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A Wife There Was
A Wife There Was
A Wife There Was
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A Wife There Was

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'Alison,' says her father, 'will be brought up as a boy.'

But this unwanted daughter is her own person.
A rebellious child, then a feisty woman.
challenging all male authority,
scorning the church's ideals of virginity and chastity,
embracing avidly the forbidden pleasures of sexuality.
Many husbands come her way - some by chance, some by choice.
So too does love - at its best, at its worst.

Born into a turbulent age
of never-ending war, relentless bubonic plague,
political unrest and fierce heresy-hunting,
Alison is very much a 14th century woman.

And yet...
her resilience and survival are timeless

Her life is haunted by conflict
between robust carnality
and a yearning for the serenity of spirituality
that she never finds. The years bring bleak inner journeys darkened by
sorrow and loss and buried secrets.

And yet, and yet...
come what may, Alison's abounding joy
is a light that never dims for long.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 12, 2007
ISBN9781466920712
A Wife There Was
Author

Gloria Cigman

Gloria Cigman, born in London. Education halted when evacuated as a child during World War Two. Five years at art schools and a brief career in advertising. Made up for lost time at night school after the age of 30. State Scholarship funded undergraduate study of English Language and Literature as a Mature Student at University College London, then postgraduate Medieval Studies in Oxford. Taught at the University of Warwick 1968-1996, as Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer. Since then, her time has been divided between Paris and Oxford, writing articles, papers for international conferences in Paris, Gottingen, Berlin, Prague, Marrakesh, Budapest, a book on shifting perceptions of evil (Exploring Evil, 2002), and this novel. After engaging for so long with what others have created, A Wife There Was fulfils an ambition to invent something of her own. Two daughters and three grandchildren play an important part in her life.

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    Book preview

    A Wife There Was - Gloria Cigman

    Copyright 2007 Gloria Cigman.

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

    transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or

    otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

    Note for Librarians: A cataloguing record for this book is available from Library

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    ISBN: 978-1-4251-1473-2

    ISBN: 978-1-4669-2071-2 (ebook)

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    10 9 8 7 6

    Contents

    Son or Daughter?

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Child–wife

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Sin and remorse

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Penitence?

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Husbands young and fresh

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Losses and Gains

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Endings and Beginnings

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    A WIFE

    THERE WAS

    Gloria Cigman

    ‘It tickles me to the very roots of my heart

    …that I have had my world in my time’

    ALISON

    For my parents, Annie and Jack

    ONE

    Son or Daughter?

    9781425114732_B6.pdf

    Chapter 1

    ALISON

    1337

    Not a promising beginning, that’s for sure. Not only was I not the boy they so craved, but my unwelcome and long-drawn-out birth nearly killed my mother. When I eventually emerged, it was feet first. They saw the missing zi-zi before the red, bawling face.

    Five sons, each named William, had lived for only a few weeks. Two others had been stillborn. As the years passed and boy after boy died, they must have asked themselves ruefully how many of the miscarriages had been boys. By the time I arrived, my four sisters were strong and thriving, two of them already restlessly marriageable and asking insistent questions about dowries.

    And there was Benjamin. Born to my weary mother three years before me – golden-haired and silent, he ate and drank very little, showed no sign that he could hear anything, but watched us all with bright, thoughtful eyes. Instead of putting paid to mutterings that some unseen sin, some secret evil, accounted for his strangeness, his awesome beauty simply fed the mutterers. That sixteenth pregnancy, everyone thought, was bound to be the last. My mother was forty-three.

    Then came the seventeenth. Surely, they had said, this late child, conceived in glorious late summer, would be a boy. My mother’s skin glowed for the first time in years; I moved vigorously within her, always on her right side; the talisman suspended on a chain over her belly leapt from east to west. No doubt about it, said my grandmother. Even so, fervent prayers were offered up to St Felicitas. Just in case. If by any chance this was a girl, a miracle could bring about what, after all, would be a very trifling task for a saint to set her hand to …

    … I now see the idleness of the saint and the intentions of Nature for what they were, rather than what they were not. Instead of a zi-zi, I had something that was to stand me in good stead all my life. To put it mildly.

    From the time I was still small enough to walk under the table without banging my head, I was puzzled about the woman who was always there, bundled up in clothes and sitting on the chair by the fireplace or the one next to the window. Like the furniture and like Ben, she never spoke; unlike Ben, she was absolutely still. I would stand with my elbows on her lap and my face propped on my hands, earnestly willing the blank, half-closed eyes to look back at me. I’d whisper to her and ask what her name was and who combed her hair and changed her clothes and when she went to the privy and where she slept. She didn’t once answer me. Perhaps I’d never wondered where my mother was because so many women busied themselves with me in our crowded household. And because my dear grandma, Bandam Bess, was always close by. She was Grand-dame to everyone but me. When I started to talk I couldn’t pronounce gr. For me, sheep all chewed tranquilly on been baass and there were people all around us who never seemed to stop bumbling and boaning and bowsing. I couldn’t pronounce cr either, which didn’t stop me from enjoying the thick beam on top of the pitcher of milk or from backing nuts with my wooden mallet and scattering bumbs all over the floor. By the time I learned to say gr and cr, it was unthinkable to call Bandam anything else.

    I didn’t realise who the still and silent person in our house was, even when Bandam Bess started to talk to me about her little Eleanor, who had been pretty, like me, and naughty, like me, with a gap between her front teeth, just like mine. Eleanor’s hair, she said, had been as thick and red-gold as mine, until it became dry and thin and grey. When I saw a tear run down her face, I supposed that her little Eleanor had grown old and died.

    As the youngest in the family, I was a kind of object. An object to be played with, fed, kept clean, shouted at and laughed at. There wasn’t a single thing I could do that someone else couldn’t do better. Margery, once my wet-nurse, then our servant, worked hard. My sisters squabbled endlessly about whose turn it was not to do what. I wasn’t allowed to help. Above all, I yearned to slosh water around as I’d seen Margery doing.

    ‘Let me sbub the floor, please let me, please, please, or I’ll sbeam!’

    When they ignored me, I did scream, and was put outside the door or under the table.

    ‘You’re always under our feet. Go and look after Ben.’

    How could I? Ben just sat there all day, rocking to and fro on the same spot: looking, not seeing; listening, not hearing, spoken to, not answering. Even so, Ben had a place in my daily life, whereas my mother was a presence without a place. Until the day I saw my father cross the room and pause by her side, then put a hand on her shoulder and bend down to whisper to her so softly that none of us could hear what he was saying. As she looked up at him with a smile that was warm but fleeting, it came to me that this must be my mother. I cried out and ran across the room to Bandam, who swiftly gathered me onto her lap and wrapped her arms around me.

    ‘She changed after you were born, my little weasel.’

    Bandam’s sadness reproached me, but her smile was forgiving. How could it have been my fault? Hers, perhaps, for not teaching her daughter how to stop the making of babies after her body and mind were tired out? My father’s, perhaps? But how could it have been mine? More than two years were to pass before my mother smiled for me.

    1342-1344

    The seventh of April came round again. For this fifth birthday, Bandam gave me three narrow blocks of wood. She’d burned tiny holes for eyes and noses and slits for mouths and swaddled each of them in triangles of soft wool.

    ‘There. You’re not going to have any baby brothers or sisters, so these can be your babies.’

    I took them outside and sat on the ground, staring at them. Then I made three shallow holes, propped each of them up and pelted them with stones and crab-apples. When they fell over, I started again, so intent on what I was doing that I didn’t see Bandam standing watching me. She was very cross.

    ‘What are you doing with your babies, you unkind Mummy?’

    Babies? As if I would think they were babies. When she turned away, I unwrapped them and used one to hit an apple back and forth against the wall. The apple soon broke into soggy pieces, so I picked up the three damp pieces of wood and took them next door. Matilda, five whole months older than me, always knew what to do when I didn’t. She wrapped them in the folds of her skirt.

    ‘Poor babies.’

    ‘They’re not babies. They’re just pieces of wood.’

    ‘No. They’ve got faces. Wood doesn’t have faces.’

    Matilda laid all three side by side on a cushion and sat looking at them fondly.

    ‘There. Baby Jesus, baby Mary and baby Joseph.’

    I laughed.

    ‘They’re not. Jesus and Mary and Joseph weren’t all babies at the same time.’

    ‘They don’t belong in time.’

    ‘What are you talking about, rabbit-face? Come on, let’s play leap frog.’

    I ran away and she followed me. The wood-babies were forgotten. We chased each other around, falling over and picking ourselves up, hiding and finding and laughing. Neither of us had the slightest inkling that this had been the first of many glimpses of the very different directions our lives were to take, or that a time could ever come when we would no longer play together so joyfully.

    Only many years later, as I knelt in the great cathedral at Chartres, close to the sacred garment that the Virgin Mary wore when the Angel Gabriel came to her, did I know what Matilda had always known: that there is another world beyond this one and beyond time.

    On my sixth birthday, Bandam started teaching me the letters of the alphabet. She made me form their shapes with my fingers and thumbs and repeat their sounds after her: s was hardest to make, but a and b and c were easy.

    ‘Such pretty hands, my little Alison,’ she said, and gently kissed each palm, then folded my fingers round, as if to stop the kisses from slipping away.

    Bandam chuckled with delight the day she came upon me crouched over a pile of muddy worms, pummelling them crossly because they wouldn’t stay in the shapes I wanted.

    In our house, we had a book. My father would bring it out proudly every Sunday. He’d prop it up on the table and gather us around him before starting to move a pointer sideways across each page and saying a lot of words, one after the other, in a slow and solemn voice. I soon stopped listening and, when no-one was looking, would climb under the table and squat there, thinking about something else. Until the day when Bandam suddenly reached down and pulled me to my feet. With my father’s permission, she stood me on a chair in front of the book, spread a piece of fine leather lightly over the open page to protect it from her fingers and, with everyone watching, showed me how the sounds I’d learned to make for different shapes can be joined up to make words. She pointed to g o d, then m e n. Then p o o r, then r i c h. I clapped my hands and burst out laughing, which brought Agnes to her feet angrily,

    ‘Nobody should ever laugh at pious writings. We never hear of Jesus laughing.’

    But my father patted my cheek and smiled and I went on to point out t h o u and s h a l t and n o t, without any help from Bandam. On the following Sunday I listened for the first time to the words that were spoken aloud,

    ‘What’s adultery?’ I asked.

    ‘Ask Tom the shepherd,’ said Margery, and Agnes blushed.

    Our parish priest said that children of my age – and even younger – must go to him from time to time to confess their sins. There were so many different ideas in our house about what was right and what was wrong, I wasn’t sure what was a sin and what wasn’t, or if the very same thing could sometimes be a sin and sometimes not a sin. I very quickly found out what a serious sinner I was as I heard myself saying yes over and over again to the parish priest’s questions.

    ‘Have you been cross with anyone lately?’

    ‘Have you been greedy at the table?’

    ‘Have you taken anything that belongs to somebody else?’

    One day, he tried a different sort of question,

    ‘Have you done anything else that you should tell me about?’

    This was the chance I’d been waiting for. I didn’t hesitate.

    ‘Yes. I committed adultery.’

    There was a pause.

    ‘Where did you commit this sin, my child?’

    ‘In the pantry.’

    ‘And who committed it with you?’

    ‘Nobody. I did it all by myself.’

    I was forgiven without comment for the unknown sin I hadn’t committed, along with all those that I had.

    ‘Today I am six years old and one month exactly.’

    I stood on a chair and said this to a room full of people. Nobody except Agnes seemed to hear me and I knew better than to expect any fond smiles from her. Something did happen, though. Until now, Ben would always stop rocking when I came into the room and fix his eyes on me, but without ever moving away from the same spot against the wall. This time he stood up suddenly and, still clutching the large smooth cobblestone that he carried with him day and night, came and sat by my side. I got up and walked across the room. He followed me. I stopped. He stopped. I walked away. He stayed so close behind me that he trod on my heels. The room fell silent as he followed me out of the door.

    He watched me fill a basket with eggs from the hen-house, then followed me back into the house.

    From then on, I could go nowhere without Ben. If I closed the door of the privy, he would sit on the ground outside and bang his head hard against the wooden post. When he needed the privy himself, he would lie down and resist with rigid limbs anyone else’s attempts to help him. Nothing private about the privy from then on, for either of us. That was when I found out about his zi-zi. I’d never seen him undressed and the discovery that he pissed through a soft little pipe that none of the rest of us had fascinated me. Sometimes, in the privy, I would hold it for him.

    ‘Have you touched anyone or been touched by anyone in an impure manner?’

    Since I didn’t know what the priest meant when he said that, I was sure I hadn’t done whatever it was. This was only question I’d ever said no to.

    ‘Have you known any forbidden pleasure?’

    I thought for a minute.

    ‘Yes. I ate the cake Bandam was saving for Blanche.’

    The priest persisted.

    ‘Have you done something you wouldn’t dare do in front of anyone else?’

    Again, I paused.

    ‘Yes. When Agnes wasn’t looking, I threw her horrible little dog out of an upstairs window. It bites my feet.’

    The priest couldn’t know how soon I started to understand such questions. The family, happy to see Ben’s growing attachment to me, had the idea of moving his mattress alongside mine. At first, we’d fall asleep curled closely together like puppies, then we began to stroke each other and, before long, to find other pleasing ways of touching that brought about a startling change in Benjamin’s zi-zi. My head knew that this was forbidden pleasure, but my heart still sees no impurity in those moments when my silent and beautiful brother’s life was unlocked to let in feelings that were out of his reach the rest of the time. I said nothing to the priest.

    Was this the beginning of the end of childhood…?

    … certainly, nothing was the same after the morning of my seventh birthday. There was I, sitting at the table, bored, fidgeting, crumbling chunks of bread and scattering bits onto the floor. Agnes shouted at me to stop wasting food and making such a mess; Blanche picked up a broom; several hens fluttered and clustered around noisily, pecking at the crumbs and at each other. My mother lifted her chin and turned towards me, her eyes wide open. I saw my father follow her gaze. I watched them watching me and smiled at them both. They smiled back at me, then at each other. My mother nodded. My father stopped smiling and turned towards us all,

    ‘I must speak to you all very seriously. I want everyone to listen carefully.’

    He hesitated, then went on,

    ‘Unless something is done about our future…’

    My poor father looked so distressed and unhappy. I went and took his hand and he started to speak again, falteringly,

    ‘There may – perhaps – be a way of avoiding ruin – and that is by no means certain – indeed, far from certain. Our best hope – maybe our only hope – lies in Alison. Which is why I have decided that she must be brought up as a boy – to be educated – to be one day – as soon as possible – to be by my side as my sons would have been…’

    He stopped again, and put an arm round me before repeating,

    ‘`Our best hope lies in Alison… the last is not going to be the least.’

    What did he mean, the least? I’d always felt more like the most. There was a lot of shouting. They were quarrelling. Everyone was talking at once, shrilly and clamorously, impatiently asking questions, not waiting for answers. Once again, the anger had something do with me. I’d done something wrong by being born. What had I done now? My father took me onto his lap; my mother came and sat next to us. My father began to speak again. He went on and on. I dozed. I opened my eyes every now and again. I heard a word here, a phrase there, before drifting back to sleep … provided for … livelihood … survival … possible solution…’

    All I could make out was that we were in danger of becoming so poor that we might starve, but I didn’t understand the rest. Nothing could change the fact that I was a girl, but my father was somehow going to put an end to my being only a girl. Only a girl?

    The very next day, he lifted me onto his horse and we rode away far beyond the village, across vast open fields, the land that he said had been farmed by the family for three generations. Why was he showing it to me, his youngest child?

    I looked all around me, but said nothing. Some evenings later, when I saw my father slumped in a chair by a window in the half-light, gazing out at trees that were turning to inky silhouettes against the sky, I climbed onto his lap and turned his face towards mine. What I saw was melancholy and weariness.

    ‘Tell me why you are sad. Why do you want me to be a boy? Don’t you love me any more?’

    He held me close and I whispered question after question into his ear. All those fields and all those sheep, why weren’t we rich? Why was our house so small? Why only one servant? Why was our furniture so old and shabby?

    Why were so many of us crammed into such a small space, while Matilda and her family lived in a spacious house full of beautiful things? Not just things for sitting on or sleeping in or eating at in everyday life. I described the small figure of Our Lady in brightly-painted stone, and the carved and gilded wooden cross standing between two polished candleholders. And, on the walls, panels of fabric elaborately woven with flowers, foliage and birds, mirrors in gilded frames and dark oak chests and cupboard doors decorated in vivid colours. In Matilda’s house there were five books, each with pictures in every margin and inside big initial letters, sometimes on a background of real gold. Five books. While we only had one, a plain book with no colours, not even red, no decoration or pictures, and empty spaces where big initials should be.

    My concern pleased him well. Settling me more comfortably by his side in the big armchair, he began to tell me what was in his mind. How much I grasped and how much I pieced together later, I can’t say, but on that day he won my trust and was never to lose it.

    The land we’d ridden across together had, in his grandfather’s time, been cultivated for the growing of barley and wheat. After several poor harvests, his father had turned all the arable acres over to sheep-rearing – a move that was well-timed in readiness for the coming boom in wool production and export. For many years the growing family prospered. Once my uncles had finished their apprenticeships and become successful artisans with sons working alongside them, each with a strong, healthy wife, they all moved away, leaving more than enough for my grandparents and his youngest son, my father, to live on …

    … until everything changed. Life became hard, then impossible, for rearers of sheep and producers of wool, when the king seized their wool as a compulsory loan to pay for the war with France. The war which, as you know, is still going on, starting and stopping and never leading anywhere.

    When, after several years, the ban on exporting wool was lifted, my father had new problems. Our rich, green land here on the Norfolk-Suffolk border was a long way from the coast and the transporting of wool or any merchandise had become more and more costly. As family after family moved away to live in one of the rapidly growing towns, the growing labour shortage pushed up wages demanded in the countryside. My father had expected that he, like his older brothers, would have sons to work with him and help provide for us all.

    Well, you know the rest. Many sons had indeed been born, but only Ben had outlived infancy. All five daughters had survived. Agnes, seventeen when I was born and married at eighteen had come back at twenty-one, abandoned or widowed. Nobody knew which. Blanche and Joan, at twenty-one and eighteen hadn’t yet been able to find husbands, and Anne, at fourteen, was already anxious about her prospects of becoming a wife. The upbringing of my four sisters had been shaped by the precepts of virtuous womanhood: Christian faith, humility and piety, domesticity and the duties of tending to children, the aged and the sick – all with little relevance to the reality that was looming over them now that my father was in his fifties.

    They say that when I was born, my father barely glanced at me. Before walking away and slamming the door, he leaned over, touched one of the tiny hands and said bitterly,

    ‘This dainty thing will never be of any use to me’

    But a possibility took root in his heart, after his first disappointment. He’d started to watch me closely until, gradually and cautiously, he had come to hope that maybe this lively last child, who was like him in so many ways, could after all take the place of the son he didn’t have. Impatient for me to leave infancy behind, he had never treated me as a child, but always talked to me seriously and thoughtfully, answering questions I hadn’t thought of asking, giving me patient and intricate explanations, encouraging me to form opinions.

    And, of course, this was why he wasn’t at all amused at any lingering infancy. While the others smiled at my stumblings over the sounds gr and cr, knowing that this oddity would correct itself in time, my adoring father simply wouldn’t allow it. He’d raise his voice:

    ‘No, Alison. Grand’dame, not Bandam.’

    I would repeat anxiously,

    ‘Bandam.’

    ‘NO, grand’dame, Grand’dame, GRAND’dame!’

    Off came my wooden shoes and I’d be lifted onto the table. With my arms round his neck and my cheek against his, I’d say earnestly,

    ‘Bandam, bandam, BANDam.’

    At mealtimes, while my chin was still well below the level of the table top, he would take away the cushions that Margery put out for me to sit on.

    ‘No, no. Alison isn’t a baby.’

    When Ben was seven, his dresses were put aside for me to wear and he went into short tunics and tabards, soft loose hose and leather shoes. I yelled and punched Margery, and demanded to be dressed in the same way.

    ‘You’re only four, and you’re only a girl.’

    She stood me in the high-sided apple box until I promised to stop kicking her.

    I was to have the best possible education, my father said, with little idea of how to go about it, since nobody had thought to educate him. Education, for him, included learning everything there was to know about rearing sheep and producing and selling raw wool, all the intricacies of husbandry and trading and the making of woollen cloth. And I would need to know far more than he knew himself because ways of doing things were changing.

    He told me that, as soon as I was old enough, he would take me with him on his travels. I was impatient to start right away, but he was firm about waiting. Matilda frowned.

    ‘No woman in the Bible does such things. Not even the bad ones.’

    Shedding my childhood took longer than my father would have liked. I think he found me charming when I was animated and childlike, but he couldn’t stand me being childish and resorting to tantrums, crying and foot-stamping.

    Sometimes I got what I wanted that way, but more often than not I didn’t. He was better at sitting things out than I was and would let me scream myself hoarse and exhausted without relenting, either ignoring me or saying sharply,

    ‘Stop that at once, Alison! You’re behaving like a child.’

    Stop being a child at seven? It was a game I learned to play. We were not as unevenly matched as you might imagine. He thought he could mould me, but while I became good at seeming to be whatever he wanted me to be, another me survived within myself.

    Chapter 2

    FAVOURITE CHILD

    1344

    But back, for a moment, to that evening, when my father said I was to be brought up as if I were a boy, and the family hurled grumbles and grievances. Some of them long-fermented. Oh, they’d seen it coming, Oh yes. Alison had been his favourite from the minute she was born, Agnes said. Margery, whose great breasts had nourished me after her own baby was born dead, and who had stayed with us ever since, raised her voice above the others,

    ‘How do you expect Alison to learn modesty and obedience? What man will want to marry the shameful and unwomanly creature that she will become?’

    Bandam didn’t shout. She opened her mouth and wailed, echoing Margery’s protest. How could my father even think of denying a girl the upbringing that befitted her God-given nature as a woman? I looked from one to the other and saw with interest that Bandam had no back teeth and Margery had a big, wobbly fold of empty skin hanging down from her throat. They all turned towards me, so I said,

    ‘What’s fitted? How can I be fitted?’

    Nobody answered me. What was I? Girl or boy? Daughter or son? Who was I? Whose was I? I was like a broth prepared by many cooks. Because my mother was neither an absence or a presence, each of them wanted to put something different into the concoction that I became. Agnes was intent on refining and subduing me: I was scolded constantly for eating messily, for looking untidy, for talking too much, for laughing too often. Poor Agnes saw me as pampered and loved without deserving either, while her dutiful striving to do what was right and proper earned her only dislike.

    Blanche, as easy-going as Agnes was stern, adored me, with not a trace of resentment. Gently and without ever shouting at me, she taught me to be ashamed of behaving badly: she mopped up food spilled on the table and on my clothes, wiped stains from around my mouth and chin, helped me to bunch up my petticoats and skirts when I squatted over the privy, made sure that I used the chamber pot instead of piddling behind a chair on the living room floor whenever it was cold and rainy outside.

    My picture of myself as a child is made up of other people’s recollections of a toy, a nuisance, a household pet, an encumbrance, a being delightful, infuriating, impossible to please, easy to please,

    ‘You laughed all the time… You were such a funny little thing, we had to laugh with you … You could turn double and triple somersaults… stand on your head… spin round and round fifteen times without falling over… You used to fill your mouth with water when nobody was looking, then suddenly smack yourself hard on both cheeks so that the water gushed out in somebody’s face…’

    Agnes’s Alison was a spoilt and demanding brat who couldn’t bear it if she wasn’t the centre of attention. Bandam’s Alison never complained about anything. Even if she scratched herself on rusty nails that nobody had noticed, had splinters in her fingers and bruises on her knees, fell downstairs or banged her head on the furniture,

    ‘You were always so sweet, Alison. You never made a fuss. You just picked yourself up and tried to suck the bits that were bleeding or bruised.’

    Margery said it was a wonder I hadn’t died a hundred different deaths,

    ‘I didn’t have eyes in the back of my head, and you weren’t afraid of anything.’

    Agnes said I thought of no-one but myself. Maud told how I would take her hand firmly whenever we crossed a stream in case she fell in. How much was true? Did I really jump into the pigs’ trough as they were feeding, or climb on the roof before I could walk, or get drunk on half a flagon of ale when I was three and a half? And did I clap my hands rhythmically before I could even sit up and dance and join in singing games before I could speak?

    I have memories of my own, of course. Falling from a window and lying perfectly contentedly among some overgrown cabbages, staring up at the sky and thinking that if this was being dead, it was nice and peaceful and nothing to be afraid of. Joan and Anne taking it in turns to push me on the swing, changing places after each twentieth push – which was how I learned to count. Sitting on the ground, arranging cherry stones or pebbles in piles of twenty, then adding up how many twenties there were. The day that Tom the shepherd came and said that there were three sheep missing, I looked out across the fields at all the twenties of anonymous sheep and wondered how he knew the exact number.

    1344-1347

    We lived about an hour on foot from the town that strangers call Thetford and we call Theford. Hard to believe that our village

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