Everything was grist to Mum’s story mill. Indeed, it has only been since I began to write this memoir that I have reconsidered the power of storytelling on so many levels. Of course, we know a story can change even a nation—the stories told by politicians, especially tyrants, dictators and despots, have sent young men and women to perish on battlefields for millennia. Countries and peoples have been brought to their knees by stories, and equally they have been given the strength to rise up, to endure and to show strength beyond measure. But as much as stories bring warmth to our days, help us find our voices or work things out, stories—even the ones considered entertaining—can also damage, create doubt, cause an aching distress or a wounding humiliation. Words have the potential to cause such pain, it’s a wonder the dictionary doesn’t come with a government health warning.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” So said my father when I came home upset after being called names at school. It was a good mantra to offer a child who had no choice but to return to school the next day, and at a time when parents would never pay a visit to the teacher to complain about bullying—if you had a problem, you had to sort it out yourself. Yes, the verse was temporary balm, even though it was wrong. Words have always hurt me. When I was young and alone, I wished my cousins were just around the corner, so I could take the whole gang from London to school with me so other kids—one or two in particular—knew I had an army at my back.
14
This Time Next Year
We’ll Be Laughing
While Dad was in Germany, blowing up those bridges and enemy communication lines, he managed to get rust remover into a cut on his hand and a severe infection developed. He was sent home to recover for a couple of weeks, stepping off the boat wearing a “medical blue” uniform—the colors that let the civilian population know that a man was not a shirker, not a conchie—a conscientious objector—but a soldier wounded in the course of his duty. The special uniform was an attempt to avoid what had happened in the 1914–1918 war, when women gave white feathers to men not in uniform. The trouble was that many of those men not wearing uniforms had in fact been to war and come home with wounds that were not visible, or were only apparent when a man turned to the woman with the feather and the sharp tongue, to reveal half a face, a jaw torn away or sockets with no eyes inside them.
I first heard that story when I was ten, in Mr. Leech’s class at primary school. He was telling us about the White Feather Movement. It was in that same lesson he told us that when he was a boy, he was on a bus in London and it was only when the young man sitting next to him turned to ask if he could squeeze past to get off at the next stop that he saw the devastating wounds the man had suffered in the 1914–1918 war. Half the man’s face had been obliterated. I never forgot that lesson, never forgot the image conjured up by my teacher, and added it to my cache of things about war to be sad about. Perhaps even then I was collecting other people’s memories in the way that some children collect shells, to look at, to remove from the jar and turn over time and again. I sometimes reflect and wonder, was it ever a surprise that such terrible facial wounds were at the heart of my first novel?
My father was grateful for the respite, because he hated the noise and the hell of working with explosives. With the war edging toward a close and the London he came home to bomb-scarred beyond belief, I wonder if that might have been the first time he uttered the words, “Never mind—this time next year, we’ll be laughing.” It was one of his favorite phrases, and it sums up not only his own attitude to life, but an attitude of a whole generation who lived through the darkest of times.
I remember the very moment those words were spoken by my dad as he put an arm around my mother’s shoulders, followed by an all-knowing wink—it would seem as if I were in a movie, with shafts of light pouring through the window onto our table of plenty. I could see it in my mind’s eye. All would be well in our world, and there we would be, the Winspears, clutching our sides with mirth, joyous at our good fortune, at the abundance raining down upon the house at the end of The Terrace. And it would all happen by this time next year. Not so long to wait, though it seemed that as I approached my sixth year, freedom from worry couldn’t come fast enough.
I sometimes wonder at what point my mother decided to go to the doctor about the weight loss and coughing fits. Mum was shaking so much she could barely get a cup of tea to the table without dropping it. The sound of china hitting the thick Victorian terracotta tiles on the kitchen floor had become a regular refrain, and as this was before you could buy unbreakable crockery, Dad had started to buy our cups and saucers from a bloke who could get wholesale prices. Yet upon reflection, I think I know the exact moment the tipping point came. It was toward the end of the year I started school—the first term had just ended, and the women were out in the hop gardens clearing old bines and burning them, ready for the men to start stringing, come spring. Using a long pole with a hook to guide the heavy string, each man would work part of the hop garden, weaving a geometric pattern for the young hop bines to grow up and around. Each cluster of shoots, known as a “hill,” had a loop of sturdy metal secured in the ground, and with the pole, the man would guide the string through that metal loop and up so that it was attached to the wires that criss-crossed the hop garden some fifteen feet above the ground. The movement was rhythmic—up and down, up and down, stringing each hill with four long lines before moving onto the next hill a few feet away. When that job was done, the women would follow with the banding-in, pulling the four strings together at shoulder height with another shorter string to form a square, before tying off and moving to the next hill. The banding-in was required to maintain tension in the stringing and to bear the increasing weight of the growing hop bine.
But for now we were gathering the piles of spent bines from the previous season and burning them. It was another cold day and the women had started a wood fire down near the tractor shed so the children could be kept warm. At dinner time—midday—Mum half-opened a tin of Ambrosia Creamed Rice Pudding and pushed it in between the glowing embers; a warm pudding for my brother and me to share following a toasted sandwich. I’d found a good thick hazel branch to use as a toasting fork and broken off the ends, leaving a Y shape for Mum to stick through a cheese sandwich. She would hand the fork back to me and I’d start to toast our sandwiches on the open fire, watching as melted cheese dropped into the flames. The other women began handing out sandwiches to their children and settling in for their own repast and a cup of tea from a thermos flask, the kind with a glass insert to keep the beverage warm. Mum dropped our flasks at least once a week, so Fred Cooke had ordered in more stock of the replacement glass linings at a cheaper price for us.
The gathered women started talking about the work, how long it might take to finish Hawkhurst field before they moved onto Mullpits field and then the Upper Eight and Bedgebury Field. I don’t even know if that’s how you spell the name “Mullpits”—it might have been “Molepits” or perhaps “Mowpits.” If you’d asked each of those women to spell the name, you’d have received five different versions.
Then during a lull in the conversation while everyone was eating, Joan looked across at my mother and said, “You know, Joyce, you’ve got really expressive eyes.”
My mother gave her a look I knew only too well and I swear the birds stopped singing. I held my breath, because I knew what was coming. “What you mean is that my eyes are popping out of my sodding head!” said Mum, and she threw our flask at the wall of the tractor shed, the sound of the glass liner shattering as she walked off into the woods.
I stood up to run after her, but Auntie Glad caught me by the arm and told me to let my mother be. Then she turned to Joan and said, “That was a blimmin’ stupid thing to say—can’t you see she’s not well?”
Because Dad had taken on night work as well as his job with Abnett’s Painting and Decorating, John and I went on the bus with Mum to the doc
tor’s surgery the following evening. I watched as “Woodie”—that’s what everyone called Dr. Wood, who had delivered John—felt around Mum’s throat and said “Hmmmm.” Then he looked into her eyes and said the same thing.
“Stand up, please, Joyce.”
Mum stood up.
“Hold out your arms, hands flat, like this, and see if you can keep them still.” He demonstrated, looking like a cartoon ghost I’d seen on the television. I knew for a fact that real ghosts looked nothing like that.
My mum held out her arms, hands flat. Only she couldn’t keep them still. They moved up and down, shaking.
“Hmmm,” said Dr. Wood.
He told her to sit down, and as he took his own seat, he told her that he was referring her to a specialist at the Kent and Sussex Hospital and that she probably had an overactive thyroid. He asked if there was any in the family, and she told him that several of her sisters were having thyroid trouble and it seemed to appear after the birth of their second child.
“Hmmm,” he said, again.
He wrote notes on a card and pushed it back into the buff envelope that was her medical record, but Mum wasn’t quite ready to leave. The bus fare was money and money was usually in short supply, so going to the doctor was a bit like shopping as far as my mother was concerned—you made sure to get a few things sorted out at the same time.
“And could you look at Jackie’s eyes. I think she has a lazy eye, but I’m not sure which, because they can both cast out to the side, but not all the time. And she’s seeing double.”
Dr. Wood looked at me. “Seeing double! Seeing double!” His eyebrows rose and I knew he was about to become the children’s doctor, with a ready smile and a joke. “Comes in handy when you’re looking at shillings! Now then, let’s have a look at those nails first, young lady.” He reached for my hand and I knew he was taking my pulse, something he always did before anything else. Then he gave the back of my hand a gentle slap. “No biting the nails. I want proper fingernails by the time I see you again, otherwise it’s bitter apple for you!”
I giggled, though I had no idea what bitter apple was and I didn’t like the sound of the word “bitter.”
“Right, let’s have a look at those eyes.” Everything was “let’s” and “we” with Dr. Wood. A few years later, he asked my then six-year-old brother, “How are we today?” and John replied, “I don’t know about you, mate, but I’m all right.”
My mother realized I had an eye problem one evening before Dad came home from work. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my Janet and John book from school, reading aloud for Mum while she sliced carrots into soup. Soup was always made in the pressure cooker, but because we’d lost the valve that controlled pressure inside the pan, she used an old knitting needle in its place, sticking it in the hole where the valve should be placed, so the pointed end of the needle faced upward out of the lid. It never quite held the increased steam inside. Under pressure that knitting needle was known to shoot up with a loud bang and stick into the ceiling. I was reading to her because although I had started school ahead of the other children, I was now falling behind with my reading, and falling behind at school was not acceptable to my mother.
“Jackie, why are you reading with your head sideways, as if you’re only looking out of one eye?”
I raised my head from my book. “So I can see the words properly.”
She rubbed her hands on a tea towel and came to stand behind me. She placed one hand on either side of my head and directed my gaze to the mantelpiece above the stove.
“How many pepper pots can you see?
“Um . . . two.”
“How many clocks?”
“There’s only one clock, Mum.”
“I know—but how many can you see?”
Tears welled up.
“Tell me how many, Jackie—come on, love. Everything will be all right.”
“Two.”
She let go of my head, and pointed to the page.
“What happens when you look at the page with both eyes?”
I pointed to a line. “That word gets mixed up with that word.”
“But you can see the words. Are they blurry?”
“No. Just mixed up.”
She sat down and put her arm around me.
“Everything’ll be all right, love,” she said again. I could feel her ribs sticking into my shoulder as she held me close.
“My head hurts,” I said. I’d been getting headaches lately too.
“I’ll get you a junior aspirin.”
She stood up, pulled out a chair and reached up to the top of the kitchen cabinet where medicines were kept well out of the way of little children. Well, sort of well out of the way. A few weeks earlier Mum had come into the kitchen to find my eighteen-month-old brother had pushed a chair next to the freestanding cabinet, which was of 1930s vintage, and using the doors as if they were steps, he was hanging on by one hand and reaching for the bright crimson lorry-shaped bottle of junior aspirin. Mum wrote to the company to tell them they shouldn’t put dangerous medicines in bottles that would tempt children to reach for them. She was sent a box containing samples of all the company’s products, with enough junior aspirin in plain bottles to last me through many headaches, which was just as well. Mum would become expert at getting free stuff through the technique of a well-written letter of complaint.
“And she’s getting headaches,” Mum continued.
The doctor picked up a pen that was also a little flashlight, and with a finger under my chin to keep my head still, he asked me to follow the tiny beam of light with my eyes. As I looked from left to right, up and down, he asked more questions.
“How often do you get these headaches, Jackie?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes.”
“When do they start—do you know?”
“Sometimes in the sunshine.” I paused, trying to remember. “Sometimes when I’m reading, and sometimes on a Monday, when the school’s clean?”
“Isn’t the school always clean? I’ll have to send someone in there with a mop!” said Dr. Wood.
I giggled. “No. On Mondays there’s more smell.”
“More smell?”
“More disinfectanty smell.”
“Ah, I see. Do you hurt anywhere else when you get a headache?”
“I feel sick. And I get lights.”
“Lights?” He released my chin, switched off the flashlight pen and put it on the desk. “What lights?”
“Squiggly. Like the telly when the tube’s gone.”
I looked over at my mother, then back at Dr. Wood.
“Jackie, I think you’re getting something called a migraine. It’s not usual for little children to get them, and when you’re older, they’ll probably go away. But when you get one, you’ve got to tell Mummy so she can give you an aspirin, and then she’s going to take you to your bedroom to lay down for a while, and she’s going to close the curtains and put a nice cold cloth on your forrid until it’s gone.” He said “forehead” just like the verse.
There once was a girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forrid
When she was good
She was very, very good
And when she was bad
She was horrid.
Looking back, I think it was his way of settling children, not speaking over them with instructions to the parent, instead telling a child what was the best remedy for something while at the same time letting the parent know what they must do. Perhaps he said “forrid” because he knew my headaches were horrid.
So began our regular visits to the Kent and Sussex Hospital in Tunbridge Wells, my mother having written to the two departments—endocrinology for her overactive thyroid, and opthalmology for my wandering eyes—so that our appointments could be coordinate
d because the bus fare was expensive.
The journey by bus was an ordeal, because motion sickness rendered me tired and weary, even if I clutched Mum’s magic penny. I wasn’t allowed to take Kwells, the tablets for motion sickness, because they made me too sleepy for my appointment. As soon as the bus stopped in Tunbridge Wells, our entourage of three—Mum, me and John—would go straight to Woolworths so Mum could use the big red weighing machine with its giant dial. Mum would look around to see if anyone was watching, then give me her bag to hold before placing my brother’s hand in mine. She would step on the scale, put a penny in the slot and watch the needle. After registering her weight she would step off with tears in her eyes.
“Right, then, we’ve got to hurry now.” And she would rush us up to the hospital for my appointment, which always came first.
On my first visit, after my initial examination by Mr. Coogan, a large man with half-moon glasses and a light that seemed to come right out of his forehead, I was sent to Miss Trew. Mr. Coogan was an important man; we knew this because he was a “mister” and not just a “doctor.” In Britain, when a doctor climbs the ladder to become a specialist of high enough standing to be a surgeon, then they are known as “mister” again. I still don’t get it. For her part, Miss Trew was the orthoptist, a highly skilled practitioner of non-surgical conditions involving eye movement. I had to get some of that information from Wikipedia, because at the time I only knew that the lovely Miss Trew was the woman who guided me through a series of exercises with a pen light just like Dr. Wood’s. Then came the special machine. It was black, and reminded me of a crouching reptile, a frog perhaps. I was instructed to put my chin on a chin-shaped little ledge and look into a viewer, then I was to follow her instructions using handles on the left and right of the machine, while she slotted slides into a viewer at each side. A dog and a kennel. A rabbit and a hutch. A man and a house. Miss Trew would ask me to put the dog in the kennel, and then she’d fiddle with her dials and the dog would be out of his kennel, so I had to put it in there again. And again, and again. Same with the rabbit and the hutch and the man with his house—oh, that rabbit, especially, could be a frisky little fellow, getting out of that darn hutch as soon as I’d managed to get him in there.
This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing Page 13