me a pair of striped dungarees approximating a pair seen and admired on Lallie in a TV Times article. In the mansion scenes, she often sports a pair of polka-dot pyjamas, but I’m resigned to wearing brushed-nylon nighties from British Home Stores. I have mentioned pyjamas, but it seems there are none in the shops. I don’t want to harp on about them, as Mum calls it, because I couldn’t bear to be teased. Not about the pyjamas, but about Lallie.
The fact is that Lallie, either as herself or as me, is the first thing I think about when I wake and the last thing to leave my head at night. She’s more vivid to me than anything else in my life – my parents, or school, or swimming with Christina. And that half an hour feeding on her image is the keenest pleasure of a day spent in pleasure. I’m a lucky girl.
WHEN THE HOUSES on Adelaide Road were built, towards the end of the nineteenth century, they were destined for the newly wealthy, with spacious rooms designed for entertaining and cramped servants’ quarters for the staff who made entertaining possible. But after the Second World War, when there were no more servants and much less wealth, bright new suburbs were built away from the centre of town, and the middle classes, eager for the next best thing and poorer than they used to be, abandoned gloomy Victoriana for the all-mod-con estates.
A few elderly householders, the legatees of the nineteenth-century doctors and solicitors, endured. As they died, the rest of the houses on Adelaide Road were sold off cheaply, to anyone who needed the space and couldn’t afford to object to rampant damp, ageing wiring and primitive plumbing. Developers divvied the buildings up into bedsits, handy both for the centre of town and the red-light district which was encroaching from the bottom of the road. A couple of unambitious brothels opened. Young couples who couldn’t afford the suburbs and were planning on a family ignored the signs of dereliction and spent weekends ripping out original marble fireplaces and oak panelling and replacing them with gas fires and Formica units. Guesthouses were established for the less successful kind of travelling salesmen. And the Brights lived there, among all this improvement and change, with no project other than existence at its most basic.
The Bright household was a shifting population of rabble-rousing adults and their resiliently neglected children, some of whom had children of their own. The family had a dynastic reputation among social services and the local magistrates court; the Bright name denoted an unworthy expenditure of time, and further signified, at the least, violence and burglary and alcoholism. Bright children truanted and stole and were occasionally sent to Borstal, once Borstal was invented. The adults spent many nights in police cells, and longer periods in jail. The police were the one public body who had a sort of weary affection for the Brights; they could so reliably be traced as the repository of stolen goods or the participants in a bungled break-in. And although individual family members had their moments, there was a Bright attitude born of hopelessness which was the next best thing to affability. No police officer, forced to make an arrest, ever felt that a Bright took it personally.
In the house on Adelaide Road, entertaining as conceived by the original architect had no place, although there were many visitors. Maureen Bright, known universally as Nan although she was only in her mid-forties, kept food on the table for the youngest, even if meals were irregular and usually from the chip shop. She preferred soft textures herself, as most of her teeth were in an agonizing state of decay. Nan was unique among her family in that she drank not to get drunk, but to ease the pain that lived and screamed in her mouth, day and night.
Nan never left the house. This was a fact, not a problem. She gave Pauline or one of the other kids money to get chips or her cigarettes or something from the off-licence if she was flush, and stayed indoors. She wasn’t a maternal woman, but she was better than nothing, and Pauline, if anyone had bothered to ask her to choose, would have singled out Nan as her favourite relative apart from her mum. Joanne, Nan’s second daughter, divided her time between the house in Adelaide Road and longer periods away with various boyfriends, most of whom were pimps. Pauline