‘Don’t be so clever,’ she snarls and slams the door behind her. As I have, this very day, just failed the arithmetic paper in the mock Eleven Plus, this remark hits home cruelly and I stare at the abused bedroom door for a long time considering the possible paths my life is going to take. Will I follow my sisters – dead or otherwise – to Queen Anne Grammar School for Girls or will I be consigned to the scrapheap of Beckfield Lane Secondary Modern? As well as my future, the bedroom door is also host to my new ‘Ye Olde England’ calendar, given to me at Christmas by Auntie Gladys. This ye olde England is not a country we’re very well acquainted with in our family – page after page, month after month, of thatched cottages, distant spires, haywains and milkmaids. It is also a fund of useful titbits of information – how else would I know when ‘Dominion Day’ was? Or the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings? If only these things were a help with the Eleven Plus.

I rifle listlessly through Monday’s Look and Learn without finding anything I want to either look at or learn. Despite having central heating in the light-and-airy pebble-dashed semi that has replaced the dark shadows of Above the Shop, Bunty refuses to turn on the radiators in the bedrooms because she thinks warm bedrooms are unhealthy. Patricia points out that hypothermia is unhealthy too, but once Bunty has her teeth in a belief then she’s an absolute terrier with it. It’s so cold in my bedroom that I can see my fingertips turning first pink and then blue and if I watch them much longer I suppose they’ll turn purple and fall off. I don’t get the chance to observe this interesting phenomenon because Patricia comes back in the room and says, ‘Can I talk to you, or are you just going to be stupid?’ Poor Patricia – she’s so desperate for a confidante that she has to make do with me. For some weeks now she has been courted by Howard – an earnest, bespectacled twig of a boy from St Peter’s, the expensive public school whose playing-fields back onto Queen Anne’s hockey-pitch. He has been spying voyeuristically on Patricia on the hockey-pitch – she’s a psychopathically deranged Right Wing – when he should have been boiling things in retorts, and he finally persuaded her, just before Christmas, to go out with him.

‘I’ve decided to do it with him,’ she says, making ‘It’ sound like a tooth extraction and, having missed the subject of the original conversation, I’m still not sure what ‘it’ might be. From the bottom of the ghostless stairs, Bunty starts shouting at Patricia but Patricia ignores her. Bunty keeps on shouting and Patricia keeps on ignoring. Who will wear out first?

Bunty.

‘Howard’s parents are going away next week-end,’ Patricia says, ‘so we’ll do it then.’ She sits on the end of my bed looking uncommonly light-hearted and I venture to enquire if she is in love with Howard.

Patricia snorts loudly. ‘Come off it, Ruby! Romantic love’s an outmoded bourgeois convention!’ (They don’t tell us that in Look and Learn.) ‘But,’ she adds reluctantly, ‘it is nice to have someone who wants you, you know?’

I nod in sympathetic understanding, it must be very nice. We celebrate this rare moment of intimacy between us by putting on my latest EP, bought with a Christmas record token, ‘Chubby Checker’s Dancin’ Party’, and solemnly practise the Twist for a while, a dance at which we are no good at all – Patricia is too stiff and self-conscious and I just fall over – until we collapse from exhaustion, side by side, on the bed and contemplate the pristine woodchip of my ceiling, so sophisticatedly different from the cracked plaster and whitewash of Above the Shop. Patricia turns her head and says, ‘I suppose you want me to take you to the pictures tomorrow?’ Patricia asks this as if she’s doing me a huge favour, whereas I know she’s as keen as me to go and see Kid Galahad because one of the few things we have in common is our devotion to Elvis Presley. And, what’s more, tomorrow, 8th January, is Elvis’s birthday, an anniversary marked on the Ye Olde England calendar by a constellation of little red, hand-drawn hearts. It is me that Patricia invites to the Odeon, rather than Howard, because she knows that Howard would scoff throughout at our tender-hearted, blue-suede-shod hero.

She meets me from school, where I have just failed yet another mock arithmetic exam, and consoles me with meat patties from Richardson’s and the information that some of the world’s great heroes – Gandhi, Schweitzer, Keats, Buddha, Elvis – never passed the Eleven Plus, but then, as I glumly point out to her, they never sat it either. Patricia herself is sitting her O Levels this year but you wouldn’t know it from the amount of time she spends on school work (none).

Kid Galahad cheers me up somewhat and the meat patties and the giant box of Poppets which we share in the dark go some way to compensate for the lack of anything to eat when we get home. Bunty is wilting these days, taking to her bed with alarming frequency, for no apparent reason, except that she is ‘not feeling well’. She has begun to make strange, unwomanly pronouncements that would have given Auntie Babs the shivers. I have, for example, stumbled upon her in the bathroom, on her hands and knees, scrubbing out the toilet bowl with Vim and vigour, and witnessed her breaking off from this meditation to snap her rubber gloves off and snarl, ‘I don’t see why a house needs a wife – it’s me that needs the wife!’ Whatever next? Demanding the vote?

As I am due to sit the first part of my Eleven Plus the following Tuesday she pulls herself together to make Sunday dinner (lunch hasn’t arrived in the north yet), a last supper of roast lamb, butter beans, roast potatoes, mint sauce and frozen peas. What a shame noone thought to cook the peas! That’s a joke – Patricia’s, when she asks Bunty what we’re having for dinner, and Bunty recites the above menu. I laugh uproariously at this because, as you can imagine, Patricia doesn’t make jokes very often. Not at all, in fact, and I laugh even more, in a Laughing Policeman kind of way, because it would be an awful shame if the first time Patricia made a joke nobody laughed.

Both Patricia and Bunty glare at me. It is an ill-timed burst of humour on Patricia’s part because she is not in the parental good books, having come in with the milk this morning. Presumably she was doing ‘it’ with Howard last night. Bunty is cross-examining her closely for evidence of recent debauchery but, to my eyes anyway, Patricia looks just the same today as she did yesterday. ‘If I thought for one minute,’ Bunty says, stirring the gravy furiously round the roasting-pan, ‘that you had been—’

‘Enjoying myself?’ Patricia says, a supercilious expression on her face that’s just asking to be erased with a slap. But no blow falls. Instead, to our alarm, Bunty starts to quiver like a half-set jelly; even the stiff curls on her head tremble like a tinsel halo on a coathanger-wire. She keeps on stirring the gravy, pretending that this attack of emotion isn’t happening. A very surprised Patricia lets her guard fall and hesitantly asks, ‘Is something wrong, Mummy?’ This unexpected manifestation of compassion (‘Mummy’!) drives Bunty over the edge and she snaps, ‘Wrong? Only you – that’s the only thing that’s wrong with me,’ and a furiously white-lipped Patricia shouts in her face, ‘What a bloody cow you are!’ and flees the kitchen. Bunty continues her tremulous gravy-stirring as if nothing had happened and without looking at me says, ‘Shift yourself, Ruby, do something useful and get the plates.’ It’s only when she’s dishing up the butter beans that look like pale little foetuses curled up on the ‘Harvest’ dinner plates that she finally dissolves, great tears falling down her cheeks like crystal pear-drops which I try to mop up ineffectively with a Kleenex. By the time we eat our Sunday dinner the gravy is congealed and the peas almost frozen up again. How on earth am I supposed to pass my ‘Verbal Reasoning’ paper on Tuesday when I see so little of it in the course of my everyday life?

The first part of the Eleven Plus seems suspiciously easy. Absent is to A x x x as P x x x x x x is to Here and the composition is really quite enjoyable: Write about one of the following:

‘Dunno,’ she says with a shrug, and then, as we stand watching the frozen river and contemplating the olden days, a curious feeling rises up inside me, a feeling of something long forgotten. It has something to do with the cold and the ice and something to do with the water too. I try to concentrate on the feeling, to bring it to life, but as soon as I do it evaporates from my brain. It’s the same feeling I have sometimes when I’m woken from sleepwalking and I know that there’s something incredibly important which I’ve lost and have been looking for – something that’s been torn out of me, leaving a hole inside – and that thing, whatever it is, has been tantalizingly within reach as if it were just around the corner, behind a door, or in a cupboard somewhere. Then I grow fully awake and have no idea at all what it is that I’ve been looking for.

‘Are you all right, Ruby?’ Patricia asks, but we are diverted by the approach of a pair of swans, balanced forlornly on their own private iceberg. We can hear the river crackling and cracking and watch as our steamy breath billows into the air. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’ I ask after a while.

‘Truanting. Do you think those swans are all right?’

‘Well, I would change places with them anytime,’ I respond gloomily. ‘At least the rest of their lives doesn’t depend on whether they can do mental arithmetic.’

‘And they can fly away if they want to,’ Patricia nods sadly.

‘And they have each other,’ I add as the swans glide past us on their ice-float, their magnificent wings ruffled to protect them from the numbing cold. A shiver goes through me from top to bottom. ‘The water looks so cold.’

‘It is,’ Patricia says with feeling and then she gives me a funny, sideways look and says, ‘Ruby?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Do you remember—’ and then she shakes her head and says, ‘Nothing, it doesn’t matter, come on – I’ll wait with you at the bus-stop if you like,’ and she turns her collar up against the wind.

Bunty rallies a little for Shrove Tuesday – a day of ‘feasting and merry-making’ according to the Ye Olde England calendar. Not in our house, not at any rate after Bunty throws the fifth pancake at the kitchen wall instead of tossing it nicely back into the pan. It sticks on the wall for a few seconds and then slowly unpeels itself into a sticky blob on the floor like an extra from a science fiction film (Killer Pancakes!). It seems awfully symbolic somehow, especially as it was George’s pancake. ‘Well,’ Patricia says with Bunty’s smile stuck across her face, ‘I was almost full anyway, weren’t you, Ruby?’

‘Just about,’ I murmur and we slink out of the kitchen quickly before the frying pan whizzes through the air towards George’s head.

An appropriate air of contrition is in the air on Ash Wednesday, but we know it won’t last. Lent also marks the beginning of Nell’s decline, taking to her bed permanently after the pancake fiasco and not even rising for Easter Monday. Somewhere in the middle of this, on Mothering Sunday, Bunty displays a blatant lack of mothering by locking Patricia out of the house, so that she’s unable to creep in as usual at three in the morning. Patricia, not to be outdone, stands down below in the quiet suburban night-air, screaming, ‘Bloody bourgeois pigs – come the revolution, you’ll be first against the wall, Bunty Lennox!’ which, not surprisingly, creates quite a stir in the neighbourhood. I think Patricia’s enjoying herself and almost looks annoyed when I throw my front-door key down to her.

I myself undergo a traumatic visit to Mr Jeffrey’s, the dentist, the day before Good Friday, resulting in the loss of three much cherished baby-teeth which I have been hanging onto as long as possible. Perhaps I do not want to leave my childhood behind. (On the other hand, perhaps I do.) Patricia very kindly exchanges the teeth for three sixpences and takes me to meet Howard in the Acropolis Coffee House. It is hard to believe that this awkward gawky person, peppered with acne, is responsible for the Bacchanalian heights which Patricia reports to me most Sunday mornings as I lie in my innocent bed listening to Easy Beat.

Easter weekend is marked by a flurry of family visitors to say goodbye to Nell who has just about ‘had enough’ of life by now. This premature wake also produces a flurry of Easter eggs. Auntie Gladys, Uncle Clifford and Adrian come as well as Auntie Babs (on her own, thank goodness) and Uncle Ted. Adrian is entirely grown up now (twenty) but is still living at home. He’s just started on a hairdressing apprenticeship and is very handy around the house – setting the table for tea and picking up the teapot and saying, ‘Shall I be mother?’ to Bunty so that she looks shocked as noone has ever offered before to swap this role with her (you can see she’s tempted). Uncle Ted, standing behind Adrian, winks at George and puts his hand on his hip and takes a few mincing steps. George gives a great guffaw of laughter but when Uncle Clifford says, ‘What’s the joke?’ shakes his head helplessly. Adrian has brought his dog with him – a timid wire-haired terrier that Rags tries to dismember.

Uncle Ted announces to the company that he has finally become engaged to his long-standing girlfriend, Sandra, and George says, ‘Knocked up?’ and all the women shout ‘George!’ disapprovingly at him. Bunty, getting down to the nitty-gritty, asks who the bridesmaids will be, while Auntie Babs looks smug because the twins are in great demand as bridesmaids. Even I would have to admit that they would probably grace a wedding a bit better than me and Patricia, for we are clumsy, slouching sorts of girls compared with Daisy and Rose. They are too busy, revising for their O-Level exams, to come and say goodbye to their grandmother. They are fifteen-going-on-sixteen and I haven’t seen them for a long time. Patricia is sixteen-going-on-seventeen and a few of her Favourite Things are Howard, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Beatles, who have rapidly taken over from Elvis in our fickle affections. (All his smouldering six-by-six, glossy, black-and-white photographs have come down off her wall and been replaced by the cheerful grins of the Fab Four. Poor Elvis.) Patricia manages to be rude to everyone – two aunties, two uncles, a cousin and even a dog, within the space of fifteen minutes (as I recall, something to do with her proposal to join the Communist Party) and I gain to the sum of three extra Easter eggs because everyone is so disgusted that they give me her eggs. But what profiteth it a girl if she gains three Easter eggs and loses her sister?

George and Uncles Ted and Clifford gather round the kitchen table with a bottle of whisky that Ted has brought and engage in an animated tri-partite discussion on a) whether or not George should build a patio at the back, b) the sight of our new neighbour, Mrs Roper, breast-feeding her baby in the conservatory next door, which elicits cries all round of ‘Bloody Hell!’ said half in admiration and half in disgust and c) the best route to Scotch Corner.

I scurry upstairs to seek refuge from this grown-up talk but up in Nell’s bedroom an even worse scene is waiting for me. Bunty, Auntie Gladys and a captive Nell are spectating at a morbid women-only striptease show with Auntie Babs as the main attraction. She moves like a statue on a revolving dais and, turning to her audience, she peels back her navy blue cardigan and white blouse to reveal – on one side a pendulous, matronly breast, and on the other side – nothing, just a pucker of skin and scar tissue. Bunty and Auntie Gladys suck in air quickly, making mouths like stricken fish and Nell moans softly. I leave the room quickly. I haven’t even learnt about getting breasts yet, let alone about losing them. I sit on the stairs pushing chocolate buttons from my Easter egg into the empty sockets in my mouth until eventually boredom propels me to go and find Patricia and secretly give her back the Easter eggs which are rightly hers.

I am both repelled and fascinated by this sight. I have never seen anyone breastfeeding before Mrs Roper (we aren’t that kind of family). It also makes an unfortunate contrast to Auntie Babs’ chest, now entirely shorn, as she lies looking paler than the sheet on her bed in St James’ in Leeds where Bunty and I go on a cheap-day return one Saturday while Patricia stays at home to fast for India.

This was shortly after I witnessed, for the first time, Bunty and Mr Roper together. Bunty and I were in the Co-op mobile shop, lurking amongst the tinned milk puddings, trying to decide between rice and semolina, when Mr Roper bounded on board, looking for washing-powder – a new man ahead of his time. ‘Well, hel-lo there!’ he said to my mother. He was smartly dressed in cavalry-twill trousers, a dogtooth-check sports jacket and a cravat. Bunty handed over her purse to me so I could pay for our purchases and she could remain ensnared by Mr Roper at the back of the van. While I chanted our divvy number to the driver I could see, reflected in the windscreen, the vision of Mr Roper presenting, with a flourish, the red plastic tulip that was being given away with every packet of Daz.

I was there and, believe me, the woman who took that tulip off Mr Roper was not my mother; that woman was a giggling confection of girlishness – charming, playful, spirited, sort of Debbie Reynolds before Eddie Fisher left her.

I fear for my mother. She is entering murky, uncharted deep space where the meteorites shower unexpectedly down and the Rings of Saturn, as we know, are Deadly.

A little while after this, at the end of June, a miracle happens – George and Bunty receive a letter telling them that I will be going to Queen Anne Grammar School. Phew, as Uncle Ted would say. Patricia, on the other hand, has some grisly results in her O Levels. This is because she walked out of most of them early. (When asked why by a furious Bunty, she just shrugs and says, ‘Dunno.’)

Patricia has a bad cold and her eyes are red but I don’t think it’s Nell she’s crying for. Our grandmother looks much the same dead as she had done in the last weeks of life, her skin a bit more yellow perhaps and an uncanny resemblance to Christine Roper’s tortoise. I feel very sorry for her but also very guilty that I’m not wracked by grief the way we were when the Pets died.

The viewing is a leisurely affair, front row, no peppermint creams. ‘Had enough?’ Bunty asks after a while and we agree that we have. As we’re leaving, Bunty turns to look back and after a slight pause says, ‘That was my mother,’ and the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, just like June Allyson’s in The Glenn Miller Story on television the previous Sunday afternoon, because I knew, with the certainty of premonition, that one day I will say exactly the same thing.

Perhaps George is vaguely aware that he is losing his wife to another man and that is why he decides to tempt her back with an exotic outing to a faraway place – the Chinese restaurant in Goodramgate. This is his first mistake, for Bunty does not like foreign food. She has not actually tasted any foreign food but nonetheless she knows she doesn’t like it. His second mistake was to invite me and Patricia.

‘Well,’ Bunty says, sitting down at the table and staring at the red tablecloth, ‘this is different.’ Glowing red paper lanterns with golden tassels hang from the roof where you would expect normal lights to be. I point out the lanterns to Patricia and she smiles indulgently at me. High-pitched string music twangs plangently in the background. ‘This place is decorated like a you-know-what,’ Bunty says, nibbling suspiciously on a prawn cracker. She fishes a flower out of her little porcelain cup of jasmine tea and examines it critically in the dim crimson light. George orders for us – the Three-Course Meal for Four – prawn cocktail, beef chop-suey, sweet-and-sour-pork, chicken chow-mein, followed by tinned lychees and coffee. ‘You’ve been here before!’ Bunty says accusingly, and George laughs and says, ‘Don’t be daft.’ But he obviously has because the waiter gives him an inscrutable wink.

George draws on his Shopkeeper’s stock of small-talk to keep Bunty amused (‘Well, how does this weather suit you, then? We’ll pay for this sunshine, eh?’) but Bunty is not seduced. ‘How long are they going to take?’ she demands impatiently after ten seconds. The prawn cocktail arrives, more lettuce than prawn; in fact it’s hard to find any prawns at all in the jungle of leaves. ‘I found one!’ I say triumphantly, ‘I’ve found a prawn!’ and George says, ‘Don’t be clever, Ruby.’ Patricia counts her prawns, putting them on the side of her plate where they lie like fat, pink commas. ‘They’re shrimp, not prawn,’ she says, prodding them with a toothpick like an earnest marine biologist. ‘Oh for heaven’s sakes!’ George says, ‘Shrimp, prawn – does it matter?’

‘It does if you’re a shrimp wanting to reproduce,’ Patricia says mildly, and Bunty says swiftly, ‘We won’t have any of that kind of talk, thank you, Patricia – it’s to be expected from you, isn’t it?’

The next course arrives. ‘Chopsticks!’ I say excitedly, twirling them in Patricia’s face and she fends me off with a napkin. ‘You don’t expect me to eat with those, do you?’ Bunty says, looking in amazement at George.

‘Why not? Millions of Chinese do,’ he says, scissoring his own ineptly in the direction of a strip of beef. Who would have known he was so cosmopolitan? Bunty lifts a limp and lanky beansprout from her plate. ‘What is this?’

‘Why don’t we just eat?’ Patricia says. She looks uncomfortable, even more pale than usual and rather edgy as if she can’t sit still in her seat. The pallor of her skin begins to change dramatically, turning to a flushed prawn-pink and – just as Bunty holds up a bit of pork and says, ‘What does dog taste like, do you think? Like this?’ – Patricia begins to shake and return from rosy-red to snow-white before falling awkwardly off her chair.

‘Well, at least now you know you’re allergic to prawns,’ I comfort her, as she lies stranded on her high, white hospital bed.

‘Shrimp,’ she reminds me and offers me a fruit gum.

I take to grammar school like a duck to water – the rigour of fifty-minute lessons, the discipline of the dinner queue, the petty alignments and re-alignments of new friendships – these are all a great release after the continual melodrama of home life. The only unnerving thing is how after every time any teacher reads out my name from a register they look up, slightly fazed, and say, ‘Patricia’s sister?’ as if they’ve never imagined Patricia having a family. Luckily, noone seems to remember Gillian.

Patricia, despite her poor exam results, is now an habituée of the Lower-Sixth Common Room and I rarely encounter her in the mellow oak of the corridors. When we do, she completely ignores me, which is rather galling, especially as other senior girls with new sisters in the school make a great fuss of them and show them off like pets to their friends.

Time trots, canters and gallops towards the end of term and I work hard at producing contour maps and diagrams of Roman central-heating systems and writing sentences in French – another language! The French teacher says I am a natural linguist and I practise the lovely new language of French at every opportunity. Je m’appelle Ruby. Je suis une pierre precieuse. Sometimes Patricia can be persuaded to converse with me but this makes Bunty paranoid because she thinks we’re talking about her. ‘Notre mère,’ Patricia remarks sweetly, ‘est une vache, n’est-ce pas?’

The end of the year is turned into the Twilight Zone by the arrival of the freshly-bereaved Daisy and Rose on New Year’s Eve. They sleep in Nell’s now empty bed and are never seen to cry. Auntie Babs – hopefully reunited with her missing parts – has surely sent them a message from the world of Spirit, but if she has, they never divulge it. Bunty never stops going on about how well behaved the twins are but I think what she means by that is that they never speak.

I am in bed and asleep long before the bells but am woken by Patricia just before midnight, drunk, but eager to reminisce on the passing year. She has an almost empty bottle of Bristol Cream Sherry with her, from which she takes an occasional slug. I decline. She had planned to see the New Year in on the Knavesmire, in the back of Howard’s old Zephyr, but they have had a falling out. ‘He’s decided he’s going to be an accountant,’ she says, the words an alcoholic slurry. She struggles to light a cigarette, an expression of disgust on her face.

‘And what are you going to be, Patricia?’ I ask cautiously. She blows out a stream of thoughtful smoke and knocks ash everywhere. ‘Dunno,’ she says finally, and then after a while, ‘I think I’d just like to be happy.’

Of all Patricia’s ambitions that somehow seems the most outrageous. ‘Well,’ I say to her, as the nearest church bells begin to welcome 1964, ‘if I had Aladdin’s lamp for the day, Patricia, that’s exactly what you would be.’ But when I look closely I can see that she’s fallen asleep and so I remove the burning cigarette from her hand and carefully stub it out on the last picture of Ye Olde England calendar – a pretty thatched and timbered cottage with roses round the door and smoke curling from the chimney.