Those Years that End with a Nought

Matilda Blythe always swore, even to herself, that she really wasn’t that interested in whether she might soon be the country’s oldest person or not. Of course she knew it wasn’t entirely true, but it didn’t matter to her as much as looking forward to seeing her great-great grandchildren did, or as much as thanking the God she still believed in, though He had tried her patience at times, that she still had her wits about her and family and friends who cared for her. She did know that, in defiance of the norm, Britain’s oldest people were both male, and they were born on the same day. She had never attempted to contact them, and rather hoped they wouldn’t try to contact her, but she wished them well, and also saw them – as, well, a kind of safety valve.

     Matilda’s birthday was on New Year’s Day. She was expected to be a Christmas baby, but had bucked the trend on her mother’s side of the family for December birthdays, and was born on the 1^st of January in 1910. “And I reckon you were lucky there, Miss Matty,” her Nanny often told her. She wished Nanny didn’t call her Miss Matty, but apparently it wouldn’t “do” otherwise. And she was never in any doubt that Nanny Josephine (and whilst missing out the Miss would not have “done”, missing out the “Nanny” would quite possibly have caused the sky to fall in and the seasons to reverse) was the power in the land. “I always thought it was a shame that The Mistress and Miss Amelia have their birthday and Christmas rolled into one”. The Mistress was her Mother, whom she called Mama, and Miss Amelia was her aunt, Mama’s younger sister, whom she had once heart Nanny Josephine call headstrong and heedless. Matilda supposed she was glad about it, too. Papa said it made her like a thoroughbred racehorse, and Mama said at least it would be easy for people to remember. 

     Some of the people in The Willows care home didn’t like the staff using their first names – their Christian names, as Matilda still tended to think, although she could see why it wasn’t always appropriate. To be fair, they always asked if it was okay, but folk almost always said it was, though some of them didn’t think so. Matilda was fine with it. Nanny Josephine had been fond of that saying about Sticks and Stones which seemed contradictory when you thought about her insistence on words like Miss and Nanny. But since Terence had passed away (and folk said he’d had a long life, but it was thirty years ago now) she sometimes thought she was always Mrs, or Mummy, or Auntie, or Grandma, and not just herself. 

     Matty could never quite work out if it were true that old people needed less sleep or not. Her sleep tended to come in fits and starts and intermissions and intervals. She did feel annoyed with herself when she nodded off in the day room, but when she was still alert and could listen to her favourite radio programmes in the small hours (everyone at The Willows had a private room, though it was understood that the staff had emergency access) she thought it was a price worth paying. She couldn’t decide if she were glad or sorry that they no longer played that Lillibullero tune on the BBC World Service. It was like some friends and acquaintances she’d had – they’d grated on her nerves, but she missed them now they weren’t around anymore. 

     She’d never been in a bedroom without a radio since Terence’s death, and had often listened on tinny headphones when he was alive. She smiled – it had been one of those little things they never agreed on, that could have become big things, but they found their solutions and ways round. So when she woke up and couldn’t hear the radio, her first thought was that it was broken, or there had been a power cut. The latter certainly couldn’t be true, could it, as there was still a light in the room. But she realised that didn’t come from her bedside lamp – she had fallen asleep with it on, which she preferred not to, but often did. 

     Why am I so small, Matty wondered. Though people might (generally behind her back, but she knew such things!) call her a little old lady because the word little almost axiomatically went before old lady she had always been quite tall, and though she knew she might stoop a little now, she prided herself on not having shrunk – well, not much.

     Her limbs felt small and thin, too, but they also felt strong, and supple, and as if she could run out into the snowy garden and climb trees in the moonlight.

     You can’t do that, Matty, she thought, don’t be ridiculous.

     You can’t do that because you are a very, very old lady, and there are no trees in the garden anyway, just some bushes and shrubs.

     You can’t do that because Nanny Josephine would tell you it wasn’t ladylike, and wouldn’t be appropriate, and though of course that wasn’t on a par with not being truthful or not being polite, it was still to be avoided at all costs.

     Nanny Josephine could be her unexpected and staunch defender on some matters. She had told Mama that she couldn’t see any harm in her keeping her rag doll, Mariah, on the little basket chair in her bedroom while she slept, even though she was a great girl who would soon be ten years old. Even though the two of them didn’t really get on, she had formed an alliance with Matty’s governess, Miss Hicks, on the matter of Matty being allowed free rein to Papa’s library. And when she’d had a terrible toothache she’d given her a nip of brandy, and even though it didn’t help much and she didn’t like the taste, she knew what it meant, and she would have given Nanny Josephine a big hug if she hadn’t been afraid she might have told her not to come over all histrionic. 

     Matty knew it was New Year’s Day, and knew it was her birthday. It almost seemed like blasphemy to think it, but Nanny Josephine had been wrong if she thought being a January baby was preferable to being a Christmas baby. Now if it had even been the 2^nd of January – that would have made all the difference!  That would have made it HER day, and not everybody else’s day. I am like a racehorse, she reminded herself, like a thoroughbred racehorse, and that’s something to be proud of. 

     The trouble was, she didn’t really like horses that much. Oh, she liked reading about them, and one of her favourite books was Black Beauty though it made her weep buckets every time she read it. She liked seeing the dignified, patient shire horses ploughing the fields, and liked the paintings of horses Mr Stubbs had made – there were prints of them in Papa’s study. But she was no horsewoman. That was a source of great disappointment to Papa. One of the consolations of having a daughter who was a “bit of a tomboy” was that at least she would know how to sit a horse. Well, that was the theory! She could manage to sit on her old chubby Shetland pony Mac, but knew that wasn’t what sitting a horse meant. 

    This was the first day not only of a new year – in her life and everybody else’s! – but of a new decade. The decade when the boys had gone to war and too many of them had not come back was over. She had heard Mama say that she was mightily relieved that Matty’s older brother Oliver was far too young to go off to war, and Papa had said that of course, he would have done his patriotic duty, but she knew he was relieved, too. He was profoundly disappointed that he couldn’t go to war because he had a bad leg and a limp after a riding accident (which didn’t stop him from being an excellent horseman who had never borne a grudge against equine kind but said his own carelessness and arrogance had been to blame). 

     She and Oliver were quite close, but unlike some of her friends, she didn’t weep buckets when her brother went back to school. School was another bone of contention in the household. Nanny Josephine and Miss Hicks were united in sadly admitting that she had probably outgrown them, and she was a bright, bookish girl. Along with Mama and Papa they were also worried that she was a bit of a solitary child, and though she wasn’t spoilt, it would do her no harm to have to learn to rub along with other girls. Nobody had consulted her, of course, and if they had, she didn’t know what she would have said. Probably one thing one minute and one thing the next. But if she did go to school then she wanted it to be a proper school, and not just what Oliver called “Somewhere they teach you how to be a lady,” adding, because that was the kind of thing older brothers did, “I reckon that’s a lost cause anyway!” But after a few minutes he had added something else, though he had to dress it up in older-brother talk. “You’re not without a brain, and a good one for a girl, and I reckon Mother and Father, “(he didn’t call them Mama and Papa anymore, at least, not when he remembered) “would just be wasting their money to send you somewhere where you only parade around with books on your head and learn how to speak French.”

     “I’d LIKE to learn how to speak French properly,” she protested.

     “Oh, it’s not the speaking French I object to – I’d rather learn that than that stupid Latin we have to! – it’s how it’s done and what it’s for.” And nodding gravely at his own wisdom on matters academical, he had left the room.

     I wonder what I will get for my birthday, thought Matty, snuggling back under her candlewick bedspread again. I’m too old for dolls now, though I’ll never part with Mariah, not even if I go to school and the other girls tease me. I’d love a book but if they give me one, I hope it’s not one that’s too babyish or one I’ve already read. 

     Am I due for another telegram from the Queen, Matty wondered, snuggling under the duvet again. She couldn’t get excited about it the way some folk did, especially when their first one was due. But she had respect for the Queen, and still remembered how she’d done her bit in the war.

     I hope there will never, ever, be another war, thought Matty, impatient for her birthday to begin properly, and yet still relishing these moments in bed.

     Matty, who had been quite interested in psychology at one point, recalled that there was such a thing as lucid dreaming, as knowing that you were dreaming, and she did now, or at least in shafts and shards. Have I really been alive that long, she thought, and the curious thing was, that ten year old Matty – and she WAS ten now, because it was after midnight – thought exactly the same thing. 

     I hope they’ve not asked people to come from the papers, thought Matty, though I suppose they have, it looks good for The Willows that one of their residents has lived to be 110 in good health and with all her wits about her, not that I really see how they can take the credit for it, though I’ve never denied I’ve been well looked after. I suppose I will have to smile and be pictured cutting a cake, and tell them the secrets of my long life. Well, if I knew that, I’d have patented it and made myself a millionaire. 

     I hope they’ve not invited a photographer, thought Matty, knowing that they almost certainly had. Papa had his own Kodak Brownie, but that wouldn’t do for a formal birthday snap, not one for the start of a new decade. She would have to sit in front of some kind of artificial back drop for what seemed like an eternity. Probably holding one of her presents. And Papa liked to support a photographer in the nearest town called Mr Brownlow. Mr Brownlow had been a conscientious objector in the war and had driven ambulances, and some people still shunned him, but Papa, for all his family had a long military history, he maintained that he had been just as brave, if not more brave, as many of the soldiers, adding, once, “Especially the officers.” Mama had frowned and told him off for what she called his “revolutionary” talk. But Matty liked Mr Brownlow. He didn’t do the silly things that another photographer they’d had round had, like telling you to say “Cheese” as if that made your jaws ache less when you were holding a smile, or to “watch the birdie”. He spoke in a quiet and sensible way. Oh, I would love a camera for my birthday, thought Matty, not a great big one like Mr Brownlow’s, of course, Papa has said he needs a new one, and just his own old Brownie would be fine.

     If anyone had told me that more or less everyone would be wandering round with cameras in their phones, and think nothing of it, I’d have thought they were crazy, thought Matty. She was tired now, and knew she would have to give in to sleep, though she longed to still be a little girl with her life before her. Or did she? Not all of that long life had been happy. Oh, she wasn’t going to whine about it, she’d been luckier than a great many folk she knew, but rose-tinted glasses weren’t her “thing” as her favourite carer, Tamara, liked to say. The Queen (and despite herself she couldn’t help wondering about that telegraph, just wishing she knew one way or the other) wasn’t the only one to have had an annus horribilis, or even anni horribili, which she supposed was the plural. She had gone to school, to a school in the next town but one, where she was a weekly boarder, and she had enjoyed it though she hated the uniform with the muddy grey gymslips and stiff white blouses, but had discovered that though she did learn French properly, she had to learn Latin, too! But nobody had ever made her go round with a book on her head. She wondered how many girls ever had, in the real world.

     She was not sure if she had been asleep for a long time, or just a few moments, but supposed it must be the latter, as light was already streaming into the room. She was not a little girl anymore, she did realise, almost at once, but knew she was not a very old lady, either. There was no radio in her room, and no Mariah sitting on a little basket chair, either. There was something about the room that flickered with familiarity, but it would not quite come into focus. It came to her in a flash. It was a room she had stayed in when she was in her twenties and visiting her husband Terence’s sister’s house, Marborne Grange. They had come there in Terence’s motor car, and he drove it himself – he loved to drive, and Oliver had rather unkindly nicknamed him Mr Toad because he tended to be reckless, and there were more and more cars on the roads, now. But especially in the country, people did still use horses and carts, and though Matty never did learn how to “sit a horse” to Papa’s satisfaction, she much preferred driving in a trap to riding in a motor car, especially, and she couldn’t help thinking it, though she knew it was disloyal, when Terence was driving.

     She took in the room as her eyes adjusted to the daylight, and noticed the wash-stand, and the striped curtains, and when she flung them open – a habit she’d never been able to get out of, despite that disaster at school when she’d brought the curtains in the dormitory off their rail, and the head-mistress, Miss Arnold, in one of those “more in sorrow than anger” voices (and inside she had a soft spot for Matty) had said, “Matilda, you must learn the truth of that saying, More Haste, Less Speed!” As Miss Arnold was also fond of clapping her hands and saying “Chop, chop, young ladies, she who hesitates is lost!” that seemed a bit rich. But she knew she had got off lightly.

     These curtains didn’t fall to the floor and land on the highly polished floorboards, and she looked out to the front drive and gardens of the Grange, that were dusted with snow, with fresh, clear, clean snow, still smooth and not wheel-rutted, the carriages still motionless and with their own icing. There were no cars there at all.

     After a perfunctory knock at the door, a maid, in a long blue dress with a white apron that even made the virgin snow look slightly murky and marked in comparison, and a mob cap on her head, though some rebellious tendrils of chestnut hair sneaked out from under it, came in, “Good gracious, Madam, that won’t do at all, you’ll catch your death of cold,” she chided, “Back into bed with you, and I’ll light the fire and fetch you your hot chocolate. We don’t want to start a new year with you ailing, now do we? There always seems to be something special about those years that end with a nought, though I don’t suppose they’re different from any other. Happy New Year to you, Madam, of course!”

     “Happy New Year, Agnes,” Matty replied, and without knowing why she knew that the maid’s name was Agnes, just as she knew that the year in question was 1820.