You will say this is too like Angela Carter's Wise Children but it's true. It's also true to say, though, my re-acquaintance with her last novel reacquainted me with them, in memory, because one I know has gone and has been gone for some time, and the other I can only presume followed suit some time after. Of course, if she is still with us (even if in the land of the fairies, somewhat aged) I profusely apologize for casting aspersions that she wasn't.
I'd like to report they danced and sang through their childhood but of that I can't be sure. It seems unlikely; they were orphaned young, sometime before the outbreak of the second world war and were left to the care of their elder brothers and sisters. To hard times and hand-me-downs.
I knew very little of all that and found it out piecemeal, a snippet here, a snippet there; none of which ever fitted together, seamlessly. Those times weren't talked of, nothing like how it is in books, chapter and prose. It should be verse, shouldn't it?
Forgive me, I'm ageing. The mind has never been what it should have been, and the hair that crowns it is fading, as if I've dusted it with talcum powder.
So, their lives up until the 1980s is a haze (the Blitz walked home in and the war survived), and even after that it's only a little clearer because they were both (again) living in the same area, a ten, fifteen minute drive from each other.
Mil's daughter flown (the first grandchild, a girl, born), one son living at home, and husband retired. Daisy, alone, widowed; a daughter, a son and two grandsons, but still chipper.
Alike and unlike, not two peas in a pod. Both small in height, maybe just or just under 5ft, both bundles of inventive fun, both with sharp flashes of humour. But could you have told they were sisters? It's debatable, that's the point.
It won't be debated here however, for I'm too close to it. They were a pair. Though I knew them separate and together. Am I confusing you? Get used to it, this is how I roll (how modern!)
Perhaps it's time for some more confusion...Mil was not Mil and Daisy was not Daisy. Mil was an M, a different M, and Daisy was an F. Though I know not how either nickname came about (I suspect it had something to do with the cousins of whom you'll hear a little of later). Mil didn't care for Mil, and Daisy, I don't know whether she cared for it or not. Both answered to them; Mil grudgingly, and Daisy, it appeared, willingly. Mil was not Mil to me personally, she was Nan. Daisy was Daisy, or her real name, shortened to end in ie.
Daisy's grandsons were possessive of Daisy; I was possessive of their Mil. We were content to occasionally share, but one was more mine, one was more theirs.
The cousins. Tom and Chad. Or was it Chad and Tom? I can't recall now which was the younger and which the older. I think perhaps there might have been an even younger one too, another grandson, a son from the son whom I'll call...another apple of Daisy's eye, but him I didn't know at all. Of the other two, well, naturally I had a crush on...was it Tom or was it Chad? Ah, be-still my beating heart. There is no place for you in this narrative.
The cousins could tease. Mil let them and joked in return too, playing whatever role came to mind, with whatever prop came to hand, on whatever day, all in good fun; though often when I was there as witness, I did wonder...I don't know how Daisy tamed them; perhaps she didn't have to. I never treated Daisy that way. Daisy was super cool! (That phrase was modern then.) She once took me into town – just me and her - in her Mini Cooper (or was it a VW? No, I'm sure it was a Cooper), the windows wound down on a summer's day as the sound system played 'My Boy Lollipop', laughing and singing all the way. Daisy was as daisy was, a little wild.
Mil and Daisy, alike and unlike, not two peas in a pod.
Picture credit: Twins Grace and Kate Hoare, 1876, John Everett Millias (source: WikiArt).
Written June 2020.
