’ she said.

Then, after Miss Kellogg, she had another session with Mr Holt. He asked her to drive him to the County Arms and back in the same Leyland van. And when they got back to the depot, she didn’t reverse-park but went into a space nose-in.

‘Why didn’t you reverse her in?’ Mr Holt asked.

‘I thought I’d leave access for the doors,’ she said.

‘Do it again, reverse in, we’re done for the day,’ said Mr Holt.

So she did and, wanting to keep the van neatly tucked in and in line with the other parked vans, she bumped the wall. After that, Mr Holt spoke again, at length.

He told her she’d broken the law twice during the test drive, once when she’d turned into Canal Street – it being a no-right-turn junction – and once when she’d moved off on an amber light. Also, she’d failed to apply the handbrake on the small incline turning into the County Arms and had held the van on the clutch-bite.

This was the most serious of the three mistakes and a van driver’s Golden Rule, because although it wasn’t exactly law-breaking, in the sense of the Highway Code, the engine on the Leyland vans couldn’t withstand that kind of abuse on a daily basis.

‘These vans are over two tonnes in weight, they want to roll back. You must never hold them on the clutch,’ he said. ‘Do you understand?’

And then he’d said, ‘If you work for me and I have to get your clutch fixed, you’ll have some explaining to do – are we clear?’

Mr Holt described the job. The main thing seemed to be just getting it done and the van not breaking down, particularly not on account of the clutch, and if a driver could achieve that, the rest was easy. The worst thing – the thing to be avoided – was that the customer would be dissatisfied and switch to another laundry – God forbid, Advance Towel Services, who were their main rival with towels.

‘Who is your main rival with boiler suits?’ our mother asked, showing great interest.

‘Our main rival there is modern fabrics and washing machines and people doing their own.’

He told her the job was all about driving all over the county to shops, pubs, clubs and hotels, delivering and changing towels in toilets. Automatic roller towels, Turkish rollers, flats, tea towels, dust-mats and boiler suits. There were five set routes for each day of the week and each van had a driver and a boy. The driver and boy were expected to empty the dirty laundry at the end of each day and load the van ready for the next.

All in all, our mother seemed quite inspired by the interview and indeed the whole event and the marvellous concepts such as being done for the day and the bun stops, the payload and applying the handbrake, which she’d only ever used for parking and now knew it had this other crucial role.

Then, after her detailed telling of it, the phone rang and it was Mr Holt saying she had got the job if she wanted it just as long as she gave him her word that she’d use the handbrake. To start the following Monday at 8 a.m. She accepted and hung up the phone.

‘I’m a van driver,’ she said, and we celebrated with a little dance around her.