Below Stairs (2 page)

The farmers were so friendly to you; they let you walk around; hang over the pigsty, scratch the pigs, cluck at the chickens and watch them milking the cows. Often the farmer’s wife would come out with a glass of lemonade for us.

There were trees to climb, marvellous trees which seemed to have grown just for children.

Back on the beach, there were the seaside shows, the Pierrot shows. It was sixpence or a shilling to sit down in a deckchair and watch it, but, needless to say, we never had money like that. So we used to stand at the back.

Looking back, I think the shows were good. Not in the least smutty because it was meant as a family show.

A soprano would come on and sing a soulful song about lost love, how she once had a lover and the lover had departed through some misunderstanding and she hoped with all her heart they would come together again. Half the audience were in tears, and so were we kids at the back. People believed in things like that then; dying for love, feeling soulful about it, regret, lost opportunities and all that kind of thing. None of this ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude. Then there was the baritone. He would sing songs about friendship, England, and ‘Hands Across the Sea’.

All this would be considered very small beer nowadays but we thought it was wonderful and so did the audience.

Then there were the donkeys, and the donkey man who looked after them. Now I’ve heard it said that people who have much to do with animals get like them both in appearance and mannerisms. So the donkey man resembled his charges. He was old, small, bowed down, grey, and very hairy. He didn’t exactly have a beard. Hair seemed to be sprouting out all over him. I thought to myself many a time, if he got down on all fours you could have got on his back and you wouldn’t have known you were not on a donkey.

What a poor sorry lot those donkeys were! I suppose they had enough to eat, but donkeys always look such pathetic creatures unless they are well looked after, and these presumably weren’t. But the well-to-do children never had to sit on the back of a donkey like the common children. Certainly not! They might get polluted. They sat in a little dogcart, all done up in red leather. It held two. These children with nannies to look after them used to come down in style in large prams.

Not only did the man who owned the dogcart have to walk along the one side, but the nanny had to walk along the other. Because no harm must come to those darlings. Though it didn’t matter about us jogging along on the back of the old donkeys getting saddle sores.

Wealthy children were never allowed to play with low-class children like us. They were never allowed to play with anyone but similarly wealthy children. They never went anywhere on their own without their nannies. Some of them had two, a nurse and an under-nurse. The lawns were open to everybody, and they couldn’t keep us away from them, but if any child wandered up to us, its nurse would say, ‘Come away! Come away this instant! Come over here.’ They’d never let them speak to us.

Mind you, we had a kind of contempt for them. They couldn’t do the things that we could do. They weren’t allowed to dirty their clothes like we were. They weren’t allowed to run in and out of the bushes. They weren’t allowed to climb all over the seats and walk along the very narrow tops of them. They weren’t allowed to do anything exciting. It wasn’t their fault.

So we never mixed, never. They played their dainty little games with large coloured balls. They pushed their dolls’ prams around and rode on their scooters.

We had nothing except perhaps an old tennis ball, but still we used to have the most marvellous games with absolutely nothing at all.

Perhaps if we had been allowed to mix, we would have become quite friendly but I don’t think so because they were brought up with an ingrained idea that they were a different class of people from us altogether.

For instance, I remember one occasion when I was playing on the lawns, I had a coat on which had originally been my grandmother’s. It was a plush affair. One of these children came over and started making remarks about my coat. The nanny said to her, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t say things like that, dear, after all they’re poor children. Their mummy hasn’t got any money.’ And the child said, ‘Haw, haw, but doesn’t she look funny? I wonder if Mummy has got anything she could give her to wear.’ I was simply furious because I hadn’t minded the coat. I hadn’t felt that because it was my grandmother’s coat there was something wrong about wearing it. But although this incident has stuck in my mind I soon got over my feelings of resentment because there was always something to do or something to look forward to, like the yearly visit to the circus.

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T
HE BEST
circus we ever had was Lord George Sanger’s. I suppose his name was George Lord and he turned it around, but we used to think he was a real lord. He dressed up so well we thought he was marvellous, in a leather jacket with fringes hanging all around, a huge Stetson hat and a sort of riding trousers, with shiny boots that came up to his knees in a point with metal studs up the side. We thought that was how a lord should dress. It was something out of this world. We couldn’t always afford to go to his circus, but we would do our utmost. Still, you could always walk around and look at all the animals – the elephants, the lions, and tigers. That was all free.

One particular year they came down, I remember, and billed as a marvellous attraction was a man who was shot from a cannon, right across the tent, and landed in a net. Every night we could hear the tremendous ‘Boom!’ as the cannon went off. This made our longing to go even stronger but it was during one of my father’s out-of-work periods. He just couldn’t give us the money. It was sixpence each for children to go in. That is for sitting right at the back. So we set about getting the money. We went along the streets knocking on people’s doors asking for old jam jars they didn’t want. We didn’t have any jam jars in our house. When we bought jam it was by the pennyworth in a cup, doled out from seven-pound jars. The grocer was a friend of mine, and used to make a fuss of me. After he’d doled out my pennyworth of jam in a great big wooden spoon, he always used to give me the spoon to lick. It was marvellous.

So we got all the jam jars we could and took them to the rag-and-bone shop. You had to get six, I think, for a penny. Then we went out getting manure. Threepence a barrow we got for it. It was easy because there used to be the corporation cart horses. Every day the cart came around with a sprinkler on the back and watered the roads. When it got to our house, it was the end of the round. The driver used to go into a nearby café and leave his two horses outside. Whether it was because it was the end of the round or whether they were tired, they always used to oblige by dropping a large load of manure. Before the man went into the café, he used to put nosebags on the horses to feed them and tremendous flocks of pigeons would come around to pick up the bits that fell from the bags. We used to run under the horses’ legs to shovel up the manure, and the pigeons would fly into the air startling the horses. How we never got kicked to death I don’t know.

Then sometimes we would follow a pantechnicon through the street waiting for it to stop and the horses to oblige. So it didn’t take very long to fill a barrow with a load of manure.

When I look back on it, we must have been very honest. We didn’t just pile it up. We would pat it all down with our shovels so that people really did have their money’s worth. It used to surprise us that, with so much of the stuff lying around, people were willing to pay for it.

After several days of this selling of jam jars and collecting manure, we managed to accumulate half a crown which, at sixpence each, was the entrance money for the five of us.

So the great day came. It was like a fairy tale. A girl dressed in glittering tights came on leading four or five elephants. She let the elephants pick her up in their trunks. Then she would lie on the floor and let them step over her.

The lions came on and roared suitably. As part of the act a man put his head right into the lion’s mouth. I couldn’t watch.

Another thing I couldn’t watch was the aerial trapeze.

But the high spot of the evening for us was the man to he shot from the cannon. The night before we went, we’d heard Mum saying to Dad that when this act had been on in America, the man didn’t land in the net the right way and he broke his neck. Well, with the callousness of children, we didn’t think it was a bad thing at all. Suppose it happened when we went. After all, he had been doing it for several nights and it was time he had a mishap.

It was the very last act of all. We saw him climb in feet first. Then came the ‘Boom’ we’d anticipated. Out he shot in a cloud of smoke. I must admit I didn’t see him sail to the other side of the tent. I suppose he must have done. He landed in the net quite safely, and there was a tremendous burst of applause which we joined in. Mind you, we would have given just as much applause if he had broken his neck.

It was a marvellous evening. I didn’t go to sleep that night thinking about it all.

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A
NOTHER DIVERSION
which may seem a commonplace now was the cinema but, of course, it bore no comparison with films today. The places by present standards were sleazy.

The one we liked was in the main street. The films were livelier and so were the serials. It used to be on every evening and Saturday afternoon. In the evenings the prices were sixpence, ninepence, a shilling, and one and threepence, but on Saturday afternoon children could get in for three halfpence if you sat downstairs, or threepence if you sat in the gallery. All the well-to-do children, well-to-do by our standards that is, went upstairs and subjected us to an avalanche of orange peelings and nutshells.

Infants in arms went in for nothing. We used to stagger up to the box office with three- and four-year-olds in our arms so that we didn’t have to pay for them. The moment we passed the box office, we put them down and let them walk.

We would all go into the cinema at least an hour before the film began. During that hour, a tremendous uproar would go on. There was a woman who always played the piano. Her name was Miss Bottle or so we always called her. She was a middle-aged spinster who had her hair scraped back in a bun with what appeared to be a hatpin skewered through it at the back. She had the most tremendous bosom. Women didn’t wear falsies in those days so I suppose it was natural. About a quarter of an hour before she was due to arrive, we used to stamp our feet on the floor and cry out, ‘Miss Bottle! Miss Bottle!’ She must have been flattered, and when she did appear, Paderewski could not have received a greater ovation than Miss Bottle did. Not that we cared the least about the music or the fact that she played the piano, it was because when she appeared we knew that the film was just going to start.

During the whole time that we were in the cinema, there was nothing but pandemonium. Babies were howling and the kids were screeching. But it didn’t matter because they were silent films. We did all the talking that there was.

Just before the film began, the manager used to come on stage with a megaphone and bawl through it, ‘Quiet! Quiet!’ Then, oozing benevolence, his face wreathed in smiles, he used to say, ‘Now, kiddies, you are going to have a marvellous time this afternoon. You’re going to see two lovely films, and I know you are going to enjoy yourselves so when you go home, don’t forget to tell your mummies and daddies what a good time you’ve had.’ Then his face would change. The smile would be wiped off, and glaring at us ferociously, he would say, ‘Look after the babies and don’t you let the little buggers wet the seats!’ But we never used to care. We used to stamp our feet and scream. Nobody took a bit of notice of him.

Then began the main film and Miss Bottle played all the way through. When I think of the stamina of those pianists! When the action was fierce, she would bang on the keys and put her foot down on the pedal to get it as loud as possible. In the romantic love scenes, she would play soft melodious tunes and the kids used to put their fingers in their mouths and whistle. We didn’t care tuppence about love in those days.

The serial was often the most harrowing thing. It also used to be our bugbear because there were some weeks when we couldn’t afford to go. Dad would be out of work and he couldn’t even give us the three halfpennies we needed to get in. It always happened when the serial had reached a most thrilling episode like the heroine being suspended over a cliff or tied on the railway line or fixed just in front of a circular saw coming nearer and nearer to her. Then up would come the words, ‘To be continued next week’. The times I’ve hung around the cinema that next week waiting for my friends to come out to tell me what had happened. It never occurred to me that she wouldn’t really get killed, that she couldn’t because the serial had to go on. I used to ask, ‘What happened to her? Did she get killed? How did she get away?’ So really the serials were a terrible worry to me.

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T
HE SHOPS
, of course, were nothing like the shops there are now. There were no such things as supermarkets or self-service stores. They were mostly little family concerns.

There was a Woolworth’s. I don’t think it was called Woolworth’s in those days. It was the ‘Thruppenny and Sixpenny Bazaar’. Everything in it was either threepence or sixpence. You would have thought that at these prices there couldn’t have been much variety but the way they used to get over it was most ingenious. They would separate things. For instance, sixpence for a kettle and threepence for the lid, not sold separately so, you see, it was still sixpence and threepence. The same with saucepans, cups and saucers and so on. Nevertheless, for sixpence, you could get a great many things.

The pawnshop played a big part in working-class people’s lives. Every Monday morning the wives would cart their husbands’ suits along to put them in pawn and have enough money to get them through the week. On Friday night or Saturday morning, they’d be along to get them out so that the husbands could wear them on Saturdays and Sundays. On Monday, back they would go again. In very hard times, other things would go in, like sheets and blankets. You didn’t get a lot of money on them but even a shilling or two helped you through the week.