Miss Marple to the rescue

Girl with Dove is a memoir by Sally Bayley, a writer who teaches at Oxford University, of growing up in a squalid, dilapidated house in a Sussex seaside town. It contains her mother Ange, her aunt Di, her grandmother, an unspecified number of siblings and a variety of temporary inhabitants who joined the Zion-seeking cult that evolved around Ange and Di. There are also a few longer-lasting denizens, such as Uncle David (first encountered unconscious on the sitting room floor), the sinister Woman Upstairs, and Poor Sue, who later seems to come to some kind of Poor End.

If this all seems a little hazy, it is because — as Bayley notes — facts were thin on the ground in her house and her book is written entirely from the standpoint of the child she was, living (though often apparently starving, with her mother more preoccupied with the cultivation of her roses and provision of elocution lessons for her children than with meals) in the middle of chaos and trying to make sense of scenes and characters as they rushed past. The confusion is increased by the decision to exclude certain facts surely known even then, such as the name of her town (Worthing, probably) and her exact number of siblings. The readerly fog starts to descend early, and only increases.

The start of the chaos, if you can locate such a thing, seems to have been the disappearance of her baby brother during the long, hot summer of 1976. ‘The Nappy Witch came and took David away and Mummy went to bed for a very long time… She didn’t wake for years.’ Who or what the Nappy Witch was — a social worker (which would suggest the family chaos was already in spate), death or a snatching — is never fully explained, though it seems death is the most likely culprit and maternal grief and depression the major distorting forces from then on.