Where Everything Seems Double, Penny Freedman [best inspirational books txt] 📗

knew it would be coming her way at some time. She sighed. Granny had been an English teacher for years so she was bound to choose syllabus books, wasn’t she? Tentatively she held out the historical book and Granny huffed.

‘Her women are all too modern,’ she said, ‘but you’ll learn a bit of history, I suppose. We’ll take this and Mockingbird – oh, and Animal Farm. You should read that.’

The cover of Animal Farm had a pig on it, and it looked like a children’s book. Granny caught her doubtful expression. ‘It’s a political allegory,’ she said.

‘Right,’ Freda said. ‘Awesome.’

She wasn’t sure whether her sarcasm was lost on Granny, who now started flitting around looking at books for herself, exclaiming at her discoveries and involving the bookseller in her search. She tried to involve Freda too, but she sat down on a rung of one of the stepladders and defiantly opened A Winter Queen. When, eventually, she heard Granny say, ‘I think that’s the lot,’ she looked up to see that the bookseller was actually smiling. Maybe, she thought, lots of people came in just to say what a sweet, funny little shop it was, but didn’t actually buy anything. She took her books over to add to Granny’s pile.

After that, they went on a search for clothes shops, but her first impression had been right – they counted eight shops selling walking gear but found nothing you could call fashion.

‘Home then?’ Granny said, and then darted across the road, waving Freda over. She was looking into the window of a shop selling stuff that looked as if it came from Africa – carved wooden things and bright, patterned throws, all very ethnic-looking but nothing Freda thought she would actually like to have. Granny, though, was pointing at a handwritten sign which said Clothes upstairs and she headed up a spiral staircase to a sort of attic space full of racks of hippyish clothes, long, shapeless skirts and loose, tunic-type tops – things for fat women to wrap themselves in and try to hide their bulges. She really did hope that Granny wasn’t going to buy anything here, but she could see her looking through a rack of kaftans.

‘Eve and I used to wear these in the 80s,’ she called to Freda. ‘We bought them at a place called The Indoor Market in Marlbury. It’s a mobile phone shop now.’

‘I thought kaftans were 1970s things,’ Freda said. ‘Flower power and all that.’

‘They were, but we were part of the counter-culture.’

Counter culture? That sounded as if it meant people who liked shopping, but it didn’t seem to be what Granny meant. It was always a dangerous thing to ask her to explain something because you were likely to get a lecture, but Freda was interested so she decided to risk it.

‘I don’t know what “counter culture” means,’ she said, and for once she got a reasonably succinct reply.

‘It’s a set of attitudes that are against the mainstream attitudes of the time,’ Granny said. ‘And the clothes people wear often signal that.’

‘So what were the kaftans signalling against?’

‘Margaret Thatcher, in a word or two. But don’t get me started on her. Let’s just say that those of us who came of age under Thatcher and didn’t want to be Thatcher’s children – jobs in the city and anyone who isn’t out for themselves is a mug – signalled it by not wearing power suits with big shoulders, or those terrible blouses with pussy-cat bows, or pearl necklaces. God, there were a lot of pearl necklaces. They even sold shirts with little strings of fake pearls attached to their collars.’

‘So you wore kaftans because you preferred the 70s?’

‘I suppose so. I can see now what a mess the 70s were politically. It’s easy to see why the country voted for a strict headmistress figure to impose some discipline. Our kaftans were a protest, like rolling your school skirt up or pulling your tie loose.’ She pulled a blue and green kaftan off the rail. ‘I’m going to get this for Eve,’ she said, ‘a la recherche du temps perdu.’

Freda had a vague idea what that must mean and decided not to ask more. She tried to imagine Granny and Eve as young women in their kaftans, but she couldn’t see it. What she could see was that Granny loved Eve, though how Eve felt about Granny she wasn’t sure.

As she was paying, Granny spotted a display of patterned bandanas on the counter and pounced on them. ‘Just the thing to suppress hair that’s gone frizzy,’ she said. ‘Choose three.’

As they left the shop and Freda was stuffing into her bag the bandanas she could not imagine ever wearing, she asked, ‘So what is the counter-culture now, Granny?’

Her grandmother stopped in her tracks to consider the question, and a woman walking behind them skirted past with an irritated huff.

‘I’m not the person to ask,’ she said. ‘Counter-cultures spring up among the young. I’d say it’s Extinction Rebellion, isn’t it? Only that’s on the way to being mainstream. Everyone in the public eye is green now. We’ll all be wearing hippie clothes again soon, you mark my words. Except the kaftans will be made from recycled plastic bags.’

Micky was not helping his father on the ferry, and Freda was not sure whether she was sorry or not. If he was going to ignore her then it was better that he wasn’t there she supposed, though she did like him and she might have liked a chance to see if he was as dead set against her as the rest of the gang seemed to be. The lake was calm and the ferry not very full, and Granny was quiet, already diving into one of the books she had bought. Freda didn’t feel like starting any of hers. Her mind felt edgy, as though there was something hovering just out of reach, and if she could just touch it it would give her an answer to