A Girl Called Cat

Even all these years later, I don't remember why she caught my eye. She wasn't outlandishly eye-catching, neither was she remarkably plain. Perhaps it was her hair: red haloed with gold in the sunlight. I caught a glimpse of her as the sea of bodies parted for a moment and it must have been that bright copper hair that captured me. She was standing mutely beside her mother, who was agreeing eagerly with something the severe and impressive Bursar was saying. The girl looked embarrassed, although perhaps the starchy new uniform she fidgeted in was the real cause of her dismay; the summer afternoon was already hot enough to rue the compulsory navy blazers we both wore, bristling with scratchy young wool against our skin.

Every new academic year, Bryanston School holds one of its many long-cherished traditions: the New Girls' Tea. The school staff in their starched uniforms carry long tables out onto the emerald Visitor's Lawns behind Founders' Hall, deck them with snowy white cloths, and spread them with Bryanston's monogrammed china and a cream tea. This event, presided over by the small, round headmistress and the tall, spindly Bursar, requires pupils in their itchy new uniforms and their respective parents (the occasional suit-sporting father amongst the blow-dried heads and kitten-heeled feet of the mothers), to stand around and Get To Know One Another. In my opinion, it's an advanced form of torture.

On that bright day, many years ago now, the girls coming up from the Junior School stood in packs.  The hierarchies were already well-worn after seven years in each others' company, and on the green lawn an entente cordiale was being cooly observed between rival factions. In the thick of the throng, as always, was Sara Snow's posse, enjoying a sweeping view from its dominant position on the stone steps that divided the two tiers of the Visitor's Lawns. Sara and her girls defiantly wore the hemlines of their pinafores four inches (and not the regulation two) above their knees; it was an entry requirement of the group that all sports were played at First team level, and they never missed an opportunity to show off chiselled thighs and sculpted calves, tanned golden by hours of hockey and netball. They had butter-wouldn't-melt smiles, sharp elbows and noses for trouble. Sara, the ringleader and Giver of Names to the rest of the class, had already escaped expulsion twice in preceding years thanks to a wealthy and influential father, who did something high up in local politics. Sara's girls were the Alphas, the ones who had to be first in everything, save for academics; this crown was grudgingly conceded to Theresa and her collective of uber-brains. Stationed at the biscuit end of the tea table, Theresa was deep in conversation with our history teacher while the rest of her group stood close at hand in quiet but fierce debate, probably about third world debt or the HIV crisis. In contrast to the soaring hemlines and glossy ponytails of Sara's posse, the pinafores of Theresa's girls drooped well below their knees and neat braids or bobs were the vogue. Meanwhile, with their usual flair for staging, the Showgirls were artfully clustered around the statue of a deer that eternally quenched its thirst in a fountain on the upper lawn. Their star was Meredith, a loud gamine girl who goofed around in lessons, feigned illness in every sport session, and blossomed in drama classes. Chief amongst her devoted minions was a pre-Raphaelite beauty, Lara, whose only ambition was "to be so famous that people will fight to buy my toenail clippings." The final corner of the limelight-hungry triumvirate who led the gang was shy, strange Sasha, who said violently unsettling things with her paintbrush and was no less savagely ambitious than the rest of her pack, despite her eerie silence.

Unlike the new girls, who stood in watchful silence beside their parents, the old girls were making a loud show of their already-belonging. Their brash, easy laughter was code, formulated to set the nerves of the newcomers jangling. Even I, an inhabitant of the sheltered walls of Bryanston for four years but still rudderless in the social seas thanks to a foreign upbringing and a distaste for cliquishness, heard that laughter scraping like nails down a blackboard. The copper-haired girl clearly did too. Sheltered by bodies in the crowd, I watched her fingernail slip between her teeth before, too late, she caught herself and sheathed the guilty hand in her blazer pocket again.  Her mother, nodding enthusiastically up at the Bursar, pretended not to notice the transgression, but the shift of weight from one hip to the other betrayed her apparent disregard.

The Bursar drifted off and the crowd stirred up and resettled. Those mothers with high hopes for their daughters dragged them over to present them to her, or buzzed around our jovial Head, who was beaming from the centre of a throng of supplicants. I was in a clump of girls on the edge of the lawn that were forced together into a grudging clique because no one else wanted us. In adulthood, we might become powerful, successful, possibly even cool, but now we were the misfits, the strays. We sheltered together out of necessity and no lasting loves or strong allegiances grew between us; mostly we were resigned to be loners. I liked it that way. Sara Snow had christened me the 'White Rabbit' and the moniker had stuck, thanks to my pale skin and my habit of disappearing into a corner of the library with a book at any opportunity. Books were easier to understand than people, and they didn't call you names. Our group also included "Ducky" (not blessed with the longest legs in the world, although perhaps the softest heart), "Bubbles" (who inadvertently snorted her chocolate milk while giggling in the dining hall and was forever after reminded of the fact that she'd once sprouted chocolate bubbles from her nose), "the Pole" (the Polish ambassador's daughter, who shot up like a weed to tower over the teaching staff) and "Tits" (who was dismayed by her own popularity with the boys at inter-school socials, and sought shelter behind thick glasses and even thicker bangs).

This was the fray that this copper-haired stranger was wading into, willingly or otherwise...well, from the look of her, not so much wading as being shoved. Until that moment, I'd been too preoccupied with surviving my pre-teens, and the accompanying horrors of social humiliation and physical discombobulation, to have any energy to spare for charitable acts such as rescuing a newcomer from the perils of Bryanston's cliques. But that furtively bitten nail had hooked me. In that second, I saw someone having a worse time of it than me. In a sweet, unexpected moment of joy, I realised I could help. My hard-won knowledge of the lay of the land, while it was too late to save me from relegation to the back benches with the rest of the Uncool, could help this shy girl with the fiery hair navigate the choppy waters to safety. I felt a surge of hope lift my feet. As I navigated the least conspicuous way through the throng - taking special care to route around the choir mistress, who was always on the lookout for new recruits - I was mentally lining up pearls of advice to give as gifts to this intriguing stranger. First, who to avoid: obviously, Sarah's gang was out of the question. The thought that my new friend might end up as one of those sleek, sly girls was too horrible to contemplate. While my horror was no doubt driven chiefly by unacknowledged envy, I did know that, beneath the gloss and the verve, they were bullies, and nasty not only to anyone not fortunate enough to be one of them, but merciless towards each other as well. The tragic spectacle of watching them cut one of their own from the herd was fresh in the class' collective memory (Emma Marchand had been demoted to Under-Prefect and also lost her place as right wing on First Hockey; the following week her underwear had been stolen during gym class and she had been forced to wear her gym shorts for the rest of the day, bulkily visible under her pinafore to vicious merriment amongst the girls she had lately called bosom friends.) If this new girl had any creative talents, the Showgirls would claim her as a matter of course, but there again I knew that was a dead end; a slavish stroking of their high priestess Meredith's ego was the entry fee and began to pall quickly. I knew this from bitter experience as I had briefly been one of them. Tessa and the brains weren't as bad a lot as the rest of them, if she had the academic chops to crack their nod, but once in their midst she would surely lose the lustre she currently possessed and become as drab and eager as they were... None of that seemed right for this shy, flame-headed girl.

 I was halfway through the crowd on the lawn before the awful realisation struck; if she was seen with me, wouldn't she be condemned to Nerdsville before the year had even begun? What was I thinking? She would be tainted with the whiff of my Undesirability before she even stood a chance of acceptance, hobbled in the starting gates before the race had even started. I swerved towards the tea table and made a bad show of selecting a sandwich while I attempted to pull myself back together and regain the glorious certainty that had propelled me across the lawn in the first place; my hand hovered over something I thought was cucumber, veered towards the salmon and cream cheese, nearly selected tuna, before coming back to accidentally brush against the cucumber at which exact moment three things happened: I sneaked a glance at her and discovered she was looking at me, my hand brushed the sandwich and I realised, too late, that it was egg and cucumber. Hateful egg. But I'd touched it now, and had to take it. Foolishly holding the offending sandwich, I risked a smile. Well, a sort of non-committal lifting of the corners of the lips. Just in case she wasn't actually looking at me; I was too vain to wear my glasses after once being called Owl Face by Sara Snow in the fourth grade. She lifted the corners of her lips too. It was like a ray of sunshine penetrated the clouds above me, and warmth flooded my world. I couldn't back out now; the chance had to be seized and if I doomed her to social ostracisation, so be it. Holding the malodorous morsel between two fingers, I walked towards her, certain the entire population of the lawn, if not in fact the whole world, was watching my blushing progress. I would be cool; I would just say, "Hello, I'm Tash, welcome to Bryanston". Nothing embarrassingly effusive, or overly desperate or anything. Just a simple hello.

Up close, she had brown eyes and perfectly pretty white teeth. Her mother smelled of Chanel No.5, the same perfume my grandmother wore. I hid the mortifying sandwich in the folds of my pinafore and drew a breath to say something cool and breezy; what came out was:

 "You're going to be my best friend."

For a tiny, endless moment, we both stood in silence, reeling from the seismic effects of this rash pronouncement. Her face registered something that I read to be either worry or terror, or both. I could barely believe the ground hadn't yet opened and swallowed me. But then she smiled, this time not just an upward kink of the lips that could be retracted or reworked into a sneer, but a genuine smile, so that I saw her perfect little teeth and a dimple nestling its way into her right cheek. She said,

"I'm Catherine."

And I knew instantly that my crazy statement was right.

On Love, Death and Apples

On Sunday morning, the phone rang while I was in bed beside the man I love, and my sister told me it had finally happened. Grandma had gone, finally separated from the fragile shell that weighted her to a hospital bed and a fog of pain.

We got up to find the day was extraordinarily bright and beautiful. A perfect Sunday. The English countryside was ebbing into harvest and a crisp autumnal chill, and we decided to walk off a hearty breakfast in the grounds of the manor house where we had stayed for the night. Hand in hand, we rambled through an overgrown forest behind the ornamental pond, talking about moving to Barcelona and having babies. Nettles nipped at my bare thighs, and gave David cause to prove that dock leaves rubbed on the pricked skin really do bring relief; a magnanimous quirk of nature. The football pitch we crossed, still foaming with thick green grass, had no takers and the croquet mallets stood at attention on the lawn, patiently waiting. We couldn't remember the rules but we whacked a few balls blithely through hoops anyway, in our own made-up game. He won.

Then, through an arch in a wall, we found ourselves in a secretive garden, tucked away beside the house. Generations of the denizens of the beautiful old house must have tended the ancient fruit trees, which still yielded an exuberant crop, but again no one took notice but the bees. The neglected trees wept fruit onto the ground and the air was thick with the perfume of ripening and rotting apples. Growing up in cities, I didn't often have the chance to pick the fruit I ate, but it still triggers an ancient excitement; surely every child rejoices in the first time the little hand closes around the jewel-like orb that yields to a tug and comes away, nestled in the palm, revealing itself to be either tart or sweet or, heaven forfend, worm-filled. My first apple-picking was at the crab apple tree in Grandma and Grandpa's back garden; a little suburban patch of green guarded by a white picket fence (although, in Calgary, I'm not sure what there was to guard against), where Grandma's clean sheets billowed and Grandpa's ranks of carrot tops marched in the breeze. Held aloft in Grandpa's arms, I grabbed a little russet apple and discovered that crab apples are a whole shocking world of sour for the mouth. I still see his face, wrinkled against the sourness as mine was.

But the apples that popped out all over the tree David and I had stumbled on were bigger than crab apples and promised to be sweeter. David reached up and tugged one off; his face exploded like a tree switched on at Christmas, confirming we'd hit the jackpot. Then, like men in the frenzied grip of a gold rush, we filled our hands and the crooks of our elbows until I took my jumper off, laid it on the grass and we piled the loot on that. There were Bramleys too, bigger and tart and singing of pies. Even more wonderful was the vine that rampaged all over one wall and dangled figs; huge, purple globules of sweet flesh. Those joined the pile on the jumper, and we carried off our treasure in the boot of the car.

At home, we realised how much fruit there was, as it piled up in bowls and colanders in the kitchen.   I found a recipe for apple pie on good old BBC Food, and started chopping and peeling and coring. In this new chapter I've suddenly plunged into, creating a home for David and I in our little Brightonian seafront flat, I resolve to be something approaching a decent cook. I (an all-burning, over-salting, smoke-alarm-activating disaster in the kitchen) come from a noble lineage of excellent cooks. How embarrassing. The women on the paternal side of my family could at least bake, and those who weren't gifted in the culinary arts could knock up a mean champagne cocktail and advise the staff on which soup to serve when. I can do none of these things, despite the best efforts of my mother, a superlative cook - who bought me the Osborne First Cookbook and valiantly attempted to steer my early efforts - and my maternal Grandma, who involved us in the Big Christmas Bake when we spent Yuletides in Canada.  Sadly, I have always been hopeless at this cooking thing...but its never too late to surprise yourself.

So, I am standing in a kitchen full of apples that are waiting to be marshalled into the perfect man-pleasing pie and attempting to summon the spirit of Grandma, who may even still be lingering in the atmosphere before the final ascent up to Heaven. It occurs to me, as I slice fruit and knead dough, that I wish Grandma had stayed longer. There's so much I realise I don't know, and now will never have the chance to learn from her. Its a moment of horrible finality, almost worse than the moment when I was sitting beside her bed in the care home, knowing the time to say goodbye forever was ticking inexorably towards me; in a few minutes I would have to rise up from the chair and take my last leave and the sadness broke over me like a wave and I could only wonder what would be the least inappropriate thing to say. "Goodbye" wasn't an option, so I settled on "I'll see you soon"; or at least that's what I attempted to say between sobs. You know those elegantly-played scenes at someone's deathbed in films? This was nothing like that. In contrast to my blubbering wreck, she was calm and beautiful. She smiled at me and told me God was guiding my steps, even when I didn't know it, and her faith bloomed out into the room as if it were golden light. Looking back on the moment, I replace the blubbering with all the things I should have said. But I console myself with the thought that the moment, however imperfect, happened. The idea that I may not have seen her one final time was so much worse than the badly-scripted goodbye I actually managed.

I was crying into the dough as it tore and crumbled. Too much butter had made it weak, a fact that Grandma would have been able to point out in time if she'd been beside me, no doubt.  Most upsetting of all was the fact that she had died in great pain and far too young; we should have had more time with her. Her elder sister is 90 and still plays the Drake church organ every Sunday. The family comes from hardy Mennonite farming stock, and the Dutch traditions, carried through Catherine the Great's Ukraine to New England and eventually Canada, meant that food was rich and filling and created to keep you going until sundown. Everything was baked with cinnamon. Nothing was wasted. I remember her showing me how to make shnetke (which I've no idea how you actually spell) with the remnants of pie crust pastry; she would roll out the scraps, sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar and then roll them back up and bake them into little parcels of sweet, spicy heaven. The fragrant kitchen, and its satellite dominion the laundry room, were her empire, the only places in her world where she had any say, any control, like so many women both then and now. Looking back to my childhood for memories of her, I realise every single one of them involves food. I am sitting with Grandma at her kitchen table and I am so small my feet dangle from the chair; she is telling me why Christians believe in Jesus, and a bowl of nectarines on the table between us smells exotic and pink. There she is cutting a birthday cake; I don't remember whose, but it is prettily iced and blazing with candles. Then she is in her flowered peach kimono, cutting the segments of the grapefruit halves in the dark kitchen just before bed so that they are ready for us at the breakfast table next morning; we will bow our heads together and give thanks before tucking in with the specially serrated grapefruit spoons she laid at each place. And she beams from the other side of a towering stack of pancakes; Grandpa was thunderously disapproving of Grandma's sweet tooth later in life as his enthusiasm for health food took hold, and the pancakes were her minor act of rebellion and her proof of love to kids and grandkids. But Christmas was her moment of glory. The baking was planned several weeks before, and required a pantry overflowing with ingredients and hour upon hour devoted to converting the nuts and butter and coconut and raisins and spices and custard into pepernuts (three kinds, all cut into tiny little buttons of dough) and pinwheel cookies and nanaimo squares and umpteen other delicacies. The family Christmas cake recipe, passed down reverently for generations, was a specialty of hers and burst out of her kitchen every year in a unashamed riot of gleaming cherries and nuts. In her own act of rebellion, my mother later added whisky...Grandma never tasted alcohol as the Mennonites are teetotal.

But the fun memories; the rambles through the park in search of Saskatoon berries, the toboggan rides down snowy slopes at Fish Creek, the ice hockey games we watched all bundled up in parkas and clutching sweet hot chocolate, the scrambling around a baseball diamond on summer evenings: not one of them features Grandma. She was in the kitchen feeding a family of six, while Grandpa got to run around with the children. And I know, deep down, that my lack of talent with food isn't that at all; its my feminist statement, my attempt to address the age-old imbalance, or possibly just my fear that I might end up missing out too, chained by an apron to a stove while the menfolk get to do the fun stuff. But perhaps Grandma's God put that tree groaning with apples in my path after all; I suddenly find I am impelled to show my love for someone the way my Grandmother showed hers for me, with pancakes and pies and soups and breads.

I put an imperfect pie in front of David, in honour of the wonderful woman who was my Grandma, and promised myself not to fear either my talent or a lack thereof. My pie was over-buttered, undercooked, starred some rather wobbly attempts at pastry crosses...but we shared it, and it was delicious.