A Little Stranger Read Online Free Page A
Author: Candia McWilliam
John, to play with his toys or in his birthday-garden, the nannies talked among themselves. They required music all day; the nursery radio played, unlistened to but never unheard, murmurous and inoffensive. John learnt words from the radio; he knew chart positions and dated words of soft hip slang. He described things as ‘fab’ and ‘really over the top’. On Margaret’s day off there was no radio until my husband came home and listened to the shipping forecast. John loved this; he sat, quite silent, with his father, a careworn expression on his uncreaseable brow. He also admired newspapers for their evident importance in the world where things were heavier to bear and trousers and silences were long.
Like many children’s, John’s first interjection had been ‘Oh dear’. It is what first children hear that parents replace more forceful oaths with, a soft oath, a nursery lament, and from this they learn that life is a dangerous business, though we tell them before they sleep that elephants use lifts and rabbits wear blue coats with brass buttons.
Naturally, the nannies gossiped. I and my friends knew this because some of these friends gossiped with their nannies. It was cosy talk, scandal with milk, of babies, fiancés, naughtiness. Perks were compared, skiing holidays, access to video recorders, horses, time off. Wages, of course, and clothes, which were swapped for special parties. The main topic, however, seemed to be weight.
It did not seem to be the case that a nanny was a necessarily maternal woman. Margaret said that she and her nanny-friends (she described them thus, like nanny-goats) all agreed that they would not care to have children unless they had a nanny. Some of these young women were, like Margaret, saving to be married, others ‘did not like’ the idea of marriage. Two had even been told, according to Margaret, that they could not have children. I thought this sad and possibly dangerous, but she assured me that they felt no more intensely towards the children in their care than the fertile nannies felt. How she knew this, I could not imagine. ‘Fertile’ was her term, rhyming with ‘myrtle’.
Not that the point of life is reproduction, only its end; but has not a nanny chosen, at any rate temporarily, children as the point of her life?
I had often thought that most professionals did not in fact care for their parish, or patients, or clients, or material for these things’ own sake, but for the return they brought. What possible return could these ordinary, if fortunate, children offer?
Whether or not Margaret and her friends were maternal, they were intensely engaged in struggling with what are considered motherly figures.
I had been right about Margaret when I deduced that she frequently changed shape. Food was of great importance to her, as adversary and as preoccupation. At the moment she was winning her struggle with it. When John ate, she did not; so it was by authority rather than example that she showed him how and what to eat. He was a good eater, with a distaste for puddings.
Margaret loved sweet things and her shopping bags were full of those strange foods made for consumers addicted to bulk and sweetness but desirous of no nourishment. She bought those strange costly foods whose colours are of an unconvincing brightness. She drank chocolate milk so thick it resembled a bodily secretion, cheesecake which sighed to the knife. At the end of each day she calculated the value in calories of all she had eaten. The refrigerator in the nursery kitchen was full of bright drinks in clear vessels like aqualungs, and bread the colour of snow. For butter she had grease which reeked faintly of town water and her jam contained neither fruit nor sugar but was red as ric-rac. She did not seem to be aware that a lettuce and an omelette made from our own eggs would taste better and do her less harm than these weightless hefty meals of cloud and promise. In brown bags, John’s food had its own
Like many children’s, John’s first interjection had been ‘Oh dear’. It is what first children hear that parents replace more forceful oaths with, a soft oath, a nursery lament, and from this they learn that life is a dangerous business, though we tell them before they sleep that elephants use lifts and rabbits wear blue coats with brass buttons.
Naturally, the nannies gossiped. I and my friends knew this because some of these friends gossiped with their nannies. It was cosy talk, scandal with milk, of babies, fiancés, naughtiness. Perks were compared, skiing holidays, access to video recorders, horses, time off. Wages, of course, and clothes, which were swapped for special parties. The main topic, however, seemed to be weight.
It did not seem to be the case that a nanny was a necessarily maternal woman. Margaret said that she and her nanny-friends (she described them thus, like nanny-goats) all agreed that they would not care to have children unless they had a nanny. Some of these young women were, like Margaret, saving to be married, others ‘did not like’ the idea of marriage. Two had even been told, according to Margaret, that they could not have children. I thought this sad and possibly dangerous, but she assured me that they felt no more intensely towards the children in their care than the fertile nannies felt. How she knew this, I could not imagine. ‘Fertile’ was her term, rhyming with ‘myrtle’.
Not that the point of life is reproduction, only its end; but has not a nanny chosen, at any rate temporarily, children as the point of her life?
I had often thought that most professionals did not in fact care for their parish, or patients, or clients, or material for these things’ own sake, but for the return they brought. What possible return could these ordinary, if fortunate, children offer?
Whether or not Margaret and her friends were maternal, they were intensely engaged in struggling with what are considered motherly figures.
I had been right about Margaret when I deduced that she frequently changed shape. Food was of great importance to her, as adversary and as preoccupation. At the moment she was winning her struggle with it. When John ate, she did not; so it was by authority rather than example that she showed him how and what to eat. He was a good eater, with a distaste for puddings.
Margaret loved sweet things and her shopping bags were full of those strange foods made for consumers addicted to bulk and sweetness but desirous of no nourishment. She bought those strange costly foods whose colours are of an unconvincing brightness. She drank chocolate milk so thick it resembled a bodily secretion, cheesecake which sighed to the knife. At the end of each day she calculated the value in calories of all she had eaten. The refrigerator in the nursery kitchen was full of bright drinks in clear vessels like aqualungs, and bread the colour of snow. For butter she had grease which reeked faintly of town water and her jam contained neither fruit nor sugar but was red as ric-rac. She did not seem to be aware that a lettuce and an omelette made from our own eggs would taste better and do her less harm than these weightless hefty meals of cloud and promise. In brown bags, John’s food had its own