Mother Knew Best (7 page)

My best friend in Bath Street was Ivy White. She had an older brother called soppy Joe. He was quite elderly and always wore a blue serge suit and a bowler hat. He had a very big head with bloodshot eyes not placed quite straight in his head and he ambled about in a slow running way. Ivy told me her brother was silly because as a baby he had eaten a whole bar of carbolic soap by mistake. I thought this must be true because very daringly I licked a bar of carbolic soap at home. So terrible was this one light lick that I knew if a baby ate a whole bar it would send him silly. Why, it would even send a grown man silly, although of course a grown man was more sensible than a little baby.

My friendship with Ivy began to wane on the day of the outing. I had no choice, for she had made me feel different from the other girls and spoilt everything. The poor children of Poplar were to be taken for a day's outing to the country by a welfare organisation. We were to obtain our tickets beforehand at a nearby vicarage. Ivy was horrified when I joined the queue for my ticket. ‘Why, Dolly Chegwidden,' she said loudly, ‘you can't come on the outing, you're rich.' This statement coming from my friend, a girl I thought the same as I was, shocked me and I ran home to Mother in tears, expecting her to deny Ivy's accusation. But worse was to come, for Mother looked pleased and said, ‘To be poor and look poor is the devil outright.' I knew then I would not go on the outing with my friends. I wished Amy would come home, she would get my ticket. She had been on one outing for a day and another for a week, both for starving dockers' children. She just joined on the end of the queues and when the woman said Amy didn't look very starving, Amy still didn't run home in tears, she just acted her part out.

I went to see my friends off hoping that the woman at the brakes would see me and insist on my going, but Ivy was watching me carefully and I knew she would tell the woman I was rich, so I looked the other way when the woman smiled at me. I went home feeling I was happier when I didn't know I was rich. Mother said, ‘Disappointments are good for young people,' which stemmed my tears because I felt angry.

One day the Sunday School included in an outing Len and Amy who left in the early morning with their sandwiches and a whole penny each to spend. The excursion was cancelled at the last minute but the vicar threw open the vicarage gardens for the children. Amy persuaded Len to spend his money while she was spending hers and finally they went home. ‘Did you enjoy the day at the sea?' asked Mother innocently. ‘Oh, yes,' cried Amy, ‘It was lovely.' Then you are a little liar,' Mother said, ‘for I have been watching you from the bedroom window.' Amy had forgotten that Mother could see across the railway to the vicarage gardens. Mother reproved her, and off Amy went to bed in a temper. First Amy paid a visit to Mother's room and tore the velvet off Mother's best hat, then satisfied she went to bed. Father grumbled at Amy for her sins, then she crept to his chest of drawers and tore into little squares some photographs Dad's best friend had taken of him. She did not put them down the lavatory through fright as I would have done. She laid them all out in his drawer so he could see them. Although I knew she was beyond the pale for the terrible revenges she took on those who crossed her, I thought she was as brave as any war heroine and I was secretly jealous of her. I could never have faced Mother's, ‘Oh, Amy, Amy, how can you be so unkind?' I would have drowned in my tears, whereas Amy was pleased to the last. She would have made a wonderful suffragette.

The Great War, or the 1914 war as we called it, the birth of my youngest sister, and starting school for the first time are all wrapped up in the same memories and I never knew which was the worst thing out of these three.

My father arrived at Valetta on the day that Marjorie was born and so she received the middle name of Valetta. I didn't know whether it was in honour of the War, the place or my father. I was very jealous that my young sister was famous because of her name, and I was annoyed that she had been born at all. When people would say, ‘Little Marjorie Valetta, a war baby,' or Mother would say her last baby, little Marjorie, was a war baby, they all seemed to say it so proudly, and little Marjorie would look all modest. Yet I knew she felt pleased and famous, and I used to grit my teeth because I always wanted to say, ‘Only just,' which would have earned me a sad glance from Mother.

I have hazy visions of my father going off ‘to the front' for before leaving Mother in tears she had to help him lay all his kit out in the little back yard so it could be checked and inspected by him in a military fashion.

He didn't have to go to war, he was forty-nine and too old, but he had joined the Territorials to get a holiday each year and when war broke out, feeling guilty that he would have had a holiday without fighting, he volunteered for the Royal Fusiliers in London and gave his age as forty-six. Mother said he shouldn't go, but Father felt he must. He couldn't go back to the West Kents for they would have known his age, and he couldn't go with the Territorials for they knew it too. But I thought the Royal Fusiliers sounded lovely, like a bugle. He laid all the pipes in the trenches in France for the Pioneer Corps, and spent his fiftieth birthday at Ypres.

I thought, early on in the war, that the front was like a barrier at a railway station: the Huns would be waiting at this white barrier (it was always white in my imagination), and when my father arrived with his grey tool chest and his men, then battle would commence.

My brother Arthur, who was seventeen, followed my father to France very quickly, and as he was a gentleman in civvy street so he looked immaculate in his uniform. I was not concerned that two of the men in the family had gone, for lots of fathers and brothers were going to the front and I felt it had something to do with that terrible picture that was everywhere—on the railway wall, on the church railings, the bank, and ever so many on the police station walls. I knew it was a picture of Kitchener because my older brothers and sisters would play battles, but I hated the picture, for Kitchener had fierce yellow eyes which followed me all along the road. I used to walk backwards and in a circle and the eyes still looked straight at me. I touched the picture once and was surprised not to feel his pointing finger, for until I touched the poster I was sure his clenched hand and large stiff forefinger were sticking out from the hoarding and walls.

My father had a bearskin which had to be returned to his old regiment as he was now in a new regiment, but one day the older girls were playing battles and jumping up from the trenches caught the bearskin alight on the gas mantle. Someone was despatched to the shops for a new inverted gas mantle before darkness fell while Mother vainly tried to repair the bearskin. She tried everything, even horsehair from her mattress but the shiny black hairs on the bearskin now had mangy patches, and I remember it hanging on her bedroom door like a diseased cat or a cat that had been in a fight, for the cats in the Grove were always fighting and mangy.

My brother Charlie was only fifteen, and as soon as Father had left for the war he went out and joined up, although Mother cried and pleaded with him not to go. Mother always said her prayers and they were answered. Charlie was sent to the very district in France where my father's battalion were stationed. By another stroke of fate a Sergeant in my father's mess was in the Office when the new recruits were being checked in. He saw my father and said, ‘Chick, there's a young boy with red curly hair who has just arrived from home. Christ, they're sending them out young now, this one doesn't look as if he's had his napkins off long; you wouldn't believe it, he's got the same name as you, Chegwidden.' Off my father went to the office but Charlie had been sent on and my father in a frantic state told the officer he thought the new recruit was his son, if so he was only just fifteen. The officer, a kindly man, traced Charlie who, much aggrieved, was sent back to his mum with some wounded. He bided his time impatiently and at the earliest age possible he joined the Royal Navy.

Only Mother cried when her men went, so it seemed strange that Amy should sob so when Arthur went off to France. It seemed impossible to pacify her, and all the more mysterious that she should act this way for she and Arthur were always at loggerheads. Her tears, alas, were not for Arthur but for what he took with him. Arthur always used to frighten us when we had anything new, for he was a tryer-on. It was an extremely rare event to own something precious of our very own and whatever was shown to him he just had to try it on after inspecting it minutely and we always clamoured for it back. Someone had given Amy a bracelet made out of elephant's hair. It was the first piece of jewellery she had ever owned and it meant the world to her. For one thing everyone knew that an elephant's hair bracelet was lucky and to us luck was everything. Arthur, dressed in his uniform and ready to leave, tried on this precious bangle and couldn't get it off. Finally he left for the front wearing the only thing Amy treasured. ‘Never mind,' said Mother, thinking to stem Amy's tears, ‘Perhaps your lucky bracelet will be the means of keeping him safe for us.' More tears from Amy, for the safety of the bracelet was her main concern and she was frantic when she thought that if Arthur were killed a little German girl might wear her bracelet. The period when Arthur was in hospital at Salonika must have been a worrying time for my sister.

Arthur became great friends with another young soldier and the two of them went all over France cutting wires so that the Germans would not know what our boys were doing. His friend was decorated, but Father said that as there were only so many decorations for so many battalions it didn't mean that Arthur was any less brave, and we all agreed. I knew that not even the decorated friend would cut his wires so beautifully and neatly as Arthur. He did everything so perfectly.

Not far from our house was a very nice baker's shop which people called the German bakers. They had been in Poplar for years and made the best bread in the district. Such a clean shop my mother thought and she cried when the shop was attacked by people during the war. It was said we should feel worried because of our name, which made me very angry, but was all right in the end because Dad and Arthur were Tommies and Charlie a Jack Tar.

The night of the Silvertown explosion remains vividly with me. One Friday evening Winnie and Amy were at Guides, Agnes had gone to live at Forest Hill at her fiancé's home as it was safer than Poplar, and Leonard was with David at the boys' club in the church institute. Mother was singing my favourite ‘They played in a beautiful garden, those children of high degree' and she had just reached the saddest and loveliest part where the little crippled boy gazes through the wrought iron gates at the beautiful rich girl, when everything went scarlet. There was a terrific bang which went right through my ears, the windows broke and scattered glass all over us. Mother quickly dressed us and we went out into the Grove where it seemed everyone had gathered. Children were screaming and Mother thought the safest place for us that night, for we expected more explosions, was the crypt of All Saints. As we went round into the main road David was running towards us laughing and crying and he appeared to be quite demented. A ‘Lady' lived in the corner house next to the estate agents which her husband owned, and she said she would give David some milk, which made me jealous, and put him to bed in her basement. Although it transpired that poor David had been blown across the hall of the institute and down the stairs by the explosion, I had no sympathy for him, for I knew ‘boys don't cry' and I felt he was having rich treatment considering the fuss he was making.

When we reached the crypt it was full of old women mothers and children. Behind us stacked in rows were a lot of wooden coffins and the old women kept cackling jokes about these coffins and I couldn't understand how they could laugh about anything so awful. Amy appeared wearing a sort of arm-band and carrying a jug of water. She had her ministering angel look on her face but she never came to us with water for we were only family.

There was a red pail which was put out for people to wee-wee in and I refused to do this. I was much too refined and modest a child, I knew, to do such a terrible thing in public. For one thing the noise the pail made when it was being filled was very loud so that even at Mother's coaxing that she would hide me with her skirts, I still refused. If people didn't see me I knew they would hear me.

The vicar came in carrying what looked like a large white enamel aeroplane, apparently it was part of an aerial torpedo which he said had just missed our lovely church and we all said a prayer of thanks because God had saved his house from destruction. We prayed for our brave boys at the front and then when news came that the night's explosion was at Woolwich Arsenal we prayed for the dead, dying and injured.

I hated the crypt with its coffins, its old women and its grey mouldy atmosphere. It had a real feeling of death and Mother said, “Very well, then, we won't come again, we will stay in our own little house and God will look after us.' I think she was worried because I wouldn't wee-wee in the crypt. From then on, if the raids were still frightening, at least home was the best place to be if one is in danger or afraid. We would snuggle up on the pot board, tell stories and listen to Big Bertha the immense gun on Blackwall Point and the answering boom from her sister Annie across the river. Mother would have to get Winnie's supper ready before we took cover for she was always late, having gone to evening classes. She would have her supper underneath the kitchen table. It was dark but we knew when Winnie had reached the rice pudding stage for when she was the last one in hers was left in the large enamel pie-dish, and we could hear her scraping and scraping to try to eat all the lovely sweet sugary brown bits which got baked on the side of the dish. Amy hated this scraping noise but it made no difference to Winnie. Scrape she would as long as she wanted to. Not a fragment must be left.