The Ghost Lake, page 15
After I’ve picked up a few bits and bobs from the high street, with its mix of innovative street landscaping and street art alongside boarded-up shops and homeless people sleeping in doorways, I cut back and drive along the northern edge of the lake site, to Eastfield and the secondary school I attended.
I attended secondary school in the nineties. The school I went to was on a council estate but took in children from villages all around the valley. My friend who lived over in Flixton would be brought to school in a taxi as she was not on the bus route and was deemed rural enough for the pick-up service. Most people got the bus, either the subsidized school bus or the local bus that circled around the villages and between the towns. I often walked the two-mile route to school.
In my school there was a mix of lower-working-class, upper-working-class and lower-middle-class kids. Mostly the kids at the school were working class, some on the poverty end of the spectrum. I don’t think we had any upper-middle-class kids there, but it’s all a bit hazy and a long time ago and perhaps I just wasn’t aware of the hierarchy then. After all, class is a strange, slightly malleable thing. It’s very difficult to categorize sometimes and causes confusion. What I do know is that it felt like the children in the school were funnelled out to the jobs in the town.
I feel that a lot of what was going on at this time was cultural. You have to see it to be it. We did not see it. I was a bright student, but I struggled at school, swinging between being in the very top classes in English and science and the very bottom classes for maths. I later realized – much, much later, in my forties at this strange time of self-reflection – that I probably have dyscalculia, a form of maths and number-based dyslexia. I still tell the time backwards sometimes and read bus timetables wrong, as if the numbers change when I’m not looking. It did not stop me from getting a biomedical science degree. I found, later in my life, that given time I was more than capable of solving complex mathematical equations and molecular diffusions, but I did not come to the solutions in the way that other people seemed to. I still got there though.
At school they didn’t know what to do with me because of my maths scores. How could someone second to top in the entire school in English be almost bottom in maths? Unbelievably, at forty-six years old, I am still carrying shame around with me because I wasn’t good at maths. My anxiety completely ruled me and made it impossible to do simple things like raise my hand in class. I could navigate the anxiety if I was playing a part – telling jokes or playing the clown – but in maths I didn’t seem to be able to do that. I can feel the burning in my cheeks as I am writing this, as if I am standing in maths class and we are still playing the game in which the whole class stood, and then one by one you sat down when you correctly answered a maths question, until everyone had got one correct and everyone was sitting down. I am still the last person standing in that class, my mind completely blank because the anxiety of the situation is stripping away everything in my head except the fact that everyone is looking at me. I would leave classes like this one, and some others physically shaking (French was a particularly brutal class because, once again, there were quick-fire questions in front of other students).
I had serious issues with anxiety at school. I don’t know if it was just the way life was in the early nineties, but I never received support for this anxiety. I never asked for support. I was too anxious to ask for support, and I wouldn’t have really known what to ask for. At the time I was so utterly convinced that I was broken in some terrible way and to ask for help would mean admitting it. I have read that this is actually very common in autistic children. It’s another thing that has pulled me towards seeking diagnosis. No one around me asked for support on my behalf, perhaps not realizing that they could ask for support. Or perhaps the people who could have done that just accepted that this was the way I was – a bit odd, very shy. Perhaps they hoped I would simply grow out of it. I have not grown out of it. I cannot grow out of it. It is just who I am.
I was mercilessly bullied, very unpopular and very miserable right through school. My oddness was not something I could change. I could cover it, and God I tried to – losing weight, wearing make-up, agonizing over my hair, my clothes, always getting it wrong as if there was some mysterious set of rules that everyone around me knew but I didn’t. Somehow people always sensed that I was different. It was like they could smell it on me. They knew that I was other. I was so unpopular, such an oddity, that I was often the butt of practical jokes. These were jokes based around the fact that nobody would ever find me attractive, so they would dare each other to pretend to ask me out or, in one memorable case, to put a hand up my skirt. It sounds so brutal now, looking back. It was brutal. I am telling you this, not because I want your pity, but because I want you to see the other girls like me who I have no doubt still exist, and for you to notice them, and perhaps even help them. I am looking at my fourteen- or fifteen-year-old self and I am telling her that it gets better. That one day you will turn around and realize that the thing that made you different, the thing that made you not fit in, is the thing that makes you special. Your brain is a strange thing, but it is an utterly beautiful thing. By the end of school I was ready to leave. I wanted out at sixteen and relished the brief freedom between leaving school and getting an actual job.
There were children at the school who had terrible experiences just because they were poor or because they lived on the council estate near the school. They were simply not expected to do anything except be funnelled through the system into the tourism trade or the factories – the frozen chip factory, the bus-making factory, the printing factories.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of those jobs. I did factory work for about seven years, before I decided to try my hand as a lab assistant. But the problem was that it didn’t really feel like a choice. My interpretation is that if you came off a council estate the expectation was that you would end up cleaning caravans, serving in a café, working in a tourist tat shop or standing on a production line. At the time, I couldn’t see any problem with that, and I didn’t think to object to any of it because, again, you have to see it to be it, and the opportunities were not there. Only the gifted kids, or the kids with parents who could afford to have their children tutored and prepped, got to break out of that mould. If you were not from a family who could recognize your skills, your abilities, and if you already had, hanging over you, the stigma of poverty, of growing up on the council estate, you had to fight twice as hard to be noticed, and you could only do that if you recognized that you should be fighting, if you realized that there was something to fight against.
I cut my teeth in the tourist trade. My first job was as an unpaid volunteer in the holiday flats that my dad bought when holidays abroad were becoming dirt cheap, cheap enough for working-class folk to afford, meaning many of the British tourist towns were facing financial crisis. My dad saw this as an opportunity. He’d paid off the mortgage on the house we grew up in, so he could then get a new mortgage on a block of holiday flats.
The building was on a street leading towards North Bay. You could smell the sea, always. It was a tall, sandy-coloured Victorian terrace, and the house had an attic, a first floor and a ground floor. Four flats in all, with a shared toilet and a shared bathroom. My dad worked full time as a bus driver and repaired, painted, decorated, maintained and cleaned the flats after work and on weekends. I remember this time, when I was about nine or ten, as being a time when I so rarely saw my dad, how he would get in after dark, eat a dinner warmed up by my mum, then fall asleep in the chair. Then get up to go and drive buses all day before heading to the flats to fix the plumbing and paint the hallways. One of the photos we used on the funeral order of service showed him up a ladder, roller in hand, little blue cap and paint-stained jacket on, doing the hallway woodchip of the flats in eggshell. The little blue cap, flecked with paint, is on a chair in the hallway at my mum’s house. So emblematic of my dad. Just like his own dad whose trilby rode his coffin to the church on his last journey.
The holiday flats were my first real experience of the tourist trade and the amount of work that would go into making sure people’s holidays were happy ones. Work that was done, not by some faceless automaton in the background, seamlessly and mechanically moving between mucky toilets and stained bedclothes, but by kids, families, people striving and stretching and grafting. My dad, and my mum, really cared about people having good holidays. People holidaying in Scarborough tended to be like us, not well-off. Holidays took months, sometimes years, of saving up for, and they knew that most of the people staying in their little block of holiday flats were people like them, who scrimped and saved for a week in Scarborough once or twice a year. One couple came for their honeymoon at the flats. My dad got up early on the morning after they arrived to bring them a platter with sausages and bacon and eggs, a gift to celebrate their new marriage. They didn’t really know what to do with someone presenting them with a load of raw meat first thing in the morning, but it was the sort of traditional working-class thing that my dad really valued.
The flats were hard work for all of us. Every weekend my parents would wake us up – my older sister, my brother and me – and get us into whatever rust bucket we were driving at the time. We’d sit with the freshly ironed bedding across our knees, being poked in the back of the head with mop handles, the car filled with everything we’d need to clean four flats and welcome the guests. I was too little to be left at home on my own and I feel, looking back, that I was more of a nuisance than a help.
We’d work at manic speed, my mum checking the cleanliness of everything we did, getting us to clean again if it wasn’t to the standard necessary for paying guests. The overriding memory is one of the deep, dark Victorian hallway, the smell of the sea washing through the house with all the windows open, the shush-shush of curtains blowing in the breeze, the constant sound of hoovering. And of the other blocks of holiday flats in the street doing the same – a row of open front doors like flags welcoming the holidaymakers, and after midday a clunk and thud and clank of cleaning equipment being loaded into parked cars as the owners prepared to go home. It all had to be done by midday when check-in began. After that we’d head upstairs to the attic, which had previously been done out as a bedsit. One of us would be in charge of making tea, one of us would be sent to the chippy round the corner with a list. Such anxiety to stand in the chip shop and tell them what I wanted, the embarrassment of asking for five fish to be fried, holding everyone else up. Then we waited. Mum or Dad would take us home, and one or the other of them would take the shift of waiting for guests to arrive.
Eventually, my dad got sick of the maintenance and eventually he sold the flats, just as property markets were on the rise. The flats sold for a profit and, combined with the money earned from the sale of our family home, my dad was finally able to buy his dream house and the smallholding – the chickens, the orchard and the koi pond he took such pride in.
Now my mum is struggling to look after the smallholding, and my dad’s legacy is dissipating, and he is not here to witness it. I think about legacy a lot, especially in relation to my dad. He had hands that were permanently calloused from all the rough, manual graft he did, right from the age of fourteen, barely stopping. Even when he was so poorly, with a chemo line dangling out of his sleeve, he was still shifting piles of manure into the garden, digging and prepping vegetable beds, mowing lawns. It was in him, to be active, to be always in motion, to be always pushing back against something. It’s so strange to have that furious energy gone, so suddenly, like the way that birdsong stops at the end of summer, how it is always slightly unexpected.
Later, I visit Scarborough, looking for the holiday flats. The sun is bright hot, and Scarborough is just as I remember it, blue skies, sunshine, the Edward Hopper shadows of the tall buildings. I identify the house. This street, and the ones that lead down to the seaside, were always lined with B&Bs and self-catering holiday flats. The traditional B&B has faded away and now there are far more Airbnbs in the area. I think ‘our’ old holiday flats might be apartments these days. I imagine the people in them no longer share a toilet and a bathroom. It probably costs quite a lot to live in an apartment this close to the sea, Peasholm Park and the town.
I have other memories of the area. Often, rather than get in the way of the cleaning regime, I would escape the dark hallways of the holiday flats to go and sit in Peasholm Park, feeding the squirrels and telling stories to myself. Peasholm Park was a magical place of fairy lights and swan boats and wildlife. I’d see water voles there, Canada geese, coots bobbing through the lily pads. It was a place of dappled light between huge trees, with secret gardens and fishponds hiding around secluded corners. The park was laid out in 1912, and was influenced by Japanese and Chinese styles, with a pagoda, sculptures and a lantern walk. The design of the park was based around Thomas Minton’s ‘willow pattern’, a Chinoiserie pattern used on ceramic tableware. At the time it was seen as completely authentic, with Chinese workers hired as part of the construction team.
Part manmade and part nature, the park is unique in many ways. After the lake and the pedal boats, one finds oneself moving up through Peasholm Glen, following the route of Peasholm Beck. All around are giant trees. Each section has a tree-theme, different species specially collected and planted for the educated walker, at a time when science and nature were evolving together, and the world was being explored. The ‘Forests of the World’ walk includes ‘Pine Forests of North America’, ‘Chinese Foothills’, ‘English Beech Wood’, ‘Slopes of Nepal’ and ‘Woodlands of New England’. There are over a thousand trees planted in the glen. They are wondrously tall in places, so much so that in the 1980s a bridge was built over the glen so that people could view the trees at eye level. In the 1990s, after a period of low funding, the now rundown and vandalized park received investment from the government, but it was a local community, ‘the Peasholm Park Friends’, who came to the rescue of this unique woodland. To be in the glen is to be away from the town. The sounds change to those of the forest, the senses dulled among the trees, the way that light and sound becomes muffled in a million piney branches. It feels secretive.
In 1994, a member of the Tree Register came to audit the trees of Peasholm Park. To his astonishment, he found several ‘champion’ trees. Champion trees are individual trees that are seen as exceptional examples of their species either due to their size, their rarity or their historical significance. In this case the champion trees were trees of significant girth and height, and the best examples of the species in the country. He also discovered two Dickson’s Golden Elms, a tree thought to have become extinct during the Dutch Elm Disease outbreak in the 1970s. There is even a tree in the glen that defies identification, either by the Tree Register or indeed by Kew Gardens officials.
Truly, this place, planted for the amusement and delight of the people of Scarborough, is unique. The volunteers successfully bid for several small grants to help open up the woodland to the public and to make it accessible, creating a seating area and woodland walks so that people could identify the most special trees and connect to nature in a new and exciting way. I knew none of this as a child, roaming between these enormous trunks, looking for peace away from the grind of the Saturday cleaning schedule, and though I didn’t know the history of the place, I still felt a connection to nature. I did not need to name the trees. I only had to reach out and touch the textured trunks, inhale the scent, or sit among them to connect to them, to find solace in the dappled light and the musky smell of bark.
The glen winds away and the park continues into the Victorian Dean Road and Manor Road cemeteries with their angels and anchor headstones. On this visit, I come here to remind myself of this place of solace, walking through the deep hush of the woods, past the tinkling beck and out into the cemetery, finding myself a ten-minute walk away from Woodlands Cemetery and my daughter. When you live in the same place all your life, everything becomes overlaid. Every time I peel back a layer of myself, here I am again, and here is my daughter, the catalyst for my reawakening.
At fourteen years old I got a doomed job waiting in a café on the seafront in Scarborough. Later, when I would find myself back working in shops and cafés as a nineteen-year-old, I would enjoy the experience of seasonal work. There were things I loved about working on the seafront. There was a proper buzz about it. It was a real way for me to enjoy a more social interaction too. There is something intimate about two co-workers at the end of the season, waiting for tourists to enter a café or a shop, waiting for orders to come into the kitchen. There is nothing to do but talk. In those spaces of quiet contemplation, my work friends and I would discuss our hopes for the future, our boyfriends, our families.
I worked a lot of different jobs in my teens and early twenties. In the first jobs, my co-workers were a mixed bunch of working-class and lower-middle-class people, from different schools around the town. These were people who I still think of fondly, but whom I will never see again, or if I do, they would be unrecognizable to me, like looking back at a diary excerpt and wondering what the context of the entries was. Some of these people were hoping for A-levels, university, careers.
One working-class girl I worked with, when I was first living with the Unsuitable Man, was much older than me at twenty or twenty-one. She was already living on her own, cherishing her independence. She wanted to be someone, wanted to go somewhere, was working so hard to get experience in the retail trade. She saw herself as management material and had a plan – she would push through anything to own her own house and car and be at the top of the chain. She’d made poor decisions early on after leaving school, but she was insanely driven, would turn up to work in smart business suits and ask to be put onto National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) training. I never saw her family – she never really talked about them, except to say that she wasn’t really in touch with them anymore. Much, much later, when I worked in the laboratory, I came across her unusual name on a blood sample. It was a post-mortem sample. She had died of a heroin overdose, and I can remember being shocked, despite not having seen her for years, because she was the sort of girl who I assumed would ride her passion, her drive for life, to success. I never thought that this would be her end. I had been inspired by her, had gone on to do NVQs of my own in retail, holding the idea of her drive and passion for self-fulfilment in my head. What happened to her? I have no idea, but what I do know is that it is hard to break away from a life of feeling undervalued. To have a degree of self-validation is a brave thing for a girl whose family seemed to want nothing to do with her, a girl who decided to get out and work to strive. In this town, in seaside towns in general, people seem to roll towards the cliff edge seeking something beautiful, only to find the end of the earth and an expanse of deep blue nothing.
