When I Had a Little Sister. Catherine Simpson

I retrained as a journalist because that seemed an acceptable way to earn a living with words. My mother died when I was forty-two and shortly after that I began to write pieces of fiction and memoir. It took me until my first novel was published, when I was fifty-one, to realize the death of my mother and the birth of my writing were linked – that in losing my mother I had acquired the right to write my own life.

       Chapter Five

      After Tricia died the thought of what would be involved in clearing the farmhouse was terrifying.

      A few years earlier I had viewed a house for sale in which the owner had died of a heart attack only days before and I had been appalled to see bread on the kitchen units that was still in date and the dead owner’s appointments on the calendar for the following week: Coffee with Bernard, 2 o’clock.

      Families move at different speeds. Tricia had been dead six months when Dad said, ‘What about doing something wi’ yon house?’ and we knew we couldn’t put it off any longer. At first I thought we’d get a skip, but no, Dad built another enormous bonfire in the orchard – this time away from the telephone wires – and, bit by bit, we ferried generations of possessions onto what was in effect a funeral pyre.

      Not knowing what to do with many things with sentimental value, we threw them into a ‘Memory Box’, actually a yellow cardboard box in which my new boots had just arrived.

      These were the things we saved:

      Tricia’s childhood jewellery: tangled silver chains, little charms and bent and twisted earrings; her drawings and paintings, watercolours of cats and dogs and horses and self-portraits; photographs of Tricia with friends we didn’t know in places we didn’t recognize. I studied her face, scanning her expression for signs of distress – did she want to be there? Was she enjoying herself or was she desperate to be alone, smoking? Was that a false smile? Was she suffering? Was that one of her good days or one of her bad?

      We saved stacks of her notebooks and diaries that I couldn’t bear to read – including the notebook that the police officer had removed along with her body. ‘She wrote a lot, didn’t she?’ he said the following day when he returned to take down more details. Elizabeth was angry. We did not know what she’d written in that notebook so why should he? Apparently, though, the book did not shed any light on her thoughts on her last night on this earth – it did not contain a suicide note. We were allowed to have it back after the inquest, except by then it was lost. Incensed they had been so careless with her things, we asked the Coroner’s Office to chase it up until the police found it and hand-delivered it to Dad’s in a sealed envelope to stop him reading it and getting upset.

      We saved Tricia’s soft toys. How do you burn a teddy bear you remember from childhood, no matter how filthy? We saved a home-made sheep, a rock-hard badger and a gangly Pink Panther. Who made these? Nobody could remember. It was probably Mum’s mum, Grandma Mary, who took up handicrafts with a passion after her husband, Grandad Ben, died – sublimating her grief in patchwork dogs, hessian dolls and punched leather work.

      We saved Tricia’s one-legged Tiny Tears doll called Karen who we found naked except for a bikini drawn on in green felt pen and wrapped in Mum’s old fox fur with its flat nose and glass eye. Karen and the toys were rescued from the farmhouse only to be flung on a rocking chair in a corner of Dad’s house where they remain, described by my teenage daughter, Lara, as ‘that pile of old weird shit’.

      We saved sherry glasses – stacks of sherry glasses in styles ranging from the delicately etched of the 1930s to the clunky and chunky of the 1970s – even though we had never drunk sherry except at Christmas. Where had all these sherry glasses come from? Dead great-aunts? Grandma? No one could remember but we took to drinking Harveys Bristol Cream before supper.

      I saved a page of doodles I discovered with the words ‘My name is Nina, and I am brilliant and I must not forget it’ written on, surrounded by trees and hearts, shoes and cats. I framed it and hung it on my daughter, Nina’s, wall.

      Although many items had been removed in the weeks after Tricia died, there were still plenty of things dangling in the wardrobe. I saved clothes that would never fit me and would never be worn again even if they did but that I remembered Tricia wearing, including the twenty-year-old bridesmaid’s dress she wore at my wedding. We saved a flowery skirt that I turned into a cushion, a dress I turned into a jumper and a jumper I turned into a hat. We saved broken beads to be made into Christmas decorations. We saved her piano certificates. We saved her swimming badges, from 50 metres to bronze lifesaving, which were still attached to her red stripy swimsuit. Going to ‘the baths’ at Lancaster had been a big deal. The first time we went I must have been about seven and expected it to be one big claw-foot bath like we had at home. I wore a swimsuit with polystyrene floats fitted round the waist – a costume rejected by Tricia. I gazed, fascinated, at the sign NO RUNNING, PUSHING, SHOUTING, DUCKING, PETTING, BOMBING, SMOKING with its helpful cartoon illustrations and I clung to the side as Tricia set off on tiptoe, splashing across the shallow end seemingly unconcerned by water lapping at her nostrils. It was similar to the only time we went ice skating. Then I’d gripped the safety rail while Tricia’s game spirit was spotted by a stranger – a middle-aged woman – who led her around the rink. By the end of a torturous hour for me they glided serenely back, side by side with crossed hands, like something off a Victorian Christmas card. Tricia was always braver than me.

      Some things were easy to burn: the piles of medication in blister packs, which went straight on the bonfire, as did stacks of appointment letters from the mental-health services. We burned her last packet of fags – the pack of ten with the four missing that we found on the bathroom floor – but by then I regretted we hadn’t put these with her in the coffin. Tobacco had been a good friend to Tricia.

      Many things were hard to burn; for instance her socks. Cello cried as he emptied her sock drawer onto the bonfire and watched Dad stopping the balled-up socks from rolling out of the flames with his big stick.

      Sometimes we got cavalier. I tossed a toilet bag into the fire without checking carefully enough what was inside, only to discover too late that it contained aerosols and sealed tubes that exploded and sent my father diving for cover behind the giant bamboo.

      During the weekends of clearing, the flames burned bright throughout Saturday afternoon and if they began to flag Dad would douse them in diesel and they’d soon be ten feet high again. The bonfire would still be smouldering on Sunday morning which meant we could continue; sofas, mattresses, damp quilts and bedspreads, all the velvet curtains, carpets, lino, on they went.

      It felt cleansing and became addictive; you’d find your eyes scanning a room for flammable materials. A battered screen! Dried-flower arrangements! More wool! Let’s drag them out and burn them!

      Once the rooms were empty we started pulling off wallpaper that hung loose and damp in places – great lengths of woodchip painted in shiny turquoise and mauve that came away bringing layers of plaster with it. We’d bang the flaking plaster with a brush until it all fell and we had at last got back to a sound surface. We wrenched off sheets of plasterboard that had been used to box in original features in the 1970s, to reveal wallpaper from the 1950s with hand-painted roses and lily of the valley.

      To watch dusty, neglected, largely unloved items set alight, burn, smoulder and turn to ashes felt right. It also felt very warm and, despite it being summer when we did the clearing, the heat on my face was comforting and gazing into the heart of a fire consuming my family history was mesmerizing.

      As a seven-year-old, I had watched the disposal of my Great-Great-Aunt Alice’s things and been fascinated by the dismantling of a life, fascinated to see someone’s life story being taken apart into its bits and pieces and each one being held up to the light, valued in some way, then kept or discarded.

      There were legends about Great-Great-Aunt Alice: she was a suffragette; she founded her own bus company between Manchester and Blackpool; she was a ‘man-hater’ who married a much younger man only to pay for him to go to Australia