THE LIFE OF GIRTIE PRICE

The story of a woman's life

Sometimes an age can be defined by those who lived in it. Take Girtie Price, for instance. Her age was our age. Let’s see how she fared.

When Girtie Price was little, when she was only just old enough to know what was going on, her mother (dad was dead, sadly, caught at the edge of a blast from a bomb that had been jettisoned by a young pilot on his way back home), her mother took her to church because that mother was a great believer in the scriptures and the promises they made. It was 1945 and the bombs had finally stopped falling, and in their place happy men and women had festooned their streets with bunting as a form of celebration that at last their fears could be rested and they could celebrate peace in their time.

There were flags everywhere, and this was the very first time that Girtie had seen a flag of any description, though there had been Union flags on public buildings so that the population might know what side they were on. And on the particular day when the bunting and the flags were at their most numerous Girtie became so excited that she wanted to lisp all about it.

“Slags!” she exclaimed during prayers in church, “slags, slags, slags!”

Her excitement earned her a slap on the legs and a subdued giggle from half the congregation along with an annoyed clucking from the other half. But as a vocal reality, the story of her utterance of slags went down all the years with her, told and retold by herself and other, right until she was truly ancient and had long forgotten all about the slapped legs.

Her life was a pretty standard affair. She fell in love with the art teacher at her school when she was fourteen, though he didn’t know about it. But she harboured cuddly thoughts about being with him on dark nights between satin sheets, dreams that persisted until she left school and he was gone from her life.

Then, after leaving school, she got a job in an office filing a complex mountain of papers, typing on forms using tippex as if it might be going out of fashion, and when she was eighteen she met Joshua, convinced herself that she loved him and agreed to marry him when he dropped theatrically onto one knee and asked her to.

When she was twenty one she had her first child, a girl who took one look at the world and proceeded to cry real tears at what she saw, but then it was the sixties and some mighty odd things made it to the papers.

Then, two years later, she conceived twins, two boys, though only one of them survived a complicated birth. She called him Seb (short for Sebastian) and the sad little lifeless twin was only ever referred to as Spare. And that was it: Joshua made every attempt at encouraging further pregnancies, sometimes energetically, but they weren’t to be. Her plumbing had given up the ghost with the help of a bit of essential surgery following the twins’ birth.

When Girtie was twenty five Joshua hit her for the first time. She annoyed him because his tea wasn’t ready when he came home from work, and his only recourse involved his fists. By the time she was twenty seven she was a mass of bruises, some quite old and faded and others fresh, and she got fed up of explaining how she walked into solid objects like lampposts. So she killed her husband. She did it cleverly, with poison from the ironmongers in town. It was meant to kill pests like rats and she used it to kill a rat called Joshua. After all, didn’t he deserve it?

So he was dead, and no-one was the wiser. “Poor woman,” they said, those who hadn’t guessed the truth, that is, “left all alone at such a young age and with two young kids to bring up…”

By the time she was thirty every trace of her bruises had long gone, and she met Colin Underwood. He was a vicar, the serious sort who absolutely knew he was right about everything, and they married just in time for him to start hitting her like Joshua had if things at home displeased him. There were things he didn’t like because he was special.. He was a proto-vegetarian because he believed in the sanctity of life.

“Eating meat is an offence to God,” he would say, so she gave him terrible vegetable meals like turnips with cabbage made into unappetising balls of goo, but she made the mistake of adding gravy to improve the flavour, and he read the ingredients on the packet and those ingredients included beef extract.

“Beef extract is meat!” he hissed, knowing he was right.

When he couldn’t find fault with what she provided his stomach he found fault with the children (he didn’t like children, though you wouldn’t have known that because his appetite for bedroom antics, the sort that encourage the fertilisation of eggs, was more akin to a marathon than a quick hundred yard dash.) He knew he couldn’t hit the children because they went to school where tales might be told in the playground about the vicar being a bully, so he punished her in lieu of punishing them.

It seemed sensible to him.

The worst offence any of them could commit had to do with his faith, which close examination might have revealed didn’t actually exist. But the church was his living, so they all had to believe implicitly in his teachings via long and involved sermons in which he did the religious equivalent of proving that black equals white.

He refused to divorce her, so he had to die, and pure chance dictated that he was actually in full regalia at a funeral when the mixture saved from the demise of Joshua and lovingly provided by Girtie started to take affect on him. He was actually standing by the grave in which a dear old soul (his final words) was about to be interred when he fell into it, face first, and twitched a few times before lying still. When they managed to fetch him out he was obviously quite dead.

“Amen,” whispered Girtie, meaningfully.

“Amen,” added the two children, the oldest of which (the girl) was in her mid teens by then and quite critical of just about everything like healthy teenagers are. But it was the surviving twin boy who was heard to point out that there would be a knocking at Hell’s door before the day was out, just see if there wasn’t.

Seb understood a great deal that made sense.

This time the police got involved and discovered the poison in the vicar’s system and Girtie had to be more than quick thinking to get away with that one.

“It was his special evening drink and he must have had a nip before the funeral service,” she said sadly, “I did wonder what was in it but he never told me. It was his own secret. He mixed it himself from a recipe handed down from his father, who died mysteriously at a young age…”

And so, when the coroner came to pronounce on his death it was put down as accidental on account of him being an absent-minded cleric messing with substances he didn’t properly understand, and as a special treat to the village suggested there should be an annual holiday to commemorate him. There was, though by the time the first anniversary came around it was universally forgotten because the new vicar’s wife was having triplets.

By the time Girtie was forty she met and fell in deep love with Angela Swift, but had to keep it secret because people frowned back then when two ladies shacked up emotionally with each other, and especially if they actually condemned themselves in the eyes of all decent men by sleeping together. By then the kids had left home, both of them, and there was nobody except for a nosy neighbour to discover the liaison between two rather exceptional ladies, and nobody took any notice of her and her dirty rumours.

Girtie took to writing novels in which her heroines did wonderful things to each other, but none of them were actually published because she didn’t submit them to anyone who might have leapt at the chance of publishing them. Yet all of them, in her words, were jolly good reads and out to win the Booker prize for quality literature. Angela liked them too, especially the chapters about ladies of the night and their dubious antics.

And so her life continued. Angela died of natural causes (surprise surprise, but then neither of the women ever wanted to hurt the other and they were lovers right up to Angela’s final breath) when Girtie was seventy two.

Then, when she was seventy seven the Covid pandemic came along and she caught a dose of it from a wheezing old man in Boots the Chemist in town. It didn’t do her much harm, though, because she had some special medicine of her own that would see to it. After all, it had worked on the two men in her life, so it ought to work on her.

It did. She was seventy-eight when she passed peacefully away after a brief session of twitching that nobody saw. They might have buried her next to one of her deceased husbands or even the lovely Angela, but they didn’t. Instead she went to the crematorium and was put in a queue waiting for the fires to be lit.

And that was Girtie Price. All of her, and to her credit I must record that she did not wait around for the poverty, privation and starvation that came to plague the people even as her ashes cooled down. But cooled they were, and shortly after they were scattered in her own back garden by her two now middle-aged but dutiful offspring.

And as a postscript, I wish to record that the new occupants of her home were rewarded by an exceptionally fruitful harvest in their garden the very next year, in the area where those sacred ashes tumbled around in the breeze.

The tomatoes did especially well.

© Peter Rogerson 04.04.22

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