During my
last year at primary (elementary) school in England in the 1960s, we had a girl
in our class who, for the purposes of data protection, I shall call Martha Ann
Dickens. Martha managed to inform all of us several times each day that her
initials spelled out MAD, and that she was indeed mad. That was her claim to
fame apparently.
Having,
myself, a mother who managed to inform me at least once a day that all four of
my grandparents were “off their heads”, I lived in constant fear of the crazy
gene spontaneously and uncontrollably leaping out and manifesting itself in
myself, thus alerting all around me to my own inherent madness. So Martha’s
pride in her craziness astounded me – she was not trying to hide but to
advertise it, and if you didn’t get it straight off after a couple of minutes, she
would jump out and bang you on the nose with it.
Martha was,
according to her own statement, an alien. I don’t mean that in the resident
without a British passport sense, but in the like she was from another planet
sense. She would attach herself to her person of choice for that day and spend
the rest of the day following them about spouting on about herself. Usually it
was me. With Martha there was not much in the way of conversation, it was more
of a long monologue for whom she required a listener. She talked as much as
possible in school, during breaks, in the lunch hour and on the walk home –
unfortunately we lived only two streets away from each other.
Apart from
the madness, the bulk of these talks consisted of Martha’s tales of being an
alien and the planet she was from. She had me convinced. Martha could rattle on
uninterrupted for hours about the planet Zob or Zod, or whatever it was called,
where it was, how she had got to Earth and how different everything was here.
If she was in 2013, she would be the geeky star of some high school sitcom,
cool, funny, witty, a sexy librarian type. In 1969, she just wasn’t. Any of
those things. She was just really weird,
and really boring.
I guess
Martha was just really way ahead of her time.
What
puzzled me was how the Dickens (pardon the pun) she was related to her family?
Mrs. Dickens was large and a little overweight and had at least two other younger
children (one of whom was a baby). None of them looked or acted like aliens.
Had they found Martha in a box at the bottom of the garden? Or had she knocked
on the door one day and asked them to look after her? Or had they really all
come on the spaceship together, landing in a deserted field in South-East
London (difficult) with a wad of cash and then just integrated themselves into
normal life? And if so, would they not be a bit pissed off with Martha for
going and spouting off about it to all and sundry?
One thing
that really compounded Martha’s claims and made her look a bit like a mad alien
was her coat. She wore a large, woolly, brown overcoat with all kinds of matching
accoutrements (hood, mittens). She was so attached to this coat that I don’t
think I ever saw her without it. I think she actually wore it in class. I only
remember her being at our school for a few months, after which she probably
returned to the planet Zob or Zod, so she probably wasn’t there in the summer.
Either that or she was and the English summers being what they were the coat
was probably not too hot for them.
Martha treated the coat like a skin. I do remember her often pretending to be some animal (large rabbit, cat or bear). Thinking about it now, I guess Martha just really wanted to be something else - anything but the little girl she actually was. And there was me thinking for an entire lifetime that I had gone to school with an alien.
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