Prudence remembered, and looked with her own satisfaction at the
careful disarray of her college room: her spare coffee mug, with a tide
mark above the evaporating sludge; some ash still on the floor from the
previous late night's smoke; crumbs and cake and the ripped carcases of
Christmas crackers; and clothes, carelessly dumped and rumpled on the
bed and over the back of the chair.
Her suitcase was on the bed, and she began to pack, eager in spite
of herself to return to her home, her mother's home, after the
breathless excitement of that first term. There was so much to tell,
and yet so much that her mother just wouldn't understand. Prudence
remembered the three telephone conversations, and the post card she'd
sent: all carefully composed, just like her mother's diary.
Dear Mum,
I'm sorry I haven't phoned or written, but it's been ever so
hectic. Lectures and meetings, and getting to know the other students,
and writing essays, and hours and hours in the library! I've made
friends with a girl on my corridor, and we're both besotted with
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who is a brilliant poet. Must go - I'm
meeting some friends at the Union to join the Literature Club! And I'm
keeping my room spick and span!!!
lots of love,
Prudence
Most of what she said was perfectly true, but it was all somehow
made a lie by what she didn't say. Somehow those bright, flat accounts
of her life left out all the shading that would have given them the
depth of reality: the third dimension was missing. She hadn't mentioned
the bleary mornings and the late nights; the drink and the smoke and
climbing in through windows; and the smothered giggles in the dark. She
enjoyed using words like "besotted", and she did like Browning; but her
room had never been spick and span, not since the beginning of term,
the day she had first scattered her things around the small, spare room.
On the desk was her diary, her most cherished possession, and she
hesitated before putting it carefully not into the suitcase, but into
her shoulder bag. All her other diaries waited in a neat row on her
shelf at home, but this one was special; different; private.
Both Prudence and her mother had always kept meticulous diaries, and
had always shared every word, delighting in their sensible and
systematic accumulation of detail.
"Perfectly plain - that's me," her mother used to say. "What you see
is what you get. I've no time for all that soul-searching and silly
anguish. Sensible people see things as they are." She would read out
aloud her comfortable account of all that day's events and,
miraculously, all the haphazard turmoil, the uncertainty and
unpredictability, would be smoothed away, leaving a sensible skeleton
of incidents, each bone in the right place, picked dry and clean, spic
and span.
Prudence would look up at her mother, fascinated, reassured and
worried: there was no uncertainty in that smooth, dependable,
inscrutable face. It made her feel safe, but also guilty: she could
never walk fast enough; her clothes got dirty too quickly; jam and
smudges appeared inexplicably on her face and in her hair. There was
always a vague and inarticulate catalogue of daydreams, frustrations
and anxieties that shifted and moved disconcertingly and uncomfortably
beneath the carefully organised, bright routine of her days, but
somehow they weren't to be written, and so weren't to be spoken. Of
course, none of this was explicit in her cloudy, wordless
understanding: she just knew that she would never get it right, and so
she pretended that the diary told all her life, and she struggled
harder to please.
Prudence remembered herself as a little girl, before she could
write, chewing her tight braids as she sat next to her mother's tight
perm, dutifully mimicking in pencilled scribbles the neat script of her
mother's hand. At the end of their silent evening ritual, they would
read to each other what they had written, and Prudence's mother would
laugh with pride as her daughter "read" those empty, scribbled lines in
the dry, tidy shorthand of her mother's diary voice:
Got up. Had breakfast. Helped hang up the clothes in the garden.
Went shopping with Mummy. Saw a puppy in the window but they're messy.
Mummy says I'm a good girl. Watched television and then read my book.
The child would look up, face glowing with the reflection of her
mother's approval.
Her childhood mornings, before she was swallowed by the junior
school across the park, were spent trailing after her mother: around
the house, dusting and rubbing at the glistening floors, and trudging
with baskets into the garden to hang up the washing.
She stood precarious on a stool under the swaying prop, and was
given responsibility for socks and smalls. Prudence shivered in the
wind and watched in awe as her mother tamed the huge flapping sheets
that threatened to slap her off her stool with their wet, white wings.
Prudence looked with anxious love at her mother's beauty: her own
pale freckles were an affront to the smooth, rouged porcelain of her
mother's cheeks, and her braids flapped like the sheets in an unruly
contrast to the perfect rigidity of her mother's uniform waves and
curls. Wobbling on her stool, she gazed at her mother's sturdy legs,
planted firm and steady in the grass, and winced at the raised hand as
the white socks slipped from her fingers and flopped to the ground,
where they lay speckled with dirt. She squeezed her eyes against the
sudden slap that came from her mother's hand, damp and stinging like
the sheets that flapped against her legs. Prudence's eyes squeezed
tears, and when she opened them, her mother was bending to lift the
heavy twist of wet, wrung towel from the bright red of the new plastic
basket. Prudence swallowed her sobs, and neither of the two said a word.
Later, in the High Street, Prudence helped with the bags, and the
one she carried dragged slightly, even though she leaned away from it
as far as she could. In the cafe, her eyes smarted again with the smoke
of her mother's cigarette, and her feet dangled above the floor,
tapping rhythmically against the legs of the chair until a tilted head
and warning look stilled her legs and brought her hands into her lap.
Outside, they passed the pet shop, and her mother walked on, unaware
of the magnet of the window. Prudence couldn't help it, and the bag
sagged with her jaw at the sight of the puppies. She sucked back her
dribble as her mouth widened into a grin, and she said, "Oh, mum, I
would so love a puppy of my own!" Prudence turned, and looked up, but
her mother was gone, a distant figure at the corner in a brown coat,
talking to a woman in blue. In a panic, she hauled on the bag, and
hobbled desperately down the pavement. Her mother grew in size as she
grew nearer, until Prudence was next to her, looking up from the
familiar perspective at the giant that dwarfed her.
"Well, I can't stay chatting all day. Must be off."
"Yes, and here's Prudence. You mustn't wander off: a man will take
you away and do dreadful things if you don't stay close to your mum."
The woman in blue receded, and Prudence's mother bent down to slap
each of her daughter's legs, hard, with a short, sharp swing of her
hand.
"I was looking at the puppies!" the child whined. "Oh, mum, can't we
get one?"
"Don't be silly, dear." Her mother's voice was firm, reasonable,
implacable, and held no hint of anger. "Dogs are dirty things. There
would be mud and all sorts all over our nice clean house. Come along,
there's a good girl."
With her free hand accepted by her mother's dry, warm grasp,
Prudence trotted in silence, leaning towards her mother against the
weight of the bag that pulled against her numb fingers. Her legs didn't
sting much any more, and anyway, she was imagining a soft and fluffy
puppy held tight and warm in her arms.
At school, Prudence learned to read, and started to write a real
diary, just like her mother's; and every night's ritual reading
mirrored the words of the previous day - a crisp catalogue of their
familiar routine. The familiar phrases tidied away the tears and swept
up Prudence's scattered misdemeanours into a small and almost invisible
heap behind the comforting rearrangement of each repeated day.
However, as she grew older, Prudence felt a vague sense of something
missing: another audience, things left unsaid; an uneasy feeling that
she was being unfaithful to each day by changing its emphasis and
leaving out the messy details of which her mother so disapproved.
It was a shock and a revelation to read Anne Frank, and find that
she could write to an imaginary friend, and share some of the innocent
secrets that she began to want to write about, but hesitated to show
her mother. She started to write to Anne's Kitty, and drifted out of
the habit of sharing her diary with her mother. Her mother said
nothing, and they wrote separately, mother downstairs, and Prudence up
in her room. She knew her mother still read her diary - and expected to
read it - because once, when she'd taken it to school, her mother had
casually asked about it almost as soon as she returned.
"I couldn't find your diary this morning when I was tidying your
room. You're not keeping secrets from me, are you?"
"No, mum, of course not." And she'd felt herself stiffen, and her
eyes moistened with a helpless anger that was suddenly and inexplicably
engulfed in guilt.
She had begun to write about boys, about the friendships and
jealousies of her classroom, but disguised names, and developed a
simple code to protect herself from an intrusive reader. There was
still a nagging dissatisfaction, though; an awareness that there was so
much left unwritten, so much that she dared not say.
Her mother commented only once, and it made things worse. "I saw
your diary when I was tidying your room this morning. It was most
peculiar! All those initials and all those silly phrases! Really! What
sort of a diary is that? Why don't you keep a proper diary, with a
record of the day, of what happened and what you did? Everything neatly
in order! That's much more sensible! When you come to read it again in
years to come, all this muddle won't make any sense, and then you'll be
disappointed, mark my words!"
Prudence clenched her teeth in frustration: she wanted to write
about her mother's irritating tone of voice; she wanted to wake up
early and write down her dreams; she wanted to lay in bed late at night
and tell Kitty the stories of her romantic fantasies; she wanted to
write down the words she'd never formed on paper and hardly ever spoken
aloud; she wanted to write about how her heart thumped and her body
tingled when that boy spoke to her, or when she saw him across the road
and through the crowd in the town centre. And she couldn't. Her mother
would tidy her room. She could picture her pausing to read aloud in the
empty house: those pursed lips putting a different voice to her
daughter's private words; the caked powder and the scattered rouge; and
the frown under the thinning, puffed-up hair.
Finally, with college, there was a delicious freedom. When she
unpacked her case in that bare room, her own room, in the hall of
residence, she had found a package, carefully wrapped. It was a diary:
a beautiful, leather-bound diary with a strap and a clasp. Prudence
smiled wryly: no lock. But her room was at last her own, and all her
thoughts and feelings, her impulses and urges, truths, lies and
imaginings could spill in sudden tumbles onto those magical pages, now
bare with promise. Sometimes she felt as though she was bursting with
pages and poems of which she hadn't the slightest inkling until her pen
started to move across the bare page. It was like that automatic
writing she'd read about, except that it wasn't anything to do with
spirits: it was her own hidden self, full of the surprises of her
unsuspected imagination.
And once out, there was the pleasure of reflection, of letting the
words roll silently in her head, or of reading them aloud and making
them frighteningly, deliciously and dangerously real.
Suddenly released, Prudence sat down at her bare desk, opened the
diary and, leaving the suitcase still open and full on the bed, held
her pen poised to write. She hesitated; then her mother's frown creased
into a grin, and she wrote the first momentous, blasphemous words:
Dear Shitty,
She paused, and then went over the letters again and again, thickening
them, and adding long swirling tails to the 'S' and the 'y'. Then,
satisfied, she began to write.