The Drying Rooms - Chapter Fifteen

My Baby Sister

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My baby sister in the garden, Bahrain, 1966

Audio version of Chapter Fifteen

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As soon as my sister and I hug each other in the Arrivals Hall (and there have been many Arrivals Halls), a missing piece slots seamlessly into place. What is contained in that missing piece?  Love, of course. But it’s not just love that has been missing – I have love in aching spades in my daily life. In the Arrivals-Hall moment with my sister there’s something else going on as well— something far back and intensely familiar.

Hugging my sister feels like coming home.  

At the moment of stepping on to the threshold of the school holidays, school vanishes. Cruel Matron vanishes. Relief, safety, and love flood in. Vistas of it stretching ahead, until the tipping point when the end of the holidays appears on the horizon and the count-down of dread begins.

Now, in our adult lives, my sister and I are separated by three thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean. The heightened anxieties and joys associated with arrivals and departures in our childhoods repeats itself year after year.

We involved the Atlantic in our love for our mother. Mum hated funerals and coffins. I can hear her splendid, smoker’s voice pronouncing coffins as far too claustrophobic.  So, after she died, my sister and I carried out mum’s usual response to any attempted conversation about her desired rituals after death:

“Oh, just chuck me in the sea!”

On a windy August day in 2011, we transported the box containing mum’s ashes in a sturdy white carrier bag, emblazoned with the undertaker’s pink-lily logo, to Teignmouth in Devon (a place of happy family memories).

We liked the idea of her transformed molecules forever floating free in the vastness of the ocean between us — even though she doubtless went straight in to the digestive tracts of the mackerel lurking in the pewter swells slapping up against Teignmouth’s sea walls. 

But we only chucked half of mum into the sea. The other half was taken by the wind and the sheep-shorn grass on Dartmoor later that day, the same spot where we scattered our father fifteen years earlier.

First our brothers, then our dad, then mum. Mum was the last to die.

But when my sister was born, everyone was very much alive.

My sister’s birth was the most exciting thing in the world.

She was born on February 10, so the first time I saw her must have been in the Easter holidays, by which time she was two months old. That year,1966, Easter fell on April 10. Of course, the memory itself has never told me that. I googled it.

The memory starts on a small blackboard at school and cuts straight to a darkened, hushed room in Bahrain.

I was ten.

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She is with a gaggle of friends, heading towards G-Block. Light is flooding the corridor. She is chatting. Then she sees it. They all see it. The news she has been waiting for, announced in white chalk on the small blackboard next to G-Block’s meshed-glass swing doors.

EMMA HAS A BABY SISTER!

She is instantly charged with jumping-up-and-down joy.  

Why has she always said that it was Cruel Matron who wrote that fanfare of chalk words for all to see? Why is she sure that it was Cruel Matron who received the telegram from her parents in Bahrain? Because there is another thing. A strong yet barely distinguishable, flickering thing – the flicker that Cruel Matron and her sometimes twinkling blue eyes joined her and her friends in celebrating the good news.

She is in a plane, looking down, forehead and nose squashed against the cold oval window. Her whole body is shimmering with the adrenaline-thrill of the spread of twinkling lights that have just appeared in the black hole of the night miles below her. Her ears are screaming and popping. She sucks the boiled sweet dispensed for landing. It makes no difference. But the pain is sweet. She is about to be in the arms of her dad and mum. She will soon step into the heat of the Bahrain night.

Still today, landing at night and stepping out of a plane straight into heat and the hot smell of jet fuel always hits her like a surge of freedom.

And now she is right back in that night fifty-eight years ago. Landing at Bahrain airport. Mum and dad on the tarmac. Their chauffeur driven car waiting.

The double excitement of not just home and parents but being whisked along empty roads, desert on either side, heading towards the twinkling lights of the capital city Manama and their huge white house and … any moment now … the most exciting thing in the world.

As soon as they are home, they go up the wide staircase to the large carpeted landing — good for practising cartwheels. Gentle parental whispers usher her into a hushed, dark little room smelling of Johnson’s baby powder. In the room there is a cot. In the cot is a shape — a peaceful little lump under a cellular blanket with only the head visible. She remembers the profile of a completely still, tiny sleeping face.

Standing on tiptoes beside the cot, she is allowed to reach down and softly softly touch her baby sister for the first time.

The room was a little dressing room off the bedroom where her sister’s nanny slept.

The house was always referred to as the Political Agency. Because that’s what it was; it was also where her father worked. He was called The Political Agent, something she never really understood as a child, but she knew it wasn’t quite the same as an ambassador. The Political Agency offices occupied the ground floor of the house. She remembers men in suits and sheikhs in robes sweeping through the huge marble-floored entrance hall — the perfect space for their family ping-pong table, where her brothers played expertly for hours.

She knew her dad was an important figure on the island. The deference of the British ex-pat community in other spaces in the town always made her feel strange and uncomfortable but it made her feel important too. She felt important at the RAF NAAFI shop in Muharraq when she went there with her mother to buy Marmite and baked beans. Is that where they bought whisky and English cigarettes as well? Or did they just miraculously appear on planes from England, like the letters with English stamps that came through the Diplomatic Bag?

She always thought the Diplomatic Bag was some kind of entity, until she learnt it was actually a man with a big black leather briefcase who carried letters on planes to British Embassies. What happened if the man lost the bag? She has a memory of one of the other school holiday children being in the know about this—probably one of the teenagers, her brothers’ clan. He said that the man chained the Diplomatic Bag to his wrist so he would have to be killed to get the bag off him.

In the garden there was a pool surrounded by oleander trees. She remembers red and pink petals floating on the water.  So why did she sometimes go swimming in the pool at the BOAC club in the dusty, hot concrety part of town? 

She suddenly remembers! It was to do with her sister’s nanny, M. She was in awe of M because she was a cool grown up (nothing like her parents). She had long dark hair and wore short, simple cotton shift dresses which showed off her beautiful long, slim, tanned legs. M was always kind to her and treated her like a grown-up friend and she had a handsome boyfriend in the RAF. They sometimes took her and her baby sister to meet their friends at that pool in the town.

Beautiful M and her handsome boyfriend also took her and her baby sister to the Ruler’s Beach. The Ruler’s Beach attracted other sleek, slim couples with bronze bodies. Bodies glistening with sensual wafts of Ambre Solaire suntan oil. She longed to be grown-up and free like those couples lying together in the blazing sun or larking about in the sea. Young men (other RAF pilots maybe) lifting laughing bikinied young women on to their strong bare shoulders.

She loved the beach because she loved swimming, but she hated lying in the sun. She was already becoming self-conscious about her fat thighs in her swimming costume. Her parents, who had nicknames for everyone and everything about them, called her thighs ‘hams’, because they looked like little legs of pork, which she always laughed along to until it didn’t seem funny anymore.  

And she never turned bronze. Her freckles multiplied under the sun and her raging lobster-red flesh turned to blisters so that at night her skin smarted at the touch of cool white sheets.

Beautiful tanned M and her handsome boyfriend took her and her baby sister to the Ruler’s Beach on a Friday, the first day of the weekend, M’s day off. Why does she know this? Because she remembers her mother repeating it in her old age reminiscence-loops – the point being that M loved her baby sister so much that she was even prepared to spend her free time with her. Really?

But mum isn’t absent in my Bahrain memories. She’s very present.

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The next chapter will also be set in Bahrain.

The photo in Chapter Five is of the Political Agency, where we lived.