Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (25 page)

‘Again,' instructs Cora, and so Eva sings again, ‘Oh, Flo, why do you go…' They ride for miles, travelling to unknown, mysterious places, accompanied by their special bicycle song. Pins slip from Eva's hair and drop to the ground disregarded; she needs both hands to steady Cora and the bike. While Eva sings, they gaze through the attic window, looking across the rooftops towards the hills and moorland. Cora pictures magical journeys and fairytale trees. Eva's thoughts are known only to herself.

Willie was still not feeling tiptop. The tonic he used to douse his malaria did not always keep it at bay. He'd lie cocooned in hot sheets slick with sweat, but icy cold the minute he tried to move. Willie's bakery book contains a recipe for a second tonic, stronger than the first, with amounts more appropriate to emergency treatment than regular use: Quinine 0.67; Diluted Sulphuric Acid 2.5; Phosphoric 54.6; Alcohol 8.1; Water to 100. In an attempt to control his discomfort, Willie seems to have dosed himself with larger and larger quantities.

Sometimes Willie was forced to go to bed as soon as he returned from the bakery. And it wasn't just the sweats: his stomach was plaguing him too, a scouring sensation he couldn't account for. Cora and Annie heard him groaning. ‘He's moaning again,' Annie would say, and disappear upstairs to rub Willie's back with Sloan's Liniment. What good a jar of Sloan's Liniment could do was anybody's guess, but it seemed to ease his pain and was the best thing Annie could think to offer. Doctors cost a shilling a visit and would only insist: rest, plenty of milk, a good diet. On evenings like these, Willie was adamant: ‘Don't let Cora see me like this.' She did not need to see him: his groans were bad enough. She also saw how Annie's lips tightened as she headed upstairs.
Even at this young age, Cora knew her sympathy exceeded her mother's.

Occasionally, however briefly, Annie had to get away. The grocer's shop next door had a telephone tucked at the back of a storeroom and, on those days, she asked her neighbour if she could make a call. Taking Cora with her, Annie led the way up a set of stairs that smelled of Izal and old biscuits. Cora had no idea who her mam was calling. In her world, telephones were as rare as private cars. George was a headmaster by this time, however, with a private telephone in his study. ‘This is our secret, Cora,' Annie always said. ‘This is just between the two of us. You understand?'

Towards the end of 1933, Willie was diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer. There would be no more elaborate loaves and fancy pastries. His days at the bakery were over. Ulcers were not so easily treatable then as they are today; major stomach operations could be life-threatening. As predicted, Willie's doctor advised a good diet, nothing acidic, plenty of rest, lots of fresh milk and – no alcohol.

His bakery days behind him, Willie joined the long list of the unemployed. By 1933, Chesterfield was as gripped by the Depression as the rest of the old industrial landscape and, although it had no place there, Willie's worsening health was absorbed by that much larger story. With so many men in need of work, his being at home wasn't much remarked upon. Clusters of men stood outside factory gates looking gaunt and strained; some, with war medals clipped to their lapels, daring anyone to challenge them as wastrels. ‘The shadow of unemployment' was much debated, but talking about it came nowhere close to the actual experience. People were scratching for slack on the coal tips again; children – and
grown men – went without shoes, or felt each stone on the pavement through paper-thin soles. Some men, ashamed of their situation, disappeared after breakfast to reappear at night with a story they'd concocted about their day. Willie felt it important to make a distinction: there was a difference between being off sick and being unemployed.

Then, as now, there was an appetite for personal stories of difficulty or endurance and, thanks to greater numbers owning cameras, an increasing demand for photographs of the general public. ‘Guineas for kiddies' snapshots. Send Yours Now,'
Woman's Life
pleaded on its front cover. Pictures appeared week after week, none of them, in Annie's estimation, anywhere near as lovely as her daughter. Local newspapers printed readers' snaps too; Annie looked out a picture of Cora. Though it seems out of character for her to advertise their distress, I assume she wanted to salvage something from their situation, especially with Christmas drawing near. The photograph was accepted, printed, and paid for. Its caption read: ‘Daddy is out of Work, but Cora believes in Santa.' Willie was furious.

T
HE STAPLE GOODS SOLD BY THE CORNER SHOP DID NOT
change that much, though, by the early 1930s, their numbers had been swelled by modern living. Almo, Compo, Glaxo, Kelso, Mazo, Rinso, Omo, Puro…the number of products ending in ‘o' far exceeded any that could be sung by a barbers' quartet. Even the manufacturers of animal feed joined in with the baser notes of Chikko. This formula permeated everyday speech: my mum thought Annie's steam puddings were cracko.

Donald Duck lollies provided a ha'penny lick; Vita-Weat, Ryvita and Energen were sold alongside the usual loaves of bread, while the begoggled chauffeurs decorating tins of Chocolate Assortment had long been replaced by slim young women with flyaway scarves and a casual wave for the pedestrians they were zooming away from.

Station Road acquired its own fish and chip shop: Arthur and Elsie Scott were doing good business in a small hut opposite the wood; Friday nights now sang with salt and vinegar. If Mrs Rudge, the current greengrocer, had fewer customers than Betsy, some
said it was because her fruit was hard as nag nails, others thought her high heels and dyed hair were a factor. ‘It wouldn't do for us all to look the same,' said Betsy in her pacifying way, while privately observing how quickly fresh fruit and vegetables were relegated in budgets already pared down to their basics. ‘House' shops came and went – people setting up shop in their front room, selling chocolate, cigarettes and tinned goods for a matter of months, or longer if they made a go of it; Fiddler's shop, higher up Station Road, served customers in the next stretch of houses. There were new publicans too, Mr and Mrs Simms, who, like the publicans before them, befriended Dick and Betsy, retailers sticking together.

Some things remained the same. The butcher's pressed meats still shaded from pink to pale grey, ha'penny ducks continued to seep dark brown gravy. Gas mantles were still on sale. For the first few years of my mum's life, her height was measured by comparing the distance between the top of her head and the bottom of the gas light when she stood on her grandma's table. Roach powder remained as essential as ever – for Betsy as well as her customers. One night a week, before going up to bed, she sprinkled the hearth, and came down to find a mound of black-clocks the next day. Lads still congregated outside the corner shop, still dragged on a shared Woodbine, though, these days, their cigarette smoke curled around talk of TT races and the town's skating rink.

Eva took the plunge and shingled her hair, allowing its newly shorn ends an irrepressible bounce. She returned from the hair-dresser with her rope of hair weighting the bottom of a pillowcase like some slumbering creature. No more elaborate ornaments and combs; the days of scattering pins were behind her. Eva looked
attractive with short hair and wondered why she had left it so long. She took herself to Arthur's Studio and sat for a celebratory photograph.

These days, Eva often read the newspaper aloud. Dick read slowly, making out words in a laboured way, but Betsy was wholly reliant on Eva. For local news, they preferred the
Yorkshire Telegraph & Star
to the
Derbyshire Times
, and caught up with national misdoings and scoundrels via the
News of the World
. Eva marked titbits to amuse Annie and saved the Gloops cartoon, the weekly story of a lisping cat, and his antics with Aunt Emma, a typically hatchet-faced ‘spinster', for Cora. For six coupons posted to the
Star
, Cora could join the Gloops Club. (‘All Gloops members are enrolled on equal terms, whether sons of the Prime Minister or daughters of the Sweep.') The next time she visited the corner shop, a badge, a special password and a set of rules awaited her. ‘Gloops' members should always try to be happy by Thmiling! Thmiling!! Thmiling!!'

As a treat, Cora and Katie Stokes were taken to Saturday- morning cinema, where they learned to thumb their noses like George Formby, and on trips to the seaside. (Usually, Eva or Betsy accompanied Annie and Cora on days out: one or the other, rarely both, thanks to the tyranny of the shop. Dick always stayed behind. To his mind, sandcastles and sticks of rock were female pleasures, and the walk would have been difficult for him.) Katie did not have a suitable frock and so Annie made one for her, with a pair of matching knickers so she could paddle in the sea. A day on Blackpool sands, a packet of warm egg sandwiches and a bottle of lemonade that was never quite as fizzy when they came to drink it as when they took it from the shop window.

Most of the time, Cora and her friends played on the rough ground between the corner shop and the pub, as had Annie and Eva before her. Trips to other people's houses were infrequent, but sometimes she called for Katie, whose family fascinated her. Katie's mother, Edna, was one of the girls who used to sluice her brothers' backs when they returned from the pit; Katie's father, Clem, had not worked since his return from the war. His was a desperate existence: long years spent propping up his smashed jaw. This thin, gaunt man rarely left his fireside chair. Though he always smiled and said hello to Cora, he rarely said anything more. Clem had plenty to be silent about.

Like many poorer householders in the 1930s, Edna and Clem could not afford to furnish both downstairs rooms; their front room contained a bicycle and little else. As with all the houses at Wheeldon Mill, their kitchen was the hub of the home. To accommodate the whole family, plus their lodger, Edna's brother, Charles,
required some engineering. The family ate in shifts, there being too few chairs for everyone to sit down at once.