Wise Children by Angela Carter Read Free Book Online

Triumph of nature over nurture, ducky. Only goes to show.
    To this day I swear, sometimes, late at night, I hear a soft thump, thump, her bare feet on the stairs, coming down to make sure the gas is off in the kitchen, the front door is locked, us girls are safe home. And there’s a smell of crushed mint that lingers in the breakfast room, sometimes, because her favourite tipple was crème de menthe frappé, with a sprig of mint, in season, but she’d drink whatever she could lay her hands on the rest of the time. And that boiled cabbage of hers. There’s an aroma in the area we can’t get rid of, no matter what we try. At first we thought it was the drains. We never touch cabbage, ourselves, not now we’re grown up. I couldn’t look a cabbage in the eye after what Grandma did to them. Boiled them to perdition. The abattoir is kinder to a cow.
    She took to children like a duck to water, enough to make you wonder why she’d not had any of her own. I asked her about that, once, years later; she said she’d never, not until she picked us up and cuddled us that very first morning, known what men were for . ‘I’d often wondered,’ she said. ‘When I saw you two, the penny dropped.’
    You must remember that there was a war on, when we were born. If we made her happy, then we didn’t add much to the collective sum of happiness in the whole of South London. First of all, the neighbours’ sons went marching off, sent to their deaths, God help them. Then the husbands, the brothers, the cousins, until, in the end, all the men went except the ones with one foot in the grave and those still in the cradle, so there was a female city, red-eyed, dressed in black, outside the door, and Grandma said it then, she said it again in 1939: ‘Every twenty years, it’s bound to happen. It’s to do with generations. The old men get so they can’t stand the competition and they kill off all the young men they can lay their hands on. They daren’t be seen to do it themselves, that would give the game away, the mothers wouldn’t stand for it, so all the men all over the world get together and make a deal: you kill off our boys and we’ll kill off yours. So that’s that. Soon done. Then the old men can sleep easy in their beds, again.’
    When the bombardments began, Grandma would go outside and shake her fist at the old men in the sky. She knew they hated women and children worst of all. She’d come back in and cuddle us. She lullabyed us, she fed us. She was our air-raid shelter; she was our entertainment; she was our breast.
    The boarders dwindled off. Too much babyshit in the bathroom. Naked babies crawling in the hall. Nobody made the beds, nobody made the porridge – the help all found good jobs in the armaments factories, didn’t they, much to Grandma’s disgust. They would depart while she harangued them. What did Grandma do for money? The odd, and I mean ‘odd’, lady vocalist might rent a room for an hour, to practise her scales, or a not-too-fussy adagio dancer want to put her feet up for twenty minutes, ahem, ahem. Visitors used the front door, up the front steps; we went down the area steps to the door in the basement.
    When we were just babbling our first ‘g’anma’, that clock turned up. The stag-topped grandfather. Shipped to us direct from Pitlochry, from the estate of Miss Euphemia Hazard, deceased, with a note to say that 49 Bard Road was the last known address of her nephew, Melchior, so they sent it here. She left it to him in her will. Everything else went to the poor.
    Grandma cursed and swore when she read that. She couldn’t bear to think that clock was all we’d get. She moved hell and high water to seek our father out. She left no stone unturned lest, as she told us later, she found him lurking underneath. Then, all of a sudden, it was the Armistice, and there he was, in the West End, playing Romeo, no less! so Grandma put on her toque and went to a matinée. Some acrobatic dancer who’d put