Almost as soon as my brother awoke from his afternoon nap—if he’d had one; even the neighbors would pray he’d have one—I was waiting for Dad to come home. I’d sit on the chair in the bay window and hold vigil, staring along the rough, pot-holed road that was The Terrace. I’d see the bus hove into view and slow down opposite Pete Eldridge’s garage—which had once been stabling for the Duke of Kent pub—and then I’d be up and out the door, running along the street and into my father’s arms. As soon as he’d had a cup of tea, we would be walking across the fields with the dog, come rain or shine, snow or hail, daylight or darkness. Walking across the fields at dusk in winter was my favorite time. There was something mystical about it, feeling the frost crunch under my feet. There was always something to see, always something he’d show me, kneeling at my side and raising his paint-stained hands—those knobby, flat-thumbed worker’s hands—and pointing so I knew where to focus my gaze, perhaps to see a rabbit, or a fox. And there was also the long slide down the Burton Way to dread.
I’m always curious about how places come to have names, often linking people to something that happened long ago. We’d walk down the footpath at the side of the house, then along the track toward Five Acres, the big field before we reached Robin’s Wood. We’d pass the stinky place where overflow sewage from septic systems came out—our community would not have a main sewer line until I was seventeen years of age. At the far end of the field was a stile and from the stile there were two paths—one to the left, a steep descent, and one to the right, which was more of a meander through the woods. My father always liked to take the path to the left; it was probably because hardly anyone ever went that way and my father liked to assert his independence by taking the path less traveled. I think choosing the trail with a challenging gradient was a variation on pitching his tent on the wrong side of the river in Germany—he did things his own way. But so steep was the path, I always fell down, often ending up caught in brambles. The first time I tumbled, my father said, “Oh, you’ve gone for a burton there, my girl!”
Going for a burton? If you search online, “Going for a burton” originated with the RAF and meant you were going to die, or you’d had an accident. Interesting. And here’s why it’s interesting—the locution was common in South East London, and there is a belief that it originated to describe the effects of Burton Ales. So, if you fall down, you’ve “Gone for a burton.” My father would never have used any phrase that might link his child to a sad demise, and given that he’d used the term since boyhood I can only think that the internet is wrong in this case, though I can believe RAF pilots would co-opt the phrase “Going for a burton” to describe a fall from the skies following an altercation with a Luftwaffe Messerschmitt.
That aside, from the time of my first fall, I always asked Dad, “Are we going the burton way this time?” So that path became the Burton Way. Years later I was walking near the old house, long after my parents had moved away, and I heard some children shouting to each other, “Let’s go down the Burton Way!” I smiled and watched as they ran off, gamboling down the track, past clean sweet-smelling woodland where the sewage used to come out, and on toward Five Acres and Robin’s Wood.
I loved that walk, loved the wild daffodils that poked up through the undergrowth in spring; the rare wild magenta orchids and abundant custard-yellow primroses clustered under trees, delicate white wood anemones with their angel wing petals, and bluebells carpeting the ground underfoot. The blooms of pink mallow would dry as the weeks went on, becoming curly and webbed by summer’s end, when they were known as “old man’s beard” by the locals, though in America, “old man’s beard” is a different plant altogether. Tall foxgloves grew wild and free, flanking the Burton Way—as I slid down the hill, I’d watch them rush past, poking up above brambles that, come September, I’d be reaching into for juicy blackberries. Every so often my father would call the dog to heel, and we’d stop. Both Lassie and I knew to be quiet, for my father was listening, sometimes cupping a hand to his ear. Then he’d point. See that? See that bird? or See that butterfly? or See that field mouse? Wait—well, look at that . . . sshhh—see the fox? Over there—there goes a rabbit? And see that hawk—he’s got his eye on the rabbit too, so he’d better get a move on. Look—watch him. He’s hovering up there, and any second . . . there he goes—see him? See him swooping down? And we would walk on, stopping to look, to watch, to see, to remember. Come on, it’s getting dark, your mum will be worried about us . . . stop . . . there he is, there’s the badger. Sshhhh. Don’t move. See him? Can you see him, love? Blimey, look at that!
One morning, early, just before sunrise, my father came to our room and lifted my brother out of bed, telling me to get up and follow him to the attic. I rubbed sleep from my eyes as I stood by the open window that in daylight would command a view for miles across the countryside. He set my four-year-old brother next to me and pointed to the sky just above the horizon. “There’s a comet going over any minute now—you don’t want to miss it, because you might not see another.” My brother was leaning against me still half asleep, a thin line of saliva from his open mouth dribbling down my arm. We waited just a little while before Dad said, “There it goes! There it goes! See it now? Can you see it?” I gave my brother a big shove so he would look too, and there we were, just the three of us watching transfixed as a comet cleared the sky above the breaking dawn.
Dad loved the night sky, loved pointing out the constellations and showing us how to locate each one. “If you can find your North Star,” he’d say, “you can find your whole universe.”
Our evening walk after Dad came home from work was an hour of see this, and see that. Later he would tell us over dinner, “That was something, wasn’t it, that hawk?” or “Some people never see a badger, unless it’s dead at the side of the road. We’re very lucky.”
11
Community’s Web
Once or twice each week we walked two miles into Cranbrook and I remember every step of the way, my mother pushing the pram with big wheels at the back and smaller wheels at the front. In summer she would fit a canopy of white broderie anglaise to shield John from the sun’s rays, so the image of my tall mother pushing her son along in his carriage was for all the world like a ship in full sail. He slept for much of the journey. Despite being just four years of age, I walked all the way, only becoming tired as we made our way up the hill toward the war memorial on the journey home.
There was a predetermined route to be followed around the shops, based upon the logistics of filling the shopping bag. Though we grew most of our own vegetables, if we needed a top-up from the greengrocers, that would be our first stop, so potatoes could go into the bag before anything else. The greengrocer would shoot them straight into the bag, place a sheet of newspaper on top, and then add the other veg. Next we went to Ratcliffe’s, the butcher, where I always tried not to look at the stuffed bull’s head on the wall, a clutch of brown paper carrier bags with string handles hung over one horn. Even though that bull was dead and this was just his head, I was always prepared for him to come charging out of the wall to maim the butcher for diminishing his dignity by using him as a bag holder.
From Ratcliffe’s we’d loop back up to the fishmonger to buy the Sunday tea. In true South and East London fashion, Sunday tea was always shellfish—not posh shellfish, but cheaper winkles and cockles and sometimes tiny prawns, all sold by the half-pint. Mum and Dad loved shellfish, but I hated even the thought of it. I would not taste any shellfish laid out on the table, limiting myself to a slice of brown bread and butter and perhaps some lettuce and cucumber with salad cream lavished on top. It was only when I was eleven years old and, having been persuaded by my mother to “please try some,” that my life-threatening allergy to shellfish was discovered. I have always found that when I don’t listen to my intuition, disaster ensues.
The last of the grocery shopping was a visit to the baker; bread went into the bag on top of everything
else so it wouldn’t get crushed. By this time the bag, which Mum pushed in at the end of the pram, had become fat, so John had to be scrunched up a bit, and that usually started him off crying. He definitely had to be rearranged, almost folded in two, by the time we came out of the library. Mum did the library run for the elderly people on The Terrace, choosing books for a couple of the ladies—the “Angélique” books by Anne and Serge Golon were a favorite—and Westerns for Mr. Kilby and Dad, especially Zane Grey’s novels. Mum herself went through a Frank Yerby phase, though she always reread the classics.
I loved the library, a small room next to the Labour Exchange, the place where people went to find work or to sign on for assistance. It was also a place where families could get their free welfare orange juice and government issue formula for babies. The concentrated orange juice was a health-building drink issued to expectant mothers and children between the ages of one month and five years of age, and it was disgusting—sickly sweet yet bitter at the same time, though loaded with vitamin C. It boasted the juice of nine oranges and it had to be diluted, though I am sure Mum got the ratio wrong, or perhaps the stuff was supposed to taste like that. Ugh, it makes my saliva glands hurt just thinking about it. The juice was part of the government’s efforts to boost well-being in the general population, though in truth it probably rotted teeth in a citizenry that wartime sugar rationing had protected.
The children’s section of the library amounted to half a wall of books, and I always looked for the new ones. I loved a book that no one else had taken before, that had no stamps on the ticket and no folded corners or crumpled pages. I was allowed two books each week and devoured them as soon as I arrived home. A particular favorite were the Milly-Molly-Mandy stories by Joyce Lankester Brisley, and those wonderful picture books by author and illustrator Mabel Lucie Attwell. I loved her depiction of children with full rosy cheeks and dimpled legs and arms, often clutching puppies or sitting with fairies. I was fascinated by fairies, because I knew exactly where they lived.
There was one more stop on the High Street before the long, slow pilgrimage on foot back to Hartley, and that was to Sykes, the stationery shop. Sykes was also a toy shop and sold everything from newspapers and magazines, which were fanned out on the counter, to pens and pencils, erasers, writing paper, air mail envelopes, cartridges, inks, paints and sketchbooks. The oak floor creaked as we walked in; we left the pram loaded with John and the groceries outside. He was perfectly safe. Sykes was my stop on the High Street. It was my stop because it was where I was allowed a new notebook, a Silvine red memo book, which cost all of threepence. Or, as the lady behind the counter—was it Mrs. Sykes herself?—would say, “That will be thruppence, young lady.” And I would reach up to hand over my twelve-sided, nickel and brass threepenny bit, and take my red notebook.
Before John was born, we’d stop for a cup of tea at the Corner Café on Stone Street, or even the café by the church steps. They were called “caffs” and served good strong tea from urns, and Bath buns, cream horns, Eccles cakes, scones and iced buns. The cream horns made with flaky pastry and filled with luscious cream always looked wonderful, but the pastry flaked everywhere the minute you bit into it, so even though we liked them, Mum and I would share an iced bun with our tea. The cream horns cost more too, which was another consideration. I remember on one occasion I had a new handbag with me—it had been a birthday present from my grandmother and I just loved it. I still have a thing about bags and purses. This bag was round, about six inches in diameter with a zipper and handle, not a strap, and was a child’s version of the sort of portmanteau a world traveler might take on an ocean liner. Mine only held my handkerchief, notebook and a pencil. It was printed with colorful luggage tags bearing the names of different places and I remember asking my mother about each of those destinations—New York, Los Angeles, Nairobi, Paris, Berlin, Istanbul. Then I boldly announced that I would go to every one of those places on my bag when I was a grown-up. Funny, that, when I look back. It might have been when my wanderlust germinated, though I had felt my world expand simply by that walk into town, edging me out of the bubble of home and the farm. The town might as well have been the whole world, because on our way down the High Street, then round to Stone Street and back up the other side, there would be people to see, to wave to, to chat with and to ask about. There was conversation, laughter, commentary on how much I’d grown, whether the baby was sleeping through the night (fat chance), one person’s “op” and another person’s difficulties—all manner of subjects were brought out, jewels of local gossip to be held to the light, to be fingered and passed around; glue pulling together our web of community.
As we went from shop to shop, Mum always looked out for one other shopper in particular, a woman who was only occasionally seen in town. If Mum saw her coming out of a shop or getting off the bus, she immediately made a beeline for her, waving out and calling after her. “Ess—Ess, wait a minute. It’s Joycie.” Ess was a Romany woman Mum had known from her days in the caravan. She always seemed pregnant and always had a pack of children around her—Ess would hold out her arms to stop them in their tracks when she heard Mum’s voice, reminding me of a hen gathering chicks under her wings. She had shiny jet-black hair pinned up in the sort of topknot that made it seem as if she had placed a lace mantilla on her head. Her skin was weathered and when she smiled her teeth were interspersed with gold. She wore a wide skirt under her jacket, and big gold hoops dangled from her earlobes. After talking about where Ess was living and working, Mum would always ask the same question: “Have you seen May?” Sometimes Ess knew the whereabouts of the woman who had helped my parents through their first winter living in the country, and sometimes she would shake her head and tell her that May had moved on to another “atchin tan”—another place to stay. Mum would be downcast if Ess hadn’t seen May. “Well, when you see her, tell her that Joycie asked after her—remember me to her, Ess. Tell her you saw me. Don’t forget.” Ess would nod, smile her toothy gold smile and squeeze my mother’s arm before they both went on their way.
It was on one of those journeys into town that my mother had a panic attack, though the term was not in vogue then and I wouldn’t have known what it was anyway. The siren used to alert the volunteer firemen in the town was the same siren that had warned of air raids during the war. We were at the bottom end of the High Street when the siren began its long wail, rising from a slow, deep whine in an ear-splitting crescendo—ear-splitting because the siren was housed on top of the post office building and we were right next to it. At once my mother grabbed John from the pram, pulled me to her and cowered in the doorway, her eyes darting back and forth as she looked across the sky. I knew in an instant what was ailing her because I knew her stories, so I grabbed her sleeve and pulled it to gain her attention.
“It’s all right, Mummy—don’t worry, there aren’t any bombs.”
No one else saw what had happened at the moment the siren started screaming. It was over in seconds—all except the shaking. The shaking worried me. Worry had started to become my comfortable place; the place I knew where to be. My mother worried a lot; there was always something to worry about. But she was also a creature of highs and lows, given to dancing around the kitchen with John on her hip, or making people laugh, or shaking with fizzy energy, or shouting in a temper. The fizzy energy worried me, because it made her cough, and when she coughed she couldn’t stop. She was getting thinner—I knew this because when she opened her arms to give me a cuddle, her sharp bones would stick into me.
By the time I started school, John was old enough for Mum to go out to work again. In fact, she’d started that spring at the nearby farm, working with other women to prepare the hop gardens for the coming season. Jobs for women with children were hard to find in the area and there was no provision for childcare. The best option was manual farming work, because children could accompany their mothers. Despite her professional skills in administration and bookkeeping, farm work was
the only job for my mother—and remaining a stay-at-home housewife was not an option. It wasn’t a matter of choice for many women in the area, so to have a mother who worked was not unusual among my peers at school. But there’s a distinction between career and work—and no one chooses to work on a farm spreading cow dung around a hop garden with a pitchfork because it’s a smart career move, any more than other occupational options in the area available for women who needed to work, which included washing sheets in the local laundry, or squeezing meat into tubes of sheep’s bladder at the sausage factory. My mother worked on the farm because we needed the money and women could take their children to work, which you couldn’t do if you worked in an office or a shop. Meanwhile my father was taking on night work in addition to his regular job.
At first, Mum pushed my old pushchair with my brother tucked up in it to the farm and work, but in time, when John was old enough, Dad found an old “sit up and beg” Raleigh bicycle for Mum: not fancy; one of those bikes that had front wheel brakes but no gears, and a metal skirt protector on the back wheel. He took it apart, restored it, found a child seat for the back of the bike and a basket for the front, and hey presto! My mother had her transport for the journey to the farm each day. Sadly, the basket didn’t survive the first crash into a ditch when the handlebars came off. Around the same time, Dad found an old three-wheeler bike for me and, again at night when he came home from work, he restored it, painting it bright red as my big present from Santa that Christmas. The bicycle was a necessity as I would need my own wheels to keep up with Mum on her way to the farm during the school holidays. When I started school, Dad had a key cut for me which I kept on a string around my neck, in case I arrived home before Mum and John.
This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing Page 10