More Than Love Letters Read online

  More Than Love Letters

  ROSY THORNTON

  headline

  www.headline.co.uk

  Copyright © 2006 Rosy Thornton

  The right of Rosy Thornton to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2010

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  eISBN : 978 0 7553 7703 9

  This Ebook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Rosy Thornton grew up near Ipswich and studied law at Cambridge. She stayed on to do a Ph.D. and has been a lecturer there ever since. Rosy lives in a village near Cambridge with her partner, their two daughters and a springer spaniel called Treacle.

  To Lyn, who would probably still beat me at Scrabble.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My gratitude goes to my family and friends (both real and virtual) who read the book in draft and gave me the benefit of their reactions: Mum, Dad and Chris, Neelam Srivastava, Jo Cowley, Louise Fryer, Hilary Ely, Helen Gurden, Alison Priest, Sue and Dave Billingham, Anne-Marie Shiels, Diane Nowell, Charlotte Houldcroft and, especially, fellow Headline neophyte Phillipa Ashley. Thank you to Midge Gillies and Jim Kelly for their invaluable advice about the process. And to all the others who have merely had to listen to me banging on about it endlessly: I am truly sorry. I am also indebted to everyone in the C19 message-board community for their encouragement of my writing in the first place (blame them).

  Particularly grateful thanks are due to my editor, Clare Foss, who has borne my shilly-shallying with the patience of a saint, and to my long-suffering agent, friend and part-time psychotherapist, Robert Dudley, who through his critical input transformed the text – not least by pointing out that in the first draft I had made the rookie error of forgetting to include a plot. And most of all to Mike, Fadela and Natalie, who have had to live with me all this time.

  42 Gledhill Street

  Ipswich

  Suffolk IP3 2DA

  Mr Richard Slater, MP

  House of Commons

  London SW1A 0AA

  14 September 2004

  Dear Mr Slater,

  I am writing to you as my constituency MP to express my concern about VAT on sanitary protection. As you know, these essential goods have been subject to a lowered rate of 5 per cent VAT since January 2001, but in my view they should be zero-rated. Mr Singh in my local chemist’s tells me that the special 5 per cent rate causes great accounting headaches for pharmacists. For me, the charging of any VAT on sanitary towels and tampons is an unarguable example of sex discrimination. It is also a hygiene issue.

  Yours sincerely,

  Margaret Hayton.

  House of Commons

  London SW1A 0AA

  20 September 2004

  Dear Ms Hayton,

  Thank you for your letter of 14 September, raising an issue of concern. Your view has been noted, and I can assure you that I shall be looking into this matter in the near future.

  Yours sincerely,

  Richard Slater, MP.

  42 Gledhill Street

  Ipswich

  Suffolk IP3 2DA

  Mr Richard Slater, MP

  House of Commons

  London SW1A 0AA

  28 November 2004

  Dear Mr Slater,

  I am writing to you as my constituency MP because I am dismayed about the British government’s failure to take steps to implement the EU Emissions Trading Directive, which is to come into effect in most member states in January 2005. The government is planning instead, I understand, to increase allocations of carbon emissions to British power generation and other industries, placing in serious jeopardy our ability to meet Kyoto targets for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2012. Do we want to be among those few European countries which are not keeping pace with staged reductions in emissions? (Us and the Greeks, basically.) It is the future of the planet that we are talking about here.

  Yours sincerely,

  Margaret Hayton.

  House of Commons

  London SW1A 0AA

  4 December 2004

  Dear Ms Hayton,

  Thank you for your letter of 28 November, raising an issue of concern. Your view has been noted, and I can assure you that I shall be looking into this matter in the near future.

  Yours sincerely,

  Richard Slater, MP.

  42 Gledhill Street

  Ipswich

  Suffolk IP3 2DA

  Mr Richard Slater, MP

  House of Commons

  London SW1A 0AA

  10 February 2005

  Dear Mr Slater,

  I am writing to you as my constituency MP to raise a matter of considerable local concern. The zip-wire in the park between Gledhill Street and Emery Street has been broken ever since I moved to Ipswich in September. Not only is this a considerable loss of amenity for the local children who use the park as their main play area, but the older children use the broken platforms from which the wire formerly ran as vantage points from which to ‘bomb’ the younger ones with twigs, sweet wrappers and other detritus. Only yesterday I had to comfort a small girl who was in tears as a result of such an attack. I hope steps may be taken as soon as possible either to mend the zip-wire or to remove the platforms. I wrote to the borough council about this back in October but have received no reply.

  More dog waste bins in the park would also be a highly desirable improvement.

  Yours sincerely,

  Margaret Hayton.

  House of Commons

  London SW1A 0AA

  16 February 2005

  Dear Ms Hayton,

  Thank you for your letter of 10 February, raising an issue of concern. Your view has been noted, and I can assure you that I shall be looking into this matter in the near future.

  Yours sincerely,

  Richard Slater, MP.

  WITCH

  Women of Ipswich Together Combating Homelessness

  Minutes of meeting at Alison’s house, 17 February 2005, 8 p.m.

  Present: Alison, Ding, Emily, Pat, Pat, Persephone, Margaret Apologies for absence: Susan

  New member

  We were pleased to welcome Margaret as a new member of the collective. Emily and Pat T. agreed to redraft the rota for emergency evening and weekend cover at Witch House to include Margaret’s name. Alison agreed to go with Margaret on any call-outs for her first few times.

  Witch House: current occupancy

  Room 1: Carole

  Room 2: Lauren

  Room 3: [void]

  Room 4: Joyce Room 5: Helen

  Referrals for room 3 were considered. The possibilities were (i) Moira, a 44-year-old who has been staying at the Women’s Aid refuge since leaving her violent husband, but who finds the noisy child-dominated environment there affects her tinnitus badly, as well as her auditory hallucinations; and (ii) Nasreen, aged 18, newly arri
ved from Albania via Felixstowe, who has been referred through the Housing Advice Centre, and is currently sleeping on Pippa from Cyrenians’s sofa. After some discussion it was decided to offer the room to Nasreen.

  News of residents

  Joyce is much better since Dr Gould changed her medication, and relationships in the house have been far easier as a result. There has been no repeat of the Coco Pops incident.

  At the weekly house meeting, the main issue was still Carole’s overuse of the washing machine, and her constant showering after other residents are in bed. Emily and Pat T. led a helpful discussion about the difficulties of living with obsessive-compulsive disorder. On the positive side, it was recognised that since Carole moved in there have been no more arguments about the state of the kitchen.

  Mrs Roberston from number 27 has complained again about noisy male visitors late at night. Emily and Pat T. have spoken to Lauren once more about telling the boys to keep the noise down, and explained how vital it is for the future of the project that no money should change hands.

  News of former residents still receiving support

  We were pleased to hear that Marianne is out of rehab and working part-time at the chemist’s.

  Angie has gone back to her partner, now that he is out of prison, and they are trying to make another go of it. It was agreed that members of the collective should continue to visit on a weekly basis, provided this can be arranged at times when her partner is out of the house.

  Finance

  Lauren’s housing benefit has finally come through, so there are no current rent arrears.

  Ding has completed this year’s application for the borough council grant and sent it off; she has also got the forms for the Lottery Fund application, although she reported that this is only available for capital grants or short-term revenue funding.

  With her job going full-time and her mum being out of St Jude’s and back home with her, Ding said that she wasn’t sure whether she could continue to act as treasurer for much longer. Margaret will meet with Ding in the office on Saturday to hear about what the job involves, and may take on the role of treasurer from the beginning of the new financial year. Thanks were expressed to Margaret for this kind offer.

  Any other business

  We have all been invited to the Rape Crisis Centre social on the 25th; please bring a bottle and something for the pot-luck vegetarian buffet. (Any nut roasts should be carefully labelled, please, after what happened to Judy last year.)

  Next week’s meeting: 8 p.m., at Pat and Pat’s house.

  42 Gledhill Street

  Ipswich

  20 February 2005

  Dear Gran,

  It was so good to see you out of hospital and back home last week. How did the interview go with that woman (Kirsty, was it?) who you were seeing about being your home help? I do hope you find someone quickly – someone you can really get along with. I know you don’t want just anyone coming in in the mornings to get you up, and seeing you in the old Little Mermaid pyjamas that you had when you were twelve. (Though that’s me, not you – I don’t suppose they had pyjamas for girls when you were twelve, did they?) But, you know, you do need to get someone soon, Gran. It must be very hard, with one side of your body not up to doing a lot, at least until the physiotherapy starts to kick in a bit. What a good thing the stroke affected your right-hand side – I mean, with you being left-handed like me. It’s funny that, because Mum’s not. It’s something I must have got straight from you.

  But it does mean you can write – and of course all the other things, like buttons and bras and spreading your Marmite. I always remember we had Marmite for tea at your house, making the toast in front of the fire, we never had it at home, no one except me liked it. I am sorry that this letter seems to keep going off in all directions, but when you said about writing rather than ringing, because of not getting to the phone so well, I thought I’d try to write just as if I was talking to you, and you know I don’t think I’ve written a letter to family or friends for years, not since those awful production-line thank you letters Mum used to sit us down to write after Christmas when we were little. I guess you’ve had quite a few of those from me, down the years – wonder if you ever kept any of them? I’m sorry the letters were so soulless, but I do remember lots of the things you gave me, Gran. I’ve still got Killer-Eyes Ted here with me, sitting on the end of my bed – and the Jill pony books, it was you who started me on those, and I must have read them all about twenty times. And do you remember that funny puppet that was Little Red Riding Hood one way round and you turned it inside out and it was the wolf? I played with that non-stop, and I cried when I took it to school and Jackie Baker threw it on the roof of the infant toilets, and Mr Hughes wouldn’t fetch it down with his ladder like he did all the footballs because he said I shouldn’t have had it out in the playground in the first place.

  My landlady (I suppose I should call her that, but it sounds so 1950s – really she’s more like a normal housemate, even though she’s miles older than me) is called Cora, and she likes to rent out the room because her husband Pete works away a lot on the oil rigs. He works three-month stints so I still haven’t met him yet – I missed him at Christmas when I was at Mum and Dad’s. I say Cora’s older than me, but actually I’ve no idea how old she must be, maybe in her forties, maybe her fifties. I can never understand how people (usually older people) can seem to tell just how old other people are by looking at them. I mean, I know when people are young (student age or a little bit older, like me), and I can tell when they are old (it’s the grey hair and wrinkles, isn’t it, really?) but in that whole in-between zone, thirties and forties and fifties, well, I can never tell at all. Most of the other staff at school are in that middle zone. Except Karen (she’s the person who helps in my class with Jack Caulfield, the blind boy I told you about), she’s not much older than me. Oh, and Mrs Martin the deputy head, who’s in the grey-and-wrinkles camp. And I honestly couldn’t place the middlies to within ten or twenty years in most cases. Maybe it’s because I never really look properly: they aren’t young or old, they are just people. I guess it comes as you get older, spotting people that are younger or older than yourself. When you reach your age, Gran, do you lose the skill again, because everyone is just young?

  Oh dear, I am worried now that Cora will walk over and see what I have written, about her age, I mean. She is writing a letter, too – we are sitting in the living room together, both writing away at our letters; it is very Jane Austen, I think. The lost art, and all that. She writes to Pete every week, never misses – I think it’s rather sweet, at their age. Apparently it isn’t always easy to get through to the rig on the phone, depends on the weather conditions in the North Sea or something.

  Anyway, Cora seem very nice. There’s a little Baby Belling in my room, and space to sit (mine’s the front bedroom, the best one in the house, which is very kind of her and Pete), and at the beginning I used to do my baked potato or my pasta up there on my own, but I hated waking up to the smell of last night’s onions, and it really seemed too much trouble to cook just for one, so I often ended up just having bread and honey for days on end. (I know how much you would disapprove of that, Gran!) And Cora was downstairs in her kitchen doing the same thing. So recently we’ve started to cook together most days. It was just weekends at first – she’d invite me down to share her supper and then I’d do a return fixture upstairs. Now we always use her kitchen, whoever’s turn it is to cook, because she’s got all the little jars of herbs and spices and everything, and my Baby Belling is under a slopy roof thing and right up against the wardrobe door, so not the easiest to get to.

  Oh dear, this letter has gone on a lot and I haven’t really told you anything yet! Well, work is going fine. We learned a song about Louis Braille today (we’ve been doing about him because of Jack); we’re just finishing the class project on spiders and starting one on Islam, and Daniel McNally hasn’t pulled down his own or anyone else’s trousers for two weeks. I’ve
also joined a women’s group. They meet every Thursday evening, and they run a safe house for homeless women. They seem like a really friendly bunch. Must go, I’ve promised I’ll take Cora’s dog, Snuffy, out to the park. She’s called after the man who wrote the music for ‘The West Wing’ (which struck me as odd, since Cora doesn’t seem a very political person) – the guy’s name is W. G. Snuffy Walden, and apparently it always made Cora and Pete laugh. Dreadful name for a human being, Cora says, but an excellent one for a spaniel.

  Lots of love,

  Margaret.

  42 Gledhill Street,

  Ipswich

  20 February 2005

  Dearest Pete,

  Well, I’m sitting in the old armchair that came from Aunt Alice when she died – I know how you always like to be able to picture me when I’m writing to you – and Snuffy is lying across my feet doing her impersonation of a draught-excluder – though I never saw a draught-excluder with its eyes tight shut and a yellow rubber duck still in its mouth.