‘The tape says WATCH ME, so let’s see what happens when we do,’ she says, sliding the video into the VHS machine, which swallows the tape whole. An image fills the screen, and it feels like the past is coming back to haunt us all.
Fifteen
SEAGLASS – 1980
The face of my nine-year-old sister fills the screen. It appears to be Lily’s turn to be the star of the family home movie. Some people are born to be the stars of their own show, and she was never interested in learning life’s lines unless they were from her own script. Other people are viewed as little more than extras in Lily’s rather narrow field of vision. If you don’t have a scene in her story, you don’t exist in her world.
Our summers at Seaglass were always my favourite time of year as a young child. As soon as school was over for my sisters, my mother would load up the car with suitcases, food, wine, and us, then we’d make the journey from London to Cornwall and escape the city for six weeks. Inevitably we would always time it wrong, arriving when the tide was in so we couldn’t cross the causeway, but that didn’t matter. As soon as I could see the old house, with its turquoise turrets, it always felt like I was home. We would play on the thin strip of remaining black sand while we waited for the sea to retreat. Sometimes having to wait for something just makes you want it more.
Nana was always so happy to see us. She would cross the sandy causeway as soon as it was safe to do so, always with the rusty old wheelbarrow in front of her and a dog close behind. I remember a black Labrador called Bob before Poppins came along. Nana would hug and kiss us all, then load our bags onto the wheelbarrow, to make it easier to transport everything to the house. It took a few trips back and forth, and we’d take it in turns to ride on top. Our bedrooms were always as we’d left them, but with clean sheets, fresh flowers, and a chocolate coin beneath the pillow of each bed. Nana always knew how to make us feel welcome and loved when we were children.
Dad was rarely there even before the divorce. My father would normally join us for at least a couple of weeks, but I don’t remember him being there at all during the summer of 1980, until after it happened. Which makes me wonder if my parents’ marriage was already in trouble, way back then. It was also around that time that our mother insisted we call her Nancy – she said that to keep calling her anything else made her feel old.
The room is completely quiet as the video begins. Nine-year-old Lily is standing in the hallway full of clocks at Seaglass . . . there are still spaces on the wall for the extra twenty or so clocks Nana has collected since. I remember this as Lily’s Fame phase. I think we all do, and Nancy smiles in the present when her favourite daughter smiles in the past. Lily takes a few steps back from the camera, to reveal a 1980s outfit that these days would be mistaken for fancy dress. The neon-pink T-shirt, purple leggings, tutu, headband and pink leg warmers bring it all back. I notice the others smiling as the child on the screen dances to the music and sings along, knowing every word of the Fame theme tune. Her endless singing about living forever seems to bother me the most, along with the other lyric she repeats a few seconds later, staring straight at the camera.
‘Remember. Remember. Remember. Remember.’
I do remember that summer at Seaglass. I wish that I didn’t.
If you were to walk into Nana’s house, there are three doors on the left of the hallway, two at the end, and one on the right. On the left you’d find a lounge, then a small library, then the music room. At the far end of the clock-filled hall is a door to the enormous kitchen, and a door to a tiny bathroom. An elaborate staircase is on the right of the hallway, but just before that there is one other door. Which was almost always locked. Nana’s studio, or ‘the West Wing’， as she sometimes liked to call it, was very much out of bounds when my sisters came to stay. It runs the full length of the house, with a door at each end, and is where she liked to write and illustrate her children’s books. These days there are giant framed book covers on the walls, including Daisy Darker’s Little Secret and some of Nana’s other favourites: Suzy Smith’s Best Birthday, Danny Delaney’s Lost Dog, Poppy Patel’s First Fib and Charlie Cho’s Worst Weekend. But back in 1980, Nana was still illustrating other people’s books and had yet to write one of her own.
Inside the studio, there were three large desks permanently covered in sketch books and drawings, four windows letting in lots of light, endless rows of different watercolour paints, pots full of ink, pens, pencils and brushes, and enormous drawers filled with different coloured paper. There were shelves crammed full of all sorts of paraphernalia that Nana once described as ‘a few of my favourite things’， and there was a huge easel with a white sheet over the top on the day this home movie was filmed. The sheet was hiding Nana’s latest work in progress – she didn’t like anyone to see her work until it was finished. A newspaper once described Nana as the female Quentin Blake. She was furious, and said that they should have called him the male Beatrice Darker.