Bad Blood

Marj was my schoolgirl mother’s brand-new best friend. Valma, my mother, had just turned sixteen that spring of 1934, and Marj was a year or at most two years older. She’d left school and was at a loose end, waiting for a hospital place to train as a nurse. She spent a lot of time at the vicarage, almost lived there, because she had in a sense no home.

Grandma had blackmailed Grandpa for years, by threatening to show his private diary to the Bishop unless he handed over part of his stipend every quarter?

. I couldn’t resist the

longing to be liked and accepted, even though it was so transparent its very intensity undermined my efforts. No one in the second eleven was more than dutifully friendly; they were embarrassed by my neediness and wary. Only in her company could I forget myself.

When, in my teens, I quarrelled with my mother, she would say in despair and disgust, “You’re just like your grandfather,” meaning

with the carving knife one of the many times when he came home pissed and incapable.”

had a scar down his hollow cheek, too, which Grandma had done

The high school liked girls with rounded characters, loyal, outgoing, serviceable girls who made the best of themselves.

marry local traders and solicitors like their fathers. Th

The high school cultivated the air of being somehow still fee-paying, it was designed to produce solid, disciplined, well-groomed girls who’d