Read Online Making It Up by Penelope Lively - Free Book Online Page A

Miranda did, moving from one rented flat or cottage to another, with occasional interludes in such light-hearted accommodation as a canal narrowboat or a trailer. When Chloe began to visit school friends, she discovered home ownership, washing machines, and fitted carpets. As she grew up, she perceived that other people’s parents were a part of the social fabric: they were policemen or postmen, or they ran a business or worked in offices or shops. They were not useless adjuncts. Their contributions were necessary; they did not drift or improvise. She became a figure of silent adolescent disapproval at raffish and jolly gatherings of Miranda’s cronies, for whom hippie culture was tailor made.
    Chloe had a favorite refrain: “It’s a question of taking control of your own life, that’s all.”
    When the children heard this said, they would get a picture of life as a dusty rug being given a brisk shake. The remark was usually made in connection with some acquaintance seen by Chloe as behaving in a feckless or ill-considered way: they were in arrears with their mortgage, or at odds with their partner, or in the wrong job. Chloe’s views were expressed with detachment, but the particular instance would be used as an admonition: take note of what is to be avoided. The two boys, Philip and Paul, let this sort of thing wash over them, on the whole; they had perfected a strategy of morose apparent attention whereby they could not be accused of never listening to a word that their mother said but at the same time were doing more or less exactly that. Sophie, the eldest, was unable to do this because natural curiosity about people and what they got up to obliged her to listen. Chloe did not believe in concealing from the young the rash excesses of the adult world. It was only through awareness of what’s out there waiting that they would learn to take evasive action. Accordingly, Sophie heard a lot about people who had dropped out of school or college or run up enormous debts and others who had fallen into drugs or drink or mere apathy. She and her brothers—who weren’t really listening anyway—were presented with a vision of the good life which reflected the Whig interpretation of history: the idea was that everything got better and better as you ascended the ladder of the years. You moved from respectable A levels to a degree to satisfactory employment. You notched up salary increases and extensions of power and responsibility and eventually you reached the safe haven of your retirement from which you contemplated your successful progress.
    By the time she was seventeen, Sophie was familiar with the general message, which she heard as the background noise of her home life, subsumed into the whole ambience and roughly on a par with the creaking floorboard on the landing and her father’s habit of humming Mozart in the bath. There was a bit more to it than that, of course: she was aware that there was a cautionary element, but saw that as on a par with the other warnings with which she had grown up, to do with crossing roads and being circumspect about friendly strangers.
    But Sophie was of course growing up in a culture resonant with warnings and advice. Fatherly police officers came to school, sat down in their shirtsleeves and told everyone about the perils of crack and coke and heroin. Brisk, approachable women dealt with sex and contraception: they drew diagrams of the reproductive system on the board and handed condoms around the class. If you had a problem you got counseled, and if you were at all flaky over your career intentions you were given a good talking-to about UCAS forms and job prospects.
    Chloe approved. All this had been around in her youth, but in a more muted and amateurish way. As for Miranda’s time . . . Chloe would sigh wearily: “It was the dark ages, wasn’t it? The kids were left to fend for themselves. Of course, drugs weren’t there yet, but