Secrets My Mother Kept (3 page)

‘Christine is coming round to play!’ I announced proudly. Mum just lifted her eyes to heaven. I looked around me. I wanted Christine to play in our back garden with me but was acutely aware that it was completely overgrown. It didn’t seem to matter when Margaret and I played out there. In fact it made it more exciting, as we had very fertile imaginations. One of our favourite games was being explorers. We would play until the summer sun set red and gold over Mr Stan’s corrugated garden shed, and I’d nudge Margaret and say, ‘Look! Aurora borealis!’ I must have heard about the northern lights from the television or from my sisters. Either way, I knew they were something exciting!

The only flowers that were visible in the garden were a few white flag irises and a big bushy pink dog rose, remnants of our grandfather’s days. Most of the space was now covered in a dense layer of weeds and grass, almost as tall as we were. The thick scratchy heads of couch grass were difficult to cut with a pair of old blunt scissors, but that was all I had. I needed to ‘tidy up’ the garden before Christine came to play and so knelt down and slowly began to cut. My sister Marge came out into the garden.

‘What are you up to?’ she asked, watching me with a curious expression.

‘Gardening.’

‘Why?’

‘Because my friend is coming to play.’

Marge smirked, ‘You’ll be lucky!’ and she went back inside laughing. The sun was hot on my back but I didn’t mind. I must have stayed there for a long time, because I remember how the grass and stones began to cut into my knees, and how my fingers ached from working the scissors.

Marge was right – Christine never did come to play. She told me her dad had forbidden her to come.

‘He says I’m not allowed round your house cos he knows your dad. He works with him at Ford’s.’

This was a bolt out of the blue for me.
My
dad?

I met her words with silence. I was used to not knowing things, used to things not making sense, and I was also used to keeping quiet. I just stared back, swallowing the disappointment and trying not to care.

Margaret and I continued to enjoy our garden throughout the summer, and played lots of pretend games, building homes with the sheets on the line, draping chairs with old bits of cloth, and using them as ‘Indian tepees’. Other favourite games involved steeping flower petals in water to make perfume, and collecting stones and grass to make a ‘dinner’ from anything else we could find. There was one time when we took this a little too far. Mum had said we couldn’t have a bath because she couldn’t afford the gas. Bath time was usually only once a week on a Sunday and we would use each other’s water. By the time it got to our turn it was an interesting grey colour. On this day we had decided we wanted our own bath. We whispered to each other in the garden, and then proceeded to plaster our faces, arms and legs with as much mud as we could find.

‘Have I got much on my face?’ I asked Margaret.

‘No, I can’t see much,’ she lied, so I layered even more of the brown-grey mixture across my cheeks.

Mum came out to call us in for bed and let out a screech.

‘You naughty girls!’ she shouted, and bent down to take the slipper off her foot. Our mum never smacked us, but in that second we saw such frustration and anger that our instincts told us to run. How well I remember diving up the stairs with Margaret a step behind me, followed closely by Mum, slipper in hand. We ran into the bathroom and slid the lock across and stood inside breathing heavily, our hearts racing.

‘Come out of there now, you naughty girls!’ Mum said angrily. But we stayed where we were. It seemed like an eternity until we heard her going back downstairs but in reality it probably took no more than a minute or two for her anger to subside and for her to see the funny side. We got our bath that night. Mum sometimes bought us Matey bubble bath when she had some money. We loved it and would sit in the bath for an age, playing with the suds until our fingers and toes were as wrinkled as prunes. That would only be in the summer time, because the bathroom in our house was painfully cold in the winter. Margaret and I usually had our bath together, and I can remember our sister Mary trying to persuade us to get out of the barely warm water onto the freezing floor.

‘If you don’t get out soon the witch will get you,’ she warned.

‘I don’t believe you,’ I retorted, ‘there’s no such thing as witches.’

‘There is!’ Mary continued, lowering her voice. ‘She lives under the bath, look you can see her peeping out now.’

Margaret and I jumped out of the water like flying fish, to be grabbed roughly and rubbed dry by our impatient, shivering sister. For a very long time that witch haunted my bathroom visits, and having to go to the toilet with the ‘witch’ waiting to pop her head out from under the bath was terrifying.

During the harshest winters Aunty would go the oil shop round the corner to our house and buy paraffin for the tiny stove that she would put in the bathroom to stop the pipes from freezing. The smell was acrid and permeated the whole house but it did take the chill off the air upstairs. The only room that was heated in the winter was what we called the kitchen but which in effect was our living room.

I mentioned being different; the rooms in our house were certainly called different names from those in my friends’ houses. They had a kitchen instead of a scullery, and their living room was what we called the kitchen. When Granny and Granddad had moved to our house when it was newly built, that was indeed what the rooms were used for. The scullery had been where the laundry was done. There had been a huge copper for heating the water, a Butler sink perched on two enormous stone pillars and a mangle for squeezing the water out of the clothes before they were hung on the line to dry. The cooking was done in the kitchen on a black lead range. Although this changed over the years, the rooms retained their past names like ghosts.

Most of the families around us were relatively poor but the homes of my friends were usually clean and tidy and most important of all they were warm. One particularly icy winter morning I went to knock for my friend Hannah who lived across the road so that we could walk to school together. Margaret was staying at home but I wanted to go to school because our class were putting on a play called
Alice in Wonderland
. Our new young teacher had cleverly said that I could play the part of the Red Queen and say, ‘Off with her head!’

‘But,’ she said, ‘you will have to be sure to come to school every day so that you can practise . . .’

Hannah’s mum glanced at her watch when she opened the door to me, but welcomed me warmly. ‘Come on in and wait, Hannah is just having her toast.’ She led me into their little kitchen and as I entered I was hit by the smell of the bread toasting under the grill. Hannah sat at the little table with her clean clothes on waiting for her toast and tea.

‘Would you like some toast, dear?’ asked her mum.

I took in the scene before me: the simply furnished but cosy room, the clean table, the fresh toast being placed on Hannah’s plate, its delicious smell wafting across to where I stood watching. We never had breakfast. Mum wasn’t usually up before school time, so I had just got myself dressed and come out as usual.

I looked solemnly at Hannah’s mum and shook my head. ‘No, thank you.’ We had been taught to be polite, but I really don’t know why I refused her kind offer, when what I wanted most in the world at that moment was to be Hannah with her fresh buttered toast, her hot cup of tea, her school socks warming above the oven and her mum, smiling.

Our primary school wasn’t very far but it took us about fifteen minutes to walk there. The route took us up past the local corner shops at the junction of Becontree Avenue across into Haydon Road and we would then come out at the top where the C of E church was opposite the Catholic church that neighboured our school. There was a good selection of local shops then. We had two greengrocers, butchers, post office, bakery, two sweet shops and a newsagents. There was also a fish and chip shop, an oil shop and a grocers on the corner and next to that our favourite shop of all: the toy shop. Margaret and I were often sent on errands to the shops as soon as we were deemed old enough, which was when I was about seven.

We passed the greengrocers just opposite our house on our way to school. They ran a raffle every month, so when a customer shopped with them they would give them a raffle ticket. The monthly prize was always a lovely big basket of fruit and vegetables. I don’t know whether my mum was extremely lucky, or the lady who owned the shop was very kind, all I do know is that we seemed to regularly win that basket of fruit and vegetables and it made a big contribution to our larder!

That wasn’t the only contribution the greengrocers made to our family, but unfortunately the other was less welcome. Although we rarely had breakfast, we would occasionally get a penny for an apple to eat on the way to school. On one particular day when we went into the shop the lady said very kindly to me, ‘Just wait there a minute.’ She went out to the back of the shop and returned with a warm, damp flannel and then proceeded to wash my face and neck. I was outraged! I attempted to pull away but she held me fast as I wriggled.

‘Just hold on – there that’s better,’ she said.

I was so angry and embarrassed! The poor woman undoubtedly meant well and I was probably filthy, but it was a while before I ventured into that shop again.

The one shop I really didn’t like going in was the corner shop The lady and man who ran it were always very unfriendly to us, and would follow us round, watching us carefully. It was the beginning of the supermarket era and although there were still certain things which you had to ask for, like cheese, butter, bacon and eggs, many things were displayed on the shelves for you to choose from.

It was only years later that I learned why those shopkeepers were so suspicious of us and the reasons were to shock me to the core.

4

Outings and Weddings

Although my primary school was pretty old and dilapidated, I do remember some things with great happiness and nostalgia.

One morning after Miss Jones had taken the register she said she had something to tell us. We looked at each other in anticipation.

‘Children, next Monday we are going to High Beech for the day.’ Some of the boys made silly noises, while we girls just smiled at each other happily.

I smiled along with the others but wasn’t really sure what or where ‘High Beech’ was, but it must be something good.

‘You will all need a packed lunch, and there will be orange squash available for you to drink,’ carried on our teacher, ‘but we will also have to learn some special rules to make sure we have a good time.’

I couldn’t wait to get home that afternoon, so that I could tell Margaret and Mum about going on an outing.

‘Can I come?’ asked Margaret hopefully. She was off school again and had been helping Mum put the washing on the line. We both liked helping Mum with the washing, even though it was hard work. We didn’t have a washing machine, so Mum would fill the big Butler sink full of hot water from the ascot that hung on the scullery wall. It was a gas water heater and I hated it because when you turned the tap on it made a really loud booming sound as the pilot light ignited the gas. This had taken the place of the old copper that had heated the water when my sisters and brothers had been young. Then Mum would pour in the Omo powder. It had a very strong odour and was a bright blue colour, but it made lots of bubbles, and had a nicer smell than the bar of soap Mum used to have to grate into the water. Sometimes I was allowed to stand on a chair and rub the clothes up and down the glass and wood washing board, which had thick ridges in it to help get the clothes clean. Once the clothes were washed and rinsed, the task of trying to remove as much water as possible from them began, so they would dry quicker. There was a big old mangle which Mum would pull out from the corner, and Margaret and I would feed the clothes through while Mum turned the handle. This then pushed the rollers round and squeezed the water out from the clothes. The only problem was that if you were not extremely careful your fingers could get ‘mangled’ along with the clothes, which we learnt to our cost was very painful!

Pegging the clothes on the line was the best bit of all, particularly if it was a windy day. We would take the basket into the garden and Mum would let the line down so we could reach. We would then be allowed to peg the smaller things out ourselves, but needed Mum’s help with things like sheets.

Today though, I had been too late to help. The washing had been done and Mum and Margaret were just finishing putting it on the line.

‘You can’t come, because it’s only for juniors,’ I said to Margaret. I felt guilty when I saw her face fall. ‘Don’t worry. Your class will go on an outing too.’

Margaret and I sat in the kitchen in front of the television and Mum switched it on so that we could see
Watch with Mother
(although ‘Mother’ rarely sat with us). Every day of the week had a different show and we each had our favourite. Mine was
Picture Book
on a Monday and Margaret’s was
The Woodentops
which was on Friday; we quite liked
Andy Pandy
though, and of course there was
The Flower Pot Men
and
Rag, Tag and Bobtail
.